[transmission from... Tyler Sonnichsen]

PART 3

READ PART ONE HERE
READ PART TWO HERE

Throughout my last year in college, Napoleon Dynamite was a way of life. The film almost transcended cult status. The sheer number of sorority girls adapting ‘Vote for Pedro’ for their respective house t-shirts amazed me. The film’s omnipresence died down a bit by May when I graduated. Shortly thereafter, though, I moved to Maine for the summer to work at a camp… where Napoleon Dynamite was a way of life. As much as older film buffs appreciated Napoleon’s understated, dry humor and surreal character studies, the campers (aged 7-15) got a great laugh every time they heard phrases like “flippin’ sweet” or “your mom goes to college.”

As one would expect, few of these kids knew much about Spinal Tap. Their parents, for the most part, were too old to get consumed in the post-Spinal Tap generation. Many of their parents could even remember watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Barely any of these kids had ever touched a vinyl record. Several had never even owned a CD. The youngest campers, at the age when many kids start to develop musical tastes, began their collection with an iPod in hand. One of the biggest hits across those iPods this summer was, coincidentally enough, a song entitled “1985.” Bowling for Soup packaged that year in a perfectly marketable chunk of sugary pop. They did not bother to mention Back to the Future, “Rain Dogs,” or anything else from 1985 that was ever important to me. That comes as no surprise. I am not important to Bowling for Soup. A majority of their primary target audience could not even remember the ascension of Nirvana with “Smells like Teen Spirit.” Given the consumption-heavy, bull-market economy during my adolescence in the ‘90s, it’s almost disenfranchising growing out of MTV’s target market. I am a young professional. Even when I do have disposable income, they still go straight for the throat of the younger demographic. Even kids “strongly encouraged not to watch” these programs fall for the schemes every step along the way.

The fact that my generation, and even a slightly younger one, is mired in the world of twenty years past is no big surprise, given the novelty value. Too many young twentysomethings, who faintly remember the era, disregard the factual elements that made the time that immediately followed This is Spinal Tap so unique. The internet is so imbued in our culture and functional lives today, much like cell phones, that we forget the intricacies of everyday life before they became popular. I cannot count the number of times that my mother, who grew up long before cable TV much less mobile phones, asked herself how she ever lived without either of those things. Mainstream, or even underground, popularity was infinitely more difficult to gain without the help of file-sharing and MySpace. MTV was the first step in this direction, though it was not nearly as populist or accessible.

Shearer, McKeon, and Guest made a few music videos as the Spinal Tap characters. These drew directly from popular rock videos at the time, further adding to the illusion that they were legitimate. Other than being generally hilarious (intentionally so, unlike some of their metal counterparts at the time), they gave music fans little reason to call them on their façade. Few popular bands at the time eschewed the facets of the music industry that Spinal Tap reflected. REM, coming out of the largely self-contained college community of Athens, Georgia, was still in the underground when Spinal Tap arrived, but began to climb to rock radio prominence steadily. They were a perfect example of a post-Spinal Tap artist who forged a new form of success while avoiding succumbing to rock clichés or watering down their music. Regardless, REM’s politically-correct, machismo-free style lent them to ridicule for their prescient “hippie-ness” and the fey countenance of singer Michael Stipe. In popular culture, especially within the lifespan of this generation, every key action has had to face an equal and opposite reaction.

In spite of their essentially diametric opposition to old rock star clichés, REM still had a “Spinal Tap” moment: “We played an Air Force gig in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1982,” said founding bassist Mike Mills, “We had a captain in uniform who took us for steaks in the officers’ mess. Then we played the show, and they hated us. They wanted Joan Jett or someone with more balls than we had.”

Every band has had to endure a number of inevitable Spinal Tap moments. When I met my roommate, one of our first topics of conversation was This is Spinal Tap. He told me about one time when he and the band he was playing in at the time rolled up to a gig in rural Maryland. The marquee read “PIZZA NIGHT” with his band’s name in smaller letters beneath it. For that reason, among others that pop up on occasion while touring, this movie is alternately uproarious and depressing to him.

