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Robbin Season

In “Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” Adorno and Horkheimer describe the culture industry as suffering from sameness. The culture industry is made up forms of media like newspapers, tv, radio, music, and movies. Adorno and Horkheimer said that the culture industry is less art and more capitalism. The culture industry does not seen to produce artful content but rather to produce entertainment that will sell. Often the content has been recycled and is not original in concept at all. 

Season 2 of “Atlanta”, created by and starring Donald Glover, was titled Robbin Season. The opening scene of episode one depicts the robbery of restaurant. The robbery ends up not having anything to do with the linear plot, the violence happened and then it was gone. After some discussion with a friend we wondered what the name of the season could mean. There were quite a few robberies throughout the season, but then my friend offered a different perspective. He said he thought Glover meant that he intended to rob the audience of their expectations.

TV shows have become quite mundane as they have become formulaic. Network TV has so many procedural cop and medical dramas. Grey’s Anatomy, General Hospital, ER, NCIS, Law and Order, NYPD Blue. Seen one and you've seen them all. We have multiple imaginations of the White House running on different networks at the same time. How many versions of the same concept do we need? Apparently a lot because there is a demand for it, and the culture industry answers the call.  

“Atlanta” is different, “Atlanta” is unique. Atlanta is so out of the box, and its story telling isn’t always linear. Episodes will center around characters we have never seen before, and likely will never see again without any explanation. Before I got used to the unorthodox story telling, episodes would leave me feeling like I missed the episode that came before it. Atlanta checks off so many boxes I don’t even know how to categorize it. It’s too funny to be a drama, it handles too many serious issues to be a comedy, and it can also be terrifying. It’s not horror though either. What it is, is real. It allows for all of the different themes present in life to exist under the premise of one TV show. The first episode began with a robbery and ended with a standoff between the police and Katt Williams who is threatening to release an Alligator he has locked up in his house. Sometimes I get lost from point A to point B when watching “Atlanta” and I find it refreshing. Donald Glover is definitely not producing ‘sameness’. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUTngLNB020

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Sportin Waves

Al’s character on ‘Atlanta’ has often struggled with his rising fame. He wants to be the same old person who does the same old things even as his music grows more popular. He feels so strongly about this that he still sells weed as a side hustle. Al’s supplier robs him at the beginning of the episode, ‘Sportin Waves’, and this leaves Al with no choice but to look for a new plug. He is chasing ‘authenticity’ as he dives deeper into the inauthentic music industry. Looking back, this episode got me to think about the panel discussion about authenticity in music, especially non black people’s role in ‘black music’. 

On the street, Al is still on the hunt for a new weed supplier. He strikes out on his first attempt but seems to have found a reliable plug who happens to be white. It takes Al a second to relax, but the guy assures him that he’s cool and Al believes him. While they are wrapping up, the new supplier tells him that his girlfriend is a huge fan of Al’s and that she is also a musician. As Al makes his exit, the supplier promises to send him some of her music. Once in the car, the supplier texts Al a link to his girlfriends Youtube page where she has uploaded an acoustic version of Al’s hit song. The supplier then puts Al in a group chat with his girlfriend where they begin to message back and forth. Disgusted, Al tosses his phone out of the window and drives away. I think Glover is poking fun at how black music can be appropriated and watered down. Al’s street anthem lyrics sound foreign and ridiculous coming from a young white woman, but I think that was Glover’s point.

Al and Earn also take a meeting at a record label, and the setting is in stark contrast to the side of Atlanta we usually see. The office is very bright and very white, in more ways than one. The panelists discussed the idea of white people making black music being a thorn in the side of the black community. I had concluded that if anything was upsetting us it was probably resentment at the fact that white artists were profitting off of something we feel didn’t belong to them. This got me thinking about the non black people that are involved in other ways. The record execs, the producers, the marketing team. They are profiting too, in fact they are profiting the most. 

