Jay Z Blueprint. Literally.

A blueprint. A start of a building. Or more aptly, when it comes to hip hop, a monument. To the rapper. Jay Z his album Blueprint is exactly that, music tracing the roots of his life in the grooves of Hayes, the strings of Motown, the spirit of the streets as captured Marvin Gaye. But all cut over modern, crossover hip-hop beat. The past. The future. Together.

All the while, Jay Z lays down his prototypixal flow, smooth, witty, genius effortless. His words echo where he’s come from, his blueprint, and capture the man he’s built from it: the man who kept AF1s on ice so that he could wear a crispy pair each day to remind him where he came from.

And where he’s going. “That Nigga Jigga” captures that evolution and it’s contradiction. While he spits about his millions, his fast car, he is still “that nigga.”

The track drops foreign sounds, weaving North Africa into the story, Africa, the place where his people came from, to talk about where he is. And to say he will never forget.

Listening to “Renegade” with outlaw rapper Eminem is like going to school. A comment on the American spirit in a document of renegade actions by these two monsters of hip hop. While Eminem uses the track to twist rhymes about the public’s image of him, for Jay Z it’s another story about where he comes from, his childhood, orphaned, but that “didn’t mean much.” Jay Z came to the fork in the road and went straight.

The titular track fully realizes of the conceit. And it’s an epic. His “Day in the Life”. It’s a full document of how Jay Z came to be Jay Z. A tale of transformation spurred by a mothers love.

The music is pure Stevie funk. B3 organs ripping into the track. A steady beat. Sounds of the late seventies. Sounds of his childhood.

And then, the track takes an unexpected turn. Jay Z passes that fork in that road. Now we are with Hova. Aggressive, straight-up hip hop beats as Jay Z testifies to his muscular rap’s superiority. The sounds of a workout underscore the hard work that made him who he is today. Today, Jigga man is diesel. His rap is on steroids. Everyone else’s rap: weak. This is the man in all senses of the word.

And like a classic musical, at the track’s end Jay Z brings back the theme of the albums hit. “Girls, Girls, Girls.” But this time it’s underscored by classic Supremes harmonies. Unlike the original statement, this Jigga lays the details of his awkward, teenage attempts with the chicks. He’s “just trying girls out.” Just figuring it out.

And there it is. The record has spun full circle. The blueprint: complete. The monument: built.

And it’s fucking brilliant.

1)    A brand is not a thing. Not a logo. Not a Pantone color. Not the shape of your bottle. Not the words on your equity wheel. It’s not an “idea” big or small. A personality. It’s certainly not a person or even like a person. And it’s not an advertisement, no matter how much it inspires me to buy your project. It’s actually not even all these things put together with a few more tossed into the mix. Because it takes more than this to make a brand. It also takes me and you.

2) Because a brand is an interaction. A unique moment of connection and exchange between people, a company, and other people. That’s it. Learn it. Love it. Live it.

3) In other words, stop trying to build a brand. Because a brand is a unique moment of connection and exchange, and you can’t build a moment of connection and exchange. Unless you have some sort of mutant powers. And in that case, you must be stopped for building a brand. That can’t happen on my watch.

4) If you do not have mutant powers, then start creating a unique world where we can have a hot moment together. Because if you create a great world, you’ll allow a great interaction. And that means, a great brand will to come into being. Think about it. Create a really valuable world full of gold roads and poppies, and Dorothy will step into that world, get stoked, a little stoned, explore it, march off to the gleaming Emerald City, and when she gets there, she’ll give the wizard the thing he’s been waiting for his whole life, poor lonely guy. What a brand that hath been sprung!

5) Do that and Dorothy will stop going on about how there is no place like home. Dorothy won’t want to go home. Even if she does, she’ll go back to your gold road, poppy-filled, free-Wizard-love Oz again and again and again. Probably many times during the day. Until she gets winded. And then she’ll do it all again. The girl will be hooked on the brand. She’ll tell her friends they’ve got to go and have this experience. This means you make lots and lots of money.

6) Don’t create a world of shit. No one likes to step in shit. Create a shitty world and most people will choose not to step into it. And I hate to say it: not stepping in shit is a moment.  And let me stress the metaphor for those in the back row. The shit? All the stuff that you produce from banner ads to your products’ boxes. All of it makes a world of shit, and if no one steps into that world of shit, your brand is nothing but someone avoiding your shit. This is not good for business.

7) But you know what is worse? Someone stepping into your shit world. Because they’ll tell their friends that your world is full of shit, and beg them not to make the same mistake you made; because they love their friends and the stench is very hard to remove from suede Sperry topsiders. Surprise! Their friends will choose not to step into your shit world, and guess what, your brand will be the result of everyone not stepping into a lonely, crying, pathetic piece of shit. This is worse for business.

