Rarely is the energy of a whole band so 

understandable in a phone call. Perhaps that is 
one of the most special parts about Tank and the 
Bangas: They can communicate their energy full 
of hope, love and strength through any medium, 
down to storytelling over the phone. Joshua 
Johnson, the group’s drummer and musical 
director, took a moment to chat with The Daily a 
few days ahead of the band’s show at The Blind Pig 
on Wednesday, Sept. 22. 

The band energy builds strongly off of the 

poetic roots of lead singer Tarriona “Tank” Ball. As 
Johnson told me, when performing live, “To me, 
it keeps her grounded in that space, that ‘I know 
what I’m doing,’ and it’s like a confidence thing. 
It comes out, no question, and it always seems to 
touch the crowd (in a) certain way, so I love seeing 
that happen.” After all, several members of the 
band met at an open mic at Blackstar, a bookstore 
and coffee shop in New Orleans, where Ball was 
reciting her poetry. 

The Blind Pig concert itself was interspersed 

with powerful moments of clarity, as Ball boomed 
spoken word poetry out over the crowd. The band 

worked as a true unit, following each other and 
the path that their songs wanted to take when 
performed live. Johnson described his “psychic 
connection” with his brother, Jonathan Johnson, 
the bass player, and another founding band 
member, Norman Spence, on bass and synth keys. 
“I can look at him, or I could just say a certain word 
that may not make sense … everybody knows 
exactly what we’re looking for, you know, it’s really 
cool,” Johnson said. But a lot of the time, he went 
on to explain, it is when that connection fails once 
every so often that they learn from each other. “A 
lot of times we find new ideas for music that way, 
honestly,” Johnson confided.

But in that small, crowded room, these ties 

were immediately obvious, never failing once. 
The way this band works live is by feeding off of 
each other’s energy and that of the crowd. They 
never play a song the same way twice. You know 
all their songs by heart, have everything off of their 
albums memorized? Great. Throw that all out of 
the window, because it’s going to sound completely 
different live. Ball’s confidence on stage was the 
kind that extends to the whole room. She held the 
hands of audience members, whooped, called and 
thrilled with humor and playful affection, allowing 
her listeners to hold her same attitude, even if just 
for two hours. 

The other band members threw their whole 

bodies into their performance (often literally). 
Albert Allenback, on flute and alto saxophone, 
drew eyes to him with his gaspingly passionate 
solos and cheerfully exaggerated energy. Johnson 
himself was clearly the anchor to which all strings 
were tied, playing with a big grin on his face but 
watchful eyes. And when asked the difference 
between playing a show and just jamming on 
their own, he answered truthfully, “They would 
say that they have the energy of the crowd. I’ll be 
honest — for me it feels the same. A lot of times 
it feels just like I’m with them, and people are 
watching now.”

This humbleness translates through to the 

band’s mentality. “Before every show we at least get 
a prayer in, and we’re thankful, you know what I’m 
saying, we have a lot to be thankful for,” Johnson 
made sure to tell me. And it was so easy to tell 
how grateful he was, just in his answers to other, 
unrelated questions. 

What makes the band unique to him is “being 

able to communicate with everybody, it’s the love 
I have for each and every one of them honestly 
… it feels like one of those bands that never break 
up and you’re like, yeah, they all have their 65th 
Anniversary World Tour.”

After about 10 years together as a band, 

however, they still haven’t found a way to define 
their sound. There’s something funk, some soul, 
some rap, some spoken word. Some have tried 
to define it, using regional terms like gumbo, but 
the band has something else in mind. “To us, it’s 
almost like magic … it touches everybody, and it 
touches everybody differently,” Johnson said. His 
description of what it is like to play aligns perfectly 
with such a fantastical genre description, telling 
The Daily, “It’s almost like (the music is) part of us, 
but it’s not like I feel like one with it … it’s us, like the 
music is us and we are the music. We are the poetry 
and the poetry is within us. And you know, it’s like 
an energy, almost.”

This grateful energy ballooned throughout 

The Blind Pig that night, emphasized in the band’s 
finale, in which Ball riffed over the band for 15 
minutes, repeating the sentence “I am strong.” 
With her arms held high, eyes open wide, the 
whole band gazing into the crowd and observing 
and learning from their looks back, it was an 
image of triumph.

