The New Classics: The Most Enduring
Books, Shows, Movies, And Ideas Since 2000
(By Slate Staff, Slate.com, 07 November 2011)
David Foster
Wallace, in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007, coined a great
phrase to describe our contemporary media environment: "Total Noise."
Movies, books, television shows, the journalistic outlets formerly known as
newspapers, podcasts, YouTube videos, actual museums, tweets—they all comprise
the noise. It's easy to feel that the cultural world has fractionated into
endless niches. Yet, just as in previous decades, there will be those ideas
that emerge and endure: the new classics.
The
difference now is that the classics are more personalized—there is no longer a
mass culture that aids in canon formation. The classics are also more diverse,
as high, low, and middlebrow culture have become inextricably twirled and
tangled. The new millennium is only 11 years old, but we at Slate became
curious—as a thought experiment—about which cultural artifacts since 2000 will
speak to future eras. What are the timeless expressions being forged in our
noisy moment? Even more important: What are we overlooking that will one day be
seen as an essential document of our time? To that end, we asked Slate
contributors to name the new classics in the fields they know best.
“I Gotta Feeling,”
The Black Eyed Peas
(Nominated by: John Swansburg, Slate culture editor )
Some songs
become classics because they are the purest expression of the musical movement
that produced them. Some songs become classics because they’re just undeniably
good. “I Gotta Feeling,” by the Black Eyed Peas, has very little to say about
politics or culture; as hip-hop, it can’t compete with Kanye or Lil Wayne; and
its goodness is frequently and convincingly denied. Yet the song has entered
the canon for the simple reason that it will be played at every wedding you
will attend for decades to come. I
mentioned this theory to a Slate colleague recently, who countered that she had
forbidden her DJ from playing the song at her nuptials. But that’s my point
exactly. “I Gotta Feeling,” like “Brick House” and “Shout” before it, has
become so standard that if you don’t want to hear it at your wedding you must
affirmatively ban it from the proceedings. (Given the song’s unlikely fondness
for Yiddish—there are the mazel tovs in the refrain, plus an easier to miss,
auto-tuned l’chaim at one point—it is surely a standard on the bar mitzvah
circuit as well.)
Whether you
love the song or hate it, you must acknowledge its insidious play for
function-hall immortality: It invites an energetic but unskilled style of dance
consisting largely of jumping up and down. Its lyrics are vague enough that it
can score country-club mixers and sorority house pregaming. It’s easy enough
for wedding bands of all stripes to master—soul is rewarded but not required.
Most important, it’s infectiously upbeat: After a couple of cocktails, even
avowed rockists and penny-loafered uncles by marriage can find themselves won
over by its relentless optimism. Who wants to be caught sulking with the salad
at Table 4 when “I Gotta Feeling” inevitably strikes up? Are you rooting for it
not to be a good night?
Clearview typeface
Nominated by: Julia Turner, Slate deputy editor
The typeface
you’ve probably heard most about lately is Helvetica, the 20-century sans serif
classic that starred in a recent documentary. But Clearview is the young
typeface to watch. It was approved in 2004 for use on American road signs as an
alternative to the old standard, Highway Gothic, and it's destined to become a
classic thanks to its utility and sheer ubiquity. Clearview was designed to
solve a problem: Highway Gothic, which has been in use since the 1940s, has
small, cramped lowercase letters that are hard to read on highway signs at
night. The creators of Clearview, designer Don Meeker and typographer James
Montalbano, sought to minimize “halation”—the glowy halos that appear on
letters and make it hard to tell, say, an a from an e—and thus enhance
legibility, and, by extension, road safety. (In the two signs above, you can
see the crisper Clearview on the right.) The typeface got its closeup in a New
York Times Magazine feature in 2007, and since then, its use has only
increased. Occasionally people squall when Clearview comes to town—New Yorkers
objected on nostalgic grounds when the typeface replaced our ALL CAPS street
signs earlier this year—but Clearview works, and it looks nice. Odds are it
will endure. And one day we’ll be nostalgic for it.
Chronicles, Volume
1
Nominated by: Ron Rosenbaum, Slate columnist
In the age
of the memoir, one stands out as illuminating and likely to last. When I
initially read it, it struck me (as the title of Mary McCarthy's famous review
of Nabokov's Pale Fire had it) like "a bolt from the blue." And it
has retained its lightning-like luminosity in the seven years since. I'm speaking of Bob Dylan's Chronicles,
Volume I. Who knew that Dylan, whose previous venture in prose, Tarantula, was
almost deliberately impenetrable, could write with such astonishing clarity,
taking us back to the matrix of creativity found in New York's East and West
Villages in the early ’60s. Telling great tales in a voice that is
distinctively yet unobtrusively literary, and yet rings with tonal echoes of
his best storytelling songs. Are all the stories true, all the names real? As
they say, it's too good to fact-check. I'd argue that it's a rare glimpse of
the notoriously taciturn Dylan as he saw himself, and that's something to be
valued.
