The Press Box - Damage Control - Assessing Louis C.K’s Career and Taylor Swift’s ‘Reputation’ (Ep.377)

Episode Date: November 11, 2017

The Ringer’s Justin Charity and K. Austin Collins assess the damage caused by Louis C.K and other badly behaved men of Hollywood (1:00). They also discuss the unfortunate prison sentencing of underdog rapper Meek Mill (11:30) before reviewing Taylor Swift's latest album, ‘Reputation’ (18:30). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm Justin Charity. I'm Cameron Collins. We're two staff writers at The Ringer, welcome to damage control on the Ringer podcast network, a show where we unpack what excites, upsets, and divides us in popular culture. This week, we're talking about Taylor Swift's reputation, about Meek Mill going to jail. But first, we're going to talk about Louis C.K., sexual harassment, and the bad men of Hollywood. How do women still go out with guys when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women,

than men. We're the number one threat to women. This week, the New York Times dropped a long-anticipated report on the sexual misconduct of the comedian Louis C.K., who's been accused by five women of either forcing them to witness or listen to him masturbate without their consent. This is fresh on the heels of multiple allegations made against the actor Kevin Spacey, among others, which started when the actor Anthony Rapp alleged that Spacey attempted to assault him when he was 14. And then there's the broader context for that's, of course, the over 80 women who've accused Harvey Weinstein of rape, assault and harassment, as well as the over 200 women who've come forward to accuse the director James Toback and many, many other men. It has been a rough few weeks charity. I have a feeling we're in a moment.

Check me if I'm wrong on this. I'm watching in real time immediately or almost immediately. Louis C.K.'s career just end. Am I over reading this as the sort of immediate repercussion of the fact that these allegations, which have been sort of rumors for a long time, rumors that surface in the New York Times, HBO's immediately distancing itself from Louis CK, FX has distanced itself from Louis CK, other comedians are starting to distance themselves from Louis CK. Louis CK has put out an apology where unlike a lot of other people who have put out quasi-apologies

in response to sexual harassment allegations. Louis C.K. led with saying the stories are true. Right. The stories that New York Times reported out are true. I did shitty things. I'm going to attempt to explain to you the impulses that led to me doing these shitty things. I'm going to attempt to characterize these shitty things as past behavior that I no longer do anymore. But the stories are true.

I'm not going to deny that. I'm going to read a little bit more from the apology because I think it gives some context for the question that you're asking about whether or not his career is going to end. What I learned later in life too late is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick, isn't a question. It's a predicament for them. The power I had over these women is that they admired me, and I wielded that power irresponsibly. I've been remorseful of my actions, and I've tried to learn from them and run from them.

So to the question of his career ending, I think that this is the kind of apology that is going to encourage many people. In fact, I've already seen this, to forgive my... I'd overstate it, but I think he's going to get a lot of credit for being thoughtful as Lucy K. Whenever he's been provocative in his comedy has tended to be given credit for being thoughtful, for being smart. I think we're already seeing people sort of say, well, Weinstein didn't come clean in this way. Well, Kevin Spacey sort of came clean. Kevin Spacey's willing to admit that he's done bad things in the past. He also doesn't claim to remember these things. Some of them,

some of them he has denied. Lucy Kay, on the other hand, is putting up. himself before us in shame as he does in his comedy all the time. So his career ending, I don't know. I think people will be inclined to forgive him. I also think that for many people there's a difference. There's certainly a functional difference between raping someone and jerking off in front of them. But I think in the case of career ending, that might be splitting hairs. But I think from other people, it's not.

Sure. I read that apology and thought, this is, I mean, on a very strange. scale. It's a low standard. It's a low standard. It's the most sympathetic sort of apology that I've read linked to allegations like this. And so maybe there's a sense of forgiveness or sympathy you might have for Louis C.K. The figure. But even then, one of the things you'll notice online right now is people recontextualizing bits of Louis TK stand up or of the show, Louis, in light of what we know now. Right. And to me, even if you, even if you look at Louis C.K. himself sympathetically. It's just you look at his art, you look at bits of his art now,

and I try to think of bits of his art that he will make going forward after this. And my mind's always going to be like, no, no, I don't want this. I don't want this. I should say up front that I would be perfectly content if he never practiced in comedy again, if he disappeared. An important part of his comedy, and the thing that people are pointing out, as you mentioned, is self-flagellation. So in the wake of a shameful event, I don't know what's to stop him from wielding this in his comedy. To be perfectly honest with you, besides the fact that I wish he wouldn't, he's not going to listen to my opinion on this. The thing I keep in mind with Lucy Kay, and with this event and with, you know, he had a movie that was supposed to be coming out next week called A Love You Daddy that is not going to be coming out anymore. As of today, the distributor Orchard has said, no thanks.

