The second season of Angel is a bit of a mixed bag, but in it, the show begins to find its form outside of its origins as a Buffy spinoff. In the first season, Angel was still indebted to its parent enough that its most memorable episodes and most of its characters came from Buffy. In Season Two, the crossovers are rarer, and Buffy herself doesn't appear at all. Angel has its own story now, for better or worse.
The season also marks a departure from the Buffy form of "Big Bad," single-season based storytelling. Several different stories weave in and out of the season, with varying degrees of resolution. At times, it's almost a straight-up serial with very little of the Monster-of-the-Week storylines which drove the first season.
The first few episodes are marked by Angel's lethargy, as the newly resurrected Darla and Wolfram & Hart begin fiddling with his sleep schedule. He's able to go through the motions, but his mind, and often body, and elsewhere. When Darla finally makes her physical appearance, Angel becomes obsessed. It is somewhat frustrating in that the audience knows who's behind Angel's dreams of Darla and why, but he doesn't know for several episodes. The frustration, of course, is thanks to the inherent drama of the reappearance of Angel's sire and the knowledge of their inevitable confrontation, delayed until the fifth episode.
The confrontation is somewhat cathartic, but leads to Angel's Darla-obsession coming to the fore, further alienating his co-workers. The rest of the Angel cast is increasing in both complexity and charm through the second season. The addition of the vampire-fighting gang leader Gunn to the crew is an especially good touch, as he adds a good mix of comedy and drama. Wesley's character continues his improvement, particularly in the episode "Guise Will Be Guise" in which he impersonates Angel. Later developments cement him as a leader as well as simply an expert in demonology.
However, it is Cordelia who steadily becomes the show's strongest character. By the end of the season I was about ready to declare her the best character of the Buffyverse. Her transition from Homecoming Queen Bitch to a powerful character in her own right has been almost seamless, especially once she switched from Buffy to Angel. I've always liked the dynamic that Cordelia brings to the shows, but now she's becoming likable as well, without sacrificing the humor she began with.
Angel's confrontation with Darla and the law firm lead to some of the season's strongest moments. He fights Darla, as well as attempting to turn her to good, as Wolfram & Hart continue hoping to push him to evil through her. Angel's quest comes to a peak in the ninth episode, "The Trial," in which he finally through stubbornness and heroism manages to convince Darla to accept her mortality. Naturally, this is almost immediately followed by the shocking re-emergence of Drusilla, who turns Darla to a vampire again as Angel is forced to watch, helpless.
The entire season so far built to that point, and the remainder seemed to stumble, unsure of where it was going. Angel becomes obsessed with revenge against Drusilla and Darla, turning dark - if not evil - and firing Gunn, Cordelia, and Wesley. In theory, this is a brilliant twist. In practice, it's awkward, forcing Angel to go all dark and the rest to turn almost entirely comic. Occasionally it works, like when Angel smokes a cigarette and then uses it to torch Darla and Drusilla, or when Wesley solves a crime a la Cluedo. But generally it's awkward (especially when Angel resorts to clumsy narration in lieu of talking to people), and a relief when Angel gets out of his funk and the gang gets back together.
Like its sibling, Buffy's Season Five, Angel improves in quality in its last third. In its best episode, "Dead End," the primary antagonist at Wolfram & Hard, Lindsay, receives a replacement hand for the one he lost in the first season finale. Lindsay quickly comes to realize the hand is evil and has a will of its own. This tips him over the edge, finally causing a break with Wolfram & Hart, but not before leaving in a blaze of glory - slapping Lilah's ass, shooting a security guard in the foot, threatening a board room, and explaining it all away with a gleeful declaration of "Evil hand!"
Towards the end of the season, the show breaks from formula and veers into a completely different direction, offering a four-part serialized string of episodes in a demonic dimension, more akin to a fantasy movie than the L.A. setting of the show. It's a quality run of episodes, with each character's development being highlighted: Cordelia's vanity is tempered by responsibility; Angel's heroism always threatened by the monster within; Wesley's leadership role forces him to make hard decisions with clarity; and Gunn tries to do the right thing while being pulled in multiple directions. Lorne, an empathic demon with a musical soul, who had been in and out of the series all season finally starts being treated like one of the main group, and the crew also rescues Fred, a mentally damaged supergenius played by the gorgeous Amy Acker, who officially joins the cast soon after.
It's a solid, if unspectacular, finish to a season with plenty of ups and downs. The second season of Angel doesn't quite put it on a level with Buffy the Vampire Slayer just yet, but much more than the first season, it says that it's possible.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Five
The premiere of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire serves as something of a microcosm for the entire season. "Buffy vs. Dracula" is, for the vast majority of the episode, is an occasionally weird, occasionally funny episode with a few character quirks. Then, at the end, the show pulls the rug out from under the viewer's feet:
Joyce Summers: "Buffy, if you're going out, can you take your sister with you?"
Buffy & Dawn, in unison: "MOM!?!"
This is one of the most audacious plot twists in television history. Prior to this moment, Buffy was an only child. Suddenly, she has fully formed younger sister, and a properly improper familial relationship with the sister. The show seems entirely comfortable with this new state of affairs, leaving the viewers completely confused.
Unfortunately, the ambition of the plot twist isn't matched by its implementation. The biggest problem is the younger sister, Dawn. She's, well, annoying. Part of it is that, as a little sister, she should be annoying. Sadly, Dawn succeed mightily at being a bother, and doesn't add anything else to the show at all for most of the season. It takes until much later in the season, the episode "The Body," for Dawn to become at all sympathetic.
Dawn's presence often has potential, as she shares the history of the show without actually having been in it (akin to Jonathan's presence from season four's "Superstar.") For example, during an episode with a robot, the season two episode "Ted," which also with a robot is mentioned. This opens a an interesting door: if Dawn had been around during "Ted," would she have sided with Buffy in seeing him as evil? How can the new Dawn-based continuity not affect the "real" continuity we've seen? This could be played for laughs, or played for drama, or both, yet it's virtually never brought up.
The other major issue dragging down the first 2/3s of the season is Buffy's love life. Following the fourth season, Buffy's relationship with soldier boy Riley seems fairly secure and straightforward. That may be nice for Buffy, but it's bad for storytelling. Riley, never the strongest character on the show (although perhaps not deserving of the vitriol he receives from Angel fans), is suddenly saddled with massive insecurities leading him to take more and more self-destructive actions. At the same time, the formerly bad-ass vampire Spike realizes that his obsession with the Slayer isn't hatred, but rather love. Spike's new-found crush leads him to show Buffy Riley's self-destructive behavior, then try to take her for himself.
This string of episodes are almost uniformly weak, thanks both to the speed with which Riley and Spike change their behavior, as well as them generally being weak episodes. A major exception is the superb episode "Fool for Love," in which Buffy speaks to Spike about the Slayers he's killed. This episode works well for two reasons. First, its flashbacks pair well with the Angel episode which followed. Both show the vampire gang of Angel, Spike, Darla and Drusilla all together for the first time, adding depth to the characters and the universe. More directly, Spike's depiction of the Slayers he kills superbly foreshadows the chief emotional arc of the season. Spike describes how the Slayers just seemed to give up. A part of them was disconnected from the rest of the world, and realized it would be easier to let him win. This, he tells Buffy, is unlikely with her, because she is directly connected to the world thanks to her friends, her mother, and her boyfriend.
In that sense, and in many others, the first fifteen episodes of the season lead up to the sixteenth and most famous, "The Body." Buffy's mother, diagnosed with, and apparently cured of, a tumor earlier in the season, suddenly dies, and Buffy must deal with the body in both a metaphorical and literal sense. Everything that the show had meandered incompetently around in the first 2/3s of the season suddenly work, no doubt in large part because show creator Joss Whedon wrote and directed it.
"The Body" succeeds on its own due to its superb direction, an experimental style which intentionally disorients the viewer from normal television perspective in order to simulate the viewpoint of the suddenly shattered main character. All the major characters are at their strongest, weakest, or both. Giles steps in superbly as a father figure. Xander and Willow panic, not knowing how to help. Dawn acts as the child a Slayer's little sister would be expected to be, alternately disbelieving, scared, disobedient, helpful, and finally, likeable. Tara and Anya, who rarely had a role other than girlfriend or comic relief, respectively, put in perhaps their greatest moments. Tara acts as the voice of sanity and reason, situating her as the show's emotional center. Anya, on the other hand, panics, completely unable to understand her emotions and how she's supposed to behave. Her social awkwardness, usually played for laughs, suddenly becomes the heartbreaking. "The Body" somehow takes a mediocre season of Buffy and turns it into something bigger, better, and amazing.
Virtually every episode after "The Body" is stronger than those which preceded it, and the season proceeds to finish its main plot with reckless abandon after two episodes which consolidate what went before. In "Forever," the emotional death of Joyce Summers causes Angel's first return since the end of Season Four, and Dawn attempts to resurrect her mother, further humanizing her. Then, in "Intervention," the Spike crush storyline suddenly moves from annoying to emotionally involving, no doubt thanks to the writing of Jane Espenson, traditionally Buffy's best non-Whedon writer.
