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Notes -
Slam Frank is kind of disappointing
(Spoiler Warning: Full spoilers for Slam Frank.)
Slam Frank is an anti-woke satirical hip hop musical, created by a few Jewish guys, that depicts a play within a play, where a woke theater troupe decides to update the story of Anne Frank for the modern age, and depict her as Anita Franco, a neurodivergent, Afro-Latina, pansexual girl forced to hide in an attic by the Nazis, as she and the other Jews hiding there deal with the most important issues in their lives: patriarchy, coming to terms with their sexuality and gender identities, and being true to her identity as a proud Afro-Latina immigrant.
Now, a disclaimer at the top, I have only listened to the official cast recording ($20 I will never get back), which omits an important song from the last 15 minutes of the musical that serves as its main twist, and I've been forced to cobble my understanding together from various summaries and the lyrics of the omitted song. (Worth pointing out that I have occasionally enjoyed musicals I encountered roughly this same way.)
But overall, I'd say I'm pretty underwhelmed.
To be very fair to it, I actually think a lot of the music is pretty decent and catchy. For a work that is so dripping in irony that many people had trouble figuring out whether it was serious or not, and what the play's message was, they put more effort into the music than you'd expect. I appreciated some of the nods to other musicals like Hamilton here and there, and there were lots of little funny moments throughout. The absurdity of a beat poem about how every woman is a Jew and the patriarchy is their attic, or Peter van Pels singing about coming out of the closet as nonbinary feel like they belong to the long tradition of musicals like Avenue Q or The Book of Mormon which manage to thread the needle of being outrageous and offensive but still enjoyable.
However, I might just be desensitized from having been on the internet for too long, but I just didn't think there was much there there in Slam Frank. While I do kind of respect them for ending the play by having Anne Frank turn her own family in to the Nazis after she learns what the Jews are planning to do to Palestine (only for Adolf Hitler to show up after the execution, revive the family, and come out as a trans woman, before the whole cast sings a song meant to show the parallels between woke left rhetoric and Nazi ideology), I can't help but feel like it is all shock humor with very little else going for it.
I wanted to feel something. I wanted them to do something witty and interesting, and instead it just seems like they had a single idea for a joke and managed to stretch it over the length of an entire musical.
I'm reminded of the empty feelings I was left with listening to Kanye West's Heil Hitler. I was listening to it, waiting for brilliant lyrics or interesting themes or ideas, and instead I just got lazy shock schlock, which doesn't do much for me. I'm not easily outraged by this kind of stuff, and so I'm just left a bit bored, asking, "What else you got?"
I'm happy that the musical exists, but in some ways it feels like a grift designed to sell tickets, even as it is a complete musical play. I thought it was odd that I couldn't find any bootlegs of the whole show, and only short clips of some of the songs online, but I think they made a very deliberate choice not to upload the complete album to Youtube or Spotify, because it would remove a lot of the "mystique" around the show that their viral advertising on Tik Tok and Instagram has created.
Unrelated Anne Frank Complaint
I listen to my local college radio station constantly when in the car. It's one of the few places left in the world where I can genuinely discover new music, without searching in any way. But because it is a public station, they play PSA's constantly, and the worst are the Pass It On people. And the worst ad they've ever created started airing recently:
Anne Frank as role model
This is actually offensively bad. Anne Frank's story shouldn't fill us with hope! How exactly does the story of a young girl who was murdered by an industrial racism machine fill us with hope? That's not the message we're meant to get from that school assignment! The point of assigning The Diary of Anne Frank in school is to place us in a state of empathy with the victims of the Holocaust*, to make us understand that these were real humans just like us being herded into camps. Whatever hope she had was misplaced! Her life ended ignominiously and miserably! To turn her into an inspirational self-help guru is to lessen the impact of the crimes committed against her.
It's offensively preachy and bad.
*FWIW I think we all need to stop empathizing with the victims and start trying to empathize with the perpetrators, and realize that It Could Happen Here
That's a tall order. A lot of people seem functionally incapable of empathy - and there's a whole topic of partisan Discourse going on about it, and on the difference between empathy and sympathy.
Many people seem to interpret a call to empathy as something like "Imagine if your brain as-is right now were transmigrated into another person's body, how would you feel?" They can't even wrap their heads around the notion that they're supposed to be imagining that they had learned an alternative fact pattern, much less held to a different epistimology and metaphysics.
Of course it can't happen here; everyone knows the Nazis are the bad guys! Everyone who can imagine otherwise is a demon in a skinsuit, which means they aren't people and should probably be stripped of rights and isolated away from everyone else, perhaps in some sort of walled camps.
You're right, but probably not for the reasons you think. Nazi empathy was popular among the Jewish emigre academics of the postwar era, and empathy took on particular prominence as things like the Banality of Evil and the Milgram experiments entered the public consciousness. The problem was that Germany couldn't be written off as a political, economic, and social backwater where Hitler was a thug exerting his will over an ignorant and unorganized population. That the German public went along with the horrors of the Third Reich was proof to them that Western Enlightenment epistemology was fundamentally flawed and in need of replacement. The Marxism that they offered as an alternative, however, was verboten during the Cold War, and this interpretation would only take hold among committed leftists.
For conservatives, the argument that they were all just evil was convenient and would prove to have wider applications. The idea of being empathetic to the circumstances of a criminal's upbringing would become a punchline.
I don’t really recall that being the dominant conservative viewpoint, at least where I grew up. Explaining Nazism isn’t really that big an issue for classical conservatism: humans are prone to cruelty, and civilization barely holds those impulses in check until it doesn’t. While the specifics differ, Germans went Nazi for the same reasons Russians went Stalinist for the same reason Comanches smashed babies against rocks: humans are inclined to cruelty, and organize in ways to facilitate organized cruelty.
The bigger argument is if conservatism, or any particular ideology, has a good track record of restraining those impulses. That’s a far bigger and honestly unresolved argument.
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