Cast of “Glee” singing “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey

If you’re on this site, you probably like “Glee.” I’m just guessing. It’s that kind of show. It’s a kind of hybrid of irony and sincerity, the sort that acknowledges its cheesy fundamentals while not only fully exploiting them, but embracing them as well. Post post ironic, maybe?

There’s probably a good word for it, something coined in the first half of the 18th century when the same thing happened somewhere, probably.

It’s also likely you like it because it’s got a gay guy, a nice jock, an Asian girl, two Jews—one stereotypical (a way of saying there’s nothing wrong with that), one really not (unless you count the Israeli military stereotype, which US television mostly does not)—a black girl, fat and proud, and a nerd in a wheelchair. If the characters weren’t so filled out, with ample storyline given to all, they would seem a lot more like what they are: an affirmative action checklist.

But what gets me about it is a thing that is so culturally invisible, it never has nor likely ever will make it on to one of those lists.

Look at that still once again. Look at our Asian girl. She’s not just Asian. She’s got a tummy.

The tummy got some play in “Pulp Fiction,” but only from a waif who thought she might like it, and even then, only one like Madonna in her “Lucky Star” phase. That is, more an absence of obvious abs than the presence of a tummy.

Madonna, “Lucky Star” (1984)

But look at Jenna Ushkowitz (yup, that’s her real name). That’s a tummy. We’ve become fine—maybe we always were fine—with fat and black. And Roseanne and John Goodman made fat and trashy visible in a way that didn’t actually make fun of the fat. But we’re usually fine with extremes in visual culture. Ushkowitz’s tummy isn’t extreme. It’s the tummy of someone who either doesn’t care too much about the world of flat, or simply eats what she likes and doesn’t pay for it with the sort of exercise whose main goal is expiation.

This is a normal person’s tummy, a normal girl’s tummy. And it’s on TV. And it’s in a tight tank top. I don’t foresee banners and documentaries. But I am more impressed with this than I am with “Dancing With Myself” (which I loved).

Kevin McHale of “Glee” singing “Dancin’ with Myself” by Billy Idol

I think this is a breakthrough, this new form of reality TV. Bring on the next tummy.

- Bert Archer

Look at this.

Madonna, “Like a Virgin” (Blonde Ambition Tour, 1990)

And this.

Britney Spears, Madonna, Christina Aquilera, Missy Elliot, “2003 VMA Awards“

And tell me why this performance by Adam Lambert at the American Music Awards is getting him cancelled from ABC shows left and right:

Adam Lambert, 22 November, 2009 (AMA Awards)

I’d like to think there’s something raunchier about what Lambert did, but I can’t find anything. The only difference I can see is that not only was the object of his kissing and thrusting the same sex, but that same sex was male. There aren’t many realms in which men face greater curtailment of their freedom of expression than women, but apparently, high-profile same-sexiness is one of them.

ABC cancelled Lambert’s appearance on “Good Morning America,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” and their “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” show.

ABC is, of course, owned by Disney.

I went to “http://abc.go.com/site/contact-us” and wrote this:

“You did not ban Madonna after performances feigning masturbation and intercourse, or Britney Spears for playing a pornographic schoolgirl, or Michael Jackson for repeatedly grabbing his crotch and thrusting his pelvis, but you continue to cancel Lambert’s appearances on your network.

If the only difference is that his actions imply homo rather than heterosexuality, please consider what sort of company, historical and current, this puts you in. Is that where ABC wants to be?”

Feel free to do likewise.

- Bert Archer

“Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” (1976-77)

This is a long clip, so I won’t keep you. But watch it all, because like Bill Viola’s “The Greeting” (not available online at its full ten-minute length, which is the whole point) or minimalist film-makers like Andy Warhol (”Blow Job” or “Haircut #2“) or late Derek Jarman (”Blue,” say), writers Jerry Adelman, Daniel Gregory Browne and Ann Marcus make the extent of this scene, in the last episode of the “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” series’ first season in 1976, as important as its content. The acting by the experts is a little off, or I would think it was if I didn’t also think that this probably unintentional shortcoming adds to the nightmarish quality of the scene.

