When it comes to box sets, Elvis Costello’s 49th-anniversary edition of his debut album “My Aim Is True” is a dream compilation for completists. The original 12-song LP clocked in at a swift 33 minutes, while the special edition features a whopping 104 tracks, along with Costello’s 72-page essay about the album’s origins. It’s a veritable feast for the ears, and “My Aim Is True” is a worthy subject for all of the attendant attention.
Released by Stiff Records in 1977, Costello’s debut took full advantage of the burgeoning punk movement. To commemorate the anniversary, such as it is, “My Aim Is True” features a fully remastered edition of the album. Stateside listeners will be delighted to learn that the edition concludes with “Watching the Detectives,” the searing track that was appended to the American release. The balance of the LP was recorded at North London’s Pathway studio with Clover, a California-based country rock band, and produced by Nick Lowe, Costello’s fellow Stiff Records colleague.
As presented here, “My Aim Is True” is every bit as explosive and exciting as the original release, an album that featured a clever blend of punk, rockabilly, pop and new wave sounds. With standout tracks like “Welcome to the Working Week,” “Less Than Zero,” and “Waiting for the End of the World,” it could hardly fail. Meanwhile, “Alison,” “(The Angels Wanna Wear) My Red Shoes,” and “Watching the Detectives” were early classics among the Costello canon.
What makes the 49th-anniversary box set particularly special is the inclusion of the extra discs. When “My Aim Is True” originally saw its release, Costello was at a crossroads. Working by day as a data entry clerk, he was contemplating different futures for his artistic self, as evinced by disc two, for example, which is entitled “The Blue Print” and is comprised of 17 acoustic demos for future tracks on such LPs as “Armed Forces,” “Get Happy!!” and “Trust.”
Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last. Sign up here
A third disc, “The Stranger in the House,” finds Costello imagining another potential career for himself as a professional songwriter. Like “The Blue Print,” “The Stranger in the House” is made up of demos and outtakes he created for his fantasy life as a working songwriter — possibly even in faraway Nashville. Meanwhile, a fourth disc, the best of the lot for fans of his longtime backing band, is entitled “Becoming the Attractions” and finds Costello, keyboard player Steve Nieve, drummer Pete Thomas and bass player Bruce Thomas transforming “My Aim Is True” for mass consumption.
A fifth disc, “Covered in Clover,” takes the story of “My Aim Is True” full circle with Costello’s 2007 live performance of the LP with Clover. A benefit performance for victims of Prader-Willi Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, Costello’s reunion with Clover demonstrates one of the singer-songwriter’s greatest strengths: the elasticity of his music and his uncanny ability to remake himself across the decades. Indeed, it is the variety and profundity of his music since 1977 that continues to make him one of his genre’s most intriguing artists.
Watching Shane Gillis tickle himself to the point of being red in the face during his third “Saturday Night Live” hosting gig this past weekend, I’d wager that no one thinks Shane Gillis is funnier than Shane Gillis. But while that’s a pretty safe bet, his confidence in his own comedic stylings can’t get full credit for landing him where he’s at: appearances on a show he was fired from, Bud Light commercials where, as he points out, he “looked like a lesbian,” and a TV show about tires that 59% of critics hate and 91% of people who probably also think it’s funny to hear women called whores love.
No, we can thank everyone who, during the course of his 38 years on this earth, politely laughed at one of Gillis’ “Cornell 7‘s Big Book of Punchlines” zingers. And additional thanks to Lorne Michaels, who knows a ratings/headlines cow when he sees one, even if he doesn’t want to house him in his own barn at the end of the night.
Just as journalists worth their paychecks are taught to shy away from punching up headlines with puns or expletives because it’s lazy work, plenty of successful comedians refrain from desperately grasping for an easy laugh by calling women whores or punching down at their “big fat bit*h sisters,” as Gillis did in his monologue on Saturday night. Leanne Morgan has, to my knowledge, never joked about going to the gym and the men there being sluts for wearing sweatpants that show off their D and B’s, and she probably actually goes to the gym. Oh wait, Gillis did say in his monologue that he feels most comfortable working out in “his friend Joe Rogan‘s private gym.” Right. Riiiiiiiight.