The main plot of the season involves a hell-Goddess named Glory, who seeks a mysterious "Key" to return to her home dimension. A group of monks opposing this transmogrify the Key into a form guaranteed to be protected by Earth's champion, the Slayer, thus Dawn is created. Dawn is both fully human and the mystical object sought by the invincible Glory. Glory is a fairly effective Big Bad, but compared to the wholesome evil of Season Three's Mayor, or the emotional connection to the Angel-Spike-Dru combination of Season Two, she's sorely lacking. She does, however, provide an excellent sense of threat. She could, and does, drive characters mad or simply kill them.
Glory's storyline suffers, like most of the others, during the lull in the middle of the season. Once Dawn's nature is revealed in the fifth episode, the main storyline simply spins its wheels while the Riley and Spike arcs are dealt with. Her storyline also suffers from the presence of her human host on Earth, a fairly normal fellow named Ben, whom Buffy encounters interning at the hospital. Ben's relationship to Glory slowly becomes clear - he is her human form, which she can occasionally take control of. Anyone who witnesses this, however, forgets it soon after. The story suffers, however, with its inconsistent characterization of Ben. One episode he's a perfectly nice guy, then he's a mass murderer working with Glory, then he's nice again, then he'll do anything to defend Dawn even at his expense, then he'll do anything to save his skin. It's the weakest part of an otherwise strong set of episodes at the end of the season.
The strongest part is Buffy's resolution. Early in the season, Spike gave her a list of reasons she would maintain her resolve. But first she loses her boyfriend. Then her mother. Her sister is revealed to be a construct. When her friends are attacked and Glory learns Dawn's nature, Buffy's only response is to run. And when Glory finds them and takes Dawn, Buffy simply stops. She finally has found something which makes her simply surrender. Of course, Buffy has one more thing attaching her to the world - her friends - who drag her out of her funk. A newly accepting Buffy finally confronts Glory, defeating her, but not before Dawn's sacrifice threatens to destroy the world. Buffy refuses to stop the ritual by killing Dawn, and instead sacrifices herself to save the world.
This was initially supposed to be the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was certainly effective and touching, although not quite at the level of Babylon 5's tearjerker, but certainly not at the laughable level of Battlestar Galactica. The final shot, of Buffy's tombstone with a line at the bottom saying "SHE SAVED THE WORLD. A LOT" is an almost perfect summation of the series, being funny, precious, and sad, all at once. It also caps Buffy as a character, who was often overlooked based on the sheer charm of her sidekicks, but really was the greatest character on the show.
However, a great ending does not a fantastic season make. Compared with the emotional punch of Season Two, the wall-to-wall quality of Season Three, or even the excellent standalone episodes of Season Four, the fifth season falls a little bit flat. Yet it's only just behind, and "The Body" is probably the best Buffy episode ever, and one of the best ever on television.
TOP 5:
1. "The Body" - What more can I say? This hour of television is the reason people think Joss Whedon is King Of All Nerds.
2. "Fool for Love" - Spike walks Buffy through the real perils of being a Slayer. The "Spikeification" hasn't pulled his teeth totally. It might be the last time we see Spike as a bad ass, as unable to compete with Buffy physically, he gets to her mentally by telling her the truth.
3. "The Gift" - The finale may be most notable for its ending and Buffy's death, but its opening, a throwback in which a single vampire chases a scared young man into an alley, calls back to the first episodes of the series. Buffy's workmanlike quipping and dispatching of the vampire, followed by her world-weary response to the kid she saves, are pitch-perfect. It's the same show, but so very different.
4. "Intervention" - Buffy becomes the last of the big three characters to get a doppelganger, after Willow's vampire and Xander's clone. Hers is a robot, or more accurately, a sex-bot for Spike's pleasure. Hilarity begins to ensue, but is quickly ruined by Buffy being told that "Death is her gift" by the First Slayer and Glory attacking and capturing Spike, who knows Dawn is the Key. Writer Jane Espenson seems to know how to make Spike, even lovelorn Spike, work as a character, and it shows in this episode, as he's likeable for the first time since his crush was revealed.
5. "Triangle" - With Riley gone, Buffy is an emotional wreck, and dedicates herself to saving Xander and Anya's relationship. Anya's tension with Willow leads to the summoning of a pissed off troll-god. What sounds like a soap opera with monsters in the ways that Buffy can occasionally grate, but it's turned into gold by the deft touch of Espenson.
Joyce Summers: "Buffy, if you're going out, can you take your sister with you?"
Buffy & Dawn, in unison: "MOM!?!"
This is one of the most audacious plot twists in television history. Prior to this moment, Buffy was an only child. Suddenly, she has fully formed younger sister, and a properly improper familial relationship with the sister. The show seems entirely comfortable with this new state of affairs, leaving the viewers completely confused.
Unfortunately, the ambition of the plot twist isn't matched by its implementation. The biggest problem is the younger sister, Dawn. She's, well, annoying. Part of it is that, as a little sister, she should be annoying. Sadly, Dawn succeed mightily at being a bother, and doesn't add anything else to the show at all for most of the season. It takes until much later in the season, the episode "The Body," for Dawn to become at all sympathetic.
Dawn's presence often has potential, as she shares the history of the show without actually having been in it (akin to Jonathan's presence from season four's "Superstar.") For example, during an episode with a robot, the season two episode "Ted," which also with a robot is mentioned. This opens a an interesting door: if Dawn had been around during "Ted," would she have sided with Buffy in seeing him as evil? How can the new Dawn-based continuity not affect the "real" continuity we've seen? This could be played for laughs, or played for drama, or both, yet it's virtually never brought up.
The other major issue dragging down the first 2/3s of the season is Buffy's love life. Following the fourth season, Buffy's relationship with soldier boy Riley seems fairly secure and straightforward. That may be nice for Buffy, but it's bad for storytelling. Riley, never the strongest character on the show (although perhaps not deserving of the vitriol he receives from Angel fans), is suddenly saddled with massive insecurities leading him to take more and more self-destructive actions. At the same time, the formerly bad-ass vampire Spike realizes that his obsession with the Slayer isn't hatred, but rather love. Spike's new-found crush leads him to show Buffy Riley's self-destructive behavior, then try to take her for himself.
This string of episodes are almost uniformly weak, thanks both to the speed with which Riley and Spike change their behavior, as well as them generally being weak episodes. A major exception is the superb episode "Fool for Love," in which Buffy speaks to Spike about the Slayers he's killed. This episode works well for two reasons. First, its flashbacks pair well with the Angel episode which followed. Both show the vampire gang of Angel, Spike, Darla and Drusilla all together for the first time, adding depth to the characters and the universe. More directly, Spike's depiction of the Slayers he kills superbly foreshadows the chief emotional arc of the season. Spike describes how the Slayers just seemed to give up. A part of them was disconnected from the rest of the world, and realized it would be easier to let him win. This, he tells Buffy, is unlikely with her, because she is directly connected to the world thanks to her friends, her mother, and her boyfriend.
In that sense, and in many others, the first fifteen episodes of the season lead up to the sixteenth and most famous, "The Body." Buffy's mother, diagnosed with, and apparently cured of, a tumor earlier in the season, suddenly dies, and Buffy must deal with the body in both a metaphorical and literal sense. Everything that the show had meandered incompetently around in the first 2/3s of the season suddenly work, no doubt in large part because show creator Joss Whedon wrote and directed it.
"The Body" succeeds on its own due to its superb direction, an experimental style which intentionally disorients the viewer from normal television perspective in order to simulate the viewpoint of the suddenly shattered main character. All the major characters are at their strongest, weakest, or both. Giles steps in superbly as a father figure. Xander and Willow panic, not knowing how to help. Dawn acts as the child a Slayer's little sister would be expected to be, alternately disbelieving, scared, disobedient, helpful, and finally, likeable. Tara and Anya, who rarely had a role other than girlfriend or comic relief, respectively, put in perhaps their greatest moments. Tara acts as the voice of sanity and reason, situating her as the show's emotional center. Anya, on the other hand, panics, completely unable to understand her emotions and how she's supposed to behave. Her social awkwardness, usually played for laughs, suddenly becomes the heartbreaking. "The Body" somehow takes a mediocre season of Buffy and turns it into something bigger, better, and amazing.
Virtually every episode after "The Body" is stronger than those which preceded it, and the season proceeds to finish its main plot with reckless abandon after two episodes which consolidate what went before. In "Forever," the emotional death of Joyce Summers causes Angel's first return since the end of Season Four, and Dawn attempts to resurrect her mother, further humanizing her. Then, in "Intervention," the Spike crush storyline suddenly moves from annoying to emotionally involving, no doubt thanks to the writing of Jane Espenson, traditionally Buffy's best non-Whedon writer.
