Generic Pop Stars and American Idol

Sadly, I can't follow up on Migs's American Idol post by saying "I've never seen the show". I saw a lot of whichever season it was that had John Stevens, which I think might've been the Ruben-Clay season, but don't hold me to that.


Look, it's Pink!

Stevens is an interesting data point on this idea that Idol is a great way to create boring pop stars, because he was absolutely the least boring contestant his year, while also having absolutely no chance of winning. Stevens, as some of you will recall (but Migs will not), was a Sinatra/Dino/Bobby Darin kind of singer. This was, of course, fascinating in a pop landscape where memories tend to stretch back only about as far as Madonna and Michael Jackson. You can see, though, how Stevens wasn't going to do so well with, say, "Latin Week" (which was, according to Wikipedia, the week he was voted off).

If American Idol were actually intended to create genuine pop stars (rather than simply being a money machine for Fox, which it is), the producers would recognize that even the broadest of pop music is targeted, niched in a certain way. Name some platinum-selling artist and I'll tell you some other platinum-selling artist's catalog that they'd be completely unable to handle. Getting back to Madonna and Michael -- they couldn't have done each other's songs (even accounting for gender differences). Pink and Britney Spears and Lady Gaga and Christina Aguilera are/were not interchangeable.

The format of Idol, though, requires the winner to finish not-last in each week. If you're middle-of-the-pack at every possible song style there is, you'll do very well on Idol, and you may get lucky enough to win. If you're excellent at some things and terrible at others (as most genuine pop stars probably are), you're probably going home early because you'll have a disastrous performance during, say, Country Week.

This isn't groundbreaking stuff, but it's basically by way of explanation of my lack of interest in the program. It's not the only reason, of course (overly bombastic singing, the judges saying the same things over and over ("a little pitchy, dawg"), too many theme weeks I just don't care about, too much puff in between performances), but if I genuinely thought the next Ke$ha or Pink or Gaga was coming out of this show, I'd watch it, even with Randy Jackson at the end of the table.

Watching American Idol

Not as exciting as Wojo's pictures, I know.

Before I discuss watching American Idol for the first time, have people seen these McDonald's ads with the coach telling the kids they can "eat like Olympians" and then taking them to McDonald's? This is an homage to the Little Chocolate Donuts SNL parody, right?

So after 8 years of avoiding American Idol, I've relented and am watching my first full episode as I write this. I enjoy music a lot. I enjoyed the show Rock Star (sadly, that Tommy Lee band from season 2 did not last). So why not Idol? I tend to avoid things that everyone likes which also seem dumb to me. And Idol always struck me as a way to create mediocre pop stars. Did you ever listen to that album Kelly Clarkson wrote herself? Neither did anyone else. Although she can sing a song written by hook-loving Swedes.

Why am I doing this?

Home bar pride. The lead singer of one of my favorite local bar bands, East Coast (no, not the most original name) tried out for Idol... and made it onto the initial show... and made through all the preliminary rounds... and tomorrow, dude performs live on national TV. He's the one they call Big Mike. I want him to succeed, and I care just enough to actually watch and probably even vote.

This will be a bit of a social experiment. Sort of like that guy who hasn't seen Lost watching the last season of Lost. So far, my thoughts? Many of these people are not very talented, and almost all of them are boring. I generally find myself agreeing with Simon.

Also, does Ellen know she looks like an elf? She could do a production of Peter Pan tomorrow.

Our Gossipy Society and Tiger's Statement

I'm interested in the point Jason made about how many people's interest in gossip is driven by their friends' interest. Following gossip is worthwhile if it means not getting left out of the conversation. Our friend Pam quipped that perhaps we should find friends who talk about more interesting things, and while I agree philosophically, it feels like more of my friends talk about celebrity gossip than before. But why?

Other than our culture getting more vapid (a possibility), I think it has to be the ease of doing it. It used to be that to follow the stories, you needed to buy a magazine weekly. Now, TMZ and Perez Hilton and all the others are free, and offer news faster. Moreover, the increasing number of people doing it has decreased the stigma of doing so. Jason referred to sneaking a purchase of US Weekly at the supermarket, but now friends will regularly send me links to gossip. And I need to read them because... well, how else would I follow important sports stories?

