I humbly accept that How To Make It In America was not a particularly good television show, if we’re going by the standards of, say, good television shows. And yet I continued to watch it until the end. That’s not so strange, I guess; that happens all the time. I am one of those people who refuses to give up on a television show I’ve started watching (well, except for Hung. Good lord, I’m not a masochist.) But what’s truly strange is that unlike with, say, Weeds — where I feel like a lone man clinging dispassionately to a ganja-laden island -- I just kind of presumed everyone else I knew was watching How To Make It In America as well, and we’d made a tacit agreement not to talk about it. And then a couple of months ago, midway through what turned out to be the show’s final season, I happened to make mention of some ridiculous plot twist to a few friends (most likely about Lake Bell’s interactions with Ziggy Sobotka) and everybody in the room regarded with me a sour grimace, as if I’d just spiked their Red Stripes with Rasta Monsta.
“You’re still watching that show?” one of them said.
1. Narcissism: inserting themselves into commentary on news/current events (bloggers as rappers)
2. Indulging in an impenetrable stream-of-consciousness style (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Rapper)
3. Substituting visceral, intuitive feeling for intellectual rigor (singer-songwriters as rappers)
4. Being politically or socially conscious in a preachy way (liberal do-gooders, Keith Olbermann as a rapper)
5. Being hung up on material goods (all Americans as rappers)
With those characteristics in mind, here are some writers who predated the hip-hop generation but might have found themselves comfortable in that culture:
Radiohead didn’t show up to play the Occupy Wall Street protests, as was rumored late last week. But Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel did. It’s a little like expecting the 82nd Airborne Division and getting the Luxembourg Navy, and that makes it all the more fitting. The protests will likely end up a lot like Mangum’s career: a yelp from the margins riding a momentary unfocused energy likely to collapse into itself before it takes any real shape.
Unless you’re the kind of person who spent more money on library fines than clothes in 1997, Neutral Milk Hotel weren’t even a blip to you. But for a second they were the hot shit in Lilliput: two very good albums of tweaky lo-fi indie rock on the label that’d later put out Arcade Fire. Mangum’s surrealist songs (about two-headed boys, the King of the Carrot Flowers, and the ghost of Anne Frank) and truth-hungry twee-trumpet of a voice were striking. Put those records on now and they still are. But just as he was peaking with promise, he dropped out of view, literally disappearing after 1998’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (which became a cult classic in absentia).
