“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moment’s notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-17 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of April 17, 2017
This Week’s Podcast:
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Policing Our Language
I had an interesting thought today. A great deal of the communication on the Internet is simply the written word. That kind of surprised me when I thought about it. It’s the 21st Century, this is the technological wonder of the age, but most of our communication is still in writing. Things like Instagram have a strong graphic aspect, but even there you find lots of words. Memes require words as well. Twitter and Facebook are about 90% words. It’s all about written language.
And there’s a battle raging over how that language is to be used. We were all taught the formal approach to language. Grammar, syntax, spelling and the like. But a large portion of the language on the Internet isn’t formal. Does that excuse us from following the formal rules? The traditionalists are responding with shrieks of outrage at the very thought. There is a right way and a wrong way. Black and white. The Interwebs community has branded such folk “Grammar Nazis”.
There’s a message in that name, of course. Any time we invoke the Nazis we are telling that group that we think of them as the lowest of the low. That they are terrible people doing terrible things. It’s a shutdown move, an attempt to stop communication. It says you are beyond reason, you are a Nazi.
As someone who loves words and has spent his adult life working with them, you might think that I’m siding with the traditionalists. While I place a high value on the skillful use of language, I don’t see this modern world in quite the black and white terms that some folk do.
I’m willing to cut social media a little slack. It’s fast and informal. So strict adherence to the rules isn’t consistent. Even that’s not a firm rule. For example, the longer you Facebook post is, the more I expect you to write literately. I also expect a little more from communities of writers. If had to make a hard and fast rule on the rules it would be this – the longer it takes you to create the post, the higher the language standards. An email should be well written. As should a meme. You took the time to pick the graphic and write something pithy. Spell checking should be standard.
The bottom line of language is communication. And we make judgments based on how others communicate. The occasional slip is no big deal. Wanting communication to be clear and correct doesn’t make you a Nazi. How you go about it, however, might make you a jerk. That’s just a different form of miscommunication.
RIP J. Geils
Do you have specific memories of the first time you heard a song or a band? There’s plenty of music that I like but don’t particularly remember where I first heard it.
I remember a song from the summer of ‘75. I was working at the old Hotel William Baker at Chautauqua. The hotel staff stayed in the staff quarters on the first floor of the middle of three buildings. I was a rising high school senior, surrounded by college students, so it was an educational summer all round. But that’s where I first heard a song called “Whammerjammer”, a wild, live cut of this blues inspired tune with an amazing harmonica lead. That’s the first time I’d ever heard the J. Geils Band.
The J. Geils Band is one of those musical groups that exist along the fringe. They are not the one hit wonders or never-weres, but they also never quite broke through to the big time. They had one number one hit, 1982’s “Centerfold”, plus one other top ten hit, off the same album, “Freeze Frame”. There were a couple more low-level Top 40 cuts, but that was it. At the same time, they were a band that toured and toured and toured. Along the way, they developed an enormous fan base. To this day when their fans talk about the band, it’s almost always about a show attended. A high energy, rocking concert that took their breath away.
I hadn’t thought about “Whammerjammer” in a long time. When I heard that lead guitarist and namesake J. Geils had been found dead in his home, that summer and that song came pouring back into my memory. Geils was born in New York City and grew up listening to Miles Davis, and Louis Armstrong. Later he added Howling Wolf and folk music to his repertoire. It was while he was in college that the group that became the J. Geils Band came together. Geils, Peter Wolf, Seth Justman, Magic Dick Salwitz, Danny Klein and Stephen Jo Bladd. The band would tour from 1970 to 1985. Geils would turn to auto racing and restoration before returning to music, eventually recording a jazz album. There were occasional reunions. In 2012, the other members of the band were talking about going back out on tour, using the name but without the man himself. He sued, and quit the band for good.
I only worked at the Billy B for that one summer, and I’ve lost touch with everyone. But when I pulled that cut up on YouTube, it all came flooding back. That’s what music can do. For a naive and musically unsophisticated suburban kid from Pittsburgh, that song was a window into a whole different kind of music. And I’ll never forget it.
John Warren Geils Jr was 71 years old.
Pepsi Silliness
I wanted to wait and see where things finally shook out over the great Pepsi advertising catastrophe. Since the carbonated beverage manufacturer has pulled the spot and back away from it, now feels like a good time to take a look at all that went on.
Let’s start with an easy one. The spot was silly. The idea that a pretty girl handing a police officer a can of pop will change the world is idealistic but silly. Of course, advertising is filled with silly ideas. The very nature of advertising is to present you with absurd concepts. Advertising tries to sell us by using “ideals” that have no real likelihood of ever really happening. And I’m talking about pretty much ALL advertising.
Second, point. It’s not like this idea is brand new. It’s the exact same base concept as the 1971 Coca-Cola ad “I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke”. If we could just get everyone chugging the same soda, we could get down to “grow(ing) apple trees and honey bees and snow-white turtle doves”. Young people gathered together to change the world through better beverages. Forty-six years ago.
Looking at more specific charges against the ad, some folks claimed it was diminishing the image and respect for popular protest movements. Powerful change has come to our nation through protest, and the courage of protesters to stand up to the challenges, sometimes life-threatening ones, that taking such a stand requires. I find it hard to believe that a Pepsi ad is much of a threat.
But the one criticism that really surprised me had to do with the image of Kendall Jenner handing the pop to the cop. Many critics immediately connected it with the incredibly powerful photo of Ieshia Evans in Baton Rouge, Louisiana last summer. An image that I think will rank with Tienamin Square’s “Tank Man”. But it’s not the image I flashed on when I first saw the ad. I saw French photojournalist Marc Riboud’s photo of a girl with a flower confronting massed bayonets at the March on the Pentagon from 1967. In fact, one of the other photos taken of that same 17-year-old, Jan Rose Kasmir, is very similar to the Evans photograph.
All of which means that the furor over the ad suffered from the same cultural and historical cultural shallowness that the ad itself did.
That’s not going to be a popular opinion in some circles. I can live with that. There is important work to be done in our culture. Work that will require sacrifice and bravery. Don’t get distracted by the silly stuff.
Here are the photos I mention –
Click to Enlarge
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| Kendall Jenner in Pepsi Ad |
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| 1967 Jan Kasmir by Marc Riboud |
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| Ieshia Evans 2016 by Jonathan Bachman (Reuters) |
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| Jan Kasmir 1967 by Marc Riboud |
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2017
Theme music for “The View From the Phlipside” and “TVFTP – Podcast” is “Hustle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
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