🍒 CHERRYPICKING #004
The rise (and predicted fall) of Chappell Roan, TAX, my love of commercials, and Spirited Away
I am excited to announce that I will be featured in TAX magazine issue 4! Clocking in at 180+ pages, issue 4 features @bentonmcclintock @multitudesofdaveys @_lobobear_ (and more!) and includes pieces like my original period-piece fiction entitled: BAIT! Full of fashion, beauty, brains, and so much more, Issue 4 will be yours online and in PRINT beginning June 25th.
Digital and Print Pre-Orders Available Now.
🍪 An advertisement for cookies
Well, we’ve done it. We reinvented cable. The more things change with streamers, the more they stay the same. In between episodes of Abbot Elementary, one can expect to see what feels like an additional 30 minutes of advertisements. The commercials, something that many who identify as Zillenials and younger can only remember as a far off memory of a time gone by, play on endless loop breaking up the streaming experience. And actually, I think this is great.
I once had a friend in elementary school who used to mute our television show (Dexter’s Lab at the time) so that he could only tune back in for the commercials. Even as a five year old I was a little anti-capitalist and found this odd. In actuality, I probably cared less about the product worshipping for each and every Floam commercial, and more just wanted to continue the episode which had captured me entirely. Still, perhaps he was on to something—in a way.
I’ve grown to love this traditional commercial experience. I find the whole conceit a bit quaint like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping for something to stick. All that to say, ads playing on TV very seldom have anything to do with you as a consumer. They must paint in broad strokes. You can see a 40-second clip about Crohn’s disease medication and then a trailer for a Ford pickup— neither necessarily targeting you in specific. Contrast this to our experience on a web-centric model. Banner ads, targeted ads, sponsored posts, all carefully constructed to reflect your online shopping and viewing habits based off of your cookies. This I believe is the truly insidious nature of marketing, one which we gleefully hand over in return for a less obstructed viewing experience.
As I sat and watched these commercials I was happy to feel as though the marketing professionals over at Nestle didn’t necessarily know anything about me. Because honestly, why should they? These ads were just another piece of content, and not one launched at me like a heat tracking missile. My brain could readily classify these as “marketing materials” and therefore tune them out and not partake in the Russian roulette of influencer affiliate links. Meanwhile the rest of the room was less-so pleased.
“Why are there ads, don’t I already pay for this?”
So here’s where I get a little controversial: I think this mindset is inherently anti-art. And here’s why: The structures we have always had in place since the beginning of art creation are designed to set up revenue streams for the artist. Of course this is not its only purpose, and the producers and network owners obviously are incentivized through their own profit margins, but in theory— the exchange is that in order to access art we as a consumer buy in in some way. Whether that be a cable package, or purchasing a physical copy of a film, there is some exchange of money for the art that you consume. By creating a model that disincentivizes the consumer from actually paying for their art, to push a narrative that a viewing experience should be “ad-free” or that they could “own every movie you could ever want for just $9.99 a month,” we devalue art as a whole and commodify the experience. In this way we are saying we don’t want the art—just the ad.
So we wonder why there are writer’s strikes, and constant labor issues with the CGI community and musicians, but the answer is clear to see— art and creativity are seen as a right— something we are all entitled to, and to do so for free.
I suppose this is what we would call Late Stage Art. Art which has become devoid of any meaning rather than its purpose to sell. We all unblinkingly lock into our timelines scroll for hours and hours on sponsored posts, never upset that we are consuming hundreds of thousands of ads a minute. Because those are the ony videos that perform well in an algorithm based off of profit margins rather than quality. Each “get ready with me” and “story time” made into a grocery list of items you need to purchase in order to improve your life. What once was the most beautiful facet of humanity—storytelling, has now just become the piece we mute in order to get back to our precious precious ads.