This show ran for 325 episodes, mostly five nights a week, I think. That’s the same number of episodes a regular network show would make in a 14-year run. The general comedically poignant approach to the series – an oblique take on the soap opera – will seem familiar to anyone who’s read Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City” series. Except the executive producer, Norman Lear, and that team of writers took this as seriously as similar teams took Lear’s “All in the Family:” well balanced, tightly scripted with a laser focus on very specific, very timely, very sensitive issues.

You can see how different it could have been by watching any given episode of “Soap,” written and produced by another Lear collaborator, Susan Harris, who started with a couple of the early episodes of “All in the Family,” went on to write the abortion episode for “Maude”, before spinning off into Lear-light land with “Soap” and, ultimately, “The Golden Girls.”

But enough of that. Watch the clip, and try to come up with another TV series performance that can match this one. Once you’ve failed at that, try to think of another show that could have accommodated a scene like this. Once you’ve failed again, devote a moment or two to thinking about the sort of mostly untapped potential serial television still has after all these millions of hours.

- Bert Archer

Here is the quintessential song for the apparently un-nameable period between 2000 and 2010. It came out early – 2004 – and though there were harbingers, most noticeably Britney Spears and Avril Lavigne, there’s really no competition.

Kelly Clarkson, “Since U Been Gone“

This decade was one of extreme tumult for the music industry. After Nirvana’s unexpected re-ordering of the North American pop universe, the industry itself was at sea for years, with no idea of what would work, throwing spaghetti against walls and finding, more often than not, that their audiences didn’t have a clue what they were trying to do. Alt and the mainstream can only co-exist in one package for so long, as both Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl prove.

Capitalism does not like uncertainty for the most part; even venture capitalists need solid market analysis before they lay down their bucks. So what we saw towards the end of the last decade and the beginning of this one was a business in conservative panic, responding not just to improperly understood consumer trends, but to the internet and downloading and the not so slow death of material media.

They wanted sure things, as much as was possible anyway; something they could have a good deal of control over in a world of which they controlled dwindlingly small amounts. And they had a precedent: Motown had been brilliant at constructing acts out of nothing – putting songwriters together with stylists and PR people to create that were paid little, made lots, and owed everything to the record company.

But people weren’t credulous in quite the same way as they were forty years ago. They could smell that old-style manufacturing from way back in the balconies. So Avril Lavigne, it was put about, wrote her own stuff. It worked well enough and long enough that she made her bosses loads of money before anyone found out she really, by any reasonable definition of the term “wrote” and “herself,” had not.

Of course we should have known, given the fact that she rose to prominence singing a duet with Céline Dion, that she was not as punk as she and her corporate creators made out. But we did not, since our resistance to faux punk had already been weakened by Green Day. And who doesn’t like sk8er bois?

But if future cows were really going to give some serious long-term milk, revelations of inauthenticity would be a problem. Hiding it is unreasonable in a culture where the entire population is potential cellphone paparazzi.

So the people had to be immunized, given small doses of act-manufacturing in a controlled environment to build up their immunity to it. Simon Cowell proved an excellent musical Edward Jenner.

dajbelshaw, “Edward Jenner: An Overview” (2007)

American Idol has had an enormous impact on this continent’s charts, and on its vocal tendency towards melisma, beginning with its first winner, Kelly Clarkson, and continuing through a remarkable string of chart toppers.

American Idol, “Kelly Clarkson Announced The Winner” (Season 1, 2003)

There have been many hits from many subsequent Idol winners, but none has been as big was “Since U Been Gone,” and of course, it was “Since U Been Gone” that proved this new formula could work. It’s a good song. It even uses some of that low-volume/high-volume toggling that worked so well with Nirvana – and any number of rock bands before them – but which has almost disappeared in the age of Auto-Tune and various other studio software packages.

It’s also a little recherché in the effect its video had, inasmuch as it had any effect at all, which videos mostly no longer do. Go to any club that plays this sort of music and you’ll see everyone dancing to it in precisely the same way as the crowd in the video are dancing to it. It’s not as choreographed as the dances Dick Clark used to introduce to viewers back during the last era of major musical manufacturing, but the principle’s the same. Which is remarkable, and possibly a testament to how pleased we all are to follow where American Idol would lead us.