4 — Wednesday, October 6, 2021
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com 

In 1978, Gary Vaynerchuck migrated from 

Belarus to a studio apartment in Queens. 
Soon after, the 7-year-old “entrepreneur at 
heart” opened a lemonade stand before mov-
ing on to make thousands of dollars selling 
baseball cards. 

Now, Vaynerchuck is the chairman of 

VaynerX, a communications company that 
parents several media-based properties. Most 
notably, he’s a social media mogul in the start-
up space, where he’s known as “GaryVee”: you 
might’ve seen a video of Vaynerchuck on your 
LinkedIn feed dissecting the lucrative NFT 
market or a clip on Instagram of him divulg-
ing the secrets of starting a business. In fact, 
if you haven’t heard of him or his buzzword-
infested rhetoric, I envy you. Vaynerchuck 
hosts a Q&A show, a daily video diary, a pod-
cast and even owns a signature sneaker — and 
this doesn’t include the full schedule of events 
he books. For someone who rejects the label 
of motivational speaker — claiming he doesn’t 
want to be anyone’s Tony Robbins — Vayner-
chuck acts the part exceptionally well.

Vaynerchuck preaches the “hustle,” a 

broad philosophy on work that encourages a 
gutsy expression of free will, chronic produc-
tivity and a self-starting mindset. Hustle cul-

ture oversees the startup phenomenon that 
draws young, steadfast pre-entrepreneurs 
to the Silicon Valley area code, each with an 
idea that will make them the next Mark Zuck-
erberg. It rings of meritocracy with more fes-
tive catchphrases — “the grind doesn’t stop,” 
“work smarter not harder” and anything else 
you would expect to hear from a business 
major powered by Ritalin. 

However, it’s all pretty disingenuous 

because Vaynerchuck already succeeded — 
he gets to look back at his journey and tell 
people how it happened, and how they can 
do the same. In a piece he wrote for Medium, 
“The Day I Decided to Become GaryVee,” 
Vaynerchuck credits brute force for his suc-
cess. He writes, “So you know why I’m sitting 
here right now? At the top of one of the fast-
est growing creative agencies of all time … At 
a 150M dollar annual revenue business? At a 
company that has ambitions to become worth 
billions and billions of dollars? Not because I 
got lucky but because I outworked you. I went 
for it. Think about it. I outworked you.”

Okay, Gary. You did outwork me. Unfortu-

nately, I don’t plan my days down to the min-
ute, depriving myself of any and all moments 
of relief, no matter how infinitesimal. I don’t 
book meetings from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. just to 
wake up at 5 a.m. the next morning and do 
it all over again. If Vaynerchuck is setting a 
standard for a lifestyle that guarantees suc-

cess, it’s physically impossible to accomplish 
doing anything less than a 19-hour work day. 
In Vaynerchuck’s school of thought, that’s 
why I’m unsuccessful.

Vaynerchuck is an excellent orator, 

addressing his audience with the tone of a 
mean high school coach — a little hostile, yet 
claims what he’s saying is in everyone’s best 
interest. His sentences are short; they hit 
you like slam poetry. Each carries tangible 
passion, sprinkled with expletives and vocal 
inflections. In this way, Vaynerchuck is an 
evangelist, and productivity adopts a spiri-
tual quality. If you are listening to or watching 
Vaynerchuck, you must feel inadequate — he 
addresses the plebian, the chronic wannabe, 
and tells them that their problems don’t mat-
ter, that they should simply choose optimism. 
Socioeconomic status, gender, race, sexual 
orientation — these things aren’t barriers to 
success. 

The single mother who relies on child sup-

port to feed her children, the ambitious kid 
plagued by generations of poverty, the ex-con 
who is denied employment from McDon-
ald’s: These people just aren’t working hard 
enough. Because to Vaynerchuck, circum-
stances that are out of one’s control might not 
stop them from trying to do the impossible. 
To Vaynerchuck, you are the driving force, 
not the woes of capitalism or the social bina-
ries that alienate marginalized communities, 

or the company you inherited from your par-
ents in order to bypass the latter.

