Clearly the right diagnostic for a given work to be Corny Genius is that it hits you deep in the feels when you're 13-15 years old. Therefore, the ultimate corny genius is... Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Heebie Geebie clearly understands what makes this a fun question.
And of course much of the magic of The Beatles was the mix of Paul's corny genius with two very much not so folks.
Taylor Swift is obviously the ultimate example, which I see she dispenses with at the beginning.
There is a follow-up post, but I didn't think it was quite as amusing as the original, which has the discussion-generating properties of offering a theory which is entirely subjective: https://notebook.substack.com/p/corny-genius-a-post-script
I really like the concept of "corny genius," and am entirely onboard with McCartney as its personification. But I disagree with a lot of the other discussion of the phenomenon.
Musical theater, when it's good, grows corn as high as an elephant's eye, so I agree that Rodgers and Hammerstein fit that category. The Book of Mormon is ironic corny genius.
Casablanca isn't a great example, though. Surely It's a Wonderful Life or The Wizard of Oz are the standards by which corny genius should be measured in the movies.
The corny greatness of the Marvel movies lies in the fact that they are faithful to the corniness of the source material. Christopher Reeve had that going for him, too. But even if Zack Snyder set part of his movie in Kansas, it suffered from an extreme corn deficit and was therefore no fun.
Except for Swift, most of the stuff people are mentioning just sucks.
Speaking of corny, how come Elvis has basically disappeared when even lesser lights from the 60s and 70s are still played by my dentist.
DC animated stuff carries the torch of the needed corniness as long as it doesn't go grimdark - Justice League, Harley Quinn, My Adventures with Superman. Less so, imx, Marvel animations.
NickS, do you know what this author's definition of "basic" is? The post begins with a reference to "my interest in Taylor Swift, being basic, and so on," and I think you can maybe make a case for an inclusive definition of "basic" where any work that does appeal to a naive audience, even if it's not only for the naive, counts.
Unfortunately I almost never have intuitions or insights about this stuff, except that "Stand By Me" is probably corny genius. Also "California Dreamin'." Seems like a hard target to hit consistently.
How does this differ from "middlebrow"? Anyway as a Swiftie and a Casablanca >>> Citizen Kane guy, I'm all for the middlebrow genius. I also sometimes call this the "craftsman" vs. "artist" distinction.
Weird that Spielberg isn't mentioned anywhere, he's one of the clearest examples.
NickS, do you know what this author's definition of "basic" is?
I don't know any better than you do -- I assume that it more or less means unironically enjoying mass market popular products.
Also "California Dreamin'."
That's an interesting example. My gut reaction is that "California Dreamin'" is too weird to qualify but maybe not.
Weird that Spielberg isn't mentioned anywhere, he's one of the clearest examples.
Neither the post or comments are remotely comprehensive, but I would agree that E.T. in particular seems like a great example.
Also, I genuinely am not sure whether "Eleanor Rigby" is a good song or a terrible song or both at once or what.
Also also, Stevie Nicks probably belongs in this discussion.
Ugh, Interstellar, my least favorite of all of Nolan's films. Weird choice.
"Bob Dylan. See Søren Kierkegaard." is funny writing. This was a great find NickS!
Stevie Nicks belongs to the world.
E.T. for sure, but just as much Jaws, Indiana Jones, and Jurassic Park.
Tom Hanks, who I know you all hate, is another shining example.
I think there's an essential innocence and sincerity to corny genius, so that Scooby Do fits, but Bugs Bunny does not. Bullwinkle is both corny and genius, but not corny genius.
I'm not seeing the Chili Peppers in this category, but the Grateful Dead is hippie corny genius.
I am resistant to placing sadness -- even corny sadness -- in this category, so even as I endorse McCartney, I think Yesterday isn't the right example. I'd be tempted to list Silly Love Songs, but I also want to exclude things that are repugnant.
Failing to close tags is neither corny nor genius.
"Bob Dylan. See Søren Kierkegaard." is funny writing. This was a great find NickS!
Yay! I do think that one reason it's so fun is that it gestures in the direction of the topic rather than trying to nail down all of the particulars.
As it happens I was part of a literature-focused discussion along these lines on Bluesy yesterday. It started because apparently there's a podcast in which two young PhDs* in literature talk about Stephen King. And apparently they're just insufferably snobbish about it.