I swear, I only watch Keeping up with the Kardashians to inform Wojo of how Lamar Odom is doing.

I haven't watched the Tiger Woods press conference yet, but after reading reports, I'm still pretty disappointed that he hasn't put on the proverbial black hat (funny, since he wears a literal one all the time) and just admit that he's not really sorry for what he did, and that he's going to go out and kick some puritan golf ass. Reading the clearly manufactured statements about being sorry and wanting to be a better person is just... well, boring. If I wanted boring, I'd watch golf.

Tiger and the media on the media

One of the things that's interesting about the celebrity culture we're in now and the media environment that's created that culture (or fed it, whatever) is when those media organizations responsible for the around-the-clock coverage Migs refers to recognize just how responsible they are for the whole world they've created. I've been letting my TV run Sports Center at night while I play poker, so last night, I saw (two or three times) a piece on Tiger Woods in anticipation of Woods's prepared-statement-reading schedule for today. A significant portion of the piece was about the media's coverage of the car-crash incident, the later revelations that Woods basically had a harem, Woods's refusal to say anything, his entry into rehab, etc. etc. etc. And a significant portion of that significant portion was about ESPN's coverage of same. The audience was shown the absurd parade of New York Post covers, of course, but also clips and audio from Sports Center, including anchors saying things like "nobody really knows what's going on".


Come on, it's my shtick now.

What is interesting about all this is the way that media outlets seem mature and intelligent enough to realize what they're doing when they report breathlessly on Tiger Woods and yet they do it anyway. It's sort of the analogue to the person who buys Us Weekly at the grocery store and hides it from her friends. We know it's an unhealthy obsession, we know that it does far more harm than good, but we don't know how to quit.

Part of the issue gets back to my initial parenthetical above, about whether the media has created the culture or merely fed it. I'm not sure there is an answer, except for the bromide that we all bear some responsibility: if ESPN and TMZ didn't create the stories, we'd have nothing to click; and if we didn't click the stories, they wouldn't make any money from the creation. The media organizations can always fall back on the old collective-action problem, though: ESPN can't stop reporting on this stuff because no one else will stop, and so they'll lose viewers, lose money, and so forth. Consumers do have a version of this excuse, actually: if all your friends care, then you have to care or else you won't have anything to talk to them about.

Given the lack of solution, I guess we just have to hope for one of two things. First, the continued rise of meta, the media covering the media, which is covered by the media, ad infinitum. If we continue on this endless loop of coverage of coverage, the whole thing will have to just implode on itself at some point, and give us the opportunity to start over. (And thus my motivations for participating in this blog are revealed.) Second, we can hope that people just get bored. "Another steroid story. Blah. Another sex scandal. Blah." Sex and drugs are titillating material, though, so I don't really see this happening anytime soon. Sadly.

The Personalization of Celebrity Gossip

The John Mayer Playboy interview has got me thinking about a lot of topics, but the one on the table for this post is the way people now interact with celebrity gossip. There's always been an aspect of judging celebrities based on gossip stories, but it feels like that's increasing. I've talked to plenty of people who don't listen to John Mayer's music that don't just have an opinion about him, but have a strong opinion about whether or not he's a douchebag, whether he was a good boyfriend to Jennifer Aniston, and whether he's a misogynist. I've been trying to work through why that is.

I think there's two main contributing factors. The first I'll refer to as TMZ, but it really encompasses all of the expanding celebrity paparazzi coverage. As the coverage has gotten more constant, people feel like they know the "real story" moreso than in the past. Of course, we don't. We have no idea what went on between John and Jen, even if we saw more pictures of them than an analogous couple from 20 years ago.

But I think the bigger change are personal blogs and Twitter. They allow celebrities to speak directly to their fans. This is of course a lot of fun and occasionally enlightening, but it also gives people a greater sense that they "know" a celebrity. Of course, the picture you get of a celebrity from Twitter is still a mediated one - 140 character thoughts are to understanding a person what a paparazzi photo is to knowing what's going on in a celebrity's life. This works both ways: on the one hand, people have a greater sense that a celebrity is their friend, but they also judge a celebrity negatively if they say something provocative in a tweet.

