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Apr 26, 2004 1 He stands there on the page, staring back at me. “No. 1.” He radiates withering indifference, like a housecat. I get the feeling that if he had a companion on either side, he’d have them bend down, so as to flip me off. When I was younger, “No. 1” stood for something. He accompanied the Cincinnati Reds to the World Series in contiguous years. You could hear him on WLS-Chicago, the greatest rock music station in the Midwest. We spotted him perched atop a magnificent animal named Secretariat. As the years passed, however, “No. 1” began to change. When you ran into him, he was no longer in the company of the most exemplary, the most accomplished, the most noteworthy. As I peruse the newspaper I see “No. 1” everywhere I turn, across the pop culture spectrum. He’s staring us all down, doing his housecat thing again; and I for one feel … well, a little betrayed. For starters, there’s that album that topped the charts last year. “Up!” was Shania Twain’s gift to us all last Christmas, a double album that was really a single album, cloned and mixed twice (and one colored red, one colored green! How perfect is that?). One mix was ostensibly country; one was ostensibly pop. The songs themselves were carved down to the musical marrow to allow for this interchangeability, arrangements and lyrics alike unfettered by character or depth. (Don’t get me wrong, friends of Shania: I have not a whisper of doubt whatsoever that Ms. Twain is every bit as deep as the fishies in the blue, blue sea. But I’m darned if I can tell it from her music.) Shania’s throngs of fans would have pounced on the album without the redundancy, but the idea here is to make new friends beyond her country homestead. Unsatisfied with almost 20 million in sales on the last album, the powers-that-be in the record industry resort to this gimmickry to make “Up!’ yours and mine, as well. Shania may be taken as the pacesetter in “No. 1”’s effort, which seems to be to compel all of us to pay more and more money to keep buying the same thing over and over. He is striking everywhere. Take Jennifer Lopez in “Maid in Manhattan,” last year's No. 1 romantic comedy. In the Shania tradition, money enables: rather than staffing this romp with a male performer of J. Lo’s own stripe, a hefty infusion of cash legitimized her presence as the leading lady of the movie by pulling in an actual actor (Ralph Fiennes) to be the leading man. To what end? Again, the Shania model prevails: free J. Lo from the confines of whatever her original career was (singer? model? I forget), creating another vehicle for giving her fans more of whatever it is they see in her. Of course, the big bucks to finance “Maid” had to come from somewhere, but of course the original author of “Cinderella” is both anonymous and dead, so royalties were not an issue. Then there are the video rentals, yet another triumph for “No. 1.” Apart from being a sequel to a parody of an allegory, “Men in Black II” permitted “No. 1” to wag his tongue at star turns. Will Smith as ultra-hip, wise-cracking world-saver. Tommy Lee Jones as cranky, deadpan pursuer of wrong-doers. Real departures for them both. “No. 1” proceeded to invade the printed word, where Michael Crichton once again reared his stratospheric head with “Prey,” which had its moment as the top choice in fiction. There’s been a long string of collaborations between “No. 1” and Crichton, best known for “Jurassic Park” - a parable of the dangers of technology, wherein scientists are careless with a new discovery and unleash horrors that threaten us all. In Crichton’s most recent thriller, a parable of the dangers of technology, scientists are careless with a new discovery and unleash horrors that threaten us all. Now there’s creativity for you. So, am I missing something here? Am I being unfair? Do Shania and J. Lo represent some kind of new evolution in the arts to which I am insensitive? Do I just not get it? If so, then explain to me how this evolution works. Explain to me how Faith Hill sells by the barge-load while Carrie Newcomer can’t get arrested. If art marches ever forward, then explain to me how, after a quarter century, pop culture (despite endless fertilization) has failed to produce a successor to either Elvis or the Beatles. Well, then, is it all about the money? When your album goes nineteen-times-platinum, and you are possessed of more money than God, the prudent artistic response is to go out and record your next album twice? We’re back to More-Is-Better? Well, then, how come the new Star Wars trilogy ain’t terrific? How is it that George Lucas made the first one out of cardboard, and it’s still cool – but the new ones, made on budgets rivaling that of the United States, are so lame? You see by now, I trust, why I am feeling so ill-at-ease. “No. 1” is a slippery bastard, a poster boy for intellectual and aesthetic decay. He used to stand for “The Best.” But then he strayed onto less reputable turf, snuggling up alongside “The Most Diverting to the Not-Particularly-Discriminating.” At last his apostacies have brought him to his current deplorable posture, signifying “The Flashiest, Emptiest, Most Redundant Waste of Time and Money Possible, Presented by the Most Breathtaking Yet Vacuous Specimens Living, to the Utterly Bored, the Recreationally Challenged and the Voluntarily Illiterate.” All of you people following “No. 1” around like flute-stoned mice, scarfing up tickets to artless make-out jags and head-banging to bouncing midriffs – what’s wrong with you? Didn’t your mommies tell you too much sugar is bad for you? Go to the library! Rent a Fellini film! Put on the White Album! And as for “No. 1,” well, a day of reckoning will come. His only enduring appearance in this fickle era has been on the cover of a Beatles collection, and our lingering penchant for our wonder years reminds us that there are cultural legacies from which “No. 1” cannot escape. Too many beers, for instance, and “No. 1” takes on a meaning far more fitting … ------------ About the author: Scott Robinson has written for a wide range of publications, from Rolling Stone to the Wall Street Journal. He is a pop music critic for the Louisville Courier-Journal. His most recent pop culture book is "YesTales: An Unauthorized Biography of Rock's Most Cosmic Band." Email: scottrobinson@att.net Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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