But the thing to remember about Lewis C.K. is that he's someone who has a website where he posted a show. show, Horace and Pete. He's self-financed. I love you daddy. He's a successful artist, but's part of the reason that these allegations have been sort of rumors for so long, rather than publicly, you know, publicly alleged. I just don't know what's to stop him from self-financing more of his own art and releasing it on the website, you know? I just, I don't know what, I mean, like, is he going to be granted an audience? I think it's going to be a diminished audience, but I still think that there's a chance that we have not seen the end of Lucy Kay.

Your point about him incorporating this or not incorporating this in his material going forward does make me think about the movie, the scrapped movie. I love you, Daddy, which you've seen. I have seen. Seared into my memory. Okay, so the movie's release has been scrapped. Am I correct? That's the state of play now.

Yes. It just won't get a release. That initially, when before the New York Times story dropped, we knew it was about to drop because the premiere was canceled. And at this point, it has been, they pulled a plug. Complicated movie. For people who have or haven't heard about this movie, it's called I Love You Daddy. In the movie, Louis C.K. plays a divorced TV writer, who's 17-year-old daughter, played by Chloe Grace Morett, starts dating an 80-something film director who's based on Woody Allen.

And that film director is played by John Malkovich. That's Leslie Goodwin. I've wanted to meet him my whole life. I'll be the best filmmaker of the last 30 years or more. Okay, well, he also needs really young women and he's what, like 80 years old?

I am Leslie. Hi. With Leslie Goodwin? Isn't that weird? That's not that weird. He likes young girls. Yes, he does. And the movie is a deliberate throwback

to Woody Allen's own movie from 1979, Manhattan. Down to the fact that in Manhattan, Woody Allen plays a TV writer who falls in love with a 17-year-old girl played by Merrill Lamingway. And in this, Lucy K is the TV writer and his daughter is a 17-year-old

who falls in love with an Allen-esque persona. And the movie's central questions, I think, are how do we relate to the art of an alleged abuser? You know, the Woody Allen character in this movie is someone who is a hero to the Louis C.K. character. And so it becomes about, you know, this guy is dating his daughter, this guy's showing up in his house, this guy is taking his daughter to Paris and all these things.

And it's just about the limits that this director keeps crossing. And the ways that Lucy Kay's character sort of just keeps letting this director get away with what he is very uncomfortable with. So there's a, there's a, frankly, like an interesting question in here about how we keep moving the bar for people that we think are abusers whose art we like. the problem I mean it sounds that sounds fundamentally problematic I mean as a question

it's a legitimate one it's just that Lucy K is not the person who can really be asking that question unless he's doing more of the self-flagellating hyper self-aware art that he's known for this is just another piece of

I think Lucy K doing the thing that he does where it's like yeah there are all these rumors about me so I'm going to make this movie that's really about Woody Allen. But in this movie, I'm going to have a character played by Charlie Day, who's an actor, who has this whole bit where he masturbates

at the mention of a hot woman, and he masturbates himself to completion. It's not just like a little jerk-off motion. It's like an ongoing, multiple-minute's long thing that he does in front of women, right? It's sort of like Lou C.K., who knows that there are rumors about his masturbation scandal, making a character in his movie that does things like this. This is classic

Louis, right? Right. The audacity of it is I think what I wish people would get to see, frankly. It's not just, oh, here's a comedian that you like who has this sort of vaguely feminist repertoire that people enjoy. It's him being this beloved comedy figure who also had these rumors dogging him for a long time. And his way of engaging with those rumors was to explicitly deny them in the press. But then do these bits that are basically him edging and getting. getting off on his impunity and getting off on the fact that no one believes that in real life, this is how Luis C.K. It's just...

I haven't seen it yet, but I'm sure it's already out there. The sort of like, what is comedy? Why shouldn't comedy be able to walk these lines? This is what comedy does. This is what comedians do stuff. What are we going to do with that conversation? I'm interested in what we, the public, are going to do. I believe it's just to take all the money in the world, the movie with Kevin Spacey, and be like, okay, we're going to erase him from this movie.