Whether or
not you like Dylan, few aside from Elvis have had as much influence on American
culture (and much as I love Elvis, he wasn't much of a writer). And here Dylan
takes us on a tour of the wild array of people and books and places that
influenced him, from folkie haunts to haunted folkies to the 42 Street Public
Library in the dead of winter, where Dylan would read century-old abolitionist
literature. Nobody has given us a better portrait of New York City and its
creative ferment. The city is his greatest character. And few have taken us inside a musician's
head the way he does in a later chapter in which, touring with the Grateful
Dead, he has a transformative musical experience I still can't quite figure
out. But whatever it was they put in his drink—and his head—that time,
something seems to have unleashed a hallucinatory beauty in his prose.
“The Star Wars
Kid”
Nominated by: Michael Agger, Slate editor
In November
of 2002, a pudgy, 15-year-old Canadian teenager named Ghyslain Raza took hold
of a golf-ball retriever and videotaped himself swinging the stick around like
Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace. Five months later, a classmate made the video
available through peer-to-peer networks, and Raza became "The Star Wars
Kid," one of the Web's first viral stars. Some estimates claim that the
original video has been viewed over a billion times. His performance was
clumsy, cringe-inducing, but ultimately winning because of the total
uninhibited effort on display. Here was everyone's inner geek, caught in a
moment of imaginative rapture.
Not everyone
saw it that way. Raza was mocked online. Some of the remixes were cruel:
"Every Jedi has a semi-retarded clone …" He became depressed and
dropped out of school, telling the New York Times: "People were laughing
at me, and it was not funny at all." His farflung fans rallied to his
side, going so far as to buy Raza an iPod and send a letter that read:
"Remember, the Internet loves you." But all the boy wanted was the
impossibility that the video had never been made public. He felt both the rush
and the sting of Internet virality, a proto-Rebecca Black. While she, and
others like her, try hard to capitalize on their popularity, Raza has moved on
and is becoming a lawyer.
His video is
classic because its story holds both the good and bad of the Internet. For the
"new classic," I choose a remix, since that's the signature Web video
genre of the past decade. Of the hundreds that exist, my nomination goes to
"Star Wars Kid Drunken Jedi." It takes the original video and makes
it funnier while also saluting its earnest, out-of-control spirit. So-called
"viral" phenomena are best when we are not making one another sick,
but rather saluting the unfiltered awesomeness that makes us all smile.
“I’m a Mac/I’m a
PC”
Nominated by: Seth Stevenson, Slate ad columnist
Which TV ads
will define the past decade? If our cutoff were 1999 instead of 2000, we’d need
to discuss the rapturous Volkswagen ad depicting—to the strains of Nick Drake’s
“Pink Moon”—a quartet of young’uns who eschew a party in favor of an aimless
and yet somehow poignant drive on a starry evening. If we were assessing
ubiquity as opposed to vitality, we’d be compelled to consider a pair of animal
spokesmen: the Geico Lizard (still going strong) and the Aflac Duck (who has
lately undergone a sort of forced laryngectomy as a result of Gilbert
Gottfried’s imprudence). If clever humor were our sole criterion, I’d vote for
Geico’s “Tiny House”—which utterly fooled me into believing it was a promo for
an actual reality show. If our judgment hinged on technical perfection, I’d
point to a pair of big-budget Nike ads (titled “Awake” and “Move”) in which
music and editing conspire to create sublime little flecks of visual art.
But forced
to predict which ad campaign will be remembered years from now for exhibiting
total mastery of the form, I’ll go with “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC.” Apple’s series of
ads portrayed PCs as nerdy cubicle drones and Macs as affable loft-dwelling
creatives—using a pair of actors as human stand-ins to represent the competing
products. The campaign was so conceptually clear, so fiendishly simple, that it
spurred a direct response from a wounded Microsoft marketing team. I had a few problems with the campaign’s
initial tone, but many of those were cleared up with the second iteration of
the ads. I’ve now come around to believing that the campaign helped not only to
send Apple sales zooming, but to forever cement the stark stylistic contrast
between the two leading luminaries of personal computing. A decade hence, when
we picture Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, will we visualize the men themselves? Or
will our mind’s eye conjure John Hodgman in an ill-fitting beige suit and
Justin Long in jeans and a hoodie?
