Category: The Media

Axl and the Banshees

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Music, The Media

[x-posted at Gelf]

In an excellent review of Guns N’ Roses’ excellent new album, Chuck Klosterman writes, “The weirdest (yet most predictable) aspect of Chinese Democracy is the way 60 percent of the lyrics seem to actively comment on the process of making the album itself.” I’ll see Chuck’s point and raise him—the reviews of Axl’s opus also spend 60 percent of their space commenting on the process of making the album.

Of course, we shouldn’t judge the reviewers too critically since they rarely get 17 years and $13 million to work with. But one thing that keeps recurring in the assessments of Chinese Democracy, in addition to those two numbers, is the phrase “banshee [noun].”

  • Spin (on the album’s title track and first single): “Once the overture of muffled voices, ominous drums, and plinky Edge-ish guitar gives way to a thick, muscular four-chord riff and that Axl banshee wail, only the most stubbornly jaded will manage to suppress the goosebump reflex.”
  • Entertainment Weekly: “At times it’s possible to hear the world-changing CD that Rose—whose banshee howl remains gloriously intact—must have had in his tightly braided skull all these years.”
  • Slate: “On Chinese Democracy, his voice is still an amazing, bludgeoning instrument, rising from demonic low rumble to piercing banshee wail.”
  • TimeOut: “The only salient elements throughout are Axl’s outlandish banshee howl and numerous ludicrous guitar solos.”
  • Blender: “. . . a blast of iMax Lynyrd Skynyrd complete with string section, a couple na-na-na refrains, several bridges to nowhere and lord knows how many latticed layers of Axl’s bandana-banshee singing.”

This raises the obvious question—what the hell is a banshee? My first guess was that it’s a flexible, downright lazy bit of rock-critic shorthand. Just in the archives of Rolling Stone, whose review did not deem Chinese Democracy banshee-fide, the phrase “banshee whatever” covers bands from AC/DC to the Replacements; it seems the guitars on Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy sound like a “banshee,” as does the Divinyls’ entire fifth album. Also banshee-like: Sinead O’ Connor.

Maybe it’s better to ask what was a banshee? The Oxford English Dictionary defines “banshee”—and the word dates back to at least the late eighteenth century—as “a supernatural being supposed by the peasantry of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands to wail under the windows of a house where one of the inmates is about to die.” But now that Chinese Democracy‘s actually out, it seems time to move past the mythological allusions to death, failure, and disease. Based on the album’s early success, might I suggest the “Orpheus croon“?

A Primer on Palin and Ayers: Or, Let’s Not Folk This Up

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Politics, The Media

[x-posted at Gelf]

Lately, people have been paying a lot of attention to Sarah Palin’s words (or “verbage“), and one of her favorite talking points has been Bill Ayers and his ties to Barack Obama. Back in August, I wrote an essay for Gelf on Obama, Ayers, and the documentary The Weather Underground, arguing that the overlooked film offered “a complicated sketch of a complicated problem.” I want to look at Palin’s take on Ayers, but first, in case you’re one of those late-breaking, unicorn-riding “uninformed voters,” let’s sketch the history of the Obama/Ayers issue.

As early as February, the Clinton campaign sent out emails on Ayers, with spokesman Phil Singer ominously wondering “what the Republicans will do with this.” It first exploded, however, at ABC’s April 16 Democrat debate. When George Stephanopoulos raised Ayers, Obama distanced himself from both the man and the “game” of invoking “flimsy” relationships. Hillary called this “a fair general statement” and then pounced: “But I also believe that Senator Obama served on a board with Mr. Ayers,” adding that Ayers’s unrepentant attitude was “deeply hurtful . . . to every American.” The next day, another Clinton spokesman, Howard Wolfson, went further: “Bill Ayers hosted an event for Senator Obama when he was running for state senate. . . . We’re not talking about whether Senator Obama ran into somebody at an ice cream store in Hyde Park.” (And, yes, that link is to the National Review‘s “The Corner”—even in April, Republicans were tracking this Ayers story more closely than Democrats, and understandably so. Less understandable is why “The Corner” has produced more than 500 posts on “Obama + Ayers” to date.)

For his part, John McCain declined to comment on Obama and Ayers in early April, but that changed after the ABC debate. In fact, on the April 20 This Week with George Stephanopoulos, McCain brought it up unprompted: for Obama to “associate and have as a friend and serve on a board and have a guy kick off your campaign that says he’s unrepentant,” said McCain, “that’s an attitude, frankly, that certainly isn’t in keeping with the overall attitude of the American people.” Since then, the McCain campaign has continued mentioning Ayers, though not as frequently or systematically as one might expect. (For example, their September ad connecting Obama to Chicago’s political scene doesn’t include Ayers.) Also, there have been outside attempts to link Obama and Ayers, both journalistic—Stanley Kurtz’s fizzled article in the Wall Street Journal—and otherwise—a privately-financed $2 million ad buy for a Swift-boatish commercial.

This brings us to early October, when all hell broke loose. Oddly enough, the second round of Obama-Ayers coverage began with an October 3 New York Times piece about their intersections in Chicago’s local politics scene. This is odd because the article made it clear that the relationship was tenuous at best, and also because Sarah Palin doesn’t really read newspapers. Still, on the campaign trail, Sarah Palin reignited the issue, and her comments have attracted far more attention from public and press. There are three obvious explanations for this: 1) it’s Palin, who always attracts more attention; 2) it’s October, with time running out and voters tuning in; 3) it’s consistent, with Palin raising the issue four days in a row.

