Deadpool & Wolverine to Flop?, Kamala's "Brat" Strategy, "Recession Pop" Music from 2008 Signaling Recession?, Politico Thinks LOTR Causes Actual War, This 00's Band Returns (The Five for 07/26/24)
Car CD player return as as "retro upgrade." Jack White gives away copies of vinyl-only release, encourages fans to pirate.
Hey, welcome to The Five.
Crazy week, so this one is a bit late…I’ll tell you about it another time.
Let’s get into Culture & Commentary.
[one]
Gen Z are becoming influencers for…blue collar careers?
Very cool.
Is social media going to inspire the next generation of tradespeople? Help end the stigma surrounding trade school? Make blue-collar careers the cool choice? I’m hopeful this is happening already, and not a minute too soon given the growing labor shortage in the trades.
At this very moment, I imagine a Gen Zer scrolling through TikTok and stopping to watch a twentysomething electrician’s badass compilation of job-site clips, commenting, “I want to become an electrician. How do I start?”
Then, switching to Instagram, they see an 18-year-old owner of a window cleaning business talking about his goal to earn six figures this year, and comment to ask, “What age were you when you started?”
The exciting truth is these videos and comments exist, courtesy of Lexis Czumak-Abreu, aka Lex the Electrician, who inspires more than 2 million followers across social platforms to consider the electrical trade, and Louis Mouchet, who is on a mission to help his fellow teens start lucrative window cleaning businesses.
Not every kid needs to go to college…but every kid needs to do SOMETHING to launch into adulthood. I did a consulting project with a jr. college here in the St. Louis area during COVID, expecting their numbers would be through the roof, as 4 year schools we're often closed at the height of the pandemic, so it would make sense for kids to do a semester or two closer to home.
Instead, what I found was that many recent high school grads were not doing much of anything…living at home and driving enough DoorDash to afford their XBOX Live subscription. Which is scary.
There are more blue collar jobs open right now, so the market will likely suck some younger professionals into those lucrative salaries. As those fill up, we’ll likely see a rebalancing towards college and white-collar trades.
[two]
Uhhh…wut?
Twitter was abuzz this week about a “hit piece” on Vice President nominee J.D. Vance for…liking Lord of the Rings?!
Vance has said his own time in the Marines deployed in Iraq was formative to his isolationist, dovish approach to foreign policy. “I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to,” Vance once recounted. “[I saw] that promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”
But his fandom also is in tension with some of Tolkien’s ideas about how nation-states should approach the outside world. The books are, in many ways, anti-isolationist. Frodo wants to ignore the ill tidings and stay home but eventually realizes that the Shire isn’t untouched by troubles elsewhere (like, say, NATO being pulled into defending Ukraine from Sauron Putin). In the end, Rohan, Gondor, the elves, ents and dwarves, all must band together and end their petty nationalist squabbles. Their lives are, they realize, interconnected.
Vance’s love of Lord of the Rings is of a piece with rightward nationalists abroad. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni used to cosplay as a hobbit. “I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” she has said, though unlike Vance she has supported aid to Ukraine.
I’ll admit, I had to look up Giorgia Meloni, which I assumed to be a male leader from the Mussolini dictatorship during WWII…nope, just the current female President of Italy…who is quite popular, overseeing a strong economy and is largely un-controversial.
As far as political hit pieces go…this might be the worst one of all time. First off, Politico can’t decide if they’re calling Vance a warmonger for liking Lord of the Rings despite his isolationist view of foreign policy…or a terrible person, because he is an isolationist.
So, which one? Is Vance going to cause a global war or bury his head in the sand until we’re in WWIII? And if Lord of the Rings is such dangerous propaganda, why hasn’t it influenced ANY other national leaders the same way? There are 150 million copies of the novels in print….we can assume Vance is not the only leader to read the Tolkein’s epic…where are the other examples of Despots created by LOTR?
[three]
Is Spotify signaling a recession?
Recession pop largely refers to the body of music that emerged during the Great Recession, which started in late 2007 and lasted for 18 months.
The recession pop trend is a “curatorial act,” said Charlie Harding, co-author of “Switched On Pop: How Popular Music Works and Why it Matters” and music adjunct professor at New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.
“It’s a trend of people trying to make sense of a thing that happened to us that was senseless,” said Harding. “There was a bunch of songs that became the soundtrack of that era.”
Contrary to the country’s economic standing at the time, Joe Bennett, a professor at Berklee College of Music and forensic musicologist specializing in the analysis of popular music and songwriting, refers to this period as “the era of the Katy Perry banger.”
