Americans are once again arranging their schedules to hear a radio show. And it’s no mystery why: Listening to Ira Glass’ public radio phenomenon “This American Life” is much like reading a good novel. There is character and scene and plot. At the end there is change, a subtle hint that the character will go on to live her life differently from that moment on. There is vision. There is inspiration or sadness or pain, but there is always something — always, as Glass would put it, a place for your heart to go.
One such moment occurred during a recent show in which a woman who had been married for a long time ran into her ex-boyfriend at a yogurt shop. She found herself thinking about him night and day. She looked forward to his calls. She considered meeting him. And finally she told her husband how she felt. What we expect is anger, or pain, or tears, resentment or the tallying up of the years her husband stood by her unfalteringly. What we expect is
outrage. Instead, the husband wraps his arms around his wife and says, “Honey, I am so sorry I can’t do that for you anymore.” He holds her, then she calls the ex and tells him she can never speak to him again.
That’s transformation.
“The husband, the wife, the ex — who, among us, has not been every character in that piece?” Glass asks.
As the medium’s coolest commodity, “This American Life” — which began airing on public radio in 1995 and falls just behind “Car Talk” and “Prairie Home Companion” in popularity — captures the listener’s imagination by mirroring our culture and society through the individual stories of people and the poignant, strange or luminescent moments in which they find themselves. Each week, “This American Life” presents “a bunch of stories,” as the program’s Web site explains; “some are documentaries, some are fiction, some are something else … we choose a theme and invite different writers and performers to contribute items on the theme.” Today the show reaches nearly a million listeners on more than 300 stations.
I spoke with Ira Glass recently at Zinfandel, a restaurant in Chicago’s River North area, not far from Touristville, with its Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Cafe. After more than a dozen e-mails attempting to pinpoint the wheres and whens, we settled on this place because Glass, who recently turned 40, feels a special affinity for it. Zinfandel, an ochre-walled nouveau American cuisine bistro piping in Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, opened right around the time “This American Life” began. Zinfandel employees are unwavering fans of the show. So loyal are they that each month the restaurant chooses a culinary theme in honor of “This American Life’s” weekly themes, and offers special menus around that theme. “There’s something so loopy about that,” Glass says. “They’ve chosen, as their medium, food. I love that.”
“The most surprising thing I can tell you about this place,” he says, leaning conspiratorially toward me, “is the shrimp cocktail. Because shrimp cocktail is not a thing you think would ever be good, but in fact it’s completely …” He thinks a moment. “It makes you think that shrimp cocktail can be something.” I stare at him. It’s true. Shrimp cocktail is just shrimp cocktail. “I think you’ll be surprised,” he says, then looks up toward the ceiling and mutters, “please, God, let it be good.”
I attempt to not look charmed. In Chicago he has a reputation for dating lots of women — an unlikely Romeo, one article called him — though pieces written about him mostly suggest he works too hard to maintain a shred of a social life. “If you date one woman a year,” he says with an air of exasperation, “times 10 years, and that’s 10 women …” he trails off. It’s a tired topic — and one that, with his growing fame, is bound to get more tiresome. I refrain from telling him that many of my highly educated, highly articulate female friends were reduced to schoolgirl giggles and the throes of groupiedom at the mention of my meeting him.
In jeans, Converse All-Stars, green T-shirt and unbuttoned button-down, Glass could be anybody — the Wrigley Field frat boy going gray, the roadie for an Elvis Costello tribute band, the tourist come to the big city for a weekend of megastores and theme restaurants. It’s precisely this regular-guy feel that allows him to penetrate worlds most of us would be barred from: a father-and-son exploration of the elder’s Alzheimer’s disease, a young daughter’s feelings of betrayal upon discovering her father and her imaginary friend are one and the same, an African-American who journeys to the homeland and in the process discovers where home is not, a pimp who fails because he is not brutal enough, a man’s violent boyhood pranks.