8)    Oh, one thing you need to stop doing, if only to save my soul from consuming itself: stop talking about how authentic your brand is. Brands can’t NOT be authentic. Look, no matter how many McDonald’s Restaurants there are to stuff your face at, each one is its own unique world to enter, but also the same McDonald’s. Keanu say, “whoa.” Try this one. Every Big Mac is different. Likely those two all beef patties come from many different cows. The lettuce isn’t all from a single lettuce patch. The sauce I assume contains different batches of goop. But at the same time they’re still all Big Mac’s. Perplexing! How is this possible that different things are all the same thing? Because they’re coming from a single source, a corporation. If both parties in the interaction agree they are the brand they are the authentic thing. Do remember what the Supreme Court said about Coca-Cola back in the day. Any bottle of sugar water that was manufactured by the Coca-Cola Corporation and is marked, with its unique properties, came from a single fountain at some giant Coca-Cola building in the sky. It comes from the Coca-Cola Corporation, or in our Big Mac case, the McDonald’s corporation. And if you listen to the government, corporations are people too. So, your Big Mac is made by one pimply dude named McDonald’s.

9)    So, every time you eat a Big Mac, because it’s a Big Mac, or you think it’s a Big Mac, you’re actually tasting every Big Mac that’s been made. You’re also tasting those that haven’t yet been made. Because there’s just one Big Mac! And you’re making that Big Mac by interacting with Ray’s Kroc. If you’re not interacting with Ray’s Kroc, you’re just eating two pieces of poorly ground meat on a few pieces of stale bread with watery rabbit bait and some kind of mauve mystery dressing. That doesn’t get a jingle.

10) By the way, I ain’t loving it. Remember that world of shit I was talking about? McDonald’s. It freaking kills people with grease. That fact is irrelevant to this article. But I needed ten points.

Experience, experience, experience. If you work in advertising or marketing, you’re constantly hearing agency pundits talking about the emergence of a new form of advertising: the experience.

Experience is the new black.

Wrong.

Not that all this chatter is the naked emperor going on about his new clothes. Rather it’s a bunch of hipsters going on about the new black of their thrift store finds.

Dear Mr. Gen Y, just because you’ve found this really cool flannel shirt in Buffalo Exchange, and it goes so perfectly with your Levi’s 511s and your fixed gear bike, does not mean that it’s new. Kurt Cobain was wearing flannel around the time you were born. And LL Bean was selling it to lumberjacks for years before that.

Fact: brands are, and have always been experiences. And advertising, or more broadly, marketing, has always been about creating experiences.

Think about it. Every brand creates an experience for its user, digital or not.

Soap is a rather pleasurable an important experience to engage with every morning. Note: you stink. I don’t like stink. Stay back, soap-free man. Generic  hemp soap is one experience, but soaping up with Irish Spring enhances your morning ritual in a way that hemp soap never could. Hemp Soap lacks a pleasing fragrance, and vibrant green swirls. It doesn’t leave you feeling fresh and clean as a whistle from a leprechaun. And nothing is more fresh and clean than a whistling leprechaun.

Or the oldest brands in America, Coca-Cola. Coke bottles were glass mash-ups of a fertility goddess and coca for a reason. And it wasn’t just reminding me of that forgotten weekend three years ago where I blacked out and awoke to find myself with a runny nose and a voluptuous stripper named Candy. No it was to create a unique tactile experience with the Coca-Cola brand. Feel that shape, they believed, and you instantly identify the brand in a bucket full of others. Even broken the glass you’d still get the lost opportunity for a Coca-Cola experience.

Even TV advertising creates an experience for the viewer. Yes, TV, the one-way media extraordinaire. Ever laugh at a commercial? Or got a chill of fright? Or just felt bored? That’s an experience. Have you ever shared that Tide Talking Stain commercial on your iPhone over a lunch, just because it’s so freaking funny? That advertising created an experience for you over roast beef sandwiches and pommes frites. And a rather jolly one at that.

But there is something new in all this: the platforms on which we have experiences and the opportunities they present for marketers.

These new platforms allow connections through experiences in a way far more efficient and, arguably, more effective than ever before.

You couldn’t connect runners across a nation to race together, literally, before Nike+.

Before all the Facey-spaces, word of mouth spread in concentrated, homogenous clusters.

Before insight crawling spiders, brand communities, video sharing, et al, masses of people couldn’t assist clients and agencies create advertising and products.

And before these platforms existed, we were limited to creating standardized experiences. Because before these new platforms, it was really hard to know when and where these experiences were happening and what their outcome was. And it was impossible to create different experiences for different people in real-time.

Yes, talking about experience sells a lot of clients on our agencies. I’m guilty myself of spinning the experience web. But maybe it’s time we stopped that cycle, and started telling the truth.

What we’re really seeing is the evolution of what’s always been our mission: to create the brand through each and every interaction among a company and people.

Let’s talk about the new ways we can form provocative brand relationships.