We're going to call Christopher Plummer. He's going to replace you. Good call from really Scott there. I believe in these nuclear options. I think that I get that some people maybe look at it and think, well, it's complicated. I mean, I feel like there are people who look at erasing Kevin Spacey the way that Republicans look at erasing Confederate monuments, right? They have this sort of perverse sense of, well, it reflects our history. And it's like, no, you need to purge these things from the culture so that people,

know that the force of hell will meet you if you behave like this. Starlet Letter, his ass. Yeah, that's the thing. It's like in the short term it seems unreasonable because it's a new norm and people don't people aren't comfortable with change. But in the long term... They don't want to reject artists that they love. Right, but it's like in the long term, the goal is to reset

the culture of Hollywood and other industries such that people can't behave by whipping their penis out at people who don't want to see that. And joking about it. Yeah. I mean, that's an extreme behavior. And I just don't see how you reset the culture of an industry to discourage that without taking extreme measures, ending Louis C.K.'s career, purging Kevin Spacey from a movie. Well, that said, we don't even know that we don't know whether Louis C.K.'s career is over. We don't know where this ends.

We may have to stick a pin in Louis C.K. for now. This week, I want to talk about one of the few sympathetic entertainers left in all of American entertainers. came and it seems like who has been embroiled in some legal turmoil that is basically going to get him sit to prison for a couple of years, it looks like. I'm talking about Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill on Monday. Meek was sentenced to two to four years in prison for violating the terms of his probation. So Meek's been struggling with the courts and with his probation officer since 2007 when he was originally arrested for drug possession in Philadelphia, right? So the terms of his probation since then have basically restricted his ability to travel and perform. And he's a rapper.

This is what he does. His living, right, is performing, recording music, releasing music. And the terms of his probation have basically frustrated his ability to make a living for himself. Right. So Meek is to a lot of people outside of rap. He's mostly famous for his feud with Drake that he got into a few years ago. There were a few memes and records that were traded over this. They're going to ask if I can play the shit Bad to Back Yeah They want it bad to back

They're going to ask if I can play this shit Bad to Bad But so for instance I first really Started reading about Meek's court cases During that time Because during the beef with Drake

There was a weird story that happened Where basically the court barred Meek from releasing new music and they barred him from touring And so it was a strange moment where it's like two rappers are in a beef and one of them is basically being restrained by a criminal court

from doing the thing that rappers do during a beef, which is release music. Right. And so I keep mentioning Drake during this just because that feud with Drake, which Meek lost very badly and in a very humiliating way, colors a lot of how people perceive Meek Mill. Yeah, absolutely. And even in rap fandom itself, right? Like in general, you know, if a rapper or like Gucci Man, right, like Gucci Man was in prison for a few years, little boozy was in prison for a few years. If a rapper goes away to prison, generally the rap community is very sympathetic.

They're like, free this person. Free Shmurda, free boozy. It was a hashtag before there were hashtags. Right, right. Exactly. Free boozy is like the original hashtag. It is the like in the aughts, man, like 2008, free boozy. But when the news that Meek was going to prison broke.

the mood was different in an interesting way. Where people were basically like, oh man, Meek Mill caught another, this is just another sign that Meek Mill lost the feud with Drake. But it's a morbid joke, right? Because the L that Meek caught

isn't that he, you know, Drake made a funny joke about him or something. It's that he's going to prison. And it was only after basically, you know, Monday is when we learned about the sentencing. And it was only after a few journalists were sort of pointing out the weird,

context of Meek's probation and his relationship with the judge. If you start looking at his judge and at his probation officer and at the sort of times he's run afoul of probation in Philadelphia, you basically have these people in Philly on the ground, these reporters who are like, this case is, this case is kind of fucked, right? So Billboard, I want to say on Tuesday, reported a story that the judge in Meek's case, Janice Brinkley tried to get Meek Mill to sign to her friend's record label. And then there was another anecdote about her wanting Meek Mill to record a cover of a boy's to men song.

I want to say most of these stories are from Meek's attorney. Okay. They are from Meeks attorney. They are nonetheless strange things for an attorney to say, for a criminal attorney to say about a judge in a case. Yeah. So there isn't a lot of beyond the sort of billboard reports now. there's not a lot of substantiating reports because there are not a lot of music publications

that have covered any of this. Taking it seriously. Right. Right. And I find this pretty frustrating, right? Yeah. So you basically have a rapper who's about to go to jail. Over some bullshit.

