Neon Hustle

Neon Hustle's Totally Subjective and Woefully Incomplete Guide to the Best Music of 2010

2010-12-15T20:28:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I've felt compelled to make a list. And now I have. The numerical rankings are as arbitrary as they ever are, but it's all in good fun, right?

Honorable Mentions:

Sharks - Show of Hands

British kids doing it the way British kids did before British kids made terrible music.

Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

In a year where Drive-By Truckers, The Hold Steady, and about million other awesome bands made astonishingly mediocre records, Arcade Fire made another great one. That says... something, doesn't it?

Surfer Blood - Astro Coast

American kids doing it the way American kids did it before American kids made terrible music.

#5 The Gaslight Anthem - American Slang

Maybe the most Springsteen-y of all the new, Springsteen-y bands around. And I mean that in the absolute best way possible.

#4 The National - High Violet

We're already taking them for granted, aren't we? Although they might not be as flashy as some of the artists taking end of year honers around the web, The National have done nothing less than craft by far the most durable, assured, indie rock record of the year. It might never be your "favorite" album, but this is one we'll return to time and time again, right after (or fucking BEFORE!) we listen to Alligator or Boxer for the 1,000th time too...

#3 LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening

James Murphy said that this might be the final LCD record, and that it was its best. Only time will tell regarding the former, but the latter is true. The first LP was a fun exercise, cobbling together a bunch of singles and throwing together a portrait of the artist as a not-young-for-long man, and the second has maybe the all-time great LCD tracks, but this is the best, most balanced, top-to-bottom BEST of the lot.

#2 Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

I'm seriously almost sick of talking about this album. But it IS an ALBUM- and that is itself a rarity in hip-hop. Put it this way: Whether or not you believe he's an artist of this particular caliber, what matters is that Kanye West BELIEVES that he is Bob Dylan and Elvis and The Beatles and Prince and whomever else. That's why he acts how he acts. That's why he is who he is. And that's why he's able to produce a work as drop-dead-incredible as MBDTF. When he interrupted Taylor at the VMAs, most people thought "Oh my God! What an asshole! What a jerk! I just hate him!" I thought "Dude... The next Kanye record is gonna be sooooooo gooooooood..." And it is.

#1 Titus Andronicus - The Monitor

Rarest of feats: A high concept album that almost instantly makes itself at home within the listener like a long-beloved favorite. Alienation, frustration, indignation and every other boon of youthful righteousness, all delivered directly from the brain of one Patrick Stickles, generation Y's first truly great guitar hero.

The Immortals List: #100-#81 Recap

2010-09-14T16:44:00.000-07:00

Can you believe it, guys? It seems like we only just began our trip through Rolling Stone's list of "The Immortals", doesn't it?

Oh, right.

Fuck it, we're TWENTY entries in! Whoo!

When the once-illustrious publication in question chose, seemingly at random, the years 1953 as the moment that rock music "began", the list of artists chosen from the time period since was generally enjoyed as non-controversial nostalgia, and nothing that people would really get up in arms about. But if my trip through some of the greats (and some of the horrific misfires) has taught me anything, it's that...

Umm... Wait, what did we take from these legendary artists?

Shall we re-cap?

Beginning at the ending:

#100 - Lee “Scratch” Perry: Makes being high in Jamaica sound fucking awesome. Which, you know, it probably is.

#99 - Curtis Mayfield: Makes being an unheralded genius in a tumultuous era sound fucking awesome.

#98 - Roxy Music: Makes being really, really English sound fucking awesome.

#97 - Diana Ross and the Supremes: Makes being “kept” by Berry Gordy sound fucking awesome.

#96 - Martha and the Vandellas: Makes being a girl group sound fucking awesome and sort of noble.

#95 - Lynyrd Skynyrd: Makes being “Southern” sound fucking awesome. (This is the highest praise I have ever or will ever give this band.)

#94 - Nine Inch Nails: Makes being Trent Reznor sound fucking awesome. I guess.

#93 - Booker T. And The MGs: Makes being “Southern” sound way more fucking awesome than Lynyrd Skynyrd does. Because FUCK YOU, Lynyrd Skynyrd!

#92 - Guns N’ Roses: Makes the reasons that we know Los Angeles isn’t fucking awesome sound fucking awesome.

#91 - Ricky Nelson: Makes being a posthumously-appreciated child star sound fucking awesome.

#90 - Carlos Santana: Makes getting some Mexican food sound fucking awesome. Hey, you wanna go get some Mexican food?

#89 - The Yardbirds: Makes being capable of more sound fucking awesome.

#88 - Miles Davis: Makes being over the hill and still more interesting than anybody else in the world sound fucking awesome.

#87 - Gram Parsons: Makes being a trustafarian sound fucking awesome.

#86 - 2Pac Shakur: Makes dying young sound fucking awesome.

#85 - Black Sabbath: Makes faeries and mental instability sound fucking METAL.

#84 - James Taylor: Sucks.

#83 - N.W.A: Makes the 90s sound fucking awesome.

#82 - Eminem: Makes the early 2000s sound fucking awesome.

#81 - The Drifters: Makes being

The Immortals #81 - The Drifters

2010-09-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

It goes like this: Brian Wilson heard "Be My Baby" ringing in his ears as he composed his teenage symphonies to God, and Phil Spector heard The Drifters when he composed "Be My Baby"...

The Drifters weren't necessarily the best of the early R&B groups, not any more than the Ronettes were the greatest of Spector's stable of "pet" production projects (The Crystals and especially Darlene Love spring to mind there), but they definitely deserve credit as largely responsible for their era's advancement of black American music into the dominant popular form of 20th century. Though the charts were littered with pop vocal groups in the 1950s, the Drifters' evolution of straightforward doo-wop into full-fledged orchestrations and overwhelming success and popularity influenced artists across many genres as that decade gave way to the 1960s.

There would arguably be no Wall of Sound without the Drifters', who also happened to serve as the penultimate production vehicle of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (whose shared denial of a place on the Immortals list is borderline criminal). There would also be no Motown without the blueprint set by Leiber and Stoller's efforts with the Drifters, which fused pre-soul rhythm and blues to lush pop arrangements, yet still remained, unmistakably, "rock and roll."

Wedding orchestral strings and brass to the fledgling sounds of young R&B hardly seems like a revolutionary act today, but it is also telling that seemingly every genre-of-the-moment now "matures" into replicating exactly that once it becomes sufficiently mainstream today.

Oh, and they might actually have been the best of the early R&B vocal groups to boot. More than enough reason to warrant inclusion on this list.

The Immortals #82 - Eminem

2010-08-06T06:44:00.000-07:00

Brace yourself. Because I'm about to make one of those grand, broad, sweeping comparisons between a relatively "young" media figure and one of the most enduring and popular icons in pop culture history. I'm warning you now that if this is the sort of thing that is as nausea-inducing to you as it usually is to me, then here's your chance to skip it now. Might I recommend a visit to www.deadbluesguys.com to peruse the grave sites of many terrific artists who were not featured in Rolling Stone's "Immortals" list? Or maybe one of those websites with the funny cats? Because here, thar be discussion of Eminem. Eminem- hip-hop's answer to...

wait for it...

Elvis Presley.

(Yes, because he's white.)

((Mostly)).

Yeah, it's really that easy. It's, like, All Music Guide easy. So let's get the list out of the way early. Eminem and Elvis are the two highest selling solo artists in their respective genres (not counting 2Pac's sales for the bazillion re-packagings of the same material). Both popularized their genres nearly a decade after their arrival as full-fledged popular phenomena in the "other" America (is it racist to continue the "black people are cool" meme? How about just ahead of the curve then?), and both became the first mega-selling white cultural ambassadors of their respective genres (I'll get to the Beastie Boys and why they're not hip-hop later on down this list).

Both also entered secondary careers as multi-media "threats" who blurred the lines between personal iconography and art, although, for the record, Eminem is a way better actor. And the public issues with substance abuse have been well-documented in the case of both men, as well as their precipitous effect in their declining popularity in eras not far removed from their initial popularity- Elvis because the Comeback Special really only earned him a quicker flight to Vegas residency as rock moved on and people stopped buying his records in favor of newer, more exciting sounds, and Em because 1999 was for-fucking-ever ago and nobody buys CDs of any kind anymore.

Eminem didn't "steal" hip-hop any more than Elvis did rock and roll, but its hard to manage a reason for his inclusion on this list without framing him as some sort of analogue to "The King" (a term used pro forma, believe me). I don't know that anybody was as really influenced by Elvis any more than either the acts he was accused of ripping off or those whom he merely outsold as contemporaries. Sure, he was great for selling the image, but did he add anything so definitively greater than Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, or frankly anybody that also happened to be recording for Sun in 1953? And is there something in "Stan" or "The Real Slim Shady" that's set to ignite a dormant creative spark in some soon-to-be brilliant 'head out there with an unwritten masterpiece that will change everything? I doubt it.

That doesn't mean they're not fun songs, or records like The Marshall Mathers LP don't hold up today. Em is a fine MC, with above average delivery and no worse than average lyricism. And he's from the Midwest. You can really never overstate the benefit of a neutral accent toward one's mainstream appeal. And as a representative of the last golden age of the music video (a form whose relevance fellow NH alumnus Steve and I notably and vastly disagree on) Eminem is a particularly poptent representative of the time and place. Hey, just like Elvis was for television! Look at that! When it rains over-obvious analogies it pours.

Bottom-line: Eminem did for hip-hop the same thing that Elvis did for rock and roll. He brought new heights of popularity to a "dangerous" style of music a good period of time after all the real danger had left it. And because there will never, ever be another 25x platinum-selling rapper, the easy comparison is all we're ever really gonna need to remember him by. That and his records, I guess. But mostly the other thing.

The Immortals #83 - N.W.A.

2010-07-31T14:27:00.000-07:00

Might as well have single-handedly invented the parental advisory sticker. And hey, God bless 'em for it.

Let's start with the obvious good: Eazy is one of the most compelling and charismatic performers of his generation. Ren, Yella and Dre, though seemingly relegated to near side-men status at times, nonetheless make their presence abundantly known in some of the groups most durable and beloved tracks. And here a baby-faced Ice Cube immediately announces himself as a force of nature, absolutely dominating his way through arguably one of the most influential A-sides in hip-hop history (a streak he'd soon continue in his indispensable early solo work).

Still, I'm not positive why Straight Outta Compton is looked-upon as an album quite as highly as it is, though I do have a pet theory that might explain its current status. See, as a child of the 90s (started high school in the fall of '96, class of '00), I remember the decade for being the times when everything updated. With the fall of the Berlin Wall came the fall of the me-me-me! 80s, and a new world order was soon established. Gen X was to become as prominent in the culture as the Boomers had been, and the artistic underground of any number of media was about to define the mainstream, with all the commercial and cache privileges that implied. Yet for all its significance, the 90s had precious few definitive musical texts to represent it. By the time 1996 rolled around, the decade was ready to coast out on an endless parade of faux-grunge, pre-packaged pop, and gangsta-gangsta wannabe redundancy (and sometimes all at the same time!)

Yella and Dre's production isn't really all that flashy, but its proto-West Coast G-thing vibe is enduring, and its high points propel the album's most memorable tracks, but for the most part this is a stepping stone to Dre's more celebrated future efforts. Yet we remember these songs as being elementarily powerful, mostly because we can't seem to disassociate them from images of the larger-than-life place so proudly 'repped in the title that came just a few years later. When the riots rocked South Central in the wake of... well, pretty much everything that N.W.A said was going on in their neighborhood, culminating with the verdict of the Rodney King trial and subsequent boiling-over of the populace into civil unrest, many in the media (as does now, it seems, the gaze of history) looked to the biggest voices in the rap world as prophets who portended it all in their lyrics. We had the troubled times, but lacked a natural soundtrack, until we picked this one.

But even though Straight Outta Compton is maybe best-remembered for it's opening one-two punch and a whole lot of f-bombs, it's hardly that straightforward or politically focused a record. Public Enemy was called "The Black CNN" because Chuck D's brought the "informed and angry about it" gravitas of a grown-ass man, but the members of N.W.A. exploded into public life at a tender age in their early adulthood. Eazy was 25, but the rest of the group were barely out of their teens- hell, Cube hadn't yet crossed that threshold. Compared to the more legitimately conscious hip-hop in that period, "Straight Outta Compton" and "Fuck tha Police" are less social commentary than an adolescent lashing-out, just raw, juvenile anger. It's the kind of emotion that's hard to muster as an adult with responsibilities like a job to get up for in the morning. Elsewhere, "I Ain't tha 1" and, um, basically everything that comes out of Eazy-E's mouth display sexual politics of a sophistication on par with your average horny 15-year-old boy.

Most of the tracks are slice-of-life grooves about partying, getting laid, and waking up the next day hoping not to get hassled by cops or lesser MCs, liberally coated with lyrical posturing on how much they get laid, party, and fuck up other MCs. In that light, Straight Outta Compton is really sort of underrated as one of the better coming of age albums of its era. And when Cube left the group after its release, it might as well have been the last scene of Stand By Me, with Richard Dreyfuss narrating about how now Ren drives a forklift and Eazy died just six years after that fateful day (and River Phoenix fades away...)

When the PMRC inquisition the music industry to adopt the so-called "Tipper Sticker", it was really only a matter of time before that little black and white warning symbol became the prized badge of entry to new worlds of badass-ness for kids all over America. And the irony of N.W.A now is that in our fervor to indulge the legacy of Straight Outta Compton, we've all become little Tipper Gores ourselves. This music validates our own inner-teenagers, the part of ourselves that needs to remember that time and place as feels most fitting to us now. And so we remember the people who remind us of then in the same way. That's why Straight Outta Compton still feels mostly scary and cool and vital today, even if the 90s as a whole weren't quite as much those things as we might remember them.

The Immortals #84 - James Taylor

2010-05-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

With the his success of ultra-popular, triple-platinum-selling second album, James Taylor became first bonafide superstar that heralded the "singer/songwriter" era, a genre that was differentiated from other music made by people who both wrote and sung their own songs in the early 1970s by its transparent willingness to veer into gratingly self-absorbed and sonically derivative territories. And considering that this was a generation of musicians who were essentially just trying to do bad impressions of Bob Dylan, that's really saying something.

Sweet Baby James is packed with the hallmarks that defined the singer/songwriter tag, as Taylor paints his tracks in broad, bucolic strokes of Americana gleaned from the country and folk of in the previous decade, and polishes them to a high gloss of mellifluousness that consistently overwhelms those barely-there moments that hint of intelligence and even a faintly dark sense of humor contained within them. In places, it's exceptionally easy to hear the title track, or "Blossom", or the iconic "Fire and Rain" and find them perfectly pleasant for what they are, which is "perfectly pleasant", I guess. But much of this album is devoted to the perfunctory task of keeping appearances of depth, be they in the shamefully thin "character study" of "Sunny Skies" or a similarly de rigueur attempt at "interpreting" the American songbook, such as with Stephen Forster's staple/chestnut "Oh! Susanna" (you know, because James was down with the whole folkie-thing.)

Which I guess begs the question of just how "good" these songs even needed to be in the first place. The "singer/songwriter" was a pop designation, and folks like Taylor were simply trying to make a name for themselves in the industry with nice songs that people liked to listen to. There's an honesty there, sure. If there wasn't, how could it so often veer into the irritating level of insistent sincerity that we so often associate with the "guy with a guitar?" And much of the music produced by Taylor and his contemporaries (or, as I'd argue, his betters) such as Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Cat Stevens, and Carole King was truly beautiful, and even sometimes deeply affecting. And hey, if selling records with a nice ditty was really the only goal he had, then Taylor was as successful a performer as anybody could possibly become by that measure.

But still, there's a lot that's missing from Dylan's influence in Taylor and the seemingly endless parade of singer/songwriters who followed his example. Dylan's was a wicked wit and he was a truly inveterate bastard, and when he turned his ire toward a subject of personal scorn (especially himself) he'd waste not one syllable in the course of intellectually and emotionally eviscerating both it and the listener. And when he stole your song, it was to show us something about where we came from and why we're here now- and at least he had the integrity to admit so outright.

A few singer/songwriters who embodied Dylan's ethos and made tremendous records (I'm thinking of Randy Newman here, who's a goddamned national treasure as far as I'm concerned), but the majority of those who followed him never even tried. James Taylor never had any illusions that he could ever be so vital, ever matter that much. At least he was as forthright as Dylan was when addressing that particular fact. In an interview with Charlie Rose in 2000, he admitted:

I've taken no more risk than I absolutely had to. I'm not changing the world, and I don't have anything to prove.

Well, I guess that's your prerogative, James. But if that's really the case, then what makes you think we could give a fuck about anything you have to say?

The Immortals #85 - Black Sabbath

2010-05-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

Just as The Ramones moved a step beyond the archetypes created by The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, and another number of other proto-acts that predicted their genre to become the first definitive punk rock band, so too did Sabbath solidify their place as history's first great true heavy metal band with 1970's Paranoid.

It's pretty cool, man.

Unlike a lot of other kids, who seem to have grown up on classic rock radio staples by Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Hendrix, I went about this whole thing ass-backward. I only acquainted myself with traditional "hard-rock" after reverse-engineering its history beginning at my punk-loving roots. After spending my teens with only a casual relationship to Suicidal Tendencies and Motorhead, I started to move toward more metal-friendly hardcore like the Dillinger Escape Plan and Converge in my early 20s, gradually discovering the more popular grindcore and melodic death metal of the 90s (big ups to Entombed and At the Gates) before meeting the "Big Four" of 80s speed and thrash (Anthrax, Megadeth, SLAAYEERR and *sigh* Metallica) and New Wave British bands like Maiden and Priest. As it was, I didn't arrive at the blues-indebted, "classic rock" era of 70s metal until the last couple of years, despite the fact that at any moment in the past ten years I could likely have randomly tuned my radio dial across the FM band for pretty good odds of hearing any track from Paranoid or Zoso.

Did I mention that before I'd ever heard those records, I was already co-hosted my college radio station's metal show for a year in grad school? Sitting in the booth with two teenagers with a fixation on cheesy power metal and Dio-era Sabbath? Man... fuck all of us...

Paranoid is an undeniably solid record with several moments of transcendence, which isn't to say it lacks flaws. In fact, arguably the weakest part of Sabbath was its most famous association. Ozzy sounded plain silly even back then, not only in the modulated vocal intro to "Iron Man" or his awkward phrasing ("Caaan he walk-at-all/Or if he moo-oo-ooves will he fall?"), but also in the fact that he was still pretty much a hippy-dippy child of the 60s and at times it feels like he's in danger of being outpaced by the band making such heavy music around him.

Ozzy's best lyrics were the ones grounded in the anxious realities of death, war, and his own depression, and his weakest indulged a tastes for fantasy and science fiction in a way that was totally permissible back then when read for vague, anti-Christian overtones, but today would probably get you filed somewhere between My Chemical Romance and Coheed and Cambria on the Hot Topic t-shirt wall. (One track on here is titled "Faeries Wear Boots", and the original name for "War Pigs" and the album as a whole? Walpurgis, after the witches' holiday of the Spring. Robert Plant, I'm comin' for you later on down this list...)

I don't mean to just shit-talk Ozzy, because each composition credits all four band members and by all accounts Ozzy had a big part in their writing (not to mention that Tony Iommi was, I'm pretty sure, just as much into the unicorns crap as he was.) Also, he could wear a fringed-jacket like a fucking champ. But if these tracks had been originally released by an instrumental power trio version of Sabbath, you'd be hard pressed to tell me they wouldn't have rocked just as hard. Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward are impeccably tight, and the stretches between Ozzy's verses are every bit as engaging for their seamless integration of riffs and solos into straightforward (but never simple) as their frontman's admittedly somewhat charismatic presence. Ozzy even gets a couple of solid vocal moments, especially on the title track and "Hand of Doom", so, you know, good on him, I guess.

Today, listening to Paranoid is very much what I imagined it was in 1970, and from what little I've seen of the still ridiculously popular Ozzfest tours, the band is pretty much just that live as well. Perhaps they don't sound as delightfully scuzzy as they would on vinyl when you're high as balls, but what's so nice about music of this type- their authenticity isn't anything that's lost with age, which is more than can be said of a lot of the other reunions that have happened in the name of a little filthy luchre.

The Immortals #86 - 2Pac Shakur

2010-05-10T14:11:00.000-07:00

Okay, confession time: I'd never heard a 2Pac song before sitting down to write this post.

Despite being, ostensibly, his core audience (a white, suburban high school freshman in southern California) when his post-incarceration magnum opus, All Eyez On Me was released, rocketing him to pop superstardom, I somehow managed to completely miss the phenomena. I was just old enough to be turning off MTV, and the once-venerable Los Angeles rock radio institution KROQ-FM had not yet completed its hellish devolution into a Clearchannel atrocity. And I never got invited to parties or had any fun ever. I had a vague familiarity with "California Love" through cultural osmosis, and I knew to attribute the phrase "picture me rollin'" to his track of the same name, but otherwise I managed to live to the ripe old age of 27 years old before becoming acquainted with the works of Mr. Tupac Amaru Shakur.

And I'm sorry, you guys, but I just do not get it.

Now, it's true that I'm the biggest hip-hop guy, but I'm far from a neophyte. I've got love for most of the genre's other entrants on Rolling Stone's "Immortals" list, and a bunch of other fairly "mainstream" acts like Eric B, and Rakim, Public Enemy, The Pharcyde, Boogie Down Productions/KRS-ONE, and A Tribe Called Quest- all have all seen some play in my collection (to name but a few...) But more important than my credentials (or relative lack thereof) is that 2Pac provides us with our first opportunity to address rap and hip-hop's inclusion by RS' parade of experts and legends as ostensibly belonging naturally within some broad interpretation of the rock and roll milieu.

Put flatly, it is incredibly dismissive of perhaps the most culturally significant musical movement of the latter half of the 20th century, despite the fact that RS' decision could charitably be taken as an intended compliment to hip-hop, that it's greatest artists are every bit as important as those from "plain old" rock and roll. But this gesture is wholly misguided, and ultimately as equally great an implied insult to the titans of jazz (and, arguably, giants of country and soul musics as well) who were not seen as deserving recognition in the world of rock music in its "first 50 years."

The six hip-hop artists who made the top 100 (four of whom are clustered between spots #75 and #86) represent a plot on behalf of Rolling Stone that could be taken as token reference at best and grotesquely commercial at worst- an slight that stings all the greater when considering that such a middling a talent as 2Pac managed to end up occupying a space that could have otherwise gone to John Coltrane or Willie Nelson (or hell, even Garth Brooks! I mean, the dude sold a bazillion fucking records, right?) But no, the "masterminds" behind the Immortals project saw fit to incorporate an overwhelmingly popular (and profitable) part of their magazine's coverage since the late 1980s with a transparent attempt to play it off as a tribute from rock and roll to hip-hop that really does neither any service, ultimately.

So why 2Pac? Well, for a lot of the reasons that Gram Parsons (our #87) is here, quite frankly. If any rapper's personal mythology ever overwhelmed the quality of his art, it was Shakur's. The oft-sung ballad of the thug-poet with who embodied such fake dynamic tensions as being "hard edged" with a "gentle soul" has somehow not been undone in the almost 15 years following his death in a senseless act of life-imitating-music-industry-created-hype, as if nobody checked the wiki and took note that the dude was a dancer with the Digital Underground (a far more honest and entertaining venture than anything from 'Pac's own recording career- "Samoans!"), or that nobody ever played the childish media games of glamorizing gang violence more egregiously.

Instead, we somehow remember him as the profligate free spirit who was lost before his time, leaving us with nothing but his interminable hours of uninspired teenage bullshit spewn across tracks so utterly unremarkable as to border on... nothing. They're fucking boring. I just listened to an hour of this two-disc Greatest Hits thing, and I can't even think of a comparison that wouldn't make his music sound like some other thing that's far more interesting and worthy of anybody's time.

Were I so inclined play this as an insult to hip-hop, I would point to 2Pac as the ultimate triumph of persona over substance, but that really isn't any more uniquely warranted a criticism as could be equally applied to 60 years of pop music, so fuck it. Instead I'll pay a specific (and ultimately far more damning) insult to Shakur for his inexplicable legions of fans to suffer: You already know that if you hadn't been shot, you'd have gotten as old and pathetic as Elvis did at the end, but you know what else?

Biggie wouldn't have.

Yeah, that's right. You thought I'd write something about 'Pac that did the favor of not mentioning him? Well I didn't. Because as long as we're humoring this little exercise and including rappers on the list, Biggie was just one of a great many artists who deserved to be here more than you.

Modern Library Top 100: #94 - Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

2010-05-09T20:51:00.000-07:00

Around the same time a few white kids in your typical suburban high school--my typical suburban high school, weirdly enough--rallied around the American flag to say they weren't too fond of a multiracial America, thank you very much, I was turning the final page on Jean Rhys's celebrated meditation on racial identity. I doubt any of those boys has read Wide Sargasso Sea, but I'm sure they would find it instructive. It's as racist as they are.

Jean Rhys first read Jane Eyre as a teenager, and was appalled at the revolting portrayal of Bertha Mason, the Jamaican creole madwoman banished to the attic of Thornfield Hall. A creole herself, Rhys decided to give Bertha her due, writing a prequel of sorts describing Bertha's youth as white girl growing up in Jamaica in the wake of emancipation. Rhys does her best to rehabilitate Mason's image, along the way tackling BIG ISSUES like the existential anguish of being in a economically dominant minority, or the pain of growing up in a nice big house that's falling apart because your mother couldn't afford to pay her former slaves enough to keep it up. And why are all the black people so mean to Bertha (here called Antoinette) anyway? The horror!

So no, I did not like this novel. To be charitable, Rhys is definitely on point vis-a-vis Victorian gender relations. She does a very good job of painting Antoinette's husband as the domineering weasel who effectively forces her into madness, his appropriation of her so complete that he even succeeds in renaming her. (Not that complete, of course, because she does eventually burn his house down in Jane Eyre. But still). But woo boy, nobody would accuse Rhys of being racially sensitive (except, of course, sensitive to the plight of white people).

Christophine, the principal black person in the novel, is a wise old woman who practices voodoo, and shepherds Antoinette throughout the narrative. She's the very definition of the magical negro, and she's just as offensive as Uncle Remus. Sandi Cosway is another black person who pops up, and he happens to be the love of Antoinette's life. He arrives for a single page to save her from a schoolyard beating, then disappears entirely from the story for his trouble. But hey, we're at least told that Sandi and Antoinette were engaged, so that's....something, I guess. The rest of the black characters either burn down Antoinette's childhood home, steal her clothes, kill her brother, call her names, or seduce her husband. Some critics have defended Rhys's portrayal of black Jamaicans, since the story is told from the point of view of a 19th century genteel Creole woman, reflecting what would have been her feelings on race. Bullfeathers, I say.