The entire experience in the office leaves Al, Earn, and the audience uncomfortable. Al sits stale face through corny jokes and feedback from the majority white office. It is clear that he is uncomfortable in the office and with the idea that this is the group of people who are pushing his music. In the office they run into another local rapper, Clark County, who seems to fit right in. White employees that shared awkward exchanges and silences with Al have inside jokes with Clark County. He is obviously very comfortable with the goings on of the administrative level of the music business. He takes the advice and feedback of the label and it has resulted in his commercial success. I think Glover is commenting on how Hip Hop which is a ‘black music form’, does not actually belong to black people. It is cultivated, manipulated, formulated, packaged, and distributed by white people for mainly white audiences. Theres a scene where Clark County is standing on a table performing for the employees. To me it looks like Glover is pointing out that the label created him for themselves, and Clark County is just a puppet dancing on a table for a white audience. 

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Woods

“Visual perspectives explain the unique ways in which visuals communicate messages non discursively”. (Sellnow 235) Images and ideas can come to symbolize larger, real life issues. Pictures that represent ideas are defined by Sellnow as ‘ideograms’. This is what I have come to understand about the show Atlanta. It always conveys deeper messages through images that represent ideas. 

In an episode called “Woods”, Earn’s cousin Al is feeling a little down on the anniversary of his mother’s passing. He has what seems to be a dream about his mom cleaning his house and telling him to get up off the couch as if she is still alive. He spends the afternoon spending time with a girl he’s been seeing named Sierra. Sierra is Instagram famous and uses her status as a social media influencer to sell products. Sierra picks up Al and all seems to be going well, Al looks to be enjoying himself. At a nail salon, Sierra tries to snap a selfie with Al. He objects but Sierra insists it would be good for both of them. Al is an up and coming rapper and Sierra is suggesting that a public relationship between them could help boost their careers. Al is offended at the idea, because he sees himself as being real and as some who always keeps it real. He leaves Sierra at the salon and begins to make his way home on foot. He runs into some teenage fans on the side of the road and he stops to chat them up. After realizing Al was alone, the teenagers attack Al in an attempt to mug him for his jewelry. Al puts up a good fight but is forced to flee into the woods when one of the kids pulls a gun. Al runs into the woods just as the day is turning into dusk. An aerial shot of the woods keeps panning out until the vastness of it is overwhelming, and the show cuts to commercial. 

There are two things the woods symbolize to me in relation to the themes of the episode. The woods are a common setting of fairytales which are fake, the opposite of Al who “keeps it real”.  I think Al is uncomfortable with some of the insincere aspects of fame, and going through the woods is a metaphor for getting through this issue.

The woods also symbolically communicate to me that they represent Al’s stormy and troubled mental state. Sierra irritated him but he also seemed to be really depressed and missing his mom. The woods are dark, terrifying and Al gets lost. Al runs into a creepy old man who seems to be following him. Al tries his best to run from him but he realizes he has been going in circles and sits down in defeat. The man catches up to Al and pulls a blade on him. Yelling at him about how his options were quit on trying to get out of the woods or die. I think the man represented either his mom, his father that he never knew, or maybe even his own self. The old man was metaphorically telling Al that he had to work to get out of his depression or his depression would kill him. 

“Getting through the woods” can also represent completing an arduous task or journey. In this case Al’s task is beating depression stemming from the death of his mom and whatever it is about fame that’s leaving him feeling less than content. The journey was mental but shown to the audience as a physical journey through the woods. When Al finally makes it out of the woods he’s suddenly at a brightly lit gas station. He arrives so abruptly I wonder how it was possible he got to to be so deep in the woods that he couldn’t find his way out. It seemed like that gas station had always been there and Al just had to allow himself to get there. Al walks into the gas station where he runs into another young fan who requests a picture. Al poses for the picture still bruised and bloody from the robbery and his night in the woods. I took the blood to mean that some of Al’s struggles were still with him and he hasn’t had time to wash them away yet, but he wasn’t in as bad of shape as he was when he was lost in the woods. He was well enough to engage with a fan even though it was his last encounter with a fan that drove him into the woods in the first place. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djuaEzf7XKA

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Champagne Papi

In another episode of “Atlanta” Donald Glover touches on what Sellnow would call ‘Parasocial Relationships’. “Parasocial Relationship Theory” describes one-sided relationships where one party knows a great deal about the other party, but not vice versa.” (Sellnow, 276) Social media maybe the greatest purveyor of parasocial relationships of all the different forms of media we have had access to. Social media has established pretty close bonds of intimacy between fans and famous people. They share pieces of their actual life and it makes us feel like we are somehow apart of it. They go on Instagram Live and share real time videos which adds the the realism because it isn’t scripted, and to the privacy effect because we get to experience a bit of their life in our own private moments and places. They give up a little privacy by sharing and it establishes intimacy. 