Glass withholds judgment completely and consistently, even with the inmates and the prostitutes. This refusal to judge, a trait that would both win him votes and make him a terrible politician, is part of the universal appeal of “This American Life.” It compels us to want to tell our stories in ways, perhaps, that we’ve not had the courage to tell before — ways that evoke audience empathy for everyone, victims and villains alike. We’ve all been down there with the liars, the thieves, the hacks. But we’ve also been heroes and saints.
He arrived exactly on time, which startled me. I assumed he’d be late, 10 or 15 minutes at least. I assumed things at the radio station would have been frantic and he’d appear panting with disheveled hair and rumpled clothing — the clichid marks of genius. In many of the articles I’d read about him, he’d sounded the part: busy beyond human capacity, the crackpot intellectual operating on two hours of sleep every night, the neurotic compelled to edit everyday conversations (somehow it’s easier to swallow a successful neurotic than a regular guy with a good idea). Though we would prefer him otherwise, Ira Glass is not, insofar as I can tell, troubled, compulsive or obsessive.
When he was 19, Glass began working at National Public Radio, first as an intern, then as a tape cutter and eventually as a reporter and producer for “All Things Considered.” (In a May airing of Terry Gross’ “Fresh Air” we heard an earlier Ira during a six-month stint as host of “Talk of the Nation” — now Ray Suarez’s gig. He sounded as odd in that position as Tom Brokaw would doing stand-up.)
In the early stages, Glass worked with Keith Talbot, a former documentary producer for NPR now working in television in New York, who germinated the seed for what would later become the genius of Glass’ show. “His job was to find new ways to structure an hour of radio and to do that in documentary,” Glass recalls. “So he thought a lot about how you listen to something and why you stay listening; he was very inventive about structure and what structure does. And later I would find that I could actually structure stories based around the principles that I had learned.”
Our grinning waitress comes to the table for the entree order. I figure she knows who he is; except for one moment near dessert when he is away from the table, she does not make eye contact with me at all, but keeps her eyes trained toward him. He is insouciantly handsome — in the way that someone who ignores mirrors is handsome, or perhaps in the way that someone who makes you feel important is handsome, or maybe in the way that someone who hasn’t changed his manner of dress in decades and whose style has finally come around again is both handsome and hip.
Glass’ role as host of “This American Life” shifts. Sometimes he is the unbeliever and sometimes the cheerleader, but he is always the one who gives a context for each story, within each week’s theme and within the world as well. He tells us not only why we should listen to the story, but why we should take pleasure in it. “Often it’s just creating desire,” he says. “You say something like ‘the city schools in America’ and it’s just like saying ‘Vietnam’ or ‘public housing.’ It’s faceless, it just seems unfixable till you put a face to it and say it’s way more complicated than you think you know. In that way, broadcasting has a role in the way we think of ourselves and in our picture of the world … my staff and I do the shows we do because they’re entertaining and moving to us and we assume they might be to someone else. There’s a value to that for me.”
Glass is a writer’s writer, or more aptly a writer’s radio host. He understands how narrative works, how to build tension, how to place words within sentences and sentences within paragraphs, how at the end of a story a character must be transformed. Every good writer knows that the most important, most evocative information should come at the end of a sentence or paragraph, and even in conversation he does this. Take his earlier words, for example: “They’ve chosen, as their medium, food. I love that.” He doesn’t say: “I love that they’ve chosen food as their medium.” Because he knows — probably instinctively — that what comes last will carry the most weight; he knows where inside a sentence the power lies — or rather where inside a sentence lies the power. And so even in his speech you hear the pregnant pauses, the places where, if he were writing the conversation, he would use colons, semicolons and dashes.
Our food arrives. Glass has ordered something geologic, a layer of hash browns, halibut, eggs and tomatillo sauce. I am less adventurous: I’m eating chicken and stuffing, which rivals my grandmother’s. “The stuffing’s always better than the rest,” he says after a sampling. “Grease and starch just always win over protein. In food as in so many things. Look around you, that’s what our whole country is based on. It’s amazing that Michael Jordan can be an iconic figure because he’s basically just protein.”
