Arts Reviews

‘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.

If I had been told that Ken Burns’s next PBS extravaganza would be a documentary film about a 20th-century American novelist and, even more improbably, had been asked to guess his (or more likely her) identity, my last choice might well have been Ernest Hemingway. This is partly because there seem to be so many more eligible Burns subjects (Richard Wright, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison) but largely because Hemingway, man and novelist, seems especially uncongenial to the Burns sensibility: his fiction doesn’t tell us very much about America; he remains in bad odor in women’s studies departments; his Great White Hunter persona must surely spell a painful three episodes for ‘viewers like you’. First, the bad news.

It’s no secret that political correctness has stunted pop culture. Comedians walk on eggshells for fear of offending the wrong person. A day hardly goes by without a public apology for old comments. Hollywood is perhaps furthest down this road to insipidity. It means creative types who enjoy pushing boundaries, offending viewers, making even the most hardy of us as uncomfortable as humanly possible, can’t thrive. One such person is the director Tom Six. In 2009, Six made popculture history with his shock-horror flick The Human Centipede — a movie about a Nazi-like German doctor who kidnaps and stitches his victims together, anus to mouth — as a sadistic experiment.

In a world gripped by Nineties nostalgia, everything old is new again. Bootcut jeans and birkenstocks are back; old Nickelodeon classic cartoons are being rebooted for a new generation. But the strangest renaissance in this throwback moment is a moral panic: Marilyn Manson, the creepy goth-rocker with a startling appearance and a voice like synthesized nails on a chalkboard, is once again up for cancellation. The difference is in who's doing the canceling — and that this time, it seems it might actually stick.  Once upon a time, back in the late 1990s, Manson was the guy whose albums you hid in your underwear drawer lest your parents find them and freak out. It wasn't just the music itself but the man who made it, and what he seemed to represent.