I’m late to Tegan and Sara’s excellent Heartthrob, but listening to standout track “Now I’m All Messed Up,” I noticed something interesting. In the song’s excellent, heartwrenching chorus, the twins sing “Now I’m all messed up / Sick inside, wondering where / Where you’re leaving your makeup / Now I’m all messed up / Sick inside wondering who / Whose life you’re making worthwhile”:

What’s intriguing about those lines is not just that they’re good and precise, but that the default interpretation of them would probably be—the rise of makeup for men in certain circumstances notwithstanding—that Tegan and Sara are singing to a woman. That shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s followed the band for more than half a minute: both of the twins are gay and in long-term relationships with women. But where in the past, those songs and lyrics that clearly referenced women, like the deftly sketched object of desire who is “Dignified in what she does / When she sings the smile that she brings / To all of you unaware of what’s to come ” in “Superstar” were part of what, along with their production, made them kind of a cult group. I think I heard them for the first time at the Women’s Center in college. Now, it doesn’t seem to have pigeonholed them at all. Even if it’s women singing about other women, plenty of guys seem to be able to hear their own experiences in lyrics like these.

A similar kind of identification-bending happens in Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” when she sings that “I’m not the guy you’re taking home,” a bit of language that could be part of a language barrier, but more likely, seems to be Robyn simultaneously conjuring up “stilettos and broken bottles” and speaking in the voice and to the experience of her gay male fans:

It doesn’t seem to me yet that this kind of pronoun fluidity to mix up the gender of the person we imagine as the protagonist of the song, or the expectation that you can identify with a song even if the sexual orientation of the lyrics or the gender of the singer clearly aren’t yours has completely conquered pop music. And of course there have always been cross-gender affiliations between singers and their audiences. But I wonder if this kind of protean approach is less closeted than it once was, if it’s less a form of code than simply a reflection of social and musical reality. Whatever it is, if it gives Tegan and Sara a chance to break out to mainstream audiences while still writing songs that are clearly addressed to women, it makes me very happy.

Almost since there’s been hip-hop, there have been white women covering songs originally recorded by black men, often for comedic effect. Most recently, Katy Perry turned in a less-utterly-humiliating-than-could-have-been expected rendition of “Ni**as in Paris.” She avoided the most obvious conflict by performing the clean version, subbing in “ninjas” for the title term and avoiding the spectacle of a white girl thinking it’s okay to use “nigger” or a variation thereof just because it appears in lyrics. Plus, the oral sex jokes are at least kind of in keeping with the faux-Sapphic hijinks that got Perry famous in the first place:

Then, there’s Karmin, who have made their entire career out of the incongruity of two white hipsters—but really, mostly, a white chick—stepping into the lyrics laid down by black rappers. There’s no question that Amy Heidemann deserves to be the champion at any number of karaoke nights, but there’s something a little weird about the idea that this is a hook for an entire career. It’s also interesting to see them take Chris Brown’s “Look at Me Now” to Ellen and Ryan Seacrest’s show, places where the original artist himself is (justly, I think) not exactly welcome:

In 2006, Robyn and Jenny Wilson covered Saul Williams’ “List of Demands (reparations).” It’s a song that’s arguably as much about romantic relationships as race, and that’s clear in the original. But Robyn and Wilson did leave out a striking verse that compares a confrontation between lovers to a confrontation between a man and the police. Williams sang in the original “Call the police! / I’m strapped to the teeth and liable to disregard your every belief…Protect ya neck,’cause, son, I’m breaking out of my noose.” That seems like a wise omission. It’d be hard for either of these women to deliver those lines with any credibility or claim to familiarity with the experiences they’re using as metaphors:

But the best entry in the the white-ladies-covering-black-male-rappers genre remains Jenny Owen Youngs, who in her cover of Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” made herself the most normal thing in the setting. When there are giant penguins and abominable snowmen about, the focus doesn’t have to be the supposed incongruity between the singer and her lyrics:

On Monday, Ryan McGee laid down a marker in the AV Club, arguing that HBO’s success with shows like The Sopranos deemphasized the need to make individual episodes of television compelling as long as they served a larger narrative, and urged episodic shows to adopt at least the facade of long-arc stories even if they weren’t well-suited to do so. James Poniewozick at Time suggested that Ryan’s overstating the extent to which this has actually happened, and make a point that I think gets at a gateway that precedes Ryan’s piece. “It’s true that a TV series is not a novel,” James writes. “But it’s also not a movie. Every medium works best when it takes advantage of what’s distinctive about it. TV is linear and cumulative, allowing a story to unfold over weeks, months or years.” So what is it that makes it a distinctive medium? And how can we best nurture that?

To answer the second question first, there’s an extent to which television is the least flexible of the major media. While it’s absolutely true that the networks are becoming somewhat more flexible about season lengths—something like ABC’s found footage horror show The River is a good example of this—and cable channels and network do make miniseries, it’s true that the standard network season is 22ish episodes and the standard cable season is 13ish episodes. The episodes are of a relatively standard length: 22ish minutes for a sitcom and 42ish for a drama on the networks and non-premium cable channels, and closer to 30 and an hour on the premium cable channels.

Those are astonishing formal constraints for an artist, even a commercial one, to work under, and it’s worth pausing to appreciate that. Standard-release movie features features can run from 80 minutes to well over two hours, and you can make something substantially shorter or longer than that and still find mass-market distribution for it. Novels are bound by some constraints on what a publisher can physically bind, but there’s a great deal of range within those technical specifications, and within them, no one’s setting limitations on how long or short chapters have to be, or even what they’re expected to look like: David Foster Wallace and Jennifer Eagan have helped shake that up. And one can only imagine, especially given the rise of e-books that can incorporate video, graphics, or animation, that experimentation will continue. Most pop songs hover in the three-minute range, but once again, that’s not a formal constraint, and iTunes may have hurt the album but it also freed artists like Robyn from its limitations. Web television may yet shake the formal constraints of television, but we’re far from a paradigm shift. Television is the most restrictive popular art form in existence, and I’m constantly awed that people manage to fit stories neatly into the space allotted to them without too much filler or franticness. But those restrictions are more than some sort of technical exercise: this is a multi-billion dollar industry, not a writing workshop handing out a structurally tricky assignment to talented students.
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The bridge is yours.

-Is anyone actually excited about the American Psycho remake?

-Gorgeous designs for Katniss’s introductory gown in The Hunger Games.

-This is not news, but Robyn continues to be just so great.

-Will 2012 be the year of the dude movie?

-Karen O. Trent Reznor. You’re welcome:

-The Watts Towers are awesome, and you should go visit them if you get a chance.

-Oprah admits faillibility, at least when it comes to launching cable networks.

-It would be pretty amazing to have a movie where Jon Hamm pursues Melissa McCarthy.

-Dave Chappelle’s back.

-Rye Rye. Robyn. What are you waiting for?