The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Thursday, February 22, 2018 — 5

“Sometimes we just look at each 

other and ask, ‘What would Big 
Bird do?’”

This is the question Pete 

Holmes, creator and star of HBO’s 
comedy show “Crashing,” and his 
writers ask themselves when they 
don’t know where to go with his 
character — a clean and somewhat 
naïve version of his younger self, 
navigating life and laughter in the 
brutal world of show business. 
Holmes recently talked to The 
Daily via a conference video chat to 
discuss the show’s second season, 
his experience in comedy and 
what it’s like to relive his own life 
through the show.

The loveable “Sesame Street”-

esque 
aspects 
of 
Holmes’s 

character 
are 
what 
makes 

“Crashing” special among other 
shows of the same “comedian’s 
life” type like “Louie.” He’s 
completely genuine as a person, 
fallible and sometimes not even 
that good at comedy. But these 
chinks in his armor are integral to 
the show’s overall flavor, bringing 
a fresh perspective to a story many 
comedy fans are already aware of. 
Holmes is really good at telling 
bad jokes, making his character’s 
newbie 
status 
on 
the 
scene 

believable and infusing a youthful 
bounce into the show. “Crashing” 
follows this fictionalized version 
of Holmes through his struggles as 
a comedian coming up in the New 
York scene after his wife leaves 
him, literally crashing on other 
comedians’ couches as he tries to 
make it in the tough club scene. 
Holmes says he “wants to take the 
struggle of doing stand-up and 
add on top of it as many relatable 

jokes and situations as possible.” 
The show definitely achieves this, 
making the difficult journey up 
comedy’s ranks understandable 
from an outside perspective and 
focusing in on the humanity of it 
all.

The first season of the show, 

which came out last spring, laid 

the foundation for an interesting 
look into the realities of a young 
comedian’s life. Holmes’s own 
experiences are the basis for 
“Crashing” — a series of emotional 
and professional ups and downs 
that keep the viewer engaged 
and invested in the show’s plot. 
He created “Crashing” with the 
guidance of co-producer Judd 
Apatow (“Knocked Up”), who 
helped to balance the show’s 
narrative to create something 
unique. After his first endeavor — a 
talk show on TBS called “The Pete 
Holmes Show” — Holmes says he 
asked himself, “What is the story 
that is kind of the most personal to 

me, that only I could tell?” His life 
was somewhat of a rollercoaster, 
Holmes reflected.

“Well, I was raised religious. 

I got married when I was 22. 
My wife left me when I was 28, 
and then I really started trying 
to become a stand-up. I was like, 
‘That sounds like a Judd Apatow 
idea.’” Holmes flew out to New 
York for what he says was “15 
minutes” with Apatow while 
he was filming Amy Schumer’s 
“Trainwreck,” a meeting which 
would prove integral to the show’s 
creation.

The balance between drama 

and comedy is what really stands 
out about “Crashing,” especially 
in its new season, which currently 
airs on Sundays at 10:30 p.m. EST. 
Holmes says Apatow is the real 
master behind this equilibrium.

“I basically tell him what really 

happened in my life and he figures 
out how to make that funny,” 
Holmes said. “I’ll tell him for 
example, ‘There’s a lot of solitude 
and eating Chinese food,’ and he’ll 
be like, ‘OK, you can do that for like 
a scene, but you have to work at 
Cold Stone Creamery.’ So I’ll give 
him credit on that one.”

The second season of the 

show tackles more existential 
and serious topics than the last, 
exploring addiction with frequent 
guest star Artie Lange (“The 
Howard Stern Show”) in the 
episode “Artie” and the battle to 
maintain faith in the spotlight 
with magician Penn Jillette in 
the season’s premiere “Atheist.” 
These themes of self-discovery 
and realization give a new edge 
to Holmes’s character, bringing 
him from “Big Bird” to something 
else — a poignant representation 
of what it means to change while 
pursuing your dreams. 

