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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
Honestly I'd prefer if western societies could please kindly stop dragging the dead out of their graves to beat dead horses with them. Anne Frank this, Hitler that, General Lee another thing...they did what they did in ages very different from our own, and we're better off looking to our own affairs rather than to try and make saints or devils out of the unusual people of the past.
There are people alive today who met veterans of the Slavers' Revolt.
There are over two hundred thousand people alive today who lived through the Holocaust.
A decade ago, the United States Government was still paying pensions from the Civil War.
The attitudes that lead to the historical horrors are still very much with us.
What do you think the attitudes are that lead to these horrors? Do you believe how we currently teach these events inoculates students against these attitudes?
I think those two questions are what make the historiography of human cruelty controversial. Different people can look at the same event, and have completely different opinions on it.
An example of this would be the Holocaust. Just looking at Jews in particular, here were/are four responses/interpretations to it:
There are more interpretations, especially once you get interpretations beyond just Jews. If you teach a particular interpretation, it’s quite possible that instead of reducing the chance of a new atrocity, you either do nothing or maybe even increase the chance.
The notion that the bloodline-denominated collective is an end in itself and the individual is a means to that end.
The notion that whether or how much a Life Matters is dependant on bloodlines. (When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?)
The notion that the property rights of rich people are more important than the personal rights of the smallfolk.
I agree that putting the Volk as the only thing worthy of moral consideration, with all other rights subordinate to it, is a core ideological feature that made Nazism, and fascism in general, so harmful.
At the same time, I think the issue is when you decide a group, or concept, is the only thing that matters morally and no other rights are important rather than whatever group or concept in particular you elevate. The communists killed millions for the revolution and utopia. In pre-modern eras, millions were butchered for king and/or faith. The crime is in discarding individual rights, not in the object you decide is the only important thing in the world.
Is there a limit to this principle? Can families morally have ingroup preference? What about a community the size of dunbar’s number? Is the limit more about how much preference you can give someone vs the reason for the preference?
While equality of people is a good, it is a good that has to be balanced against the fact that any individual human has people they care about and people they don’t and our social lives, and really civilization as a whole, are built on this distinction.
I think this is more the crime of the Confederates and isn’t really the core objection to Nazi Germany. I think the principle of equality under the law naturally leads to people saying rich and poor deserve the same rights. All societies have had both positive and negative rights, and you can’t clearly separate the two in practice. Which rights different people have is a constant negotiation. While I think slavery is a clear violation of equality under the law, and the civil war is an example of the problems it caused, I don’t think you can just from the specific case of slavery to a modern rich vs poor issue.
"the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."
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