“I think about the 2008 recession and the music that was taking over the radio waves at that point. It’s a lot of Katy Perry, and a lot of hyper, very fast music,” said Lewis. “It’s very dance pop.”
The songs that dominated the charts — also including The Black Eyed Pea’s “I Gotta Feeling” and Kesha’s “Tik Tok” — were “party anthems,” Bennett said. “It was all about dancing and having a good time, in contrast to the actual economic circumstances.”
“They were feel-good songs to get us out of a difficult time and they were the medicine we needed,” Bennett said.
Since the Great Depression in the 1930s, consumers have shown a preference for happier songs during periods of economic uncertainty, according to Diane Negra, professor of film studies and screen culture at University College Dublin.
“There’s that cliché that music is faster and more upbeat and consoling in difficult times,” she said.
Music can mimic and respond to major trends, and a great example is the 1980s, according to Harding. The period of high inflation and economic downturn was also a time when subgenres like house and techno emerged.
It’s yet another sign that, while the overall economy looks good on paper, a large percentage of the population has been shut out of the housing market due to sky-high prices and sharp interest rates, struggling under heavy student loans, and other factors that equal a functional “recession” for those making less than six-figures.
[four]
And pop music isn’t just signaling economics…but also politics.
When Kamala Harris became the prospective new Democratic party presidential candidate on July 21, social media was quickly flooded with coconut and palm tree emojis, black writing on lime green backgrounds, the word “brat”, and questions about the actress Maya Rudolph’s whereabouts. But how do these memes and popular culture references relate to the US election campaign?
Following last year’s “Barbiecore” theme, social media posts this summer are all about neon lime green and being “brat”. The trend emerged from the new album of the same name by British pop singer Charli XCX.
Many social media users have adopted the album cover art (black arial font on a neon lime green background) as a meme (a popular and shareable cultural idea). According to Charli XCX, the meaning of “brat” is to be “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party … Who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown … is very honest, very blunt, a little bit volatile”.
Harris has become associated with the meme over the past weeks. But it was not until Charli XCX posted her endorsement of the sentiment (“kamala IS brat”) that the “brat” posts about Harris really took off. The campaign appeared to be keenly aware of the trend and created a header image for the new “kamalahq” X account in the style of the album cover.
I’ve never been a Charlie XCX fan, but painting Harris as a leader who’s “a little messy and likes to party, and is a little bit volatile” will probably inspire more memes than actual votes from young people in November. On the other hand, the Trump campaign in 2020 proves memes have real power…and Kamala is getting an enthusiasm bump among young voters.
Elsewhere in pop music and politics, and 5 second clip of J.D. Vance saying:
“we are run in this country, via our Corporate Oligarchs, via the Democrats, by a bunch of childless Cat Ladies, who are miserable in their own lives with the choices they’ve made, so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
…which is probably not the best way to win over independents.
Jennifer Aniston got pretty mad about this.
“All I can say is... Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”
It’s worth noting that Trump supports IVF treatments, and Vance supports Trump, so I’m not exactly sure who Aniston is is talking to (or about) here. It’s also worth noting that Aniston was in a brief marriage to Brad Pitt that ended when she was 36, and didn’t marry again until she was 46 years old (which again, lasted three years).
While I sympathize with Aniston’s desire to be a mother, the reality is that she had all the resources in the world to adopt (like Pitt’s 2nd wife did—several times) or freeze her eggs, and apparently chose her career over having kids from 25-35 while on Friends. I feel sad for Aniston that life didn’t turn out the way she had hoped, but it’s a bit absurd to blame J.D. Vance for this, as Jennifer’s hit show had it’s final season when he was in high school. Especially when he doesn’t appear to be against IVF.
Given that Vance was such a long shot for VP, I doubt he was thinking about much his comments would hurt him (and the Trump ticket) later. But we’re not done with the pop culture angle yet, because the “Swifties” had to make this about themselves and their god:
My first reaction was that “nobody would categorize Taylor Swift as miserable,” but her last two records are about being miserable mega-famous billionaire, so maybe the Swifties are correct that the shoe fits in this case.
For the record “has yet to make a Presidential endorsement,” is a heck of a misleading statement…as Taylor Swift hates President Trump. We can only assume that Swift hasn’t thrown her hat in with Kamala yet because she’s been too busy being very rich and unfathomably famous.
