Episode 124: Hip-Hop, Holodecks And Losing Well

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• Comedian Chris Gethard Urges Us To Lose Well

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  Comedian Chris Gethard has a history of putting his own spin on stand-up comedy.

  He once staged a tournament where two comedians would have five minutes to be funnier than the other one. The winner advanced and the loser was shot with a paintball gun.

  Gethard used to think his ideas were too weird. But not anymore. He’s written a memoir — called “Lose Well” — in which he encourages us to embrace failure.

  Gethard told WPR’s “BETA” that the best advice he ever got was from the therapist he started seeing in 2007. He was 26 years old and he’d been doing comedy for seven years.

  “And she made it really clear that you’ve got to give yourself no other option at some point,” Gethard said. “You either go all in or you don’t, but you don’t just sit on the fence forever. She said cut off every source of income you have that’s not the type of thing you would want to do, whether that’s acting or performing or writing comedy. And I explained to her that it was a very bad idea because I paid my rent through all my freelance gigs. And she said ‘Well, you can pay your rent forever and sit here panicking or you can go all in.’”

  “And she made something very clear, which has proven true to me in my life, which was: if you take this big swing and it doesn’t work out, you’re gonna be a lot happier than you are sitting in the middle ground.”

  So if Gethard is now able to recognize the success in his professional life, why is he promoting failure instead?

  “I think especially as Americans, we are raised to have this idea of you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you go make things happen,” Gethard explained. “And I think there’s some real nobility to that. I think there’s some real good advice in that. But I also think that it makes this issue very binary, very black and white, very much like this idea of you win or you lose and that’s that.

  “And I think that when you commit to the idea that you might fail, and, in fact that when you do fail, that that’s OK, you start to find a middle ground. And the middle ground has so many more layers to it than that, it’s got such a broader spectrum of possibility than that. And what I’ve seen over and over again, in my own life and in people around me who work in creative fields, non-creative fields, is that when you embrace the idea that you might fail, you very often get to happiness quicker.”

  In “Lose Well,” Gethard writes that when he stopped chasing success, he let the inner truth of his loser nature rise to the surface.

  “A lot of that for me comes through a habit I think many of us fall into, which is comparing yourself to your peers,” Gethard said. “So I was coming up in the New York comedy scene in an era when it was really hot. The theater I was working at, it was called the Upright Citizens Brigade. My two best friends in my improv group at the time were Bobby Moynihan, who got cast on ‘SNL,’ and Zach Woods, who got cast on ‘The Office.’ So I would see other people’s success and that made me feel like a real loser.

  “And at a certain point, I had to take a step back and realize that that was all ego. And I had to embrace what was good about me and if what was good about me was perhaps a little less mainstream or a little less palatable to a casting director, I had to find ways to embrace that and make those assets and not deficits,” he added.

  “And when I just kind of decided not to care about relative success or other people’s definition of success, I started to realize that maybe at the end of the day I have struck out, it really allowed me to know myself better. It allowed my audiences to know me a little bit better. My work became a lot more vulnerable, a lot more open and honest. And all of that came with just realizing, man, I’m the loser of my gang, I’m the one who missed.”

  Gethard used to worry that his ideas were too weird and that they were preventing him from having a successful career. It was a conversation with Anthony King, the artistic director of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre that helped Gethard realize he was mistaken.

  “He’s (King) the one who said to me, ‘You gotta make a show that’s just this stuff. This is what everybody loves from you. Why aren’t you just embracing it?’ And he forced me to name it ‘The Chris Gethard Show‘ which proved to be a huge benefit to my career, the idea that I branded my name on this idea of this aggressive New York weirdness comedy. And it took me way too long and I was pretty obtuse. And there were many times when I could have embraced who I was and I didn’t,” Gethard said.

  “With that show (‘The Chris Gethard Show’), every episode was weirder than the last. It kind of became this community-driven attempt to top ourselves. There was one time when a random studio audience member came on camera when we were still on public access and started beating me with a flog. That was not a great moment in my life. I had kickboxers beat me up, I’ve had dominatrices beat me up. I’ve been doused in almost every substance. We once did a bit called ‘The Human Crane’ where my effort was to make myself the claw on a big human-sized version of the claw machine game from the arcade.”

