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Men On The Net(Works)

I am truly embarrassed to admit this, but I used to keep this (especially exhaustive) list of men I found attractive in a little notebook I kept hidden in my room. After I came out, the point of this lst was much more clear; but at first, you know, it was just an interesting diversion.

Apparently... I'm not alone in this: Via World of Wonder, James St. James directs us to Matthew Rettemund's exhaustive list of the 50 hottest men on television. This makes perfect sense since James, Matthew, me, and the rest of my gay generation kind of all kept this list, with many of the same men on it. I'm not sure it's the same for the kids these days, but that moment of recognition, that "you thought he was sexy too?" conversation was like a feminist click of "I'm not crazy" and "I finally fit in with the others."  It was not just, simply, the leering and lust... but goodness, aren't they talented?

Rettemund (who has the "nice work if you can get it" of being Professionally Gay) covers pretty much all the bases, and does a nice job of filtering in some of the more recent examples to a list that he's clearly been caring about for years. I don't make a physical list anymore (or even an Excel soreadsheet)... but one does, you know, keep track. And these days, when every TV show has that "hot guy who drips sexy" role, that isn't always easy.  Thank Goddess for IMDB.

A lot of this fascination can be traced back to the late seventies, when increasing gay visibility made frank depiction and interest in male beauty less of a social taboo (and the seventies were pretty sex-mad, anyway). Rettemund covers most of the bases - though he misses, most egregiously, Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy of The Hardy Boys - with a little heavy emphasis on youth, even for my tastes. I'm not sure Blair Underwood is am especially brave choice, either. But Rettemund does capture, in pictures, that glorious moment when Tony Danza and John Schneider were as hot as street trade (and don't think they didn't know it).

One can nitpick this sort of thing to death (shortlist: Ian Somerhalder, Paul Wesley, Cam Gigandet, No Dawson's Creek?, Patrick Dempsey, Jensen Ackles, Jared Padalecki... I mean, jeez), and that's without diving deeply into daytime soaps (he does namecheck Brian Bloom!), but this list will serve as a fine, fresh start. And Rettemund rescues the show that nearly every gay man can remember even if the show was barely watched: the CW's Summerland, where the male beauty was simply freaking ridonkulous. If nothing else... thank you for Ryan Kwanten!

Oh, and yes, this is just TV. Film is a different story altogether. And yes, this is really gay, too. But Betty, how could I resist? And hey.... Merry Christmas!

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The Beginning Of The End: 2012 Is A Worst Song Ever Treasure Trove

End of year compiling has just begun, and I want in on the madness. Even for a year of light blogging, I got in a good bit of observations for Worst Song Ever... and lo and behold, my choices made the Top of the Pops. Via Jezebel, it seems Spotify (the world's worst App, from what I can tell; I finally had to delete it becaue apparently it won't run if you don't Facebook) has published their top song requests of the year. And.... I rest my case, since "overplayed" is a big piece of the Worst Song Rules. 

(Also, I rest my case about Spotify.)

Anyway, the list:

• 1. Gotye featuring Kimbra — "Somebody That I Used to Know"
• 2. Carly Rae Jepsen — "Call Me Maybe"
• 3. Fun. featuring Janelle Monáe — "We Are Young"
• 4. Flo Rida — "Whistle"
• 5. Flo Rida featuring Sia — "Wild Ones"
• 6. Train — "Drive By"
• 7. Nicki Minaj — "Starships"
• 8. Maroon 5 featuring Wiz Khalifa — "Payphone"
• 9. David Guetta featuring Sia — "Titanium"
• 10. Loreen — "Euphoria"

Yes, 4 of the 10 already made my list this year. Of the others, I would put both Flo Rida songs on the list... but I apparently now Hate All Flo Rida, which means it doesn't count. Whistle and Wild One are but two atrocious station changing examples.  Similarly, I'm not sure which David Guetta assemblage is "Titanium", but Guetta's diluted himself into a cartoon, my opinion (and PS, how does Sia become the go-to nobody for these things?). In any case, I can't dis Carly Rae Jepsen, and Gotye was my first big fave of this year. So maybe I have a little mass taste. But just a little.

