Its remake 16 years later — which I had never heard of before writing this blog — finished 12 places below the original:
The number one British single today in 1962:
The number one single today in 1975
Proving there is no accounting for taste, even among the supposedly cultured British, I present their number one single today in 1981:
The number one British single today in 1997:
The short list of birthdays begins with one-hit-wonder Ernie K. Doe (whose inclusion certainly does not express my opinion about my own mother-in-law):
Bobby Hendricks of the Drifters:
Michael Wilton of Queensryche:
One non-musical death of note today in 1987: The indescribable Andy Warhol, who among other things managed the Velvet Underground:
One musical death of note today in 2002: Drummer Ronnie Verrell, who drummed as Animal on the Muppet Show:
Tonight begins the high school girls basketball playoffs in Wisconsin, followed one week from today by the boys playoffs.
So it seems appropriate to bring up self-described liberal sportswriter Bryan Curtis:
Today, sportswriting is basically a liberal profession, practiced by liberals who enforce an unapologetically liberal code. As Frank Deford, who joined Sports Illustrated in the ’60s, told me, “You compare that era to this era, no question we are much more liberal than we ever were before.”
In the age of liberal sportswriting, the writers are now far more liberal than the readers. “Absolutely I think we’re to the left of most sports fans,” said Craig Calcaterra, who writes for HardballTalk. “It’s folly for any of us to think we’re speaking for the common fan.”
Of course, labels like “liberal” and “conservative” don’t translate perfectly to sports. Do you have to be liberal to call Roger Goodell a tool? So maybe it’s better to put it like this: There was a time when filling your column with liberal ideas on race, class, gender, and labor policy got you dubbed a “sociologist.” These days, such views are more likely to get you a job.
Donald Trump’s election was merely an accelerant for a change that was already sweeping across sportswriting. On issues that divided the big columnists for years, there’s now something like a consensus. NCAA amateurism is rotten. The Washington Redskins nickname is more rotten. LGBT athletes ought to be welcomed rather than shunned. Head injuries are the great scandal of the NFL.
A few decades ago, Taylor Branch’s line that NCAA amateurism had “an unmistakable whiff of the plantation” would have been an eye-rollingly hot take. Now, if you turned in a column comparing college football to the institution of slavery, I suspect few editors would try to talk you out of publishing it. But they might ask you to come up with something more original.
As recently as the turn of the century, you could find columnists hanging Alex Rodriguez’s $252 million contract around his neck. Nobody much writes about free agency like that anymore. Even a bad contract is usually called a misallocation of resources by a team rather than a manifestation of a ballplayer’s overweening greed.
In the new world of liberal sportswriting, athletes who dabble in political activism are covered admiringly. Last year, Slate’s Josh Levin went searching for the voices who were dinging Colin Kaepernick for his national anthem protest. Levin found conservatives like Tomi Lahren and a couple of personalities from FS1. In the old days, such voices would have filled up half the sports columns, easy.
Institutions that made for easy off-day fodder for the writers now get increasing scrutiny. The writer Joe Sheehan has called the Major League Baseball draft “a quasi-criminal enterprise that serves the powerful at the expense of the powerless.” Lester Rodney would have been proud of that line.
And these are just issues within sports. Look at the way sportswriters tweet about politics now. “God bless the @nytimes and the @washingtonpost,” Peter King tweeted earlier this week after the papers revealed the Trump administration’s web of ties to Russia. Two weeks ago, sportswriters blasted away at Trump’s immigration ban — staging their own pussy-hat protest within the press box. Last year, Roger Angellcame out of the bullpen to endorse Hillary Clinton.
“How many sportswriters have you seen on Twitter defending Donald Trump?” asked the baseball writer Rob Neyer. “I haven’t seen one. I’m sure there must have been a few writers out there who did vote for him, but there’s a lot of pressure not to be public about it.”
Forget the viability of being a Trump-friendly sportswriter today. Could someone even be a Paul Ryan–friendly sportswriter — knocking out their power rankings while tweeting that Obamacare is a failure and the Iran deal was a giveaway of American sovereignty?
In sportswriting, there was once a social and professional price to pay for being a noisy liberal. Now, there’s at least a social price to pay for being a conservative. Figuring out how the job changed — how we all became the children of Lester Rodney — is one of the most fascinating questions of our age.
There was always a coven of liberals in sportswriting: Shirley Povich, Dan Parker, Sam Lacy, George Kiseda, Robert Lipsyte, Wells Twombly, and the merry band known as the Chipmunks. As Roger Kahn once wrote, “Sports tell anyone who watches intelligently about the times in which we live: about managed news and corporate politics, about race and terror and what the process of aging does to strong men.”
But these idealists plied their trade in a media universe almost completely different from our own. The first reason sportswriting became a liberal profession is that the product known as “sportswriting” has been radically altered from what it was 40, 30, even 20 years ago.
The old liberal sportswriter was a prisoner of daily newspapers. If he wanted to write about politics, he had to do it within the confines of a sports story.“You decide whether you think this is a lefty idea or not,” said Larry Merchant, who was a columnist at the old (liberal) New York Post. “I wrote a story about a horse that had ridden in the Kentucky Derby. Now, it was in service of the national police in riot control in Washington, D.C. To me, that’s the most natural story in the world!”
Even if a newspaper had a “political” sports columnist, he was nearly always paired with a second, apolitical columnist, who matched the former’s moral crusades with his own rigid attention to balls and strikes.
“When you treat sports as a self-contained universe into which the rest of the universe does not intrude, it will inevitably be conservative,” said Craig Calcaterra. You defer to the commissioner, to the head coach, to the reserve clause — to the reigning authority.
The internet leveled the barrier between sportswriting and the rest of the universe. It also dropped the neutrality that was practiced by everyone but a handful of columnists. “We might have been more liberal than you would have imagined we were, but we didn’t bring it in our copy, you know?” said Deford. “We separated our individual lives from what we wrote because that was what was expected.”
