Kid Kicked Out of School for...US Navy Flag, Viral Country Phenom Oliver Anthony Finally Explains Himself, Elder Millennials Using WAY Too Much Booze/Drugs, The Guitar is Dying (The Five for 09/01/23)
Plus, David Fincher (Gone Girl, The Social Network) has a new thriller coming out. Star Wars finally has a hit again...but it's too confusing.
Hey, welcome to The Five, a publication about the stories that matter.
It’s Friday, so let’s dive into Culture & Commentary.
[one]
The Oliver Anthony story just keeps going (including being used as a question at the first Republican debate). The longer the “Rich Men North of Richmond” song is talked about, the more baseless the takes become.
Yahoo completely jumped the shark when they tried to tie three songs that have nothing to do with each other, Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” and Morgan Wallen’s double album.
As the controversy over Aldean’s song brewed, fellow country singer Morgan Wallen enjoyed the success of the single “Last Night,” which had a historic stay atop the Billboard Hot 100 throughout the spring and summer. The song was included on Wallen’s third album, One Thing at a Time, a hit in its own right.
In early 2021, Wallen became the center of controversy after video surfaced of him using a racist slur outside his Nashville home. He said he had merely intended to be “playful” and apologized.
The incident focused public attention on the long history of anti-Blackness in country music but did not necessarily engender the reckoning some thought was long overdue for the famously white genre.
Despite the controversy, Wallen’s double album Dangerous continued to enjoy blistering sales throughout 2021. This year, One Thing at a Time took (and maintained for several months) the top Billboard spot, leading Variety to call him the “undisputed champ” of Billboard’s charts..
Let’s unpack this.
A. Wallen was on “hour 72 of a 72 hour bender” when he uttered a word…he should not have. It’s innapropraite, and there’s no excuse for it, but the guy was drunk (and probably high) and appeared to have no idea what he was doing.
He had an addiction problem, and he fixed it. That doesn’t mean you need to listen to him (I don’t—I just don’t like his music).
Whatever you think of Wallen—he’s not overtly political. Or, subtly political, for that matter. He’s a run of the mill Nashville guy who sings about booze (pre-rehab), girls and being sad.
B. Oliver Anthony has gone out of his way to distance his music from partisan politics.
C. So that leaves…Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town.” Yeah, that’s a “Conservative” country song. It’s more of a meme than a musical composition, which is why I’m not a fan. I get why it resonates thematically with some, but I just can’t get past Aldean’s lack of vocal dexterity and uninspired delivery, or sad-sack-suburbanite-trying-to-be-a-biker aesthetic whether or not I connect with a lyric or two.
Unfortunately for Yahoo, it stands alone. There’s no “trend” in county music of “conservative hits”…just a corporate press outlet desperately trying to click-farm their way to attention by publishing outright untruths.
Sometimes I get intimidated by the fact that The Five, a small, one-writer publication, is up against such gigantic, well funded outlets.
Then those outlets come along and remind us all how stupid they are, opening the door for more independent media.
[two]
A twelve year old student in Colorado Springs was kicked out of school for a Gadsden Flag on his backpack, which the school falsely claims has “origins in slavery.”
Let’s just hop over to Wikipedia on that one.
Gadsden decided that the American navy needed a distinctive flag and took it upon himself to make one in 1775.[25][6] He gave Commodore Esek Hopkins a yellow rattlesnake flag to serve as his personal standard on USS Alfred, the flagship of America's first navy squadron.[7][20]: 289 Gadsden intended the design as a warning to Great Britain not to trample the liberties of its subjects.[26]
It’s a Navy flag. It was always a Navy flag.
But according to the school district…
As for the argument that “some people who have done something bad wore a thing” argument…let’s hop back over to Wikipedia one more time to look at one particularly stupid rhetorical trick:
Reductio ad Hitlerum (/ˈhɪtlərəm/; Latin for "reduction to Hitler"), also known as playing the Nazi card,[1][2] is an attempt to invalidate someone else's argument on the basis that the same idea was promoted or practised by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party.[3] Arguments can be termed reductio ad Hitlerum if they are fallacious (e.g., arguing that because Hitler abstained from eating meat or was against smoking, anyone else who does so is a Nazi).
If a school can’t understand basic facts about the American Revolution, it calls into serious question the staff’s ability to convey any other subjects accurately. And if the staff can only lean back on an argument as intellectually sound as screaming “Hitler also had a dog” at a random passerby walking their Golden Retriever.
Meanwhile in Montreal, school districts are making it mandatory for students to accept notebooks that promote transgenderism, abortion and…octopuses, I guess. It’s not an apples to apples comparison (different countries), but both events happened this week, and show the schism of what symbolism is “acceptable” messaging in modern education.
It’s a reminder that all education is someone’s indoctrination. We’re currently fighting over who’s values are going to win out.
And it’s making the local school one of the most contentious locations of American politics.
But a patch on a backpack is already settled law. In 1969, the Supreme Court setteld 7-2 in Tinker vs. Des Moines, ruling in favor of students who were suspended for wearing black arm bands in protest of the Vietnam War.
The Supreme Court’s majority ruled that neither students nor teachers “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” The Court took the position that school officials could not prohibit only on the suspicion that the speech might disrupt the learning environment
The whole story has a pretty sad ending, as Jaden is (not surprisingly) being bullied. Jr. high is tough enough without being a trending topic on Twitter.
