Modern City Architecture Causing Depression?, Right Wing Media in Full Scale Civil War, Teen Pop Artist Thinks Vinyl Records Will End the World, Japan Reacts to Oppenheimer (The Five for 04/05/24)
Plus, the controversy around Netflix rebooting 1970's sitcom Good Times, Viral country singer Oliver Anthony drops his debut album.
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Now, let’s dive into Culture & Commentary.
[one]
This one is complicated…so hang with me. Politically right online journalism and commentary has grown from a barely-there niche reaching Millennials who weren’t into Fox News…into a full blown juggernaut, with The Daily Wire producing a hit comedy movie (Lady Ballers) in 2023, and almost certainly outpacing CNN (600,000 weekly viewers) and MSNBC (1.2 million live weekly viewers).
Other online-only (no broadcast/cable/satellite TV/radio presence) generating 5-10x the audience of broadcast cable, including Tucker Carlson (a fired Fox News host with 5 million views this week on Twitter), Steven Crowder (2 million views on Rumble this week), Dan Bongino (4 million views on Rumble this week), and…whatever Candace Owens is going to pull on her own platform.
Despite all the success (or, because of it?!) the online right is ripping itself to shreds. Here’s a quick timeline:
Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro are feuding over the Israel/Hamas war.
Candace Owens, the Daily Wire’s most popular host, was fired for reasons that have not yet been stated (although rumors abound, there isn’t enough time to cover them), with Owens threatening to go scorched earth, despite an apparent nondisclosure on both sides.
Meanwhile, right-wing Comedian/podcast host Steven Crowder, who lost a substantial portion of his audience after a Ring camera of Crowder’s abusive behavior towards his then-pregnant wife, and a public battle with the Daily Wire over a contract offer last year.
Crowder is now being sued by former show cast member Jared Monroe, who may have been one of the male employees to be sexually harassed by Crowder, who is either gay…or a very strange heterosexual who allegedly likes illegally exposing himself to men who work for him, according to Yahoo:
According to text messages reviewed by the outlet, Crowder sent photos of his genitals to co-workers. He would also allegedly expose his genitals to employees in person so frequently that most of them either laughed uncomfortably or showed outright disgust as a way to give him the attention he sought to as a way to get him to stop.
From a cultural perspective, what’s fascinating here…is that all these people were personal friends and frequent collaborators for years, and sometimes, decades.
Now, Carlson seems to despise Shapiro, Candace Owens hates Shapiro and Steven Crowder, and the very large audiences that have been built by Steven Crowder’s Louder with Crowder brand and The Daily Wire will almost certainly fragment into smaller chunks.
Right wing online media is now going through what every social media movement experiences from the Tea Party movement of 2009, to Black Lives Matter (which has lost 67% of it’s reach and support since 2020), and before that…the Hippie movement, punk rock subculture…and even the Flappers of the 1920’s.
Social movements are built to die…and right wing online media will either be reborn n smaller pieces…or will burn out and something else will take it’s place.
The social movements that endure…tend to not succeed (for example, PETA, which has rabid fans…but a very unsuccessful track record for turning meat eaters into vegans)…with a core that sticks around because they see themselves as lovable losers who might win some day.
All that to say…social science has proven that the Dark Knight meme holds true.
[two]
Ugh. I’ve never had a reason to write about Billie Eilish in the past, a neo-goth teen star who claims to have been discovered via making music in her bedroom, but in reality is the daughter of two uber-connected actor/musicians in Hollywood and had a LOT of professional help to become an “organic” superstar.
Anyway, Billie is Big Mad that you’re favorite artist has more than one color of vinyl record for sale.
Billie Eilish has spoken up against the practice of “some of the biggest artists in the world” releasing multiple vinyl variants to boost album sales.
In a new interview with Billboard about her sustainability efforts, Eilish vented about the wastefulness that comes from producing different vinyl packages to entice more fan spending.
“We live in this day and age where, for some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyl and packaging,” Eilish said. “Which ups the sales and ups the numbers and gets them more money and gets them more.”
She continued, “I find it really frustrating as somebody who really goes out of my way to be sustainable and do the best that I can and try to involve everybody in my team in being sustainable — and then it’s some of the biggest artists in the world making fucking 40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more.”
Eilish added that she finds it “so wasteful” and “irritating” to see “all your favorite artists doing that shit” because they care so much about their sales numbers and “making money.”
Let’s just take a look at Billie’s own store, which contains a bunch of different colored vinyl pressings of only a couple of records…I rest my case.
