Tynan's Anger

Given the confusion that increasingly occurs between the music business and the music art, especially in an era where the rules have changed/broken down, I figured I'd separate the wheat from the chaff by focusing on the events moments that changed the music industry this decade. I'll focus on the artistic developments later.

Many of these business developments have gone underreported by older music critics who were not raised on the internet. In my case, I saw them all happen in middle school, high school, college, and beyond. Without further ado, here are the biggest music business gamechanger--from a consumer's standpoint--of the past decade.

1. The iTunes Store Opens.


More than Napster, LimeWire, bitTorrent or any other online platform for music distribution, the release of iTunes Store did more than anything to end the CD as the format of choice. What the iTunes store's release in 2004 essentially provided was a completel, widespread, legally-sanctioned way to download music online, the type of thing previously reserved for those with enough cash to burn on eMusic or mp3.com. While a dropdown from the price of CDs, 99 cents/song and $9.99 an album was still overcharging for a distribution method that would have turned a profit with $5. Nonetheless, iTunes essentially gave legitimacy to the same platform that had been used for piracy for the past four years, and the line between legal and illegal downloads had never become so blurred (not coincidentally, Napster failed with an identical business model released around the same time).

2. The iPod integrates with the iTunes store.

There were several botched candidates to replace the Walkman (thousands of minidisc players now occupy landfills nationwide), and both iTunes and the iPod had existed since 2001. But it wasn't until the seamless integration of the iTunes and the iPod (as well as the more affordable iPod mini) took over in 2003 that it became a tour de force of music distribution. At this point, music consumers could purchase, download, and transfer music to a portable music player in seconds, and listen to just about any song they own on the go without lugging around a case of CDs. Apple is the master of integrating several of their products, and the iTunes/iPod integration was the crown jewel of their business strategy.

In sum, the combination of the iPod and the iTunes store made 2003 the most transformative year in the music industry this decade. Tracing any attitude about the music industry now must take into account whether that attitude was developed before and after 2003. I'll never forget a particular moment as a junior in high school in the spring of 2003, when one of my favorite teachers, a just-over 40 Social Studies teacher who played guitar in class and loved to talk about how Gene Simmons used to be an NYC public school teacher too, made some crack about how all the records he owned were wasted on kids with CDs. A classmate of mine responded "CDs? Please, MP3s!" She wasn't joking.

3. The Shins's Wincing The Night Away sells over 100,000 albums and debuts at #2 on Billboard on an independent label in 2007.

In terms of the nexus point of artistic, critical, and industry tastes, there's no more influential moment this decade than this too-often ignored development in music sales that occurred in January 2007. The Shins a band on the previously downtrodden indie label Sub Pop, had seen a rapid spike in popularity following their lauded appearance in the 2004 indie film Garden State. They weren't quite the same indie darlings afterwards, but it didn't matter. Wincing the Night Away, by no means the band's most critically beloved album, reached #2 on the Billboard chart, seemingly out of nowhere. While Sub Pop was 49% owned by Warner Music, the fact that it remained primarily independent meant it didn't have the same corrupt industry standards (unreasonable 5+ album deals, less artistic control, payola, etc.) that had led Napster users in 1999 to see piracy as a method of Civil Disobediance.

Soon afterwards, Arcade Fire, a band made famous by the Internet, also reached #2, with less sales despite much better reviews. Modest Mouse, Spoon, Vampire Weekend, and Animal Collective all followed suit (some on completely independent labels, some on semi-majors with deals similar to Sub Pop). By this point, the raw sales were too disappointing for most majors to realize the significance, and even less so for a generation of music fans trained not to trust the charts. But the #2 chart placement for the Shins meant that they were one of the most popular bands in America, be it from music snobs who remember the Shins before the band was cool, casual music fans with high speed internet connections who downloaded the album by the band from Garden State, or music fans who only had access to music via Walmart or Target. It's understandable how this blurred the indie/mainstream divide. The former was a business term, and the latter was a cultural term. The difference was that those two categories were no longer mutually exclusive.