The whole thing makes you wonder how many of these outspoken Conservative parents are standing up for a cause vs. grasping at 15 minutes of social media stardom by setting up school board sessions and administration meetings to be as explosive as possible.
No matter the motivations, it’s often the children who lose.
Jaden got to keep a patch on his bag.
But he’s not socially isolated.
Jaden lost.
And his mom, and hundreds of YouTube reaction channels and thousands of Twitter accounts, are to blame.
[three]
I suppose the answer to this story is for you to point at me and say “hey dummy, start playing guitar.” Perhaps when my kids are a bit older and I’m not a few months into a new business, I can be a part of the solution.
Sadly, the musical instrument revolution, kicked off by the COVID lockdown, has already reversed.
Fender’s CFO Matt Janopaul has revealed that in 2022 the electric guitar giant had to deal with almost $100 million worth of canceled orders.
Most players know by now that one of the few upsides of the pandemic was a boom in guitar sales. Indeed, after some years on the wane, guitar sales returned to their highest figures since the ’60s Beatlemania boom.
Of course, what goes up, must go down, and a decline has subsequently followed. Now we have some concrete figures from the world’s biggest guitar brand, Fender.
Speaking to business publication Pyments as part of its Tough Calls series, Janopaul discussed the extent of the downturn in orders and explained how Fender survived the knock.
“We had 16 million people pick up a guitar during the pandemic, 30 million worldwide. And the industry and Fender really benefited from that,” explains Janopaul.
“Then, of course, we get to 2022 and people decide to start taking vacations or doing other things with their disposable income. Guitars were no longer the priority – and the tough call I had to make was dealing with retail partner cancellations of orders in the magnitude approaching $100 million.”
The decline of Fender guitars feels like we’re losing a piece of America, like if Levi’s jeans or Converse All Stars were to simply cease to be. If you’ve always thought about picking an instrument up as an adult (or, re-engage with an old hobby), here’s a good argument from INC Magazine to do just that:
Playing music makes you happy. McMaster University discovered that babies who took interactive music classes displayed better early communication skills. They also smiled more.
Musicians can process multiple things at once. As mentioned above, this is because playing music forces you to process multiple senses at once. This can lead to superior multisensory skills.
Music increases blood flow in your brain. Studies have found that short bursts of musical training increase the blood flow to the left hemisphere of the brain. That can be helpful when you need a burst of energy. Skip the energy drink and jam for 30 minutes.
Music helps the brain recover. Motor control improved in everyday activities with stroke patients.
[four]
Elder Millennials and Gen Xer’s are…hitting the sauce pretty hard. And the weed, and the powder. And the pills.
Last year, a record 28% of adults aged 35 to 50 said they use marijuana, more than double the 13% who said they used the drug a decade ago, according to the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future panel study. Last year’s number is the highest since 2008 when data was first collected.
Daily marijuana use was reported by nearly 7% of mid-life adults. Daily use is defined as using the drug 20 or more times in the past 30 days.
Hallucinogenic drug use also hit record levels among middle-aged adults last year.
Just over 4% of mid-life adults said they had used hallucinogenic drugs last year, the highest level since 2008. About 12% of middle-aged adults said they had used some drug other than marijuana last year, such as hallucinogens like LSD, cocaine, amphetamines, sedatives, and heroin.
Binge drinking hit record levels among middle-aged adults as well.
About 29% of mid-life adults said they had consumed five or more drinks in a row sometime in the past two weeks, the highest since it was first measured in 2008.
Amphetamine use has also jumped over the last decade, with just over 3% of mid-life adults saying they used amphetamines in the past year, compared to just over 1% saying so in 2012.
We’re going to see a lot of early graves filled from this behavior, tragically.
[five]
As always, let’s head into the weekend with a pop culture roundup.
STOP THE PRESSES…Michael Fassbender (Prometheus, X-Men: First Class) and Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton, Snowpiercer) are teaming up with director David Fincher (Gone Girl, Se7en, Fight Club, The Social Network).
Holy cow. This should be good. In theaters in November, on Netflix a couple weeks later.
One Piece is about pirates, monsters and the like. The source material comes from a Japanese Manga with tremendous global popularity. Season 1 just dropped, and so far has excellent marks from fans and critics alike on Rotten Tomatoes, if you’re into pirate-y things.
Judging by the “Rated Fresh” critical and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes, Ahsoka looks like the best Star Wars project to come out in years.
I haven’t watched the show yet, but apparently you need to be pretty well versed in more than a handful of Star Wars movies and shows to understand what the heck is going on this one.
The “interconnected world” theory looks good on paper, but at some point, it becomes a burden on the fans, who will tune out in favor of entertainment that takes less Googling…
NEW MUSIC
Red Clay Strays share just as much sonically with the classic sounds of the Memphis based Sun Records as with Americana vocal standouts Jason Isbell, Nathaniel Rateliff and Brittany Howard of the Alabama Shakes.
The band also captures an aesthetic cool, tied together by vocalist Brandon Coleman’s uncanny resemblance to the late James Dean.
These guys are brand new, but given how quickly Zach Bryan, Turnpike Troubadours and Charles Wesley Godwin have ascended to stadium status as the Americana genre continues to grow, it might be a good idea to catch RCS live while you still can in a small(ish) venue. Check out tour dates here. None in St. Louis, sadly.
Until the next one
-sth