Anyway, I guess the point of this all is that it really shouldn't be so hard to step outside yourself and write a sympathetic fully-realized character outside your own experience. But for whatever reason people keep fucking it up. I've long railed against Hollywood's (a collection of white men if there ever was one) treatment of women as either baby-crazy psychopaths (I'm looking at you, Judy Greer) or bland objects of adolescent desire (oh hi, Zooey Deschanel!). And obviously it's not just about gender. Going back a wee bit further, Robinson Crusoe's boy Friday wasn't exactly a positive step forward in race relations.

So maybe I shouldn't be so harsh on Wide Sargasso Sea. It's just another pearl in a necklace of failure. And besides, it's not a total drag. But if it's one of the best novels of the 20th Century, we deserve better.

The Immortals #87 - Gram Parsons

2010-05-09T11:17:00.000-07:00

The "Whatever That Is" Immortals post.

(Props if you got that reference.)

I'll admit to being moderately annoyed that this entry is not simply for The Flying Burrito Brothers. It's true that Chris Hillman will get his props in another entry much further down on this list, and that there is no single figure more closely associated with his referred musical style on this side of the nearest Urban Outfitters, but still- doesn't this just sort of smack of aggrandizement? Almost nowhere in the annals of his discography does he achieve anything of note without significant collaborative effort.

Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the final Byrds LP and often cited as the first "country-rock" album, was dominated by Roger McGuinn while his first two albums with the Flying Burrito Bros (a band name he outright stole from his old International Submarine Band-mates), The Guilded Palace of Sin and Burrito Deluxe, were all-star efforts featuring the talents of former Byrds Hillman and Michael Clarke along with incomparable efforts from bassist Chris Ethridge and pedal steel guitarist "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow. And as the Burritos continued to make underrated records following Parsons' departure, Gram made a couple of records with no less a talented co-star than the young Miss Emmylou Harris; records that went nowhere until, decades after his overdose, they were dusted off as a hipster cause célèbre and credited for kick-starting the alt country craze that began in earnest in the 1990s.

Parsons' mythology has almost certainly outpaced any legitimate claim he might have had to being the "godfather" of alt country. Apart from the incalculable influence of the outsider country sounds made in Bakersfield and Lubbock in the mid-20th century, there were simply too many credible revivalists of folk, rock, blues and Appalachian musics to essentialize as any sort of cohesive "movement" under the patronage of a rich-born, Harvard-educated Southern boy who played with some good bands once he moved to LA.

Yet we know more about Gram than practically any of the other supposed originators of alt country, and a large part of me suspects that it's because he's just so damned easy to glamorize. He was credited years after his early passing as an unheralded genius. He had fascinating, idiosyncratic interests UFOs, Joshua Tree, rodeo tailoring and casual narcotics usage. And it certainly never hurt that he was always the cutest boy in any room he walked into. He was the genuine, original indie idol. Hell, he was even predisposed to calling his particular take on country, folk, gospel and rock as "cosmic American music", making him the original "whatever that is" alt-pedagogue. I mean, not to diminish all the excellent music that he played in his too-short 26 years, but did any other musician benefit as much from the live fast, die young school of rock legacy-making as Gram?

Still. There's something to idol-worship... isn't there?

Glorious Noise recently pointed to a section of The Observer's press for a new Rolling Stones documentary that made note of the closeness of Mick and Gram:

"Keith and Gram were intimate like brothers, especially musically. The idea was floating around that Gram would produce a Gram Parsons album for the newly formed Rolling Stones Records. Mick, I think, was a little afraid because that would mean that Gram and Keith might even tour together to promote it. And if there is no room for Mick, there is no room also for the Rolling Stones."

My favorite piece of Burrito Bros. trivia is that it was they, and not the Stones, who first recorded and released a version of the Richards/Jagger composition "Wild Horses." The story goes that, during their prolonged European bro-down, Keith played a demo of the song for Gram, and Parsons flipped for it and insisted that he be allowed to record it with for the Burritos' second album, which wound up being released a year before Sticky Fingers. The result is, blasphemy be damned, my favorite version of my favorite Stones song.

Three years later, he'd be dead, and he wasn't even really famous yet.

What if indeed...

The Immortals #88 - Miles Davis

2010-05-08T12:34:00.000-07:00

In Murray Lerner's Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue, there's a moment in which percussionist James Mtume argues that Miles Davis' move to fusion and "jazz-rock" (a term that everybody seems as loathe to accept as I was to type it) was a natural progression by one of the 20th century's greatest musical innovators:

Look man, when the temperance scale was created- the 440- that was the synthesizer of its time. I'm sure there was some harpsichord players walking around talking about "they're not keeping it real..."

In the same film, jazz critic and noted cantankerous old crank Stanley Crouch had a different take:

That's bullshit. That's all part of the "Miles Davis" myth. Miles Davis was trying to make some money.

Is it too much of a cop-out to say that they were both right?

Rolling Stone's list of "The Immortals" includes more than one artist whose work was quite conspicuously not, or not really, of rock and roll or its tributary genres. We'll get to the assembled rappers and crossover stars as we try to reconcile those musics' place in "rock" history in just a little while, but sneaking a peak at what's to come, we note a peculiar absence of homage to any artists from that most uniquely American of all art forms: jazz. In fact, only one artist appears on this list that is more widely associated with jazz, and he's on here for the work that most conspicuously got him labeled as a sellout and rejected by true jazz fans. Not that he cared.

See, the truth is that Miles Davis was kind of a little fucker.

There's little to dispute that Miles did more for jazz in his six decades-long career (and particularly the thirty years spanning 1945 to 1975) than perhaps any single performer, bandleader, composer, or producer. He ushered his form into more new styles in more new eras than anybody, and had the virtuoso chops to back up every accolade he ever earned or should have earned. But for all his meaningful innovation and pure, unadulterated musical brilliance, Davis wasn't getting rich as a middle-aged jazzer. Nobody pays their rent in respect.

Add in to the equation that Miles had recently married the new Mrs. Betty Davis, a firebrand funk/soul singer who introduced him to a few spiritual soulmates in the music of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. The psychedelic sounds of acid-soul and zeroed-out funk inspired Miles, always restless and ready to push the boundaries of whatever came next, to plug in and riff, an event that might have ranked with Dylan at Newport in 1965, if not for the fact that, yeah, Miles was kinda-sorta hoping to cross over to the new generation of kids and hopefully make some real dough.

The results owed more than a little to his influences. Davis would later credit entire riffs from A Tribute to Jack Johnson and Big Fun (compiled mostly from his On the Corner outtakes) to Hendrix and Sly, lifted wholesale and warped beyond recognition by collaborators like Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Pete Cosey, Tony Williams, and Airto Moreira, to name just a few. And while his live shows in the 1970s were uncompromisingly hard-edged and disputatious of the core audience who had followed him from jazz to... whatever this was, his records in that era were meticulously constructed from take after labyrinthine take, jam after endless jam in post-production to create his finished products. Be it "jazz" or not, the mercurial mixture was composed with an ear for something Miles specifically wanted his audience to hear, even if they didn't get it.

I'm not sure I get it, either. Listening to Bitches Brew for the first time revealed little more than dissonance for broad, almost interminable stretches, even having been primed in 2010 by my first adult excursions into jazz appreciation. I've trained on Coleman and Dolphy and Zorn, at least a little, but I'd be hard-pressed to explain what exactly was going on here beyond the fact that the pianos were electric. And while Bitches Brew is, for whatever reasons, heralded as the masterwork of "Miles Electric", I'd argue that there are far more examples of greater significance on his other big albums of this era for both impressions on jazz and rock musics.

On the Corner and Big Fun are terrific, freaky cousins to Curtis Mayfield, late-period Temptations, and Sly's There's A Riot Goin' On. Live-Evil bounces like a more propulsive Funkadelic, and would fit neatly on the shelf next to Maggot Brain (another 1971 classic.) And In a Silent Way contains more accessibly beautiful moments than arguably much of his "traditional" jazz works since he and Gil Evans interpreted Gershwin on Porgy and Bess.

And while Lerner's documentary would have you believe that Davis' electric work was most meaningful to lame jam bands, the sonic scope of what he achieved in these diversions had profound and far-reaching impacts on everything that came after it (Eno's Another Green World alone ties Miles to most of modern alternative music in six degrees or less.)

And that's pretty damned cool. Even if Stanley Crouch (and I) would rather listen to 'Round Midnight or Live at Newport 1958 again instead.

The Immortals #89 - The Yardbirds

2010-05-03T15:36:00.000-07:00

It's telling that I couldn't find any "definitive" Yardbirds record to listen to when preparing this entry. The band is best known for being a significant presence in the early "British Invasion" of 60s rock and for having a membership that included Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page- all of whom would go on to become much more famous for making much better music of much greater importance in the immediate future.

A run through this Yardbirds compilation's track list displays that the band failed to be a legitimate showcase for those celebrated musicians as either guitarists or songwriters. Like so many great bands of their time, they made their name on covers that interpreted American rock, soul and blues through the filter of white English kids with good taste in fashion, some fairly exotic instrumentation, and the desperate need to lay pipe for better careers to come.

(It's an old writer's term. Look it up.)

There are some kickin' tracks on here, especially the barbed wire whip of "Heart Full of Soul" and the justly-renowned "For Your Love", but both of those were written by the dude from 10cc. If Clapton, the Jeff Beck Group, and Led Zeppelin were going to eventually reinvent rock and roll into their own versions of drug-fuled power riffage (Clapton), heavy fusion (Beck), and... ummm... just a really kick-ass, turned-to-eleven version of the Yardbirds (Page), they were going to have to start at an earlier link in its evolutionary chain.

But unlike peers like the Beatles, Stones, and Kinks, the Yardbirds didn't go forward to do their best, most universe-altering work as a unified whole. And so now "The Yardbirds" are frozen in time, the greatest of the British Invasion acts not to mutate into something else, the embodiment of a sort of adolescent stage in rock's development.

The Immortals #90 - Carlos Santana

2009-11-08T16:16:00.000-08:00

Santana is lot like Jimi Hendrix, if Hendrix had only been about as nonthreatening as a plate of refried beans.

Was that racist?

In 1999, Santana released the mega-selling collaborations album Supernatural, featuring such enduring creative powerhouses as Rob Thomas (he was in Matchbox 20!), Eagle-Eye Cherry (his name is all nouns!), and Everlast (he wrote "Jump Around!") This made him the most popular middle-aged Mexican in the world, a title he held until the rise of George Lopez. Maybe Supernatural was the record I should have studied for this series. It was probably the most representative document from his entire career of everything Santana's music really is: comfortably re-tread classic rock, uninspired-but-pleasant virtuoso leads, and tasteful cameo-whoring, all dressed up with a "muy caliente" Latin flair that'll have you running for the border.

I might have read that last thing from a packet of Taco Bell hot sauce.

Supernatural is exactly the kind of record you want to make when you're old and boring and waiting for some lifetime achievement recognition, and a fitting tribute to a man who personified the phrase "popular recording artist." But I didn't pick Supernatural for this entry, opting instead for Santana's sacred and time-tested "best" record, Abraxis. And you know what? It's lame.

It's telling that Santana's enduring classic only contains two original compositions. He doesn't really have much of an original voice or point of view beyond wanting to play electric guitar over traditional Latin inspired standards. I suppose it's nice that in his way, Santana's popularization of more diverse instrumentation in rock informed some of the better diversions into world music in later decades. And hey, a pre-Bonnaroo culture of blacklight poster enthusiasts needed something to listen to until Phish came around, right?

I can see why this sold a ton of records. Despite its illusion of exoticism, it's blandly palatable to seemingly any audience. And while it's non-challenging, it's also not an entirely unpleasant score for any number of background music needs. But I can't just sit down and actually listen to the whole record today without it really just making me want to listen Jimi, or Fleetwood Mac, or Tito Puente or Can instead. Or maybe eat some chips and salsa.

Mmmmm... chips and salsa.

The Immortals #91 - Ricky Nelson

2009-11-07T13:08:00.000-08:00

You might hear the name "Ricky Nelson" and think of the spoiled, talentless offspring whose terrible music was only popularized for his ability to be a televised proxy of famous parents. But you're actually thinking of his kids.

Ricky Nelson's career was notably discredited his lineage through much of his adult life, but the posthumous recognition he's seen for his place as not only the original teen idol but one of the first great rock stars is deserved. His wasn't a music career born of contrivance, like, say, David Cassidy's, but the result of an actual talent that just happened to grow up on TV.

That doesn't change the fact that in the beginning (for white people anyway) there was Elvis, and there was Ricky Nelson. Where Elvis' aping of rockabilly leaned more heavily on rhythm and blues of the delta, Nelson mixed similar influences with an overt and unabashed pop sensibility. And he wrote a couple of plain amazing songs for it.

Go listen to "Travelin' Man" right now. Go ahead.

But all the modern praise for Nelson is probably a bit overstated. In truth, he wouldn't have made my top 100, and his legacy benefited from an age-old biopic plot device: he died suddenly and tragically, and in a plane crash to boot. There aren't many better bonafides for to admittance to rock and roll Heaven than that.

And hey, he died. So let's just let him have it, yeah?

The Immortals #92 - Guns N' Roses

2009-11-04T12:53:00.000-08:00

Way back in January, the erstwhile co-authors of this site and myself made a road trip from southern California to Las Vegas, Nevada. Each of us being inveterate gamblers (untrue) and borderline problem drinkers (closer to true), the neon capital of the world called to us Hustlers for an off-season weekend of wandering the strip, seeing the sights, and intermittent gaming heightened by the thrill of undeserved "free" drinks carried by Eastern European-born waitresses.

A particularly memorable moment came on our second proper evening in town as we approached the gleaming casinos from our borrowed timeshared condo on the outskirts of tourist-land. Popping a disc into the car stereo, the intro started with an echoed, clanging guitar lick, followed by snaking high-hat... I made sure to carefully time the music with our left hand turn onto Las Vegas Blvd, cruising in time for the climactic "Cha!"

Welcome to the Jungle, baby.

It might have been the highlight of the whole weekend.

Except that it wasn't.
If memory serves, we turned the stereo back down before the first bridge. Why? Because it's 2009 and we're neither strippers nor professional wrestlers- who the fuck wants to listen to Guns N' Roses?

In 1987, it's not too hard to imagine why this was considered "revolutionary." Compared to all the other hair-obsessed pop metal bands popularized by Guns' own hometown Sunset scene, Axl, Slash, Duff, Izzy and Steven were about as badass as could be. Never mind that they were themselves just as hair-obsessed and poppy as any of their counterparts- Guns felt different, back then anyway.

To be fair, Slash plays electric guitar quite well, and Izzy/Duff both helped craft several tracks into catchy hits. Axl was surely compelling (if not particularly charismatic.) There's a reason that Appetite for Destruction has been so much longer-lived than albums by Guns' contemporaries. It is, on the whole, a solid 40% better than most of the excrement it can be compared to from its era. It was 1987 and mainstream music sucked. In fact, I could have been a whole lot more fair to Guns and picked the noble failure of Use Your Illusion, with its high points offering glimpses of actual nuance in Rose's persona and- dare I say it?- talent, even. But Appetite is the record they/he will forever be known and celebrated for, plus it sold a a million bajillion copies, so good on them.

And so it was that Guns N' Roses was perhaps the biggest band in the world for a glorious 4 years of excess and undeserved acclaim from people with shitty taste. And then along came Nevermind. Although technically true that Nirvana knocked Michael Jackson's last good record off the top of the charts (Dangerous- RESPECT), it wasn't the end of the King of Pop, who enjoyed another good 5 or so years of absolute peak popularity worldwide. Rather, it was Guns N' Roses who were relegated to a distant 2nd place in the world of rock music, soon to be outpaced by dozens of less-than-Nirvana grunge and grunge-imitators (and then eventually by Nirvana again with Kurt Cobain's 1994 suicide.)

During the long wait for (and following the inevitable failure of) Chinese Democracy GN'R became more sideshow than legend. The creatively valid members of the band left and/or got fired, Axl challenged Jacko to a race for who could descend into freaky cult-figure status and social irrelevance the fastest (sadly, Axl lost again- nobody beats the King), and their fanbase waited, dwindled, and eventually realized that Fred Durst was a reasonable enough facsimile for their lost messiah. By the time of Democracy's release late last year, it was little more than an afterthought on a career that all but the douchiest of males had forgotten. The transparency of Rose' cashgrab was almost insulting- you could only buy the record at Best Buy in the US, and there was even a Dr. Pepper tie-in!

Guns feel today like a band that were never more than the sum of their parts: Crazy redheaded controversy magnet, stoner icon with a cheap fashion gimmick, bass player from a "real" music city and not fake-old Los Angeles, a drummer who repped "punk" to people who don't know shit about T.S.O.L., and at least one guitarist with an awesome nickname (I refer, of course, to "Izzy." What kind of name is "Slash?" I mean REALLY...)

That sense of hollowness was only heightened by the decade-plus that Axl Spent bloating its lineup with as many potentially notable names as possible, including actual notables like guitar-noodling demigod Buckethead, session super-man Josh Freese, and Tommy "I Was in the Fucking Replacements!" Stinson. Now you can see Guns N' Roses on their periodic tours for a couple hundred bucks. The venues they play are surely better than whatever state fair Ratt is gigging next summer... but by how much?

Well, they're #92 on the "Immortals" list, so I guess the upside is that I get to take potshots at them for eternity. In fact, the picture for this entry was very nearly one of Kurt Cobain himself, from the famous "Where's Axl" scuffle backstage at the 1992 Video Music Awards (the same telecast that yielded a memorable Guns duet with Elton John on "November Rain.")

Why?

Because fuck you, Axl.

You lose again.

The Immortals #93 - Booker T. And The MG's

2009-03-26T18:48:00.000-07:00

Too much is made of their being an integrated band. Recognition for their monumental importance as the house band at Stax, a fine bit of historical revisionism. Their sound? Overestimated. And that's a shame, because they really should be loved for exactly what they were.

First, addressing the obvious- they had no vocalist. One of only 2 entrants in the Immortals list not to have featured a singer. But, at the risk of sounding an apologist, I'd posit that the organ and guitar on those records were a duo worthy of mention alongside any fronting duo in rock history. And I don't mean Booker T. Jones and Steve Cropper, not the men or how they played those instruments/parts- that's an important distinction. I mean that the organ and the guitar on those records were Mick and Keith, John and Paul... or maybe more appropriately Sam and Dave. Even backing Wilson Pickett or Eddie Floyd, the instrumental track itself always seemed to present another frontman and sidekick, commanding the listener up front in the mix.

It's good that they had their effect on other people's records, because they released precious few compositions of their own (the landmark Green Onions contains a mere 3 original tunes.) Most if Onions is composed of reproductions of songs they'd already fleshed-out on other people's records, and yeah, it's sort of impossible not to prefer the originals we know and love. That's not to say that it isn't a sheer pleasure to listen to Booker T. and the boys- that title track is utterly un-improvable. But it would frankly be a lot easier to overlook the fact of their own songs' scarcity if it didn't highlight a suspicion you get listening to the MG's: that in a few records-worth of material, they could have ended up so much more than extras for the Akroyd/Landis canon.

In another universe they might have been the Animals (if never the Stones): remembered for their lasting influence but also beneficiaries of an era of mania that let them cash in while they were young enough to enjoy it. Instead, they get the distinction of being imitated in modern music just as often as they're sampled outright, a more obscured legacy (though certainly one of honor itself.) Maybe that's all fitting, just as well for the world's best backing band.

The Immortals #94 - Nine Inch Nails

2009-03-25T19:01:00.000-07:00

Nine Inch Nails are the most popular "industrial rock" band of all time. So yeah, Trent Reznor got famous, but just technically.

No era of popular music was ever as accepting of naked emotional release as the 1990s, but as the grunge boom snowballed out of control, we lost our sense for deciding quality from insistence, meaning any two-bit lump could and would be signed to a multi-record deal worth many major label millions for our eagerness to confuse earnestness with talent. This would be taken to even further extremes (bordering on the grotesque and/or humorous) in the early 2000s with nu-metal and emo ascendant, but in 1994, that shit was juuust about to ripen. And so, after a modestly successful (but only cautiously embraced) also-ran debut called Pretty Hate Machine, Nine Inch Nails was ready set the new curve.

The resulting album, The Downward Spiral, feels pretty transparently like exactly the record Steve Albini and Brian Eno's hyperneurotic trust fund kid would make. And not really in a cool way, but I fully get how it would have been taken that way 15 years ago.

In hindsight, I think the most compelling thing about the album today- like so much about the alternative/industrial genres- are its peripheral associations. No matter how schlocky Mark Romanek's video for "Closer" seems in a post-Saw-franchise-society, the truth is it's actually every bit as vital as the song for most of us, and probably more. Johnny Cash had a knack for stealing the songs he covered by virtue of the indelible, unmistakable mark he left on the source material, but I think we can all tell that he had an easier time of it elevating album-closer "Hurt" by virtue of the patina of superficiality it carries when eventually filed away in the Reznor oeuvre. I mean, Bowie himself wrote the damned piece in the original "Immortals" issue of RS, and for a while there in my thought proccess that alone seemed as interesting thing to write about as anything else related to The Downward Spiral.

And it was. And that's why I just said that. Yet Michael Trent Reznor remains a semi-famous, sort-of rock star... and a damned millionaire to boot! Does that dredge up any of the anger we were supposedly feeling and embracing in the 90s? Not really.

What were we talking about again?

The Immortals #95 - Lynyrd Skynyrd

2008-12-29T10:01:00.000-08:00

Today I talk about my personal feelings regarding Lynyrd Skynyrd.

*Ahem*

Fuck classic rock
Fuck 3 guitars
Fuck solos
Fuck that hat
Fuck saying fuck Neil Young
Fuck multiple bridges
Fuck back-up singing wives
Fuck pride
Fuck confederate flags
Fuck stupid spellings for stupid band names
Fuck reunion tours
Fuck plane crashes

I'll try to get it some day, I really will. In another life, I'll say that my 3 years in Arkansas were an elaborate field study of southern culture. I'll actually chart the estimated thousand times a month that Clearchannel stations play "Sweet Home Alabama" in a given month and publish colorful spreadsheets. I'll listen to more than the first 3 minutes of "Freebird" before getting sick of it and turning it off. I promise I'll try. But now, at the age of 26, I know that I've spent enough of my life peripherally engaged by Lynyrd Skynyrd to know that I've never been ready to give them a fair shake. And I'm still not now.

Neon Hustle's Totally Subjective and Woefully Incomplete Guide to the Best Music of 2008, Part 1

2008-12-27T13:52:00.000-08:00

This is part 1 of an ongoing, year-end series from your buddies at NH.

Entries are presented in no particular order. Each author's parts were crafted independently of one another, and should pretty much never be taken as representative of an opinion/endorsement by the collective. Except when they are. But that'll probably be for totally different reasons anyway.

Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight

Let's call a spade a spade here, shall we? Emo generally sucks. Beyond the monotonic soundscape and whiny upper-middle class perspective lies a wasteland of lyrics so vastly insipid that Lou Pearlman has to be ROFLing in his prison cell.

With the bar set so low, then, it shouldn't be hard to make a "good" emo record, and The Midnight Organ Fight is certainly that. It's also one of the best albums of the year. It's caustic and funny and genuine -- you have to be legitimately scarred to write lines like "You won't find love in a hole / It takes more than fucking someone / You don't know to keep warm". And the music itself is strikingly affecting alt-folk, not the same upbeat pop-punk tune we've heard scores of times from the likes of Panic! At the Disco or their unfortunate clone, My Chemical Romance.

-Steven

Ezra Furman and the Harpoons - Inside the Human Body

There's something of a rarity that exists today, in a world about to see the release of the first 10 disc CD/Blu-Ray volley of the "Neil Young Archives" box sets and which welcomed the 8th (eighth!) installment of Dylan's long-running Bootleg series in 2008. That rare thing to which I refer is the opposite of those retrospective-obsessed dinosaurs: the young, unestablished artist whose output isn't yet outpaced by their creative productivity. That might sound like a backhanded compliment, but sometimes it can mean you've just been lucky enough to stumble in on a musician documenting the process of writing good songs and throwing them together to make an honest to goodness long-player. And if you're lucky and it turns out that his records don't suck, that's pretty sepcial, right?

Ezra Furman is still basically a kid, his Harpoons having been formed in 2006 after playing parties at Tufts, this year saw their 3rd album, Inside the Human Body released on Minty Fresh. Furman spends 45 minutes careening between imitations of influences and contemporaries alike, and at times you'll swear Furman's vocals are channeling Alec Ounsworth, Gordon Gano, Spencer Krug, and/or Robert Smith, even as his band plays indie rock, folk-punk, or Modern Lovers-styled decosntructo-pop. You can call it amatuerish and derrivitive, or you can step back and wonder at how anybody writes a track as monolithic as "Take Off Your Sunglasses."

-Brendan

Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

Bon Iver's debut dropped in February, which means it's been talked about as a potential record of the year for so long that the "it's overrated" backlash has begun.

It's all flimshaw.

There's something timeless about a lot of the songs on For Emma, or maybe anachronistic. It's easy enough to imagine "Skinny Love" being sung around a campfire on the American frontier, or "The Wolves" being the keystone to a movie soundtrack 100 years from now. And in the here and now, there's an austere intimacy to each track that provides a nice antidote to the in-your-face spectacles that defined 2008.

-Steven

David Byne and Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

Old people would have you believe that Everything that Happens could never be as good as the first Byrne/Eno record, 1981's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. I know they are old people, because they probably care about the influence of samples and world music on types of borderline popular music that nobody actually listens to today.

Despite the reported influences of gospel and soul having been filtered through Byrne's hermit-like prickishness or Brian Eno's eventual and complete tanshumanist merge of consciousness into a downloadable iPhone application, Everything that Happens is good because it's made up of songs. Real, catchy, pretty songs, songs better than anything either has released in quite a while. And if it sometimes sounds like a lost hit from 1988, well, that's probably all for the better then, isn't it?

-Brendan

The Immortals #96 - Martha and the Vandellas

2008-12-22T16:22:00.000-08:00

Everything I wrote about Berry Gordy applies to Martha and the Vandellas too. Plus a few controversial claims which I will make after the jump.

They're ranked ahead of the Supremes on this list because, on average, any three members of the Vandellas were better singers than any three members in the Supremes' history.

The Vandellas had nearly half as many "hits", but they were all roughly 2.6 times better than most of those Supremes songs.

Martha and the Vandellas were more popular with black people at the time. Back then (as with today, but especially back then) that was important because rock and roll had only been stolen a couple of decades earlier. White peoples' taste wasn't that good in the early going (that's why we'll probably never catch up.)

Martha didn't leave Detroit.

Unlike most "pop" girl groups, when you listen to Martha and the Vandellas, you can feel your organs start burning inside your chest a little. Which is rad.

20th Century Masters: The Millenium Collection by Martha and the Vandellas

The Immortals #97 - Diana Ross and the Supremes

2008-12-20T13:44:00.000-08:00

The significance of Diana Ross and the Supremes is not about Diana Ross. Everybody, from Rolling Stone to the Kennedy Center would have you believe that she is a special talent, and honestly, yeah, she could sing a little. But that's not why she matters (if she matters.) Neither is her relevance to anybody about Florence Ballard, or Cindy Birdsong, or Mary Wilson, or Holland, Dozier and Holland or the Funk Brothers or fucking anybody else save for one man. The significance of Diana Ross and the Supremes is that they were the crowing achievement of mister Berry Gordy Jr.