What it all adds up to is that a person in the limelight now is subject to a scrutiny that is much more personal and heated than it was in the past. This has to be hard for celebrities who are aware of how they are perceived, and have to deal with the inaccuracies and out and out lies that get passed around as news. Of course, if they try and fight back using Twitter, they get an unfiltered communication device - but they also subject themselves to even greater scrutiny.

Championships and Luck

I think Wojo's point about the mano-a-mano nature of baseball is a good one. If a star player goes 1-for-18 in the playoffs, there's no one else to blame but the player, and maybe the quality of pitcher he faces - in basketball and football, its much easier to credit the defense. Now, if that 1-for-18 streak happened in May, we'd simply call it a slump, and people are now even well-versed enough to say things like "regression to the mean" and "small sample size." But only in May. Why?

If we recognize that a player's performance in an important baseball game is as likely to be good as performance in a regular baseball game (and lots of studies have showed this to be basically true), then a 3-for-4 game is just good luck, and an 0-for-4 game is bad luck. What follows from that is problematic for a lot of people - the outcome of a baseball game is determined by the talent of the two teams and the way the two teams match-up, but also by the luck of the draw in terms of players' performance levels. This idea is anathema to the way people want to think about champions as "the best."

Baseball is an interesting sport to discuss for this point, because teams are much more bunched together than in other sports - no team has ever had a regular season approaching the '07 Pats or the '96 Bulls in terms of winning percentage (or, on the flip side, the '08 Lions or the current Nets). Good baseball teams win 60% of their games, and bad ones win 40%. It's not completely uncommon for a bottom team to sweep a series with a very good team. So, when two good teams play, the odds of either team winning have to be close to a coin flip (a better discussion of baseball odds appears in this Phil Birnbaum post). But the winner of that coin flip is exhaulted, and the loser is questioned. We don't give a title to the team that would win the most if we played the season 1000 times - we only play the season once.

To simply explain the results of a 7-game series as luck would make sports seem hollow. Who cares about a dice roll? So instead, we look for reasons why performance was good or poor in that moment. We find character flaws in the losers, and build the winners into supermen. Now, these discussions aren't completely without merit. How a player responds to pressure must have some impact on performance, particularly on the negative side (anyone who's played sports knows the feeling of being "tight" in a big moment and having to overcome that). But it's generally less than one might think.

Recognizing that doesn't necessarily take the fun out of sports, but it does take a lot of the morality out of sports, and baseball writers/fans love morals (see any discussion of steroids ever). Perhaps that explains the resistance.

Bad arguments about baseball and football

Migs's point about the relative mutedness of the discussion of Peyton Manning's testicle size seems dead-on to me. I suffer from even more selection bias, though, since I don't really read about football. I follow the Football Outsiders guys on Twitter and I read Bill Simmons, but that's about it. I'm much more well versed in baseball, so that's where I'm going to take this.

It strikes me that almost 35 years after Bill James hit the scene, seven years after Moneyball, almost fifteen years after the founding of Baseball Prospectus, five years after the founding (and two years after the shuttering) of Fire Joe Morgan, ten years after Voros McCracken published his Defense-Independent Pitching research, we're still having a lot of the same discussions about "clutchness", the value of a home run (every year, without fail, someone argues that homers kill rallies, and thus are sometimes less valuable than doubles), and the "hittability" of pitchers that we've been having since time immemorial.

In football and basketball, I understand why we're still clinging to outmoded ideas. Baseball has a long history advanced stats that doesn't really exist in the other sports. (John Thorn and Pete Palmer wrote "The Hidden Game of Baseball" in 1985. Earnshaw Cook wrote "Percentage Baseball" in 1964.) Second, interactions are vastly more important in football and basketball. Baseball is essentially a one-on-one-on-one sport, where a pitcher faces a batter, who then tries to put the ball where a defender can't get it. Defensive responsibility zones overlap to an extent, but for the most part, if a ball is hit in a particular area, we can assign almost all of the credit or blame for catching or not catching that ball to one defender. Thus, in football and basketball, it is more difficult for stats to have meaning because they have to account for significantly more context.

