Every school year brings a lot of joy into our lives here at Cardinal Arts page. But we're cynical bastards, so we prefer to focus on the worst things to happen and we aren't talking about genuinely tragic events like the fatal Great White concert or Joe Strummer's passing. Here are 15 ways in which the arts hit rock bottom this school year.
The singer-songwriter craze isn't a new phenomenon. Every 10 years or so, America becomes obsessed with the idea that the same song is somehow better or more credible if the person singing also wrote it. The inevitable result is a bunch of hacks finding huge success.
Alicia Keys and Michelle Branch got it all started last year, but now things have reached the point of absurdity. On the one hand, you've got the bratty, boring and stoic singer/songwriters of the classic James Taylor, Carly Simon mold. This includes sleep-inducing charlatans like Vanessa Carlton and John Mayer.
Worse is the crop of straight-up pop stars desperately seeking songwriter credibility. Is Justin Timberlake's solo debut better because we know he helped write it? Are Christina Aguilera's skanky and self-congratulatory forays into \individual style"" more credible because she played a bigger part in the creative process? The whole fad is absurd and it is spinning out of control.
Worse yet is Avril Lavigne. Fans of ""The Simpsons"" might find Avril Lavigne similar to Poochie the Dog. Her existence is predicated on the image of a sensitive young woman who mixes skater, punk and pop while sharing her most intimate feelings through song. Really, she's just a grab bag of robbed and diluted fashions and musical styles, an exploitative myth of teenaged America.
This singer-songwriter craze has reached its peak with Lavigne. Let's hope it passes like the cultural kidney stone it is.
Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you the low point that pop-punk has reached. Pop-punk in itself is usually a low point, but Good Charlotte has topped all the rest.
""Oh no! I don't have a mansion! Authority isn't on my side! I'm punk!""
Nice try, guys.
Since when was making a critical comment about the president an unpatriotic sin? It's when you're a country music ""artist."" The Dixie Chicks' lead singer, Natalie Maines, whose music is about as controversial as a ""Blue's Clues"" marathon, was lambasted for saying that she was ""ashamed"" that Bush was from Texas. This has prompted a lot of country fans to pull over their Ford F-150's to the side of the dirt road and chuck any Dixie Chicks CDs they might have. Some have even begun rallying around 9/11 songs that don't address the issue of war. How can you justify massive war with...
""Have you forgotten how it felt that day/ To see your homeland under fire/ And her people blown away?/ Have you forgotten when those towers fell?""
No, none of us have forgotten, Darryl Worley. But silencing dissenters is by no means patriotic. Remember when country music was all about protest for the downtrodden? When Jonny Cash sang from Folsom Prison because country was the voice of the voiceless? If Cash was against the war, will ""patriots"" silence him as well? The Dixie Chicks should not be crucified for such miniscule remarks just because it's wartime. This backlash borders on fascism in that it singles out critical comments as treacherous. Intelligent political dialogue on the issue cannot be boiled down to simplistic ""patriotic"" lyrics like...
""...And you'll be sorry that you messed with/ The US of A/ Cause we'll put a boot in your ass/ It's the American way.""
A boot in the ass? Come on, folks! This is neanderthalic! Country fans always complain they are misunderstood-they are not all close-minded rednecks. Maybe so, but when your most popular band is banned on radio, and your other popular acts are threatening to place boots up the enemy's ass as if Osama is some drunken townie breaking off a bottle and threatening to ""cut you,"" your civility and class in your art is not properly communicated.
Some would argue that reality television never really had a high point. Perhaps the original ""Survivor"" had some appeal because it could pass itself off as an original production. However, whatever innovation it first possessed was drowned in the sequels. Somehow, without ever being something worthwhile or even decent, reality television continues to lower the lowest common denominator.
The newest batch of shows, whether it be the heinous ""Man vs. Beast"" or ""Mr. Personality,"" can't seem to get away from a single gimmick for too long. Where a bad sitcom manages to fall after a single season precisely because the gimmick gets old, reality television that can keep going long past the gimmick has grown stale. One only need to look to the second-to-last episode of ""Joe Millionaire"" to see nothing but recycled content for an entire show.