Which, first of all, why bother, but second of all, if you think Danse Macabre has no merit as literature, you're just a fucking moron.
But anyway, it led to a whole thing, part of which is understanding that there is no conflict whatsoever between popularity and quality of composition, but it's hard for some people to accept this. And McCartney was my specific example: his tunes seem so light and straightforward and, yes, corny, but nobody who knows anything about music believes that it's easy to do what he does. Not just because writing timeless popular music is hard, but because there's sophistication & cleverness in his music that's not readily apparent but is also essential to its success.
*or candidates, not sure. But, like, youths
Oh, and I very much wanted to pull Spielberg into that discussion, so there you go.
I feel certain that there's a clear distinction between the concept and middlebrow, but I can't pin it down. TBH, I think the distinctions that brow discourse attempt to draw are fundamentally artificial, partly because there's a slipperiness around popularity. Like, Frank Lloyd Wright (arguably a corny genius) was, in his time, avant garde and difficult, but in our time he's quite popular, so I feel certain he'd be dismissed as middlebrow, especially in comparison to his Euro peers (although most of them weren't really peers, being younger and influenced by his early work).
Not going to accept Michael Curtiz as middlebrow, that guy could do anything..and did.
Silly Love Songs
I don't have the musical chops to say whether this is true, but what I want to be true is that schlock McCartney is what you get when he produces easy tunefulness without applying any musical sophistication (eg surprising chord changes or clever basslines). But who knows? The common sense is that schlock McCartney is what you get when he doesn't try hard at the lyrics and/or doesn't have a sardonic voice* balancing his corniness.
*whether Lennons, Costello's, or his own, inner sense
Curtiz was a supreme artist who could do in any thing in any genre.
McCartney did do a lot of silly little crap but he also did a lot of other stuff
Bob Ross. Those happy little trees are corny AF. And I love them.
I think 'corny' is underspecified.
27 What's wrong with that? I need to know.
How much of Marvel's success was coasting off close ups of Robert Downey Jr being real sarcastic?
I sort of put The Cars into the category.
Well now the whole 1980s were corny.
I think "middlebrow" implies some pretension to good taste, whereas "basic" is indifferent to it.
I'm intrigued by the suggestion that Dickens was a corny genius. He at least started out intending to be a radical campaigner. Can you be a corny radical campaigner? Or do you become corny over time when your erstwhile radicalism becomes mainstream? And musically, is this what happened to McCartney or indeed the Grateful Dead?
"Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story is not Starbuck's pumpkin latte in October
No, but the author isn't saying that Tokyo Story is basic; the author is saying that choosing Tokyo Story is basic.
https://youtu.be/8ntPFNFbPb0?si=9vGP09UqKoIYnUxn
McCartney/Lennon redux. Sons co-wrote; not one little bit to my taste.
37: yeah, I think "basic" is completely orthogonal to brows. I guess nothing highbrow can be basic, but I don't see any reason to think basic bitches are aware of what's middle- or lowbrow.
Anyway, my Hater's Guide to Brows is that lowbrow stuff isn't art, middlebrow stuff is art that people like, and highbrow stuff is art that's mostly liked by people who think it's very important to be above others.
Saw 41 existed the other day, refuse to give it a try.
38: I don't think corniness conflicts with radical intent. "All You Need is Love" (John, of course) is corny but also (naively) radical. It's a Wonderful Life is in some ways radical while being wholly corny.
Earnestness is the opposite of irony, right? Earnestness isn't synonymous with corniness, but it's essential to it, I think. And Dickens was always earnest*.
*I say with no authority bc I've read hardly any, but that's my understanding
34: Field of Dreams vs Bull Durham
I don't think that GRRM, or at least A Song of Ice and Fire is corny, but something in the way he writes attracts me like no other writer is not far off from corny genius. There are a lot of entry points for people to latch on to and make the work/the world their own, so that gives people a sense of ownership in the way that something more obviously exquisitely wrought -- The Book of the New Sun to take a decades-older example -- does not. The first couple of books are not all that well written -- I think I got my copy of A Game of Thrones for 99¢ because the second book (or maybe third?) was new and the publisher was making a push to make the series popular. Anyway, I remember thinking how much better A Dance of Dragons was just sentence by sentence.