  For the past decade, Gethard has employed a mantra which he describes as “goofy, and a little embarrassing.” It’s a two-word phrase that he says to himself when he’s writing, strategizing or thinking big: Funny plus.

  “Funny plus. That’s become a very informative thing to me,” he said. “That’s just the idea that you should at the end of the day seek to raise the bar, not just meet it. When you start out at something, you’re bad at it. You want to just get good at it. So you look around at the people who are good at it and you go, ‘I want to be as good as they are.’ And I would say, ‘No, try to be better than they are.’ And I’d argue the way to do that is to add something to it.”

  So how has this “funny plus” concept influenced Gethard’s podcast, “Beautiful/Anonymous: Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People“?

  “The whole show is I just take a phone call and I talk to someone for an hour. They never tell me their name, I’m not allowed to hang up. It’s as simple as that. And I thought it was going to be kind of an extension of my TV show where people would be prank calling me,” he said. “It instead became a thing where people tell me their dark secrets, people tell me their stresses. And I realized it’s funny, plus it’s very empathetic.”

• 'Hip-Hop Evolution' Features Rap Music's Architects And Legends

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  As host of the Peabody Award-winning Netflix documentary series, “Hip-Hop Evolution,” Shad Kabango has had conversations with the architects, innovators, luminaries and legends of hip-hop.

  An award-winning emcee himself, he confesses to WPR’s “BETA” that he’s a bit star-struck when sitting down to interview his hip-hop idols.

  “But, the cool thing is, I don’t feel like I have to hide my inner fanboy, because they’re human beings too and they’re also amazed and surprised and delighted to do such special things,” he said.

  The Birth Of Hip-Hop

  That human element is front and center as Shad explores the evolution of the uniquely American genre and traces its timeline all the way back to August 1973. A teenage Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell threw a party for his sister in their apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in the Bronx, which is considered hip-hop’s “Big Bang” moment.

  “He was playing the sections of records that they called ‘breaks;’ a breakdown of drums and bass, some funky kind of percussion,” Shad said.

  The innovation came from Herc having two copies of the records he played. He’d pick the needle up and place it back at the beginning of the “break” on one record as the other continued to play, creating a repeating loop of music Herc called the “merry-go-round.”

  The records were funk, soul and reggae, providing an alternative to the dominance of disco. As Shad explained, “You could call James Brown really a godfather of hip-hop, because his break beats are so fundamental, foundational to the music.”

  Herc is part of an accepted trinity of early DJs credited with the birth of hip-hop, which also includes Afrika Bambaataa, who’s credited with “bringing this sort of ethos of hip-hop being about unity, knowledge and empowerment,” Shad said.

  Then there’s Grandmaster Flash, who Shad describes as “The real technical innovator, because what he did, was he made that whole looping thing with the break beats super smooth.”

  In the documentary, Grandmaster Flash said, “Most DJs concentrated their efforts on the tone arm. It’d be totally sloppy, off beat. I knew there has to be a better way, and after trying many different things, I placed my fingers on the vinyl. I let it go … stopped it. Let it go … stop it. I said to myself, ‘I have absolute control of the record.’”

  Rapper’s Delight

  In the early days of hip-hop, it was all about the DJ. The person with the microphone — the emcee — was just there to hype up the crowd. That soon evolved into couplets and short rhymes, expanding in to crews of multiple emcees with increasingly elaborate routines. But hip-hop was still considered spontaneous and ephemeral — to be experienced in the moment.

  “Hip-hop at that time was a spontaneous thing,” Shad said. “A lot of the people at the forefront at that time in the Bronx and in Harlem; they didn’t really imagine this being something you could capture on record.”

  That all changed in 1979 when producer Sylvia Robinson gathered three kids from New Jersey in a studio to rhyme over the groove from Chic’s “Good Times.” The result was “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang, and it exposed the world outside New York City to hip-hop, selling millions of copies.

  But the members of The Sugarhill Gang stole many of the song’s lyrics from well-known New York emcees, who’s parties they had attended. Shad reveals that Grandmaster Caz, who’s considered one of the greatest emcees ever, wrote more than a third of the song.