4. Guitar Hero is released.


I hated Guitar Hero when I was first exposed to it, primarily because my college dorm-mates exclaimed, "it's like playing real music, but it's a video game!" (like my high school classmate, they weren't joking). Raised on video games but with a devotion to music, I was sympathetic but simultaneously felt the same disgust older music fans felt. Than I played the game, and realized that it was as good as the best video games I'd played.

More related to the music industry, however, I should have opened my eyes when my friends with no interest in music suddenly found themselves enjoying songs by Cream, Motorhead, Blue Oyster Cult (Godzilla!), and Joan Jett, and that was just the first iteration of this game. Later versions expanded music tastes, and in most cases, actually improved them. All the while, the music industry realized they could make a boatload with their back catalog, as did bands. Guitar Hero's meathead metal (which I love) soon expanded to Rock Band's mix of just about every rock music style imaginable which involved guitars, drums, and singing (which I love even more). A fan poll on VH1 put "Ace of Spades" in the top 10 of the greatest hard rock songs of all time. I don't think that respect for a critically beloved but oft-forgotten single from a gold album from 1980 would have happened without Guitar Hero.

5. Pitchfork becomes the new Rolling Stone/record store clerk/fanzine, but moreso.

I first discovered Pitchforkmag.com via a Google search for The Darkness as a high school senior in 2003. I don't remember if I searched for "the darkness" or "the darkness review," but I do remember that Pitchfork was the first site I clicked on, and it provided a positive review for an album I already liked, just as I was transitioning from listening to Queen and Linkin Park to the Ramones and the Velvet Underground. Pitchforkmag.com had been on the Internet since the mid-90s, but it didn't take on its tastemaking role until 2003 and 2004—not coincidentally, just as iTunes, Google, and MySpace were all starting to become the primary distribution vehicles for music.

Not only did Pitchfork essentially replace the authority of print magazines dominated by older critics (e.g., 50-year-olds, not 30-year-olds), but its style epitomized the lack of a line between indie and major label pop music that had been brewing for quite some time, applying all albums to a universal scale that equated albums by Spoon, Interpol, and the Arcade Fire to the Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, and Pearl Jam, with the traditional "critics picks" usually winning out.

While Pitchfork's review style has remained somewhat notorious, circa 2003, they had enough credentials to have known about Modest Mouse a decade before they became popular. They were the only site to give a negative review to Elephant by newfound MTV sensations the White Stripes, and weren't above giving a 0.0 review (the "Blutarsky") to just about any band, be it Jet, Sonic Youth, or the Flaming Lips.

Things have changed by 2009, including Pitchfork's tastes, which included a lot of releases the site initially lambasted on their end of the decade lists with a younger generation of critics on staff. The remains of the print music industry also learned how to use the internet better, as Rolling Stone now dominates Pitchfork in terms of web traffic. Nonetheless, Pitchfork dominated online music coverage during a critical period in the web's development, and now the site has unprecedented tastemaking ability. A good review on Pitchfork will do more for a band than a good review in any other music publication, website, or blog these days, for better or for worse.

6. Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" video becomes the most viewed YouTube video of all time.

How easy it is to forget that, as late as mid-2006, many websites, blogs, and publications were afraid of embedding YouTube videos on their site, lest they face the same kind of lawsuits given to 8-year-old Kazaa users three years earlier. Nonetheless, YouTube already was becoming the primary vehicle for music video distribution, legally or not, even for major label bands (OK Go, anyone?). The fact that MTV stopped showing full music videos on the now-defunct Total Request Live only furthered YouTube's role in filling a pre-existing demand. Before "Girlfriend," the long-running champion of YouTube's most viewed video was "The Evolution of Dance," a live performance that featured four decades of pop music, a preposterous dance routine, and mostly organically-generated traffic. The fact that "Girlfriend" swept away the most viewed title so rapidly showed that the same consumers who were buying this week's top CD at the mall 10 years earlier hadn't changed all that much, but had just moved to computers. With the power of a full-marketing campaign, major industries realized they could overpower any user-generated content in terms of eyeballs, if not in terms of the bottom line.