Oh, and just to sum up this year in all its (painful) pop misery, one of those really nifty "mashups" of... well, everything.

  

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Ew, It's Gross. I'm Not Doing It (Plus Some Thoughts On Taylor Swift)

 

"We are never ever ever getting into leather" is much fun (via one of my regular must reads, the World of Wonder blog), but then so is the Taylor Swift original which kicked off her album Red.

 

 

Swift has gotten a lot of grief because the song, apparently, is a thinly veiled diss of Jake Gyllenhaal. This is in line with previous songs, her subtextual critics suggest, with a string of songs aimed at exes and occasionally their new girlfriends. For her part, Swift doesn't entirely deny that her songs come out of her experiences, or that some of them are indeed, about a specific person or event.

That is usally how one writes a song.

I'm sort of struck by the obvious sexism at play in this, and by the blindness of otherwise sensitive types (like Jezebel) to the double standard at work. It's as if all that material written by high profile male rockstars to their (often equally high profile) girlfriends and exes never happened. Did nobody hear the backstory of "My Sharona"?  Or how Dylan aimed a string of (actually rather bitchy) singles at his girlfriends from the sixties (including, just as a for instance, Edie Sedgwick)? How about something more recent - did no one listen to the words to "Gives You Hell" by All American Rejects? (Yeah, I don't love it either... but still).

Apparently, it's wrong for a woman to complain about bad boyfriends... or something. Or perhaps it's just that Swift's kiss-offs are aimed at young, handsome, popular celebrity men whose puppy dog reps (even a dog like John Mayer) preclude thinking badly of them in the public sphere. Perhaps it's simply the charmed nature of Swift's career and her own super-sweet public persona. I know I resisted at first, but Swift's chops as a musician and songwriter have become simply impossible to dismiss or ignore. And that, really, is why a song like "We are never ever getting back together" has sting. 

Whatever the case for resistance and ugly backlash, I can't help the feeling that if Swift were a man and the disses in question were aimed at ex-girlfriends we wouldn't be having this backlash and the star would be a hero, not a bitch. And that's just like... ew.

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 There's some issues of sexism attached (it's only boys, and a certain type of gay boy at that)... but I just find the underlying politics of it - gay boys taking back their power - somehow liberating. I do wish they someone would add lesbians to this... because that would make the mind-spinning complete. 

Saturday Singalong: It's Flyte Tyme

Today, I'm all about Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis:

The SOS Band, Borrowed Love. Arguably, The SOS Band was the purest vehicle for the "Flyte Tyme" sound developed by Jam and Lewis, not even so much a "sound" as a whole set of atmospherics, layered synths on top of driving, percolating beats. SOS Band had already enjoyed success with Take Your Time (Do It Right), but the three albums concocted with Jam and Lewis set a new standard, especially on the expansive side ones of each one, the first which featured Just The Way You Like It, and the second, Sands of Time, which featured Borrowed Love. Borrowed Love percolates sharply, whie reveling in the jazzy, slightly mournful lyric sung by Mary Davis, one of the great, undersung lead singers in modern R&B. This song, and much of the Flyte Tyme collaborations came to define "Quiet Storm" radio in the mid to late eighties, a late night jam of torchy ballads, smooth jazz, and acts like SOS Band and Loos Ends who kind of defied easy descriptions. Also, Borrowed Love shows the Flyte Tyme magic with a particular sub genre of Other Woman songs, the Love on the Side story.

