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A second tilt with the new impermanence

Among the arcane disputes which occupy modest amounts of editorial time is the matter of how typographically to identify television shows. Bear with me, for I think (this morning, anyhow) that this minor matter can suggest something about our changing relationship to media.

It may be helpful to understand that Peter and I have very different relationships to the cathode ray tube. My parents wouldn't let one in the house until I was in junior high, when mother relented and brought a 12-inch black and white home and, much later, caused it to be hooked up to cable so we could actually use it. This had nothing to do with the softening of her belief that there was nothing worth watching on TV (she still doesn't have one). Rather, it was her dawning recognition that when father and I drove to his colleague's house to watch football games, well, a certain amount of wine was consumed by the adults. (I remember, in particular, the legendary Oklahoma-Nebraska battles of the early 1970s, and a triple overtime NFL playoff game between, I think, Kansas City and Miami.) The colleague in question had his own vinyard and looked rather like Bacchus, and perhaps too much fun was being had before our winding drive home. Peter, I suspect, had a more conventional raising, which doubtless accounts for the fact that he has at least twice thanked "Gilligan's Island" in our pages.

(What this means as an adult is that I am unable to tune out a television when it's on in the room. What this meant as an adolescent was that I was so fascinated by the twelve-inch object, and by the proceedings, that I watched the entire Watergate hearings. That was also the summer I had an unpleasant interaction with the family chainsaw and couldn't bend my right leg, else I suspect I'd have been off playing soccer somewhere.)

Our dispute, in any event, has to do with whether television shows should be rendered, as above, in quotation marks, or, as Peter would prefer (and as I remain unable to do here because I still haven't downloaded Firefox) in italics. The way I was taught, films, plays, books, and album titles were italicized. TV shows, poems, and individual songs, were placed inside quotation marks. Peter argues, and let me apologize for approximating both the sense and force of his words, but he's off at the edge of the arctic circle just now, that TV shows should be italicized and the individual episodes, which now have titles, should be in quotation marks. (I note, sadly, that a number of daily newspapers now italicize song titles.)

Leaving aside, for the moment, the matter of what one might do with the nightly news or the "Tonight Show," neither of which have episodic titles (that I know of), I simply refuse to accept the possibility that a TV series merits the same consideration that a film (or a book) gets. Television, to my way of thinking, is a much more transitory and commercial art, whereas movies -- the ones one thinks of as film, at least -- can aspire to survive as more durable exemplars of a particularly difficult and elusive artform.

But as I contemplate our changing relationship to popular music, I am obliged to reckon the possibility that I am simply wrong about this. (I'm not, but I have to be open to the possibility, eh?)

Watching college kids meet each other at the family coffeeshop, I have been struck that their initial conversations, during which they seek to locate each other on some kind of spectrum of shared interests, do not focus on music. In my high school you could easily segment kids on the basis of what they listened to (or didn't). The guys with bondo muscle cars in the south parking lot, the ones who smoked and made out with a steady stream of wild and tawdry girls (the luck!), they listened to Aerosmith and the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. Now, in Seattle during the 1970s, we ALL listened to Led Zeppelin, but that's not my point. Those were hostile, macho, dangerous sounds. It was fighting music, on several levels, and my crowd steered clear (and listened to Jackson Browne). By college we sorted ourselves out by t-shirts, for those who listened to Duran Duran would surely not cavort with the Springsteen crowd, nor the B-52 fan, nor those few who had actually heard (instead of hearing of) the Sex Pistols or, say, Gary Numan.

No more, I suspect. Or at least much less. Now the conversation seems to revolve around television shows and DVDs. Nerd guys who play a lot of video games watch "The Simpsons." Political hipsters watch "The Daily Show." I don't know who watches all those reality things, but they seem to segment along some kind of social fissures, as well. A certain kind of outre affluence seems to attend the Showtime series (and maybe they're not all Showtime, I dunno) like "Six Feet Under" and "The Sopranos." Some of which even aspire to the subtlty and complexity of a film, or so it is argued. And don't even get me started on "Gray's Anatomy," which, at least, shows against the UFC bouts and so Susan and I can retreat to separate corners on Thurday night.

While it's true that musical careers can be made (or at least financed) by song placements on popular shows (if I get one more e-mailed press release touting a new band who have placed a song on "Scrubs," as if I should either watch or care...), it also seems to be the case that fans are loyal to the show, not to the artist. More importantly, the music is subordinate as a cultural signifier to the show on which it is played. And, down the line, the TV show is a more important cultural signifier than any popular music now seems to be.

Which raises the question: Why aren't they selling "Gray's Anatomy" T-shirts?

Maybe they are.

In any event, this all seems a far cry from the times in which I grew up, times in which music could (and had) sound the call to political change, in which the tribes we belonged to were much simpler, in which pop music occupied the space in public discussion now often taken by the latest episode of "Survivor" or whatever.

Downloading may not be killing the music industry; nor saving it. And popular music may simply have lost its hold on our culture. I am trying to think of the anthem which followed "Teen Spirit" and captured the mood of the times, but I cannot. Unless that Spice Girls song counts, and it doesn't, does it?

As always, feel free to e-mail reponses to grant at no depression dot net.

Posted by grant on February 18, 2007 11:21 AM | Permalink