The timeless magic of this movie is, though, that everyone is part of the joke. Anyone can have a Spinal Tap moment, and most all of us have. I have never been in a band, but I have gotten lost backstage at performance venues before. I’ll never forget the knowing laugh my roommate and I shared in Madrid upon getting served miniscule bread that broke whenever we tried to fold it. Every band in which I have had friends has discussed obtaining two more basses and performing “Big Bottom,” just for the sake of doing it. The idea of “turning [anything] up to 11” has become so commonplace that I don’t even think twice when I hear it anymore.

To put it succinctly, This is Spinal Tap isn’t one of those great comedic movies that tickles your funny bone and changes your life once you see it. It’s better than that. It succeeds on almost too many levels to comprehend. American culture, and most of western civilization as well, has never been the same since Spinal Tap arrived. Not a bad accomplishment for a British band who has lost four drummers to supernatural occurrences (a bizarre gardening accident, spontaneous combustion…), has never won critical acclaim, been full of internal squabbles for years, and, for all intensive purposes, isn’t even an authentic band.

Granted, I would disagree with any assertion that the band isn’t “real.” When observing the effect that Spinal Tap has had in the past twenty-one years and my own generation’s ironic fixation on that mid-80’s era, I have no doubt in mind that they are indeed real, almost frighteningly so. I often think about my generation and lower my head in disbelief. I cannot believe how many ridiculous values that most of my peers have adopted, and their love of randomness and cartoonish excesses only digs deeper. I don’t know if these fascinations will eventually disappear under a pile of Von Dutch trucker hats and “Jesus is my homeboy” T-shirts, but I can always hope for a massive awakening. This is Spinal Tap provided such for any rock musician who has lived since 1984, as it will for anyone who ever will rock. “Stonehenge,” “Sex Farm,” “Heavy Duty,” and perhaps most of all “Big Bottom” are unmatched pieces of satire that will be completely listenable and understandable for generations after Bowling for Soup, and anyone else who has capitalized on 80’s kitsch in recent years, are gone.

Until then, I can only hope that my generation doesn’t implode on its own nostalgic excesses. Fortunately, for as long as any of us can remember, we’ve had This is Spinal Tap reminding us about the dangers of, and inherent ironies in, those excesses. For those members of the post-Spinal Tap generation who don’t quite comprehend all that this represents, they’ve got a great film at any rate to simply kick back and enjoy. To young people today, the line between stupid and clever has never been thinner.

[transmission from... Tyler S]

PART 2

CONT'D FROM PART ONE (READ IT HERE).

David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel, and Derek Smalls represent almost every single stereotype embedded with the term “rock star.” They are dumb, petty, completely preoccupied with machismo and style over substance, and, in one indispensable scene, even get lost on their way to the stage. A friend and I, while living together in 80’s-crazy Spain, introduced Spinal Tap humor to our host señora and other Madrileños who hadn’t been sufficiently exposed to it. We thought of Spinal Tap as a perfect hybrid of the testosterone-loaded Aussies AC/DC (also enormous in Spain) and countless other bands who personified the “rock star” prototype: Led Zeppelin, Def Leppard, Black Sabbath, etc. For example, one scene where Nigel plays his guitar with a violin (which my friend and I watched repeatedly, laughing harder every time), is a haughty but faithful caricature of Jimmy Page bowing his guitar. Tap’s lyrics were a pitch-perfect lampoon:

The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin’
That’s what I said
The looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand
Or so I have read
My baby fits me like a flesh tuxedo,
I want to sink her with my pink torpedo.
- “Big Bottom”

I refuse to believe that these lyrics are at all incompatible with AC/DC tracks like “Let Me Put My Love Into You” and “Sink the Pink.” Even if Tap’s lyrics are deliberately over the top, they made a lot of rock fans back up and see their heroes in a different light, whether they wanted to face it or not.

