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      in Movies

      The Strange Afterlife of George Carlin

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      In the closing monologue from a recent episode of his HBO talk show, Bill Maher cataloged a series of social conditions that he suggested were hampering stand-up comedy and imperiling free speech: cancel culture, a perceived increase of sensitivity on college campuses, and Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars.Near the end of his remarks, Maher invoked the comedian George Carlin, a personal hero whose iconoclastic spirit, he seemed to believe, could never thrive in such a thin-skinned and overly entitled era. “Oh, George,” he said, “it’s a good thing you’re dead.”Carlin, the cantankerous, longhaired sage who used his withering insight and gleefully profane vocabulary to take aim at American hypocrisy, died in 2008. But in the years since, it can feel like he never really left us.On an almost daily basis, parts of Carlin’s routines rise to the surface of our discourse, and he is embraced by people who span the political spectrum — they may rarely agree with each other, but they are certain that Carlin would agree with them.Carlin’s rueful 1996 routine about conservatives’ opposition to abortion (“they will do anything for the unborn, but once you’re born, you’re on your own”) became a newly viral phenomenon and was shown on a recent broadcast of the MSNBC program “11th Hour.” A video clip of a Carlin bit about how Americans are ravenous for war (“so we’re good at it, and it’s a good thing we are — we’re not very good at anything else anymore!”) has been tweeted by Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota. On the right-wing website Breitbart, Carlin has been cited as an expert on bipartisanship (“the word bipartisan usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out”) and hailed as a rebel who didn’t acquiesce to authority.Carlin is a venerated figure in his chosen field who unites performers as disparate as Joe Rogan and Jim Gaffigan, but he’s also someone whose influence transcends comedy. He is a touchstone shared by the psychologist Steven Pinker, the rapper and actor Ice Cube and people on social media who equate the pandemic with George Orwell novels. Carlin’s indignant voice feels so impossible to duplicate that quotes he never said and entire essays he didn’t write are often wrongly attributed to him.George Carlin on “Saturday Night Live” in 1975. His fans include Joe Rogan and Jim Gaffigan.Herb Ball/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesThere’s a strange afterlife that Carlin enjoys, not just as a comic but also as a moral compass. Few of us care in quite the same way if our choices in life would meet the approval of Johnny Carson or Andy Kaufman.That Carlin’s work endures long after him is not only a testament to his talents; it’s a sign that his frustrations, which he expressed humorously but felt authentically, still resonate with audiences, and that the injustices he identified in American society persist to this day.“There’s something about his righteous aggravation — it’s a rare point of view, and it’s rare that it’s a natural point of view,” said Marc Maron, the comedian and podcaster. “It’s not something you can pretend to make happen. Aggravation is not always funny.”And Carlin’s routines, particularly from his splenetic, late-period specials, have hardly lost their punch. It’s still bracing to hear the bitter wordplay in his lament: “It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”When he spoke, “you always felt like you were hearing the truth, or his truth,” said the comedian Bill Burr. “He was giving you the truth of what he felt, which most of us don’t do. It’s refreshing to listen to another human being tell you exactly how they feel, even if it’s 180 degrees removed from what you agree with.”But the durability of Carlin’s material can be dangerous, too. Dislocated from the time and circumstances that inspired his work, the arguments he delivered can be made to serve purposes he didn’t intend.As those who were closest to him have learned, when he is unable to advocate for himself, he can be made to seem like he supported any opinion at all.“It is a daily battle for me,” said Kelly Carlin, the comedian’s daughter. “At first I was like, I’ll be the interpreter and tell them what I think he meant. And then it was like, this is not my job. It’s like trying to push back a tidal wave sometimes.”The continuing relevance of Carlin’s material is partly a result of how he learned to compose and refine it over a career that spanned nearly 50 years.As he explained in a 1997 interview on “The Chris Rock Show,” he essentially saw himself as a playful provocateur. “I like to bother people,” he said, adding that he tried to figure out “where the line is drawn, and then deliberately cross it and drag the audience with you. And have them happy that you did it.”Carlin with his daughter, Kelly, on the left and his first wife, Brenda. He’s the subject of a new documentary.George Carlin’s Estate, via HBOCarlin is well-known for pivoting from a strait-laced, suit-and-tie approach to standup in the late 1960s and early ’70s and for immersing himself in the counterculture that shaped his personal politics.But a new two-part HBO documentary, “George Carlin’s American Dream,” which will be shown May 20 and 21, illustrates how his professional trajectory consisted of numerous ups and downs — multiple efforts to rediscover his voice and refine his material when his personal radar detected he was out of step with the times.“He would do that every decade or so,” said Judd Apatow, the comedian and filmmaker who directed the documentary with Michael Bonfiglio. “At the moment when it seemed like he was out of gas, he would suddenly recharge and reinvent himself.”As he evolved from a fast-talking parodist of TV and radio to a rhetorical bomb-tosser, Carlin had a set of standards that remained consistent. “He had deep core values that were good,” Bonfiglio said: “Take care of other people. Take care of the planet. There was a sense of fairness and rooting for the underdog. Those would shine through, even in his darkest stuff.”But over the decades, as Carlin watched America’s retreat from Vietnam and its entrance into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as corporate power grew more intractable and environmental catastrophe felt unavoidable, his feelings of bitter disappointment flooded into his routines.At times, Maron said, “his anger became more pronounced than his ability to speak funny within it.” But in every hourlong set he performed, Maron added, “there would be one bit that was worth the entire special.”Carlin’s personal politics were readily identifiable. Kelly Carlin said her father was “99 percent progressive” and that he raised her in a manner that today might be contemptuously dismissed as woke.