Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto Read online

  That illusion started to crack in RW 3. That’s also when the show’s mentality started to leak into the social bloodstream.

  The reason this occurred in San Francisco is because two of the housemates, Puck and Pedro, never allowed themselves to slip into The Real World’s fabricated portrait of reality; they were always keenly cognizant of how they could use this program to forward their goals. Depending on your attitude, Pedro’s agenda was either altruistic (i.e., personalizing the HIV epidemic), self-aggrandizing (he was doggedly focused on achieving martyrdom status), or a little of both (which is probably closest to the mark). Meanwhile, Puck’s agenda was entirely negative, any way you slice it; he wanted to become the show’s first “breakout star” (a Real World Fonzie, if you will), and he succeeded at that goal by actively trying to wreck the entire project. In a show about living together, he tried to be impossible to live with. But in at least one way, Pedro and Puck were identical: Both of these guys immediately saw that they could design their own TV show by developing a script within their head. They fashioned themselves as caricatures.

  Ironically, they both attacked each other for doing this. By the ninth episode, Puck was breaking the fourth wall by suggesting that Pedro was trying to force his message down the throats of viewers; no one had ever implied something like this before. Without being too obvious, The Real World producers relaxed the reins and gave up on the notion that this show was somehow organic; a decision was made to let Puck and Pedro fight over the future identity of The Real World. Puck represented the idea of a show where everyone was openly fake and we all knew it was a sham; Pedro represented the aesthetic of a show where what we saw was mostly fake, but we would agree to watch it as if it was totally real. It was almost a social contract. To feel Pedro’s pain (as Bill Clinton supposedly did), you had to suspend your disbelief—a paradoxical requirement for a reality program.

  In the end, Puck’s asinine subversion turned everyone against him with too much voracity. He was jettisoned from the house in episode eleven, appearing only sporadically for the remainder of the season. Pedro remained in the residence and became MTV’s shining moment of the 1990s; he proved himself as an educational hero with a mind-blowing flair for the dramatic (the fact that he died the day after the final episode aired is almost as eerie as Charles Schulz dying the same day the final Peanuts strip ran in newspapers). Though the second half of the RW 3 season (after Puck’s departure) is considerably less entertaining than its first half, it’s probably good Puck was booted. He would have destroyed the show. In fact, whenever a member of a Real World cast has tried to subvert the premise of the program—Puck, Seattle’s Irene,15 Hawaii’s Justin16—they’ve never made it through an entire season. If they did, it would have turned something charmingly silly into a complete farce. But as long as that unspoken agreement remains between the show and the audience—they pretend to be normal people, we pretend to believe them—The Real World works as both bubblegum sociology and a sculptor of human behavior…which brings me back to what I was saying about how almost everyone I meet has suddenly turned into a Real World cast member.

  It all became clear in 1994, during RW 3: I had just graduated from college the previous spring and was residing in Fargo, a town I was logistically familiar with despite knowing virtually no one who lived there. However, Fargo is only an hour’s drive from Grand Forks, North Dakota (the college town where I attended school), so I drove back to “rock” every other weekend. I’d cut out of work early and arrive in G.F. around 4:30 P.M.; I’d spring for a case of Busch pounders (I was now making $18,500 a year and was therefore unspeakably rich) and I’d sit around with a revolving door of acquaintances in someone’s shithole apartment. We’d load up on Busch until it was time to go to the local uncool sports bar (Jonesy’s) at 8:00, which was where you went before hitting the hipster bar (Whitey’s) at around 10:20. Not unlike the summer of 1992, there was no real activity: We’d just sit around and listen to the dying days of grunge, fondly reminiscing about things that had happened in the very recent past. But sometimes I’d notice something weird, especially if strangers stumbled into our posse: Everyone was adopting a singularity to their self-awareness. When I had first arrived at college in 1990, one of the things I loved was the discovery of people who seemed impossible to categorize; I’d meet a guy watching a Vikings-Packers game in the TV room, only to later discover that he was obsessed with Fugazi, only to eventually learn that he was a gay born-again Christian. There was a certain collegiate cachet to being a walking contradiction. But somehow The Real World leaked out of those TV sets when Puck shattered the glass barrier between his life and ours. People started becoming personality templates, devoid of complication and obsessed with melodrama. I distinctly recall drinking with two girls in a Grand Forks tavern while they discussed their plan to “confront” a third roommate about her “abrasive” behavior. How did that become a normal way to talk? Who makes plans to “confront” a roommate? To me, it was obvious where this stuff came from: It came from Real World people. It was Real World culture. It’s a microcosm of the United Nations, occupied by seven underdeveloped countries trying to force the others to recognize their right to exist.

