Arguments, Auteurs, and Atlantic Writers

Some rambling about lists, movies, and tradition

Deposit your coin and make your choice.

A few things that have crossed my path …

The Song, the Songwriter, or What the Hell?

I won’t go into the same detail about the New York Times’ “Greatest Living American Songwriters” list that many other commentators, most more knowledgeable than me, have done. By now we all know the problems: no Randy Newman, no John Fogerty, no Gamble and Huff, the inexplicable inclusion of Stephin Merritt and Mariah Carey.

But I want to discuss just what it means to be a great songwriter. Is it hits? Is it a legacy? Is it both? I recently read David Hajdu’s marvelous book about the history of songwriting and popular music, “Love for Sale,” and his continued point is that popular music, in a capitalist age, is written for financial success as much as (if not more than) art. Or, to borrow one of my favorite lines of Paul McCartney’s—describing what he and John Lennon would say when getting together at John’s house—“Let’s write a swimming pool.”

As the Times itself asked, “And besides, how do you define ‘greatness’? Is it about originality? Influence? Mass appeal?”

Certainly, I can’t argue with Mariah Carey when it comes to hits, though I can’t hum a single one of them right now. Nor can I argue with Diane Warren, a gun for hire who has written chart-toppers including Toni Braxton’s “Un-break My Heart” and Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.”

But will songs by either of them be remembered beyond stations (or playlists) featuring the greatest hits of yesterday and today, nostalgia trips for people who grew up in the ‘90s and ‘00s? Occasionally you get a performer who can turn chart fodder into something deeper; I remember being stunned by Sam Moore’s cover of Warren’s “Blame It on the Rain,” which took Milli Vanilli’s dated product and gave it some heft.

Then again, Shonen Knife made “Top of the World,” a Carpenters song I loathe (written by Richard Carpenter and John Bettis), into a real song, too.

Anyway, the Times did what it wanted. It started arguments. People in my age bracket—the dreaded over-50s who help those stations featuring the greatest hits of yesterday and today collect ad revenue—are wondering where our heroes are. Critics are poking holes in the Times’ methodology, which clearly had a few thumbs on the scale to add hipster’s hipster Merritt (c’mon, NYT, you know you really wanted to add the far more talented Rufus Wainwright) or leave off a time-tested writer like Jimmy Webb.

And what about the Broadway/Hollywood tunesmiths, the Lin-Manuel Mirandas and Robert & Kristen Anderson Lopezes? Don’t they count?

I’ll stop now, except for one more thing. Personally, I think a songwriters’ list should feature people who write both distinctive and timeless songs. Admittedly, the issue with “timeless” is that a song needs time to take root in the culture. But I guarantee you people will still be covering—and pondering—“Wichita Lineman” decades from now. I don’t know if you could say that about Lana Del Rey.

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‘One Battle After Another,’ Dying on the ‘Vineland’

I sat down to watch “One Battle After Another” shortly after it won the Oscar for best picture. And, while I (as always) admired Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmmaking skills, all I could think of was, “This was the best picture of the year?”

There are some scenes of brilliance: Leonardo DiCaprio’s argument with some pinhead over a long-forgotten password, the creepy meeting of the Christmas Adventurers Club, pretty much any scene featuring Benicio Del Toro. But those were separated by logy stretches of slack action and dialogue.

And I still don’t understand the praise for the chase scene near the end of the movie. If Anderson was drawing from “The French Connection” and “Bullitt,” he completely missed the point. Instead, I was reminded of the “endless running” scene in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

Though Anderson wasn’t being funny.

I think part of the problem is his source material. “One Battle After Another” was based on Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” a typically Pynchonean stew of government conspiracy, misunderstandings, and funny names. Now, Pynchon is many things: cross-disciplinarily brilliant, logorhythmically stunning, absurdly silly. But too often those qualities combine to make for a shallow meal, in particular because Pynchon’s characters—Tyrone Slothrop, Benny Profane, Doc Sportello—don’t have much of a life as actual people. They’re stick figures (with funny names) stuck in a world that might be one giant conspiracy, or several smaller conspiracies that don’t know if they’re conspiracies.

