Is Politics Ruining Pop Culture?

and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia made to travel.

For many of us, pop culture is an escape.

Primetime sitcoms, summer jams, blockbuster movies, these are the things we retreat to when we need to take a break from the stresses of everyday life.

But what do you do when your pop culture icons announce their political affiliations?

Is politics ruining pop culture?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic, and with me here in D.C.

is my esteemed co-host, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

Hi, Jeff.

Hello, Matt.

I am delighted to say that we are joined today by our regular

guests on Radio Atlantic, Megan Garber.

Hello.

And Jillian White.

Hey.

Hello to you both.

Well, one was ambivalent and one was not.

Listener, you choose.

We convene today, as usual, around a question.

Is politics ruining pop culture?

Gone are the days, if these days, ever existed, when you get home from work, you kick off your shoes, you turn on your prime time, and escape from the worries of the wider world.

In America, at least, political polarization is now ubiquitous.

You can't listen to Kanye West without picturing him in a Make America Great Again cap.

You can't watch watch Roseanne without knowing that she's spreading conspiracy theories on Reddit.

You can't watch The Simpsons without confronting the problems with a poo.

And we may not be able to have comedians perform at the White House Correspondents dinner again.

Oh my God, it's the end of the world as we know it.

No more comedians at the White House Correspondents Association dinner.

Megan, I wanted to point the first question to you.

You write about culture, and so I'm hoping you can take the long view on this.

Let me stipulate, first of all, that pop culture has always been political.

Wait, can I just do something before we start?

Yeah.

I want to promise the listener that if they stay with us through this episode, that I'm going to have a small, semi-amusing Kellyanne Conway at the White House Correspondents Association dinner story at the very end.

Just saying.

All right.

What a treat.

Yeah, exactly.

This is going to be our start of the episode.

Yeah, there you go.

I'm ready.

I'm gearing it up.

So, Megan, you're right about culture, but I want to ask you to take the long view on this.

Stipulating that pop culture has always been political.

Is it more politically fraught than it's been in our lifetimes now?

Or is it just me?

No, I think it is more.

I think it's more overtly politically fraught is what I would say.

I think it's more partisan than political.

So I think we're very aware of partisanship as an identity at this point.

And I think that that's true for creators as well as for viewers and audiences of culture.

So I think we're very sort of hyper-attuned to our political identity and the party sense of it.

But in terms of the politics, I think, like you said, it's always been this way.

And I think now we're just actually recognizing what's always been true, which is pop culture has always made assumptions about the way the world works and, you know, ideas of politics and ideas of justice and ideas of empathy and attention and who deserves all of that.

So it's actually kind of refreshing in some ways to see that be more openly on the table at this point, I think.

Yeah.

Now, Jillian, in our pages, we've been debating implicitly, several writers at The Atlantic have been debating this question of what is our responsibility as consumers of culture to consume voraciously, widely, diversely, and what is our responsibility to pop culture by artists that we may have political disagreements with?

I mean, I think the interesting thing about pop culture and about entertainment in general is that your responsibility

really

kind of only lies with yourself.

I think it requires you to ask yourself what's important to you and who is that reflected in and what are you trying to accomplish when it comes to the culture and art and entertainment that you consume.

So I think the thing that makes people uncomfortable in this moment is that we now have this much more vast body that we know about the entertainers that we consume.

You can see their Twitter and see what they're saying.

You can see their off-the-cuff comments at two o'clock in the morning.

You know what they wear when they go to the grocery store.

You have this entire body of information about them that you didn't have before.

And oftentimes that reveals some stuff that really is at odds with what you believe or what you feel or what you think.

And then you have the responsibility of saying, okay, well, do I want to support them and do I want to be complicit in them continuing down that line?

And then you have to ask yourself, okay, so if I don't, how do I handle that?

And I think one of the ways that Americans have always thought about rejecting people or rejecting an idea or rejecting a company or rejecting something that they don't like is

through economic power.

So at the point where you decide that somebody represents something that you don't want to be a part of, you can decide not to go to their concerts, not to go to their shows, not to buy their art.

So I think that's kind of the point that we're at.

It's going to be very boring culture, isn't it, in the future?

Say more.

Say more?

Why is it going to be boring?

No, I think that was about all I have to say.

Well, why is it going to be boring?

Well, I'm going to say that.

So no, no, no, no, no, no.

So I've been thinking about this as an old you know all right um and i was thinking about every every single show i watched in the 70s uh is what's the term the kids use today problematic you're fire jeff all right yeah no that's right i just violated

i violated the first rule you should know that jeff has uh state laid down at the outset of this conversation the edict that the word problematic can't no but i put it in scare quotes didn't i i thought it good i thought it was sad i don't know if listeners heard those scary quotes sounded pretty scary to me um no it's it is interesting that that if you think about everything that

filled the minds of people my age and even younger in the 70s and 80s, it's all

problems everywhere you look.

It's got race problems.

It's got chauvinism problems.

It's got general misogyny problems.

It's got cruelty problems.

It's got...

problems.

I'm not arguing that the stuff is not flawed.

I'm just observing the fact that we are going to be, we're in a process where it seems at the beginning of expunging a lot of the cultural past.

I actually reject the idea that that means that we're going to have kind of a bland cultural experience from here on out.

I think people make those decisions for themselves, right?

So I think problematic in the first place is an interesting way to...

Problematic.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a problem.