Pete Holmes on reliving 
his own life on ‘Crashing’

CLARA SCOTT
Daily Arts Writer

HBO

MUSIC ALBUM REVIEW

 
In a trend of music videos 
that have literally nothing to 
do with the song, The Chain-
smokers’ video for “You Owe 
Me” starts off with two solid 
minutes of mundane house-
work. Singer Andrew Tag-
gart vacuums, washes dishes 
and mops a spotless expanse 
of tile while staring blankly 
into the camera as Alex Pall, 
the other half of the duo, 
wipes a suspicious splotch of 
blood off of the stairs outside 
and irons a pair of pants.
 What’s the deal? Some 
greater commentary on how 
EDM-pop musicians are 

normal people too? Pall sets 
down a footstool, then deftly 
uses it to right a crooked pic-

ture. Taggart lights candles 
slowly and robotically, all 
the while gazing at the 
viewer with that same blank 
stare. A wide shot shows 
viewers that he’s standing 
behind a table filled with 

MUSIC VIDEO REVIEW: ‘YOU OWE ME’

“You Owe Me”

The Chainsmokers

Disruptor Records

DISRUPTOR RECORDS

The 
end 
of 
Feb. 
and 

beginning of Mar. are always 
nostalgic for me. The sky is gray, 
the snow is melting, the green 
that’s been hidden all winter is 
slowly beginning to make its 
resurgence. Everything seems 
melancholic, but hopeful.

I first listened to Lorde in 

the backseat of my best friend’s 
mom’s 
Honda. 
We 
were 

approaching our sophomore 
year of high school, a time I 
now refer to as the summer of 
“Royals.”

“You know,” my best friend 

said, “she’s only a year older 
than us.”

“Royals” played on repeat 

for 
the 
entirety 
of 
that 

summer, 
through 
poolside 

speakers and the car radios of 
the upperclassmen who drove 
us around our small suburban 
town to bonfires and 24-hour 
Coney 
Islands. 
It 
became, 

to me — the naïve, careless 
15-year-old that I was — an 
anthem for the things I could 
not articulate.

Pure Heroine came out that 

Sept. My best friend and I 
danced around her bedroom 

in our homecoming dresses to 
“Ribs,” shouting over the music 
that we should’ve ditched our 
dates and gone to the dance 
with each other. We played “No 
Better” at every party, drunk 
off of wine coolers purchased 
by somebody’s mother.

That Oct., I fell into a 

youthful, foolish kind of small 
town love that only a 15-year-
old could fall into. He was two 
years older than me and the 
captain of our high school’s 
soccer team: the quintessential 
teenage daydream.

He and I didn’t have much 

to do but drive around and go 
for milkshakes at 3:00 a.m. 
Somehow, though, this was 
enough. It was magical. It 
was a feeling I couldn’t put 
my finger on until I heard 
“400 Lux,” a song that, then, 
explained all of the magic 
in our naïve relationship’s 
mundanity; and now, it makes 
me feel 15 with butterflies in 
my stomach again.

Four years later, which might 

as well have been a lifetime, 
I listened to Melodrama for 
the first time in the backseat 
of a taxi. I was leaving New 
York City, the place I’d called 
home for the summer and had, 
in turn, fallen terribly in love 

with. I listened to the album 
in order, and then over again. 
I cried hysterically the whole 
time.

I cried because Melodrama 

was the first album I’d ever 
considered mine — one that 
validated 
feelings 
that 
I’d 

felt 
on 
a 
conscious 
level, 

and 
simultaneously 
pulled 

feelings that I’d never felt out 
of the depths of my 19-year-old 
psyche.

Each song was a masterpiece. 

Each song held a piece of me 
in it. Each song made the 
messiness of what it means to 
be my age OK. Every time I’d 
become infatuated with the 
wrong person, every inevitable 
end of a relationship, every 
night that ended in a failed 
quest for belonging — it was all 
OK.

Lorde’s music has carried me 

through my naïve adolescence 
and 
is 
still 
carrying 
me 

through my messy transition to 
adulthood, through backseats 
and boyfriends and long nights. 
I’d never quite understood that 
music has the ability to save 
someone. But at this moment, if 
there’s anything that I can say 
that I understand completely, 
it’s that Lorde’s music saves me 
every single day.

