LAURA DZUBAY

Daily Arts Writer

A group of teens, silently, 

hops a fence and slips into a 
beautiful glass house in Beverly 
Hills. Then, a wail of sirens 
breaks out, only it’s not sirens; 
it’s the punishingly loud treble 
of 
Sleigh 
Bells’s 

“Crown 
on 
the 

Ground.” The song 
wails and pulses as 
Sophia Coppola — 
queen of intertitles 
— 
immerses 
her 

audience 
in 
the 

world of mid-aught 
celebrity fan culture. 
Tabloid-yellow 
font is overlaid on 
thousand-dollar 
shoes 
and 
Louis 
Vuitton 

luggage. Our heroes (if you can 
call them that) approach the 
camera in slow motion. The 
flurry of cameras around them 
is mirrored in footage of Rachel 
Bilson and Paris Hilton walking 
the red carpet.

This is as 2009 as it gets. Of 

course, I’m talking about “The 
Bling Ring.”

The film follows fictionalized 

versions of a real-life cohort of 
teens who robbed celebrities 
in 2008 and 2009. Based on 
the Vanity Fair masterpiece 
by Nancy Jo Sales (yes, that 
Nancy Jo from that viral reality 
TV clip), much of the film’s 
dialogue is pulled from actual 
testimony from the kids. These 
kids are the product of a reality 
TV state, inundated with TMZ 
and with celebrities at their 
fingertips. A careful cocktail 
of late-stage capitalism and 
reality TV had crafted a very 
specific breed of celebrity as 
something that was accessible 
through material acquisition.

This 
is 
what 
celebrity 

culture 
looked 
like 
before 

Instagram, before we wanted 
our celebrities to be “human” 
or “relatable.”

Even in a world that 

demands a level of flash 
unusual for Coppola, she 
proves to have unparalleled 
empathy for her characters. 
She understands their world 
acutely and soundtracks the 
film with music that is both 
historically 
accurate 
and 

tonally appropriate.

The 
film’s 
soundtrack 

emphasizes 
the 
kind 
of 

aspirational lifestyle these 
children have been sold: one 
of excess. Adderall, designer 
bags, 
romanticized 
rehab 

stints and diamond-encrusted 
danger — this glut is mirrored 
in the sonic intensity of the 
soundtrack.

Early-aughts 
reality 
TV 

is a surreal beast. Shows 
like “Flavor of Love,” “The 
Simple Life” and “Bad Girls 
Club” paved the way for the 
Kardashians 
by 
marketing 

outrageous 
stunts 
and 

aesthetic 
extravagance. 

In tandem with the rise of 
TMZ, 
Facebook 
and 
the 

ever-increasing 
reach 
of 

the Internet, this type of 
entertainment 
demanded 

celebrities 
be 
bigger, 

louder 
and 
more 
visible. 

Celebrity was dictated not 
by talent, necessarily, but by 
performance stamina — who 
could be “on” all the time. In 
that vein, the Paris Hiltons 

and Lindsay Lohans of the 
world win. Their stars burn 
brighter (and explode bigger) 
than anyone else’s.

Coppola pairs them with their 

less obviously visible musical 

counterparts. 
The 

lure of artists like 
Azealia Banks and 
Kanye 
3West 
is 

built as much on 
their music as their 
public 
personas. 

In one of the film’s 
more iconic scenes, 
Emma Watson (“The 
Circle”) and Taissa 
Farmiga 
(“Rules 

Don’t Apply”) dance 

to Banks’s “212” in a club.

The 
two 
Kanye 
tracks 

Coppola picks are “All of the 
Lights” and “Power,” which 
are both buoyed 
by a throbbing, 
clappy bassline. 
The 
clapping 

in the back of 
“Power” sounds 
like 
the 
click 

of a camera as 
West sings: “No 
one man should 
have 
all 
that 

power.” 
He’s 

mad and jealous 
and also acutely 
self-aware 
— 

something 
the 

film is too. The 
song plays over 
the 
group 
as 

they stroll down the streets of 
Beverly Hills, sunglasses on and 
iced coffees in hand. They look, 
for a moment, to have finally 
become the people they’ve been 
robbing, but Coppola holds us 
here — shooting the scene in 
slow motion — and the longer 
we hold, the longer it feels like 

an act, nothing more than a 
good performance.