One of Glass’s strengths is that very few of the stories on his show are what they seem to be at first listen. The sidewalk Sinatra impersonator, for example, is not merely another member of America’s wacky fringe, but rather he embodies how life can surprise us, the accidental moments and meetings that color our lives — the profundities and reminders of things inside us, the pieces we may have left along the way or the places we’ve forgotten to find joy.
But despite his clarity in pinpointing the nucleus of a story, Glass is hardly skulking around every corner searching for material. There’s enough material sitting in boxes at the station, he says. He doesn’t need to look for it in everyday life; most conversations aren’t that interesting, anyway. Though he did admit to a recent moment when, on a rare sunny day in Chicago, he sat on a deck overlooking Lake Michigan with NPR’s president and WBEZ’s station manager — all three in dark suits. “Suddenly, I felt like I was in some Tom Clancy novel!” he shrieks. “I wanted to say, ‘Don’t you guys think this is really weird? We’re sitting outside in the sun and we’re wearing suits as if we’re plotting the overthrow of Belize!”
Which, I tell him, would only take the three of them.
Lately, Glass has toyed with the idea of “This American Life” as a television show — he’s even had offers. The format would be similar to the radio show, with weekly themes and segments. Though part of the magic of radio is how it allows individual imagination to bloom, Glass feels confident that he could capture this as well in a visual medium. “Each story would be shot in a different style,” he explains, “some with a hand-held camera in available light, some shot with a director and lighting and beautiful in the way that an Errol Morris film is beautiful. A lot of the images will be” — he pauses a moment — “I’ve been warned not to say this in front of TV networks because they take it as a little more arty and threatening than I think it is … The images will be more impressionistic. They won’t directly represent, but will gesture at ideas in the story.”
In a recent piece he wrote for Slate magazine, Glass mentioned the possibility of putting the radio show on hiatus for a year and exploring television. “The next morning I woke up with [something] like a bad hangover,” he shakes his head, “like ‘what did I say that for?’ That’s not what I want to do. What I want to do is keep doing the radio show and also do some television.” It’s a scenario that, on his current high, seems entirely plausible.
In the world of “This American Life,” Glass believes that art is anything that gives us pleasure, anything that evokes some sort of emotional or visceral response. The stories that air on the show are chosen with this in mind. John Gardner once defined art as seeking to improve life, not debase it, as seeking “to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us … Art rediscovers, generation by generation, what is necessary to humanness,” he wrote. It is arguable that Ira Glass may have brewed our latest, greatest example of the marriage between art and humanity. Or, as he himself might put it, a surprisingly perfect concoction of grease, starch and protein.
A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about how the media giants who own your local commercial television and radio stations have been striking like startled rattlesnakes at an FCC proposal that would shed a light on who’s buying our elections. The proposed new rule would make it easier to find out who’s bankrolling political attack ads by posting the information online.
The stations already have the data and are required by law to make it public to anyone who asks. But you can get only it by going to the station and asking for the actual paper documents – what’s known as “the public file.” Stations don’t want to put it online because — you guessed it — that would make it too easy for you to find out who’s putting up the cash for all those ads polluting your hometown airwaves.
If approved, the new rule would require the ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox affiliates in the top 50 markets to make their files on political advertising available online immediately. Other stations would have a two-year grace period.
In the meantime, the mighty giants of broadcasting have been fighting back. A number of senators serving the industry have spoken up against the proposal and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) — led by their top lobbyist and president, the frozen food millionaire and former Oregon Republican Senator Gordon Smith – have been meeting with commissioners urging them to scuttle its proposal or at least water it down until it means nothing.
As Jeffrey Rosen of The New Republic magazine wrote:
“The arguments against transparency offered by the networks show that, having experienced the windfall of advertising dollars that Citizens United unleashed, they have little interest in meeting their legal and ethical responsibility to serve the public interest.”
The FCC is scheduled to vote on their proposal on April 27, and on Monday its chairman, Julius Genachowski, walked into the lion’s den – the really nice one in Las Vegas – and addressed the NAB’s annual convention. He noted that, “Using rhetoric that one writer described as ‘teeth-gnashing’ and ‘fire-breathing,’ some in the broadcast industry have elected to position themselves against technology, against transparency, and against journalism.”