The iPod
Nominated by: Farhad Manjoo, Slate technology columnist
The iPod wouldn’t
belong on this list if you were looking at just the thing itself: Sure, it was
a really nice music player, it sold like gangbusters, and the scroll
wheel—which in later versions turned into the click wheel—was a truly
innovative tech interface. Yet the iPod had its heart in the 1980s; it was just
a smaller, better Walkman, if you stopped to think about it. Still, the iPod changed everything in tech.
Before the iPod, Apple was a marginal computer company. Afterward, it was a
powerhouse, on the way to becoming the biggest, most profitable firm in the
business.
The iPod
taught Apple two things: First, that its seamless, integrated approach—making
the software and hardware for a device—worked better in the consumer
electronics business than it did in the PC business. Second, that operations
matter: The iPod was where Apple perfected its now legendary ability to make
lots and lots of devices for very little money. In this way, it set the stage
for the iPhone and the iPad, two devices that ushered in the “post-PC” era in
tech.
Indirectly,
then, you can tie the iPod to much else in tech these days—not just stuff Apple
makes, but stuff all of its competitors make, too. If it weren’t for the iPod,
you wouldn’t have had the iPhone, hence no App Store, so no Instagram or Angry
Birds. But without the iPod, Google’s Android OS would look like the
BlackBerry, and there’d be no Kindle Fire, either. You may not think about your
trusty old iPod anymore, but remember: It started everything.
Nowhere Man, by Aleksandar
Hemon
Nominated by: David Haglund, Slate Brow Beat editor
Aleksandar
Hemon’s prose is not “luminous” or “spare”; it doesn’t “limn” anything. It is
angry, funny, and sad—and full of unexpected word-combinations that convey not
just the outside world but an individual’s experience of it: an elevator, for
instance, “rife with a woman’s fragrant absence: peachy, skinny, dense.” That
scent is detected by the nose of Hemon’s great alter ego, Jozef Pronek, in
Nowhere Man (2002), Hemon’s best book ... so far. Like Hemon, Pronek grew up in
Sarajevo, and came to the United States on a visit in his late 20s; he got
stuck in Chicago when the Siege of Sarajevo started (as Hemon did). To improve
his English, Hemon read Lolita with a dictionary close by, and Nabokov also
inspires his stance toward adjectives: “You pile them up until the object is
formed completely.”
Or the man:
Pronek takes amusing, awkard, angry form in a series of stories with different
narrators (Nowhere Man is subtitled “The Pronek Fantasies”) that move freely
between his birth (“his crumpled face, dominated by a screaming mouth, like an
Expressionist painting”) and adulthood. We observe the “fireworks of universal
experiences” as well as “the ephemera, the nethermoments.” Poor and at sea in
landlocked Chicago, Pronek works whatever jobs he can; the book’s anger and
sadness stem from American indignities as well as Bosnian horrors. Earlier,
while studying abroad in Kiev, Pronek happened to meet the first President
Bush, who walked “in the long dumb strides of a man whose path had always been
secure.” Like most of ours, Pronek’s steps are much less secure, and far more
interesting.
Roger Federer
Nominated by: Josh Levin, Slate sports editor
The most impressive thing about Roger
Federer is how he makes his admirers nostalgic for an era that he obliterated.
Federer’s artful, loping game reminds us of the slo-mo champions of yore, who
couldn’t possibly hang in the topspin-and-smash epoch that the Swiss star made
his own. Federer is an emissary from the past to the future—and from the future
to the past. I believe this shot constitutes proof that time travel is
possible. Also, this one. And don’t forget this one, which helped convince Andy Roddick to
give up tennis for a career of supporting roles in
the American Pie movies.
Athletic immortality doesn’t come for free
along with a lot of Grand Slam wins—hell, Ivan Lendl won 8 slams and nobody cares about that guy. The
true greats make their chosen sport something that it wasn’t, they build a new
kind of game on the same court. Lendl won a bunch of titles because he played
the same way as everybody else, only better. Federer didn’t play the same as
anybody else. He was so much faster, so much more agile, and so successful,
that he made the best players in the world look like they were holding their
rackets upside down.
David Foster Wallace said this better than
I have in his essay “Federer as Religious
Experience,” and the fact
that DFW said it at all is a good indication that the Federer name will persist
long after we forget how to spell Novak Djokovic. Nadal and Djokovic are great. Federer is a
paragon. Step aside René Lacoste—the finest shirts of 2100 will bear the RF logo.
