I was fascinated by the notion of a publication like Harper's, one of America's leading intellectual magazines, running an almost entirely single-sourced story by a childhood pal of the subject that struck almost every knowledgeable reader as screwy, if not flat-out wrong. In response to the criticism, Harper's Senior Editor Ben Metcalf denies that the story said what I, Marks, and others thought it said. Frank's point, he says, was not that Holmes didn't like Yum-Yum's kind of music but that any intelligent person must have a relationship with popular culture that is multi-leveled: Someone who collects Elvis kitsch might not really like Elvis; but obviously, on some level, he feels an attraction. This oh-so-sophisticated take is what made an otherwise unremarkable story about a failed rock band worthy of Harper's.
On the face of it, an entertainer who puts on a game face during a Seventeen-sponsored tour and then mocks it afterward (as Frank suggests Holmes did) isn't necessarily being "ironic," any more than a fast-food clerk is being "ironic" when he evinces a concern for a customer's order that he doesn't really feel. But Metcalf thinks Holmes is different from other performers because of a quintessentially Harper's distinction: Holmes, you see, is "a very smart guy." Metcalf repeats this phrase like a mantra during our conversation. Whereas a Mariah Carey or a New Kid on the Block (to use his examples) does the show business grind without any awareness of its silliness, someone like Holmes has to know better. In other words, a Venezualan-Irish girl from Long Island and a bunch of Boston street kids are just pop-star puppets going through the motions. But Chris Holmes, a wealthy University of Chicago graduate, must be different--even if, to outside observers, the game's the same.
This sort of attitude is pervasive in Harper's. Exposing the entertainments of the hoi polloi, especially the hoi polloi outside Manhattan, as pathetic, sad, and disturbing is a popular exercise for the magazine's writers. Harper's hires superhip novelist David Foster Wallace (author of Infinite Jest) to write long features making fun of cruise ships and Midwestern fairs; Harper's is where excellent young New Republic writer Stephen Glass goes to skewer telephone psychics.
Metcalf explains that Frank's article about Holmes was really much more complicated than I thought. If it seemed to say one thing, it was really saying something else as well. Irony is a game of and for "very smart guys"--Harper's readers. In Frank's story, Marks observes, "all the other musicians are dumb, pop rock is dumb, the music industry is dumb, music journalists are dumb, other rock bands are dumb, people in the Midwest who go to bars to see rock bands in their mullet haircuts are dumb, and the only smart people in the whole scene are Tom Frank and Chris Holmes."
Frank stands firmly by his interpretation of Yum-Yum, saying Holmes's apparent sincerity does not in any way contradict an ironic intent. He explains Holmes's bragging about "the project's certain success and his impending stardom" as merely behaving "in character." Holmes himself utters the word ironic only once in the article, saying, "No one thought it was funny or ironic that we were doing Seventeen shows. Nobody got it. Nobody knew who we were." What was there to get? Would-be pop stars do things like that. It's their job.
After asking me if I was an English major, Frank begins lecturing me on the fallacy of intention, wondering why I'm asking him to explain his story. The article strongly implies that Frank has special insight into Holmes's intentions: It announces his longstanding friendship with the subject in its first paragraph, and its obsessive, single-sourced following of Holmes makes it appear that Frank's interpretation derives from his subject. But then, crediting Holmes with ironic intent just because he claimed it would also be a fallacy of intention.
In the end, it's hard to pin down Frank's position. But a Harper's piece doesn't have to make a clear point. The front of the magazine is devoted largely to reprints of documents, articles, and images, usually presented with insouciant sarcasm and meant to be laughable. The magazine's features, by contrast, are of overwhelming deadpan sententiousness, or at least seem to be. In Harper's, it's hard to know what to make of anything. As a longtime reader, I often hope the editors are only kidding--as when they offered up novelist Annie Dillard's set of disconnected statistics about mass deaths or devoted nine pages to meditations about the deeper meaning of running over birds.
But there is at least one sincerely felt attitude that Harper's Editor Lewis Lapham spreads like an inky miasma over the whole magazine: He treats the horror of modern capitalism as self-evident. The story of Yum-Yum could easily be read as illustrating the frequent impotence of the capitalist "culture trust" whose power Frank rails against in his other writings. After all, the promotional might of Time Warner (even coupled with Holmes's "very smart guy" ironic manipulation of the press) led, as it so often does, to a money-losing flop. But that angle just wouldn't suit Harper's.
The issue in which Frank's article appears also contains a Lapham editorial attacking Washington Post columnist (and Reason Foundation trustee) Jim Glassman for "find[ing] no reason to think that the barbarism implicit in the restless energies of big-time global capitalism requires some sort of check or balance...by a lively...practice of...democratic politics." The essay is a bitter condemnation of the market order without a hint of explanation of what exactly is so hideously wrong with it (especially as compared with the alternatives).
Frank, who snagged Lapham to write an introduction to one of his books, echoes Lapham's foggy bitterness when he blames the dominance of "fake earnestness, earnest fakeness" on the market. Basing his conclusion on the unproven and insulting notion that no one--or at least no smart person--can genuinely love capitalist products such as pop music, Frank, like Lapham, practices a snobbery without understanding. The enemies of capitalism used to argue that it would lead inevitably to war and the steady immiseration of the working class. Now, the best they can muster against it is that it's just too, too vulgar. I'm not sure whether this weakening of anti-capitalist rhetoric is ironic, but it is worth thinking about as the century in which the market order overcame its most powerful challenges draws to a close.
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