He added, “[T]he argument against moving the public file online is that required broadcaster disclosures shouldn’t be too public. But in a world where everything is going digital, why have a special exemption for broadcasters’ political disclosure obligation?”
Whatever the result on the 27th, those negative attack ads already are cluttering the airwaves like so much unsolicited junk mail and it’s only going to get much, much worse as the super PACs, political parties, the moguls and tycoons, many acting in secrecy, lavish perhaps as much as three billion dollars on local stations between now and November.
But now there’s something new in the mix, especially appalling to anyone who truly cares about public broadcasting. On April 12, by a vote of 2-1, two of three judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found in favor of KMTP, a small public station in San Francisco, and struck down the federal ban against political and issue advertising on public TV and radio. For decades there’s been a rule against turning those airwaves over to ads for political campaigns and causes. Now the court has ruled that the free speech rights of political advertisers take precedence.
Imagine if you turned on your TV set someday soon and were greeted by “Sesame Street,” brought to you by the letter C, for “creeping campaign cash corruption.” Perhaps that’s a bit of a stretch, but as the late William F. Buckley, Jr., used to say, the point survives the exaggeration.
If ever there was a camel’s nose under the tent, this is it – and we don’t mean one of those humped creatures that show up on PBS’ “Nature” or an episode about backpacking through Egypt on “Globe Trekker.” The current public system was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. “It will get part of its support from our government,” Johnson said, “but it will be carefully guarded from government or from party control. It will be free, and it will be independent — and it will belong to all of our people.”
The Public Broadcasting Act uses the word “noncommercial” 16 times to describe what public television and radio should be. And it specifically says that, “No noncommercial educational broadcasting station may support or oppose any candidate for political office.” We’ve taken that seriously all these years, and most of us who have labored in this vineyard still think public broadcasting should be a refuge from the braying distortions and outright lies that characterize politics today — especially those endless, head splitting ads.
But in its majority decision the court wrote, “Neither logic nor evidence supports the notion that public issue and political advertisers are likely to encourage public broadcast stations to dilute the kind of noncommercial programming whose maintenance is the substantial interest that would support the advertising bans.”
Sorry, your honors: This is the same so-called “logic” that led the U.S. Supreme Court to issue its notorious Citizens United decision, the one that opened all spigots to flood the political landscape with cash and the airwaves with trash. “To be truthful” one former PBS board member said, “it scares me to death.” Us, too.
The court decision did uphold the ban on public broadcasting selling ad time for commercial goods and services, although, as corporations and others cover the cost of programming through what’s euphemistically referred to as “enhanced underwriting,” public TV already is close to the line of what differentiates it from commercial broadcasting.
And understandably, with our stations always in a financial pickle, frantically hanging on by their fingertips, it won’t be easy to turn down those quick bucks from super PACs and others. But hang in there, brothers and sisters in the faith: If ever there was a time for solidarity and spine, this is it.
Stations KPBS in San Diego and KSFR, public radio in Santa Fe, have said they won’t do it. If enough of you say no, this invasion might be repelled. And viewers, they need to know you’re behind them.
There is no way to deny that on NPR today, author Caitlin Flanagan tried to lecture me on how I might have had a “better” adolescence. (There is proof on the Internet, so I know I didn’t hallucinate it.) Specifically, she tried to use me as an example of the perils of having the Internet in your room as an adolescent, because I didn’t happen to meet a great guy to date in high school. The remedy? More princess movies.
Many people, including my actual parents, think I turned out pretty OK. And Flanagan, whose book “Girl Land” I reviewed here, usually restricts her professional vocation of annoying feminists to print. So what was I doing defending my very existence on the radio?
