Preheader: Plus: Apes, bees, beefs, husbands and Eurovision

View this email online by Linda Holmes Welcome! It was the week when a rap beef reached a tipping point. It was the week when another paper company lined up for its big moment. And it was the week when a Chicago music legend was remembered. Let's get to it. People are mad about this Apple ad. And that's the point. There is something so ugly about crushing an acoustic guitar. Making it buckle, making the middle of it explode in splinters. That might be personal to me, as someone who grew up with a dad who was what you might call a campfire guitarist — not a performer, just a dad who used to entertain us with songs like "Dark as a Dungeon," a little folk tune about the lethal dangers of coal mining. Maybe to you, it's not the guitar. Maybe it's the cameras or the vinyl records. A screenshot from the new ad for "the thinnest Apple product ever." NPR A little more than halfway through the new ad for "the thinnest Apple product ever," an enormous hydraulic press bears down on an acoustic guitar — and cameras, and records, and other things that hold reservoirs of emotion for people who make art. Paint, pencils, a dressmaker's mannequin, books, a wooden model of a person, a not-yet-dry clay bust, a video game cabinet. Everything is flattened under its power. But the most spectacular crushings are of musical instruments — that guitar, a piano, a drum set, a trumpet standing on its end until it gives way. The ad — which Apple has since apologized for — is meant to communicate, I suppose, that this tiny, thin iPad can contain what is important from all these things. It can replace them all. You can make your music with it. You can paint with it. You can play games on it. You can take your photos with it. And it suggests this means you can finally destroy all those things that have been so burdensome, like massive pianos and messy paint. But these are not practical items to begin with. Nobody owns a piano because it's practical; it's about the least practical thing you can own. It can wreck your floor. It goes out of tune. And if you happen to get a new place, you don't just need movers for it; you may need special movers. You don't own a piano to get from point A to point B in the most direct way you can. You own a piano for the reason we had one in my house: a person plays it. Someone sits down, as my mother did, and plays the "Maple Leaf Rag," and you can hear the pedals lightly squeak, and you can watch hands skitter across keys, and of course you are listening to music — but also, those are your mother's hands. Of course, to be fair, the ad is also meant to cause controversy, because you do not crush beautiful things and offend accidentally. The ad says almost nothing about the iPad itself except that it's very thin; the point is all the crushing, the point is the ugliness, so admittedly, to recognize that ugliness is to serve the ad's purpose. But its ugliness is also what proves the folly of its concept. The reason people will react as emotionally as they do to the vulgarity of the ad is precisely why the thinnest iPad yet cannot do what they say it will do. It cannot replace the things that people have, over hundreds of years, learned to carry and live beside, and to incorporate into their creation of what they hope will be beauty. Art is intertwined with humanity, with all its flawed dimensions, and the two cannot be separated. In the making of art, there is family, there are friends and collaborators, there is both fragility and permanence, and there is the passage of time. And there is physicality. In our current environment, the ad plays as an extension of, or maybe a companion to, the idea that artificial intelligence — or what travels under that name — can take over the production of art: of books, of illustrations, of music, of films. We are enduring an all-out assault on the need for anyone's idiosyncratic individuality to be involved in the creation of art. It is an attempt to reduce creative acts to devices with the right capabilities, to the point where machines can make it all entirely without us. We will, in this vision, order a book or a film as we do a mass-produced piece of fast fashion, and as such, it will be cheap and disposable and reliant on the exploitation of labor. But the very fact that Apple knew this ad would make people so angry is how you know this reductive approach to art is doomed to fail. The people who made this ad specifically chose to crush things that are valuable not only because of their capabilities, but because they are things that creative people imbue with meaning, that they save up for and hand down to their kids. Those things will not be replaced by iPads. You can make beautiful music with an iPad; you can make beautiful digital art. But that art will be made alongside other music, other art, not stacked on top of the corpses of old violins. If you think of new frontiers