The main plot of the season involves a hell-Goddess named Glory, who seeks a mysterious "Key" to return to her home dimension. A group of monks opposing this transmogrify the Key into a form guaranteed to be protected by Earth's champion, the Slayer, thus Dawn is created. Dawn is both fully human and the mystical object sought by the invincible Glory. Glory is a fairly effective Big Bad, but compared to the wholesome evil of Season Three's Mayor, or the emotional connection to the Angel-Spike-Dru combination of Season Two, she's sorely lacking. She does, however, provide an excellent sense of threat. She could, and does, drive characters mad or simply kill them.
Glory's storyline suffers, like most of the others, during the lull in the middle of the season. Once Dawn's nature is revealed in the fifth episode, the main storyline simply spins its wheels while the Riley and Spike arcs are dealt with. Her storyline also suffers from the presence of her human host on Earth, a fairly normal fellow named Ben, whom Buffy encounters interning at the hospital. Ben's relationship to Glory slowly becomes clear - he is her human form, which she can occasionally take control of. Anyone who witnesses this, however, forgets it soon after. The story suffers, however, with its inconsistent characterization of Ben. One episode he's a perfectly nice guy, then he's a mass murderer working with Glory, then he's nice again, then he'll do anything to defend Dawn even at his expense, then he'll do anything to save his skin. It's the weakest part of an otherwise strong set of episodes at the end of the season.
The strongest part is Buffy's resolution. Early in the season, Spike gave her a list of reasons she would maintain her resolve. But first she loses her boyfriend. Then her mother. Her sister is revealed to be a construct. When her friends are attacked and Glory learns Dawn's nature, Buffy's only response is to run. And when Glory finds them and takes Dawn, Buffy simply stops. She finally has found something which makes her simply surrender. Of course, Buffy has one more thing attaching her to the world - her friends - who drag her out of her funk. A newly accepting Buffy finally confronts Glory, defeating her, but not before Dawn's sacrifice threatens to destroy the world. Buffy refuses to stop the ritual by killing Dawn, and instead sacrifices herself to save the world.
This was initially supposed to be the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was certainly effective and touching, although not quite at the level of Babylon 5's tearjerker, but certainly not at the laughable level of Battlestar Galactica. The final shot, of Buffy's tombstone with a line at the bottom saying "SHE SAVED THE WORLD. A LOT" is an almost perfect summation of the series, being funny, precious, and sad, all at once. It also caps Buffy as a character, who was often overlooked based on the sheer charm of her sidekicks, but really was the greatest character on the show.
However, a great ending does not a fantastic season make. Compared with the emotional punch of Season Two, the wall-to-wall quality of Season Three, or even the excellent standalone episodes of Season Four, the fifth season falls a little bit flat. Yet it's only just behind, and "The Body" is probably the best Buffy episode ever, and one of the best ever on television.
TOP 5:
1. "The Body" - What more can I say? This hour of television is the reason people think Joss Whedon is King Of All Nerds.
2. "Fool for Love" - Spike walks Buffy through the real perils of being a Slayer. The "Spikeification" hasn't pulled his teeth totally. It might be the last time we see Spike as a bad ass, as unable to compete with Buffy physically, he gets to her mentally by telling her the truth.
3. "The Gift" - The finale may be most notable for its ending and Buffy's death, but its opening, a throwback in which a single vampire chases a scared young man into an alley, calls back to the first episodes of the series. Buffy's workmanlike quipping and dispatching of the vampire, followed by her world-weary response to the kid she saves, are pitch-perfect. It's the same show, but so very different.
4. "Intervention" - Buffy becomes the last of the big three characters to get a doppelganger, after Willow's vampire and Xander's clone. Hers is a robot, or more accurately, a sex-bot for Spike's pleasure. Hilarity begins to ensue, but is quickly ruined by Buffy being told that "Death is her gift" by the First Slayer and Glory attacking and capturing Spike, who knows Dawn is the Key. Writer Jane Espenson seems to know how to make Spike, even lovelorn Spike, work as a character, and it shows in this episode, as he's likeable for the first time since his crush was revealed.
5. "Triangle" - With Riley gone, Buffy is an emotional wreck, and dedicates herself to saving Xander and Anya's relationship. Anya's tension with Willow leads to the summoning of a pissed off troll-god. What sounds like a soap opera with monsters in the ways that Buffy can occasionally grate, but it's turned into gold by the deft touch of Espenson.
Friday, April 09, 2010
Fallout 3
Fallout 3 is a game with history. It has antecedents like Fallout 1 & 2 or Morrowind and Oblivion; it has a fully fleshed out game world; it has a full role-playing system. These are all valid, if entirely obvious, points to discuss for comparison. However, playing the game itself evokes a different kind of feeling. The slow uncovering of a game world filled with interesting nooks and crannies evokes the best aspects of the exploration-based Castlevania and Metroid games, while the role-playing system successfully melds Fallout with a first-person shooter.
Fallout 3 is built around exploration and character development more than previous games in the series, thanks primarily to its switch to a 3D engine. In previous Fallout games, each important part of the game was segmented off from the next. The player traveled to a town over a world map. This is gone in Fallout 3, replaced by a contiguous world where the player can walk from one side of the map to the other. In addition to that, it rewards the player who chooses to walk by showing interesting things to walk towards, in addition to having a compass with a marker showing where unexplored areas are. The scope is smaller - it's simply the D.C. area (now the "Capital Wasteland") instead of half of California - which is somewhat disappointing only because the game makes the player want more.
This makes Fallout 3 feel like it is unfolding naturally in front of the player – Where you are feels exactly where you're supposed to be. Certainly, some parts of the game are harder than others, but ideally, the player soon realizes this and wanders in a different direction. This is why it is such a shock when, upon finishing the main quest, the game simply ends. Sure, this happens in most every other RPG, but in Fallout 3, this sudden, arbitrary imposition of boundaries was a betrayal. Likewise, the official downloadable content released by Bethesda disappoints largely because it takes the player away from the Capital Wasteland instead of providing more to explore.
That Fallout 3 was even released, given the distance between it and its predecessors, was a pleasant surprise. That it's a great game, and a worthy continuation of the name is even better. That it takes the franchise in new directions, with new perspectives, while maintaining much of original games' charm makes it a modern classic.
Fallout 3 is built around exploration and character development more than previous games in the series, thanks primarily to its switch to a 3D engine. In previous Fallout games, each important part of the game was segmented off from the next. The player traveled to a town over a world map. This is gone in Fallout 3, replaced by a contiguous world where the player can walk from one side of the map to the other. In addition to that, it rewards the player who chooses to walk by showing interesting things to walk towards, in addition to having a compass with a marker showing where unexplored areas are. The scope is smaller - it's simply the D.C. area (now the "Capital Wasteland") instead of half of California - which is somewhat disappointing only because the game makes the player want more.
This makes Fallout 3 feel like it is unfolding naturally in front of the player – Where you are feels exactly where you're supposed to be. Certainly, some parts of the game are harder than others, but ideally, the player soon realizes this and wanders in a different direction. This is why it is such a shock when, upon finishing the main quest, the game simply ends. Sure, this happens in most every other RPG, but in Fallout 3, this sudden, arbitrary imposition of boundaries was a betrayal. Likewise, the official downloadable content released by Bethesda disappoints largely because it takes the player away from the Capital Wasteland instead of providing more to explore.
That Fallout 3 was even released, given the distance between it and its predecessors, was a pleasant surprise. That it's a great game, and a worthy continuation of the name is even better. That it takes the franchise in new directions, with new perspectives, while maintaining much of original games' charm makes it a modern classic.
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
A New Project
I am writing a book. I've been working on it for about six weeks, and I've got over ten thousand words. This is significantly more than any other book project I've started, which includes a few novels in the past, and a brief poke at trying to write on the Antioch situation. This time, more successfully, I'm choosing to write about something I've already done much of the research on - the history of video games.
It began when The Escapist put out their publication schedule, including an issue on how games were better in the old days (followed by one on how games' best days are ahead.) This gave me the impetus to write a short piece on how the games we play these days were pretty well defined in the 1990's. All of the major genres were either created or refined in the 1990's, with very little new being done in the 2000's. The article was rejected, ironically, but it helped me to get started on that process. This has helped me realize that:
On the other hand, the research is going to be fun. Although I've played most of the great games, there are still several which I missed (intentionally or not), don't really remember, or perhaps quirky outliers that I never got around to. So next on list, while I still have access to a Wii, is Super Mario Galaxy.
After that? I'm looking forward to spending some time with M.U.L.E., The Ocarina of Time, Metroid, and Silent Hill. I'm more wary of Tomb Raider, FarmVille, Myst, and Resident Evil, but you know - the things we do for art.
It began when The Escapist put out their publication schedule, including an issue on how games were better in the old days (followed by one on how games' best days are ahead.) This gave me the impetus to write a short piece on how the games we play these days were pretty well defined in the 1990's. All of the major genres were either created or refined in the 1990's, with very little new being done in the 2000's. The article was rejected, ironically, but it helped me to get started on that process. This has helped me realize that:
- The history of video games can be told in an interesting fashion using genre as a lens. It's how gamers perceive games, and it keeps the focus on the games, instead of on the designers, corporations, or technology.