  During that very first summer of The Real World, everyone kept telling me I should try to get on RW 2. They gave the same advice to my hot dog–eating roommate. I suspect this was meant to be a compliment to both of us; when people tell you that you should be on a reality program, they’re basically saying you’re crazy enough to amuse total strangers. I was always flattered by this suggestion, and I used to fantasize about being cast on The Real World, imagining that it would make me famous. What I failed to realize is that being a former member of The Real World is the worst kind of fame. There is no financial upside; it offers no artistic credibility or mainstream adoration or easy sex. Basically, the only reward is that people will (a) point at you in public, and (b) ask you about absolutely nothing else until the day you die, when your participation in a cable television program becomes the lead item in your obituary. You will be the kind of person who suddenly gets recognized at places like Burger King, but you will still be the kind of person who eats at places like Burger King.

  Once you’ve been on TV, nothing else matters. If Flora from Miami wrote the twenty-first-century version of Anna Karenina, she’d still be known as the loud-mouthed bitch who fell through the bathroom window. Almost a dozen ex–Real World ers have pursued careers in music, all with a jump-start from MTV. None have succeeded; their combined album sales would be dwarfed by Arrested Development’s live album. Eric Neis and Puck managed to stay in the spotlight for a few extra milliseconds, but they both went bankrupt. It appears that the highest residual success one can achieve from a Real World stint is that of being asked to compete in a Real World/Road Rules challenge All these people are forever doomed to the one-dimensional qualities that made them famous nobodies. The idea that they could do anything else seems impossible.

  This is why I could never be on The Real World, no matter how much I love watching it. I could never filter every experience through my singular, self-conscious individuality. Yet part of me fears this will happen anyway; I fear that The Real World’s unipersonal approach will become so central to American life that I’ll need a singular persona just to make conversation with whatever media-saturated robot I end up marrying. Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable. I guess my only hope is to find myself an Alabama Julie, whose wonderfully one-dimensional naïveté will be impressed by the unpretentious way I vomit out the window.

  1. An obvious example: White kids using the word like phat unironically.

  2. Kevin from RW 1, Kameelah from RW 6, Coral from RW 10, etc.

  3. Norman, Beth, Pedro, Dan, Chris, et al. 4.

  4. Julie, Elka, that big-toothed Mormon, the girl with perfect lips from Louisiana, and Trishelle.

  5. Joe from Miami.

  6. Judd from San Francisco.

  7. Dominic from L.A.

&nbs
p; 8. Kind of like that dork from Hawaii who fell in love with the alcoholic lesbian and then dated her sister.

  9. Theoretically Ruthie, the drunk chick from Hawaii—although (in truth) she was actually more reasonable than everyone else in that house.

  10. Cory in San Fran, all the other girls from Hawaii, Tonya from Chicago, and every other female who spends at least two episodes of any season staring at a large body of water.

  11. Julie from the first NYC cast, the blonde from New Orleans, Kevin in the second set of New Yorkers, and Frank from Vegas.

  12. I say “seemingly” because this argument appears totally superficial—until you find out the context: It happened during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, a fact that MTV never mentioned. As a rule, The Real World does not deal with the issue of context very well, consciously skewing it much of the time. When David (the black comedian in Los Angeles was kicked out for “sexually harassing” future NBA groupie Tami in RW 2, the viewing audience is given the impression that he had been living in the house for weeks. In truth, it happened almost immediately after everyone moved in.

