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Bread, "Baby I'm-A Want You" What was that? A sound. There is something on your sleepless mind. Someone else's hands crawling along the aluminum siding, downstairs, by the back door, there just long enough to leave fingerprints on the baby's skull. Andy wakes up quick enough to see a man without a face, on the grass, walking away. A few hours later, the piano comes in and the drums hit. The alarm clock is on. It is Saturday. He investigates the scene of the crime with his slippers and unkempt stomach poking out of robe. There is nothing to find. The carefully wrapped hose, the tomato plants, the repatched screen door show no violation. He absently smooths his hair out and sniffs the air. This has happened before. Sometimes Andy hears knocks on the door -- the bedroom door, even -- or calls on the phone in the middle of the night, but there is no longer another to tell him that there's nothing wrong. But Andy, you will never be safe. Someone will always wish to violate. Nothing can stay outside for long. And maybe this is good, and maybe this is bad, and maybe you will never know. "The Merchants of Cool" "It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late." -- E.M. Cioran Why wasn't this show made in 1993? Even in 1993, media consolidation was been proceeding at a sprightly pace, Mark Crispin Miller and The Baffler were howling Jeremiahs on this issue, and as far as I can see, most of the methods of appropriating youth culture for industry's ends were already firmly in place. Ah, but the organizing personality of that time's youth culture was Kurt Cobain, so that made the situation...well, tolerable. Sure, Kurt killed himself, but he at least he was autonomous. Better a self-destructive narcissist* rather than a living consumer fantasy. Nirvana had roots, and Kurt killed himself in the ultimate act of sincerity, but Britney only has The Right Now. In other words, I think the reason this show was made in 2001 and not 1993 is Britney. Well, no, of course, the real reason is AOL Time Warner, but in a poetic way, it is Britney. After spending the last few years reading a slew of boomers expressing their horror over teenpop's rise and relief over its death, I can't help but feel that in their heyday, the teenpoppers triggered a coiled spring of intellectual hysteria where Brit dancing in a high-school uniform was the perfect representation of the closed-loop of media oligopoly made flesh, a portent of autonomy-through-consumerism that no anti-branding jeremiad or statistic about branding could ever match for vividness. Contrary to what's said on the site by Mark Crispin Miller (who appropriately enough looks like Lou Barlow), I think as a music, teenpop is deeply exciting even if I think it's rarely great, partly because what teenpop represents a "normalization" of what's been happening in R&B for the last couple years. You gotta give it that, at least. But I'd never in a million years defend Total Request Live, which has only helped to make MTV's programming a hundred times more suffocatingly narrow. |
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