The Ringer: All Posts by Nate Rogers2023-08-10T08:14:53-04:00https://www.theringer.com/authors/nate-rogers/rss2023-08-10T08:14:53-04:002023-08-10T08:14:53-04:00Think You’re a Good Person? That’s Up to the Cart Narc and His Camera.
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/HUyAMT1yO7HwRmKLB0P_Q5ypYyA=/168x0:1033x649/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72530977/cartNarc2.7.jpg" />
<figcaption>Carson McNamara, www.carsonmcnamara.com</figcaption>
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<p>Along for the ride with Sebastian Davis, who’s built an empire of weaponized righteousness on YouTube based on a simple idea: Putting your shopping cart back is a test of your character </p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="HEwUnI">I was beginning to think it wasn’t going to happen. After 90 minutes with the Cart Narc, taking part in a “Narc-along” as he patrolled multiple grocery store parking lots on a sweltering July afternoon in Pasadena, California, there had yet to be any devious altercations like the ones that had made his YouTube channel famous. </p>
<p id="77eatj">Sebastian Davis, a boyish 42-year-old better known as “Agent Sebastian” in his Cart Narcs videos, was dressed like he was going to war. He was wrapped in an actual bulletproof vest (a gift sent by one of his many fans—this one a cop in Louisiana), with a red patch reading “CART NARCS” across his chest, just above a strapped-in GoPro. He carried an orange baton, like one an airport worker would use guiding a plane out of its gate. And he was in Nike Free Runs, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice, light up his voice-siren alert (a deliberately obnoxious variation on the <em>buoy-weep</em> that police will use to pull someone over), and deploy his catchphrase: “That’s not where the cart goes!”</p>
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<p id="Qrc8dH">But as the sun was beginning to set, his only encounters that day with people who had committed cart offenses—that is, people who hadn’t returned their carts to the designated cart return areas—were cordial affairs: a young woman whose cart wheels had locked on her, the anti-theft mechanism having been inadvertently tripped; an older man wheeling his cart out to the sidewalk to wait for his wife to pick him up. After having consumed a robust amount of the Cart Narc’s more incendiary interactions with what he calls “the lazybones”—exchanges that can be equally fascinating and hilarious, as people argue with him in a manner laced with an intensity that feels legitimately dangerous at times—I was, truthfully, a little disappointed. The dignified side of his beat was not what I most wanted to see. </p>
<p id="CzD70x">But then, action struck. “Uh-oh,” Davis said, cutting himself off mid-sentence, turning on the GoPro and dashing across the Vons parking lot. “Classic curbing, two-wheeler,” he said, approaching a middle-aged man who had lodged his cart partially into a planter area, leaning halfway onto the asphalt. “Come on over here, buddy,” Davis said. “Cart return’s right there.” Unmoved, the man started to drive off in his Nissan Maxima, at which point Davis implemented his typical counteroffensive: dropping a magnetic bumper sticker that says “lazybones” onto the car. (There are a few varieties of magnets, including one that says “I don’t return my shopping cart, like a jerk.”) The man rolled down his window, and they began to discuss the disagreement: </p>
<p id="c8sKkI">Man: “Take that shit off.”</p>
<p id="me5X5l">Davis: “Well, you left your cart blocking the pathway.”</p>
<p id="VTJFmj">Man: “Take it off.” </p>
<p id="OW18BC">Davis: “Will you move your cart?”</p>
<p id="ncUdWo">Man: “Take it off.” </p>
<p id="q6InPY">Davis: “Move your cart.” </p>
<p id="TGEOUb">At this point, the man peeled off in a huff.</p>
<p id="Vgbmiu">Soon after, more action. This time, the cart was left in a walkway next to the accessible parking spaces (and only a few steps from the actual cart return), and, as Davis scampered over, the cart-abandoner said, “I have asthma” as she got into the passenger seat of a vehicle. “You walked pretty darn far to have asthma,” Davis replied. The woman said she was recently in the hospital: “Do you want what I have right now?” she snapped, suddenly coughing, “because I’ll give it to you happily.” A second woman in the car then flashed a previously unseen parking placard and said, “You don’t know who you’re fucking speaking to, so fuck off.” Davis placed a lazybones magnet on the hood of their car, gently, like a teacher handing back an exam paper with a big, red “F” on it. “I know I’m speaking to a couple lazybones, actually.” </p>
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<p id="djPHCZ">Since 2018, when the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzWQH0u4VJU">early version</a> of Cart Narcs launched, a common refrain uttered by alleged lazybones is to suggest that Davis “get a real job”—at which point he will invariably tell them, “This is a real job.” He’s not lying. The Cart Narcs YouTube page has over half a million subscribers—these are his beloved “Narcateers,” as he calls them—and the videos are broadly spread on all major social media platforms, especially Facebook, TikTok, and Reddit, always with some degree of inspired debate in the comments. </p>
<p id="RGVW3x">But even in a more traditional sense than most YouTubers, this <em>is</em> Davis’s job. He’s a creative producer at<em> The Woody Show</em>, a popular, widely syndicated morning comedy show that’s under the umbrella of radio behemoth iHeartMedia, which in turn owns the Cart Narcs intellectual property. The ad revenue that comes in through monetizing the videos goes to Davis, who says it is used to cover expenses. For his overall work with iHeartMedia, Davis is paid a healthy salary, which he describes as being six figures. Some people clock in and send emails all day. Davis clocks in and becomes the Cart Narc. </p>
<p id="lGd9el">Here’s how it works: Several afternoons a week, Davis will put aside his other responsibilities at <em>The Woody Show</em> and head out to film. Most of his videos are shot in the Los Angeles area, where he lives, but he brings his Cart Narcs gear with him when he travels—occasionally he’ll book a trip to some exotic location, like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvN1AMKrrpM">Australia</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNhSD5qATxo">Japan</a>, just to shake things up. “I’ll drive from Boston to New York and stop every half hour in some little town,” he told me.</p>
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<p id="SL4pSL">The ideal parking lot is one in which there are plenty of cart return areas, he explained. “Zero excuses not to put the cart away, essentially,” Davis said. “That’s what I’m looking for.” In the lot, he’s developed a sixth sense for what to watch—and listen—for. “Oftentimes, you’ll hear it before you’ll see it,” he said. “The jingle-jangle.” Davis said the tell for whether someone is going to return their cart can be read “all in [their] first step.” “If their head is up, and they’re looking around,” he elaborated, “and they’re going somewhere purposefully, they’re looking for the right place to put it.”</p>
<p id="CFwMc3">According to Davis, roughly 50 percent of people that he calls out for not returning their cart will simply put it back—no harm, no foul. Twenty-five percent will ignore him. And then that last 25 percent will quarrel in some way, disagreeing with his logic, his methods, or both. This combative group is where the money shots come from—people seething, bickering, bartering, threatening. He’s had <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIYLjvqBJuI">drinks thrown at him</a>, he’s been <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alsc1BS78GM">chased around</a>. In Texas, he’s had guns <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8d_XYd1dac">pulled</a> on him or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGYjnCapKOk">flashed</a> at him. “I’m a killer,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1MBkcZbA_U">said</a> one Texan in 2020, “and I’m fixin’ to put my six right in your forehead.”</p>
<p id="k0VoN1">During the Narc-along, after the driver of the Maxima burned a little rubber on his way out, I realized that my adrenaline was running. I asked Davis whether he still got a rush out of these exchanges, having been through them hundreds of times. “Not anymore, no,” he said. “It’s like the Matrix, where it’s all slow motion to me. … I enjoy the nuances of it—I was talking about the differences—but the general beats are all the same. They’re variations on the same lazy symphony.”</p>
<p id="wZNYus">The idea for Cart Narcs came out of a casual conversation at the <em>Woody Show</em> office about little annoyances committed by others, and Davis didn’t expect the project to be much of anything at first. But with each new video, he added a few notes to the music sheet, and eventually the lazy symphony was being performed on computers and phones across the world. From a glance at the comments sections, the success of Cart Narcs can partially be attributed to its ability to tap into a well of frustration that many have with the perceived selfishness of those they live among. Usually in life, that frustration is abstract, or fueled by <em>l’esprit de l’escalier</em>—a feeling of mourning what you didn’t or couldn’t say. But here the resentment manifests itself in the form of a literal agent, enforcing a concrete moral scenario on which most seem to agree: Even if you’re not <em>required </em>to, you should probably put your shopping cart back.</p>
<p id="dQNofS">“I think<em> </em>Cart Narcs has taken off because it’s just such a great study in the human condition,” Renae Ravey, a cohost on <em>The Woody Show</em>, told me over the phone. “Something as simple as putting a cart in a cart corral, and you get busted not doing it, and your immediate response is you want to beat this guy to death because he’s caught you. … I think that’s why people gravitate towards it.” Ravey thought about it for a beat and laughed. “And I mean, there’s always going to be that group that just like seeing people get confronted and pissed off.” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="njTlGT">Sebastian Davis goes by many names. To his family, he’s “Garrett,” which is his middle name, and starting in college, his fraternity brothers started calling him “Sebas,” in reference to the <em>Dumb and Dumber</em> character—as in, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSipYY933eU">“Kick his ass, Sea Bass!”</a>—and that name has stuck on <em>The Woody Show</em>. “Davis” itself is also a stage name, which is a shortening of his full, hyphenated last name. </p>
<p id="0pkvD8">“I’m used to bossing people around,” Davis’s mother, Karen, told me, poking fun at the meme that her name has become. She and her husband, a tax attorney, decided to homeschool their kids until high school, partially due to the fact that Karen despised school growing up. Sebastian, who is the oldest of four, noted that he was raised in a “a chore-intensive household,” and described a dynamic in which he and his siblings would have to pick up others’ trash before heading home from places like the park. </p>
<p id="zauEPP">“I ruled those kids with an iron fist,” Karen said. “I’m not saying I was abusive to them, but with four kids, you have to just keep things in line. They can’t start getting away with stuff.” Karen remembers that it was routine for people to come up to their table at restaurants and compliment her kids’ good behavior. </p>
<p id="BqQwEB">Sebastian seems to have taken after Karen in certain ways. They both pursued STEM programs in college—Karen studied nursing and Sebastian studied chemical engineering—but were compelled to keep a foot in the humanities: Karen learned Latin and Sebastian took an internship at a radio station. She and her son also share a dislike of those who expect others to clean up after them. </p>
<p id="TUanzJ">Karen told me a story of when she worked at a dining hall in college. Students were expected to bring their trays back to a return area, but they were getting worse about adhering to the system, and one day she approached a group and asked them to bus their tables. “They were just going to leave their trays on the tables for us to clean up, which is not really our job,” she remembered, clearly still irritated decades later. She said that one of the girls then pounced on her, beating Karen badly enough to send her to the hospital. (I later asked Sebastian whether this story may have been a Batman-esque origin story for Cart Narcs, but he learned about the story himself only after the channel started.)</p>
<p id="MepJG3">In high school, Davis worked at a grocery store—yes, wrangling carts, among other tasks. (“Fun job,” he said, sincerely.) After college, he worked as an engineer in Atlanta for a few years, but continued to moonlight in radio. In 2015, he got the job at <em>The Woody Show</em> and packed his things for L.A. The show’s host, Woody Fife, picked him up at the airport and they went straight to a comic book convention, where Davis did man-on-the-street type interviews. </p>
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<cite>Photo by Nate Rogers</cite>
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<p id="YSMyJO">The slogan of <em>The Woody Show</em> is “Insensitivity training for a politically correct world,” and it can reasonably be described as a fairly conservative show. (A recurring segment is called “Redneck News.”) Davis said his personal politics lean more on the “independent-slash-libertarian” side of things, and that he and the cohosts don’t always align on politics. “I don’t use the word ‘family’ like <em>Fast & Furiou</em>s,” he said. “I mean it like ‘brothers and sisters who you can argue with in a fun way.’”</p>
<p id="PTsWVB">Davis’s main beat in the early years was straight-laced interviews with oddball characters, often with the attempt to make fun of his subjects. One of his ongoing series, for instance, is called <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9LiBh_EtJGyl7Ooh21uK5clqyO58cLkP">“Trolling With Sebas,”</a> and probably his most popular non–Cart Narc series is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89-9BCglhkw">“Who Paid for Your Coachella Ticket?”</a> in which he seems to take particular joy in finding the adults at the festival who will admit that their parents paid their way. (Another subtle question he asked in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQeNeKHsCF0">2018 edition</a>: “Who paid for your boobs?”)</p>
<p id="Po7ICs">Trolling may be the name of the game in other contexts, but at least when it comes to Cart Narcs, Davis doesn’t think the term fits. “I’m not the Merriam-Webster over here, but to me, a troll is someone who agitates someone simply for the sake of the agitation,” he considered. Cart Narcs, as he sees it, <em>has</em> a point: “You could argue it’s a good use of social media,” he said. “I hate the term ‘influencer,’ ’cause it doesn’t mean anything—but this, you’re influencing decent behavior, hopefully. … It’s a weird subgenre of practical comedy with a good message.”</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="HhQXKq">It’s surprisingly clear when shopping cart etiquette became a modern lightning-rod test of moral character. In May 2020—at the beginning of the pandemic, as people were fiercely debating what they owed to their fellow citizens—an <a href="https://pisco.pubninja.com/c1c2170f-f039-4c84-adb8-d031c6a58acb.jpeg">image</a> of a 4chan post titled “The Shopping Cart Theory” went viral. The post explains in clinical, unwavering terms the massive stakes of this simple task: “The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing,” it reads. “A person who is unable to [return the cart] is no better than an animal.” Google Trends <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=cart%20narcs,shopping%20cart%20theory&hl=en">shows</a> “Shopping Cart Theory” searches skyrocketing at the same point that “Cart Narcs” searches really began to take off. </p>
<p id="wDC6KQ">It may be an “ultimate litmus test” to many now, but in the decades after the shopping cart was invented by Sylvan Goldman in 1936, it did not appear cart etiquette was much of an issue. Judging by <a href="https://northwoodcommons.com/filesystem/northwood-commons/gallery/history/1951-foodfair.jpg">archival</a> <a href="https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AAKMGW/1950s-shopping-center-parking-lot-AAKMGW.jpg">photos</a>, anyway, American grocery store parking lots through at least the 1950s did not appear to have cart corral areas, meaning that people were expected to return the carts to the front of the store, if an employee didn’t walk out with them. (Lazybones, of course, still existed in <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/533606255827518921/">this</a> <a href="https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AAKXET/1960s-shop-rite-supermarket-building-parking-lot-AAKXET.jpg">era</a> as well.) It was only <a href="http://reddit.com/r/TheWayWeWere/comments/fp9le0/a_thrifty_store_parking_lot_in_barstow_california/">in the 1970s</a>, as supermarkets and their parking lots ballooned in size, that corrals seem to have become common—a “meet you halfway” gesture by the store. (Or a way to break down the expectation that an employee would bring your groceries to your car for you.) It’s become common in other countries to use a coin-deposit system to motivate shoppers to return their carts, but, aside from a few chains <a href="https://www.aisleofshame.com/aldi-shopping-cart/">like Aldi</a>, American supermarkets have left cart-returning to the honor system. This was probably a mistake.</p>
<p id="PAr2Yo">The Cart Narc has an “old-person exemption” that he applies on a judgment basis, and he also refrains from busting people with dogs and young children. (While he believes that able-bodied adults <em>should</em> return their carts even with their hands full, he doesn’t want to get innocent children and dogs involved.) If you have a clear disability, it seems Davis will use his judgment to decide to give you a pass as well—but having a parking placard alone is not enough for him: “A lot of people I bust are using a friend’s placard or family member’s placard,” he reasoned. “They walked all around the store, loaded a full basket of groceries, and then suddenly, ‘Oh!’”</p>
<p id="Xwyep1">A common argument you’ll hear in Cart Narc videos from an accused lazybones is that it’s someone’s job to wrangle the carts. That may be so, but clearly the corrals are there to be used. And if no one returned their carts, it would be pure chaos in the parking lots, causing problems for disabled customers and serving as potential hazards for cars. (I emailed 10 grocery store chains to ask whether, as a matter of policy, they would like their customers to use the corrals when possible, and none responded. But a brief survey of employees at three different Los Angeles–area supermarkets was unanimous: If you can, put your shopping cart in the corral, they said; it’s not a huge deal, but they don’t want to pick up after you.)</p>
<p id="jdxmu8">So the Cart Narc appears to be in the right on the principle of whether taking your cart back is the right thing to do, if you’re able. This is the same ruling that Michael Schur, creator of the Emmy-nominated sitcom <em>The Good Place</em>, came to in his recent book, <em>How to Be Perfect</em>, a sugarcoated guide to assessing the world through the lens of various moral schools of thought. On the subject of the shopping cart dilemma, Schur believes that it’s best philosophically solved by considering the concept of ubuntu, a southern African belief that might be summed up by the phrase “I am, because we are.” Using the ubuntu mindset, Schur writes, we should put our shopping cart back “because it helps other people, and <em>we</em> are only people <em>through other people.</em>”</p>
<p id="CuCDow">But how does this righteousness become complicated when you add in the fact that the Cart Narc is <em>shaming</em> other people to do the right thing? And more than that, what about the fact that he’s also antagonizing them on camera in order to amuse people on the internet?</p>
<p id="NQlw59">In a vacuum, Schur believes that shame is not as bad as it sounds. “Some amount of shame is good,” he told me, “because if you are shameless—entirely shameless—and you’re incapable of feeling shame, then you’re Donald Trump; you just do whatever you want, and there’s no feedback from society that tells you that you’re on the wrong path or that you’re misbehaving in some way.” Extrapolating from there, he considered, “That must mean there is some amount of shame that it’s OK to make other people feel in certain situations.”</p>
<p id="GsUCmC">Still, when you add the YouTube element, Schur believes that the Cart Narc is somewhat in the wrong: “It’s a slightly unfair fight to use a person just going about their day—you don’t know what’s going on in their life, you don’t know what kind of people they are,” he said. “And you’re kind of preying on the fact that they weren’t expecting to be ambushed by a film crew, and then capturing their adrenaline-fueled response to being filmed in that moment.”</p>
<p id="4SDlWi">The Cart Narc has a tendency to irk even those who agree with his principles; generally speaking, narcing is not something that is widely supported. But one defense of the Cart Narc that can’t be denied, whether you like him or not, is that he does seem to have influenced a good number of people to become passionate about the issue of being courteous. And while some lazybones busted by him may double down, the overall impact has to be considered if it outweighs the negative. “I think the ratio is definitely in my favor as far as that stuff goes,” Davis said. “The positive leverage of social media for Cart Narcs is that one person’s screwup can be an inspiration for however many other people who watched the video.”</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="JBR5OY">In the Cart Narcs video when Davis goes to Japan, there’s no one for him to bust; at the Costco in Chiba, all the carts were neatly in the return areas. So, without much to do, he begins <a href="https://youtu.be/DNhSD5qATxo?t=370">an impression</a> of fellow first-person documentarian John Wilson (of HBO’s <em>How to With John Wilson</em>)<em>.</em> That impression made me realize that Cart Narcs shares a certain quality with shows like <em>How to </em>or <em>Nathan for You</em>: It offers a glimpse at some of the more bizarre and amusing people on the planet—people whom you would usually never do anything to other than pass in the parking lot. </p>
<p id="JmiC7Q">Davis avoids cursing and narrates the videos in his radio-friendly voice as if everyone is his pupil, so it makes sense that he sees parallels between Cart Narcs and stories for kids: “These are little <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop%27s_Fables"><em>Aesop’s Fables</em></a>,” Davis said. “Little stories about good and bad. This is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goofus_and_Gallant"><em>Goofus and Gallant</em></a> from <em>Highlights for Children</em>. These are little moral tales, but told with real people in a silly way. So it’s the same reason everyone always has loved stories, since the beginning of time. It’s that we see ourselves in these people, good and bad.”</p>
<p id="CtVtgB">But tucking Cart Narcs away in any traditional genre still feels like it’s missing something, too. It doesn’t capture the rawness, the absurdity, the repetition, the brutality. Maybe more than anything, its genre can be understood only as “YouTube”—as part of the media organism that has reshaped the world by finding ways to give us unadulterated, compressed versions of what we seem to crave, even without us being able to describe why we crave it. </p>
<p id="OZnoAA">In his new documentary, <em>The YouTube Effect</em>, Alex Winter looks at the history of the platform and sees something that began with a video of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw">the cofounder looking at elephants at the zoo</a> and has resulted in people climbing up the walls of Congress. (Winter’s 2020 documentary <em>Showbiz Kids </em>was produced by Ringer Films.) Algorithmic echo chambers have developed into what Winter calls the Rage-O-Sphere—a media ecosystem built by and for the modern viewer’s insatiable desire to be riled up. When I called Winter, I expected him to be wary of Cart Narcs for the way that it feeds into this. But he actually saw it the other way around. </p>
<p id="s2TDy6">“I think he’s taken the Rage-O-Sphere,” Winter said, “and just shows it for the utter inanity that it is—that anyone can get absolutely enraged about anything, no matter how stupid.”</p>
<p id="tpdFA5">Winter, a father of three boys, conceded that his “tolerance for that kind of influencer is very low.” But, he said, “[Davis is] really talented. He has a deft ability to lure people into extended sequences, real-time sequences—that takes talent. And when someone comes along and does that, well, you really can’t help but laugh your ass off.”</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="0vfOng">Davis seems to enjoy being the Cart Narc—to a point. “I do get kind of like, ‘Ugh, OK, more carts,’ that sort of thing,” he said. “I just don’t have the appetite to do it full-time.” He’s described the Cart Narc beat as tapping into a bleak part of society that he simply doesn’t want to live in. “To see it time and time again …” he said, trailing off. He mentioned his trip to Japan. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”</p>
<p id="bd1Y3y">Not everyone wants the channel to go on forever, anyway. Ravey, Davis’s <em>Woody Show</em> colleague, told me that the longer it goes on, the less she likes it. “Because I find my concern for Sebas’s safety outweighs anything that would come back from the segment,” she said. “I don’t want to be the radio show that’s gotten somebody killed for a bit in a parking lot.” </p>
<p id="FoTbsV">But how could Davis quit? During my Narc-along, grocery store employees—the type of workers who have to undertake endless, thankless tasks with a “customer is always right” mentality—came flocking out to meet him like he was the working-class pope. They took selfies, they chatted about their shifts. It would be difficult to make any argument against Davis while this was happening. “I mean, we want to yell at people, too,” a Vons employee named Eric told me, sitting on the curb, taking his break. </p>
<p id="ZJHOmB">There was also a steady stream of shoppers who approached him throughout the afternoon, more than one of whom said something to the effect of “You’re doing God’s work over here.” Most of these people were old enough to do their own shopping, but at one point a kid—maybe 14 or so—stopped his mom as they were heading toward their car. “Yooooo, are you guys the Cart Narcs?” he asked, thinking that I, too, must have been an agent. “Can we take a selfie? I’ve seen all your videos.” Davis posed for the picture, and told the kid’s mom, “Glad you’re raising a good kid who takes his carts back.” She seemed very confused. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="e5zSxG">A few moments later, I saw the kid pushing his cart back to a corral, so I gave him a smile and a thumbs-up. With a stern look—pure honor and duty personified—he pointed his thumb back up to me. To him, there was nothing funny about it.</p>
<p id="IzZNDm"><a href="https://twitter.com/nate_rgrs"><em>Nate Rogers</em></a><em> is a writer in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>,</em> Los Angeles Times<em>, </em>GQ<em>, and elsewhere.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/pop-culture/2023/8/10/23825135/cart-narc-shopping-cart-theory-instagram-youtubeNate Rogers2023-04-12T07:17:33-04:002023-04-12T07:17:33-04:00Dril Is Everyone. More Specifically, He’s a Guy Named Paul.
