What kind of crazy fucked up world do we live in where a TV show is better than any mainstream music released this year?<\/p>\n
Music used to be cutting edge, music used to touch your soul, you used to look to music to help you understand yourself, point the way.\u00c2\u00a0 Now you’re better off watching "The Sopranos".<\/p>\n
Oh, of course, last season was a bummer.\u00c2\u00a0 But you’ve got to give David Chase credit for TRYING SOMETHING DIFFERENT!\u00c2\u00a0 Which Bono and U2 refuse to do.\u00c2\u00a0 Musical acts used to test the limits when they were at their peak.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s why Neil Young’s a legend.\u00c2\u00a0 "Time Fades Away" was a fuck you to all the wimps expecting a new "Harvest".\u00c2\u00a0 Now, you’ve got to get the fans in a club, you’ve got to get them on a cash gravy train, you’ve got to have your hands in their pants.\u00c2\u00a0 You’re ripping them off every which way and yet you still expect them to believe, ain’t that a laugh.<\/p>\n
I remember driving down the freeway hearing Marvin Gaye’s "Sexual Healing".\u00c2\u00a0 Even Alanis Morissette’s "Hand In Pocket".\u00c2\u00a0 Where are the one listen tunes of today?\u00c2\u00a0 That make you run to the record store, to purchase, to play?\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, there’s good stuff out there, but it’s not TRANSCENDENT!\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, we had Marshall Mathers for a while.\u00c2\u00a0 But he’s no Syd Barrett.\u00c2\u00a0 He stopped making music and just did stupid things.\u00c2\u00a0 We want to scrape his remains off our jackets.\u00c2\u00a0 But we’re constantly peering in on "The Sopranos", we want to see what Tony and the gang are up to.<\/p>\n
The right wing press says the show’s success depends on violence.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, if that were true why doesn’t every TV show, every movie with blood succeed?\u00c2\u00a0 No, the physicality, the excesses, are just a backdrop to the family story.\u00c2\u00a0 This is us.\u00c2\u00a0 More than we ever were on "Seinfeld" or "thirtysomething", certainly more than we ever were on "Little House On The Prairie" or "The Brady Bunch".\u00c2\u00a0 America is about individual fiefdoms, known as families, and how you try to stay connected while establishing a separate identity, as you try to accumulate wealth.<\/p>\n
Oh some substitute status for wealth.\u00c2\u00a0 But oftentimes they’re the same thing.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what we revere in our celebrities.\u00c2\u00a0 Not their talent, but their access, their lifestyle.\u00c2\u00a0 We want to play too.\u00c2\u00a0 EVERYBODY wants to play.<\/p>\n
And everybody bends the rules.\u00c2\u00a0 But HOW FAR?<\/p>\n
Tony Soprano is just the hothead down the street, with a temper, except for the fact that he’s a mafioso.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, you know the kind of guy, he makes small talk when you run into him at Fountains of Wayne, but then you get an agitated phone call, telling you to make sure you take in your garbage cans, that your dog doesn’t take a shit on his lawn.\u00c2\u00a0 The line between civility and chaos is fine in American society.\u00c2\u00a0 And the culture of the street is not the same as the culture of the university.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not about civil discourse, but STANDING UP FOR YOURSELF!<\/p>\n
Bobby Bacala was no different from an underling at the office, who’s been kowtowing to the boss for too long.\u00c2\u00a0 Tony went too far.<\/p>\n
But doesn’t everybody go too far when there’s alcohol involved.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, Monopoly is fun when you’re ten.\u00c2\u00a0 But when the game transpires over hours in the heat of an evening drenched with spirits, there’s going to be trouble.\u00c2\u00a0 And it won’t be about truth so much as a release of tension.<\/p>\n
Or maybe it’s just my family.\u00c2\u00a0 The explosive moments.\u00c2\u00a0 It could be totally calm and then my dad would erupt like a supernova.<\/p>\n
And what’s up with Meadow.\u00c2\u00a0 Is she going to be a professional or is she going to take over the family?\u00c2\u00a0 Because loyalty is key in our society.\u00c2\u00a0 Did you catch how offended she was over Tony’s arrest?<\/p>\n
And Anthony, Jr.\u00c2\u00a0 What do you do with a kid like this?\u00c2\u00a0 Who can’t go to school?\u00c2\u00a0 Who’s good at heart but who is so easily influenced by others?\u00c2\u00a0 If you don’t have a similar member of your family, you don’t have a family.<\/p>\n
But the greatness of the episode came in the foreshadowings that didn’t come true, that didn’t come to pass.<\/p>\n
You saw that kid playing in the lake, and you just knew she was going to drown.\u00c2\u00a0 But then Tony said what you were thinking, and Carmela told the story of the pool party and it never happened.<\/p>\n
And when Tony pulled off the highway for Bobby to take a pee, you were sure he was going to beat the shit out of him.\u00c2\u00a0 But when they reappeared with the Canucks, Bobby was unscathed.<\/p>\n
We didn’t feel like we were being tricked, we felt like we were being respected.\u00c2\u00a0 And this drew us in further.<\/p>\n
What do you do with a sister like Janice?\u00c2\u00a0 Who’s got an eternal chip on her shoulder?\u00c2\u00a0 Always believing she is the best and the brightest and your success is not only unjustified, it should be HERS?<\/p>\n
Watching "The Sopranos" is watching us.\u00c2\u00a0 And we’re forever riveted by our own story, how did we get here, how is it going to work out?<\/p>\n
Traditional entertainment serves us a fantasy, believing like Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men" that we can’t handle the truth.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s what we’re confronted with 24\/7.\u00c2\u00a0 We hold it inside because we don’t see it reflected in the media.\u00c2\u00a0 We feel completely alone until we watch "The Sopranos".<\/p>\n
It doesn’t cost much.\u00c2\u00a0 Just a few extra bucks on your cable bill.\u00c2\u00a0 You don’t have to pay to park, and you don’t have to be worried about being elbowed aside by the hoi polloi.\u00c2\u00a0 If you want to be a VIP, you lay down for a plasma or an LCD set and are able to watch it in HD.<\/p>\n
And Sunday night at 9 PM, as you nestle on the couch with your popcorn and Coke, you start hearing that song, never a hit, but better than anything on the Top Forty.\u00c2\u00a0 And your adrenaline starts to pump.\u00c2\u00a0 Tony’s put the money in the toll.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s on the New Jersey Turnpike.\u00c2\u00a0 And then he turns into his driveway, the music screeches to a halt, the image fades to black, and you’re inside.<\/p>\n
That’s what we’re all looking for, to be inside.<\/p>\n
It’s not about gloss, or shine.\u00c2\u00a0 Tony is overweight.\u00c2\u00a0 Carmela doesn’t fit the image of a babe.\u00c2\u00a0 But they’re three-dimensional in a way none of the usual suspects are.\u00c2\u00a0 We know them, we are them.\u00c2\u00a0 Living compromised lives, yet still trying to fulfill our dreams, all the while laughing, eating and having a little fun, in the bedroom, at the restaurant, in front of the TV.<\/p>\n
This is the kind of art we marvel at, that we can’t get enough of.\u00c2\u00a0 One containing truth, about the human condition.<\/p>\n
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What kind of crazy fucked up world do we live in where a TV show is better than any mainstream music released this year? Music used to be cutting edge, music used to touch your soul, you used to look to music to help you understand yourself, point the way.\u00c2\u00a0 Now you’re better off watching […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-ce","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}