Some time ago there was a Twitter prompt I cannot find that asked if there was such a thing as “a corny genius.”1 My memory is that everybody instantly replied with Paul McCartney. Which makes sense. Anyway, I still think about this prompt from time to time. It has obvious relevance to my interest in Taylor Swift, being basic, and so on. But we are going to leave Taylor out of this post (aside from this paragraph) and instead consider simply the question of—the corny genius. What is it?
In a real-life conversation about “corny geniuses,” I found myself frequently referring to “Yesterday,” which is not even a song I like all that much. But I feel like it is the work of corny genius par excellence: simple, wistful, with emotions that hit you direct in the heart. A deep pool filled with water so clear you can see right to the bottom. And basically anybody can sing along. That part’s important too.
What Is “Corny”?
To free associate for a moment without actually looking anything up: “corn” generally is going to bring up the American Midwest. Cornfed, cornball, and so on. Doing a little bit of light research seems like it bears this association out: “corny” is supposed to have overtones of “hick,” so, unsophisticated, unfashionable. (But not: unpopular.)
Here’s a first pass at “the corny artist,” but obviously I’m open to being convinced any of these claims are wrong. The corny artist:
prizes accessibility over difficulty, feeling over thinking, sincerity over irony, and so on.
aims for the biggest audience possible.
possesses a certain kind of purity of heart in the sense of “wanting one thing”—there are certain kinds of complexities or feelings of ambivalence that a corny artist will avoid.
and so, speaking very broadly, has artistic values that are directly opposed to those of (for example) a modernist artist like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or Ezra Pound.2
Things can feel corny in the sense of “being accessible” while not quite being corny. Melodramas like Stella Dallas for instance were certainly feeling-driven crowd-pleasers. But Stella Dallas’s monomaniacal need to extract tears, specifically, from its audience makes it not corny to me.
Things can be basic without being corny—because “basic” can just mean “canonical” or “foundational.” If you asked me to name a Japanese movie I liked, and I said “Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story,” that would be, like saying Rashomon, a basic choice. But I’m not sure either would be a corny choice.
Some art forms are more conducive to corny genius than others. Pop music (here meaning, “non–classical music”) is going to have a lot of corny geniuses, except for jazz, which will have hardly any. Novelists, on the other hand, I suspect will mostly be unable to sustain the necessary purity of heart for an entire novel.
What Is “Genius”?
I’m not answering that one, come on.
What Is “Genius”?
It’s a lyrics website.
What Is “Genius”?
Go away!
Who Is Not A Corny Genius?
Cole Porter is not a corny genius. Joni Mitchell is not a corny genius. Vladimir Nabokov is not a corny genius. Ernst Lubitsch is not a corny genius. Toni Morrison is not a corny genius.
At least three of these (Porter, Mitchell, Lubitsch) are absolutely pop artists in some sense so they are useful in clarifying that corny =/= popular or even aiming to be popular. And all of these people might have produced individual works of corny genius in their career. But they are not themselves corny geniuses. In general, the more somebody’s work depends on things like sophisticated wordplay and irony, the less likely can they be plausibly described as being corny. If you deliberately court certain abrasive or off-putting qualities in your work, you also won’t be corny.
Joni Mitchell isn’t corny for any of those reasons, though. She isn’t corny because she’s weird. That said, enough time can pass that weirdness no longer registers in the same way—an argument could be made for Emily Dickinson as a corny genius, and she’s very weird, but her weirdness reads as “oldness” now. Similarly, time can also make corniness cease to register—Samuel Richardson might have once been a corny genius, but no longer.
Who Is A Corny Genius?
Sam Cooke. Rogers & Hammerstein, probably. Paul McCartney, already mentioned. Leonard Bernstein, I suspect. Frank Capra. Taylor Swift. W.H. Auden. The Carpenters. E.M. Forster (maybe).3 Makoto Shinkai is a corny genius. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Lana Del Rey. Stevie Wonder.4
Some Individual Works of Corny Genius
“Those Winter Sundays,” Robert Hayden
Casablanca5
“Alone,” Heart
“Rubber Ring,” The Smiths6
“The Dead,” James Joyce7
Interstellar8
Swan Lake
Borderline Cases.
David Lynch. This might be a work-by-work sort of deal. I think everything I’ve seen of Twin Peaks is extremely corny and indeed what makes it weird to experience is the way in which David Lynch has somehow figured out how to create a kind of corn supersaturation, embracing corniness to such a degree that it starts to become weird and upsetting.9 But I wouldn’t call Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive corny.
Jon Batiste. I almost put him in the corny genius list, then didn’t because I felt like I didn’t really know his work well enough, but then I watched him on stage with Lana on the Coachella livestream last night… I open the floor.
Søren Kierkegaard. I said a reliance on irony prevented you from being a corny genius. And yet.…
Bob Dylan. See Søren Kierkegaard.
Joanna Newsom. Like Joni Mitchell, Joanna Newsom is weird. But there’s a certain… something… to her work and the fact that her instrument is a harp that also pushes her in this direction. I think if her voice were less abrasive, she would easily be a corny genius, but as it is, she’s hard to categorize.
George Herbert. See Joanna Newsom.
Stragglers and Strays
Jonathan Franzen wants to be a corny genius but unfortunately he is not.10
There’s a type of artist that definitely was a corny genius but isn’t anymore. Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites are two examples that spring to mind. Possibly Dickens too.
There’s a certain kind of artist that courts a deliberately “cute” affect—I’m thinking here of a poet like Stevie Smith—that are corn-adjacent but, I think, not themselves corny. (Elizabeth Bishop maybe goes here too, ditto Frank O’Hara.)
Does Any of This Matter?
No. But you had fun, right? And that’s what matters here at BDM Industries.
If you happen to have it I will link.
My enumeration of these values should not really be taken for me throwing in with them. I am kind of neutral here, I think. I am pro art-can-be-entertainment but also, it doesn’t need to be and art-not-as-entertainment is much more in need of support.
It’s true that the Substack tends in the favoring corny geniuses direction, but this is partly because I am not going to humorously blog a read of something I take more seriously intellectually. Like if I reread Life and Fate I’m not going to write a jokey post about it.
I haven’t really read enough of him to make this call.
I still haven’t watched High Fidelity but I’m obsessed with this clip that
put in the comments of a different post about how terrible “I Just Called To Say I Love You” is:“When all the archtypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion. Just as the height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure, and the height of perversion border on mystical energy, so too the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime. Something has spoken in place of the director. If nothing else, it is a phenomenon worthy of awe.” Umberto Eco (via my friend Olivia)
The Smiths are basic but not corny.
Otherwise, decidedly not a cornball. But everybody loves “The Dead.” Everybody.
In some ways this is best summed up by his attempt to come up with a catchy song people pretend to be too cool to like but secretly love in Purity. He picked a song from the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 for 2010. He did not pick any of the ones you might think “oh, that would work,” like “Teenage Dream” or “Tik Tok” or “Use Somebody” or “You Belong With Me.” No, he picked this:
A song I have literally never heard anybody enjoy, though somebody must have.
I can't believe you wrote an essay on the Corny Genius without mentioning the Final Boss of Corny Geniuses - The Boss, Bruce Springsteen.
I think there are situations when corniness is necessary, but not sufficient for genius - I'm thinking of Disney movies, which need to be corny to be genius, although there are plenty that are corny without achieving genius.
Then there are situations where an artist can be corny and/or genius, but not at the same time. Johnny Cash immediately springs to mind.