Hipster R&B, Eli the Un-Manning: The Week"s Best Pop-Culture Writing
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Slate
Gravity Is Going to Be a Camp Classic
J. Bryan Lowder
Camp lives in those random moments at which you can’t help but say, “Girl. Come on.” When you are momentarily knocked off narrative course by a piece of wild aesthetic debris that simply won’t be ignored. If you think you didn’t experience a few of these unintentional detours in Gravity, you’re either lying or were just too stressed out to notice. The latter is a fair excuse: I’ll allow that my argument may only be vindicated on a second viewing, once the shock-and-awe has worn off. But, mark my words, this movie will be midnight screening fodder in no time.
How could it not be? Here comes a Sandra Bullock (campy enough by itself) in a high-budget “Hanes Her Way” commercial that ends with a delightfully gauche SYMBOLIC tableaux of a fetus in utero. And then she starts talking to herself in a poorly written “I choose to live!” speech straight out of some black-and-white melodrama. Oh, and did you know (because, MORE PATHOS!) that she has a TRAGEDY in her past that she deals with by driving (“driving, George, just driving…”) a lot, presumably all the way to the Hubble Space Telescope? No worries if not, because Cuarón has included the sympathy fail-safe of a middle-aged white lady shaking a lot and mumbling in some kind of space capsule—a technique originated unforgettably by Jodie “OK TO GO” Foster in Contact. And then, finally, more Hanes (and thigh muscles!) in a closing struggle with some seaweed and an unbearably heavy “Dawn of Man” metaphor as we cut, with ridiculously overwrought and loud scoring, to credits. GRAVITY. Get it? Because Cuarón’s thoughts about the universe and humanity have a lot of that.
Deadspin
Simone Biles Vs. The Racists: Are Black Gymnasts The New Black QBs?
Dvora Meyers
That’s where Ciaralli’s remarks about artistry come in. They are part of a larger ongoing conversation amongst coaches, athletes, judges, and fans as to the direction of the sport, on whether it moves in a more artistic direction or towards power and tricks, as though those are mutually exclusive categories. Most of these debates usually end with artistry supporters reminding everyone that the sport is called “artistic gymnastics,” never mind that no one can agree what “artistry” in gymnastics means.
Last year, I wrote about how “artistic” or “artistry” is coded language for body type. Lithe and flexible gymnasts are routinely called “artistic” regardless of how well they dance or engage with the music or audience. Short, muscular gymnasts such as former Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson or Biles are not considered “artistic” regardless of how they move or connect. (I’ve seen Biles perform live twice now—she can really sell a routine.) This, however, is the first time I’ve seen “artistry” brought up in the context of race. He’s pitting the “European” (read: white) body types on the “artistic” side against “powerful” and black. And given that many fans feel that increasing difficulty demands are destroying the supposed artistic nature of the sport, Ciaralli’s statements, for those who follow the sport closely, essentially turned Biles into the powerful bull in the elegant gymnastics china shop.
Pitchfork
I Started a Joke: “PBR&B” and What Genres Mean Now
Eric Harvey
I have mixed feelings about being linked to such a phenomenon. Don’t get me wrong—it’s cool to have my name on Wikipedia, but I’d rather such an honor be for something I put a bit more time into, or, well, am actually proud of. I still think “PBR&B” is silly-if-not-catchy, though misleading yes, and even offensive to some—particularly the artists forced to suffer the indignity of having their music classified under the heading of a snarky joke.
If someone else came up with “PBR&B”, I would resent them. I “coined” it for the simple reason that it’s a pun, and I love puns. But I didn’t exactly coin it to describe the music itself. (Its grandfather genre, “Rhythm and Blues”, is another story. That was coined by Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler in 1949, to replace “Race Records”, the offensive name of a chart used at the time to rank the popularity of music made by African-Americans.) Instead, it’s one of those genres that describes an imagined fanbase. As Fennessey claimed in that article, there was a brief moment a few years ago when a handful of artists who nominally made R&B were doing so in a way that allowed certain observers to group them together. This happens regularly with any type of popular music, and R&B is no exception. The difference with “PBR&B” is that I cobbled together three artists who were doing drastically different things, more or less because they were making music that had the capacity to “cross over,” in old industry parlance. In more modern terms, it’s music rooted in African-American traditions that…well, to put it bluntly, might sell to young white people for whom other types of more rhythm-focused or bluesy modern R&B might not.
Flavorwire
Why Is No One Talking About the Fact That Chris Brown Was Raped?