“He taught me from Day 1 that the Black and brown people have always been oppressed, horribly and systematically, by the owners of wealth,” she said. “He had a pure disdain and loathing for white men in America.”That leftist bent was unmistakable in Carlin’s standup, too: He railed against police violence, championed prison reform and environmentalism and condemned organized religion.But he was also critical of Democrats and “guilty white liberals,” while he endorsed other ideas that conservatives supported. He despised euphemism and the policing of language, reviled what he called “the continued puss-ification of the American male” and rebuked his countrymen who would “trade away a little of their freedom for the feeling — the illusion — of security.”Using language that would later be echoed by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, Carlin observed in a 2005 routine that the interwoven systems of American economy and government were not designed to ensure the prosperity of the average citizen: “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it,” he said.“The table is tilted, folks,” Carlin added. “The game is rigged.”Carlin didn’t hesitate to criticize presidents by name — Bill Clinton and George W. Bush among them — but, more often, he spoke in broader terms and addressed institutional failings.“There were other court jesters before Carlin and alongside Carlin, but Carlin was more powerful and dangerous to the king,” said Journey Gunderson, the executive director of the National Comedy Center, which is home to more than 25,000 items from Carlin’s archives.What gave him his potency, Gunderson said, was that he turned his standup “into a call to action.” Carlin, she said, “taught everyone where to find the power that they have and encouraged them to use it.”Carlin at a benefit for the Bitter End in New York in 1992. He was “99 percent progressive,” said his daughter, but also took some positions that echoed those of conservatives today.Ed Bailey/Associated PressThat approach gave Carlin’s comedy a longevity that not even the work of his esteemed predecessor Lenny Bruce has attained.“It requires a scholarship to appreciate Lenny Bruce,” Maron said. “You’ve got to sort through a number of very dated impressions and news stories. Whereas George was always making things totally accessible.”(Even in her father’s later years, Kelly Carlin said, if he had an idea for a topical joke, rather than put it in his act, he would share them with people like the broadcaster Keith Olbermann, who was then the host of “Countdown” on MSNBC. Olbermann confirmed this, saying that Carlin sent him “a couple of one-liners about Bush” and a sports joke he keeps framed on his wall.)For the most part, Carlin left behind no protégés or appointed successors. When he died, no one else could say they spoke on his behalf. And while the generations of stand-ups that have followed may have a sincere reverence for him, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are fluent in the jokes he told.“A lot of us know that you’re supposed to say Carlin is an influence, but I don’t think a lot of us can back that up,” the comedian Nikki Glaser said.A lack of familiarity with Carlin’s words, his history and his values can lead to misapprehension when his arguments are stretched to fit present-day conditions he didn’t live to see.Several times during the pandemic, Carlin has drawn attention for a routine from his 1999 special, “You Are All Diseased,” in which he mischievously suggests that a childhood spent swimming in the polluted Hudson River was the reason he didn’t catch polio.(“In my neighborhood, no one ever got polio,” he fulminates. “No one, ever. You know why? ’Cause we swam in raw sewage. It strengthened our immune systems. The polio never had a prayer.”)As Kelly Carlin explained, some viewers concluded — wrongly — that her father would have opposed coronavirus vaccines.“Everyone’s like, see? George Carlin would have been anti-vaccination,” she said. “And I’m like, no. My dad was pro-science, pro-rational thinking, pro-evidence-based medicine. The man was a heart patient for 30 years. When he was a kid and the polio vaccine became available, he got the polio vaccine.”Though she generally tries to avoid intervening in these kinds of disputes, Kelly Carlin has used her social media to correct this reading. “I felt it was important that people not use him to undermine what we needed to do to get through this virus,” she said.On other modern-day topics in which George Carlin surely would have had an incendiary but clarifying take on — the Trump and Biden presidencies, social media, Elon Musk or the Marvel Cinematic Universe — no matter how much we might wish to know his thoughts, he remains frustratingly out of reach. Kelly Carlin said she could understand why audiences might long for her father’s particular brand of unvarnished honesty at this moment.“I think we are in a time of exponential uncertainty as a species,” she said. “He’s a man who looked forward and said, ‘This is not going to end well.’ He saw the chaos coming.”And Carlin remains almost universally admired as a free-speech pioneer: He was arrested in 1972 for a performance of “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” and that same routine would later play a key role when the federal government asserted its power to regulate the broadcast of indecent content.Because of that status, Carlin is frequently summoned in contemporary debates over how comedians choose to use their platforms. When controversy engulfed Dave Chappelle’s 2021 special “The Closer,” which was criticized as transphobic and prompted walkouts at Netflix, Carlin’s name was invoked, even though no one could be certain what position he might have taken: Would he have criticized Chappelle as intolerant or defended his right to express himself?Carlin was arrested in Milwaukee in 1972 on obscenity and disorderly conduct charges. The case was later dismissed and the comedian was widely admired for his free-speech stance.Bettmann Archive/Getty ImagesIn efforts to divine his opinion, some Carlin fans pointed to a 1990 interview he gave to Larry King, when he expressed his misgivings about the crude standup of Andrew Dice Clay: “His targets are underdogs, and comedy has traditionally picked on power — people who abuse their power,” Carlin said at the time.Kelly Carlin said her father “always took the stand that more speech is better than less speech” and would have supported Chappelle’s right to perform the special. But, she added, “if you’re a comedian, you’ve got to be funny.”“If you’re going to take the audience over the line, you’ve got to construct things in a way that they’re willingly crossing it with you,” she said. “Did Dave Chappelle do that for everybody? Clearly not.”Even so, Kelly Carlin said, “is it dangerous when a culture wants to shut people down for speech? I think my dad would say that is dangerous.”Like his friend and forerunner Lenny Bruce, who was arrested and convicted on obscenity charges (and who later received a posthumous pardon), George Carlin was battling the state’s power to discourage and punish his expression.Maron contended that free-speech conflicts have shifted since Carlin’s era in such a way that it doesn’t make sense to drag Carlin back into them.“That fight was already won,” Maron said. “What’s going on now is not that fight.” Today, he said, we live “in a world where anybody can really say what they want, whether anyone believes that or not.”While Carlin would still probably be dissatisfied with the state of free speech today, Maron said, his barbs would have been aimed at “the corporate occupation” of discourse, with digital monoliths like Google, Facebook and Twitter “dictating how culture thrives and is consumed.”And if a comedian wants to claim freedom of speech while using words that others deem hateful, Maron said, “you can say them all you want — you’re probably just going to be hanging around people who enjoy that kind of stuff. If that’s the company you want to keep, do what you gotta do.”Without Carlin’s humanistic spirit to guide it, contemporary standup can sometimes feel like a ruthless place. “There’s this fearlessness in comedy now that is so fake,” Glaser said. “There’s so much sleight of hand and so many illusions happening onstage to trick an audience that you’re being brave.”