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<p>Paul Dochney posted his way into the halls of internet lore. After 15 years of anonymity, can he emerge without compromising his act?</p> <p id="OCBFw1"><em>“Man is a double being and can take, now the god’s-eye view of things, now the brute’s eye view.” —Aldous Huxley, </em>Ends and Means<em>, 1937</em></p>
<p id="GL76xb"><em>“the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: ‘theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron’” —</em><a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312?lang=en"><em>Dril, Twitter, 2014</em></a></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="ty4lot">Dril is a real person, or so I had been told. Sitting in the House of Pies in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, I was waiting for him to join me in a booth—but I didn’t know who was actually going to show up. </p>
<p id="j8Awvp">It was the quiet midafternoon hours at the diner, which is a relic of when the area was less upscale, and it still partially attracts an off-key clientele of misfits and bozos, some of whom are alone and in no hurry to leave. (As I sat, an older man in oversized overalls walked by carrying a seat cushion; it was unclear whether he worked there.) This venue was the most readily available approximation of Dril’s world that I could think of. </p>
<p id="mXHPpY">While I waited, I pulled up Dril’s Twitter account and looked at <a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/1631067010355404801">a recent post</a>: “The fact is,” he wrote, “people arent doing a good job wiping their ass these days. And its attracting all manner of stray dogs and coyotes to our towns.” The likes were ticking up and up in real time as they moved toward their eventual zenith of almost 17,000. By Dril standards, this wasn’t even a particularly popular—or deranged—post. </p>
<p id="9UEVkU">With 1.7 million highly engaged followers, Dril is one of the more powerful Twitter users and, by default, one of the more powerful figures on the internet. Active since 2008, the Dril account—simultaneously known by the profile name “Wint”—with its grainy Jack Nicholson avatar, has been responsible for countless viral posts, just as beloved for the vivid scenes they induce as for the baffling grammatical and spelling errors they contain. Many of his tweets have become part of the permanent online lexicon: “<a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/134787490526658561">‘im not owned! im not owned!!’</a>, i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob”; “<a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/831805955402776576?lang=en">issuing correction on a previous post of mine</a>, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to them’”; “<a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/504134967946141697?lang=en">i am selling six beautfiul, extremely ill, white horses</a>. they no longer recognize me as their father, and are the Burden of my life.”</p>
<p id="767eS8">To most people, he is nothing; show the unaffiliated some of his posts, and they will likely just generate confusion and possibly anguish. (“Uh, so, I think I’ll stick with gardening. Where bull poop helps good things grow, and the tweets come from birds, not nitwits,” read <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/22/dril-musk-twitter-future/?commentID=424b0bae-efbd-4824-bb52-d5ea64ed85b5">one</a> of many upset people in the comment section of a recent <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/22/dril-musk-twitter-future/"><em>Washington Post </em>feature</a> about Dril, inadvertently adopting their own Dril-esque cadence in the process.) But to a large sect of the Very Online, he is king—the undisputed poet laureate of shitposting, the architect of a satire so effective that it has become impossible to tell when Dril stopped mocking the way people speak online and when we, instead, started speaking like Dril online.</p>
<p id="7eWbpa">For almost 10 years, he was entirely anonymous. Like a decent number of the people in the so-called <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jwherrman/weird-twitter-the-oral-history">“Weird Twitter” scene</a> that Dril is still vaguely a part of, he doesn’t put his real name on the account—but as time has gone on and his popularity has grown, it’s become nothing short of miraculous that he’s kept up the mystery. He’s a <a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/217087278013616128">pyramid</a>-<a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/1167921495659577346">obsessed</a> phantom. He’s <a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/13408516505075712?lang=en">banky</a>. Still, over the years, some of his digital curtain has begun to part—largely spurred by his <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/who-on-earth-would-dox-dril-the-only-good-anonymous-person-on-the-internet">being doxxed</a> in 2017, when his identity was revealed to supposedly be that of a man named Paul. </p>
<p id="bWY14G">Around the same time, Dril started a <a href="https://www.patreon.com/dril">Patreon</a>, released a book, <em>Dril Official </em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dril-Official-Years-Anniversary-Collection/dp/1724941682/ref=sr_1_5?crid=251ST9WWDUWP5&keywords=dril&qid=1680303126&s=books&sprefix=dri%2Cstripbooks%2C158&sr=1-5"><em>“Mr. Ten Years”</em></a><em> Anniversary Collection</em>, and had an Adult Swim television show, <em>TruthPoint</em>—a surrealist Infowars parody in which he manifested behind a cheap old man mask and bantered with self-professed <a href="https://youtu.be/7t948ZQfH1g?t=140">“manic pixie stream boy”</a> cohost Derek Estevez-Olsen. Dril also began doing an interview here and there, but never anything substantial, and always in character. I reached out to him via email, and when he replied, the name attached to the account was “paul d.” But I still wasn’t totally sure that he wouldn’t walk into House of Pies with his mask on, throw a plate against a wall, and then walk out. </p>
<p id="gLyWUw">“I’m Paul,” he said, once he found me and after I began by asking whom, exactly, I could say I was speaking to. </p>
<p id="IFPMAp">Paul Dochney, who is 35, does not, in fact, look like a mutant Jack Nicholson. He has soft features and a gentle disposition and looks something like a young Eugene Mirman. It’s difficult to say what I expected to find sitting across from me, but it wasn’t this. Looking at him, you’d never presume that this was the person who made <a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/384408932061417472?lang=en">candle purchasing a matter of financial insecurity</a>. </p>
<p id="FK3uOB">He opted to stick with water—not a terrible decision at the House of Pies, but also, I worried, a choice that theoretically allowed him a quick exit at any point. For a while, I got the sense that he might have been deciding how much to reveal to me in real time, based on how the conversation went. But one thing he was clear about from the beginning: It was all right to end this game of living in the digital shadows.</p>
<p id="BFnfQ2">“I mean, my name is already out there,” he said, acknowledging the fact that, after the doxxing, he had at separate points confirmed his name on both <a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/1028250494580404226?lang=en">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fuc6ql/i_am_dril_ceo_of_the_dril_account_on_twittercom/fmddeh3/">Reddit</a>. “It’s in my Wikipedia article. Maybe people need to grow up. Just accept that I’m not like Santa Claus. I’m not a magic elf who posts.”</p>
<p id="kWYw8e">In some sense, anonymity has served a creative purpose. “Practically, it’s a good tool,” Estevez-Olsen told me later in a phone interview, “because when you make a post, you don’t want to be like, ‘From Paul Dochney, <a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/171450835388203008?lang=en">I fuck flags</a>’ or whatever. You want to have some distance from it.” (He would know: “Estevez-Olsen” is itself a <em>TruthPoint</em> stage name that he asked me to use for reasons of privacy.)</p>
<p id="QJzsTi">But the secrecy has also lingered because of the types of personalities Dril naturally attracts to his orbit. “Most people are normal,” Dochney explained. “But there’s, like, three or four weirdos who just ruin it for everyone.” Jon Hendren, a fellow titan of Weird Twitter who is known by his subtle handle, @fart, told me that he had seen some disturbing messages people had sent Dochney in the past—that he wasn’t being paranoid or dramatic. “It’s gotta be kind of surreal,” Hendren said. “And it’s got to be kind of difficult to live with.”</p>
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<cite>Illustration by Jonathan Bartlett, based on <a class="ql-link" href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/384408932061417472?lang=en" target="_blank">a tweet by Dril</a></cite>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="vgBHdg">Dril may be a phantom, but Dochney, like the rest of us, did come from somewhere. He was raised in New Jersey in a working-class family, he explained to me; his father worked as a FedEx manager “for the longest time,” and his mother was a homemaker who also chased down side jobs. “I was very into the internet from a very early age,” Dochney said, nursing his cup of water. “I was kind of in the background most of the time, just daydreaming about video games and stuff like that. I mean, I had a few friends. I wasn’t a total outcast or a weirdo. But I was on the quiet side.”</p>
<p id="eBCQAB">After dropping out after his first attempt at college, Dochney eventually gave it another shot at Wilmington University in Delaware—“the cheapest college I could find that would still give me a valid bachelor’s degree,” he said. There, he studied media design: “Like, web design and HTML and the Adobe Suite and all that stuff,” he said. “Graphics.”</p>
<p id="gTOVPs">In essence, the character of Dril was born on Something Awful, an outsider comedy website that had particularly popular message boards and file-sharing forums in the 2000s. It was where many—if not most—of the essential Weird Twitter personalities came from, and where some, like Hendren, were (poorly) paid moderators or contributors. “Effort was looked down upon for a long time,” said Hendren, who added that he apparently once banned Dochney from one of the forums (although he is friendly with him these days). “And so if you’re just naturally funny, and if you’re just naturally saying good things, then you did fine there.”</p>
<p id="WD0cht">Cynicism and brashness defined the Something Awful aesthetic. Its founder, Richard Kyanka, explained <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/nzg4yw/fuck-you-and-die-an-oral-history-of-something-awful">to <em>Vice</em></a> in 2017 that part of his goal with the site was to produce “parodies of wonks who were saying the internet was the future without saying, ‘Well there could be a possible downside to the internet.’” He went on, “Everybody was talking about how the internet was going to revolutionize everything and everything was going to be great, but nobody ever talked about how shitty the internet could also be.” </p>
<p id="8A4Naj">Dochney was a regular in the infamous Fuck You and Die forum, and he said that he mostly posted artwork. (“They had this, like, flag system,” he remembered, “where you could post these little images of, like, cartoons or, like, asses that are shitting.”) At that time, Dochney went by “gigantic drill” on the site, a name he came up with when he was still a teenager. “If there was some inspiration behind it, I’ve forgotten it by now,” he said.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="EFXLu1"><q>“Just accept that I’m not like Santa Claus. I’m not a magic elf who posts.” —Dril, a.k.a. Paul Dochney</q></aside></div>
<p id="oE5yY4">About two years after Twitter was founded in 2006, a friend told him he should sign up and join the growing group of Something Awful affiliates who were taking advantage of what was then a novelty: a mobile-friendly way to post. The handle “@drill” with two <em>l</em>’s was taken, so “@dril” it was. Dochney’s first post, which has since gone on to have an inexplicable life of its own, was partially a response to a friend who had told him to sign up: <a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/922321981">“no.”</a></p>
<p id="dhE1jJ">“This is in 2008,” Dochney said, “when it was brand new, and everyone was just posting bullshit like, ‘Oh, this is what I had for lunch.’ It was just, like, tech guys posting inane details about their lives. I posted ‘no’ because I didn’t care for it at the time. I still really don’t care for it.”</p>
<p id="cjcCH6">Dochney posts often, and with seeming abandon. “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BPGQ6YVQ?ref_=dbs_m_mng_rwt_calw_tpbk_0&storeType=ebooks&qid=1680306759&sr=1-1">For the Pleasure of the Fans</a>,” he recently released <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BPT7XJN2?binding=paperback&searchxofy=true&ref_=dbs_s_bs_series_rwt_tpbk&qid=1680306759&sr=1-1">four versions</a> of a book compiling 10,000 of his “finest” posts, the equivalent of roughly two posts per day during the 14 years of time covered. (The font in these books is beyond minuscule, and getting past the line spacing to actually read the tweets is a high-wire act; the format is its own joke.) “I just post whatever bullshit I’m thinking,” Dochney explained of the Dril Process. “I kind of have to get into, like, the writing mood. But there’s no ritual or anything. Usually when I’m driving or I’m in the shower, I’ll come up with some sort of idea.”</p>
<p id="7N14YP">The character of Dril is fluid, but taken as a whole, the blurry image starts to come into focus: It’s that of an easily agitated, overly confident, wildly crass, IBS-ridden middle-aged man thrashing away on a computer—probably a PC. He speaks in outlandish non sequiturs and engages with brands with unreasonable love and hate in equal measure. He is the dark, democratic promise of the internet—that anyone can use it to broadcast their opinions at any time—fulfilled. “I just go back to how specific and unique it is,” comedian and actor David Cross told me. “There’s nobody quite like him, and it perfectly encapsulates that Twitter dialogue.”</p>
<p id="hLUpBo">When I asked Dochney whether the type of person he’s satirizing is more common now or merely more visible, he said, “I think there’s just so many of those minds out there that we can only see because of the internet. In the 1920s or whatever, there were just as many dumb, crazy people who only met, like, four people in their entire life, and just died in obscurity.” He noted that he appreciates that the site “records this interesting snapshot of all the insane people who exist in the background and just post.” It was one of the only moments when he had anything remotely complimentary to say about Twitter.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="gQW2c0">Since Dochney moved to L.A. a few years ago, which he did to hopefully “get a job <em>entertaining</em> in some capacity,” he has survived mainly on his various Dril-based incomes. He told me he’s making a decent living but clarified that he probably makes “as much money as a Kmart manager or something.” (His Patreon, which is now focused on funding the development of a video game and is available in “disgusting” and “Fucked” tiers, is currently taking in $1,468 a month from roughly 500 subscribers.)</p>
<p id="rpZlh3">There is clearly a market for what Dochney does, but tapping into it hasn’t been the easiest process. He recalled talking to a publisher about potentially putting out his book <em>The Get Rich and Become God Method</em>, which is a textbook-sized survey of his art and humor and also quite literally a step-by-step guide to getting rich and becoming God. “I sent them the PDF,” he said, “and I did not get a response from them. I can imagine that, like, they turned to Page 11 and saw a Ku Klux Klan member with his blue penis sticking out, and just said, ‘No, thank you. I can’t market this for the life of me.’” (The page being referenced is titled “Thoughts of My Son,” and it features said blue, seminude Ku Klux Klan member being defended by his father: “I ask that you PLEASE look BEYOND his Crude Visage before you lay Judgement upon this Man,” the father pleads. “AND read some of his Posts.”) Like his other books, <em>Method</em> was eventually <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Become-Method-DRIL-collection/dp/B09JJCGM6Y/ref=sr_1_6?crid=251ST9WWDUWP5&keywords=dril&qid=1680308564&s=books&sprefix=dri%2Cstripbooks%2C158&sr=1-6">self-released</a>. </p>
<p id="ieGgvq">The arrival of <em>TruthPoint</em> on Adult Swim was an unexpected moment in Dochney’s career, not just because it marked his transition from writer to performer—something he said he had never dabbled in before—but also because of the corporate legitimacy of it. Still, <em>TruthPoint</em> was one of the more bizarre programs I have ever watched in any capacity, let alone on a channel owned by Warner Bros. (The second episode, which is almost an hour long, <a href="https://youtu.be/ONBj_5PHzoE?t=2544">at one point</a> features Estevez-Olsen reading a passage from the novelization of the 2001 movie <em>Lara Croft: Tomb Raider</em>, which is itself an adaptation of the video game franchise of the same name; Dril’s review of the book was “This is a thriller from beginning to end, folks.”) The show had promise, but the timing was bad; the pandemic forced them to do episodes over video calls, and new episodes stopped airing in fall 2020. </p>
<p id="P1GgFz">Dochney and Estevez-Olsen are working to keep the <em>TruthPoint</em> enterprise alive—ideally by rebooting it in a more sketch-oriented format, they said. (Estevez-Olsen cited Chris Morris’s ’90s news parody show, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pr8xnNi7OM"><em>Brass Eye</em></a>, as a partial model.) But part of the difficulty is communicating just what the show is—who, exactly, they are.</p>
<p id="iy3ux1">“We met with this agent from a big [agency]. We were showing him the pitch decks we had put together that we worked hard on,” Estevez-Olsen said. “He was just like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know if I can do anything for you. Because it’s almost like you’re saying you’re not comedians, really, you’re not writers—we can’t, like, put you on a sitcom as a writing team.’ I think in that moment, I felt pretty stupid. I felt like an outsider artist, and we’re, like, dragging in our misshapen barrels that we were painting in the backyard and being like, ‘You should put this in a museum.’”</p>
<p id="5urjOi">In the diner, I asked Dochney whether he thought of himself as a writer, and he said, “I kind of consider myself a lot of things. I do art and writing. But I’d rather be called a writer than a social media influencer or something like that. That is vile to me.”</p>
<p id="Ndv2se">Defining and understanding how social media works in the artistic realm is still a new field. It is also one that will likely be far more important in the grand scheme of things than many would like to imagine. “This is the world young artists and art students live in,” Aaron Betsky, a writer and critic specializing in art and design, noted in a 2014 <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/10/man-and-machine-susan-orlean"><em>New Yorker </em>feature</a> about Horse_ebooks, a bot-imitating piece of Twitter art. “The way we represent our world is more and more digitally based and networked. If art is in any way reflecting our world, it will have to adopt and adapt these techniques and technologies.”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="O7Ohda"><q>“I’d rather be called a writer than a social media influencer or something like that. That is vile to me.” —Dochney</q></aside></div>
<p id="91GgvZ">Mark Sample, professor and chair of digital studies at Davidson College, told me that he believes Dril might be understood within the developing field of netprov (as in internet improvisation). Not altogether unrelated to electronic literature, or net art as a whole, netprov is, Sample explained, “the idea of using a social media platform as a kind of improvisational space in which the people on the other side aren’t really sure, are they seeing something that’s really sincere and earnest, or are they watching a performance?” I started to imagine Dril as the Ornette Coleman of the internet, but Sample said he likens it in some way to a living statue street performer “who’s just <em>always</em> doing it, whether there’s even a crowd around or not.” </p>
<p id="H1YeuA">Darcie Wilder, writer of the tweet-inspired 2017 novel <em>literally show me a healthy person</em>, sees something that’s similar to performance art: “It’s not just the jokes he’s doing—it’s the performance and the actual whole thing,” she told me.</p>
<p id="TTJ6od">Perhaps no artist has done more to push forward the conversation about how social media can exist in the artistic realm than Jacob Bakkila, who ran Horse_ebooks as part of a larger artistic collaboration with Thomas Bender. The Horse_ebooks project was deliberately ended in 2013—“No one wants to work on a painting forever,” Bakkila said at the time—and Bakkila, who now works in advertising in addition to his ongoing work as a multimedia artist, spoke thoughtfully to me over video call about the promise of art in the digital landscape. But of anyone I talked to, he was the most concerned about the risk of overintellectualizing Dril’s act—of being the type of person who, in his analogy, would study photosynthesis but forget to watch “the leaves change color.” </p>
<p id="ZivswB">“He’s a poster,” Bakkila said. “And I think that there’s a great beauty to that because it’s also the native language of the internet. … It’s what the internet is designed to do, is to let you post on it. And it goes deeper—in that sense, it’s more profound than comedy, although obviously he’s very funny. And it’s more profound than art, although obviously he’s artistic. But I think first and foremost, he’s a poster. And he’s the best one we have.” </p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TAs8bKsn9hKX5flMUic1jsdYjK8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24577948/dril_tweet2.jpg">
<cite>Illustration by Jonathan Bartlett, based on <a class="ql-link" href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/171450835388203008?lang=en" target="_blank">a tweet by Dril</a></cite>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="Qk1glA">Often, when people talk about Dril, they use him as a vehicle to talk about Twitter itself—its initial promise, its inevitable demise. The approach is something like using Andy Kaufman to talk about <em>Saturday Night Live</em>; it’s not wrong, exactly, but it is a missed opportunity for something more specific, and more interesting, at any rate. There is plenty to learn about Twitter through Dril, but less to learn about Dril through Twitter. </p>
<p id="C8so1C">Dochney described his popularity on the site as “incidental” and his association with it more as a millstone than a gift. “I do find a lot of aspects of Twitter very disgusting,” he said. “It would not be my first choice of websites to get popular on, but that’s just the way it goes. And I got to work with that.” (Twitter, for what it’s worth, seems to value Dril’s presence, as he is <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23659842/twitter-boost-elon-musk-dril-mrbeast-algorithm-accounts">reportedly</a> one of about 35 elite users, along with the likes of LeBron James and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, currently being “boosted” on the site.)</p>
<p id="86xBGn">Posting, in its various forms and locations, is a skill, and Dochney knows how to recognize it as well as anybody. Donald Trump, he noted, is “a very good poster”—a skill that is likely bolstered by the fact that he’s also “legitimately probably nuts, a little bit.” (“Sometimes,” Dochney did add, however, “being mentally ill makes you a <em>worse</em> poster.”) As for memes, one of the primary forms of posting, Dochney doesn’t “respect” them: “I think memes are just jokes you stole, basically,” he said. “I like making shit.”</p>
<p id="xtdYcn">To my eye, Dochney hasn’t lost a step in his second decade of posting as Dril, and more than that, some of his best posts have <a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/1613611545875054592?lang=en">been</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/1551754703632887808?s=20&t=2UktvnaJh2IDNGxUZh6hug">in</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/1628999985445613568?s=21&t=ZbcX4APnXt9vnLt_8L1Q3g">the</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/1625907835623337987?s=21&t=6_HhQaydaKAMVeLGXkWXag">last</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/1638350541440024576?s=12&t=xxsywDoqJRgpVg2pnmf4zw">year</a>. But the criticisms and half-serious conspiracy theories are constant. One that Dochney is particularly irritated by is the “you didn’t <em>used</em> to be topical” line: “I was always a product of what was going on around me,” he said, exasperated. “So it’s kind of weird when people start accusing me of, like, ‘Oh, you sold your account to Waffle House, and now you’re posting differently,’ or some bullshit like that.” If anything, Dochney added, he believes he’s been “doing the same shtick almost to a fault, really.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="3XA0Dg"><q>“I think first and foremost, he’s a poster. And he’s the best one we have.” —Jacob Bakkila</q></aside></div>
<p id="YXJwLx">When <em>TruthPoint</em> was first announced in 2019, there was enough of a cynical reaction from some of Dril’s followers that Darcie Wilder addressed it in <a href="https://theoutline.com/post/8108/dril-adult-swim-show-selling-out?zd=2&zi=xbxqc2ng">an essay</a> for <em>The Outline</em> (a platform that, notably, is now dead): “Twitter and Hollywood are obviously vastly different ecosystems,” she wrote, “but as the time we spend staring into a screen becomes split between traditional entertainment products and crowdsourced online content presented by tech platforms, their value becomes intertwined. But only one of these industries pays its writers.”</p>
<p id="166IX3">“Neither one of us really had in our heart of hearts,” Estevez-Olsen told me, “that we were going to write 140-character, pithy, little, funny, cute things for the rest of our lives. Paul wanted to—like me—write books, make TV shows, do whatever you can to build a world and express all of that.” The way Dochney put it, posting, for him, is “kind of like going to the bathroom, really—just putting something out there.” He seemed a little worn out by the idea of being an old man firing up Twitter. “Posting is not something you want to do forever,” he said.</p>
<p id="Gpi31P">Contrary to the nature of his comedy—pitch black, often finding a deceptively amusing way to channel some of the most disturbing inclinations that society has—Dochney does not identify as a nihilistic person. The darkness of the internet, he believes, is an illusion that comes from when “you’re on Twitter, and you’re just exposed to the worst of it, mainlined 24/7,” he said. “I don’t want to be like one of those guys, like, ‘You know, war is not so bad if you look at the positive stuff.’ But it’s not 100 percent hopeless, I’d say.” </p>
<p id="09I4hc">This surprised me. If there’s one accent in the posting language that could be arguably sourced to Dril, it’s the disaffected irony so many of us have adopted online—the way we seem increasingly allergic to earnestness and blanketed in a wisecracking despair. I told him his answer was pretty starkly different from the image I had of Dril in my head: sweating, drooling, grinning maniacally, on the verge of a heart attack.</p>
<p id="aS1KUc">“If I wasn’t relatively happy with my life, maybe I could have been that guy,” he said. “Maybe if my posts never took off and I was still working in a mail room at the age of almost 40, I would be just as angry, and posting about my ass and balls with all sincerity.”</p>
<p id="ftGOsr"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="lyL26N">In January, I went to see <em>TruthPoint Cataclysm</em>, a live reincarnation of the <em>TruthPoint </em>show, which functioned as the first substantial time that Dochney had made a public appearance as Dril. The performance was at the Elysian Theater in the freeway-adjacent stretch of L.A.’s Frogtown, and tickets for the 135-seat venue were sold out. Inside, however, there were some empty seats, mostly in the front, which was perhaps a sign of an instinctive avoidance of a splash zone that did, actually, become a factor later on. </p>
<p id="7P1BOP">Presented in 12D—“10 times more than a normal 2D experience,” according to Estevez-Olsen—the show’s topic was gambling, with Dril and Estevez-Olsen engaging in a variety of salient debates about best practices when betting money, whether in the casino or with crypto or what have you. Toward the end of the show, there was a raffle to give away a copy of a small book that Dochney had supposedly written called <em>How to Cheat at Casino Games by Being a Bitch. </em>In a fit of fury, he tore one of the copies of this book up, and Estevez-Olsen threw the pages into the audience. </p>
<p id="3BrQMT">On my way out, I made off with a few torn sheets, which I was later amused to find consisted of semi-coherent chapters—filled with actual jokes. (“If you want to make any decent money at the track, there’s one thing you must remember,” the section on horse racing reads. “You’ve got to get ‘WET’, which stands for ‘Win Every Time.’”) Dochney had sat down and written all this out and then had it printed, presumably just for the bit—or for his own personal satisfaction, or both. </p>
<p id="FhxSoE">The whole event—from the in-person nature of it to the physical prop book—felt very distant from anything I might experience while aimlessly scrolling around on my phone. Still, despite his <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CqYcsmfJgRA/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link">live comedy sets</a> with Estevez-Olsen and <a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/1641284631206166529">his gigs hosting movie screenings</a>, Twitter remains at the forefront of everything when we talk about Dril. And it most likely will until the platform is out of our lives.</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="2uLKbO"><q>“If people find out about who he is in real life, and then they suddenly don’t like the stuff anymore, that’s just silly. If you like what he’s written, you like it, and that’s all there is to it.” —Derek Estevez-Olsen</q></aside></div>
<p id="zfQzEF">“I think it’s getting further away from, like, whatever cool thing it was,” said Wilder, who told me she used to think Twitter was its own art but these days finds that belief “embarrassing.” “Now it’s obviously just, like, data mining and advertising. … Dril is also very different from that. Like, those things don’t really apply to his feed. It’s really weird that he’s still so successful.”</p>
<p id="y5Yhnb">Late last year, as Twitter users worried about the future of the platform amid <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tech/2022/11/22/23471923/twitter-elon-musk-layoffs-changes-future">new CEO Elon Musk’s takeover</a>, the thought of losing Dril prompted at least one user to <a href="https://twitter.com/nickfarruggia/status/1594121736987250688">catalog every Dril tweet</a> like he was grabbing the family pets and photo albums from a burning home. But Dochney wondered whether Twitter’s demise could potentially force him to “grow in ways I never thought possible.” He also considered the notion that it might destroy his career entirely. Either way, he decided, “You gotta commend Elon for doing everything in his power to wipe this nuisance website off the face of the earth.” (Add swapping <a href="https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/elon-musk-twitter-logo-doge-dogecoin-meme-1235572343/">Twitter’s blue bird logo for Doge</a> last week to Musk’s long list of screwups.)</p>
<p id="JHLJOX">Regardless of Twitter’s fate, one development that’s guaranteed in the immediate future is that relinquishing pure anonymity will change things for Dochney, at least to some degree. If his fans were replying with <a href="https://twitter.com/TygerbugGarrett/status/1028265972619042816">“don’t do this”</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/Canama139/status/1028303795913220096">“this account is ruined now”</a> when he posted his name a few years ago, how they’d respond to a gesture far more forthright remains to be seen. </p>
<p id="P2QlwF">“They want it to be, like, an insane guy who lives in the woods or something,” said Estevez-Olsen. “Or they want it to be just a blurry man. But yeah, it’s a guy named Paul. He’s, like, fairly normal. … I feel like if people find out about who he is in real life, and then they suddenly don’t like the stuff anymore, that’s just silly. If you like what he’s written, you like it, and that’s all there is to it.” </p>
<p id="1Dry8k">David Cross brought up when Bobcat Goldthwait decided to stop performing in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0qAfWWQJ5w">his outlandish voice</a>, even though it was what the comedian was initially known for. “At some point, he was like, ‘Fuck it, I don’t want to do this anymore,’” Cross said. “I mean, it’s Bob Dylan going electric.”</p>
<p id="xke55C">One way I’ve processed the idea of Dochney’s story undergoing a sea change is to remind myself that he is, by nature, a troll. And more than that, he’s a troll who trolls trolls. The most disappointing thing Dochney could become is predictable, even in something as outlandish as perpetual namelessness. I’m glad he didn’t walk into the House of Pies and throw a plate against the wall. But part of the fun is that I thought there was a chance he might do it anyway. </p>