in art as an opportunity to destroy sculptures or explode bottles of paint, you never understood art at all, and you never will. In certain kinds of stories, "I am not worried" is the last thing you say before the monster devours you. But while I am worried about the economics of art and its creation, I am not worried at all that art made by humans will ever vanish or be replaced by the thinnest iPad ever. The gasp that went up from so many people when they saw that guitar explode, that sound came from the part of a human being that makes art. And that part instinctively understands that beauty isn't fixated on tech-world dominance. It doesn't demand to crush what is loved in order to chase the fantasy that you can fit everything that matters into the pocket of a briefcase. Newsletter continues after sponsor message We Recommend The Beekeeper came out in January, but it's had an interesting buzz (sorry) around it recently, so I finally checked it out, and you know what? It's pretty good! It's a Jason Statham action picture in which he plays an avenging fighter (you are shocked!) who is determined to take down the people who scammed his neighbor out of her life savings. It's certainly not a masterpiece of nuance, but there's something extremely satisfying about seeing the bad guys in a movie like this portrayed as just ordinary, life-ruining doofuses. Forget blowing up military installations: this guy is going to burn down your annoying call center. It's available on demand now. The death of legendary stuntwoman Jeannie Epper led me back this week to the documentary Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story, which you can rent or stream in a variety of places, including on Tubi for free. It will give you Epper's story, and it's also a great companion to The Fall Guy (which I hope you'll see in a theater), because both understand the hard work and commitment of stunt performers. We're gearing up to watch a new season of Bridgerton, and since these seasons have only come out every other year, you might need a refresher before you dive in. Perhaps you'd like to remind yourself where we were when last we saw all these fancy people? I am currently reading The Husbands, an inventive comedy-drama by Holly Gramazio. The hook is irresistible: a single woman's attic suddenly starts producing husbands for her, and every time one of them goes up there, he's replaced by a new one who comes back down. It's a conundrum: How do you get a husband you don't like to go up there so you can get a new one? How do you keep one you do like from going up there so he doesn't disappear? I am enjoying it a lot, and I can't wait to see where it's going. Listen to the Podcast Sponsor-Free Support your favorite pop culture junkies AND listen without sponsor interruptions with a subscription to Pop Culture Happy Hour+! Learn more and sign up at plus.npr.org/happy. Learn More What We Did This Week Drake onstage during Drake's 'Till Death Do Us Part' rap battle in 2021. Amy Sussman/Getty Images   Glen and Aisha were joined by Tre'vell Anderson and Ryan Mitchell to talk about the complicated project that is Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show. How complicated is it? Ryan says, "I'm sitting at an intersection of absolutely hating it and realizing that it also might be the best show I've ever watched in my entire life." Aisha, Stephen and I watched the Jerry Seinfeld Netflix film Unfrosted, and we tackled the most important question: What's the best Pop-Tart flavor? It's Dua Lipa time, so Stephen was joined by Reanna Cruz and Shamira Ibrahim to discuss the singer's latest album, Radical Optimism. Enjoy their conversation about the person Shamira calls "the artist, the brand, the constantly vacationing icon." Shamira Ibrahim returned to talk to Aisha about the Drake-Kendrick beef and more generally the status of 2024 as "the year of pop culture grievances." And Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the latest entry in a storied franchise, so Aisha talked to Jordan Morris and Wailin Wong about the film, and why Jordan compares it to "nachos at a bar." You may know this, but it's Eurovision time again, and that means it's time for one of the event's great joys: Glen's rundown of some of the best songs of this round. Read about France's entry, which Glen says has "a searching, plaintive, torch-song quality that's more quintessentially French than a beret slathered with Camembert and stuffed in a baguette." What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: Wailin Wong: Brian Moylan’s Vanderpump Rules recaps on Vulture Jordan Morris: The Worst Ronin, by Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Faith Schaffer Aisha Harris: Luciano Pavarotti and Celine Dion live duet of “I Hate You Then I Love You” Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes. What do you think of today's email? 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