2 episodes in, Glee 2, every bit as much as Glee 1, is tighty-whitey. is this okay with us? for my part, i’m finding it rather joyous. leastways, i didn’t think i could hear Empire State Of Mind one more time without a three-day waiting period. those kids killed it, to use a phrase that seems finally to have fallen out of usage, and it was every inch defiant whiteness.
Glee gets derided for being so Benettonian. never mind that this is a Ryan Murphy show so it comes out each week with absolutely everything about it labeled. conceptually and historically, show choir is the medicine of the white man; if the kids are multi-racial they’re still ingredients in the homogeneity. the real work Glee is doing is making it fun to be white again. being white is clearly better*, as Louis C.K. said, but except for glancingly so, self-deprecation & so on, it’s not been much fun in any pop-culture or geosexual sense for a while. when Glenn Beck said that foul thing about Obama back in twinnyk9, that he, Obama, hates “white culture” every white person laughed/died a little inside. white culture? what’s that?
sometime, whenever it was Wicker Park came out, Ben Gibbard said people need to get over it and just admit they like Phil Collins. tacky, yet refined. to a certain kind of sophist that’d be like swallowing your own head. but there are DJs and bloggers and record collectors (these are real Reichsnobs in their own right, too, guys who save enough money for a decent hi-fi for the bedroom and throw parties where if you don’t know who Barbra Fowler is the bar gets cash only real quick) who build mixtapes around the whole conceit that Phil Collins was good, or that the years 1977-83 really did produce regular freshets of wonder that weren’t all New Romantic or asymmetrical or otherwise postmodern. some of them were by Kenny Loggins and a bunch of them were stinking lily-white as hell.
3-4 years ago Justice found a way to make dance music sound like melodic thrash and consequences really were never the same. their record is unlistenable now, except for maybe New Jack, and everyone knows they know it. but not looking at, say, their rejected Fabric mix, with stuff like Frank Stallone’s Far From Over and Korgis’ Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime, would be missing their point. don’t reject it, basically. Stuff White People Like was the most retarded meme ever but it’s what we’re up against.
Will Leitch said on Twitter that Ken Burns’ The Tenth Inning, on PBS this week, is/was like Huey Lewis editing Pitchfork for a day. let him, please?
notice i’m not going anywhere near show tunes or gayness or Jewishness, lines on which Glee runs really well; better, for once, to keep it broad.
say hello, again to subversive whiteness, which for all the factionalist fauxrealness should be okay to be okay with.
*as opposed to white people being better, which is different & untrue.
