[Originally from the February 22nd edition of my newsletter.]
Years ago, I stumbled across a comedian named Josh Johnson on YouTube. I had to go back and find the exact video and it turns out to be seven years old, Catfishing the KKK. Since then, he’s been slowly making a name for himself doing standup. Recently, he’s gotten decently big on YouTube for doing sets where he breaks down current events. They are usually anywhere from 20 minutes to a full hour of him explaining various happenings in the world. From Trump to the Drake/Kendrick Beef. It’s incredibly impressive the way he can create such informative and thoughtful sets while also having callbacks to bits earlier on. You can see how well he’s honed his skills between the first video and his more recent ones.
One of the most recent videos covered the Kendrick Lamar Super Bowl Halftime show. If you hadn’t seen the halftime show, it was an entertaining one. Samuel L. Jackson appears as Uncle Sam and the halftime show basically weaves a story of Kendrick “playing the great American game”. And, as Kendrick is wont to do, there were also layers to the imagery and songs. Personally, I thought it was a testament to how thoughtful Kendrick is as an artist but it also served as the perfect culmination of his yearlong campaign to utterly destroy Drake. He simply set out to embarrass his long time rival only to win five Grammys and perform it at the Super Bowl. It just shows that sometimes, it’s better to be a hater.
The most diabolical smile in Super Bowl Halftime History.
Sorry, I got sidetracked.
In his video, Josh spends 50 minutes breaking down a lot of the imagery and parts of what it meant. While there was a whole section that he either skipped or it got cut from the video, he manages to explain what a lot of the imagery meant. As always, it is really thoughtful and incorporated a story from his own life as well as about the venue he was performing at that night. When I say thoughtful, I mean it in the truest sense that he clearly puts a lot of thought into the set and what he wants to talk about. And it always comes across as sincere which is not as abundant in current stand-up comedy spaces.
But if you can’t watch the entire 50 minutes, I think the part that resonated the most is in the final five minutes where he responds to criticism that Kendrick didn’t go hard enough with the incredible line: “Art can save your life but entertainment will never be your salvation”.
In America (and the west in general), people tend to lean on entertainment and escapism pretty heavily. And the harder times get, the harder they lean. It’s expected to entertain us, educate us, inspire us, edify us, absolve us, and ultimately save us. While it can do some of those things, entertainment (and entertainers) can only do so much.
Even now, you see people looking to fictional movies and characters for inspiration on how to handle real events that we’re living through. And I get it, that’s what you’ve leaned on but Star Wars or the MCU might not be the best place to look for a plan of action.
It’s getting to the point where it feels like entertainers and creators are held to a higher standard than our actual authority figures and expected to do things we don’t even ask of our representatives. That’s part of why creators and entertainers are burning out because they have to live up to standards that go beyond what they are making and collapsing under the pressure. Imagine making a comic, a game, or YouTube channel then having several people put you on a pedestal and tell you that your creation is the thing that keeps them going. No pressure, right?
Kendrick Lamar is a great entertainer, but he’s an entertainer. He literally has a song called Savior telling the people that he can’t be their savior. He can’t lead the revolution but he can probably make a dope song for us to march to. And the thing is that he shouldn’t have to be our savior. We have tons of history in book and video form that covers real people who lived through real events that should serve as inspiration. They might not have written an ill sixteen or did anything as exciting as an action film star, but they probably made huge impacts and saved lives in mundane, boring ways.
When I was younger, I was a huge fan of Eminem. His music was almost cathartic for a kid who didn’t get to be angry or voice his displeasure with things. When things got bad in the house, I could pull out my Walkman and pop in The Eminem Show to flood out the yelling. But Eminem didn’t save me. Eminem didn’t stand up to my stepdad. I did that. The music helped me get to a place where I could do that but I had to take action myself.
Art can save your life but entertainment will never be your salvation. You can take inspiration from entertainment and maybe even be motivated by it, but you have to save yourself.