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<cite>Illustration by Jonathan Bartlett, based on <a class="ql-link" href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/134787490526658561" target="_blank">a tweet by Dril</a></cite>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="MsU9dz">Before meeting up with Dochney, I wrote down a list of artists and art that I thought he might have some lineage from, and late in our conversation, I began rattling them off to see whether he felt any attachment. I wanted to attempt to understand Dochney within the context of the history of comedy.</p>
<p id="Nt3wFz"><em>Looney Tunes</em>? “I was more of a <em>Ren & Stimpy</em> child,” he said. Kurt Vonnegut? “Pretty good.” Jack Handey? “I really liked that.” <em>A Confederacy of Dunces</em>? “I thought it was funny. I thought it was kind of ahead of its time. … [Ignatius J. Reilly] was, like, the first internet nerd before the internet even existed.” Marcel Duchamp—the, uh, <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573">“urinal guy,”</a> I stammered. “I don’t know if I can respect a man who you refer to as ‘the urinal guy,’” he replied. </p>
<p id="eIAEfc">Dochney described himself as being “overexposed” to comedy these days and didn’t appear to be too enamored of the mainstream comedy scene in general. But there was one moment when he noticeably brightened up about the subject of comedy he was a fan of—and that was when he was talking about posts that he thought were categorically funnier than his. The Dril page often retweets arcane mutterings from accounts with essentially no followers, and Dochney was explaining one way he sometimes navigates Twitter to locate these lonely crevices of social media: Think of something, and spell it hilariously wrong. </p>
<p id="EcfNaP">The other day, he said, he took “Willy Wonka” and spelled it “Welly Wonka,” and he found a bunch of posts from “the dumbest people ever” talking about the characters from Roald Dahl’s books. He also found what appeared to be an elementary school classroom that was “taking place on Twitter for some reason.” The class was discussing Wonka, and the teacher had prompted the students to choose three words that they would use to describe the Oompa Loompas in some way. “The responses were some of the funniest shit I’ve probably ever seen,” he said. “There was one that was, like, ‘small, clown, smart.’ The other one was, like, ‘short, dumb, unfunny.’”</p>
<p id="7lwHwD">I told him that it felt like a demonstration of the fact that, ultimately, there’s nobody funnier than someone who’s not trying to be in the first place.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="bdsjOL">“It’s very sad for all these professional comedians that there’s something there that they can never grasp,” he said. “And I guess me, too, in a way.”</p>
<p id="bltIT0"><a href="https://twitter.com/nate_rgrs"><em>Nate Rogers</em></a><em> is a writer in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>,</em> Los Angeles Times<em>, </em>GQ<em>, and elsewhere.</em></p>
<aside id="04z0F0"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside>
https://www.theringer.com/tech/2023/4/12/23673003/dril-twitter-interview-profile-identityNate Rogers2023-01-20T16:00:12-05:002023-01-20T16:00:12-05:00David Crosby Never Cut His Hair
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<p>The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young member was a fearless captain of folk rock who embraced mutiny. He also wasn’t afraid to go down with the ship.</p> <p id="govxFp">David Crosby scored a no. 1 hit with his first major recording—but he would’ve had a right to be pissed off about how it went down. That’s because, in January 1965, when the newly formed Byrds went to record a version of Bob Dylan’s then-unreleased “Mr. Tambourine Man,” producer Terry Melcher thought session musicians were needed. Roger McGuinn was allowed to play his jangly guitar part—which would turn out to be the immaculate conception point for Peter Buck’s whole career—and McGuinn, Crosby, and Gene Clark teamed up to sing the vocals. But members of the elite studio team the Wrecking Crew came in to play all the other instrumentation. </p>
<p id="TJdvD0">For most musicians—even supremely talented ones—relegating them to backing vocals would render them more or less obsolete. (Does anyone ever talk about how great Peter Tork and Davy Jones’s “oohs” and “aahs” are on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4FIu4Xj16I">“Last Train to Clarksville”</a>?) Crosby, however, took his assignment and changed the course of popular music. Working with just a straightforward folk melody, he arranged a complex harmony that has the trio’s vocal lines dancing around each other in a manner so dazzling that even crotchety Dylan was <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/how-bob-dylans-bringing-it-all-back-home-stunned-the-world-158316/3/">said</a> to approve. (At least according to Crosby, an unreliable narrator if there ever was one.) The room was filled with musicians who recorded on songs like “Be My Baby” and “I Get Around,” but Crosby was the star that day. He was a dropout vagabond, just a few years removed from burgling houses as his way of getting by. (At least, according to Crosby.) He was 23 years old.</p>
<p id="tmgY0b">“I give the credit to Crosby,” McGuinn <a href="https://www.goldminemag.com/articles/the-byrds-roger-mcguinn-is-still-flying-high">said</a> in 2011, when asked about the unique blend of the Byrds’ vocals. “He was brilliant at devising these harmony parts that were not strict third, fourth, or fifth improvisational combination of the three. That’s what makes the Byrds’ harmonies.”</p>
<p id="R6ecVC">Crosby, who died this week at 81 of undisclosed causes, had his career so frequently overshadowed by his antics—by <a href="https://ultimateclassicrock.com/david-crosby-sentenced-to-prison/">legal issues</a>, by <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/david-crosby-apologizes-to-neil-young-daryl-hannah-41358/">shit-stirring in the press</a>, by <a href="https://twitter.com/thedavidcrosby/status/1290454011452313600">endless tweeting</a> in his later years—that it’s easy to forget to lead with his music. And even when you <em>do</em> focus on the music, the picture that comes in often isn’t totally clear. Despite being able to make an enemy out of just about anyone, one of Crosby’s paramount skills during his career was, remarkably, finding himself in continuous orbit of other great talents. So much so that his accomplishments are hard to pin down: Just how much <em>did</em> he contribute to get a writing credit on the Byrds’ <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxyOhFBoxSY">“Eight Miles High”</a>? (It was apparently just one line.) What, exactly, did his presence in the room bring to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1PrUU2S_iw">“Ohio”</a>? (That’s him wailing “How many more?” at the end.)</p>
<p id="rF4VNe">“My role is my role,” Crosby <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/david-crosby-the-rolling-stone-interview-2-168048/">told</a> <em>Rolling Stone</em> in 1970. “I don’t want to get tagged into it too tight, but on the most basic level I can approach it, it’s energy source, communication, and focus.”</p>
<p id="WAWbbp">The son of Floyd Crosby, the legendary cinematographer behind the 1952 classic Western noir <em>High Noon</em>, David Crosby grew up with a peripheral understanding of the entertainment industry—and, in particular, the art of movies, which are created by committee. Like a hotshot director, he seemed to go through life with the awareness that what he brought was not just a vision, but also knowing whom to work with in order to bring that vision to life. (Or when it would be wise to let someone else’s vision take center stage.) After dropping out of school, Crosby bounced around the country—Dennis Hopper was later said to have modeled his <em>Easy Rider</em> persona after him—eventually landing in New York during the folk-scene explosion, where he would be introduced to McGuinn. </p>
<p id="K6Hkkz">Crosby’s time with the Byrds set a precedent of the path that he would repeat several times over in his life: start a group, collaborate with marquee talent, and then break up spectacularly. After the album <em>Mr. Tambourine Man</em> essentially placed the term “folk rock” into the modern vernacular, Crosby hung around for another four albums, his songwriting presence slowly increasing as they went along—a sort of George Harrison figure for the group, contributing occasional songs like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4ra2DxBq2U">“Everybody’s Been Burned,”</a> while providing ancillary support to the more dominant songwriting of McGuinn and Chris Hillman. But Crosby was thrown out of the band during the making of 1968’s <em>The Notorious Byrd Brothers</em>, partially because he wanted to include more original material, and partially because he wouldn’t stop talking about JFK conspiracy theories on stage. (“The Warren Report ain’t the truth, that’s plain to anybody,” Crosby said to <em>Rolling Stone</em> in 1970, describing his usual stage banter. “And it happened in your country. Don’t you wonder why? Don’t you wonder?”)</p>
<p id="8pKHEF">At a party at Joni Mitchell’s house (Crosby produced her debut album, <em>Song to a Seagull</em>), the trio of Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash first hit it off, each feeling freed from the shackles of their previous groups (the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Hollies, respectively). Operating as Crosby, Stills & Nash, the band had a smash hit with their 1969 self-titled debut, and then doubled down, adding Neil Young, with whom they made the 1970 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album <em>Déjà Vu</em>, which hit no. 1. The members’ approach was inspired by both resentment for previous collaborations and an embrace of new collaborations at the same time.</p>
<p id="x2bYKw">“I started out as a solo writer, writing all my own stuff and jealously guarding it,” Crosby explained <a href="https://www.stereogum.com/2152972/david-crosby-twitter-stills-nash-isbell-woodstock-joni-mitchell/interviews/weve-got-a-file-on-you/">to <em>Stereogum</em></a> in 2021. “A lot of people do that. They want all the credit, they want all the money. What I found out is, the other guy always thinks of something I wouldn’t think of. It’s more colors, it’s like having two palettes of colors instead of one. We paint a better picture.”</p>
<p id="D4N78G">But as democratic as these albums were, Crosby’s songs, like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jaq2mwPGaE4">“Guinnevere”</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCs6Tpd5sFQ">“Déjà Vu,”</a> were always easy to pick out; they would be the ones with the strange tunings and structures, the ones with the most out-there lyrics. (“If I had ever been here before / I would probably know just what to do.”) Listening to him push songs like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as5lE64J1hQ">“Almost Cut My Hair”</a> over semi-jazzy terrain made it seem like he was never <em>quite</em> a team player, even if he was the one who formed the team in the first place. </p>
<p id="HsyyHV">As always with Crosby, though, the music was just one part of the story. CSNY was an experiment in explosive personalities—and even with a group that included Neil Young, someone who once abandoned Stills mid-tour with a note that said, “Eat a peach,” Crosby still came out as the most volatile figure. “See, the thing is, everybody—especially David—is a controversial character,” Young <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/crosby-stills-nash-young-taylor-reeves-180801/4/">told</a> <em>Rolling Stone</em> in 1969. “Everybody has an opinion. Like, I like to watch David just to see what he’ll do next.”</p>
<p id="1qgSRk">Already an unpredictable character, Crosby was sent into an emotional tailspin when his longtime girlfriend, Christine Hinton, died in a car accident in 1969. His substance use subsequently became more severe, and his behavior more erratic. As he continued to make music throughout the ’70s and into ’80s—including the landmark 1971 solo release <em>If I Could Only Remember My Name</em>—he was heading for his own ditch, like the one <a href="https://floodmagazine.com/39690/tired-eyes-an-apprecation-of-neil-youngs-ditch-trilogy/">Young himself ended up in</a>. At his lowest, Crosby spent multiple stints in prison for drug and firearm charges. (It’s reasonable to presume that the gun in his lap on <a href="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0572/7915/2293/products/4115267-2854378_500x.jpg?v=1657297324">the cover of <em>Déjà Vu</em></a> wasn’t a prop.)</p>
<p id="XqYd3Y">But the second career of Crosby is nothing short of remarkable. Even though he released plenty of music after his major legal and addiction issues subsided, he embodied something more powerful—and frankly bizarre—than just a musician. He was the walking id of the hippie generation—the counterpoint to the boomers who left behind their ponchos when middle age and mortgages started staring them down. Crosby never stopped wearing odd clothing and smoking weed. He never stopped singing. </p>
<p id="KJdrbW">“I don’t look back at all,” Crosby <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/nov/15/david-crosby-interview-trump-new-album-tour">told</a> <em>The Guardian</em> in 2018, by way of answering a general question, but providing an ethos in the process. “I don’t think about any of this stuff, I don’t concern myself with it. My focus is all on today, tomorrow, next week, and next year. That’s where I put all of my attention, constantly.”</p>
<p id="u2sMZD">Most household names have the good sense to not freely post on social media, but this protective approach didn’t fall in line with Crosby’s surprising interest in the digital realm. While his old frenemy Neil seems hellbent on avoiding any kind of embrace of the new frontier of the internet, Crosby charged forward with abandon. Crosby’s Twitter presence—one in which he would consistently reply to <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2023/01/david-crosby-dead-stills-nash-byrds-twitter.html">almost any inane question sent from any account</a>—could be seen as an extension, however unintentional, of his artistic realm. This is the thing about great posters: They don’t think. They act as vessels through which the content flows, almost like a trance. Crosby posted with the abandon of a truly free spirit. He spent his last hours posting because it was what he liked to do. Because, for better or for worse—and, often, it <em>was </em>worse—he didn’t view it as PR, but just a way of being himself.</p>
<p id="KnHTLA">“I like Twitter,” he explained to <em>Stereogum</em>. “It’s a place where it’s a conversation. It’s not ‘Post a cute pic of me,’ ‘Do you think I’m cute.’ It’s a place where you can actually converse, and sometimes you can get engaged in discourse.”</p>
<p id="kE2aAo">There’s a certain irony in Crosby dying during the rollout <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/boygenius-julien-baker-phoebe-bridgers-lucy-dacus-the-record-interview-1234660514/">of a boygenius record</a>; for the cover photo of the first boygenius EP, the group—consisting of Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker—<a href="https://twitter.com/kevinoconnornba/status/1031954614751350784?lang=en">recreated</a> Henry Diltz’s iconic front cover image of <em>Crosby, Stills & Nash</em>. It was a nod from one generation’s most powerful supergroup to another’s, but in typical Crosby fashion, this gesture didn’t stop him from <a href="https://www.billboard.com/music/rock/david-crosby-slams-phoebe-bridgers-smashed-guitar-snl-9523783/">stirring the pot</a>, later posting that Bridgers’s guitar-breaking performance on <em>Saturday Night Live </em>was “pathetic.” Bridgers, whether she likes it or not, is a student of the school of shitposting that Crosby helped found; like a pupil turning on the master, she simply replied, <a href="https://www.spin.com/2021/02/phoebe-bridgers-calls-david-crosby-little-bitch-after-critique-of-guitar-smash/">“little bitch.”</a></p>
<p id="ea5ysy">This is the thing about Crosby that was as inspiring as it was asinine: With the exception of Joni Mitchell, there wasn’t a person in the world he didn’t think he could take one on one, in some capacity. Even when it came to his contemporaries—the artists with whom he harmonized to create something <em>together</em> that was greater than the sum of its parts—he would still insist on saying he was the best. He was like a former champion boxer who only got louder the more he wished he could still be in the ring with the current heavyweights. In regard to how he stacked up against the talents of the rest of CSNY, he was as adamant as ever in his later years that <em>he </em>was the greatest, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/sep/02/david-crosby-on-love-music-and-rancour-neil-young-is-probably-the-most-selfish-person-i-know">telling</a> <em>The Guardian</em> in 2021, “I thought I was as good or better.”</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="lvMBr4">“I don’t know who you think you are,” he sings on the 1966 Byrds song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIuufQb0knw">“What’s Happening?”</a> “I don’t know what you’re doing here.” Whether Crosby meant the lyric as a swipe at his then-bandmates playing alongside him, or as just a stoned thought one might have watching someone walk down the street, it’s one of his all-time best compositions—a moment when he truly <em>was </em>better than McGuinn, better than Clark, better than Hillman, better than Stills, better than Nash, better than Young. It’s a freight train of a song, chugging along, but also feeling as if it’s in danger of meandering off the tracks. At one point, Crosby slightly cracks up while singing, some secret joke amusing him that we’ll never know a thing about. And then the song starts to drift off, full steam ahead into the deep distance. </p>
<p id="bAHdEl"><a href="https://twitter.com/nate_rgrs"><em>Nate Rogers</em></a><em> is a writer in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>,</em> Los Angeles Times<em>, </em>GQ<em>, and elsewhere.</em></p>
<aside id="pbvqMX"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside>
https://www.theringer.com/music/2023/1/20/23564409/david-crosby-obituaryNate Rogers2022-12-21T05:40:00-05:002022-12-21T05:40:00-05:00Is Live Music Broken? It’s Not Just Ticketmaster, It’s Everything.
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<p>The nightmarish experience Taylor Swift fans went through earlier this year has sparked debate over monopolies and how tickets are sold. But it’s more than just Swift’s upcoming tour—the entire concert industry is facing unprecedented challenges.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="Cyn8Ro">The biggest act in the country wants to sell tickets for a major tour, and Ticketmaster is standing in the way. It’s June 1994, and Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament are in front of Congress, providing testimony for a House Government Operations subcommittee hearing regarding Ticketmaster’s potential monopoly in the concert industry. </p>
<p id="blxZbR">A few months prior, in October 1993, Pearl Jam had released their second album, <em>Vs.</em>, and subsequently set the record for most copies of an album sold in its first week. A few months after that, in April 1994, Kurt Cobain died by suicide. Whether they liked it or not, Pearl Jam were now leading whatever the future of the music industry was, and instead of capitalizing on this, extending their tour of arenas and amphitheaters into the summer, they submit a measured protest to a handful of politicians. Gossard and Ament, two of the band’s founding members, grin as they’re sworn in. They’re wearing shorts. <em>Vs.</em>, indeed.</p>
<p id="ctXOP9">What led to this moment was simpler than one might think. Pearl Jam wanted to cap the service-fee charge for their shows at $1.80, and Ticketmaster refused. (Usual service fees in this <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-06-30-ca-10438-story.html">era were between $4 and $8</a>.) Catching wind of the disagreement, the Justice Department prompted Pearl Jam to submit an antitrust complaint; by this point, Ticketmaster controlled around 90 percent of the ticketing market in the country, based on certain <a href="https://www.seattleweekly.com/music/pearl-jam-versus-ticketmaster/">accounts</a>. There was, briefly, the sense that some real antitrust repercussions might come of this. But none did. </p>
<p id="FbLlR6">“The whole thing was a joke,” Ament recalled <a href="https://www.spin.com/2017/08/pearl-jam-oral-history-2001/">to <em>Spin</em></a> in 2001. “The Department of Justice used us to look hip.” In the same article, singer Eddie Vedder summed up his feelings: “It was really amazing to be right up close and get absolutely stomped on by a huge corporate entity.”</p>
<p id="hWa2Co">Pissed off, Pearl Jam attempted to conduct their next tour, in 1995, entirely without using Ticketmaster. But because of Ticketmaster’s exclusive contracts with almost every American venue that a powerhouse like Pearl Jam would logically play at that point, the band ended up booked at a variety of odd, difficult places, like Boreal Ridge Ski Resort in Lake Tahoe and the Del Mar Fairgrounds in San Diego. The tour was an unmitigated disaster, and the band canceled it halfway through, having been strained to a breaking point. A few years later, they begrudgingly went back to Ticketmaster.</p>
<p id="ipM1Kl">“When Pearl Jam did [their boycott] in the mid-’90s, they weren’t really cheerleaded for it in the media,” said Steven Hyden, author of <em>Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation </em>(and a <em>Ringer</em> contributor). “They were really perceived, I think, as this Don Quixote–type band, leaning into windmills.”</p>
<p id="giXyYS">Almost 30 years later, the windmills are spinning faster than ever. In the 1970s, Ticketmaster became a player in the nascent computerized ticketing industry via innovation, but it eventually took near-complete power via a rather different method: acquisition of the competition. Ticketmaster swallowed up parties that nudged against its realm, like Ticketron, its main competitor, which Ticketmaster purchased in 1991. But the most notable acquisition came in 2010, when Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation, a juggernaut in show promotion and venue ownership/operation. </p>
<p id="qvLDlO">The Justice Department investigated that merger, ultimately approving it with certain restrictive conditions, which were later determined to have been <a href="https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/doj-says-that-live-nation-broke-the-promises-of-the-american-people-as-court-enters-judgment-that-modifies-and-extends-consent-decree/">“repeatedly” broken</a>; after the merger, the behemoth increased its revenue every year until the pandemic hit. “It’s a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_integration">vertical monopoly</a>,” said Dean Budnick, who, with Josh Baron, wrote the 2011 book <em>Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped.</em> “You can’t convince me otherwise.”</p>
<p id="X7Z4nY">But can the U.S. government be convinced? Congress is gearing up for another Ticketmaster <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-congress-hold-hearing-ticketing-industry-ticketmaster-problems-selling-taylor-2022-11-22/">hearing</a>, and this time the face of the movement is a much different type of star than Pearl Jam. If anything comes from this fresh wave of interest in the ticketing business, it will forever be Taylor Swift who is associated with it (even if she has yet to engage with the antitrust conversation in any substantive way). In November, the first round of ticketing for her upcoming Eras Tour was a Swiftie train wreck, in which Ticketmaster’s system was underprepared and overloaded, leading to fan complaints of brutal queues and failed checkouts. Swift described the experience of getting tickets as akin to surviving multiple <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2022-11-18/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-eras-statement">“bear attacks”</a>—and this was just the <em>presale</em>. (The general sale was subsequently scrapped and replaced with a <a href="https://people.com/music/ticketmaster-to-sell-remaining-tickets-to-taylor-swift-tour/">modified lottery system</a>.)</p>
<p id="uoNWpZ">To critics of Live Nation–Ticketmaster, the debacle was evidence of the anticompetitive nature of its domination. In an <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-live-nation-monopoly-antitrust-commentary-1234635257/">op-ed for <em>Rolling Stone</em></a>, Krista Brown, a policy analyst at the American Economic Liberties Project, which is leading a campaign to break up Ticketmaster, called this just the latest in a long list of actions by a corporation gouging fans to maximize profits. She cited the company’s embrace of the previously taboo secondary market, the control of a baffling number of venues, and ballooning service fees as having led to “a near-extortion ring.” </p>
<p id="Tqa7CD">“In the same way that people get frustrated with airlines—like, they don’t have a customer service line, because they are not afraid of losing people—Ticketmaster, it’s the same case,” Brown told me. “[They] don’t have to worry about keeping people happy.”</p>
<p id="saWixb">Ticketmaster’s strength has been uniquely scrutinized in recent decades in part because it’s easy for many to understand it as a corporate infection of the arts, a realm that most would prefer to remain free of capitalistic exploitation. Where things become more alarming, however, is when you try to apply the logic of the Ticketmaster situation to everything else around you. How different is Ticketmaster from any of the other mega-conglomerates that you pour money into on a daily basis? How different is it, exactly, from the increasingly powerful corporations we call pop stars?</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="WoWLu6">There is some irony to the fact that the straw that might break Live Nation’s back has to do with Taylor Swift’s tour, because Live Nation is not the tour’s promoter. AEG Presents, Live Nation’s biggest rival, is, and it’s using Ticketmaster only because of the exclusive deals in place with almost all of the venues it wanted to book. “We didn’t have a choice,” an AEG representative explained <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/live-nation-chairman-taylor-swift-ticketmaster-sales-demand-1234632312/">to <em>Rolling Stone</em></a>.</p>
<p id="j4edJn">What this means is that certain aspects of the ticketing fiasco that people are upset about aren’t directly the responsibility of Live Nation. Ticket prices, for instance, are set by the artist and promoter. And the service fees are not kept unilaterally by the ticketer—usually these fees are split among various parties, such as the ticketer, the promoter, the venue, and sometimes the artists themselves. The ghost beneficiary setup isn’t a bug; it’s historically part of the company’s design.</p>
<p id="LPrlog">“I think that Ticketmaster, in effect, agreed to take it on the chin in return for these contracts with the venues,” Alan Citron, a former Ticketmaster president, said in <em>Ticket Masters</em> of the reason behind this kind of arrangement. “Part of the unspoken agreement, or maybe even spoken, was that we will be the face of ticketing. Buying a ticket is not a real enjoyable process. We’ll make it as good as it can be, and we’ll also take the bruises from people who don’t like the process.” Jerry Seltzer, a former Ticketmaster VP, noted, “We took all the shit for the promoters. [Legendary promoter] Bill Graham and others would say, ‘You know we can’t do anything about the service charges. It’s the ticketing company.’”</p>
<p id="p6saaJ">Consider the ongoing debate about Ticketmaster’s embrace of “dynamic pricing,” in which certain events are priced according to fluctuating market demand, and can surge to extreme levels. When fans found themselves staring down Bruce Springsteen tickets <a href="https://www.brooklynvegan.com/bruce-springsteen-talks-ticketmasters-dynamic-pricing-5000-tickets/">as high as $5,000</a>, the logical target of their ire was the company attempting to sell them the tickets. But the excess money charged in dynamic pricing goes back to the same larger group as a regular ticket sale, just in higher amounts. The idea behind this system is ostensibly to prevent scalpers from taking advantage of any gap between the regular price and the aftermarket price, even if it leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. (Springsteen’s take: “Why shouldn’t that money go to the guys that are going to be up there sweating three hours a night for it?”)</p>
<p id="gVSqe6">That’s not to say Ticketmaster hasn’t limited the options available to (and potentially steered the ethics of) outside parties by virtue of its sheer control. When I brought up the idea of Ticketmaster serving as the punching bag for other complicit parties benefiting from their share of the pie, Krista Brown, the policy analyst, said, “That’s just such a classic Ticketmaster talking point, and I’ve heard it over and over again. … It’s like a race to the bottom. Live Nation created the ecosystem that exists, gave them these options, and all of them are terrible.” </p>
<p id="4otHuL">But when it comes down to it, the most clear responsibility Ticketmaster had in the Taylor Swift situation was to create a system that could withstand the demand from fans of the biggest artist in the country. There’s the argument that, without any healthy competition, there’s little need for Ticketmaster to make sure its system works. At the same time, however, a collapse like the one that occurred in the Swift presale benefitted no one, Ticketmaster included. It cost the ticketer money and reputation—and perhaps worst of all for the company, drew further scrutiny to its business practices. </p>
<p id="ADNeie">“Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase concert tickets,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar in a statement announcing the upcoming hearing that she will be leading alongside Senator Mike Lee. “The high fees, site disruptions, and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve.”</p>
<p id="ajfGzl">Ticketmaster, which did not respond to a request for comment for this article, has provided a pretty straightforward defense of what went wrong. In a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221117205600/https://blog.ticketmaster.com/the-taylor-swift-onsale-explained/">blog post</a> that was temporarily deleted (and later edited and reposted) after Swifties swarmed it, the company said it believed that limiting the presale to “Verified Fans,” who had to receive a code ahead of time, would contain the demand to a reasonable amount. Instead, the post said, “the staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests—4x our previous peak.” At an event that week, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/taylor-swift-tour-tickets-pre-sale-1235264178/">said</a>, “We invited a million and a half on that day to come and buy those tickets, but it’s kind of like having a party. Everybody crashed that door at the same time with 3.5 billion requests.” </p>
<p id="xeL4Br">There is some legitimacy to the notion that <em>any</em> ticketing agency would have faced immense struggle in attempting to navigate the mind-boggling level of fame and popularity that Taylor Swift now has. (Her new album, <em>Midnights</em>, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/01/how-taylor-swift-made-midnights-her-biggest-success-yet.html">broke the record</a> for largest overall week for any album; it took just four days for her to break the previous record, which was held by … her, for her 2017 album <em>Reputation</em>.) Dean Budnick, the <em>Ticket Masters</em> author, pointed out that Ticketmaster would have likely fared better if it had staggered the presale dates, instead of attempting to handle them all at once. Still, in a larger sense, the demand was unparalleled. “I’m not here to altogether defend Ticketmaster, I want to be clear,” Budnick said. “Get me going on service fees and you got me. But when it comes to this? I don’t know what they realistically could have done.” </p>
<p id="l4tkd2">It’s an interesting time to have a tour breaking records for demand. In a moment when there is apparently a legitimate secondhand market to support <a href="https://www.stubhub.com/taylor-swift-inglewood-tickets-8-3-2023/event/151197038/?quantity=2&sections=1303238&ticketClasses=954&listingQty=&priceRange=0%2C0">$300 nosebleeds</a> (plus another $100 or so in fees) at Swift’s upcoming shows, there is a simultaneous dearth of interest at a concerning amount of concerts. If you’ve been out there this past year, maybe you’ve seen it, too: underfilled rooms, particularly for midlevel bands, have never felt more common. This summer, I went to see an international act at the top of their game, playing in support of an album awarded Best New Music by <em>Pitchfork</em>—once a guarantee of <a href="https://brooklynrail.org/2007/10/music/gauging-the-pitchfork-effect">a certain level of hype</a>—and the room was maybe half full. Something is just off right now. </p>
<p id="9DcLhs">Jay Marciano, CEO of AEG Presents, explained his take on the trend in a <a href="https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/jay-marciano-on-streaming-coachella-macro-economics-and-why-everyones-a-genius-in-a-bull-market/">recent interview</a> with <em>Music Business Worldwide</em>, saying that there was an initial reopening “euphoria” that was then quickly tempered. “As we started to move into summer 2022,” he said, “we had to look at the supply side: There were too many shows, and too many choices. Combine that with a little bit of that pullback on consumer sentiment, and it’s not a surprise to me that only the really hot artists and shows are guaranteed to sell—anything else closer to the margins is going to find things more difficult.”</p>