And let’s remember where our industry comes from: the medicine shows of the 19^th century. Advertising started as theater, the ultimate communal experience, where people sit in an audience and relate to each others as equals (Victor Turner called it communitas).  At the medicine show, advertising rolled into your town in a rickety cart. Each performance married to mountebank’s messages about a patent medicine. These were experiences in the purest sense of the word, visceral joys found in the beats of drums, feet a-dancing, words a-flying, snake oil a tryin’. They were persuasive experiences that equated the joy of this heightened theatrical experience with suspicious products that claimed to restore our vim when we experienced them.

They were kind of like Irish Spring.

It seems that many Internet companies in the social space have utopian visions. Twitter wants to be the heartbeat of the world. Facebook wants to be a vehicle for endless sharing. Google wants to free the knowledge of the world.

These company’s ambitions are not anything new. This is no revolution. They’re spirit is born of a great American tradition: the design of utopic communities. And to understand how they might change the world, it might help to think about the history of utopic planning, especially in the previous disruptive age: the time of industrial revolution. No better place to begin than New York and its Central Park.

One of the closest things to Utopia is walking the promenade in Central Park. There a single line of trees, a perfect forest. Squint. You can imagine the swells of the 19^th century parading with you. It’s a vision of America that could only have been shaped in the 19^th century.

When Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of Central Park, contributed towards a city that represented all aspects of America’s utopic experiment, New York City.

Conceptually Central Park was born in the 1850s, the time, of course, when industrial machines were prompting a westward movement across America, and redefining the notion of labor (as well observed by Leo Marx’s work on “The Machine in the Garden”). But the story of the Park begins in 1811, when urban planners designed the city’s grid plan.

In conceiving the grid, the planners of New York City projected a massive Cartesian grid onto the New York City landscape. Massive indeed. It stretched from what is now downtown and stretching to uptown Manhattan—155 blocks from tip to tail; over 2028 parcels of land.

2028 parcels for the good people of New York to fill. It would take them more than 100 years to do this. But if you’ve ever been to New York City, or seen the opening of the film Tootsie, with its rush hour parade, you know how full.

At this time, most of New York was pastoral: farms, brooks, hills. It was an organic city, built mostly from nature’s way. But NYC’s urban planners wanted their city to have a more rational plan, a city that was like a machine for human interaction. In their minds, this machine would deepen the city’s population density and ultimately, through the force of such a dynamic market, exchange occurring on each and every corner, they would create the most thriving economy in the world, an endless pool of human productivity.

The grid itself was literally designed to improve the process of buying and selling real estate. It standardized the parcels. It also construed them in right angles, which at the time was the primary way homes were built at the time.

More abstractly, to the planners, the grid system represented a reframing of nature, a conquering if you will, or as Rem Koolhaas called it, in his book “Delirious New York,” ‘a utilitarian polemic.” A “utilitarian polemic:” an argument about the relationship between man’s work and civilization, a metaphorical representation of the efficiency of the early industrial age. As the planners said, it was designed to reign in “unsophisticated minds.”

As manifest destiny was to the American West, a spreading of enlightenment notions across America to tame the savage, the grid of Manhattan represented the spreading of rationality over nature to tame the uncivilized masses. The goal: utopia.

Now Central Park.

There was no Central Park in the plan for the grid.  In fact, Central Park was a reaction to the grid plan’s success.

By mid-century the manifest destiny of New York City had progressed rapidly. Populations were spreading northwards at a rapid clip. The danger to those who believed in conservation? There would be no time to avert this movement. Soon New York would be a heaving machine stoked with humanity. So in 1853 the Commissioners of Estimate and Assessment were appointed to reclaim the land between 59th and 104th Street, a stretch at that time still uninhabited plots on the grid.

It was a massively subjective argument, if you think about it, that New York would soon be engulfed by populations of men. Especially considering that this was over 50 years before it was actually engulfed by populations of men. But it was a prophetic one. By the early 20th century, the only way for New York to grow was up.

Central park was to serve as the “lungs of the city:” the place in New York where men and women could breathe after a hard days work. Its rolling hills were designed to preserve the natural world within a city that strove to tame that very world. In effect it ended up being part of the conquering.

Because Central Park itself was designed as rationally as New York City. Central Park projected a machine of the pastoral within the grid designed to produce transcendental experience.

Central Park system was designed to deliver sublimity; that feeling—as Schoepenhauer argued—where one feels the immensity of the Universe, and one’s union with nature; that American feeling that Whitman captured in “Leaves of Grass.” While there were existing picturesque elements throughout its span, Olmsted—the great architect—believed they should be increased in their affect. He wanted efficiency in his pastoral vision. Uplift with ease.

Much like the artists who traveled across America to portray the American West as an ideal, Olmsted designed Central Park to portray the ideal of the pastoral in Manhattan. Each view of the park is designed to heighten the beauty of New York City’s earth (ironically, on the area where the deep layers of schist rock that allowed for the development of skyscrapers, those final sword plunged into New York’s natural earth). Each vantage point is designed to create the sublime. Each flattening or raising of the land, each interference with “the easy, undulating outlines, and picturesque rocky scenery” was designed to make it easier to perceive the existing “picturesque outlines of the ground.” Even the ramble, that spontaneous outburst of twigs, bushes, and vagabonds, is a planned aspect of that park.