Perhaps it's that mano-a-mano atmosphere that has retarded the conversation in baseball. We know that fans and writers (through some interaction effect of their own -- I'm not really clear on how much I should blame fans for being who they are and thus forcing writers to write what they need to hear, or the writers for creating the myths fans believe in) love to oversimplify and focus on one particular aspect of a game or a team. Alex Rodriguez is the root of all evil for the Yankees, and Derek Jeter is responsible for all good. Peyton Manning is the greatest regular-season quarterback ever but chokes when it matters. Kobe Bryant has the balls of a horse but Dirk Nowitzki is soft and weak. But when you make these arguments in football or basketball, you don't have to make sophisticated counterarguments to shoot them down -- it doesn't take a stats genius to look at the video of the Manning interception and see that there might've been a slip or a miscommunication between Manning and Reggie Wayne.

In baseball, though, Alex Rodriguez striking out can only be placed on him. He doesn't have any excuses. The arguments have to get more subtle, because you have to point to studies about how clutchness doesn't exist as a skill. You have to impart the concept that 40 at-bats in the post-season just doesn't provide the same evaluative window as 600 in the regular season. What it all comes down to is that you have to convince people of the huge role that randomness and luck play every single day.

I'll conclude by going back to the word "understandable". I get why people have a hard time accepting this. We want to believe that we are in control of things. It's why we have debates about welfare and affirmative action, and why some people were actually on Paul Shirley's side regarding Haiti. The idea that the course of a significant portion of our lives (maybe more than a significant portion, depending on how you feel about free will in general) is determined by factors that are 100% out of our control verges on heresy.

Media Coverage of the Implications of a Very Close Football Game

"Any print columnist who writes that the Saints' victory will forever change New Orleans should be shot. Even the bloggers will do better." - Buzz Bissinger

Yes we will, I think. Totally agree with Wojo about the implications of the game for the city of New Orleans. It's a wonderful story. Certainly everyone at my party was cheering for the Saints, and word from the game is that 75% of the crowd there was cheering for them too. I think we all feel good for the city - a championship is a wonderful pick me up in a very difficult time of rebuilding.

Wojo decided to leave media coverage of the game to another time, and I've decided that time is now. This game has provided an interesting window into where we're at now in how we view major sporting events. On the one hand, there was the instant overreaction - Brees is the best quarterback in football now! Manning is a choker! But there was also a very quick backlash against the standard overreaction. The arguments are one's everybody's heard - Manning played well, made one bad throw (and it may not even have been - Wayne slipped coming out of the break), and shouldn't be punished because his defense couldn't stop the Saints in the second half. This has turned out to be the dominant way to view the game - not the choker/hero theme. Now, part of this is the bias in my selection of reading on football - Football Outsiders is my main source of football analysis, and they are among the most reasoned writers on the sport. They abhor the standard insipid football discussion. But it wasn't just them. Even Bill Simmons, popularizer of the term "Manning Face" wrote a surprisingly reasoned column (even if he did let his readers make the dumb arguments for him at the end of it). In searching for Manning "choker" stories, I found plenty of people saying that we shouldn't jump to conclusions based on one game.

This is a terrific moment. Smart, reasonable writers don't have quite the pull of newspaper columnists, but their power, relative to "bloggers" (and in that group, I'd include writers with mainly an internet presence, like the Football Outsiders guys, Will Leitch, and even Simmons) is decreasing. And thankfully, that may mean a world where excellent players don't get labeled "chokers" because they lose in big games for reasons beyond their control. Heck, people might some day understand the concept of small sample sizes and the non-existence of clutch. But at least for now Manning's legacy is safe.

"Big" win for New Orleans

Well, that was quite a Super Bowl. In the end, I found myself rooting more for the Colts than the Saints, probably 55/45 or 60/40. Somewhere in that range. I am 100% with Migs on the 19-0 issue, but in the end, I think (although it wasn't really a rational process) I wanted Peyton Manning to win more than I wanted Jim Caldwell to lose. That said, I'm completely happy for the Saints and for their fans to get to have this feeling.

Austen made an interesting point to me in a text, though: this doesn't do anything for the city itself. It doesn't help it rebuild, it doesn't help repair the massive racial and economic inequalities that exist there. If anything, in fact, it might give us the opportunity to paper over those issues. When I (and every other person who writes about this win) write something like "good for New Orleans", I worry that this is just one more unconscious tactic in the battle to forget about the plight of the less fortunate.

