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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
If you ask someone what they would have done during 1930s Germany or 1850s South, there's never any willingness to say "I'd probably have done whatever the typical person did." Maybe the question is incoherent--what does it even mean for the self to be transplanted into a different person in a different society and time? But that more philosophical objection doesn't seem to be the real driver of the response: it's never "that's incoherent" or "I don't know," but instead "I would have been a partisan guerrilla against the Nazis or helped run the Underground Railroad."
It ends up serving as a narrative building exercise to reinforce your own identity, instead of a way to test your own mental models of how you act and make decisions.
The question is incoherent, and it's not just a matter of not being able to deal with hypotheticals. If I woke up tomorrow as I am now but in that time, of course my opinions and attitudes would be dramatically out of lockstep with everyone else around me. But if you're asking what I would be doing had I grown up in that situation, unless you believe in a very strong version of biological determinism mixed with very fast evolution (ie: that the "better, more moral" humans of today are the result of genetic differences that crop up over a couple of centuries or even as little as a couple of decades), then you're asking me to tell you what a person that I am not thinks.
I get the same issue when my wife asks me if I think a guy is attractive or my type. No matter how I answer that no, I'm simply not attracted to men, she'll invariably ask me "okay, but what if you were?". I cannot answer that question; I'm not this hypothetical attracted to men Pigeonburger, any answer is at best a random guess.
I'm in broad directional agreement, but that perspective has its own issues. I could ask you, "what would you do if you saw a child about to get hit by a car tomorrow, and you could save him with little risk to yourself?" Taking that principle to the extreme, it's impossible to say: you are not in that particular situation, and you lack all the context and history of the preceding day that will form the you of tomorrow.
The question is really something like, what do you predict your self model would do? And maybe it's a question of the stability of that model: it's likely stable over the vagaries of a day's events, but not stable to swapping out your entire life experience.
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Yes, this is what empathy is. Understanding the thought processes of other people.
But I tend to take the spirit of these questions as something like "Imagine a person with your rough personality and qualities, and imagine how they might react to these historical factors".
But then the question is no longer what do you think you would do if in that position. I do get empathy for those people, I just don't think it can meaninfully framed personally.
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What's galling about this is that, growing up in the 90s, I was one of many children who was explicitly taught that it could happen here due to conformity and herd mentality and such, especially with regards to ideologies or belief systems or just teams that one likes and feels like one belongs in. I recall a film from the 70s or 80s called The Wave that was shown to basically every student in my school as they passed through late grade school, which was a fictionalized account of a high school teacher bootstrapping a fascist-like organization in his school called The Wave merely based on conformity and obedience, with the climax being the twist that he reveals to all the students that he set this up on purpose to demonstrate how a specifically Nazi-like organization (he presented videos of Hitler when he was purportedly revealing to his students the true leader of The Wave) can rise among supposedly free-thinking, well-meaning Americans all trying to do good things for good reasons.
The obvious conclusion from this is that, for any ideological/political/religious/etc. belief system you follow - especially ones that are approved by people you hold in high regard and/or people who can and do reward/punish you - must be held in great suspicion and skepticism for possibly causing you to become a Nazi foot soldier while completely under the belief that you are an anti-Nazi who does Good Things for Good Reasons.
And yet, this teaching doesn't seem to have continued or been common in the decades since, to the extent that the dominant thing being taught is actually just naked tribalism about how Only Bad People would do Bad Things for Bad Reasons, and We are certainly not Bad People, because we believe ourselves to be Good People doing Good Things for Good Reasons.
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I touch on this in another comment, but this idea isn't exactly a conservative coup. Blaming bad things on bad people is easy and doesn't say anything about society as a whole. Did slavery exist because of flawed individuals, or because the United States Constitution is a fundamentally flawed document that allowed such an institution to exist in the first place? Does amending the Constitution to prohibit slavery actually solve the problem, or only mask the symptoms of a system based on the kind of power dynamics that allow for that kind of exploitation? Is the past 150 years of postbellum racism and inequality due to our inability to adequately address this basic issue?
Neither. It existed because that sort of thing was totally normal across most of human existance and the Europeans hadn't decided to totally ban it for offending them yet. It's still totally normal across much of the globe.
Imagine a someone in a vegan future asking if the Constitution allowed meat-eating because the people who wrote it were just bad?
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Not a conservative or a Founding Father/Constitution fetishist. And, no, any individual deciding to be moral and heroic doesn't change much: there's always some rate of that, and every system that establishes itself has learned to divert, marginalize, or harness that rate.
But the goal should be to interject yourself at critical points, and nudge the system toward dynamics that are are likely to lead to value-aligned outcomes. By itself, that's a very hard problem and hard to do well, but not understanding why a regular person might be a Nazi or support the institution of slavery makes that even harder, not easier.
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