Strange, it seems, to conquer nature through efficiency to perceive its immensity. Not that strange if you go back to Schopenhauer, who believed an aspect of the sublime was the taming of nature.

Central Park was a work of art. Maybe the greatest of the 19th century. Olmsted was the artist, arguably working in the spirit of the transcendentalist painters of the mid-19th century Hudson School.

But more importantly than being an artist, Olmsted was a utopian. He realized the final element of New York’s utopian vision, the reinvention of nature itself. His utopian vision imposes the rational onto nature to do so, making both work more efficiently. And it’s a vision that resolves the tension of this American moment: the tension between nature and the rational, between the sublime and the industrial.

So back to the Internet.

In this moment, as we project our own grid onto this country, this network of human connection, this Internet, and as we increase the efficiency of our connections to family, friends, colleagues and strangers, I wonder, where is the Internet’s Central Park. Where are the lungs of that virtual city? Where do we find the sublime in the virtual world? Can the sublime even exist in that world?

I’m still alive. I don’t know about you. Because likely I haven’t seen you in ages. In fact, I might never have seen you. Who are you anyway? Oh yeah. My Internet friends.

You see: you don’t see me; you see only a reflection of me. Our interactions are separated from everything that makes me truly live, in all senses of that word—being alive, and coming to you live.

To be alive is to be present. It requires presence, the reciprocal gaze. The eyes of the dead prove it. Nothing more eerie than seeing a person lacking that reciprocal stare.

Not that we haven’t tried to hold on to the un-living. But funerary photography never raised the dead. And we might have had technologies that separated us in space and body. The telephone might have sounded like a ghost in a machine but you could still hear someone breathing—sometimes heavily—on the other end of the line.

Sometimes you just make me feel like I’m in another place. Fuck, you may bore me each and every time you speak.  Like last night over dinner. Who the fuck cares about China’s declining fertility rate’s potential affect on their power? Or you may order the blandest shit on the menu. Chicken? Really? Yawn. Or worse, just order a salad and push it aside, because you’re a vegetarian who’s suddenly decided to go all Jain Dharma on me. You can kill me softly with boredom but sadly you’re still there, poorly attuning to my affect, putting me to sleep, a hypnotist of played out presence.

You couldn’t do any of this on the Internet. You’re dead to me. You’ve got no presence. You gaze not. Every interaction happens in the past. Even your fucking Skype conference call exists on a delay. IM is just typing. That barely legal slut you’re talking to—and sharing naughty bits’ pictures with—probably is a dog, and I mean dog like bark, bark, woof, woof, not even human, pick up their shit.

We constantly are missing each other in the moment. Dead.

To be live is also to be here and gone. Moments are ephemeral. They’re unmediated experiences. Even when we’re creating a mediated image. Like holding up a cellphone at your baby to capture each and every coo, you’re still having a moment that’s there and gone. You’re trying to preserve it, but you’re always failing. Live is the ephemeral. It’s something we always are chasing from the future, running back.

Live exists in the real world. Not on the Internet. On the Internet, every moment we have lasts for ever. Every click is tracked. Every status of what’s on our mind, ever character of what we’re doing now, just metaphors for liveness, just our deadness.

We never “are” on the Internet. We’re always “were like this”—and only in our heads. We even shape our “were like this.” We’re just all poor imitations of Yeats writing metaphors of ourselves, a dead butterfly pinned to a canvas when we should be flapping our wings into the widening gyre and somehow causing a starving child to find food in some dusty Saharan encampment.

All this wouldn’t be much of a big deal. Back in 1994 when two fat, stinky, stoned hippies hung out on in some MUD and pretended to be dragons blowing smoke up each others asses on a pile of gold, this was a “who cares”. But now it’s a “WTF”.

Because more and more of our social interactions are happening on the Internet. 17% of the world population lives on Facebook daily. And they love you there a long time. We’re talking hours a day for some.

Think about this time spent in terms of what is becoming our interactions. Think about a world where we’re never live and we’re never alive, yet the majority of people feel as though they are interacting with the real us. And in reality, that majority only interacts with the dead us through these murdering platforms. They only see us in our photographs. They only experience our thoughts and gestures in links and statuses. They’re looking at zombies, and they don’t even see us biting out their own eyes.

Come on. Don’t kid yourself, social guy. How many of your online friends have you actually experienced live and in the flesh over the past year? I hate people, in general. And I tend to live a hermetic existence, but still I get around a little. And when I counted, of the over 400 friends I have on Facebook alone, it seems that I’ve seen less than 40 within the past year.

But I’d bet most have seen me. Just not alive and live.