Pop music in the 1960s wasn't really driven by The Beatles and Dylan and Brian Wilson all pushing one another, though that's a nice way to romanticize everything. In fact, those artists influenced one another and many more artists to make music that was on the fringe of the furthest acceptable boundaries at the time for rock music. Smile is nice and all, but even had it been released when originally planned, it wasn't going to rival the sales of "She Loves You" 45s, nor would it be accepted as idealized gospel of the psychedelic brilliance of what is, in hindsight, a great and important time in our cultural history. Fuck that shit. The popular consciousness is represented first and foremost by what sold enough to qualify as truly "pop" music, and the man who made the most profitable, popular music on the planet for the better part of a decade was Berry Gordy with his Motown sound. Keep your pitiful sales of Revolver, to this day more people know twice as many Gordy Motown hits by heart as can even name a track other than "Yellow Submarine." Truth. Hendrix is the soundtrack to our revisionism. Gordy, Motown, and Diana Ross and the Supremes were the soundtrack to the entire country's trip to the grocery store.

Included in Gordy's genius was his coordination of talented people with interesting people. That's what differentiated him from the other most important producer of that era, Phil Spector. Spector made hits without personalities- name me the drummer who pounded the first kick, kick-kick, snare on "Be My Baby." Nobody can. Practically everybody who wrote/co-produced/played/sang on a Spector hit in that era was sublimated to one man's singular vision... and that vision was more or less of himself.

Gordy, on the other hand, made personalities into hits, taking a just-alright singer who was kind of an insufferable bitch and made her the name in front for an already successful group. He recognized what sold their records and gave her top-billing, growing both the person and the brand in the process. Maybe the greatest music marketer of all time, and he had an ear too. He made more hits than he could count. Any of them could represent the man. But on this list, he's represented by Diana Ross and the Supremes.

The Best of Diana Ross and the Supremes by Diana Ross and the Supremes

Invisible Men

2008-12-20T08:58:00.001-08:00

To anybody who's reading this, yes, we still exist.

But Just Barely.

See, we have jobs. We have other projects. We have stressful and time-consuming pursuits of postgraduate degrees. And at the end of the day, Top Chef ain't gonna watch itself, you dig?

An idea for a new beginning for Neon Hustle has been floated around. Perhaps it will take, perhaps it won't. Either way, we're just as pop/culture-obsessive as ever. I'd recommend against removing NH from your feeds, as I have a feeling we'll come up with something eventually to intrude upon your minds once more.

Thanks for reading.

IX: OMG GG

2008-09-14T22:40:00.000-07:00

After undertaking to re-watch the first season of The OCsuch that I could write essays by the episode, a curious thing happened: I couldn't stop watching. The same vortex that ensnared me on its premiere had me again. This isn't to say that I've stopped - far from it - but to explain my curiously intertwined absence.

Gossip Girl is the sort of cultural phenomenon that can escape one entirely if they don't own a television and aren't plugged into the right circles. I know this because it happened to me. When I woke up one morning to find my days filled with blog subscriptions instead of my second job, I found a world with a show so popular it has its own tag on Gawker. And here I thought I was still with it?

Whereas Josh Schwarz's previous project, The OC came at the beginning of the TV revolution - DVR was a distinctly luxury item and streaming piracy was naught but a twinkle in the eyes of the college students who scoured the torrents for Canadian Television rips of network shows - GG arrived into a world whose television viewers were in control. Apart from this, and its meager challenge to the final season of The Wire for the title of "Cultural Item of Note: 2007-2008 Television Season Category," I can think of no other reason why Gossip Girl did not reach the pan-cultural, iconic status of The OC. Not only is it practically the same show, but it arrived in a culture even so status obsessed that it can sustain The Hills and an American edition of the British OK tabloid.

Gossip Girl is, in its essence, the refinement of The OC. A comparison less on its tastes, sentiments, or even a coastal rivalry, GG is Schwarz distilling the same plots, the same themes, and even some of the same characters through the filters of network lessons learned and East Coast location filming.

In his new series, Schwarz has matured not just in his style, but also in his content. In Episode 9, "The Heights," The OC is at its high school soap opera best. Even with its B-Plot of the Balboa Wetlands development project, it is a John Hughes movie writ television. The tomboyish friend who helps her guy friend crush get the other girl, the missed connections that nearly tear apart the nascent star-crossed teenage romance, the showdown on the soccer field where Ryan tackles his nemesis because he thinks Luke is still after his girl! In this episode, and indeed much of that which redeems the series, the is high school, or at least its cultural simulacrum. Distorted, Technicolor, glossed, and exaggerated but not so impossible as to take it completely out of the sphere of the shared experience.

Gossip Girl owes no allegiance to your petty nostalgia. Insomuch as school exists, it is purposeful background to absurd shenanigans. Sure, in Orange County there was the USC obsession, but in the Upper East Side the Ivy League application process involves courting your author/idol and outing your best friend as a recovering alcoholic. And if you're not at that school, you're a home-schooled filmmaker. Or whatever it is that Vanessa does when she's not turning Rufus's gallery into a cafe.

The OC thrived on contrivance. Characters drawn deep enough to like and shallow enough to turn the plot on the dime, wildly unlikable personas cast as unlikely heroes, aspirational locations and people and products. And though I'd be lying if I said GG weren't possessed of these same flaws, I'd be no less dishonest if I didn't admit it I loved it. In part for the same reasons that I got caught up in The OC in the first place, but also because GG, for all its flaws, seems- at least on first watching- to dig a little bit deeper for its story lines. Little J's pyrrhic war with Blair, Dan and Serena's romance, Rufus's tragi-comic love life. Though these stories on occasion fall victim to television's peculiar coincidences, they're driven by characters that both define and are defined by their experiences.

And it's not that Gossip Girl didn't open the second season with a bizarre series of wildly unlikely and unfortunate events that all led up to one wonderfully salacious payoff. But at least when GG does bad, it does bad incredibly well.

VIII: The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies

2008-08-04T11:44:00.000-07:00

Some may consider it an abomination to even mention Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the same breath as The OC. However, it is in the same way that we owe Kafka the psychological referent for the nightmare of the bureaucratic state that we owe Solzhenitsyn for the visceral emotional referents of the autocratic regime. In America, we thankfully live far from the Soviet reign of terror, but The Gulag Archipelago is rife with reminders that the distance has been growing narrower at an alarming rate. The lack of recourse to the rule of law, the coercive interrogation techniques, the use of the legal system for political ends, the uncertainty.

When Episode 8 finds Julie Cooper attempting to relegate Marissa to an institution, without the consent of her father, we find her in a situation that is physically entirely dissimilar from that of Ivan Denisovich. For one thing, Southern California is much warmer. But for another, when we are supposed to assume adolescence for everything and we are supposed to accept Julie Cooper as a scheming dictator, we can see something closer. Solzhenitsyn's lessons may have been meant for his people, and may even have been meant as specific warnings against the dangers of the Soviet state, but their significance goes much further. In his writings under threat of destruction, imprisonment, and death, Solzhenitsyn's stories of the terror and absurdity and incoherence and danger of a totalitarian state bent on the preservation of power for its own sake stand as a warning against all malfeasance and corruption within the status quo. It is naive folly to say that either power or government is intrinsically malevolent, but it is thanks to writers like Solzhenitsyn that we will always have the memory of just how far astray either can go such that we may stay far from such paths.

VII: Tijuana Hangover

2008-07-30T10:18:00.000-07:00

Now think about what this band could sound like on their first full length. Think about what it could sound like when they tighten up the beats and make the arrangements go somewhere, but keep the fun and the energy. Think about what it will sound like when you’re pushing those nifty bass lines through something other than your computer speakers. And think what will happen when that bass player realizes he can play half the notes and be twice as awesome. Pretty sweet, right? (10/08/07)

At Indefinite Articles, the writers undertake Preemptive Strikes, a category of posts subtitled: "Movies we haven't seen, books we haven't read, games we haven't played." Their Long Hauls tackle bodies of work as varied as Highlander, Star Trek: TOS, Doug, and Metal Gear Solid. Writing this as I am under the marque of my series of a season of a show off the air for nearly five years, I have a certain affinity for this project.

Between these two extremes of criticism, lies the status quo of the blogosphere. With neither the willingness to admit to their preconceptions nor the reflection of posterity, the electronically chattering class hops to keyboards as quickly as possible to register its opinions on whatever movie or record crosses their path. Now that "the scoop" is had by hitting post as quickly as possible, one needs only get a link to an mp3 and the critical equivalent of "OMG FRIST!" to claim blog supremacy. Beware quality; that way outdated timestamps lay.

Thus, we have the cycle of buzz: a band exists, gains exposure and then hits critical mass. Immediately, there is a spike in the blogosphere's attention before the only one's inquiring are the one's who care about the music. The brown dwarf that remains after a buzz band's rise to glory.

It was after just such supernova that I first looked at the Black Kids. It was October and I was hopeful. Going back and listening to Wizard of Ahhhhs, I can't help but feel it still. Listening to "Hit the Heartbreaks" the mugginess that pulls the voices together and makes a frenzy of the synthesizers and teenaged voices may not sound professional, but it lent them an urgency more compelling than most punk bands.

On Partie Traumatic, The Black Kids lose this along with much of what made them so special. One of the difficulties in listening to a band that cleans up its sound having finally gained access to professional studio, gear, and production assistance is trying to disentangle one's own ideal images from what the artists envisioned. When the Mountain Goats left the lo-fi era for the 4AD era, they picked up a slew of fans but left a few at the onramp wondering what happened to the songwriter who they'd associated with their own militantly lo-fi ethos. The Goats were of course a curious example in that they eventually picked back up many of those fans, but were also notable in that the tidal shift in their music was one of style and not one of quality. The Black Kids could hardly blame the failures of Ahhhs on a broken boombox: Partie Traumatic sounds remarkably similar apart from brighter synthesizers, better vocal tracking, a bevy of overdubs, and a generally more busy soundscape.

Perhaps these things are a matter of taste, but compare - if you can - the first three seconds of the two versions of "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You." In those three seconds, you have the beginnings of all the problems with the sound of this album. For all the band's failures, restraint was hardly one of them but it only worsened in the studio. The original version could admittedly be recorded more cleanly, but its reverb drenched solo guitar succinctly declares the hook and allows plenty of space into which the band can drop. The new one brightens the tone almost to distraction and leads off by scratching the rhythm before a second, almost identical sounding, guitar comes in to clutter up the track even more. The rest of the track feels like a clinical exercise. The backing vocals are sometimes separated out so far that the shouts seem like they're coming from a different room and the hyperactive bassline from the original still hasn't quite found a groove.

Partie Traumatic isn't all bad, and it certainly deserves more consideration than Pitchfork saw fit to give it. At its best, it's an incredibly accessible dance record that has all the inviting post-punk cues that made them the darlings of the blogosphere in the first place. The musicianship is consistently stronger, and the lead vocals are much stronger than before even if the weakness of the backup vocals (more the parts than the voices) is made awkwardly obvious by the brighter production.

Despite its high points, The Black Kids had little hope of recapturing our imaginations with this album. Even were it to have equalled Wizard of Ahhhs, we would have been left wanting because so much of what we loved in it was unrealized potential. To see them here - a record deal, a record - and but no closer to finding the next gear, is perhaps the biggest disappointment in listening to the album.

Still, we should probably be honest with ourselves: where could they have gone? We wanted to believe that their irresistibility would translate into something more and that they could be more than the sum of their influences. But what cause did we have? When Marissa Cooper got in the Cohen's Land Rover to drive down to Tijuana for the weekend on the heels of all her chaos, did we really expect anything else but for her to end up drinking alone in a sketchy bar before overdosing on pills? Nine times out of ten the dancey 80's revival band will remain just that, and just as frequently the poor little rich girl will mix Cuervo and codeine. When the surprises happen, they're brilliant. A glimmer of redemption for Marissa, Turn on the Bright Lights for the hopeful.

VI: Misses and Kisses

2008-07-29T14:20:00.000-07:00

If sincerity is the new irony, Jason Anderson may be the new Nerf Herder. His songwriting takes the high points of Bruce Springsteen, Against Me!, and the Weakerthans and occasionally swirls it together with an unabashed appreciation for the howling choruses, soaring guitar solos, and ostentatious piano that make people love the 1980s despite its myriad failures as a decade.

Drama can hook an audience with any of a thousand lures, but the most irresistable are those that speak to our common experiences. On the surface, the most alluring are the ones that titillate and excite, but these can rarely sustain. Celebrity gossip rags kept a steady business, but it took Us Weekly's concept of photoessays and stories that concoct a shared reality of Hollywood starlets and the shoppers in Aisle 5 to make American celebrity culture inescapable.

The OC plays on the same tropes: drawing the viewer in with the aspirational visuals and trying to trick its audience into establishing a sympathy with the all-too-similar problems of its characters. Alcoholism, outsiders, marital issues, and, of course, love in the time of home rooms and hormones. However much the show concerns itself with teen romance, it never wholly succeeds in the telling the romances in which it seems so invested.

At the opposite end of the success spectrum, is Judd Apatow's Freaks and Geeks. Where The OC thrives on the melodrama of the extraordinary, Freaks basks in the stunning awkwardness of the everyday. Though each show has its archetypal nerd, their lives could be no more different. Seth is smart, tall, funny, unconventionally cute, and has zero friends or acquaintances despite having lived in the same place for a decade. Sam is short, awkward, and always accompanied by his only two friends on the planet. Seth Cohen might be confronted with preposterously imaginary choice between a bombshell in a Wonder Woman costume and an impossibly cute girl who drew him a personal comic book, but Sam Weir pines after the cheerleader and wins her heart by a season's worth of luck. Fine, Apatow may require the fairy dust of television for his character's chances, but that's as much use as he makes of it. Even though Sam gets the girl, he realizes that the girl he dreamed of dating isn't actually the girl that he wants to be dating, leading him to the far more interesting questions of where one goes after attaining all one's adolescent dreams, and as an adolescent no less, and shortly thereafter realizing that they're hollow.

The reason why Freaks and Geeks is such an infinitely more affecting show, and the reason why it still sits on Blockbuster's shelves while The OC has been consigned to the scrap heap, is that even though it strains credulity to believe that Cindy Sanders would deign to date Sam Weir, we can understand why she makes that decision. When the supposedly slutty Summer is revealed as a virgin, it's a shock, but not altogether mind boggling because we know so little about her. She chats with Marissa occasionally, but turned down Luke once, but that's about all we know. Cindy Sanders, by contrast, has gone through an epic romance with Todd Schellinger

Apatow's retellings of the trials and tribulations of high school romance are hardly flawless, but they're closer to most realities than The OC ever is, not that any portrayal could capture the reality of those moments - where Summer grabs Seth for the kiss at the close of Episode 6, or Sam and Cindy sit on the bed at the make out party at the close of "Smooching and Mooching" - but the closest might be the previously mentioned Jason Anderson.

With a photographic gift for imagery, Jason Anderson is one of the most refreshing songwriters around - someone who doesn't need to hind behind the irony or dismissiveness that has become de rigeur among most songwriters who seem afraid to let on that they care. Not only does he clearly, but he makes you feel like you should, too, regardless of what he's singing about. At his best, he paints pictures that, for all their exquisite detail, are expansive and universal in their emotion. "Watch Your Step," from 2008's The Hopeful and the Unafraid is one of those songs. In it, he manages to capture everything that inspires wonder and terror in first kisses, with a melody that's inescapable and a production that seems ripped from 1986. And all this before hitting the first chorus.

When Seth kissed Summer, we cheered. But it was a strange victory because it was so clearly insignificant - she quickly excused herself to talk to a banker, after all. When Sam Weir asks to kiss Cindy Sanders, we're rooting for him and grimacing at the same time, as we enjoy one of the most awkward television moments this side of Curb Your Enthusiasm. But more than that, we feel for Sam - his satisfaction when he finally does kiss her, and the nervous fear as she pounces on him to make with the necking. With Sam, we feel it because we were there, especially if we were more than a little bit Sam Weir at one point or another in our lives. But with Jason Anderson, we feel it because it's all of our lives.

Jason Anderson - Watch Your Step
- MySpace
- Order from K Records
- Order from iTunes

The Tennessee Trick Deck

2008-07-27T16:34:00.000-07:00

It’s maybe the laziest tendency of the national media when covering “underground” music to sell the image of a modern day Laurel Canyon, to attempt to recapture the mythical days when the most creative and popular artists of the day collaborated on one another’s best works during the 60s. This inclination in covering new music is really quite natural. After all, simply naming a young band that most folks have never heard and who might never appeal to the masses is largely pointless, but depicting those same artists as being a part of a scene- even if merely by circumstances of time and place- lends otherwise anonymous talent the collective weight of community. It’s intuitive form of marketing both the bands and the news, and when media outlets can’t find a localized narrative to suit a general audience, they’re often apt to just invent one.

The same article that the Times published as an 80s retrospective on Sonic Youth and the influence of No New York was again written in the early 2000s when we became re-obsessed with Manhattan and all things Strokes-ian. The New Yorker recently published its love letter for Los Angeles’ art space The Smell and the new record by No Age, and Salon reached for the holiest of hyperbolic metaphors when they proclaimed Portland “America's Indie Rock Mecca” (while, oddly, also somehow drafting the image of northern Oregon as sort of an alt veteran’s version of Boca.) Seattle, Brooklyn, and Montreal have all been given the same treatment, along with countless others. In fact, it seems that all it takes for a city to be decreed the new capital of Cool is to have 3 or more bands playing decent music within a 30 mile radius of one another.

The glaring exception to this rule, of course, is Memphis, Tennessee. In fact, I'll go so far as to say the River City is without a doubt the least glamorous “important” place in rock and roll. Its legacy of all-time greats maps like the hub at Dallas-Fort Worth (or, more appropriately, FedEx), a convenient meeting point from which the region’s country, jazz, R&B and blues musicians to cut and distribute records or depart on tours. Despite being touted as the “Birthplace of Rock and Roll,” the city has never sustained much of a scene of its own so much as been home base for a variety of diverse and largely independent artists. Its musical notoriety today is literally as a place where musicians come to buckle down beneath the lip-served notions of history and without the distraction of, you know, stuff to do before a track is finished. Also, sometimes people die there. It’s not an especially bad town by any means, but, having spent nearly 3 years of my former life a quick trip down interstate 63 away, I can tell you from experience that the locals- and the bands- have to make their own fun.

A downside to the recent trend of media coverage is that a city without a featured profile on page 1 of the arts section often leaves its musicians precious few ways to access the national conversation. Jay Reatard has felt the brunt of this neglect. Since his late adolescence he’s been the creative force behind projects like the Reatards, Lost Music and Angry Angles, and he’s spent over 10 years a return to punk's origins as a singles-driven medium, releasing his self-recorded songs without regard for the integrity of who constitutes your band at a given moment or even knowing who was going to press the vinyl. In 2006 he released Blood Visions, his first record as Jay Reatard, a concept piece about possibly murdering ex girlfriends played in the catchiest way possible. And with the buzz he worked up from touring that album (and from occasionally wailing on drunk assholes at his shows), he’s managed to release a steady stream of singles for the last 2 years. Highlighting exactly what kind of exposure Memphians can expect for their hometown’s coolness currency is that Reatard has remained pretty much under everybody’s radar all this time… despite having been releasing his new material on Matador for the last year, one of the most established and powerful independent labels in the world. 17 of these tracks have now been compiled on one disc as Singles 06-07.

Not so much growing out of his punk past as rounding it out, this collection absolutely slays. The DIY aesthetic Reatard carries over from the best old punk acts belies the sophistication of his influences and the subtlety of his new compositions. There are new wave referents (“Night of Broken Glass,” “Let it All Go”), pitch-perfect pop (“All Over Again” and a cover of the Go-Betweens “Don’t Let Him Come Back”) and plenty of thrashing rockers (pretty much everything else) rounding out a near-flawless 40 minute set.

Without our crutch of regional association to buy coverage, we’ve lost some of our ability to self-regulate perspective. The temptation is to compare him and the rest of what John Norris’ hair has recognized as the new lo-fi “scene” to acts like Guided By Voices, but that would be faulty. Not just because Reatard’s own endowments stop well short of the attention span required to appreciate Quadrophenia but because at least in GBV’s heyday the term “lo-fi” was a de-facto descriptive for an emerging genre of home-recorded bands that broke through established ceilings of critical and mainstream acceptance. It was actually a relevant thing for GBV, Pavement, Liz Phair, Sebadoh, and others collectively defined an aesthetic that was more than an arbitrary group of good bands- they were a substantial part of what made the 1990s music boom an “alternative” in the first place. The same can’t be said of today’s supposed movement, which conveys little more sense of community than an overlap of MySpace friends.

But even a man whose choice of surname is, frankly, pretty retarded (he was born Jay Lindsay) deserves more than that. What impresses most about Singles 06-07 exists independent of its recording quality, which is nowhere near emphasized to the point that bands like Times New Viking have chosen to make theirs. Upon one listen, it seems glaringly obvious that the production value on this year's Rip It Off are intended to be as inextricably tied to the songs as their melodies, and this seems to make them wear thin in a way that Reatard’s more sturdy, road-worn compositions don’t. A record that “sounds bad” usually translates into a great live show, and TNV certainly have their share of pop hooks and a sense of hip that certainly owes little to their being from Columbus, but Reatard just has something that the Vikings lack.

No, the most impressive thing about Reatard’s Singles is that you have to be reminded that that the compilation represents the fruits of a single year. It’s merely a chronological document and nobody, least of all the man himself, has even claimed that it’s his best work. The fact is that he’s just so shit-hot right now that he can shuffle together his output any which way and is still dealing aces that trump nearly any other rock release of the year.

V: On Rights

2008-07-21T16:02:00.000-07:00

In light of the recent Supreme Court decision, we bring you the climactic scene of Episode 5 as imagined by advocates of individual gun rights

"What was that, Abercrombie?" Donnie yells, pulling his gat. Donnie broods and glares, because that's what one does when one is from the wrong side of the Orange County-Riverside border. He stares down Luke, raising his .357 at the All-American water-polo captain ten paces across the room, waiting for an answer.

Luke reaches around to the back of his designer board shorts, feeling for his piece, when his cocksure stare melts like a lonely Balboa Bar abandoned on the pier at noon.

"Jesus, Luke, do you never do anything right?" a soused Marissa Cooper contributes to the conversation, pulling a 9mm Beretta from the gun compartment of her matching Gucci handbag. "Drop the gun Donnie." Her words turn stern, but her hand can't quite hold the authority, or the straight line.

Seeing his star-crossed love interest once again as a distressed object that could only be saved by his actions, Ryan quickly switches from Brood to Break and pulls his own gun from the signature holster that he wears across his signature wife beater. In Newport, everyone packs heat, but in Chino, everyone lets everyone else know it. Because they gots to represent.

Ryan steadies himself behind the bar; Donny is the only obstacle between he and Luke. Luke is all that stands between Donny and the glass door. The bottle of Skyy was the only line between Marissa and a good night, but she broke through that line.

The Natty Ice is thick on Donny's breath, or as thick as Natty Ice can be. He didn't come here looking for a gunfight. A fight, sure. And yeah, he pulled the first piece of iron, but when it's 1am and you're eight beers and fifty Newporters deep into a party, sometimes these things like a good idea. It doesn't? Well, you're not the one with a gun. God bless the USA.

"What's going on?" Holly walks down the stairs, stumbling up next to Ryan with a comically over-sized shotgun that she must have taken from under her parents' bed from a box labeled "Use in the Event of the Apocalypse or a Democratic Administration." Donnie turns his head to look behind him, keeping his gun ahead on Luke, to see Holly aim the shotgun and almost tip over.

Ryan lowers his weapon and steadies Holly, taking the shotgun from her hands in the process. "You have acquired: The Shotgun" Seth Cohen remarks in his videogame announcer voice. Later, Summer would ask him why he doesn't pack heat. "Summer, my witty banter is all the heat I need." He would die in a gang shoot out on the pier two days later.

As Ryan, is holstering his Colt 45, the glass door slides open. It's Donny's friends. Blustering but without weapons drawn, they burst into the room, "What the hell is going on here Donny? Is this chump bothering-"

But that's as far as he gets, because Marissa's drunkenly itchy trigger finger freaked out and put a slug into Corona Hoodlum #1's shoulder. Immediately, Donny turns to his right and exacts vengeance, cutting a full three seasons out of the life of the show. Luke, in a fit of rage, runs to tackle Donny, because that's what Cro Magnon Man did, but Ryan had already aimed the shotgun at where Donny's chest would have been. Where Luke's head was.

All the while Corona Hoodlum #2 was pulling his sholem, an M-16 that he keeps strapped to his back. Because, you know, there's an inalienable individual right to carry guns. For the protection of a free state. This is our well regulated state militia.

Is It Over Yet?

2008-07-20T16:47:00.000-07:00

Pop Punk has always existed on the border of legitimacy and farce. For every Buzzcocks record, there was an Enema of the State. And for the bands that have always lived on that precipice, such as the Offspring, balancing the tight rope of mainstream acceptance and satisfying the best and worst of their fanbase has led to a variety of comic, terrible, and comically terrible results. The following is perhaps the most perfect of the last.

Show me how to lie
you're getting better all the time
And turning all against the one
Is an art that’s hard to teach

Another clever word
Sets off an unsuspecting herd
And as you step back into line
A mob jumps to their feet

"You're Gonna Go Far Kid." (Offspring - MySpace)

(Alternatively Panic! At The Disco's Myspace, where the album version's lack of an intro makes the point even clearer)

The troubling part of this comparison isn't that the Offspring ripped off Panic! At the Disco, it's that they somehow took the concept of the speak/sing diatribe and made it worse. To start, they copped the theme of deceit and made it even more painfully obvious, turning it from the agonizingly emo to the vacuously vague social criticism of 90's California punk. If there's one thing less interesting than hearing breathy teenage breakup angst, it's angsty teenage Soc 101.

Still, these things might be forgivable for the backbeat, the melody, and the powerchords, because that's pop punk's point, anyways. But that's where the wheels fall off. Assuming you're still reading this having listened to both of these songs, there's not much more I need to say: the vocal phrasing is identical; the only thing keeping the verse drum parts from being carbon copies is Panic's willingness to mix it up a bit, and the emo kids' instrumentation is infinitely more interesting than the Offspring's, which gets through the words with little more than stabbed powerchords. But I suppose finding room for one of the members of the trinity ain't bad. However much I loved Ixnay on the Hombre and Smash in my adolesence, time comes to admit they were never the Buzzcocks.

First there was the unlistenable kitsch of Pretty Fly for a White Guy, then the blatant theft of the most godawful Beatles song, and then a string of forgettable attempts to recapture the cultural zeitgeist. But this is enough, this is where we have to draw the line. This is Offspring's own "Greatest Man That Ever Lived," their Cut the Crap, their Return of Saturn. This is the proof that the band has finally outlived its usefulness and need never be heard from again. Find other projects, fade quietly into that good night, take up needlework or woodcraft. But please: no more Offspring.

