Introducing the Awl Music App: Music Videos for and by People, Not Machines

Today, we launch Awl Music as an app on iTunes. You can watch your favorite music videos on your iPad, or throw them to your Apple TV like any other television channel. Get it here! Here's why we think this needs to exist.

My music video collection began in 1989, the year my family finally got MTV. Cable had been slow to arrive in the San Fernando Valley, and my family was not much for early adopting anything anyway. I had one previous experience with MTV, a few years earlier, when I spent two weeks of the summer in the basement of my aunt's house in Scarsdale, watching six hours a day of MTV with my cousin Stephen.

That was 1986, and it was was a phenomenal year for music. It was the year of Janet Jackson's Control, Peter Gabriel's So, The Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill, Madonna's True Blue, Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet, Run D.M.C.'s Raising Hell and The Pet Shop Boys's Please. Phil Collins was still releasing videos off of No Jacket Required, and he was still fronting Genesis for Invisible Touch. MTV played the videos from these albums with the frequency of propaganda, and they carved deep, deep pathways into my brain.

The video for "Sledgehammer" was the first time I was conscious of filmmaking technology. "Land of Confusion" was my first exposure to political satire. The strings at the beginning of "Papa Don't Preach," played over scenes of the Manhattan skyline, became indelibly associated with New York City. Things I adored for the rest of my life first came to my attention during those two weeks watching television in Scarsdale.

But by the time MTV came to my house in the Valley in 1989, all those music videos were off the air. Even at the age of twelve I had a sense of nostalgia, so I went on a mission to capture all the ones I associated with that summer. Whenever there was a "Top 100 Videos of All Time" weekend, I spent hours with my face a foot from the television, one finger on the VCR's record button. For good measure, I also grabbed new videos I liked, just in case they vanished, too.

I ultimately filled two VHS tapes, long-play setting, six hours each. I'm not sure I ever watched them. It just felt good to know I had that connection to 1986 if I needed it. Years later, the Internet came around, making this entire exercise pointless. The tapes no longer have any function (nor do I own a VCR), they just remind me that I once tried very hard to hold on to something ephemeral that was really important to me.

A number of people I grew up with had a relationship with music videos. We saw them the way we looked up to a cool older sibling we wanted to be like one day. Music videos defined our sense of fun. They provided some belonging to those who felt different. They presented us with attitudes to imitate. They had an effect, and we loved them.

It's with this in mind that The Awl began Awl Music, and today we re-platform site as an iPad app. You can watch it like a television channel if you also have Apple TV. The app is available right now on iTunes.

Awl Music is meant to emulate the MTV experience of thirty years ago. We have VJs just like MTV did back then, and these are people you already know. Dave Bry, Jeff Rosenthal, Sarah Johnson and David Shapiro'all friends of The Awl'are programming the channel. Awl Network editors like Alex, Choire, Edith and Adam will also contribute. There will be guest VJs like Emily Gould and her "Songs About Gossip" playlist, as well as crowdsourced selections like the "Summer Jams" playlist. Everyone who programs the channel has great taste. Each one has a different taste.

In some ways this is a reaction against the trend of algorithm-based discovery engines that permeate the Internet nowadays. Our VJs pick videos that resonate with them. We believe these videos are less likely to suck than the ones guessed at by lines of code. We're taking on the machines. The machines understand genre, they can detect syncopated rhythm, and they know what other videos people who watched one video also watched. But the machines don't understand meaning.

For the next week and a half, The Awl will be running a series by a few writers who know what it's like to find meaning in a music video. Specifically, we asked them to write about the first music video that meant something to them. If Awl Music can bring even a touch of experiences like theirs to your television set, we'll consider the whole enterprise a success.

Eric Spiegelman is a web producer in Los Angeles.

New York City, September 4, 2012

[No stars] The tattered, bloated remnants of someone else's weather. The hurricane was no longer a news item or an alarming form on the satellite photo, but a soggy influence. Stepping outside was suffocating, the feeling of putting previously worn socks back on after going barefoot. On the schoolyard playground, the fountain sprayed water upward and inward, ceaselessly splashing onto an inlaid map of the United States. Showers later on were inevitable and no more interesting than the rest of it.

The League of Ordinary Ladies: A Summer Reflection

Previously: Jobs and Juice.

Esther C. Werdiger made more totes!

One Trouble with Our "Pop Thinkers"

Here is the problem in a nutshell with the "idea fellows" of our time: consider this lengthy analysis of Whole Foods as a customer-centric institution, as a perfect example of "customer capitalism." (Not a terrifically good coinage, but hey, you pump out what you can while you're working on your TED talk.) Nowhere in this treatise does the fact appear that, um, one way Whole Foods interacts with capitalism and customers is that, while some prices make a lot of sense, SOME OTHER PRICES AT WHOLE FOODS ARE LITERALLY AS MUCH AS DOUBLE WHAT THEY ARE ELSEWHERE. And other prices are easily 30% to 50% more, for the same products available elsewhere. So yeah, you're buying that loaf of high protein organic "men's bread" for almost $9 at Whole Foods and the people who work there are fun and are super nice to you (and are also fairly well-paid, in the marketplace of "people working in stores"), but you can also go down to the hippie store (or the Fairway!) and buy it for $4-something. Hence, your analysis of capitalism is a failure because it does not actually consider the capitalism involved.