It’s not the controversy alone that’s of value to a show like “SNL”; it’s giving a platform to someone who’s more than willing to stand there, in front of a live audience, and verbalize the ugly things that people are afraid to say out loud . . . for now. But if they see enough people doing it, they may just be bold enough to do the same.
Point being, happy, successful, confident, well-loved comedians are creative and secure enough to reach out and up for their material, not straight into their own asses. There’s a difference between being a “controversial” comic and appealing to the lowest common denominator. Dave Chappelle is equally awful, content-wise, but at least he’s good at being the absolute worst, if that can be a thing for the sake of this argument. Worth noting here that, even though he’s been in the game far longer than Gillis, Chappelle’s hosting number is only one larger than his . . . wonder why that is?
Gillis has made a career out of appealing to people chomping at the bit for their chance to storm the Capitol, and apparently there’s a home for that now on “SNL,” a show that’s lasted 51 years and counting by offering up a little something for everyone and carving out space for anyone — except for women, and people of color, and, more and more, viewers who haven’t been able to wear a red ball cap since 2017. Who’s laughing now? Not anyone I’d want to be next to on the treadmill.
Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last. Sign up here
It’s not the controversy alone that’s of value to a show like “SNL”; it’s giving a platform to someone who’s more than willing to stand there, in front of a live audience, and verbalize the ugly things that people are afraid to say out loud . . . for now. But if they see enough people doing it, they may just be bold enough to do the same. And so it goes, and here we are. Audiences just want to look in a mirror, even if they themselves internally despise what they see in that mirror.
Gillis got enough polite, awkward laughs on his misogynistic sad clown shtick thus far from friends, relatives and dates just waiting for him to shut up so they can order appetizers that now he not only has a whole career to showcase that shtick, but a built-in audience of like-minded fans who also were told by one too many people that they have “a great sense of humor.” We’re all paying the nauseating price now, and anyone who paved the way is complicit.
But “SNL” is a liberal show, you may be thinking. I mean . . . sure? But it’s also a show with a sound bite archive spanning decades which includes such hits as “Jane, you ignorant slut,” from a late-’70s “Weekend Update” sketch starring Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin. I’ll save you the Google. There’s more.
Gillis got enough polite, awkward laughs on his misogynistic sad clown shtick thus far from friends, relatives and dates just waiting for him to shut up so they can order appetizers that now he not only has a whole career to showcase that shtick, but a built-in audience of like-minded fans who also were told by one too many people that they have “a great sense of humor.”
In the wake of Gillis’ most recent hosting gig, it’s been refreshing to see men in the entertainment industry call him out. Michael Che, who started at “SNL” as a writer in 2013 and transitioned to an on-screen role as a “Weekend Update” co-anchor the following year, weighed in on Gillis’ monologue via a series of Instagram stories, writing, “Gotta do more press this week to promote the special . . . wonder what every f—ing questions gonna be about . . . thanks a lot, Shane.” “Schitt’s Creek” star Dan Levy, son of “SCTV” alum Eugene Levy, also took to Instagram with a more direct and thoughtful approach, saying, “Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.”
But the most effective statement would be from Lorne Michaels, which he could make by honoring his first instinct to place Gillis in the persona non grata pile after clips from his podcast, “Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast,” showed him using racist and homophobic slurs, causing Gillis to be canned from the cast of “SNL” just days after his hiring was announced.
I personally regret every time I put wind in the sails of a deeply unfunny and offensive man by politely laughing, feeling too awkward to course-correct the moment. Most women have these moments. I had one during my first job, when I was 15, and I laughed at the security guard twice my age who joked about his pants feeling tight after I mentioned that I had a girlfriend. I had one when I was driving with an old friend and didn’t give more than a “you gotta be careful with stuff like that” warning when he launched into a rant about how the women assaulted by Harvey Weinstein “shouldn’t have been surprised” he acted the way he did. It’s hard to stand up in moments like these, but look what happens when we don’t. Shane Gillis is a cystic pimple. All the rest of it is the pus.
Lorne Michaels will likely invite Gillis back. The fact that I and countless other writers are typing out similar commentaries all but ensures it. But what he should be asking himself is whether the audience he’s going after with jokes like the ones Gillis made this past weekend is an audience he’d feel comfortable sitting in. That should matter. And more people should say something if it seems like it doesn’t.
