Things to take away from Prozac Nation spokeswoman-turned-attorney Elizabeth Wurtzel’s polemic “The Internet Is Ruining America’s Movies And Music,” which, despite being little more than 1,127 semi-coherent words that basically restate the title’s thesis over and over again, somehow made its way to being published in The Wall Street Journal last week:
1. Someone out there still cares about folkie Pete Yorn, although apparently not enough to mention him anywhere beyond the lede of the piece. (To be fair to Wurtzel, though, I had no idea that he’d actually cracked the Billboard 200’s top 20 back in the day.)
2. Wurtzel is bummed out that instead of rock stars who blazed trails of nuttiness across the sky, “all we’ve got left is Britney Spears.” Curious, given that Ms. Spears’ recent travails would have made her a hell of an addition to the 10th-anniversary edition of Wurtzel’s ode to crazy ladies Bitch. (Guess that’s not happening, oops!)
3. Wurtzel’s penchant for cliches hasn’t ebbed a bit, as she trots out the old “You can’t download a [blank]” saw, this time about painting and sculpture, which has somehow transcended the Internet because art receipts in November 2007 were higher than those in November 2006. Even though one could argue that the economy is in a much worse place now. And that maybe more current numbers should be used to support one’s facts.
4. So yes, the aforementioned three facts, plus references to the “new Bruce Springsteen album” and a reference to another study from November of ‘07, are more than enough to make the casual reader wonder just how long Wurtzel has been shopping this piece around, and why on Earth the WSJ decided to run with this not-very-groundbreaking polemic now. It’s a toss-up between August being a slower-than-molasses news month or this piece taking that long to edit just to get it to a place of relative coherence.
Wurtzel’s article is an opinion piece, not hard journalism, and as such I don’t really have a problem with it. I don’t agree with everything she says here–people do still listen to albums, and downloading, IMO, is far from bein’ the devil’s work–but her points are fairly well articulated, and she makes some accurate observations (like the thing about new Mac products making more of a splash than new albums.)
Not sure what’s so awful about the op-ed itself, other than that it was written by Wurtzel, whose previous work was admittedly obnoxious.
“It’s a toss-up between August being a slower-than-molasses news month or this piece taking that long to edit just to get it to a place of relative coherence.”
My vote is all of the above, plus Wurtzel having a friend in editorial.
Also, seriously? The offhanded argument that America sucks at the fine arts? That because Pollack was no Picasso (and nobody else was Picasso, about which we should be very very relieved), we should focus all of our energies on movies and music? I just… there are no words.
@breedavies: Hear, hear!!
“…the days when lines formed around the block at New York’s Ziegfeld Theater because the latest installment of Star Wars had opened…”
Two things wrong with this assertion: a.) the latest Star Wars installments are not even George Lucas’s idea of worthwhile American popular culture, and b.) The Dark Knight.
I like her false nostalgia for the 60s the best. She talks about running out to buy Beatles records when they were broken up before she was even in kindergarden and she talks wistfully about Dylan changing everyone’s perspective when he only put out like two notable records in her lifetime. I really wish that boomer hagiography would quit trickling up the chain like this. I mean, fuck, I hope that kids born in 2005 aren’t someday writing about “Fifty Cent boldly ushering in post-feminism” or “Disturbed feeding the war hungry id of a nation.”
Someone out there still cares about folkie Pete Yorn
It’s almost tender. Like someone pointing to their dead Weeble from 1975.
Good to know Wurtzel is still sucking at life, and seriously, what was the Wall Street Journal thinking? I can’t believe I wasted a good week of subway-riding reading that pile of crap, Prozac Nation, when I could have been reading Cosmo. After years and years of hype, I decided to take a stab at her book…which read like a wannabe Sassy Magazine reject piece. The plight of the privileged white girl has NEVER been interesting to anyone, even people like me, privileged white girls. I want to pack teenage girls a lunch of Live Through This and a copy of Henry Rollins’ Get in the Van and tell them that there is more to life than drama queen drug overdoses and the elitist college experience.
Elizabeth Wurtzel SUCKS.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but a lot of people still care about Pete Yorn. A lot more than car about your gibberish filled rants. Pete also had a number 8 video on VH1 this year. Maybe you should brush up on your music before you comment on it.