7. MySpace remains the go-to site for bands even after Facebook.

Social media platforms come and go at such a rapid rate these days that it's easy to forget when MySpace was the undisputed dominant social networking site on the web. I didn't sign up for it in high school because it creeped me out, but I was in the minority. Of course, I signed up for Facebook as soon as it became available for my college-to-be in the summer of 2004.

For at least 3 solid years before and after the sale to Newscorp, MySpace dominated the social networking world, including the magical year of 2003, when all bands started going online. Even today, when MySpace as a personal networking site seems as archaic as AOL or Friendster, MySpace is still the dominant platforms for bands, replacing just about all individualized domain names for a more uniform distribution method that evened the playing field, even if it reduced the playing field's size. By now, major labels finding bands via MySpace is no longer an Internet success story; it's the only success story.

This was a change that ultimately benefitted Napster-raised consumers; after years of trying to find out about bands I liked in high school via awful, cryptic, Flash-based websites, I took to finding bands via MySpace naturally. In most cases, of course, I googled them.

8. DRM protection is removed from iTunes tracks.

In elementary school, I had a computer teacher who insisted to us that we would go to jail if we uploaded games onto floppy disks. It seemed preposterous at the time, and as it turns out, no one wants to imprison children for dubious corporate purposes. What this meant was that all the controversies over bootlegged recordings and sneaking cameras into concerts in the early '90s seemed preposterous to those who came of age just a few years later. Anything that prevented the seamless distribution of music from one friend to another was suspect, and only promoted more piracy. Hence, while DRM protection standards were a huge concession circa 2003 (you can buy a song once and put it on five separate computers?!?!), the concession of a concession occured--long overdue, in the eyes of most consumers--with the erosion of DRM that occurred in 2007. It was the last humiliating blow to the record industry's complete control over the product of their bands.

9. Modest Mouse sells "Gravity Rides Everything" To A Nissan Ad.
Modest Mouse may have been a breakthrough success with 2004's Good News For People Who Love Bad News, but their real contribution to the music industry came a few years earlier, when they sold "Gravity Rides Everything" a track from 2001's critically acclaimed but commercially ignored The Moon and Antartica. Modest Mouse had spent nearly a decade touring indie clubs, and before Garden State and the OC made indie rock sales in movies a norm, this entirely respected band broke an enormous boundry for struggling bands: selling songs to commercials. As late as the 90s, this was verboten in the world of indie ethics, but with the anarchy that would dominate the later part of this decade's music industry, selling songs to ads has become not just one of the better ways for bands to pay rent (in the words of Isaac Brock), but to get mainstream attention. The long-term history of songs in advertising has been controversial--Rob Horning and Ze Pequeno at PopMatters have started some excellent discussions on the subject--but it's hard to imagine how anyone from the Shins, MIA, Saul Williams, or any number of smaller bands would become as popular as they became without ads.

10. Twitter and Google Trends set the tone for music coverage.



As soon as Michael Jackson died in June of 2009, I pretty much stopped blogging about music for the rest of the summer. I did so because I knew the majority of music coverage would revolve around Michael Jackson, and since I don't remember black Michael (I was in kindergarden when the "Black and White" single came out), I had nothing to contribute to the conversation.

Nonetheless, Michael Jackson was a dead celebrity, which meant that he dominated Google Trends and Twitter Trends that day. I had seen this two years earlier when Ana Nicole Smith died, and the dominance of her death on Google Trends let to an F1 story in the New York Times. It is unclear how much people searching for Ana Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton's prison sentence, etc. were doing so because they were obsessed with celebrity and how many were searching just because they heard that Ana Nicole Smith had died. Nonetheless, the eyeball-starved mainstream media, from the New York Times to CNN to NBC Nightly News, latched on, and the tabloid side of music news began to dominate even the critical spectrum.

How many people who RIPed Brittany Murphy across the Internet had an emotional attachment to Tai in Clueless? How many people who hyped the Pavement reunion concert in record speed remembered the release of Slanted and Enchanted? Why did blogs start publishing the same "why do you care, you dumb consumer" articles that they used to lambast newspapers for doing?

