Art that was nowhere near what you expected

My question is regarding art that was not what you were expecting. When I bought Saturday Night Fever on DVD, I was expecting a camp glitterfest along the lines of Grease or Footloose. Instead what I got was an anti-hero desperately trying and failing to claw his way out of a bad neighborhood. Around the time John Travolta was coldly telling a crying woman it was her own fault she had been raped, seeing as how she had been drinking and clearly gagging for it, I stopped expecting him to break into “Summer Nights.” The dancing scenes are the only relief from scenes of racism, abuse, and despair. Ever since I saw it, I cannot hear the title song in the same way again: The line “I’m going nowhere… Somebody help me…” takes on a shiver-inducing meaning once you have the context of the movie. Saturday Night Fever was a hell of a lot grimmer than I was expecting, and I have not learned: I made the same error recently with Boogie Nights. What piece of art, for better or worse, was nothing like you imagined it would be? —Emma
Tasha Robinson
As I’ve said before in this column and on our podcast, I grew up on big, sunny classic musicals like Mary Poppins and The Sound Of Music. A few years ago, I suddenly realized I’d somehow missed out on some of the biggest classics—The King And I, Carousel, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, Brigadoon, Oklahoma, and so forth. None of them turned out to be what I was expecting (Seven Brides in particular is disturbingly rape-themed, right down to a big happy song about the importance of kidnapping the object of your affections) but of all of them, Oklahoma left me most floored. This is a musical where the “hero,” Curly, dedicates an entire song to trying to talk his romantic rival, Jud, into suicide, under the pretense that once Jud dies, everyone will realize how mean they were to him, and will regret it. There’s a cute, chipper song from a girl lamenting that she’s available for any man’s use, but she just cain’t help it. There’s a song and dance that’s just about how cowboys and farmers want to kill each other. There’s a drug-induced rape-and-murder-fantasy ballet, and a song where all the ladies strip down to their (admittedly pretty bulky) underwear to lounge around together. The whole story is based around the threat of rape and murder coming off Jud, and the farmer’s daughter who attempts to use Jud as an emotional weapon against Curly, and is terrified when the whole thing backfires. It wouldn’t disturb me if the musical just had dark themes—so did Fiddler On The Roof and West Side Story, and those are terrific—but all the questionable behavior and dark, savage desire comes in an otherwise perky package, and the mismatch is endlessly disturbing. Or in the case of the rape-ballet, just tremendously weird—especially if you’re expecting Mary Poppins, which is really light on sullen, murderous, sexually threatening farmhands and not-really-funny shotgun weddings.
Claire Zulkey
If you hadn’t mentioned Saturday Night Fever, Emma, I probably would have brought that up myself. I agree—nobody expects to see a (spoiler alert!) guy falling to his death in a movie that’s most known for a white suit and the Bee Gees. On that note, Cabaret also surprised me with its darkness. (More spoilers!) I expected Cabaret to be a good-time campfest thanks to Liza Minnelli, Bob Fosse, a bowler hat, music, and dancing. I did not expect Nazis, beatings and abortions. While I suppose some part of me figured it was part of the gay canon, I also did not anticipate the loneliness, anger, and confusion that ensues in Sally, Brian, and Max’s love triangle. I think when I popped in Cabaret, I basically expected Chicago but with Judy Garland’s daughter, but it was a whole hell of a lot more serious than that.
Philip Dyess-Nugent
I can think of several musicians or rock groups—Ornette Coleman, the Velvets, New York Dolls, Pere Ubu, even the Shiny Beast-era Captain Beefheart—that surprised me the first time I heard them, because I’d heard so much about how uncommercial and audience-dividing they were. So I was braced for something I’d have to learn to like, and the first few bars just filled me with instantaneous, high-energy pleasure. Maybe these were simply cases of me discovering artists who were “before their time” at the exact moment that time caught up with them, good and hard. I had a less-happy experience with the 1970 Billy Wilder film The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes, because both the title and what I knew by then of the director’s work had me expecting a parody, a Mel Brooks–Airplane!-style take on the great detective. It turns out that the actual, very long movie settles into a groove that’s slow, wistful, and autumnal—a little too much of all three for me, though many people think highly of it, even if each of them seems to think he’s the only person in the world who likes it. (It’s one of those movies that 999 out of every thousand film critics has described as “an underrated masterpiece.”) Likewise the more recent The Ice Harvest, whose pedigree (it was directed by Harold Ramis) and ad campaign were both designed to attract audiences who had no idea they were about to spend part of their holiday weekend watching Kansas lowlifes murder, betray, and tough-talk each other in a wintry film noir.
