I am a total NPR junkie. I actually don't mind pledge week. I can recite the weekly lineup off the top of my head. I get annoyed when programming changes suddenly or a host is replaced (yes, I'm still cranky about Bob Edwards). I am, in short, a big nerdy NPR addict.
Our local station, KUOW, has one of the largest audiences in the country, so we sometimes get to listen to pilots of new shows before they are established and go national. One of them, Pop Vultures, had a nice enough premise: a group of friends who discuss pop music. The people sound fairly young, and they aren't professional critics. They're just people who really like pop music. I had hope for this show.
Unfortunately, the show collapses under the weight of its own meaningless drivel and self-indulgence. The host, Kate Sullivan, is in her thirties, but sounds much younger--partly because she seems unable to string together a coherent idea without using "like" or "you know" every fifth word or so, her speech is full of awkward pauses, and she ends every sentence with an upward lilt of her voice that's usually reserved for questions. In short, she sounds like the worst kind of insecure, giggling teenager.
The format is conversations between Kate and the rest of the Vultures, her friends. I can understand the awkward pauses in this format--they're going for a natural feel (though awkward pauses on NPR are too often used by writers and commentators to telegraph "I am saying something very important and emotionally touching right now"), so I can understand the decision to leave those in. But I can't help but think that any grown woman should be able to come up with something better than, "Four is like, an organic number. [...] You have four Beatles." To add to this, her delivery is stilted, punctuated by random giggling, and a lot of "Umm..." and "Uh..." (in addition to my above complaint of the constant use of "like" and "you know").
Ironically enough, Sullivan stumbles onto what I think is one of the major problems of the show on the first installment: "Coolness," she says, "is in the eye of the beholder." It's tough to critique music in a meaningful way--it's almost entirely a matter of taste. The show doesn't bother to acknowledge this at all; the Vultures' opinions are presented as fact, and anyone who disagrees is either a snob, ignorant, or just plain stupid. I don't expect reviews or critiques to agree with me, but I think it would be much more effective if the Vultures' actually bothered to explain why a particular band matters to them, why they think it has some historical importance to pop music as a whole, and what it is about a particular singer or song that touches them and stirs them. For example, on the first show, Sullivan talks about The White Stripes. She is a big fan, and at the start of this section of the show, she says, "When I talk about The White Stripes, I get really dumb. Because I love them, truly. And, I think that when you love a band, like deeply, you get really really stupid." This is actually a good start--who can't relate to the giddy, exhilarating feeling of passion for a singer/band, that feeling that takes your dignity and leaves you a drooling fangirl/boy? She goes on to talk about The White Stripes with another one of the Vultures, who says that they remind him of "really bad music. [...] It's like, somebody forgot to get a bass player, there's, you know--someone forgot to buy new cymbals." This is actually a nice change--for the remaining episodes, the other Vultures are mostly relegated to the role of yes-men. Sullivan's response to her friend's opinion of her beloved band though, is more typical of the tone of the show: "Who cares if they can't play. What-ever. But even if they couldn't, do I give a shit?"
The program does occasionally show some flash of insight. Some of its best moments come in conversations between the guys (Sullivan's conversations with her friend Hillary tend to degenerate into giggling and just agreeing with each other over and over). They will actually occasionally explain why they like something, or, even better, explain the context that a certain song came into being in, and explain why they think it's important to music as a whole. These moments are few and far between, and the conversations between the men feature a lot of Beavis-and-Butthead-style laughing and drooling over female performers' "hotness".
In between these glimmers of insight, we are subjected to statments like "The teen pop phenomenon, I think, started with the Spice Girls. I would contend that the Spice Girls were the big bang of teen pop." Because there were no teen idols before the Spice Girls, right. Or, when calling her friend to talk about the "Britney-Christina debate": "Everything Britney touches turns to fairy dust." "And everything Christina touches," her friend adds, "is just...normal."
In fact, some of the lowest points of the show come in conversations between Kate and her friend Hillary. In show three, they go on at length about Weezer's Say It Ain't So. Sullivan actually seems to have a good grasp of what the song is about (alcoholism and repeating the destructive patterns of, in this case, a father). But then, there's this:
"And like, when you see them live, that's, I mean, I think that's their most popular song, like, that's certainly the one where all the kids are singing along impassioned and, punching their fists in the air, with like, the passion of someone who lived through it, and that's when you really go like, 'alcoholism is the epidemic."
Call me cynical, but I'd be willing to bet that most kids at a Weezer concert are just pumping their fists in the air to a really rocking song.
Sometimes, Kate and Hillary's conversations descend into the downright catty. Also in show three, they spend almost half the show bashing Sheryl Crow. I am personally not a big Sheryl Crow fan, especially not recent songs (I do like The Globe Sessions, though), but the tone of this conversation is beyond petty. They offer no reason as to why they do this. I can only guess that Crow has failed to meet some unstated standard of coolness.
"Hillary, I don't wanna drag you down, or tie you down, but I want you to talk a little bit right now about Sheryl Crow."
"Puh-leeease. She's like, the richest person in the world, sitting in the front row of Versace shows, and singing about how she's so poor..."
"Nooo!" gasps Kate.
