(I thought I’d try to write an academic-sounding header just for fun – how’d I do? Did I use “tropes” even vaguely correctly?)
About a year ago, Dan wrote a post about The Flight of The Conchords, as he deftly put it: “a Tenacious D-meets-The Royal Tenenbaums hipster spoof musical thing about "a two man, digi-folk band from New Zealand as they try to make a name for themselves in their adopted home of New York City," which “is about what you’d expect from such a thing – really funny at times, a bit slow at times, a bit twee, very clever and also, underneath it all, existentially aloof.” While I’m not sure exactly what “existentially aloof” means, I pretty much agree, but with my two thumbs up raised a bit higher than my partner’s. And after watching the whole series, I really miss the hapless duo and hope they make more, soon!
Dan’s post, headered “[FoTC] and their subtly misogynistic tinge and my love/hate relationship with hipster dudes,” touches on several things in conchordance, if you will, with stuff I want to address this week.
For starters, Dan and I see the flip sides of one particular coin. Dan writes of what he sees as the shows misogyny, that:
“the hyper-self aware, hyper-self absorbed persona of the male hipster is, deceptively often, just yet another mask that the modern man has discovered that allows him to avoid being vulnerable to the female world. Flight of the Conchords is a lot of things, and one of those things it seems to be, based on episode one, is a boys’ club.”
While I agree about the hipster persona as often just another version of the traditional, distant man, I give the show much more credit (perhaps too much, as) at least in part, commentary on both men and hipsterism. Today I’’ll stick with the men stuff, Friday I’ll hit the hip.
Our two heroes are two of the many extremes of cliche male heterosexuality: the super-sensitive guy who has to beat the babes off with a stick; and the hopeless horndog who never gets any.
Brett (prounounced “Britt” in that lovely New Zealand twang) is skinny and delicate. Several episodes address his inability/refusal to have sex without first having a real romantic connection with a woman. Jumaine is the opposite, a preening, egomaniacal boor (with a heart of gold, though – or silver, or at least bronze, anyway) trying to act like a rocker dude, whose pathetic lines fall on lovely but repulsed ears time and time again. Conchords mocks hipster- and rocker-male attitudes toward women (and themselves, and groupie women’s toward rocker men, and so very much more ) via said swaggering rockstar and oversensitive wimpy-white-guy-with-guitar.
Also, used in at least two of the boys’ numbers, they use the term “sexist,” (pronounced “sixist” – here, from the hip-hop sendup “Hiphopopotamus vs Rhymenocerous”: “Yeah that’s right, sometimes my lyrics are sexist. But you lovely bitches and hos should know
I’m trying to correct this.") which I don’t know if I’ve ever heard the word in a pop song before, certainly not one sung by a man, and have only heard the subject even broached a handful of times (Gang of Four’s "It’s Her Factory" is the only one that comes to mind right now) in songs by men. You can check out the Conchords’ videos, what I think comprise the finest moments of the show on youtube, duh.
(One of the best things about the Conchords is, beyond great “novelty band” hilarity, just how skillfully-wrought, how catchy the actual tunes – which range from Bowie to Prince to Pet Shop Boys to Rap – are. Check out, especially, “Fou Da Fa Fa,” “Business Time,” currently a minor radio hit around these parts, and “Inner City Pressure,” just to get started.)
In my next post, I want to address the “hipster” part of Dan’s post via exploring my own degree of “cool” which has lately been commented on, twice, and how weird that feels. I also want to talk about a recent insult I received and how that felt, too. I need to tell you about my feelings, dear readers, I do.
Getting on the Conchords bandwagon at this point would seem to position me more as a wannabe, a late-joining yuppie, learning and raving about “that great new show!” about a year in, at the point when cognoscenti are all “Whatevs” and shit. But I like to think there’s a “hip” scale akin to the one in the gym that tells me I don’t have to get my heart rate as high at my advanced age. That is, at 43, picking up on FoTC at all is pretty darn cool. Right? Stay tuned.