“There was never a cruelty to Carlin,” she said. “He always seemed filled with empathy.”Gunderson, of the National Comedy Center, described Carlin as “a leader who didn’t want to hold all the power.” The ultimate lesson he had for us, she said, is that we have “the unlimited right to challenge everything, to never stop thinking critically about any source of power or any institution” — even Carlin himself.Kelly Carlin cautioned that we should not be too beholden to any of the messages in her father’s stand-up: Of course George Carlin believed in much of what he said onstage, but what mattered most to him was that audiences learned to think for themselves. He never wanted to be anyone’s role model and was never a comfortable joiner of causes.“The moment anyone gets in a group, gets together for meetings and puts on armbands, he instantly didn’t want that,” she said.If George Carlin were around now to respond to the questions we have for him, “he would have schooled us on both sides and come up with a third-way truth that would have blown our minds,” she said. “But not solved anything. He was never looking to solve the culture wars or solve America’s problems. He was always looking to show off what he’d been thinking about at home.” More

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      in Theater

      As Mamet Returns to Broadway, His Claims on Pedophilia Get Spotlight

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      The playwright fueled outrage with his claim on Fox News that teachers were “inclined” to pedophilia as he promoted a new book that decries “the Left’s anti-Trump psychosis.”David Mamet’s latest character describes an airplane pilot who gets lost because his map is incomplete. “The pilot’s answer to the question ‘where am I?’ lies not on the map, but out the windscreen,” says the character, speaking in the everyday language set to staccato rhythm that has come to be known as Mametspeak. “That’s where he is.”This new monologue is not delivered in one of Mamet’s dozens of plays or films, but in a friend-of-the-court brief that Mamet filed last month. He wrote it in support of a Texas law intended to prevent social media companies from censoring conservative voices. (The law has been challenged on the grounds that it could prevent private platforms from reasonably moderating content.) The legal setting helps explain the absence of one typical Mamet feature: profanity.With a revival of “American Buffalo,” his classic 1975 drama about small-time hustlers in a Chicago junk shop, opening Thursday night on Broadway in a production starring Laurence Fishburne, Mamet has been engaged in a blizzard of activities that are hardly standard fare for preshow publicity. But they are very much in keeping with his long history of pushing hot buttons — and with his late-career embrace of conservatism and support for former President Donald J. Trump.Mamet claimed on Fox News that “teachers are inclined, particularly men, because men are predators, to pedophilia.”In addition to the amicus brief, Mamet released an essay collection this month, “Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch,” in which he complains about the “plandemic” coronavirus lockdowns, decries “the Left’s anti-Trump psychosis” and suggests that it was Democrats and the media who threatened “armed rebellion” in the event that their preferred candidate lost the 2020 election.Then, over the weekend, Mamet fueled outrage by claiming on Fox News that “teachers are inclined, particularly men, because men are predators, to pedophilia.”He made the remark while discussing a Florida law prohibiting classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in certain younger grades, a law opponents have labeled “Don’t Say Gay.”“If there’s no community control of the schools, what we have is kids being not only indoctrinated but groomed, in a very real sense, by people who are, whether they know it or not, sexual predators,” Mamet told the host, Mark Levin.“Are they abusing the kids physically?” Mamet added. “No, I don’t think so. But they’re abusing them mentally and using sex to do so.”In response, the Tony Award-winning actor Colman Domingo wrote on Twitter, apparently referring to another Mamet play, “Speed-the-Plow,” “American Theater. Do your duty. Take out the trash. Buffalo’s, Plows and all.” And the culture writer Mark Harris wrote on Twitter, “At a time of increasing threats to gay people, David Mamet has chosen to ally himself with the purveyors of a vicious ugly slander that will endanger teachers and LGBT Americans. It’s inexcusable.”Mamet declined through a representative to comment for this article; in “Recessional,” he dismisses The New York Times as “a former newspaper” and suggests that The Times and other media insist on works that “express ‘right thinking,’ that is, statism.”Mamet, 74, came to prominence in the 1970s with a series of plays including “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” and “American Buffalo.” His 1984 play “Glengarry Glen Ross,” two acts of profane one-upmanship among desperate real-estate salesmen, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. He has worked extensively in Hollywood, receiving Oscar nominations for his screenplays for “The Verdict,” a 1982 movie starring Paul Newman, and “Wag the Dog” in 1997, which he wrote with Hilary Henkin. He wrote and directed a number of films, including “House of Games,” “The Spanish Prisoner” and “Heist.”He first announced his rightward turn in a 2008 Village Voice essay, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” (He said on a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” that he had intended the essay to focus on “political civility,” and had been surprised by the headline.) He wrote last year on the website UnHerd that he had been “elected a non-person by the Left many years ago,” and added: “It’s uncomfortable, and it’s costly and sad to see the happy fields in which I played all those decades — Broadway, book publishing, TV and film — fold up and Hail Caesar, but there it is.”The new revival of “American Buffalo” — one of his most admired works, and one often read as a critique of capitalism, in a production starring Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss — will test his ability to play on one of his main fields, Broadway. And it will offer an indication of whether, at a moment of intense political polarization, audiences are still receptive to works by artists they may disagree with.In his new book, Mamet is pessimistic on the market for challenging plays, warning that theater on Broadway has largely been replaced by pageantry, complaining of the “fatuity of issue plays” and bemoaning the demise of the “knowledgeable Broadway audience” in an era when its theatergoers are mostly tourists.The new revival of Mamet’s “American Buffalo” stars, from left, Darren Criss, Laurence Fishburne and Sam Rockwell.