Alright, alright, so I’m a little slow on the Chronicles of Narnia SNL rap. But it’s damn great.
Now children, as an excercise, let’s compare blog/media coverage of this event:
NYT:
Publication Date: December 27, 2005
Summary: Two white guys create the startup version of comedy. The Web helps them to get famous.
Best line: And Mr. Samberg found himself in the delicate position of having to explain to his mother that the song’s chorus is a play on words involving the name “Chronicles of Narnia” and the word chronic, a slang term for marijuana. “She’s like, ‘So is it actually about weed?’ ” Mr. Samberg said. “It makes you think it’s going to be aboit’s actually just about ‘Narnia.’ She’s like, ‘Oh, I think I get it.’ “
Worst use of an outdated late 80s/early 90s slang term combined with staccatissimo use of adjectives: For most aspiring rappers, the fastest route to having material circulated around the World Wide Web is to produce a work that is radical, cutting-edge and, in a word, cool.
Worst way to admit your coverage is way late: By the next morning, the video had burrowed its way into the nation’s cultural consciousness. (Note: A full 10 DAYS after the piece aired on SNL.)
Publication Date: December 23, 2005
Summary: Two white guys create a cultish rap on SNL. It may be silly, but that’s precisely what makes it great.
Best line: Really, is “I’ve got mad hits like I was Rod Carew” any less ridiculous than “I love those cupcakes like McAdams loves Gosling”?
Publication Date: December 19, 2005
Summary: This SNL sketch is quite hilarious. Watch it.
Best line: Thankfully, network television does not kill all good things: The Chronic-WHAT-cles of Narnia kicks just as much tuckus as the online shorts that made Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer web celebs in the first place.
LESSON:
Here’s what the NYT is good at: providing breaking news. They’re good at telling you what happened, and providing some short term context.
Here’s what Slate is good at: Making you THINK. Challenging your ideas, and telling you what something in the news means. In this way, it doesn’t matter that much if it’s a day or two or three behind the event. People are still consuming it as news.
Here’s what BB is good at: We found this cool thing on the Web very recently (most likely within the last couple of hours) and we think you should check it out too.
CONCLUSION: When the NYT does cover something like this, they look really dumb and behind the times. I’d prefer to know more about what it means for the future of SNL/rap music (Ã la Slate) rather than a play-by-play of how the video was produced:
On the evening of Dec. 12, the four wrote a song about “two guys rapping about very lame, sensitive stuff,” as Mr. Samberg described it. They recorded it the following night in the office Mr. Samberg shares with Mr. Schaffer and Mr. Taccone at “SNL,” using a laptop computer that Mr. Taccone bought on Craigslist.
Then, while their colleagues were rehearsing and rewriting that Saturday’s show, the group spent the morning of Dec. 15 shooting their video with a borrowed camera, using the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Chelsea to stand in for a multiplex cinema and Mr. Taccone’s girlfriend’s sister to play a convenience-store clerk. Mr. Schaffer spent the next night – and morning – editing the video and working with technicians to bring it up to broadcast standards. Finally, at about 11 p.m. on Dec. 17, the four learned from Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of “SNL,” that “Lazy Sunday” would be shown on that night’s show.
Does anyone really care what time the group learned from SNL when it would be on the air?
