Borkowski Weekly Media Trends: 17-06-22
Kate Bush's Deal with God || Tories's Harold Shipman gaffe || Joker The Musical
For Bush, Licensing to Netflix Turns Out To Be a Deal With God
We have long though that the rules of what songs go viral as audio for Tik Toks are more or less random. In recent examples, it can be anything, a certain tone created by the music, a punchy lyric or musical moment that gives a special je ne sais quoi to accompanying video.
Attempts to engineer songs for TikTok virality (like Drake’s Toosie Slide) have typically failed to capture the hive imagination. Whereas something that unexpectedly yields a viral dance (like ‘Lock It’), or a once-famous hit like Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’ being used with just the right video, or even a pretty random MGMT song slowed and reverb’d can spark a wildfire. In each case, TikToks zoom in on a short memorable section of a song that sticks out for people. There’s really no telling why they work.
However, the recent success of Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ seems to have sparked peoples’ TikTok-addled imaginations in a slightly less organic way. The process was nudged along by an especially vivid re-imagining of the song in the latest, hit series of ‘Stranger Things’. The song is now the oldest song ever to reach No. 1 on the streaming chart, thanks in part to esoteric rules which have changed what constitutes a Billboard ‘sale’ to accomodate the rise of streaming sites.
The lesson: if you’re sitting on the rights to an archive of great material, a smart licensing decision might speed up the process of virality. Because of Tik Tok’s churn-rate of audio samples, it would not be surprising if this had happened for her independent of the Stranger Things feature. In many ways, Bush’s subversive, dreamy pop is the perfect music for today’s streamers. That said, Tik Tok feeds on on all culture, high and low, old and new, so that it feels fully appropriate to modify Warhol’s axiom: ‘in the future, every song will have its 7-15 seconds of fame.’
Wakefield By-election Tory Candidate - 'We didn't stop trusting GPs after Harold Shipman'
This newsletter comments regularly on the use of Dead Cat tactics in British politics, and this week, as several key by-election battles heat up around the country, one candidate has, to develop the metaphor, lobbed a flaming liger carcass into the mix.
Nadeem Ahmed, the Tory Candidates in Wakefield made a bizarre plea for voters to stick with the party in a by-election triggered by Imran Khan’s resignation after being convicted of sexual assault of a minor. 'We didn't stop trusting GPs after Harold Shipman'. Harold Shipman was a GP and serial killer, who killed himself in Wakefield prison.
He also insists local voters understand that 'bad apples' exist in every part of society, but that this is no reason to discard the entire tree.
The issue with this tactic is that we need to believe that all the other ‘apples’ in his party are delicious, crunchy and blemish-free, when in fact, at the top of this particular tree is Boris Johnson, the first Prime Minister to have been found to have broken the law in office.
So, in an attempt to distract us from yet another scandal blighting an already-riddled government, he has compared his own party to Harold Shipman and invited the politterati and his political enemies to point out that his predecessor is very far from the Tories’ only problem, all one week before the public are given the opportunity to give the government a very bloody nose. The golden age of political communications it ain’t.
Challenge of making successful Superhero Musical is no Joke(r)
This week’s reports that the sequel to 2019’s Batman villain origin story Joker would be a musical co-starring Lady Gaga shocked many, but in truth this kind of ambitious (or desperate?) move has been a long time coming.
Spurred by the astronomical success of Marvel, superhero films have become the most lucrative genre over the past two decades. But the resultant proliferation of movies that, no matter how good, are ultimately similar in content and style, has caused fatigue among cinephiles, and even a backlash against a genre perceived in some quarters as the cinematic equivalent of a theme park ride: momentary endorphin rushes held together by little of substance or pathos.
This is a problem for studios and producers because the success of the superhero is ultimately built on a fanbase that transcends the traditional comic-, video game- and anime-loving strongholds and includes film lovers of all shapes and sizes.
And there’s been a growing demand from this wider fanbase to freshen things up artistically and stylistically.
This may (alongside a decade of DC comics characters’ dismal failures to compete with their Marvel counterparts on the field of big dumb popcorn blockbusters) partially explain Todd Philips’ decision to do Joker as a kind of arthouse psychological thriller, and Matt Reeves ‘emo Batman’ follow-up.
Even the undisputed market leaders Marvel have hinted at a willingness to tear up the rulebook. Their miniseries Wandavision traversed various genres before [sort of SPOILER] a fairly by-the-numbers superhero ending. There was also much excitement when a trailer for upcoming feature Thor: Love & Thunder hinted at an even more radical departure from superhero norms- a romcom- and then consternation when it was revealed to be a(nother) action-adventure.
Now the Joker 2 team have seized the gauntlet and taken a genuine risk by plonking superhero IP into a totally different style of storytelling. Central to the jeopardy is the scale of (probable) departure in tone from the original – generally considered the most distinctive and critically lauded film to be produced about a DC character in a decade. Even if it’s good, a tonal change risks alienating fans of The Joker. Another danger for anyone attempting a movie musical is that when they are bad, they are excruciatingly, hall-of-fame bad; nobody would want to be responsible for turning the Oscar-laden Joker into Cats.
However, with Lady Gaga, a powerhouse of the musical genre, on board, a killer creative team (maybe taken from the wave of new, non-traditional musicals that have breathed life into Broadway and the West End?), and the retention of the elements that made Joker so interesting (that Hildur Guðnadottir soundscape, anyone?) this could be the spark that ignites a revolution in how superhero stories are told.