Or maybe he is corny at the start. I mean it's the Wars of the Roses plus dragons plus Mongols, right? Spot the historical model: oh, there's Henry VIII! etc. So I guess it's corny in a certain way.
The iPod's shuffle has just tossed out "Fat-Bottomed Girls." Too sleazy to be corny, yeah? And "Bohemian Rhapsody" is probably also too overwrought to be corny, though maybe now that it is such an icon it has slid from avant-garde to corn with the passage of time. "Bicycle Race," though, is probably corny genius.
I was just listening to a podcast that extensively compared Homestuck to Book of the New Sun.
"Don't Stop" is Fleetwood Mac doing corny.
Only in so far as the casting of Russell Crowe in a musical.
So scoring individual artworks this way is fun, but it seems to me that there's an aspect that's important that hasn't been mentioned, how artists and audience relate to each other. Emily Dickinson in particular had very little published in her lifetime, basically spent decades caring for her sick mom. Projecting her writing and Sir Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmastime onto the same spectrum abstracts away too much.
That said, apparent sincerity from ironic artists is to me an interesting edge case-- Kate McKinnon's Hallelujah performance, or Oscar Wilde's sincere writing say. Comments in the middle of songs made in a different register from the song are another one.
Oh and Nick I'm happy to to see a link to a substack essayist. Substack seems to me to have a serious problem with the cult of personality aspect of publishing there, but for now seems like one of the few viable places where people can make a living or at least get a little material support and find an audience writing. Bring back nineties blogging and Lingua Franca I guess, covering sincerity and irony both.
Speaking of Curtiz, I watched The Sea Hawk last night. As part of a pirate double feature (along with Black Swan). I'm willing, I guess, to say that the Queen Elizabeth I's exhortation to resist Hitler was corny. And yet, this is part of what having a civilization means.
I do like Captain Blood better than Sea Hawk, I think. Olivia de Haviland! Basil Rathbone! The villains are Stuart lackeys!
I haven't clicked through, but is the movie Yesterday mentioned? I really enjoyed the scene where he plays the song, and how his friends react.
Is it corny genius that they left the scene of him singing Something to Ana de Armas on the cutting room floor because they wanted the road to Lily James to be uncomplicated?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUfkZ4pCJB0&t=6s
(Oh, if people didn't see the movie, this struggling singer/songwriter wakes up and suddenly there's no such thing as the Beatles. It takes him a while to figure this out -- Yesterday is the first step -- but once he does, he releases a bunch of songs, to tremendous popular acclaim, as his own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VgRuLQgeSE&t=11s Now I did click through, and I don't see that OP has seen the movie either!)
https://youtu.be/Num0q-l-ldc?si=X-IHCHllwyDH4gUf
57: Saw that in the feed of a German reporter who is a friend from Tbilisi times. She appended "having not, as agreed, kept the peace."
House vote today on US support for Ukraine! Not before time...
omg the red hots at age 17 are so corny genius! (their first album came out when I was 17 so I think I get a little leeway on the age thing)
I feel a little better about still occasionally enjoying them even though I know they are also kinda bad.
[on my way to read the article & comments now]
It's hard, nigh impossible, to relate to someone else's corny feels, isn't it?
This was my favorite take on Swift from Slate's Carl Wilson:
"Meanwhile, Taylor Swift seemed to think she was at a shareholders' meeting to announce her second-quarter profit projections, or, as she called it, her new album."
This is roughly what Orwell was getting at in his essay on Kipling: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/rudyard-kipling/
"But what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form - for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things - some emotion which very nearly every human being can share. The merit of a poem like 'When all the world is young, lad' is that, however sentimental it may be, its sentiment is 'true' sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find yourself thinking the thought it expresses sooner or later; and then, if you happen to know the poem, it will come back into your mind and seem better than it did before..."
a shareholders' meeting to announce her second-quarter profit projections, or, as she called it, her new album.
Haters gonna hate hate hate
Tom Petty seems like an obvious corny genius.
Yes, Tom Petty seems like a much better example than Dylan.
Bob Dylan established the path for Midwestern people to improve themselves. Flee the state and change your name.