Janet Jackson, Love Will Never Do Without You. Jackson's whole rebirth as an eighties pop icon is all about Jam and Lewis, who produced the 4 pivotal albums that define the backbone of her hits (Design of a Decade wraps the story up in a bow). Jackson, of course, ebenfitted mightily from their carefully controlled approach to sound production, and they make some of the best use of what might otherwise be dismissed as a thin, breathy approach to singing, making her into a latter day Diana Ross. The kitchen sink, extended length (in the album version) opus of Love Will Never Do is a big case in point: layered synths, layered vocals, and a propulsive rhythm track tend to mask the almost childlike vocals from Janet, giving the song an almost unearned maturity and depth. But it really, really works.

Herb Alpert, Keep Your Eye On Me. Jam and Lewis were so succesful at turning Jackson into a star for A&M records that it really did seem natural that the label's founder, Alpert (the "A" in A&M), would collaborate with them on a career reviving album. Alpert's role as a sixties star trumpeter who captured pop success was ancient history, but the jazzy revisionist approach to his classic sound was beyond refreshing; it was audacious and daring. Who knew he had it in him? And who, at that point, knew Jam and Lewis were that capable of an artistic leap?

Human League, Human. Turning the top English synth act of the eighties into the next SOS Band may seem easy and derivative, but the collaboration did work wonders for both sides: The League never had quite such an accessible hit, and the track is simply, sheerly gorgeous. The cascading synths of the open, the plaintive lyric (yet another "sorry for my love on the side" message), are indeed a compelling mix of man and machine. Just because it looks easy, doesn't make it so.

Cherrelle, Affair. Cherrelle's career was also built on Jam and Lewis and their effective presentation of Cherrelle as a lusty woman willing to cheat ("Saturday Love", "Everything I MIss At Home", "You Look Good To Me", just for starters). Affair's forthright lyrics - "I don't need commitment, I don't need a man to tell me how to feel" - spoke to a frankness in the sexuality of independent urban women that was impossible to deny.

Johnny Gill, Rub You The Right Way. I was reminded of the primacy of Jam and Lewis and their work when this track showed up on my Sirius XM "Nineties on Nine" station ("Eighties on Eight" is also pretty awesome). Gill never was the biggest R&B star, but this track is a showstopper, from its explosive opening (a shouted "Pump Up the Bass!" followed by a signature Jam/Lewis zig zag of synths) to its sexy close ("your every wish is my command"). Your average song about a sexy massage would seem pretty silly. Not this one. 

Boyz II Men, 4 Seasons of Loneliness. Any of a number of their ballads would make the point, but I like the old fashioned, even gimmicky appraoch to a "4 seasons" song, subverted by BIIM's jazzy inventiveness in layered harmonies, and the Flyte Tyme magic in a sound curtain. The instrumentation is barely noticeable; it's the singing that really does the work, but even that is treated as a multilayered instrument in the Jam/Lewis mix, which gently softens what could be an overwrought lyric - "This loneliness has crushed my heart" - into a gentle, plaintive testament to love and loss.

Saturday Singalong: Hep Cats And Gossip Girls

...and I was accused today of being too attached to old, classic looking clothes, too:

Ella Fitzgerald - Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone. This is a fairly rare track, compiled as part of a collection for my coffee house job, and one of my favorites, because it's such a great opener - for an album, a concert, or a mix tape. I particularly like when usual ballads from the "singer/songwriter" era are given spiky, peppy arrangements. I had a friend who pointed out that Ella had a tendency to "sleepwalk" through drowsy arrangements; this one has none of that, giving a real sharpness to her attack. By the end, you will do exactly as she asks.

Lena Horne - Do Nothing Til You Hear From Me. Horne's career was all about a series of reinventions, including her late life transformation into the great jazz interpreter she was always meant to be. This is from one of her last albums, inspired in part by her friend Billy Strayhorn, who helped shape her singing. The remarkable thing isn't just that she's in amazing voice, it's the incredibly light, playful, downright sexy way she plays with the lyric. She weaves the spell so seamlessly that you can almost miss the "...and you never will" she appends to the title lyric. She's that convincing.

