Aiming For The Middle

You Could Still Miss The Side Of The Barn

On The Elusive ‘Mainstream’

It’s been an interesting couple of months with the release of some big movies this year. It’s been the best year for going to movies since before the pandemic, and it’s great to see the audiences back at the movie theatres. Clearly, the death of cinema was greatly exaggerated. Still, I have had a bit of time to contemplate about the different outcomes for some of these films.

It took me years to understand this but, mainstream appeal is very hard to grok if you don’t have a taste for it. One clue I had early on was how Madonna rose to fame on the back of a very flimsy voice and a pretty dull bunch of songs that got a lot of airplay. Joni Mitchell decried the rise of Madonna saying talent matters, and that Madonna is a bad role model because in Joni Mitchell’s eyes, Madonna didn’t have talent. I didn’t think much of Madonna’s material but clearly there were gajillions of people who were lapping it up and throwing money at it. If they were there consuming it, it was legitimately a thing, even if I didn’t get it. By the time she was putting out her book ‘Sex’, I had come to the conclusion that whatever the mainstream was that were buying into the Madonna phenomenon and persona, not only wasn’t I a part of it, I had no way of understanding how it worked.

Similarly, I was one of the few people who watched ‘Blade Runner’ in its initial theatrical run in 1982. I loved it in spite of all the critics at the time telling me it was crap and that it was not a worthy film. The mainstream rejected this film for whatever reason, and I never quite got it until much later. If you went in hoping to see Harrison Ford do action movie stuff, ‘Blade Runner’ does not give you a whole lot of that. There are other things about it I adore but the mainstream ignored it for a decade before critics came to revise their take on the film.

Over a lifetime of these kinds of experiences, you realise that your own tastes are not part of that mainstream that makes some things highly successful. One’s tastes are one’s own - you like what you like because that’s what you like - and that’s totally fine. However, if a person has tastes that do not belong to the mainstream, how on earth can they aim to make a blockbuster or a hit record that captures the enthusiasm of the mainstream? If you are the kind of weirdo that likes curios like ‘Amazon Women on the Moon’ or ‘1941’, but not ‘Home Alone’ or ‘Police Academy’, you have to question how far your own aesthetic can take you. In turn, if you are somebody that’s into one thing and one thing alone, like splatter horror or science fiction, then mainstream success is inevitably going to elude you because your aesthetic scope is too narrow.

I’m not going to be snarky or condescending about the mainstream. This is not a cultural elitist rant to put own the mainstream or those who are more sensitive to its appeal, or for that matter Madonna fans. I’m not taking Joni Mitchell’s side in denouncing Madonna. I don’t really know how to describe the demographic and its tastes that creates the cultural phenomena we see year after year. Sometimes a blockbuster or a hit is legitimately great - like this year’s hit movies. The critics who are harsh on Spiderman movies or even Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’, are demonstrating they don’t know about the mainstream either.

I think it’s okay to be suspicious of the mainstream that gives you Madonna, but it’s also the same mainstream that delivers Marvel movies or ‘Jaws’ or ‘Babe’. The mainstream is so schizophrenic it also delivered the success of both ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer; in the same year. You misread the mainstream at your own peril, but it’s hard to predict how it behaves. The abject Box Office failure of ‘Supergirl’, a mere 5 weeks before ‘Spiderman: Brand New Day’ illustrates the difficulty of targeting the mainstream. It’s not easy to get mainstream success even when you have a whole studio apparatus dedicated to hitting the mark. And hence the film industry adage: “Nobody ever knew nothing”.

In turn, if you are the sort of super-specialised creator that only likes some obscure sub-genre but do not like what’s going on in the mainstream, you’re going to be hard pressed to break out of your subcultural ghetto and do something to affect the wider world. That might be okay if you’re some kind of purist - God knows we’ve all been through that phase - but it behooves you to know purists rarely make money being purists.