I recently witnessed a professor 

of 
music 
accuse 
a 
famous 

20th-century composer of having 
“ruined music.” The class was 
discussing important orchestral 
works by 20th-century composers, 
and a student mentioned Boulez’s 
“Le Marteau sans Maitre,” a 
blistering avant-garde work filled 
with rhythmic and harmonic 
dissonances. The professor claimed 
that he hated Boulez, that Boulez 
should not be studied as he had 
ruined music.

Boulez has always been a 

controversial 
figure 
among 

20th-century 
composers 
and 

critics. His death in 2016 left 
behind 
a 
controversial 
legacy 

for musicologists, scholars and 
classical 
music 
aficionados 
to 

pick apart. As a conductor, Boulez 
went through periods in which he 
conducted music primarily from 
the classical era and periods in 
which he conducted music almost 
exclusively from the modern era. 
As a writer and critic, Boulez 
published articles both in defense 
of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of 
Spring” and in condemnation of 
Schoenberg’s (radical) late works. 
His life as a critic and conductor was 
riddled with these inconsistencies.

As the composition professor 

explained to the class, Boulez 
“ruined music” in that he advocated 
for a complete rejection of the study 
of the Western canon of classical 
music. His famed summer program 
in Darmstadt was conceived almost 
entirely in this vein: He refused 
to 
study 
any 
non-modernist 

compositions, claiming that the 
modernist 
movement 
required 

a 
rejection 
of 
the 
historical 

legacies of classical music and the 
use of radical new forms based 
on emancipated rhythmic and 
harmonic dissonances.

Boulez’s 
infamous 
article 

“Schoenberg 
Is 
Dead,” 
for 

example, represents some of his 
most 
scathing 
condemnations 

of anything but the most radical 
modernist 
music. 
Schoenberg’s 

late explorations of tonal music, 
Boulez asserted, had “went off in 
the wrong direction so persistently 
that it would be hard to find an 
equally 
mistaken 
perspective 

in the entire history of music.” 
Schoenberg’s 
was 
erroneously 

attempting “to construct works of 
the same essence as that of those in 
the sound-universe he had just left 
behind,” a practice which “led to 
the decrepitude of the larger part of 
his serial oeuvre.”

“It is time to neutralize the 

setback,” Boulez exclaims, and 
“grasp the serial domain as a 
whole.”

Though 
Boulez 
may 
be 

among the strongest examples of 
modernist and rejectionist artists, 
this idea of rejecting historical 
forms is the true mark of an avant-
garde artist. This is the modern 
legacy of the avant-garde music: the 

desertion of artistic customs that 
had developed over generations, 
the constant need for radical 
innovation and separation from 
historical precedent.

Composers such as Boulez chose 

to break entirely with conventional 
musical forms, writing pieces with 
purely abstract titles in which 
no note occurs more frequently 
than any other note. These pieces 
are hard to palate and harder 
still to learn to love, especially 
for those audiences that do not 
have an extensive background in 

contemporary classical music.

The same can be said of many 

of the avant-garde periods most 
famous plays, particularly Samuel 
Beckett’s 
famed 
“Waiting 
for 

Godot”; while the play has been 
frequently cited by playwrights 
and other theater buffs for its lack 
of plot and intriguing ambiguous 
meaning, few modern companies 
can sell tickets to productions of 
this work.

Modern 
artists, 
however, 

are beginning to find new and 
intriguing means of responding 
to and shaping this rejectionist 
legacy. For many, this involves 
using the language of the pre-
avant-garde styles in avant-garde 
forms and structures. For others, 
this involves using the language of 
the avant-garde in pre-avant-garde 
forms and structures. In both 
instances, however, the influences 
of the avant-garde and the pre-
avant-garde are broken up and 
juxtaposed, sparking the formation 
of unprecedented yet familiar 
works.

Modern playwrights are finding 

new ways of using nonlinear or 
other non-standard forms to depict 
classic subjects. Stephen Adly 
Guirgis’s “The Last Days of Judas 
Iscariot,” for example, used an 
undeniably avant-garde influenced 
plot structure to reference Biblical 
messages 
about 
the 
human 

condition. Though these messages 
were conveyed through the guise 
of a purgatorial trial, they were 
conveyed in the language of the 
decidedly pre-avant-garde.