Traffic, traffic traffic. Music websites that "needed" traffic spikes in any way possible, no matter how short term, saw articles they "had" to cover. Again and again with media old and new, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Postscript: Many readers may note that this list did not include Radiohead's "it's up to you" distribution of In Rainbows. This is not an accidental omission. I fully recognize the insane amount of coverage this record's distribution method received. Radiohead made a lot more money this way than they would have on a major label, but the official release of the CD still charted at #1, even as roughly 30% of all online copies of In Rainbows were still pirated. Nine Inch Nails followed suit with arguably more success but less coverage, as did Saul Williams, who flopped in terms of sales with this method. While the In Rainbows story was probably the most symbolic of how the record industry has changed, it has yet to drastically change how music listeners actually consume music.

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Labels: ads, art versus business, billboard, consumers, google trends, guitar hero, ipod, itunes, modest mouse, music industry, myspace, napster, pitchfork media, riaa, the shins, twitter, youtube

Over thee past year, my father has commented on how he couldn't believe Mary-Louise Parker, a Tony-winning stage actor, would "lower" herself to a TV role for Weeds. My brother, before leaving for college, was arguing with friends over whether Tru Blood or Lost was the worst show ever made. Both arguments seemed ludicrous to me, but it was a rather telling generational gap: on one side, there was the conviction that TV was a fundamentally flawed lowbrow media. On the other side, there was the convictions of those who don't remember a time when there was little good TV to be found, but do understand hype.

What both views ignore is a rather extraordinary transformation in American media and American art over the past decade: this has been the best decade of television we've ever seen, and the competition really isn't close. In fact, TV is so good right now that it may be the most thriving art form in contemporary American society. It may even be the best golden age stretch of any art form America has ever produced.

The process that made TV so good was a combination of a variety of cultural, commercial, and political factors. For one, the end of the Cold War convinced even those far to the left that capitalism was ultimately a more sustainable and democratic economic system. This was a fundamental change in leftist artistic philosophy, to say nothing of world philosophy. The result, for overwhelmingly liberal creative types, was essentially the end of the conviction that working on TV was inherently "selling out." There were still business forces to contend with, but they weren't inherently evil from a personal standpoint, so long as the business process didn't affect the quality of your artwork.

Instead, TV, which began as a commercial medium before it was even considered a potentially artistic one, has come to exemplify how a competitive market benefits everyone. When there are hundreds of channels having to compete for eyeballs, they quality of the product goes up -- and the benefit goes to the consumer. Even as network ratings have drastically declined this decade, the corporate behemoths are still as rich as they've always been, no matter how much revenue shrinks. More importantly, the rise of cable channels has led to more chances for innovation, and more resources to do so. By 2009, the rise of good cable has trickled up to network television.

You couldn't have good TV this decade without industry transformation that took place in the '90s. With the breakdown of the ostensible wall between "high art" and "low art," the few artists who dared to toe the line for profit were often more successful: shows like The Simpsons, Seinfeld, ER, and Law & Order were able to make unprecedented profits while still trumping most of what had been on TV beforehand, even within their own genres.

In addition to the rise of cable this decade, there was the rise of DVDs, On-Demand, and the increased availability of "premium channels" that made it increasingly difficult for the "brilliant but cancelled" phenomenon to persist. The newfound voice the Internet provided for fan masses only helped. It was also more egalitarian: in the bicoastal TV culture that has notoriously marginalized Middle America, the Internet allowed devoted, intelligent fans to have their say, fans who only had TV as their primary source of entertainment.

And these are just the innovations that had clear profit lines: TiVo, YouTube, and piracy made it even easier to get quality television, which means that the networks had to shape up. Furthermore, DVR (the industry-approved response of TiVo), and Hulu are increasingly showing networks that viewers are less hell-bent on sticking it to the man and more interested in easy access to quality programming. DVR and Hulu only make sense in a medium that was always essentially free to viewers.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out the effects of HBO shows like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, The Wire, and Curb Your Enthusiam. It's easy to forget that the main purpose for these channels early on was to see things too risqué for network; in his latest stand-up special, David Spade joked that HBO has strayed from its pornographic roots. Late in the '90s, HBO launched an extensive new programming campaign using a tag line destined to be crucial to American history: "It's not TV, It's HBO." You could argue that TV became HBO.