By 1984, many factors had led to a major cross-cultural reevaluation of the proverbial rock star. The rise in popularity of softer, more benign “new wave” music; the rising AIDS epidemic that as Vince Neil of the ever-so-decadent Motley Crue put it, “f—ked everything up,” greatly thinning the ranks of prospective groupies awaiting them backstage on any given night. While AC/DC, Aerosmith, and Motley Crue all maintained substantial followings, their excesses became a punch line, even taboo, in some circles. When Aerosmith vocalist Steven Tyler watched This is Spinal Tap, it pissed him off; he failed to see any humor in it. He was in a downward spiral at the time, and seeing a band make a string of mistakes, no matter how ridiculous, made it all hurt more for him, given the time and the environment. After all, in addition to AIDS crashing into the mainstream, you had ‘Morning in America,’ the ‘War on Drugs,’ an entire generation of disenchanted young adults, and nothing like the internet to create any sense of community.

Anyone who was alive when Spinal Tap arrived is at least in their early twenties today. Almost anyone younger than thirty would be hard pressed to remember our culture before AIDS, the War on Drugs, and especially MTV. Almost anyone born before 1986 longs for that idyllic time when “MTV actually played music,” but still discounts any contentions that MTV ruined music altogether. Every successful pop band in the past twenty-five years has closely associated themselves with the often self-aggrandizing imagery in music videos. Even artists more relevant to our parents’ generation entered the fold once they realized that MTV was onto something. Look no further than The Rolling Stones with “Start Me Up” or the Grateful Dead’s “Touch of Grey,” their first and only top-ten hit. By 1984, MTV was well established and on its way to becoming a cultural juggernaut. Even those who grew up long before the mainstream ascension of the music video could not deny that it was here to stay, and things were changing drastically.

Spinal Tap was an invented band with a back-story that encompassed both eras. The “stock footage” of the band performing in their early incarnations is a great case of MTV’s effect. We see a clip of The Thamesmen (Nigel and David’s early band) performing “Gimme Some Money” on the BBC show ‘Pop, Look, and Listen’ in 1965. We know that the Thamesmen never existed, “Gimme Some Money” was a damn funny, retroactively fabricated song written in the early 1980’s, and that ‘Pop, Look, and Listen’ was not a real show. However, millions of twentysomethings have no natural capacity to distinguish that clip’s authenticity from the Beatles performing “She Loves You” on The Ed Sullivan Show by simply looking at it free of context.

More than twenty years after Spinal Tap, the closest thing we have had to such an all-encompassing lampoon was a boy band called 2Gether. The show had plenty of hilarious moments, but it poked fun at a subgenre of pop that was deliberately superficial and well in touch with its own absurdity. Plus, it was created by and for MTV, the party responsible for the ascension of the major wave of boy bands at the time. I always had a lot of respect for the individuals in these; most of them understood what function they served and didn’t think of themselves as proven artists. What aggravated me was listening to Gene Simmons cite old Leadbelly lyrics to defend his and other rock stars’ sexual promiscuity. Ozzy Osborne, whose excessive drug use and infamous behavior came to define him as much as his music, believed that This is Spinal Tap was a true documentary. To most of the world, the film was a well-done satire about a silly rock band complete with classic one-liners (“We toured the world and elsewhere”) and an engaging storyline. To Osborne, Tyler, and plenty of other aging rock stars at the time, it was a true-to-life sad story of a band whose bad luck and even worse career choices led them to perform at an amusement park, billed beneath a puppet show.

It should have been no surprise to Reiner when he had legions of fans approach him after the film came out, saying that he should have made a documentary on a better-known band. The band’s and the film’s authenticity was dead-on. They even brought in cinematographer Peter Smokler, who worked as a camera man on the classic Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter. The film clearly reflected Guest, et al’s collective reverence for rock n’ roll, despite the amount of fun they had at its expense.