Nat King Cole - I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter. One of my favorite, and wisest, album purchases is this collection of Cole's work with Billy May, one of the greatest arrangers of all time. May was instrumental in creating the fifties-era jazz style of slamming, chatty horn arrangements, which require some similarly strong singing. The apex of this may well be May's work with Sinatra, but Cole's arguably the better singer. The way he crashes into the final "make believe it came, make believe it came... frooom yoooou" is amazing. 

Sammy Davis, Jr. - That Old Black Magic. I tend to think that time has not been kind enough to Sammy Davis, practically the Michael Jackson of his era, a star from the time he was small, and one of the most natural performers and entertainers ever. Something about "Candyman" and "Mr. Bojangles" and his later apearancs in the seventies overwhelms the crucial role he played defining the sound of sixties jazz-pop and set the standard in most ways for a Vegas performer. This track is but one easy example, pure performance magic with some of the most amazing singing attached. And his final "under that old black magic called love" and the way he jumps high-to-low and back again on "called" is indeed magical.

Frank Sinatra - Luck Be A Lady. The remarkable thing about Sinatra, or one of many, is the span of his career. Just when you think his voice is finally giving out, he pulled yet another amazing trick: think "New York New York" in 1977 or even "Teach Me Tonight" in 1982. Luck Be A Lady was an amazing track when it premiered in Guys and Dolls, and when it entered the American songbook. But Sinatra recorded it fairly late in his career, at the height of his powers as a Vegas headliner, and his version drips with the late sixties, early seventies rhythm track of High Vegas. But it's his vocal attack that's just breathtaking; he's aging, there's definitely smoke in his chords, it's almost flat in spots, but how he soars on the peaks! Stick with me baby... I'm the fella you came in with. You can just see the chorus girls with the feathers all around him.

Frank and/or Sammy and/or Lena - The Lady Is A Tramp. This is less about the singer, and more about the song - "She gets too hungry to wait for dinner at eight" is about the best opening ever, a clear definition of a person and a lifestyle choice in a sentence. Frank's version is classic, Sammy's is all sass and the tightrope between black and white in the era of integration ("she likes the free fresh... wind in her wig."), Lena's is all about reclaiming your power and finding yourself - "That's why this here lady - is a tramp." Indeed. 

It's Hard To Look Right, At You Baby...

 

 

I have to admit... I don't entirely get this; the phenomenon of Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" as a YouTube/lip-synch/cover item just mystifies me. The song is tuneful enough (which, among several reasons, is why I wouldn't call it a Worst Song Ever), but pulling out the video camera and shooting a lip synch video with my frat/cheerleading squad/co-workers... not really, no. I suspect that this YouTube phenom is actually the culmination of several trends in pop music that have been bubbling under the radar for a while (the lip synchs, the cover versions, the flash mobs, your nephew, her grandmother...), and ultimately, this may be the New Milennium equivalent of the Mix Tape - remember when you thought you were the only one making mix tapes? And then it turned out everyone did it?

Yeah, kind of like that. 

Now, who can take this to the next level?

TV To Talk About

Of all the distractions that have kept me from writing - a protracted illness, a promotion at work, life in general - none has been quite has captivating the past few days as the news from TV pilot season. Though many things change in these modern media times (it's a theme for me, just now), the major networks and their pilot development system has, oddly, not changed all that much. From January to about April, Hollywood busily prepares experimental episodes of dozens of new TV shows, and the networks study and test them while deciding which TV shows live or die for next season's schedule. The biggest change from when I was a kid is that gossip about the pilot process is way more visible now than it ever was, and the "early line" on next season's hot new shows starts... yesterday. Thanks mostly, to Deadline Hollywood  and their TV editor Nellie Andreeva (if you still don't know about Nikki Finke and Nellie et al and you care at all about Film or Television as a business, just hang your head in shame), we get more news these days about the TV pilots than ever, and this past week has been fast and furious as up fronts (the period when Network TV still sells most of their advertising for the coming year) start next week, with new schedules revealed and the general public surprised, happy or saddened with news of their favorite shows. These days, people who really care already know, and the "save my show" campaigns either already happened or generally, it's too late.

