Sorry, I’m getting to this late...

[ad hoc]

The number of people who have ursus on ignore is quite surprising

[WOM]

The number of people who have ursus on ignore is quite surprising

[Jah Womble]

Yes, yes. All apologies.

I missed that (mainly because of the other notifications) - and I've never heard the expression before.

[ursus arctos]

It became a bit of an obsession among US pop culture types about five years ago

Laurie Penny wrote a piece for the New Statesman on her being taken for one

[Various Artist]

I'm amazed you've never even heard it Jah. I probably have TV Tropes to thank for introducing it to me several years ago, though.

It's easy, though. Basically, think of Zooey Deschanel. Now you're thinking of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

[Various Artist]

So, did we decide if it was a lemon or eleven, after all that?

[Nocturnal Submission]

No, you're right about "lemon" being the correct word and the lyrics being largely nonsense though with some background behind it. I just didn't realise that was the case before reading this thread.

I haven't yet read the article linked to upthread that mentions it though, I presume you mean "undeserving"?

No, "deserving" - it's a list of (supposedly) ropey lyrics.

[Nocturnal Submission]

So, did we decide if it was a lemon or eleven, after all that?

Pretty sure it was "lemon" and written for laughs or perhaps the laziest of lazy rhymes. "Eleven" would have rhymed much better and have actually worked.

[Ray de Galles]

It's lemon, it's in the article linked to in my last post.

Though I could be on everyone's ignore list too, obvs.

[Ray de Galles]

No, "deserving" - it's a list of (supposedly) ropey lyrics.

Ah, who/what was "my ass - do your research" aimed at then? I thought it was at the NME for including it on the list.

[Hot Pepsi]

I know Gary Kemp was not alone in quickly becoming infatuated with the female lead singer of a rock band.* I think that's pretty standard. Recall that in How I Met Your Mother, part of the description of his fantasy wife was that she played bass.

Really, off the top of my head, I can think of about ten female musicians that I instantly fancied irrationally. If they play and instrument too, all the better. Fortunately, I've never met any of them or tried to talk to their parents.

I'm amazed you've never even heard it Jah. I probably have TV Tropes to thank for introducing it to me several years ago, though.
It's easy, though. Basically, think of Zooey Deschanel. Now you're thinking of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

That's not really fair to her, of course, but as I recall correctly, the concern about MPDG really peaked with Zooey Deschanel's performance in 100 Days of Summer. That was also unfair, if anyone actually bothered to watch that film to the end, it's clear that the writers chose to show that that's what she was in the mind of Joseph Gordon Levitt's (do we still have to use his middle name now that he's almost 40?) character, but that, in fact, she didn't really want to be that and she never really was. She just liked The Smiths, has an excellent singing voice, rode a bike with a basket and wore a lot of vintage dresses. That doesn't mean she was there to fix him. Still, it's all from his point of view and has a bunch of lazy voice-over, so it's not as good as it could have been.

She was set up as a kind of a MPDG in New Girl, but then the writers sorted it out such that she was no more or less flakey or manic than the male characters on the show. She didn't fix him and they didn't fix her. They just grew up together. It was sort of a much-less cynical version of Seinfeld or a less irritating Friends. Not surprisingly, it was created by a woman.

The other quintessential examples of MPDG I can recall are, not coincidentally, from Cameron Crowe** movies. Penny Lane in Almost Famous and Kirsten Dunst's character in Elizabethtown stand out. But the point of Almost Famous, among other things, was that it was all a carefully constructed persona that she really couldn't maintain. She pretended to be free and not care that Russell was married, but she cared. She said she was going to just go to Morocco but "THERE NEVER WAS A MOROCCO!" It's also suggested that she's only 16, which is a big problem, of course, but that's another story.

Elizabethtown just doesn't quite work at all, though it does make Louisville look like and decent place to be stuck for a few days, so good for their film board on landing the film. Dunst just might not be the right actor for that role, but I'm sure Orlando Bloom wasn't right as the male protagonist, because I'm not sure he's actually much of an actor, to be honest. He's just a blank slate. He's the right tool for the job in the Pirates films and as Legolas in the Tolkien stuff, but he can't carry it off in a rom com.

Of course, most of the examples are white, thin and, despite the costume department's best efforts to mix it up, conventionally attractive, so part of the objection to these characters is just that we need more diverse representations of young women in films (and fronting pop bands, I guess). But I think they're also objecting to the expectation that the girl's job is to fix the young man. He's usually intelligent - he may be handsome like Orlando Bloom or, er, not like Woody Allen, but in either case, he's usually got evidence of a deep misunderstood darkness that only the sunshine of the MPDG can drive away.

And, in most of these stories, she is all too happy to do so - at least for a while - but very often her reasons are never fully illuminated because most of these stories are from the man/boy's perspective and the audience learns a lot more about what he likes about her than what she likes about him. (My experience from real life mirrors that of 100 Days of Summer and not Elizabethtown, i.e., the girl gets sick of the depression and moodiness very quickly.)