But I think when you say somebody's problematic, it

kind of intimates that there is a potential solution, right?

So when you're asking yourself where you're drawing these lines about what types of culture and entertainment you consume, you can say, for instance, that you didn't like what Kanye West said and you think that he needs to go read a book and maybe sit down for a little bit, but that doesn't mean you're not going to listen to his albums because at the end of the day, who is he really hurting, right?

That is a line that you can draw and say that you're still going to consume his art.

However, you maybe draw a line at somebody who has been accused of or convicted of rape.

Maybe that is problematic in a different way.

And I think that's why lumping all of these people under the title title of problematic is in itself problematic.

Well,

there's a couple of different problems here.

I mean, there's the problem brought about by me too and the things we know about.

I mean, you're referring before to this idea that we know so much about people from their Instagram.

We also know so much about people because

women now have talked about some of these people and how bad they are.

And so there's a category that's easier for me to sort of dismiss, which is the

I don't want to watch Kevin Spacey and Usual Suspects anymore, even though I like that movie because

I don't want to look at Kevin Spacey anymore.

That's one side of it.

Maybe these all things are all on a continuum, but I think that's a fairly clear category.

And I think that's as interesting as this other category, to tell you the truth.

I don't know what Megan, it's actually a separate question for Megan in a way, which is, you know, do we throw out the art with the artist or is it just a natural human response not to want to watch the Huxtables anymore?

Okay, well, I'm going to try to skirt that question just a little because I think it's so difficult.

But I would like to complicate it with one more level, which is, I think, one of the things that came out with the reporting about Me Too is how structural all of these problems are.

You know, so it's Kevin Spacey, but it's also that network of people who protected him for all that time, you know, and it seems like we.

Everybody's shitty.

I mean, kind of.

I don't want to, you know, there's certainly there's a distinction between Kevin Spacey and that network, but there is a level of everyone was a little bit complicit, or at least a lot of people were a little bit complicit.

And to make a piece of culture, especially the kinds that we're talking about, which is TV shows and movies and music and things like that, it's a network of people.

It's not just the one artist.

I think sometimes we can fixate a little too much on, you know, this notion of the auto.

That is actually, you are actually,

you are making an argument about my question, which is

that it's not the individual, that

you can take the culture for what it is and understand that everything from the period in which that culture was made was a problem.

I think that's what you're saying.

Well, I'm avoiding your question a little bit because it's such a good one, but it's also because it's, I mean, these are questions that have come up in literature with like formalism and like in law with originalism in the Supreme Court.

Like there are these sort of age-old questions that we haven't successfully answered.

So, yeah, I think it's hard to answer it.

I also think that there are two distinct phenomena here, and they don't need to really overlap all that much.

Both of them, yes, are about the question of who are you going to support with your culture consumption.

But it's a different circumstance to talk about Kevin Spacey or

Bill Cosby

and who, you know, I think you can

just acts of criminal evil.

And to talk, on the other hand, about artists who you disagree with, right?

Artists who have come out and expressed a political affiliation that you do not share.

You can sever those two things, I think, fairly cleanly and, you know, be just grossed out by the former.

And then still.

Is there anyone in your life who you like as an artist who you just don't like as a person?

Because of their views?

Like, have you stayed loyal to someone's art, even as you sort of dismiss the person?

I can't think of, I can't think of any.

I mean, I think the, in some ways, the more that the matter of someone's personal deficiencies and flaws escapes into my perception of them, even looking into crowds and screen.

Yeah, it's

what about you?

I'm trying to think.

I feel like besides Ted Nugent, obviously.

I know you're a huge Ted Nugent fan.

No, I mean, I think the thing that's happened for me more frequently is that

music or a movie or culture has, I've revisited it years later and realized how deeply problematic it is,

or how dangerous, or how homophobic, or how racist, or how misogynistic it is.

And then I face the question of: do I continue supporting this artist?

For me, I mean, DMX is a great example of that, as is Dipsat, and a bunch of other rappers.

You know, when you listen to the music that they made in the 90s and the early 2000s, it is stuff that I wouldn't want played sometimes around people that I love because there's a lot of offensive, especially homophobic

language in that.

Jillian's trolling me a little bit because she knows that I adore DMX and she's trying to provoke me into actually doing my DMX impersonation.

This is the thing that we're doing.

Which, as they say, is problematic.

Yeah.

I mean, that is the love that we share.

But, Jeff, aren't you sort of acting hypocritically against the values of free expression by not doing your DMX impression right now?

No, you know what?

We're a big tent, but we're not that big.

How about that?

How about that?

Can you still call yourself a decent person if you don't do your DMX impersonation on?

You know, you're going to make me lose my mind.

Upright right in here.

Approximately right here.

You're going to make me lose.

My mind.

But, I mean, let's not make it abstract for a second and let's talk about Kanye.

Since he is the subject of the moment.

What stuff?

And I think this is the...

Wait, he's the subject of the moment?

I thought the demise of democracy was the subject of the moment.

Well, I mean, he's a symptom of the demise of democracy.

Okay,

just checking.

Just checking.

So, Kanye,

a rapper whose music I've loved for a long time, one of my favorite Kanye songs, All Falls Down.

My favorite version of it, in fact, is the version that I think he played at a concert with an acoustic set with John Legend in like St.

Louis back in the day where Kanye was rapping over John Legend playing the piano and singing the hook to All Falls Down.

Oh, it all falls down.

I promise, she's so self-conscious.