For a nearly decade long stretch, every new HBO show was being described as "the best TV show ever." In many ways, they were true. From an artistic standpoint, The Sopranos, The Wire, and Six Feet Under were light years ahead of what was available for non-diehards previously. For me, a crucial turning point came for me came in 2003, when a dramaturg instructor in my extracurricular theater program hesitantly began watching The Sopranos. Within three weeks, she had gone from saying, "I don't understand what the fuss is about" to exclaiming, "this is drama on the level of Hamlet!"

HBO's effect was not only felt on primetime dramas and comedy; It also affected made for TV-movies and the miniseries. A medium that was previously considered among the lowest of the low arts was now full of projects like Band of Brothers, Wit, Angels in America, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and John Adams. Many of these projects came from the theater world, especially those that were too ambitious for movies but just right for those in a medium with a higher budget but an ingrained focus on dialogue. The networks still haven't caught up with HBO on this front, and they may not be able to with current business limitations. Still, I can see very few drawbacks to seeing networks compete with HBO on this front.


Ironically, since HBO was still remaining somewhat faithful to its pornographic roots. Late night television needed a way to keep eyes off the nudity that was increasingly a presence in the bedrooms of the crucial under-30 demographic, either on the TV or the Internet. The result was a completely transformed late night landscape that made all the bloviating over Leno v. Letterman in 1993 appear moot in hindsight. Those who wanted to relax at night watched Leno, those who had been raised watching Letterman could still do so and get to work on time. Younger generations looking for the edgy stuff could now watch The Daily Show and Conan O'Brien, or, later, The Soup, The Craig Ferguson Show and The Colbert Report.

By being more selective about its guests and more extreme in its political humor -- an advantage cable has over the networks -- The Daily Show became a vehicle for an entire generation's political rage, one that was helped along by Comedy Central's efforts with South Park (a show that reached its prime this decade), and helped make stars of Lewis Black, Steve Carrel, Stephen Colbert and hell, even Ed Helms.

Meanwhile, the vehicle for the sicker side of humor was taken over by Adult Swim on Comedy Central. All the controversies in the '90s over Beavis and Butthead, The Simpsons, and South Park seemed moot compared to postmodern insanity of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Robot Chicken.

In the '90s, the focus was on shows with ridiculously high ratings on an established network or cable channel. The concerns over those shows ignored the sick sense of humor that Nickelodeon was fostering among those now in their 20s with Ren & Stimpy, Rocko's Modern Life, and The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Those concerns were overlooked at the time primarily because, well, it was on cable. It's no wonder that Invader Zim, despite being just as clever and no less incendiary than the shows of the early '90s, struggled to stay on the air in an increasingly watchful commercial landscape.

All this ended up producing better shows on the networks. Even on the most risk-averse TV channels, the occasional breakthroughs shined through. After the 2000 election, The West Wing provided a vehicle for those who wanted to see how the Clinton administration should have behaved. While still somewhat primitive, The West Wing featured an unprecedented level of verisimilitude for a political network primetime show. Aaron Sorkin's original conception of The West Wing, didn't even feature the President. The addition of Jed Bartlett in the development stage provided one of the most essential characters on TV this decade, one that would be a "concession" for most writers, but one that could only come from a theater veteran who understood the value of being commercially viable in addition to artistically credible.

Meanwhile, 24 provided a primetime network action thriller unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. Not only had there never been a TV show comparable to Die Hard on network; there wasn't even a movie that took the same inventive approach to the political action thriller. All the talk of the show's fantastical view of torture overshadowed the fact that the show took an unprecedentedly realistic view of national security. The conservative implications are the product of a depiction of what an inherently conservative profession, which has the same office politics and struggles with balancing the personal and professional of any job. This one that just happens to have more at stake than, say, a paper company in Scranton, PA.

Unlike most action thrillers in the past, who from John Wayne and Ronald Reagan to Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger had always matched their characters' conservatism, 24's star was Kiefer Sutherland, a Canadian Socialist who, like the character he depicted, has proven to be far more militant than would befit his better judgment.