  “I mean, you can even hear the name ‘Casanova’ spelled out,” Shad said. “I mean, that’s Caz.”

  So, what did New York emcees think of the track?

  “They hated it,” said Shad. “They really, really hated it.”

  In the documentary, Caz himself sounds off about “Rapper’s Delight.”

  “I mean, what are they doing to our art form, you know what I mean?” Caz said. “It’s like, this is the first introduction that people get to what we do? To what we been doing for like seven years?”

  The Message

  The hip-hop of the 1970s was party music. However, that perception began to shift in 1982 with the release of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s “The Message.”

  “‘The Message’ spoke to what was going on in the community in a really frank and poetic way,” Shad said.

  With legendary Melle Mel lyrics like, “It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under,” and “Don’t push me ‘cuz I’m close to the edge. I’m trying not to lose my head,” hip-hop expanded its pallette.

  “When we think about hip-hop now, we think about it as, you know, like Chuck D said, the CNN of the street. We think about it as music with a message. It absolutely opened up possibilities for hip-hop music,” Shad explained.

  The Golden Age Of Hip-Hop

  As the 1980s progressed, hip-hop entered what many refer to as the “Golden Age” of the genre, producing new sounds and superstars at a staggering pace. Run DMC, who are described in the documentary as “The Beatles of Hip-Hop,” were among those leading the charge.

  “They were the first real hip-hop stars. Firstly, because of the big records that they had, but also because of their style,” Shad said. “They dressed the way people dressed in the streets. They really carried that whole aesthetic.”

  Beyond Run DMC, groups like Eric B. & Rakim, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and Public Enemy, brought new sounds and aesthetics to hip-hop that dramatically expanded the possibilities of the genre.

  Public Enemy burst onto the scene in 1988 with their sophomore album, “It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back,” featuring a ferocious production style, powerfully political lyrics delivered by Chuck D and his big, booming voice and a militaristic stage presence that added up to a group Shad refers to as “a game changer.”

  Hip-Hop Leaves NYC

  Meanwhile, Los Angeles was forming its own identity with the explicit, hardcore “Gangsta Rap” of groups like N.W.A.

  “That was absolutely the product of the realities in Los Angeles of gang life there, and police brutality there,” Shad said. “And it spoke to that stuff with a frankness and with a sonic heft that people hadn’t heard before.”

  In Miami, the music adopted a bass-heavy dance club feel with groups like 2 Live Crew.

  Artists in the south like The Geto Boys featured a southern drawl and elements of soul and gospel that hadn’t been heard before.

  In Oakland, Digital Underground were acolytes of the slick 70’s funk of Parliament Funkadelic, and Paris displayed a social consciousness rooted in the city’s Black Panther tradition.

  The Women Of Hip-Hop

  Artists like Salt-N-Peppa, Queen Latifah and MC Lyte were noticeably absent from the first season of “Hip-Hop Evolution,” and the series has received criticism for not featuring the contributions of women.

  Shad agrees.

  “Not that we didn’t try, but we weren’t able to land some interviews with some of the major women that were there. That was huge failure of the first season,” Shad said. “Women have been around since the beginning of hip-hop in the earliest crews and that should have been represented in season one, and it’s represented a bit more in season two.”

  The two seasons of “Hip-Hop Evolution” are now streaming on Netflix.

• What 'Groundhog Day' And A Daffy Duck Cartoon Can Teach Us About Digital Storytelling

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  In 1997, Janet Murray published a book called “Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace.” In this influential book, Murray explores how the computer is reshaping the stories we live by. Twenty years later, she updated the book. She said that the introduction to the new edition could have simply said, “I was right.”

  Murray has many ideas about how digital technology can be applied to a variety of areas to create compelling digital narratives, including journalism.

  “If we’re thinking about journalism for instance, I like the work very much of Nonny de la Peña who reproduces actual events in a very complex technological way,” Murray told WPR’s “BETA.” “It doesn’t seem real, it obviously is a computer-generated set of characters. But it uses real audio and it places you in this very privileged witness position. And the effect of being in that witness position is a deeper, more intimate understanding in some way of this particular event.