Over some bullshit. You have a lot of, you have some emerging evidence suggesting that the reasons he's about to go to jail. I should say that, like, Meek Mill has basically violated the terms of his parole occasionally by riding dirt bikes around Philadelphia and smoking weed. Those are basically how he's run afoul of the judge in his case. The reasons why he's going to go to jail seem to be kind of shady. And music journalism, despite the fact that music journalism was very happy to cover Meekmo

when he was sort of engaged in this comical feud with Drake. Right. And it was not really paid a lot of attention to the circumstances. And also another irony of this is that we're all awoken now. Right. So this is the thing. This is someone going to tell. If you're talking about a Kendrick Lamar record, if you're talking about a Gucci Man record,

like it's very popular for music journalism to engage almost overly seriously with the idea of, you know, rappers and the prison industrial complex and things like that. And that's all true in a sort of music criticism, liberal arts degree, album review sort of way. Right. But when you put that in contrast with the fact that Meek doesn't really seem to have a lot of. advocates. He doesn't seem to have a lot of people who are that invested in reporting the story out. And I find that strange and frustrating. And I haven't figured out why. And as you're saying before, he is the butt of a joke. And somehow that seems like it hasn't really changed course

in light of all this. It's just not the story that we seem to want to tell about Meek. I guess I'm wondering how we go about changing that. Why are we so attached to this narrative of him being a loser? People are only going to give a shit about any of this, about this extremely weird court case that seems to have made Meek Mill a loser in a real way in the criminal justice system after he does his time and comes back

and finds that he's unable to restart his music career. It's fascinating that this is all a matter of persona, really. Yeah. Well, it's unfortunate that it's all the matter of persona, really. Speaking of personas. We're going to talk about somebody whose persona is starting to wear a little bit thin. We're going to talk about Taylor Swift, who's got a new album out this week. We're going to talk about her on our segment, DIY.

In our next segment, DIY, where Cam and I subject ourselves to some shit that people can't stop talking about. And people can't stop talking about Taylor Swift and this new album called Reputation. I'm sorry. Full disclosure. I was going to listen to this album either way because I happened to, on average, like Taylor Swift's music. The thing about this album was that we kind of knew it was going to be some bullshit based on these singles. But the thing about the actual album is that it's not the bullshit I expected. This is not the bullshit you are looking for.

I don't know what to say. Taylor Swift's new album reputation is boring. It is hardly a Taylor Swift album. It did not really get much of a rise out of me one way or another. I will copped a liking one song, and it wasn't one of the singles. I will copped it liking End Game. The one that had Ed Sheeran on it. I don't even know what's...

End Game featuring Ed Sheeran. I don't even know what to say. And the rapper future. I don't know what to say. That's your pick. I apologize. That's your critic's choice? That's what this album has done to me.

I, Charity, help me with this album because you wrote about this as well this week, went into this album, having at least among our friends collectively agreed that we were preparing for it to be a failure. Because the singles, look what you made me do, et cetera, were just not, they were provoking something that was not provocative. They were just not interesting. They were bad songs. But more importantly, they were putting forward a persona that just the old Taylor is dead. I don't know what to say. Who is that? I want to reiterate what you just said.

We were expecting some bullshit, but this isn't the bullshit we expected. Yeah. I think that's it, except I kind of did expect it. Because I will say, you pointed out that the singles are just all over the place and not great,

and people were panning them, and people, they sort of bricked relative to the 1989 single, certainly, which stayed. Deservingly some. They went number one, and they stayed number one, and that's what they did.

And these songs are debuting high, but they're just dropping like flies. In terms of the fact, as far as the bullshit that one did or did not expect goes, the second single from this album is a song called Ready for It, which may be a promo single, actually. Right. It's the opening track on the album. The second song we got to hear on the internet from this album is Ready for It.

Right. And Ready for It is a song that every time I try to listen to it and watch the music video, I just struggle to understand what, not only what the song is about, but what the emotional through line of it is. It seems so musically confused and emotionally confused that... And emotional throughlines are Taylor's thing. Right, that's the thing. That's her talent.

Like, you know what the emotional through line of blank spaces. Well, to be fair, she has the same emotional through line that she's had since she was 12. Sure. But, right, it's legible. I get it. She is not the first child talent, though, to have to grow up and have a musical career. You know what I mean? No, she's not the first to fail to grow up.

That's also true. That's also true. But I find this album frustrating because everything about it, on the individual song level and then on the level of how songs relate to each other, everything about it sounds like it's made by a person who doesn't know. She sounds like somebody who doesn't know what a Taylor Swift song is supposed to sound like anymore. She's lost in the sauce. I would never call myself a Taylor Swift stand, but I've also always had to concede, despite always being systematic. of her persona that she can write a hook.