<p id="ggsOW8">And whether you can fill the room or not, the financial squeeze is still being felt. Substantial acts like Animal Collective and Santigold have <a href="https://pitchfork.com/news/animal-collective-cancel-2022-european-tour/">canceled</a> recent tours, <a href="https://variety.com/2022/music/news/santigold-canceled-tour-independent-artists-1235403290/">citing</a> a variety of factors, like inflation, supply-chain issues, and COVID concerns, which they say have exposed them to dire economic risk. Further down the chain, buzzy club-size acts like Wednesday and Squirrel Flower have <a href="https://www.stereogum.com/2181957/wednesday-sxsw-diiv-squirrel-flower-airbnb-doordash/columns/sounding-board/">spoken out</a> against the predatory grind up-and-coming bands are expected to put up with. (“Ya’ll gotta do some DoorDash/instacart on your days off,” was one helpful response to Wednesday’s touring frustrations.)</p>
<p id="R8FGnQ">The way legitimate superstar Lorde put it in a <a href="https://www.stereogum.com/2205718/lorde-concert-industry-explainer-email-touring/news/">recent newsletter post</a>, “Basically, for artists, promoters and crews, things are at an almost unprecedented level of difficulty.” Lorde added that, for someone of her stature, taking a hit on profits isn’t a huge deal. “But for pretty much every artist selling less tickets than I am, touring has become a demented struggle to break even or face debt,” she said. “The math doesn’t make sense.” </p>
<p id="ioygeu">If you squint, it’s the same conversation being had in the country at large about the concern of the 1 percent piling incomprehensible wealth and stomping down the working class in the process. Overall inflation-adjusted music revenue is <a href="https://www.statista.com/chart/17244/us-music-revenue-by-format/">climbing back up</a> in recent years after hitting a low in 2014, but in 2020, just 39 percent of active artists—those who released more than 10 tracks and garnered more than 1,000 monthly listeners at some point in the year—on Spotify (<em>The Ringer</em>’s parent company) made <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/arts/music/streaming-music-payments.html">more than $1,000</a>. Touring was long thought to be a reliable means of income for musicians facing the changing economics of the streaming landscape, but when that’s no longer a viable money-making option either, there’s the question of whether there’s still a legitimate middle class for artists.</p>
<p id="VJjn7Y">Being a musician has always been a tough road, but if you’re not one of the biggest-selling acts in the world, like Lorde or Taylor Swift, it’s never been more difficult in the modern era to earn a comfortable living. (It’s no coincidence that the amount of working-class creatives in the U.K. has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/dec/10/huge-decline-working-class-people-arts-reflects-society">gone down 50 percent</a> since the 1970s.) Meanwhile, last month, Live Nation <a href="https://www.billboard.com/pro/live-nation-record-quarter-earnings-touring-business-booms/">reported</a> a total quarterly revenue of $6.2 billion. It was a new record for the company. </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="khbZy5">When people talk about the influence of poptimism in the music industry, it’s generally a conversation about the way people <em>think</em> about music. The first shot sent from poptimism’s line was fired by Kelefa Sanneh, whose 2004 <em>New York Times</em> essay <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/arts/music/the-rap-against-rockism.html?_r=1">“The Rap Against Rockism”</a> made the compelling case that critics and listeners were overdue to stop viewing all genres through the lens of tropes established when rock was king. His impetus was the scandal of Ashlee Simpson being caught lip-synching on <em>Saturday Night Live</em>, which was a possibly career-ruining incident, if you thought of live singing as a requisite for being an acclaimed musician. Sanneh’s point was that, for Simpson, a pop star in the making (albeit with a rock-ish, emo-influenced tilt), maybe that wasn’t an entirely fair judgment. </p>
<p id="iM27kJ">“What I was trying to write about in that essay,” Sanneh told me, “were the assumptions and prejudices within rock music—and how those assumptions and prejudices had come to color the way people listened to and judged all sorts of music.” </p>
<p id="VeiYQa">The influence of Sanneh’s essay on the poptimism ideology is often misunderstood, considering that the word “poptimism” is nowhere to be seen in the essay itself—and considering <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/11/16/16666306/taylor-swift-poptimism-2017">what poptimism soon became</a>. Over the course of the next decade, the perception of the movement became less focused on an open-mindedness about <em>every</em> type of musician and more focused on an embrace of a previously critically castigated class of musician: the pop star. </p>
<p id="U2DhfH">A <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-education-of-a-part-time-punk">semi-reformed punk</a> who is now a staff writer for <em>The</em> <em>New Yorker</em>, Sanneh is an amusing representative for the movement. His 2021 book, <em>Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres</em>, for instance, is not an attempt to demonstrate how great pop music is, but rather to show the way that a variety of ecosystems in music are essential and unique: “Part of the argument of the book is that each genre, each community, has its own assumptions and prejudices,” he said. “And so the idea is not like, ‘Oh, we need to get rid of <em>all</em> of these assumptions and prejudices.’”</p>
<p id="wwz11n">The effusive praise doled out to pop stars by fans and the media since 2004 is generally viewed as a critical gesture, perpetuated by listeners and writers using a modern method of thinking to support “guilty pleasure”–type artists in a way that previous generations were too smug to embrace. But what if the poptimism movement is, at its core, more economic than critical? What if the main reason pop stars have been held up in the digital era isn’t a conscious intellectual choice and instead the increasing power imbalance in the music industry and country at large?</p>
<p id="AwqAJ0">Steven Hyden sees it two ways. First off, that poptimism was a legitimate movement that was established in good critical faith. “I think that was totally valid and necessary,” he said. But beyond the earnest benefits, there has been something more sinister going on beneath the surface: “Simultaneous to [the anti-rockist poptimism movement], the old media started to collapse, and it was replaced by the internet. And what the internet was running on wasn’t poptimism—it was pure capitalism. It was this idea that if you get the most hits, and the most attention, that you are also the most worthwhile, and most worthy of discussion.” Hyden described it as a “perfect storm” scenario, “where the things that are the most successful get written about the most, and there’s this sort of backdoor justification for it that comes from this early-aughts poptimism conversation.”</p>
<p id="kfuzZu">The music media’s intense focus on what drives traffic isn’t just a reflection of what people want to click on—it’s a reflection of where the money increasingly is. Music is a business, and putting together an album worth writing about, and then installing a team around that album to facilitate a media strategy, is generally expensive. For the non–major label artists struggling on the margins of both the recorded music sphere and the live-concert industry, it should be no surprise that they’re less able than ever to fight for space with the Taylor Swifts of the world. </p>
<p id="up48km">In talking about this, I found myself worrying about how the lack of money and resources for the expanding class of musicians who need day jobs in order to survive might affect the quality of the music they make. One of the only constants in the history of pop music is listeners worrying that pop music is getting worse, of course, but how would you know if the wolf is here, after many generations of people crying about it? Does it not stand to reason that, as the funds dwindle and the infrastructure fractures for many musicians, so, too, would the quality of their product?</p>
<p id="PFyGcE">“Income inequality is obviously a society-wide problem,” said Hyden. “But when it comes to art, I don’t feel like the people with the most money make the best music. I think that’s been disproven over and over again. And I don’t think that’s true now. A lot of the big pop records, I think, are boring as hell.” He brings up one of his favorite albums of this year, MJ Lenderman’s <em>Boat Songs</em>, which “probably cost, like, $200 to make.” (Notably, Lenderman is also a member of the band Wednesday.)</p>
<p id="lnNgFB">Aware that I was suddenly the grump of the conversation, I clarified to Hyden that, every year, I still find new music as profound to me as any other. Great art fights through. But more frequently than ever, I had to admit, the new music I put on just seems to wash over me. Yes, I’m getting older, and the vast majority of people tend to <a href="https://www.avclub.com/new-study-shows-that-people-stop-listening-to-new-music-1798279117">lose interest in new music as they age</a>. Yes, my listening habits are not as disciplined as they used to be, now that my smartphone is always arm’s-length away. Regardless, the fact remains: Popular acts that are doing relatively well often come out sounding like background music. Like music to type to. </p>
<p id="dhVGno">“To some degree, I agree with you,” he said. “It’s harder for records to stick now.” Hyden cites the “churn of the internet” as a factor in the changing way we interact with music overall: “If you’re not investing anything into a record, it’s also disposable. Like, if it took no effort to get, and you didn’t spend any money on it, you just added it to your thing—you pressed the little plus button—what stakes do you have in the record? You have no stakes in it.”</p>
<p id="pd8o8n">Sanneh is similarly unconcerned with the way that music might be changing along with the industry. “Sometimes I have bits of what you’re talking about,” said Sanneh, “where, like, I hear so much music now. I hear more new music now than has ever been the case in my life. And that’s <em>weird</em>.” But generally speaking, he’s encouraged by the fact that the barrier for entry to make and release music has never been lower. “It seems to me like more people than ever have a chance to make some music and have it be heard,” he said. “And for someone who loves music as much as I do, it’s hard not to see that as a good thing.”</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="swtPBo">What will come of the Justice Department’s investigation into Live Nation–Ticketmaster is difficult to predict. It will be some time before a decision is made—and if there are any measures taken, none of them will be instantaneous. The infrastructure that props up the Live Nation empire is more than just a shared letterhead; it’s a business of relationships. The system in place to drive profits for the corporations involved is a handshake that will not be easily ripped apart. </p>
<p id="xhNNRO">Budnick, the <em>Ticket Masters</em> author, is somewhat skeptical that Ticketmaster will be broken up at all, given the fact that the Justice Department has already had multiple looks at the company in recent memory. But he believes there are modest, attainable rules that could be put in place to help roll back some of the extremities causing issues within the concert industry, like a national anti-scalping law, or a limit on how high service charges can be. </p>
<p id="gUD6zU">Brown, the policy analyst, is more optimistic in the prospect of a breakup. She believes that Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, is more motivated than his predecessors, and noted his <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/11/01/1133032238/judge-blocks-penguin-random-house-simon-schuster-merger">recent </a>success in blocking the publishing merger of Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House. “[The Live Nation–Ticketmaster merger has] been kind of a dark mark on the way that the Obama administration handled antitrust concerns,” she said, “[such] that I do have faith that something will be different this time.”</p>
<p id="Ig3G8o">There’s more than just the future of the concert industry at stake. Brown noted that the way Live Nation has built itself up is “emblematic of where we are in terms of corporate power having far too much influence in our economies, our society, and our ability to make choices as citizens and consumers.” Any substantive action taken by the federal government to limit Live Nation would be a precedent of potentially large ramifications, given the rate at which mergers are factoring into the country’s genetic makeup. From 2009 to 2018, the number of corporate mergers reviewed by the Justice Department <em>tripled</em>, according to Amy Klobuchar’s 2021 book, <em>Antitrust: Taking on Monopoly Power From the Gilded Age to the Digital Age</em>. There’s no reason to believe this trend won’t continue unless it’s stopped by force. </p>
<p id="ZEu4Xr">“The effects of monopoly power can be felt everywhere, raising all sorts of questions for the American economy,” Klobuchar writes in <em>Antitrust</em>. “Why do farmers pay so much for seeds and fertilizer? Why is health care so expensive? Why is it so costly to ship goods by rail in certain places? And why are so few incentives in place for Big Tech companies to protect your private information? If you haven’t wondered about any of this, you need to.” </p>
<p id="NfVWdC">Regardless of how the investigation might ultimately impact the direct effect on the consumer level with something like ticket prices—which have <a href="https://www.ticketnews.com/2022/07/concert-ticket-prices-surged-nearly-20-from-pre-covid-norm/">gone up 20 percent</a> since 2019—Kelefa Sanneh thinks that maybe ticket prices <em>should </em>go up. Maybe concertgoers could stand to reassess how much they feel a show is really worth. “Even if it’s in a tiny venue, big venue, whatever—a show by a musical act that you really like is something that you’ll probably remember for the rest of your life,” he told me. “So there’s a sense in which I suspect there’s actually some room for prices to go up, as much as no one likes to hear that. Because there really is nothing like seeing a great concert.”</p>
<p id="Grrfv3">When I spoke to Sanneh, I was on the fence about going to see the baroque-pop savant Weyes Blood that night, and I mentioned this in passing as an example of how it’s a tougher decision to go to a show than it used to be, given how expensive tickets have become. Later on, as we were getting off the phone, he said, “I think you should go to Weyes Blood. You’re not going to regret it.”</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="r9d2Sl">A few hours later, I decided to buy a ticket on the secondhand market—for $35, with an added 37 percent service charge, high in the balcony of the Theatre at Ace Hotel, a gorgeous former moviehouse in Downtown Los Angeles built in 1927. Weyes Blood, a.k.a. Natalie Mering, was performing in support of <em>And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow</em>, her fifth album, which she has described as being the second in a trilogy about collective catastrophe. Dressed in a white suit, she performed with a large prop bomb dangling on a wire behind her—not so much a metaphor as a looming threat. In the opening number, “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” she lamented: “We can’t see from far away / To know that every wave might not be the same / But it’s all a part of one big thing.” The show was worth every penny.</p>
<p id="03J7qV"><a href="https://twitter.com/nate_rgrs"><em>Nate Rogers</em></a><em> is a writer in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>,</em> Los Angeles Times<em>, </em>GQ<em>, and elsewhere.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/music/2022/12/21/23519063/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-tours-canceled-live-nation-concert-industryNate Rogers2022-09-01T06:30:00-04:002022-09-01T06:30:00-04:00“You’ll Call Now”: The Sears AC Commercial That Will Never Die
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<figcaption>Sears/Getty Images/Ringer illustration</figcaption>
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<p>The ubiquitous ’90s daytime cable ad has been a shorthand for nostalgia and heat waves for decades. Why are we so helplessly drawn to its sweaty orbit?</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="2mJhuq">A few months into the pandemic, Marco Garcia had too much time on his hands and a quarter-century-long itch that he badly needed to scratch. “This was something that had come up so many times over the years,” Garcia, a tech employee in Boston, says. “It was the subject of many drunken discussions amongst friends.” </p>
<p id="RPo5JL">Like a fair amount of American millennials who grew up watching daytime Nickelodeon, Garcia had a distinct infatuation with a particular commercial. It’s not like he had any real interest in commercials at large, he says; he wasn’t also going around quoting the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prg_SVBfFWw">Muzzy</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZJSjrox_2s"><em>Pure Moods</em></a> spots or anything like that. But there was just something about this ad that caused it to be lodged into his brain and constantly referenced around various forms of company—sometimes yielding results that surprised even him. The 35-year-old Garcia remembers a time from his childhood when his family was at his rabbi’s house for a Sabbath lunch, and his mention of the ad got a reaction from the rabbi, who somehow knew it as well. “I was like, ‘This is proof that this commercial cannot skip past <em>anyone’s</em> radar,’” Garcia says.</p>
<p id="FZ24S2"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rqZZgVxnCk">The brain-burrowing commercial at hand</a> begins in media res: A couple, disheveled and sweaty, in the kitchen, are in the middle of a conversation about how hot it is. “I can<em>not</em> live another day without air conditioning,” the woman says, fanning herself with the open freezer door. The man, framed in a brutal Dutch angle, looking at his morning paper, replies with a casual weather forecast. “Says tomorrow’s gonna be hotter.” </p>
<p id="Vp2Fpa">“Hotter?” the woman groans.</p>
<p id="G6gpqN">“Like yesterday,” he says, matter of fact.</p>
<p id="ra9A3e">“Yesterday? Yesterday you said you’d call Sears,” she reminds him, pulling the paper down. </p>
<p id="8Xq3ER">“I’ll call today,” he replies, looking to move on. But the woman has heard this one before. </p>
<p id="XsffBw">“You’ll call now,” she says, lovingly, in a way that betrays the fact that this is not a choice for him.</p>
<p id="ywrnXb">A quick beat—a moment of consideration from the man in which the whole relationship seems to flash before his eyes, as he bobs his head from side to side. He smiles wryly and almost whispers his next three words, the tone outwardly playful but perhaps distinctly pained on some deep, interior level. “<em>I’ll call now</em>.”</p>
<p id="UFWjjw">At the end of the ad—after about 40 seconds of cheerful narration explaining the benefits of a Sears-installed Kenmore unit—they reappear in an air-conditioned oasis, looking and feeling good. “So what’s the paper say about tomorrow?” the woman asks, about to enjoy a climate-controlled strawberry. “Another scorcher!” he tells her, and she almost looks straight back to the camera for her punny reply: “<em>Cool</em>.”</p>
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<p id="qEQMFv">In November 2020, Garcia decided to do what he had talked about with his friends many times: track down the couple from the Sears AC commercial. “Some have taken up sourdough bread baking, online degrees, and a slew of other more ‘meaningful’ activities, as a way of coping with the pandemic lockdown restrictions,” Garcia wrote in his <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/Commercials/comments/jz1ftp/actors_names_from_90s_sears_home_air_conditioning/">post</a> on the Commercials subreddit. “Say what you will, but this is what I’ve chosen to take on.” The post, titled “Actors names from 90s Sears Home Air Conditioning Commercial (I’ll Call Now!),” garnered only a handful of upvotes and comments. But one of them was from someone named Monica Zaffarano: “Here I am! This has been hysterical to see this unearthed! You’ll watch now!” she wrote, adding a few smiley-face emoji.</p>
<p id="rkjgYk">I found myself on this post recently because, I, too, had the same compulsion as Garcia to learn more about the commercial. In the summer of 2020, I had even gone so far as to reach out to Sears’ corporate office—or what was left of it after the company filed for bankruptcy in 2018—and got no response. I also reached out to the current iterations of the two longtime advertising agencies for Sears—Ogilvy & Mather and Young & Rubicam—with no luck. But I couldn’t let it go. </p>
<p id="EdwHHm">The commercial was a living meme in the pre-digital era, as I remember it—a script that a certain type of person felt compelled to recite whenever it was hot out—and it became an internet meme almost immediately when YouTube started. And yet, unlike most early-era internet memes, this one has had true staying power. Every year, it blows back up in Reddit posts on places like <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/ta72a0/the_sears_air_conditioner_commercial/">/r/nostalgia</a>—and lately it’s been utilized in videos with a TikTok-style sense of humor, too, with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxrCyqXzHI8">re-creation</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/bigtimemaca/videos/making-the-1990s-sears-air-conditioning-commercial/3276301332598769/">response</a> videos that only further support this ad as some odd force of nature. With the assist from Garcia, I decided to scratch the same itch.</p>
<p id="r7D8g8">“It’s still really hard for me to understand how this thing went so viral,” Zaffarano, the actress in the commercial, tells me. “It didn’t strike me as any different than any other commercial that I had done as an actor, quite frankly.” </p>
<p id="5g0FCy">Zaffarano lives in Los Angeles and runs a production company—working behind the scenes to put together the types of commercials and photo shoots that she used to star in. Back in the ’90s, she was a busy model, actress, and musician, capitalizing on a resemblance to Julia Roberts and Andie MacDowell, who were at that point hugely in demand, to get all kinds of work. She spent a few years in Europe, pursuing modeling and music (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxF_WuwK4Zo&t=16s">here</a> she is miming the bongos as part of Shari Belafonte’s TV performance band), and eventually made it back to the U.S., where she did commercial and acting gigs of all kinds (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyFndSZx9DI">here</a> she is riding a horse in a music video for the Buffalo Club). The work was steady, and she never had the need for a side hustle to make ends meet. “It was a marketable thing, whatever I seemed to have back then,” Zaffarano says. </p>
<p id="9LkhWc">She had no idea about the enduring life of the Sears ad until a few years ago, when her daughter, Emma, a millennial, showed her a few posts online, including Garcia’s plea into the digital night. This was appropriate, since, in the spring of 1995, when the Sears commercial was made, Zaffarano was living in Chicago and had just recently found out that she was pregnant <em>with</em> Emma. </p>
<p id="t38zzt">“When they cast me for Sears, I hadn’t popped,” she explains. “I was still wearing my regular old clothes. And then whenever we got to production, which was weeks later, is when I realized, ‘Oh, I can’t really hide it.’” The only person she told on the shoot was the wardrobe stylist, who advised Zaffarano to keep the detail between them, and suggested she just carry a dish towel to help hide the baby bump. (You can see the Towel Technique <a href="https://youtu.be/4rqZZgVxnCk?t=22">during</a> the narration part of the minute-long ad, as the man gives her a thumbs-up while on the phone, since he did, in fact, call now.) The daylong shoot went off without a hitch. </p>
<p id="Wh3wmX">Gus Buktenica, the actor opposite Zaffarano that day, was similarly unaware of the commercial’s second life until a niece tipped him a few years ago, sending him down a rabbit hole of comment sections. Some of those commenters, he’d notice, loved to pile on him and his character. “It’s like, ‘What did I do?’” he says with a laugh. “‘I’m just doing a commercial here!’ But I wasn’t hurt by it—it was amusing.”</p>
<p id="mQdtDp">In the mid-’90s, Buktenica, who is still a full-time actor, was particularly busy with commercial work. He drove a limo about once a week “just to hang on” to the gig, but he had a few national commercial spots that paid well, like a Mr. Clean ad, which he says was the most lucrative one he ever got. “I saw half of that once at the gym,” he remembers, explaining that he didn’t have cable at the time and would rarely catch his ads in the wild. “It wasn’t like this one, you know. I guess they just played the absolute shit out of this one.”</p>
<p id="cY76h5">Buktenica is a little hazy on the details of the Sears shoot, but he thinks he remembers it being filmed on a somewhat cloudy and rainy day. Definitely not a scorcher. And one thing he remembers for sure: Despite ending up as likely one of the most viewed ads of all time, it was a low-budget affair, and was actually filmed at the director’s house in the suburbs of Chicago.</p>
<p id="AgkY6F">“Is this a prank?” says Joe Scudiero, the director of the ad, when I get him on the phone. “Am I on some prank thing? Out of all the commercials that we’ve done …”</p>
<p id="e9Ad2N">Scudiero is a known entity in the Chicago advertising world, and this actually wasn’t his first time going viral. He was originally an editor, but in the early ’90s, he decided to shoot some film on a lark; he grabbed his cousin and asked him to do a dance against a brick wall as the hum of the city buzzed by. “I always loved the concept of 2-D,” Scudiero explains. “A wall, a person, and the camera.” Scudiero brought the film to an ad agency he was working with, and soon it was used in a commercial for a radio station, The Loop. Known as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5ypfs0aBdc">“Joey Bag O’ Donuts,”</a> the ad was a word-of-mouth sensation. (“People call the radio station just to find out when the TV spot will air so they can videotape it for friends,” the <em>L.A. Times</em> <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-07-04-vw-9954-story.html">reported</a> in 1993.) Scudiero’s career as a commercial director took off from there. </p>
<p id="qKqlXE">As for how he got this job, Scudiero, in his thick Chicago accent, jumps right in: “I was in a dice game, right, with Dave Ward, the producer. He lost, and he goes, ‘Joey, how can I pay you?’” OK, what really happened was that Ward, a producer at A. Eicoff & Company, an ad agency, called him up and explained that they had this gig that they needed to turn around quickly, and that the budget was tight. “Can you do it?” Ward asked him. </p>
<p id="0c0YyD">To keep the production on budget, Scudiero decided to shoot at his place. “They showed me the boards and it felt simple enough—I didn’t need a big location,” he says. “I just needed a couple to be sitting at a kitchen.” From preproduction to post, it all went as well as you could ever hope—with the exception that everything in Scudiero’s freezer went bad over the course of the filming. (For sound reasons, the refrigerator was unplugged, and with Zaffarano doing her lines with the freezer door open, the food didn’t stand a chance.) “That was the first time and the last time we’ll ever shoot in my home,” Scudiero says. “My wife almost killed me.” </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="4hPHz1">A quote you’ll often come across in the advertising world, which is attributed to retail giant John Wanamaker, is: “Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Particularly in the pre-digital era, the major players, like David Ogilvy and his firm Ogilvy & Mather, were as much selling confidence as they were results. At Eicoff, however, Wanamaker’s lament would never have applied. </p>
<p id="OMXYZ5">Founded in 1959 by Alvin Eicoff, the agency specializes in—and in many ways trail-blazed—direct-response advertising. Unlike traditional advertising, which hopes to win your business through passive coercion, direct-response advertising is pushing an actionable item: send your check here, call this number, click this link. (Eicoff, a highly memed company, is responsible for spots like Wilford Brimley’s “diabeetus” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdqdC7j41cs">Liberty Medical campaign</a> and Sally Struthers’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGTEKWRLJuQ">Save the Children campaign</a>.) When creating these ads, there is little argument to be made for artistry, and that is because in terms of results, there is no ambiguity. Either the ad is effective or it is not—and if it isn’t, they won’t hesitate to take it down and try something different. “We always were sort of envious of Ogilvy, because it was hard to track,” says Ward, the producer of the Sears ad, who worked at Eicoff for decades before recently retiring. </p>
<p id="x2ToyK">Sears, the largest retailer in the country through the 1980s, was still a major marketing force in the ’90s, but not every ad campaign received the same focus and resources. Ogilvy or Y&R would get the more traditional television commercial assignments, which would take considerable time and money to make. Something like the 1995 AC commercial, however—a direct-response ad solely intended to instigate calls—would go to Eicoff, which was purchased by Ogilvy in 1981 and still operates under Ogilvy’s larger media umbrella. Ward estimates that, while an Ogilvy-produced Sears ad of the time would have “easily” cost $500,000, this AC spot probably cost more like $100,000. “You can’t make that go that far, really,” he said.</p>
<p id="FeaSns">“I remember you had to get a lot of information into a short period of time—just a couple of seconds,” says Judy Rohner, who wrote the Sears AC commercial. “And so you had to get a lot of copy points in and usually had to be as literal as possible to accomplish all that. The husband and wife sitting around the table—and it’s hot and they don’t have air conditioning, and they’re kind of complaining to each other—just seemed kind of funny.”</p>
<p id="VXbs1u">Rohner joined Eicoff in 1989 as a copywriter, and then rose up the ranks to become a vice president before retiring in 2007. She now lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and had no idea that her ad was a meme. By her estimation, that spot was written perhaps as quickly as overnight—and was really just another assignment. </p>
<p id="ACGWZy">“It would make sense that you would have seen it in your childhood on Nickelodeon and afternoon TV,” she tells me, “because that’s how Eicoff placed media. They didn’t buy prime time on the major networks—they bought individual slots of media on cheap channels in the afternoon. And it was just a part of the philosophy there that when you wanted people to pick up the phone and call about something, you shouldn’t be on any show that they’re really engaged in. You would want to be on cheap TV, where people are half-interested.”</p>
<p id="Sx3JqM">Beyond the fact that it was cheap ad time, the reason the commercial was pushed so hard on networks like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network for a good number of years was because they were targeting parents who might have been home while their kids were watching <em>Rugrats</em> or <em>Dexter’s Laboratory</em>—and who were disengaged enough with the programming to potentially make a call. “The fact that you saw it over and over again meant that it was working,” Rohner explains. (One lesson from David Ogilvy in his 1983 book, <em>Ogilvy on Advertising</em>: “If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling. … You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade.”)</p>
<p id="br2LUs">Brian Kelly, an Ogilvy vet who was also a marketing vice president at Sears during the ’90s, sees this ad as a likely extension of a prominent campaign he helped create around the same time, known as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tkBQ9BSfYA">the Softer Side of Sears</a>, which targeted women. “What had happened [in the ’90s],” Kelly says, “was that women were really running the American family—women were what I call the chief financial officer. And as the chief financial officer of the home, we needed to build a dedicated relationship with her, because she was the one that was really going into these mall-based stores and buying appliances.” The campaign was a success, “[spurring] sales” <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-18-fi-1267-story.html">according</a> to the <em>L.A. Times</em>, and can reasonably be credited with partially manufacturing the last successful years of Sears, which would soon go out in a ball of mismanagement flames in the 21st century. (There are a handful of remaining Sears stores, but the former juggernaut is all but dead.)</p>
<p id="TXrkN9">Sears’ successful campaign aside, the advertising world at that point was still struggling to figure out how to effectively market to women. Jean Kilbourne, the filmmaker and activist behind the <em>Killing Us Softly </em>film series about depictions of women in advertising, explains that in the ’80s, ad firms were clumsily trying to market to women in the workforce and mothers at home by using an all-in-one “Superwoman” character: “The one who was a brain surgeon, but she was actually at home making cereal in the ad,” Kilbourne says. “Somehow, you’re supposed to do it all.”</p>