She had no idea what she was doing in college.

That major that she major and don't make no money.

But she won't drop out of parents to look at her funny.

Now, tell me that ain't insecure.

The concept of school seems so succurred.

Sophomore, three years, ain't picked the career.

She like, fuck it, I'll just stay down her and do hair.

Cause that's enough money to buy her a few pairs of new airs.

Her baby daddy don't really care.

She's so precious with the peer pressure.

Couldn't afford a car.

So she named her daughter Alexis.

She had hair so long that it looked that song 10 years ago

was just a bold consumerist critique.

All falls down, right?

We shine because they hate us, floss because they degrade us.

We're trying to buy back our 40 acres.

And for that paper, look how low we are soup.

And I'm just going to stop right there.

Yep.

It's hard.

Wow, wait, I want to do that again.

It's hard not to go back and listen to All Falls Down and hear a little bit of Bill Cosby's pound cake speech in it, which is notorious.

Uh-oh.

Right.

Kanye's talking about the woman who couldn't afford a car, so she named a daughter Alexis.

And 10 years ago, he's on her side.

By the way.

Right.

Really?

But it's a better line.

It's a funnier line if you feel like he's on her side.

It's a less funny line if you feel like he's making fun of her.

So the song is entertaining, but it's also straightforwardly political.

And I think it's completely legitimate if learning more about Kanye's political affiliations now tinges how you feel about his music back in the day.

And if you say,

this is not so much for me, the troubling aspects of this are drawn out by what I now know about this artist.

But honestly, my favorite thing to come out of this whole Kanye West business is the discovery of this new artist, a young woman named Chica Orenika, who started 2018 by announcing on her Twitter feed that we would all know her name by the end of the year, and who is now blowing up because she recorded a response to Kanye over the beat of his track Jesus Walks that is complete and utter fire.

Take a listen to a second of that.

can wake up.

I mean,

okay.

But, you know, on the other hand, we have our colleague Connor Friedersdorf, who wrote about Roseanne.

Another famous race.

Controversy.

Another famous rapper.

You know,

I can't come up with her.

Yeah, no.

Connor.

By the way, Connor Friedersdorf's name is immune to rappization.

Yeah.

By the way.

You know.

C.

F.

Dorf.

Done work.

Frito C.

Yeah.

Oh, Frito.

Something with Frito.

Frito?

Yeah.

All right.

Go on.

So Connor wrote about

Roseanne and the controversy

over Roseanne.

He wrote a piece called How Roseanne Divides the Left.

He juxtaposes two points of view on

culture.

Quote, in one telling, art transcends politics and wrong-headed political beliefs are most constructively met with tolerant engagement, which is ultimately a liberalizing force.

In the other telling, this is a moment when art must be judged according to its political content and shunning that which is problematic is, quote, a start toward defending it.

More or less the strategy that former vice president Dan Quayle once tried against Murphy Brown.

So,

you know, I think you can almost even tell in this passage how Connor feels about which side represents a more societally constructive approach to art and culture making.

in that we should engage with the things that we disagree with, that we should...

But I guess guess my question is, how should that play into pop culture, the stuff that we consume, what entertains us?

Well, I think, I mean, it's interesting how we think about pop culture at this point in terms of morality almost.

I mean, you know, you have the concept of the guilty pleasure, which is something that you, you know, you know, you shouldn't watch, but you do anyway, which I would say for me, That's about 70% to 80% of the watching that I do.

And I think that's probably true for a lot of people.

But I wonder if that's the wrong approach in some ways, because pop culture should be entertaining, first and foremost.

You know, it should be, you should like it on some level.

And I very much agree that, you know, you shouldn't turn something off just because there's one element of it that you don't like.

Like, it's good to be open-minded and open-hearted about what you consume.

But I would say on the other end, I don't think you have to force yourself to watch something.

that you don't want to or that's going to make you uncomfortable because there are so many other choices out there.

You know, Roseanne is such an interesting case because, you know, I watched Roseanne a lot when I was growing up, but it was one of the few shows that you could watch because there just weren't that many shows to watch.

And I think now that's not the case anymore.

You know, for the most part, you can watch so much stuff and read so much stuff and it changes things.

But the interesting thing is not the people who turn off the thing.

that they just don't like, which is a normal reaction.

The interesting thing is the sort of almost fundamentalist approach of, I don't like this, so therefore you can't like it either.

And I'm going to judge you morally based on your decision to like this.

And that, I mean, that is, even among atheists and progressives, that is a deeply religious impulse, a purifying impulse.

And that's what, that's what's

problematic about the culture today, is that the deep desire

of people to tell other people, and this is a libertarian streak in me coming out, deep desire, need of people to tell other people what they should consume and what they shouldn't consume.

Anyway.

Yeah, and I think, I mean, interestingly, I think you're right that that impulse is one that's existed for a long time, and it's more of a

puritanical, more religious impulse almost than otherwise.

Purification.

Yeah, for

years, for decades, for as long as I can remember, the Family Research Council has offered movie reviews to evangelical Christian families to say, here are movies that we sanction that you can feel comfortable taking your time.

Did you grow up watching movies according to what the Family Research Council says?

Oh, yeah.

When the Passion of the Christ came out, which, by the way, is not a family-friendly movie.

But when The Passion of the Christ came out, that was aired in, you know, we had screenings of it in my school.

And, you know, several families had.

What was the first movie you saw that the Family Research Council hated?