But Vaynerchuck is not a normal person 

— regular people don’t say things like “I’d 
rip both my legs off, and arms, to be 25 years 
old” or “I would suffocate and die if I worked 
9:00–5:00. I wouldn’t be happy. I want to 
work.” The average GaryVee listener might 
try to be just like him, because that’s what 
he’s telling them to do. What if the average 
GaryVee listener or average worker in general 
does not derive happiness from workaholism? 
Turning something you don’t enjoy into a life-
style, especially when that lifestyle requires 
an 80-hour work week, almost guarantees 
burnout. Go and live like Vaynerchuck for a 
week, and try to come back with a brain that 
hasn’t been reduced to gray sludge.

I can understand why hustle culture is so 

seductive — it evokes our survivalist nature: 
work harder than everyone else and you will 
reach the top. The strongest deserve to tri-
umph and the weak eat their dust. Hard work, 
excessive work, makes you a valuable member 
of society.

But American work culture is already 

riddled with toxicity — 83% of American 
workers report stress and burnout negatively 
impacting their personal relationships, and 
91% report a reduced work performance due 
to these same factors. Absolute commitment 
to productivity requires sacrifices in other 

aspects of life, including mental health. There 
is no getting around the fact that well-being 
and success at work are not mutually exclu-
sive.

With Vaynerchuck as the high priest of 

workplace productivity, what happens if 
everyone who listens to him actually puts his 
advice into practice? Will these people ever 
figure out that brute force alone can’t make 
you a millionaire? To me, the Gary Vayner-
chuck story creates a sort of paradox: He must 
attribute his success to something in order to 
market himself as a motivational speaker, but 
that something isn’t going to work for every-
one. It isn’t going to work for most people. 
Corporate America doesn’t want you in the 
club unless you’re already a part of it. The 
grindstone of capitalism is not meant to be an 
accessible venue; it’s evil and devoid of empa-
thy, it pulverizes the disenfranchised and 
garnishes the CEOs and GaryVees with more 
money. What we’re looking at, in the long 
term, is a generation of people who completely 
run out of gas before they turn 25, chasing the 
1% chance of breaking through. That’s why 
his popularity feels like a bad omen.

In a perfect world, America runs on the 

4 day week — we’d be more productive, less 
stressed, and wouldn’t have to take a cold 
shower at the crack of dawn just to wake our-
selves up. And we certainly wouldn’t have to 
listen to GaryVee to be successful.

You should stop listening to GaryVee

LAINE BROTHERTON

Daily Arts Writer

Content warning: Mental illness, 

suicide

Despite their rise in popularity over 

the last decade, movie musicals tend 
to be incredibly hit-or-miss. There’s 
a lot to be said about the clunkiness of 
the stage-to-screen adaptation, but at 
the core of this inelegance is the fact 
that Broadway musicals depend on 
something that no one will ever be 
able to translate fully to film: a certain 
suspension of disbelief. On Broadway, 
people can dress up like cats and sing 
about something called a “Jellicle Ball,” 
and the show will run for 18 years. 
When the same thing is attempted 
on screen, the film gains a reputation 
for being one of the worst movies ever 
made. It’s true that there is a lot wrong 
with the “Cats” movie, but the story’s 
absurdity was always there — what 
changed was a wider audience’s level of 
tolerance for it.

“Dear Evan Hansen” joins the ranks 

of other movie musicals with new film 
adaptations, and it suffers deeply from 
that change in tolerance. Ben Platt 
(“The Politician”) can play a 17-year-
old on a stage that distances him from 
his audience, but if you put him in front 
of a camera lens, every feature of his 
betrays the fact that he’s in his late 20s. 
On stage, he can sing poppy, hummable 
anthems that make it easy to forget the 
fact that his character acts abhorrently 
throughout the show, and then the show 
can garner near-universal acclaim and a 
reputation as a powerful force for suicide 
awareness and prevention. This is not 
the case for the film.

In “Dear Evan Hansen,” the titular 

character is a socially anxious, severely 
depressed high school senior who 
writes letters to himself as part of an 
exercise assigned by his therapist. On 
the first day of school, Connor Murphy 
(Colton Ryan, “Uncle Frank”), an angry 
social outcast, takes one of the letters 
after becoming enraged by its mention 
of his sister Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever, 
“Booksmart”), Evan’s longtime crush.