In any case, now is a nice moment to recap some of the past TV season as it winds to a close, and we know a lot about who's going, whose staying (and even some of what's coming, though I won't comment on them yet. Mostly). So here are some farewells and some celebrations and some... why did that come back?

First, the farewells:

1. GCB. Based on the novel Good Christian Bitches, ABC been's auditioning this Texas soap for a spot on the fall schedule (presumably, to replace Desperate Housewives, which finally limped to its close). The show focused on Brooke, whose perfect seeming marriage ended at the start of the show with the death of her philandering, embezzling husband, and her return to the wealthy Dallas enclave where her mother Gigi still lives. Their lives revolved around the local baptist church, full of Texas money and sudsy storylines. The show wasn't perfect - a little too much camp, a lot of bitchy arch dialogue, and some preposterous plotting - but for the show it was aiming to replace, it seemed like a pretty good start. Sadly, ABC has decided to go in other directions (let's save our hope for 666 Park Avenue and Nashville, especially), leaving Leslie Bibb still looking for the star vehicle she really deserves.... not to mention poor Kristen Chenoweth, who may never find another role so tailored to her talents.
2. Ringer. Hopes were high when the former Queen of the WB and the first big anchor for the new CW (when they merged with UPN) was coming back in a new series. But the least convincing thing in this good twin/bad twin mixup was the lead herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, who looked wan and uncomfortable from the get-go (and from what I hear, never got better. I just gave up after three epsidoes last fall). Perplexingly complex, and not in that good way where you care to figure it out, Ringer never found an audience, and I think most fans just want to fondly remember the best days of Buffy when Gellar and Joss Whedon were firing on all cylinders (and, to be fair, you could argue that we remember Buffy herself better than Gellar actually was. I know, sacrilege). In any case, I suspect Gellar's own judgment about her next best role doesn't take into account that she'd be better in a more active, dynamic, and physically demanding part - say a tough talking cop or such. Locked into the role of wealthy man's plaything brings out a kind of passivity in Gellar's performing that was really hard to take.
3. The Secret Circle. The most mystifying of duds, as this witchy poo bit of business followed The Vampire Diaries (built in audience), was created by Kevin Williamson (both Dawson's and TVD), and was based on a book by the creator of Vampire Diaries (i.e., Williamson already knew how to work the source material). And the premise seemed promising - teen witches, sexy derring do, hints of danger and big dark secrets... and then, nothing. Recasting the hot teen blonde boy after 4 episodes was a sign of buyer's remorse at the CW (the kid was wooden... but who isn't in that casting pool?), and the show never found a satisfying tone. But that's just the beginning of bizarre misfires all around (especially making the lead girl generally less likable with every episode), and especially perplexing when The Vampire Diaries seemed completely immune to any of these plotting disasters (providing a gasp filled, near perfect finale to boot). But then, that's Williamson for ya - he shoots for the rafters and when it's good (those shows, Scream), it's brilliant, and when it flops (later seasons of Dawson, Scream 4), it really fails. Here's hoping his next venture works better...
4. Harry's Law. I don't care - and if you're under 55, you probably don't either - but here's another example of network still not believing that older audiences, especially older women, are worth courting, even in large numbers. Harry's Law was actually NBC's second largest drama series in terms of audience, yet they seemd to think nothing of tossing it, while courting not fourth place, but fifth, among major networks (that's right.. on some nights, even Univision beats them). All because Harry's Law was next to nothing in 18-49, but huge in older audiences. We are on the cusp of a moment when senior viewing is bound to matter more (baby boomers in their golden years... anyone?), but apparently, not enough for a legal procedural led by an older female actress who's wildly popular within her age cohort. Which probably means another Emmy for Kathy Bates, and a lot of angry bloggers.
5. Pan Am (and The Playboy Club and Awake and Missing and The River and Alcatraz...). A number of high profile, big budget drama series came and went with surprising speed, with Pan Am being among the most high profile and prominent duds. both Pan Am and the shorter lived Playboy Club tried to get some ziz out of the same neo-sixties vibe that's apparently made Mad Men a hit, but both shows kind of underlined what Mad Men struggles with (and better): that roles for women in the sixties were professionally limiting, highly decorative, and probably caused the Women's Movement. Personally, I thought the Playboy Club explored these tensions better than the others, but of course... they're still Playboy Bunnies and the sexism was especially built in. Pan Am pretty much gave up from the start, trying to lace the obviously dull roles of glorified waitresses with a preposterous Cold War spy story that was more annoying than interesting. But the amazing thing about Pan Am was the obvious enormous expense of it all, recreating Eeno Saarinen's famed Pan Am terminal at JFK, the planes, the foreign locales (and in period)... the question of "and, why?" never entirely went away. Obviously, networks feel that the expense is worth it when shows pan out and become hits... but this season seemed especially loaded with expensive boondoggles (period dramas, pricey - yet untried - talent like Ashley Judd, elaborately scripted fantasy) of questionable long term prospect. And next season, though somewhat reined in, does seem like few execs learned much from their mistakes (though ABC apparently passed on Shonda Rimes expensive, elaborate soap Gilded Lilys, set in the Gilded Age).