The "genius" part is the tricky thing here. It's not just "corny but wildly popular" or "corny but not terrible," right? Is genius an I-know-it-when-I-see-it phenomenon, or can the corny variety be inferred from sales figures? (Incidentally, we were discussing this at the dinner table until Elke finally objected that "this conversation is messing with my head" because "corn" is a current euphemism a la "pr0n" on social media. Sorry, kid, we're not that tacky.)
7 is a question that probably has an answer, something to do with the business management of the catalog?
Heebie, if you don't have a post queued up, just put up a current events placeholder. There are events happening currently.
I keep being exposed to "Someday You'll Accompany Me" and it's really reminding me of a Saturday Night Live sketch that was stupid.
68: back 25 years ago the euphemism "checking the corn futures [on the internet]" was already current, among my weird friends, anyway.
My BIL had a series of CDs called "AM Gold" from back in AM radio days when the Rolling Stones shared the top of the charts with Melanie, and Roger Miller singing "King of the Road". Looking down the playlists rings a lot of the same bells, certainly of corn, but also of corny genius. AM radio was a good filter for this stuff is what I'm saying.
70: jeez, which ones did you have in mind? Now I want heebie to put up a current events post.
Corn futures are too important to joke about.
73: mostly I've been thinking about war in the Middle East, elections in India, whatever the hell is going on in Congress, and generally trying to stare into a crystal ball at the next decade. Trump if others are feeling chatty about him.
Absolutely, but if I shift my focus one more time today, my brain will overheat.
You are welcome to use this thread to talk about current events if you wish.
I did not see this until just now!
The nice thing about war in the fucking Middle East is that it will definitely still be happening next week. No worries, just a couple of idle remarks when things seemed slow. I'm not sure that I personally have anything earthshattering to say, and I am also suddenly busy, "lol."
Crap. In the office pool, I bet for peace in the Middle East starting this Saturday.
James Gunn has scenes of corny genius. The climax of his suicide squad movie, for instance.
I had my first experience of an outright ChatGPT hallucination. I asked about a poem I remembered, (La Fausse Monnaie , great, recommended) incorrectly thinking Victor Hugo wrote it. I got this, refers to something that does not exist:
which poetry collection contains Victor hugo prose poem about counterfeit coin given to beggarChatGPT Victor Hugo's prose poem about the counterfeit coin given to a beggar is included in his collection titled "Les Contemplations." "Les Contemplations" is one of Hugo's most famous poetry collections, originally published in 1856. The collection is divided into two books: "Autrefois" (Formerly) and "Aujourd'hui" (Today), and it contains a wide range of poems reflecting on themes such as love, loss, nature, and social issues. The poem about the counterfeit coin can be found in the section "Aujourd'hui."
I got that when I tried asking about the symbolism of the sea in, wait for it, Iris Murdoch's The Sea The Sea. It fabricated deaths in the novel that didn't happen.
Did you tell it it is wrong? It's both hilarious and infuriating when it agrees that it is wrong, apologizes profusely, and then makes something else up.
No, it responded with the honeyed words of a middle manager:
I apologize for the inconvenience. It seems there might have been a misunderstanding. Victor Hugo's "Les Contemplations" is indeed a public domain text, but it primarily consists of poetry, not prose. While there are many prose works by Hugo, they may not always be included in collections of his poetry.If you're specifically looking for a prose work by Victor Hugo about a counterfeit coin given to a beggar, it might not be part of "Les Contemplations." Instead, it could be from another collection or a standalone piece. Hugo's works are extensive, so it's possible that this particular prose poem might be found in a different collection or anthology.
I seem to draw out somewhat more sub/dom interactions, which (obv) does not reflect well on me. This was the end of a conversation about some other historical innacuracy it had offered me:
Yes, as an AI language model, I can learn from my mistakes and use that knowledge to improve my responses in the future. In this case, I have learned that the automatic pop-up toaster was invented in 1919 by Charles Strite, not in 1940 as I had previously mentioned. Thank you for correcting my mistake and helping me improve my knowledge. I will strive to provide more accurate and up-to-date information in the future.
I didn't include pointed remarks, I just asked "There is no such thing there, what's the URL?" instead of "Don't you check your work before answering about something so easy to verify with public information before wasting my time? I may as well ask my cat". In fairness, Les Contemplations looks pretty good.
A well read cat, even if lacking in encyclopedic knowledge.
has the author of the linked piece read any frank o'hara? "corn adjacent" my ass.