Network comedy has been a trickier enterprise for the artistically inclined. Perhaps the biggest problem with the high-stakes world of network television has been its tendency to cut off shows before they properly develop. This is especially true of more innovative comedy, which has generally acquired the label of being a "cult classic. Nevertheless, just about any cable channel would have been thrilled with the ratings of shows like Arrested Development, Futurama, and Family Guy, all of which were fully available on DVD and acquired an even more devoted following after being canceled.

DVDs even helped equal the playing field between judging "edgy comedy" past and present. Compared to the first eight seasons of The Simpsons, now uncut on DVD, it was easier to see just how inferior even the best episodes of Family Guy were to the heyday of The Simpsons, a show that was on decline by the time Family Guy was emerging. It was easier than ever to see how Saturday Night Live has lost its vitality since its incarnation in the mid-'70s. Yet, you could also see how many of the problems of today's show, from awkward staging to its struggle to fill time have been issues the show always faced.

The most amazing element of this transformation was that it was happening with almost no attention from the media industry responsible for covering television. The major concerns of a media industry trained to be cynical focused on the rise of reality TV, the censorship surrounding Janet Jackson's Super Bowl pasted-nipple "exposure," and the "criminals" watching YouTube.

These were all concerns that made sense in a previous generation, when TV was the idiot Box, and were valid when Leave It To Beaver, Hill Street Blues, and Dallas were among the "best" products TV offered. In those cases, censorship was a political issue that didn't affect art on TV until the Smothers Brothers or Laugh In. But the lower quality of TV art at the start was mainly the product of a culture where the best artists didn't want to develop their art for television. The stigmatization of television follows the same patterns as the stigmatization of the "Little Theater" movement, pre-Code Hollywood films, Cubist painting and early comic books, all of which are now increasingly essential elements of high culture.

The difference with TV is that it became a viable medium after World War II, when the economy was thriving and the prominence of Communism was rapidly declining among the American left. As a result, capitalism came first with television, quality second. There were ups and downs along the time, just like there were ups and downs in American society. Nonetheless, television's progression into higher quality, higher profitability, and more equitable distribution is consistent with a variety of historical, economic and sociological equivalents. Despite the inherent negativity of academia, television has practically implemented what academia has worked out in theory.

There are still some areas where I would like to see television improve, namely the development of quality female characters without the need model-quality looks, and the development of television as smart as The Sopranos for more rural audiences. Those caveats aside, I would still maintain that over the last 10-15 years, television has become America's greatest artistic and culturally vital medium, and a model for all other artistic media. With its increasingly global presence, (even after the War in Iraq, Friends was the most popular show in the Middle East), American television has already begun to change cultural values that have been conflated by political values. As with all art, the fantasy world is better. But it's getting closer to the reality.

Top 10 Shows of the Decade:
10. 30 Rock
9. Arrested Development
8. Invader Zim
7. The West Wing
6. The Colbert Report
5. Six Feet Under
4. 24
3. The Wire
2. The Daily Show
1. The Sopranos

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Labels: daily show, decade in review, dvds, dvr, high art/low art, hulu, sitcoms, Sopranos, television, the wire, tivo, youtube

Jim Gaffigan has become one of America’s favorite comics, a uniter of Red and Blue States alike, by basing his material on pure sloth. The Indiana native, who has lived in New York City for 20 years, first became a major player with his revered 2000 Comedy Central Presents special that introduced the world to his jokes on laziness, Mexican food and the plight of the Manatee. Gaffigan would then build a small but devoted following through his appearances on David Letterman, a highly successful Sierra Mist ad campaign with Michael Ian Black, and the occasional well-timed movie and TV role (Super Troopers, Flight of the Concords, That ‘70s Show). Arguably his biggest breakthrough came with his sensational 2006 special Beyond the Pale, which probably had a higher food joke-per-minute ratio than any previous comedy special in television history. His new special, King Baby, premieres this Sunday, and the act is already picking up steam on YouTube for his soon-to-be-legendary routine on bacon. I spoke with the Gaffigan, the oft-described everyman comedian, over the phone about how he’s really not as lazy as he seems, why he doesn’t like telling dirty jokes on stage anymore, and why he’d never do an ad for Hot Pockets.

