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REPTILE LOVE: If you’re going on Survivor, expect to be joining a team branded like a new line of SUVs. |
The Bleeding Queens, Coconut Riot, Fail and Fail Again . . . These are some of the names that will never be given to the competing tribes on Survivor. Dogjaw, the Spiffies — not them either. If you’re going on Survivor, expect to be joining a team branded like a new line of SUVs, or a hot restaurant: this season on Survivor: Fiji (CBS, Thursdays, 8 pm) it’s “Moto” and “Ravu.” The Nissan Ravu: two miles to the gallon, but it can go straight up the side of a building without spilling your coffee.
This is the 14th Survivor, and how very familiar it all is: the muttered conspirings under the jungle canopy, the dozy fish impaled on homemade spears, and leathery old Jeff Probst in his temple of skulls, smiling like GI Joe. “When your fire is gone,” he says, with grim fixity, “so are you.” Too right, Jeff. Mark Burnett, the British ex-paratrooper and reality witch doctor, is still in the production seat, so Survivor still works dirtily, subliminally, on the reptilian level. During Fiji’s premiere episode last week, I found myself focusing on the music, on the way the daylight hours are soundtracked with grand swirls of orchestra, themes of nobility and conquest as the contestants forage for dinner or perform their feats of strength in the sun. Then darkness falls and we creep out with snake-charmer woodwind and bone rattle, the blowdart’s puff and the chiming of bowls. Pan the camera to the left a couple of feet and there’s a goblin lounge band doing its thing, the small, headdressed men caught by surprise, frozen over their tingling instruments.
Everyone on Survivor knows all about Survivor: you have to slither and sneak your way into alliances, you have to be strong but not too strong, and so on. This is part of the interest of the show in its late late phase — the sophistication of the cast and how that plays against the standard reality trope of people thrust babbling into strangeness, not knowing what the hell they’re doing. The dudes in Ego Trip’s The (White) Rapper Show (VH1, Mondays, 10 pm), for example, don’t know what the hell they’re doing, and neither do the producers. Half the show is a clunky satire on the very notion of white-rapperdom: the contestants live in a place called the White House and have their rap battles on a set that looks like a heavily graffiti’d corner of Sesame Street. When host MC Serch (a white rapper himself, as you may remember) sends somebody home, he shouts, “It’s time for you to STEP OFF!”, then tosses a pair of laced-together sneakers over a sagging power line.
But the show’s other side is an exploration of craft as fussily detailed as Project Runway: these kids may be lost in fake negritude, but they can rap their baggy little asses off. They go into trancelike states, bar after bar, wreathed in contrapuntal flow. “Yo, I feel like a evil genius, defining the meaning of being the meanest!” scatted Jon Boy last week, in lines of which Gilbert & Sullivan might have been proud. Passers-by (he was standing outside a clothing emporium in Queens) were quite unmoved by his skills. Harsh! Irish rapper Sully, meanwhile, offended by the suggestion that he write a rap about the shortcomings of his teammates, complained, “I’m a stand-up dude/But you got me in a jammed-up mood . . . !”