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“They come to Broadway exactly as they come to Disneyland,” he writes in “Recessional,” published by the HarperCollins imprint Broadside. “As in that happiest place, they do not come to risk their hard-earned cash on a problematic event. (They might not like the play nor appreciate being ‘challenged’; they might just want a break after a day of shopping.)”His recent publicity (he “seems to be doing his best — or worst — to make headlines,” Deadline noted) may also affect the box office.When Mamet appeared on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” recently, Maher challenged Mamet on some of the views of the 2020 election he expressed in his book. “You think the attempted coup was from the Left; I think it was from the Right,” Maher said.“I misspoke,” Mamet said, urging people to skip that page of the book.But Mamet, for all the concerns he expresses in his book of being blacklisted, is unlikely to be canceled from the canon. “If I was teaching a class on contemporary American drama, I would teach Mamet,” said Harry J. Elam Jr., a longtime scholar of 20th-century American drama at Stanford University who is now president of Occidental College, speaking before Mamet’s most recent comments. “He has that type of importance.”Gregory Mosher, who has directed nearly two dozen Mamet plays — including the 1984 premiere of “Glengarry Glen Ross” — said that Mamet’s influence extended beyond his own plays and films to other spheres. He sees Mamet’s mark on works of prestige television such as “The Wire.”“Mamet made it OK to write about worlds that we now take for granted on HBO and elsewhere,” said Mosher, the chairman of theater at Hunter College, “and of course to say the word you can’t print.”The last two weeks of preview performances of “American Buffalo” played to houses that were 93 percent and 88 percent full, according to the Broadway League. (Through a representative, the production’s director, Neil Pepe, and producer, Jeffrey Richards, declined to comment.)Mamet embraced the Trump presidency; he told The Guardian earlier this year that Trump had done a “great job” as president and suggested that his defeat in 2020 was “questionable.” In “Recessional,” he writes that Trump “speaks American, and those of us who also love the language are awed and delighted to hear it from an elected official.”“One of the reasons my friendship with David has survived all these years,” said the comedian Jonathan Katz, “is we never discuss politics.”Much earlier, Mamet appeared to question the liberal outlook that he has said surrounded him in the theater world with his 1992 play “Oleanna.” Depicting a disputed sexual harassment allegation a female student makes against a male professor, it was read as interrogating political correctness. For Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, “Oleanna” — which Eustis saw in its original run at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village featuring Mamet’s longtime collaborator William H. Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon, Mamet’s wife — was evidence of a shift.Mamet’s early plays, Eustis said, are “tremendously morally ambiguous and complex.” With “Oleanna,” argued Eustis, who has never worked with Mamet, “he actually started to put his finger on the scale.”But Leslie Kane, an English professor emerita at Westfield State University who wrote several scholarly books about Mamet and said she grew close to him and his family, perceived a through line between Mamet’s long-held obsessions as an artist and some of his later political stances. “His concern is language and the ability to use language,” she said, adding, “I think that’s what he believes: In our current environment, restrictions on speech require that people in society must watch what they say.”But Mamet, who has made free speech a central issue lately, is not a fan of post-show discussions of his own works featuring members of the productions. In 2017 he made news with a stipulation that none of the discussions, known as talkbacks, could be held within two hours of performances of his plays, calling for a fine of $25,000 for each offense. In his new book he says talkbacks are “transforming an evening at the theater into an English class.”One person who thinks that the politics of Mamet’s plays — to say nothing of his punditry — are largely irrelevant to his plays’ success is Mamet himself.“For fifty years I’ve paid my rent by getting people into the theater,” he writes in “Recessional.” “There are several strategies for doing so, but from the first I’ve relied on the most effective I know: be good.”The technique was not infallible, he notes.“And the audience and I sometimes differed about its definition,” he writes. “I did, however, know one certain way to keep them away: tell ’em the play was good for them.” More

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      in Music

      Spotify's Joe Rogan Deal Is Said to Be Worth Over $200 Million

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      It was the deal that helped make Spotify a podcasting giant, but has now put the company at the center of a fiery debate about misinformation and free speech.Spotify was already the king of music streaming. But to help propel the company into its next phase as an all-purpose audio juggernaut, and further challenge Apple and Google, it wanted a superstar podcaster, much as Howard Stern helped put satellite radio on the map in 2006. Spotify executives came to view Joe Rogan — a comedian and sports commentator whose no-holds-barred podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” was already a monster hit on YouTube — as that transformative star.In May 2020, after an intense courtship, Spotify announced a licensing agreement to host Mr. Rogan’s show exclusively. Although reported then to be worth more than $100 million, the true value of the deal that was negotiated at the time, which covered three and a half years, was at least $200 million, with the possibility of more, according to two people familiar with the details of the transaction who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss it.But in recent weeks the show that helped Spotify catapult into a market leader for podcasts has also placed it at the center of the sort of cultural storm that has long engulfed Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, over questions about the responsibility tech behemoths have for the content on their platforms.It began when several prominent artists, led by Neil Young, took their music off the service to protest what they described as Covid vaccine misinformation on Mr. Rogan’s show. Then clips from old “Joe Rogan Experience” episodes caught fire on social media, showing him using a racial slur repeatedly and chuckling at jokes about sexual exploitation, prompting Mr. Rogan to apologize for his past use of the slur. A #DeleteSpotify social media campaign began calling for a boycott. And some Spotify podcasters publicly criticized Mr. Rogan and the platform.Spotify declined to make company executives available for interviews. Dustee Jenkins, a spokeswoman for the company, declined to comment on the terms of Mr. Rogan’s deal. Representatives of Mr. Rogan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.Even in the frothy podcast market, the deal for “The Joe Rogan Experience” was extraordinary. Spotify had purchased entire content companies, Gimlet Media and The Ringer, for slightly less than $200 million each, according to company filings.With tens of millions of listeners for its buzziest episodes, “The Joe Rogan Experience” is Spotify’s biggest podcast not only in the United States but in 92 other markets, with a following that hangs on every word of his hourslong shows. In its financial reports, Spotify cites podcasts — and Mr. Rogan’s show in particular — as a factor in the long-sought growth of its advertising business. At a recent company meeting, Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive, told employees that exclusive content like Mr. Rogan’s show is vital ammunition in Spotify’s competition against tech Goliaths like Apple and Google.