Oh, gosh, that's a good question.

I mean, probably a lot.

Like, I don't think

I don't think that the Family Research Council folks really liked the Smurfs all that much or like Rainbow Bright.

Oh, right.

Wait, were the Smurfs gay or something?

Is that the thing?

Well, there are kind of challenges within some strains of,

no, just about fantasy generally.

Oh, right, right.

You know,

care bears project energy out of their stomachs, which has.

I mean, who among us?

I wish I could project energy out of my stomach.

But this is the thing.

Like, you know,

there is within that.

community,

there is a vetted vehicle for them enforcing what

media, what pop culture even aligns with their.

Which, by the way, is absolutely fine because it's voluntary.

It's totally fine.

Right.

I mean, we can't, and everything about this conversation, thank God, still is more or less voluntary.

But would it be bad if, like, you know, there was a queer version of that, if like

the human rights campaign were

offering reviews of movies that

it felt had positive depictions of queer characters.

Nothing particularly wrong with that.

I mean, it's just, I think the flip that the even though it implies a judgment of

whatever they want to talk about.

I think the

harder part of this comes in the sort of

preening moral judgments of people who don't share your cultural tastes.

You know, that's the but I don't think there's anything wrong with a positive guide to people say, hey, this is culture that you might like and consume it accordingly.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Where this probably gets the pop cultural realm where this gets most acute is probably comedy.

Good transition.

Welcome, the Shell Wolf.

I mean, let's talk about it, right?

Wait, you know, are we fulfilling some sort of inside-the-beltway stereotype by talking about it four days after the event when everybody's supposed to have moved on already?

I mean, I will say that this is not a new conversation for us, right?

Last year, we published a cover story about Alec Baldwin's depiction of the president,

asking about the role of satire in playing into the conditions

that we all have I mean, the Michelle Wolfe story is a story about

structural problems.

You can't take a comedy club and move it inside an event that's half or a third Kiwanis, a third high school graduation, a third First Amendment discussion,

and then impose Michelle Wolfe on it without consequence.

So

that's the structural issue there, I think.

And that means that the dinner needs to be rethought.

But there's nothing that Michelle Wolfe said

that was

outrageous by the standards of mainstream American comedy today.

The only thing that was outrageous, quote-unquote, outrageous, was that one of her victims was there in front of her, invited by the group, and then publicly humiliated by a comedy.

That's structural, right?

Well, of course it's structural.

The problem is you don't invite somebody to dinner and then publicly humiliate them.

That's just manners.

And especially when

you want this person there, Sarah Sanders.

And again, this is not a commentary on Sarah Sanders and her relationship to the truth and democracy and the free press and the First Amendment.

But that was

the fatal flaw was, what do you think is going to happen when you put Sarah Sanders and Michelle Wolfe in a room and give Michelle Wolfe a mic?

Like, what do you think?

I'm not blaming the White House Correspondents Association.

They're in a tough spot.

And

they, obviously, they had good intentions, but they didn't think through this problem.

But anyway,

that was my spiel.

I think maybe the thing they didn't think through is that I got a thumbs up from Megan, finally.

I think maybe the thing that they didn't think through is that perhaps in these supercharged times, a roast is not the proper format.

No, that's what I mean.

I mean, you know,

there's always a lag.

It happens all the time, though, right?

Like, it's always been a roast.

It's always been about somebody's.

It's not been quite so roasty.

Right, yeah.

I mean, I agree it hasn't been as easy as roasty, yeah.

But

I don't even know if I agree with that.

What?

What, that it'sn't been as roasty.

I mean, I think.

No, it wasn't like that.

I think in general...

The sense has always been, ooh, this is a little uncomfortable.

I was there in Colbert in 2006.

It was squeamish.

Right.

It's always been a little, you're taking some tough shots at a person who's sitting, you know, six feet away from you.

This is a little.

And I thought that that was always part of the point.

He's the theater of a, of, you know, America's political leaders on stage being made fun of and taking it.

Right.

But the problem is Sarah Sanders is not America's leader.

I would have been absolutely fine Donald Trump being up there and having Michelle Wolfe eviscerate him, but he's the elected leader of the United States.

And I just, it was, it was, people, people assume that a lot of people in the audience were squeamish or prudish or whatever.

There was a particular dynamic that people don't understand.

which is that you're watching a woman, whether you have sympathy for her or not.

And by the way, for the first time ever, a lot of people in in that room had a modicum of sympathy for Sarah Sanders.

So that counts as a win for Donald Trump, by the way.

But

the feeling was, wait a second, these jokes are fine, but don't like, don't throw this woman out a window.

She happened to come to your dinner.

Everything else was fine.

You know, and the jokes, well, Megan was there.

She can give you her view.

Yeah.

No, I mean, similar.

I think the lack of mutuality was what really felt weird about it because she was not there to defend herself.

I mean, she was sitting there, but she didn't actually get to speak.

And, you know, the tradition is that the president gives it and gets it.

And so there was the lack of that.

But one thing I would add to this, just to zoom out from the Washington Hilton Saturday a little bit, I mean, I found it really interesting how we turn to comedy for truth-telling.

You know, in this age of mistrust in so many different institutions, we look to comedy to do what journalism does.

Well, the less you can say earnestly, the more the comics have to say, joke, quote-unquote, jokingly, right?

Yeah, I think that's true.

But we, I mean, I think we look to comics almost just to

tell us the truth about the world we live in, and we don't really trust anyone else to do it in ways that we used to.

