Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese's Short-Lived My Journey Through HBO's Period Music Drama Vinyl Continues With Its Juicy Fifth Episode, "He In Racist Fire"
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices
One of the many reasons I adored Sinners is because it is about the transcendent power of live music and how the right band and the right show can send you hurling through an electric tunnel of time and space into a realm beyond your imagination.
Sinners is about a young man so skilled at playing and singing the blues that his talent tears a hole through time and space, induces a time warp jam between the past, present, and future, and attracts the malevolent attention of blood-sucking demons from the bowels of hell.
That’s a recurring theme in my writing, most notably my 2013 book You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me. I should probably specify that I write about the shattering, overwhelming emotional power of the right concert and its ability to connect you with the person you used to be and the person you will someday become, not the part about vampires.
Sinners gave me a feeling I previously only experienced while high on drugs at Phish shows and Gatherings of the Juggalos, and I did not even need to be on MDMA to re-live it.
I’m not just talking about Phish and ICP: “Weird Al” Yankovic shows can also be deeply spiritual experiences in which you commune with the child you once were, the parent you have become, and a future that is exhilaratingly and terrifyingly unknowable.
The heavily hyped but short-lived HBO period drama Vinyl is similarly obsessed with time. It’s a show about the 1973 New York music business written by men of a certain age who all share an interest in rock and roll’s debauched past and subscriptions to Mojo.
Vinyl chronicles the past through the sensibilities and taste of the present. In the cheesiest moment in “He In Racist Fire”, the beligerent, pouty singer of the Nasty Bits, Kip Stevens (James Jagger, son of executive producer and co-creator Mick) puts on a copy of Big Star’s Number One Record and plays “Thirteen.”
An understandably impressed Jamie Vine (Juno Temple) marvels that Big Star only sold five albums, all of which were to music critics. Those music critics went on to form seminal punk and alternative rock bands that are now enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Big Star is like New York Dolls in that they are legendary for their incredible unpopularity. They were obscure when they released feeble-selling albums, but they became so important and influential that a show like Vinyl can’t keep away from them.
Belt-tightening measures continue at American Century. Ambitious A&R man Clark Morelle (Jack Quaid) is fired by Julian "Julie" Silver (Max Casella, Doogie’s sidekick from Doogie Howser, M.D). He’s devastated.
“I went to Harvard” he says softly, which leads Julie to tell him, “If I were you, I’d take that Whiffenpoof shit off your resume.”
The Whiffenpoofs are Yale’s a cappella group, but it’s still a funny line. The Whiffenpoofs would perform a cappella versions of popular songs, then they’d be given wedgies and have their heads stuck inside toilets by their audience.
Clark holds onto employment, but at a steep cost to his diginity and self-esteem, when he’s demoted to gofer, a glorified intern.
Richie wants to sign Hannibal, a Sly Stone/George Clinton-style flamboyant, futuristic funk superstar. He goes on a double date with his wife Devon (Olivia Wilde) and Hannibal’s foxy ex, only to become quietly enraged when Hannibal begins slow-dancing with Devon in an unmistakably sexual way that creates the impression that they would very much like to have sex, possibly while Richie and Hannibal’s make out as well.
Richie may be a hedonist addicted to sex as well as cocaine and taking risks, but he’s also a straight, macho white man mortified by his wife’s clear-cut sexual desire for a man who is very different from him. Richie comes onto his wife, only to become apoplectic when he sees how aroused she is.
It’s a scene that explores toxic masculinity, jealousy, and racism in a manner befitting a post-Sopranos look at the white fragility of men in power who live in fear of losing that power, of having it stripped away by a changing world.
Richie is interested in the lead singer of The Nasty Bits but has no interest in the rest of the band. Kip is the star, on account of he looks exactly like Mick Jagger’s son because he is Mick Jagger’s son, but his bandmates are dismissed as mediocre musicians with negligible stage presences and zero in the way of charisma.
This is more or less exactly like a previous subplot where Clark tried to sign Alice Cooper as a solo after trying unsuccessfully to separate him, personally, professionally, and financially, from his band.
Kip is reluctant at first. He’s a tedious rock and roll rebel who responds angrily to something as mundane as being asked to contribute to a bio to send to magazines and radio stations. “I’m Kip Stevens. Fuck your mom. There’s your bio,” he sneers in disgust.
I don’t want to be critical, but that’s not a good bio. A good bio would give relevant information about the band’s background and influences, and discuss the album's contents and its making. A bio that says someone’s name and then,“Fuck your mom” probably wouldn’t be well-received and, honestly, seems unprofessional.
Richie fails to sign Hannibal, who does not seem overly impressed by his explosion of sexual jealousy. Even more disastrously, Hannibal signs with rival Jervis (Ken Marino) instead.
Our anti-hero consoles himself by experiencing even more music nobody knew about in 1973, but would become seen as impossibly essential and influential: The Velvet Underground.
Instead of playing a Velvet Underground song like "White Light White Heat,” Lou Reed instead performs “The Original Wrapper”, a poorly received 1986 novelty hip hop song.
As in Sinners, the music is so powerful that it temporarily bridges the past and future to the present.
In an even bolder move, Reed plays The Raven, his Edgar Allen Poe-themed concept album, and Lulu, his little-loved 2011 collaboration with Metallica, in their entirety.
Richie’s mind is blown by music from the future crashing into the present, but his expression tells you that he’s disappointed in both of these projects and considers them muddled and misconceived.
Just kidding! This does end with Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground playing “White Light White Heat,” but it stops there.
Unlike Sinners or a memorable Phish shows, this is not transcendent art. But it is forty minutes of entertaining television from a show that finds its groove by abandoning the off-putting excess of attitude and self-regard that characterized its first and second episodes.
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here.