It's funny, in the other major sports, the championship teams actually provide a tangible benefit to their city by hosting the big games, resulting in additional revenue for local businesses and so forth. New Orleans, though, doesn't get to host tens of thousands of people traveling to see the game, but they do get to pay for hundreds of hours of police overtime for security for the eventual championship parade.

I don't want to come off completely sour about this, but, related to something I tweeted, I think we ought to take care not to blow this up into some life-changing event for the people of New Orleans.

(That tweet was making a dual reference, by the way; the other point being "let's not start talking about how Peyton Manning has no testicles". But in the interest of keeping a post fairly well confined to just a topic or two, I'll leave the issue of media coverage (creation) of the larger implications of one very close football game for another time.)

It has to be the Saints

Unlike Wojo, I'm fully declared for this game. I've decided which delicious team colored cupcake from Crumbs I will eat after I down 2-3 large pulled pork sandwiches. It's the Saints. It has to be.

• First: New Orleans, Katrina, destruction, Superdome as hell, revitalization, rallying around the team, epic season. No decent human doesn't appreciate this angle, even Colts fans.
• Second, this is a franchise that until this year had won two playoff games total. This fan base has suffered for a long time. It'd be nice to see them win one.
• Most importantly: what the Colts did in the Curtis Painter game was not okay. I'm a Jets fan, and I was cheering for the Colts that day - I wanted to see perfection, just to be able to say I saw it happen. I love Manning for the same reasons Wojo does. I'd have been fine with a Jets win, but the way they got it was repulsive. The goal of football is to win games, particularly if there is something to compete for, like, perhaps, being the greatest of all time. If the Colts win, it will somehow justify their strategy to people - "their goal was to win the Super Bowl, and they did." But they didn't need to do that to win the Super Bowl. Manning has never missed a game and never takes big hits. They could have rested hurt players, but played to win. They didn't. So I don't want to see them win the Super Bowl and somehow think Jim Caldwell has been vindicated in any way.

I'm not exactly sure why the Colts decision makes me so angry. I think its this: our attachment to sports is an emotional one. We have goals and hopes for the teams we follow and enjoy. We want teams to care in the same way we do, or else we feel like chumps - why should we care if the people attempting to make the history don't? The Colts resting their starters made it clear that they and their fans did not have the same goals. The Colts said "This is a business; we have no need to attempt to be the best ever, just to achieve our general goal. We will be risk averse in doing so." It felt cold. (That blank look on Jim Caldwell's face did not help. Neither did the anguished look on the faces of the players.) It made me feel bad for caring that a team was approaching 19-0. The Colts told me, in so many words, that I was a sucker, and that all the fans filling their stadiums were suckers.

So scream (full bellied and drunkenly) with me: "Who dat?! Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?!"

Super Bowl rooting interests

Neither Migs nor I have a rooting stake in this Super Bowl in the conventional way. Indianapolis and New Orleans aren't our teams, they're not rivals of our teams, neither one stole a notable player or coach from our teams ... they just have no connection that I can see. (Although it's possible Migs will point out something I missed in his follow-up.) Sure, New Orleans was in the NFC West for many years. (Remember when the NFC West actually had only one western team, with St. Louis, Atlanta, Carolina, and New Orleans making up the rest of the division. Wasn't that absurd?) But I don't think San Francisco and New Orleans had any real intra-division rivalry then, and certainly none has survived today.

So who do I root for? I guess it's time for bullet-points. (Wizard-points?)

In favor of the Colts:

• I like Peyton Manning. I like his media personality: goofy, but not in a Chad Ochocinco way. More understated, but still endearingly weird. I'm thinking of him berating children and hitting them with footballs, or playing ping-pong with Justin Timberlake, or crashing your football party. (I can't seem to put together the right search to find that last one, but you know what I'm talking about.) I also like Peyton Manning as a football player. First, his throws are sort of unintimidating. They wobble a lot. He doesn't really throw that beautiful spiral ball that most NFL quarterbacks seem to throw. Second, his movement in the pocket is remarkable. I remain confident that, with a little training, I could beat him in a foot race, yet he never gets hit. His knowledge of where pressure is coming from, his little Manning Shoulder Turn (TM), his quick release, and a thousand other little things add up to almost never taking big hits (what percentage of his sacks are him laying down underneath the charging lineman who came free? Has to be huge, right?) and never getting the ball stripped, and it's beautiful to watch.