 

And, on a happier note, I'm glad to see that these are coming back:

1. The Vampire Diaries and Supernatural. The CW renewed a raft of its current successes - not just these two horror/fantasy shows, but also Nikita, Gossip Girl and 90210 - suggesting that they've found a way to make shows that may fly uder conventional radar, but attract rabid followings nonetheless (If GG can't be called a hit, it's remarkable that its made Blake Lively a fashion and media star, just as one example). Supernatural seemed to have played its big story arc out in six seasons, and the seventh has been touch and go, but as long as the actors are game, I'm happy to stick with it; while the Vampire Diaries has shown remarkable fluidity writing itself into corners and then imaginatively breaking through them. Add in another interesting fantasy show next season along with the prequel to Sex and the City (the Carrie Diaries), and the CW seems poised to remain the network that gets the young viewer.
2. Scandal. I was dubious about yet another Shonda Rimes exercise with a commanding female lead in the world of male power (in this case, politics and Washington wheeling and dealing), but steady underplaying and some effective but uderstated writing have convinced me that Scandal is the real thing - a solid, fairly unique premise that lets talented people shine in a layered ensemble (all that, and it manages to avoid seeming like a pale carbon of, say, The Good Wife). Kerry Washington does, as it turns out, make a captivating series lead, and an interracial affair with the President turns out to be way hotter and more plausible than one might think. Densely plotted, and you have to pay attention... but Rimes gets things about TV plotting that others only dream to know, making it easy to keep things straight and stay interested. What mystifies me is why the other two Shondaland shows - Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice - both of which seem creatively spent, will limp along next year while other, interesting shows fall away (can you sense my GCB bitterness?).
3. Don't Trust the B- in Apt. 23. Comedy's an ugly business these days, full of asinine guys and insulting humor (and yet, I still love me some Archer)... which, somehow is what makes this show about a crass, unlikable woman in the lead all the more offbeat and appealing. Pairing a nice, innocent lamb in the city with a manipulative, selfish but brilliant ne'er do well is hardly new, but nothing on the B- feels stale. And then there's the genius of having James van der Beek play... James van der Beek, shallow and dopey has-been from Dawson's Creek. The byplay between the three leads is smart and refreshing, and the plots, thus far, have been brilliant combinations of sly and sick. If they can keep up the pace set in the first five, the creators are geniuses. If it manages to be merely funny and fresh week to week, I'll take it.
4. Community (and Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock and even Up All Night). It's been a long time coming, but my best friend managed to convince me that Community is way funnier and smarter than I realized (though the computer fantasy room is a cheap and easy write-around of doing some of the hard work). And even though I don't watch it, I know Parks and Recreation is good work. That they both survived predictions of cancellation is heartening, as is the fact that 30 Rock, however imperfectly, will have 13 episodes to wrap up their run as well next year. And, just as heartening, someone saw fit to give the promising cast and premise of Up All NIght a chance to get it together, too (it's Maya Rudolph's quasi-Oprah that really has me interested in what they can do). All these shows suggest that good comedy can be more than cheap insults and white guys being just jerks. And that deserves to survive, doesn't it?
5. The Good Wife. Naturally. CBS may be renewing a raft of dubious nonsense (all those CSeyes, the twin NCISesses, that awful show with Tom Selleck as the head of the NYPD, never mind what passes for comedy there), but they are also renewing what's fast become the jewel of network prime time, an intelligent interesting show with a lot of fascinating characters you care about and follow week to week. That's what television, I think, is supposed to be. And, at least, the one show that proves how to do it well these days is still there.  

