So last year I took a year off from the Trainies – it didn’t seem, what with everything being the absolute worst it had been to that point, like there was a lot of space for, well, anything that I do here at all on this here site, let alone the thing where I laud the silliest and most ridiculous things to happen all year.
And then, you know, things got worse. And worse. And worse. And, frankly, they’re probably going to get even worse still. Which manages to call into question what I’m doing even further.
This here website is, in the grand miasma of things that exist on the internet, small potatoes, so you’ll have to bear in mind as I write the rest of this that I’m aware of what it is I’m doing. Some of it is going to sound like I think what I’m doing is louder or more visible than it is, and I feel I need to state that this here space was pretty much designed to do two things: 1) keep track of whatever thing I’m going on about, culturally and 2) make my friends (and anyone else that finds it) laugh.
This site is, primarily, about the idea of popularity, and the ways in which popularity is displayed and, in many ways, manufactured. My particular interest here is not necessarily of-the-moment popularity1, but rather the ways in which popularity becomes remembered/enshrined. So I write about Greatest Thing lists, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and, most prominently, awards shows. Basically as many awards shows as I can squeeze into the thing without treading too far into fields where I don’t really have any knowledge2, because the combination of pageantry and insistent corporate opinions is basically catnip to me.
1 although some of that is necessary due to the clout-establishing push-and-pull I’ll go into some detail about below
2 or, occasionally, by blundering full steam ahead into fields I don’t care about
In any event, awards shows3 are an interesting display of corporate interests because they’re orthogonal to popularity, at least in theory. The popular things are their own reward – they make money for the companies that produce them and, in theory, the company then keeps producing them4, but there are organizations that exist to provide a sort of leg-up into the idea of things that are “good” beyond their popularity5. The “good”-ness provides an economic long-tail relationship that recoups the money spent on it through its quality, rather than its direct popularity.
3 for the rest of this piece, I will use the words “awards shows” one billion times, and by it I mean not n necessarily just the outward-presenting television aspect, but the whole ceremonial awarding of things by a decision-making body – that is to say, I consider the Golden Globes an awards show even though they’re no longer broadcast, but also the book awards that I read, even though those are in private ceremonies, etc.
4 the fact that this is getting weirder and harder to quantify – in probably just about the same degree that the popularity itself is getting weirder and harder to quantify – is a little bit beside the point here, but still worth acknowledging, even if only in a footnote.
5 this is a distinction that I feel is worth exploring a bit, but I’m not going to do so in this particular piece. It’s also the case that there is a sort of trendlet in fans of an extremely popular thing complaining that it doesn’t also win awards – superhero movie people, primarily, but also certain wings of pop-music fandom – and that’s on deck to write about basically the next time it happens, but that is not this piece either.
In any event, this sort of secondary-marketing aspect of awards shows is what provides the tension that, in theory, keeps them running (to the extent they are running, anyway); the awards-granting bodies have to convince people that what they are awarding – that the things that they’re advocating that you spend your time/money on because of their quality – are worth it. In order to do so, they also have to dovetail with the sort of things that any given viewer also thinks is going to have had value.
Taking a step back, it’s important to acknowledge that the successful execution of an entertainment experience6 is an exercise in emotional manipulation7 – a narrative is being presented in order to generate a feeling. That’s fine, that’s what we’re, generally, signing up for – an opportunity to have the emotional experience of a thing, for whatever personal or private reasons that one might have.
6 which I’m separating from the idea of an artistic experience because I’m focusing on the money-generating (and, secondarily, the nearly-inseparable “respectability”-generating) aspect of the thing right here, rather than the aesthetic/personal aspect of it.
7 even a relatively-dry nature documentary relies on this, and even things like my beloved, tone-neutral How It’s Made is about the low-key satisfaction of finding something out. It’s emotional manipulation all the way down.
And so I put forward that the utility of the awards show, from this perspective, is to confirm to the viewer that their emotional state was, in fact, correct, or the state that they pretended to was correct8, or whatever. This is how the awards-granting body allies itself with the taste of the viewer – by confirming that they have the taste necessary for the alliance. .
8 I try very hard to avoid accusing anyone – directly or by implication – of not actually liking the things they like, for two reasons: 1) it (somehow still! Even as an old-ass adult! Still!) happens to me all the time and it’s dumb and 2) it really doesn’t matter if the thing the person enjoys is the acknowledgment of their enjoyment, or the thing itself, it’s all basically the same in the end.
