16 Grumbles
I’d really been hoping to announce on the blog’s birthday a couple of weeks back
that it would finally be returning to a regular flow of content.
That last word has devolved into a rather hollow one, with page impressions crucial
to ad revenue and much of social media — be it a business model unto itself or engagement in support of personal or corporate branding — driven by a mantra of continuing to feed the beast lest attention slip. I remember when it was a marker of value and productivity: “This boxed set / omnibus / deluxe edition is chock full of great bonus content!” I’m optimistic that the aggregated material here provides value to anyone who stops by and pokes around even if my productivity took a serious dive
years ago.
I recently got back to cleaning up old entries and lining up enough new ones that it made sense to me to celebrate at least a soft revival in some retrospective posts. You can guess how that went by my tone right now. Which doesn’t mean the aforementioned stuff won’t see the virtual light of day once I’ve proven to myself that a reliable, consistent schedule can be achieved. I hain’t given up yet.
Related: Welcome • The Slog • Blest of the Bog
A Lot of Night Music
Here, appropriately enough for the day, is a labor of Questlove that opened his excellent documentary about Saturday Night Live’s musical legacy. You can watch the mashup montage directly in his Instagram post or as embedded a couple of paragraphs into an article on the NBC website. The entirety of Ladies and Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music re-airs tomorrow night, Feb. 15th, from 8 to 11 p.m. ET on the network and is streamable on Peacock.
John MacDonald is credited as editor of the montage, and Oz Rodríguez as co-
director on the special. Questlove’s 2021 doc Summer of Soul, about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, is for my money one of the best films of the decade, period, and not just because I hadn’t seen Marilyn McCoo in too long; you can watch it on Hulu.
Peacock debuted four 1-hour chapters of a documentary series marking Saturday
Night Live’s 50th in January, with a concert featuring many past musical guests streaming tonight. SNL’s entire catalog of nearly 1,000 episodes is on the service as well. The anniversary special is set to air live on NBC Sunday night, Feb. 16th, at 8 p.m. ET, preceded by a red-carpet show at 7.
Don’t sleep on Ladies and Gentlemen… even if you’re far more interested in SNL’s comedic heritage than its musical guests. Music as part of that comedic heritage is also deftly explored, from sketch jingles and The Lonely Island shorts to celebrity impressions and musicians as hosts.
Related: Mad Mix • Swift Kicks • My Other Saturday Notes