Cartoon Blood

2008-07-19T23:16:00.000-07:00

Here at Neon Hustle, we like music. We also like television. Living back in a house with the latter, I bring you the following exploration of that once bold attempt to join the two media. But this ain't yo' momma's MTV. No, this is FNMTV: A liveblog on cartoon blood, one man's immovable hair, and the ethical-cum-aesthetic low point of summer songs.

0:04 - I forgot that Pete Wentz hosts this show. He's wearing a sleeveless hoodie and just introduced a ten second clip of LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out." This is already seeming like a very bad idea.

0:05 - They're running a clip wherein LL Cool J is talking about going to the market as a kid. "I can't work the register, ma!" The message for today's youth: Work might be good for some people, but not if you want to be a star. He's bagging groceries now as a photo op and asking where to put things. If he were a candidate, his questions would be the equivalent of Kerry asking for Swiss on a Philly Cheesesteak. We'll accept elitism from our celebrities, but not from our leaders.

0:09 - Run DMC "Rock Box" Clip. LL Cool J is talking about how rap was blowing up at the time of this clip and how he was partying with Russel Simmons and Madonna when it came out. "Rock Box" was released in 1984. LL Cool J released Radio in 1985.

0:10 - The crowd is cheering for a clip of Pete Wentz stuffing his face with spaghetti in an homage to "Doin' It." So far my enjoyment of this show is directly correlated to the dude's screen time.

0:11 - Video Premiere! It's hard to say what the most distracting part of this experience is: there's the video effect that makes me feel like I'm constantly engaging hyperdrive and the "your baby" being looped through the chorus. The worst is probably the crowd noise randomly piped in during the track. Having come of age in the midst of TRL, I keep thinking the producers are about to cut to the studio. No such luck.

0:15 - They've got a skybox? Tim Kash, the British accented VJ, sits with The Game and James Montgomery, a "music journalist" who resembles Craig Finn, sans 20 years and 60 pounds. And Montgomery just dissed the track! "I didn't see that drive there, I want to see the hunger from the kid who wanted to get out of the supermarket." While it sounds disturbingly like commentary on a basketall halftime show, he's got a point. The crowd booed, and the VJ advised him to watch his back. They're about to cut to commercials, a phrase I use loosely since they just spent thirty seconds talking about how you could use Verizon to be a better MTV consumer, but not before letting us know that She & Him will be coming up soon. Did you know Zooey Deschanel is an actress!

00:20 - Last week, Rihanna played with Maroon 5. Apparently she has a song other than "Umbrella" and justice still hasn't been served on their career.

00:21 - "You may know her from a movie called "Almost Famous." And he is almost famous. Please welcome She & Him." I wonder if Wentz writes his own material. Oh, he's asking her about the actress/singer transition, and him about getting involved with someone making the actress/singer transition... He probably does. Next question is an homage to Almost Famous because, get this, she was in that movie! "Is there a record that did set you free, or that is so influential to you?" If you were wondering, she said Revolver.

The video is unbelievably, adorably, and wonderfully twee. Which makes it all the better when they turn to The Game for the first word: "I just like all the cartoon blood. I figured out a way to get blood into my videos without MTV blurring it out, ya gotta make it cartoon." Montgomery makes the Scar-Jo comparisons and then the VJ continues sucking up to The Game. The dude's got a Dodgers tattoo on right cheek, clearly way cooler than the journo.

It's worth saying that, even beyond the catchy single, great video, and adorable singer/actress, the She & Him record really is quite good. The songwriting is strong, and it's a refreshing throwback in sound and sensibility. Her voice, while far from perfect, is strong when it needs to be and vulnerable in just the way that her songs ask. It's a shame that she's unable to escape the actress narrative, when the more apt comparisons may be to 1920's revivalists The Ditty Bops or still-learing-the-vocals Kaki King.

0:31 - Dark Knight Returns clip instead of immediately bringing out Daughtry. I'm really quite ok with this. Though the clip isn't all that interesting. Heath Ledger shoots some guns and Batman stoically rams a garbage truck. Wentz: "I want to see the Game driving the Batmobile." Ok, the sucking up to the Game is getting a bit much.

0:33 - Fuck, they're rolling the Daughtry clip. The phrase "American Idol" isn't mentioned, but the blue-collar family man makes good is laid on thicker than Pete Wentz's product. Seriously, I don't think I've seen his hair move - it's like Trump Hair or something.

0:35 - Watching Pete Wentz's hair for movement is more interesting than this interview. Daughtry observes: "We can say anything and [the crowd would] be all, "WOOO!"" He's painfully right.

00:39 - Blurring the line between the show and the advertisements. Pete Wentz drives a smart car to go pick up The Game and his entourage. They kick him out, and two guys sit on the gate of the trunk as they drive into the distance. Wentz forlornly asks a local for directions. If this is an ad, it sucks as much as the Daughtry clip. Pete Wentz just claimed Ryan Seacrest as a friend. I don't think Ryan Seacrest would admit to having Ryan Seacrest as a friend.

0:42 - This is the first time I've consciously listened to Daughtry and I'm really wishing I hadn't. This band seems to combine the self-satisfied, over-the-top vocals of Creed with the rhythm section from Nickelback. Their guitar and piano parts fall between the aforementioned and Aerosmith.

Is it wrong to hate on a band while they run a video publicizing the charity work of underappreciated groups and people from across the world? While it's been done before, there are a laundry list of groups that people might never have heard of were it not for this video. Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty Internaional, Urban Compass, Insight Prison Project, Seacology, Surfaid, Room to Read, Homeboy Industries, Keep a Child A Live...

0:49 - I'd keep listing, but the commercial break is over and Katy Perry is on talking about what might be the song of the summer, "I Kissed a Girl." Hilights of the clip, which cuts between shots of her face (cleavage and up) and her hands... on her legs.

"Girls are very girly, we have summer parties and we have choreographed dance moves in pajamas... It's kind of about that. It's like kissing your arm sometimes. We smell very good. We smell like vanilla, watermelons, strawberries. [...] Not trying to be a role model or a posterchild for anything because I'm in the business of rock and roll. I'm in the business of rock and roll... I came here to inspire people to listen to pop music again."

This is one of the worst hit songs ever. There are some that are unlistenable but inexplicably turn to pop culture earworm ("Pop" by N*Sync). There are others that are just plain bad, in the "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)" way. I'll defer on the latter to the posters and commenters at Feministe:

In popular culture, kissing a woman is only permissible and sanctioned if a woman is already an avowed heterosexual. [...] The icing on the cake comes from Perry’s own objectification of a female subject: “Just wanna try you on / I’m curious for you” and “No, I don’t even know your name / It doesn’t matter / You’re my experimental game / Just human nature”. Now we’re free to dehumanize and sexualize each other into pieces of meat to be sampled, instead of waiting around for a man to do it! [...] This attitude underscores an aggressive masculinity that runs through the song, its beat, and Perry’s singing: “and I liked it” is sung with such defiance. It poses as third-wave feminism with a “girly” but loud-and-proud protagonist, but is really just good, old-fashioned woman-using.

Back to the point, Perry's song is abysmal. It rides its sing-along chorus as far as it will go, but has little else but a story written in lyrics that don't quite scan over a marching electro-drum beat. For someone who claims to be in the business of rock and roll, she doesn't have much faith in the holy trinity of bass, drums, and guitar.

As the show draws to a close, Perry is showered in balloons.

In watching an hour of television, I saw three music videos and one live performance. If I'd gotten to hear The Game's thoughts on Katy Perry, it might have almost been worth it.

III-IV: Collars

2008-07-18T00:27:00.001-07:00

It is entirely coincidental that the posting of the third installment of the series coincided with the conviction, without jail time, of Lee Kun-Hee, former Chairman of Samsung Group. Not that his sentence is big news; such occurrences have become commonplace.

Having cast off the shackles of their colonial oppressors and defined the framework of a free state, our country's landed white forefathers set their sights on the next great set of legal challenges facing an ever-westward expanding America. Willard Hurst's "Law and the Conditions of Freedom" presents the development of legal institutions in 19th century America that a cynic may see concerned as much with promoting a climate conducive to the development of enterprise as the rule of law. In fact, if the latter was a goal, it was perhaps worthwhile only in service of the former. And so the law of torts, of contracts, and of property were developed to help the entrepreneurial souls of these United States fulfill the potential of the land they saw before them. Pristine and uninhabited... though only described by the former prior to being placed in the thrall of industrialization, and only noted as the latter for ignorance or disregard of multitudes of Native Americans. But, yeah, go west, young man!

Episode three of The OC throws the contemporary viewer into a swirl of reference, and a sensation of pop cultural vertigo. Ryan's nemesis is none other than Francis Capra (Eli "Weevil" Navarro) from Veronica Mars, who lays the crime/prison drama hurt on young Mr. Atwood in the form of a fork to the neck. If the wound looks a bit like a vampire bite, you can blame the writer: Buffy expatriate Jane Espensen (Band Candy). The "crime": Ryan is unable to be released to a guardian after being held for questioning in the fire that consumed the Newport Group's latest model home.

Episode four of the series closes with what everyone enjoys the show for most: rash, poorly thought out decisions which cut a clear and tantalizing path to high melodrama. In this case, we have the confluence of Jimmy Cooper's embezzlement of his client's money to pay for his family's lavish lifestyle combined with his total unwillingness to confront his problems directly... until the social event of the year when one of his clients would like a check for his at-this-point embezzled money. Never mind that he could have not shown up, or simply written a bad check considering he was already hemorrhaging cash and looking at 20 years in the joint, but no, he was going to own up to it.

There's been plenty of ink spilled on the place of law in society, whether it has played such a consciously mustache-twirling capitalist role as Hurst portrays and critics of capitalism would accuse, and whether such roles can be normatively categorized for good or for ill. Not only have I yet to even begin my legal education, but these questions go far deeper than a few hundred words in a blog post on a tv show. Still, it's admirable that a primetime high school soap points out what should be obvious and inescapable: that it's all too rare that white collar criminals have to roll the hard eight, and it's far too often that the disadvantaged find themselves on the losing side of the craps game that our legal system can sometimes be.

In abstract terms, we believe justice should be meted out equally - a thief should be treated as a thief. In specific terms, we are willing to carve out exceptions in the name of circumstance and familiarity. But in between, our conception of justice has become so warped that the prospect of a white collar criminal serving jail time is almost impossible to comprehend. Since 2003, we've made steps: but they're more punchlines than warnings. Martha Stewart, Scooter Libby, Enron Executives? But by and large, it is far easier to sell America on jailing a man for life for stealing a few video tapes than it is to sell them on defrauding the country and taking its citizenry for millions. After all, if 3 strikes work for baseball, it must work for the criminal justice system.

Perhaps this means that Hurst was wrong - if our legal system has engendered bad business practices, can it really be said that is the course on which it sought to set us? Perhaps the country lost its way, and the protection of markets and enterprise was gradually replaced by the zealous guarding of entrenched monopolies and corrupt actors? Maybe those old, propertied white men had a point when they were focusing on preventing bad people from doing bad things to take advantage of good people, just expanding that notion to business as well as government.

II: The Greatest Song That Ever Lived

2008-07-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

As these pieces were written sequentially, the show's most greivous use of this song was not mentioned in the original draft. Watching the series finale, one is left to wonder if there will ever be a new universal dramatic shibboleth in the vein of the Buckley cover. We can only hope it will be "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived," from Weezer's Red album.

"Jeff is the son of cult songwriter Tim Buckley
Jeff's Song "the last goobye was udesd in the movie vanilla sky
Jeff was born on noember 17, 1966 in Orange County, California."

- Music Guide Subtitles, Episode 2 of Season 1, The OC

These are the optional subtitles that appear while Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah" plays in the moments prior to the fiery climax of the second episode of the series - when Marissa Cooper walks into the model home in which Ryan Atwood is living, throws herself at him, only to have herself turned down in what is either the most emotionally mature decision by a sixteen year old juvenile delinquent or what would be the stupidest decision of any man's life. These are also perhaps the stupidest facts to include while this song is playing.

For starters, the song is not a Buckley original, but a cover of a Leonard Cohen song: a fact that has been common knowledge as the track has been used ad naseum by TV producers since they seemingly discovered the track. Perhaps this history also bears mention, in that the the OC is blazing a trail cut by dozens of pioneers before them, most of which also dropped the dramatic ball with their use of the song. There are also the more charitable facts to include: Buckley described his Orange County roots in a Raygun interview as "rootless trailer trash," a characterization which would make Marissa's introductory line, "this song reminds me of you," a bit more sensical. Of course, it would also risk problematizing the concept of the OC as universally perfect and hazard the very premise of the show.

Perhaps the show isn't premised in such an inviolable perfection of the county, but it does (at least at this stage) rely on defining issues of class along distinctly geographic lines. While the OC doesn't deny that there are problems with class in America, it says that these problems are ones of The Riverside County. Perhaps even more importantly, they are ones that come when the Riverside, and the LA, meet the OC, as happens when Seth goes to the LBC in the third episode, only to have his mom's Range Rover tore up. As long as Ryan were to have stayed in Chino, things may not have been great for him, but he could have maintained his path without much interference, aberration of the carjacking aside.

The other tidbit about Buckley the producers neglect to mention in their three point summary is perhaps the most tragic, and the most widely known -- which makes its absence all the more conspicuous. Jeff Buckley died in Memphis, drowning in the Wolf River Tributary of the Mississippi River. Fully clothed, wearing his boots, and singing Zep's "Whole Lotta Love," the thirty year old swam out and disappeared from sight. Maybe this is to what Marissa's enigmatic line was referring, but such subtext is way too good for this show.

Or consider this explanation: Marissa attempts suicide in a swirl of emotions brought on by her parents divorce, her ill-fated romance with Luke, and her then un-requited love for Ryan, by whom she is reminded of this song. Fall Out Boy named the song "Hum Hallelujah" after the Jeff Buckley cover since it was playing in Pete Wentz's car when he attempted suicide. Pete Wentz parlayed the commercial success of Fall Out Boy into the creation of a personal brand that has evangelized the aesthetics of the contemporary wave of emo-punk -- or mall-emo; emo; pop-punk; deriviative, uninventive and misogynistic crap; whatever you choose to call it. The OC turned its position as a cultural arbiter into a venue for the first bridgings of "indie" and "mainstream" culture from the perspective of the mainstream. That is to say, while underground scenes have cried cooptation for decades, and have broken to varying degrees (hip-hop, new-wave), it was the advent of the OC that started the groundswell of mainstream journalistic consensus that indie was " in" beyond the post-Nirvana search for suitable college radio acts. Now, indie was in because it was indie.

Perhaps, Marissa Cooper is foreshadowing her eventual role in the cultural landscape. Perhaps Marissa Cooper is Pete Wentz.

I: Forward, Into the Breach

2008-07-08T22:45:00.000-07:00

Inspired by timing, geography, and our friends, what follows is the first in a series.

Phantom Planet first skyrocketed to fame on the identity of their drummer, Wes Anderson's beloved Jason Schwartzman. One of the bands to synthesize LA club buzz with nationwide nerd appreciation on the heels of Rushmore, countless records were sold into the hands of fans soon to be disappointed with the workmanlike attempt to crib the Attractions without the dynamism of Elvis Costello. That is, of course, but for the lead single: California.

The song was released in November of 2002, but hit the bigtime after McG picked it as the theme song to Fox's summer premiere blockbuster series, The OC. For the first episode, it is a transition piece, playing as Ryan moves from Chino to Newport Beach. The carefree, echoing track starts as he packs his bag, fleeing his mom and abusive step father, and futilely seeks refuge with friends. Pulling his public defender's card from his pocket and sticking it in his mouth, not unintentionally like a cigarette, Sandy Cohen arrives once more as the savior in an incongruous black BMW.

For all of Phantom Planet's faults, and all the qualms one can have with a pop song, this track is a fantastic piece of work. The piano and guitar build a surprisingly solid base until the drums come in with a casually powerful backbeat under the second verse, and the the chorus is among the best reasons why stereos were put in cars and roads were built down the California coast.

But the 101 doesn't go from Chino to Newport, and that isn't even the biggest problem here. "California" is a song about coming back, and the OC is a show about being anywhere but. Despite any overtures toward similarity and common human experience, it is a show driven by conflicts bred by difference. "Welcome to the OC, Bitch."

It used to be that residents of Orange County, CA would describe their origins to foreigners by some combination of landmarks. Los Angeles, Disney Land, San Diego, Not in Florida. This show had the remarkable effect of putting a place on the map, no disrepect to Colin and Jack. From here on out, the response to identifying your origins behind the Orange Curtain was no longer, "Where's Orange County?" but "Do you know Seth and Summer?"

That isn't exaggeration. I've been asked a variant of that query on multiple occasions: by Brits, Irish, Spaniards, Thais, Serbs, Tenesseans. Mostly with the same wink and self-aware smirk that belies the stupidity of the question, but with the question nonetheless.

We are nearly five years from the premiere of the Oc. A show that began the shift toward the year-round prime-time premiere scheduling, but that couldn't stop the onslaught of reality-television on the networks. A show that forever altered the self-perceived and therefore only reality of the place in which I lived for eighteen years. A show that today isn't even carried in my hometown's Blockbuster. A show that is perhaps due for a critical reevaluation, or perhaps one that can occupy me for twenty seven episodes and two months before I start law school.

Hagiography for the Hostile

2008-06-26T19:48:00.000-07:00

George Carlin died of heart failure Sunday in Santa Monica, California. He fucking mattered.

Our last true living link to the time of revolutionaries like Bruce and Pryor, he possessed a decidedly more intellectual lean than either yet possessed neither man’s trappings of lifestyles. We seem prone, in our least optimistic times, to ask what could have been but for Bruce’s casual-turned-consuming drug use (a predictable result of the naïve Beats’ junk affectation and, arguably, listening to jazz) or Pryor’s surprising expiration at the age of 65 (the inevitable result of such prolonged use of heavy narcotics and, arguably, those movies with Gene Wilder.) We had such a relic among us for all those years, and a man who stayed long enough to see more than one boundary to push in a lifetime. Of all the icons to inspire so many generations of comedy writers, Carlin seems the most immediately traceable to our modern “alternative” sensibilities, and he can also be remembered as a life lived in example to his philosophical descendants.

In all these ensuing decades of hack pun-smiths and observational retreaders coming to typify our expectation of comedians, Carlin’s routines were not only as clever and utterly original those years ago, but remarkable in their acuity and economy even today, defining a style truly unique from his peers and imitators. At his best (and he was always at his best, right up through his final performance just one week before his passing) he could proudly call himself the finest bullshit detector we’ve ever had, and to George Carlin that was a responsibility. Where imitation has lead so many to comics to (lucrative) mediocrity bereft of legitimately dangerous insight, Carlin never lost his edge or his nerve. Equal parts performance artist and dedicated semanticist, he remained every bit as attuned and committed to his roles as Andy Kauffman or Umberto Ecco. The vanguard of all enemies of the status quo, Carlin spent a career in our invented social covenant of language and put our skeletons out to bleach in the sun. His methods of subversion were both novel and precise, and his most memorable works sprang not only from the absurdities of the things we’ve experienced, but the very ways in which we talk about them.

But contrary to what many of us would like to think, commentary isn’t always activism. You have to earn the distinction of having ever changed anything, and Carlin won his bona fides many times over. A dirty, pierced long-hair in the button-downed entertainment industry of the 60s and 70s, one of the only outspoken atheists to remain in the public eye through the “moral majority” uprising of the 80s (and again in the 2000s), and a vital source of anti-institutionalism through the new century, he can be pointed to as someone who has definitively and profoundly altered not only popular culture, but the nature of American public discourse as well. And, of course, Carlin also has a badge of honor that none of whom we consider “edgy” comics today ever will- his “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” bit was so damned good it was played before the justices of United States Supreme Court.

In recent years we’ve seen the departures of the only voices of dissent to have ever made any difference: Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, and now perhaps our last great critic of convention, all in an era when we need them at their most volatile in an all-too urgent way. We’ve spent so long in numbing self-delusion that his clarity of vision could only be called miraculous, and his willingness to share it was among the closest things I’ve ever known to a promise of redemption that I could believe in. Before the official canonization, let me declare his nomination here: in our shared cultural mythology, George Carlin is our saint of words.

Live Blog Listening Party: Stay Positive by The Hold Steady

2008-06-05T16:38:00.000-07:00

While we at Neon Hustle certainly esteem each other’s opinions, we’re by no means monolithic in our likes and dislikes. Even if we tend to agree or disagree on the specific quality of something, oftentimes the reasons for those assessments are at complete odds. So when a band we all admire (for predictably different reasons) releases a new album, we're of course going to try and make sense of it all.

The Hold Steady will issue their fourth LP, Stay Positive, in July on Vagrant Records. One of the most anticipated new releases of 2008 (at least in our camp), we’ve consequently wasted no time in assembling. What follows are our opinions of the album—biased in orientation, baseless in gestation, and bellicose of argument—as produced in real time listening to Stay Positive. Our missives have been edited only for length, coherency, and to mask the scent of three budding alcoholics.

Into the breach...

*********

Brendan: Any things to say about The Hold Steady or Stay Positive before we begin? Thoughts, expectations, etc?

Darryl: As a general thought, I have enough faith in Craig Finn as an artist that I was willing to put in the effort to work through some tracks that irked me at first (like “One for the Cutters”) and at this point I'm a pretty big fan of the album. I'm not yet sure where I put it overall in their work.

Steven: It’s not as good Boys and Girls in America, certainly, but that album was pretty freaking spectacular. It's strange, the Hold Steady sort of assumed the mantle of being the voice of America's youth with Boys and Girls, and this album seems a very concentrated reaction against that.

Brendan: In terms of literally using their age to reconnect with adolescent experience, this seems a more overtly pop-punk record. But my initial reaction is that I immediately connected with a higher percentage of songs on Stay Positive than any other Hold Steady album.

Steven: Okay, well let's go.

TRACK 1: “Constructive Summer”

(Tattoo by Adam Suerte, Brooklyn Tattoo. Thanks to Mr. Lee.)

Darryl: The unreconstructed pop-punk fan in me adores this track. So does the rest of me, but that part especially.

Steven: Yeah, I'm a total sucker for unadulterated optimism, which this song has in spades.

Brendan: "Constructive Summer" marks the first Hold Steady track with backing vocals by Lucero's Ben Nichols, who guests on 3 tracks.

Darryl: Wait, he's somewhere other than here and “Magazines”?

Steven: I didn’t even know he was on this track! The only time Nichols ever distinguishes himself at any point in this record is in "Magazines".

Brendan: Here's my problem: people seem to like the shout-along choruses that started in earnest with "Chips Ahoy!", but I think the band is underselling itself by not letting any other member of the band/guest compliment Finn with a true backing vocal. Nichols sings in his lower register the whole time and he's absolutely buried in the mix.

Darryl: I think the other vocalist is a false need. Yes, there are amazing bands with great second vocalists (Saint Mick Jones?) but I by no means think they need to define the band. Even sing-along songs can work with layered vocals by a single singer.

Moreover, I think the inclusion of a second vocalist with presence risks diluting the impact of a band whose identity is in so many ways defined by the consistency of Finn's gravel. Insomuch as second vocalists come in, they fill specific needs (“Chillout Tent,” “Constructive Summer”). I dig.

Brendan: So why even have the guest vocal then? What specific need is filled here? I mean, Nichols has a unique enough voice to be used well, but he really seems noticeably buried in this mix. Like, it stands out that the response vocal is so low.

Darryl: Could the story in “Chillout Tent” be told as well by Finn? Maybe, but the fresh voice adds so much to it. On this track, I think it's a matter of creating a dynamic that follows the sort of band/concert/summer/experience evoked by the song. I can almost envision Ben leaning into a mic at a live show to sing this, and I think that's what it's supposed to sound like.

Brendan: I do have another point quickly if we're off that one. What's the threshold on Minneapolis shoutouts? The "double whiskey coke no ice" lyric in "Constructive Summer" is, in a song otherwise not actively acknowledged to be set in Minnesota, is a reference to Dillinger Four.

Darryl: I appreciated it. And I appreciated Dillinger Four. It's subtle, which is nice.

Brendan: The band is from fucking Brooklyn . Pick a loyalty already. At some point, you fail to be from your hometown.

Darryl: Says the man who reps Texas but still has the "I Love the OC" shirt.

Brendan: But why is Brooklyn not a part of their mythology?

Steven: Inertia?

Brendan: Of course, Newton! What a fool I've been!

Steven: Seriously, if you're going to be a hyper self-referential band, you have to call back to your old albums. And for whatever reason, Finn sang first about Minnesota. That was what, 10 years ago now?

Brendan: More than that if you count Lifter Puller, which I do.

Darryl: Whether conscious or not, there's always a degree of resistance to change. Which in some ways is representative of some of their characters, and in other ways simply a product of growing up and not being quite willing to let go.

Do we want to move on to “Sequestered in Memphis”?

Brendan: After this: “Constructive Summer” is so far is the #2 best opening track on any album this year. Because it rocks face. That is all.

TRACK 2: “Sequestered in Memphis”

Darryl: I had my doubts about this track when it premiered, but I've since come around to everything about it. The story, the characters, the sound, the instrumentation.

Brendan: This is Nichols’ second track.

Steven: I'd have never known.

Darryl: When you talk about them addressing a new range of experiences, is this one of the tracks you're talking about?

Steven: Yeah, this is certainly part of that. It’s the first time any of Finn's protagonists deals with the fallout from their actions.

Darryl: Exactly!

Brendan: I don’t know about that. He's flippant about the "consequences".

Steven: Sure, but even if the protagonist is dismissive of those consequences, he's still dealing with them if only because he’s being questioned by the police. The acceptance of those consequences comes later in the album, which we’ll get to. It’s a soft-build up, but an important change in the usual HS narrative.

Darryl: I think it's as much about the context as anything else. "Reality" or "the law" or whatever is an abstract or perhaps nonexistent entity in other tracks.

Brendan: "Do you think I'm that stupid? / Well look, what the hell, I'll tell my story again …" This guy doesn't give a shit; you’ve got nothing on him.

Darryl: It bears mention that even if the same kind of character is still dodging the same kind of issues, the story is being told from a different perspective than usual, which I think is a notable difference. (This might be Gideon in twenty years.)

Steven: It's THE noticeable difference, in my mind. I completely agree that the character's paradigm hasn't shifted at all. But, again, the previous consequences were usually detoxing in some way or another. This dude's got a shitstorm of problems coming his way beyond “my head hurts”.

Brendan: In any event, as the only one of us who has lived in both Texas and the Memphis metropolitan area, I am tempted to make this my banner HS song. I probably would too, if I didn't place a horrible stigma on first-singles from albums.

Steven: You could do worse. This is a kick-ass tune. For instance, you could choose....

Brendan: Uh oh

TRACK 3: “One for the Cutters”

Steven: … this one. We’re entering the two-song doldrums of the album.

Darryl: It's such a drastic shift, and it references back to something altogether different both in style and era from the first tracks.