I wonder what this is doing to our psyches. They say that the intra-personal dynamic and the quality of interchange in presence affects deeply our well-being. How we’ve modeled it through our caretaker-child interactions, and how those models are replicated or broken vis a vis new relationships. So if our relationships all lack the positive affect attunement that is key to healthy models, if the majority of our relationships lack the presence requires, if we live in the world of the dead, how depressing.

Isn’t the world depressing enough? Maybe it’s time we stopped praising the efficiency of the Internet’s connections—in finding a job, helping you out of a jam, in crowd-sourcing information on the best restaurant in San Francisco for crabs and jellyfish. Instead let’s start decrying its deadening effect on us all. This is a life and death issue for our mental health and for that of the children. And if I recall, the children are our future; teach them well; let them lead the way; show them all the beauty they possess inside. Can’t do that if they’re dead. And that makes me sad.

I feel the need for Prozac simply from writing this.

Watching a VH1 Classic documentary yesterday called “The seven ages of rock,” I began to hear Coltrane and Coleman in the live footage from CBGB’s. I closed my eyes, and replaced Patti Smith’s uncooked poetry with Kerouac’s drunk rapping. Suddenly there was Mingus boxing John Cale off the stage, picking up that bass and plucking out the dopest bass line you ever heard.

Iggy Pop, one of punk’s fathers, was directly influenced by Coltrane. You can hear it in “Fun House”, the free saxophone natural within the flailing garage of The Stooges. Iggy has said in interviews, Coltrane inspired not just his sound but also his performance style. He wanted to do with his body what Coltrane did with his saxophone. Think of Iggy’s body akimbo to the music and you’ll never watch him the same way again.

Patti Smith is another connection, not to the Coltrane and Coleman, but to the Beat-Jazz connection. Patti was very much a beat poet, influenced by the spirit of Rimbaud as filtered through Kerouac, Ginsburg and Dylan. She dropped down stanzas as Cale’s band dropped a beat. Much like the dharma bums, music was a backdrop for her to scrawl rants. But it was punk replacing jazz on her stage.

But even listening to the raw sounds of punk, even the Ramones, a band of misfits who seem to be from a strange planet light years from jazz. Was there ever an improvised note in a single Ramone ditty? Yet to me, their three minute collisions hold a connection to free jazz’s meter. The sloppy live playing of those rocket-shot aliens from Queens, NY, turned four on the floor to polyrhythm, every missed beat another meter.

Connections in music are hard to define. It’s just not as obvious as the written word. The meter and language of say a book is like a genetic code to compare fathers and sons. In music there are no telling strands. Music has no footnotes.

So, maybe I’m grasping at some phantom sounds, looking for these mysterious musical connections. Regardless it’s cool, cool in the truest sense of the word, to think NY’s jazz cats crept down to the bars where NY’s punks’ scribbled their names on backstage walls.

Prince has a genius that can’t be calculated. Case in point: add Hendrix and James Brown to Radiohead and it still doesn’t equal up to what Prince does in his cover of “Creep” at Coachella.

“One day when you’re looking back/you were young/and man you were sad/when you’re young/you get sad/when you’re young you get sad/and you get high.”

These lyrics are from “To be Young (Is to be Sad, Is to Be High)” the rockabilly whoop-it-up that counts off Ryan Adams’ “Heartbreaker.” To this day, “To be Young (Is to be Sad, Is to Be High) remains an alt-country highlight. In the song, Adams spit on the haters. And in three minutes, he proved he wasn’t just a prodigy from Whiskeytown; he was a mature songwriter.

And a tortured soul.

Today “To be Young (Is to be Sad, Is to Be High)” still captures the presence of early rock n’ roll—with a modern twist. The song echos like Sun Records but those echoes are filled with melancholy, reflection and insight.

But despite the thoughtfulness of the lyric, the music is an unhinged stomp. You feel sawdust scraping the floor as your feet kick. You smell the staleness of the dive bar. You hear the popping tops of 99 bottles of Bud. The band taunts the crowd behind a chicken’s cage, the wires their only protection from the wranglers. And they still might toss a few of those bottles if Adams goes out of tune.

But just as this scene is whooped up with a frenzied “whee-ho,” Adams’ sneering turns to retrospect. The steel guitar slides in and Adams reflects on the party around him. Young/Sad/Sad/Young/High. And the crowd goes on dancing, young/sad/sad/young/high.

That’s “Heartbreaker” tip to tail. No wonder the record has been copied by every wannabe with an acoustic guitar, a G-chord, and a heart cut into their arm.

The other highlights explore the geography of love. “Oh my Sweet Carolina” and “Come Pick Me Up” are both songs of a man displaced; a man who longs to return to the one thing that hurts him the most: his home, his love.

In “Oh my Sweet Carolina,” Adams’ desires to be carried back to his dirt-poor home, dead tired from life’s journey. Still he remembers that sometimes life takes you too far away. Sometimes you can never return home; even when your pockets are full of its dust and cane and your grave lies there, waiting. Carolina: a woman, a mother, a home, a death.