"There's a line that says, 'I don't have diddly squat,' I think."
Hillary continues, to more astounded gasps from Kate. "It's true. It's in the song."
"Aww, nuts," gasps Kate.
"She's singing like, 'I can't afford anything but everything's gonna be ok.' Uh..."
"Oh, it's so brave of her!" Kate adds in a condescending tone.
Apparently the idea of a song not being a biographical documentary has never occurred to them.
Sullivan starts trying to explain what her problem with Crow is, and it degenerates into an extended rant:
"It's that, like, you know, there are so few women in rock music, in rock and roll, pop, whatever you wanna call it, so few, and there's so many vacuous, just, idiots, women in pop, that like, if a woman actually, like, gets to a certain level of notoriety within rock, you, you kind of, hope that she's gonna kick some ass, that she's gonna, she's gonna stand for something, she's gonna mix it up a little bit. You know, like maybe even like Madonna, like just, just mix it up and freak people out and get controversial, just cause it's fun, for no other reason, you know, she's [Crow] done nothing like that, and she even had like, potential, like, she seemed like she was kind of a liberal, you know, sort of, pro-choice, and sort of, vaguely hippie-esque, and now she's just like, really rich, and gross, and she never does anything controversial, you know, her big political statement is like, having dinner with Bill Clinton. Hel-lo?"
I guess everything Sheryl touches does not turn to fairy dust.
Kate and Hillary laugh, and continue on:
"I feel the same way about Liz Phair," adds Hillary.
"Oh, totally! Total rich housewife. Rich Chicago housewife."
(Are rich Chicago housewives more evil than regular non-Chicago housewives?)
"Yeah!"
"The first time I saw her," Hillary adds, "she was so scared to go on stage that she was throwing up before, and like, was absolutely terrified to be on stage. And then you and I went to see her at the University, and she was kind of doing that, she was like, tan, remember, she was tan?"
"She was really tan, and that was really disturbing," agrees Kate.
"I know, she's tanned, and she had like, some flowy pants on her, or something, didn't she? And like, nice tennis shoes, and she looked like a housewife, and then she was kind of doing that awful skippy dance across the stage, and she had all these backup singers, and stuff, that were like, beaming at her."
Tans and flowy pants, the unmistakable signs of bad music.
"And the show was really really short, cause she just got..."
"And boring," interrupts Hillary.
"...tired, or didn't feel like it," continues Kate, "and it was boring as hell, and you just really got the feeling that, underneath it all her goal had been just to be pretty, and rich, and well-known..."
"And well-liked."
"And well-liked, exactly." Agrees Kate. "And when she had achieved that, then it was time to have a baby. And um, and Sheryl Crow, I kind of feel like the same thing, like now that she's you know, famous, and pretty, and she gets to wear Versace, and go to Versace shows, and eat Versaces, and..." (Versace pronounced "Versa-ce" each time.)
"And she can wear really high-heeled shoes because she doesn't have to walk anywhere anymore," adds Hillary (though a couple of shows later she praises Mary J. Blige for being able to hop around the stage in really high heels).
"Right, and she can talk about how, how bad it is that teen pop queens get, get half naked in magazines, and the she can pose on the cover of "Stuff" magazine, in shorts going up her butt."
"Yeah, it's fine..."
"It's fine..."
"Whatever..."
"Yeah, it's all good..."
"That's not even good controversy," concludes Hillary.
"We hate her, let's not talk about her."
I could only wish they had decided that before spending half the show on this.
"She's not interesting."
"No, she's boring."
And so is this conversation. And that may be its biggest fault; I like snark as much as the next jaded bastard (see TWOP for some great, witty snark). I can appreciate a good rant. But this is just self-indulgent rambling--which is fine to do with your friends, but it's not worth building a Public Radio show around.
The rest of this particular show is spent bashing Sting, whose sin is, apparently, that he's "so completely unaware of his own complete whackness."
On another occasion, Kate talks to Hillary about her experience watching Snoop Dogg. They get right down to the important musical issues: Kate wants to know what he was wearing. After they sort that out, the rest of the conversation revolves around how hostile Dogg was towards the audience, and how, according to Hillary, that was "just so hot" and "sexy." It made my head hurt.
To close, I'll just leave you with some choice quotes from Sullivan:
"One of the things I liked about ["American Idol"] was like, I felt that, in a sad way, it united America." (maybe Bush should use that as a campaign slogan: "Uniting people through, like, you know, 'American Idol,' and stuff.")
"Anybody who actually says the Backstreet Boys are bad, either they're not listening or don't know good music."
About current teen fashion: "I don't know how it happened, I mean, I suppose it's the eighties revival, whatever, but it's one of those revivals that is so completely not annoying." Almost the entirety of show twelve is built around how the eighties revival is, after all, pretty annoying.
"I mean, I guess what I, I guess what I like about Pink most of all is that, uh, I don't know, like she smokes a lot. I like that about her, like, she smokes menthols, and to me, that's like, keeping it real."
"Well, Outkast make me feel like I fit in this world, like I have a place in this world. And maybe I have a place in other worlds too. Um, Outkast make me proud to be an American. Outkast make me proud to be a black man."
Rock on, brother Sullivan.
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