And in case you had any doubt that this was big package-little song, watch her do it live, poor thing. Still, these are creations meant for iTunes, the live performances meant to bring the audience closer to the media phenom, so they’ll buy merch and download more, rather than to deliver a premium live product. Nothing wrong with that. Except maybe this:

Kelly Clarkson, “Since U Been Gone Acoustic” (2006)

- Bert Archer

Unlike the 70s and 80s, if you asked someone what the quintessential song of the 1960 was and they said something like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” you’d have a hard time arguing with them. You could quibble and say it was “The Times They Are a Changin’,” but you’d have to mount a pretty impressive campaign get most people off that protest, folk song track, even though Motown and British Invasion were going strong during the decade as well.

The 90s are the same, and though the decade is bogged down in a little less aspic than the 60s, there’s not much point in arguing that the quintessential song at least comes from that hybrid of heavy metal, punk, goth and pop developed in the Pacific Northwest, and that, from among the roughly 1989-1993 flood of creepy angry grief that came at us, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is the quintessence of grunge.

Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” (1991)

Grunge was meant for a very specific group of people: disaffected, superior, the sort of educated 20-year-old who thinks his parents are clueless, corporations are evil, and jocks suck because of all their consumerism and stuff. And it would have stayed that way, moving from small club to small club as Greenriver and Soundgarden and The Melvins affirmed their demographic’s temporary sense of themselves.

But then, as always happens with genres that click, and never happens with those that don’t, there came a long a band that not only embodied the ethos, but catered, consciously or un, to a much broader market, in this case with an attractive lead with far too much respect for musicianship and a better way around standard song structure than their peers.

Nirvana, “Live At The Reading Festival” (1992)

This song, and the album it fronted, was arguably the last major musical phenomenon to be fuelled by its video. You remember it, set in a high school gym, the band of outsiders performing for an appreciative crowd of jocks who were belaying their disdain for Kurt and friends until the music stopped, while Kurt and friends abused them in song without their knowing or, more likely, caring. Mutual contempt you could dance to. Perfect. You could even ride the fence, sympathize with the decreasingly underdogged musicians without fully buying into their utter disdain, and still buy the album. Which everyone did, knocking Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous,” and the 80s, off the charts.

Kurt himself embodied the middle ground of this contempt, hating the stupid audiences who didn’t get he was making fun of them, and hating himself for whatever it was he was doing wrong in trying to be alternative and ending up at the front of the mainstream. It’s not ground anyone can hold for long.

Most give in and accept the success, and then end up chasing it when the inevitable wane comes. Kurt didn’t, sealing his band’s short arc, and this song in particular, in the same sort of hyperbaric chamber of purity that’s made Janis Joplin into a retroactive R&B genius, and Jimi Hendrix into an unassailable guitar god.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” made 90s the alt decade. It gave people like David Geffen, and the folks at A&M and elsewhere the idea that weird anti-commercial stuff might sell. It gave record-buyers the same idea.

Of course, you can’t be alt and mainstream at the same time, no matter how hard Urban Outfitters might try, and the rest of the decade was spent chasing Kurt’s ghost, alt bands trying to reproduce the suceess, and pop bands trying to score a little alt cred.

The only ones who managed to get a real bite in were the rappers who despite their different aims, techniques and worldview, were Kurt’s only true beneficiaries.

When everyone else realized the magic wasn’t coming back, alt imploded into the most prolonged and unabashedly commercial music scene the industry had ever seen, just before it imploded itself into the singularity of the download.

- Bert Archer

The criteria for a decade’s quintessential song are specific. The song must be by a band whose only real success came in the decade in question and whose reputation has not grown in the decades since. A song by U2 is a U2 song, not an 80s song. The song itself must have been popular during that same decade, and of a style that would not have made sense or been popular in any previous decade.