“We’re not in the business of dictating the discourse that these creators want to have on their shows,” Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive, told employees. But dozens of episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” were recently taken down.Lucas Jackson/ReutersAs Mr. Rogan faced growing public criticism, Spotify responded by reaffirming its commitment to free speech, even as dozens of Mr. Rogan’s past episodes have been removed. It also made its content guidelines public for the first time, said that it would add “content advisory” notices to episodes discussing the coronavirus and promised to contribute $100 million for work by creators “from historically marginalized groups.”The moves came as Spotify faced growing dissension among high-profile creators. This month Ava DuVernay, the film director who announced a podcast deal with Spotify a year ago but has yet to produce any content under it, severed her ties with Spotify, according to a statement from her production company, Array. And Jemele Hill, the former ESPN commentator, said that Spotify’s defense of Mr. Rogan had created problems with her audience, and raised questions about the sincerity of the company’s dedication to minority talent.“What I would like to see,” Ms. Hill said in an interview, “is for them to hand $100 million to somebody who is Black.”A Pivot to PodcastingFor Spotify, the move into podcasting is the culmination of years of strategy to find a business that is more profitable than hosting music, for which it must pay about two-thirds of every dollar to rights holders.The company dipped its toe into video around 2015, but little came of it. By 2018, the year Spotify listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, it was forming plans to pursue Mr. Rogan, hoping to supercharge its market position in non-music audio and to chip away at the dominance of Apple and Google’s YouTube.To make Spotify a player in podcasting, Mr. Ek and his deputies, including Dawn Ostroff, a former television and magazine publishing executive, and Courtney Holt, formerly of Maker Studios, an online video network, set out on a multipart strategy. Spotify would buy audio studios, like Gimlet, and acquire exclusive rights to existing shows. With Spotify Originals, the company would also create buzzy new programs in partnership with creators like Ms. DuVernay’s Array and Higher Ground, the production company of former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama.Developing a portfolio of podcasts unique to Spotify, as Netflix had built a walled garden for video, was a key aim, according to several employees involved in the strategy discussions.“All music streaming services are offering the same plain vanilla ice cream at the same price,” said Will Page, Spotify’s former top economist, who was not involved in the Rogan deal but is a frequent commentator on the digital media business. “The overarching issue is how do you make your customer proposition distinct.”Growth StrategySpotify has greatly increased its podcast offerings in the last four years — a period of rapid growth in both users and revenue for the company. More

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      in Movies

      ‘’Twas the Fight Before Christmas’ Review: A Not-So-Silent Night

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      This documentary recounts how an Idaho man filed a discrimination lawsuit after his neighbors refused to let him host an annual Christmas light extravaganza.If your holiday dinner table sees some heated arguments this year, just be glad if it doesn’t result in an actual melee, with armed standoffs in front of a blow-up Santa Claus.That’s how bad things get in “’Twas the Fight Before Christmas,” an Apple Original documentary that recounts how Jeremy Morris, an attorney from Idaho, sued his neighborhood homeowners association, claiming religious discrimination after it refused to let him host his annual Christmas light extravaganza.Directed by Becky Read, the film feels at first like a mundane depiction of a neighborhood squabble, giving play-by-play accounts of the stern letters sent back and forth between Morris and the West Hayden Estates Homeowners’ Association. But once Morris decks his house with over 200,000 Christmas lights and orders a camel — yes, a live camel — to his front yard despite warnings not to do so, the stakes quickly escalate.Morris, who eats up the screen in his on-camera interviews, has the tenacity of both a well-trained lawyer and a zealot, positioning himself as a “miracle worker” unable to fully practice his Christian faith even as he makes life difficult for those around him. Read also interviews many of the West Hayden Estates residents, who participate in soft re-enactments of the events that help bring the absurdity of the conflict to light.By the time the legal battle reaches its conclusion (for now), the film is more than ready to hint at the greater political implications of Morris’s actions, with the attorney voicing his desire to run for senator. One can’t help but wonder if Morris has already calculated the number of Christmas lights needed to cover the White House.’Twas the Fight Before ChristmasNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      in Music

      Rapper’s Arrest Awakens Rage in Spanish Youth Chafing in Pandemic

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeWatch: ‘WandaVision’Travel: More SustainablyFreeze: Homemade TreatsCheck Out: Podcasters’ Favorite PodcastsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRapper’s Arrest Awakens Rage in Spanish Youth Chafing in PandemicNearly two weeks of sometimes violent demonstrations have turned into a collective outcry from young adults who see bleak futures and precious time lost to lockdowns.Protesters marching in support of Pablo Hasél, a controversial Spanish rapper, in Barcelona this week. Credit…Felipe Dana/Associated PressFeb. 27, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETLeer en españolBARCELONA — It had all the markings of a free speech showdown: Pablo Hasél, a controversial Spanish rapper, had barricaded himself on a university campus to avoid a nine-month jail sentence on charges that he had glorified terrorism and denigrated the monarchy. While students surrounded him, police in riot gear moved in; Mr. Hasél raised his fist in defiance as he was taken away.But Oriol Pi, a 21-year-old in Barcelona, saw something more as he watched the events unfold last week on Twitter. He thought of the job he had as an events manager before the pandemic, and how he was laid off after the lockdowns. He thought of the curfew and the mask mandates that he felt were unnecessary for young people. He thought of how his parents’ generation had faced nothing like it.And he thought it was time for Spain’s youth to take to the streets.