I have seen it the other way around. There have been a bunch of YA films - and not all written by John Greene, believe it or not - where it is the spontaneous and fun boy that helps the girl with cancer/trauma/unimaginable grief.

Neftlix' I Am Not OK With This, which I highly recommend, takes this format and injects sci-fi/horror into it. I recommend it.





*I'm sure there are reams of inscrutable critical theory papers that could be or have been written about women in rock bands in the 80s and 90s (and no doubt Camille Paglia has written 14,000 word rebuttals about how their wrong because something something Aristotle and something something when I studied at Yale with Harold Bloom something something anti-trans). But I don't plan to try to read any of them.


**He defense against the charge was, I think, that there have always been MPDG - Audrey Hepburn, most notably, and I think he called his own first wife, Nancy Wilson, was one.

[Nocturnal Submission]

Ah, who/what was "my ass - do your research" aimed at then? I thought it was at the NME for including it on the list.

Jah Womble was aiming it at the NME on the basis, I think, that they'd either got the lyric wrong, which they hadn't, or that it had some meaningful intent, which it didn't.

[Jah Womble]

And he's right here to explain. Yes, seems I was mistaken and that the 'meaningless' version of the lyric was actually correct. At least, according to one or two other sources. The NME have done things like this before, however, hence my haste in pulling them up. (Taking Cobain's lyric literally is a bit stupid, as well.)

And, no, I've never heard the expression 'MPDG' before today. Possibly an 'age' thing - or just not an expression I'd ever be likely to use. (I've never knowingly seen anything featuring Zooey Deschanel, although a few people reckon my daughter looks like her. So, there's the rub.)

[Hot Pepsi]

When I was growing up (1980s), it was quite fashionable to dismiss the Beatles as overrated--as a result, although I'd heard lots of their singles, I'd never really explored them as an albums band. It probably wasn't until the mid-90s that I bought a copy of Revolver and I later ended up buying the mono box set (plus a copy of Let it Be). Since then, I listen to them all the time.

It was the opposite here in the late 80s.

The Beatles were fairly popular with me and many of my friends. Indeed, a lot of us listened to music from the 60s and 70s because, in the late 80s in central Pennsylvania, the commercial rock stations either played hair metal or "classic rock" and, as we've discussed in other threads, the post-Live Aid 80s were just kinda shit for mainstream popular music in general.

Records, cassettes and CDs were expensive, so we weren't buying many. But what we could do is brazenly tape other people's records. And a lot of parents had Beatles records, so that got passed around. And I had a music teacher in 8th grade who loved the Beatles and helped get me turned onto them. (I still see her around. I should approach her someday and thank her for what she did for us. She was the first adult in my life who really loved pop music and told us about it) Led Zeppelin were popular among the college students - still are, I think - but I didn't get properly into them until much later.* The Doors were big among some of my friends, of course. That's another topic.

Despite having a massive university, for a variety of reasons I've explained elsewhere, this has never been a great place for what was then called "college rock" or "new music" or "alternative music. It still really isn't. Not many of the cool bands ever come here, the local scene has mostly about "classic rock" or folk or just boring cover bands. When I was growing up, the college radio station was underpowered and only played "college music" late at night. The rest of the time it was an NPR station or played other styles.**

But we did have those late night shows, and being fairly prosperous and educated, we at least knew there was other music out there and could try to find it here or there. And we had MTV 120 Minutes and Alternative Nation so, at least, we could find out about REM and Depeche Mode and what not. I got into They Might Be Giants - way way way into them - because I heard them on the Dr Demento show, for example. But for the most part, if it wasn't on a major label, it was hard to come by. That's why major labels are called major labels.


* I was never into music that was so openly about sex. I'm not anti-sex. I just didn't like hearing other people brag about how much of it they're having. I'm still that way to a large extent. I'm sure a shrink could do a lot with that revelation.

**That wasn't all bad. Like, there was a blues show and a reggae show and, even now, weekends are mostly folk music, so I was exposed to that. I suspect a lot of kids living outside a big city never heard anything but Top 40 and country growing up. And NPR is always nice to have. On Sundays the main rock station was handed over to The Doctor, the one and only black DJ within 100 miles. I was not really into that, but in retrospect it was cool that this station playing to a 95% white audience would stop the hair metal for a day and turn it over to soul and R&B. Of course, the station was eventually bought by a national conglomerate and he got fired - the fate of all local radio - but at least we were exposed to that.

[Wouter D]

I got into They Might Be Giants because their Malcolm in the Middle theme, Boss of Me, was on MTV all the time. I bought the single, it had a not terribly interesting B-side in Mr. Xcitement, but also a live version of Birdhouse In Your Soul. That got me hooked.