What exactly has she raised? Here, courtesy of the McCain campaign, is Palin’s statement from October 4: “Turns out, one of [Obama’s] earliest supporters is a man who, according to The New York Times, was a domestic terrorist. . . . This is not a man who sees America as you and I do—as the greatest force for good in the world. This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country.” Now, you can parse this several ways—for starters, we’re talking about only one terrorist, Ayers—but what’s important is that Palin’s content parallels McCain’s, and even Hillary’s. In all three cases, Obama and Ayers are hammered for their early involvement and their difference from, in McCain’s words, “the overall attitude of the American people.”

Despite the similarities between Hillary, McCain, and Palin, it’s the latter’s attacks that are really registering—and here we return to Palin’s words. An additional reason for the effectiveness of Palin’s attacks, I think, is her use of  “pals around.” Plenty of people have noted Palin’s increasingly folksy behavior—we’ve zoomed past Fargo and into Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. territory—and this locution is a perfect example. Presumably, one “pals around” at hockey games, and that’s exactly why it’s such a damning phrase.

I expect Palin to repeat these charges for the foreseeable future, just as she did on October 6 in Clearwater, Florida. Helpfully, the Federal News Service recorded a complete transcript of this event; it’s even peppered with “(Boos)” and “(Applause),” giving the impression that it was filmed before a live studio audience. Palin’s speech contains more homespun wisdom (“You can do the math or go with your gut”) and an answer for her non-answer on what she reads (“Really in that interview I was just getting really impatient because I was so convinced that Americans want to hear about the issues”). But it’s worth noting that Palin has tightened up her “pals around” line, which now reads “work with a former domestic terrorist” (my emphasis). Whether her original words were spontaneous or premeditated, sloppy or precise, they’ve done their damage.

Edit Thy Neighbor

by Craig Fehrman, posted in The Media

[x-posted at Gelf]

In the August 4 issue of the New Yorker, Ben McGrath tells the story of Alan Rogers, a talented and thoughtful Army lifer who died in Iraq. McGrath’s essay explores whether the military and media intentionally covered up Rogers’s identity as “the first known gay casualty of the Iraq war,” and it makes for fascinating reading. But I was drawn to several lively paragraphs in the middle of McGrath’s essay. There, he describes the “edit war” over Rogers’s posthumous Wikipedia entry, a war fought over phrases like “he was gay and worked to end ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell'” and a picture of Rogers holding hands with another man.

I’ll admit that this conflict forms an arresting image — like a protester whose sandwich boards can dry-erase. But in choosing to focus on it (and this is his only mention of Wikipedia), McGrath follows a recent trend in the coverage of the online encyclopedia — toward overplaying the aggression of its “talk” and “history” pages. This is different than starting with the idea that Wikipedia is flawed or amateur or clumsy. This is brushing aside those ideas to focus on the Wikidrama, ignoring the ends in order to wallow in the means.

Another example of this trend is Eve Fairbanks’s recent essay in the New Republic, on the Wikipedia entries of presidential candidates. Fairbanks’s examples fall into two groups: vandalism (“An editor replaced a photo of Hillary on her Wikipedia page with a picture of a walrus”) and interpretation (“. . . whether to describe Clinton as ‘a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination’ or just ‘a candidate'”). By the end of the essay, though, her emphasis falls on interpretation.

Maybe that’s because vandalism is so 2005. While early critics keyed on Wikipedia’s vandalism, the encyclopedia has slowly found acceptance — not as The Perfect Tool, but as a solid, self-policing source of information. Now, it seems, reporters like McGrath and Fairbanks must turn to the scandal of interpretation.

You’d think institutions like the New Yorker and the New Republic would remain above this kind of sensationalism. Indeed, the entire situation feels strange, a media mashup where two of the toughest places to write for rub elbows with the easiest. Nevertheless, these elite media organs seem more interested in Wikipedia’s interpretations than just about anyone else, even if their goals remain unclear. Perhaps this is related to the innovative WikiScanner, which traces anonymous edits back to their sources. Perhaps it has something to do with the New Yorker’s previous run-in with Wikipedia, the 2006 “Essjay controversy.”

Whatever the cause, I can imagine plenty of effects. Let’s pick two. First, tracking these debates serves roughly the same purpose as using color quotes (which, if you believe Gelf, means they don’t serve any purpose at all). Ultimately, we’re talking about the shock value of online graffiti. Second, and more important, a focus on interpretation can obscure everything Wikipedia has going for it. If you visit Hillary’s entry now, you won’t find anyone arguing whether Clinton is “a leading candidate” or “a candidate” — the way they did in April, when Fairbanks turned in her essay. Because Wikipedia can instantly evolve and self-edit, Hillary is now merely a “former candidate.”

This ability to adapt — to add, say, a new entry when someone like Alan Rogers becomes newsworthy — is a big part of Wikipedia’s value. And twisting this merit into a behind-the-scenes spat is simply a new way to discriminate against Wikipedia —- not for its content, but for its conflict.