As they leave a club, at the 

peak of their spree, too drunk to 
drive but too young and high on 
adrenaline to call a cab, M.I.A.’s 
“Bad Girls” blares over the car 
speakers. The song’s refrain 
sums up their aspirations: “Live 
fast, die young, bad girls do it 
well.” This is the myth they’ve 
been sold and they desperately 
want to be mythologized. The 
precarity of their lives — both 
immediately, in the car and 
generally in their crimes — 
is nothing compared to the 
prospect of remembrance. Bad 
girls get photographed. Bad 
girls get remembered.

That’s 
the 
soundtrack’s 

brilliance, 
the 
balance 
it 

strikes 
between 
narrative 

reality — “Bad 
Girls” would be 
playing in that 
car — and tonal 
melancholy. 
There 
is 

something 
that 

feels inescapable 
about 
their 

situation. 
They 

feel like victims 
of 
a 
larger 

machine, 
a 

machine that has 
raised them on a 
myth.

Coppola 

scores the film 
such 
that 
we 

understand 
the 
appeal 
of 

celebrity glamour, of designer 
sunglasses and of Paris Hilton’s 
closet. But we also feel the 
tragedy and impossibility of this 
world, its falseness and careful 
creation. The kids are criminals, 
yes, but they’re also kids who 
believe, wholeheartedly, in a lie.

‘The Bling Ring’ scores 
the reality TV generation

DAILY FILM COLUMN

A24

MADELEINE

GAUDIN

Adderall, 

designer bags, 
romanticized 
rehab stints 
and diamond-

encrusted danger

The old woman in the 

recording tells you she is 
from Chapel Hill, N.C. In the 
background, she plucks and 
strums at a guitar: You can 
picture her weathered fingers 
moving 
expertly 
over 
the 

strings as she smiles into the 
microphone, addressing the 
crowd. She was 85 years old, 
then living in Washington, 
D.C..

“I guess I’ll live there the 

rest of my life,” she says, 
“‘cause all my people are there 
— my daughter, her children, 
all her granddaughters. My 
grands and greats and greats, 
all there.”

The recording is a live 

version of “Freight Train,” 
from the album Live!, released 
in 
1998. 
The 
woman 
is 

Elizabeth Cotten, who was 
born in 1893 and wrote the 
song when she was only 11 
or 12-years-old. She taught 
herself to play the banjo 
and the guitar as a child, 
borrowing 
her 
brother’s 

instruments against his wishes 
and reversing them so that she 
could play them left-handed. 
At the age of 11, she saved up 
enough money doing domestic 
work — $3.75 — to buy her own 
guitar. She developed her own 
unique method of alternating 
the bass and the melody while 
she was playing, which came 
to be known as “Cotten style,” 
and was already a proficient 
guitar player and songwriter 
by her early teens.

It is hard for me to try to tell 

you about Elizabeth Cotten; 
it is impossible, I think, for 
anybody to adequately define 
or describe her, other than 
herself. She knew what she 
wanted and who she was, 
lived life on her own terms. 
She shares a prime example 
of this with us on another 
track from the same live 
album, “Elizabeth Story, et al., 
Honeybabe, Your Papa Cares 
For You.”

In the story, she explains, 

“When I was born in the 
world, 
they 
didn’t 
name 

me.” Her mother and father 
couldn’t agree on a name, so 
for the first few years of her 

life, she was known only as 
“Babe,” “Sis” and “Little Sis” 
by the people around her, up 
until her first day of school.

“When (the teacher) was 

calling the roll, she says, 
‘Little Sis Nevills.’ She said, 
‘Do you have a name?’” says 
Cotten in the recording. “I 
says, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘What 
is it?’ I said, ‘Elizabeth.’ So I 
named myself.”