Brendan: I’ll bite. I love this track. Go off.

Darryl: First listen: Too long, weird instrumentation, your songs are NOT sing-along songs!

Steven: The harpsichord is cloying. It's too long. And Finn’s first foray into economic/social justice just feels false to me.

Brendan: Tell me why "When one townie falls in the forest does anyone notice" aren’t the best lyrics on the record.

Steven: It’s didactic.

Brendan: Ah, but why isn't this growth? I mean, he's spent how many years now playing on the middle-to-lower class sandbox? Previously, the only upper-class characters were there to score, and we get that.

Darryl: A friend of mine was a big fan of Separation Sunday, but found Boys and Girls too "sing along song" for her tastes. Of course, she reads a lot of Joyce and lived in Greece for a while. She doesn't love HS for the Springsteen drenched opening of “Stuck Between Stations,” or the chorus of "You Can Make Him Like You." She liked the fact that Finn could tell a story with words, punctuated by music, like nobody else these days. That's what SS did, and that's what this song does. Awkwardly, it puts its musical adventurism totally in service of the story.

With this song, if I listen to the music, I want to tear out my headphones. If I hear the words, I'm pretty much hooked.

Brendan: I love the harpsichord. Why is the instrumentation not rewarded?

Darryl: Because it sounds like a troubadour traveling through Sherwood Methampheta-Forest. This is not a great song. But it's not "The Greatest Man that Ever Lived" either.

Steven: So why are you so taken with it, Brendan?

Brendan: This song, to me, is when Stay Positive hooks me. It’s lyrically engaging, and if you can't take harpsichord, I understand. But if you like the sound, this is an exceptionally well paced track, and Franz gets double credit for the rising piano scale.

Steven: Yeah, the piano is fantastic.

Brendan: If you like the piano, recognize that it is a direct foil to the harpsichord. You like it because the melodic work is already being done in another register!

Darryl: I like this song for the characters it creates and where it puts them. I like the sound insomuch as it carries me into a mildly unsettled feeling that I think is something key to the story. The Stranglers were a post-punk band, but they never had the dancey-ness of New Order or the heart on the sleeve emotion of the Cure, but what made them interesting is how they created sweeping, dark, and occasionally operatic songs that were drenched in reverb, experimented with synthesizers and other instrumentation, and were dark in the most pathetically 15 year old deadjournal way, but were still interesting because they held you with their melodies and their ideas.

What ultimately gets me, though, is that I never liked the Stranglers that much. And I don't like this song this much, even if it's got some incredibly redeeming qualities.

That's pretty much all I wanted to get out there. And also that I don't really think I'd call it well paced.

TRACK 4: “Navy Sheets”

Steven: Continuing with the theme of "totally wasted backup vocalists," that's Patterson Hood you can barely hear on this track.

Darryl: Continuing my theme of not knowing that a backup vocalist was brought on...

Brendan: This record has a weak as hell mix.

Steven: I only know it’s Hood because of the band’s website. How did you know about Nichols?

Brendan: His voice is more distinct, plus there was the promo material.

Darryl: Also, Brendan stalks Lucero.

Brendan: Not since That Much Further West, thanks.

Steven: That was the one album Darryl recommended to me! No wonder I dismissed them.

Darryl: Damn, my bad. I can't remember when I'd have put that as my Lucero pick. I like that album, but I'm not sure I'd have ever put it over Tennessee as an intro.

And is Is it safe to say that, given the digression, that no one has overwhelming opinions on this track?

Steven: Yup.

Brendan: We just spent the whole of "Navy Sheets" talking about another band!

Darryl: I don't know what this song reminds me of.

Brendan: It reminds me of the re-done CGI in the Star Wars re-releases of the late 90s.

Hey guys, if I ever meet George Lucas, remind me to punch him in the junk

Steven: It reminds me that I want to skip this track whenever it comes on.

TRACK 5: “Lord, I’m Discouraged”

Steven: Craig Finn said this album was about growing up, and this is most clear-cut example of that. It’s definitely the album’s highlight.

Darryl: I figured that would be your take. Given your DBT appreciation and affinity for this sort of song, this was written for you.

Steven: Yeah, I’m predictable.

Darryl: And probably right.

Steven: I can't think of a single fault with it. Seriously, a copy of this song should be buried in a time capsule or sent into space or something, just as evidence of the worthiness of human endeavor in the 21st century.

Brendan: Even though Kubler goes to the finger tapping in the 4th minute? Seriously, is the guitar solo worth a fucking thing anymore?

Steven: I'd say absolutely, but then I'm a DBT fan

Darryl: I'm not sure the guitar solo can really exist as an independent entity anymore. Especially with a guitar solo like that, you can't help but be reminded of every other shredder to do the same, or some similar thing, before it. Hair metal ruined any stretch of notes that fast and that long for future generations.

Steven: So does that mean I'm a dinosaur? Because I’m a total sucker for guitar solos.

Darryl: No, it just means you're not as jaded. This song really is fantastic. I think I’m willing to indulge the guitar solo in the sense that it seems to fit in a bizarre, depressed way.

Brendan: Someone tell me what this story is about.

Steven: It's a guy with an ambiguous relationship with a girl who's clearly on the downward spiral, praying for her salvation. So it's the first ever HS protagonist outside the prism of the usual lowlifes.

I think that guitar solo is there just to make sure that we know the guy hasn't given up all hope. In the first couple of verses he’s just listing off all the things gone wrong, but after that solo, the tenor of his confession changes to one where he puts the resolution in the hands of God, who wouldn’t handle the situation any worse than he has. There’s something powerful in that.

Brendan: That last line might also be the admission that he's completely moved on. He hoped she's alright because she's not in his life to watch over anymore.

Steven: Oooh, I like that, even if I’m not sure I totally agree.

TRACK 6: “Yeah Sapphire”

Steven: This is a fucking great song, even if it’s pretty redolent of “Constructive Summer,” musically speaking.

Brendan: Only slower and not as propulsively interesting. Nothing here speaks to my 16 year old self, except the Sacto shoutout, where I was born and hope never to return to.

Steven: I thought we had decided this album was beyond the 16 year olds? Anyway, this is a pretty cookie-cutter HS song, but there’s a ripping line I’ve totally latched on to: “Dreams they cost money, but money costs some dreams.” I also think its tempo works great after “Lord, I’m Discouraged”.

Brendan: I never agreed that this wasn’t for “The Kids.”

Darryl: Structurally, this could be a sing-along. It has all the makings of the Boys and Girls tracks that put us in that place, but it's more restrained. I'm not sure if that's intentional or whether they swung for the fence and missed.

Brendan: Is Boys and Girls really a sing-along record? I sing along to “Chips Ahoy!” and “You Can Make Him Like You”, but is that the REAL HS?

Darryl: I don’t know if there’s a “real” HS. I think there's a continuum of evolution, I don't think they're static.

Steven: Is “sing-along” a pejorative term for you guys?

Brendan: No, I like sing-alongs, but not without a defined secondary vocal presence (see “Magazines”). But I consider a straight ahead rock song that I can sing along with to be an unevolved version of what I used to like, back before I realized that I couldn’t mute every other chord effectively enough to play ska.

TRACK 7: “Both Crosses”

Brendan: Worst song on the album?

Steven: This is a very dense track, lyrically speaking, that is frankly beyond me without access to the lyrics. With that caveat, it’s pretty bad, but what makes it so? The banjo doesn’t help things, I know that.

Darryl: The indulgent instrumentation and dense wall of sound.

Brendan: Are Finn's lyrical pretensions towards Catholicism an affectation at this point? Do they serve a purpose beyond saying, “I went to Boston College!”?

Darryl: I think Catholicism is a crucial element of some of his characters.

Brendan: Ah, but this is not a character-driven record.

Darryl: Not in the broader sense, but I think it's still stories about people, and still very directly so.

Brendan: But without the context of the other characters.

Darryl: You mean across the whole album/catalog?

Brendan: Yeah. There is no connect on this album’s characters. It’s not a story record.

Darryl: I think that's true - and in the sense that the characters could sometimes be drawn without Catholicism and be no less full, I think it can sometimes be a crutch for him.

TRACK 8: “Stay Positive”

Darryl: The pacing on this album is really great.

Steven: Yeah, we've been listening to this thing for about two hours, and that's the one thing that's struck me most about it. There's really only one off note ("One for the Cutters").

Brendan: So, is this one a reach-out to the kids? You’ve got shoutouts to Youth of Today and 7 Seconds.

Darryl: Only if you reach out to the kids these days with references to bands that started in the 80s.

Brendan: Ah, but the throwback shit is popular with kids (like me).

Darryl: True, but the song rags on the actual youths of today (not the band) pretty heavily. “The kids are too skinny, the kids are gonna have kids of their own, etc...” It seems like it’s looking at the scene by looking back.

Also, this is Stay Positive’s reference-every-other-HS-track-ever song.

Steven: "Stay positive" the song is to Stay Positive the album as that long guitar solo was to "Lord I'm discouraged": bit of levity before the resignation and fatalism set in (in the album’s case, the last three tracks).

TRACK 9: “Magazines”

Steven: Wherein we finally meet Ben Nichols.

Brendan: Somebody please tell me why "Magazines" shouldn’t be a hit?

Steven: I'm actually surprised that this wasn't the first single.

Brendan: This is the most adult of any relationship Finn seems to write about. Not to say middle aged, but characters with real jobs and the same leanings they had when they were 17. You know, like anybody else.

Darryl: I think that's pretty accurate; it's definitely a lot closer than anything on Separation Sunday, but I'm still put off by some of the lyrics. “Hits her like a tambourine,” "I know you're pretty pissed, I hope you'll still let me kiss you." It's this sort of lyricism more than any other factor that reminds me of the mall-emo genre. There's a casual misogyny and a dynamic of objectification that's eerily reminiscent of Fall Out Boy, Brand New and company. Which isn't to say it's a bad representation of that character, but it weirds me out.

Brendan: I'm just saying, these are as fully formed as any characters on the record. Why can't their experience be taken as a matured relationship?

Darryl: Because I think after the first verse, the character of the woman isn't really defined by much apart from the way in which she's pursued by the men.

Brendan: Is “Magazines” the best song on the album?

Darryl: I don't think it's the best song on the album, but I do think it's probably the best single on the album.

Brendan: Do either of you have significant issues with the hypothetical of if the album ended now? Would you miss the latter songs?

Darryl: No. It was a great album up to this point, and resolves pretty well here.

Brendan: And how can you not love that “Magazines” ends with the exact note as “Holland 1945”?

TRACK 10: “Joke About Jamaica”

Steven: So does your previous observation make these next two tracks superfluous? Because I really like the narrative conceit of this one. I think it's pretty important to the album, both as a warning against superficial self-worth, and a pretty sardonic take on ossifying in a youth-dominated culture.

Brendan: Explain.

Steven: It's about a groupie who thinks she's hot shit till she gets older, at which point the bands won’t have anything to with her. So she gets bitter: “The boys in the band, no they’ll never be stars.” It doesn’t really add anything to the album thematically, but it reinforces the themes. And it's very listenable.

Darryl: But being written from the perspective of a woman, I think it is a different take.

Steven: Yeah, but I think there's also a bit of transference there. The fears of age squeezing you out of a youth-dominated scene are probably front and center for Finn and Co.

Brendan: Why the marked lack of Tad's leads? This is the first track to feature them since "Lord, I’m Discouraged". I remember when I first started listening to HS, Kubler’s guitar was all over 'em. But I think there are 2 guitar solo tracks on this entire album.

Darryl: I think the role of the guitar changes pretty significantly in the style of the last few songs. With Boys and Girls there was a pretty significant shift to other instruments, though.

Brendan: I half want to enter a philosophical deathmatch with Steven over guitar solos. But okay, let’s move on.

TRACK 11: “Slapped Actress”

Darryl: What's the best album closer HS have done?

Brendan: “How a Resurrection Really Feels”

Darryl: Yeah, that's always been my pick, too. Both for what it does for the album and for the song itself just kicking ass.

Steven: “Killer Parties”

Darryl: That was my second choice. I think “Slapped Actress” is third, with “Southtown Girls” coming in last.

Steven: Considering “Southtown Girls” is a pretty strong track, that's still some high praise. They certainly know how to close out albums, in other words.

Brendan: That, or they have a high percentage of good songs equally worthy of praise.

Darryl: I dunno, I don't think “Killer Parties” would have worked nearly as well had it been placed anywhere else on the record. “Southtown Girls” is the exception in that I think it may have been better somewhere else.

Brendan: Let’s wrap this up, then. Best songs: "Magazines,” "Lord, I’m Discouraged," "One for the Cutters"

Darryl: “Lord I'm Discouraged,” “Slapped Actress” and “Constructive Summer”

Steven: “Lord, I’m Discouraged,” “Constructive Summer” and “Sequestered in Memphis”. So there’s a general consensus about the best songs, with the obvious exception being “One for the Cutters”.

Brendan: So is this album a progression? A regression? A holding pattern?

Darryl: I think it's a progression. If you look at Separation Sunday and Almost Killed Me as records heavily focused on stories and words, and at Boys and Girls as their first step towards a more musically adventurous band, I think it's hard to see this as anything but a further progression down that line. There’s a question as to whether it's been a success—there weren't the missteps of “One for the Cutters” on Boys and Girls—but I don't think it's regressing or holding. I think they're pushing themselves for sure.

End Transmission

The Big Laydown

2008-06-04T14:01:00.000-07:00

It started in late 2006, with the curio announcement that Scarlett Johansson- yes, that Scarlett Johansson- was to make an album. What’s more, she was to make an album of Tom Waits covers. Eye rolling turned into a sustained level of interest, which was piqued with the accompanying details. Dave Sitek, musical backbone of the adored TV on the Radio, had been tapped to create a backdrop for the assuredly surreal sounds to come. Cameos and collaborators piled up with each infrequent press release, along with rumors and gossip, whisperings of Ziggy Stardust sightings in the bayou, and speculation as to whether or not Johansson could actually, you know, sing. More than a year and a half later, Anywhere I Lay My Head arrived.

The average music fan has probably heard some of mostly the same criticisms. The record certainly has its rough spots, and yeah, the lows are pretty low indeed- especially the painfully-obvious music box on “I Wish I Was in New Orleans” and the hideously juvenile dance track train-wreck that is “I Don’t Want to Grow Up.” But it is also true that the highs are actually quite close to… stunning. Sitek’s now-trademark percussive drone, highlighted by string and woodwind flourishes, pair beautifully with some of the melodic highpoints of Waits’ career, which manage yoke the sometimes meandering and abstract tendencies of Sitek’s own band to some plain perfectly-written songs. While Johansson’s immature contralto stands out repeatedly in the record as a glaring point of weakness, it is, at the very least, an interesting diversion in places and occasionally manages to reach peaks simply not suggested possible by her previous known work at the mic.

It turns out, that we could reverse the billing on the closing duet “Who Are You” and have a decent case that Tunde Adebimpe alone would have made this a terrific TVoTR release. Consider his tracks as nothing more than a collaboration between him and Sitek, and we could easily extrapolate Bowie's sample into an album we’d call at least 3.4 times better than Heathen and proceed to argue its relative merits alongside Scary Monsters as his last good albums. In all actuality, pretty much the entire first half of the album (up to and including the co-written Johansson/Sitek original) is an unqualified success. Johansson’s taste in covers material is vindicated by some long-overdue attention paid to a couple of Waits’ should-be classics. The Brooklyn all-star backing band cameos (members of TV on the Radio, Celebration and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) exceed their ill-defined expectations and produce some great instrumentals. Bowie remains convincingly Bowie-like (in shades of Lou’s “Satellite of Love” no less) and Sitek absolutely produces the shit out of everything. Then we drink some lemonade, maybe watch Manhattan again, and head home happy in the early summer night.

Yet although most reviewers have claimed pretenses wanting to of give the album a fair shake, everybody seems to hedge against venturing any kind of strong sentiment as to the ultimate quality of these eleven tracks. The resulting critical response has come in deceivingly mediocre ratings and disingenuously superficial assessments. No attempt is made by anybody to reconcile the phenomenon of why this album, once a nexus of fairly intense fetishism by more than a few people, has been met with such absolute indifference upon its arrival. Given the principles involved and lopsided results, it seems that there would be at least a little spirited debate about Anywhere I Lay My Head. Yet a glance around the media reveals that it’s not just that the major outlets aren’t into it, but the fact is that nobody seems to be into it, and the question of why has consumed me...

Right around the time that anticipation of the Scar-Jo record had mounted, another musical debut by an indie-crush-worthy actress arrived with little fanfare. She & Him is a collaboration between Zoey Deschanel, she of healthy filmography and radar-straddling profile, and M. Ward, he of notably consistent (and Pitchfork-approved) folk-inflected solo career. The two have produced, by all accounts a lovely little collection of songs entitled Volume One, consisting of both covers (by the likes of key Ward influences Smokey Robinson and the Beatles) and originals credited to Deschanel and produced by Ward. With a studio band assembled by Ward and featuring members of the Decemberists and Devotchka, the duo manages to recall the pop highlights of obvious idols Tammy Wynette and Patsy Cline. Despite a few missteps, like the poorly-placed slowdown of “Take it Back” and a completely useless afterthought of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” (seriously), the album is full of affecting, hook-filled songs that know when it’s better to quit than risk going too far out of their depth.

At a loss for explaining the different receptions for Johansson’s and Deschanel’s respective efforts, my mind wandered among a number of possibilities. Obviously, the subject of novelty in music has been on my mind recently. When and why a given project may be dismissed out of hand while another is celebrated for whatever reasons still evades me. What I have come to understand, in a very “hipster-bashing is a totally hipster thing to do” kind of way, is that coolness-as-commodity requires a level of sub-cultural protectionism. This is often taken (rightly or wrongly, but mostly rightly) as exclusionary and elitism by the world at large. And, for people who spend as much time listening to and thinking about music as I do, the single biggest conceit we seem to make for our obsession is the lonely life of being a definitive arbiter of our own tastes.

Of course, these standards become compounded by the fact of indie-rock being a still largely male-dominated society, begging the engagement of forces beyond rationale, and sometimes bordering on misogyny. Scarlett was everybody’s dream girl from Ghost World through Lost in Translation. Now we respond to the unmistakable signifiers of her being finally and totally co-opted by the mainstream: appearing in lousy Bruckheimer summer blockbusters, going bicoastal (and unabashedly “Hollywood”) and, most painfully of all, dating Ryan Reynolds. As such, these recent albums are more than anything a referendum on the state of the people who made them. Anywhere I Lay My Head isn’t especially bad, but the collective yawn it has elicited is our final proof that Scarlett Johansson just isn’t cool anymore. Divorcing our opinion of the woman’s work from any ability to care about it is the only mechanism we have to protect ourselves from the fact that such an undertaking high likelihood of being an abject failure. To invest ouselves now risks seeing Scarlett make a joke of herself- and, by extension, us- in the most demoralizing way possible: on the E! Network between comments about her upcoming role in yet another shitty (and profitable) movie.

It is now abundantly clear that only thing Ms. Johansson could have done to change anybody’s opinion of her record was to be less famous when she made it. In the hands of an unknown (preferably male) quantity, we’ll not only forgive such a “novelty” project, but applaud it heartily, as in the case of the Dirty Projectors, whose Rise Above was a fixture on every cool kid’s favorites of 2007 list. A collective based in the consensus Center of the Universe (Williamsburg, apparently) has every advantage to produce- without fear of reprisal- a Black Flag covers abomination that remains, nine months after its release, as flimsy and frequently unlistenable as it did the first time I ignored it.

Likewise, Deschanel gets a pass for essentially being so far out of the greater public consciousness that it doesn’t matter when she fails. And she inevitably will fail. Volume One, for all its pleasant moments isn’t exactly announcing itself as a definitive work of an assured new voice to take the medium by storm, though Deschanel’s prominent role in M. Night Shyamalan’s forthcoming The Happening promises to be a debacle enough to ensure that she’ll have the chance to produce a few more volumes of She & Him to try for something even better. And you know what? I’ll bet they’ll be pretty good, too. If only the poor movie star would be afforded the same chance.

Battlestar Galactica: Season 4, Episode 8, "Sine Qua Non"

2008-06-03T02:24:00.000-07:00

After three straight adrenaline-fueled episodes, Battlestar Galactica returned from its Memorial Day hiatus with “Sine Qua Non”, a frustratingly uneven character study probing into the collective consciousness of those left behind in the wake of the events in “Guess What’s Coming to Dinner?” It’s tempting to think of “Sine Qua Non” as a regression of sorts, a callback to the meandering character sketches of the first few episodes of BSG’s fourth and final season. But whereas those earlier revelations often felt frivolous, exploring the remaining fleet’s reaction to the disappearance of their President, to say nothing of half the fleet’s military strength, was of the utmost importance.

“Sine Qua Non” opens up promisingly enough, with a blizzard of washed-out hallucinatory sequences imagined by Natalie, the gutshot cylon leader, superimposed against a flurry of medical activity, as Galactica’s medics rush to resuscitate their new ally. They fail through no fault of their own, and with her last act Natalie, true to the sensuous nature of her model, grasps blindly for one last physical touch, here provided by the good Doc Cottle. Apparently I was wrong in my speculation that she might be the dying leader. Ah well.

Elsewhere, Vice President Tom Zarek, the former terrorist and master politician, attempts to assume control of the Presidency, as stipulated in the constitution. In a strange turn, the normally expedient Admiral Adama—the man who accepted the presidency of Gaius Baltar, for goodness’ sake—outright refuses to acknowledge Zarek’s legitimacy, and so the youngest member of the quorum, the Admiral’s son Lee, is tasked to find a suitable replacement for Zarek, while the Admiral is forced to look within for the first time in a great while. Thus are the two main thrusts of this episode launched.

It was always apparent to anyone paying attention that Lee’s foray into politics was going to result in him becoming President. And that’s okay—inevitability is a perfectly acceptable narrative choice, provided the journey in question is handled deftly. Unfortunately it hasn’t been. Lee has always been the least defined character on the show, and his dealings with the quorum this season have totally compounded this. Jamie Bamber is a great actor, but his recent scenes, apart from negotiating the safety of Gaius Baltar, have always seemed perfunctory at best, superfluous at worst. That dynamic continues here, as the writers had to bring in Romo Lampkin, erstwhile public defender, just to get Lee sped along.

Lampkin is a bit like Anton Chigur—he’s a force of nature, more a collection of tics than anything recognizably human. I always liked him, but he was totally unnecessary in “Sine Qua Non”. The entire point to his presence was to reiterate and reilluminate the survivor’s guilt, which of course brings up a problem. The logistics of Galactica ensure that we’re never far away from any of the survivor’s guilt, so focusing on Romo’s anguish didn’t add anything to this equation. Indeed, it was mostly mimicry, as Romo Sixth-Sensing his wife’s cat echoed the guilt of both Saul Tigh, who sees his dead wife in the face of his current lover, and Admiral Adama, who has conversations with his dead ex-wife each anniversary. Lampkin is a secondary character in the midst of the show’s final season, and having him complete a totally unbelievable arc (in the span of a single episode, no less) was a colossal waste of time.

As Galactica moves more and more towards character-specific episodes, it often leaves us some crucial character in the lurch. Take Saul Tigh, who has been largely relegated to the periphery for much of this season. Because we haven’t seen much of him, two starting developments—Saul impregnating Caprica-Six (what’s Baltar gonna think?), and Saul assuming command of the Galactica, didn’t strike home with nearly as much force as intended. But hey, at least we got to see Romo get a new dog.

Lampkin also pops up in Bill Adama’s narrative, as he once again tells someone something they should already know, namely, Bill hearts Laura: “Sine qua non … those things we deem essential, without which we cannot bear living. Without which life in general loses its specific value, becomes abstract.” From Galactica’s outset, there has been romantic tension between Adama and Roslin. But they’ve always danced around it, which, come to think of it, is probably a good thing. When BSG’s other two leads, Starbuck and Apollo, finally decided to explore their oft-ignored personal feelings, it erupted in an angsty, completely forgettable mess that was painful for both viewer and character to watch.

But Adama’s intentions here are much more pure. Starbuck and Apollo hooked up because they could; Adama, thanks to Roslin’s abduction, has his hand forced. He might not ever unite with his love—this is Battlestar Galactica, after all—but as the camera pulls back on his lone raptor framed against the oblivion of space, it's clear that he’s damned sure going to try.

False Promises and Indiana Jones

2008-06-02T01:52:00.000-07:00

Steven Spielberg’s most blockbustery films have always wed big-budget commerciality to some stream of deeper issues running beneath the narrative’s surface—the collapse of childhood in ET, the psychology of fear in Jaws, and most importantly, the danger of cloned dinosaurs running amok on a Costa Rican island in Jurassic Park. But take away either the commerciality (as in Amistad, or A.I.) or the depth (as in 1941) and you’re left with an unsettlingly mediocre experience, and that's just what you get with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Midway through its first act, our eponymous hero, having just been launched a preposterous distance by the force of an atomic blast (in a 50s-era refrigerator—but at least it’s lead-lined, so we know this is all totally plausible), scampers up an embankment to survey the oblivion. Lurching into frame, Indiana is dwarfed completely by the iconic mushroom cloud billowing heavenwards. It’s the first of many hints that Indy has aged into a world beyond him, a world in which the miracle of the split atom is every bit as important as the miracles of the Lost Ark or the Holy Grail. In a literal flash, everything that defined Indiana Jones over the past three decades seemingly disappears: once a fierce detractor of the US government, Jones has become an OSS agent in the intervening years; a lone wolf defined by his transient relationships, Indy somehow picked up a steady sidekick in the War.

It’s a promising proposition: rarely (if ever) is an audience given the perspective of enough time to watch a character—much less a cultural icon—evolve into something completely different, whether by conscious decision making or by fading away into obsolescence. But that potential payoff quickly disappears, as we’re quickly reminded that, while our own reality is suffused with vicissitudes both bitter and sweet, movie heroes suffer no such indignities. At a stroke, Spielberg undermines whatever deeper currents may have been at work for Crystal Skull. “We’re at an age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away,” Indiana opines to an old friend, just after receiving news of his dismissal, but neither he nor Spielberg ever really mean it. Indiana hasn’t lost his breezy self-confidence or his superior physical skills: he’s able to crack wise and crack skulls with the same old aplomb, and all the while careening down a narrow dirt lane in a Brazilian rainforest to boot. And as for that whole life-taketh-away thing? By film’s end, Indiana ends up with a family without even trying.

At the climax, Indiana once again surveys a scene of spectacular destruction, as a spaceship twirls with enough force to destroy an ancient temple and divert the mighty Amazon from its course. It’s the perfect inverse bookend to the mushroom cloud shot earlier on. Indiana is master of this domain. He has engineered these events, and he watches not from below but from above. He is no longer a solitary figure defined against the grandeur in the distance; He is the Almighty observing his creation. He is Zeus on Olympus. He alone knows what it all means, and he alone knows where it’s all going, as the promise of a fallible American hero once again circles the drain.

Maybe next time.