Just like comedy fans replay their favorite routines every so often, I often find myself returning to a few journalistic pieces written about comedy to help me order my thoughts. One is Lindy West’s 2013 Jezebel piece she wrote in the wake of debating Jim Norton concerning comedy’s role in perpetuating rape culture on the canceled FX series “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell.”
The aftershock is probably more memorable than the piece. The barrage of hatred that bombarded West moved her to record a YouTube video wherein she reads the litany of threats prompted by her daring to suggest that comedians be more thoughtful in their stand-up routines.
The essay she wrote about that experience plainly summarizes her reasonable stance. “I believe that the way we speak about things and the type of media we consume profoundly influences how we think about the world,” she wrote.
Emily Nussbaum’s 2017 New Yorker essay “How Jokes Won the Election,” a second repeat reader, is a kind of response to that call, taking a hard look at the far-right’s weaponizing of humor and cloaking threats in punchlines. This tactic helped Donald Trump, a most ridiculous candidate, sail to the White House.
“How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?” Nussbaum asked, a question we should be mulling each time Netflix triumphantly announces a new stand-up special from celebrities who can’t get enough of reducing queerness into a punchline.
One year before West debated Norton on TV, Joe Rogan’s NBC gig “Fear Factor” aired its last episode. He talks about his departure in his Netflix stand-up “Burn the Boats,” in which he revealed that the line he refused to cross was to challenge contestants to drink donkey semen.
“When I’m the voice of reason,” Rogan said, “you’ve got a really f***ed-up program.” You could reasonably apply that same note to Netflix, which recently debuted Rogan’s hour-plus special as a live comedy event.
Netflix is determined to maintain its claim as the top destination for stand-up specials, which it does by flooding the stream with choices. The Hollywood Reporter cites a source that counted the total number of comedy specials released in 2023 at more than 150, with most of those appearing on Netflix.
Amazon’s Prime Video is also a player, countering Netflix’s “anything goes” approach with a select stream of comics known for working clean like Nate Bargatze and Jim Gaffigan. Hulu is also beefing up its stand-up presence with 12 specials per year while one-time king HBO is going niche, matching Amazon’s eight-special ballpark.
This feels like light years from the era when a Comedy Central special was every ambitious comic’s goal – that, or getting a sitcom deal. Then HBO became the comic’s dream gig and, to a lesser extent, Showtime.
Now Netflix is the comedian’s golden ticket. Get a stand-up special there or a deal for multiple gigs, and the possibilities are endless. On the lower end, lesser-known comics can fill clubs or maybe larger theaters.
Mid-to-top range comics can fill arenas once they’re in with the service’s top executive Ted Sarandos. Taylor Tomlinson was a relative unknown when she signed on to do a few specials. Now she has a weeknight broadcast network gig, “After Midnight,” following “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
Live events, however, are reserved for the top-level killers. Chris Rock’s followed nearly a year of silence about getting slapped at the Oscars, which also happened live. Katt Williams’ live special “Woke Foke” came after his post-New Year’s tea-spilling on Club Shay Shay.
Other live specials, including “The Roast of Tom Brady” and John Mulaney’s six-episode variety talk show “John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A.” were exercises in brand establishment as much as entertainment events, although Mulaney’s was undeniably more of a creative high-wire act.
Rogan’s stand-up special, his first in six years, is a mutual exhibit of power and influence. He’s one of a very few entertainers whose presidential endorsement makes headlines. (He’s backing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as you may have guessed.)
He doesn’t need Netflix, but surely Netflix is happy to have him.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the new multiyear contract Spotify signed with Rogan in February to continue hosting his podcast could be worth as much as $250 million and is no longer exclusive to the streamer.
He’s also opened Comedy Mothership in Austin, drawing performers from around the country to the Texas city in a quest to create another stand-up epicenter driven by successful podcasters as opposed to New York’s and Los Angeles’ comedy club pipeline.
And Rogan, who caused a furor in 2022 for spreading misinformation during the pandemic, is accepted as an inevitability of modern popular culture. A recent Bloomberg profile softened his reputation to just short of baby skin texture by describing his podcast as “[mixing] marathon interviews of prominent guests with a hefty dose of often conventional and sometimes iffy lifestyle advice — including diet tips, exercise routines and vitamin supplements.”