“Do you know about Quakers? They try to find the good in everyone, and I felt you tried to do that in Flanagan’s book,” the producer at NPR’s “On Point” told me, as he tried to convince me to take part in the on-air discussion. (If you read my review, you’ll see this says more about the laceration Flanagan received elsewhere than any unusual empathy on my part.) I told him I was reluctant to engage in something that could turn into a catfight, but was persuaded that the thoughtful tone of the show and its host would prevail. Ultimately, too, I didn’t want to shy away from a fight that I thought was important.
My other worry was that Flanagan would use the first half-hour, which she had exclusively to herself, to moderate her message and preempt any criticism, leaving me to lamely disagree. Others had also seen her analysis as dangerously nostalgic, a fantasy of sheltering precious girls that seemed divorced from real girls’ lives and totally ignored the lives of boys. Turns out I needn’t have worried.
After all, this is a major component of what people pay her for: Trolling, plain and simple, a Michele Bachmann-esque disregard for facts, only better-read and better-written. What could possibly induce her to stop?
On the air, she went even further, by suggesting several times that women and girls are solely responsible for whether men treat them like princesses (as one caller said she suggested to her daughter while watching princess movies, which Flanagan cheered) or like sluts, and whether those men stick around to parent, too. When the host, Tom Ashbrook, politely accused her of setting up a false dichotomy between parents who cared about their daughters in the culture and those who didn’t, she replied, “I think there are, you know, people who are very comfortable with their daughters being part of a culture where they’re servicing boys and they’re even comfortable with their girls performing oral sex on boys they don’t know very well. There are a lot of moms like that and I accept that.”
And then she turned on me. I had first taken issue with how she seemed to demonize boys or imply that they weren’t hurt by gender norms. When I talked about the need for information about safe sexuality and healthy boundaries, she responded, “I think as far as information, what I’m seeing is that girls have lots and lots of information about sexuality. I can show you lots of eighth-grade girls who know how to roll on a condoms because they’ve learned that in school. And I think all of that may be fine for some girls, to send them out into this pornified culture with that information, probably best that they have it.” Some girls, meaning those slutty girls who will never get a man to love them! In any case, when I called her out for that bizarre conflation of porn and sex ed, she got personal.
I’d pointed out earlier that I’d had the Internet in my bedroom as a teen, something Flanagan specifically wants parents to ban. I also described my adolescence not as the dreamy withdrawal she’d described, but as “a very fertile time where I was really lucky to have a supportive community that allowed me to pursue intellectual and creative pursuits.”
Never mind those things. “Let me ask you a question, Irina,” said Flanagan. (The host had already said my name, Irin, correctly.) “Did you have a boyfriend in high school?”
Then I made a mistake — I answered. “I dated some guys who were probably not great guys but I was lucky that nothing really bad …”
“What could we adults have done to you to help you with your dating relationships?” she persisted. We went to commercial before I could sputter a reply. (Nothing could have been done “to” me, and like I said, nothing really bad happened.)
Flanagan had the floor when we got back, at which point she used me as an example of a cautionary tale of how girls who are “empowered” and have Internet access allow themselves to be abused by men. Or something. “My book ‘Girl Land’ is asking, What could we have done differently for Irin, so that in addition to the IM and the Internet and the sex-ed classes, she also had something that would help her interact with boys where she could find a way that boys would treat her kindly?” Flanagan cooed.
Never mind that Flanagan writes in her book about a more traumatizing adolescent experience than I ever had, an assault that took place on a conventional date and without Internet in her bedroom and without “hookup culture.” Was that her fault for not demanding more of men?
“Caitlin, I so much appreciate your concern for me,” I replied, “but frankly, my adolescence was fine … I think that making mistakes is part of adolescence and how you figure out how to partner with people.” I also said, “I don’t think this should be about me, nor should it be about you. This is really about what’s going on in the American culture.” (I lost that battle.)
Ashbrook asked, sensibly, “Is that the measure of a good adolescence, whether they had a good boyfriend in high school?” It wasn’t of mine — I said that for me the measure was that ”I emerged feeling happy and connected and with healthy relationships, got into the college of my choice, have a career that I am happy about, where I get to debate Caitlin Flanagan about female sexuality.”