Soon after, Connor takes his own life 

off-screen, but Evan’s letter is found in 
his pocket, leading Connor’s mother 
Cynthia (Amy Adams, “The Woman 
in the Window”) to believe that the 
two were friends. 
Sympathetic 
to 

the family, Evan 
doesn’t 
correct 

them and instead 
doubles 
down, 

even going as far 
as to write multiple 
backdated 
emails 
between 

himself 
and 

Connor and rewriting his own history 
to 
accommodate 
their 
fabricated 

friendship. He entrenches himself 
within the grieving Murphy family 
— essentially replacing Connor as a 
son figure — begins dating Zoe, and 
becomes an internet sensation after his 
speech at Connor’s memorial service 
goes viral.

As a musical, the film asks us to accept 

a certain amount of implausibility as 
soon as Evan starts singing two minutes 
in, and this might be easier to do if the 
direction didn’t suffer at the hands of 
Stephen Chbosky (“Wonder”), a first-
time movie musical director. Even for a 

musical with straightforward settings 
and 
situations, 
Chbosky’s 
almost 

static, lingering camera eliminates the 
potential for any kind of dynamism 
during the musical numbers, flattening 
them. They’re almost boring, and some 
at the beginning even feel gratuitous.

The film is also filled with little 

oddities that are hard to comprehend 
as ever being believable. There is, of 
course, the fact that the attempt to 
age Platt down by 10 years somehow 
had the opposite effect. The internet 
exploded after the trailer’s release, 
with most of the commentary making 
the same observation: Ben Platt looks 
really, really old in this movie. There’s 
also a production design that makes us 
wonder if anyone involved has stepped 
foot inside of a high school since the 
early 2000s, and a sort of hilarious 
misunderstanding of how young people 
use technology (a lingering shot on 
video entitled “His Best Friend Died … 
You Won’t Believe What He Did Next!” 
actually provoked laughs in my theater).

Most importantly, though, the shift 

in the level of acceptability between 
stage and film changes the way that we 
interpret Evan and his actions. Criticism 
for the content of “Dear Evan Hansen” is 
not new; a 2017 piece from Medium even 
calls the musical “a toxic piece of theatre, 
a morally bankrupt exploitation of the 
experience of mental illness.” Evan is a 
character whose struggle with mental 
illness makes him easy to sympathize 
with, but is that enough to forgive all 
of the hurt he causes when his lies 
unravel? Does internal struggle justify 
objectively bad actions? Is “Words Fail,” 
an admittedly powerful eleven o’clock 
number, enough to absolve Evan of all of 
his sins?

The film desperately wants us to say 

“yes,” but my answer is “no.” One of the 
most salient criticisms of the musical is 
that it’s emotionally manipulative, and 
the film’s late addition of an essential 
revelation about Evan, intercut with the 
aforementioned eleven o’clock number, 
validates that criticism. We’re supposed 
to be hearing an unconditional apology 
from the character, but the movie 
inserts raw imagery of his earlier suicide 
attempt on top of it, asking the audience 
to forgive all of his indiscretions 
because of his trauma. This completely 
undercuts the number’s intentions, 
obscures 
the 
musical’s 
ultimate 

message 
and 

leaves behind a 
bitter aftertaste. In 
trying to redeem 
Evan, 
the 
film 

reveals its blatant 
manipulation. This 
decision 
resolves 

some 
of 
the 

frustrating moral 
ambiguity of the 

source material, but not for the better.

Critically and commercially, “Dear 

Evan Hansen” is one of the most 
successful Broadway musicals of the 
last decade, but its film adaptation is 
on its way to becoming one of the most 
poorly received movie musicals of all 
time. The ineffective translation to 
the screen has a lot to do with the way 
that many of the musical’s narrative 
decisions and themes just don’t work 
on film, revealing some of them as 
clumsy, some as mildly absurd and 
others as genuinely unacceptable. 

‘Dear Evan Hansen’ stumbles 

from stage to screen, then 

falls flat on its face

This image is from the official trailer for “Dear 

Evan Hansen,” distributed by Universal Pictures.

KATRINA STEBBINS

Daily Arts Writer

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

This image is from the official Tank and the Bangas website.