“My mother thinks this is about Pablo Hasél, but it’s not just that,” said Mr. Pi, who joined the protests that broke out in Barcelona last week. “Everything just exploded. It’s a whole collection of so many things which you have to understand.”“Everything just exploded. It’s a whole collection of so many things which you have to understand,” said Oriol Pi, 21, of the youth demonstrations taking place across Spain. Credit…Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesFor nine nights, this seaside city’s streets, long quiet from pandemic curfews, have erupted in sometimes violent demonstrations that have spread to Madrid and other Spanish hubs. What began as a protest over Mr. Hasél’s prosecution has become a collective outcry by a generation that sees not just a lost future for itself, but also a present that has been robbed, years and experiences it will never get back, even when the pandemic is gone.The frustration of young people stemming from the pandemic is not limited to Spain alone. Across Europe, university life has been deeply curtailed or turned on its head by the limitations of virtual classes.Social isolation is as endemic as the contagion itself. Anxiety and depression have reached alarming rates among young people nearly everywhere, mental health experts and studies have found. The police and mostly young protesters have also clashed in other parts of Europe, including last month in Amsterdam.“It’s not the same now for a person who is 60 — or a 50-year-old with life experience and everything completely organized — as it is for a person who is 18 now and has the feeling that every hour they lose to this pandemic, it’s like losing their entire life,” said Enric Juliana, an opinion columnist with La Vanguardia, Barcelona’s leading newspaper.Barcelona was once a city of music festivals on the beach and all-night bars, leaving few better places in Europe to be young. But the crisis, which devastated tourism and shrank the national economy by 11 percent last year, was a catastrophe for Spain’s young adults.Police officers during clashes following a protest condemning the arrest of Mr. Hasél in Barcelona on Tuesday.Credit…Emilio Morenatti/Associated PressIt is an instance of déjà vu for those who also lived through the financial crisis of 2008, which took one of its heaviest tolls in Spain. Like then, young people have had to move back into the homes of their parents, with entry-level jobs being among the first to vanish.But unlike past economic downturns, the pandemic cut much deeper. It hit at a time when unemployment for people under age 25 was already high in Spain at 30 percent. Now 40 percent of Spain’s youth are unemployed, the highest rate in Europe, according to European Union statistics.For someone like Mr. Pi, the arrest of the rapper Mr. Hasél, and his rage-against-the-machine defiance, has become a symbol of the frustration of Spain’s young people.“I loved that the man left with his fist in the air,” said Mr. Pi, who said he hadn’t heard of the rapper before Spain brought charges against him. “It’s about fighting for your freedom, and he did it to the very last minute.”The case of Mr. Hasél, whose real name is Pablo Rivadulla Duró, is also igniting a debate about free speech and Spain’s efforts to limit it.The authorities charged Mr. Hasél under a law that allows for prison sentences for certain kinds of incendiary statements. Mr. Hasél, known as a provocateur as much as a rapper, had accused the Spanish police of brutality, compared judges to Nazis and even celebrated ETA, a Basque separatist group that folded two years ago after decades of bloody terrorist campaigns that left around 850 people dead.In 2018, a Spanish court sentenced him to two years in prison, though that was later reduced to nine months. The prosecution focused on his Twitter posts and a song he had written about former King Juan Carlos, whom Mr. Hasél had called a “Mafioso,” among other insults. (The former king abdicated in 2014, and decamped Spain entirely last summer for the United Arab Emirates amid a corruption scandal.)“What he’s said at trial is that they put him in prison for saying the truth, because what he says about the king, aside from all the insults, is exactly what happened,” said Fèlix Colomer, a 27-year-old documentary filmmaker who got to know Mr. Hasél while exploring a project about his trial.Fèlix Colomer and his partner, Valeria, at their home in Barcelona on Friday. On some nights, Mr. Colomer has led the Barcelona protests.Credit…Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesMr. Colomer, who on certain nights has led the Barcelona protesters, noted that others have been prosecuted in Spain for social media comments, a troubling sign for Spain’s democracy, in his view. A Spanish rapper known as Valtònyc fled to Belgium in 2018 after getting a prison sentence for his lyrics that a court found glorified terrorism and insulted the monarchy — charges similar to those Mr. Hasél faces.Yet some feel Mr. Hasél crossed a line in his lyrics. José Ignacio Torreblanca, a political science professor at the National Distance Education University in Madrid, said while the law’s use troubled him, Mr. Hasél was not the right figure to build a youth movement around.“He’s no Joan Baez, he’s actively justifying and promoting violence. This is clear in his songs. He says things like, ‘I wish a bomb explodes under your car,’” said Mr. Torreblanca, referring to a song by Mr. Hasél that called for the assassination of a Basque government official and another that said a mayor in Catalonia “deserved a bullet.”Amid public pressure that was growing even before the protests, the Justice Ministry said on Monday that it planned to change the country’s criminal code to reduce sentences related to the kinds of speech violations for which Mr. Hasél was sentenced.But for Nahuel Pérez, a 23-year-old who works in Barcelona taking care of the mentally disabled, freedom for Mr. Hasél is only the start of his concerns.Since arriving in Barcelona five years ago from his hometown on the resort island of Ibiza, Mr. Pérez said, he hasn’t found a job with a salary high enough to cover the cost of living. To save money on rent, he recently moved into an apartment with four other roommates. The close quarters meant social distancing was impossible.Nahuel Pérez, left, with his roommates in their apartment in Barcelona on Friday. “The youth of this country are in a pretty deplorable state,” Mr. Pérez said.Credit…Samuel Aranda for The New York Times“The youth of this country are in a pretty deplorable state,” he said.After Mr. Hasél was arrested at the university, Mr. Pi, who had seen the news on Twitter, began to see people announcing protests on the messaging app Telegram. He told his mother he wanted to go to the demonstrations, but she didn’t seem to quite understand why.“I’m not going to go look for you at the police station,” is what she told him, Mr. Pi said.He thought about what it must have been like for his mother at his age.There was no pandemic. Spain was booming. She was a teacher and married in her 20s to another professional, Mr. Pi’s father. The two found a house and raised a family.Mr. Pi, by contrast, is an adult still living with his mother.“Our parents got all the good fruit and here’s what we’re facing: There’s no fruit in the tree anymore, because they took the best of it,” said Mr. Pi. “Everything that was the good life, the best of Spain — there’s none of that left for us.”When he’s not at the protests, Mr. Pi spends his days working as a hall monitor in a nearby school that operates a mix of online and socially distanced in-person classes.It’s not the career he wanted — not a career at all, he says — but it pays the bills, and lets him talk to high school students to get their outlook on the situation in Spain.He doesn’t mince words about what lies ahead for them.“These are the people who will be me in ten years,” he said. “I think they’re hearing something that no one has ever told them. I would have listened if someone had come to me when I was 12 and said: ‘Listen, you’re going to have to struggle for your future.’”Roser Toll Pifarré contributed reporting from Barcelona, and Raphael Minder from Madrid.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Obscure Musicology Journal Sparks Battles Over Race and Free Speech