And I think the dinner gets to that, where we, everyone sort of said, Michelle Wolfe was the person who was telling the truth, you know, about that dinner and in that room.

And that's that's a striking turn of the world.

And by the way,

she was.

Yeah.

Maybe not the way we would tell it, but she was.

I think for that reason, comedy is also the arena that gets obsolete quickest, where the norms change and you realize it.

You cringe at the jokes sometimes.

And then you go back and you listen to Eddie Murphy Raw Delirious in the 80s.

Oh my God, I just did that recently.

I forgot that it was totally homophobic.

Right.

Right.

Totally.

Despite the fact that he's up on stage in the tightest

outfit that you can do.

That part I did not notice.

I'll give you that.

But

that's a perfect example for this discussion, which is like, that was hysterical.

I used to go see those shows live.

Right.

And now it's just not funny.

AIDS.

Remember

20 minutes on AIDS as hysterical.

Yes.

It was amazing.

And it's not, by the way, it's not his fault because we can't submit him to the harsh judgment of presentism.

I can't go back 30 years and judge him by today's standards.

You could say that he was certainly not progressive, but he was in the mainstream of the way Americans talked about the issue.

just, that's what I meant by my first point about the TV that I watched 40 years ago.

It's just like, it's just not good because culture has moved forward.

You know, like, it's not that we have to throw it out.

It's like, I don't even want to watch it.

And I think this goes back to the point that I was making about music, which is that.

Sometimes when I listen to things that I listened to when I was a teenager in my early 20s, I cringe now and I'm like, oh, that is so uncomfortable.

You shouldn't be saying that.

That's unacceptable.

You can't enjoy it anymore.

Well, I wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't listen to it on repeat.

I certainly wouldn't listen to it out loud anymore.

But I also don't judge those artists necessarily by today's standards for music that they made 20 years ago.

If they came out today and made a similar song,

I don't have a problem with that.

We do believe, right?

We allegedly believe as a society, we certainly believe as journalists that people change and grow.

The Joy Reed controversy, not to introduce a whole other meme here, but you know.

Put aside the fact that she's probably BSing us about the, you know, the,

what do you call it?

Uh, what, what, what What was her argument?

That she was hacked, that she was hacked.

Put aside the issue of whether she was hacked.

What we as a society sometimes do for people and sometimes don't is say, well, you changed.

You're no longer the person that you were.

And so there is some forgiveness, but it nevertheless doesn't make the stuff that you used to listen to pleasant.

And here's what I see as the flip side of all of this.

I think that's good.

I think that the creative destruction, there is such a thing as creative destruction when it comes to pop culture too.

And I think think that's a natural part of the process just the way that old songs sound like part of their era old jokes sound like part of their era and you can it is a little bit hard to listen to dmx now

but you can you can i mean nine out of ten songs

there's a big ones the dmx christmas special is fine it's great but you can start to fold in other culture into your diet.

That's just the natural way of things.

New musicians discover new sounds and they invent new songs and we like them.

This is very important because Jillian is allowing me to actually DJ her wedding.

So I'm programming.

Really, Jillian, that's it.

I'm programming it all.

I am programming.

I know I'm programming.

You're set on a pop card.

I got two hours.

Two hours of music.

I just won't be on the record saying that.

I'm two hours.

Sounds problematic.

DJ problematic in the house.

Stick with us.

In a moment, we'll talk about what you do when your pop culture is problematic.

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All of us, for one reason or another, have had the experience of falling out of love with a piece of entertainment or an entertainer that we once were fans of.

So I asked several members of our team here at The Atlantic the question, who or what have you fallen out of love with?

And what have you found in their place?

I think that Kanye West as an artist is incredibly difficult to enjoy given his comments on Twitter and the interview with TMZ that he gave this past week.

He said things like

400 years of slavery was a choice.

And I think his support of Donald Trump, no matter where you stand politically, indicates that he is an artist that feels no level of responsibility to his listeners or the responsibility that he feels to this quote-unquote free thought absolves him of a responsibility to communicate with his listeners or fans.

in a way that is constructive.

Kanye West has always been an artist that has talked about politics up until and before the George Bush doesn't care about black people comment in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

But now it feels like his desired level of autonomy outranks him making commentary that is constructive in this space and saying something that is just like factually incorrect in an era where facts are under assault, like 400 years of slavery was a choice and drawing on all of the kind of pain and brutality that came out of that system and still exists today, I think was incredibly irresponsible.

And so, the person that I would replace him with, given the fact that he has carried the mantle for Chicago for so long, is Chance the Rapper.

Because while faulty, he is someone who has tried to use his platform in really intentional ways for the betterment of Chicago politically, socially, and on a music platform.

So, probably a couple of months ago, I had had a rough couple of days at work.

It had just been sort of bad news cycle after bad news cycle.

And I was looking for some relief.

I figured I'd turn on a trashy movie.

And 50 Shades Darker was suggested to me.

So I thought, I'll turn this on.

It'll be funny.

And I lasted about five minutes.

Essentially, the main character starts a new job.

And there's sort of this shot of her talking to her new boss and

they're talking about how she asks her, he says something like, you look nice.

Are you going out tonight?

And then she says she is.

They have a brief chat and she walks away and the camera sort of shows him watching her walk away in a very suggestive way.

And I just felt my stomach sink.

because it sort of felt like they were setting up for some sort of sexual harassment or maybe workplace romance plotline.