Cotten began working as 

a maid alongside her mother 
when she was 13 and married 
her husband at 15. She had 
one daughter and spent many 
years working and moving 
around, having given up the 
guitar in favor of church and 
family obligations. Around 40 
years later, she was working 
in a department store one day 
when she helped a lost child 
find her mother. The child 
was Peggy Seeger, the mother 
Ruth Crawford Seeger. The 
Seeger family hired Cotten 
as a maid, which eventually 
prompted Cotten to remember 
her own musical past and to 
re-teach herself the guitar 
almost 
completely. 
The 

Seegers ultimately ended up 
helping Cotten record some 
of her early music; soon, she 
was performing publicly. She 
attracted fans during the folk 
revival of the early 1960s, even 
performing at the legendary 
Newport Folk Festival.

Because Cotten spent so 

much of her life unrecognized 
as a musician, she is already 
well into her 60s in most of the 
recordings of her that exist. 
This makes for a strange and 
quietly profound experience: 
When you listen to some of 
Elizabeth 
Cotten’s 
songs, 

you’re listening to songs that 
she wrote as a very young girl 
and sang for others only years 
later, as an older woman. The 
words are forward-looking, 
but also sometimes a little 
death-preoccupied, 
as 
folk 

songs often are. They’re songs 
that make you think about 
the beginning of your life and 
also the end of it, and how far 
you’ve come in between.

Perhaps nowhere is this 

conveyed 
more 
absolutely 

than 
in 
“Freight 
Train.” 

There are other, more popular 
recordings of the song — as 
well as covers of it by more 
popular artists — but Cotten’s 
Live! version is my favorite. 
You can hear her at age 85, after 
all those years of working and 
growing and being herself, all 
those experiences: The time 
she named herself Elizabeth, 
the time a taxi driver told 
her a joke while they were 
passing by a cemetery, the 
daughter she had and all of 
the grandchildren and great-
grandchildren who came after. 
And she’s singing “Freight 
Train,” a song she wrote as a 
young child, on the other side 
of all of those years.

It’s a simple song, really — a 

song about the train tracks that 
ran by her childhood home. 
After she runs through the 
opening chord progression, 
she asks the audience, “Y’all 

ever heard that before?” and 
they all laugh. Yes, they have. 
You can hear them singing the 
words along with her — open, 
honest words about the love 
that you can have for a little 
thing when that thing is in a 
place that you love.

They sing, “When I die, 

Lord, bury me deep / Way 
down on old Chestnut Street / 
So I can hear old Number Nine 
/ As she comes rolling by.” The 
sound of a roomful of people 
singing about a sentiment 
ordinarily so incommunicable, 
together, from memory, is 

the kind of thing that stays 
with a person. It’s a feeling 
like 
coming 
full 
circle, 

transcendent and communal 
in a way that folk music often 
reaches for, but rarely ever 
achieves so naturally.

It doesn’t feel right to sum 

up a reflection on Elizabeth 
Cotten with words of my 
own. She was, after all, a 
woman who made her own 
words, her own life, her own 
name. Her personality was 
aptly described by Folkways 
as 
“quietly 
commanding,” 

and, fittingly, her music is 
emotional, natural, quiet and 
strong. The fact that we have 
her story and her music still 
available to us is a treasure too 
often overlooked. What old 
woman becomes a powerful 
presence in the world of folk 
music well into her 60s? What 
little girl teaches herself how 
to play the guitar like an 
expert, upside-down and left-
handed? What little girl names 
herself?

In the live recording of 

“Washington Blues,” Cotten 
recounts the early process of 
learning how to play the guitar 
and trying to get her brother 
to help her. She had to figure 
out how to play the instrument 
in a way that made sense for 
her, turning it upside-down 
and playing using her own 
method. Her brother told her 
to try changing the strings, 
but it ended up making the 
guitar sound even worse than 
it had before.

“So no one help me,” she 

says, and the audience laughs 
and claps. “Everything I play 
for y’all tonight, I give myself 
credit, ‘cause nobody need 
help me.”

No pressure, but you need 
to know Elizabeth Cotten

VESTAPOL

The unrecognized folk singer lived a powerful, independant life

It is impossible, I 
think, for anybody 

to adequately 

define or describe 

her, other than 

herself

The fact that we 
have her story 

and her music still 
available to us is a 
treasure too often 

overlooked.

MUSIC NOTEBOOK

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, March 21, 2018— 5A

