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