- I've probably played enough games to be able to do this well. Whenever lists of "The All-Time Greatest" or "The Most Influential Games" come out, I've played most all of them.
- I think at this point, I have the writing ability and longevity to do it.
On the other hand, the research is going to be fun. Although I've played most of the great games, there are still several which I missed (intentionally or not), don't really remember, or perhaps quirky outliers that I never got around to. So next on list, while I still have access to a Wii, is Super Mario Galaxy.
After that? I'm looking forward to spending some time with M.U.L.E., The Ocarina of Time, Metroid, and Silent Hill. I'm more wary of Tomb Raider, FarmVille, Myst, and Resident Evil, but you know - the things we do for art.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
A History of Histories
In A History of Histories, British historian John Burrow sets himself a nearly impossible task in the title of the book alone. Impressively, he succeeds, describing the general form of history in the west in a single volume, and even more impressive is the fact that he makes it entirely readable.
Along the way, there are some excellent summaries, some explanations for why we know Livy and Tacitus so well, as well as some laments for the lists of lost histories. But when the book gets out of the Middle Ages to the point where the modern history genre starts to take shape is where it starts to get really interesting.
Perhaps the most interesting section is when Burrow starts discussing the underappreciated legal scholars of the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment who trace the history of law through archives, only to discover that everything their societies believe about how their law is a corrupted version of "Roman law" is wrong, and it's actually a collection of compromises and creations within the context of the times, as opposed to wisdom descended from the "ancients." At this point, the book is a fascinating chronicle of the intersection of society, history, law, and perception.
If the book has a major weakness, it's that the 20th Century section seems narrowly-focused and cursory. The author freely admits that he cannot go into the entirety of 20th Century histories in the single chapter he allots to it, which is fair, but it certainly leaves the reader wanting more - perhaps a second volume on the subject? Its narrow focus on "History" as an academic discipline, as opposed to the conception of "history" within society based around that discipline is disappointing, although also understandable.
A History of Histories has a fairly narrow audience, who probably know if they would be interested simply from the title. Members of that audience likely won't be disappointed.
Along the way, there are some excellent summaries, some explanations for why we know Livy and Tacitus so well, as well as some laments for the lists of lost histories. But when the book gets out of the Middle Ages to the point where the modern history genre starts to take shape is where it starts to get really interesting.
Perhaps the most interesting section is when Burrow starts discussing the underappreciated legal scholars of the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment who trace the history of law through archives, only to discover that everything their societies believe about how their law is a corrupted version of "Roman law" is wrong, and it's actually a collection of compromises and creations within the context of the times, as opposed to wisdom descended from the "ancients." At this point, the book is a fascinating chronicle of the intersection of society, history, law, and perception.
If the book has a major weakness, it's that the 20th Century section seems narrowly-focused and cursory. The author freely admits that he cannot go into the entirety of 20th Century histories in the single chapter he allots to it, which is fair, but it certainly leaves the reader wanting more - perhaps a second volume on the subject? Its narrow focus on "History" as an academic discipline, as opposed to the conception of "history" within society based around that discipline is disappointing, although also understandable.
A History of Histories has a fairly narrow audience, who probably know if they would be interested simply from the title. Members of that audience likely won't be disappointed.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Obvious Influence: The Philip K. Dick Reader
American science fiction is generally divided into a Golden Age from the 1940's to the 1960's or so, when the giant names of Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov, and more wrote. The transition between their short, pulp novels or entertaining short stories to today's modern science fiction isn't always easy to grasp, but reading a set of Philip K. Dick stories all at once, such as the collection in The Philip K. Dick Reader demonstrates where that transition may have taken place.
The short stories of early SF were often more entertaining than the early novels, for the simple reason that they let the authors show off a sense of humor. They were generally based on some scientific or pseudo-scientific concept discussed and implemented by scientists, which leads to some kind of twist ending, usually ironic, occasionally horrifying. The Arthur C. Clarke short story, "The Nine Billion Names of God" exemplifies this model: A few computer engineers are called to a Himalayan monastery to help the monks there achieve their goal of writing down all nine billion mathematical combinations of letters which could spell any name for God. Having achieved this task, the engineers leave the monastery, pleased with themselves, only to notice that the stars in the night sky are starting to disappear.
The first story in the collection, "Fair Game," operates under this model. A well-respected professor of physics at a Colorado university starts noticing a giant eye observing his movements, and seems to be having surreal traps placed for him. It could be mental illness, but he and his colleagues, a little too easily, decide that it must be a race of giant aliens who take all their ideas from humans, and have chosen this professor because of his genius. After trying to run, he eventually gives in, rationalizing that he'll still be an important and respected physicist...only to discover himself being thrown into a frying pan.
The form is the same as most early SF, but it involves Dick's most characteristic attribute in his writing: the intersection of mental illness with science fiction, or more generally, the psychological argument of what is perception and what is reality? Mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia or psychosis, cause people to mistake their perceptions for reality. Mind-altering drugs, a characteristic common to later Dick works, also have many of the same issues. In Dick's science fiction, technologies which can alter perception or reality offers fertile ground for growing interesting stories. Dick would later write a novel called The Simulacra, which sums this up in a single word.
The second story in the collection, "The Hanging Stranger," builds on the perception theme while adding in another of Dick's focuses, totalitarianism. An ordinary man notices a hanged man on a lamppost, and determines, through logic little different than mental illness, that other people aren't noticing the hanged man because they've been taken over by alien beings. He escalates the situation - horrifyingly believing his young son has been taken over, and killing him - until the reader discovers that the main character was right all along.
The fourth story, "The Golden Man," brings in the last of Dick's major themes, fear of nuclear war and radiation-based mutations. An overwhelmingly powerful government organization dedicated to hunting down mutants discovers a man with golden skin which they try to study, then kill, only to find out that the Golden Man, who can see the near future, is also irresistible to women, which he uses to escape. The implication is both that the Golden Man, a near-animal who lives entirely in time that he can perceive, is also able to breed at will - and the mutants will end up destroying humanity.
If that sounds vaguely familiar, it's not just that Dick is generally influential, but may be the author who's most connected to Hollywood. The recent Nicholas Cage film Next was loosely based on "The Golden Man." When published in 1997, The Philip K. Dick Reader contained two stories which had already been turned into the movies Total Recall and Screamers. In the next decade, three more just from this collection were turned into films: Minority Report, Next, and Paycheck. These are generally some of the best stories in the collection, and they demonstrate Dick's flair for both cinematic and psychological writing. "The Minority Report" especially stands out, both for its inherent quality, and when compared to the Tom Cruise film it inspired. The original story is similar, but isn't quite so excessively twist-filled, and has a significant anti-totalitarian aspect of the storyline largely missing from the plot (though not the setting) of the film.
The story "Shell Game" brings together many of Dick's favorite themes in an entertaining satire. A small colony of humans on a distant moon are convinced that they're under constant attack from an elite group of Terran soldiers. Everything that goes wrong on the planet is sabotage, and constant military presence is necessary to fight off the soldiers. Some of the leaders, concerned as to why they never see the Terran attackers, find evidence their colony was actually a rocket of mentally ill paranoids who crashed onto their moon. How, they ask the others, can they even know if they're under attack or mentally ill? They try to find a scientific test to see if the colony is in the grips of a collective mass paranoid hallucination, but others, still-paranoid, treat them as in league with the Terrans. The story ends with the paranoids loading up the repaired rocket with H-Bombs to attack Earth. Group-think infiltrating politics with disastrous results made the story disturbing to me having seen how the media and political class did much the same thing with the Iraq War, and I'm sure the story had the same effect on people who saw Watergate or the Bay of Pigs Invasion or McCarthyism or the rise of fascism in Europe or the French Revolution. It is, quite simply, science fiction at its best.
Not every story is a winner, but with nearly 30 to choose from, that is no surprise. This is an excellent collection of stories, as well as a historically important collection of influential science fiction.
The short stories of early SF were often more entertaining than the early novels, for the simple reason that they let the authors show off a sense of humor. They were generally based on some scientific or pseudo-scientific concept discussed and implemented by scientists, which leads to some kind of twist ending, usually ironic, occasionally horrifying. The Arthur C. Clarke short story, "The Nine Billion Names of God" exemplifies this model: A few computer engineers are called to a Himalayan monastery to help the monks there achieve their goal of writing down all nine billion mathematical combinations of letters which could spell any name for God. Having achieved this task, the engineers leave the monastery, pleased with themselves, only to notice that the stars in the night sky are starting to disappear.
