The birth of the wrongness (18 August 2008)

I'm still thinking about wrongness, purposeful attempts to alienate an audience through a kind of puerile repetition or offensiveness that on its face contains no politically subversive content. Pop music has been a fertile ground for breeding wrongness, as PopMatters' recent list of Detours, unlikely albums by established artists, makes plain. Wrongness may be defined as the attempt to reject aesthetically or repudiate the constraints of popularity after the compromises to achieve it have already been made. (Think Metal Machine Music or Jim Morrison's Miami performance on March 1, 1969.) Since it is so self-referential, it tends to be politically and artistically sterile. The appeal of such wrongness is limited mainly to connoisseurs of disillusionment and cynicism, and more important, to those "true fans" of the contemptuous artists. By sticking with performers no matter how much hatred they direct at their audiences, these fans prove they are not dilettantes.

But the 1990s may have been the heyday for wrongness, as college rock became indie rock, which became alternative, which became profitably embedded in the established mainstream of pop genres. Efforts to preserve indie credibility and maintain integrity in the face of commercial success were played out at the aesthetic level at the very moment when what had first been seized upon as the sign of integrity -- grunge -- became a highly marketable and easily duplicated commodity. Elaborate simulacrums of lo-fi ineptitude became a calling card in alternative rock and graphic design. Grunge could connote integrity and/or authenticity without its purveyors needing to have any. But, of course, that has been true of many up-and-coming commercial forms emerging from various subcultures. What was interesting about the 1990s was that authenticity for the first time became the main appeal of the new style, its basic substance and message, the organizing principle for all its hallmarks. Hip-hop moved in the same direction, fetishizing authenticity as an end in itself rather than serving as an ex post facto description of a style that was ultimately "about" something else.

When grunginess became a mainstream cliche, something more heinous was necessary to demonstrate how alternative you meant to be. Hence, wrongness, or being "brown" as '90s alternative rock band Ween called it. Around the time the band made the quintessentially "wrong" move of putting out a straight contemporary-country record replete with the genre's cliches and lyrics full of derogatory stereotypes -- all the while insisting they were fully in earnest -- it would play shows featuring limit-testing 20-minute versions of b-side "Vallejo" and "Poop Ship Destroyer," an epic tribute to brownness. These were the antithesis of hippie jams (though Ween ironically would later become embraced by the jam-band scene), meant not to be expansive and pleasing to drug-altered minds, but to be abrasively tedious and mind-numbing, forcing observers to question when, if ever, it will end, and cleasing the mind of all remembered pleasures in the show, perhaps so the band could start fresh afterwards, trying to re-earn the audience's trust and approval. In this was an analogue to all indie bands' predicaments, having full knowledge of their own selling out and wondering if it were possible to regain integrity somehow, through some purifying ritual of awfulness.

Anyway, with the Family Guy's success, it may be that wrongness of this sort is in the process of going the way of grunge. What will the new oppositional aesthetic be now that wrongness and purposeful annoyance is losing its ability to repel?

Wrongness and Family Guy (14 August 2008)

Recently I started watching Family Guy, the animated Fox show that for a long time I assumed was sort of an vulgarized take on The Simpsons, with the jokes made dumber to appeal to the Maxim-reading frat crowd. That assumption was wrong; though there are plenty of surface similarities between the shows, Family Guy represents an entirely different kind of humor -- mainly it's a matter of arbitrary references piled up. Kind of like Mystery Science Theater, these are random stabs, meant to seem spontaneously generated as a reaction to events and seemingly designed to gratify the audience for its ability to recognize the allusions. It's pleasant to know trivia; Family Guy works on the theory that remembering pointless pop culture tidbits is funny in and of itself. Just remembering there was such a cultural creation as Mrs. Garrett from The Facts of Life is the essence of the joke. It cuts both ways -- it's flattering to get what the show has dredged up, but at the same time that makes us the butt of joke for having remembered.

There's no attempt at coherent satire, like The Simpsons frequently presents, or clever plot architectonics, as in Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm, where disparate plot threads are implausibly tied together. Family Guy defiantly rejects any kind of thematic unity, along with the rest of the Aristotelian rules. Its form is more that of a website like Fark.com than a sitcom. It's anchored in an aesthetic that has probably never made it this close to the mainstream before in the history of mass culture: wrongness.

It's probably best to define wrongness by what strikes me as the most notorious example, the extended sequences in which Peter, the dad character, fights a giant chicken. These are elaborate parodies of the fights in blockbuster action movies, but that is only part of what is meant to make them funny -- that's just the shallow surface premise. Their complete gratuity, highlighted by the complete absence of relation to the episode's plot, is also part of the joke, but the core principle on which these scenes are based is their interminableness. They go on well beyond what the audience expects, well beyond the moment at which every possible person will have gotten the joke's surface premise, and enter a realm of annoyance and discomfort. They seemed designed to provoke the viewer's anger, to make us shout at the screen, "Enough already!"

One might protest that these are lazy ideas deployed to fill time when the show's writers' invention fails them, but these sorts of messed-up scenes are in virtually every episode. They are not accidental. They have their analogues, too, in several other aspects of the show, completing a sort of holistic spirit of wrongness. These moments, when Stewie (the diabolical baby) goes on and on about Brian (the family dog who, in a Snoopy-derived reductio ad absurdem, is the most intelligent and mature family member) and his procrastination about his novel, or when Peter deliberates over stupid Trivial Pursuit non-questions, provoke the same creeped-out feeling that is the basis for the character of Quagmire, the hypersexed neighbor who perpetually takes his advances too far with inappropriate people and derives sexual pleasure from things that are too bizarre. Herbert, the bitter old molester, prompts a similar feeling, as the moment we start to laugh at his skeevy advances, he becomes contemptuous and spews unfunny, ominous insults and threats.

And the show's lack of a plot works this way too -- ordinary markers of the "acts" of a sitcom episode are ignored, conflicts are introduced and then forgotten, unresolved. The show will end abruptly on an off beat, or introduce a digression that takes over as the main storyline. Traditional TV conventions are gestured toward and then suspended, not so much subverted as exposed, taken too literally, pushed too far to the point where they can't be allowed to function as the shorthand they serve as in other contexts but become instead strange. This makes Family Guy weirdly Brechtian. It often tries to alienate us, as though that were now understood to be a cutting-edge form of humor.

The show's writers seemed to purposely build in a moment to every episode where they make the equivalent of chanting "not funny, not funny, not funny" into something funny through sheer persistence. The scenes of wrongness refuse to let us sit back and passively tally the orchestrated moments when we are supposed to laugh (which sitcoms customarily choreograph with laugh tracks). Instead we are forced by frustration into a different sort of emotional engagement. It's a pretty audacious approach, and it's no wonder the show has been canceled several times. What puzzles me is that there are enough devotees of wrongness to keep getting the show resurrected.