Southpaw #11: The Adults Are Talking
What a music video can tell us about sports and the state of the Left
Dear readers,
Happy December (sort of). As we wrote earlier this week, we’re hoping to grow Southpaw, and we need your help. We love writing this newsletter, and we’d do it for free, but we’d like to be able to pay for freelance content, expand our coverage into new areas, and extend our digital footprint. All these things cost money, so if you’re able and willing, please consider donating here. We are so grateful for your support, and we’re excited for you to see what we have in store.
-Calder and Ian
The adults are talking. Should we listen?
In the new music video for “The Adults are Talking,” the Strokes face off against some robots in a futuristic baseball game, and they’re taking a real shellacking. None of the band members can catch up to the robo-pitcher’s fastball at the plate, and on the mound, frontman Julian Casablancas is serving up meatballs that the robots are smacking around the diamond. It doesn’t help that the Strokes appear to be fielding a team of only five players.
Interspersed throughout the Strokes’ trouble on the diamond are shots of other humans getting their asses kicked by robots, one in a tennis match and another in a boxing bout. At one point, a robot prepares a beautiful piece of sushi. The Strokes are not known for their subtlety, and the political message of the video’s set-up is clear: automation is here, our robot overlords are beating us handily, and overall, things are bad indeed.
Just as everything appears hopeless, though, a rain delay stops play in the Strokes vs. Robots match-up. After the teams get back on the field, the tide starts to turn for the five-piece band from New York. The robo-pitcher hits Casablancas with a pitch, and bassist Nikolai Fraiture cracks a pitch into the left-field corner. Casablancas, already on the move for a hit-and-run, scores from first. All of his jewelry manages to stay on, and his nicely-painted nails remain unchipped as he slides safely into home. In the ninth inning, the Strokes are finally on the board. The camera pans up to the scoreboard—Strokes 1, Robots 56.
Undeterred, the Strokes celebrate their pyrrhic victory like they’ve won the World Series. They mob Casablancas at home plate, pop bottles of champagne, and in a fit of delirium, Casablancas socks drummer Fab Moretti in the face. Pure art.
As a disclaimer, we love the Strokes—almost as much as we love baseball—so this video was basically tailor-made for us. Also, these fine gentlemen are entertainers, not cultural critics, so we shouldn’t read too deeply into their video. But there is nevertheless a message in the Strokes’ new video that speaks to what we try to do with Southpaw.
In the non-bionic world, sports are binary. A team wins, or they don’t. When they do, commentators are quick to point out everything they did right, even if they bumbled their way into a win. (“A win’s a win,” as the saying goes.) When they don’t, the TV talking heads are never at loss for reasons. Pundits are all too willing to pick out the exact moment when “momentum shifted” in an opponent’s favor and dissect every mistake, misstep, and missed opportunity. Counterfactuals abound.
This logic bleeds into our discussions of politics, and especially electoral politics—like when CNN bigwigs retrospectively identify “momentum shifts” in campaigns, even though noshift was obvious at the time, or when MSNBC commentators dissect debate performances with the same manic zeal that Stephen A. Smith brings to a halftime report. This seamless exchange between the rhetoric of sports and the rhetoric of politics is a primary feature of what Robert Lipsyte called “SportsWorld,” the world that is dominated by the logic and rationality of competitive sports. “The language of sports, its organizations, its values, its class systems, its disciplines, its energies, are used by politics, by business, by all the factors that engineer our daily life to justify, vivify, enhance, sometimes obscure nonsports activities,” Lipsyte wrote in 1975. “The SportsWorld metaphor is so rich in possibility, one must simply stop.”
SportsWorld is especially hospitable to right-wing politics because it glorifies the same hyper-competitive, hyper-individualistic, market-oriented logic that undergirds the contemporary conservative worldview: Those who work hard enough get ahead, so if you’re not ahead, you didn’t work hard enough; sacrifice for your team (but only if it serves your interests); if you’re not first, you’re last. It’s worth remembering that the conservative obsession with “participation trophies” isn’t some weird glitch in the Right’s cultural politics. Admitting that participation trophies might serve a legitimate function would be tantamount to admitting that perhaps people aren’t poor just because they didn’t work hard enough, or that rich people maybe didn’t get that way because they earned it and everyone else didn’t.
We’re not arguing that we should be handing out more participation trophies, but we do think that if we change the way we talk about sports, we can change the political values that they instill in those who care about them. And we think that there are ways of talking and writing about sports that focus less on competition and victory and individual success and more on solidarity, struggle, and collective achievement. Team sports offer compelling examples of solidarity, but the same dynamic extends even to the less visible parts of professional sports: in players’ struggles against greedy owners, in Black players’ protests against racist leagues, in female athletes fights for equal pay and recognition. What would our politics look like if these were the dominant themes that we borrowed from sports? It might sound silly, but what if, like the Strokes’ little baseball team, we cared more about solidarity that we did about winning?
For a fleeting moment, the Strokes’ absurd baseball game helped us imagine this new paradigm. The video is also just downright cathartic. Being a progressive in 2020 feels a lot like being a member of the Strokes facing off against robots. A virus has ravaged an already broken economy, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that the plutocrats in charge aren’t going to do anything about it. The Republican Party—a minoritarian faction—holds onto power through clever exploitation of anti-democratic institutions, fear-mongering, and sheer deceit. A handful of corporate monopolies, completely insulated from democratic accountability, make billions by disseminating vitriolic bullshit and further quickening the slow-motion death of the planet. And yet president-elect Joe Biden’s cabinet picks suggest that progressives are going to hear a lot of the Strokes’ refrain for the next four years: “Please, the adults are talking.”
The Strokes know what it’s like to lose. (Another song on their 2020 record is called “Ode To The Mets,” and their famously snippy relationship with one another also sounds a lot like the constant infighting on the Left.) What they’ve learned from 20 years as a band is that the victories that come from collective struggle, however small, are worth celebrating. Frankly, as we watch our robot overlords run up the score, it’s the only way to keep the faith.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . why we’re good at spotting cheaters, and why there aren’t very many of them? “In politics, as in sports, if the final score isn’t accepted, the whole game is lost,” by Thomas Boswell in the Washington Post (December 4, 2020).
. . . another victory in the the U.S. Women’s National Team’s fight for equal pay? “U.S. Women's Soccer Team Settles Part Of Gender Discrimination Suit,” by Vanessa Romo for NPR (December 1, 2020).
. . . the dark history of naming climbing routes, and how the sport is changing? “Climbing routes are riddled with racist and misogynistic names. Meet the people trying to change it all,” by Amanda Loudin in The Lily (November 30, 2020).
. . . English soccer players’ response to fans booing during protests? “Mahlon Romeo angry and hurt by those Millwall fans who booed 'taking the knee' gesture,” by Richard Cawley in London News Online (December 5, 2020).