The Daily Swarm

The New Yorker’s TV critic Nancy Franklin does a good job critiquing Elvis Costello’s new music talk show “Spectacle” on the Sundance chanel which this season includes Elton John (who is also the show’s exectuvie producer), Rufus Wainwright, Rosanne Cash, Herbie Hancock, Tony Bennett and an “amateur musician, a saxophonist from Arkansas, the Artist Formerly Known as President of the United States, whose session with Costello airs this week.”

Franklin also manages to get in a swipe at iTunes Digital Rights Management encoded music and advises readers to download music they may hear on the show from Amazon rather than iTunes. “Why Amazon first, and not iTunes?” she asks. “Because all the digital music that Amazon sells is unlocked, meaning that it can be shared limitlessly with friends. Music wants to be paid for, but, after that, it wants to be free.” Except on the same web page is an ad for New Yorker podcasts and assorted content available on…iTunes.

While Franklin lauds the show’s format and Costello’s extensive music knowledge, she is critical of “Spectacle”‘s homogeneous audience: “What I’m not crazy about is the audiences that are gathered for the show; in the first seven episodes put together, I noticed only two black faces and no young proto-rockers, just a monotonous sea of well-groomed upper-middle-class white people, smiling bland Stepford smiles, their faces warmly, lovingly lit, almost like the figures in a de La Tour painting. I longed to see a pierced eyebrow or a wrinkled shirt or a scowl—something like the one Costello wore thirty years ago. ”

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