In a previous episode Glover’s character Earn broke up with his girlfriend and mother of his daughter, Van. In this episode, titled ‘Champagne Papi’, Van spent an evening away from her young daughter with some girlfriends. Her friend scored them an invitation to Drake’s New Year’s Eve party hosted at his mansion. Van had been scrolling through Instagram all night looking at girls posting pictures with Drake at the party while her friends drank, smoked and got ready. She sees a video of Earn in her feed with another girl and she decides to make it her mission to get a picture with Drake because as she put it, her Instagram was “weak as fuck”. She doesn’t know Drake or the girls that are posing with him. They don’t know her either but that doesn’t stop Van from letting it affect her attitudes. She’s jealous that they are around him, and more accurately she's jealous that they are displaying a relationship with him. She is only getting a one sided view. She doesn’t know the relationship these girls have with Drake. Even still, as a fan she feels entitled to an opportunity to hang out with him and post pictures too. 

After clearing security at the entrance to Drake’s mansion, Van and her friends take an edible before splitting up. One went off to enjoy the party, Van took care of the friend that the edible hit the hardest, and another had made it her mission to get close to a young black actor whose girlfriend she disapproved of. She doesn’t know this man from anywhere but again through a false bond of intimacy feels its appropriate to comment on his relationship as if she knows him. The encounter is awkward, embarrassing, and its unclear if it even left her fulfilled. 

Van loses her high friend and spends the rest of the night looking for Drake, getting lost in his mansion in the process. She ends up on the second floor in what seems to be Drake’s living quarters. She walks through his bathroom, plays with the clothes in his closet, and then stumbles upon an old Mexican man who informs her that one, he is Drake’s grandfather, and two, that Drake is on tour. Van is so disappointed that she went through all the fuss and Drake wasn’t even there. She makes her way downstairs where she finds two women charging money for photos with cardboard cutouts of Drake. Again Van is disappointed and one of the girls in charge of the operations laughs and asks, “What, did you think you were going to have a meaningful conversation with Drake”? Van is so disappointed she’s not even sure what she wanted or expected, but I think she did expect to get close to him in the way Instagram has made her feel close to him. The way Instagram made her feel those girls posing with him were close to him. Her friends even referred to him as “Aubrey’, his real name. Again that’s that false bond of intimacy created by Instagram and his music.

My favorite scene in the whole episode features Van’s friend that got super high off the edible. She had gotten lost on her own and stumbled into Darius, one of the series regulars. The girl had been deliriously high the whole episode so it is quite possible that she is imagining him... after all, why would he be at Drake’s house? She asks Darius, “Is this real”? He responds, “No. No it is not”. He continues by explaining to her Bostrom’s Simulation Theory which states that we are living in a simulation that is indistinguishable to us from reality. The camera pans out to reveal that a girl in a bikini has been swaying by herself in the jacuzzi behind them. Van’s friend again wonders, “Is she real”? Darius responds, “Real fake”. I think Donald Glover is commenting on how parasocial relationships are essentially the illusion of an actual relationship, but it’s all fake. The girl swaying in the jacuzzi looks like a music video, another form of media that allows us to falsely interpret Drake’s surreal reality. The cardboard cutouts represent the very hollow version of Drake that we know. And the relationship we have with him is as fake as the pictures of the girls posing with a cardboard cut out. 

The title of the episode is called “Champagne Papi which is Drake’s Instagram name. Glover is cleverly uses his Instagram persona as the title to illustrate that its a persona that we have the relationship with. But the relationship does exist on some level however one-sided that it is. It exists just enough that Glover was able to take the bits he does know about Drake and them imagine the rest. Like imagining that he would have portraits of himself with an owl perched on his arm hanging on his walls, that he would have a Mexican grandfather, or that he would have an elevator music version of one of his songs playing in his bathroom!

 Super fun episode. Click the link to watch the Bostrom’s Simulation Theory scene!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiVhw5KJnsA