The song and the band must also be, in several ways, representative or symptomatic of the era that bore them, musically or culturally. The song, though not necessarily the band, must also be good. To say “Hey Jude” is the quintessential song of the 60s is to misunderstand the notion entirely.

So picking a decade’s song takes some understanding of the decade, some sympathy for it, some empathy with it. You have to have the sort of sensibility that can tell you that despite all the signs pointing in so many other, cooler directions, the quintessential song of the 1980s is “Karma Chameleon.” You must also realize that the video is a big part of why that is true.

Culture Club, “Karma Chameleon” (1984)

Most of the rest of Culture Club’s songs are, aside from the style in which they were delivered, standard love songs of one sort or another. But “Karma Chameleon” glittered. It’s the song Culture Club was waiting for, the video they were collectively born to make; it is the band’s apotheosis.

It also makes very little sense. What is desert loving and how might it be reflected in one’s eyes? No matter, because unlike the most popular songs of the decade both before and after it, the significant hits of the 80s mostly had fairly oblique relationships to meaning, you know, qua meaning.

There’s a video somewhere, which I cannot find and the friendly people at the American National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences cannot for legal reasons provide, of Boy George accepting the Best New Artist Grammy in 1983. “Thank you America,” I believe he said. “You have class, you have style, and you know a good drag queen when you see one.”

This was 1983 you’ll recall. AIDS was first noticed in June, two years earlier. People were still calling it GRID as Boy George took the stage, not only gay but a drag queen, not only a drag queen but a drag queen with dreds, not only a drag queen with dreds but a drag queen with dreds who was over 6 feet tall and about half as broad.

This was the moment British drag stopped being an old-boy joke, a tradition David Bowie had tapped into (rather unsubversively, all things considered), and became something a good deal more incriminating.

“Boy George Lookalike Competition, Sydney” (1984)

This was also to become one of only two iconic looks the decade threw up, the other being Madonna and Cyndi Lauper’s junk-store layering. Boy George was what all those New Romantics like the Rhodes brothers were playing at. His makeup and outfits were signifiers, not teases. And listen to their discography — is there a feminine pronoun in there anywhere?

Though the gays themselves probably had more fun the decade before, the 80s were gayer. It was the decade when gay’s shit hit the fan, when anal sex and swallowing semen made it to the covers of Maclean’s and Time, Rock Hudson and Freddie Mercury finally came out (albeit at the last possible moment) and Elizabeth Taylor coined the phrase “Some of my best friends are gay” and moved her iffy nation away from internment camps and towards AmFAR.

Old violet eyes may have won her homos sympathy, but George won a generation’s teeny-pop admiration. “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” was a shock, “Church of the Poison Mind” was a come-on, but “Karma Chameleon” was the act itself.

Look at him there, on the Mississippi and perhaps even in Mississippi, in 1870, entertaining the crowds while Reagan and Thatcher fleece them.

No? Look at him there, doing those feline, serpentine moves of his, wearing a rainbow-coloured necklace made of pom-poms, embodying the connection between the outsider sexuality of African-Americans of the Old South with his own, reaching back into the roots of rock to serve himself up as its natural evolution.

No? OK, you’re probably right, it’s as meaningless as the lyrics. But really, look at him there, giving a performance that would have been utterly unthinkable before the very moment you saw it for the first time in 1984, sounding like no one else, looking like no one else (unless you believe Pete Burns).

BBC, “Pete Burns Interview”

No one would have put up with Boy George in 1976 (as Peter Burns can tell you), and everyone would have laughed in 1995. But in 1984, it went to No. 1 in 16 countries, Canada, the US and the UK included. The singles that preceded it on the Canadian, UK and US charts, Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom,” “Red Red Wine” by UB40 and “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes, respectively, would have, and in Schilling and UB40’s case did, fit quite nicely previous decades, but Karma Chameleon is pure 80s, and shines all the brighter for it.

- Bert Archer

Boston, “More Than a Feeling” (1976)

It started as a conversational gambit at a party where I know all but one or two guests in only the vaguest ways, and most not at all. What’s the quintessential 70s song? I asked. Not the best song, not the biggest song, but the song that is most fully of the decade, but at the same time does not transcend it.

