Why it’s still important for bands to do well on Saturday Night Live
In case you missed it, Saturday Night Live is relevant again. I don’t mean that it’s back to being funny, though that’s occasionally been true this season. (Granted, I’m a sucker for sketches where Fred Armisen impersonates Barack Obama impersonating how Bill Cosby makes a hoagie.) I’m referring to the show’s musical offerings, which have been consistently generating headlines lately, though not necessarily for positive reasons. It’s not supposed to be this way: In the age of YouTube and an overabundance of music websites offering original video content, a 37-year-old TV show on a major network shouldn’t be an important player when it comes to spotlighting up-and-coming artists. And yet SNL is must-see music TV.
SNL’s recent musical performances have been such big pop-culture news that SNL itself has satirized them. After Lana Del Rey’s iconic bungling of “Video Games” and “Blue Jeans” on the show back in January, Kristen Wiig was on “Weekend Update” as Del Rey, skewering the singer’s oddly aloof persona and the ferocious criticism her performance inspired on the Internet. Then, two weeks after Bon Iver seemingly went out of its way to embody every doddering soft-rock cliché during its listless SNL appearance, Justin Timberlake impersonated the band’s leader Justin Vernon and played an even sleepier version of “Holocene” in a memorable sketch. As for the YouTube-endorsed lobotomy-pop duo Karmin, which was soundly mocked after appearing in the February 11 Zooey Deschanel episode, there’s been no SNL parody yet, probably because Karmin is practically an SNL parody already.
All of this has given SNL a curious reputation of late for bad (or at least polarizing) musical performances. Even Bon Iver, which has the best critical and commercial pedigree of this latest batch of SNL musical acts, looked a little unprepared for the show’s spotlight—or, at the very least, nobody in the band seemed to recognize that playing something slightly more upbeat (like Bon Iver’s rousing opener “Perth”) would have played better on television than the deathly cheeseball ballad “Beth/Rest.”
Old grumbles about SNL’s famously bad sound mix aside, none of these performances have reflected poorly on the show, even as critics have blown acid-covered raspberries at the artists. SNL creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels might hang out with the A-team of baby-boomer rock stars—Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and Mick Jagger, among other walking album covers—but he’s maintained the integrity of his show as an up-to-date snapshot of contemporary pop culture by gambling on young artists who appear to be on the cusp of breaking. The snapshot might not always be pretty, but at least it is current.