<p id="p6WkF7">This have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach could somewhat explain one enduring element of the Sears AC ad, which is the ongoing debate of who, really, was controlling whom during that kitchen standoff. Many commenters seem to read a patriarchal dynamic at play, since the woman is deferring to the man to make the decision and call himself. (“Why couldn’t she call tho?” is a pretty typical <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/mirlzz/ill_call_now_late_90s_sears_air_conditioning/gt69uvz/">comment</a> on these threads.) But some see the woman as being discreetly in charge of the situation, not taking “I’ll deal with it later” for an answer. </p>
<p id="tyewae">“I do think there was something in itself a little bit modern,” Kilbourne says of her reading of the gender dynamics in the ad. “In a way, she has a little more power than women often have had in ads with men. So I guess that is a slightly more modern—modern in terms of the ’90s—twist on a dynamic where a woman wouldn’t be <em>brazen</em> as to say ‘Do it now.’” (Still, that’s not to mean that the Sears ad is to be interpreted as some covertly feminist gesture, even in the most generous reading. “There’s always been a tendency on the part of advertisers—and actually on the part of capitalism in general—to co-opt any kind of movements for social change,” Kilbourne reminds.)</p>
<p id="i1sJEq">When I first asked Judy Rohner what she had been going for in the gender dynamics of the ad, she said she didn’t specifically remember. It was 27 years ago, after all. But the day after we talked, she sent me a text, telling me that she watched the ad a few more times, and had some thoughts about why it was so effective, particularly to a child of the ’90s like me: “Of course, it just ran over and over,” she wrote. “It’s also pretty tightly written, has a fast rhythm, and the couple is cute. Yeah, the woman should have called herself—this was the ’90s, not the ’50s. But it’s always fun watching two people who really do like each other argue—whether it’s the Honeymooners or Nick and Nora or a silly Sears ‘call now’ commercial.”</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="66d5EF">When the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976, he explained the broad concept—that certain cultural traits, like fashion or slang, go through a form of natural selection that mirrors the way biology goes through evolution—using the metaphor of a virus. “So when anybody talks about something going viral on the internet,” he <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/richard-dawkins-memes">told <em>Wired</em></a> in 2013, “that is exactly what a meme is.”</p>
<p id="YzkMyb">The best way I could explain myself to Joe Scudiero, as he was wondering whether I was pranking him with my call, was that his commercial had infected my brain. (“In a good way!” I assured him, as he apologized.) What was so amusing to me about the Sears ad was something he seemingly couldn’t totally wrap his head around—but he did understand how these things happen. Scudiero brought up an old commercial for a towing company called Victory Auto Wreckers that used to air all the time in his native Chicago, which has its own cult following. “It’s just embedded in your brain,” he says. “I know what you’re talking about.” </p>
<p id="gTtCqV">When I later looked up <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fM5K5jK840">the Victory Auto commercial</a> for myself on YouTube, I found a mass of comments similar to what you would find on a rip of the Sears ad. The commercial’s fans were driven by a compulsion based on some kind of shared cocktail of mundane nostalgia and low-budget absurdity specific to a tribe of people, and through that, all found themselves joyfully in the same strange corner of the internet. To me, though, the ad meant nothing.</p>
<p id="61y5ag">“The way that memes are most effective, where they are easily shared, is they have to be complex,” says Shane Tilton, a professor of multimedia journalism at Ohio Northern University. “And they have to resonate. So there has to be some layers to them.” </p>
<p id="THtlPf">Tilton says there are certain psychological principles that help explain why memes catch on, such as exposure theory—the idea that mere repetitive exposure breeds positive association. He also explains that the more <em>positive</em> experiences you have surrounding a piece of media—like, for instance, watching an ad during the carefree days of being a kid in summer—the more likely you are to remember it. But ultimately, nobody can really explain why people like Marco Garcia and I feel keenly attached to this ridiculous commercial. “There’s so many variations [to the formula of why memes succeed],” he says. “It just happens. Things get popular because it gets popular.”</p>
<p id="LsNbSw">Soon after I reached out to Zaffarano and Buktenica, I received an email from Zaffarano titled “Reunited and it feels so good.” Inside was a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Cfy0kYMLHvE/">picture</a> of the two of them, enjoying another scorcher together in Los Angeles—their first time seeing each other since being in Joe Scudiero’s kitchen in 1995. “It was like picking up like yesterday, to be honest,” Zaffarano tells me later. “He’s my friend.”</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="rXdhxe">Garcia is excited to see what will happen next in the ongoing life of the Sears AC commercial now that things are coming full circle; perhaps a return to the acting world is in store for Zaffarano, he says, and “maybe Gus will get the role of a lifetime—a <em>Breaking Bad</em>–esque type role.” But for the time being, this picture of the two of them back together is enough—this new thread of the meme that he very much manifested himself: “It’s a strange dream come true.”</p>
<p id="lLhSYg"><a href="https://twitter.com/nate_rgrs"><em>Nate Rogers</em></a><em> is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>,</em> Los Angeles Times<em>, </em>GQ<em>, and elsewhere.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/pop-culture/2022/9/1/23331936/sears-ac-commercial-youll-call-nowNate Rogers2022-07-27T06:20:00-04:002022-07-27T06:20:00-04:00The History of Emo Bands Hating the Word “Emo”
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<p>A survey on the subgenre, compiled via the most effective way to look at how it’s developed over time: what artists have answered to the very question of whether they are emo in the first place</p> <p id="FWbTCs"><em>My Chemical Romance is touring again, Paramore and Jimmy Eat World are headlining a major festival this fall, and there’s a skinny, tattooed, white dude with a guitar dominating the charts. In case you haven’t heard, emo is back, baby! In honor of its return to prominence—plus the 20th anniversary of the first MCR album—</em>The Ringer<em> is following </em><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/wendys-debuts-emo-logo-location-londons-camden-neighborhood-2022-7"><em>Emo Wendy’s</em></a><em> lead and tapping into that nostalgia. </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2022/7/25/23277197/welcome-to-emo-week-on-the-ringer"><em>Welcome to Emo Week</em></a><em>, where we’ll explore the scene’s roots, its evolution to the modern-day Fifth Wave, and some of the ephemera around the genre. Grab your Telecasters and Manic Panic and join us in the Black Parade.</em></p>
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<p id="wviexC">It started, like many things in the history of independent music, with Ian MacKaye. “I must say, ‘emocore’ must be the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life,” he said, during a concert sometime around 1986, providing what was likely the first public comment about the brewing scene he was largely responsible for creating. </p>
<p id="1bFwJS">Most origin stories of entire genres you’d expect to be tall tales—no more credible than the idea of Abner Doubleday inventing baseball. But this <em>Genesis</em> chapter of emo is shockingly, miraculously credible, since it was captured <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSmioRyZwQA&t=1070s">on film</a>. MacKaye, then roughly 24 years old, was playing a set at Washington, D.C.’s Nightclub 9:30 with Embrace, one of several post–Minor Threat bands he was in before forming Fugazi soon after. While cameras were rolling, he mentioned that a recent issue of <em>Thrasher</em> had labeled him and his contemporaries “emocore”—short for “emotional hardcore.” “As if hardcore wasn’t emotional to begin with,” he says, in between sips of something nonalcoholic. “Anyway, it’s caca. I hate to say it but you can only hold your silence for so long with some of this stupidest shit.”</p>
<p id="dJIv88">And so, the emo club was born—and born right along with it: the anguish of those who were decreed, of no personal volition, to be members. First-wave emo bands were vocal—and sometimes pretty nasty—about their displeasure with the term but, if anything, the ire only grew during the second and third waves, reaching a fever pitch in 2007, when Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance called emo as a whole “fucking garbage.” One way to look at it is, until Obama’s second term, the best metric for figuring out if a band qualified as emo was to see if they had ever <em>denied</em> being emo in the first place. (Sorry, Ian MacKaye, but that means you, too.)</p>
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<p id="tXl1qe">Way made his infamous comment to <em>The</em> <em>Maine Campus</em> newspaper, naturally, and when <em>Rolling Stone </em>picked it up as a <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/my-chemical-romances-gerard-way-taps-another-nail-into-emo-coffin-101867/">news story</a>, their title referred to it as “[Tapping] Another Nail Into [the] ‘Emo’ Coffin,” clearly delighting over the idea that the overly commodified, Hot Topic–ified genre surely wasn’t going to wriggle itself out of <em>this</em> jam. <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1424149-id-like-to-see-ol-donny-trump-wriggle-his-way-out-of-this-jam">Ah, well, nevertheless</a>: Emo’s fourth wave was already gestating in suburbs around the country before the digital ink was dry. Driven by a millennial demographic that was at first overtaken by the undeniable hooks of <em>TRL</em> bands like Fall Out Boy, the revival artists eventually found their way back to the initial outsider ethos of the genre, armed with easily accessible digital archives that prove there <em>was</em> a time when it wasn’t at all embarrassing to be called emo, even if most of the bands at the time seemed to think so. </p>
<p id="bgWYyM">One of the most notable distinctions between the emo revival artists and their predecessors is an increased affection—or at the very least a decreased protestation—of being emo. In 2014, Brendan Lukens of Modern Baseball’s <a href="https://stagebuddy.com/music/music-feature/frontman-brendan-lukens-modern-baseballs-swift-rise-fame">stance</a> for his group was that they “really like to just play it safe and say simply indie or rock,” but that they “appreciate” being categorized as an emo band, among other genres. Fast forward a few years to 2019, and Phoebe Bridgers would be sitting next to Conor Oberst in <a href="https://youtu.be/385LARTOu7w?t=102">a <em>Pitchfork</em> interview</a> and saying that being emo was “underrated and misunderstood.” (Worth noting: Bright Eyes frontman Oberst <a href="https://propertyofzack.com/post/86280796647/the-first-time-conor-oberst-heard-the-word-emo">once said</a>, “I didn’t ever feel like it applied or was true so I didn’t pay much attention to it.”) For many, it appears that it’s finally cool to not just like emo music, but affirm <em>being</em> emo without any inhibition as well; in 2022, emo is less a genre than a state of mind. For probably just as many, though, it’s still a term they would avoid owning up to, even if they like screaming along to “I Know the End,” too.</p>
<p id="enOqL1">In the 2019 book <em>From the Basement: A History of Emo Music and How It Changed Society</em>, Taylor Markarian considers why it is that “emo” as a term has caused—and continues to cause, to a degree—such an unwelcome reception, both to outsiders and insiders: “Humans have maintained pretty poor relationships with their emotions for as long as they’ve had them,” she writes. “Every day we are puzzled, even baffled, by them. It’s hard for many people to look their emotions square in the eyes.” Is it any wonder in a country as emotionally stunted as the United States that this would be an issue? The surprise, really, is that we’ve reached <em>some</em> level of emo pride whatsoever. </p>
<p id="Q7byvv">It’s not difficult to understand how the conversation has and hasn’t changed since MacKaye first weighed in 36 years ago, and that’s because almost every emo band seems to have been asked directly about it … a lot. The history of using the term “emo”—of what it means musically, culturally, personally—is meticulously documented in some of the messier corners of the internet, wherever old band interviews have survived. To save you the trouble of digging through it all yourself, below is a comprehensively incomprehensive sampling of emo artists’ thoughts on being called emo.</p>
<h3 id="QT8GWd">Rites of Spring</h3>
<p id="CG7gr9">Don’t mention it to him, but Guy Picciotto and his group Rites of Spring basically started emo. This was a few years before he joined Fugazi, when the only logical placement for his music was within the larger D.C. punk scene, but there was something about it—the octave-based chords, the brutally wounded lyrics—that warranted a new classification. Picciotto rejected the emocore label altogether: “I’ve never recognized ‘emo’ as a genre of music,” he said in a 2003 <a href="http://www.markprindle.com/picciotto-i.htm">interview</a> with Mark Prindle. “I know there is this generic commonplace that every band that gets labeled with that term hates it. They feel scandalized by it. But honestly, I just thought that all the bands I played in were punk rock bands. … When I was young, I was always over the top because I was so fucked up. Not ‘fucked up’ as in ‘wasted’ but more mentally ‘fucked up.’ And I was really jacked up. So it came out of that.”</p>
<h3 id="zUqCT5">Jawbox</h3>
<p id="5jZdUN">Jawbox is one of those early-’90s fringe cases of maybe-emo-maybe-not whose status becomes slightly more clear when you look at what singer/guitarist J. Robbins did later on as a producer, working with decidedly emo bands like Braid and the Promise Ring. (This, reportedly, would lead Ian MacKaye to jokingly call him “the King of Emo.”) “I’m a few years older than all of the guys in bands like Braid and the Promise Ring,” Robbins said in a 1999 <a href="http://www.jimdero.com/OtherWritings/Other%20emo.htm">interview in <em>Guitar World</em></a>. “But I know that something we have in common is that our first exposure to hardcore punk really shook us all and galvanized us and made us want to go out and <em>do something</em>. I feel like it’s more of a sense of purpose and being inspired by the ‘80s post-hardcore scene. All of the bands that I know that we’re calling emo take that as a jumping-off point. Philosophically, they share a work ethic and a sense of the band and music as this engine that propelled them to experience.”</p>
<h3 id="JAovDn">Indian Summer</h3>
<p id="VYO3ky">“If you use that word to describe Moss Icon or Rites of Spring, I’m OK with Indian Summer being called an emo band,” Adam Nanaa <a href="https://numerogroup.com/blogs/stories/indian-summer-you-had-to-be-there#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIf%20you%20use%20that%20word,doing%20what%20we%20were%20doing">said to writer Ken Shipley</a> in 2019, ahead of the reissue of his group’s entire run—all two years of it—by Numero Group. Twenty-five years after their breakup, Adam and his brother Seth were easier on emo than some of the godfathers of the genre, to a degree. “I don’t particularly think we have anything in common with anything that happened after us,” he went on. “We weren’t out to get that moniker, we were just doing what we were doing. So whatever name they come up with, that’s someone else’s business.” The way Seth put it, “We would never have used that word, unless it was derogatory.”</p>
<h3 id="dtsF0o">Weezer</h3>
<p id="cvP7LI">Anyone who thinks Weezer isn’t emo clearly hasn’t heard <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2dosVRzLSM">“I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams”</a> lately, but somehow the band tends to avoid the tag. That’s probably because Rivers Cuomo’s M.O. is to cunningly answer any question about emo with some form of “I don’t know her.” “I don’t hang out with teenagers,” he said in a <a href="https://www.spin.com/featured/weezer-cover-story-2002/">2002 interview</a> with <em>Spin</em>. “I don’t really know what [emo] means. I don’t have a feel for what’s going on.” </p>
<h3 id="tK8N0M">Sunny Day Real Estate </h3>
<p id="KUVLm7">“Well, we’re a rock band basically,” Sunny Day Real Estate drummer William Goldsmith said in a <a href="https://www.mtv.com/news/1434719/sunny-day-real-estate-talks-about-the-emo-core-tag/">1998 interview</a> with <em>MTV</em>. “I don’t disrespect anyone for using the term emocore, or rock, or anything, but back in the day, emocore was just about the worst dis that you could throw on a band,” guitarist Dan Hoerner added. Eighteen years (and yet another breakup) later, at least frontman Jeremy Enigk had come to terms with it: “The jury—they voted, man,” he <a href="https://www.avclub.com/sunny-day-real-estate-s-jeremy-enigk-on-being-the-reluc-1798252145">told <em>the A.V. Club</em></a>. “And we can’t get away from it. <em>Rolling Stone</em> recently did a ‘Top Emo Albums’ of all time list, and then <em>South Park</em> did an episode with us in it, and it’s like … OK. Yep. We may as well embrace it.”</p>
<aside id="KI8B3Y"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Through With Being Cool: How Emo Nights Across the World Became Big Business","url":"https://www.theringer.com/music/2022/7/27/23279511/emo-night-nite-los-angeles-brooklyn-tour-coachella-first"},{"title":"Why Travis Barker Became Your Favorite Rapper’s Favorite Drummer","url":"https://www.theringer.com/rap/2022/7/27/23280164/travis-barker-emo-producer-punk-hip-hop-blink-182"}]}'></div></aside><h3 id="KtEkrr">The Get Up Kids</h3>
<p id="iI07kC">Some of the most controversial comments ever made on the subject of emo came from Jim Suptic, guitarist of the Get Up Kids: “If this is the world we helped create, then I apologize,” he told <a href="https://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4137393-if-this-is-the-world-we-helped-create-then-i-apologise-the-get-up-kids-get-back"><em>Drowned In Sound</em> in 2009</a>, referring to a recent festival he played heavy on third-wave emo bands like Fall Out Boy and Taking Back Sunday. “If a band gets huge and they say we inspired them, great. The problem is most of them aren’t very good. What does that say about us? I don’t know. Maybe we sucked. We at least can play our instruments.” Ten years later, he and bandmate Matt Pryor had mellowed—but only somewhat. “I don’t know, man,” Pryor muttered to <a href="https://www.kerrang.com/the-get-up-kids-have-made-their-peace-with-being-emo"><em>Kerrang</em> in 2019</a>. “Some fucking corny ass bands get really popular!”</p>
<h3 id="taJo6T">Texas Is The Reason</h3>
<p id="EqDShc">“If you had asked me in 1987 whether or not I considered myself ‘emo,’ I would have told you to fuck off,” Texas Is The Reason’s Norman Brannon wrote in an essay <a href="https://www.talkhouse.com/emo-a-personal-history-in-three-parts-part-1-1987-1990/">for <em>Talkhouse</em> in 2019</a>. “The derision with which the word was used—the implication of its very tonality—suggested that ‘emo’ had also become an updated shorthand for ‘faggot.’ You’d often hear people say things like, ‘What are you, fucking emo?’” Brannon, who came out as gay after the band’s initial run, noted that he felt the association with the word initially left him “vulnerable to a type of exposure that quite realistically threatened” his safety. “I had no way of knowing this word would go on to ensure and even enrich my future. I had no way of knowing that I might somehow be attached to this word forever.”</p>
<h3 id="HwlR1K">Jimmy Eat World</h3>
<p id="aCurSx">Emo can be understood as a fashion aesthetic as much as a sound, but Jimmy Eat World have never looked the part. At a glance, the quartet more resembles real estate agents than a major-label rock band, which has probably helped their longevity to a degree: “I’m sure Capitol [Records] would love it if we came out and called ourselves an emo band and then they could totally trumpet that,” singer/guitarist Jim Adkins <a href="http://www.jimdero.com/OtherWritings/Other%20emo.htm">told <em>Guitar World</em></a> in 1999. “But I’d like to be a career musician, so I don’t want to do that.” Adkins has said that he doesn’t consider <em>Clarity </em>and <em>Bleed American</em>, his band’s quintessential albums, to be emo, and in recent years the group still bristles somewhat at it. “When you’re a band you should be careful about associating yourself with any kind of thing like that,” drummer Zach Lind <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5_lXHBFhHk">said</a> in 2011. “It kind of means everything and nothing at the same time.”</p>
<h3 id="1q6Hko">My Chemical Romance</h3>
<p id="weBaey">When Gerard Way made his infamous “emo is fucking garbage” comments in 2007, he elaborated that he felt “lumped in” with what was considered emo at the time: “Put the records next to each other and listen to them and there’s actually no similarities,” he said, convincing approximately no one. Even recently, guitarist Frank Iero still sounds heated on the subject: “I think it has been so bastardized and diluted that I don’t even know what it means anymore,” he said <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG_uiNdfnXE">on <em>the Zach Sang Show</em></a> in 2019. “I think that it started out as short for emotional. When you use it now to just describe a shitty haircut, like, that sucks.”</p>
<h3 id="f9I0bk">Fall Out Boy</h3>
<p id="oY6kD5">If there was one band in particular that Way was likely referring to when he ripped into his perceived contemporaries, it was Fall Out Boy—or at least, that’s the way it was largely interpreted at the time. Regardless, bassist Pete Wentz never appeared to be one to let the subject get to him. “I get what people are saying with the eyeliner and the girl pants and this and that,” he <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pete-wentz-talks-fame-new-fall-out-boy-songs-and-one-hilarious-emo-gag-111233/">told <em>Rolling Stone</em></a><em> </em>around the same time in 2007. “Hopefully, [emo] is more than just a t-shirt slogan. Hopefully, some of us bands are able to grow and become bigger than emo.” He also mentioned the idea of his band playing with the word “emo” on a huge banner on stage: “If you’re emo, you might as well be in on the joke.”</p>
<h3 id="2cCcWj">Panic! At the Disco</h3>
<p id="SYPL8l">Brendon Urie and Ryan Ross talked so much shit on emo during Panic! At the Disco’s early years it would be difficult to list it all in one place. (A <a href="https://prettyoddfever.tumblr.com/post/631376369703649280/why-its-kind-of-funny-that-patd-is-remembered-as">thorough breakdown</a> can be found on Tumblr, if you have an hour or two to kill.) “Emo is bullshit!” Urie most succinctly <a href="https://www.nme.com/news/music/panic-at-the-disco-55-1348718">told <em>NME</em></a> in 2006. “The stereotype is guys that are weak and have failing relationships [and] write about how sad they are. If you listen to our songs, not one of them has that tone.” In a <a href="https://www.mtv.com/news/j580jx/panic-at-the-disco-dont-want-fans-fixating-on-their-boyish-good-looks">harrowing <em>MTV</em> story</a> titled, “Panic! At The Disco Don’t Want Fans Fixating On Their Boyish Good Looks,” Ross shared his thoughts on being labeled emo: “It’s a bummer to realize we’re in <em>Teen Beat</em> magazine and read some shitty article they’ve written about us being an emo-punk band. I’ve seen those kids at the shows, I can hear them, and I can certainly tell the difference between one of our fans and a Fall Out Boy fan who’s just there because they heard we were hot.” By the time the group put out their second album <em>Pretty. Odd.</em> in 2008, they had largely left behind anything resembling an emo sound.</p>
<h3 id="CeRPi9">Paramore</h3>
<p id="cXHmIq">“Oh, man, we were so concerned—especially me—with not being whatever the scene deemed as poser or whatever,” Hayley Williams of Paramore <a href="https://www.rollingstone.co.uk/music/features/hayley-williams-on-her-new-podcast-everything-is-emo-15631/">recently told <em>Rolling Stone</em></a><em>.</em> “Especially as a young girl, the pressure was really on to not be lame. … Definitely more than once said we were not emo in interviews.” Williams was discussing her new <em>BBC Sounds </em>podcast/radio show called <em>Everything Is Emo</em>, which functions as a personal analysis of the genre and an attempt to zero in on what the word means in 2022: “I’ve watched it evolve throughout the years … One minute emo sounds like pop punk and then the next minute emo sounds like Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst doing a project together. Where we’ve gotten to now, people are much more open to a lot of different versions of the word and I think that’s cool.”</p>
<h3 id="rBYhWt">The Hotelier</h3>
<p id="7P5TIm">These days you’d be hard-pressed to find a young band forcefully pushing back on being called emo, but in 2016, at least, the Hotelier still had some bite when it came to the subject: “Us making records has been about showing that this style of music isn’t awful because there’s something inherent about how the instruments are played or how the melodies are done that make it specifically awful,” drummer Sam Frederick <a href="https://www.stereogum.com/1877859/anarchy-in-worcester-mass/interviews/">told <em>Stereogum</em></a>. “I think that a lot of people who make that style of music got lazy. Mostly because they were given tons of money to make subpar albums.” Bassist/vocalist Christian Holden added: “I feel that what talking about the emo revival always does is it finds a way to make us separate from other indie rock that’s happening when I don’t think that’s purposeful or needed, except that some people think that it’s not as cool or something.”</p>
<h3 id="rfVXhQ">Lil Peep</h3>
<p id="jzOnZt">“I would listen to underground bands and shit, but I wouldn’t call [my music] the new emo necessarily,” Lil Peep <a href="https://pitchfork.com/features/rising/10001-tears-of-a-dirtbag-rapper-lil-peep-is-the-future-of-emo/">told <em>Pitchfork</em></a> just as he was blowing up in 2017, and less than a year before his death. “It’s just another wave of it, it’s a subgenre. I don’t think it replaces it or is even mimicking it. It’s a whole new thing, and it’s good for the emo genre as a whole and all the fans and all the people who ever liked it, because it’s going to keep it relevant. It’s just adapting to the new sounds that people want to listen to when they hop in the car and shit. We’re just giving it that emo spin.”</p>
<h3 id="vJI24c">Juice WRLD</h3>
<p id="YEYh1Y">When asked if he considered emo to be a positive or a negative label, Juice WRLD, not yet 20 years old, <a href="https://hypebeast.com/2018/7/juice-wrld-interview-goodbye-and-good-riddance">told <em>Hypebeast</em></a> in 2018, “Both, I feel like sometimes music has to be a little dark because the world is not really a light place. It’s not really a happy place, not to sound too pessimistic. Sometimes being optimistic ain’t it.” </p>
<h3 id="7wGNRF">Olivia Rodrigo</h3>
<p class="c-end-para" id="lN3qkd">While they were writing “Drivers License” together, Olivia Rodrigo and Dan Nigro were trying to find the right mood for the bridge. Nigro, who was in the ’00s emo band As Tall as Lions, was the one in the room to suggest that they dial back the drama a tad: “The first bridge for ‘Drivers License’ was so emo,” he said in a <a href="https://youtu.be/JxJfUoZFx8Y?t=169"><em>Rolling Stone</em> video interview</a>, sitting next to Rodrigo. “I’m very emo,” Olivia Rodrigo replied. “Dan was in an emo band, and he still tells me I’m emo—that’s how you know you’re really emo.”</p>
<p id="jfzovs"><a href="https://twitter.com/nate_rgrs"><em>Nate Rogers</em></a><em> is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in </em>The New York Times<em>,</em> Los Angeles Times<em>, </em>GQ<em>, and elsewhere.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/music/2022/7/27/23279669/bands-not-wanting-to-be-called-emo-historyNate Rogers2022-06-07T11:02:19-04:002022-06-07T11:02:19-04:00Kate Bush, “Running Up That Hill,” and the End of Music Charts As We Knew Them
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<p>Thanks to ‘Stranger Things,’ one of art pop’s most reclusive figures has almost inadvertently found herself with a top-10 charting hit. Is it a fluke or a sign of the times?</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="4mmlyV">Kate Bush is being born again. It’s the last song of her 1985 masterpiece <em>Hounds of Love</em>—the finale of a seven-song suite titled <em>The Ninth Wave</em>, which tells the story of a castaway in a life jacket drifting through the open ocean. Close to death, the castaway experiences a <em>Christmas Carol</em>–like series of past, present, and future hallucinations before being rescued (or appearing to be, at least). “D’you know what?” she sings on<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fh1UMVU_TI"> “The Morning Fog,”</a> newly appreciative of the people in her life after going through such a harrowing experience. “I love you better now.”</p>
<p id="JhwFV1">Rebirth has always been central to Bush’s music. A star since she was 19, when her 1978 debut single<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1pMMIe4hb4"> “Wuthering Heights”</a> hit no. 1 in her native U.K., Bush has pushed back against traditions as much as any major pop star, with every new album a departure, every new sound a twist. (Imagine, if you can, a top young musician of today following up their first no. 1 album with something as out there as <em>The Dreaming</em>, Bush’s 1982 LP that at one point features her<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uHUUwgGW5c"> impression of a donkey</a>.) Waiting to see how the next chapter will unfold is part of the appeal of being one of her fans—and part of the challenge. </p>
<p id="0omp1T">It was par for the course, then, that the latest unexpected rebirth of Kate Bush’s career arrived this past week not with an album drop but with a music sync. Her song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” the lead single from <em>Hounds of Love</em>, has stormed back onto the charts after its central inclusion in the fourth season of <em>Stranger Things</em>, topping recent daily streaming lists in the U.S. and U.K., and reaching no. 8 on both the formal U.K. Singles Chart and the Billboard Hot 100 (Bush’s first time ever on the top 10 of the latter chart). Thirty-seven years after its initial release—when it reached no. 3 in the U.K. and no. 30 in the U.S.—the song is by some metrics doing better than contemporary smash hits by the likes of Harry Styles, Lizzo, and Bad Bunny. “[‘Running Up That Hill’] is the biggest song in the country right now, if you ask me,” says Charlie Harding, the cohost of <em>Switched on Pop</em>, a podcast about pop music.</p>
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<p id="DkdzfI">Old music returning to the charts after a soundtrack feature is not exactly a new phenomenon. In the U.S., Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” charted <em>higher</em> in 1992 (no. 2) than it did in 1976 (no. 9) after Wayne and Garth headbanged to it in <em>Wayne’s World</em>. (Freddie Mercury’s 1991 death also contributed.) Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose” didn’t even make the Hot 100 when it was released in 1994, and then shot to no. 1 in 1995 after soundtracking the nipple suits in <em>Batman Forever</em>. But by and large, old music appearing on the charts had been rare. That’s changing—fast. </p>
<p id="4krn2L">“You have double, triple, quadruple the older songs returning not only into our consciousness but onto the charts,” says Jason Lipshutz, the executive director of music at <em>Billboard</em>, who recently <a href="https://www.billboard.com/music/chart-beat/kate-bush-running-up-that-hill-stranger-things-spotify-1235079096/">covered</a> the “Running Up That Hill” anomaly. There are new avenues for old songs—particularly those that came out only a few months or years back—to break through, Lipshutz says, largely due to how streaming and social media have changed the way people listen and impacted the charts. Lipshutz brings up Lizzo’s 2017 single<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P00HMxdsVZI"> “Truth Hurts,”</a> which parlayed a soundtrack inclusion (on the movie <em>Someone Great</em>, for those keeping score, because you probably don’t remember) into TikTok buzz, and ultimately steamrolled into every wedding reception for the whole summer. By the time the song hit no. 1 in 2019, Lizzo was promoting an entirely different album. </p>
<p id="RZpmaS">Even when considering the way charts are changing to include more older music, though, the Kate Bush resurgence is still an aberration. “We have songs that kind of bubble up and then bubble back down,” Lipshutz explains, “and then you have the other instances like this, where it’s, like, a monumental leap on the charts.” </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="n1gfyL"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Summer Blockbuster Season Is in Full Swing—On Television","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/6/7/23157383/summer-blockbuster-movie-releases-tv-top-gun-stranger-things"},{"title":"The Many Sides of Post Malone Thrive Together on ‘Twelve Carat Toothache’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2022/6/7/23157446/post-malone-twelve-carat-toothache-album-review"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="twMKIr">Some of this success can be explained by the placement itself. “Running Up That Hill” is the central mystical motif of this season of <em>Stranger Things</em>—used numerous times, and written diegetically into the plot itself. (The character of Max, played by Sadie Sink, lovingly carries around the <em>Hounds of Love </em>cassette and listens to “Running Up That Hill” in the first episode as she walks through Hawkins High; the song and cassette are used during crucial sequences in later episodes.) Drenched in gated reverb and woozy synths, the song is also an ideal track to sonically fit into the retro sound that the show has so carefully curated. “It’s working on all of these levels of reference, both internally to the episode, to the larger series, to our sort of collective nostalgia of what the 1980s feel like,” says Harding. </p>