This loosening of the prose was hastened along by a technological change. Starting in the 1950s, accounts of games (“gamers”) became less valuable when fans could watch for themselves on TV. As the game inventory on cable and then DirecTV and then the internet has exploded, gamers are less valuable than ever. Newbie sportswriters have been redeployed. “The people who in an earlier generation would be telling us what they saw are telling us what they think instead,” said Josh Levin.
The internet transformed sportswriting in another way: It made a local concern into a national one. On one level, this is pure joy: Now everyone gets to read Andy McCullough. But it also meant that reactionary opinions that may have played in St. Louis or Cincinnati are now held up for ridicule by the writers at Deadspin. I suspect a lot of sportswriters who might be right-leaning either get on the train or don’t write about politics at all.
You might argue, as Neyer does, that the old sportswriters were probably mostly left-of-center types. But without Twitter, it was difficult for anyone to know this. “When I started doing this, in 2003, it felt a little lonely, like I was in a phone booth yelling this stuff,” said The Nation’s Dave Zirin. “I didn’t know, or have access to, a community of sportswriters who felt similarly.”
The changes in the architecture of sportswriting also changed the profession’s great dilemma. For a century, even sportswriters who had curious minds felt the narcotic pull of the toy department. (It took the carnage of the ’68 Democratic National Convention to shock Red Smith into consciousness.) Then — once woke — the sportswriter faced a second problem: What do I do? Try to sneak politics into my column? Abandon the good salary and Marriott points offered by sportswriting to do “real work” on the front page?
In the Twitter era, I suspect most sportswriters don’t feel this dilemma very keenly or even at all. As the world burns, they turn in their power rankings and then they tweet about Trump.
There were other tractor beams that pulled sportswriting to the left. After a slack period since Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown shuffled off the main stage, we’ve finally entered the second great age of athlete activism. “You’re talking about 50 years of pretty much quiet,” said Sandy Padwe, who wrote a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer and later became an editor at Sports Illustrated. The new wave of activism “is not like the ’60s by any means,” Padwe said. “But it’s a hell of an improvement.”
It’s not only athlete activism that has rejiggered sportswriting but the athletes’ increased power. In the ’60s, a sportswriter who merely wanted to be a stenographer to the powerful would cozy up to the league commissioner or owner. Now — after the explosion in player salaries and the voice granted by Twitter — the same power seeker is more likely to cozy up to LeBron James, or his agent. As Lester Rodney would tell you, when you’re covering sports from the workers’ point of view instead of management’s, the trade inevitably moves to the left.
Non-sports types like Taylor Branch have given the industry a much-needed noogie. Branch’s 2011 article in The Atlantic transformed the crusade against NCAA amateurism from one often neglected in the sports press into one that burned up the New York Times op-ed page. “It makes sense that a hometown sports page is not going to get into this,” Branch said. “Their job is to feed the appetite of the sports fan. This is a fly on their dessert.”
Deford told me: “I kill myself when I think that when I ran The Nationalneither I nor the bright people on that paper thought we really ought to examine the NCAA. We never said that. We just accepted that. We took it at face value. We should be ashamed of it.”
If liberals have a long-standing delusion, it’s that the presentation of hard data (about everything from climate change to “voter fraud”) will win the masses to their cause. But within sportswriting, this is actually true. The publication of college football coaches’ rapidly inflating salaries floated the anti-amateurism crusade. If you know that the NBA signed a $24 billion TV deal with ESPN and Turner, it’s hard to argue that even Timofey Mozgov’s contract is going to bankrupt the league.
“It’s the accumulation of evidence rather than political change,” said Bruce Arthur, who writes a column for the Toronto Star. “People just figured it out.”
There are chance events too. The fact that Dan Snyder hasn’t put many winning Redskins teams on the field has the side effect of undermining support for the team’s nickname — “If Snyder’s for it,” people think, “how can I not be against it?” Similarly, Roger Goodell’s mishandling of issues like Deflategate suggests that he might be mishandling player safety too.
Donald Trump’s election changed sports Twitter into a frisky episode of All In With Chris Hayes. But here, sportswriters are probably being radicalized at roughly the same rate as the rest of the electorate — a process that began during George W. Bush’s administration and continued apace through the Obama years. If most Democrats you know seem feistier than they did 20 years ago, it follows that sportswriters would too.
Talk to the real lefties within sportswriting — Lipsyte, Padwe — and you find they’re skeptical that we’re witnessing a genuine ideological conversion. Sportswriters rarely touch issues like the antitrust exemption and the flag-waving militarism that drenches pro sports. (See Fox’s Super Bowl pregame show for one recent example.) There’s still plenty of PED hysteria, even if it’s getting better. The idea that league drafts unfairly conscript players to teams feels like an issue that’s just starting to get mainstream traction. In 10 years, woke sportswriters will be wondering why our generation didn’t talk more about it.
Maybe what we’re seeing is simply writers plying their trade in a different era. “We shouldn’t piss on things that are progress and are good,” Lipsyte said. “But how much of it is really any kind of expression of liberalism? How much is times change and we change with it? Maybe we’re just standing in the same place but being carried along by the flow.”
The Obama administration was a dream time for liberal sportswriters, who had a president who talked about sports like they did. Trump’s election caused a convulsion. Lipsyte added, “Kaepernick, the manifestos of Meloand LeBron, and the Trumpish tinge to the Patriots and its reaction from players who say they won’t go to the White House have to be acknowledged, and once you do that, it feels like left-leaning commentary. Unless, of course, it is.”
On November 8, we learned a lot of Americans aren’t ready to sail into the progressive horizon. In sportswriting, as in politics, there was a backlash that you could see across the media.
First, conservative political writers began grumbling about their sports pages the way they grumble about the front pages. A 2014 American Spectator column sniffed: “[The sportswriter] now lies prostrate before a new set of masters: Mimosa-sipping Manhattanites and liberal witch hunters whose sole interest in sports is purging football teams of offensive names, obtaining equal screen-time for females, and celebrating sexual diversity.” Equal time and diversity — what a crock.
Next, other sportswriters took up the critique. “The sports media is the most far-left contingent of media that exists in this country,” Fox Sports’ Clay Travis declared last month. In tsk-tsking the writers — and the athletes they worship — the holdouts sounded like the founders of Fox News. Your media’s been hijacked!