Tom Hawking
It’s hard to imagine Jezebel (or anyone else, for that matter) being so trite about this quote if it came from… well, pretty much anyone apart from Chris Brown. But they’re not alone in this — neither the original profile nor any subsequent commentary made even the briefest mention of the fact that the encounter was a crime. Instead, writers have either described it as boasting, or said things like, “Chris doesn’t drop that fact as if it’s a crutch or a sign of a rough upbringing — instead the R&B singer totally owns it!,” or used it as an excuse for another clickbait hatepiece.
Let’s just say again: we’re talking about someone having sex with an eight-year-old here. Isn’t that worth stopping and thinking about for a bit? Apparently not — after all, it’s much easier just to pull out the quote and use it as the excuse for a bit of pageview-wrangling “CHRIS BROWN IS THE WORST” sensationalism than to think about its implications.
Spin
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: The Triumph of Mike WiLL Made It
Christina Lee
Despite being a hometown favorite, Mike gets more of a polite road-team reception during his radio tour. When HOT 107.9′s Durtty Boyz premieres “23,” they give it two slots on its Top 10 countdown, but offer no comment. V-103′s DJ Greg Street focuses on Cyrus’ controversial VMAs performance rather than the new music. “She need to come down to the A and get that booty right,” says Streetz 94.5′s DJ Holiday, allowing, slightly reluctantly, that he liked the track, adding little more. But Mike is optimistic, and with precedent.
“‘We Can’t Stop’ — everyone said that it wasn’t going to work on pop radio, because it didn’t have an EDM-type beat,” he says, still stationed in 94.5′s parking lot. “But it went to No. 2 onBillboard and No. 1 on iTunes.” As for “23,” he got plenty of advice: “People said, ‘You should put Miley last,’ or ‘It’s not going to work on urban radio.’” But his job is to make urban radio work for him. While on-air at 94.5, DJ Holiday asks Mike to name a bucket-list collaborator — “Lady Gaga,” he answers, “and any street artist I haven’t met who’s turnt up.”
NPR
The Tribe Has Broken: How Sexism Is Silently Killing Survivor
Linda Holmes
Survivor has always been one of the most heavily gendered shows on television. It has specialized from the outset in a set of stereotypes: tough sexy male athletes, nurturing moms, sweet young things, wise and wily (male) silver foxes, and so forth. The women wear such wee bathing suits (while spending over a month foraging on an island) that one spent an entire season with a digitized blur floating just below the base of her spine and just above the waistband of her suit. Far more men than women have been treated as “leaders,” and host Jeff Probst has never been even one-tenth as interested in women contestants as he is in the men. He’s essentially come right out and said so, that the women just tend not to be as interesting on the whole as the men.
But this “Blood vs. Water” season, in which a tribe of returning players has been facing off against a tribe made up of their “loved ones,” has quickly ripened into the most distastefully bro-worshiping, wife-fearing season yet.
Grantland
The Secret of Eli Manning
Brian Phillips
It makes fascinating viewing, watching the draft-day pundits try to reconcile those two big concepts, the Mannings and something wrong; it’s like there’s no verb to connect the parts of that sentence. The crowd at Madison Square Garden boos every mention of Eli’s name, but you can’t really come out as anti-Manning if you’re one of the boys in big suits. It’s not the done thing. Chris Berman at one point, and this is by way of firing off a criticism, just starts listing different categories of respect: “The Manning family. The first family. I mean, respect of the game. Respect of the people. Absolutely.” But then he hits on the conceptual solution he’s been grasping for, one that lets him question the family’s actions while still praising its essential nature. If the Mannings are synonymous with respect and honor, as they must be, but their manipulation of the draft isn’t respectful or honorable, as it maybe hasn’t been, then look: They’ve merely behaved in a way that has caused them not to resemble themselves. They’re not bad people. They’re just, in the moment, un-Manning-like.
And I don’t know about you, but watching this old draft footage now, watching Eli sheepishly blink down at Suzy Kolber during about 150 pre- and post-selection interviews, what runs through my head is, Why didn’t Peyton have to go through this? If you’re Peyton, everything just falls into place: You work hard, you binge-watch game film, a well-run Colts team happens to land the first draft pick, click. It’s as if fate shares your focus. Eli is more Archie’s natural heir than Peyton will ever be — like Eli, his dad was a fun and scrambly quarterback, more a seat-of-the-pants adventurer than the lucid math-compulsive then playing in Indiana — but because Peyton came along first, the definition of Manningness has somehow shifted in a way that includes Eli out. “Being here with my family these past few days has been really great,” he tells Kolber afterward. But something has been settled over this draft week: Eli is the un-Manning. He is the Manning who makes mistakes, and thus, as a Manning, he is unlike himself.
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