It turned into a 45-minute enthusiasm, drawing several more people in, expanded into three more decades, meandered into why there was no such things as a quintessential 60s song, and all in all passed the time quite pleasantly between cake (it was somebody’s fiancée’s birthday) and general dissolution. But then, for some reason, it started creeping in to my thoughts as I was writing other things, thinking about other things, for the entirety of the next week, taking me to YouTube to bone up on the performances, to Wikipedia for background, and eventually leaking into a Facebook status update, pulling more people into the conversation.

As it ended up, I didn’t change my mind from what we had decided at the party, but my reasons deepened, and I came to believe that we had nailed it, a conclusion for the ages, four songs for the time capsule or space-shot or whatever it is we decide to preserve our best bits in.

Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” was the song that got that conversation started, and the one that convinced me you could say a song and a decade are consanguineous.

The 70s gave world music many things — Bowie being at least three of them — but two things stand out: stadium rock and rock ballads. There were concerts in stadiums before, but the music was still being written, and even played, to enjoy on your HiFi in the rumpus room, or possibly at a school dance. The 70s icons were teenagers in the 60s and couldn’t have helped but notice how oddly small even The Beatles looked when they played “Twist and Shout” at Shea.

So by the time they took the stage, everything got bigger: the riffs, the attacks, the speakers, the solos and the hair. The hair has gone up and down, in and out since the 70s — I imagine it in time lapse as a pleasant throb — but the rest has stayed put. Everyone from U2 to the Three Tenors to Taylor Swift uses what they learned from the 70s.

The great power bands of the era knew, or at least sensed, that all the drang and sturm could end up alienating the crowds, the bands in danger drifting away on some empyrean mist of heroic metaphor, cranked amps and blowjobs. The Who kept it real with Beatles-esque humour (”Pictures of Lilly,” “Boris the Spider”), Queen, in addition to humour (pretty much everything) and camp (ditto), used the 50s (”Crazy Little Thing Called Love”) to keep themselves from getting too big for their leather britches.

Everyone else used ballads, a practice that did yeoman’s duty for The Stones (”Angie,” “Ruby Tuesday,” “Wild Horses”) through Nazareth (”Love Hurts”), Guns ‘n’ Roses (”November Rain”), Notorious B.I.G. (”Playa Hater”) and Sean Combs (Sauce Money’s “I’ll Be Missing You”). For some, like Bon Jovi and poor Aerosmith, it became the default once their pituitaries finally wound down – but don’t hold that against the form itself.

Boston was not a great power band. They weren’t a great band at all, in fact. They were a delivery system for a single eruption of genius from the idiosyncratic mind of Polaroid engineer Tom Scholz, who spent five years tinkering with the song, ultimately creating new hardware to achieve the effects he wanted.

The result was a single track with everything that made 70s rock 70s rock, and nothing else. Its power comes from the near constant micro and macro tension and release, from the structure of the opening strums to the drift from “drift away” to the major riff. The verses are D-major (I’m told) mini-ballads that morph into arena-rocking G-major (see previous parentheses) bass drives. Despite all that time in Scholz’s basement, there’s nothing in the song that you can’t reproduce in your own mouth.

But more than all that, “More Than a Feeling” is earnest. While other bands, aware of their own pretensions and a little embarrassed by them (or by the possibility of being called out on them), stuck pins in their balloons almost as soon as they got them inflated (The Stones are a notable exception), Scholz was unabashedly straightforward in what is essentially his statement of rock’s seriousness, emotional heft and general grandeur. It’s the stuff everyone from Queen to Spinal Tap and in their own cute, unconscious, goateed way, Nickleback have been making fun of ever since.

Like all great things, it contains at least one contradiction: It is one of the epitomes of stadium rock, yet, having achieved its best effects through careful studio engineering, it loses something when played live, as you can see in this second video of a 1979 performance.

Boston, “Giant’s Stadium” (1979)

And the final test of its staying power? Watch it covered by the cast of “Scrubs.” It rocks us still.

Scrubs, “My Half-Acre” (2006)

- Bert Archer