• I want Tom Brady's possible legacy of being the best QB of his generation dead and buried. If Peyton wins this Super Bowl, and especially if he wins it in either heroic or blowout fashion, his legacy will be significantly burnished, especially considering that Tom Brady's has been overseeing the downfall of Rome over the last two years. (Not that it's his fault, by any means. He didn't even play in one of those two years. But twenty years from now, our memories will be hazier and we'll remember that he was still the quarterback of the Patriots while they fell apart.) It's nothing personal against Tom Brady, really. It's just that I hate the guy.


• Pierre Garcon, Haitian-American. Also, his college football team was the Purple Raiders.


• I think it would be funny to watch how the media deals with the coaching staff of the Colts. Super Bowl-winning coaches are supposed to be revered, but this is a unique situation on the offensive side because of Peyton Manning. Tom Moore gets no credit for being the offensive coordinator on this team, as if calling plays is all a coordinator does. His game-planning, overseeing of the offensive staff, and shaping the scheme in which Manning has had so much success all fall by the wayside because, you know, Peyton makes the play calls. Then, team-wide, Jim Caldwell's Art Shell-like demeanor on the sidelines has made him an easy target for people like Bill Simmons. On top of that, you have his refusal to go for the 19-0 season still lingering in people's minds. The potential cognitive dissonance of "Jim Caldwell, Super Bowl-winning head coach" is too much to pass up.


• I like the resolute way the Colts have refused to buy into "running and defense win in the playoffs" meme. Their defense isn't terrible or anything, but it's not exactly the 2000 Ravens, either. And their run game is decidedly mediocre. They win on the backs of Manning, Wayne, and Clark. I'm for this. (Now, this means that I also was, in a certain way, for the Patriots against the Giants a few years ago, too. That's ok. I can own that contradiction.)

Now, on the Saints side of things:

• I like Drew Brees. (Yes, apparently quarterbacks matter to me a lot.) I totally buy into the awesomeness of his pregame pump-up-the-team huddles. I feel for him over the whole drama with his mom. I like that he's as good as he is despite having something less than the prototypical quarterback's body. (Not that he's JaMarcus Russell or Doug Flutie or anything. But he is pretty short.)


• I like Reggie Bush. I don't mind that he took a lot of money to play at USC. (In fact, I encourage the top players to do this. You're the ones making millions for the schools. Get yours.) Further, he gives me an excuse to continue my run of posting gratuitous photos in my posts.
  
  
  Badonk
  
  Most importantly, though, I'd like for him to win a Super Bowl so that maybe people will stop caring, four years in to his career, whether he's a "bust" or merely "overdrafted". He is what he is, and he's still plenty young enough (did you know he's only 24?) to be even a little more than that. If the Saints can win a Super Bowl with him as a significant contributing player, then maybe we can quit talking about how they should have drafted D'Brickashaw Ferguson instead.


• I'm burying the lede here, but: New Orleans. I'm not even going to go into it, because it's all been written. Over and over and over. But suffice it to say that I'd be much happier for the city and fans of New Orleans than for the city and fans of Indianapolis.

I am, predictably, unable to come to a conclusion on this. I'd advise the players, coaches, and fan bases of both teams that I'm in a precarious state here. Any slight move by either one of them could win me over or knock me off their bandwagon. If a Saint gets into a domestic dispute tonight, I'd probably pull for the Colts. If it's revealed that Reggie Bush is secretly a huge Waylon Jennings fan, I'd probably pull for the Saints. I'm in your hands, guys.

Niche media and the Super Bowl

The Super Bowl burnout issue is another one I can talk about in theory without necessarily having any personal history with. My media consumption when I was a teenager was mainly syndicated television and whatever I was reading from the library. In college, I tuned out the mass media, in part because I was in a forest in western Massachusetts, in part because I had always-on internet for the first time, and in part because I could rely on my friends to tell me what was happening in the world at our daily lunch gatherings. Needless to say, I didn't have a lot of football-watching friends, so I missed the Super Bowl Media Explosion then, too. And then after college, my media habits were starting to form into the niche consumption that Migs talks about.