I don't know know because they turned it off.

And that was the first time I realized that it was really starting to affect me, the culture that I consumed and sort of the Me Too era.

I think the thing that I've kind of had to give up to some extent is House of Cards, the Netflix original.

And in particular, Kevin Spacey's character.

Kevin Spacey, obviously,

is problematic himself right now with accusations going back decades.

He's kind of retreated from the public stage.

But I think what got me more is that his character on House of Cards was really interesting in the beginning, especially for his duplicity.

Frank Underwood was a career politician, very suave, had this kind of like good old boy attitude around him, utterly fake.

Was it entirely a masquerade just to advance him politically?

And that was fascinating to see him take on the mask, take off the mask.

But now, seeing that Kevin Spacey himself has been living with the mask for some time,

that takes a little bit of the joy out, even aside from the whole concept of House of Cards being a bit ridiculous in the current political climate.

And I honestly haven't been able to find a show to replace that in my life.

You know, Veep doesn't really do the same thing.

Scandal wasn't something that I'm really looking to go back and bone up on.

I don't have a

political thriller with intrigue that feels appropriate right now.

So I think like a lot of stuff that I haven't been able to to enjoy as much anymore is work of artists whose professional lives and personal lives are sort of

there's there's sort of a blurred line between them.

So like for example the work of Aziz and Sari, the work of Bill Cosby, R.

Kelly, folks who you know sort of in their work appear themes that

the allegations that have come out in their personal lives are quite related to, right?

So Aziz Ansari and R.

Kelly and Louis C.K., they like often, you know, in their work talk about romance and dating and love.

And, you know, that's kind of where things have come up in their in the news about them.

So I really can't see their work anymore without thinking of all those other things.

Like there's no way for me to compartmentalize the two.

I think there has been this process sort of organically happening in my life where I've been creating my own canon.

And I've been sort of like clearing the table of all of these people that, you know, you sort of took for granted as being the masters and whatever field that they were in.

And then trying to search for just new artists, faces, voices.

And in that process, for example, like let's say Netflix, I've been looking, gravitating a lot more towards women anti-heroes, like really interesting, complex portrayal of women.

So

shows where you'd see, traditionally see like this brooding detective with like problems in his like personal life.

Like I've

seen women do that role really interestingly.

Like for so The Fall, The Killing.

In terms of anti-heroes, I've also really enjoyed Jessica Jones, which has

an array of really interesting women characters.

Apart from that, I think I've made a Spotify list of women-only artists, old and new.

And I've been really enjoying going through a re-education

of everything that I've sort of the same genres of music that I've always listened to, but like

kind of doing them over from this new perspective.

And then I think I actually, right before this, I counted, I've read 10 books this year so far and

eight of them have been by women, mostly women of color.

One has been by a white man.

So I feel like there's that like that process has sort of, you know, slowing off of layers has already started happening.

And I think I became much more intentional about it this year.

When I was a teen, I was super into emo music.

All of those bands from the mid-2000s, like Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, Jimmy Eat World, Dashboard Confessional, all of that was extremely my jam.

Uh,

and as I was

sort of listening to it more recently, just nostalgically, um, it was kind of shocking how bad some some of the lyrics were.

Obviously, that was like a subculture that had a lot of,

you know, hyperbole and aggression and things like that.

And I did remember that, but I didn't realize how

overt the misogyny was sometimes.

There's a lot of subtle misogynist dynamics and tons of music, right?

But like, there's a Fallout Boy lyric that is literally,

wear me like a locket around your throat.

I'll weigh you down.

I'll watch you choke.

You look so good in blue.

So it is overt, like it is overt.

And so that's been really hard to think about how that might have like affected me as a kid because I loved it so much and I didn't really think about it critically.

And I still, I still do listen to it and I still do enjoy it because it reminds me of like being a kid and it's very nostalgic in that way.

But it also has this sort of undercurrent of just dynamics that I guess were always around me that I didn't notice.

I think emote kind of ended, you know, it's sort of bounded in time, right?

But there's actually a big like swell right now of women-led rock bands and like women rock singers who are doing very like emotional writing and it is this like very smart, precise analysis of relationships and emotions.

And I've been super into that.

So that's like Wax Ahatchee, Lucy Docus, Snail Mail,

Mitzki, all of these bands and singers that sort of hit the same notes or can hit you in the same way.

But it's obviously a very different perspective.

And I think it's just like really smart and really affecting.

So that's what I would recommend.

Awesome.

From Julie Beck.

One of the specific shows, Megan, you had mentioned that sitcoms, you know, when Roseanne first aired, it was in a context where we had just the network shows basically to choose from, the network lineup.

But that we, we're in a world where series are flourishing of every shape and size.

There's some things I even know if we call them sitcoms anymore.

Yeah.

Like Atlanta.

Yeah, totally.

It's so experimental.

And yeah.

Well, and one thing too,

I mean, to pivot off of what Julia was saying, you know, rom-coms are just, as a genre, they are a problem.

And they have been for so long.

And I think now back to what I grew up with, really.

You know, what I was told was normal when it came to romance, and it's so troubling now.

And I try to be aware of it, but I also feel like it must have affected me in some way to have grown up, you know, being told that this was the way things were done.

What's an example of a now-bad rom-com?

Oh, my goodness.

It was once good.

I mean, so many.

Well, we don't need to get into this debate.

This has been a big debate at the Atlantic.