Images and their inherent presentation, for the last few generations, have been a vital link to the past, which is both a good and bad thing. I recently spoke to my father about my scattershot memories of the mid-80s; I felt too many people were basing their own perceptions of that time in the context of movies like St. Elmo’s Fire and The Breakfast Club. He felt the same way about his generation and World War II. He was born six years after the war ended, but he still grew up feeling the ripples of it in everyday society. Granted, he lived through the Vietnam era, which was something I am grateful that I missed, though the current War in Iraq certainly will leave a stain on my generation. I’ll never forget hearing my hostess telling us stories about going to college under Franco. I’ll can see myself telling youngsters stories about going to college under Bush some day.

College, though, has always been a form of separate peace. My father spent most of the Vietnam era in college, so it didn’t scar him quite as badly since he wasn’t surrounded with friends and neighbors who were going off to die. The last two and a half years of college were the same for me. Students, generally, are exempt from active military duty while they study, so college is a perfect opportunity to search for an escape. Parties with 1980’s themes normally provide it if alcohol alone isn’t enough to blur the edges of reality.
TO BE CONTINUED LATER THIS WEEK..

[transmission from... Tyler S.]

This is the first part of what's to be a three-part installment over the course of this week. This was an essay I wrote and submitted for The Random House Twentysomething Writers Contest. Since they got over a thousand submissions, I'm not terribly surprised that I didn't win a spot on the book. I'm excited to buy and read this collection, though every essay in there had better damn well be amazing, since I busted my ass writing this diatribe about my generation. But I'm presenting it to you all now since I still like it and think it's a pretty good representation of my twisted, analytic worldview. Enjoy and let me know what you think!



“We’re a part of the post-Spinal Tap generation. Everything we do and everything we have done has been taken the piss of.”
– Thom Yorke, Radiohead Vocalist (The Independent, 1998)

Last month on my break from work, I stopped into a nearby music and bookstore. Being a serious music junkie, I satisfied my fix flipping through their CD section for a few minutes. Being strapped for cash at the time, I convinced myself not to buy anything. But I did not consider what I was about to spot, sitting innocently on a discount rack nearby. The This is Spinal Tap Official Companion caught my eye, warped cover and all. I picked it up, hoping for a quick laugh before going back to work. Just like the film has on more occasions than I can count, the book delivered. I could have opened the book to any passage, read it to myself, and laughed hard enough to invite a number of strangers’ stares. ‘I need to buy this,’ I thought to myself. I kept reading on my walk back to work, and fairly consistently for the following week.

To say that This is Spinal Tap was simply a great comedy would be an understatement. The more that I thought about the film itself, the more I thought about the past twenty-one years of our culture since director Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Mike McKeon, and Harry Shearer deployed it in 1984. I have been around for twenty-two. It just recently hit me that most of my views and perspectives on popular culture, in some way, have been influenced by, or reflected in, this movie. I live in the post-Spinal Tap generation, indeed.

The film’s most all-encompassing accomplishment is that it illustrates a timeless parable about rock music and pop culture in general. Initially, I considered it ridiculous to pin the pulse of a culture on one movie that came out more than two decades ago. After all, haven’t there been a number of decent comedies that came out during my own adolescence? Of course- Rushmore, The Wedding Singer, Napoleon Dynamite, I could go on. But I won’t, because I’d be pushing myself to think of any other comedies from the past ten years that I could defend on any intellectual level.

One thing to consider is that, of the three reasonably good films I listed above, two of those are definitively anti-modern. The Wedding Singer, a major box office hit in 1997, even takes place in 1985. The points of reference certainly don’t end with movies. Every fashion magazine has at some point highlighted “resurging” 80’s fashion trends that most people would agree shouldn’t have been popular in the first place. One can’t escape a mainstream college bar without hearing a crowd of drunken co-eds yelling the chorus to “Livin’ on a Prayer,” “Take Me Home Tonight,” or “Don’t Stop Believin’” (and if you’re fortunate enough as I have been on a few occasions, all three). I can’t speak on the behalf of older generations regarding the value of nostalgia, but I highly doubt that any other generation has ever been so fascinated and nostalgic for memories that they do not legitimately possess. Never has one generation been so defined by another.