<p id="D7GAR4">Add that to the fact that Bush’s whole <em>thing </em>often dabbled in horror-movie-adjacent world-building—listen to that demon voice on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7FEneG7gsg">“Waking the Witch”</a> and tell me you don’t hear Vecna—and you have yourself a killer needle drop. Ann Powers, NPR music critic and noted Kate Bush scholar, brings up the song<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR4KnfcgLm0"> “Hammer Horror,”</a> from 1978’s <em>Lionheart</em>, which is named after the British studio behind classic horror movies like <em>Dracula</em> and <em>The Curse of Frankenstein</em>. “She’s been writing songs that are like the stories that a show like <em>Stranger Things</em> tells for her whole career,” Powers says. “This is her wheelhouse, this is her territory. She already rules this queendom.”</p>
<p id="vcdhX8">But a renaissance doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the Bushassaince is no exception. Pop stars tend to hang around until they overstay their welcome, which is what makes Bush’s notorious reclusivity particularly alluring. (She has largely avoided live shows her entire career, and rarely grants interviews. Just the fact that she posted a <a href="https://www.katebush.com/news/stranger-things/">brief statement</a> about the <em>Stranger Things </em>flurry was notable industry news.) For decades, discovering her discography has felt like discovering a secret stash that was hiding in plain sight. “There isn’t the acoustic bluegrass project she did at 47 or something like that,” as Powers puts it. “That doesn’t exist.”</p>
<p id="1rZcz2">Bush is a musician’s musician—one that artists name-check and cover—and “Running Up That Hill” always seems to be the song to come up. Maybe your introduction to it was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07cCVEMsDjA">when <em>The O.C.</em></a> used Placebo’s cover to set the mood as Ryan runs away from his troubles <em>again</em>. Or maybe you heard the recent covers from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SMIxlEbOxM">Car Seat Headrest</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7iVWK2W48o">Meg Myers</a>, or caught Fiona Apple’s reference in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emXYPRlVBas">“Fetch the Bolt Cutters.”</a> Maybe you heard the rerecorded version Bush did <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft3yUKjzV4s">for the London Summer Olympics</a> 10 years ago, and it’s been in the back of your brain ever since. </p>
<p id="qcz1VD">Big Boi from Outkast is, wonderfully, one of the biggest Kate Bush fans on the planet, and a few years ago he tried to get to the bottom of what makes “Running Up That Hill” such a perfect song. “One, it was good to pedal [your bike] to,” he said<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSdHgq3oBD8"> to <em>Pitchfork</em></a>. “It made you go fast.” But more than that, he added, it encapsulates the mysterious, cinematic experience that is being a fan of her work: “You didn’t know what was coming around the corner,” he went on, “and when that song ended, you didn’t know if it was going into another song, or if that was like a B- or a C-section to that one particular song. It was just one cohesive body of work that took you on an adventure.”</p>
<p id="cY4fsE">“Running Up That Hill” sounds like a You Can Do It anthem, but that wasn’t really what Bush was going for when she wrote it. “Sometimes you can hurt somebody purely accidentally or be afraid to tell them something because you think they might be hurt when really they’ll understand,” Bush explained <a href="http://gaffa.org/reaching/i85_ti.html">to the London<em> Times</em></a> in 1985. “So what that song is about is making a deal with God to let two people swap place so they’ll be able to see things from one another’s perspective.”</p>
<p id="tEZZzx">“You don’t want to hurt me,” Bush sings on the track, her voice booming over an extraterrestrial synth line, “but see how deep the bullet lies.” Like <em>The Dreaming</em>, <em>Hounds of Love</em> was largely composed and recorded by Bush on a Fairlight CMI, a complex, then-cutting edge “digital audio workstation” that <a href="https://i0.wp.com/120years.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/fairlight-cmi-1981-02.jpg">looks</a> almost like a parody of the Gary Numan–ass devices people were using in the ’80s. (Peter Gabriel, who featured Bush’s vocals on<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xZmlUV8muY"> “Games Without Frontiers”</a> in 1980, introduced her to the instrument.) Bush’s regular collaborator (and boyfriend at the time) Del Palmer programmed the massive drum machine part that anchors the song. </p>
<p id="VcZTPs">In recent years, the song has been used in the soundtrack to a number of prominent television shows (<em>On Becoming a God in Central Florida</em>, <em>Vanity Fair</em>) and a few of the appearances are on programs (<em>GLOW</em>, <em>Pose</em>) that nod to the fact that “Running Up That Hill” also functions as a popular gay anthem. That inclusive interpretation of the work is more in line with the literal lyrical context Bush sang about—the hope that true empathy could be fostered by something as simple (and unfortunately unattainable) as a walk in someone else’s shoes. But it’s a song that’s served listeners in a variety of ways, partially because of how infectious it is, and partially because of how universal the language is.</p>
<p id="nFFJm1">“What it ultimately means is, we <em>can’t</em> actually truly understand each other, but we are going to continue to try,” says Powers. “And so in a way, even though the reason for the sentiment is different than what most people thought, the sentiment itself is contained in the song.”</p>
<p id="SF0nYS">Max wasn’t worried about any of that when Vecna is closing in on her—and neither was Nora Felder, the music supervisor on <em>Stranger Things</em>, who was the one to pinpoint “Running Up That Hill” as the right track for the show (and, thankfully for the Duffer brothers, had the budget to pull it off)<em>. </em>“In Max’s situation,” Felder <a href="https://variety.com/2022/music/news/stranger-things-kate-bush-running-up-hill-1235282576/">told <em>Variety</em></a>, “the need for a ‘deal with god’ can perhaps be metaphorically understood as a desperate cry for love.” It means whatever you want. Kate Bush is being born again.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="B1qmsR">The supernova pop-cultural moment surrounding “Running Up That Hill” has been building for decades, in a sense. And it might turn out to be a pure outlier incident—serving a uniquely talented artist at just the right moment—which people shake their heads at for years to come. It also might not. </p>
<p id="VTpmJR">For some time now, the trend has been solidifying: Old music is growing more valuable than new music. According to <a href="https://mrcdatareports.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/MRC_YEAREND_2021_US_FNL-1.pdf">data</a> from Luminate, formerly known as MRC Data and Nielsen Music, at the beginning of 2022, old music—that is, music that had not been released within the past 18 months—accounted for 70 percent of the market in the U.S. in 2021, a jump of 5 percentage points from the previous year. (2021 also marked the first time since it was monitored by MRC Data that streaming of new music <em>declined</em>, not just in relation to old music, but overall.) “Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact,” Ted Gioia <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-killing-new-music/621339/">wrote in <em>The</em> <em>Atlantic</em></a> in his assessment of the data. </p>
<p id="AHfaHg">There are some important caveats that might explain some of this. The most obvious one is that streaming is the increasingly predominant way that people consume music, and because of that, the statistics are starting to include older demographics at a faster clip. And as the streaming user base grows older, so, too, will the age of the music being listened to. (Another consideration not to be overlooked: In previous eras, it was much harder to account for a population’s broad listening habits outside of the physical, new music they purchased in record stores; these days, streaming charts offer a more nuanced window into the day-to-day reality of what people play in their homes, cars, offices, etc.)</p>
<p id="bG0sKd">It’s also just possible now for people to scratch a musical itch without getting off the couch. “This is the democratization of listenership,” says Lipshutz, the <em>Billboard</em> editor. “Before the streaming era, and way before the TikTok era, if you watched <em>Stranger Things</em> and were like, ‘Oh, I love this Kate Bush song “Running Up That Hill,” I’ve never heard it before,’ you would have to go out and buy a CD of Kate Bush or the <em>Stranger Things</em> soundtrack. And that’s just completely flipped.”</p>
<p id="m9nMlO">But in general, the trend is not a fluke: Especially fueled by how TikTok can lift up a random old track basically from nothing and send it into the stratosphere—see: Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” by way of cranberry juice—catalog music of boomer acts is booming. “There’s so much opportunity out there for all these legacy labels, even for songs that are out of cycle to have another life,” Danny Gillick, then TikTok’s senior manager of music content and label partnerships, <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/tiktok-old-hits-fleetwood-mac-jack-johnson-aly-aj-1086232/">told <em>Rolling Stone</em></a><em>. </em>“There’s a whole treasure chest of these earworms that I grew up with that you can see now are having a second life.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="1y7RkV"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Winners and Losers (So Far) of ‘Stranger Things’ Season 4","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2022/6/2/23150650/the-winners-and-losers-so-far-of-stranger-things-season-4"},{"title":"The ‘Stranger Things’ Season 4 Mythology Guide: Questions, Answers, and Theories","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2022/5/30/23147116/stranger-things-season-4-vecna-upside-down-questions-theories"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="kwZ1y7">It’s no coincidence, then, that legacy acts have begun to sell the publishing rights to their entire life’s work for absurd amounts of money. Springsteen: $550 million; Bob Dylan: over $300 million; Paul Simon: $250 million; Stevie Nicks: $100 million (and that includes only her <em>share</em> of Fleetwood Mac’s catalog); even Justin Timberlake got $100 million for god knows what reason. “If you just think about the impact of legacy music [right now],” says Harding, “the strongest indicator is that hedge funds are literally buying up publishing.”</p>
<p id="LNFLhB">How alarmed we should be about the reverse trending pattern of old and new music is a matter of some debate. It’s difficult to quantify, but one could reasonably presume that part of the motivating force behind the rise of old music is the increasing hurdles placed in front of new musicians trying to break through into the larger public consciousness. Industry revenue has been on the rise lately—an <a href="https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/global-recorded-music-revenues-hit-25-9bn-in-2021-up-18-5-yoy/#:~:text=World%20Leaders-,Global%20recorded%20music%20revenues%20hit,in%202021%2C%20up%2018.5%25%20YoY&text=Global%20recorded%20music%20revenues%20reached,increase%20of%2018.5%25%20versus%202020.">18 percent overall bump</a> in 2021—but the numbers on the working-class margin still appear to be dangerously low; according to a <a href="https://thecreativeindependent.com/music-industry-report/"><em>Creative Independent</em> survey</a> from 2020, only 12 percent of musicians reported that 80 to 100 percent of their income came from music-related work. No matter how talented a musician you are, it’s difficult to fight for plays with Kate Bush and Bob Dylan when you’re working a day job on the side. And if things continue this way, the gulf will only get wider, with repercussions that may be staggering to the industry. </p>
<p id="iYepWs">Still, Harding thinks the trend is more reflective “of what record stores have always known, which is, legacy acts sell well,” he says. “Like, if you walked into Best Buy in the year 2000, they would have been merchandising <em>Dark Side of the Moon</em>, because that album sells extremely well. They’re merchandising <em>Thriller</em>, they’re merchandising Beatles records.” </p>
<p id="RLAzxr">Powers concedes that it’s “a confusing time for artists,” but doesn’t think it’s necessarily bad that older music is getting increased attention. “Mostly it messes with the conventional music industry,” she says, “which is, I think, locked into a less-than-optimal system or framework anyway. Like, why do we always assume that the most recent work by an artist is the only thing they have to promote?”</p>
<p id="Qi1iNM">One byproduct of what’s going on with legacy catalogs is that there appears to be a distinct, expanding willingness for soundtrack usage from huge artists. It wasn’t long ago that, if a music supervisor wanted “Running Up That Hill” in their production, they’d have to use that awful Placebo cover, or just find something with the same vibe on the cheap. Nowadays, there are multiple Pink Floyd needle drops in something like the new season of <em>Russian Doll</em>—including a sprawling, multi-minute use of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” in the finale—and nobody bats an eye. (Of note: Pink Floyd member David Gilmour mentored Kate Bush in the early years of her career; last week, with impeccable timing, Pink Floyd <a href="https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/pink-floyd-joins-tiktok-1235078893/">announced</a> that they’re joining TikTok.) “I’ve noticed that even the Beatles’ catalog is showing up in more places,” Powers considers. “The final frontier.”</p>
<p id="liLtCK">Part of the new willingness is no doubt due to the fact that money is harder to come by than it used to be for even the big-name artists. (Overall industry revenue is up lately, yes, but it was still <a href="https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/15/us-recorded-music-revenues-46-percent-lower/#:~:text=According%20to%20inflation%2Dadjusted%20data,year%20total%20of%20%2422.7%20billion.">down 46 percent</a> in 2020 when adjusted for inflation compared to its late-’90s peak.) And if you think the finance groups buying up these catalogs won’t monetize them every way they can, I’ve got a “Drivers License”–caliber bridge to sell you. </p>
<p id="FmjpDt">But a key part of why you’re hearing more big-name needle drops is also due to artist estates beginning to chase in earnest the exact situation currently happening with Kate Bush (however futile that chase might be). Whatever she was paid for the <em>Stranger Things</em> spot—which would no doubt be life-changing for most artists—was eventually beside the point: The real rock star money is in the chain of events that led to this current level of virality that can’t be bought—that led to you reading this right now. </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="XzjH4C">Most needle drops—even the heavy-hitting ones—have no substantial secondary impact. (Is anyone talking about Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” because of <em>its</em> inclusion in this season of <em>Stranger Things</em>?) The show airs, some viewers discover/rediscover the song, checks are sent out, end of story. If this story starts to get out of hand with one of your favorite artists, though, it may be tough to swallow, as some die-hard Kate Bush fans are now discovering.</p>
<p id="0D1vnk">“[It’s] annoying because now im gonna hear it everywhere and people are gonna call me a tiktok shill for listening to the queen of art pop,” <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/katebush/comments/v19bgl/stranger_things/ianop25/">reads</a> one comment in a thread about the situation on the Kate Bush subreddit. “I’d make a deal with god to stop tiktok getting this song,” <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/katebush/comments/v0iolv/running_up_that_hill_is_currently_the_number_1/iagu6lj/">reads</a> another. </p>
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<p id="TgVFeA">In the conversation about cultural gate-keeping, there’s often more high-horse pushback against the gate-keeping than actual gate-keeping itself, but nonetheless, in this case, agony from die-hards is legitimately out there, if you look for it. In response, it’s easy to take the objectively more mature approach and say, “Let people enjoy things,” which, sure, fine, you’re right. It’s a little tougher, though, to take a moment to run up that hill and empathize with people who feel hurt by an artist they admire becoming a tool for corporate advertisement—who feel like they’ve lost a special relationship.</p>
<p id="kZqkl1">Once upon a time, Ann Powers was a die-hard Kate Bush fan who briefly lost that special relationship herself. In the late-’70s, Powers stumbled on Bush’s music as a teenager, and became obsessed, based on how different it was from everything else: “She was huge in England,” Powers explains, “but in Seattle, Washington, she wasn’t fitting in with the proto-versions of Mudhoney that we were going to see on a Friday night.” Powers says she “clung to that fandom and felt special because of it. She’s the kind of artist that engenders that kind of fandom because her work is so idiosyncratic.”</p>
<p id="FmxVnf">When <em>Hounds of Love</em> came out, Powers’s initial reaction was to feel that she “was no longer my Kate,” as she explained <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/6SRyjaLZMrzFwH6ibPVumA">on <em>Bandsplain</em></a>—that the mass appeal of the new album betrayed the progressive pop approach from the first four albums. For some time, she left her Kate on the shelf. But eventually she came to her senses: “Years later, when I returned to <em>Hounds of Love</em>, I realized she had not abandoned all the things I loved about her,” Powers explains. “What you learn later when you return to that work [that broke through] is almost always: The artist is still the artist. Maybe they’ve put a different frame around their work, or maybe one song has allowed a bigger audience into the work, but they’re still who they are. And usually, the arc of the artists—and this happened with Kate—they kind of go back to the weirdness eventually anyway.”</p>
<p id="5uUyqN">What will come of all this for Bush is anyone’s best guess—but it’s hard to imagine it will, after four decades, meaningfully change how she goes about her career. If she wanted, she could turn this all into much bigger, stranger things: unparalleled hype for a new album, a sold-out world tour, features, remixes, Eggo commercials. But anyone expecting any of that clearly still has a lot to learn about the enigma that is Kate Bush. </p>
<p id="6zMKl1">In 1979, when she was still playing into the more traditional path expected of a young pop star, Bush allowed for a documentary to be made in conjunction with her tour—a tour that ended up serving as the final live dates of her career until a residency in 2014 at the Hammersmith Apollo in London. Sitting in a recording studio, an impatient interviewer asks a barrage of rapid-fire questions.</p>
<p id="jARRjj">“What’s the most satisfying thing you do?” the interviewer eventually asks.</p>
<p id="JzuwxZ">“The most satisfying thing?” Bush replies, searching for an answer. “I guess when you’ve actually written a song, and you think about what’s going to happen to it in the future.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="vJaoIo">She starts to elaborate, mentioning strings and vocal parts—and perhaps she had something else enlightening to add, but is quickly cut off for a new question. It was purely out of her control. </p>
<p id="yTxQYJ"><a href="https://twitter.com/nate_rgrs"><em>Nate Rogers</em></a><em> is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in the </em>Los Angeles Times<em>, </em>The Washington Post<em>, </em>Stereogum, <em>and elsewhere.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/music/2022/6/7/23157824/kate-bush-running-up-that-hill-stranger-things-billboard-chartsNate Rogers2021-09-09T06:00:00-04:002021-09-09T06:00:00-04:00Music Copyright in the Age of Forgetting
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<p>In the post–“Blurred Lines” legal landscape, artists like Lorde are treading extra carefully when their music ends up sounding similar to someone else’s. But our brains can’t be trusted to notice when we steal an idea—and the problem is likely getting worse.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="SQU8Fu">“Oh my god.” These were the <a href="https://twitter.com/NickfromIslands/status/1405201917861531652">words</a> of Nick Thorburn, the main creative force of the band Islands (and composer of the original <em>Serial </em>theme), when someone on Twitter kindly informed him in June that he had covered someone else’s song without realizing it—and released it. <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4SqCqljoTT5TMSVSco9qF8?si=c3b258fda4a8424d">“Carpenter,”</a> the third track on this year’s Islands album, <em>Islomania</em>, was not, in fact, written by him at all. It was essentially a cover of the 2014 Julie Byrne track <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2kSeNucLoBda0BBLYKurtp?si=93a5428b99fb4a12">“Prism Song,”</a> which, ironically enough, starts with a musical quote, of sorts, referencing a Tim Hardin line that has seeped deep into the Western world’s musical consciousness: <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7w7dNg4CYpVG3qwC4SJbRt?si=53fb2a7f5fc34a33">“If I were a carpenter ...”</a></p>
<p id="oVBXdZ">Thorburn explained in a <a href="https://www.stereogum.com/2151423/islands-julie-byrne-carpenter-prism-song-plagiarism/news/">statement</a> to <em>Stereogum</em> that he had heard “Prism Song” years ago, likely on a streaming playlist, and decided to record a quick version of it on his phone. Then, when digging through his recordings, looking for inspiration in making an album, he found the recording, forgot its origin, and misattributed it to be from his own mind. “‘Oops’ does not suffice,” Thorburn wrote. “As is now blindingly evident, my memory has some pretty severe limits.” He took full responsibility, apologized to Byrne, and <a href="https://pitchfork.com/news/nick-thorburn-apologizes-for-accidentally-covering-julie-byrne-on-new-islands-album/">noted</a> that she would be receiving 100 percent of the publishing rights for the song. (For her part, Byrne didn’t publicly comment; both Thorburn and Byrne declined interview requests for this article.)</p>
<p id="IZwJTK">This is a particularly wild story, but the nature of it is not unheard of—albeit usually in more subtle, complicated forms. The day <em>Islomania </em>came out this past June, Lorde admitted in an <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/lorde-solar-power-interview-zane-lowe-1182759/">interview</a> with Zane Lowe that the “blueprint” of her new single <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3KdoeNlEN0BoAKWzaRLNZa?si=97fe8fb03eb44b2e">“Solar Power”</a> was <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7dSBZzVmyBaLDxT2v3EJHB?si=2b8dd1b37bc549af">“Loaded,”</a> a 1990 song from the genre-hopping Scottish band Primal Scream, which she said she had never heard before writing her song. (The implication here is that Lorde believes she and cowriter Jack Antonoff made something undeniably indebted to “Loaded,” but purely by happenstance.) At some point after “Solar Power” was made, but before it was released, someone in Lorde’s camp brought this issue up, and she addressed it head-on: “I reached out to Bobby [Gillespie, bandleader of Primal Scream], and he was so lovely about it,” Lorde told Lowe. “He was like, ‘You know, these things happen. You caught a vibe that we caught years ago.’ And he gave us his blessing.” </p>
<p id="GIcQC8">There’s a certain poeticism to “Loaded,” of all songs, being the one caught up in an originality discussion in 2021. The seven-minute ode to, well, getting loaded, was a defining hit in the bustling early-’90s dance scene in the U.K.—but it almost didn’t get made. Before its release, Primal Scream were struggling to make a name for themselves as a more traditional rock band, and, desperate to mix things up, they encouraged unproven DJ Andrew Weatherall to remix a song for them. </p>
<p id="FAW3ir">Weatherall, who was “full of piss and vinegar, full of the confidence of ignorance,” as he <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq1zZIfxoFo">put it to the BBC</a> a few years before his death in 2020, chose the song <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3pFoRyXyPuCFQ3L5Z2mlp8?si=73f543eca5bd4dca">“I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have,”</a> a Stones-y ballad from 1989’s <em>Primal Scream</em>, and started messing around. The remix he put together was so adventurous and infectious that it could only be heard as a stand-alone work—an entirely singular song that, to this day, many listeners have no idea is a reimagining of another song. If there were ever a good example in modern pop that illustrates how fluid and unpredictable songwriting can be, it’s this one. Of <em>course</em> Bobby Gillespie gave Lorde his blessing. </p>
<p id="kYRz7J">Yet there was still a reason that people around Lorde brought up the issue in the first place. Historically, claims of copyright infringement—the legal issue that covers plagiarism of protected works—in music have tended to occur in situations where the melodic overlap is pretty sizable. But a 2015 ruling shook up the industry’s understanding of what constitutes a legitimate case, when Robin Thicke’s no. 1 hit, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/5PUvinSo4MNqW7vmomGRS7?si=a9e7538f906942fb">“Blurred Lines,”</a> was found to have infringed upon Marvin Gaye’s classic <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/63sL08MaoxkIvyPRCu13Ig?si=938dc91523f14733">“Got to Give It Up”</a> despite the lack of a traditionally compelling musicological argument that the two songs were egregiously similar. (Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that “Blurred Lines” <em>was</em> inspired on a production level by “Got to Give It Up,” something cowriter Pharrell Williams <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfJkRXcXZQQ">plainly admitted</a>.) This was a controversial decision, upheld on appeal in 2018, which many felt established a troubling legal precedent: that a song could be guilty of plagiarizing another song’s “feel.” It created a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/business/media/plagiarism-music-songwriters.html">culture</a> of <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/music-copyright-lawsuits-chilling-effect-935310/">fear</a>, with songwriters and executives unsure of what is allowed in the act of writing and recording a song.</p>
<p id="6Ix60F">“People are more concerned than they were before,” says Joe Bennett, a professor at the Berklee College of Music and a forensic musicologist—someone who is hired to offer an expert opinion, either privately or in court, about similarities between two pieces of music. “I get a lot of calls from clients [lately] who want me to do a bit of preemptive work to just check that something isn’t too close to an earlier work, often inadvertently.”</p>
<p id="fyyDcc">We’re now squarely within a new era of music copyright litigation, signaled by a steep wave of fresh cases and settlements arriving on top of what was already a steadily rising tide. But while plagiarism has never been a larger industry issue than it is today, it also has never been more poorly defined. And given the way songwriters often borrow ideas without realizing that they’re borrowing—a documented artistic tendency that is likely increasing in frequency in our chaotic online world—this latest squall of disputes may be just the beginning of an even larger storm.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="cE2UjK"><q>“You can find musical similarities in a song by Marvin Gaye and a symphony by Beethoven if you stretch things far enough.” —Charles Cronin, founder of the Music Copyright Infringement Resource</q></aside></div>
<p id="B1YJXY">At least in the case of “Solar Power,” though, even if Primal Scream theoretically wanted to pursue litigation, the group probably would have a tough—if not impossible—road to legal victory. That’s not because the songs aren’t distinctly kindred; the outro/chorus of “Solar Power” and the main progression of “Loaded,” adjusted for key, can essentially be played over each other. But simple, repeating chord patterns (a.k.a. chord loops) like this one are, according to Bennett, not copyright protectable. “There are a bunch of chord loops that exist in the world,” Bennett explains, “and they’re standard building blocks that songwriters use.” </p>
<p id="8MNWAt">There are other details that might raise the eyebrows of those comparing the songs, such as the similar instrumentation in both—and the fact that the cover of <em>Screamadelica</em>, the album with “Loaded” on it, features an illustration of a sun, when Lorde has referred to <em>Solar Power </em>as being a <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/lorde-hot-ones-1204381/">“sun-worship album.”</a> (OK, that one’s a stretch.) But in terms of “Loaded” being able to win against “Solar Power” in a hypothetical court of law, Bennett thinks it would be “far away from” a lock. </p>
<p id="gARDxR">Part of the issue is also that it’s not clear how much of <em>any</em> aspect of “Loaded,” a melodically simple song with clear lineage to a variety of previous songs and genres, is undisputedly copyright protected in the first place: “Most of it is not,” says Charles Cronin, a lawyer and professor who founded the <a href="https://blogs.law.gwu.edu/mcir/">Music Copyright Infringement Resource</a>, a comprehensive database of music copyright litigation maintained by George Washington University. “[‘Loaded’ is similar to ‘Solar Power’] rhythmically, yeah, and it has similar sounds. But musically, no, in part because I would argue that there’s so little original musical expression in either of them.”</p>
<p id="U5MAGq">Adding credence to this belief is the fact that “Solar Power” also has been noted for its comparability to <em>another </em>early-’90s hit: George Michael’s <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1SKApv6ZfJ9bkUxeRObJEF?si=352c82f39d494558">“Freedom! ’90.”</a> (And that’s not even to mention the <a href="https://youtu.be/MirTynsEhFQ?t=130">Lorde-acknowledged</a> debt that “Solar Power” has to Robbie Williams’s 2000 song <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7oQSevUCbYs4QawXTHQVV1?si=60c710aede4c49a1">“Rock DJ,”</a> which features a reference to A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It?” that is prominently echoed in Lorde’s song.) Perhaps Lorde directly addressed the connection to “Loaded” simply because it came before George Michael’s hit—“Freedom! ’90” was released a mere eight months later, in October 1990—but the overlaps here also cannot be denied. </p>
<p id="55iebW">Broadly speaking, it’s the same chord loop and the same sunny, celebratory textures featured in “Loaded,” “Freedom! ’90,” and “Solar Power.” But at the center of all this is the fact that the progression and the “feel” in these songs is firmly rooted within the gospel tradition, and doesn’t belong to any of them. As Rembert Browne <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2016/12/george-michaels-freedom-90-is-a-power-song.html">noted in <em>Vulture</em></a> in 2016, when explaining why he had such fondness for “Freedom! ’90” as a child: “It sounded like church.”</p>
<p id="3jE2HH">The week after “Solar Power” came out, George Michael’s estate issued a <a href="https://www.georgemichael.com/news/article/#news-36772">statement</a>: “We are aware that many people are making a connection between [‘Freedom! ’90’ and ‘Solar Power’], which George would have been flattered to hear, so on behalf of one great artist to a fellow artist, we wish her every success with the single.”</p>
<p id="ujRZTf"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="36B54k">Lorde’s cautious approach here is not an isolated incident in the contemporary music industry. In 2017, to cite another example, the group Right Said Fred were approached by Taylor Swift’s camp in advance of the release of her single <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1P17dC1amhFzptugyAO7Il?si=5fb81fa399b545ea">“Look What You Made Me Do.”</a> Swift’s song bore a distinct resemblance to their shirt-stripping manifesto <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2WElktskrNJEwgpp5Vouxk?si=1c6d92f571f74cc5">“I’m Too Sexy,”</a> and so a <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/right-said-fred-on-taylor-swifts-cynical-look-what-you-made-me-do-205808/">deal</a> was made for an undisclosed percentage of the songwriting credit. (In the case of “Solar Power,” Primal Scream has not been given songwriting credit or any other form of compensation—a detail confirmed by a representative for Bobby Gillespie; a representative for Lorde did not reply to a request for comment.) Even if musicologists think a song is likely in the clear, as Bennett and Cronin believe with “Solar Power,” there’s still a level of concern floating around industry circles that’s led to an increase in advance consultations, agreements, and deals, just to avoid any possible future headache. (If you were wondering how a group like Animal Collective managed to get a writing credit on Beyoncé’s <em>Lemonade</em>, <a href="https://pitchfork.com/news/65028-beyonce-producer-boots-explains-animal-collective-credit-on-6-inch/">now you know</a>.)</p>
