Steve Spillman

Notes On "Fuck You." →

So the new Cee-Lo song has already inspired a backlash, which just proves that it’s a phenomenon*. But all the hoo-ha about whether it should be the song of the summer kind of misses the point: people are going bananas over what is basically just a pretty good song.

“Fuck You” is a catchy song that arrives without fanfare, performed by an artist who doesn’t exist in the gossip-media space**, with a video that’s strictly the kind-of-racy lyrics. We’re able simply to discover the song, and the song is pretty good. But we’re used to hearing songs that are either:

very good or very bad but by people whose personae eclipse the music (Kanye, Katy Perry, etc.) or

pretty good but niche-y and by people who Pitchfork et al are trying to tell us are geniuses (Animal Collective, !!!, etc.) or

execrable but by reality stars (The Real Housewives, Heidi Whatever, etc.).

So pretty good plus kind of racy plus prejudgment-free equals PHENOMENON.

But really, “Fuck You” just satisfies the minimum requirements for pop music. That people are this excited about it tells us less about it and more about what’s missing from pop music at the moment***.

It’s like “Modern Family.” People go fucking nuts about “Modern Family.” And I enjoy “Modern Family!” But I agree with Karen Kilgariff, who played a song at Akbar a few weeks ago that contained these lyrics:

If one more person says to me

“You should watch ‘Modern Family,’”

I’m gonna go

and buy me that gun

that I’ve had my eye on.”

Let’s take a deep breath. “Modern Family” gives us relatable characters in believable relationships displaying human emotion in truthful situations. “Modern Family” simply satisfies the minimum requirements for comedy. It is indeed very good. But it should be the baseline. Really, with the sheer amount of funny, talented people in this business****, it should be the worst show on TV. We can and should be operating at this level all the time.

We are allowed to.

*It also proves that people are trying to set backlash speed records.

**Nobody’s on “Team Cee-Lo,” for example.

***Tom Scharpling put it perfectly on “The Best Show” last night: “Why can’t 50 of my friends email me a clean Temptations song?”

****There are some! I know some! Go to IO West on any night and you will see a handful of really funny, talented people! UCB too! Groundlings and Second City even!

(via daveholmes)

Yes! For so many reasons!

I expected the Fuck You hype train from what I think of as the mainstream internet (LOL, “mainstream”) but to see it fawned over by every corner of the taste spectrum is worrying. It’s a good song. But so is every other song that’s on the radio, you know? In some way?

And a big Fuck You to Modern Family as well. Remember when the first episode premiered and critics were all Arrested Development 2.0! The show we’ve been waiting for! It’s weird that people who like good things came to believe that party line, somehow. The best I can say for it is it has the cadence and sincerity and general outlines of a funny thing — they just haven’t been filled in.

(Also it’s not that progressive; shut up.)

2010 is the year of “good” things, I think. Waiting on some good things.

Posted August 25, 2010 at 4:33pm
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