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Getting It Wrong

I get a lot of things wrong. Last week I wrote Sony could have made TV shows out of their lesser Spiderman characters. Today I find Disney and Marvel are moving towards cancelling their live actions shows. Apparently they haven’t driven subscription sign-ups and so they have not led to riches as they had hoped. It appears the whole TV production piece is just not a winner for Disney and Marvel, together and apart. Seems to me the bother of ripping away the ‘Daredevil’ related content from Netflix, just to bring them to Disney+, only to end them this way was a pretty dumb move - but what would I know?

I also wrote a few weeks ago that ‘Genesis to Revelation’ was so juvenile and boring that if you played it to Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford today, they would probably cringe and ask for it to be turned off. I have discovered in the past week this is totally incorrect. Banks and Rutherford are teaming up with old chum Peter Gabriel to revisit those recordings. I guess they’re going to bring modern studio techniques to polish them up. It would be a bit like bronzing your first turd - but what would I know?

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What’s Spinning This Week (in no particular order):

1. Deja Vu - Crosby Stills Nash & Young

2. The Essential Leonard Cohen - Leonard Cohan

3. Nantucket Sleighride - Mountain

4. Inner Secrets - Santana

5. The Song Remains The Same - Led Zeppelin

I’ve had a difficult relationship with ‘Deja Vu’ for many years. I used to refer to it as ‘The Brown Album’. My difficulty with it goes back decades. I knew it was good but I never used to get it. The reason I didn’t get it was because I was looking for other things in my rock music, and this is an album where those features are downplayed. What it does boast are tight vocals and a bunch of cool songs that showcase their talents beautifully. Thankfully, I get it now. It’s pretty awesome. To get there, I had to listen to ‘Triple J’s Hottest 100 Vol.20’ whereupon I faced the true horror of indifferent music. This is the opposite of indifferent music - it’s Baby Boomer shit but it is impassioned Baby Boomer shit.

Leonard Cohen is a great artist… apparently. I’m amazed at how untouched I am by his songs. Here is a two disc anthology and it has interesting lyrics and some fine fingerpicking on guitar. Somehow, he’s not singing for me, and he’s not singing to me and he’s not singing of me. I wish I could be one of then people who are moved by this material, but I am not. It leaves me cold and outside of the things described in his songs. There are plenty of people who are not moved by stuff I’m moved by so that’s how the world goes around. Not everything is accessible, not everything is convertible. Maybe I’ll get this one mid-next century.

‘Nantucket Sleighride’ is the second disc in the 5-disc box set I got of Mountain’s material from the early 1970s. There’s some fancy playing going on here too, but this one is a bit less imaginative than ‘Climbing!’. The album as a whole has a more narrow focus on the blues rock thing and it doesn’t break out of its box much. Still, it’s a whole lot more up my alley than the Leonard Cohen anthology.

‘Inner Secretes’ finds Santana trying to get more vocals going, as well as trying out the new thing of the day, disco beats. It is so 1978. I’m not sure it works for him to be so half-heartedly trendy. The extended guitar solos are good - that’s what you come to Santana for - so there’s plenty of stuff to keep you happy. If anything, it’s not quite as exciting as ‘Amigos’. If he was trying to be commercial and relevant, this is a lukewarm attempt. If this was genuinely the space he wanted to explore, it feels like he’s come off the boil a little bit.

This week’s nostalgia listen is ‘The Song Remains The Same’. Back in the day I got the double LP and listened to it once when I dutifully transferred it to cassette tape (as was the custom of the time), and then listened to that cassette tape on my Walkman fewer than 3 times. It sounded way too murky and hissy and noisy, as if the band was stumbling around in the dark with the fog machine turned on to max. The 21st Century re-mix re-mastered version of this album is miles ahead of the original LP release. As it turns out, Eddie Kramer did record it cleanly and when brought up to date, the recording demonstrates how vivid Led Zeppelin was in 1973 at Madison Square Gardens. I think the updated mix and mastering plus the intervening years has made this a much better listen today.