This Will Either Spoil Or Excite Your Appetite, Depending

If you'd like to see a list of stuntfoods where "a Whopper with five patties" represents the least extravagant concoction, head on over here.

New York City, September 2, 2012

'' Sun with clouds about to overtake it, alternating with clouds about to give way to sun. Proportions tipped to the cloudier side as the afternoon went on. It was gray outside the Battery Maritime Terminal and gray inside, under the cold light fixtures. The ferry yawed and pitched, turning for Governor's Island; the engine rattled skulls. The water was pewter. A brief drizzle fell on the island's perimeter road. A whole family, child after child after child, came veering up from behind on bicycles. The wobbliest child went a few more yards and wiped out sideways. The sun found the harbor and laid down a narrow line of brilliant silver, pointing away from the Statue of Liberty. Then it found the boxes of Lower Manhattan and did with them what it could. The line to get back to the ferry stayed overcast. Cotton candy turned to wool candy in the damp air, on its way to felt. Back up in the West 60s, an hour later, golden sun poured through. Beautiful conditions for an excursion.

Weather ratings range from zero to five stars.

How College Comedies Are Watched by All Ages of Dudes

"College is the best time of your life," is something people like to say and believe. It's also something that self-perpetuates itself: you approach college with that special time of your life vigor and demand nothing less. Accordingly, it's the college comedy film's obligation to capture this ethos from all angles: those looking forward to college, those in college, and those looking back at college.

Animal House came out on DVD around the time I was applying for colleges. My dad swiftly purchased it for me with the advice of "you should watch this before you go to college." I am not unique in this; dads were buying their sons Animal House VHSs for years and will eventually buy them Animal House 3-D blu-rays for years to come. Animal House and other college comedy films can show you what college will be like or, at least, show you what everyone else will think college will be like. They also give you something to look forward to, to study for the SATs for. More specifically they seem to exist to answer one question: Will I get to see boobs in college? And the answer based on every single college comedy is a resounding "Yes!" There are more boobs in these movies than there are blackboards, which is reasonable since the vast majority of college comedies speak much more to the male collegiate ideal than the female. In these movies, women are objects either to be ogled at or won over by the charming protagonist (or if they're really lucky, they get to be just housewives who stay at home taking blowjob classes). It's unfortunate; however, these pictures are geared towards the adolescent and the adolescent at heart, and that viewer wants to believe college is the time when they'll see the most boobs possible.

For those in college it's less about the aspiration of seeing the boobs, it's about how will they see boobs. To those inclined, these movies become instructional. For example:

Luckily this hasn't grown to become common practice. But this has:

Toga Parties date back to the 1950s but Animal House is credited for making them as an essential part of the college experience as sodium-based diets and too infrequently washed bed sheets. Where a disco party nowadays would be thrown with irony and intentional misrepresentation, kids continue to throw Toga Parties in earnest. Still, more than these explicit examples, these college comedies provide a guide to how college should feel. In these movies, college at its best is lived like there is a tomorrow and that tomorrow is going to be filled with not college and a job and drudgery. Vance "Van" Wilder, Jr. can't leave college because college is the only place where good things, college things can happen and he instructs others, namely Taj, how do follow suit. Similarly, it was Rodney Dangerfield's job in Back To School to teach his son the right way to be a college student, which mostly involves partying, talking back in class, and doing flippy dives into pools. Even Revenge of the Nerds doesn't aspire to offer an alternative vision of college but to assert that nerds too can have the same sort of drunken shenanigans as the muscular. For those in college, they can watch movies about college, regardless of how incredibly dated they are, and confirm they're doing it right.

Then that person graduates and that same movie reminds them that they did it right. The college comedy allows its post-college viewer to remember the time that was. Old School took this a step further and made the film about this nostalgia itself. Beyond its fratty set pieces, the film is about being able to relive the best time of your life. Sure, now they can afford to bring Snoop Dogg to a party but the result isn't so much different from when they were 20 and Doggystyle was playing over the boombox. This gets to the core of the revisionist history element to most college comedies. Partly, this is because every college comedy is written by someone who went to college and wanted to recreate their experience with a bit more pizazz and partly this is because college comedies can fill in some of the gaps in your partying memory. You might not have chugged a fifth of Jack but you totally know someone who did (so what if he was a fictional character). College comedies prey on the built-in feelings many have towards that time and they use that goodwill as a sort of workaround from having to ground the film emotionally. A generation's college comedy acts a supplement to a college photo album: "This is what my friends and I looked like and this movie shows how we felt and what we did and how often we saw girls' boobs."

And it all works because very generally college is the same for most viewers. There are tons of variables that can go into a college experience but it still is college, the time in your life when you are about 18-22 and live at a school surrounded by only people your age. The cut and dryness of the time period gives these movies an added bit of universality. Everyone has mid-20s and early-30s and etc. but it's pretty impossible to delineate them as completely. High school is similar to college in this way; however, because they characters are younger, it's a bit creepy to make them as lewd. College as a clear-cut time period becomes a thing; a thing teenagers can look forward to; a thing college students can inhabit; a thing parents could remember fondly to their kids. All college comedies draw from this and contribute to it. They are ways to experience THE "best time of your life" in perfect-90 minute bundles and see some boobs in the process.