  13. Relatively speaking.

  14. This is partially because everyone who does use postmodern in casual conversation seems to define it differently, usually in accordance with whatever argument they’re trying to illustrate. I think the best definition is the simplest: “Any art that is conscious of the fact that it is, in fact, art.” So when I refer to something as postmodern, that’s usually what I mean. I realize some would suggest that an even better definition is “Any art that is conscious of the fact that it is, in fact, product,” but that strikes me as needlessly cynical.

  15. This was that chick with Lyme disease.

  16. This was the gay law student with the spiky hair.

  When I initially heard CBS was creating the quasi-Orwellian reality program Big Brother, I was wildly enthusiastic. It sounded like a better version of The Real World, because the premise seemed to guarantee emotional confliction: Not only were they going to force total strangers to live together, but these poor chumps wouldn’t even be allowed to leave the room. I imagined it would be like jamming Puck and Pedro and Amaya and that drunk Hawaiian girl into Anne Frank’s annex and forcing them to emote at gunpoint. This would be perfect television.

  However, Big Brother was a failed experiment, and I know why: They don’t use music. I never knew what was going on. During key moments on The Real World, we are always instructed how to feel; if two people are playing chess to Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” I know their relationship is doomed; if they’re playing along with Sheryl Crow’s “Everyday Is a Winding Road,” I know they are mending fences and exploring a new level of companionship. But on Big Brother, there is never a musical subtext; in this particular instance, we’d merely see two hollow stoics moving rooks and knights, wholly devoid of sentiment.

  Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless. I once spent an evening chatting about the complexity of modern relationships with a male acquaintance, his ex-girlfriend, and her roommate. When I went to bed that night, I thought our conversation had been wonderful. Twelve hours later, I was informed that the ex-girlfriend spent the entire evening “in a rage,” apparently because the other male in our foursome had been “brooding and surly,” creating a tension that subsequently made the ex-girlfriend’s roommate “completely uncomfortable” with the nature of our dialogue. I never noticed any of this. I never have any idea how other people feel; they always appear fine to me. But if somebody had pointedly played Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield” that night, I’m sure I could have constructed some empathy.

  4 Every Dog Must Have His Every Day, Every Drunk Must Have His Drink 0:42

  Several months before nineteen unsmiling people from the Middle East woke up early on a Tuesday in order to commit suicide by flying planes into tall New York office buildings, I sent out a mass e-mail to several acquaintances that focused on the concept of patriotism. At the time, “patriotism” seemed like a quaint, baffling concept; it was almost like asking people to express their feelings on the art of blacksmithing. But sometimes I like to ask people what they think about blacksmithing, too.

  So ANYWAY, here was the content of my e-mail: I gave everyone two potential options for a hypothetical blind date and asked them to pick who they’d prefer. The only things they knew about the first candidate was that he or she was attractive and successful. The only things they knew about the second candidate was that he or she was attractive, successful, and “extremely patriotic.” No other details were provided or could be ascertained.

  Just about everyone immediately responded by selecting the first individual. They viewed patriotism as a downside. I wasn’t too surprised; in fact, I was mostly just amused by how everyone seemed to think extremely patriotic people weren’t just undateable, but totally fucking insane. One of them wrote that the quality of “patriotism” was on par with “regularly listening to Cat Stevens” and “loves Robin Williams movies.” Comparisons were made to Ted Nugent and Patrick Henry. And one especially snide fellow sent back a mass message to the entire e-mail group, essentially claiming that any woman who loved America didn’t deserve to date him, not because he hated his country but because patriotic people weren’t smart.

  That last response outraged one of my friends, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer who had been the only individual in the entire group who claimed to prefer the extremely patriotic candidate to the alternative. He sent me one of the most sincerely aggravated epistles I’ve ever received, and I still recall a segment of his electronic diatribe that was painfully accurate: “You know how historians call people who came of age during World War II ‘the greatest generation’? No one will ever say that about us,” he wrote. “We’ll be ‘the cool generation.’ That’s all we’re good at, and that’s all you and your friends seem to aspire to.”