“Come Pick Me Up” may be the ultimate “please come back” song. A song of a man so broken by love, he can’t even make his own bed. He hopes that the woman who once slept beside him, might yet return. “Come Pick me Up” is sung like it’s a drunken phone call to an ex. Adams’ alternates between a quivering whisper and a whiskeyed shout. He wonders if she still see his eyes in the reflections of a mannequin’s eye. He promises to love her no matter what she will do to him.  To love her even if she hurts him as she did throughout their fucked-up relationship. He begs her: pick me up off the ground, steal my records; screw all my friends. “I wish you would.”

Over the next nine years, Ryan Adams wouldn’t just sing about being broken, he would become broken himself. His life became a very special episode of “Behind the Music”. Fame came in “Gold” when Adams’ “New York, New York” music video became a symbol for 9/11. A love letter for a sad time, in “New York, New York,” Ryan laid down a Dylan-esque flow about the one affair that didn’t last and the other that did: his love of New York.  In the video, as Ryan sang the Twin Towers stood proud in the distance. Lost love and geography.

Perhaps Ryan loved New York too much. Ryan Adams was eaten up and spit out by its energy. Nightly he passed out on the tables of the East Village bars. He was gawked at “Brownies” stumbling from booze, pills, heroin, whatever the fuck the guy was on that Tuesday. Guess he was just young, sad and high.

Then these binges, and his failed relationships, plunged him full swing into mania. The resulting prolific period produced three albums—in a year. Three albums that should have been one masterpiece, if only Adams were sober enough to edit himself.

Then (cue the music) redemption. Adams cleaned himself up, married the girl next store, Mandy Moore, and goes on to paint, write a book of poetry and, of course, hit the studio to produce a tightly knit collection of songs dedicated to his new wife, “Cardinology.”

But never in this very special episode, has Adams duplicated the perfection of “Heartbreaker”, and I wonder if he ever will. He’s not young, sad and high.

Law & Order is among the most culturally influential pieces of the 20th century and is shaping up to sit in the same place in the 21st. Place the venerable series in the company of other great popular art that struggles with the central questions of a time and asks millions to join in that struggle.

Law & Order has created its body of work over 20 years on TV. For a drama, that’s unheard of.  And there seems to be no reason to believe the series will pass into the good night. It continues to rage and age, gracefully.

The past few seasons of the original Law & Order series, especially the current one, are shaping up to be among the strongest; filled with terrorist plots, an indictment against US torture, abortion, privacy and relationships in the age of the Internet. And as it has always done, Law & Order isn’t just ripping stories from the headlines, it’s taking the newspaper and wrapping it with a gordian knot:  when caught in the bit torrents of technological change, how does a polarized society proffer justice?

Law and Order is a modern revival of the morality play. Like the morality play, it offers a central character who must be judged based on his sinful actions, who must represent these actions and be punished for them to receive penance.

In the prototypical morality play, the sinner’s evil is weighed by the judge of judges, God. God knows all, and has the power, and mercy—got to love the Christian mercy—to absolve any sin, even (gasp) murder.

For example, in the most important version in the form, the 15th century’s, Everyman, the titular character, is summoned by Death to account for his life. Throughout the play he searches to find anyone who will stand up with him, his defense attorney, and uphold his good name. Even his Good Deeds abandon him, after all, the guy’s a sinner, a bum, hump.

Don’t neglect the Good Deeds because they’ll walk out on you faster than a woman singing “I Will Survive” when you come home from work.

Instead, Knowledge accompanies him, Knowledge of the self one supposes. With her, Everyman accounts for his life, subsequently scourges himself before God— what else is he going to do in front of a God who’s had the smoking guns in his back pocket as soon as they were shot.  And in his scourging of himself, Everyman receives penance.

Clearly, the message of the original morality plays is religious. Morality plays remind there is an innate order in the universe. His name is God. He sits up in the sky, on some gilded throne, and just, somehow, knows all. Did I mention, if he don’t like what he knows, he throws the lightning bolts?

But ultimately God is merciful. The dude gave up is son and had him killed. I’m sure even for the omniscient God, this was not an easy decision. But a good one, if you buy the mythology.  Because when Jesus died and was risen, we are all absolved of our sins.

God gets us. We suck. And we need his help to not burn in hell. And he’s there to help. God loves us. Amen.

And here is where Law & Order flips the form of the morality. Law & Order operates in a world where it is disputable that God exists. Law & Order asks, what if god were one of us, just a slob like one of us?

God in Law & order is the US constitution and the case law as cobbled together by a bunch of 18th century noblemen in powdered wigs, the arguments of McCoy and Cutter and the assorted, strikingly hot, ADAs, the guest starring defense attorney (likely the shifty Ned Eisenberg), and the ruling judge themselves, an often crusty and imposing character actor. And even though there is a judge, in Law & Order, there really is no judge with a capital J, only a coming to order, only trying to make sense out of the senseless. Justice, after all, is blind, and the scales are heavy.