That is why This is Spinal Tap is the great American comedy, as far as our culture today should be concerned. While its subtle, ingeniously improvised humor may be subjective to the viewer’s taste, it arrived at the perfect time and made all of the perfect moves. Anyone who was alive when this movie came out is in at least their early twenties today. To people my age, the novelty of the mid-80’s runs thick. Quotes from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club permeate the Facebook and MySpace profiles of thousands of my peers. The 1980’s is perhaps the most common theme for college parties now, in the esteemed company of themes like “Pimps & Ho’s” and “White Trash.” My sister, who was born in 1986 and barely remembers anything about the decade at all, enjoys 80’s parties because of the atmosphere that permits one to look however ridiculous as they see fit. The fashion and image are easy to build a caricature around. The most “Spinal Tap” facet of this post-Spinal Tap generation is that novelty and irony are two of our greatest values.

On the November 12, 2005 installment of the popular syndicated comic strip “Zits,” the star Jeremy lauds his stereotypically un-hip dad for his “cool,” “random” sweatshirt that has a “totally vintage design with real rural authenticity.” He asks his dad where he got this hilarious sweatshirt, and his oblivious dad answers: the rural supermarket advertised on the sweatshirt. The widespread fascination with vintage clothing is a perfect microcosm of the bigger picture, but that is just one of many examples of my generation’s thrill with the all that is random and/or ironic.

When it comes to a few specific points of reference, I fall right into that crowd. For example, I believe that the mullet hairstyle has always been, and always will be, awesome. I would never wear my hair in that fashion without a serious incentive, be it monetary or blackmail, but I stand behind my views on the quintessentially 80’s ‘do. An individual who chooses to sport his or her hair short in front and long in back is most often oblivious to their hairstyle’s wide ridicule. Everyone who laughs behind that person’s back feels like they are in on an enormous cosmic inside joke. The same thing goes for trucker hats and aviator sunglasses, except many people are actually wearing those to make a statement (even if they don’t know what that statement exactly is). All three of these things predate 1984, but people today equate them with the ridiculous, trashy culture that Spinal Tap tore apart subversively.

This is not at all to say that the mid-1980’s were without a surplus of legitimate cultural value. The years 1984 through 1987 are vitally important to me (are not were, as I was barely three years old at the time). Various films and albums from those years are among my favorites: Back to the Future; “Double Nickels on the Dime” by Minutemen; “Rain Dogs” by Tom Waits; David Lynch’s Blue Velvet; I could go on. Keeping that in mind, what is it about that era that makes it so definitive and fascinating to my generation? It’s difficult to understand it from an objective standpoint when you hadn’t even learned to talk at the time. On a political or economical keel, 1984-1986 formulated the heart of the Reagan era in the United States. The military budget was skyrocketing, school funds were getting slashed, and millions of disenfranchised youths were coming of age during an awkward age. As Paul Westerberg yelled on The Replacements’ song “Bastards of Young” (another great work from 1985), “Dreams unfulfilled/graduate unskilled/ it beats picking cotton and waiting to be forgotten/ …unwillingness to claim us/you’ve got no war to name us.”

A myriad of these thoughts and ones similar passed through my head after watching Spinal Tap again after buying the book. Initially, I felt that I was overanalyzing. On a basic, cinematic level, This is Spinal Tap is a hilarious, subtly brilliant movie. I believe that any great movie is just as good or better the second time you watch it, and this is a film that any self-respecting music fan in his 20’s has seen more than twice. Entertainment Weekly ranked it as the #1 Cult film of all time, and Blender and SPIN both called it the greatest Rock N’ Roll Movie ever made. Many contend that it created the ‘mockumentary.’ Granted, the fake band as satire had been a convention for a while (e.g. Eric Idle’s ‘Rutles,’ The Monkees, the Muppets Dr. Teeth and Electric Mayhem). However, Rob Reiner, Mike McKeon, Harry Shearer, and Christopher Guest nailed the concept, and took it to an entirely new level that they may never have intended.
TO BE CONTINUED LATER THIS WEEK...