I’d gone into said debate with the idea of maybe seeing the good in her, or at least seeking a thoughtful discussion of where we diverged and why. That’s where I really went wrong.
Is there a worse insult in rock music than “adult contemporary”? And is there anything worse for a fan than hearing it applied to a favorite band? For many listeners, Nitsuh Abebe’s recent essay in New York magazine will be a provocation. The esteemed critic (and a Pitchfork colleague) appends the sleepy “adult contemporary” label to several indie-rock darlings, including Wilco, Feist, Stephen Malkmus, Neko Case — and even Radiohead, all of which Abebe essentially lumps together and calls “NPR Muzak.” “If there is a consensus about what counts as respectable, adult music in 2011,” he writes, “then these acts are surely a part of it: While more people consider pop music inherently silly than enjoy it, few assaults are leveled at the seriousness or artistic value of this stuff. It’s tasteful and subtle and brings a few newish ideas to the middle of the road; it adheres to a classic sense of what rock and American music are, but approaches it from artful enough directions to not seem entirely fusty.” This is not high praise. “The main criticism you hear about this kind of record — even outweighing references to Starbucks and/or the bourgeoisie — is that it is just too dull to even bother producing any more complex indictment of it.”
Too dull even to hate: That is the essence of “adult contemporary.” What adds even more sting to the indictment is that these acts are not just reasonably successful within the low-expectations parameters of indie rock, but are well-respected and well-loved as lifers and innovators who have developed distinctive sounds and personas over the years. Indeed, Wilco and Radiohead could be considered the reigning elder statesmen of the American and U.K. underground, respectively. Abebe wonders if these older artists will spark a backlash in younger generations, much the same way the indulgences of ‘70s prog and singer-songwriter fare spurred the back-to-basics fire of punk. However, the relationship between these two generations proves much more complicated than that.
But first: Wilco, adult contemporary? Really? “Adult contemporary” originated in the early 1960s as a radio format aimed at older listeners alienated by the harsher sounds of rock and R&B. Over the decades, it has fragmented into hot AC, soft or lite AC, urban AC, and many other permutations. It’s essentially an umbrella term that has historically covered acts as diverse as Pat Boone, Roberta Flack, the Carpenters, Duncan Sheik and even such country acts as Martina McBride and Lee Ann Womack. It is the pasture to which older acts like Rod Stewart, George Michael and Cyndi Lauper are relegated, often with standards or roots albums; the only reason such artists have continued to prosper is because their audience belongs to a generation that still buys albums. In general, however, the term connotes a smooth, sometimes slick, serious and usually unobtrusive aesthetic — perfect for office visits or dinner parties.
Perhaps dinner parties have changed fundamentally over the years, because if acts like Wilco and Feist are truly “adult contemporary,” then they may be the most adventurous generation of adults in the rock era, not bound by any one genre or any one idea of how music should sound or how it should age. Abebe, again aiming for easy provocation, compares today’s bands to Sting’s safe, toothless solo career, somehow finding common ground between “Russians” and “Bull Black Nova.”
And anyway, amid their experiments with motorik beats and fractured song structures, Wilco actually embraced the equally derogatory and silly term “dad rock” on their new album, “The Whole Love.” “If you won’t set the kids on fire, well I might,” Tweedy sings on “I Might,” the first single. It’s a telling moment in the band’s catalog, a reassertion of their musical mission as well as a complicated bit of household politics. Feist’s music is never quite so self-conscious, but the understated quality of her blues-derived pop songs should not be mistaken for easy listening. Instead, her latest, “Metals,” is more often clenched like a fist or braced for the next unimaginable tragedy. Perhaps the only thing she has in common with Wilco — or with Malkmus, Radiohead or Neko Case — is age. Their audiences may overlap, but the music remains distinctive, different and mostly compelling.
