It’s an unsettling thing that success can so easily be made to look like corruption. You’ll find a good and pretty darn funny example in The TV Set, a smart ring-up of the vulgarities of network television I caught tonight at E Street Cinema down by Ford’s Theatre.
While hardly a new theme — artist meets suit, integrity meets compromise — I enjoyed how the conflict was brought to life by dramatizing the way coercion and criticism can be cloaked in the rhetoric of persuasion and euphemism.
When the imperious network executive (Sigourney Weaver) wants to dumb down the pet project of an earnest writer (David Duchovny), she doesn’t directly confront him with her demands. His will is slowly bent through a series of passive-aggressive maneuvers that erode his resistance and are undertaken with a smile sandwiched between empty compliments. Looming at every turn, of course, is the unspoken knowledge that one side of the table is holding all of the cards.
Unlike other recent workplace satires like The Office or Dilbert, where bureaucratic gamesmanship and corporate happy talk are depicted as the shield and song of the incompetent, The TV Set aims to show how it can also be the sword of the ambitious and the powerful. Plus it’s really funny.
I walked up to see Hot Chip perform last night at the 9:30 Club. If you haven’t heard these guys, they got some solid love last year and even some mainstream video play thanks to the funky breakout single “Over and Over.”
Alright show. I dug the slackerish twist they put on Kraftwerk’s style of stagecraft and when things really got rumbling the music hit with serious heft. It reminded me a bit of the industrial shows from my Chicago days put on by Ministry and KMFDM.
The biggest thing missing yet are the songs. Even the group’s best material often ignores the model of rising tension and dramatic, climatic release capitalized on by the rhythmic pop music I most enjoy. Sadly, the new songs they played didn’t show much progress there.
Here’s the latest edition in my periodic series of pop music compilations. They’ve been rolling at about a quarterly clip for more than three years now. I haven’t kept an official count, but I’d guess this is somewhere around the tenth or eleventh installment.
Poplife 04.12.07
- LCD Soundsystem - North American Scum
- Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Down With Love
- Devin The Dude f. Snoop Dogg and Andre 3000 - What A Job
- Arcade Fire - No Cars Go
- The Ark - Absolutely No Decorum
- Sophie Ellis-Bextor - New York City Lights
- Go Home Productions - Nightbeatle
- Madonna - What It Feels Like For A Girl [Stéphane Pompougnac Remix]
If you want a copy, let me know.