America's Neon Hustle

2008-05-22T02:16:00.000-07:00

Up until last night, I had never seen an episode of American Idol. That’s not because I’m some fussy elitist, mind you— I’ve watched more episodes of The Single Guy and Suddenly Susan than I care to admit. It’s just that I never got around to catching up on the show’s first few seasons, and at some point that failure became something of a badge of honor, on par with my accomplishment of not throwing up for 14 straight years (a streak terminated, sadly, by an ill-fated tub of KFC mashed potatoes a few years back). Anyway, a fluke series of events finally made me cave to inevitability, and last night I finally succumbed, sitting through the finale of America’s most popular show. I’m glad I did.

I suppose I should start off by saying I didn't enter into this arrangement totally ignorant of American Idol’s workings. Thanks to Ken Levine and Alan Sepinwall, I think I have a pretty good idea of what’s been going on this season, whether it was the ill-timed apotheosis of little David Archuleta, Paula’s drunken soothsaying, or the inescapable sense of a formula starting to fray at the edges. What I wasn’t prepared for was just how irritating that formula could be. In particle physics, there’s something called the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which essentially states that if you affect one particle in a certain way, its partner will be affected inversely. Watching the show unfold, it was hard not to think back to that dynamic, because every time something cool and exciting happened, it was almost immediately undermined by something equally odious.

Take Graham Nash. He’s a great performer, a living legend, and perhaps most relevantly, one of the few artists from the 60s who has consistently managed to not become a total parody of himself. I was really excited when he came out on stage, in other words. But his duet with Brooke was such shameless pandering (and so devoid of harmony) that it made me reconsider my previous assessment of Nash and his accomplishments, to the point that when I was re-listening to Déjà Vu after the show, I couldn’t stop thinking about that desultory duet. Has American Idol ruined CSNY for me? God, I hope not.

There were quite a few other good/bad moments, like eventual winner David Cook’s bliss with ZZ Top being followed by the unforgivably talentless Jonas Brothers (or, Hansen without the guilty pleasure of "MMMBop", which, come to think of it, wasn't even that pleasurable). But through all that, I remained mesmerized. To the extent that there’s anything culturally redeeming about American Idol, it’s probably how unabashedly American it really is: outrageous spectacle, style trumping talent, rabid commercialism at its most unforgiving. It's a force of nature, propelling an everyman into an international superstar, while simultaneously able to destroy my confidence in what I once cherished. Here’s a show that embodies, rather perfectly, the very ethos of this blog's spiritual namesake, bashing its viewers into perfect submission with the greatest of ease.

I can't wait for next year.

Reaper: Season 1, Episode 18, "Cancun"

2008-05-21T03:27:00.000-07:00

Oh, Reaper. I had such high hopes for you. Really, I did. You were an honest-to-gosh success story, the plucky underdog that somehow managed to overcome its birth defects and blossom into a fine TV show. You became so breezy and confident, in fact, that you were setting yourself up to be the heir apparent to Buffy. But now, Reaper? I think you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.

So let’s talk developments, shall we? After a scant week of letting viewers consider the potential demonosity (not a word, but it totally should be) of their show’s hero, showrunners Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters predictably hedged on giving an answer. There were certainly some strong hints that Sam is indeed the Devil’s son, whether it was the Devil’s unnerving sympathy for Sam (which may just be a subconscious rebellion against Ray Wise playing any positive emotion, as all my experience has conditioned me to think of him as, well, evil), Sam and the Devil having a catch, or the tarot card revelations, but there’s enough uncertainty that it could still go either way.

At all events, the denouement of Tony the demon’s insurrection has changed the show’s underlying dynamic forever, because this time Fazekas and Butters can’t fix things just by having Sam move into another apartment. The Devil is very clearly on Sam’s side now, whether or not they’re kin, offering Sam time off from being a reaper until Sam wants to return. (To which one wonders, why would he ever?) On the one hand, that means we’ll stop having to suffer through a torrent of lame “villains” like the tarot card reader this week, who was so underdeveloped it wasn’t even clear that she was evil. On the other hand, Sam opining, “They’re not gonna stop. They’re gonna keep coming till I’m dead” probably just means we’ll be given a weekly trickle of souls gunning zealously for Sam, instead of the much more fun dynamic of the souls running away from him.

I probably wouldn’t be so displeased with these revelations had they been handled with the narrative confidence of the past few weeks, but in “Cancun”, everything felt rushed and incomplete. That was most galling when Tony inexplicably failed to rescue Sam’s father, but it manifested itself too in Sam’s total lack of emotion in the wake of his father’s death. Maybe that was unintentional—Bret Harrison isn’t a very good actor, after all—but the rest of the emotion felt contrived, too: Andi’s perfunctory sympathies, Sam abandoning her to go to the (admittedly awesome) fireworks pyre. And then, of course, there was the weirdness with the Devil (the Devil!) choking back tears.

Oh, and apparently Sam (or the devil’s son, should he be introduced later) is destined to end the world. Of course, it was apparently too much trouble to let the audience in on that supremely important fact except as an afterthought during the fireworks show, so maybe it’s not as profound as I presume it is. Certainly it’s not as crucial, in the near term, as Sam’s mother disinterring his father, who seems to have supernatural powers of his own. That’s a development that would be more appealing if Sam’s familial angst had ever held any dramatic sway, but Sam’s family is a total dead end for this show, and I honestly couldn't care less about the shenangians between the Devil and Sam's father (or mother, for that matter).

The rest of the episode was similarly off-putting, as just about everything fell flat. The subplot with the succubus may have been funnier if the high-Sock was qualitatively different from normal Sock, and his willingness to share his new paramour with Ben just felt crass. It wasn't at all consistent with the normally empathetic Sock that's shown to be pretty attuned to the women in his life, Gladys especially.

Meanwhile, Andi gets forced into doing Sam’s busywork, in yet another example of Reaper being about 30 years behind the rest of the world when it comes to women’s empowerment (even if it did allow her to show off her detective acumen). What the hell happened to feisty Andi, who talked back to Ted and built a cardboard box fort and didn’t take shit from anyone? I miss her.

Really the only thing that worked well in "Cancun" was the return of the gay demon Steve, now a gay angel. Having been raised on The State, I never knew that Ken Marino had such impressive acting chops, but the look of joy and wonder on his face upon realizing that God’s capacity to forgive can extend to demons was marvelous. I really hope both he and Michael Ian Black return for next season, because this is a show that badly needs some more supporting characters. It could also use some heavenly input every now and then too, if only to bring the Devil back under the evil umbrella.

So here we are, with a show-altering finale that wasn’t handled particularly deftly. Still, considering Reaper is slated for a Spring return, Fazekas and Butters have 8 months to figure out how to fix what went wrong.

What did everyone else think?

Battlestar Galactica: Season 4, Episode 7, "Guess What's Coming To Dinner?"

2008-05-19T17:37:00.000-07:00

If the first few episodes of Battlestar Galactica’s fourth and final season—obsessed as they were with exploring the collective psyche of the principal cast—managed to repulse many viewers expecting a more dynamic payoff to the revelations from the show's 3^rd season, “Guess What’s Coming to Dinner?” should satisfy that greedy, plot-crazed mob. Penned by longtime Galactica scribe Michael Angeli (who can have some trouble with prolix dialog, but is absolutely redoubtable with the show’s hallmark actiony sequences), the episode was a mirror of seasons past: a desperate flight from a cylon threat, Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) and Roslin investigating religious visions with gusto. It was also the first episode since the season premiere to showcase each member of the show’s impressively large stable of characters—even secondary and tertiary ones, like Racetrack and Hoshi. It was, in short, a welcome return to past glory, a near-perfect mélange of character and plot that is common to all the best storytelling, in any medium.

“Guess What’s Coming to Dinner?” opened up confidently, with Gaius Baltar (James Callis) guttersniping Laura Roslin on his radio sermon (seriously, he’s more ubiquitous than Paul Harvey now, isn’t he?), deriding her secret visions of the mysterious opera house, visions she shares with Galactica’s resident cylons, Sharon Agathon (Grace Park) and Caprica-Six (Tricia Helfer). Still consumed by his personal animosity towards the president, Baltar hasn’t exactly entered the rarified air of the saints, but the haunted, sympathetic look he gives the newly-legless Felix Gaeta (Alessandro Juliani)—his former protégé, as well as the man who has tried to kill him twice, once with a knife and once with perjury—suggests that he’s getting there. The Baltar of seasons past would have been pleased at the crippling of an enemy; that’s clearly no longer the case.

Elsewhere, events swirled primarily around the newly minted cylon-human alliance, as the surviving cylons from Brother Cavil’s holocaust no longer wish anything more than to be reunited with their lost brothers and sisters, the final five, whom they believe to be on the ragtag fleet as refugees from Earth (which is why they were able to recall a famous Earthen diddy, “All Along the Watchtower”, in last season’s finale). Instead, they have elected to become more human, even offering to help the humans destroy the cylon resurrection capacity.

There were great looks from the final four as they realized what these revelations of earth and mortality mean to them: Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan) just wants to be done with the whole thing, desperate to keep his humanity intact (his first instinct aboard the basestar wasn’t to tinker with its controls, but to determine the party responsible for shooting Gaeta), while Tory Foster (Rekha Sharma), who has been embracing this whole cylon thing with an appalling amount of zeal, looks horrified that her shot at immortality is being taken away from her. That revelation brought Tory back to her most recognizably human form since last season; she was genuinely hurt by Roslin impugning her character, and pumping Gaius for information (literally! Zing!) marked the first time this season she was acting in someone else’s interests, not her own.

Meanwhile, Anders (Michael Trucco) just can’t stop feeling guilty. How much of that stems from shooting Gaeta the man, and how much of that stems from shooting Gaeta the potential cylon—who in now the 5^th person to ever sing in the show, the first four all being cylon—is certainly up to debate, but the pain on Trucco’s face was palpable. People are already parsing through the song’s lyrics for potential meaning (you can read about the composition process at composer Bear McCreary’s wonderfully detailed blog), but it worked on a different level for me, providing an elegiac counterpoint to Lee Adama (Jamie Bamber) playing the hero and imploring Roslin to explain her actions. She acquiesces, which is consistent with the changes of last week, but she’s still ultimately disdainful of representative democracy.

When that capitulation results in Natalie (Tricia Helfer again) explaining her actions to the quorum, a very grave Starbuck, watching the proceedings with a keen eye, realizes that the hybrid’s warning—that she, Kara, the harbinger of death—takes on a new significance. Thrace begins to realize that, hey, maybe it’s a positive appellation, referring not the destruction of mankind but to the potential loss of immortality among the cylons. That realization led to a reunion of sorts for Thrace and Roslin, who had bonded over religious imagery so many times before, promising to help each other ascertain the facts of the opera house, an ominous development underscored once more by Gaeta’s elegiac soprano.

That scene, in addition to showing Kara finally getting her shit back, set most of the rest of the events in motion. Half the principal cast is now trapped aboard the commandeered basestar with its twitchy, sentient centurions (even if the skinjobs have been robbed of their menace, the centurions sure haven’t) being spirited away against their will; Laura bringing Searider Falcon aboard the ship, suggesting she and Adama will never get to consummate their relationship. And, of course, Sharon Agathon shooting Natalie two times in the chest (what’s with the number eights never getting any headshots?) to protect her child, calling into question whether or not Roslin is still the prophesied dying leader—might Natalie now be? Some people have had problems with that last one, since Natalie is very clearly not Caprica-Six, the model in the shared visions, and Sharon above all should know that not all cylons are created equally. But at the same time I really can’t find fault, since the disorienting nature of Hera’s actions were very creepy to watch, and would set any parent on edge.

All in all, a fine episode. What did everyone else think?

Reaper: Season 1, Episode 17, "The Leak"

2008-05-14T14:00:00.000-07:00

Well, that was encouraging. Since coming back from the strike, Reaper has been on a roll, solving most of its formula’s problems (the lame, will-they-or-won’t-they romance; the lack of any overarching narrative) while maintaining the comedy and secondary characters that kept the show watchable even during its doldrums. Last week I speculated that “Greg Schmeg” might have been to Reaper what “The Boyfriend” was to Seinfeld, propelling a formerly pedestrian show upward, into the heights of legitimately good television, and “The Leak” cheerfully confirms that hypothesis.

“The Leak” wasn’t as funny as “Greg Schmeg” (though there were some great moments: Heathcliff vs Garfield; the tuxedo shirt; Winston) but in every other respect, it was an improvement. I’m not sure we as a television-watching public are willing to put up with purely episodic shows anymore—although judging from the CSIs and NCISs splattered across the Nielsen charts, it’s probably just me—and “The Leak” satisfied that need for overarching plot, advancing the overarching demon-insurrection, as well as revisiting Sam’s contract shenanigans.

Curiously, both narratives intersected this week. Back when Sam moved out and away from his family, it really benefited the show—the sappy parental angst really didn’t fit in with the rest of the secondary characters accepting Sam’s fate with magnanimity—but it was obvious that the show would eventually have to return, given that Sam’s father intentionally sabotaged Sam’s chances of getting out of his contract. Along with everyone else, I had presumed that this would ultimately lead to a tacky, emotionally hollow confrontation between Sam and his father that no one would care about. But the demon insurrection story allowed that dynamic to breathe. Thanks to his father’s selfishness, Sam’s only demon allies now think he’s the son of the devil (there’s no way he could be; I think it was pretty obvious that the Devil knew the rebels were watching him just then), and I expect that’s going to lead to some amusing betrayals and headspins: Sam has to spy on the demon rebellion because the Devil compels him to, the demons have to keep him close because they can’t risk alienating him, etc.

This was also the first time since Patton Oswalt’s guest spot that the soul-of-the-week was in any way interesting. While previous souls had some cool gimmicks—the acid queen, the tattoo guy—they were blandly developed, assuming they were developed at all. Maybe it was just because Mike the lothario was given a lot more screentime than any other souls, but that seedy, snake-oil charm was never off-putting or perfunctory the way other souls have been.

Brendan says that The Workbench might be the coolest hangout for a TV gang that we’ve seen in a while—and I don’t disagree—but Reaper has always had trouble capitalizing on that potential. “The Leak” finally changed that, whether it was Andi and Sam lounging in the tub section, the Devil transporting Sam via mailbox, or taking away his stepladder. It’s yet another problem that, for now, seems to have been fixed.

Again, the only real complaint that I can consistently lodge against Reaper is that it doesn’t know what to do with its women, especially Andi. Ever since Andi’s box fort established her quirky, creative side, she’s fallen into the trap of the bland, attractive girlfriend who would never in a million years stir up trouble. Thanks to Sam’s similar sad-sackedness, their relationship won’t ever be too dysfunctional, but my word, she’s getting absolutely railroaded by Sock, and it’s a bit distracting to watch. Look, I get that Sock is a force of nature, but it would be nice to have Andi stick up for herself once in a while. Hell, I’d be happy with her just kicking Sock to the backseat so her boyfriend could ride shotgun.

The Immortals: #98 - Roxy Music

2008-05-13T21:30:00.000-07:00

It would be a different story if they gave Brian Eno his due.

Standards like “Do the Strand” and “Ladytron” posit Roxy Music's first records as sort of art-rock’s answer to The Rocky Horror Picture Show: campy, but endearing, and plenty enough fun on a Saturday night. But really, nobody’s naming a Tim Curry and Meat Loaf joint as world-realigning stuff (except, I guess, maybe Barry Bostwick.) Were we to evaluate Roxy’s output in the context of how Brian Eno twisted our conventions of pop music in the 1970s we could more readily forgive the missteps. But no, Roxy Music was always first and foremost Bryan Ferry’s band, and, divested of the awesome kinds of weirdness that Eno wrung from otherwise straightforward rockers like “Virginia Plain” there are simply too few glimpses of brilliance to justify the accolades that the post-Eno catalogue have accrued.

Case in point: The consensus pick for “Best” (TM) Roxy Music album, Country Life.

For being touted as a glam rock touchstone, there seems to be little here that isn’t a mere approximation of the hallowed heroes of Ferry’s time. The Eurotrash melodrama of “Bitter-Sweet” is better realized on Lou’s Berlin. The un-tethered guitar and sax soloing imitates the avant squall of Iggy’s Stooges. And let’s face it- just about everything else Ferry attempts are half-rate Bowie impersonations that find only varying levels of success. The halcyon days of the Big Three still dominate any conversation as to what this music was supposed to sound like in the early 70s.

...which is not all to say that Roxy Music is totally undeserving of a measure of their success. Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera are actually very decent sidekicks, and their contributions largely keep Country Life from slipping out of memory altogether. Ferry has his moments too. Standout “A Really Good Time” is carried by a tidy melody and features lyrical phrasing that recalls Blonde on Blonde era Dylan. And not even the extraneous production effects on “Prairie Rose” can conceal the very best of Ferry’s vocal hooks.

But I’ve always suspected that Roxy Music’s greatest achievement was, above all else, being a band elevated by a personal aesthetic of more enduring significance than anything found in their music. See, Roxy Music made for substandard glam because they actually never were glam in the first place. Glam found danger in subverting concepts of gender and expectation and flirting with marginalized sexualities associated with drug freaks and street people. The music made sense, all jagged and ripped and fucked up interpretations of these glitter and garbage people who populated the decaying urban centers of the cultural world. Bryan Ferry didn’t belong there. His penchant for mugging and proggy, soft rock tendencies instead prophesized New Romantic (even so long before Punk begat New Wave.) He predicted a sub-genre of a sub-genre that is only distinguishable from its antecedents by... uhm... face stripes? Johnny Rotten should have hated Roxy Music every bit as much as the “over-the-top grandiose” sound of every other band in that incestuous scene.

In fact, Roxy’s supposedly profound effect on the early punk rock remains sonically nonexistent, and is more than likely a reinterpretation of the long-held love kids like Lil’ Lydon had for an icon to adolescents in the Isles. That Ferry was once a role model for countless young English punks surely wasn’t because he was almost the singer for King Crimson, but because he literally played the role of a model. The tuxedo fetish, the recurring cover-supermodels, the arty edges smoothed out by an oil-slick croon- this was James Bond… in a band! I have to imagine that this is exactly what teenaged British boys considered the objective and penultimate definition of “cool.”

And why not? I mean, the man really does wear the fucking hell out of a suit (just ask a member of Duran Duran!) But the fact remains that Roxy Music is perhaps the ultimate case of image validating a legacy after the fact, and the notion of this version of the band having that much influence, even if argued sincerely, is still not accurate. Roxy Music were no more key to the advancement of rock and roll than Tim Curry was to the sexual revolution. That Bryan Ferry is celebrated by so many reveals how revisionist we are in our appraisals of the things we just kind of seem to like, even in spite of our claims to taste.

Country Life by Roxy Music

Battlestar Galactica: Season 4, Episode 6, "Faith"

2008-05-12T14:20:00.000-07:00

Whoa.

As much as I’ve loved the ponderous lack of urgency underwriting these past few character-driven episodes of Galactica, I can certainly see how they might have gotten a bit frustrating, particularly threaded out over a month or so. “Faith” addressed these concerns by dialing up the action, not only with several impeccably disorienting shootouts, but by setting up the events of the foreseeable future.

That’s not to say that “Faith” was a brainless action-romp; it was, in fact, perhaps the most probing episode so far this season. But rather than further flesh out its characters, “Faith” instead elected to explore how those characters respond to a very fundamental tenet of humanity (and, thanks to recent events, cylon-ness): we’re all going to die.

Before we begin, even if you didn’t rejoice in that motif (and if you didn’t, you’re crazy), at least Kara Thrace, or whatever it is that looks like her, was brought back to the competent, reasonable military officer she once was. There was something touching about her rushing to help Gaeta, the insubordinate (to her) mutineer whom she nearly airlocked early last season, forgetting her personal animosity and her own mission almost instantly to administer medical aid to someone many feel didn’t deserve it. That mutiny, acting as it did as a referendum on Kara’s unstable command, reined her in, obviating that divisively militant personality, and made the climactic scene with the hybrid—who revealed to her that she, Starbuck, was the bringer of death, and would lead them to their “end,” whatever that means—a more interesting scene than a smug, blustery Kara Thrace receiving her destiny otherwise would have been.

Tagging along with Kara, Anders and Athena aboard the cylon basestar was one Jean Barolay, whom I couldn’t remember ever seeing before (though, as it turns out, she’s been in several episodes, as a resistance group member on both Old Caprica and New Caprica). Usually when an anonymous character volunteers to go on a dangerous mission, one of two things happens: either the character sabotages it, or winds up sticking a knife against someone’s throat. Here, Barolay existed simply to die ignobly, alone and in enemy territory, as retribution for her past sins. She wasn’t here to provide a fleeting moment of false drama, but to illuminate how far the cylons have come in their quest to become human. They’re no longer glib about death (on New Caprica, Cavil’s only complaint about his reincarnations was that they gave him migraines) since it’s now a final state of being, certainly an imponderable fate for a race that had previously been, at all events, immortal. Even as Gina, the Six who seems to be in charge of the lone basestar surviving Cavil’s holocaust, derides the concept of “human justice” and blood for blood she embraces it, pulling the trigger of the gun Anders couldn’t bear to fire. The momentary kiss between Gina and the guilty Six wasn’t erotic at all; it was a sublimely abject expression of comfort between two personalities that operate on sensuousness, not rationality.

Elsewhere on the basestar, Athena finally met up with a group of her sisters, so to speak, in a scene that echoed the events of season 1’s finale, “Kobol’s Last Gleaming”. But while that earlier confrontation untethered Boomer from her humanity, Athena's encounter reinforced hers. She refused to even entertain the idea of helping her fellows on that principle, even if that help was a simple, sympathetic hand to a dying Eight, hemorrhaging blood into a milky-white pool: “You pick your side, and you stick.” Grace Park is often forgotten when people talk about the embarrassingly talented Galactica cast (which may have something to do with the fact that she’s been out of the spotlight for so long. Seriously, she and Jamie Bamber must have some incriminating photos of Ronald Moore), but she and Tricia Helfer have done a fine job throughout the series of shading scores of identical bodies with believably unique personalities.

But the emotional centerpiece of “Faith” was, unquestionably, President Laura Roslin and her new BFF coming to grips with their mortality. From Roslin’s staggered gait to the frank conversation about her faith in God/s (on your deathbed, there’s no subject more important than that), the entire sequence felt uncomfortably real. I think it’s fair to say that Roslin accepting Baltar’s monotheism was all but inevitable, but I hadn’t expected it to come so early, and without any grandiose, heartfelt speech from James Callis. Instead, Baltar was consigned to a radio the entire episode, a whispering ghost of reassurance that, yes Laura, everything’s gonna be all right.

I really can’t say enough about Mary McDonnell here. Roslin’s breakdown after realizing that she’s not exactly like her mother—who was, like her, a teacher and penitent monotheist—was heartbreaking, and it led to that fine moment on the boat, a cascade of emotions flooding her face—joy at seeing her mother; distaste at having embraced anything by Gaius Baltar. That emotional matrix played out again in Adama’s quarters, but it was further suffused by Roslin’s apprehension at accepting a religion that essentially denies what has up to now driven her along: she’s the prophesied dying leader who will lead humanity to Earth. If nothing else, that loss of certitude undermined Laura’s iron fist just for just a moment, allowing Laura, the cancer patient, to comfort Adama’s growing despair about the events of Galactica that are increasingly spinning out of his control.

Some other thoughts:

In an episode where so many faced their mortality stoically, watching Gaeta—the man who refused to beg for his life, even as he was the individual most responsible for the successful New Caprican resistance—beg a man to leave his wife and friends to die just so he could save his leg felt a bit off to me.

Can we please abandon the clock countdown? On all shows? Seriously, there was just no way that the Demetrius was going to leave the basestar floating around in space, not with that many principals aboard, and that knowledge totally undercut any lame tension there may have been.

While 3 of the final four cylons have all lost their humanity to a certain extent, Anders, in his compassion towards Barolay and the Eight, is reinforcing his.

Modern Library Top 100: #95 - Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (1954)

2008-05-08T03:58:00.000-07:00

If art is about making a connection between the artist and the observer, then lots of art eludes me. I can usually appreciate the central ideas behind a supposed masterpiece, but it’s often difficult for me to admire their execution. Walking into the SFMOMA, I don’t see the beauty of a mundane object outside its natural setting; I see a toilet on its side. The idea of a time-travelling schizophrenic is certainly appealing, but Donnie Darko was about as enjoyable as a snuff film. (The comment section is to prove me wrong, people!) And seriously, don’t even get me started on the torpid horrors of The Animal Collective.

Frankly, the majority of my slog through Modern Library’s Top 100 list has been similarly unfulfilling. There have been a couple entries that I’ve truly enjoyed, but for the most part I’ve found the list to be forgettable. Like that toilet, the books seemed to have been more about big ideas than anything else, so they never really connected with me. Thankfully, just as I was beginning to entertain doubts about abandoning this project, I read Under the Net, a novel that finally backs its big ideas with a delightful story to match them.

Under the Net is a pretty straightforward tale, actually. Jake Donaghue is a French-to-English translator living in 1950s London, trying to make ends meet and solve a tricky love quadrangle he’s mired himself in. Along the way he publishes book about the meaninglessness of language; dognaps Mister Mars, an aging movie star; and cracks some bobby skulls in a massive labor riot on a Roman Forum. Essentially it’s a picaresque novel with a protagonist actually resembling a likeable human being, and that’s a rare gift.

In reading Under the Net, it’s hard not to recall Martin Blank, John Cusack’s character in Grosse Pointe Blank. Both Martin and Jake have done some pretty terrible things (though Jake’s rap sheet stops short of assassinating government witnesses), they both have to deal with the romantic consequences of an unexpected homecoming, and each man has a decidedly philosophic bent. But where Martin’s philosophy is necessarily couched in the shallow quip (after all, it’s probably not possible to be named the 21st greatest comedy film of all time if you’re focusing too much on epistemology), Jake’s has a lot of room to breathe simply by dint of literature being a more expansive medium. That's a dynamic that leads many authors to awkwardly shoehorn personal philosophies in their novels. Murdoch, who was a philosophy don at Oxford, probably had to deal with this temptation more than most, but she manages to integrate her personal take on Wittgenstein and Beckett into the narrative without it once sounding awkward.

I could rhapsodize on and on, but I won't. I usually try to connect these pieces to some overarching personal concern or motif, but Under the Net really does speak for itself. It's the first novel I've read with a narrative enriched with deep ideas without sounding pedantic. I can't dispense any higher praise.

Reaper: Season 1, Episode 16, "Greg Schmeg"

2008-05-07T04:02:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it only takes one episode to launch a show to greatness. Seinfeld was a pedestrian comedy until “The Boyfriend”; How I Met Your Mother didn’t catch fire till “Slap Bet”. I’m not willing to lump Reaper in with those worthies—yet—but if its subsequent episodes (of which I'm hoping there will be more) are as funny and engaging as “Greg Schmeg”, Reaper is setting itself up to be a damned fine show.

