Filter Machine Glitch
Introducing a new recurring feature: 'Tracks on Teevee'
Welcome to the first installment of TRACKS ON TEEVEE, a new Tracks on Tracks series where we’ll be looking closely at special moments of song in movies, on TV shows, and across the vast video expanses of the World Wide Web. TRACKS ON TEEVEE is here to share these moments and ask what makes them tick.
These essays will generally be available in full only to paid subscribers, as a token of my appreciation. Of course, I’m hoping that this incentive lures a few more of you to open your wallets. Paid subscriptions are what buys me time to work on the site. In addition to bonus articles like this one, paid subscribers get access to TRACKS ON TAP, a playlist (available for Apple Music and Spotify) that features almost every song ever mentioned in a Tracks essay. They also get the knowledge that they’re directly supporting the existence of writing they enjoy.
And now, without further ado …
Filter Machine Glitch
Sometimes art is the axe slicing the plastic smile off a TV host’s face.
“Meet a book-loving, kind, angry, acoustic guitarist,” says the voice-over. “Real talented but not yet a household name.”
He looks uncomfortable, the way he so often did in public. He’s sitting in an apartment that’s been turned into a TV set, or a TV set that’s been made to look like an apartment, and everyone there — everyone but him — is inhabiting the role of TV person. Professionally cheery, unflappably light. Everything a joke. That’s the job, on TV: to appear on the screen, making yourself into a filter between the viewer and the world, transforming whatever passes through into easy lightness, which makes it easier to watch over breakfast, which makes it easier to sell ads.
The joke here seems to be that the musician is… angry. That he has purple hair, maybe looks like someone’s idea of a punk rocker. Some relevant person has heard his music before – someone in the booking department, at least – but I’m guessing that no one in front of the camera has. And so: jokes. “Feeling a little hostile, are we?” one of them asks the musician. “I’m wondering if there’s potential that any of us might come to physical harm.”
He’s angry, get it? Unlike you and me, viewer. Unlike us. Ha, ha.
And then he starts playing.
The year is 1995. The show is “Breakfast Time”: a short-lived attempt at a cooler, smarter morning show, broadcast first on FX, then later on Fox. The host taking the reins today is Tom Bergeron, later of “Hollywood Squares,” “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” and “Dancing with the Stars.” The purple-haired musician is Elliott Smith, here to sing “Clementine,” which isn’t especially angry. He looks like a punk rocker, sure, but the song isn’t punk, at least not in any remotely standard sense of the word. It’s too pretty.
There’s just acoustic guitar and Smith’s voice, soft as always, giving the impression that he’s whispering in your ear, in danger of running out of breath. The lyrics tell a sad story in second-person: you know a relationship you’re in is probably over, but you don’t know what to do about it; you’re getting kicked out of the bar at closing time; you’re trying to keep “Oh My Darling Clementine” out of your head because it’s just too sad (you are lost and gone forever); you’re failing.
Smith’s performance is great. In a way, an apartment (even a TV-set apartment) is a perfect setting for his music, which often seems tailor-made for headphones — there he is, in your ear — and often felt much too intimate for many live stages. But the real pleasure of this clip comes less from the performance itself than from watching Bergeron and the rest of the “Breakfast Time” crew respond. I never watched the show, so I don’t really know who these people are. All I really know about them is that, when “Clementine” starts playing, they all go extremely quiet, making together a space that can hold that soft voice.
Their faces change, too. The closeups are amazing.
I can’t say for sure what’s going through these peoples’ minds while Smith plays what sounds, while you’re listening to it, like the saddest song in the world. A song about getting down in the snow just because, just to pass the time. Because the bar is closed and you don’t know what else to do. Because you want to feel something. I would happily read a 10,000-word oral history about how the people of “Breakfast Time” remember that morning. To me it looks like they're temporarily forgetting that they’re supposed to be acting a certain way – acting like TV people. They look, in that forgetting, almost childlike. Like they’re remembering their near-total vulnerability in the face of the world’s caprice (that very thing they’re supposed to be helping the TV distract us from). It looks like they regret their jokey manner from just a few minutes prior, and like they’re feeling something like awe at how quickly it’s been evaporated away by Smith’s performance. There’s a goofy puppet sitting just over Smith’s shoulder — a recurring character named Bob, my research tells me — and somehow even he looks chastened.
So often, the machinery of the world takes the gift of art and attempts to repurpose it as “content,” taking whatever the artist was originally up to and using it to fill the space between commercials, to play while we’re shopping for shoes, to keep us scrolling. Even when the art itself is literally unchanged, this decontextualization creates a kind of flattening. I’m fascinated by moments like this one, where you see the machinery glitch and the flattening effort fail, or at least fail to operate as smoothly as usual. Paradoxically, it makes for great TV. Kafka famously called art “the axe that breaks the ice within.” Here, it’s also the axe slicing the plastic smiles off a bunch of TV faces, exposing the humanity underneath. It’s a shock to see it, a shock of the best kind. If they’re human, then you must be too. ✹
Peter I like this new feature and enjoyed listening to Clemintine. Thanks