As I’ve shared before, I was a big fan of Swift early on (I found out about her via her first record, as a contact of mine in the music industry was Taylor’s live show coach), but between Swift’s last two albums Midnights and Tortured Poets Department being garbage albums and the constant narcissism of her fans, listening isn’t much fun anymore.
Pop music isn’t making politics better…politics is making pop music worse. Or rather, the fans are. At this point, I may just throw my Taylor Swift vinyl on Facebook Marketplace and delete her from streaming. She’s still a great artist overall (when you cut 2023 and 2024 from the record books), but her fans are ruining the experience by making everything in the whole world about Taylor Swift.
Music and TV should be respites from a crazy election year, not an extension of them.
[five]
As always, let’s head into the weekend with a pop culture roundup:
Zack Snyder dropped a trailer for the director’s cut of the newly-retitled Rebel Moon Chapter One: Chalice of Blood, and it’s so violent, YouTube age-restricted it (click here to watch). If you liked the originals and thought “if only these movies were a combined 6 hours and a featured a lot more gore,” then check out extended cut on August 2nd.
The car CD player is back as a “throwback upgrade” in the Subaru WRX. It’ll cost you an extra $375…props to those Gen Z kids for bringing the shiny plastic discs back. This time, the CD loads vertically in the center console. If you were wondering, you can still buy Visor CD holders from the Clinton era on Amazon.
Jack White of many different bands (The White Stripes, The Racenteurs, The Dead Weather) released a new album on vinyl-only as a free gift with any purchase at his Third Man records stores in Nashville, Detroit and London, which was simply in a plain white sleeve. The album has been dubbed No Name. Looks like this one will never hit traditional streaming, but you can find a ripped version on YouTube, or find it on a torrent website. In this case, pirating is guilt free, as Jack White encouraged fans to download the project from less-than-legal sources.
Norah Jones dropped by NPR to record for the Tiny Desk concert series…and it’s great.
The Batman spinoff Penguin will cover the Gotham of Robert Pattison’s Batman between the first movie, and upcoming sequel. Colin Farrell (The Gentlemen, Phone Booth) stars as the DC crime boss. See it on HBO Max in September.
Wow. The final entry into the Deadpool saga looks like it’s bringing emotional gravitas along with the series trademark humor. MCU boss Kevin Feige has called the movie “almost as important” as Infinity War and Endgame for the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Because it’s sci-fi, Marvel might just be able to use Deadpool & Wolverine story to slide into another universe to erase the mound of crap that pretty much all of their movies and TV shows have been post-Endgame, and get franchise that once stacked up billion dollar hits at the box office back on track. We’ll find out this weekend…
UPDATE: Yeah, reviews are mid-to-bad. At some point, it’s questionable whether the MCU can continue in this format. They may need to pull a DC and completely reboot.
However, one of my favorite film writers, my buddy Dan Buffa, loved it…so maybe this will be a new direction for the MCU. His writeup is definitely worth your time.
Todd Phillips is one heck of a director, ranging from gust-busting comedy (The Hangover, Borat) to gut-punching dramas (A Star is Born). The filmmaker is reuniting with Joaquin Phoenix for a sequel to the billion-dollar Joker, for yet another look at 70’s era New York through the lens of a comic book villain. This time, Lady Gaga comes along for the ride…and as a duet partner. Somehow, this looks amazing. See it 10/04.
Liev Shreiber (X-Men, Defiance) stars in an adaptation of Earnest Hemingway’s final novel as a terminally ill Col. Richard Cantwell during the waning days of WWII. He decides to spend his final days in Venice, duck hunting…but doesn’t expect to fall in love. “I have death sewn into the lining of my clothes.” So. Very. Hemingway. See it 08/30.
Holy cow. Egyptian director Ibrahim Nash'at spent a year with the Taliban after the U.S. abandoned the country, and billions of dollars of military assets. He nearly got killed for his trouble. Out 08/31.
[new music]
Cigarettes After Sex taps the same vein as the 2000’s British indie band The XX, who only put out two albums. Drawing heavily from 80’s synth pop, the Texas-based band writes songs for Millennials who watch 500 Days of Summer on repeat and love the era of music when Death Cab for Cutie and The National broke through from underground favorites to mega-hit artists.
That should be enough to tell you if it’s worth hitting play on X’s or not.
Early aughts piano rock outfit The Fray are back after a decade away. Despite the fact that original vocalist Isaac Slade exited the band…the slimmed down lineup (now a three piece) captures the original vibe of the band while pushing the sound in a fresh new direction.
Until the next one,
-sth