However, the concept of “audience” is a moving target, since groups of listeners are constantly fragmenting and subdividing against acute lines of genre and taste. The idea of “adult contemporary,” then, seems like a relic, only slightly more obsolete than rock radio itself. Even the kneejerk pejoratives Abebe associates with the market seem oddly dated: Starbucks has curtailed not only the number of stores in the United States but also the amount of music it sells, and this year NPR has streamed and discussed a wide range of albums, including punk supergroup Wild Flag, Beirut, young jangle-popsters Real Estate, Fucked Up, Hammers of Misfortune, head-bangers Giant Squid and Ohio thrashers Skeletonwitch. It’s hardly the bastion of middlebrow, good-for-you, let’s-go-crazy-in-the-Volvo music, if it ever was.
To be called “adult contemporary” is to be dismissed as old, out of touch, irrelevant. Adults are the establishment — the very thing kids are meant to rebel against. Abebe admits that it’s unlikely, as “the music world is now fragmented enough that we have the luxury of ignoring things we don’t like, rather than rebelling against them.” However: “One great sign about new independent rock bands, over the past few years, has been a noticeable uptick in the number whose names are vulgar jokes, or deliberately inappropriate — in other words, mission statements that tasteful professionalism and the approval of sober-minded adults are not among their interests — and who play music that’s abrasive or adventurous enough to match.”
But unprintable names in rock music have been around longer than A— C—, and something about that idea — of young musicians embracing abrasive noise as a response to the music of their elders — seems to be as antiquated as “adult contemporary.” It imagines a fairly conventional form of rebellion, one based on a historical model that employs aggression in response to the establishment. If an obnoxous name is real rebellion, give me Neko Case any day. If anything, this current generation’s form of rebellion is new and specific to itself, perhaps nodding to the fact that today’s adult rockers in no way resemble the adult rockers of the past. In fact, arguably the best punk band of the moment is OFF!, a Los Angeles quartet led by Keith Morris, who may be older than 50 but still flails and jumps as maniacally as he did with his former band the Circle Jerks 30 years ago.
Perhaps the latest form of rebellion in music has nothing to do with volume or tempo or band names and everything to do with style and history. Reared on the Internet, where vast archives of music are only a few clicks away, younger artists today rely heavily on the past for inspiration. Yet, few generations have been so savvy about the past as this one, and in surveying the music of previous generations, they are discovering and rehabbing sounds and styles once dismissed. And some of what they’re looking to is the adult contemporary. Saxophone solos, once universally derided, are now centerpieces in songs by Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Foster the People. Anthony Gonzalez of the French act M83 continues to plumb the New Romanticism of the early 1980s to craft synth-pop anthems with an overwhelming melancholy, while Dan Bejar of Destroyer (who is old enough to be “adult contemporary”) reimagined ‘80s lite rock, with its flanged drums and slick keyboard sound, as an almost avant garde framework for his musings on the state of North American pop music. Both of their albums — “Hurry Up We’re Dreaming” and “Kaputt,” respectively —are album of the year contenders.
In that regard, the most divisive song of the year isn’t by Fucked Up or Danish destructo-punks Iceage, who have both released excellent albums this year; nor is it by Tyler, the Creator, the California rapper whose much-discussed sick jokes sound like empty provocations. Instead, it’s by Bon Iver, whom Abebe includes among his list of “meh” and “adult contemporary” acts. The Wisconsin-born indie folk singer embraces AutoTune and even worked with Kanye West, but his most controversial act was adding a Korg M1 keyboard to “Beth/Rest,” the final track on his second album, “Bon Iver, Bon Iver.” Although it adds a subtle anthemic quality to the song, the waterdrop sound of that keyboard is more closely associated with the likes of Bruce Hornsby and Steve Winwood than with indie-folk. Many listeners wrote it off as cheesy or ironic, but Vernon has repeatedly asserted his love of the instrument and the genre with which it has been linked. Along with namedropping Hornsby and covering Bonnie Raitt, that approach has established Bon Iver not as “adult contemporary,” but an act that plumbs old “adult contemporary” for new inspiration. That may be the ultimate rebellion: finding new uses for the music adults once rejected, embracing the uncool as the newly subversive.
