Elizabeth Wurtzel Really Misses The Monoculture, Man
Things to take away from Prozac Nation spokeswoman-turned-attorney Elizabeth Wurtzel’s polemic “The Internet Is Ruining America’s Movies And Music,” which, despite being little more than 1,127 semi-coherent words that basically restate the title’s thesis over and over again, somehow made its way to being published in The Wall Street Journal last week:
1. Someone out there still cares about folkie Pete Yorn, although apparently not enough to mention him anywhere beyond the lede of the piece. (To be fair to Wurtzel, though, I had no idea that he’d actually cracked the Billboard 200’s top 20 back in the day.)
2. Wurtzel is bummed out that instead of rock stars who blazed trails of nuttiness across the sky, “all we’ve got left is Britney Spears.” Curious, given that Ms. Spears’ recent travails would have made her a hell of an addition to the 10th-anniversary edition of Wurtzel’s ode to crazy ladies Bitch. (Guess that’s not happening, oops!)
3. Wurtzel’s penchant for cliches hasn’t ebbed a bit, as she trots out the old “You can’t download a [blank]” saw, this time about painting and sculpture, which has somehow transcended the Internet because art receipts in November 2007 were higher than those in November 2006. Even though one could argue that the economy is in a much worse place now. And that maybe more current numbers should be used to support one’s facts.
4. So yes, the aforementioned three facts, plus references to the “new Bruce Springsteen album” and a reference to another study from November of ’07, are more than enough to make the casual reader wonder just how long Wurtzel has been shopping this piece around, and why on Earth the WSJ decided to run with this not-very-groundbreaking polemic now. It’s a toss-up between August being a slower-than-molasses news month or this piece taking that long to edit just to get it to a place of relative coherence.