Those who are sitting out the liberal sportswriting renaissance are as likely to tweak the media as they are to offer competing ideas. This week, when Nike released an “Equality” ad starring LeBron James and Serena Williams, Jason Whitlock said: “all this ‘resist, resist’ … it’s bogus. It’s a campaign. … It ain’t got a damn thing to do with you, the ordinary working man.”
Earlier this year, when Ronda Rousey was throttled by Amanda Nunes, Travis said: “There were a ton of people in the sports media who wanted Ronda Rousey to be good because it somehow represented their belief that women are better than men.” Breitbart approvingly cited the remark. …
If anything has gone haywire in this new world … Writers trying to find the proper, liberal response to new issues wind up tying themselves in knots.
Take the reaction to the Ray Rice video in 2014. There was a hue and cry throughout sportswriting: Something ought to be done! (If there was any criticism, it came from the left: that replays of the elevator video were “re-victimizing” his then-fiancée, Janay.)
Unfortunately, many of the early columns didn’t always say who ought to do something or what it should be. Roger Goodell used the groundswell of rage to suspend Rice indefinitely and increase his already-fearsome power over player discipline.
Such imprecision doesn’t just empower hardliners like Goodell. A few months after Rice’s suspension, Adam Silver, the model of a progressive commissioner, used a gray area in his league’s CBA to levy a harsh punishment against a convicted domestic abuser, Jeffery Taylor. Silver attributed his actions to what he called the “evolving social consensus” — much of which was crafted in the media.
And there’s another liberal ideal at stake here: that criminals who’ve paid their debt to society ought to have a chance to re-enter it. In 2010, Barack Obama congratulated the owner of the Eagles for giving Michael Vick a job after he was released from prison. Rice’s bad acts were very different from Vick’s. But say Rice got another NFL job after his apology tour. Would a sportswriter have written an encomium to the owner who signed Rice? Should they have? It’s an awfully tough question.
In a sense that Curtis doesn’t mention I can understand how this happened. Of the five Ws and one H — Who, What, Where, When, Why and How — the Why and How could have more opinion than the rest. Did a basketball team lose because it failed to score for seven minutes, or because its opponent outscored them 14–0 over that seven minutes? Did Green Bay beat Dallas because of Aaron Rodgers’ great play, or because the Cowboys defense played poorly?
The fact vs. opinion standards have always been looser in sports journalism as well.
That great liberal Supreme Court Chief Justice Hugo Black may not have approved of this. He famously said he read the sports pages first because the sports page chronicles man’s successes, while the front page chronicles man’s failures.
I do not approve of this. For one thing, it wasn’t a conservative who coined the execrable phrase “The personal is political.” I do not believe sports fans read the sports page to get a sportswriter’s sociological or political views. Sports was one of an apparently decreasing number of areas in our lives measured in wins and losses instead of lefty victim-du-jour babble, and now it’s not.
It isn’t as if sports media can afford to offend its consumers. Sports Illustrated is printing seven fewer issues this year. The increasing politicization of ESPN has dovetailed with a drop in subscribers. NFL ratings dropped corresponding to Kaepernick’s protest. There are numerous websites and smartphone apps available for those who want only the scores and avoid sportswriter opinions. And it strikes me as career suicide in an era where news media outlets are shedding jobs left and right to go out of your way to alienate a substantial percentage of your readers, who are probably more likely to follow sports than those on the left side of the political aisle.
Will Flanders of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty suggests an expansion of school choice that might not be obvious:
Too often, school choice is Wisconsin is considered to be an issue only for Milwaukee. The Milwaukee Public School (MPS) district continually fails its students, particularly from poor and minority backgrounds. School choice has given these children a second chance at life. But lost in this debate is the fact that school districts outside of Milwaukee are not living up to expectations either.
For example, children in Wisconsin rural school districts are falling behind the rest of the state. These students are less likely to be proficient in math and reading relative to their peers in suburban districts. To show this, I analyzed data from the most recent state test, the Forward Exam.
The Department of Public Instruction (DPI) designates each school in the state as urban, suburban, rural or town. While most of these definitions are self-explanatory, “towns” are areas outside major cities with populations between 2,500 and 25,000. In the figures below, I show the difference in proficiency on the math and English portions of the Forward Exam from an econometric model that includes these school designations and many control variables also related to achievement (I leave Milwaukee out of this analysis).
The length of the bar in the graph below represents the extent to which schools in each category under perform suburban schools in math proficiency.
All of these types of school districts perform significantly worse than suburban schools, but the differences are most staggering in rural areas and small towns. In Math, students in rural schools are 8% less likely to be proficient in math. In small towns, they are more than 4% less likely to be proficient. A similar story is told when by the numbers for English/Language Arts, presented below.
In English, students in rural areas are about 5% less likely to be proficient than students in suburban schools, and students in small towns are 4% less likely to achieve proficiency.
Further increases in per pupil spending are unlikely to close this achievement gap. As I have detailed previously in Right Wisconsin, there is little relationship between per student spending in Wisconsin and academic achievement.
Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem. School choice programs like the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program (WPCP) have been shown to consistently improve performance. In Milwaukee, studies have found improved academic performance, lowered likelihoods of becoming involved in criminal activity and increased likelihood of high school graduation.
It is vital that access to school choice be expanded rapidly outside of Milwaukee. One key to doing this is lifting the income cap on the WPCP. Currently, students in Milwaukee whose families earn up to 300% of the poverty line are eligible for a voucher. In a situation that is fundamentally unfair to outstate parents, they are only eligible for a voucher with incomes up to 185% of the poverty line. This easy change would allow many more kids to access high quality schools their families could not otherwise afford.
Additionally, existing enrollment caps on the WPCP stunt the growth of the program. By lifting enrollment caps, far more students could enroll, and the WPCP could flourish.