  What’s kind of ironic about this statement is that I think my lawyer friend was trying to make me reevaluate the state of my life, but it mostly just made me think about Billy Joel. Nobody would ever claim that Billy Joel is cool in the conventional sense, particularly if they’re the kind of person who actively worries about what coolness is supposed to mean. Billy Joel is also not cool in the kitschy, campy, “he’s so uncool he’s cool” sense, which also happens to be the most tired designation in popular culture. He has no intrinsic coolness, and he has no extrinsic coolness. If cool was a color, it would be black—and Billy Joel would be sort of burnt orange.

  Yet Billy Joel is great. And he’s not great because he’s uncool, nor is he great because he “doesn’t worry about being cool” (because I think he kind of does). No, he’s great in the same the way that your dead grandfather is great. Because unlike 99 percent of pop artists, there is absolutely no relationship between Joel’s greatness and Joel’s coolness (or lack thereof), just as there’s no relationship between the “greatness” of serving in World War II and the “coolness” of serving in World War II. What he does as an artist wouldn’t be better if he was significantly cooler, and it’s not worse because he isn’t. And that’s sort of amazing when one considers that he’s supposedly a rock star.

  For just about everybody else in the idiom of rock, being cool is pretty much the whole job description. It’s difficult to think of rock artists who are great without being cool, since that’s precisely why we need them to exist. There have been countless bands in rock history—T. Rex, Jane’s Addiction, the White Stripes, et al.—who I will always classify as “great,” even though they’re really just spine-crushingly “cool.” What they are is more important than what they do. And this is not a criticism of coolness; by and large, the musical component of rock isn’t nearly as important as the iconography and the posturing and the idea of what we’re supposed to be experiencing. If given the choice between hearing a great band and seeing a cool band, I’ll take the latter every single time; this is why the Eagles suck. But it’s the constraints of that very relationship that give Billy Jo
el his subterranean fabulousity, and it’s why he’s unassumingly superior to all his mainstream seventies peers who got far more credit (James Taylor, Carole King, Bruce Springsteen, etc.). Joel is the only rock star I’ve ever loved who I never wanted to be (not even when he was sleeping with Christie Brinkley). Every one of Joel’s important songs—including the happy ones—are ultimately about loneliness. And it’s not “clever lonely” (like Morrissey) or “interesting lonely” (like Radiohead); it’s “lonely lonely,” like the way it feels when you’re being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking: What about that godawful current events song that seemed like a rip-off of R.E.M. (1989’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”)? What’s lonely about that, you ask? Well, my response is simple—I don’t count that song. I don’t count anything that comes after his An Innocent Man album, and I barely count that one. And aesthetically, this is totally acceptable. Unless they die before the age of thirty-three, nobody’s entire career matters, and we all unconsciously understand this. If you’re trapped in a Beatles-Stones debate, it’s not like anybody tries to prove a point by comparing Help! to Steel Wheels. BlackSabbath is the most underrated band in rock history, and that designation isn’t weakened by 1994’s Cross Purposes. Even guys who make relatively important albums in the twilight of their artistic life—most notably Bob Dylan and Neil Young—are granted unlimited lines of critical credit simply for not making albums that are completely terrible. The unspoken (though much-denied) conceit of everybody who loves rock ’n’ roll is that nobody old and rickety can be relevant at all, so anything remotely close to social consequence is akin to genius; that’s why Love and Theft was classified as “classic” in 2001, even though it would have been nothing more than “solid” in 1976. So no one is denying that Billy Joel has put out crap for as many years as he put out quality. But it doesn’t matter, because he never had the responsibility of staying cool. His crappiest albums (The Bridge, River of Dreams, etc.) can just be separated out and ignored entirely. Unlike Lou Reed or David Bowie, “Billy Joel” is not a larger pop construct or an expansive pop idea. Billy Joel is just a guy. And that’s why—unlike someone like Jeff Buckley—his records wouldn’t seem any better if he was dead.