If you’ve read any comic books in, oh, the last 30 years or so, you might be familiar with the concept of a multiverse. A multiverse consists of different parallel universes in which there are alternate outcomes for familiar characters involved in several storylines, sometimes simultaneously. In other words, things are similar … but different.
Sometimes shockingly so.
Our own real-life popular culture can sometimes feel a little bit like a comic-book multiverse. With so many content outlets to fill these days, artists often create alternate versions of something, be it a song with slightly tweaked lyrics or directors’ cuts of movies or TV shows with two different endings. And on top of all that, sometimes two totally different things can have the same title, creating confounding confusion for those of us diligently trying to navigate our maddeningly complex pop culture multiverse.
I’m writing about this today because last week I reviewed the debut album from a Canadian pop-reggae group known as Magic! The band’s song “Rude” has topped the charts for a month now. And the album proved to be one of the most interesting I’ve heard in a while, in part because these guys waded into some surprisingly spiritual subject matter while mostly avoiding problematic content.
Or so I thought.
Until I got an email from an alert reader telling us that one of the songs on the album, “Stupid Me,” actually included several f-words.
No it doesn’t, I thought, feeling a tad bid defensive.
After all, I’d downloaded the album from iTunes and diligently looked to see if there was any sort of explicit version available from any major retailers. There wasn’t. So I felt pretty certain that the missive was misguided.
But … it wasn’t.
Apparently, the band released an alternate version of the song that’s turned up, among possible other places, on its official Vevo channel. Ugh.
That revelation was particularly annoying given the good things we had to say about the band’s generally positive lyrics elsewhere. And so now, just as we had to do in a similar situation with a Jason Mraz album back in 2012, our Magic! album review stands amended with a more cautionary note.
And then came another email, this one from a married couple who went to see the new Daniel Radcliffe romcom What If, thinking we’d given it a five-star review. We did give a Christian film called What If … exactly that rating back in 2010. But that’s not the film that’s in theaters now, and not the film that this couple unintentionally ended up seeing. Suffice it to say that the newer film is several stars off that high mark.
What’s my point here? Exactly this: It’s a crazy entertainment world out there these days, and we’re all being forced to pay increasingly careful attention when we’re engaging with it. Sometimes, even when we’re pretty sure we’ve done our homework well and know what the score is, unwelcome surprises like the two I’ve just described slip through the net unawares.
In those moments, we may find ourselves in situations where we have to exercise on-the-spot discernment and make spontaneous decisions about what we’ve accidentally or unwittingly been exposed to. Maybe we turn a TV show off. Leave a theater. Or stop to have an impromptu conversation with our kids about what they’ve just seen or heard that we weren’t expecting.
This can happen even by way of commercials during TV shows that don’t have many problems themselves or while watching content-riddled trailers before an otherwise untarnished movie night. And please know that even really diligent, intentional folks (sometimes even on the Plugged In staff!) get nasty surprises from time to time, no matter how hard we all try.
I’d like to end my “maddening multiverse” blog entry today on an upbeat note. Though we hate (hate, HATE) missing anything significant in the 20 or so media reviews we publish or broadcast each week here at Plugged In, sometimes that happens. And in those cases, your letters, emails and Facebook posts letting us know that we need to take another look at something are invaluable. We take each one of them seriously and do our best to check out the potential problem areas you’ve told us we might have missed—for one odd reason or another! Thank you, and we’ll keep navigating the multiverse together.
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