Well … there is a substantial logistical problem here, and it has to do with an obvious characteristic of rural areas. The most common non-public school in rural areas are Catholic schools. There are more non-Catholic Christian schools than there used to be, but still very few. And non-religious private schools are nearly impossible to find outside urban areas. If you think rural schools are far apart now, imagine having one non-public school in a 10-county area.
Nevertheless, charter schools have been seen as taking away resources from rural schools. This would be one way of dealing with that issue.
The problem with the man currently leading the Republican party is that he is, as the Washington Post puts it, a hostage to the “fanatical policies of the extreme right.” His administration “insults women” and his unwelcome presence in public life “insults us all.” And, because the Republican party is all about the winning these days, the GOP establishment is “ready to forgive” . . . what? . . . “just about anything — as long as he wins.”
So says the Post, which is not alone in this estimate: Extreme on economic issues, extreme on the so-called social issues, he even has had an “extreme foreign-policy makeover,” according to The Atlantic. His views on immigration, MSNBC says, represent the Republican party “shrinking down to its most extreme elements.” One cable-news panelist insists he was the most extreme Republican presidential candidate ever. Paul Krugman laments that he has forsaken all serious policy thinking for “dangerous fantasy.” Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times is also alert to the “dangers” he presents, the “most dangerous of all” being his views on Iran, though Kristof also worries that he is too buddy-buddy with that awful, scheming Benjamin Netanyahu. Predictably, Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow dogpiled him for his perplexing relationship with Moscow. Vice calls him a “sociopath” and Maureen Dowd dismissed him as “an out-of-touch plutocrat” who keeps “his true nature . . . buried where we can’t see it,” a devious figure who is so awful deep down inside that he “must hide an essential part of who he is” from the public.
President Mitt Romney sounds like he would have been a riot. Alas, his presidency never came to pass, thanks in no small part to the hysteria chronicled above. Every Republican president is “the most extreme ever,” or so Democrats and their media friends insist. (“We do always say that,” one Democratic friend acknowledged. “And it is always true.” Well . . . )
In this corner, the American Press; in the opposite corner, the American President. The time has come for choosing sides — or so do many of our friends on the left and in the media (there is some crossover in that group) insist, as do more than a few of our friends on the right.
On Friday, I was scolded by Joe Hagan of New York magazine (he must have taken a break from the vital service he is offering to the republic at the moment, composing a biography of Jann Wenner) for daring to criticize my media colleagues in the age of Trump, “since you are supposedly a journalist.” It is, he insisted, “as if you, as a conservative, can’t see objective reality along with somebody you assume is a political opposite.” No, it is as if the American news media is predictably biased and incompetent, and would be writing almost precisely what it is writing about Donald Trump if the election had been won by Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, or Pat Sajak. Or, as the example above shows, Mitt Romney, who is a great many things (some of them admirable) but hardly an “extremist” or a “danger” to the republic.
It is possible, if you are not mentally crippled, to hold your mind two non-exclusive ideas: Donald J. Trump stinks, and the press stinks. Trump’s spat with the press is a bloodless Iran–Iraq war, and I myself am cheering for (metaphorical) casualties. If you find yourself only able to focus on which party stinks worse, then you have adopted the pre-kindergarten “binary choice” rhetoric of the campaign, in which both Trump and Clinton supporters insisted that we must ignore the obvious character defects, financial shenanigans, lies, and foolishness of A or B on the theory that B or A is so much worse that we simply cannot acknowledge any shortcomings on the other side.
Those of us who have not entirely surrendered our neocortices to one cable-news tribe or the other are perfectly capable of criticizing Trump and criticizing the media.
Of course the American media is terrible. Everybody knows this. Everybody who follows the public debate about guns, taxes, or abortion knows this. Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, knows this, which is why he sheepishly acknowledged that the so-called Newspaper of Record and its editors “don’t get religion.” And that is just a little bit of what they don’t get. Other senior editors at major media outlets know this, too. The people who run the Washington Post know this. The reflexive Democratic affiliation of most of the major media is a simple fact of life that you’d have to be foolish or dishonest to deny: Hell, I got the business about being a conservative when I was being considered for a copy-editor’s job a million years ago at the Philadelphia Inquirer—working in the sports section.
The tragedy of all this is that, yeah, we really could use an effective, active, and credible press right now. We have an active one five days out of the week, an effective one five days out of the month, and a credible one . . . not that often. My criticisms of Trump do not go so far as those who believe that he is a budding fascist dictator on the verge of building concentration camps, but if you really did believe that, wouldn’t you wish, at least a little, that the media hadn’t been exactly as hysterical when faced with the bland, anodyne visage of Mitt Romney? Or John McCain? You want to be taken seriously now after insisting that Dick Cheney was the new American Gestapo?
The last wolf show we bought tickets for wasn’t really all that spectacularly lupine.
It would be really very useful to have an authoritative source. I do not agree with Barack Obama about much of anything, but there is something to his argument that our public discourse suffers from our lack of anything that might be generally agreed upon as an authoritative source. The problem is that Barack Obama believes that this authoritative source should be Rachel Maddow or someone like her, or the editorial columns of the New York Times, dopey and predictable as they are. And, of course, there are people like Joe Hagan of New York, who believe that the current moment is simply too dangerous—it’s always dangerous with these people—to acknowledge that.
Hagan’s opposite number is a correspondent who on the same day sneered at me for relying on the New York Times as a source for a historical question, because we all know that no conservative can trust the New York Times. The Times column in question was written by the eminent historian John Lukacs, whose conservative bona fides are such that there is literally a chapter on him in a book called Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America 1950–1985, alongside Russell Kirk, Michael Novak (RIP), and William F. Buckley Jr. It did not matter to him what was written or by whom, only that it came from the other side—from the enemy camp.
We deserve a better press, and a better president, too. If you are the sort of partisan who cannot entertain the possibility that both of these things may be true at the same time, then you ought to consider the possibility that you are one of the reasons why we do not have a better press or a better president.
On Presidents Day, Jonah Goldberg writes about how he …
… watched the reaction to President Trump’s press conference. My friend Mollie Hemingway captured a very widespread sentiment out there:
“I would watch a @realDonaldTrump press conference at any time of any day. It’s just so entertaining.”