Some have moved their lives to Austin to be close to Rogan’s Mothership, including the likes of Tom Segura and Shane Gillis. Exerting his pull in the comedy world, which boasts a booming live performance market, only makes him more powerful. Pollstar says the Top 30 comedy tours grossed nearly $514 million in 2023.
Joe Rogan doesn’t need Netflix, but surely Netflix is happy to have him.
But what he and the other comics he boosts have in common, besides Netflix deals, is their penchant for anti-trans material and platforming far-right bigots in the name of “asking questions” and pursuing the “truth.” They also sell out arenas, cultivating their audiences online and forwarding some truly odious ideas in the name of yuks and supposed pondering.
Segura welcomed accused sex trafficker and vocal misogynist Andrew Tate as a guest on “Your Mom’s House,” which he co-hosts with his wife Christina Pazsitzky. Gillis and Matt McCusker’s “Secret Podcast” is where listeners can hear more of the racist material that got Gillis fired from his “Saturday Night Live” gig before it began.
Rogan has hosted all these comics along with all types of conspiracy theorists, “free-thinkers” like Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson, and worst of all, repeat Rogan guest Alex Jones.
Rogan goes on at length about Jones in “Burn the Boats,” calling him “right about a lot of things . . . he was wrong about that one thing, though. But he’s right — the wrong thing was a big one! But he’s right — that one thing was huge. But he’s often correct!”
That is quite a stance to take about a man who not only concocted a massive lie about the Sandy Hook massacre, that one thing he was wrong about, but recently opined that Trump should embrace Project 2025 instead of distancing himself from it. And not for the jokes.
Let’s not forget another significant event Jones made possible: he spearheaded the organization efforts that became the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021. You know, the direct attack on democracy sane people refer to as an insurrection.
This is part of Rogan’s Netflix special, in which he also jokes, “We lost a lot of good people during the pandemic. Many of them are still alive.”
Ha! Kidding! Not about his admiration for Alex Jones, though.
The prevailing model in any business, showbiz included, is that success breeds success. A week after Rogan’s special premiered it’s still in the service’s Top 10 most popular titles, sitting at No. 4 as of Friday.
Netflix’s average output of one special per week along with its other debuts means Rogan will eventually be washed down the stream along with the other comics. But his Netflix berth places him in front of many more people, including those who don’t follow his podcast.
Contemplating what all of this means returned me to West’s thoughts from 11 years ago because they apply here. “I do believe that comedy’s current permissiveness around cavalier, cruel, victim-targeting rape jokes contributes to (that’s contributes — not causes) a culture of young men who don’t understand what it means to take this stuff seriously,” she wrote.
Indeed. Comedians who may have made light of sexual assault a decade ago have since moved on to joke about others more easily vilified than half the human population. Mainly transgender people.
Rogan is right there with them. And Netflix’s willingness to further elevate a performer whose entire schtick is slapping a smile on disinformation and normalizing trans panic should worry more of us, even if they’ve done it several times before.
A predictable rebuttal is that people don’t have to watch if they don’t want to, which is true. A lot of people watch Netflix, though; the service accounted for 8.4% of TV usage for June, according to Nielsen, a month during which 40.3% of time spent watching TV in June was attributable to streaming.
You can turn on Netflix and watch Hannah Gadsby or other progressive comedians who took a stand against the service’s promotion of Dave Chappelle’s anti-trans material. Besides, there’s a market for this stuff, as Spotify proved by standing by Rogan in 2022. The service lost subscribers and artists over Rogan’s conspiracy-mongering related to COVID and vaccines, but even Neil Young’s back now. If you can’t beat ‘em, et cetera, et cetera.
“[A] joke can be another kind of Big Lie, shrunk to look like a toy,” Nussbaum wrote. “It’s the thrill of hyperbole, of treating the extreme as normal, the shock (and the joy) of seeing the normal get violated, fast.” Flood the stream with so many jokes like that and from a whole lot of mainstreamed mouthpieces to the point of making fringe nonsense into just another normal bit, and like Rogan said, you’ve got yourself a really f***ed-up program.