<p id="SiGg7b">There also has been an increasing trend of artists quietly receiving secondary writing credits for successful songs after they’ve been released. That was the case with Mark Ronson’s <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/32OlwWuMpZ6b0aN2RZOeMS?si=c3a6ee82c207495e">“Uptown Funk,”</a> when five performers and producers behind the Gap Band’s <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0lGUhQpPTwwGCxsMaH8hdW?si=2388187e91504fbd">“Oops Upside Your Head”</a> were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/01/mark-ronson-uptown-funk-gains-five-new-writers">formally added</a> as songwriters to Ronson’s no. 1 song in 2015 without a trial. The move brought the total number of “Uptown Funk” songwriters to <em>eleven</em>, because the decision had been made to preemptively add Trinidad James and producer Devon Gallaspy, whose <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0pgeVJrdNok4KhbiM58ayZ?si=829f8a9ef86b4714">“All Gold Everything”</a> had inspired the song’s post-chorus bridge.</p>
<p id="1LFVNR">And then just a few weeks back, it was <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/9619456/olivia-rodrigo-good-4-u-credits-paramore-misery-business/">revealed</a> that Hayley Williams and Josh Farro from Paramore were suddenly being given writing credit for Olivia Rodrigo’s no. 1 song <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4ZtFanR9U6ndgddUvNcjcG?si=9dec142d49114718">“Good 4 U”</a> due to its similarity to <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6SpLc7EXZIPpy0sVko0aoU?si=9b2280216fe94065">“Misery Business.”</a> The move followed <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/olivia-rodrigo-adds-taylor-swift-st-vincent-jack-antonoff-co-writes-to-deja-vu-1193659/">two<em> </em>other incidents</a> in which people in Taylor Swift’s camp were given writing credits for songs on Rodrigo’s debut album, <em>Sour</em>; one because of a deliberate interpretation that was settled preemptively and the other because of a post-release agreement. (Rodrigo faced some additional public speculation because the riff of her song <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6SRsiMl7w1USE4mFqrOhHC?si=5b752fc7e8ad4316">“Brutal”</a> resembles that of Elvis Costello’s <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0JgMHia55MBfhfqZIRi3kF?si=128415493eb94ba3">“Pump It Up”</a>; Costello himself dismissed that matter <a href="https://twitter.com/ElvisCostello/status/1409567943520931847">on Twitter:</a> “It’s how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy. That’s what I did.”)</p>
<p id="40XisH">“It has been, and a little bit remains, the Wild West,” says Robert Jacobs, an attorney who specializes in music copyright cases. (In April, Jacobs <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/dj-marshmello-wins-lawsuit-exploring-two-hits-remix-rights-4164760/">won</a> a prominent case for his client, Marshmello, whose song <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2dpaYNEQHiRxtZbfNsse99?si=0be000ddcc1f4852">“Happier”</a> was the target of a lawsuit by Arty, a Russian DJ, who claimed copyright infringement of his <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4jEB3KAsjmNSQGQmQk4Ii8?si=83d65e6b2e994d2e">2014 remix of OneRepublic’s “I Lived”</a>; Arty’s attorney was Richard Busch, who also represented the Marvin Gaye estate in the “Blurred Lines” case, and who rose to power in the early 2000s as a <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2006/11/the-shady-one-man-corporation-that-s-destroying-hip-hop.html">leading figure</a> in a wave of sampling lawsuits.) “I think since ‘Blurred Lines’ especially,” Jacobs says, “people have been more willing to go and attain licenses or forgo certain uses based on it.”</p>
<p id="nNhunf">Jacobs points out that copyright cases are <em>sui generis</em>, meaning each case is assessed on its own merits, without clear benchmarks for what makes a valid claim. That slippery setup, mixed with Robin Thicke being forced to pay up, has led to a noticeable uptick of all kinds of cases. “It’s incredible what I’ve seen,” he says. </p>
<p id="k5AAG6">Recent copyright infringement victories for <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/led-zeppelin-stairway-to-heaven-copyright-infringement-ruling-appeal-964530/">Led Zeppelin</a> and <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/katy-perry-dark-horse-copyright-win-appeal-969009/">Katy Perry</a> have cooled some heads, but “Blurred Lines” continues to loom, particularly as Donald Glover appears headed to trial in defense of his Childish Gambino song <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0b9oOr2ZgvyQu88wzixux9?si=6a09c6cf0a444508">“This Is America,”</a> which is <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/legalentertainment/2021/05/17/childish-gambinos-this-is-america-caught-in-wave-of-music-copyright-lawsuits/">accused</a> of having copied Kidd Wes’s <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/79xj4hjZ108WvSsvPhNzGV?si=9c3c4dd8f2294c89">“Made in America.”</a> Most experts seem to agree that the musical similarities in the paradigm-shifting “Blurred Lines” case were not substantial enough for a conviction, but Judith Finell, a musicologist who testified on behalf of the Gaye estate, doesn’t think the takeaway should be that a similar “feel” can get you in hot water. (And as Gillespie phrased it to Lorde, “vibe” is at the center of the conversation about “Solar Power.”)</p>
<p id="qyd8ke">“That’s what the press says, but that’s not accurate at all,” Finell says. “The Marvin Gaye case was actually a very classic case of melodic and other kinds of imitation of the composition, and it was proven through very careful analysis and transcription of every single note and every single accompaniment line and bass line and lyric.” Finell equates the current situation to one in which people have been stealing cars for years without getting caught, and now that one car thief has been penalized, “all the people who’ve stolen cars are getting worried because they see it’s being enforced.” </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="ISWcRf"><q>“You can easily say I’ve never heard it before when you might’ve heard it a dozen times and you just can’t remember.” —Gayle Dow, psychology professor</q></aside></div>
<p id="IF3YH2">Charles Cronin, the attorney/professor, doesn’t buy it: “I don’t believe [the Gaye estate’s musicological argument] for a moment,” he says. “You can find musical similarities in a song by Marvin Gaye and a symphony by Beethoven if you stretch things far enough.”</p>
<p id="RztMt5">Cronin’s belief that the situation has gotten out of control stems from the fact that, in the scope of the country’s history, music copyright cases are on a constant rise, and have “exploded” in recent years. In the 19th century, music copyright cases in the U.S. were few and far in between, and were essentially claims of outright-stolen sheet music. Even heading into the recorded music era, songs were frequently indebted to other works—just listen to something like Hank Williams’s <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4WThTuQ9hOeJWolUtHwkQy?si=4f2f6f0338374204">“Move It on Over”</a> and Bill Haley’s <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/1uRKT2LRANv4baowBWHfDS?si=f9540e332ad84da2">“Rock Around the Clock”</a>—but attitudes toward what was a fair re-interpretation were far less strict. Over time, however, the types of cases widened, and leniency waned. (Also not a coincidence: There was suddenly much more money up for grabs.)</p>
<p id="IWzo26">And then everything changed in 1976. That was when George Harrison was found guilty of “subconsciously” copying the 1963 Chiffons song <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2Bs1Lw9LX8hBm70t1iGdlh?si=82afc6b2c456449e">“He’s So Fine”</a> with his 1970 song <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0qdQUeKVyevrbKhAo0ibxS?si=dcdeed5d08204924">“My Sweet Lord,”</a> which was the top-selling single of 1971 in the U.K. (The record that “My Sweet Lord” appears on, <em>All Things Must Pass</em>, received a 50th-anniversary reissue last month.) No one wanted to believe that Harrison, a goddamn Beatle, had deliberately plagiarized the iconic girl group, but it was difficult to deny that the songs were, melodically and structurally, very much the same. And it’s not like Harrison could claim to have never heard his accidental source material on this one; “He’s So Fine” had hit no. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, where it stayed for four weeks.</p>
<p id="1LXnsC">The ruling brought up a strange question: Can you be held accountable for a crime that you didn’t realize you were committing? The answer is <em>sort of</em>: “Even though <em>intent</em> doesn’t matter,” says Jacobs, the attorney, “you still need to prove access.” </p>
<p id="lL3NzD">In this case, Harrison had plenty of access to the song—and in his 2015 biography, <em>George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door</em>, Graeme Thomson notes that several people around Harrison during the writing and recording of “My Sweet Lord” claim to have directly brought the connection to “He’s So Fine” up to him. (“Could it have been that, as a Beatle, Harrison simply thought he could get away with it?” Thomson asks in the book.) Regardless, the neverending legal battle was grueling for Harrison, who called it the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=pT8zEAAAQBAJ&pg=PR81&lpg=PR81&dq=It+was+the+worst+experience+of+my+life,+taking+my+guitar+to+court,+trying+to+explain+how+I+write+a+song.+george+harrison&source=bl&ots=n-zRhcvxwy&sig=ACfU3U2bdT40gYbuTPzB5-DiuM6Ac6Iexw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjL7I7uuKzyAhWaFjQIHZu4D08Q6AF6BAgMEAM#v=onepage&q=It%20was%20the%20worst%20experience%20of%20my%20life%2C%20taking%20my%20guitar%20to%20court%2C%20trying%20to%20explain%20how%20I%20write%20a%20song.%20george%20harrison&f=false">“worst experience of my life,”</a> and <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/a-conversation-with-george-harrison-190204/">told <em>Rolling Stone</em></a> that he subsequently struggled to write music in the years after. (He parodied the situation in his 1976 song <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0eAcyscDIMa94ZxSwNfVZE?si=f343eda275244fbc">“This Song.”</a>)</p>
<p id="6EY3fG">“I think what happens is we’re used to half-listening,” says Alan S. Brown, a now-retired psychology professor who, in 1989, spearheaded the first formal <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1989-24862-001">case study</a> of cryptomnesia, the clinical term for accidental plagiarism. “If music is playing in the background on a radio station, it may float into your brain and stick there without you fully processing it. And then you pull it back later.” Through a series of tests asking subjects to come up with original information within a group setting, Brown’s research demonstrated that it’s common for people to copy others without being aware of it.</p>
<p id="dYwmC8">This research was expanded upon in 2015 by Gayle Dow, a psychology professor at Christopher Newport University, who implemented a study specifically about the way cryptomnesia affects the creative process. Dow asked subjects to do a variety of imaginative tasks—such as drawing a sketch of an alien—and found that, when people were given an example beforehand, they often copied some aspect of what they were shown. “It’s like a cognitive illusion that we fall prey to,” she says. </p>
<p id="xj2hf6">Brown believes the phenomenon of cryptomnesia is likely more acute in the creative world than it is in our day-to-day lives “because [artists are actively] searching for unique ideas.” Essentially, when drawing into the deep, murky songwriting well, musicians could be tapping into songs that they may not be consciously aware of. This is a likely explanation for how Sam Smith’s 2014 hit <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/5Nm9ERjJZ5oyfXZTECKmRt?si=9348277f144a4888">“Stay With Me”</a> ended up strongly resembling Tom Petty’s 1989 radio staple <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7gSQv1OHpkIoAdUiRLdmI6?si=db94dc71bba94eeb">“I Won’t Back Down,”</a> a situation that was <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tom-petty-on-sam-smith-settlement-no-hard-feelings-these-things-happen-35541/">settled out of court</a>. (Another possibility when two songs sound the same is that they’re the result of what lawyers call “independent creation,” which more or less means it’s a coincidence; this, again, is what Lorde claims to have happened with “Solar Power” and “Loaded.”) “You can easily say I’ve never heard it before,” says Dow, “when you might’ve heard it a dozen times and you just can’t remember.”</p>
<p id="nlV9Fx">Cryptomnesia has been a recognized part of human behavior for over a hundred years; one notable example is from 1892, when Helen Keller, a miraculously talented writer, was <a href="https://www.perkins.org/the-frost-king-incident/">found to have plagiarized</a> a short story she wrote at the age of 11—an error that is generally accepted as having been accidental. But it seems that, as modern life continues to pick up speed, and humans ingest massive amounts of new information every day, the instances are accelerating. “Right now I have about seven tabs open—it’s too much!” says Dow. “The more that we process, the less likely we are going to be able to monitor the sources. So cryptomnesia should statistically increase.” </p>
<p id="48P2YP">Brown agrees: “With the pandemic, we’ve just had a year and a half of sitting in front of a screen,” he considers. “Everything is kind of merging together a little bit, and it’s sort of becoming the same colors. And that is going to make things more challenging.”</p>
<p id="hMu1Op"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="mQ5fkI">An interesting detail regarding the Islands–Julie Byrne mishap is that “Carpenter” isn’t a strict cover of “Prism Song.” Thorburn’s work uses the distinct foundation of Byrne’s song—a lovely folk tune about how frighteningly easy it could’ve been to have never met someone important to you. But he also expands on it with his own lyrics in the second verse, in addition to a sparkling new outro. It’s as if Byrne and Thorburn had collaborated in a dream.</p>
<p id="6eDen3">Maybe if Thorburn, a well-respected figure in indie rock, had a team of people around him in the same way that Lorde does, the accident would’ve been noticed by someone before the album was regrettably printed without Byrne’s deserved credit. And maybe at that point it would’ve been decided to not release the song at all. That would have been a shame. “Carpenter–Prism Song,” as it is now officially known, is likely the result of an honest mistake—it seems astronomically implausible that Thorburn would’ve stolen that much of a song deliberately—and is ultimately an excellent piece of music; the world is a better place with the song in it. Just as importantly, it’s also a fascinating window into the way our brains work—and perhaps a harbinger of the type of pitfalls that await us with rising frequency in the hyper-digital future.</p>
<p id="h4x9rN">At one point during the “He’s So Fine” scandal, George Harrison fantasized about the invention of a machine that you “can just play any new song into ... and [it] will say, ‘Sorry’ or, ‘Yes, OK,’” according to <em>Behind the Locked Door.</em> He was frustrated by the ambiguity of what crossed the line into plagiarism, and, in his memoir, <em>I Me Mine</em>, wrote that he didn’t “understand how the courts aren’t filled with similar cases—as 99 percent of the popular music that can be heard is reminiscent of something or other.” He had a point. As Bennett, the Berklee musicologist, puts it, in the world of songwriting, “we mostly keep coming back to fishing in this same pond.” (In 2000, just before his death, Harrison <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0oxHHrFsVjEznaaqd3uS1P?si=9c9f36ca6fee4504">re-recorded</a> “My Sweet Lord” with an adjusted vocal melody to better distinguish it from “He’s So Fine”; he said in a promotional interview that he “enjoyed singing the song again and not singing those notes in that order.”)</p>
<p id="swKP1S">It turns out that the technology Harrison was fantasizing about is actively being developed—most prominently <a href="https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-just-invented-ai-technology-that-will-police-songwriter-plagiarism/">by Spotify</a>, which recently filed a patent request for a music-recognition tool that goes beyond what’s currently available from services like <a href="https://www.shazam.com/">Shazam</a> and <a href="https://www.midomi.com/">SoundHound</a>. [<em>Editor’s note: Spotify is the parent company of </em>The Ringer.] But even if a program is developed that can effectively pick up on subtle musical similarities between a new song and an old song, it won’t be able to simply say “Sorry” or “Yes, OK.” That will remain impossible as long as the American legal system isn’t totally clear about what constitutes copyright infringement—about what aspects of someone’s work make it wholly “unique.” “I’ve been close to this field for maybe 20 years now,” says Bennett, “and I haven’t really gotten any closer to answering that question: ‘What is a song?’”</p>
<p id="T9fBLm">Pushing aside the floating definition of what makes a song, anyway, and what defines original work, music copyright cases are still continuing to multiply, with no sign of slowing down anytime soon. Ed Sheeran alone has been implicated in <em>four</em> separate <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-music-ed-sheeran/ed-sheeran-must-face-plagiarism-claim-judge-idUSKBN2BM2YN">copyright</a> <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-39556351">issues</a> in the past few years, <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/7735550/ed-sheeran-tlc-no-scrubs-writers-shape-of-you-credits">two</a> of <a href="https://www.nme.com/news/music/ed-sheeran-blocked-from-receiving-shape-of-you-royalties-amid-ongoing-copyright-battle-2542688">them</a> related to the same song, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7qiZfU4dY1lWllzX7mPBI3?si=a838ce2715e64d14">“Shape of You.”</a> And with every song a click away, and all of us swirling around in a soup of neverending media, the ability to reasonably use independent creation as a defense is becoming more difficult by the minute. “As long as we’re a country that believes in compensating people for their work and their contributions,” says Finnell, the musicologist, “I don’t see how [the high level of cases is] going to go away.”</p>
<p id="Uq9qCN">Looking at the state of things, then, it’s not hard to understand why pop stars like Lorde are being advised to seek clearance ahead of time, out of an abundance of caution. The worst that happens in that case is that someone like Gillespie asks for a share of songwriting credit, and all parties move on without a painful and expensive trial.</p>
<p id="vdZRi5">Gayle Dow recommends that everyone remain especially vigilant in keeping track of their information sources these days in order to avoid committing any egregious accidental plagiarism. But to some degree, it will always be a screwup that’s impossible to totally avoid, particularly for anyone trying to produce something creative, like a song. “Cryptomnesia in itself could be viewed as [a component of] creativity,” she says. </p>
<p id="XlHZO4">One artist who has proved notably adept at avoiding accidental plagiarism is Paul McCartney, who, despite having written hundreds of the most scrutinized songs of all time, has never had a noteworthy, public copyright dispute directed at him. (The closest <a href="https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/ob-la-di-ob-la-da-beatles-plagiarism-controversy.html/">instance</a> was when an acquaintance claimed to have ownership of the phrase “ob-la-di, ob-la-da”; the matter was settled out of court.) McCartney has likely avoided this trouble partially because of his inherent paranoia of it: In 1963, when he woke up from a dream with the melody to <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3BQHpFgAp4l80e1XslIjNI?si=b3458fddacea4c54">“Yesterday”</a> in his head, he was convinced he must have stolen it from somewhere. Only after checking extensively with industry figures did he accept that “Yesterday” was truly his creation. </p>
<p id="3Bzz8l">McCartney also looked out for those around him. When John Lennon showed up with the initial idea for <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2EqlS6tkEnglzr7tkKAAYD?si=71c9aa0b5e5b44da">“Come Together,”</a> a song inspired by Chuck Berry’s <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4xPPWZKEMw6u2cfmqcswSP?si=450e324cdf1f48c1">“You Can’t Catch Me,”</a> McCartney pointed out to him that it was <em>too </em>inspired by it. “I said, ‘Look, it’s a great song, I love it,’” McCartney remembers in the new Hulu series <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2021/7/16/22579638/paul-mccartney-321-hulu-rick-rubin"><em>McCartney 3, 2, 1</em></a><em>. </em>“‘But we gotta do something to get away from that.’”</p>
<p id="5oNYTu">Moving it into a lower gear with his iconic bassline, McCartney helped restyle the song significantly—and yet, it still landed Lennon in a legal battle. The saga was drawn out and bizarre, and ended up with a settlement in the form of Lennon agreeing to record three covers of songs owned by the same publisher as “You Can’t Catch Me.” </p>
<p id="CtaaJk">It’s a shame that it got nasty, and maybe the whole mess could have been avoided by Lennon simply calling up Berry and asking for his blessing. (Or cutting him a check.) Any way you look at it, though, Berry does deserve some credit for “Come Together”; you can hear his original verse melody in the song, and the “here come ol’ flat-top” line is almost directly lifted. But 50-plus years later, no reasonable person would hear the final result of “Come Together” as being anything other than the work of true originals.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="mBevdm">“That’s a nice fact of music,” McCartney says at one point in the Hulu series. “Even though you’re inspired by something, it’s going to sound like you.” </p>
<p id="15xCtQ"><a href="https://twitter.com/nate_rgrs"><em>Nate Rogers</em></a><em> is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in the </em>Los Angeles Times<em>, </em>The Washington Post<em>, </em>Stereogum, <em>and elsewhere.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/music/2021/9/9/22663301/music-plagiarism-copyright-infringement-lorde-olivia-rodrigo-blurred-linesNate Rogers2021-03-11T06:20:00-05:002021-03-11T06:20:00-05:00What’s Next for Nico Walker, the Former Heroin-Addicted Bank Robber Who Inspired ‘Cherry’?
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<p>After a bestselling debut novel, ‘Cherry,’ and a major motion picture adaptation by the Russo brothers, one of the literary scene’s brightest new stars is trying to prove that his success wasn’t a fluke. But first he has to adapt to life outside of a cell.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="5LOitH">Nico Walker is marching in circles around his house, thinking back on the time that someone tried to stab him with a pencil shank in prison. “Believe it or not, it was over algebra,” he says, elaborating that he was a GED tutor while incarcerated, teaching his fellow inmates, some of whom had short fuses. “He fuckin’ fortunately missed when he took the swipe, because he was trying to bury the motherfucker in me.” </p>
<p id="sIaCGh">A brief pause—a brief wash of the reality of someone attempting to kill him. “But anyway,” he says, shifting the tone, “he ended up having every fucking tooth kicked out of his head on the yard a little bit later,” because he was “putting on airs” about who he was, Walker explains, matter of fact. “It sucked because one of the guys who kicked his fucking head in was the top scorer on our soccer team—and we [lost him] in the playoffs. And we didn’t win.”</p>
<p id="Pyd3rr">This roller-coaster ride of an anecdote is classic Nico—morose, blasé, hysterical, and, to some, probably a little offensive. It’s all the components you’ll find in <em>Cherry</em>, Walker’s 2018 semi-autobiographical debut novel, which he wrote while in prison and which serves as a road map for how he got there in the first place. </p>
<p id="JunFF6">The story is as hard to believe as it is impossible to make up: Walker served in the Iraq War as a U.S. Army medic, and developed a devastating case of PTSD; after spiraling into heroin addiction upon return to his native Cleveland, he picked up the hobby of robbing banks. Ten of them. He was caught after a police chase, which ended with him crashing his car, breaking two bones in his back. In 2012, a somewhat sympathetic judge sentenced him to 11 years in federal prison, where he arrived to serve out his term in a wheelchair.</p>
<p id="taRrZF">“I hope it doesn’t bother you that I’m pacing around,” he says over a video call on his phone. Walker is speaking from Oxford, Mississippi, where he’s been living since being let out slightly ahead of schedule—into a halfway house in the fall of 2019, and on supervised release in the spring of 2020. His hair is longer than the military/prison crew cut he’s had for most of his adult life, and, clearly appreciating the newfound freedom of stylistic expression, he’s also adorned with mascara and a soft blue eyeshadow. </p>
<p id="QQPt0p">Over a button-up and tie, the white sweater he’s wearing reads “Porn Carnival” in sequined cursive—a promotional item from Rachel Rabbit White’s 2019 poetry book of the same name. The sweater was lent to him by White, who’s occasionally in the background of the video call; the couple got engaged last year, and White relocated to Oxford. (They’re hoping to move to New York together sometime soon.)</p>
<p id="MSj3Ei">Walker lights his first of several cigarettes during our conversation, which is an action I learn to value, because it means the twitchy figure on my screen is about to sit down for at least a few minutes. “They wouldn’t let me smoke in the Apple interview,” he says, taking a drag of a Winston Red. “Monsters.”</p>
<p id="5Zn833">The lighting gear is still in the living room from the promotional interview he did earlier in the day for Apple TV+, the distributor of the film version of <em>Cherry</em>, the production of which Walker had essentially nothing to do with. This detachment may well have been the way he wanted it, but it wasn’t like there was any other choice: When the film rights were officially sold, for a cool million bucks, Walker was still very much incarcerated. (The negotiation slowed down at one point because he ran out of allocated phone minutes.) He had to take others’ word for it that Joe and Anthony Russo, the filmmakers eager to make the adaptation, were the directors of the highest-grossest film ever made (<em>Avengers: Endgame</em>), and that they wanted Spider-Man himself (OK, Tom Holland) to play the lead, a thinly veiled portrayal of Nico.</p>
<p id="61iabH">“I had been in jail since before the fucking <em>Avengers</em> ever happened,” Walker says in his gravelly drawl. “I went to jail when Tobey Maguire was Spider-Man. I didn’t know who Tom Holland was.”</p>
<p id="za3sP3"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="BJv8Mg">Walker is now 35 years old, and has been to hell and back several times over. His early years, however, were as charmed as one can hope, growing up in a well-to-do family in suburban Cleveland. It was a decision to join the military at 19 that changed his direction for the worse.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="tKrJfQ"><q>“I had been in jail since before the fucking <em>Avengers</em> ever happened. I went to jail when Tobey Maguire was Spider-Man. I didn’t know who Tom Holland was.” — Nico Walker</q></aside></div>
<p id="yew5YO">“I knew people who had [served in the Middle East] and were going over there,” he says, trying to pinpoint his rationale for joining. “If I was gonna be guilty in this just by filling up a gas tank, living in America, and having that communal guilt, I was gonna go through it. I was gonna put my ass on the motherfucking line.”</p>
<p id="YFwIGg">Enlisted as a “health care specialist,” he figured he would be stationed in something like a hospital, helping people. “I kind of naively thought—and I admit naively—that if I were a medic, it was like you weren’t condoning the killing,” he says. “I didn’t even know that medics carried guns. I didn’t do a lot of research.” </p>
<p id="nD1gW4">The reality was much more severe than he had hoped: In 2005, Walker was attached to an infantry unit deployed into the so-called “Triangle of Death,” south of Baghdad, during the most deadly phase of the war. For a full year, he was sent out nearly every day—sometimes multiple times a day—on highly dangerous patrol missions, regularly having to place bodies, or what was left of them, in bags. And to make matters worse, it didn’t even seem like the Americans were doing any good.</p>
<p id="kKhdVR">“You got there and you were like, ‘Man, this is kind of fake,’” he says. “It was just, like, go out there and piss these people off until somebody shoots at you or blows something up. And then go fuck some more shit up until they do it again. We were literally there to create conflict so they could report on it at home, and justify more fucking spending.”</p>
<p id="LUxbyf">By the time Walker returned home in 2007, he was being taken apart emotionally by his experiences; a forensic psychiatrist, Pablo Stewart, would later <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/books/cherry-nico-walker.html">describe</a> him as being “one of the most severely impaired trauma victims” he’d ever seen. Walker tried to go to college via the GI Bill, but flunked out as his addictions were worsening, and his marriage with his first wife, Kara, was disintegrating. Around all this, Walker was the lead singer and songwriter in a Libertines-inspired psychedelic garage rock band named Safari, developing some (well-deserved) interest in the local music scene. </p>
<p id="nC48a1">On the track <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0oElf5KAENC26eqctU00II?si=4Kub-g4KRFOXP10AL_Ai7w">“Banger,”</a> from 2010’s <em>Maybe Tomorrow</em>, Walker sings in a heavily reverbed voice, “So you don’t belong / So you don’t belong / So where do you go?” One verse later, he seems to complicate the issue even more: “Better have some money / Better have some money / Or they’ll get you for sure.” </p>
<p id="q1bRtF">Less than two months after that album came out, Walker began robbing banks as a means to cope with the PTSD—a compulsion he says was driven more by a desire to get out of his own head for a few high-octane minutes at a time than to snag a couple thousand dollars from a modest-sized bank. “If at any point along the way there had been a proper intervention, this wouldn’t have happened,” Stewart, the psychiatrist, told <em>The New York Times</em>. “He found his own cure, and it just happened to be robbing banks.” </p>
<p id="eGBPph">In 2011, a feature about Safari was commissioned by the national music publication <em>Consequence of Sound</em>, but it was killed after Walker’s shocking arrest, which occurred “just days” before the story was scheduled to run, according to journalist Hilary Cadigan. </p>
<p id="C9aUo8">“The older you get the more you see that everybody’s spinning plates, just hanging on by a thread,” Walker was quoted as saying in <a href="http://solapalooza.blogspot.com/2011/07/interview-with-singersongwriterbank.html">the spiked article</a>. “At any moment everything can fall apart.”</p>
<p id="1ORQyH"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="HaUNrt">Walker lives in Oxford to be close to his manager, Matthew Johnson. Johnson has run Fat Possum Records there since the early ’90s, when his original focus was finding (and often coaxing) elder statesmen blues players, like Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside, to release their music with him—and sometimes be managed by him as well. (A fair number of artists on his early roster had been incarcerated at one point or another; Burnside himself served time for killing an intruder on his property.) As the crop of traditional blues talents faded away over time, though, the label’s interest has shifted to accommodate neo-blues acts such as the Black Keys, who broke big after Fat Possum releases like 2004’s <em>Rubber Factory</em>, as well as acts that sound more like Safari.</p>
<p id="xvn9bk">“[He’s] trying to illustrate the evolution of the authentic anarchic howl—from Charley Patton to Eminem,” wrote Jay McInerney in a 2002 <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/02/04/white-man-at-the-door">profile</a> of Johnson in <em>The New Yorker</em>. “He seems to be looking for the anti-Whitmanesque strain of the American voice—the naysayers, the verbal bomb throwers, the primal screamers. His heroes are the antiheroes.”</p>
<p id="nDlD7E">Johnson has developed a reputation for living on his own terms, to say the least (in that <em>New Yorker</em> story, McInerney recalled a time Johnson sold him a car without informing him that said car was stolen), and to be sure, he was tough to get hold of. “Matthew’s not much of an emailer,” a kind voice at the Fat Possum office informs me when I call the label’s front desk, asking for some kind of help wrangling the boss, who was going on several days incommunicado. The label motto is “We’re Trying Our Best,” after all.</p>
<p id="7Q4RDa">But eventually Johnson does get on the phone to talk about his client. “There are very few things I care about,” he says in a sludgy Southern accent, “and this is one of ’em.”</p>