🗽 Gay people, Chappell Roan’s success doesn’t mean you’re old,
And even if it did, there are worse things than simply getting older
I remember the old wars. Madonna on Late Night referring to Lady Gaga as reductive, her songs constantly getting compared to other artists (who she openly claimed as inspirations, but were somehow used as a knock against her artistic integrity) all her performances and art boiled down to merely shock factor—devoid of substance. I remember Artpop.
In the years since, Gaga has clawed her way out of this game of comparison and comfortably nestled herself into the pantheon of greats before her. But with each new generation, comes new voices and new bright shiny young things to idolize. One who is garnering a particularly astounding wave of attention at the moment is the Midwest Princess herself, Chappell Roan.
From the beginning Chappell has been compared to Gaga, her stage presence, her commitment to the queer community, her willingness to experiment with fashion and bucking conventionality— and especially with her tenacious attitude. One only need to watch the videos of Chappell playing her red nord electro keyboard before fame to elicit familiar memories of an early Gaga singing Wicked in her school cafeteria or “carrying [her] piano down her four flight walk-up." Hell, even their first albums follow the same themes and storyline, both being utterly obsessed with the path and concept of fame, with Chappell’s Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (released in 2023) following her constant commitment to success through turbulent periods.
She has all the makings for a feel-good story, and so right on cue, the detractors are coming out of the woodwork. The same gay people who felt “attacked” by the then older Madonna fans for their connection to Gaga, are now becoming just like their forefathers. The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree on this sort of thing. Gaga fans now take these comparisons, at first said with appreciation and praise, as a form of discrediting. It is fine, it might seem, to be similar to another artist enough to draw comparisons, but you had better hope that you never exceed that fame or try to step out of that shadow. Such is the toxic half life of a gay icon and their fans.
Another pernicious element of this comes in the form of coded, and often outright, misogyny. You cannot simply uplift one woman’s voice in this culture, you must also tear down another woman to get your point across. See the discourse that: “Chappell is not Gaga she’s more of a [fill in the name of a less-commercially viable popstar here.]”
If anything is reductive, it is this mindset.
***
In the Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello written Max comedy Hacks, the main character Deborah Vance plays a sort of gay icon comedian, a persona which is echoed by the actress portraying the character “supreme mother Jean Smart herself.” The show interestingly blends the meta narrative of what it is like to be this type of woman who is idolized by predominately gay men, and how this can often lead to an arena of success not typically afforded to women in a male-gatekept media industry. Vance has a gay assistant who started as one of her original fans, but who starts to feel left behind after Vance begins to find success outside of just the queer community (think Gaga performing Shallow for every townie mom who drives a Nissan Murano). At a bar this character is met by an older gay man who offers some sage advice,
“You can’t stop being a fan now that she’s got more of them. We loved her before anybody else did, and she loved us before anybody else did. That’s not nothing. We just have to share her now.”
This comes with age, and perhaps the gay people who are most at odds with this acceptance are the ones who are challenged by the very concept of aging themselves. There is room for Chappell Roan for the young girls in the Midwest, just as there was room for Gaga in a pre-Glee America, and Madonna before her in a time when AIDs was still considered a death sentence. These can all be true.
I think sometimes we see the successes of the younger generation as some sort of harbinger that our time is up. We no longer have anything to offer now that we aren’t the shiny new object plastered on every TV screen in America, handing our meat purse to Cher. And though this feeling may come from a real place, we must also investigate why we believe that individuals lose their value to a society after they hit a certain age. It is patently not reflected in the literature, with Madonna just recently playing to the largest crowd of 1.6 million fans, and Gaga continuing to appear in films and push herself creatively a decade into her career.
It might feel scary, but getting older doesn’t mean you’re done, in a lot of ways it means you are just beginning—and all the while you get to enjoy the efforts of younger and older people before you, while you drive home listening to Ray of Light, feel the joy of dancing to Rain on Me, and remember your first kiss while listening to Red Wine Supernova.
🏯 A conversation with Spirited Away
Sometimes, I watch a movie and I’m like, “this movie deserves to get an Oscar,” and a lot of times they already have, and it’s like, hey that’s cool. I love when the award does the thing it’s like supposed to do. Sometimes critically acclaimed movies, actually are good. And that’s great.
