 He's just sort of part of the musical furniture of American culture. It's just wallpaper. With Kenny G's music, what can you say? Kenny G, the curly, main saxophonist who has sold 75 million records and inspired the entire genre of smooth jazz, isn't just the best-selling instrumentalist of all time. He's also one of the most critically reviled musicians in history, and he's the subject of the new HBO documentary, Listening to Kenny G, which the New Yorker called an ironic masterpiece that perfectly defines the elusive and contested concept of a guilty pleasure. In Listening to Kenny G, director Penny Lane explores why critics hate Kenny G and the masses love him, creating a funny, poignant, and entrancing conversation about mass commercial appeal and elite tastes. When I think about music, the first thing that comes to mind is just the idea of taste and how deeply intimate that is with our sense of selves and your sense of social identity. So I really wanted to do something about that, and then getting from that to Kenny was pretty obvious. So an exploration of why Kenny G is the most popular and successful and best-selling instrumentalist of all time, and why that success makes a certain subset of people really mad. That's a hard lick and I just played it really well. Lane gives the critics their due. To many of them, Kenny G is offensive because he seems fundamentally uninterested in the musical tradition that he has come to define for millions of people around the globe. I spent a lot of time with Kenny, and it kind of didn't matter how many different ways I asked him what he was up to when he was creating these songs. He was just like, I don't know, it's pretty. Like, I like it. Like, most artists have like a whole set of things they're thinking about, like who your audience is, and who you're in conversation with, and what histories you're drawing on, and how are you innovating, how are you making something new. Kenny just isn't engaged in that, and I think it's it's his utter lack of interest in jazz. Kenny G does not know anything about jazz. So what do the people like who love Kenny G? I think the most important thing is that it's music that is useful. It's useful in their lives. I think life is hard, and there is nothing wrong with like wanting something to relax to after like your 10 hours at the factory, or you know, whatever. It's useful music because it doesn't have lyrics. It doesn't get in the way. You can put it on in the background. So people study to it. They meditate to it. They run to it. They make love to it. They get married to it. They've used it to put babies to sleep. Anesthesiologists use it before surgery. It helps get the heart rate down. The Chinese government uses it to send people home at the end of the work day. It is a supremely functional music, which is interesting because it's referred to by another critic as musical furniture, which I think is actually pretty apt. It's easy to forget that most people when I tell them that I made a film about why people hate Kenny G are like, who hates Kenny G? Everyone loves Kenny G. Reason interviewed you a few years ago when your incredible documentary How Satan Question Mark came out, that is a film about a group of Satanists who are pushing for equal representation of religious icons in the public square. What's the connection there? The joke way of putting it would be to say, like, after I made a movie defending Satanists, you know, I thought to myself, who do people hate more than Satanists? But that's not really true, of course. It's more like, I am, I think what I'm good at and what I'm, I think what I'm good at and what I'm trying to do often with my films is find really entertaining, funny ways to talk about really serious issues that I don't think a po-faced delivery would get a big audience for. And I want people to be able to change their minds. I want people to be willing to change their minds. I love that. I love the feeling of finding out that I'm wrong. Not everyone does. I love it. I'm trying to engineer moments where it's like destabilizing for people. I think one of the most insightful criticisms is a jazz ensemble is kind of a call-and-response thing. It's equal parts. Everybody's playing against each other. And that Kenny G, it's just Kenny G. It's just the saxophone. Everybody else there is there to support him. Yeah, so solo performance. He says it's not sex, it's masturbation. The most quoted line in the movie. But that guy is also a ridiculous character of a jazz. But why should jazz have one meaning that is described by some old white guys who are really upset that this Jewish guy from Seattle is selling so many records and is fucking with their little pot? Yes. I agree with you that that is a question the movie raises. I can see it both ways. I'm trying to play it down the middle. I'm trying to lay out a kind of banquet of discussion topics. Lane's films all proceed from the assumption that she doesn't have all the answers and that she doesn't know the best way for other people to live or the best music to listen to. It's no coincidence that she's a longtime reader of Reason Magazine. I started subscribing to Reason when I was in college and I went to Vassar. So it like came in the mail. I would like put it underneath all my other mail to bring it back to my dorm room. But honestly, like in high school, I remember we had like a politics class and you were supposed to choose like Democrat or Republican to like be part of the debate or whatever. And I just like didn't like it. I just didn't know what to do because I was like, I don't want either one. And my teacher was like, okay, well, there's this other thing. And I think on some level I probably was attracted to it because it made me feel special. Like I'm the one person here who doesn't want to go along with the crowd. I was like, well, yeah, society needs people who are annoying, who stand outside and say, yeah, but what about this? You know, and like I've always identified with that kind of personality. And I do think that is somewhat of a kind of libertarian personality type. But as far as my ideology goes in the films, I think to the extent that there is ideology there, it's very much about humility. I think I'm a genius and I should run the world. But like I would never want to do that because I actually don't think that my ideas are better than other people's ideas. I mean, I think I have ideas about how I want to live, but I'm not interested in imposing them on other people. I think I would more say that I'm asking people usually to consider issues from different points of view and to acknowledge that probably they're going to gravitate toward one of those. So you might watch the Kenne G film and think the critics are villains. You might watch the Kenne G film and think that Kenny... Kenne G is history's greatest monster. Yes, someone else would watch it and find him odious and unacceptable. I am thrilled to make a film that allows for those readings. I really am not trying to tell people what to think, truly. But I do think that there are things that I'm passionate about foregrounding that I want to force people to contend with.