Modern composers are also 

finding new ways of using non-
standard formal structures as a 
means of reinterpreting Classical 
concepts and forms. Ted Hearne’s 
“The Law of Mosaics,” for example, 
uses humorous juxtapositions to 

deconstruct standard pieces of the 
string orchestra repertoire. The 
result, Hearne explains, is a “law 
of mosaics” in which the meaning 
of the work is derived not through 
the standard idea of development 
but through the piecing together of 
different pieces “in the absence of 
the whole.”

Modern opera also shares many 

of 
these 
tendencies, 
although 

the avant-garde period has had 
significantly less of an effect on the 
genre. John Adams’s many operas 
about recent historical events, for 
example, use standard operatic 
form and convention to interpret 
previously non-operatic thematic 
material. 
Jonathan 
Dawe’s 

“Cracked Orlando,” on the other 
hand, does the opposite — Grazio 
Braccioli’s libretto, used in Vivaldi’s 
opera, is fragmented using fractal 
geometry into a series of ideas 
between onstage and projected 
dancers and singers that interact 
throughout the work.

Our modern idiom is best 

described as an idiom lacking a 
defining characteristic: an idiom 
derived entirely from fragmented 
ideas taken from other historical 
idioms. Unlike the avant-garde 
period, we are no longer obsessed 
with the creation of new forms 
or the rejection of old forms. We 
are obsessed, instead, with the 
deconstruction of old ideas into 
new forms.

It is the nonlinear narrative, I 

believe, that will be the defining 
legacy of the 21st century. Just as 
the 20th century was the century of 
“rejection,” the 21st century will be 
the century of juxtaposition. Just 
as Boulez “ruined music,” so are 
today’s artists de-contextualizing 
and 
reinterpreting 
historical 

practices to the point that they 
cannot be recognized for what they 
were originally intended to do.

Our century, furthermore, is 

defined by benefits of the internet 
and the many different types of 
music that we can all access. Music 
cannot be ruined because it can no 
longer be strictly defined. While 
Boulez and the avant-garde artists 
may have pushed the performing 
arts in a radical new direction, 
the internet has allowed us to 
experience both new and old art 
— the rejected and the radically 
new. We are experiencing a radical 
democratization of art: A period in 
which the artists and artistic work 
that we consume is defined almost 
entirely by our own taste, not that 
of an artistic program director or a 
museum curator.

Boulez may have changed music 

but he did not “ruin” it. The same 
can be said of every artist that 
came before him, and the same 
will be said of every artist that 
comes after. He did redefine art, 
however, and we are still struggling 
to understand the full implications 
of the avant-garde movement he 
propagated.

The Man who Ruined 

Music

DAILY COMMUNITY CULTURE COLUMN

SAMMY 
SUSSMAN

MUSIC NOTEBOOK
On Lorde, love & spring

JENNA BARLAGE

Daily Arts Writer

The balance 

between drama 

and comedy 
is what really 

stands out about 

“Crashing,” 

especially in its 

new season

already blazing candles — a 
séance? Some sort of weird 
Ouija ritual?
 The video’s bloody cli-
max reveals that dinner 
guests are in fact the dinner. 
Funny. A bit overplayed, 
maybe. Kind of like a blood-
ier version of The Ready 
Set’s music video for “Love 
Like Woe” from 2010. We’ve 
gotten to the point where 
blood has almost lost its 
shock value, and although it 
makes for a relatively light 
hearted spin on what might 
otherwise be a drawn out, 
overdramatic piece about 
mopiness and vengeance, it 
isn’t exactly unique in the 
grand scheme of music vid-
eos. “You Owe Me” itself is 
smoother and slower paced 
than a lot of the duo’s pop 
hits, including the obnox-
iously infamous “Closer.” 
Maybe this video heralds a 
new era for The Chainsmok-
ers: less of that snappy four 
chord progression primed 
for radio release and more of 
something different. We’ll 
have to wait and see. 

- Sam Lu, Daily Arts Writer

TV INTERVIEW