You guys know what I'm going to say,

actually.

We're going to have a special issue on this.

A special episode.

Moving right along.

Yeah.

Of course.

Really?

Yeah.

Worst movie ever made.

Oh, thank you.

Yes.

Let him read

that holes.

There is a lot competing for that title.

It's true.

It's not a good movie.

There's a lot wrong with that movie.

There's a lot wrong with that.

Except there is a really adorable child octopus.

So

no, he wasn't.

Oh, wow.

All right.

Sorry.

We didn't mean to go down this rabbit hole.

So there's also, I mean, there are so many.

I mean, it's hard to think of one that actually is good, you know, in some ways.

Like the movie Hitch, for example, which stars Will Smith.

When I first saw it, I loved it.

I was like, what a wonderful, charming movie.

It does not hold up at all.

It begins, he's, he plays a love doctor who coaches men how to get women.

It begins with a line about, if she tells you she's not interested, just keep pushing.

She's probably lying.

And it goes on and on and on like this.

It's kind of horrifying.

But on a more positive note, I think there are so many new entries in sitcoms, in movies, in literature, et cetera,

that really are part of the rom-com genre that are very untraditional.

You know, so like I think of Insecure, for example, on HBO, or, I mean, Crazy Ask Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin, Broad City, I think is a rom-com that's about friendship, or like Ladybird is kind of a rom-com between a mother and a daughter in some way.

So anyway, I just, I think that that genre is doing interesting and hope-giving things right now.

And I think you don't actually have to look all that far for the void of what we now know to be problematic programming to be filled, right?

So when we think about the Cosby show and when I think about the place that that held in my life when I was younger, you know, they were a, you know, upper middle class affluent family living in a brownstone in Brooklyn.

I was in a middle class, upper middle class black family living in a brownstone in Brooklyn.

But when you look back at a lot of those episodes, you can see a lot of the roots and tenets of the pound cake speech being played out by Cliff Huxtable.

And then when you think about one of the other big family sitcoms for black folk that came around in that same area.

You're going to talk about West Philadelphia, aren't you?

I sure am.

You know,

there's your antidote to that right there.

I mean, I'm sure there were problematic aspects of that or things that we look back on that don't hold up.

But the first principal air.

Right, but there were other options.

And Uncle Phil was another type of familial, you know, a paternal, loving character that had, you know, three kids, was doing well, and was able to represent that same thing.

So I think when we have this concern about, well, if we cast off the problematics, who's going to fill their space?

Lots of people.

Yeah.

I I mean, and as a nerdy black kid who had to grow up in the era of Steve Urkel, thank you, Carlton.

Thank you, Carlton, for existing.

You were nerdy growing up?

Don't do that.

Just messed him with you.

But you know what's interesting?

One day, 20 years from now, our kids are going to be talking about how problematic.

All the shows that are right now not problematic are.

It's amazing sort of thing for reasons that we can't even imagine.

And they will be creating wonderful new shows.

And by the way, and by the way, which is sort of an advertisement for forgiveness, cultural forgiveness in a way, which is that that's where you were then, and that's where we are now.

And who the hell knows what tomorrow is going to be?

Thank you.

I'll be at the Riverside Church next week.

And at Jillian's wedding.

And at Jillian's wedding.

Oh, my God.

I am.

That was.

To use an old NBC sitcom convention, one to grow on.

With that, let us turn to Keepers.

The closing segment, in which I ask all of our listeners and our guests, what you've heard, read, listened to, watched, read, experienced recently that you do not want to forget.

This is one just to note, now that we are about to wave goodbye to the end of cold weather in D.C., I'm going to bring in a keeper from a listener in Minnesota, Owen,

from the last snow to mark the passing of the seasons.

Hi, Radio Atlantic team.

My name is Owen Truesdell, and I live in St.

Paul, Minnesota.

And we just got

a April blizzard, about 15 inches of snow in April.

And my keeper is when I look out my window, I see my neighbors helping people push their cars,

parents pulling their kids on sleds, and dogs bounding through the snow.

And as much of a pain in the butt as an April blizzard might be, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.

So that's my keeper.

That was dear.

Yeah.

Great dogs bounding through the snow.

Yeah, that's not what happens when it snows in D.C.

Whatever the opposite of that is.

But yes, there are several fist pumps for those of us who lived in Minnesota in the room.

Having heard that, Megan, what would you like to keep?

Well, I've been thinking about shows that I find soothing.

You know, when the news gets a lot and fast, et cetera.

Things that I just turn to to

find a little bit of solace and peace in the world.

So my keeper is one that I would want to keep pretty much every week, and that is the Great British Baking Show.

I know some people in this room, it is amazing.

It is so perfect.

It's very antidote.

Very earnest.

Yeah.

So

beautiful.

I like earnestness.

Spirit of generosity.

Thank you, Jeff.

Yes.

That is the best thing.

I love a good

mean.

They're not mean at people.

They're not the opposite of them.

They're nice almost to a fault, but not quite.

The other thing is just the emotional hook of when they show the illustrations of the conception of the baked goods and then play that delightful little bit of it.

And they're drawn with such love.

Yeah.

It's one, just everything about it is designed to be soothing and wonderful, and you will be in a better mood having watched it than when you started.

Awesome.

So that is my first time.

Just like this podcast.

Yes.

Jeffrey Goldberg, what is your keeper?

Oh, now when I get to tell him I'm killing Ann Conway, yes.

it is.