Sure, Eilish has been famous since being a teenager, which is going to warp your view of reality a bit. This publication isn’t set up to be a scientific deep dive, but let’s just think about about how much of our food comes in plastic containers (i.e. pretty much all of it, even bananas and avocados get stuffed into plastic bags in the grocery store).
So, do you think the average music fan generates more plastic use via vinyl…or food? I love music in general, and vinyl records in particular, but even I need calories to survive.
Much of modern environmentalism…dips into being religious dogma, and Eilish seems to have branded herself as a Pagan Priestess. But rather than the Moral Majority of the 1980’s and 1990’s, which pushed back against the lyrical content of bands like Korn, Nirvana and Metallica (which appear to be sonic influences on Billie’s albums), the new cultural Puritanism is pushing back against the plastic on which those records are pressed.
Eilish got famous for remixing 90’s sounds into something new. Now she’s just remixing 90’s legalism for a different religion (Environmentalism).
I’m all for environmental stewardship, but I’m not giving up vinyl records, minor plastic luxuries will last for a generation if cared for, when the country throws away a bajillion Wal-Mart plastic bags every day.
[three]
This week, TikTok and YouTube were abuzz with commentary on how bad architecture can contribute to clinical depression. Gen-Zer Brett Cooper summed up the discussion well:
Alright, so this entire topic of how ugly modern cities are, something that I've noticed and thought about obviously for a long time, but especially while I was living in Budapest because I spent almost six months every day being surrounded by beautiful, preserved, historical buildings, buildings with incredible, ornate detail, art, and architecture, and obviously, It makes you think, like, why don't we even try to make buildings that look like this anymore?
Like, have we lost all of those artisan skills? Are we just not interested? Probably both, to be honest. And I also thought about it when I was looking for a house here in Nashville. Like, if I was shown another tall and skinny house that was crammed together on a lot, with four other houses, literally on like a quarter of an acre, with no unique features, no personality, I was going, And obviously, trends come and go and architecture changes, but at least the older trends had unique qualities.
They weren't just flat, and beige, and depressing, and made out of cardboard, which is what a lot of houses are made out of these days.
And the research…yup, there’s something to this. Brutalist architecture (which is most famous for “Soviet” style buildings that pretty much all look like Communist torture chambers) relies heavily on concrete. And the more concrete people are around, the more sad they feel, according to a study published in The Guardian:
Antipathy to the “concrete jungle” is rooted in the assumption that concrete-heavy environments are by nature detrimental to psychological health. One study of more than 4 million Swedes, published in 2004 in the British Journal of Psychiatry, seemed to suggest that moving from a rural to an urban environment had a detrimental effect on individuals’ mental health. Researchers at Exeter University, meanwhile, have used data from the British Household Panel Survey to show that mental health is improved in the long term by moving to greener areas.
And in 1985, Alice Coleman, a geographer at King’s College London, took the theory so far as to publish Utopia on Trial, in which she sought to lay the blame for antisocial behaviour and crime on the design of 1960s modernist estates. She even got a tower block knocked down in outer Birmingham and replaced with a village green in order to show that it would “improve” the estate it stood in.
This is a tough social ill to take on, as most of us will never design or build a building…but Gen-Z bringing light to the situation may be a good first step in reversing a horrible trend (brutalist/industrialist architecture running rampant in American cities) contributing to negative mental outcomes.
[four]
The hit movie Oppenheimer (about the creation of the atomic bomb) has finally opened in Japan, and the nation is pretty pissed off about it. Fair enough, as the use of atomic bombs to end WWII, resulting in the loss of 110,00-210,000 civillians (a number so horrific I can’t even fathom it.
However, my compassion is somewhat tempered by the fact that Japan refuses to take ANY accountability for enslaving Koreans or slaughtering Chinese civillians during the Second World War.
From Foreignpolicy.com:
Imperial Japan annexed the Empire of Korea in 1910 as a critical step in the colonial project that would eventually lead to its alliance with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Over a million Koreans would be conscripted as slave labor for Japan’s war effort—not counting the hundreds of thousands of women forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese army. Lee Chun-sik, now in his nineties, was one of the many who were forced into slave labor. Lee did grueling and dangerous work at a steel mill in Japan, receiving no pay, little food, and regular beatings. In 2005, Lee and three other former forced laborers sued Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation, the successor of the wartime steel mill, in the South Korean courts after losing an earlier lawsuit they filed in Japan. In October 2018, after a long legal battle, Lee prevailed in the Supreme Court of Korea. After 13 years of litigation, Lee is the only one of the plaintiffs still alive.
