Enter “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” which had also capitalized on the popularity of “Masked Singer” to create its own “Masked Dancer” stunt. After those segments became viral hits and the “Masked Singer” team saw how well they played, Fox alternative entertainment and specials president Rob Wade said he was finally convinced. – Variety
Author: Douglas McLennan
How Online “Superfans” Made Pop Music A Scary Place
While music has long been intertwined with internet communities and the rise of social networks, a growing faction of the most vocal and dedicated pop enthusiasts have embraced the term “stan” — taken from the 20-year-old Eminem song about a superfan turned homicidal stalker — and are redefining what it means to love an artist. – The New York Times
Learning To Hear Beethoven
James Wood: “It took me some time to listen properly to Beethoven, to get past the heroic glower of his portrait, the worldwide canonicity. (Surely it didn’t help that our entire generation, like those before us, had to trudge through Für Elise and what we could manage of the Pathétique on the piano. I used to go to sleep to the broken sounds of those pieces, as my brother, five years older, toiled downstairs at his ‘homework’.) It wasn’t till my early twenties that I started listening to the piano sonatas as they demand to be heard: evenly, carefully.” – London Review of Books
How Consolidation Is Killing Good Art
“The lack of options marketed to consumers has created a missing middle: the zone between mass market and niche market where experimentation is supposed to proliferate and engender variety. Worse, the consolidation of the country’s vast creative sector into fewer, more powerful production and publishing companies has come at the direct expense of the quality of their product.” – The New Republic
How Rich Corporate Publishers Are Gouging Public Schools
Over the past decade, Silicon Valley’s tech behemoths have discreetly and methodically tightened their grip on American schools, and the pandemic has given them license to squeeze even tighter. – The New Republic
Gustavo Dudamel And His New Virtual Reality Symphony
Dudamel takes on the role of virtual guide on a tour that takes us from the creation of instruments and how they vibrate and channel sound to the synapses of the brain where sound is processed as the orchestra plays around us. – BBC
How TV Fundamentally Changed in 2020
2020 wasn’t just about bigger numbers for the streaming industry. We also got to see an acceleration of cord cutting as viewers migrated by the millions from legacy cable; a shift in power as device-makers emerged as the new gatekeepers; and the erosion of long-established theatrical release windows. – Protocol
An Argument For “Canceling” Beethoven?
“He was the most performed composer in America in 2019-20, with over double the number of performances of Mozart (the second most performed). Being a guaranteed ticket-seller and donor pleaser, he keeps reappearing in concert programmes to the exclusion of other, more diverse composers. In the neo-liberal world, where audiences prefer the familiar, such attitudes to programming are unlikely to change unless there is a mass cultural boycott (i.e. ‘cancelling’) of composers like Beethoven.” – Varsity
Why A Charlie Brown Christmas Is So Enduring
“Charles Schulz had what Maurice Sendak had: respect for children. He understood the way they think and feel, not the way adults want them to think and feel. He understood that there’s a point in children’s growing up when Christmas doesn’t work its magic as reliably as it once did. Schulz let them explore a taboo subject, Christmastime unhappiness, while still reassuring them that Christmas is a good and fun and wonderful thing.” – The Atlantic
What To Look Forward To In The Arts In A Biden Administration
Proposed actions include an expansion of existing workforce hiring programs to include artists and creative workers, launching a program of federal arts commissions, developing an ArtistCorps within AmeriCorps, continuing CARES Act policies that extended benefits to the self-employed, and the creation of a new leadership position to coordinate federal arts policy. – Forbes