The first story in the collection, "Fair Game," operates under this model. A well-respected professor of physics at a Colorado university starts noticing a giant eye observing his movements, and seems to be having surreal traps placed for him. It could be mental illness, but he and his colleagues, a little too easily, decide that it must be a race of giant aliens who take all their ideas from humans, and have chosen this professor because of his genius. After trying to run, he eventually gives in, rationalizing that he'll still be an important and respected physicist...only to discover himself being thrown into a frying pan.
The form is the same as most early SF, but it involves Dick's most characteristic attribute in his writing: the intersection of mental illness with science fiction, or more generally, the psychological argument of what is perception and what is reality? Mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia or psychosis, cause people to mistake their perceptions for reality. Mind-altering drugs, a characteristic common to later Dick works, also have many of the same issues. In Dick's science fiction, technologies which can alter perception or reality offers fertile ground for growing interesting stories. Dick would later write a novel called The Simulacra, which sums this up in a single word.
The second story in the collection, "The Hanging Stranger," builds on the perception theme while adding in another of Dick's focuses, totalitarianism. An ordinary man notices a hanged man on a lamppost, and determines, through logic little different than mental illness, that other people aren't noticing the hanged man because they've been taken over by alien beings. He escalates the situation - horrifyingly believing his young son has been taken over, and killing him - until the reader discovers that the main character was right all along.
The fourth story, "The Golden Man," brings in the last of Dick's major themes, fear of nuclear war and radiation-based mutations. An overwhelmingly powerful government organization dedicated to hunting down mutants discovers a man with golden skin which they try to study, then kill, only to find out that the Golden Man, who can see the near future, is also irresistible to women, which he uses to escape. The implication is both that the Golden Man, a near-animal who lives entirely in time that he can perceive, is also able to breed at will - and the mutants will end up destroying humanity.
If that sounds vaguely familiar, it's not just that Dick is generally influential, but may be the author who's most connected to Hollywood. The recent Nicholas Cage film Next was loosely based on "The Golden Man." When published in 1997, The Philip K. Dick Reader contained two stories which had already been turned into the movies Total Recall and Screamers. In the next decade, three more just from this collection were turned into films: Minority Report, Next, and Paycheck. These are generally some of the best stories in the collection, and they demonstrate Dick's flair for both cinematic and psychological writing. "The Minority Report" especially stands out, both for its inherent quality, and when compared to the Tom Cruise film it inspired. The original story is similar, but isn't quite so excessively twist-filled, and has a significant anti-totalitarian aspect of the storyline largely missing from the plot (though not the setting) of the film.
The story "Shell Game" brings together many of Dick's favorite themes in an entertaining satire. A small colony of humans on a distant moon are convinced that they're under constant attack from an elite group of Terran soldiers. Everything that goes wrong on the planet is sabotage, and constant military presence is necessary to fight off the soldiers. Some of the leaders, concerned as to why they never see the Terran attackers, find evidence their colony was actually a rocket of mentally ill paranoids who crashed onto their moon. How, they ask the others, can they even know if they're under attack or mentally ill? They try to find a scientific test to see if the colony is in the grips of a collective mass paranoid hallucination, but others, still-paranoid, treat them as in league with the Terrans. The story ends with the paranoids loading up the repaired rocket with H-Bombs to attack Earth. Group-think infiltrating politics with disastrous results made the story disturbing to me having seen how the media and political class did much the same thing with the Iraq War, and I'm sure the story had the same effect on people who saw Watergate or the Bay of Pigs Invasion or McCarthyism or the rise of fascism in Europe or the French Revolution. It is, quite simply, science fiction at its best.
Not every story is a winner, but with nearly 30 to choose from, that is no surprise. This is an excellent collection of stories, as well as a historically important collection of influential science fiction.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Fallout 3 - Antici...PAtion
I have Fallout 3 and I'm not playing it.
This shocks me. In fact, I kind of feel physically anxious that I'm not playing it right now. There are lots of reasons that I'm not playing it, but do they really trump the reasons TO play it? The original Fallout is one of my all-time favorite games, and also one of the most important games ever. Its sequel, while creatively uninspiring, is generally an excellent extension to the classic game. I've played the hell out of both. So why am I not playing #3?
Partly because I'm downloading mods. The last Bethesda game I played, Morrowind, was almost instantly dramatically improved by adding a few mods. So, I'm doing the same with Fallout 3. But as interesting as it could be with good mods, am I really sure that it's not worth playing without? No, but it's not that alone.
Partly because I'm worried I might like it too much. It's not like I'm lacking in spare time, but I at least have a few things to do in my life. Had a programming class tonight, and graphic design tomorrow. I've also got a few writing projects I'd like to be doing more of: book reviews, movie reviews, game reviews, and a big game history project. If I started Fallout 3, well, what if it was so good that I didn't do anything else for three weeks? I had some access to the game last summer, when I was staying with someone who had it for PlayStation 3, but it was not my PS3, and not my TV it was attached to, so I didn't play it because if I had really liked it, I couldn't have played it when someone else wanted to use the PS3 or TV, which was pretty much constantly that wasn't M-F 9-5. Should I be so concerned about a game taking over my life? When it's Fallout, apparently.
Partly because, well, I just can't believe that it's real. The original Fallout came a full 10 years before its second sequel, and the first sequel was just a year later than the original. That's an odd ratio, but it gets worse when you consider the business standpoint. Fallout's original developer and publisher, Interplay, was one of the best game companies of the late 1990's, with Fallout, Sacrifice, Jagged Alliance 2, Wizardry 8, and more. Yet it still went out of business. Happily for Fallout, Bethesda Software was paying attention and decided to add it to its business, but there's still a part of me that gave up on ever seeing a third installment. It's the part of me that says "HOLY FUCKING SHIT I OWN FALLOUT 3!!!" in the bad, disbelieving way.
Partly because I missed my chance. A few years ago, I really wanted to put together a game-related portfolio to break into the industry. I decided that my careen and game interests would be best served by becoming an expert Fallout 3 modder. Then I got distracted by idealistic poverty, got new ambitions, and couldn't afford the game when it came out, and also thought it wouldn't run on my PC (turns out I was mistaken). My ambitions have been altered somewhat - more interested in writing about than writing for at this point - but my emotional investment remains, to some extent.
Partly because I have other games I want to deal with at the moment. I'm still trying to finish Okami, in addition to various other Wii games, like No More Heroes. I also just got Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. I'm worried that they'll get overwhelmed by Fallout. And that's probably okay generally speaking, a game is a game, but part of my brain says once started, games should be completed.
And partly, finally, because I'm scared not that it'll be great and take over my life, but that it'll be bad, and maybe it won't. I think the idea of merging the Fallout setting and character development with a first-person shooter is a wonderful idea. I was arguing that it was a good idea back in the '90's, when it was horrifically unpopular. I just don't know if the extraordinarily-ambitious-with-somewhat-disappointing-returns Bethesda model will work. Consciously, I think it should. There's no reason why not. Reviews and sales certainly indicate that they got it right. But I've got enough of an iconoclast in me that I'm a little bit worried.
Once the mods finish downloading, I'm going to start playing. I'm just surprised at my restraint and my chomping at the bit. It's an important series, and an important game, and one I expect to have a lot to say about. This blog is about to get post-apocalyptic.
This shocks me. In fact, I kind of feel physically anxious that I'm not playing it right now. There are lots of reasons that I'm not playing it, but do they really trump the reasons TO play it? The original Fallout is one of my all-time favorite games, and also one of the most important games ever. Its sequel, while creatively uninspiring, is generally an excellent extension to the classic game. I've played the hell out of both. So why am I not playing #3?
Partly because I'm downloading mods. The last Bethesda game I played, Morrowind, was almost instantly dramatically improved by adding a few mods. So, I'm doing the same with Fallout 3. But as interesting as it could be with good mods, am I really sure that it's not worth playing without? No, but it's not that alone.
Partly because I'm worried I might like it too much. It's not like I'm lacking in spare time, but I at least have a few things to do in my life. Had a programming class tonight, and graphic design tomorrow. I've also got a few writing projects I'd like to be doing more of: book reviews, movie reviews, game reviews, and a big game history project. If I started Fallout 3, well, what if it was so good that I didn't do anything else for three weeks? I had some access to the game last summer, when I was staying with someone who had it for PlayStation 3, but it was not my PS3, and not my TV it was attached to, so I didn't play it because if I had really liked it, I couldn't have played it when someone else wanted to use the PS3 or TV, which was pretty much constantly that wasn't M-F 9-5. Should I be so concerned about a game taking over my life? When it's Fallout, apparently.
Partly because, well, I just can't believe that it's real. The original Fallout came a full 10 years before its second sequel, and the first sequel was just a year later than the original. That's an odd ratio, but it gets worse when you consider the business standpoint. Fallout's original developer and publisher, Interplay, was one of the best game companies of the late 1990's, with Fallout, Sacrifice, Jagged Alliance 2, Wizardry 8, and more. Yet it still went out of business. Happily for Fallout, Bethesda Software was paying attention and decided to add it to its business, but there's still a part of me that gave up on ever seeing a third installment. It's the part of me that says "HOLY FUCKING SHIT I OWN FALLOUT 3!!!" in the bad, disbelieving way.