Ethan Stanislawski: Me and a lot of my friends always talk about how our lives turn into Jim Gaffigan routines, except when we experience it it’s really depressing. Does the type of laziness you describe on stage ever stop being funny?

Jim Gaffigan: I like to think that I romanticize those lazy moments. Like, when we finally do indulge in some of the laziness, there’s always some guilt, like “Oh man, all I did was watch Roadhouse for the weekend.” And that’s pretty depressing, but in hindsight it’s pretty hysterical. I think it’s something everyone’s kind of guilty of.

ES: I kind of feel these moments are even more universal than even most observational comedy, like you don’t even have to put on pants to have these moments apply to your life.

JG: I do think that everyone can relate to moments of being a lazy slob.

ES: You’re one of the only comedians I’ve seen who works better on Comedy Central than when you’re uncensored. Do you think there’s something that helps your appeal when you’re less dirty?

JG: Well, I feel that I used to be kinda dirty, but I never was that dirty of a comic. I would do it in the past, but part of stand-up for me is setting up personal challenges. So I cut out cursing from my act as a personal challenge. Any comedian can throw in a “fuck” and get a reaction from an audience. For me when I’d use it, I’d always feel it was more that the joke wasn’t necessarily done. I also didn’t want to not be able to follow myself…if you have a great dirty joke, it’s kinda hard to go back to talking about cake or bacon. It’s more how the show is going. I mean, I love dirty comics. I’ve been doing stand-up forever, so it’s just how my act is starting to change. I don’t really miss cursing on stage—it’s more about good writing for me.

ES: A lot of comedians fall into the trap of being best known for one routine (Dave Chappelle comes to mind.) You did a YouTube video spoofing fans coming up to you talking about the Hot Pockets routine. How do you try to avoid being known as “the Hot Pockets guy?”

JG: I mean, it’s not the end of the world. I definitely don’t want my tombstone to read “Jim the Hot Pockets Guy.” But it doesn’t really bother me because there was a time not long ago where I was the “meow guy” from Super Troopers, or with my earlier standup it was just “the manatee guy.” So if I’m now known as “the bacon guy,” it’s not the end of the world. I’ll keep writing and hopefully I’ll come up with another joke that will replace that. Now I’m being known as this “food comic guy.” I mean you write about what you’re passion is, and right now it’s about being lazy and eating.

ES: One more Hot Pockets question and I swear we’ll move on. Do you think you’ve ultimately helped or hurt Hot Pockets’ marketing department? Lewis Black ended up doing promos for the Weather Channel. Have they approached you to do ads for Hot Pockets?

JG: It’s interesting. A guy emailed me saying he was part of a focus group of Hot Pocket consumers who watched my material and were asked whether it encouraged them to eat it or not. So they’ve done research, and I think I’ve definitely helped them; I mean, they know it’s not caviar. But again, though, I wouldn’t want to be known as the Hot Pockets guy, so I wouldn’t do a commercial for them. That’s not to say I’m against commercials. But for awhile on my last tour they’d do guerilla marketing where they’d have a guy show up at my show dressed as a Hot Pocket passing out coupons. We had to put a stop to them because people thought I was working with Hot Pockets.

ES: Yeah, it must have seemed like you were on the inside of a Hot Pockets conspiracy.

JG: Yeah, you know what I mean? And it’s not like there’s a whole message to the Hot Pockets joke. It’s basically just “Hot Pockets give you diarrhea.”

ES: I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone do the politically correct audience member voice in quite the same way you do. Did that come from a need in your show early on, or did it just come about spontaneously that just stuck?

JG: I mean, I started out definitely doing these characters from the Lower East Side. And there was a lady where the voice came from, going back, like, 12, or 14 years. But the whole idea of talking for other people has always been an aspect of my personality. It’s just an effective way to diffuse a situation in a funny way. Like if you walk into a room and there are people waiting for you, you say “I can’t believe he’s late.” In doing that, I end up where people aren’t that mad at me. There’s an awareness, and they’re more likely to forgive you.