It’s Law and Order. Not Law and Justice.

And without an all-knowing judge, morality becomes a question in itself, as does penance. It’s an educated guess by learned men and women. No wonder when justice is doled out on Law & Order, the show’s button ends with a question, or a half-hearted affirmation that the conclusion of the case was just.

Not even the wise Jack McCoy can do anything but guess at the truth of justice, at the truth of morality.

In Law & Order there is no penance. There is punishment. For the accused. And for society itself who must live with the pain, and the question of its product, these horrible actions, these horrible consequences.

Because while Everyman can explain his actions with Knowledge, in Law & Order the actions of the accused even lack truth. Their explanation is a question. Evidence: did he do it, why yes; we think. The defendant’s proclamations: not guilty, laying out actions mostly to cause doubt that they ever happened. And sometimes doubting that it didn’t happen for a rather good reason. And the jury, well, they’re just guessing too, and sometimes they get hung up.

In other words, Law in our world has no truth. For there is only a judgement of truth, only reasonable doubt, or lack thereof, pronouncements of guilt and innocent by the average Dick and Deborah.

What are we left with? Finding our own Law and Order.

For the Love of Ray J. Rock of Love. Flavor of Love. I Love New York. I Love Money.

When will the “of love” genre die?

I hope never. I love the “of love” shows. I watch them religiously. I’m happy to prostrate myself to my DVR and cross myself out of respect for the strippers, bitches, faux-life pimps and ho’s that populate these shows.

Despite the naked jello wrestling and displays of grotesque frenching, the “of love” shows dialogue with some of our most important philosophic texts. In particular “of love” shows present a train wreck of sexy that compliments Plato’s “Symposium.” Brett Michaels, Socrates are spinning the same yarn about the baffling mystery of love. Brett just sings it sweeter.

Plato’s “Symposium’s” most famous tale of love is attributed to the poet Aristophanes.  Through a tale of hermaphroditic beasts split into two part, Aristophanes argues that love is about finding our missing half.  For Aristophanes, there is one perfect person in the world for us, and our mission is to find them, somehow, amongst all the other potential lovers.

The “of love” shows are not about that tale. We’re talking Socrates tale here.

You see, Socrates hated Aristophanes. Something about stealing the others boy toy.

I think. I could be making it up. There was no Us Weekly to fact check the Grecian gossip.

Whatever the reason for Socrates hatred of Aristophanes, the feeling was mutual. So when it came time in Plato’s “Symposium” for Socrates to trump all with his tale of love he took the opposite position of the comic. He made love all about fucking everyone you meet.

Socrates was into swinging.

Socrates believed to be in love was to fall in love with everyone. To appreciate your love was to appreciate the beauty in every body. For Socrates, love wasn’t about devotion to a quest for a missing half; it was about a perpetual hard-on for every ass. In Socrates world there wasn’t one perfect love for every person, there was just one idea called love and every person was “of love.”

Because Socrates general belief was that the world was but a representation of the truth of things. The world was “of” the truth.  Likewise, the apprehension of love was a transcendent experience, bringing us to see beyond the representation before us. To use another one of his famous metaphors, love led us out of the cave of shadows into the blinding light. Ever hear of being blinded by love? Socrates might as well have used that term as a proxy for lots of fucking.

The reality show is the perfect realization of Socrates’ argument. They’re “reality shows” after all—a theatrical performance of reality.  They are the representations of the true ideal Socrates speaks of.  They are a display of the argument that reality is a representation of reality.

Reality shows are a pale representation of reality. And the “of love” shows are an even paler representation “of love.” But that’s what makes them the perfect vehicle for us to understand the truth of love. They show us the shades of reality, a flavor of love.

On the “of love” shows, the Z-list heroic romantic apprehends and loves numerous beings—hence the heroic nature of their rather unlikely attractiveness. They are love Why else would anyone want to get with the crack visage of Flav? His ability to see the beauty in all those nicknamed narcissists and boob jobs, that’s why. That ability is magic. Flav, Brett, New York, Real, Chance, they all are embodiments of love’s truth, of the eidos of love.

This is the representation “of love:” a display of Brett Michaels admiring Frenchy’s performance at his favorite strip club.  Or Flav getting it on with Bootz in his bedroom. Or Tailor Made handing New York a Tiffany’s bracelet and her giving him a big, wet tongue. In watching these representations “of love” we are given the ability to truly love by looking through their eyes. In their loving stare we begin to see beauty in any nut job with a poorly done boob job. Even that horrible Juliette Lewis looking stripper with the boobs of steel, hatred of basil and voice that makes her seem like she’s totally over being totally over it; she’s hot when you’re seeing her through love.

You don’t have to look far to figure this out. It’s in the show’s names. It’s “of love” not “about love” or “searching for love” or “in love.” “Of” a piece of a larger truth, a shadow,
“of love,” just a representation of love’s aspect.