Perhaps the problem of reality television is that the reality behind it has been corroded to fantasy. There's always a carrot at the end of a stick waiting for the participants. The promise of millions at the end of an ordeal or the hand of a beautiful woman or man makes reality television the furthest thing from reality. No amount of reality offers fabulous cash prizes or eternal love when the moment is up.
Though the appeal of voyeurism will keep the proposed reality television network alive and allow a show like ""The Real Beverly Hillbillies"" to exist, the guilty little pleasures it provides the viewer should be quickly dismissed. Peering into another person's ready-for-prime-time life has become a contest more twisted than the strangest nightmare.
With ""The Real Beverly Hillbillies,"" reality television deliberately insults and exploits class disparity in the United States. An intentional mismatch of privilege and poverty is used to entertain and fill a night of programming. Reality television has passed from random half hours of conspiring strangers to a mockery of the way people live.
Producers have been working hard to put together a new Superman movie for a 2004 release. There's just one little problem: they don't have a leading man to play Superman. Not only do they not have a star, but they have already been turned down by seemingly every actor in Hollywood. Jude Law, Josh Hartnett and Ashton Kutcher have all turned down the superhero role. Producers have scraped so close to the bottom of the barrel that they have reportedly even considered Jerry O'Connell.
If you have a budget of more than $100 million to make a Superman movie and you get to the point of even considering a guy whose last starring role was opposite a CGI kangaroo, you truly have reached rock bottom. No wonder director Brett Ratner quit the project.
Fifty percent of music is music; the other half is leeches who suck on the life blood of music that succeeds. Jewel's runoff fans were absorbed by Meredith Brooks and Nirvana's fans found themselves listening to Silverchair as grunge took off. Even Britney had her Christina.
The garage rock revival is the latest trend, starting the beginning of the year with solid rapport and worthy fame. For example, the White Stripes are rock's only standing great band and the Strokes, who grew from the New York club scene, have released sturdy work. Swedish rock, long limited stateside to the Cardigans' tracks and ABBA oldies, has now bolstered its catalogue with the catchy Hives and the brilliant Raveonettes. But left in the sun so long, garage rock has begun to spoil.
When Meredith Brooks hit the scene, no one was confused. She was second tier to Jewel and Alanis Morrissette. But this school year's wave of bad garage rock has repeatedly met by the same two steps: advance critical praise followed by critics eating crow.
Music media jumped on British rock magazine NME's declaration that The Music were the most important British band since Oasis. The Music garnered enough advance positive press to sorely disappoint listeners with an album full of painfully directionless songs. In addition, after immense build up, the Vines' album surprised reviewers by sounding like an unimpressive Nirvana cover band. The Datsuns' release, a mix of bad hair and glam rock was hyped for months as an AC/DC who emanated fun. 2003 may be the death of garage rock. What was once a vital scene is now a showcase of mediocre stars.
On Sept. 22, Mike Batt paid an undisclosed six- figure sum for violating John Cage's copyright on noiselessness. The offensive song, ""One Minute of Silence"" was actually an entire minute of silence used to separate two acoustic pieces on his band's album, The Planets' Classical Graffiti. Batt credited the song to Batt/Cage as mocking reference to Cage's 1952 four-and-a-half minute silent piece ""4'33"".""
Although Batt eventually settled out of court, he initially had every intent to fight the lawsuit. ""I certainly wasn't quoting his silence. I claim my silence is original silence,"" he told BBC radio's Front Row. Batt went as far as staging a public performance of ""4'33"" to demonstrate differences between the pieces in July, pointing out that Cage's work, a scored piece, contained notes, whereas his did not.
Lame, profit-minded cover songs hitting the radio is inevitable, but this year has seen a particularly offensive crop. Worst of the bunch is the Counting Crows collaborating with Vanessa Carlton to brutalize Joni Mitchell's ""Big Yellow Taxi."" The new version douses the song in slick and awful overproduction, while featuring vocal performances from Carlton and Adam Duritz that sound like pouty pre-schoolers. Who says nothing could make Joni Mitchell more annoying?