The Ukraine war’s spillover into the Black Sea is creating a growing European security and commercial risk: Drones are hitting ships and killing sailors, grain routes are under strain, and insurers and investors are weighing the cost of operating through Ukraine’s ports.
Five commercial vessels have been hit in Bulgarian and Romanian waters over the past week alone, leaving at least four people dead, several sailors missing and others injured. In response, Black Sea countries Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey have raised the issue at NATO, asking for more focus toward the region and joint support, according to two alliance diplomats.
“The attack within Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone is absolutely unacceptable. It constitutes a serious breach of maritime and international law and will further jeopardise safe navigation in the Black Sea,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev said on X after the attacks last week.
Russia has been attacking Ukrainian ports and cities in the area since the start of its full-scale invasion. But the recent strikes have brought the spillover into NATO territory. If they continue, EU leaders will face pressure to protect Black Sea shipping and keep Ukrainian trade moving.
Those questions will be top of mind at Thursday’s European Council summit. According to draft conclusions obtained by POLITICO, leaders are expected to discuss the “immediate restoration of safe passage for grain cargo ships.”
A wider problem
Russia is not the only country using naval drones in the Black Sea. Ukraine has also used them against Russian-linked shipping. In June, a Ukrainian sea drone exploded in Romania’s Constanța port after Kyiv said it had veered off course because of Russian electronic interference.
“The Black Sea situation is quite dangerous because attacks are coming from both [sides],” said an EU shipping representative, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “You have to worry about both.”
Attribution can also be difficult. Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev said Wednesday that investigators still have not proven that Russia is behind the strikes — although some have attributed his reticence to his broadly softer approach toward the Kremlin.
Drone operations by both Russia and Ukraine are likely to continue as long as each has the money and production capacity to sustain them, said Cristian Vlas, assistant research manager for Eastern Europe at the think tank ACLED.
Oleksii Goncharenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker and founder of the Black Sea Security Forum, told POLITICO that a “serious diplomatic initiative” was needed, bringing together Ukraine, Russia and a third-party guarantor, such as Turkey, “to restore freedom of navigation in the Black Sea.”
Grain routes under pressure
The security risk is disrupting routes that carry Ukraine’s harvest to market, with consequences for EU transport links. Black Sea ports are Ukraine’s main export gateway, handling around 95 percent of the country’s grain exports, as well as significant volumes of iron ore. Shipping traffic has fallen as the security risk has grown.
Some cargo is being rerouted to the River Danube, but capacity there has been stretched in recent months as drought pushes water levels to record lows. Operators are trying to add rail capacity, but that risks moving the bottleneck westward to Romania.
Moving more Ukrainian grain overland also risks reviving tensions with farmers in neighboring EU countries, Vlas said. Romanian farmers have worried that Ukrainian produce meant only to transit could stay on the domestic market, he added, while transport operators are already juggling competing demands for capacity.
Ukraine’s Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi has warned that millions of tons of unsold grain is piling up, and that farmers who can’t sell won’t be able to afford to resow all their land.
Bulgaria is working with Romania and Turkey on a joint initiative to protect freedom of navigation in the Black Sea, which Radev plans to bring to EU leaders on Thursday.
Following the Black Sea countries’ request at NATO, military officials are likely to look into possible options such as shifting counter-drone systems to the region, the two alliance diplomats said. Radev said Sofia will convene his counterparts in Ankara and Bucharest to examine further proposals, while a senior Bulgarian official called for new joint anti-drone systems with Romania, partly financed by the EU.
Investment at risk
The attacks also threaten what had started to look like a renewed bet on Ukraine’s ports. MSC, the world’s largest container line, was among the biggest and newest investors, reportedly acquiring a majority stake in a container terminal at a port near Odesa in May.
Ukraine has also been offering investors a long-term concession at the Chornomorsk terminal near Odesa. This terminal is one of Ukraine’s largest planned port public-private partnerships and part of what is expected to be a multibillion-euro reconstruction effort involving European companies.
But people who work in Ukraine’s ports say the case for rebuilding is collapsing.
“No one is ready to invest and rebuild, since you know that tomorrow there will be another missile, another pack of drones,” Oleg Grygoriuk, chairman of Ukraine’s Marine Transport Workers’ Trade Union, said.
Login