And I agree with her: It certainly was entertaining in parts. In other parts, not so much. But the problem is that entertainment value is one of the lowest standards one can hold a president to. … And it may be entertaining to watch a president of the United States spill out his id on national television like a torn net full of mackerel on a dock. But if that’s a standard for how to judge a presidential press conference, why didn’t we elect Charlie Sheen?
I keep hearing from conservative pundits that a lot of people out in the “real world” thought this press conference was awesome. I’m sure this is true. But I wonder how many conservative pundits realize that the people who thought it was awesome are already in Trump’s amen corner (and that these are precisely the folks that conservative pundits are most likely to hear from — and depend on?). Does anyone seriously believe that Trump persuaded significant numbers of people who didn’t already love him?
I’ve written a bunch about the MacGuffinization of American politics in recent years. Ace of Spades coined the term to describe how the media covered Barack Obama. They cast him as the hero of a drama and the only goal was to see how he overcame problems. It didn’t matter if he was wrong on policy — including the Constitution — what mattered was whether he emerged victorious. “In a movie or book, ‘The MacGuffin’ is the thing the hero wants,” Ace explained. “Usually the villain wants it too, and their conflict over who will end up with The MacGuffin forms the basic spine of the story.” Further on, Ace writes:
Watching Chris Matthews interview Obama, I was struck by just how uninterested in policy questions Matthews (and his panel) were, and how almost every question seemed to be, at heart, about Obama’s emotional response to difficulties — not about policy itself, but about Obama’s Hero’s Journey in navigating the plot of President Barack Obama: The Movie. As with a MacGuffin in the movie, only the Hero’s emotional response to the MacGuffin matters.
Now the MacGuffin thing is just a useful metaphor or analogy. But the dynamic it captures goes to the very core of humanity. While working on my book, I’ve come to believe more than ever that man is a story-telling animal and that stories are what give us meaning, direction, and passion. Hume’s point about reason being a slave to passion should be more properly understood as “reason is a slave to narrative.” But we can talk more about that later.
The relevant point here is that Trump was right when he said yesterday that he didn’t divide America, it was divided when he showed up. What concerns me is that vast numbers of conservatives who lamented the MacGuffinized presidency and media of the Obama era have grabbed with both hands the MacGuffinized presidency of Donald Trump.
It is entirely true that the press served as an eager participant in the story of Obama. It is also entirely true that much of the mainstream media is playing the reverse role in the story of Trump’s presidency. And, it’s also the case that much of the conservative media is now playing the role they once decried in the MSM. The same people who rolled their eyes at every clickbait headline blaring “Watch as Jon Stewart DESTROYS” this or that Republican now cheer as Trump rails against the “Failing New York Times” or “Very Fake News.” It doesn’t matter that Trump’s arguments are as bogus, selective, or disingenuous as Stewart’s. What matters is to cheer the “butt hurt” of Chuck Todd or Jim Acosta or some other enemy. …
Sean Hannity has taken to calling Chuck Todd a leader of something called “the alt-left,” a thing that is not a thing except in Hannity’s studio. (The “alt” in “alt-right” refers to a desire to replace the traditional Right with a new tribalist-nationalist Right. What “Left” is Chuck Todd trying to replace? This is weak-tea Alinskyite distraction.)
Now, that’s not entirely fair since I’ve always liked Todd, despite our fairly frequent disagreements. But you know what I mean. And I also agree with Mollie that the mainstream media has a lot to answer for when it comes to how they’ve treated conservatives and Republican presidents. I’ve written literally tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of words on this very point. And while I think Mollie is being unfair to Chuck here, I also think she misses the point.
When Donald Trump says any — and I mean any — negative coverage of him is fake, he’s making a very, very different claim than that of traditional bias. He is saying that news stories — with multiple sources from his administration, sometimes on the record — are simply fabricated. And just because the self-loving press idiotically takes the bait every time, handing him the mallet to bludgeon them with, doesn’t change the fact that the president of the United States is not only wrong, he’s lying. Yes, the New York Times gets stories wrong (News flash!), but it is not a work of fiction.
The argument one often hears from anti-anti-Trump conservatives is that they’re just holding the mainstream media accountable. Fine. Do that. But if you don’t show much interest in holding a president — who is the leader of the Republican party and maybe the conservative movement — accountable, then you’ve become an accomplice to the hero in a MacGuffinized presidency. One can see this most clearly when you hear radio- and TV-show hosts dismiss an argument by noting it comes from some alleged “Trump hater.” It’s the exact same tactic liberals used against those of us who criticized Bill Clinton. My animosity for Bill Clinton didn’t make him play football-coach-and-the-cheerleader with an intern. Likewise, my alleged feelings about Trump don’t make me wrong when I point out he’s lying when he says he won in a historic landslide or when he insists that his administration has been humming like a well-oiled machine.
Whether he understands what he’s doing or not, Trump’s goal is to delegitimize any critical voices. I think he’s motivated more by narcissism than by some evil-genius scheme, but it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is truth. We are entering a phase where everything is measured not by veracity, but by feeling: If certain facts make us feel like “our side” is losing, then those facts aren’t real. If certain fictions make the other side feel bad, then they are facts. Again, Trump didn’t create this sorry dynamic, but he is accelerating it at blistering speed. I’m less concerned about “fake news” than I am by fake opinions — by which I mean the widespread tendency to score political arguments based upon how much applause they will get from your team.
Reading Kevin Williamson’s terrific essay on President’s Day, I’m of a mind to think the presidency has always been MacGuffinized. But just because a problem has a long pedigree doesn’t mean the problem can’t get worse. I know I use this line from Orwell too much (and I’m eager to hear suggestions for substitutes), but it captures the dynamic of the moment so well: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.” Collectively, we’re all getting drunk on our feelings and then failing all the more completely for it.
The Beatles had quite a schedule today in 1963. They drove from Liverpool to London through the night to appear on the BBC’s “Parade of the Pops,” which was on live at noon.
After their two songs, they drove back north another three hours to get to their evening performance at the Swimming Baths in Doncaster.