Stated more directly: the awards show has to first convince you that it’s worth paying attention to by presenting its statements of “quality” or “worthiness” or whatever in such a way that you can agree with them, so that you will look to them for continued assurance of that same “quality.” the extent to which this is (or, indeed, has ever been) effective I leave to the individual to decide. Thus the awards show is an attempt to provide this information, and that makes it an interesting flexion point where you can, or at least I can9 see where the wheels are turning, at least in this one place.
9 or at least i like to think I can
My position here is that awards shows (and “best of” lists and the charts and whatever else) function, in and of themselves, as a sort of meta-entertainment, where the emotional manipulation is about you being right, or you being set on the right path, or however you want to categorize a confirmation of both your taste and your initial, non-meta reaction. And, if that were the whole thing, that would be the end of it – there’s really nothing wrong with people liking whatever they want to like for whatever reason they’ve got10, but it’s not quite the whole thing.
10 short of absurd edge-case reasons – obviously liking something because it abets you, say, murdering people is bad
The thing that brought me to it in the first place – to awards, to lists, to all of it – is that they end up being a part of the record for the things so awarded. However many people do or do not care about the Academy Awards, for example, when they happen, future people will still only have that sort of thing to go on when they are interested in what is going on in movies of that year. They have the charts to tell them what’s popular11, and they have the contemporaneous awards (among a few other things) to tell them what is “good”. But outside of the popularity, outside of the things that are leftover as detritus, the existence of awards is a primary indicator of what people thought was good outside of things with mass-appeal12, which means that, even if they aren’t quite the most-respected thing in the moment, they’re still things that win out over history due to the relative-durability of the official opinion so-enshrined
11 this is sort of less fraught as a historical record – it is, after all, demonstrating what people are spending their money/time/streams on, even if the reasons for the popularity of any given thing are stupid or bad or incomprehensible.
12 without getting too far into the spongy morass of a swamp that is trying to define what “mass appeal” is and how, say, the Emmys would represent something different, although see below for some of it.
I’m not going to spend a great deal of time unpacking the cultural idea of the difference between “popular” and “good”. For one thing, the idea is so ingrained into the cultural discussion that it’s hard to tease it out (we have a basically constant low-level argument about, say, whether superhero movies are, in fact, movies13, to name one example), but also just because the point of awards-granting bodies is to draw cultural attention to something without taking its popularity into account14, which necessarily says that there are two different things here.
13 I think there could be a really interesting anthropological line of thought if you looked at what was excluded from being considered “serious” art over time, and the things that it says. I’m not doing that here, though. This has already taken me quite some time, and I’m trying to keep the word count down.
14 taking as evidence for this that every award doesn’t just go to the most popular thing every time, even though it sometimes does
The extent to which that difference matters, or should matter, I live as an exercise to the reader, because it’s so far beyond the purview of this space that I’m not really even going to consider it beyond laying out that it exists.
Anyway, the point that all of this is driving toward is this: Awards shows are a way to examine how an entertainment entity wants to manipulate you, directly, into feeling about something15, by affirming your taste or creating some urgency within you to experience the things that they want to tell you to experience. And so examining – even examining in a jokey way – the ways in which that thing happens, and the means by which it works, becomes a way of examining my (and, I suppose aspirationally, others’) reactions to just exactly that manipulation.
15 With, once more, the caveat that they may not be successful – I’m not talking about their efficacy, just their general mien.
The Trainies, then, are the natural outgrowth of all of that – in order to examine the ways in which the forces that provide corporatized entertainment, I must also offer my own stake in the position. This is done primarily through posts about music, the thing I spend most of my time enjoying and thinking about, but it’s also done, in a somewhat more oblique way, through the Trainies, where I keep track of the examples of trendlets, attempted trendlets, and massive displays of disconnection with the actual point, and then award them a tiny award. Trainy award winners are selected, primarily, on the basis of their ability to either fail entirely at the sort of large-scale manipulation necessary to win other wards, the ability to create something (a fandom, a social media following, a news kerfuffle) out of the dumbest things possible, ana attempt to sell people something with no value and, occasionally, about once a year, a successful attempt to do those things by unorthodox means.
The idea, of course, being that the more you think about, say, why a record label wants you to pay attention to someone, or why a movie studio wants you to pay attention to something, or why a book publisher wants you to…you get it, then you start to think about why other people want you to pay attention to other things. Bigger things. Things that, say, you might want to have a firm grounding in/grasp of your own opinions and beliefs about, say. Nobody starts doing push-ups with the explicit intent of lifting a car off their baby, but if you want to be able to lift a car off a baby, you might start by doing a push-up.
Consider this whole experiment, then, a push-up.
Ohio Needs a Train 