Pop Culture Takes a Serious Reality Check

By JEFF LEEDS and PAUL BROWNFIELD

Sept. 18, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

Rock ‘n’ roll was back on the radio, absent Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire” and scores of other pop standards, now deemed insensitive. A muted, reflective David Letterman returned to late-night television--without a monologue or his signature “Top 10” list. And the Los Angeles Dodgers retook the field, after first unfurling a giant American flag that covered most of the outfield grass.

Paralyzed after the terrorist attacks, American popular culture has begun returning to its place on the national stage. And yet, as the shows go on, they do so in most cases cautiously, with a heightened sensitivity to the nation’s still open wounds.

Radio disc jockeys were being warned against playing songs that might seem in poor taste. The nation’s largest chain of radio stations distributed a long list of questionable song titles to programmers, ranging from AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” to the Chi-Lites’ “Have You Seen Her,” to, oddly, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

“It is terribly sad here in New York,” Letterman told his audience at the Ed Sullivan Theater. It was his first show since the Tuesday attack, and the comedian’s voice sometimes trembled as he spoke. “We have lost 5,000 fellow New Yorkers. You can feel it. You can feel it. You can see it. It’s terribly sad.”

The New Yorker magazine was circulating its first issue since the attacks on the World Trade Center, but one that would contain none of its signature, wry cartoons.

“Some people may feel that precisely what we may need is cartoons,” said editor David Remnick, “but I couldn’t bear to publish talking dogs and psychiatrist jokes.”

At New York-based Gourmet magazine, the staff spent last weekend cooking for relief workers in its test kitchen and then resumed work on its traditional November Thanksgiving issue.

“It was already food-centered and America-centered,” said editor Ruth Reichl, “and we didn’t have to change much. But we did have a big piece on Pakistan that we pulled out and replaced with a story on Texas.”

The Dodgers and other Major League Baseball teams resumed play, with ballplayers speaking of the relative unimportance of their pennant chases and sportswriters busily purging war metaphors from their lexicons.

ESPN covered the national anthem at both baseball games it televised Monday night. Fox went a step further, vowing to make the national anthem a part of every baseball and football broadcast for the duration.

Fans at the Dodger game sang along to both the National Anthem and “God Bless America.” American flags had been placed above each dugout.

Not all purveyors were veering on to the high road. Shock jock Howard Stern on Monday quizzed a purported member of the Ku Klux Klan about whether he’d be willing to assist people of various racial or religious backgrounds trapped beneath the World Trade Center rubble.

The theatrical grapplers of the World Wrestling Federation, by contrast, were models of sensitivity. On Thursday they had offered a gentler version of their premiere show, “Smackdown,” with wrestlers reflecting somberly on the tragedy.

By Monday night, however, they were ready to rumble.

“It was very clear [last] Tuesday the world just stopped. You’re not going to have a show. That was easy,” WWF spokesman Gary Davis said Monday “ . . . I think there’s a feeling today, now, that you just have got to get on with your life, as terrible as this tragedy is.”

The television industry in general has been reevaluating its program schedules. Many movies and series with violent or disturbing content were yanked last Tuesday and replaced with lighter fare.

Some publicists were trying to put the most gentle spin on the fact that some shows went back into production last week. CBS’ “King of Queens” shot an episode last week, though the Friday taping was done without a studio audience.

“The general feeling among the cast and crew was that everyone wanted to get back to work,” the show’s executive producer, Josh Goldsmith, said through a CBS publicist. “But it didn’t seem appropriate to film in front of a live studio audience.”

We did feel, by getting a show finished, we would do our very small part trying to resume normal life in this time of tragedy.”

Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show”--which recently won a prestigious Peabody Award for its acerbic commentary on current events--has been dark since the attacks. Writers for the New York-based series began meeting again Monday to determine how a show built to poke fun at the puffed-up nature of national and world events can still function.

A source close to the show conceded that its typically scornful and biting tone will be softened. But he suggested, gamely enough, that perhaps comedy could be found in commenting upon the show’s very inability to comment on the terrorist attacks--to address the situation, as he put it, on a “meta level.”