Today in 1956, Elvis Presley performed three shows at the Fort Homer Hesterly Armory in Tampa, Fla. Presley closed the final show by announcing to the crowd of 14,000, “Girls, I’ll see you backstage.”
Many of them took Presley at his word. Presley barely made it into his dressing room, losing some of his clothes and his shoes in the girl gauntlet.
The number one single today in 1961 posed the question of whether actors can sing:
(Answer: Generally, singers act better than actors sing. Read on.)
This is a follow-up of sorts to last week’s post about the musical brilliance of Chicago, whose 50th anniversary of formation was yesterday.
Other brass rock bands are covered by Ken Michallef:
Rock legend has it that when 28-year-old organist Al Kooper, a veteran of historic sessions with Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, founded ten-piece band Blood, Sweat & Tears, he planned to build on the “brass-rock” sound of chart-toppers The Buckinghams, who had scored a 1967 #1 hit with the soul-suffused Kind of a Drag.
Coincidentally, The Buckinghams’ soon-to-be-manager, James William Guercio, became the producer for the most enduring of all bands that would epitomize and most successfully commercialize that specific “brass-rock” sound: Chicago.
But not before Blood, Sweat & Tears had recorded a string of chart-topping late ’60s/early ’70s hits including I Can’t Quit Her (the only hit to include founder Kooper), You’ve Made Me So Very Happy, “Spinning Wheel,” Laura Nyro’s And When I Die, Lucretia Mac Evil and Go Down Gamblin’. BS&T were the perfect amalgam and representation of a New York City horn rock band, stacked with hot-shot musician ringers who could cut big band jazz charts as easily as flower power pop. But in BS&T they were encouraged to break musical boundaries while racking up gold-selling Top 10 hit singles and albums. Combining appealing commercial songwriting with jazz improvisation, big band brass arrangements, 20th century classical, R&B and neo-psychedelia, BS&T also benefitted from a hairy-chested vocalist who rivaled Tom Jones for sheer balls and bravado: David Clayton-Thomas.
While Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago were the most successful purveyors of the “brass-rock” or horn band sound, other young musicians, skilled in jazz and rock, were ready to capitalize on the burgeoning style. Raised on rock, but with an awareness of the brass instruments that infused ’60s/’70s pop culture from the ubiquitous pit orchestras of popular television variety shows and movie soundtracks like The French Connection and Rocky, to then popular musicians Al Hirt, Herb Alpert and Doc Severinsen, horn rock was the common currency of its day just as synthesizers and AutoTune are today.
Blasting from the nation’s urban centers that were then in the grips of anti-war demonstrations, Black nationalism and Women’s Liberation movements, horn rock burned brightly, hit warp speed, and as quickly flamed out. The following bands comprise the great one hit wonders, the influential but doomed trailblazers, and the chart-topping mass culture movers of the horn band sound—some of whom we still know and love today.
Blood Sweat & Tears
The Premise: Crashed the Top 40 party with jazz arrangements and solo improvising, scored massive hits with sharp lyrics
Spinning Wheel still confounds jazz lovers to this day. From the surging brass crescendo intro to David Clayton-Thomas’s carefree lyric recitation to drummer Bobby Colomby’s Ringo-on-methamphetamine drum fills, “Spinning Wheel” was a game-changer. … BS&T played with the dynamic sensitivity of a jazz sextet or big band, but with a rock attitude, an entirely new approach. The groove is as funky as Sly and the Family Stone, and the dissonant bridge references that psychedelic big bang, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Gritty, slick and powerful, Blood, Sweat & Tears revolutionized rock.
The Verdict: Solid chops, great playing (*****)
The Electric Flag
Led by guitarist Mike Bloomfield, keyboardist Barry Goldberg, singer Nick Gravenites and drummer Buddy Miles, The Electric Flag brought serious blues and soul intent to rock, Bloomfield’s electric blues guitar brilliance and Miles’ funky-butt drumming driving a sweltering brass section as hard as James Brown and Albert Collins combined.
Formed in San Francisco in 1967, The Electric Flag began as Bloomfield’s baby, but as the band went through various contortions, wasted time recording a movie soundtrack and lost members to various addictions, blues-belting drummer/vocalist Miles took a larger role, forcing cover material on the band which didn’t have many original compositions to begin with. Tiring, Bloomfield left the band but not until they recorded their classic 1968 debut, A Long Time Comin’. There can be heard the booming brass section of Peter Strazza, saxophone; Marcus Doubleday, trumpet; Herb Rich, saxophone; and Stemzie Hunter, saxophone. Long Time Comin’ features such ferocious rockers as Howlin’ Wolf’s Killing Floor, slow-groover Texas, and revue-worthy shouter, Wine.
The Verdict: Gritty, blues-infected horn charts, smoldering rock undertow (**** ½)
Average White Band
The Premise: Scottish sextet meets at the intersection of blue-eyed soul and R&B horn shouts
A band of Scottish white boys playing R&B and funk? Average White Band was anything but, scoring a string of hits that swung from ’70s funk to early ’80s disco. Their early albums, AWB and Cut The Cake, have been sampled by everyone from Beastie Boys and Ice Cube, Eric B. & Rakim to TLC. And AWB’s deep-boweled, soulful horn sound is as compelling as ever. AWB’s hits include the time-twitching funk of 1974’s Pick Up The Pieces (its irregular meters freaking most rock musicians), the slippery soul of Cut The Cake, and If I Ever Lose This Heaven: this is what blue-eyed soul dreams are made of.
The Verdict: AWB scored radio hits that became classics, still lauded for great grooves and innovative musicianship (****).
Chicago
The Premise: Your mother’s favorite horn band, spanning the generations with mighty brass-powered pop
Still going strong 40 years on, having survived the figurate death of bassist Peter Cetera and the literal death of guitarist Terry Kath, Chicago created an innovative horn band sound that remains instantly recognizable. Their hits, including 25 Or 6 To 4, Saturday In The Park, Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? and Call On Me, are epic examples of perfect pop songcraft tempered by great musicianship. Combining principal composers Robert Lamm, Peter Cetera, Lee Loughnane and James Pankow’s love of The Beatles with an assimilation of the brass bravado of Woody Herman and Stan Kenton, Chicago’s success was practically guaranteed. The group shed their hardcore jazz roots by Chicago III, the band’s music becoming more streamlined and pop friendly. And the hits kept coming. Chicago is one of the best selling bands of all time, with 100 million albums sold like Snickers sexing it up with Mr. Softee.