Worst Song Ever: Out With The Old, Out With The New...

Something old, something new... I haven't heard a lot of terrible in a while, but when they do... jeepers.

Bryan Adams, Summer of '69. Lazy, lazy, lazy: never mind that Adams can't be the protagonist of the song (he was 10 in 1969), or the failure to evoke a decade as tumultuous as the sixties were, no, let's just wonder about "best days of my life," the line meant to imply this summer - remember, when his "band" broke up - was amazing because he met some girl and it just seemed to "last forever" when, of course, that girl's no longer in the picture and his rock aspirations amounted to even bigger, better things. Yes, the song, basically, is an insult to us al, dreamers or not, who fixate on our past as if it were golden, or reject holding onto the past because there's no point. Cynical, lazy and obvious, Summer of 69 is just corporate rock with little more than profit in mind. And no, I don't hate all Bryan Adams. What was really insulting about this song was that the same fairly sexy, smart songwriter who mixed pain and pleasure in "Cuts Like A Knife" (and showed up in one of MTV's most casually arresting videos) ultimately resorted to it. And no, I don't think "Canadian" is the perjorative for it.

Nicki Minaj, Starships. I freely admit, I don't entirely get Minaj or her success, but I don't entirely depise it: Super Bass has its charms (boom ba loom ba boom ba boom boom bass, indeed), and somebody should indeed know who the f*** I is. But that song came from Stargate, a production team recently profiled in The New Yorker's creative arts issue (I don't hate all New Yorkers, either, natch) along with this song's writer, Ester Dean. The article is especially deadly for the way it pulls back a Wizard of Oz-like curtain on the team's approach to songwriting, what they term "hhok plus hook plus hook" which appears to mean the layering on of easy catch phrases (going a long way to explaining a lot of their work with Rihanna, like the atrocious "S&M"). Starships, produced by another, Stargate-like team, is a good example of how the process can fail, all meaningless catchphrases loaded on top of one another until complete incoherence is achieved. It's not the song is lazy, overprocessed, or not undeniably catchy - it's all of these. It's the astonishing amount (obviously) of money, time and effort spent to put complete gibberish onto a digital hard drive as if it did, indeed, mean something. 

