With all the weirdness and the uncertainty that has taken over the world the past few months, it has become a necessity and fairly vital for the few of you who remain rational individuals on this poor earth to go into a weekend on a positive note. You may have noticed that pop culture does not look at its best lately, still, there are signs of hope that mankind is not utterly doomed; not just yet.
This week we theorize that late night television has finally begun to realize that popular music does not only embrace that stinking sea of indie pop artists whose overproduced goods have become mindless replicates of one another, nor the one-off hip-hop shooting stars, nor the bro country sensations, nor whatever else the industry wants us to believe is hot on each given occurrence. We hypothesize that the people who do the bookings for those late night shows are candid workers with honorable intentions who all they want to do is provide a service to us, the unthinking audiences, and help the voices of those significant and profound artists that are still out there be heard for the sake of the art, and we are speculatively on their side for a while.
Even concerning the blandest and most uninteresting of those television programs, let us consider that optimism is still alive. Because regarding the actual comedy The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon may have become only a shadow of both its starring comedian's former glory and the show's rich history, yet, like we've mentioned earlier, we ponder that the staff's intentions are honest, and when it comes to the musical guests they seem to be trying a bit harder than they do with the comedy.
The Tonight Show's musical guests are always treated with much enthusiasm, and when their act is over we are invariably reminded by the host that the way they do it is always "the way to do it". The show's lineup this month among others included SZA, Fifth Harmony and Gucci Mane, Kygo and Ellie Goulding, and Kelsea Ballerini, but also The Who, the most elderly version of them ever, but still The Who; and last night... Slayer...
Whether it is because Fallon likes to rock out every now and then between the giggles and the never-ending paying of compliments to his guests whomever they are and no matter their status, or because they wanted to have the band on as a novelty act, or because someone in the bookings department wanted to get fired from NBC, they actually booked Slayer. The band went on, they performed Raining Blood from their 1986 thrash metal milestone, Reign In Blood, and they destroyed.
This appearance has been promoted as Slayer's late night debut, but the band seven years ago played on Jimmy Kimmel Live, only on an exterior stage.
The show which in 2017 lost both its head writer and the ratings' top spot in total viewers, might already be trying for a change of gear. If putting on Slayer means that this is starting to happen through the musical guests, that shift is most welcome. If it's all purely coincidental, it's still okay. We may still have to ask Tame Impala though, who will be the next ones to get on that certain stage next week, because the room might still be reverberating from the energy of the mighty Slayer.
ZR