The Verdict: Who could deny their sophisticated arrangements and mighty musicianship, much less their pop songwriting prowess? (****)
The Ides Of March
The Premise: As one hit wonders go, Vehicle is mightier than most, and slams as hard today as yesterday
Yet another band from the Chicago suburbs, mighty one-hit-wonders The Ides of March captured the gritty and galvanic working class roots of their native city with 1970’s Vehicle, featuring a heaving brass arrangement that would’ve made the perfect soundtrack to Charlton Heston’s chariot death scene in ‘Ben Hur.’ “Great God in heaven don’t you know I love you” went the song’s funky-evil tag line, as a comic guitar solo and breathtaking brass spew red hot cinders on anyone within earshot. Magnificent!! It was written and sung by band member Jim Peterik—who’d later form Survivor and co-write Eye Of The Tiger, no less.
Chase
The Verdict: A brilliant horn arrangement meets corny lyrics and a progressive groove (***)
The Premise: The early ’70s sound of blazing trumpets and commercial ambitionNo, it’s not The Ohio Players covering Play That Funky Music White Boy. Though the best horn bands were typically hard and gritty, there’s no denying the boogaloo funk factor some bands pursued in their dreams of success. With that caveat, Bill Chase’s Chase and their 1971 hit Get It On sports a beautiful brass arrangement that cascades over the ears like rushing water, though the track’s lyrics (“Get it on, get it on, get in on in the morning NOW”) and corny drum rhythms wouldn’t have been out of place on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh in. Sock it to me? And the band proudly featured a four-piece trumpet section!
The Verdict: You’re at a party, someone asks for something retro but still dance-worthy. Time to “Get It On!” (**)
Dreams
The Premise: Many are called, few are chosen. Innovative jazz rock band scores brilliant debut as a foretaste of magnificent careers to come
A super-group that nearly predated the fusion and jazz-rock movements while also spawning several important careers, Dreams released a self-titled debut that was a stone cold jazz-rock burner—though its uneven follow-up, Imagine My Surprise, couldn’t compare. Considering the original band’s lineup, the importance of its debut is hard to exaggerate: Billy Cobham, drums; John Abercrombie, guitar; Michael Brecker, tenor and soprano saxophones; Barry Rogers, trombone; and Randy Brecker, trumpet and flugelhorn. Though ‘Dreams” individual performances are brilliant, the band had no one-hit-wonder songwriters in its stable, its debut failing to chart. ‘Imagine My Surprise’, produced by Steve Cropper, was perhaps funkier, but less spontaneous and certainly less brass-powered. But Dreams remains an exciting listen and hints at the genre’s possibilities, from the queasy beauty of Holli Be Home, and the sizzling tenor sax fire and acetylene drumming of Dream Suite, to the backwards Afro Cuban funk near-hit Try Me. Dreams is the sound of a dangerous NYC, circa 1970.
The Verdict: Dreams maintains its jazz-rock heat 40 years later, as do the band’s blistering solos and tightly-executed arrangements (*****)
Lighthouse
The Premise: Another classic horn band one-hit-wonder, performed by an exceptional Canadian group that couldn’t find a follow-up
It’s often been said that watching The Beatles perform on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ in 1964 made a million boys buy guitars, but what made as many steal saxophones, trumpets and trombones from unattended high school orchestra lockers? Lighthouse’s massive one-hit-wonder, One Fine Morning, is practically evidence of criminal intent, the 1971 hit’s flowing groove, bass-slapping attack and hard rock guitar presaging its roaring brass bluster. As the band quakes below, the vocalist—who sounds as if he’s riding aloft a black stallion racing down the beach—shouts “As long as you love me girl, we’ll fly,” as over-stimulated harmony vocals and a breezy acoustic piano “bring it all back home,” as we used to say.
The Verdict: A massive hit single boasting a sky-cracking horn section that retains it majesty year after year (*** ½)
Cold Blood
The Premise: Bluesy San-Fran horn band led by a mighty female vocalist
That rare thing, an all male horn band fronted by a powerful female vocalist, Cold Blood is a San Francisco-based, East Bay soul-jazz-rock band that continues to burn brightly into the new millennium. The band, with original vocalist Lydia Pence, in some ways epitomized that greasy East Bay sound: 16th note driven hi-hat funk paired with popping electric bass lines and equally staccato and neck-jerking horn section blasts. Pence brought a soulful goodness not unlike Janis Joplin, while the immaculate rhythm section resembled that other Bay Area powerhouse: Tower Of Power. Cold Blood’s first four albums remain their best: Cold Blood, Sisyphus, First Taste Of Sin (produced by Donny Hathaway), and Thriller.
The Verdict: Powerhouse brass blowers aided by equally talented female vocalist provides solid entertainment from the 1970s to today (****)
The Sons Of Champlin
The Premise: Later Chicago (the band) musician in his early days leads northern California semi-horn band in good vibrations assault
Another California band, this time hailing from way up the coast, The Sons of Champlin was founded by eventual latter-day Chicago member Bill Champlin—who brought a casual soulfulness to his band’s floppy drum grooves and shambolic brass figures. SoC seemed more acoustic guitar than brass driven, even when no acoustic guitar was present. This is singer/songwriter horn band material, music more designed for happy sing-a-longs covering topical themes than driving a nail-hard groove designed to impale your brain on funk. SoC’s 1969 album Loosen Up Naturally, originally two vinyl slabs for the price of one, is worth seeking out. Feel the flower power children.