Well hello

Anyway, I started this intending to agree with Migs: it's really difficult to shove things down people's throats these days. I know about "Tik Tok" and Ke$ha, but only because I happened to hear an essay comparing the song to Avatar on NPR a few weeks ago. They played snippets during the broadcast, but I've never heard the song all the way through. And it's not like I'm one of those people who rejects pop music (i.e. I'm not That Asshole).

The big sports stories that I can remember from the past week and a half are Brett Favre's post-NFC Championship Game pictures (which I didn't look at -- I need to see that grossness?) and Joe Mauer's fake ten-year extension with the Twins. As you might guess, my news comes mostly from Twitter at this point.

I don't know how Twitter figures into this, though. Is it just an evolution of blogs and the like, down to how certain things become hits and others fly entirely under your radar depending on who you follow? Or is there more to it than that? Certainly it's more personal -- I'm much more confident that Peter King reads his @replies than I am that he reads comments on his columns or blog posts. (I got an obnoxious direct message from Ric Bucher the other day, for instance, and my list of "awesome celebrity encounters on Twitter" includes Bill Willingham, Michael Cudlitz, Colson Whitehead, and Tom Lenk.) But putting aside the interactivity point, I haven't figured out whether Twitter represents an evolution in what we see and read and hear in the way that the widespread availability of internet access represented an upgrade over television and newspapers, or the way that the invention of blogs represented an upgrade over a web culture that revolved around a couple of major sites.

Super Bowl Oversaturation

Wojo, I don't think you're as much of an outlier on music as you think. Those awesome record stores where the "music community" existed? Not real. No one's best friend was actually the guy behind the counter at a music shop, except maybe rock writers (who were there constantly). Listening to music was a solo endeavor that people mostly did in their rooms. People talk about music as much now as we used to - in fact, we're forced to talk about it more to find out about new bands.

Honest question: am I alone in feeling that the "Super Bowl is overhyped" meme is overhyped? Already, there's been stories, as there are every year, that all the stories have been overdone. And I guess this is true if you watch ESPN all day, because the Super Bowl is, naturally, a top story. But there's where the internet comes in, right? If you work, or are on the move, you get your sports news on the internet; this in turn means you can tailor your consumption on stories. For the Super Bowl, I've read the columns from the football writers I usually read (and they tend to avoid the cliched storylines at all times). I'm not burned out on the Super Bowl - I'm getting excited for the game.

This perhaps an unexpected change in the way we consume media: the things that get "shoved down our throats" are less overwhelming because they're easier to avoid. The #1 song in the country (I had to look it up - its something called Tik Tok by Ke$ha) isn't everywhere, because there's so many entertainment options that don't feature it. So if you hear it and do enjoy it, you're less likely to burn out on it (easy comparison: I completely burned out on Coldplay's "Clocks" in 2003; I didn't burn out on "Viva La Vida" at all). It improves our enjoyment of the big things.

A personal perspective on the splintering of music

I could be the poster child for Migs's comments about how people consume music these days. In middle school, I fell asleep listening to 102.5 KDON, and I could sing all the R&B and hip-hop songs on the radio. ("All the gangbangers forgot about the drive-by ...") I watched Beach MTV every single day during summer vacation, and not just while I ate lunch -- I'd watch it from beginning to end. Yes, I was twelve or thirteen, so Daisy Fuentes in a bikini was a very large part of this, but she wasn't the only thing; I also loved the Blind Melon, Dr. Dre, Bone Thugs, Counting Crows, and Coolio videos, not to mention one-hit wonder classics like Ahmad's "Back in the Day".


(blatant excuse to run a bikini photo of Daisy Fuentes? You hush!)

(By the way, I'm suddenly doubting the very existence of Beach MTV, because I can't seem to find any sign of it online, and it's not on Daisy's IMDB page. Did I make it up? Did I mix up both the name and the host?)

And where am I now? I've seen Taylor Swift's video where she claims she's a nerd who never gets the boy once. (Quick aside -- I hate that video. The song is supposed to be about remaining who you are, about the inner truth, the connection between two people, being more important than the physical appearances, right? So why does the nerdy girl have to take off her glasses and doll herself up to get the boy to notice her at the dance?) I couldn't tell you five albums that were nominated for Grammys, although I know from Keith Law's Twitter that Silversun Pickups were nominated for Best New Artist even though "Lazy Eye" was a huge smash a few years ago. ("A huge smash" in my understanding being that it was played on KEXP four times a day.)

