State of the Culture: Oscar Flicks and Hip Hop Halftime

BUCK: We wanted to talk to you for a second about the culture, and there are two things. One thing we could talk about is the Super Bowl halftime show from last night, and the other one is the Oscars have been announced, right? Clay, first of all, have you seen any of these movies so far that are nominated for best picture?

CLAY: I bet I haven’t even seen who the nominees are. Unless Spider-Man or Encanto are on that list, the answer is probably “no.”

BUCK: This blew my mind. Spider-Man, what is it called, the new one? I haven’t seen it. Oh, No Way Home has grossed $9 million over the weekend but is the fourth highest grossing movie ever, ever, all time. That’s up there with like Jurassic Park and ET and Avatar.

CLAY: Well, one thing they managed to do, Buck, is they don’t index for inflation. So, there is always going to be an advantage on the newer films, especially now with 7.5% inflation.

BUCK: Totally valid. But isn’t this like the 10th Spider-Man? Literally, I think there have been seven or eight Spider-Man movies, at least at this point, anyway.

CLAY: Yeah, we took the boys and of course the boys love it. Oh, yeah, it’s great. I go see every just about superhero movie ’cause I’ve got three young boys, and they love all of them, right? My 14-, my 11-, my 7-year-old, as a family we often go watch these. So these are wheelhouse movies for me; so it doesn’t surprise me at all. Now, all these Oscar films that are nominated last year… I used to go see everything. I used to love the movies. Last year was the first year I think that I’d never seen any of the Oscar movies. I guarantee you I haven’t seen any of them this year.

BUCK: Just all of these movies together, which includes, Don’t Look Up, which is… Isn’t that like a climate change movie?

CLAY: I actually saw that one. That’s on Netflix.

BUCK: Oh, see? You have seen it.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Licorice Pizza. Never heard of that.

CLAY: No.

BUCK: Belfast. I have a feeling that’s a sad one.

CLAY: Yeah, probably not a happy one.

BUCK: Coda. What else do we have here? I can’t even read some of these. Drive My Car? I’ve never even heard of that one. Okay. Dune. I saw Dune, and if you read the Frank Herbert classic. I will say it is an excellent film adaptation of it. So Dune’s a good movie. I don’t know if it made a lot of money or not. Dune is actually a good movie.

But we bring this up just because of all the Oscar nominated films. Usually, they get talked about. Less than a million-dollar gross over the weekend. Now, covid obviously playing a big part of this. But the bigger thing for me, Clay, than the receipts for this, so to speak, is I’d never heard of these. Of the 10 movies nominated, I’ve heard of two of them before now just to go show, what is Hollywood doing these days?

CLAY: They have lost their ability to speak to the masses, right? They speak to an elite subset, and they’ve lost their ability to speak to the masses. I gotta give credit. You and I are around the same age. I understand some people out there did not like the Super Bowl halftime show. But I grew up on Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Eminem in many ways. That was a 1990s-era halftime show, right?

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: If you were in bars, restaurants, college, high school, in the 1990s, you probably really liked last night’s show.

BUCK: That whole halftime show was a throwback to people who were in high school, college, and maybe recent grads circa 1995.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: That’s maybe ’94, ’95. That’s when all those songs were really popular. I’m somebody who grew up listening to that music, I will say. I don’t really listen to much hip-hop anymore. I haven’t in some time.

CLAY: I don’t listen to much music at all, anymore. Now, my kids listen to everything that’s current; so I hear a lot of it from them. What I would say in general is, I would like to go back to the 1990s and early 2000s era, when we embraced creative freedom for everyone. Because if you go look at rap lyrics as if you look at many lyrics in music of all different types, very borderline sometimes in what is being said, but we give them the creative freedom.

BUCK: I don’t know if it’s even borderline. I think you can actually make a strong case for… Gosh, I’m gonna use the word “misogyny” and not be making fun of the people using it. I think that there’s —

CLAY: I would rather have too much that’s going on in terms of creative freedom, which is why I think this whole cancel culture era is so awful, because if you use Joe Rogan, for instance, as an example we’ve got artists trying to cancel other artists, right? Whether you like whatever his name is — Neil Young — or not, when he comes out and says what Joe Rogan is doing is an art form, right, a long podcast interview is an art form. What we are doing in radio is an art form of sorts, right?

BUCK: Clay, we are artistes.

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: Mais oui, bien sur.

CLAY: I don’t remember an era in my life when artists, who are supposed to — through their nuance, in exploration of larger issues — advance our cultural understanding and conversation surrounding so many complex issues. When they are trying to get things canceled it represents a fundamental attack upon art itself. I just find it hard to believe that they even understand. They’re swept up in the cancel culture mob just like so many other idiots are.

BUCK: But this is about power dynamics, right?

CLAY: To a large extent.

BUCK: It’s not really about principle for these different groups that want to cancel people and this is why the building of alternative platforms and the understanding… One thing we’ll be talking about when we look at the deep state Russia collusion narrative is a lot of those people got taken care of. They got book deals. They get speaking engagements, the ones who are the most involved in the lies about Trump and Russia and all the rest of it.

You see this in a cultural sense too. If you’re a good soldier for the left, so to speak, you get away with more. You can always come back, and people on the right often go, “Ah, someone got canceled. Oh, they’ll figure it out. Maybe they’ll go open an auto body shop somewhere or something,” which is hard to do, actually.

But, you know what I’m saying. It’s time that people actually see this for what it is. They’re gonna keep canceling us while they have the power to do it. We’re not gonna convince them through our arguments to make them stop. We have to create some artillery, so to speak, in the free speech battle on our side.