So here’s the deal, for you poor souls (yuk yuk) not in the know. In September, the CW released a critically acclaimed pilot about a sadsack worker drone (Sam Oliver, played by Bret Harrison) toiling away in a big-box construction supply store. One day he wakes up to find the Devil (the ineffable Ray Wise, who’s as delightfully evil here as he was on Twin Peaks) lying on his comforter. The Devil coolly informs Sam that, thanks to a dubious bargain his parents made before his birth, his soul has become property of Hell. So Sam, distraught, is forced into a second job: a bounty hunter for Hell’s escaped souls—a rather altruistic task, all things considered, but since Sam never voluntarily auctioned off his immortal soul the Devil is forbidden from making him do anything too odious.

Anyway, that pilot was awesome. It was clever and novel and it had three best friends in funny suits attacking a fire monster with a vacuum cleaner. But subsequent episodes? Ugh. Reaper became formulaic in the worst way. Each week Sam and his friends at the box store would face a bland, crudely-drawn villain. A will-they-or-won’t-they “romantic” relationship between Sam and his childhood friend Andi (Missy Peregrym) was so maudlin and predictable it could have come from the notebook of a ten-year-old who had watched nothing but Ross and Rachel her entire life.

But Reaper’s biggest problem was that it forgot to be funny. The comedic charm of Sam’s friends Ben (Rick Gonzalez, always awesome) and Sock (Tyler Labine, whose Jack Black impersonanation has been toned down, thankfully) took a back seat to Sam’s whiny angst about doing the Devil’s work, and to the tedious romance between Sam and Andi. Worse still, DMV clerk/secretary for Hell Gladys (Christine Willes), the most reliably guffaw-inducing character on the show, disappeared for a long string of episodes without any explanation. The producers of Reaper entrusted their show to Harrison and Peregrym, the show’s two prettiest people. As Ken Levine just pointed out, that’s not exactly a recipe for comedic success.

We here at NH hated the WGA strike (and still do), but at least it seems to have refocused Reaper’s showrunners, Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas. The result is a breezy, much more confident affair. In the first five episodes since Reaper’s return, Sam has moved away from home, thus eliminating an awkward, go-nowhere family storyline. Sam and Andi are now in a relationship, even avoiding the lame she-can-never-know-my-secret dynamic: Andi knows Sam’s a reaper, and she’s cool with it. They’ve even abandoned the slavish devotion to the villain-of-the-week formula, introducing a rather fun subplot involving The State alumni Michael Ian Black and Ken Marino as gay ex-demons leveraging Sam to overthrow Satan, a narrative arc that promises to last at least through the end of this season. And oh yeah, the funny’s back. Gonzalez and Labine have been showcased more and more, and with Black and Marino and Lucy Davis (from the UK’s version of The Office), they’ve introduced legitimately amusing guest stars.

That momentum carried over into this week. “Greg Schmeg” wasn’t just a great episode of Reaper, it was of the best episodes of network television this season. There were some outrageously funny moments in it, particularly the devil’s attempts to get Sam to kill the man brainwashing Andi into cheating on him. Tricking an unwitting Sam into carrying the biggest knife I’ve ever seen before unveiling the smooching couple was a great sight gag (“I show you this because I care. And also I kind of enjoy it.”), but giving Sam a telescope to spy on them, then swapping the telescope with a sniper rifle, still has me giggling. During Reaper’s doldrums the Devil often acted too much like Sam’s buddy, but he’s become increasingly more menacing in this post-strike run and the show is better for it. Plus Ray Wise is absolutely eating it up, and that’s always delightful.

There were some other great moments, like Gladys’s triumphant return (cheerfully admitting that she’s bribable, assuming the bribe is a promise to take care of her Persian cat, Fancy) and the burnout paranormal arms dealer, who was funnier and more interesting in 2 minutes of screentime than most of Reaper’s previous guest stars were in twenty. But the best of them all was probably Sam finally showing some backbone and standing up to the Devil, and outfoxing him in the process. Harrison isn’t as funny as his co-stars, but as Sam he doesn’t need to be (and he probably shouldn’t be, considering Sam’s unhappy fate). As the straight man determined to do the right thing, Harrison is spot on for the role, and good on Butters and Fazekas for finally realizing it.

If there was a blemish in “Greg Schmeg”, it was the reiteration that Reaper still can’t do proper romance. I have a lot of gripes with Hollywood, but chief among them is the persistent fear of presenting a legitimately layered female character. It’s as if writers everywhere are afraid to create a woman who is in any way flawed, and Ben’s new love interest (Battlestar Galactica’s Kandyse McClure) is in the same mold as Andi before her: impossibly patient, impossibly pretty, impossibly good. But that’s something I can overlook if the show promises to be as consistently funny and engaging as these past few episodes have been.

One other thing: “If you ever feel like turning that triangle into a square, let me know.” Ew.

Iron Man: Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

2008-05-06T02:14:00.001-07:00

As a celluloid showcase for blowing shit up, Iron Man probably represents the pinnacle of human achievement. But as an affecting cinematic experience, it falls flat on its face, the latest turd in the bottomless toilet bowl of big-budget superhero movies. Morally bankrupt, Iron Man sates its audience’s basest retributive bloodlust without once elevating the dynamics of personal responsibility, illuminating instead nothing more than American cinema’s cultural morass.

Superficially, there’s nothing at all wrong with Iron Man. It’s visually bombastic in the best sense of the phrase, and Robert Downey Jr. plays billionaire playboy and weapons manufacturer Tony Stark with a kind of bracing aplomb. Even the plot, though sieve-like, moves briskly enough to mitigate the inevitable groan factor of its holes.

But Iron Man suffers from being a superhero film that is too afraid to pit its hero against anything more complex than some second-rate Bond lackeys. The bad guys Stark encounters in Afghanistan are just a discrete group of rogue thugs, carving up random spheres of influence and thirsting for power simply for its own sake. They’re not religious warriors, they’re not disaffected peasants mutilated by Stark’s weapons, and in a film that takes some rather awkward pains to establish its hero’s patriotic credentials, they’re never even connected to the War on Terror. Stark’s conflict with them is backed by a kind of juvenile morality that might play well on Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, but can’t help but be pandering in a wide-release.

Tony Stark rebels against his past by embracing it, fighting against the horrors of the weapons industry by building the most powerful one ever devised (to its credit, someone in the film points out the absurdity in this), gravely endangering the world he so recently swore to protect in the process. To the extent that we can judge any decision, it should be evaluated on its range of likely outcomes. In that light, Stark’s decisions are unpardonable sins: he brings the world to the brink and triumphs only by dint of outrageous fortune.

Stark finds it easier to use his vast resources to build a machine to satisfy his own personal vendettas (his own, and his too-heroic Afghan friend’s) instead of using them to change the global political structure he’s always profited from. In reality, he’s a charlatan, buoyed by the charm of a snake oil salesman, but we’re told he’s a laudable hero just because he has a winning smile and a cute pet robot. It’s the ultimate triumph of style over substance, and given where we are as society, that’s an all-too-common dynamic that desperately needs to end.

One other thing. Lots of praise has been spilled over the relationship between Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow, and it’s mystifying. We’re supposed to sympathize for a woman who can love a philandering (indirect) mass murderer, but can’t possibly countenance him endangering himself trying to right his wrongs (once again to its credit, Downey points out this absurdity in the film, but he never follows up on it). This is good romance? Buh? Either Paltrow’s character is pure evil, or she’s suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

Battlestar Galactica: Season 4, Episode 5, "The Road Less Traveled"

2008-05-05T03:58:00.001-07:00

“You have to make peace with your past. That part of you is gone.”

Couched in the cryptic doublespeak of a half-mad cylon, the sentiment above is more than a stern injunction to our hero, Kara Thrace. It is, simply, the refrain of the events of “The Road Less Travelled”, and all that has transpired early on in Battlestar Galactica’s fourth season.

Since its universally praised premiere, “He That Believeth In Me”, complaints have been legion about the subsequent episodes of this season, ranging from the unwelcome evolution of favorite characters (specifically, the rather curious transformation of the once-proud Kara Thrace into a frenzied shadow of her former self) to its glacial plot developments. Hell, a peek at the TWoP forums leaves one with the impression that Ronald Moore and company deserve a fashionable coat made from some hot tar and feathers, expiation for the destruction of what was once so good and true.

As perfect as the most of the episodes in the first 3 seasons were, there are only so many logistical crises and cylon attacks the ragtag fleet could withstand without spinning the wheels. In that respect, perhaps it’s a mixed blessing that Battlestar Galactica has never enjoyed monster ratings—it’s a virtual certainty that a cash cow would never be allowed to leave on its own terms, but to be stretched out as long as possible, intention in art be damned (think Lost). I don’t doubt that there’s still lots of potential in exploring further the politics of the fleet, or fleshing out some of the minor characters (I’m still waiting for a Doc Cottle showcase), but better to get out a season early than a season late. A ragged group of humans on the run from an inexorable killing force is a great conceit, but the up-and-down reception of season 3 signaled to audiences and creators alike that it was time to move on, to move in a different direction and have the fleet find Earth or die in the process.

Of course, it’s one thing to acknowledge that a new direction is needed, quite another to agree with the one taken. Episodes like “The Road Less Travelled” should assure viewers that Moore and company have things well in hand, its echoing motifs bouncing off character parallels to create a very literary and very watchable 44 minutes. While the episode ended with the fleet no closer to Earth, the real progression came, as it consistently has this season, in the characters themselves. The majority of screentime was given to the increasingly-troubled Demetrius, but the more affecting moments lay in the person of Chief Galen Tyrol, who, in becoming both cylon and widower in a matter of weeks, was very obviously falling apart. I’m consistently amazed by the scope and talent of Galactica’s stable of actors, but here, Aaron Douglass may have given the best work of any of them this season. Tyrol deliberately dehumanizing himself, both physically with his freshly shaved head and psychologically with a gun to his cheek, worked mostly thanks to Douglass’s commanding presence and miraculous facial control (seriously, he must have been paying attention to Michael Hogan’s eyeball during the past year and a half).

In other words, Tyrol’s downward spiral felt earned, ultimately, and that made his reconciliation with Baltar that much more satisfying. I speculated earlier that Tyrol losing his wife might untether him from the stalwart character we had come to know, because, like Boomer before him, he would be alone. That eventuality certainly came to pass (though the Boomer parallels stop short, since Tyrol, crucially, didn’t pull the trigger), but who could suspect was that Tyrol would find his support—his salvation, even—in the words and deeds of Gaius frakking Baltar? As this season progresses, it’s becoming easier to understand just how it is that Baltar has been able to accumulate, and maintain, such a devout following. However tantalizing his message that all of God’s children are perfect beings is, without a compassionate figurehead it would sink under the weight of the established Gods. Baltar, if nothing else in this episode, for the very first time in the character’s history proved himself to care deeply about someone other than himself. That’s progress, people.

As for the Demetrius saga, it’s difficult to speculate on the early events of a two-parter. Helo’s mutiny certainly would have been more emotionally compelling had it not been established previously that he was willing to break military protocol to follow his conscience—remember, this is the man who squandered humanity’s only chance to permanently eliminate the cylon threat because he couldn’t countenance another genocide. That said, it was mostly good, if (and I’ll cop to what others are saying here) mostly pointless. Starbuck is still crazy? Check. Anders and Athena are still not getting any airtime? Check two. Leoben’s introduction was an interesting development, but he only briefly interacted with anyone outside of Kara (his scene with Anders, however, was worth the price of admission, each man knowing something the other doesn’t), and those scenes were predictably maudlin. And he only confirmed what was already suspected: that the cylon civil war is devastating. There aren’t any more resurrection ships. They’re playing for keeps.

Still. Baltar. The savior. Of both cylon and human. Yowza.

Battlestar Galactica: Season 4, Episode 4, "Escape Velocity"

2008-04-29T02:55:00.000-07:00

When the prophet Zoroaster popularized the concept of monotheism 2500 years ago, the world wasn’t exactly torn apart in a blizzard of religious confrontation. Thanks largely to Cyrus I, the Persian King of Kings who accepted this strange new belief with magnanimity and urged his subjects to do the same, monotheism existed peacefully alongside the Vedic gods of antiquity. If there’s one thing to learn from the tumultuous events of “Escape Velocity”, the fourth episode in Battlestar Galactica’s fourth and final season, it’s that monotheism’s emergence on the ragtag fleet is going to be a much messier affair.

The nexus of “Escape Velocity” was very obviously Gaius Baltar’s disturbing vein of monotheism clashing with the powers that be, and as with monotheism here on Earth, it seems that Baltar’s message is ultimately destined to win out. For that, Baltar has had an unlikely (and unwitting) ally in Laura Roslin, whose transparent attempts to destroy him, whether by trial in last season’s finale, or by politicking this week, have essentially created a sympathetic figure where once stood the most loathed person on the fleet. Roslin’s hatred for Baltar has long surpassed the boundaries of rationality, considering she amnestied everyone on New Caprica and remembers him before the holocaust only in fevered images. Coupled with her increasing inclination to totalitarianism, Roslin’s detestation of Baltar has twice pitted her against Lee Adama, who, despite being consistently re-drawn as a character, has usually acted as the fleet’s conscience. Baltar’s big speech enumerating his new ontology, however influenced it was by his own personal hallucination (the Six in Baltar’s head has always assured him he was destined for something bigger, and, with the phantom shirt-tug, she’s now taking active steps to ensure he fulfills that destiny), was only possible because Roslin’s blustering moral certitude provoked Lee to action, as it did during Baltar’s trial. If Ronald Moore is setting up Lee to be the Hatfield to Roslin’s McCoy, as many fans are predicting and the events of “Escape Velocity” suggest, it’s going to be difficult for Roslin to win that feud, and even more difficult for fans to actively root for her. Such a sweeping and believable shift in audience loyalties—imagine watching in seasons 2 or 3 and actively cheering on Baltar to get one over the stoic Roslin—is a tribute to Moore’s impressive narrative acumen, and gives faith that the show can’t help but go out strong, unlike The X-Files, say, or Buffy.

Not much else happened in “Escape Velocity” but not much had to: it was a time for these characters, having gone through so many changes of late, to take some time to reflect. A bewigged and haggard Roslin dropping hints about the funeral she wants; Tigh finally acknowledging he needs to come to grips with Ellen; Tyrol accepting he settled for the best of limited options. A weaker show might founder in such introspective seas, but Battlestar Galactica seems to thrive in them—the series’ best moments (“Scar”, “Unfinished Business”, “33”) have always focused more on the journey than the destination, and “Escape Velocity" continued that tradition.

One other thing. I was getting annoyed by the constant visual tricks that this season seems to be foisting on us (Tigh shooting Adama in the eye in the premiere, Tyrol hearing Adama berate his child as an abomination, Tigh seeing Ellen in Caprica-Six) before I realized it was probably just a manifestation of the cylon projection system described in season 3. That brings up some interesting metaphysical questions, though: are these hallucinations wish fulfillment? Can the four control those images? These are the things that I should really stop thinking about.

The Patriot's Draft

2008-04-24T13:50:00.000-07:00

The Writers Guild versus the AMPTP might soon measure amongst the most significant events of our recent national public-political discourse. Stateside opinion of this president’s agenda has descended into an absurd nonsensicality, an afterthought inherent to an administration crippled by its overseas endeavors. Our recent presidential campaigns have been muted by permeating senses of foregone conclusions, both bleakly desperate (2004) and cautiously promising (2008.) And by now the once vaunted “New” Congress has proved infinitely more interested in on occupying itself with the affairs d’Clemens and Belichick than seizing upon any major policy movements. Meanwhile, a major labor dispute has now come and not really gone, helping to define in no small way the terms of a major domestic industry’s growth for the immediate hereafter with few Americans knowing (caring?) about the matters at stake, not only as relate to professional writers, but our own very lifestyles.

The terms of the writers’ return remain undisclosed to the public, but it is probable that the writers will receive a royalty rate lower than the proposed reparations for DVD sales would have provided once the agreement is ratified, as well as royalties for new media still well-below the desired broadcast television standard. Though, thankfully, nobody will be losing their homes or starving in Los Feliz in the immediate future for this agreement, there remains no end to the dirty tricks at the disposal of our multinational overlords to squeeze entertainment workers for every last penny. Online media- on the back of content bereft of the costs of manufacturing, shipping, storing and retailing physical properties- may very well yield profits soon into the billions. And as other proposals that might limit the continued dominance of corporate media powers seem doomed to fail, an eventual revelation of the strike’s resolution turning out to be the “Home Video Swindle: Redux” seems not only plausible, but exceedingly likely. Come the maturity of an integrated, online age for all popular entertainment, we will see more and more importance implicit to such issues as those highlighted in the recent strike. Yes, our scripted television shows are coming back on the air, but for thousands of people who work in the industry bracing for the possibility of more upheaval, their livelihoods are very much still up in it. A settlement shouldn’t suggest anything has truly been settled.

HBO’s John Adams miniseries wrapped up its 7 episode Emmy-grab this past Sunday night. I share many of the criticisms of the series that have been commonly reported in critics’ circles. The performances throughout are consistently decent yet somehow disappointing, many episodes are given to interminably boring stretches devoid of any sense of historian David McCullough’s transcendent passion for its source material, and that this gritty age of telefilms’ insistence on realism has culminated in a most brutal extreme, seemingly independent of any storytelling purpose. Yet it still evident to me that Adams is possessed of at least one strength which elevates it from utter mediocrity: John Adams was a simply brilliant mind and a dynamic speaker in heated debate, whose talents here lead to several excellent scenes depicting the political contests of our nation’s birth and early years. Paul Giamatti, in the series titular role, plays his finest moments with a dour ferocity of belief in the import his duties, which take him from the courtrooms of colonial Boston to the hostile would-be architects of America at Independence Hall and even an Audience with King Crankypants the Second himself.

Sadly, these excellent scenes are spread too few and too far between diversions that, despite substantial runtimes, still feel too shallow and limiting in their depictions of Adams as a person. We endure lengthy treatments on his restless periods in Europe (the French here are hedonist airheads, the Dutch wry moneychangers) and infrequent interaction with his family that mostly settles for presenting the man in the simple dyad of sensitive husband, overbearing-yet-distant father. But more than anything, his endless frustration permeates our every sense of the man. While often depicted fretting that he may not have done enough to secure a future for his fledgling country, certainly seems convinced enough of his accomplishments as a legislator and diplomat to brood endlessly over his recognized place in history for them. Adams was all-too aware it seems, even in his own time, that he was destined to the second-tier of our historical remembrance, behind men more popular (Thomas Jefferson), weighty (George Washington) or merely adept at whoring for attention (Benjamin Franklin.) To this day the greatest tribute paid to him is a 752 page biography that most Americans will never so much as use to level a coffee table (and now, 8 or so more hours of HBO’s post-Sopranos programming.)

Our neglect for the contentious farmer’s son from Massachusetts parallels our current role as consumers regarding the status of entertainment workers. Mixed thoughts and opinions converge for me as I experience a viewing of HBO’s John Adams miniseries via a less-than-legal internet source. Tuning into Hulu, with its high quality streams and conveniently stable servers has taken on something of a conflicting feel for me. It is a fact that our continued support for online content has enabled the technology that makes it so much clearer, faster and more plentiful and profitable) than ever, yet this is also maybe the single largest source of the leverage used by corporate powers to shirk fairness and continue to dominate its own, largely anonymous workmen’s class.
John Adams, the series, asks us to glorify the most unlikely qualities of likability that define our uniquely American spirit, and to elevate the collective effort of those who raised our nation by celebrating the most relatively nondescript of our sacred statesman. Adams, the man, lost his place on Mount Rushmore not for undeserving, but as the cost of his inability to be both indispensible and beloved at the same time. Tuning into Big-Money outlets like Hulu for our 30 Rock fix now feels, in some small way, complicit with a similar kind of marginalization to that which Adams has endured in our collective consciousness. It is after all our demand for new media that has pit another great American institution- Labor- against the times.

Or am I just framing a self-serving argument for the torrent abuser in all of us? Are we privateers or pirates? I’m really not sure, though I think I can say that, today, being a buccaneer bootlegger has never quite felt so patriotic.

Battlestar Galactica: Season 4, Episode 3, "The Ties That Bind"

2008-04-20T02:15:00.000-07:00

A scant week after one of the worst episodes in its history, Battlestar Galactica returned Friday night to offer a nearly perfect hour of television, touching on all the themes that make the show so great without once striking the wrong note.

If last week’s episode was the series at its weakest—relentlessly didactic, stuffed with obvious dialogue and inconsistent character development—then “The Ties That Bind” was a stern reminder to audiences that Battlestar Galactica still has plenty of verve. From the oppressive confines of the Demetrius to President Roslin’s voiceless anguish during her chemo drip, it was a triumph of visual storytelling, and yet another point in favor of my belief that today’s best cinematic storytelling can be found on your television.

There were so many oh-my-god moments in “The Ties That Bind” that it’s difficult to discuss them at all without sounding synoptic. Cally’s murder, of course, was the most important, as her demise was not only the most gut-wrenching moment of the episode but also its central axis. The antipathy towards Cally has been growing steadily over the course of the series, and the producers often toyed with viewers’ hopes that she just frakking die already, repeatedly placing her in life-and-death situations from which she barely managed to escape. But in death, Cally joins her colleagues Louanne Katraine and Ellen Tigh as characters we loathed, but whom, in the end, we can’t help but mourn.

That there can even be sympathy for a woman who was prepared to send her baby out of an airlock is a testament to Nicki Clyne’s ability to convey Cally’s desperation at being in such a miserable frame of mind. Taking drugs to numb the pain of being in a loveless marriage with a man who savagely beat her (it was nice to hear Cally admit that she played on Tyrol’s guilt to get him to marry her), stuck in a job she hates but can’t escape, and, finally, finding out that her husband and her baby are cylon, Cally, who has always been the most avowed cylon-hater on the ragtag fleet, simply felt her only recourse was murder-suicide. I’m not saying that her circumstances make her decision defensible, and I’ll stop short of comparing Cally’s situation to the murderous mothers coming out of Mississippi every other week, but going into that airlock was certainly an understandable decision, and I don’t think there’s another show that could have made me feel that way.

In any event, when history judges Battlestar Galactica, it won’t mistake Cally for a strong female character. Though she certainly had her moments, biting off the ear of an attempted rapist, or her defiantly telling Boomer to frak off in a New Caprica prison cell, in the end, Cally was just a stop-lossed wannabe dental student, thrust into the flurry of events by dint of circumstance rather than any special destiny. She was the everywoman, and she’ll be missed.

Of course, the real horror of Cally’s death is that she had come to her senses, decided not to kill herself and her son, but was forced out of the airlock anyway by the newly cylonized Tory Foster (now with super-strength!). Because of all the shows on television, only Battlestar Galactica has the audacity to actually have Cally follow through with her ghastly plan, there was a palpable sense of dread when she walked into the airlock, clutching her child. But Tory’s appearance offered Cally, and us viewers, a way out. I wanted so desperately to believe in Tory’s good intentions that after she brutally sucker punched Cally, it felt like she punched me, too.

I can’t think of any equivalent to the total, cruel destruction of a major character on a TV show (maybe Angel killing Miss Calendar?), but it was done so artfully that I can’t possibly find complaint. That starts with Rekha Sharma, who, after having been treated as an afterthought during most of her tenure in the show, has proved herself worthy with the past two episodes. Her performance in the airlock was nothing short of a revelation, her manner and inflection alternating between tenderness and malice.

There will of course be debate behind Tory’s intentions. Is her programming finally taking over? Was she protecting herself and her compatriots? Did she just hate Cally as much as most viewers did? Whatever the case, she’s clearly made her bed. It’ll be interesting to see how Tyrol, who has always been anchored by his relationships, transitions from here out. His wife is airlocked, his deck crew friends are all gone (dead or on the Demtrius). The only human relationship he has left is Admiral Adama, who, in a nice parallel to his bedside visit with President Roslin, wordlessly consoled Tyrol in the episode’s closing moments.

The cylon civil war material was equally good, but in a less immediate way. In my analysis last week I glossed over what had happened, but the developments in “The Ties That Bind” are too important to ignore, essentially fulfilling the hybrid’s prophecy from Razor:

“The seven, now six, self-described machines who believe themselves without sin, but in time, it is sin that will consume them. They will know enmity, bitterness, the wrenching agony of the one splintering into the many, and then they will join the promised land, gathered on the wings of an angel. Not an end, but a beginning.”

During the oft-maligned third season, many criticisms centered on the fact that increased focus on the cylons stripped them of their menace and mystery. That still holds true, but with the reveal of four of the final five, as well as the prophesied intertwined destinies of human and cylon, fleshing out the cylons, so to speak, was important narrative legwork. I’m not sure what the ultimate fate of humanity will be (I’m not sure Ronald Moore knows, either), but I know the cylons will have something to do with it. And when the end comes, I’d much rather them be a known commodity than just some faceless, monolithic killing force.

Of course, if the hybrid’s words are true about the cylons, they’re probably true about Starbuck as well: “She is the herald of the apocalypse. The harbinger of death. They must not follow her.” That dramatic irony is surely going to factor heavily into the upcoming episodes. But for now, all’s quiet, as the events served primarily to set up just who was on the ship (Athena, Helo, Gaeta, Anders, and Starbuck—who the hell is guarding Galactica now?) and to give Starbuck a speech that was a BIG GIANT SIGN to suggest that Starbuck is a cylon, claiming as she did that she feels untethered from her body.

For my money, I don’t think she’s the fifth. For one, it’s too obvious. For another, her description of alienation is totally opposite of Tory’s heightened sense of sensation. There was obviously something done to her in absentia, but I have a hunch it’s more supernatural than not.

The missteps, what few there were, naturally came with the Apollo stuff. Lee continues to be the least interesting character on the show, manipulated once more by Tom Zarek (after being the puppet to Romo Lampkin’s puppeteer in season 3’s finale). I think the writers have always had trouble with establishing Lee’s character, but in Zarek, they have a layered personality to balance him. A freedom-fighter/terrorist whose principles can get in the way of his humanity, it was nice to see someone on the fleet finally acknowledge some trepidation with regards to Roslin’s inclination towards totalitarianism, however benign (and scripturally justified) that totalitarianism can be.

Some other thoughts:

The cylon centurions have always looked frighteningly real, and even seeing them cleaning up some cabinets in the basestar didn’t detract from that menace.

Bear McCreary’s soundtrack has long been one of Battlestar Galactica’s secret weapons, and the Persian-inflected guitar filtering through Cally’s eavesdropping was the latest example of that.

There was a certain savageness to Cally taking a wrench to Tyrol’s head, but it was nonetheless realistic: two sickening thuds, Tyrol staggering but not going down, eyes bulging and unfocused. It was the best fight I've seen since Dan Dority grappled with The Captain in Deadwood’s thoroughfare.

