{"id":14435,"date":"2011-11-07T05:45:13","date_gmt":"2011-11-07T13:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=14435"},"modified":"2011-11-07T05:58:44","modified_gmt":"2011-11-07T13:58:44","slug":"odes-to-joy-or-anything-else","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=14435","title":{"rendered":"Odes to Joy. Or Anything Else."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><center> <iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"475\" height=\"352\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/bU2zoQ8gV-s\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe> <\/center><br \/>\n.<\/p>\n<p>Roughly speaking, a genre is the type of story told &#8212; the people and the setting &#8212; while a medium is the form it&#8217;s told in.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.prospectmagazine.co.uk\/2011\/10\/odes-to-joy\/\">David Benedict<\/a> asks, &#8220;what makes <em>Singin\u2019 in the Rain<\/em> the masterpiece of so despised a genre?&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What thrillers did for fear musicals did for happiness. But 20th-century culture was all about lionising isolation, fracture and breakdown, so happy endings and happiness itself were all but banished from serious consideration. What place, then, for Kelly\u2019s rain-soaked jubilation or Garland\u2019s pleasure?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I love musicals, and I couldn&#8217;t count how many times I&#8217;ve watched <em>Singin&#8217; in the Rain<\/em>. But Benedict&#8217;s article annoyed me, the same way as someone saying they&#8217;re going to defend comic books (medium) who goes on to just defend superheros (genre). <\/p>\n<p>Musicals aren&#8217;t a genre; they&#8217;re a medium. Benedict isn&#8217;t defending musicals, he&#8217;s just defending a particular genre of musical. That&#8217;s great, that&#8217;s swell, but there&#8217;s other stuff as well.<\/p>\n<p>Musicals didn&#8217;t disappear when the culture was allegedly all about &#8220;isolation, fracture and breakdown&#8221;; there are great musicals with those themes, most famously Stephen Sondheim&#8217;s works (<em>Sweeny Todd, Sunday in the Park With George, Assassins<\/em>, etc). Those musicals aren&#8217;t shots of pure joy to the prefrontal cortex, true, ((Except for &#8220;Have a Little Priest,&#8221; which really is.)) but they have other pleasures.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s as if someone sets out to defend movies, and then talks about the wild chaotic vitality of <em>Duck Soup<\/em>. Well, it&#8217;s true, <em>Duck Soup<\/em> is a great movie, and the Marx Brothers were gods. But that&#8217;s not all movies can be. And fantastic as it is, <em>Singin&#8217; in the Rain<\/em> isn&#8217;t all musicals can be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>. Roughly speaking, a genre is the type of story told &#8212; the people and the setting &#8212; while a medium is the form it&#8217;s told in. David Benedict asks, &#8220;what makes Singin\u2019 in the Rain the masterpiece of so &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=14435\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crossposted-on-tada","category-popular-and-unpopular-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14435"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14442,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14435\/revisions\/14442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}