<p id="WKJQYR">Simply put, <em>Cherry </em>wouldn’t exist without Matthew Johnson. After Walker recovered from his back injury (and overcame his heroin addiction cold turkey) in prison, a journalist named Scott Johnson (no relation to Matthew) came to visit him. The 2013 story Scott ended up writing for <em>BuzzFeed</em>, <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/scottbuzz/passing-the-note-is-the-bang-how-a-war-hero-became-a-serial">“How a War Hero Became a Serial Bank Robber,”</a> developed substantial attention, and found its way to Matthew, who took a keen interest. </p>
<p id="mAazzv">“I have a whole fucking bookcase dedicated to bank robbers,” says Matthew Johnson, who is also the co-owner of the indie publishing house Tyrant. “There’s a huge history with war veterans from the Civil War and bank robbery. … They’d never left some shitty county in Tennessee, and then they’d go to, like, Manassas, and 36,000 people would die in one day—they can’t go back and work in a general store. It’s that line from <em>Full Metal Jacket</em>: ‘All he needs is somebody to throw hand grenades at him the rest of his life.’”</p>
<p id="kGyhUj">Johnson, who was not unfamiliar with how to navigate the prison system, got in contact with Walker, and tried to convince him to use his time locked up to hone a new skill. “I was like, ‘Listen, kid, I’m 20 years older than you,’” Johnson remembers. “‘You’re gonna be the fucking asshole at the end of the bar telling somebody what really happened, and people are gonna roll their fucking eyes when they see you. The only way you’re gonna get out of the shadow of your own fucking life is to write this out.’”</p>
<p id="h5Gbmq">At that point, Walker was studying plant propagation, with aims of becoming a gardener. He was tough to convince, even with Johnson’s insistence that he was “leaving a lot of money on the table.” But Johnson persisted, sending books as motivation, and soon Walker was sending back pages, written on a typewriter in the prison law library—though it was not exactly a smooth process.</p>
<p id="7uvz0d">“I was trying to be a smart guy or something,” Walker says, which in essence meant writing “like what a person who writes a book writes a book like.” </p>
<p id="xHoQLJ">“It took us three or four years to do this,” Johnson explains. “It was the most pretentious, horrible horseshit that he wrote when he [first] sent it to me; it was like a Victorian dandy novel. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’”</p>
<p id="I0YDSc">But eventually Walker sent a passage that “had fucking fire in it,” as he said—that was as wry and thoughtful and honest as Walker is in real life—and Johnson seized the opportunity. “I was like, ‘Whoa, this is actually good,’” he says. “‘Stop. Everything before this literally sucks.’”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="rrpua4"><q>“It took us three or four years to do this. It was the most pretentious, horrible horseshit that he wrote when he [first] sent it to me; it was like a Victorian dandy novel. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’” — Matthew Johnson</q></aside></div>
<p id="ScFvO7">Working many early mornings, and using grammar lessons he taught himself as part of GED tutoring, Walker found his voice: something like if there was a forgotten member of J.D. Salinger’s Glass family who grew up with <em>Grand Theft Auto </em>and access to internet pornography.</p>
<p id="0br9rV">“We had a break from the snow and you could see the dormant grass,” a passage reads. “The day was cold but it was forgiving. It was time for a robbery.”</p>
<p id="1jHhtT">Originally planned for a release on Tyrant, where the goal would be to sell a couple thousand copies, the project developed into something that Johnson realized belonged at a bigger publisher. And after painstaking revisions with an editorial team at Knopf, largely having to be communicated over the phone, <em>Cherry</em> was released to widespread acclaim—and landed on bestseller lists. Nico didn’t need to study plant propagation anymore.</p>
<p id="dtHpDf">“Reading it—and I mean this with respect and sincerity—is like watching a naked man shoot Roman candles into the desert at twilight while violently puking on himself,” Jia Tolentino <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2018-in-review/more-books-we-loved-in-2018">wrote</a> about <em>Cherry </em>in <em>The</em> <em>New Yorker</em>, where the book was listed as one of the best of the year. Christian Lorentzen <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2018/07/cherry-might-be-the-first-great-opioid-epidemic-novel.html">said</a> in <em>Vulture</em> that it “might be the first great novel of the opioid epidemic.” </p>
<p id="Aq2Ba1">Still, it wasn’t just the literary crowd that Walker managed to capture. “I think this is one of the best portrayals of Army life in ‘The Suck’ that’s been written,” one Amazon reviewer <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R187MLRX2F4965/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=052543593X">wrote</a> “from a soldier perspective.” “It’s an auspicious first book. Would be very interested in what follows.”</p>
<p id="uO8FTU"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="ye61X0">Rachel Rabbit White first had <em>Cherry</em> recommended to her after she presented on Albertine Sarrazin in a book club. White may have been initially drawn to Sarrazin’s story partially for its parallels to her own—like Sarrazin, who died in Montpellier in 1967, White is a writer who has also been a sex worker. But Walker came up in regard to the manner in which Sarrazin wrote her first two novels: in prison. Soon White found herself reading <em>Cherry</em> on a plane, unable to put the book down. </p>
<p id="tgO0uw">Some time later, after Walker was released to the halfway house, White received a request from a “shady” email address. “I want to buy some poems,” Walker wrote, reaching out about a magazine project that he was spearheading, which was eventually killed due to the pandemic. White asked Giancarlo DiTrapano, co-owner of Tyrant Books, whether this really was Walker, and DiTrapano confirmed that it was. He also told her, maybe half seriously, that she and Walker should date. </p>
<p id="HAFUHS">“I hadn’t had a thought in my head about Nico as any sort of romantic prospect until Gian said that,” White says over the phone. “Though I do remember, when I was reading the book, I looked at the [author] photo of Nico and I thought, ‘He is kind of cute, actually.’”</p>
<p id="Znasys">White and Walker started texting, and then calling, and then FaceTiming, and then she started traveling from New York to see him in Mississippi. It wasn’t long before Walker proposed. “Ah yes the hooker and the bank robber,” White wrote in <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CKuhqOSllNc/">an Instagram post</a> going behind the scenes of their engagement photos. </p>
<p id="IqmaNc">But did she ever worry about getting seriously involved with someone with a past as complicated as Nico’s? “I think to an extent someone could say that about me, too,” she says. “It became clear to me, like, yes, he’s someone I should worry about in this transition—but only in terms of making sure he’s OK.”</p>
<p id="oXweTQ">No small thing, White found herself leading the unique social experiment of catching someone up on a decade of culture they had missed out on. She introduced him to memes and emoji (Walker thought the latter were text “decorations”); she played him Kanye West’s <em>The Life of Pablo</em>; she tried, futilely, to explain what the hell was going on with Lil Wayne these days. “We’d be really drunk, dancing or something, and he’d be like, ‘They did surgery on a grape, babe,’” she says with a laugh.</p>
<p id="OfPZOx">The new romance proved to be an important anchor, because it was an extremely difficult time for Walker at large. “I got out of prison, and the first thing I did was watch my mother die,” he says. (Walker’s mother, Liliana, passed away in February 2020 from leukemia.) “What she went through was really terrible. I’ve seen a lot of shit, and it was some of the worst shit I’ve ever seen in my life.”</p>
<p id="rT3NBh">Walker also had to deal with the destabilizing shock of being back in the outside world after nine years—an outside world that just so happened to be collapsing on itself in a developing pandemic. He was a mess. “I was shaking like a wet dog, man. It was so nerve-racking just to not be in prison anymore,” he remembers. “I was like, ‘I swear, I wish I was in fucking prison,’ because that’s where everybody I knew was. That was where my friends were.”</p>
<p id="lT7VOr">He doesn’t go into much detail—partially, he says, because he doesn’t remember how it started—but there was an incident, in which he says he almost died, and a hospital stint, in which he thinks he caught COVID-19; from there he was sent to a state-sanctioned rehab. </p>
<p id="4T0Dz9">“Humbling” is how he describes the experience, especially in the way it opened his eyes to the magnitude of poverty and addiction issues that have a hold on so many in Mississippi. It was soon after he was cleared for release that White moved to be with him. </p>
<p id="PuNMpX">“One thing about Rachel is she’s always tried to lift me up,” Walker says. “Other people, they try to take from you, and Rachel is not that way.” In a 90-minute conversation, mostly about war and death and prison, this is the only moment when Walker tears up. “Probably my biggest fear—my biggest motivator—is letting her down. I don’t want to let her down.”</p>
<p id="R8rm5V"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="b9popp">Between 2007 and 2017, the number of fatal overdoses in Ohio <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/us/ohio-overdose-deaths-coroners-office.html">quadrupled</a>, largely spurred by the rise of <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/analysis.html">three successive waves</a> of drugs: prescription opioids, followed by heroin, followed by fentanyl. Since 2007, overdoses have been the <a href="https://odh.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/odh/know-our-programs/violence-injury-prevention-program/Drug-overdose/">leading cause</a> of accidental death in the state, overtaking car accidents, and in 2019, the state ranked third-worst in the country in overdose mortality rate, behind Delaware and West Virginia, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm">according</a> to the CDC. </p>
<p id="IvMYQB">“You know all that stuff about <a href="https://ktla.com/news/local-news/refrigerated-trucks-arrive-in-l-a-as-bodies-pile-up-at-hospital-morgues-amid-rising-covid-19-death-toll/">refrigerator trucks</a> during the pandemic back in May or whatever?” Walker asks. “We had the refrigerator trucks in Cleveland for the heroin.”</p>
<p id="EcASH1">In regard to the theme of addiction, <em>Cherry</em>’s Ohio setting is very distinct. And when Walker was deciding whether to agree to sell the film adaptation rights to Joe and Anthony Russo, who are from Cleveland, their shared hometown was at the center of it. </p>
<p id="Pgo2Cj">“I thought he had a real fuckin’ advantage in that,” Walker says, referring to Joe Russo, whom he talked to for “a total of four minutes” on the phone before the contract was signed. “I thought he would have respect for the town and not turn it into some kind of fucking joke or something.” </p>
<p id="qlDIdm">A desire to do the town justice ran both ways. “Reading the book, we were immediately drawn in because it dripped of Cleveland,” Anthony Russo said in an email. “We knew so many kids like Cherry, having attended an all-boys school.” (The book’s protagonist technically has no name, but in the screenplay he’s referred to as “Cherry,” which is military slang for a newbie.) “Joe even worked at the same restaurant as [Nico] did for a time. Growing up, there’s a sense of shame in being from the city that went bankrupt and where the mayor’s hair caught on fire, and we could identify how being from this place of urban decay colored Cherry’s view of himself and the world around him.”</p>
<p id="RA62HO">The film version of <em>Cherry</em>, which was released in theaters last month and hits Apple+ on Friday, was mostly shot on location around Cleveland, and the result is a notably dark, visceral product from filmmakers whose last four directorial projects have been Marvel movies. And unlike those movies, war isn’t depicted as a comic book–inspired action sequence—it’s as bleak and dumb and violent as Walker describes. </p>
<p id="qFTLfF">But the movie does make plenty of other concessions in changing the story and tone to make it palatable to wider audiences, and perhaps sensing this, Walker still hasn’t opted to watch it himself. “I’m just a little possessive of my version of it,” he says. “When I think about the book, I don’t want to see the film. I want to see the book as I remembered it, ’cause it’s the only thing I’ve ever done in my life. So it’s kind of important to me.”</p>
<p id="Dx1kRL"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="XZOJgi">All things considered, Nico Walker is doing a lot better. White says he’s shaking off more and more of the “aura” of prison, and Walker says his drinking is under control, partially due to the help of Suboxone, a drug prescribed to fight a dependence on opioids. He says he still has nightmares, but mindfulness exercises and a form of self-induced exposure therapy (in which he focuses on traumatic incidents, rather than trying to dispel them) is helping his PTSD. </p>
<p id="aBLR5p">“I mean, I worry, but I worry about everybody,” says Johnson. “I think [Nico] just needs to keep working, and sort of let the rough side drag, you know what I mean? I don’t think he’ll ever be Eagle Scout of the Year or somethin’, but hopefully he won’t end up robbing banks again.”</p>
<p id="ap7QA1">Walker is far along on his second novel, which is a third-person story about prison. (He tried writing on a computer but ultimately decided that he preferred the typewriter method he used for <em>Cherry</em>.) White says it’s great (and very funny), but Walker is hesitant to wrap it up and send it in.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="jpClcB"><q>“I don’t think he’ll ever be Eagle Scout of the Year or somethin’, but hopefully he won’t end up robbing banks again.” — Johnson</q></aside></div>
<p id="4HmIHb">“It’s a lot of pressure right now, man,” he says. “I think that I’ve had a lot of luck, and sometimes your luck runs out.” He cites the German expression “<em>einmal ist keinmal</em>,” which translates to “once is never.” “You don’t wanna do anything just to do it,” he explains. “If you’re gonna do it, you need to do something good. Otherwise somebody else needs to have my spot. I don’t need to be doing it.”</p>
<p id="uZz9C3">Johnson thinks he does, though, not just for Walker’s own sake but also for the sake of the public. “Sometimes it’s just, like, you have all this goddamn shit that’s always stuck between the stations,” he says. “I guess people call it reality. It’s always buzzing on and on and every once in a while you can see things that are important. Every once in a while someone like Nico kind of pops up.”</p>
<p id="zTGgYn">Anyway, a million dollars isn’t what it used to be—particularly when $40,000 had to be used to repay the banks that Walker stole from. This was a detail that was reported in the press numerous times in the past few years, always with a vagueness that implied that Walker was sending the money as some kind of personal choice. Out of the goodness of his own heart. I ask him about that and he laughs. </p>
<p id="W6cgEy">“I had to,” he explains. “I had a restitution order.”</p>
<p id="TrInPB">The banks don’t deserve your <em>Cherry</em> money, I say. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="FBcobg">“They definitely don’t, but they got it,” Walker replies. “Fuck ’em.”</p>
<p id="Q9OFnj"><a href="https://twitter.com/nate_rgrs"><em>Nate Rogers</em></a><em> is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in the </em>Los Angeles Times<em>, </em>The Washington Post<em>, </em>Stereogum, <em>and elsewhere.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/2021/3/11/22321723/nico-walker-cherry-movie-author-russo-brothers-adaptationNate Rogers2020-07-28T08:27:52-04:002020-07-28T08:27:52-04:00Taylor Swift, Bon Iver, and the Myth of the Isolation Album
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<p>The cottagecore aesthetic of ‘Folklore’ fits it neatly into the lineage of musical exile narratives, both good and bad. It’s a story we love to indulge in—even if it rarely gets at the true meaning of being alone. </p> <p id="G5OTKF">In 2011, a 27-year-old musician named Tom Ruskin split from Chicago, frustrated with what his life had become. He wanted to get away from the city—from the struggle, from the noise, from the girlfriend who had just dumped him—and out of the creative rut he’d been stuck in. The music career just wasn’t working, so he said to hell with it and headed to a cabin in the backwoods of Illinois. When he left, pretty much all he had with him was an acoustic guitar, a few extra packs of strings, and a four-track recording device. The stage was set to make his masterpiece.</p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="UMRueB"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Taylor Swift Is Singing About More Than Taylor Swift—and Rediscovering Herself in the Process","url":"https://www.theringer.com/music/2020/7/27/21339589/taylor-swift-folklore-review"},{"title":"An FAQ for Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/music/2020/7/24/21337262/taylor-swift-folklore-explained-joe-alwyn-bon-iver"},{"title":"The Taylor Swift ‘Folklore’ Exit Survey","url":"https://www.theringer.com/music/2020/7/24/21337316/taylor-swift-folklore-exit-survey"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="8qQL7H">Tom Ruskin’s music never did reach the audiences he was hoping, because Tom Ruskin is the fictional subject of <a href="https://local.theonion.com/man-just-going-to-grab-guitar-and-old-four-track-go-ou-1819572725">the <em>Onion</em> article</a> “Man Just Going to Grab Guitar and Old Four-Track, Go Out to Cabin in Woods, Make Shittiest Album Anyone’s Ever Heard.” But you were with me for a few sentences because this tale is as well trod in the music world as the Appalachian Trail. </p>
<p id="LMqGxX">The most deliberate touchstone for Ruskin, of course, is Justin Vernon, whose first album as Bon Iver, <em>For Emma, Forever Ago</em>, was put together with more or less the same map as our <em>Onion</em> protagonist. (Vernon was feeling broken in 2006, dealing with a bout of heartbreak in addition to a bout of mononucleosis, so he went to his father’s hunting cabin in remote Wisconsin, where he made the record that vaulted him to stardom.) Stories like his are enduring for understandable reasons: They’re romantic, they’re dramatic, they’re about taking control of your own life back when you feel like you’ve lost it. They’re basically <em>Jerry Maguire</em> walk-out scenes for musicians. </p>
<p id="xmMxjh">So it’s no wonder Vernon showed up on <em>Folklore</em>, Taylor Swift’s wistful walk into the woods released this past Friday. Vernon most notably cowrote and sings on the duet <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4pvb0WLRcMtbPGmtejJJ6y?si=6VzZvVB5T6anjKMxCDLSmA">“Exile,”</a> but his presence feels less relevant to the song itself and more tied to the promotional imagery of the project at large. With an album cover featuring a black-and-white photo of Swift alone in a thicket of trees, pensively staring into the distance, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-a8s8OLBSE">a lead music video</a> that starts off with her alone in a cabin, playing a worn piano next to a fire, it’s clear what vibe she was going for. Enlisting Vernon for a supporting role in a project like this is like getting Pacino to cameo in your mob movie. </p>
<p id="kSidSB">It’s hard to hold a savvy marketing strategy against Swift, and first <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2020/7/27/21339589/taylor-swift-folklore-review">reviews</a> and <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2020/7/24/21337316/taylor-swift-folklore-exit-survey">reactions</a> are proof enough that this angle was, in fact, just what the doctor ordered, career-wise, particularly after the bombastic letdown of 2017’s <em>Reputation </em>and the cotton-candy shrug of 2019’s <em>Lover</em>, both of which won—gasp—zero Grammys. (<em>Folklore</em> is such a sure bet for Album of the Year at the 2021 Grammys that I’ll eat Werner Herzog’s shoe if it doesn’t win.) Musically, it’s an undeniably charming album, and with the overarching sonic influence of the National’s Aaron Dessner, who produced and cowrote much of the music, it’s catnip for a more indie-inclined group of listeners who want something easy to digest during a stomach-churning summer. </p>
<p id="kvHPsb">But as far as neo-transcendentalist packaging goes, there’s legitimate criticism to be made of framing a major label production, with superstar producers and collaborators, alongside a series of lyric videos of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s5xdY6MCeI">blinking lighthouses</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osdoLjUNFnA">figures walking alone on dirt paths</a>. It’s at best a bit silly, at worst straight-up manipulative—and it’s further proof that the most significant obstacle Taylor Swift has yet to hurdle is her unwavering basicness. She didn’t have to go Method and start hunting her own food for the angle to feel sincere, but when you make an album predominantly from <a href="https://parade.com/542224/paulettecohn/see-inside-taylor-swifts-historic-25-million-beverly-hills-mansion/#15-3">your L.A. mansion</a>, featuring a song <a href="https://www.glamour.com/story/taylor-swift-last-great-american-dynasty-lyrics-meaning-rebekah-harkness">about one of your <em>other </em>mansions</a>, it’s going to feel a bit hollow. </p>
<p id="Nvcwdp">To be sure, though, Swift isn’t the first—and definitely will not be the last—to get caught in between her means and her message. Just within the past few years, Justin Timberlake and Kanye West <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2018/2/2/16962956/justin-timberlake-man-of-the-woods-album-review">both</a> <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/6/2/17420710/kanye-west-ye-album-review-kid-cudi-070-shake-valee-nicki-minaj">made</a> the consensus worst-reviewed albums of their careers by releasing their “I’m retreating from the terrors of celebrity to the comforts of nature” albums, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. People can see through the act, especially in the Instagram era, which allows fans to know all too well what kind of lifestyle people like Timberlake and West actually live, as opposed to the one they want to play dress-up for during precisely one corporate-strategized album cycle. For major label artists, at least, if you swing and miss with this kind of approach, you’ll whiff so hard you’ll fall on your ass.</p>
<div class="c-float-left"><div id="6wJ9fl"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/5flRIznp9Cdh8mzskewFb6" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="W0pg36">Even in a pandemic, meditative isolation is an inherently corny and privileged narrative to assign yourself. Part of the reason it felt genuine for Justin Vernon was that he was a nobody when he made <em>For Emma, Forever Ago</em>, and didn’t even intend to release the album at first. (Friends insisted he did, and eventually Jagjaguwar gave it a proper release.) Possibly the greatest isolation album, Bruce Springsteen’s <em>Nebraska</em>, rang true despite Springsteen’s massive success and resources partially because of the fact that it was initially intended to be demos for a full-band album. It was only after the E Street <em>Nebraska</em> sessions didn’t feel right that Springsteen and producer/manager Jon Landau realized the home-recorded Tascam PortaStudio tapes were the thing to release. (Quick side note: @Springsteen please release the full-band <em>Nebraska </em>recordings thank you.)</p>
<p id="STWW5l">But where’s the line between authentic and phony in this conversation? And who can be the judge? Are albums like Skip Spence’s <em>Oar</em> (largely written while Spence was in a mental institution) or Nick Drake’s <em>Pink Moon</em> (written as he drifted into poverty, mental illness, and despair) any less credible as isolation albums because they were ultimately recorded in studios? Does Whitney’s <em>Light Upon the Lake</em> fit the bill if the band never really were alone at the cabin where they wrote it, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGKN6qiDqnk">had each other’s company</a> the whole time? </p>
<p id="5bZ2IO">Looking at the other side of that same coin, consider a work that perhaps has the inaccurate reputation of being an isolation album: Elliott Smith’s self-titled 1995 album, which is being <a href="https://elliottsmith.co/collections/25th-anniversary">reissued</a> next month by Kill Rock Stars for its 25th anniversary. Primarily recorded in the Portland basement of a friend, and known for containing one of the bleakest songs ever recorded in <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6WuRo5MdVrpKCl6lkKIAlp?si=zuAAel8tR5GwnsSkLb5pdQ">“Needle in the Hay,”</a> it’s understandable why people associate this album—and Smith at large—with the image of the loner locked in a room, dramatically writing sad bastard music as a means to get away from it all. </p>
<p id="rf0wAN">But at this point in his life, Smith was still very much stable and in control. The drug metaphors he was singing about in songs like “The White Lady Loves You More” were still mainly just that—metaphors—and he was in a dedicated relationship with photographer JJ Gonson, who took the shot used for the album cover. He wasn’t solemnly crafting his art at the top of Mount Hood; instead, he was actually known to casually write his songs while watching TV.</p>
<p id="CKRSro">Smith was certainly not free of the demons that would later destroy him, and his band Heatmiser was indeed on the verge of breaking up—but he wasn’t alone in this era either. It’s hard to reconcile this idea with a dark song like <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6cldphAAziIM33xCRESP2R?si=CkBNrZUiRnu-0XjQYyHs0g">“Single File,”</a> and yet you can sense the relative happiness in archival interviews and ephemera, like pictures of <a href="https://elliottsmithgallery.tumblr.com/post/147945275281/disneyland-1994">Heatmiser and friends goofing around at Disneyland in 1994</a>. The sound of <em>Elliott Smith </em>is simply not that of someone desperately trying to separate himself from the world, even if it might really, <em>really</em> seem like it when juxtaposed with a scene of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pyBB7y8fDU">Luke Wilson cutting his wrists in <em>The Royal Tenenbaums</em></a>. </p>
<p id="gWgDga">The fact is Smith’s musical ambitions were much more grand than locking himself in his friend’s basement and playing an acoustic guitar. He idolized the Beatles, and the first chance he got he took major label money and made lush, instrument-heavy studio albums like <em>XO</em> and <em>Figure 8</em>. As his life unraveled, he produced full-tilt rock songs like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxLn44KhFrc">“L.A.,”</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXXMKBwzHuc">rearranged</a> songs like “Needle in the Hay” to be performed live in this style as well. But his reputation was already locked in. People wanted him to be the isolation artist more than he wanted to be that artist himself. </p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="7TryL8">
<p id="bp9eOb">In 1977, a 35-year-old musician named Mossy Kilcher decided to self-release her homemade folk songs about living in the Alaskan wilderness—and I promise you I’m not pulling your leg this time. Kilcher’s story is larger than life, but it is true: The child of Yule Kilcher, a Swiss expat who helped make Alaska a state and eventually served in its senate, Mossy was raised in a family homestead outside of the city of Homer, largely separated from the non-natural world. For decades she was one of Alaska’s only female ranchers, and to this day she maintains a homestead lifestyle, running a farm where she takes guests on extended horseback trips. (Notably, her niece is the musician Jewel, and her family is featured in the Discovery Channel reality show <em>Alaska:</em> <em>The Last Frontier</em>.)</p>
<p id="2qOG0H">Folk music was something Kilcher was brought up taking part in, not as a potential vehicle for stardom or Grammys or mansions but as a way to connect with family, nature, and herself. At one point she took her songs to a studio, the result of which became that self-released 1977 collection, <em>Northwind Calling</em>, an album recently <a href="http://www.tompkinssquare.com/archives/1177">reissued</a> by the label Tompkins Square. But she hated the experience of working in a studio—and of being condescended to by the engineer working with her—and ultimately chose to give up pursuing any formal path to being a career artist. “I was a nervous wreck,” Kilcher <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/arts/music/mossy-kilcher-northwind-calling.html">told <em>The New York Times</em></a><em> </em>this month of recording in a studio. “It was intense beyond belief, something I never wanted to do again.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><div id="p7bROc"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/3WU6MXAsqttX0u3VV1d4Au" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="piKGve">Kilcher’s music stands out today because of its virtuousness—its remote origins, its raw, uncommercial nature—and her story gets at an uncomfortable truth that people don’t generally want to acknowledge, which is that these “cabin in the woods” narratives are almost always based on a foundation of lifestyle tourism. They are usually so far from the reality of true solitude, like that of enduring entire winters year after year in near-total seclusion with your family, that it borders on embarrassing. </p>
<p id="IqzVHy">One fact that gets highlighted every now and again about Henry David Thoreau is that, during his stay at Walden Pond, his mother would often do his laundry. There’s been some <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/123162/everybody-hates-henry-david-thoreau">worthwhile defenses</a> of Thoreau’s credibility on this issue, but no matter how you cut it, details like these are effective at wiping away the artifice of “roughing it” that’s often associated with the transcendentalists, as well as their modern-day equivalents in artists like Justin Vernon. (It’s worth pointing out that Vernon’s father brought him cheese, eggs, and beer every 10 days or so during his stay in the family cabin.)</p>
<p id="df3iZU">The practical bottom line of trying to survive off the land, particularly in a ruthless place like Kilcher’s Alaska, is that it’s actually not something that pairs with the act of making art. For the most part it’s enough of a struggle just to find food to eat, as Christopher McCandless found out when he died in the Alaskan wilderness after living there for about four months, a saga chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s book <em>Into the Wild</em>. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="kzuOne"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="A8sE7G">In Sean Penn’s 2007 film adaptation of the book, McCandless is generously depicted, with several of his key mistakes more or less left out. This includes the fatal error of having not brought a detailed map of the area with him, which could have helped him find a hand-operated tram available just a quarter mile from where he was unable to re-cross a river back to safety. (Finding the river rushing, McCandless instead decided to turn back and return to his now-mythical bus shelter. Within weeks he died of apparent starvation.)</p>
<p id="chwlGl">People love that movie—and they love its soundtrack, too, which was almost entirely written and performed by Eddie Vedder, sounding like something <em>he</em> might’ve made alone in a cabin somewhere. People also just love McCandless’s story in general, to the degree that Alaskan park authorities <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53106441">recently had to remove his bus</a> from the wilderness because people were getting killed trying to find it. There’s something elementally magnetic about this fantasy of leaving civilization behind, and whether it’s a fantasy rooted in anything resembling practicality or self-awareness seems to have nothing to do with it. </p>
<p id="Ai1USF">Taylor Swift using a back-to-nature visual template for <em>Folklore</em>, an album that is basically in no way actually about nature, says far less about Taylor Swift the person and far more about Taylor Swift the product. That’s fine, because a capitalistic promotion of the outdoors is still an endorsement of something that’s worth promoting no matter the motive. And I don’t doubt that she really does want to escape back to nature sometimes, away from superstar expectations, away from her political responsibility as a public figure, away from the paparazzi, who follow her even when she’s just trying to <a href="https://people.com/music/taylor-swift-joe-alwyn-hiking-date-los-angeles/">go on a hike with her boyfriend</a>. If given the opportunity, who <em>wouldn’t</em> want to crack a beer with Justin Vernon in a cabin and make some music, even if it turned out to be the shittiest album anyone’s ever heard?</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="hSToRp">“Please picture me in the weeds,” Swift sings on the new song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEY-GPsru_E">“Seven.”</a> “Before I learned civility / I used to scream ferociously / Any time I wanted.”</p>
<p id="y0kLkp"><a href="https://twitter.com/nate_rgrs"><em>Nate Rogers</em></a><em> is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in</em> <em>the </em>Los Angeles Times<em>, </em>Billboard<em>, and elsewhere. </em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/music/2020/7/28/21344659/taylor-swift-bon-iver-exile-folklore-isolation-albumNate Rogers