Tank and the Bangas, thankful and 

triumphant at the Blind Pig

ROSA SOFIA KAMINSKI

Daily Arts Writer

The Good, The Bad and ‘The Many Saints of Newark’

It is hard to express the influence that HBO’s 

“The Sopranos” had on the history of television. 
The show dominated the television landscape 
during its eight-year run, continuing to rack up 
praise and viewers even as shows like “Lost” 
captivated the country. People continually refer 
to “The Sopranos” as a beacon of high-quality 
storytelling and entertainment, naming creator 
and writer David Chase (“The Rockford Files”) 
as a bona fide genius, cementing the legacy of 
well-made HBO shows that continues to this day.

Maybe this is why the return into the world 

of “The Sopranos” with the recently released 
prequel film “The Many Saints of Newark” feels 
so underwhelming. 

The film marketed itself hard as the origin story 

for James Gandolfini’s (“Enough Said”) iconic 
character Tony Soprano, but in reality, Chase 
and co-writer Lawrence Konner (“Boardwalk 
Empire”) focus on Richard “Dickie” Moltisanti 
(Alessandro Nivola, “American Hustle”), the 
father of a character from the original series. 
Tony does play a part in the movie, spending 
the first hour as a child (William Ludwig, “Side 
Hustle”) before the film hops forward five years 
when Tony is a teenager (Michael Gandolfini, 
“Cherry”). Other characters from the show are 
here as well, playing parts ranging in size from 
fun easter egg to vital story characters, but make 
no mistake: This is Dickie’s story. 

Set in 1967, Dickie Moltisanti welcomes back 

his father Aldo “Hollywood Dick” Moltisanti 
(Ray Liotta, “Goodfellas”) and his new wife 
Giuseppina (Michela De Rossi, “Boys Cry”) 
from their trip to Italy. With his father back in 
town, Dickie puts pressure on Harold McBrayer 
(Leslie Odom Jr., “One Night in Miami”), a mob 
enforcer, to get debts owed to the mob. Internal 
tensions both within the mob and the Black 
community come to a head during the Newark 
Riots, causing a deeper rift between Newark’s 
two prominent communities. Five years later, 
Harold becomes hellbent on starting up his own 
gang to rival the mob, setting his sights firmly on 
Dickie and causing a turf war that ends the only 
way the criminals know how: Death. 

The plot summary above may seem convoluted 

— and it is — but it leaves out a lot of details: The 
movie haphazardly tries to also weave in story 
beats for known characters like Junior (Corey 
Stoll, “Ant Man”), and shifts focus to Tony and 
his relationship with his mother. The script 
constantly jumps from character to character, a 
buckshot of narrative that sometimes connects 
together. The film seemingly wants the core 
relationship to be between an impressionable 
Tony Soprano and his Uncle Dickie who wants 
a better life for him, but it constantly loses track 
of whose story it is trying to tell, doing a major 
disservice to both characters. Are audiences 
supposed to empathize with Tony, with the 
possible knowledge of the man he will become, 
or with Dickie, who exists solely for these 120 
minutes and remains hard to emotionally 

understand? 

Director Alan Taylor (“Game of Thrones”), 

a frequent Chase collaborator on the TV show, 
does an admirable job bringing a cinematic 
quality to the work. Scenes are often visually 
pleasing and the camera work handles a lot of the 
emotional burden for the hard-to-read Dickie. 
Taylor puts the set and prop department to 
work establishing realistic-looking locations and 
objects, even going so far as to destroy it all for 
the Riot.

The actors are all top-notch as well. The 

actors of existing characters channel the 
original performances while adding their own 
flair — special mention must be paid to Michael 
Gandolfini’s performance of the character his 
father created. He inherits the character with 
grace and crafts a more naïve, innocent character 
than the one audiences are familiar with. 

Undoubtedly though, the most interesting 

characters are the ones created for the film. 
Nivola 
conveys 
Dickie’s 
main 
struggles 

admirably: Is Dickie a violent menace damned 
for his past deeds or can he redeem himself by 
doing good things for others? Unfortunately for 
Nivola, the script simply doesn’t allow enough 
time or space to get into the depths of Dickie’s 
mind. For a series that prides itself on in-depth 
examinations of its characters — the main 
premise is literally a mobster going to therapy — 
it’s a huge missed opportunity to never allow the 
audience to see how Dickie feels. 

M. DEITZ

Digital Culture Beat Editor

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