And let Jillian go first.

I want people to hang on.

Yeah, I want to be.

I was going to alternate genders.

Go on, Jillian.

My keeper is

nerds geeking out at comic book movies.

And this is because

I recently saw the latest Avengers movie.

And this is going to comic book movies on opening night is very new for me.

It is not something I have cared deeply about or was into.

And I used to laugh at all the people who were dressed up and really, really into it but on this last go-around just the sheer amount of joy that it brought people people walking around wearing Avengers t-shirts and having their Captain America shields just for two to three hours they were just so geeked to be there and excited about entertainment and pop culture and what it looked like and just like this bond of community that happened during it before and after it I don't know.

It just felt really special and something that I'm not normally a part of.

So I would like to keep that feeling.

That is wonderful.

It's more than a feeling.

That's problematic.

Jeffrey, what is your keeper?

So my keeper is the White House Correspondents Association dinner

because

Kellyanne Conway came over and I gave her a First Amendment pin and I said, Kellyanne, why don't you wear this First Amendment pin?

And she said, I'll wear this pin if you wear a Second Amendment pin.

And I said, I'll wear the Second Amendment pin if you wear a Third Amendment pin.

And we were doing like full shtick, which was awesome until I remembered that Kellyanne Conway actually might not like the First Amendment.

So it was kind of more serious than that.

But she went with the joke for a while.

I don't know why she showed up there.

She doesn't like the press,

and the press doesn't very much like her.

But it was kind of one of those moments that you can't really describe

to people who don't go to this dinner, which of course is loathed, I understand it.

But, you know, there was this moment for repartee, but it also showed me the limits of the possibility of repartee and mixing with people who really don't like what the press does.

And I just have, I have a lot of feelings about that moment that I'll share later.

Now we'll unpack on a later episode.

Excellent.

Right.

And a very special episode of Radio Orlando.

The more you know,

this time it's personal.

So I was in Orlando recently visiting my parents and happened to catch a short marathon of The Golden Girls.

Yes.

Yeah.

I love it.

I'm never going to overturn The Golden Girls my whole life.

Just, I mean, the Golden Girls itself, four comedians at the height of their powers doing such amazing comedy.

They are so good on that show.

I was mesmerized.

But there's this one particular episode called, Oh, Shut Up, Rose.

It's from the first episode of the third season.

And the plot of the episode in part is that Blanche has given away Rose's beloved teddy bear

to a young girl from the neighborhood who is like a Girl Scout type and is a do-gooder and is at the house and has come and is so sweet and loves this teddy bear so much and was so glad to have it.

And Blanche gave it to her, not realizing that it was a priceless heirloom from Rose's youth, which she had kept with her from her days in St.

Olaf.

And so Rose just knows that the teddy bear is lost.

She does not know that it has been given away.

And

much of the episode is Blanche and Dorothy trying to bargain with this girl who reveals herself to be increasingly cunning in

her demands.

for returning this teddy bear.

Much of the episode is Blanche and Dorothy trying to get it back from her and bargaining with her.

And the price becomes ever more expensive.

At one point, the girl cuts the teddy bear's ear off, holds a water gun with red ink in it to the teddy bear's head and

threatens to bring an end to this bear.

But at the end of the episode, Rose,

and Betty White, in this very fantastic, classic moment of sitcom performance and just one of the most delightful bits of physical comedy ever, gives a speech about sorrow.

And I'll play the speech.

Get the door, Rose.

So, all four golden girls are in the room, Dorothy, Blanche, Lydia, and Rose.

And next to the door.

You, good morning.

Well, kid, what do you want?

I changed my mind.

This, of course, I was wrong to ask for all those gifts.

Dorothy, you see, I knew she'd come to her senses.

I decided cash is better.

That way, I can buy exactly what I want.

And now the speech is coming up.

I'll get my purse.

No,

Blanche, I'm not gonna let you do that.

I've been doing a lot of thinking.

If after all the years of love and companionship, Fernando and I are meant to part company, I'll just have to accept that.

Time to time, life deals you an unfriendly hand.

There's nothing you can do about it.

I guess there's a lesson to be learned here.

Sometimes life just isn't fair, kiddo.

I will link to the clip, a clip of this moment in the show notes.

And I'm just going to say that I will never not be able to look at the way that Betty White shoved that young Jenny Lewis out the door and think that it's the most priceless thing I've ever seen.

Ugh, makes me laugh so hard every time.

The Golden Girls.

A Golden Girls Keeper.

That is just a testament to the fact that there is old entertainment that is still unproblematic.

I'm sure we can find problems with the Golden Girls.

I was going to say that.

No, let's not try.

No.

Just thank them for being a friend.

And with that, Megan, Jillian, Jeff, thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Till next time.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

Thank you to our guests, Megan Garber and Jillian White.

In addition to my esteemed co-host, Jeffrey Goldberg, and our additional staff voices in order of appearance, Adrian Green, Caroline Mims-Nice, Andrew McGill, Pandey Misra, and and Julie Beck.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.

Catherine Wells is our executive producer of Atlantic Podcasts.

Leave us your keeper.

Send us a voicemail at 202-266-7600 with your answer to the question, what do you not want to forget?

Feel free to tell us how we're doing.

Again, 202-266-7600.

Check us out at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

Catch our show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, rate and review as an Apple Podcast and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

But most importantly, thank you for listening.

May you find entertainment that grants you relief from all that you find problematic.

We'll see you next week.