UPDATED BELOW
Lisa Simeone, host of two cultural programs on National Public Radio, was fired from one of her positions last night for her leading role in the Freedom Plaza occupation in Washington, D.C. The proximate cause was a series of blogs posts in the Daily Caller asserting that she had violated NPR’s code of ethics, an allegation which Simeone denies.
“It overblown. Everyone’s overreacting,” Simeone told Salon in a phone interview. “It’s like McCarthyism.”
Simeone, a former weekend host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” show, had not worked directly for the network since 2002. As a freelancer contracting with WDAV, a music and arts station in Davidson, N.C., she hosts NPR’s “World of Opera” program. NPR and WDAV released statements today saying they are “in conversation” about Simeone’s future.
[UPDATE 2:35 pm. Scott Nolan, station manager of WDAV, tells Salon that Simeone will remain as host of "World of Opera."
"Her activities outside of the job do not violate anything in our employee code and have in no way affected her job performance," Nolan said in a phone interview. "She's a terrific host and we look forward to working with her."]
Simeone has been active in a group called October 2011 which has occupied Freedom Plaza in downtown Washington since Oct. 5. The group planned its action last spring before the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged. The October 2011 group has since joined forces with the Occupy DC movement based a few blocks away in McPherson Square.
The Daily Caller is using Simeone’s exercise of her First Amendment rights to beat up on NPR for its liberal ways. The conservative Web site said yesterday:
The political advocacy Simeone has displayed also appears to be an affront to what incoming NPR CEO Gary Knell has said he’d like the network to be: “It’s about journalism, it’s about news,” Knell, who starts on December 1, told the Associated Press after he got the job. “It’s not about promoting one political agenda or another.”
The problem, says Simeone, is, “I’m not an NPR journalist. I am not paid by NPR. I don’t do news. I don’t do analysis. And I have never talked about the occupation movement on the air. I do this entirely in my free time.”
Simeone said she was fired Wednesday night by Moira Rankin, executive producer of “Soundprint,” a weekly documentary program that Simeone hosts. The program, independently produced, airs on NPR stations around the country.
“It was bewildering,” Simeone said. “She started by quoting all these reports from the Daily Caller, and I didn’t know even what that was. She said, ‘Are you involved with this organization [October 2011]? I said, ‘Yes, I was one of about 50 people who helped put this together.’ She said, ‘That’s a problem because I’m getting all these calls. I think you violated the NPR code of ethics.’”
“I said, ‘Can you explain how?’” Simeone went on. “Scott Simon writes Op-Eds. Cokie Roberts [is paid] tens of thousand of dollars in fees talking to business groups. Mara Liasson goes on Fox TV to express her opinions. They all report on the issues — which I don’t do. I finally said, ‘Are you firing me?’ She said yes.”
As the Daily Caller has reported, NPR’s ethics policy for journalists forbids them from “engag[ing] in public relations work, paid or unpaid.”
The code allows for exceptions in cases such as “certain volunteer nonprofit, nonpartisan activities, such as participating in the work of a church, synagogue or other institution of worship, or a charitable organization, so long as this would not conflict with the interests of NPR in reporting on activities related to that institution or organization.”
Simeone says there is no conflict.
“I’ve never hid my views and my opinions have never leeched into what I do on NPR. People can listen to all my shows. When I was talking about ‘Tosca,’ I could have talked about the relevance today of Cavaradossi, the tenor who is a political prisoner and who is tortured. I didn’t mention it. It’s a show about opera, for God’s sake.”
Simeone called the spread of occupation movement in recent weeks “a wonderful flowering of citizenship” and said she had no regrets about supporting it , despite the fact that she lost a job.
“I’m really, really lucky,” she said. “I’m married to man with a good job and my home is paid for. I’m way luckier than millions of people in this country. I’m not complaining.”
Caitlin Flanagan (Credit: Andrew Zinn/Little, Brown) 
Thom Yorke, Feist and Jeff Tweedy (Credit: Reuters) 
Kevin Dawes (Credit: YouTube/Kevin Daws) 
Lisa Simeone, fired NPR host (Credit: Reuters/NPR) 