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyObscure Musicology Journal Sparks Battles Over Race and Free SpeechA scholar’s address about racism and music theory was met with a vituperative, personal response by a small journal. It faced calls to cease publishing.A debate about racism, musicology, free speech and the music theorist Heinrich Schenker — pictured here with his wife, Jeanette — has roiled academia.Credit…N. Johnson for The New York TimesFeb. 14, 2021Updated 4:27 p.m. ETA periodical devoted to the study of a long-dead European music theorist is an unlikely suspect to spark an explosive battle over race and free speech.But the tiny Journal of Schenkerian Studies, with a paid circulation of about 30 copies an issue per year, has ignited a fiery reckoning over race and the limits of academic free speech, along with whiffs of a generational struggle. The battle threatens to consume the career of Timothy Jackson, a 62-year-old music theory professor at the University of North Texas, and led to calls to dissolve the journal.It also prompted Professor Jackson to file an unusual lawsuit charging the university with violating his First Amendment rights — while accusing his critics of defamation.This tale began in the autumn of 2019 when Philip Ewell, a Black music theory professor at Hunter College, addressed the Society for Music Theory in Columbus, Ohio. He described music theory as dominated by white males and beset by racism. He held up the theorist Heinrich Schenker, who died in Austria in 1935, as an exemplar of that flawed world, a “virulent racist” who wrote of “primitive” and “inferior” races — views, he argued, that suffused his theories of music.“I’ve only scratched the surface in showing out how Schenker’s racism permeates his music theories,” Professor Ewell said, accusing generations of Schenker scholars of trying to “whitewash” the theorist in an act of “colorblind racism.”The society’s members — its professoriate is 94 percent white — responded with a standing ovation. Many younger faculty members and graduate students embraced his call to dismantle “white mythologies” and study non-European music forms. The tone was of repentance.“We humbly acknowledge that we have much work to do to dismantle the whiteness and systemic racism that deeply shape our discipline,” the society’s executive board later stated.At the University of North Texas, however, Professor Jackson, a white musicologist, watched a video of that speech and felt a swell of anger. His fellow scholars stood accused, some by name, of constructing a white “witness protection program” and shrugging off Schenker’s racism. That struck him as unfair and inaccurate, as some had explored Schenker’s oft-hateful views on race and ethnicity.A tenured music theory professor, Professor Jackson was the grandson of Jewish émigrés and had lost many relatives in the Holocaust. He had a singular passion: He searched out lost works by Jewish composers hounded and killed by the Nazis.And he devoted himself to the study of Schenker, a towering Jewish intellect credited with stripping music to its essence in search of an internal language. The Journal of Schenkerian Studies, published under the aegis of the University of North Texas, was read by a small but intense coterie of scholars.He and other North Texas professors decided to explore Professor Ewell’s claims about connections between Schenker’s racial views and music theories.They called for essays and published every submission. Five essays stoutly defended Professor Ewell; most of the remaining 10 essays took strong issue. One was anonymous. Another was plainly querulous. (“Ewell of course would reply that I am white and by extension a purveyor of white music theory, while he is Black,” wrote David Beach, a retired dean of music at the University of Toronto. “I can’t argue with that.”).Professor Jackson’s essay was barbed. Schenker, he wrote, was no privileged white man. Rather he was a Jew in prewar Germany, the definition of the persecuted other. The Nazis destroyed much of his work and his wife perished in a concentration camp.Professor Jackson then took an incendiary turn. He wrote that Professor Ewell had scapegoated Schenker within “the much larger context of Black-on-Jew attacks in the United States” and that his “denunciation of Schenker and Schenkerians may be seen as part and parcel of the much broader current of Black anti-Semitism.” He wrote that such phenomena “currently manifest themselves in myriad ways, including the pattern of violence against Jews, the obnoxious lyrics of some hip-hop songs, etc.”Timothy Jackson, a professor at the University of North Texas, was removed from the Journal of Schenkerian Studies after publishing an issue that was denounced as racist.Credit…N. Johnson for The New York TimesNoting the paucity of Black musicians in classical music, Professor Jackson wrote that “few grow up in homes where classical music is profoundly valued.” He proposed increased funding for music education and a commitment to demolishing “institutionalized racist barriers.”And he took pointed shots at Professor Ewell.“I understand full well,” Professor Jackson wrote, “that Ewell only attacks Schenker as a pretext to his main argument: That liberalism is a racist conspiracy to deny rights to ‘people of color.’”His remarks lit a rhetorical match. The journal appeared in late July. Within days the executive board of the Society for Music Theory stated that several essays contained “anti-Black statements and personal ad hominem attacks” and said that its failure to invite Professor Ewell to respond was designed to “replicate a culture of whiteness.”Soon after, 900 professors and graduate students signed a letter denouncing the journal’s editors for ignoring peer review. The essays, they stated, constituted “anti-Black racism.”Graduate students at the University of North Texas issued an unsigned manifesto calling for the journal to be dissolved and for the “potential removal” of faculty members who used it “to promote racism.”University of North Texas officials in December released an investigation that accused Professor Jackson of failing to hew to best practices and of having too much power over the journal’s graduate student editor. He was barred him from the magazine, and money for the Schenker Center was suspended.Jennifer Evans-Crowley, the university’s provost, did not rule out that disciplinary steps might be taken against Professor Jackson. “I can’t speak to that at this time,” she told The New York Times.Professor Jackson stands shunned by fellow faculty. Two graduate students who support him told me their peers feared that working with him could damage their careers.