I don't want to oversell things, because when I look at the list of Best Album nominees, I can tell you who all these people are. I was, in fact, aware of the existence of all five artists, and four of the albums. (The one I didn't know, which is either odd or completely appropriate, was the entry from the Dave Matthews Band. I truly had no idea they released an album in 2009.)

Until Migs mentioned it, though, I'm not sure I realized just how out of touch I was. Part of this is that music never has been a communal experience for me. I think I attended my first live show after I graduated college. In high school, I listened to "alternative" more or less as a means of differentiating myself from the R&B and hip-hop masses. (Yes, I was the stereotype, listening to Nine Inch Nails because nobody I knew got me.) I've been to Fun Fun Fun Fest, a fantastically eclectic two-day festival in Austin, twice, alone each time.

In some ways, this has been a blessing: even as my music tastes pushed farther away from what was on the radio, I was never sucked into those awful "have you heard X" bragfests that rock critics and hipsters (who all just want to be rock critics anyway) insist on engaging in.

But more importantly, because even when I had a shared knowledge of the current music with my peers, I didn't really know I had it, I didn't realize that we were losing that community until it had become so obvious that even Entertainment Weekly would acknowledge it. This has left me with an intellectual understanding that music is not what it used to be (the simultaneous deaths of music magazines, record sales, record stores, and music television, including the VMAs) without any strong emotional feelings about it one way or the other. I can't miss conversations about can't-miss musical moments that never happened in the first place.

(By the way, of all the videos I linked to in the above paragraph, there was only one that I actually felt the need to rewatch from beginning to end, and that was Bone Thugs' "Crossroads". Whatever inferences you care to draw ...)

On the Relevance of Musical Awards

Taylor Swift won a bunch of Grammys last night, including "Album of the Year." But if a fairly small percentage of music listeners have heard the album, or its competitors, why should anyone care?

I'll ignore the meta-question about whether music awards make sense at all - judging aesthetic pieces of art as to their objective value is fairly silly. But accepting a world in which its reasonable to give albums star ratings (or number ratings, if you're Pitchfork), award shows still require more than that to be relevant. They need a shared experience.

When I was younger, I enjoyed the MTV Video Music Awards a lot. In fact, my first conversation with my high school best friend was about the 1997 VMAs (remember that one? Busta Rhymes and Martha Stewart, Sting and P. Diddy, Bruce Springsteen and the Wallflowers - lot to discuss the day after). The reason why? Everyone watched the same videos. Everyone had opinions about which one was best because, even if they preferred music that wasn''t represented in the show, they knew enough about the people who were a part of it to have an opinion.

Now? I see a handful of music videos every year, and those generally once or twice. For the Grammys - if I don't like something a good deal, its unlikely that I'll listen to it. Before the internet/iPods/smart phones, even if someone had non-mainstream music interests, they had to interact with mainstream music via the radio, or music video, or just the opinions of their peers. And not just the occasional "oh, I heard that Taylor Swift song a few times, and I liked that one Beyonce song" - exposure was pretty constant. Now? I had only the vaguest notion of who Taylor Swift was until she played SNL, and even then I fast-forwarded through her performances after the first 30 seconds. It wasn't until Kanye interrupted her that I realized how big she was. [By the way, hasn't Kanye suffered enough? He wasn't at the Grammys, I presume because no one lets him go to any awards show anymore. The dude made Taylor Swift's Q rating double. Can't people let it go?]

So I honestly hadn't listened all the way through to any Album of the Year candidates. My main rooting interest was for "I'm on a Boat" in that R&B Collaboration category. Once I realized the interesting performances were over (and really, they were done when Gaga and Elton finished the opening), I turned it off. And I don't think I was alone. Heck, a lot of people probably didn't even turn it on.

Weirdly, the only award show the Grammys might have a longer lifespan than are the VMAs, which are really pointless, now that watching music videos seems so 1997. MTV should just have music performances surrounding a reality TV awards show. Live music + reality TV? Now THAT would be very 2010.