But I don't know what to do with this album in which nothing stands out really about her. Right? Like these songs could belong to anybody. I think pop stars get to hide behind persona and narrative a lot. Yes. So I'll say that. We encourage it. You know, take 1989, which is a hugely successful Taylor Swift album, at least three years ago, had massive singles.

So let's take one of the biggest singles from that album. Bad Blood, which I think is a horrible song. Okay. I think that song is horrible. But constitutionally, I get what that song is. It's petty, brady, combative, rah-wah anthem song. Got it. Okay, I get what this is.

It's a combative pop song. Sure. And I just am like, where is that, where did that clarity go? Where did that clarity of who she is? It went into the song titles. Right, yo, totally. The music, the song's... Can we read some of these songs?

I don't know. Can we, yeah. Can we please read some of the song that was actually? End game. Call it what you want. What you made me do. The lead single. I did something bad.

Don't blame me. So it goes. Call it what you want. I look at the track list and I'm like, okay, this is going to be Fuck the Haders, the album from Taylor Swift. That's an album that we've all heard before for many people. It's a legitimate lane for an album. It's an album that I appreciate.

Totally. And I think she got to. the song titles right that's the thing but that's what I mean when I say that pop stars can hide behind they can hide behind persona and marketing in a way that that clarity on a marketing level on a presentation level and the gulf between how just again emotionally just confused and unsure and musically unsure and muddled it all sounds and yet I I just have a feeling that by the end of this day, which is the first release day for the album,

I don't know. I feel like the critical tide is basically people saying, oh, something's decent. I don't think it's decent. It's fine. I mean, I will say as someone who loves a song Bad Blood, the thing about that song that's especially petty to me is that as an earworm. I think even if you hate it, you could immediately

recall the melody. Could you not? You know how bad blood goes. Yeah, for sure. You hear bad blood. I hear it in my sleep. You know, it's just like it's an earworm. It's a good It's a successful pop song. I can't say that about anything here. I think the best way to say fuck you to the haters is to...

Make good music! Yes! Make a good-ass album! Which she didn't. Which is too bad. But I will also say another trend in the way that we talk about these things is being so unforgivable with a bad album. I think a bad album is fine. I would say this is her first bad album.

You know what? I'm just going to put my ear to the ground to hear singles. And when I finally hear a single that sounds like, Taylor Swift remember how to make a song again fine, but I'm not. I think that's fair. I'm not. Yeah. We're never going to get another style. We're never getting another bad blood. I think Taylor Swift in 2017 is just in a totally different musical landscape than she was in 2014 when in 1989 came out, right? Right. Right. Sure. Taylor Swift is reemerging in Cardi B's America.

and I just think that in Cardi B's America in Post Malone's America Because I'm telling you Like future, you know, Future and Kendrick Lamar were big artists around the time 1909 came out But they couldn't chart the way that Taylor Swift could be number one for weeks at a time Sure.

Like they had songs, but they didn't have Taylor Swift level songs. And now the charts and the streaming service playlist, like those are all dominated by Little Pump, future, post Malone. They're dominated by rappers. The market is so saturated with rap running musical taste and youth culture right now that it just seems like having this Fox News blonde white girl come out with her follow-up to 1989.

It just seems like you came out of cryostasis at the wrong time. Cardi B's America didn't vote for Trump, though. I still think that like Taylor Swift's fan base. Yeah, I'm not saying that white. people evaporated overnight. No, no, no, no. I'm not saying that that happened. I'm just saying that though it's different.

It's not just that like rap exists, white pop exists. They've always existed in tandem. I'm just saying that in terms of the musical landscape, in terms of commercial music, rap and R&B and rap adjacent things and rap crossover are running the table so thoroughly. And Taylor Swift seems so polar opposite to all of those influences that it's weird to have a Taylor Swift album in the mix with that musical landscape. Well, in conclusion, listeners, if you

have strong opinions, strong favorable opinions about this Taylor Swift album, please tweet at us because we sure as hell do not, and we would love to understand if you have strong feelings about reputation, the Taylor Swift album with no hits. That aside, though, I think that wraps

it up for us this week. What do you think, Cam? Yeah, I'm done. We'll reemerge into the real world. Bad shit will have happened. And we'll be back to talk about it again on damage control. Until then, everybody, chill out, relax, don't at me, and free meek mill. Free meek!