The Verdict: Though unfocused and lacking the drive that epitomizes the great horn bands, SoC retain a certain magical mystery appeal (***)
Ten Wheel Drive
The Premise: A true amalgam of blues grooves and jazz brass arrangements, led by one of the greatest vocalists ever
Short-lived but influential, Ten Wheel Drive, featuring magnetic vocalist Genya Ravan, operated between 1968 and 1974, bringing a burning blues sensibility to jazz-rock arrangements. On “Ain’t Gonna Happen,” you can hear the musical maturity and professionalism in the band’s tightly arranged ensembles and in Ravan, a storming vocalist on par with Janis Joplin. Early iterations of the group featured frequent Miles Davis saxophonist Dave Liebman, Blues Brothers’ trombonist Tom “Bones” Malone, and jazz giant, trombonist Bill Watrous. Ten Wheel Drive’s four albums, “Construction #1′ (1969), Brief Replies (1970), Peculiar Friends (1971) and ‘Ten Wheel Drive’ (1974) are essential listening, as are Genya Ravan’s ‘Genya Ravan’ (1972), ‘They Love Me, They Love Me Not’ (1973), and Goldie Zelkowitz (1974).
The Verdict: There’s a steaming furnace behind every TWD track; their four albums remain essential listening (*****)
The Flock
The Premise: Seemingly poised for breakout success, versatile band brings violin to the table
Yet another Chicago-based horn band signed to Columbia Records, The Flock didn’t achieve the success of their fellow natives, but the albums hold up well. Featuring future Mahavishnu Orchestra violinist Jerry Goodman, The Flock touted classic brass arrangements, but the band had a little more up its collective sleeve, perhaps too sophisticated and skilled for its own good. Their 1969 debut, ‘The Flock’, reflects the band’s interest in Miles Davis’s then evolving jazz with unusual textures, experimental segues and wild vocals. The Flock’s 1970 follow-up, ‘Dinosaur Swamps’, featured the semi-hit, Big Bird, a down-home country jig cum funk-brass belter turned straight-ahead jazz romp, another sign of The Flock’s versatility and musicality. 1975’s ‘Inside Out’ (now minus Goodman) got the band no closer to commercial success, and strains of radio rock began to creep in.
The Verdict: Too diverse and talented to easily morph their talents into bite-sized PR nuggets, The Flock never found their way but their music resounds with late 60s determination (***)
Edgar Winter’s White Trash
Edgar Winter’s White Trash
The Premise: Albino-led horn band mines swamp boogie and blues from the Deep South
Multi-instrumentalist Edgar Winter brought a sweaty Texan sensibility to horn rock, synthesizer rock, blues and rock ‘n’ roll. Though his biggest success came with the mega-hits Frankenstein and Free Ride, Winter’s first band, White Trash, was a hard living, hard driving monster, as can be heard on their two albums, 1971’s White Trash and ’72’s Roadwork. Combining Bobby “Blue” Bland’s horn sensibilities with the grueling rhythm section of drummer Bobby Ramirez (RIP), bassist Randy Jo Hobbs and guitarist Rick Derringer, White Trash held a raw southern component no northeastern band could match. Prime tracks from the two White Trash albums include the blazing Still Alive And Well, Back in The U.S.A., Rock ‘N Roll Hoochie Koo (featuring guitarist/brother Johnny Winter), and the hit, Keep Playing That Rock ‘n’ Roll.
The Verdict: A natural entertainer and band leader, saxophonist Edgar Winter created one of the most gloriously grooving horn bands to ever walk the earth (*****)
Tower Of Power
The Premise: The quintessential Oakland horn band, aided by innovative musicians and songwriting brilliance
Oakland’s finest, the great large ensemble that featured such innovative musicians as drummer David Garibaldi, bassist Francis “Rocco” Prestia, organist Chester Thompson, trumpeter Mic Gillette, tenor saxophonist Lenny Pickett and baritone saxophonist Stephen “Doc” Kupka, it’s hard to encapsulate or exaggerate the achievements of Tower Of Power. Though the band didn’t innovate complex, tongue-in-groove rhythms combined with appealing R&B material, they did it better than anyone else. Tower Of Power’s first six albums are R&B masterpieces: East Bay Grease (1970), Bump City (1972), Tower Of Power (1973), Back To Oakland (1974), Urban Renewal (’74) and In The Slot (1975). Tower Of Power hit upon not only a magical lineup, but exquisite songs, from the super funk What Is Hip? and Oakland Stroke to crooning pop classics, Soul Of A Child, Man from the Past, and This Time It’s Real, to intricate rhythmic juggernauts, Soul Vaccination, Squib Cakes and Garibaldi’s Vuela Por Noche. Tower of Power remains a one-of-a kind musical organization.
The Verdict: Greatest horn band of all time, each album a classic (*****+)
Mandrill
The Premise: Brooklyn brothers bring urban sounds to bear in polyglot horn band
A Brooklyn band founded by three Panama-born brothers in 1968, Mandrill combine brash brass sounds with earthy grooves in multi-kulti arrangements. We’re talking funk, funk, funk, NYC style, appropriately sampled in later years by Public Enemy, Kanye West, Eminem and 9th Wonder. The band’s diverse interests brought many styles into their wheelhouse, from Latin, salsa, rock, blues, soul and beyond.
The Verdict: Reflecting their melting pot locale, Mandrill created hot grooves like none other (*** ½)
Osibisa
The Premise: African and Caribbean sourced horn band creates early “world music” treatises
Another band that fused African, Caribbean, jazz, funk, rock, Latin and R&B, London’s Osibisa drew from that city’s melting pot just as Mandrill reflected its New York heritage. Oddly similar to East LA band War, the African and Caribbean born musicians of Osibisa focused on simple, communicative grooves and instantly catchy melodies. The music even has a “spiritual jazz” element, heard in its lush harmony vocals and spacey percussive jams. 1971’s Osibisa and Woyaya, 1972’s Heads, 1973’s Happy Children and 1974’s Osibirock are essential slabs of horn rock for free floating travelers of all destinations.
The Verdict: Perhaps more relevant today than in the 70s, Osibisa’s music is full of mystery, exotica and surprise (****)
I’m glad I stumbled upon this, because I had not heard of several of these acts before reading. Clearly I need to expand my brass rock horizons.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 