The suffering of Lee and many others is historical fact. But if you went by the Japanese government’s hysterical reaction—accusing its neighbor of “trying to shift South Korea’s responsibility” over the wartime forced labor—you might think it was Korea that was the villain of this story. Following the Supreme Court’s decision, Tokyo has threatened to recall its ambassador to South Korea, levy sanctions against South Korean exports to Japan, seize South Korean government property in Japan, and reintroduce visa requirements for visiting Korean tourists. Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono even demanded South Korean President Moon Jae-in intervene with the Supreme Court’s decision—a ridiculous request to make against a constitutional democracy that mandates separation of powers.
Those 200,000 civilians the U.S. killed with the bombs…Japan killed more people than that BY HAND (knives and guns) in just one city (Nanking) in China during WWII.
Look, America isn’t perfect…but Good Lord, if you’re unable to reckon with your own unspeakable atrocities as a nation, just shut the heck up about American and keep sending us your superior automobiles.
-Signed, a Toyota and Honda owner.
P.S. If you’re still unsure if you were the bad guys…good guys don’t stack the bodies of women and children in a ditch and then pose for a photograph like a hunter with a trophy buck.
[five]
As always, let’s head into the weekend with a pop culture roundup:
“This is the tale of horror and wonder, innocence and beauty, violence and sin. This story would haunt the island for years to come.” Riley Keough (Mad Max: Fury Road) and Lilly Gladstone (Killer of the Flower Moon, Billions) co-lead this tale of a murdered 14-year-old girl who went missing, and seven teenagers were accused of a savage murder.
It’s based on a book written about the true events, so viewer beware…this one looks compelling, but very heavy. Episode 1 drops on Hulu 04/17.
Good Times was one of the more unlikely sitcoms of the 1970’s, allegedly based on Chicago’s Gabrini-Green housing project. I’ve never seen the original (which ended it’s run before I was born), but The IP is now being “rebooted” (kinda) with the fictional descendants of the original characters….in cartoon form. Perhaps the most surpsing element of the show is that it’s executive produced by Seth McFarlane (of Family Guy fame—somewhat expected) AND NBA guard Steph Curry (huh, didn’t see that one coming).
There’s been some backlash online, both of fans of the original sitcom who believe the tone of the 1970’s IP has been corrupted, and just by the general public who question whether or not a DRUG DEALING BABY is really that funny.
Most rom-coms don’t catch my eye, but throw “from the director of Mean Girls” (one of my all time favorite comedies) into the trailer, and I at least have mild interest (for a streamer, anyway) for a laugh or two.
Brook Shields (The Blue Lagoon) plays a mom who’s reunited with her college ex-boyfriend, played by Benjamin Bratt (Miss Congeniality, Traffic), when the pair are forced together at a destination wedding where their respective children are marrying.
Will it be any good? Meh, who knows…but it’s interesting that Hollywood is trying to make these things again, as this genre of film had nearly gone extinct.
[new music]
Apple Music | YouTube Music
Oliver Anthony may have been the most viral singer in the history of music, going from a complete unknown blue collar worker who did music on the side to 100 million views of his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” in a matter of weeks. The obligatory appearance on Joe Rogan ensued, and video snippets popped up of Anthony playing with new mentor Jamie Johnson.
His debut clearly isn’t aiming for radio play…or even mass market success. The Virginia warbles with Appalachian tone, as he takes aim at the political left and right in equal measure, and champions the blue collar worker, and gives generous airtime to reading passages from the Old & New Testament on interlude tracks between songs.
And people's cryin' 'bout burnin' coal
But not the poor souls who's diggin' it
I reckon there's been a many good man in the grave
Tryna keep our houses lit
Down in the oilfields, the pipelines
The linemen and the coal mines
So we can sit at home and plug in a newfangled bullshit
And republicans and democrats
I swear, they're all just full of crap
I ain't ever met a good city slicker or bureaucrat
Sum 41 were REALLY cool about around the time of the Y2K crisis (ask your parents, kids), and then when pop punk went out, the Canadian quintet leaned into hardcore and metal…and maintained a smaller (but intensly loyal) fanbase. Eight albums later, they’re finally calling it quits, with a double album send-off, one punk, and one hard rock/metal. If you’re going to skim it, don’t miss the pre-release single “Landmines” on the punk side, and a satisfying cover of The Rolling Stones “Paint it Black” on the back half of the project.
Heck of a run for a band that released their breakthrough weeks before 9/11.
Until the next one,
-sth