Mulholland Drive
Nominated by: Dana Stevens, Slate movie critic
Being asked
to contribute a movie for a hypothetical “new canon” of post-2000 classics
immediately plunged me down a rabbit hole of unanswerable questions. What does
"canonical" mean in the century after the canon exploded? The whole
notion of a fixed pantheon of culturally sanctioned works has been troubled—if
not definitively discredited—for a good two decades now. And the
ever-increasing number of channels that new media offers people to find, watch,
discuss, and create movies for themselves makes that pantheon seem ever more
like a dusty echo chamber. So I’ll choose a movie that takes its own dive down
multiple narrative rabbit holes: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (or to use
Lynch’s preferred spelling, Mulholland Dr.)
I wouldn’t
say Mulholland Dr. is the best movie of the past 10 years—if forced by a
gun-wielding list-compiler to name a candidate for that spot, I’d likely name
Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. (Here’s my list of the 10 best movies of the new millennium from late 2010, which includes both
films.) But if canon-worthiness is about what works will last as a part
of the cultural conversation, Lynch’s slippery, mind-altering tale of murder,
betrayal, romantic obsession, and show business has to claim the spot. Almost
10 years to the week since its release in October 2001, Mulholland Dr. can
still provoke dinner-length conversations that range from squirrelly debates
about plot threads (what is that guy behind the Dumpster at the diner supposed
to represent?) to flights of swooning hyperbole (that lip-synching scene at the
Club Silencio!). To skip Mulholland Dr. is not only to miss out on two and a
half hours of bravura filmmaking, but on dozens more hours of discussions as
spiraling and open-ended as the movie itself.
The Ugg
Nominated by: Simon Doonan, Slate fashion critic
In the last
10 years the fashion landscape has exploded into a million conflicting and
diverse notions and styles. Within the chaos there are certain consistent
trendy items that have demonstrated exceptional staying power: examples include
the skinny jean, the prominently logo'd handbag, the tattoo, and the
cripplingly high sculptural platform shoe. Which item will prove to have the
most endurance?
I am betting
on the Ugg. (Yes, I know, it wasn't invented this millennium—but we fashion
folk have always been sketchy on details.) The Ugg is the place where comfort
meets glamour. The Ugg offers a refuge from the crucifixion of 7-inch heels.
The Ugg is democratic. Even the Duchess of Cambridge wears Uggs.
The Clock
Nominated by: Ben Davis, art critic
I’m not sure
that Christian Marclay’s The Clock really needs any more praise. But you also
can’t deny it: No single work of visual art of the recent past even comes close
to having the same impact. Last year, when it debuted at the London gallery
White Cube, it attracted blockbuster crowds. At Paula Cooper in New York,
people camped out to experience the full sweep of the 24-hour video
installation. “The Clock” has become an immediate touchstone, snapped up by the
country’s major museums—LACMA, MoMA, the MFA Boston—and drafted into service at
international art spectacles in Japan (the current Yokohama Triennial) and
Italy (the Venice Biennale, where it won the Silver Lion for best work on view
earlier this year). Evidently, The Clock is capable of touching a truly broad
and popular audience as well as the cognoscenti, not something you can say
about just any old work of contemporary art.
In essence,
The Clock is a single-channel video, usually shown on a large cinema screen,
comprised of thousands of short clips from film history—from High Noon to
Pineapple Express—stitched together into one epic, free-associative montage.
What makes this more than just an overgrown YouTube video is the narrative that
unites it all: time. Each clip has been selected because it somehow features a
temporal reference, usually in the form of clock somewhere on-screen, with the
moment on-screen syncing up to the moment in real time, as you watch it. Thus,
as a viewer, you schizophrenically leap from one universe to the next, from drama
to horror to comedy and back again, never settling down—but always aware that
each moment is chained to the relentless beat of the present. The effect is
almost magical: The Clock is both cerebral and visceral, both a mammoth work of
pop art and almost spiritual in the way it puts you in touch with time. As a
creative achievement, it feels at once completely contemporary but also—to be
cute—completely timeless.
The Wire
Nominated by: June Thomas, Slate cultural critic
I don’t
usually take my TV cues from Jacob Weisberg, but the Slate Group’s editor in
chief was absolutely right when he declared The Wire to be “the best TV show
ever broadcast” in this country, because it “portrays the social, political,
and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision,
and moral vision of great literature.” In fact, The Wire could not have existed
in any medium but television, where it was given 60 hours and a cast of
hundreds to work out its epic sweep. The show’s creator, David Simon, recruited
some of the best chroniclers of urban America, including George Pelecanos and
Richard Price, to the writing team; and provided great black actors with roles
worthy of their talents. (Omar! Bubbles! Prop Joe! Brother Mouzone!) But what
elevates The Wire above other great shows of this century (The Sopranos, Mad
Men, Foyle’s War) was the decision to keep things fresh by focusing each of the
five seasons on a different aspect of Baltimore life: the drug trade, the
docks, city politics, the school system, and the newspaper industry. If there’s
a more disturbing portrait of 21-century America than Season 4 of The Wire,
I’ve yet to encounter it.
