Arts Reviews

If you’re a diehard Beatles fan, it’s been a pricy year. And it’s going to get much worse. Within the last 12 months, those of us unable to resist new or repackaged product from John, Paul, George and Ringo have wrestled with sense and reason over whether to splash out on one of the numerous limited-edition, pre-release colored vinyl copies of McCartney III, the mega-box set reissue of Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band from 1970 or even, dear old Ringo’s recent EP, ‘Zoom In’. And there’s more to come; expect a cascade of marketing hoopla around August’s Get Back, the Lord Of The Rings director Peter Jackson’s reworking of the band’s 1969 misery-memoir movie Let It Be, as well as a lavish tome of McCartney lyrics and memoirs in November.

Inside, the new Netflix special from comedian Bo Burnham, was apparently written, directed, performed and edited solely by its star throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. An impressive feat. In the same timeframe, I posted literally thousands of tweets. What can I say? Some of us are just born productive. Inside was also filmed entirely in one room. It is a bare, depressing sort of room, uncomfortably reminiscent of the bare, depressing room of the angel-faced serial killer at the center of Takashi Miike's classic horror film Audition. Happily, Burnham is not keeping a captive in a trash bag. Still, the man has a lot of morbid cerebral fun with the question of whether he can leave the room or whether he is stuck there. Burnham’s creativity is to be welcomed.

There has never been a sitcom as successful as Friends. Between 1994 and 2004, it was watched by 25 million people a week in the US. Seventeen years after the final episode aired, Friends was still the fourth most watched show in the world. So it’s no surprise that the new Friends: The Reunion is a big deal. One of my friends, a fellow super fan, told me she drank a bottle of wine before watching it and recommended I do the same. I lack self-control so drank two, passed out, and then had to face the 94-minute special sober and hungover. It was unclear what the reunion set out to be. An extended interview with the cast? A documentary about the show’s origins? An hour in and it still wasn’t clear.

How should we measure the value of a work of art or, failing that, a pop song? Take for example John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, which was recorded exactly 50 years ago. It certainly scores on the sales front, having shifted about 21 million copies worldwide according to the Chartmasters service. That’s a healthy revenue stream in anyone’s book, particularly for a tune whose lyric urges us to envision a world without possessions. The ‘ubiquitous’ box gets ticked, too, because ‘Imagine’ has been covered by more than 200 other artists. It’s the unifying song we all seem to turn to at moments of crisis, as when the pianist David Martello performed it in front of the Paris Bataclan the morning after the November 2015 terrorist attacks there.

‘People of color were snubbed in major categories,’ announced Ricky Gervais, during his final kamikaze stint hosting the 78th Golden Globe awards in January 2020. ‘Nothing we can do about that, Hollywood Foreign Press are all very racist.’ Gervais’s words haunt the HFPA this week. The Hollywood institution behind the annual Golden Globes awards is floundering beneath an industry-wide wave of condemnation and cancellation, that culminated on Monday with NBC announcing they won’t be screening the  2022 edition.

When my editor asked me to watch Elon Musk on Saturday Night Live, I desperately wondered how to refuse. 'Actually, I’m busy on Saturday night.' Useless. There are a million ways to watch live television after the event. 'I’m a bit sick right now.' Too sick to watch TV and write about it? 'I can’t hear Pete Davidson’s voice without wanting to punch a hole in wall.' True, but not the sort of thing you want to admit in public. Damn it, I agreed. Journalists are asked to visit Syria and Afghanistan, after all, so I can hardly complain about having to watch Saturday Night Live. As The Spectator’s unofficial comedy critic, moreover, I have had to experience everything from Sarah Cooper’s mirthless Netflix special to Charlie Kirk’s bewildering satire on right-wing punditry.

My secret hope is that Elon Musk uses his Saturday Night Live platform this weekend to launch a comedic assault on political correctness so brutal it is seared forever onto the collective retina of the biggest audience the show has had in decades. Provided he used SNL to tear with equal vigor into each faction of the intersectional oppression spectrum — ethnic minorities, LGBTQIAA+ folk, fat activists, the blue-haired and non-binary, flat-earthers and feminists — and managed while doing so to be undeniably funny, I believe Musk could get away with it. He could also create a cultural moment the value of which as a non-fungible token would be more than perhaps even he could afford.

I'm sorry to start this blog with a lament, but something sad has happened in Pittsburgh. Its maestro — whom some critics believe to be the finest orchestral conductor in the world — has recorded Beethoven's Ninth and unexpectedly messed it up. Since becoming music director in 2008, the 62-year-old Austrian Manfred Honeck has transformed the reputation of the Pittsburgh Symphony to the point where no one still refers to the 'Big Five' American orchestras, traditionally those of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia. It's happened fast, too. In 2013, the New York Times reported that the Big Five were being swept away by 'the great western migration' of musical excellence to Los Angeles and San Francisco. No mention of Pittsburgh.

Sixteen years ago I interviewed a young American musician whose band had just signed to Rough Trade. We met in a café in west London, and he had with him a bag of records he’d just bought. In that bag were a handful of classic albums from the English folk revival, and in the intervening years Colin Meloy has steered the Decemberists to a frankly unlikely level of success, even topping the US album charts with The King Is Dead. Over three April weekends they have been performing shows to mark their 20th anniversary (which was actually last year, but pandemic and all that), which highlighted just what an idiosyncratic band they are. The English folk came through in the beautiful ‘January Hymn’, but also in one of Meloy’s other loves — the prog-metal side of folk.

As a Taylor Swift fan, I’ve greeted the past year’s cornucopia of fresh content with joy and gratitude. Every day, I wake up and wonder: will there be a new Taylor Swift album today? With astounding frequency, there is! The latest entry into the T. Swift COVID-era canon, following folklore and evermore, is the re-recording of her 2008 smash-hit album Fearless, now available as a 27-track pop-country marathon known as Taylor’s Version. Of course, the original Fearless was also, strictly speaking, ‘Taylor’s Version’. But the master recordings of that album, which can be monetized through lucrative avenues like sampling and commercials, belonged to the label she signed with as a teenager, who refused to sell them back to her.