Jason Heller
I’ve been a Lou Reed fan since getting into The Velvet Underground in high school. From then into my early 20s, I began accumulating Reed solo albums, especially the standout records from the ’70s, like Transformer, Berlin, Coney Island Baby, and The Blue Mask. In particular, The Blue Mask has some pretty harrowing guitar work (thanks to Reed’s stellar interplay with the late, great Robert Quine)—stuff that ranks up there with some of VU’s noisiest moments. That said, I shied away from Reed’s most notorious noise-fest, Metal Machine Music, as long as I possibly could. It wasn’t hard; in the early-to-mid-’90s, it wasn’t that easy to find MMM on LP, and I was a vinyl junkie back then. The longer I put off hearing, the more the album’s infamy grew in my mind. I read articles about it. I heard people talk about it. By the time I finally broke down and got a copy of it on CD around ’96 or so, I was prepared to throw it on, press play, and have my brain instantly liquefied and my eyes melt out of my face. Honestly, though, MMM didn’t do any of those things. In fact, I found it… kind of pretty. No, really. Maybe the whole thing had been built up too much in my mind. Or maybe I’d already subjected myself to so many MMM-inspired feedback-drone bands by that point, the granddaddy of that whole movement actually sounded kind of quaint. I don’t mean to downplay the disc’s historical significance, nor do I mean to appear all blasé about something that most human beings justifiably recoil in horror while hearing (that is, if more than .00000001 percent of the world’s population had ever heard it). I guess I just expected something a little less, I dunno, hypnotic. To me, MMM isn’t some kind of sonic monstrosity, it’s a white-noise lullaby.
Will Harris
I have a long history of coming into artists’ work well after the point that most everyone else has discovered them, and as a result, I’ve often fallen in love with an album that longtime fans have deemed subpar because it doesn’t hold up to the artist’s supposed masterwork. Such was the case with Public Image Ltd., though at least my entry point—Album (though to date myself, my first copy was actually called Cassette)—is one that the majority of PiL fans, if not all of them, deem to be a reasonably consistent effort. What I didn’t realize, however, was that Album was by far the band’s most accessible release up to that point, so when a surface glance at their discography assured me that Second Edition, a.k.a. Metal Box, was the absolute best PiL had to offer, I figured, “Wow, if I liked Cassette, then I’ll really love this!” Having just begun the upgrade to CDs, I bought the disc on its reputation alone, slapped it in the player, and promptly began wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into. I know the musical trifecta of John Lydon, Jah Wobble, and Keith Levene is still considered to be among the best post-punk had to offer, but I went in expecting “Rise” and got “Albatross.” Talk about jarring. As a result, Second Edition was taken out of the player and sat untouched before finally being sold off a few years later in a mid-college purge to buy my family Christmas presents, and although I’ve come to appreciate a few of the songs over the years—“Death Disco,” “Memories,” and “Careering”—thanks to repeated spins of PiL’s The Greatest Hits, So Far, I’ve never felt the need to own Second Edition again.
Ryan McGee
I loved music growing up, but I’m not sure I ever thought about it. Sure, I’d have my trigger finger ready, anxious to record that week’s big hit singles once Casey Kasem stopped his overly long introductions. But I never really stopped to contemplate what music meant, or what it could do. That changed in 1989, when the 14-year-old me walked into a music store and plunked down some accumulated allowance money to pick up Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. I liked License To Ill well enough, but I didn’t think about its context in the larger musical world. But Paul’s Boutique just knocked my head in, and I’ve been kind of recovering ever since. Even listening to it now while I type up this response leaves me a little in awe: The production is incredible, the attitude is unique, and the creativity on display is top-notch. While I bought the record on the strength of the single “Hey Ladies,” I was drawn into the myriad of samples laid down by producers The Dust Brothers. Those samples led me down a rabbit hole to music I didn’t even know existed, expanding my musical vocabulary and my mind in the process. In one album, Beastie Boys went from a bunch of dudes waxing semi-poetic about Paul Revere’s prowess with a whiffleball bat to men name-dropping science “like Galileo dropped the orange.” I’ve been more impressed with records in the time since, but I don’t think I’ve ever been as surprised.