Partly because I missed my chance. A few years ago, I really wanted to put together a game-related portfolio to break into the industry. I decided that my careen and game interests would be best served by becoming an expert Fallout 3 modder. Then I got distracted by idealistic poverty, got new ambitions, and couldn't afford the game when it came out, and also thought it wouldn't run on my PC (turns out I was mistaken). My ambitions have been altered somewhat - more interested in writing about than writing for at this point - but my emotional investment remains, to some extent.
Partly because I have other games I want to deal with at the moment. I'm still trying to finish Okami, in addition to various other Wii games, like No More Heroes. I also just got Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. I'm worried that they'll get overwhelmed by Fallout. And that's probably okay generally speaking, a game is a game, but part of my brain says once started, games should be completed.
And partly, finally, because I'm scared not that it'll be great and take over my life, but that it'll be bad, and maybe it won't. I think the idea of merging the Fallout setting and character development with a first-person shooter is a wonderful idea. I was arguing that it was a good idea back in the '90's, when it was horrifically unpopular. I just don't know if the extraordinarily-ambitious-with-somewhat-disappointing-returns Bethesda model will work. Consciously, I think it should. There's no reason why not. Reviews and sales certainly indicate that they got it right. But I've got enough of an iconoclast in me that I'm a little bit worried.
Once the mods finish downloading, I'm going to start playing. I'm just surprised at my restraint and my chomping at the bit. It's an important series, and an important game, and one I expect to have a lot to say about. This blog is about to get post-apocalyptic.
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Promethea
My rave review of Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III's Promethea is up, here. I'm not posting it in full here only because Lunch's picture capacity is much better, and some of it really should be seen.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Final Fantasy Tactics A2: The Best Kind of Sequel
There are many ways to do sequels in the video game world, but the most common can be summed up as "More of the same, only better." Keep what was good about the original game, tweak the things that can be improved upon, and fix anything that was broken. By that logic, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 is a resounding success.
The primary problem with the original Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was a lack of easily accessible information. The GBA's screen was just too small and low-res to contain the large amounts of information a relatively complex RPG really needs, and the move to the DS fixes the problem as expected. It also adds more quests, more classes, more races, and a few other innovations that generally work to the game's benefit.
The worst of the new innovations are a set of quests called Clan Trials, which offer significant benefits, but can be excruciatingly repetitive. Also, the twenty new classes and two new races are somewhat weak, as many of the classes are redundant or even outright bad, although there are a few gems like Raptors and Tricksters.
Final Fantasy Tactics A2 also has some fun with traditional RPG tropes. The characters at one point talk about how, death is rare in the game world thanks to healing magic and resurrection items, winking and nodding at decades of RPG fans who've made the same point. Even better than that, FFTA2 fixes the age-old RPG problem of new-town/better-items by adapting Final Fantasy XII's "Bazaar" system, where defeating enemies gives the player random items which can be traded in to unlock new items. The plot, meanwhile, is trifling, and the game realizes this and happily spends virtually no time on it, recognizing that the player wants more questing, less talking.
Square Enix has their tactical RPG form honed to a science, and it shows with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2. Veterans of the form will find significant improvements and interesting new quests, while newcomers to the genre will discover a game that's fast and easy to play, but filled with action and complexity. Highly recommended.
The primary problem with the original Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was a lack of easily accessible information. The GBA's screen was just too small and low-res to contain the large amounts of information a relatively complex RPG really needs, and the move to the DS fixes the problem as expected. It also adds more quests, more classes, more races, and a few other innovations that generally work to the game's benefit.
The worst of the new innovations are a set of quests called Clan Trials, which offer significant benefits, but can be excruciatingly repetitive. Also, the twenty new classes and two new races are somewhat weak, as many of the classes are redundant or even outright bad, although there are a few gems like Raptors and Tricksters.
Final Fantasy Tactics A2 also has some fun with traditional RPG tropes. The characters at one point talk about how, death is rare in the game world thanks to healing magic and resurrection items, winking and nodding at decades of RPG fans who've made the same point. Even better than that, FFTA2 fixes the age-old RPG problem of new-town/better-items by adapting Final Fantasy XII's "Bazaar" system, where defeating enemies gives the player random items which can be traded in to unlock new items. The plot, meanwhile, is trifling, and the game realizes this and happily spends virtually no time on it, recognizing that the player wants more questing, less talking.
Square Enix has their tactical RPG form honed to a science, and it shows with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2. Veterans of the form will find significant improvements and interesting new quests, while newcomers to the genre will discover a game that's fast and easy to play, but filled with action and complexity. Highly recommended.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Okami: This Is Not The End, My Wolfy Friend
Okami is a beautiful, interesting game and will get the full review it deserves soon enough, but for now, I'm interested by its beginning. Or middle. Possibly end. I'm not entirely sure. Either way, the first major section of the game is either a bizarre, poor game design decision, or a brilliant subversion of the heroic form.
The storyline of Okami is fairly similar to most other fantasy-based games - there's an ancient evil, a rebirth of an ancient hero, a quest to discover magical items to defeat the ancient evil, and so on. That's all fairly straightforward, but what's not is that that part of the game ends after 10-15 hours of play. The Big Bad, an ancient many-headed serpent named Orochi, is the focus of the game's intro and the entire plot of the game at first, complete with prophecies and quests to get items to weaken him. Then, all of the sudden, before the player has collected all of their powers, they are suddenly pushed into Orochi's sealed cave, a long, puzzle and combat-filled dungeon complete with heroic music implying that this is indeed the final confrontation with ultimate evil.
There are a few clues that it's not quite the ending that it seems to be. The game offers a wide range of collectibles, as most action/adventures do, and the player certainly won't have a complete collection of magic, items, or the various other tchotches involved in Okami. But it's still not quite so overwhelmingly obvious that I wasn't concerned that I'd missed out on half the game.
This is, generally, poor game design. If the player feels like they've completed the game, they're more likely to shelve it. If there were a Star Wars game which involved the destruction of the Death Star and death of the Emperor, a final level involving wandering around Endor picking up the garbage probably wouldn't go over terribly well.
On the other hand, Okami isn't a terribly serious game, and there's plenty of reason to believe that the heroic fantasy faux-ending isn't so much a game design failure as it is an elaborate joke. In the game world, the ancient evil was vanquished by a legendary hero and a wolf-god sidekick. The player becomes the wolf-god Amaterasu, and the ancient hero's descendant, Susano, works alongside Amaterasu in order to defeat the Big Bad. In most games, the player would be Susano, fulfilling his destiny and defeating all evil everywhere, then hooking up with his sweetheart at the end.
The subversion comes from Susano's character. He's an incompetent boob and drunken layabout who is basically guilt-tripped into trying anything at all, and once he does make any attempt at being a heroic warrior, it's only the efforts of the player, who uses magic to make Susano appear competent, which make him succeed.
If the first part of Okami is viewed as Susano's story, it's an amusing satire of fantasy game tropes. The hero is a shiftless dreamer who is forced into action, and then, based entirely on the help of his sidekick, succeeds in destroying evil and getting the girl (his village's sake brewer). Amaterasu may spend a good 15 minutes defeating the Big Bad, but Susano skates in and does his super-secret evil-destroying technique which finishes an already-completed job.
Unfortunately Okami doesn't make its satire explicit, which leads me to wonder if the scenario creators intended to satirize generic game plotting at all, or if they just stumbled into an interesting concept and stumbled right back out with a bit of genre-savvy winking at the audience.
The storyline of Okami is fairly similar to most other fantasy-based games - there's an ancient evil, a rebirth of an ancient hero, a quest to discover magical items to defeat the ancient evil, and so on. That's all fairly straightforward, but what's not is that that part of the game ends after 10-15 hours of play. The Big Bad, an ancient many-headed serpent named Orochi, is the focus of the game's intro and the entire plot of the game at first, complete with prophecies and quests to get items to weaken him. Then, all of the sudden, before the player has collected all of their powers, they are suddenly pushed into Orochi's sealed cave, a long, puzzle and combat-filled dungeon complete with heroic music implying that this is indeed the final confrontation with ultimate evil.
There are a few clues that it's not quite the ending that it seems to be. The game offers a wide range of collectibles, as most action/adventures do, and the player certainly won't have a complete collection of magic, items, or the various other tchotches involved in Okami. But it's still not quite so overwhelmingly obvious that I wasn't concerned that I'd missed out on half the game.
This is, generally, poor game design. If the player feels like they've completed the game, they're more likely to shelve it. If there were a Star Wars game which involved the destruction of the Death Star and death of the Emperor, a final level involving wandering around Endor picking up the garbage probably wouldn't go over terribly well.
