One of the nonproblems about the 21st century is a certain loss of urgency in keeping up with pop culture moments. These days it seems there's always a digital backstop, and if you miss it in theaters (as most do) you can always catch it on Netflix or home video.
Nothing really ever goes away, and while that's comforting it also makes it easy to put off engaging with a given work. Just as James Joyce has always sat unread on a lot of shelves, now we might discover unwatched episodes (or entire seasons) of talked-about shows on the DVR. In our house we didn't really watch The Wire until the last season aired on HBO; it took a few more years to go back and view it from the beginning.
The idea is that we all lead busy lives and don't devote more than a few hours a week to active screen watching. (I continue to be amazed when I find myself in the company of film reviewers who somehow also find time to keep current on television. There are great gaping holes in my pop-culture education. About the only '90s TV show I actively watched was Seinfeld. I've probably seen more than half of all the South Park and The Simpsons episodes ever made, but I'm not sure I'd bet any amount of money that mattered to me on it.)
But we catch up on things as we can, and there's something just interesting enough about Cameron Crowe's Roadies to keep us coming back. Not that it's exactly good television, but watching a Crowe film (including Almost Famous, which somehow feels simultaneously over- and underrated) is like watching a puppy trying to assemble an Ikea dresser. You know it's going to be a mess, but something endearing might happen anyway.
At least that's how I feel about his Showtime series Roadies, which plays a lot like Almost Famous 2 in that it simultaneously evinces a genuine feel for the people who make and passionately consume rock 'n' roll music and a shaky relationship with the way things work in the real world. While Crowe is an artist whose work superficially seems rooted in a reality pointillistically constructed from significant details, it's situated in a bizarro world where people do things for inexplicable and/or perverse reasons.
For instance, the episode of Roadies which I've just watched (not the current episode, but one I'd archived in the DVR and nearly forgotten about) was a strange story about a mythical creature -- influential and respected middle-aged music blogger Bryce Newman (Rainn Wilson). What we're supposed to believe is that this blogger has so upset the touring company of the Staton-House Band, the fictional classic rock outfit that employs most of Roadies' main characters, by writing a dismissive, negative review off a YouTube video that he gets flown to Atlanta to actually watch a show and hopefully recant his opinion.
It's a tortured and singularly odd setup, although I guess there were junkets for music journalists in the '70s, when Crowe was covering the beat. But that could be forgiven were the "critic" not some vile parody of a critic, a corrupt and self-impressed phony who's worse than Ratatouille's villainous Anton Ego (voiced by Peter O'Toole and modeled after French actor Louis Jouvet). Newman has nothing interesting to say beyond "rock is dead," and he's so obviously a straw man that we read his every line as kind of nonsensical boilerplate. He's a hypocritical jerk, devoid of any redeeming playfulness.
And the crew -- misunderstanding the precise instructions of their British boss to make Newman feel welcome as a kind of wink, wink, nudge, nudge green light to torture the poor fool -- proceed to sexually assault and drug Newman, causing him to flame out in a very public (and very sit-commy) way. Yet somehow this humiliation brings about exactly the result everyone was hoping for, and at the end of the episode he has not only recanted his tirade against the band but rediscovered an authentic part of himself. Which still might be OK were it not for the heavily underlined fact that he never got to hear a note of music from the band itself. But he thinks he did, and that's what matters, a character helpfully instructs us.
Really? The music is just a placebo, C.C.? Doesn't that undermine your raison d'etre?
Yet embedded in this painful horror show is a smaller and nearly magical story about how Lindsey Buckingham shows up to help out his old friend, Staton-House Band road manager Bill (Luke Wilson), who is desperately in need of an opening act. While Buckingham is no actor, he does a pretty good job of playing himself as a compassionate and emotionally alert person who is sincerely concerned about Bill's welfare -- especially about his sobriety in the face of the brutal touring schedule. Bill, we understand, is a man slowly coming apart; like many another middle-aged action hero, he's getting too old for this, uh, show. Buckingham, who evinces the gravitas of someone who has come through the maelstrom, recognizes the "Fellini meets the Monkees" circus swirling around his old friend and sensibly bails.