  “And the other thing that she’s very good at, which a lot of the people who are experimenting with journalism are not so good at, is that she takes an event that has narrative compression to it, that has dramatic compression, she takes an understandable dramatic moment, she doesn’t just try to stick a camera in an exotic place and assume that you will learn something just by spinning around and looking at it. She picks a particular politically significant and dramatically moving moment, just like you would if you were writing a feature story. But then she puts you in the middle of it.”

  Murray taught the first-ever interactive narrative course when she was at MIT in the early 1990s and now she’s teaching interactive narrative at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

  One of the films that she has taught regularly is the 1993 Bill Murray comedy, “Groundhog Day.”

  “Because ‘Groundhog Day’ takes the same situation and repeats it but it is really well-designed to make the different versions comment upon each other and to be parallel,” Murray said. “So we never lose our place in that day, we always know where we are in that day, and we never get bored that we’re seeing the same thing happen. It’s really a masterful example that we are just learning how to do that with interactive storytelling where we can segment the story that well and then juxtapose contrasting variants that pay off for seeing all of them rather than just one of them.”

  Another piece of analog media that Murray introduces to her students every year since she started teaching is the 1953 Daffy Duck cartoon, “Duck Amuck,” which was directed by the legendary animator Chuck Jones.

  This groundbreaking cartoon has the same anarchic, fourth-wall-busting quality of many of Charlie Kaufman’s mind-bending screenplays and films. As Murray said, “‘Duck Amuck’ is the same meta frame of mind exactly.”

  “It offers variants on a situation that shows you how far you get in dramatic expectations just by genres,” Murray explained. “So Daffy is in an animation where the animator is constantly erasing parts of the frame or substituting other backgrounds or other elements, formulaic elements, for the ones that Daffy has started to act with. So he’s a pirate and he’s a cowboy. And it shows you just how much you get from these props in terms of genre. But then as you get to the punchline, which is more and more gets erased, and so the very structure of animation is called into question, with the frames themselves. And you realize that it’s Bugs Bunny who is playing this prank on Daffy, it asks you to think about well, when do you lose belief that Daffy is actually there? And in fact, it’s so skilfully done that you never lose belief that Daffy is there, no matter what is erased. And because we have such a long history with Daffy Duck that his presence once established, it’s not erasable by calling attention to the medium.”

  Murray said one way to understand the new digital narrative environment is through the metaphor of the kaleidoscope. She references an observation made by media visionary Marshall McLuhan that connects with this idea.

  “He talked about the mosaic. So McLuhan called attention to something that is transparent to us now, which is the cognitive structure we needed in order to take for granted a newspaper,” she said. “So a newspaper is a mosaic as he points out. And, of course, it’s a mosaic that has headlines and ledes and bylines and captions to pictures. It has all of these conventions that allow us to look at the front page and understand what’s the most important story and what are the lesser important stories and just what degree of importance it has by the size of the headline.

  “It’s particularly relevant when you think about how news has moved to the digital sphere. How we had to reinvent those conventions very painfully over time. So that now we can look at the home page of a newspaper, if we go to the home page, and see the same kinds of information.”

  “So the question is how does a medium deal with complexity, how does it assimilate a lot of different pieces that don’t then confuse us but allow us to become more conversant about the world, that make us more cognitively complex? So we get smarter as the media gets more developed. And my idea of what we need is similar to that mosaic of the newspaper that McLuhan points out is a sense of a kaleidoscopic design frame for digital storytelling.”

  Could Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 psychological thriller, “Rashomon,” serve as an old-school example of Murray’s kaleidoscopic storytelling? After all, it does involve a story told by four characters recounting very different versions about the account of a samurai’s murder and the rape of his wife.

  “Yes. But the thing about ‘Rashomon’ is that the pieces are not as parallel as one might like,” Murray said. “And the telling is not as compressed as one might like in an interactive form. So if you compare that to ‘Groundhog Day,’ very different aesthetics in many ways, the storytelling has a different pace to it. And I think that in order for people to move between complicated stories, then you’d have to find something that has a pace somewhere in between ‘Groundhog Day’ and ‘Rashomon,’ you know where the differences have that kind of moral physics of ‘Rashomon.’ It’s really important to see how the robber tells it versus how the woman tells it versus how the witness tells it. But you can move among those different pieces more easily.”