On the other hand, Okami isn't a terribly serious game, and there's plenty of reason to believe that the heroic fantasy faux-ending isn't so much a game design failure as it is an elaborate joke. In the game world, the ancient evil was vanquished by a legendary hero and a wolf-god sidekick. The player becomes the wolf-god Amaterasu, and the ancient hero's descendant, Susano, works alongside Amaterasu in order to defeat the Big Bad. In most games, the player would be Susano, fulfilling his destiny and defeating all evil everywhere, then hooking up with his sweetheart at the end.
The subversion comes from Susano's character. He's an incompetent boob and drunken layabout who is basically guilt-tripped into trying anything at all, and once he does make any attempt at being a heroic warrior, it's only the efforts of the player, who uses magic to make Susano appear competent, which make him succeed.
If the first part of Okami is viewed as Susano's story, it's an amusing satire of fantasy game tropes. The hero is a shiftless dreamer who is forced into action, and then, based entirely on the help of his sidekick, succeeds in destroying evil and getting the girl (his village's sake brewer). Amaterasu may spend a good 15 minutes defeating the Big Bad, but Susano skates in and does his super-secret evil-destroying technique which finishes an already-completed job.
Unfortunately Okami doesn't make its satire explicit, which leads me to wonder if the scenario creators intended to satirize generic game plotting at all, or if they just stumbled into an interesting concept and stumbled right back out with a bit of genre-savvy winking at the audience.
Monday, February 08, 2010
Genres Aren't Going Anywhere
I've been running a little roughshod over the comments on this post at the Brainy Gamer, when it's really well worth a post of my own.
The post is mostly about Mass Effect 2, but makes more dramatic statements about the nature of game genres at the moment:
I tend to disagree with this, and it might be in part because I'm not "in the now" in game industry terms. In general I try to step back thanks to my history-based lens, but it's even more apparent in that I really haven't played very many new games or been immersed in the gaming press for the past five years or so. It all kind of looks the same to me - not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that I'm very hesitant to say that any new game will be so important that it breaks down genre boundaries.
There are a few reasons for this. First, I tend to think that genres are a necessary part of human existence. We categorize information. They're shortcuts, or hacks, which allow us to judge new info quickly, and act on it accordingly. Sometimes this doesn't work perfectly, of course, and more often it requires major caveats along the lines of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a romantic movie that's funny, but there's no way in hell that it's a romantic comedy" sort. But these caveats, which critics like myself may focus on, don't negate the inherent use of classification. There will always be a use for if-you-like-x-you-may-like-y.
Second, as long as genres have existed, genre-bending has existed. As I mentioned in the comments, Deus Ex was a first-person shooter role-playing game, and Quest for Glory was a role-playing adventure game, and modern action sports games like Madden have long-term strategic "franchise" modes. A single example of a game isn't enough to indicate that genre-bending is bigger now than it was then. Sometimes great games which fit between-genres redefine their genres, like franchise modes in Madden, whereas in the case of Quest for Glory, they might just be interesting experiments. If you'd asked me in the late '90's which game was more likely to redefine the computer role-playing game, Fallout or Diablo, I'd have said Diablo in a heartbeat. It had the critical and commercial consensus, and was immediately accessible. Yet Diablo has barely spawned clones, let alone a genre, whereas the Fallout style of gameplay, through Bioware, has become the default for CRPGs.
Even if does demonstrate a pattern where FPS/RPGs become common, then that's not going to eliminate the concept of genres: it'll create a new genre. Way back in the '80's, there were adventure games based around using items to solve puzzles, and there were action games which were often real-time reflex-based games. When games like The Legend of Zelda started combining puzzles with reflexes, the previous genres didn't disappear, instead they created the Action/Adventure genre!
The post is mostly about Mass Effect 2, but makes more dramatic statements about the nature of game genres at the moment:
More than ever, genre categories seem like arbitrary labels we apply to games so they can be properly shelved.
I tend to disagree with this, and it might be in part because I'm not "in the now" in game industry terms. In general I try to step back thanks to my history-based lens, but it's even more apparent in that I really haven't played very many new games or been immersed in the gaming press for the past five years or so. It all kind of looks the same to me - not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that I'm very hesitant to say that any new game will be so important that it breaks down genre boundaries.
There are a few reasons for this. First, I tend to think that genres are a necessary part of human existence. We categorize information. They're shortcuts, or hacks, which allow us to judge new info quickly, and act on it accordingly. Sometimes this doesn't work perfectly, of course, and more often it requires major caveats along the lines of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a romantic movie that's funny, but there's no way in hell that it's a romantic comedy" sort. But these caveats, which critics like myself may focus on, don't negate the inherent use of classification. There will always be a use for if-you-like-x-you-may-like-y.
Second, as long as genres have existed, genre-bending has existed. As I mentioned in the comments, Deus Ex was a first-person shooter role-playing game, and Quest for Glory was a role-playing adventure game, and modern action sports games like Madden have long-term strategic "franchise" modes. A single example of a game isn't enough to indicate that genre-bending is bigger now than it was then. Sometimes great games which fit between-genres redefine their genres, like franchise modes in Madden, whereas in the case of Quest for Glory, they might just be interesting experiments. If you'd asked me in the late '90's which game was more likely to redefine the computer role-playing game, Fallout or Diablo, I'd have said Diablo in a heartbeat. It had the critical and commercial consensus, and was immediately accessible. Yet Diablo has barely spawned clones, let alone a genre, whereas the Fallout style of gameplay, through Bioware, has become the default for CRPGs.
Even if does demonstrate a pattern where FPS/RPGs become common, then that's not going to eliminate the concept of genres: it'll create a new genre. Way back in the '80's, there were adventure games based around using items to solve puzzles, and there were action games which were often real-time reflex-based games. When games like The Legend of Zelda started combining puzzles with reflexes, the previous genres didn't disappear, instead they created the Action/Adventure genre!
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Bamboozled, or, Blackface is Bad The Movie
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Southland Tales, calling it the most bizarre major studio movie of our era. Bamboozled is the only film I've seen that can really be considered competition. But while Southland Tales is an incoherent mess, it's still a single incoherent mess. Bamboozled, on the other hand, suffers from severe Multiple Personality Disorder.
The main part of Bamboozled acts as a kind of race-tinged Network with a dash of The Producers. Damon Wayans stars as the only black writer for a major network, who gets called out by his boss (Michael Rapaport) for his tame, Cosby-like show pitches. Wayans decides to prove...something or another by pitching a show so hideously racist that his boss will understand...I really don't know. One of the major problems with the film is that both the characters and the film itself appear to have no real concept of cause-and-effect. At any rate, Wayans' pitch is Mantan: The New Millenium Minstrel Show. Because the film takes place in something that only superficially resembles reality, the hideously racist variety show somehow becomes a massive hit. Hilarity fails to ensue.
Network took a similarly absurd premise and generally made it work, based on superb over-the-top performances from its cast, thanks to dramatic monologue after dramatic monologue. Bamboozled's cast can't hold its own. Wayans' annoying affectation of an accent helps bring most scenes around him to a screeching halt, and Jada Pinkett Smith is merely competent in a film that demands insanity. The smaller characters are often better, such as Mos Def's inane radical rapper, who demands to not be called by his slave name, instead as his revolutionary chosen name: Big Black African. (note: most clips are rather not safe for work if you don't have headphones.)
When Mos Def and Michael Rapaport's characters are on-screen, the film starts to work as a satire or parody filled with outsized characters, absurd situations, and a devastating critique of the kind of institutional racism which masquerades as multiculturalism and tolerance. The high point of the film occurs when, once the New Millenium Minstrel Show becomes a hit, the network brings in a PR guru to counter claims that the show might be racist. Wayans is still operating under the impression that he's making the show to prove the point that the show is bad (or whatever), and skillfully eviscerate the consultant's defense of racism:
(consultant scene begins at roughly 8:12 and continues into Part 8)
These scenes are from a movie I'd love to see. They just happen to collide with another movie I'd also be interested in seeing, and the collision turns out terribly for all involved. It often feels like, during the creation of the film, Spike Lee came across so much intense historical footage of blackface, sambos, and minstrel shows that he wanted to make a documentary about just how ghastly this stuff was, and how it still pervades our culture. Several montages of these historical artifacts, as well as a collection of Sambo dolls Wayans begins to collect, and some beautifully tragic scenes where the actors put on their blackface in the traditional fashion show Lee's unsuppressed rage and sadness. They also never mesh with the Network-like satire or the disposable relationship drama of the rest of the film. More than anything, most of Bamboozled feels like several unrelated scripts thrown together, with actors playing the same characters while the tone, style, and plot change from scene to scene, almost totally inexplicably - it's often downright amateurish.
The end of the film, which follows Network's lead into over-the-top violence and tragedy, just makes things worse. Wayans, at some point, inexplicably changes from hating his show to being its staunch defender, and everything just falls apart from there. It ends with Wayans repudiating the entire minstrel show concept, destroying his entire collection of Sambos, and closes on a montage of minstrely and sambos. The montage is shocking and powerful, and includes thingslike tiny Shirley Temple dancing in a minstrel show, but it ends the film on a simplistic, unsatirical note: blackface is bad!