Buckingham pretty much saves the show -- for Bill and for us -- with this sweet, small turn, and one wonders if this isn't the story in which Crowe is more invested. (It also helps that Buckingham performs two strong songs in the episode.)
You would think that as someone with plenty of experience as critic and artist (and let's not ignore the way critics sometimes work as artists) that he'd have something more relevant to say about the dynamic between Newman and the band. But he opts instead for a cartoonish treatment that employs a lazy and inaccurate stereotype. It's like the A story is for the chumps and suckers, the slapstick-slurping masses with no feeling for nuance. And the B story is for us.
A lot of people have given up on Crowe, and there are probably plenty of others who really like his off-kilter, clumsy plots. Plenty are probably willing to accept him for what he has shown himself to be. It's probably naive to think that he's capable of so much better.
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This month's big album, Frank Ocean's Blond, feels more like a business marketing story than an art project. There's lots to write about before you even crease the music.
For instance, even the name invites explication. The digital release is officially known as Blonde, although it's stylized as blond on Ocean's website (where you can download suggested album covers). This deliberately ambiguous move caused the Atlantic's Spencer Kornhaber to speculate that it was somehow a reference to the Higgs boson subatomic particle.
"The so-called 'God particle' can either contain mass or not, almost immediately disappears into nothingness after coming into somethingness, was first detected by humans in July 2012 (a few days before Ocean's album Channel Orange arrived!), and is prone to mis-explanation and misunderstanding by laymen like me," Kornhaber wrote in a display of very un- Newman-esque whimsy.
Ocean had been teasing the release of an album, his follow-up to his 2012 debut Channel Orange, for months if not years (the album was reportedly "nearly finished" in 2014). Then Ocean announced he would release it in July.
He didn't, but on Aug. 19 he released a "visual album" -- a 45-minute music video -- apparently designed (in part) to satisfy his contract with his record label Def Jam and its parent organization Universal Music Group. Blond arrived the next day, irritating Universal Music Group, which instead of taking 86 percent of the revenue generated by the album got nothing. (Expect them to retaliate either in court against Ocean or by keeping their other artists -- like Drake and Kanye West -- off Ocean's enabler Apple Music.
By releasing Blond on his own, Ocean stands to make many more millions than he would have otherwise, but more importantly he seemed to have monkey-wrenched a corporatized system. It might be more interesting to explore the ramifications of Ocean's maneuver than talk about his album -- which is fine if you've developed a taste for glitchy, miasmatic midtempo ballads delivered in an earnest manner and filtered through an eerie array of effects. Which, I have to admit, I haven't. Though I appreciate Ocean's talent as a vocalist and producer, there's always a part of me that wishes for more songcraft. I'm not ready to abandon the compact power of a tightly wound chord progression for the exploded, blasted soundscapes Ocean tends to meander through. Track by track, it's remarkable. But strung together as an album experience, it's borderline boring.
Ocean's art is not containable in your headphones; like Madonna and her tribe (which includes Jay-Z and Beyonce and nearly every aspiring pop star right of Tame Impala and even presidential candidate Donald Trump), what he's really doing is manipulating the culture via a brand that operates across the spectrum of theaters, impinging upon fashion and politics as well as entertainment and art. It just seems kind of silly to try to write a record review of a record that's only the tip of an artist's spear.
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Another thing Crowe's hyper-pretentious Newman doesn't grasp is that we are all prisoners of our own taste. This means that most of us are perfectly capable of loving art that we suspect is actually quite bad. So there's nothing really brave about confessing a love for so-called dad rock or yacht rock or disco (which has been rehabilitated to the point that it's probably hip to complain about it again), because everybody who has lived in the world with an open heart has been affected by the sentimental and the cute. What Woody Allen said: The heart wants what it wants.
The new Drive-By Truckers album American Band (out Sept. 30, but you can find videos of some of the tracks online) hits me right in the sweet spot. It's a restorative, guitar-driven Southern rock album with intelligent, politically alert lyrics. It makes me proud to be an American, and happy to be able to occasionally write about essential things like rock 'n' roll. Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood have each developed into humane songwriters and wily vocalists, and the tension between these two makes the group the best American contender for the World's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll band.
Or, as Newman writes at the end of that terrible episode of Roadies: "This can be the future. A glimpse of what rock looked like in America."
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Style on 09/18/2016