(Not that I’ve read the entire Pynchon canon—and it probably says as much about me as it does about him—but my favorite Pynchon character is Byron the Bulb, the anthropomorphic luminaire raging against the Phoebus cartel—a real thing!—in “Gravity’s Rainbow.”)

I give Anderson points for his attempts to bring Pynchon’s worldview to a wider audience. (This isn’t his first jitterbug with the mysterious author; he also gave “Inherent Vice” a shot.) But I prefer his more somber character studies. “There Will Be Blood” would have won all the Oscars if it hadn’t been for the Coens’ “No Country for Old Men,” and “Phantom Thread” is one of those quiet films that makes your jaw drop with its fiendish ending. Too bad Daniel Day-Lewis is retired; he and Anderson are one hell of a powerful combination. His version of Sean Penn’s Col. Lockjaw would have been twice as terrifying.

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Escaping the Walled Garden

I used to enjoy David Brooks. He was one of those reasonable Republicans who would pop up on the “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” and debate the amiable Democrat Mark Shields, and he wrote puckish books of pop sociology like “Bobos in Paradise,” about the ‘90s wave of limousine liberals.

But then he started taking his post as a New York Times columnist very seriously and became the kind of conservative who tut-tuts the lack of religion and seriousness in culture and politics while favoring the moneyed class who don’t really care about religion (unless, these days, it’s Christian fundamentalism or Opus Dei Catholicism) or seriousness (which is for wonks who actually care about helping people).

Brooks is now a writer for the Atlantic, where he gets to write in-depth articles on the same hobbyhorses he used to attempt in his 800-word Times pieces. In the most recent issue, he looks into why “History Is Running Backwards.”

It’s a meaty topic, and Brooks offers a capable primer on the back-and-forth of history:

The 18th-century French Enlightenment cult of reason produced the 19th-century Romantic cult of passion as a counterreaction. The 19th-century explosion of industrialization produced the neo-Gothic reaction, led by people such as John Ruskin, who celebrated pre-machine living.

For much of the 20th century, faith in progress was the guiding ideology of modernity … Today, however, billions of people have lost that faith in progress as a source of meaning and are flocking to its opposite.

He ends up praising the traditionalists, who value rootedness in place and culture, while noting they have built walls around themselves. Still, he also has to express some regretful finger-wagging against those left-wing relativists who protest Western Civ: “The ethos of individualism has led us to cut ourselves off from our own traditions: We’re so focused on the individual self that we fail to appreciate the millennia-long conversations within which each self swims.”

Now, that strain of thinking frustrates me as well, but I like to think that the so-called cancel-culture crowd is more open to the humanities than the wall-building traditionalists.

It’s a constant push and pull, isn’t it? Right now the wall-builders are ascendant, and mushy urban-dwelling English majors like me are looking for the exits. Brooks ignores the faults of traditionalism—there’s a reason that people leave their hometowns, whether it be family abuse, differing goals, or the narrowness of “that’s the way we’ve always done it”—as well as the fact that relocating from “home” has been a human trait for thousands of years. But at least he acknowledges that we need roots and growth, if reluctantly.

I happened to read a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar column around the time I was reading Brooks’ piece. He expresses a more welcoming idea I can sign on to, especially in these contentious times.

“We’re all tired,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote. “We’ve been ‘flooded [in] the zone’ until we’re gasping for air. But the strength of our community, the ‘American Experiment,’ doesn’t come from those of us who find a clever exit strategy. It comes from those who look at the mess, look at the wires and the pulleys, and say, ‘Nope. I’m staying put.’ ”

Let’s build a home—and a culture—we can all take part in. Including those who want to put both Mariah Carey and Stephin Merritt on a list of greatest living songwriters.