ES: So you use that voice in everyday life in addition to on stage?

JG: Yeah, I do. I kind of do it involuntarily.

ES: I’m from New York but I went to school in Chicago, so I’ve kinda got the reverse dynamic of you saw came from the Midwest culture and then moved to New York. I feel like you definitely play with the Midwest/East Coast dynamic a lot in your show. Do you feel that’s been an influence in your act?

JG: I mean, I’ve lived in New York for 20 years, and I’m still treated like a tourist. There’s no getting around how bland Midwestern I am. I wouldn’t be able to describe it, but there is kind of a Midwestern sensibility. It’s a kind of sarcasm and cynicism, but in a different kind of way than it is in New York and the Northeast. But there is kind of a New York element of my pacing, like an efficiency, that is a sign of a New York comic. I don’t take too long in getting to the joke…I like that wherever I go, audiences are responsive. I would never want to be just a regional comic.

ES: There’s been a return in popularity of observational humor the last couple of years (Mitch Hedburg in his time, Demetri Martin etc.) after a lot of years of angry political comedy. How much do you think cultural timing has played into your popularity?

JG: There are a ton of styles; for awhile there was a lot of high energy, angry comics, I was thinking I could be a lot of people’s second favorite comic, but they’d also like me, so I could be something of a crossover. But nowadays you can’t just be one thing as a comic. In the '80s, you could be the topical comic or the guy who did impressions. Now, you have to be more eccentric in how you do even observational comedy. What Demetri does is very different from what I do. Each comic has to do their own thing; both me and Demetri are just doing the kind of stand-up we like doing. That’s pretty much how it is for every comic; I love Chris Rock and Lewis Black, but they’re just doing their own thing.

ES: How much does Twitter and social media play into your comedy now? It seems like the format of Twitter (just 140 characters) is sort of perfectly suited to your style? Do you see is as part of your comedy or more to help your career?

JG: I honestly have no idea. I’m doing an hour special on Sunday, and I want people to know about it. On the internet, it’s more useful if you want to find out when I’m performing in your area. Most people I meet say “I’d go if you were performing in my area.” So with Facebook, Twitter, and Vlogs and everything, I'm more trying to get the word out. I’m not really trying to convert anyone. Awhile ago I was in a club in D.C., and when I got back I got an email saying “Hey, when are you coming to D.C.?” I was just there! So I decided, “alright, I’ll just have an email list.” Facebook’s great because you can promote your event without really bugging people who aren’t interested. And with the twitter and vlogging, it’s just another way of getting the word out. I was on a plane the other night, so I was just horsing around on Twitter. I mean, it’s all in the hope of getting people to watch my special. I mean, I spent three years writing it…and I worked really hard on it. All this lets me do self-promotion without being obnoxious about it.

ES: The line on TV between marketing and material has gotten blurrier, at least. You’ve been good with that. I think people who’ve seen you on social media will certainly not miss your special for lack of information.

JG: Oh yeah, cool. I mean it’s an essential part to get the word out. I’ve worked for awhile to get my act out there. I mean, I really do work hard. There’s a whole kind of coolness to saying something like you don’t do your homework. It’s cool to say “I didn’t work on this, I just show up.” But I do work hard, and I certainly want people to know about it. So if sending a message on Twitter gets 20 more people to see my show, it's doing important work. I mean it seems like I’m not trying, but I push myself to go really far.

ES: To wrap things up on a more serious note, one of my best friends is a militant feminist who has completely lost her sense of humor after a bad relationship, and she will still cry from laughing when she sees your act.

JG: I mean, I feel like I’m just doing my thing and it’s nothing exceptional, but I love it when I talk to audience members after my shows and I see a lesbian couple along with a Mormon couple. I really had no elaborate plan with my stand-up. But I love to see how many different types of people like my stuff.

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Jim Gaffigan’s King Baby premieres on Comedy Central Sunday, March 29, at 9/8 c. The DVD of King Baby, as well as the CD, come out on March 31. Photo by Martin Crook. This review was originally published on Blogcritics

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