“Everything has become exceedingly polarized and the Twitter mob is like a quasi-fascist police state,” Professor Jackson said in an interview. “Any imputation of racism is anathema and therefore I must be exorcised.”This controversy raises intertwined questions. What is the role of universities in policing intellectual debate? Academic duels can be metaphorically bloody affairs. Marxists slash and parry with monetarists; postmodernists trade punches with modernists. Tenure and tradition traditionally shield sharp-tongued academics from censure.For a university to intrude struck others as alarming. Samantha Harris, a lawyer with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, a free speech advocacy group, urged the university to drop its investigation.She did not argue Professor Jackson’s every word was temperate.“This is an academic disagreement and it should be hashed out in journals of music theory,” Ms. Harris said. “The academic debate centers on censorship and putting orthodoxy over education, and that is chilling.”That said, race is an electric wire in American society and a traditional defense of untrammeled speech on campus competes with a newer view that speech itself can constitute violence. Professors who denounced the journal stressed that they opposed censorship but noted pointedly that cultural attitudes are shifting.“I’m educated in the tradition that says the best response to bad speech is more speech,” said Professor Edward Klorman of McGill University. “But sometimes the traditional idea of free speech comes into conflict with safety and inclusivity.”There is too a question with which intellectuals have long wrestled. What to make of intellectuals who voice monstrous thoughts? The renowned philosopher Martin Heidegger was a Nazi Party member and Paul de Man, a deconstructionist literary theorist, wrote for pro-Nazi publications. The Japanese writer Yukio Mishima eroticized fascism and tried to inspire a coup.Schenker, who was born in Galicia, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was an ardent cultural Germanophile and given to dyspeptic diatribes. He spoke of the “filthy” French; English, and Italians as “inferior races”; and Slavs as “half animals.” Africans had a “cannibal spirit.”Did his theoretical brilliance counter the weight of disreputable rages?Professor Ewell argued that Schenker’s racism and theories are inseparable. “At a minimum,” he wrote in a paper, “we must present Schenker’s work to our students in full view of his racist beliefs.”The dispute has played out beyond the United States. Forty-six scholars and musicians in Europe and the Middle East wrote a defense of Professor Jackson and sounded a puzzled note. Professor Ewell, they wrote, delivered a provocative polemic with accusations aimed at living scholars and Professor Jackson simply answered in kind.Neither professor is inclined to back down. A cellist and scholar of Russian classical music, Professor Ewell, 54, describes himself as an activist for racial, gender and social justice and a critic of whiteness in music theory.Shortly after the Journal of Schenkerian Studies appeared in July, Professor Ewell — who eight years ago published in that journal — canceled a lecture at the University of North Texas. He said he had not read the essays that criticized him.“I won’t read them because I won’t participate in my dehumanization,” he told The Denton Record-Chronicle in Texas. “They were incensed by my Blackness challenging their whiteness.”Professor Ewell, who also is on the faculty of the City University of New York Graduate Center, declined an interview with The Times. He is part of a generation of scholars who are undertaking critical-race examinations of their fields. In “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” the paper he presented in Columbus, he writes that he is for all intents “a practitioner of white music theory” and that “rigorous conversations about race and whiteness” are required to “make fundamental antiracist changes in our structures and institutions.”For music programs to require mastery of German, he has said, “is racist obviously.” He has criticized the requirement that music Ph.D. students study German or a limited number of “white” languages, noting that at Yale he needed a dispensation to study Russian. He wrote that the “antiracist policy solution” would be “to require languages with one new caveat: any language — including sign language and computer languages, for instance — is acceptable with the exception of Ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French or German, which will only be allowed by petition as a dispensation.”Last April he fired a broadside at Beethoven, writing that it would be academically irresponsible to call him more than an “above average” composer. Beethoven, he wrote, “has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for 200 years.”As for Schenker, Professor Ewell argued that his racism informed his music theories: “As with the inequality of races, Schenker believed in the inequality of tones.”That view is contested. Professor Eric Wen arrived in the United States from Hong Kong six decades ago and amid slurs and loneliness discovered in classical music what he describes as a colorblind solace. Schenker held a key to mysteries.“Schenker penetrated to the heart of what makes music enduring and inspiring,” said Professor Wen, who teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. “He was no angel and so what? His ideology is problematic but his insights are massive.”How this ends is not clear. The university report portrayed Professor Jackson as hijacking the journal, ignoring a graduate student editor, making decisions on his own and tossing aside peer review.A trove of internal emails, which were included as exhibits in the lawsuit, casts doubt on some of those claims. Far from being a captive project of Professor Jackson, the emails show that members of the journal’s editorial staff were deeply involved in the planning of the issue, and that several colleagues on the faculty at North Texas, including one seen as an ally of Professor Ewell, helped draft its call for papers. When cries of racism arose, all but one of those colleagues denounced the journal. A graduate student editor publicly claimed to have participated because he “feared retaliation” from Professor Jackson, who was his superior, and said he had essentially agreed with Professor Ewell all along. The emails paint a contradictory picture, as he had described Professor Ewell’s paper as “naive.”Professor Jackson hired a lawyer who specialized in such cases, Michael Allen, and the lawsuit he filed against his university charges retaliation against his free speech rights. More extraordinary, he sued fellow professors and a graduate student for defamation. That aspect of the lawsuit was a step too far for FIRE, the free speech group, which supported targeting the university but took the view that suing colleagues and students was a tit-for-tat exercise in squelching speech.“We believe such lawsuits are generally unwise,” the group stated, “and can often chill or target core protected speech.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More