Politics Versus the Playoffs

2008-04-20T00:38:00.000-07:00

The Democratic primary race lingers into April like a bad hangover, and each day's changes only taunt us with the prospect of its conclusion. We emerge this week from the doldrums with the Pennsylvania primary - a lull lasting for weeks until April 22, when the political winds came to a stop and the candidates were left without a primary or caucus to billow their sails. With no horse race to be won, the system created its own to be followed. The graph of Gallup's national head-to-head poll became inescapable (but what question does it ask? and what ones does it answer?) and each superdelegate added to a tally became a notable gain. To control one is to preclude your opponent from doing so. All moves are part of a grander strategy, and there are no events, only processes. It is not as simple as a Machiavellian conspiracy to control the demos: the candidates, the press corp, the "media," and the consumers coordinate, cooperate, create a relationship of supply and demand where the creation of "irrelevant news as commodity" is inevitable.

Shortly after Super Tuesday, the media narrative had evolved to contain the thread of similarity. That for all the differences willed into being, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were by and large the same. Though this narrative had the potential to evolve in any number of ways, conflict plays better than compromise. Rather than establish the points at which ground is shared between the two candidates, the media set to work in justifying the conflict that it would help perpetuate. If they are the same (and they are) the conflict is, on-face, incoherent. So, we construct difference - Obama as New Politics/Inspirational Leader/social change versus Clinton as Old Politics/Executive Leader/political change. But we could instead turn our attentions to how a campaign develops and maintains an absurdly skewed self-perception. How despite being confronted with near mathematical impossibility, and a chance of victory that depends entirely on tearing the party apart, the Clinton campaign persists by falling into the groupthink and narcissism that can become the heart of even the best political campaigns. The epitaphs were being written on the headstone of the Clinton campaign weeks ago, yet here we are.

In writing about the NBA, I am both gifted with and hindered by a complete lack of historical perspective. While I can't speak to "what it was like in the day," perhaps this is for the best. If the world has lost its sense of historicity, then the NBA is one of the locations in which the loss is most clearly evident. The NBA, as it falls increasingly behind the NFL and MLB despite their well publicized problems with video-cameras and steroids, is judged less by the League as it exists today, than by the cultural narratives that portray it. Past the halcyon days of Jordan. Players as Thugs. Less hustle than March Madness. It doesn't matter if these are true, it matters that they are taken as true. We've lost the need for authenticity in our historical representations, and so we are happy to accept those with which we are presented. If we challenge them, we will do so functionally - to prove a point - and recreate a competing narrative based not in historical authenticity, but in counterpoint to the dominant narrative. Faithful representations of the past, insomuch as they are possible, are worthless.

And even though the post-industrial/late-capitalist world is perhaps the best equipped to allow investigations into history, we simply don't. The expansion of the digital age has provided access to data, analysis, and commentary that allows us to look not just into events, but into portrayals thereof, and the way in which attitude and focus shifts over time. The Internet's democratization of information doesn't just solve for market inefficiencies, the short-term, capital-contextual utility of the sea-change, but drowns us in information from which we are to construct narratives for whatever morality lesson the story-tellers would have us learn.

Going back to the start of the season, there are signs of stories that still persist: Kevin Garnett as Messiah. Knicks as farce. Spurs as Playoff Machines. The Hawks accomplishing something. Which is perhaps not setting their bar too high for success, but no matter. These are all far less interesting than what is done with other, less comfortable storylines. Yi Jianlian had all but disappeared from discussion by the All-Star Break. A story abandoned and never recovered to be rewritten or even resolved. The "Shaq trade as failure" disappeared, but it less morphed from that story into a new one, than evaporated to be immediately supplanted by an altered version of the "Suns as Prospective Champions" narrative from the early season.

Kobe Bryant's trade demands, however, are perhaps the most interesting. This story began with world-destroying chaos - the sort from which only 9th ranked teams and apocalypse stories in sacred texts seem to emerge. But then the Lakers heard the call and we saw the ascendance of Kobe's supporting cast. When the Lakers became a contending team, it was perhaps the most compelling story to emerge from the season. Whereas opposed to the Garnett trade, which peaked before it started and was (merely?) flawless execution through the 82 games, we saw the evolution of Kobe and of the Lakers with distinct historicity. First, it was the development of Bynum: brought on by will and effort, but this was taken over by the Gasol trade and the mystique of architecture. And thus, with a team as stacked as the Lakers, we can look toward them as gods and peg their success on the mystical drive of play-off chemistry. We can both root for the most talented team in the NBA, and still look to their success as the triumph of an engine finally firing on all cylinders. They can be both the Golden State Warriors and LeBron James.

There are unquestionable problems with the place of sports stars in popular culture, but if the spotlight on Kobe Bryant has succeeded in one thing, it is that we watch this series fully aware of his context. Sport is interesting as mere contest, but it is altogether more interesting as a battle between wills, systems, and stories. We are gripped by the championship matches in sports movies as much because they are suspenseful games as because they are the final tests of the characters about whom we care. If the quarterback makes the play, it doesn't matter because you love the team. It matters because you need him to succeed.

We think we know Kobe. Whether we like him or not, we feel as though the glimpses we've had of his life are enough to understand him, and from this we pick a side. For all the commentary about his legal transgressions and prima donna whining, these are concerns ancillary to his game. If they do affect it, then it will be proven on the court. If he plays through them, or harnesses them to become something more, it doesn't matter: only the score does.

In the sense that there is only one outcome that matters - the win - the NBA playoffs are a refreshing break from the Democratic primary race. Does Clinton need to win by double digits to walk tall into North Carolina, or can she squeak by and carry through to Indiana on a microscopic delegate gain? How many points will the "bitter" comments cost Obama? Will media backlash cut into Hillary's numbers? Phoenix might have forced Finley and Duncan to make heroic three-pointers to force the first and second overtimes, but it doesn't matter since the Suns lost and the Spurs won. However close it might have been, the Suns lost that game. However much it broke their spirits, they are only back 1 game. In politics, there are no binary outcomes, and those that seem to be are quickly recast into ambiguity and gradient so as to be better spun.

Still, we insist on turning discrete events into systems. 83% of teams that win the first game in Round 1 win the series, the ESPN ticker tells me, but this is meaningless when Round 1 has a disproportionate number of mismatches, and when the home court advantage should privilege the already better team. We can be told that each game will make or break a series, but the field is still filled with possibilities. No one has elevated their game without having someone down the court doing the same thing. Arenas/James. Duncan/Nash. And even though Chris Paul mattered more than Nowitski and Kidd, who combined for 19 boards and 42 points but couldn't shut down the Hornets in the second half, Dallas could quite easily set the series score back to even after the next game.

In theory, politics has the same dynamic. A winner, a loser; a binary outcome. But being part of such an expansive process, we forget its relation to the fights that take place in the run up to the ballot. We focus on the day-to-day with only an eye on how it all relates to the finish line. It's the finish line, however, that's causing us the most problems. In setting our sights on the Pennsylvania primary, we've forgotten that it only matters insomuch as it helps us pick a candidate. And in picking a candidate, we've lost sight of our end goal - winning the general election - as John McCain rebuilds his favorability rating and coalesces support in the right wing. And once we do get to the general election, we look to the fight over the prize - focusing on the electoral math of short term decisions and often ignoring what it means for the policy we eventually hope to implement. We'll keep supporting inefficient bio-fuels and indulging nationalistic saber-rattling security rhetoric to get the drop on the GOP and get the win.

Not that this is the wrong way to run a political campaign. Perhaps it's the only way to run a political campaign that has any chance of winning: if you don't keep a microscope on the here and now, your opponent will win because she is. But today, when the Western Conference playoffs are providing one of the densest fields in the history of sport, and the Democratic primary gets drawn back once more into the fight over whether or not Obama should wear a flag pin, I am keeping a much keener eye on the hardcourt than on the polling numbers. When Hillary steps aside (and she will step aside - the only question being whether she'll win Pennsylvania by enough to justify staying in until North Carolina), I'll be right back on the political bandwagon. Basketball, for all its glory, doesn't last forever, but I'll enjoy it while it's hear. And while it may not resolve into any significance beyond that which it has within itself, it's still pretty fun to watch.

Battlestar Galactica: Season 4, Episode 2, "Six of One"

2008-04-15T03:51:00.000-07:00

One thing that’s always bothered me about Hollywood is the way it tends to gloss over the deaths of its minor characters. It’s annoying to see James Bond mow down a group of lackeys without a twitch of remorse. But on a show like “Battlestar Galactica,” where the sanctity of human life is measured by the number 39,676, such blithe disregard for it is simply an unpardonable sin.

The final moments of last week’s episode saw Kara Thrace (Katee Sackhoff) in such a desperate frenzy to gain access to President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) that she lobbed a grenade at two redshirts guarding Roslin’s door. It was a shocking but effective scene, agreeing both with what we know about Thrace from seasons past (she will relentlessly do what she thinks is right, and to hell with the consequences) and what was established earlier in the episode itself—namely, that Thrace believes that she and only she can lead the fleet on the proper course to Earth.

On an obsessively serialized show like “Battlestar Galactica,” that drastic action should have had far-flung repercussions, and during the show’s first few seasons it certainly would have—think back to Boomer’s (Grace Park) slowly-evolving horror at blowing up the fleet’s water tank in season 1, or Colonel Tigh (Michael Hogan) drinking himself to oblivion in the wake of New Caprica. It would have been more organic to “Battlestar Galactica” to see Thrace profoundly changed in some way. Consumed by guilt, perhaps, or becoming a fanatic willing to shed blood to spread her unique word. But neither Thrace nor her peers in the fleet seem to give the matter much thought, and by the end of “Six of One,” Thrace is back to the person she used to be, and in charge of a separate mission to find Earth to boot.

Last week I observed that “He That Believeth In Me” marked a new “Battlestar Galactica,” focusing more on the series’ mythology than the workings of the fleet. “Six of One” shifts that paradigm even further, as the show seems to be concerning itself far more with plot than with character. Whether or not that’s a good thing is certainly a debatable point, since what irked most viewers of season 3 was the spinning-of-the-wheels quality to the character studies like “The Woman King” or “Dirty Hands,” episodes that many consider to be the show’s worst. But that kind of relentless plotting can sometimes lead to enormous oversights like the overlooked murder. At its best, “Battlestar Galactica” seamlessly incorporates both character and plot, but “Six of One” brings up some very valid concerns that the producers might wrap things up too quickly.

Some other thoughts:

Even a weak episode of “Battlestar Galactica” is eminently watchable, and for that we can thank Gaius Baltar (James Callis). I suspect that most of us would be horrified to meet ourselves, and Callis plays that impatience and derision beautifully. That said, head-Baltar meeting with the real Baltar probably demonstrates that there is some sort of deity—be it the one true God, or a more minor one—pulling the strings on this whole shindig.

It was nice to see that Tigh hasn't lost his enthusiasm for sending people out on horrible missions in order to serve a greater cause, and even nicer to see Tory Foster (Rekha Sharma) get her first big scene in some time and knock it out of the park.

The obligatory scene between Adama (Edward James Olmos) and Roslin was superb as always, despite some awkward dialogue. ("You can stay in the room but get out of my head"? Ouch.) These characters have changed so much since the miniseries that they almost seem to have switched roles, with Roslin the cold-blooded pragmatist and Adama the forgiving and patient teacher.

Apologies

2008-04-08T01:31:00.001-07:00

If your RSS happened to blow up this morning, you can blame me for not knowing what the hell I was doing. Or Brendan for not telling me what I needed to know.

Actually, don't blame me at all. It's all Brendan's fault.

Battlestar Galactica: Season 4, Episode 1

2008-04-08T00:45:00.000-07:00

For most of its first 3 seasons, Battlestar Galactica always kept its unique mythology in the background, tending instead to focus on the more immediate concerns of the fleet. Sure, there were a few minor episodes that flashed elements of a paganish mysticism. And President Roslin’s (Mary McDonnell) character has always been at least partially defined by her certitude that she is the prophesied dying leader who will lead humankind to Earth. But many of the elements of the series’ overriding mysteries came to the fore in season’s 3 finale, which saw the outing of Colonel Tigh (Michael Hogan), Chief Tyrol (Aaron Douglass), Samuel Anders (Michael Trucco) and Tory Foster (Rekha Sharma) as 4 of the final 5 unseen cylons, to say nothing of Kara Thrace’s (Katee Sackhoff) miraculous return from the dead.

Those revelations, coming as they did in the final moments of season 3’s finale, gave the fans hundreds of questions to chew on during the year-long hiatus. That's nothing new: Galactica’s finales have always been massive cliffhangers, either by showing the ominous march of cylon centurions through the marketplace on New Caprica, or the shooting of Commander William Adama (Edward James Olmos). Still, while those previous events were mostly character-altering developments, the events of season 3 led to a fundamental shift in the series itself. Viewers were no longer asking, “What happens next?” but rather, “What the hell does this all mean?”

That dynamic is something viewers of Lost will certainly understand. But if there was any trepidation that this new Galactica would falter along the lines of that show—minutiae designed for the sake of weirdness, inorganic character decisions designed to forestall eventual revelations—the events of “He That Believeth in Me” laid those fears to rest. After a breathtaking battle sequence in the opening act (the best work the Galactica effects crew has ever done), the episode settled down to do what it does best: take a look at how the events of the show effect the characters in it.

If there was a theme to the episode, it was one of identity. “Be the man you want to be until the day you die,” Tyrol admonishes Anders, echoing Tigh’s speech in the finale, post-revelation (“My name is Saul Tigh. I am an officer in the colonial fleet. Whatever else I am, whatever else it means, that’s the man I want to be. And if I die to day, that’s the man I’ll be”). While the newly revealed cylons will certainly grapple with their outing, so to speak, I’m not so sure those revelations will profoundly affect their behavior. We’ve already seen one cylon be able to overcome her programmed hatred of humanity thanks to the power of love, and certainly 3 of the final 4 have deep relationships, too. (Only Tory is something of a wildcard, but that’s primarily because we haven’t really been exposed to her in any meaningful sense.)

In any event, while the episode’s most poignant moments lay in its dramatic irony (particularly poor Anders telling Kara he would still love her even if she were a cylon, with Kara retorting that she would kill him in a New York minute if he was), the episode’s best moments were those focused on the newly-exonerated Gaius Baltar (James Callis). Baltar is unquestionably one of the richest characters on television, ever, and much of that is thanks to Callis’ wonderful ability to extract some (dark) humor from what is a mostly bleak show. That was on full display here, particularly when Baltar’s disgust with his ragtag groupies didn’t extend to his taking advantage of one of them.

But Callis isn't some one-trick pony, and has anchored Baltar’s memorable arc throughout the series—from traitor to president to Marx to now, apparently, Jesus, complete with a cheesy string-lighted shrine from his groupies. Yet Baltar isn’t just Jesus, he’s also actively proselytizing for the cylon’s monotheism. Does that make him Zoroaster as well? John the Baptist? Galactica has never been one to shy away from allusions—particularly visual ones, as the shot of Baltar praying was reminiscent of thousands of Italian frescoes. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Some other thoughts:

The survivor count is getting depressingly low. They’ve lost 10,000 people (more than 20 percent ) in the span of 10 episodes.

Michael Hogan is turning in fantastic work every episode. He’s more expressive with one eye than most people are with their whole bodies.

The episode's only weak spots were Apollo-centric. For a show obsessed with its character continuity as Galactica is, it was odd to watch Apollo seem blithely unconcerned as to Starbuck's potential cylon-ness (this is the man who nearly exterminated the entire cylon race, as well as consistently belittle the Sharon-Helo relationship). In the same vein, Apollo turning in his wings to his father to get away from the military seemed an odd moment, particularly because much of season 2 was dedicated to establishing how similar the two really were.

Choosy viewers choose skiffy

2008-04-03T00:34:00.000-07:00

Americans don’t do smart. Or rather, we venerate the lowest common denominator, as Paris Hilton, Real World vs. Road Rules Challenge, and the 2000 election can all attest. I used to think that this anti-intellectualist streak was a relatively new development—after all, was not our nation once a shining beacon to the rest of the world, producing such august worthies as Benjamin Franklin? Henry Adams? L. Ron Hubbard?

But lo! How quickly one forgets the pet rock, to say nothing of William Jennings Bryan and the other mountebanks in our rogues gallery. Perhaps HL Mencken—America’s sternest biographer, as well as its keenest observer of the human condition—said it best: “The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.” Remember that the next time you see another Jason Friedberg movie shoot to the top of the box office, folks.

That’s probably why science fiction is so loathed here. It’s the dominion of the pocket-protected twerp with his head in the clouds, when it’s not affixed to the monitor’s eerie glow. So whenever I tell my friends that Battlestar Galactica is the best thing on television (a role it assumes by default with The Wire’s passing), I’m met with blank stares, if not outright scorn.

But screw them. There’s never been a bolder, more ambitious show. Battlestar Galactica, at its essence, is about the destruction of humanity, and how its few survivors struggle to maintain their civilization as they stagger towards a fabled lost planet called Earth. It is ferociously learned, projecting western cultural icons onto a pastiche of Greek/Mormon/Jewish/Hindu mythology, lending a disconcerting familiarity to the proceedings. Even if those proceedings entail epic space battles with a monolithic race of humanoid robots hell-bent on humanity’s extinction, which is as cool as it sounds.

Like all superlative works of fiction, Battlestar Galactica tackles tough issues without ever sounding preachy. It’s the only thing I’ve ever seen that can attempt to humanize suicide bombers—and succeed in doing so. Its universe reflects our own, in that it abandons the common tropes of television to show a world where there are no moustache-twirling villains, no white shielded paladins. Just a group of humans trying to make do.

Battlestar Galactica’s fourth and final season premieres this Friday at 10 on the SciFi channel. I’ll be recapping each episode here at NH, though I imagine many of you will be totally lost. So to help you catch up on what is a heavily serialized show, the SciFi channel has created a primer of sorts, recapitulating the meat and bones of the show’s previous 3 seasons, which you can find below. See you Friday(ish).

The Immortals: #99 - Curtis Mayfield

2008-03-24T16:17:00.000-07:00

The soundtrack for which he remains best known is, today, lessened, marred by the trappings of a movie which demanded uncharacteristically unsubtle (read: cartoonishly racist) subject matter that both dates and devalues his excellent work. I don’t care who you are, making characters like Youngblood Priest and Eddie into anything less than an offensive caricatures and cinematized stereotypes was a superhuman task. That Mayfield made from that ludicrous material music so heartfelt and enduringly resonant as to nearly legitimize pure exploitation has to be a testament to both his talent and those songs (this was proven again when Superfly became the first film to make less money than its soundtrack.) Still, while a stigma may forever be attached to that heralded “classic,” Curtis settles the debate over which was truly his best record.

Mayfield showcases every ability here. An extraordinary producer, his reverbed, psychedelic vocals and inventive instrumentation influenced everyone from Sly Stone to Jimi Hendrix. The extra material on subsequent releases of Curtis includes several future mid-hits in demo form, and comparisons display his exceptional talent as an arranger and composer in both the elegance of his studio dynamism and the visceral punch of his hard-wah riffing. And of course, as an alternately uplifting and apocalyptic lyricist, his tracks plumbed the darkest depths of politics, race, drugs and urban ill-health while never descending so deep into the engrossing paranoia as to lose faith that we could not rise above it all again.

Unfortunately, like most artists in the early 70s retroactively noted for making “socially conscious” music, that recurring message of hope is too-often remembered as the whole story of what is, in actuality, a much more significant result from Mayfield’s musical endowments. His contemporaries in the modern sounds of soul, greats like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and the Gordy-led menagerie of Motown masters, made innovative records built from the gold-selling foundations of their socially conventional pop sounds. Remember, by this time previously negative associations were merely archaic reminders of 50s race-baiting, and the 60s had officially established whites as the prime (and profitable) audience for what was now the full-cultural force of rock and roll. Even as the nation descended into ever-worsening levels of sickness in the polarized era of civil rights, Vietnam and general socio-political upheaval, the radio became as safe as milk, and new orders of catchy numbers by clean-cut representatives from any popular genre could be made to order overnight from Hitsville, Wherever.

Mayfield, though of a similar mass-marketed pedigree in his back-catalogue with The Impressions, became the key figure in separating the homogenized racial legacies of co-opted rhythm and blues based musics. Unafraid to parlay in both the idioms of language and emotion found in real-life discussions of highly-charged issues, he determined that honest self expression couldn’t appeal to everyone all the time- that to create something great might well have to alienate some people in the process. Put another way, Curtis Mayfield boldly made black music that was really black again. And with that, good shit returned again to the AM dial.

"Sistas! Niggers! Whities! Jews! Crackers! Don't worry... If there's Hell below, we're all gonna go!"

One can quite likely trace a straight line from Mayfield’s first spoken words on the first cut off the first side of his solo debut to the sounds yet to come straight out of Compton, Detroit, and Brooklyn and everywhere else there was inequity in class, race or creed. Like the future works of those artists, Curtis provides a brutally authentic examination of not only its own time, but of some of our lasting American dualities. The message remains as simple as ever: we are a people rife with spiritual decay, yet together we're still capable of truly great things. Whether this amounts to a defense of gangsta rap or BET, or an attempt to reconcile any controversy associated with taking sides on our cultural divisions I’m really not sure. But what I am certain of now is that, in a towering and singular career, Curtis Mayfield once taught us that we simply couldn’t pretend we had achieved the harmony and prosperity that a unified people deserve. And he promises us that we have greatness still to earn.

Curtis by Curtis Mayfield

The Immortals: #100 - Lee "Scratch" Perry

2008-02-28T13:09:00.000-08:00

The story of Jamaican popular music is one of self-reinvention, where the mento sounds of the island’s dancehalls evolved into ska and rocksteady variants to create a rich and unique folk tradition over a relatively small window of time. And while the most popular and influential musicians of their era were certainly ready to put an ear to their contemporaries, only one figure could make the whole island stop dead in its tracks to see its own future: Lee “Scratch” Perry was the crazed visionary of their native musics, and everybody knew it. That’s why they flocked to him to produce their tracks, and to proudly display his mark prominently on their own legacies. His creations were rife with imperfections and non sequiturs, signifiers of his own idiosyncrasies which, like the famously detuned piano of Studio 1, sustained each note he recorded with the unmistakable ring of his personal madness. While Perry's known erratic and volatile history at times overshadows his specific innovations, a glace back at the decades since he first hit the charts reveals a more subtle and important place in rock and roll history.

It is significant that the commercial viability of punk was first realized in England, where pop singles were propelled up the charts by seemingly nothing but the collective despair of the young, broke and angry. The Clash filled their first recordings with Junior Murvin covers, barely-veiled weed references and songs about how the only true revolutionaries in their punk explosion were found in the black clubs of Sheperd’s Bush. And you know something- they were right. When, my 15 year old self asks, did punk rockers stop listening to reggae music? After all, the towering influence of Scratch himself might be the most immediate link we have to our beloved indie ethos of Do It Yourself. Sure, the states had their share of forebears of would become punk, but any number of those proto-whatever acts were "DIY" only in the sense that they hadn’t the means to replicate the post-Motown, post-psychedelic take on American rock and soul (or the British Invaders who were themselves responding to those trends) that they aimed for. Ultimately, almost every Nugget of the garage-y goodness that we all love actually came from bands who aspired only to match the conventions of the time.

Far more punk than those days could predict, Scratch was true to himself, an Upsetter at heart from his earliest days. He broke genre boundaries because they could no longer contain his mad genius, and he pushed standard technologies past previous limits to fulfill the drive he felt to create something that could move even his own addled soul. When the instruments couldn’t make the right noises, he re-imagined the studio itself, and when he was ready to impart his pedagogy unto others, he did so in a lab built by hand from brick and wire. And, profane in all but the eyes of Jah, he christened his studio the Black Ark. Listening to a survey of his works, from the vocal pop of the Wailers and Junior Byles to his most hard-core instrumental dubs, one senses that the man’s recordings are as close to a map of his brain as could be generated in an Earthly language. Lee Perry made music because if he tried to put his actual thoughts into words, they’d have locked him away and thrown away the key.

Arkology by Lee "Scratch" Perry

Modern Library Top 100: #96 - Sophie's Choice by William Styron (1979)

2008-02-14T00:16:00.000-08:00

It’s probably not possible to write a bad Holocaust book, even if the book in question is totally innocent of literary quality. Tapping into the reservoir of shock and shame that still guides our collective memory of that madness is the ultimate storytelling crutch. The Manichean reality of the camps and ghettos is so unbelievable that first-person accounts of it would read almost like a simple morality fable about the apotheosis of evil, if not for the 12,000,000 bodies that make the fable very, very real.

Against that backdrop, it’s easy to see how even unskilled hands can craft from such duality something overwhelmingly affecting. Witness Elie Wiesel’s Night. Certainly not one of the great novels I’ve read, Night is seared into memory because despite its literary faults, it describes, simply, those acts of unequivocal selflessness transpiring contemporaneously with similarly pure evil (there is no other word).

But if Holocaust literature is always an affecting experience, for a long time it suffered from being told from a single, unwavering paradigm—that of the survivor memoir. Then, in 1979, a middle-aged Virginian gentile by the name of William Styron had the audacity to publish Sophie’s Choice, one of the first (and certainly the most commercially viable) efforts of fiction to bring the Holocaust home, so to speak. Styron’s protagonist Stingo is a wide-eyed twentysomething boy, a southern gentleman-in-training living large in the Big Apple. And he experiences the Holocaust only indirectly, through the recounted memories of his fictional neighbor Sophie, memories that ultimately destroy her.

Almost immediately after its publication, Styron was attacked from more or less every corner. How dare this American, this interloper, shoehorn his way into the tragedy of tragedies that, ultimately, isn’t even his story to tell? And do so by inventing a horror amid an epoch rife with horrors already beyond imagination?

That question of “ownership” of the Holocaust is essential, I think, not only to Sophie’s Choice but to a whole bunch of other political shit that Neon Hustle strives to avoid, something I'll honor here. Suffice it to say, the cacophony of Styron’s detractors ultimately couldn’t smother what was undeniably a great novel. Partly as a consequence of Sophie's Choice, then, the Holocaust has come to be seen equally as a Jewish (and Gypsy, and Polack and Slav and homosexual and Soviet POW) experience and one that speaks to every global citizen. Speaking delicately, while you can’t really fault the survivors for defining their Holocaust experience as theirs and theirs alone, that impulse to exclude the rest of us 60 years later makes it more difficult for to appreciate, even sympathize with, what they endured.

So what makes Sophie’s Choice such a great book? Probably it’s Sophie herself. She is beautifully, brilliantly drawn, and if Styron didn’t actually know anyone like her in his too-short life, he certainly did his homework to create such a convincing character. Garrulous and withdrawn, exuberant and abject: Sophie embodies the withered dreams of her generation. This is a book I read twice through (I had erroneously assumed, being the lummox I am, that Sophie’s choice was a choice between sparing her child and herself, not a choice between saving one of her two children, a prism which undermined the experience for me the first time round. Plainly, the lesson here is to approach all things with an open mind, or at least a bare minimum of foreknowledge) and each time Sophie jumped off the page, someone you desperately want to talk to even while knowing that you’ll despair at what she has to say.

There are some faults here, of course, particularly Styron’s attempts at tying together the Holocaust and U.S. slavery. But rarely is a sweeping 600 page novel absolutely perfect. Credit Styron for aiming for the stars and getting at least as far as the moon, an accomplishment that’s still impressive 30 years on.