It’s “Real Chance of Love” not “Real Chance at Love.” Because the love they’re searching for is just the aspect of love, not love itself.

It’s “Rock of Love” because love can be rocky, much like Brett Michaels career and his love life. Because no matter how many thorns life sticks you with, you can still love again. Because everyone is beautiful and worthy of a connection.

It’s “Flavor of Love” not “Flava of Love” or “Flava in Love” it’s about just one flavor of love. It’s not about Flav. It’s about the concept of love itself as represented by Flav’s performance of loving nearly everyone with a heartbeat, a hole and a leopard print teddy.

So what’s the aspect of love that our “of love” shows display? Love is fame. To love on these shows is to be loved by someone who is loved by everyone. To receive the grill, the ring, the rose, the final French kiss, to survive all the elimination challenges and be named the one, is to be famous by being with the famous. That’s why to be selected with Brett you’ve got to roll with his rockin’ backstage lifestyle. You’ve got to be able to be famous yourself.

This is the truth of modern love. Fame is love. Love is fame. To be a lover is to be loved and to be the love of the one loved by everyone is to be loved by everyone yourself. In your fame, you become the truth of love, the beauty seen in all things.You become famous: loved and desired by all!

Famous: representing everyone, stars are like us.

Famous: more real than anyone, stars “like” us.

Famous: To be a reality star, to be hotter than hot even when you’re not.

You know what I love? I love these shows!

So for the love of Ray J! Time to get this party started. Bring on the booze. Grease the pole. Make the nickname proclamations; I’m thinking she’s “Hot Wax” and that blonde over there is “Rack M. Up.” Let’s prep the mise en place for the “eat shit” challenge. Gaffer: light the confessional booth and the elimination stage. Contestants: loose off your speedos, flip your bikinis to the wind. Girls and boys go wild! Let’s start to look “of love.”

Well, the USA Today is no longer the paper of record. Though it remains as colorful and thin as ever. According to the US Audit Burea of Circulation, more people read the dense Wall Street Journal than the light USA Today.

What about our friend, the old gray lady, if we can still call a color paper old and gray? Well, the NY Times fared pretty well considering its tumble to the nadir of profitability. The NY Times saw (only) a 7.3% change in circulation. 7.3% less, but still better than the NY Post at 19% or the LA Times, which saw its circulation drop 11%.

I’m more convinced that statistics like these, among others that have foreboded the end of the paper and all paper journalism, also forebode the industries saving grace. This study is the same.

Like the the magazine, what will save the newspaper is more journalistic value. Journalistic value is the competitive advantage of these paper media. It’s what they do best, and what they can offer that’s more than the internet could ever provide, even with hours of google searching.

Print’s breadth and depth can’t, as of now, be reproduced in a medium that prides itself on the real-time, of the instant, burst of bloggity. What it requires is time and insight, diverse sets of resources and space for words. News curation adds another hurdle. Rather than curating simple comment, newspapers curate a depth of original reporting, often that same reporting commented on by the writers of Huffington Post. No blog could possibly devote time to both real-time, to the minute reporting and the sort of longitudinal journalism required to break a story that’s worth commenting on. Balloon Boy notwithstanding.

Just look at the two print publications that somehow have remained grounded in this dustbowl industry are the Journal and, on the magazine side, the Economist. Both titles share strengths.  They have a strong, well-argued, slightly partisan point of view. They share a breadth and depth of coverage that can’t be replicated in a single online channel or through so-called citizen journalism (aka tweets of rumor and innuendo). Even if you follow the internet’s news reporting religiously on, even if you receive constant mobile updates on the state of the state, you can still gain an incredible amount of information and perspective from the Journal and the Economist.

If anything, you might even see these pubs feed off of the constant flux of online news. We saw this the gossip category, where a rise in book circulation correlated with the rise of sites such as Perez Hilton. Because the more you are in the know, the more the depth of argument keeps you interested. You can’t engage the argument otherwise. You can’t talk Mugabe unless you know what’s going on in his government.

Want your magazine or newspaper to succeed? Follow the lead of the WSJ and the Economist. Attract an affluent, educated audience by providing long-form articles that make the news more; what your readers demand. You’ve got to do more than help them know what’s going on in the world; you’ve got to help them understand why it’s happening.

What’s going on never just meant, “what’s happening now?”

Maybe it’s time for more general news publications, but not general news publications that report on what’s happening. General news publications that argue positions in relationship to other reportage. General news publications that tell me what’s going on, that probe the why.

Don’t abandon online. Or print. Let them support each other. Let online be the 24/7 cycle. Let print be the depth.

And as a side bar, don’t do it by contaminating the great print brands, by making them Internet properties to sell booooooooring display advertising. Let’s expand our publishing company’s brand portfolio to include new online brands, ones with new value propositions that support the other publications. Own your own version of the Economist and the Huffington Post, not the Economist and the Economist.com. Sounds crazy, but maybe more than a Fox.

Newspaper industry: Poor circulation | The Economist