Radio musical programmers, shoved aside by news coverage last week, were wary of offending listeners. Jack Evans, an executive with the 1,200-station, San Antonio-based Clear Channel group, prepared a list of 150 potentially offensive song titles as a guide for programmers.

The list cut a swath across formats from rock to pop to oldies. It included AC/DC’s “Safe in New York City,” Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic,” which makes reference to a plane crash, and both the Bob Dylan and Guns N’ Roses versions of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

Las Vegas-based radio broadcaster Citadel Communications was building a similar list of about 70 songs, ranging from the Beastie Boys’ “Sure Shot” to Peter Paul & Mary’s “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane.”

“I think that literally overnight the personalities of people have been significantly changed,” said Scott Mahalick, Citadel’s vice president for programming, “and radio needs to be in tune to that.”

Nonetheless, he said, “people need entertainment, they need a release, it’s part of our culture.”

Songs with even passing references to targets, fires, crashes, absent loved ones and the like have all but vanished from playlists, according to Mediabase, a Clear Channel-owned firm that compiles airplay data.

In the so-called “hot adult contemporary” format, R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” has seen a 63% drop in the number of “spins” in the last week, compared with the week before, according to the data. Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me” is down 45% in that format.

Among Hollywood filmmakers there has been concern that studios might begin to shy away from scripts that realistically depict terrorism--either to avoid touching raw nerves or out of fear they might give terrorists ideas. Warner Bros. and Disney already have postponed release of two terrorism-themed movies.

Ed Zwick, who directed the 1998 thriller “The Siege,” a film about an Arab terrorist cell operating in New York, said he believes nothing should be taboo in movies: “One of Thornton Wilder’s most famous books was ‘The Bridge of San Luis Rey.’ It’s the story of a bridge collapsing. It becomes a mediation on fate and love. Nothing should ever be proscribed.”

Musicians shared an emerging sense that aftershocks from last week could change the tenor of popular music. Singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow, for one, said Monday that she already was revisiting pieces on an album she finished a few weeks ago.

On one track, she bemoaned the lack of heroes in the world today, a complaint she said now rings hollow given the performance of firefighters in New York. She plans to alter the lyrics or scrap the song.

“I feel differently about all that now after what we’ve seen,” Crow said. “My home in New York City is right next to a fire station, and I had a lot of good friends and familiar faces in that department who are missing now.”

Producer Rick Rubin, who has worked with musicians as diverse as Aerosmith, Johnny Cash and the Beastie Boys, said Monday that he expects a new gravity to pull on the themes in music.

“Everything that happens in society influences music at all turns,” he said, “and something as big as this can’t help but affect the music we’re going to hear.”

Whether all of this represents a sea change in popular culture or merely a passing tic of heightened concern will depend in part on how events play out from here forward. The arc of popular culture has bounced upward--or been driven downward--by major events before.

Said Robert Thompson, professor of media and pop culture at Syracuse University: “Given some distance, Hollywood will rediscover the terrorist in a big way and do even more on the subject. Fiction and storytelling is how we come to grips with the real world.

”. . . The more long-lasting impact is the effect on the ultra-hip, ironic, wise-guy culture that took root in the early ‘80s, influenced by ‘Saturday Night Live’ and people like David Letterman, Andy Kaufman--an entire generation of people.

” Irony as a mode of communications was appropriate for peacetime, but that now gets called into question.”

Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Rachel Abramowitz, Geoff Boucher, Corie Brown, Sallie Hofmeister, Peter H. King, Paul Lieberman, Louise Roug, David Shaw and Robert W. Welkos.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Questionable Lyrics

Clear Channel, the nation’s largest chain of radio stations, distributed to its disc jockeys a list of songs that might now be in bad taste, including:

Steve Miller: “Jet Airliner”

Queen: “Another One Bites the Dust”

Pat Benatar: “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”

Bangles: “Walk Like an Egyptian”

Kansas: “Dust in the Wind”

Led Zeppelin: “Stairway to Heaven”

The Beatles: “A Day in the Life”

Nine Inch Nails: “Head Like a Hole”

Bob Dylan: “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”

Megadeth: “Sweating Bullets”

Metallica: “Seek and Destroy”

Jerry Lee Lewis: “Great Balls of Fire”