Runners-up for Worst Cover Prize include Uncle Kracker's rendition of Dobie Gray's ""Drift Away"" and the Dixie Chicks' version of ""Landslide"" by Fleetwood Mac. The original ""Drift Away"" is one of the most beautiful songs ever recorded. Uncle Kracker reduces it to over-enunciated, thoroughly sterilized elevator pop. Meanwhile, the Dixie Chicks take one of pop music's most expressive breakup songs and do their best to kill its emotion with detached vocals, glossy harmonies and heartlessly precise guitar picking.
This year, Benzino put out a mix tape that included dis songs about Eminem, saying the superstar, as a white, corporate-backed rapper, represented everything wrong with hip-hop. Of course, Benzino himself is a half-white entrepreneur. Whoops. Eminem struck back with two dis songs that tore Benzino to shreds and separated the man from the boy. Not only did Benzino go out of his way to embarrass himself, but in the process, he aided XXL's emerging dominance over The Source in the world of hip-hop journalism.
Everyone liked ""Moulin Rouge."" Even more people liked ""Chicago."" Now it's time to pay the piper. There's a building line of opportunists looking to cash in on the musical fad already. Joel Schumacher, the man who killed the Batman franchise, is already signed on to direct ""Phantom of the Opera."" Meanwhile, a new big-screen version of ""Guys and Dolls"" is on the horizon, with Vin Diesel having reportedly been in talks to star. Scared yet? You should be.
Movie-musicals are one thing when they are helmed by directors with theater backgrounds, like Baz Luhrmann or Rob Marshall, and star actors who can actually sing and dance, like Ewan McGregor or Catherine Zeta-Jones. But when you get into movie directors of middling talent like Schumacher and movie actors of middling talent like Diesel, you're asking for big trouble.
Just as being offered a box of crayons is different than being given the artwork those colors could create, being given a poorly juxtaposed mess of styles is not good music. It isn't music at all. Boomkat's remedial debut, Boomkatalogue.one, is a box of jigsaw pieces which don't go together. The group is a brother-sister combination who create ire with an urgency only obtainable by a misguided corporate desire to give the people what they want. One note was punk, the next house. With depressingly disjointed vocals, Taryn's twelve-year old voice complemented her five-year old lyrical attention span.
Choosing an event which never desired to be a political to advance an antiwar message, Michael Moore made the antiwar movement seem brash. Choosing to pander to his audience and use bumper sticker-esque slogans instead of rational arguments made antiwar activists seem smug. Michael Moore used the Oscars to take like-minded people down with him, and liberalism suffered in his attempt to advance the cause.
""Ghost Ship,"" ""Darkness Falls,"" ""Final Destination 2"" and ""feardotcom"" garnered a combined $121 million at the box-office, all opening during this 2002-2003 school year. That's an average of $30 million per flick. What is worse is that a fair contingent of movie-goers were happy with those movies.
Hollywood, having overdone the slasher flick with the ""Scream"" series, has now latched onto the new variant of horror movie-the mysteriousthriller. The worst part is that ""The Ring,"" the one good film this year that followed this formula, was merely a remake of the Japanese hit ""Ringu."" The studios would do well to take notes and learn what makes a film scary and intense, as opposed to the ridiculous, cheesy garbage that they passed off as horror films in the last nine months.
With an increasing number of major studios with art film divisions like Miramax, Fox Searchlight or Sony Pictures Classics, actual indie film studios are being pushed out, bought out or, in some cases, downright abandoned.
The traditional role of the indie was to buy acclaimed movies from film festivals which otherwise wouldn't be shown and use that money to finance movies that wouldn't be made. When a major studio's boutique can offer millions, small studios can't compete. Moviemakers win; they make more money. Moviegoers lose; art films themselves become more tailored to being bought by a pseudo-major and less adventurous studios.