I can’t say on my first watch of Spirited Away as a child that I understood a whole lot of its depth. After all, at the time, I was still learning how to use the microwave oven and quite literally stumbling through how to read. So it stands to reason that I didn’t necessarily acquire the critical comprehension skills needed to take in a lot of the symbolism throughout the film or other films like it, until I had parsed through some of that other stuff.
When I saw No Face, the greed spirit, I saw it as merely a character in a film, and a scary one at that. I didn’t see what larger cultural statement a character like that may represent, and I certainly couldn’t apply this message to my own life. I was a passive viewer, simply along for the ride—enjoying the pretty colors and nice sounds. That being said, it is completely understandable to lack the context needed to consume a piece of art in the fullest at such a young age. After all, you quite literally have not lived enough life to understand what a film or piece of art is saying.
I remember hearing this sentiment a lot growing up and thinking it was so patronizing. Of course I understand the plot of the movie— I’m watching it. But, as I revisit films from my youth, or engage with new pieces of art, I am trying to do so with more of an eye for a meta-narrative, to sit and absorb art with the goal of engaging with it like a conversation. And… at risk of sounding pretentious, or perhaps worse—entirely late to the party, this new relationship with art is bringing me a depth of enjoyment I have been sorely missing. Good art, I believe, is a dialogue between the viewer and the artist, and it is when a work manages to do this that it is truly effective.
So, in simplest terms, when a movie is good—I like it.
Spirited Away is one such film. One which I believe is best digested after meticulous chewing. For me, one of the most tragic through lines in all of Miyazaki’s films is the transition from childhood to adult life, and the burnout that that can very often accompany this aging process. In many of his films our characters have an inherent spark in them, be it Kiki’s magical abilities, or Chihiro’s own tenacious spirit, and these are lost over time in trying to fit into a world of adult expectations. One which our young protagonists feel like complete strangers in.
With this reading, I was able to relate to Spirited Away in a quality I haven’t experienced before. I watched as Chihiro lost her name to the brechtian horrors of her work environment, and thought of my own de-humanization process felt through office life. I watched her quite literally shovel coal (perhaps an analog to Miyazaki’s own start in the art world and the incomprable plethora of sketches a made by young anime artists during their career) and I think of the grunt work that I participated in feeding the monstrous algorithm with constant Instagram posts and social media dribble.
The film comments on the industrialization of Japan, and its own shift away from spirituality following World War II, speaking (there’s that word again) directly to the ways in which this new capitalistic structure strips us of our humanity.
It is heartening, and then also perhaps not so much, to know that these struggles are felt by so many, across so many different generations. Many of us feel used up by our work, losing what spark we had as young people, and offering up our literal essence to these institutions and machines of capital that serve only to chew us up and spit us out like the boiler room at the bathhouse. All the while, we are losing that element of interconnectedness to our community and the physical world around us.
This is a heavy topic for what is ostensibly a children’s movie. Much more so than say, Trolls: World Tour. But this narrative is handled with care and sensitivity, and most importantly quiet. In so many of Hayao Miyazaki’s films he offers the viewer these long plotting moments of near-silent reflection. A train ride through the countryside, a meal being cooked, that silent moment right before you fall asleep—these are all given to us as the view as a moment to ask ourselves the bigger questions.
To sit with a piece of art is to sit with our self.
AND…
For more of my writing, check out the first chapter of the book I’m working on. The feedback has been so fulfilling already and I am excited to get more of my thoughts out on the page. Chapter one, Spark Plugs, follows the story of Rory as he self-medicates and crumbles under the pressures of his University writing program, causing him to move out of the city and into what feels like the end of his life. (Sound familiar?) Read it here.
Read more from CHERRYPICKING:
🐆CHERRYPICKING #001 | 👽CHERRYPICKING #002 | 🐑CHERRYPICKING #003