Maroon 5 (featuring Wiz Khalifa), Payphone. Let's be honest, it's hard being Maroon 5; hard being a band who zoomed to the top of the charts in about 1 and a half albums, rethinking Chic-era bass heavy disco beats as stylish, designer rock music for the upscale lounge set, and proving, on a string of hits (not to mention some pretty choice album filler), at least a dozen ways to reinvent that wheel.  That success is due, in no small part, to Adam Levine, possessed of one of the highest, most graceful tenors in pop, able to sound yearning, sweet and sublimely sad, often all at once (She Will Be Loved, for starters, Misery to follow). Levine's also an offbeat heartthrob, which explains his budding success as the latest thing in Reality show TV judging on The Voice. But, alas, success will spoil Rock Hunter: Levine is, more or less, phoning it in for this lazy Chris Brown viaTaio Cruzish, Usher-lite single, which can't even be bothered, lyrically, to either set itself in a past where payphones actually mattered, or somehow explain why the central image of a payphone even matters to the point of the song. Instantly forgettable, yet still featuring a vocal jump that borders, even for Levine, on screechy, Payphone is the first time I've felt like Maroon 5 is cashing the check rather than putting in the effort. And yes, Moves Like Jagger did kind of hint at this development, but even that, egregious Xtina notwithstanding, made up in verve what it lacked in panache. Levine may not have moves like Jagger, but his own style is sexy enough, most of the time. Here's hoping the album isn't a complete dud.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: Not That Different From Each Other

Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, buttonholing the reader in his short story “The Rich Boy” (1926). “They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” Today’s rich are not only different from you and me but different from yesterday’s.

No one who has followed the heedless speculation that led to the 2008 financial meltdown and the subsequent bailouts would think of millennial-era greedheads as being anything other than steel-toed in advancing and achieving their interests; it is the rest of us who appear soft, our trust playing us for suckers. The distance between Fitzgerald’s very rich—now the extremely rich, the 1 percent—and the remaining 99 percent has never been steeper. The 1 percent occupy a higher altitude than the rest of us: their clouds look fluffier; their sunlight gleams with Hollywood gold. In Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis novels and in film classics from the previous century, the rich are portrayed as builders and expansionists, their pharaoh fortunes amassed from steel, brick, minerals, timber, railroads, shipbuilding, newspaper publishing; even those who won their money on Wall Street seem propped on industrial girders. Round-bellied, a watch fob looped from a vest pocket, these bankers and tycoons command offices as grand as railway stations, eat in dining rooms fit for Versailles. What they do and how they live have weight, imprint. The vast wealth depicted in movie/TV drama today is divorced from manufacturing and an invisible army of laborers doing their part; it’s divorced from anything resembling work. It’s floating and caressing, immortalizing.

- the generally perceptive James Wolcott, blathering about images of wealth on TV in the latest issue of Vanity Fair.

Now I generally like Wolcott, and I especially like him when it comes to culture watching - he takes it seriously, and he watches a lot - but this one is weak. Never mind the kind of lazy premise, a chance to quickly rope in a wide swath of series television in a highly generalized observation; the problem actually lies in the premise itself - his notion that somehow wealth today is vastly different from wealth in the past. This is just absurd - the first decade of the Twentieth Century was called The Gilded Age for a reason, and it wasn't because the men who made fortunes were "builders and expansionists"; it's because they made enormous profits in their businesses, and even more money in stocks and financial dealings. The Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, Morgans and Whitneys and Astors were not especially different from the wealthy bankers and hedge fund types of today: flush with absurd amounts of cash, spending it on pointless displays of generally poor taste. Wolcott generalizes off of Theordore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis... as if he's never heard of Edith Wharton or Henry James, the real chroniclers of this life of ease and indolence. Indeed, he goes so far as to dress up this middling case with a familiar line from the greatest of these observers of wealth, Fitzgerald himself, as if to miss entirely the point of The Great Gatsby.

I'm not trying to suggest that film and television are doing some great job dramatizing the realities of life as most of us face them; but what's deeply problematic in Wolcott's narrow view is some sense that This Just Happened and It's Not Like How They Used To Do It. The reality is... this is exactly how they used to do it, and it works. And perhaps the most telling failure to see this lies in Wolcott completely overlooking the largest and most tasteless display of excessive wealth: Downton Abbey. Or doesn't that count?