The High Line and
Brooklyn Bridge Park
Nominated by: Witold Rybczynski, Slate architecture critic
Product design
tends to change so rapidly, and most electronic devices have such a short life
that they barely have time to become “classics.” Will anyone remember the
iPhone in 50 years? I doubt it—we’ll have something better. Architecture has
just gone through the heady mill of an economic boom, which made for many
expensive and extravagant buildings, but few, I suspect, that will be greatly
admired in the future. My pick as
long-lasting designs are two urban parks. The High Line, not because it will
necessarily spawn many imitators, but because it marks a coming together of
urbanism, nature, and fashion, in a way that will, I suspect, mark an era. The
other, also in New York, is Brooklyn Bridge Park, which will become a model—for
creatively reusing industrial urban land. Its low-key design well suits the
stringent economic times that seem to be on the horizon. It’s not Central Park,
but it’s as close as our generation will get.
Avenging Angel, by
Craig Taborn
Nominated by: Seth Colter Walls, jazz critic
During an
interview with Jason Moran, right after the jazz pianist’s receipt of a
MacArthur “genius” grant in 2010, I asked him to free-associate about some of
his contemporaries. He seemed diplomatically taciturn in several cases, though
when I asked Moran for his thoughts about Craig Taborn, he paused and shifted
to real talk. “Everyone who plays piano knows what Craig is doing,” Moran told
me, with what felt like awe. But that’s
not the same thing as the ideal number of people knowing about what Craig Taborn
is doing. In part, the pianist has been to blame. While he’s recorded as a
sideman on a dizzyingly diverse (and high-quality) number of albums that runs
into the dozens, until this year’s solo CD Avenging Angel, he hadn’t put out
anything under his own name since 2004.
It was worth
the wait. Wholly improvised but rigorously controlled, the 70-plus-minute set
of Taborn at a grand piano bears an incredible, unmistakable intensity—even
when Taborn is just barely pressing the hammers to the strings. As the
contemplative minimalism of opening track “The Broad Day King” gives way to the
dreamy sustain of “Glossolalia,” you’ll be hard-pressed to recall any other
jagged left turn executed with comparable fluidity. And when Taborn—a powerful
keyboard-abuser—finally does start in with the contrapuntal pounding (during
the title track, among others), Avenging Angel doesn’t just seem like an “album
of the year” candidate, but something destined to have one of those “crown”
icons next to its four-star rating in the 30th Penguin Guide to Jazz, however
many years from now. Anyone who wonders why their “indie” music has become so
familiar as to be arguably equated with “adult contemporary” should take a tour
of Taborn's sound-world: a place where echoes of Debussy, ’70s AACM-school
jazz, and minimal techno collide with a force that could easily preclude
intelligibility. In Taborn’s hands, that radical chorus really sings.
“Marlboro Marine,”
by Luis Sinco
Nominated by: Heather Murphy, Slate photo editor
Many enormously
talented photojournalists have risked their lives to cover the war in Iraq. As
a result, millions of powerful photos emerged. Sadly, as the war dragged on and
on—and then was overshadowed by Afghanistan, the images began to blend
together, one bloody combat mission fading into another, one young soldier
indistinguishable from the next. Except
for Luis Sinco’s Marlboro Marine. Thirty years from now, his smudged face will
continue to stand apart from all the other smudged faces.
Marine Lance
Cpl. James Blake Miller (his real name) is the “Afghan Girl” of the 2000s. As
he struggles with his post-combat nightmares over the coming decades, he’ll
smoke his way through textbooks, posters, and documentaries. Calling out a single photo as “the new
classic” is an impossible task. Each genre of photography has its own classics.
Sinco’s photo, emblazoned in the minds of millions as it hit the covers of more
than 150 newspapers in 2004, is just one of many.
It’s been a
decade of radical digital change in photography. Talking to friends in the
photo world about this project, many suggested iPhone photos taken with
Hipstamatic filters as the new classic. I was tempted to agree. But then I
realized that a classic is not a trend or style, it is a single undistinguishable
image that will live on, whether we want it to or not. There have been many
significant cellphone photos throughout the last few years, but with the
exception of perhaps the amateur shot of the “Miracle on the Hudson,” have we
seen many that will still be discussed in 50 years?
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