The main part of Bamboozled acts as a kind of race-tinged Network with a dash of The Producers. Damon Wayans stars as the only black writer for a major network, who gets called out by his boss (Michael Rapaport) for his tame, Cosby-like show pitches. Wayans decides to prove...something or another by pitching a show so hideously racist that his boss will understand...I really don't know. One of the major problems with the film is that both the characters and the film itself appear to have no real concept of cause-and-effect. At any rate, Wayans' pitch is Mantan: The New Millenium Minstrel Show. Because the film takes place in something that only superficially resembles reality, the hideously racist variety show somehow becomes a massive hit. Hilarity fails to ensue.
Network took a similarly absurd premise and generally made it work, based on superb over-the-top performances from its cast, thanks to dramatic monologue after dramatic monologue. Bamboozled's cast can't hold its own. Wayans' annoying affectation of an accent helps bring most scenes around him to a screeching halt, and Jada Pinkett Smith is merely competent in a film that demands insanity. The smaller characters are often better, such as Mos Def's inane radical rapper, who demands to not be called by his slave name, instead as his revolutionary chosen name: Big Black African. (note: most clips are rather not safe for work if you don't have headphones.)
When Mos Def and Michael Rapaport's characters are on-screen, the film starts to work as a satire or parody filled with outsized characters, absurd situations, and a devastating critique of the kind of institutional racism which masquerades as multiculturalism and tolerance. The high point of the film occurs when, once the New Millenium Minstrel Show becomes a hit, the network brings in a PR guru to counter claims that the show might be racist. Wayans is still operating under the impression that he's making the show to prove the point that the show is bad (or whatever), and skillfully eviscerate the consultant's defense of racism:
(consultant scene begins at roughly 8:12 and continues into Part 8)
These scenes are from a movie I'd love to see. They just happen to collide with another movie I'd also be interested in seeing, and the collision turns out terribly for all involved. It often feels like, during the creation of the film, Spike Lee came across so much intense historical footage of blackface, sambos, and minstrel shows that he wanted to make a documentary about just how ghastly this stuff was, and how it still pervades our culture. Several montages of these historical artifacts, as well as a collection of Sambo dolls Wayans begins to collect, and some beautifully tragic scenes where the actors put on their blackface in the traditional fashion show Lee's unsuppressed rage and sadness. They also never mesh with the Network-like satire or the disposable relationship drama of the rest of the film. More than anything, most of Bamboozled feels like several unrelated scripts thrown together, with actors playing the same characters while the tone, style, and plot change from scene to scene, almost totally inexplicably - it's often downright amateurish.
The end of the film, which follows Network's lead into over-the-top violence and tragedy, just makes things worse. Wayans, at some point, inexplicably changes from hating his show to being its staunch defender, and everything just falls apart from there. It ends with Wayans repudiating the entire minstrel show concept, destroying his entire collection of Sambos, and closes on a montage of minstrely and sambos. The montage is shocking and powerful, and includes thingslike tiny Shirley Temple dancing in a minstrel show, but it ends the film on a simplistic, unsatirical note: blackface is bad!
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Gateway to Geekery: Babylon 5
Babylon 5 is perhaps the only television show ever to have a multi-year plot structured in advance of its creation, and the follow-through for that is entirely effective. However, the plotting is so far-sighting, that it can be initially imposing - particularly given that the pilot movie and first season of the show are occasionally less-than-competent.
I was a fan when it aired, and, with some trepidation, I decided to rewatch it again recently. Happily, the show was still good, and easily held its own against other 90's SF, like Buffy or The X-Files. The Renaissance Poet watched it as well for the first time, and since she didn't have a nostalgia cushion, so I decided to blast through the crap and get to the good stuff. By and large, it worked.
There's another minor complication - particularly in the first and second seasons, episodes aired out of order. I don't know if this was fixed for DVD releases. I do know that seasons 1 and 2 on Hulu are in airing order, not proper order. Generally this isn't terrible (it wasn't gutted like Firefly) but occasionally watching in the proper order makes the show make much more sense, especially in season 2. A master chronological list is available here. Bookmark it!
Season 1
Season 1 is the most iffy of all the Babylon 5 seasons. First of all, as a television show, B5 was struggling to find its footing, especially given that no science fiction show other than Star Trek had ever aired successfully on American TV. Second, the plot of B5 unfolds slowly, and it's hard to see it as anything other than a procedural/monster-of-the-week show most of the time.
It's easiest to sort the episodes into three categories - those critical for the main story (which are also generally the best episodes), watchable episodes which bring up somewhat important character or universe background, and those which are just plain bad.
The best way to go about watching the season is to watch the first two episodes, in my view. If you think "Hey, this is fantastic!" then watch 'em all. If you think it's moderately interesting, then watch the first two categories. If your patience is tested...well, sorry about that, but it does get good. I swear. Watch the critical episodes and get to Season 2 as quickly as you can.
Critical Episodes
1-01 - "Midnight on the Firing Line"
1-02 - "Soul Hunter"
1-05 - "Parliament of Dreams" *
1-06 - "Mind War"
1-08 - "And The Sky Full of Stars"
1-13 - "Signs and Portents"
1-16/17 - "A Voice in the Wilderness" pt. 1/2 **
1-18 - "Babylon Squared"
1-21 - "Legacies" *
1-22 - "Chrysalis"
* In terms of plot, these aren't absolutely necessary. However, they both introduce important characters, and are better-quality than others.
** If you're really, really disliking the show after the first couple of episodes, skip to this one. It's early B5 at its best - good character development, interesting storyline, and for the first time, it has a successful sense of humor! If this doesn't grab you, it may be that nothing will.
Watchable Episodes
1-03 "Born to the Purple" *
1-09 "Deathwalker"
1-10 "Believers"
1-12 "By Any Means Necessary"
1-15 "Eyes"
1-19 "The Quality of Mercy" *
* These episodes are directly referenced later on, more than once in certain cases, so they're somewhat important. On the other hand, they're not terribly good, particularly "Born to the Purple." A plot summary may be the best way to go.
Eminently Skippable
1-04 "Infection" (this is pretty clearly the single worst episode of the entire five seasons)
1-07 "The War Prayer"
1-11 "Survivors"
1-14 "Grail"
1-20 "TKO"
Season 2
Most of the second season is a step above the first in quality and importance. One episode, though, just kind of raises a stink: 2-04 "A Distant Star"
The Movies
Babylon 5 had one pilot movie, and five other made-for-TV movies.
"The Gathering" - This is the pilot movie, and has several problems. First of all, it's kind of bad. Second, it was scored by a totally different composer than the rest of the series, and B5's music is one of its most distinctive and good qualities. It was later re-edited for TNT with proper music and some of the crap eliminated, but it's still not terribly good. I advise skipping it, or watching the edited version after you're sure you like the series.
"In the Beginning" - A prequel movie made for TNT. It's a little contrived, but has some occasional moments of excellence. I would recommend watching it, at one of three points: as the entry into B5; after the two-parter in season 3; or when it was produced, between seasons 4 and 5.
"Thirdspace" - Made at the same time as "In the Beginning," it's kind of a reimagining of Babylon 5 as a big dumb action movie, and reasonably successful at that. Watch after its chronology at any time (around the middle of Season 4).
"River of Souls" - Set after the end of the last normal episode, but before the grand finale. It's pretty good. Watch anytime in the second half of the fifth season.
"A Call to Arms" and "Legend of the Rangers" - Two pseudo-pilots for spinoffs, one of which came to be, the second of which didn't. I didn't like "A Call to Arms" and I heard "Legend of the Rangers" was worse. I'd skip 'em.
In conclusion, I am a geek.
I was a fan when it aired, and, with some trepidation, I decided to rewatch it again recently. Happily, the show was still good, and easily held its own against other 90's SF, like Buffy or The X-Files. The Renaissance Poet watched it as well for the first time, and since she didn't have a nostalgia cushion, so I decided to blast through the crap and get to the good stuff. By and large, it worked.
There's another minor complication - particularly in the first and second seasons, episodes aired out of order. I don't know if this was fixed for DVD releases. I do know that seasons 1 and 2 on Hulu are in airing order, not proper order. Generally this isn't terrible (it wasn't gutted like Firefly) but occasionally watching in the proper order makes the show make much more sense, especially in season 2. A master chronological list is available here. Bookmark it!
Season 1
Season 1 is the most iffy of all the Babylon 5 seasons. First of all, as a television show, B5 was struggling to find its footing, especially given that no science fiction show other than Star Trek had ever aired successfully on American TV. Second, the plot of B5 unfolds slowly, and it's hard to see it as anything other than a procedural/monster-of-the-week show most of the time.
It's easiest to sort the episodes into three categories - those critical for the main story (which are also generally the best episodes), watchable episodes which bring up somewhat important character or universe background, and those which are just plain bad.
The best way to go about watching the season is to watch the first two episodes, in my view. If you think "Hey, this is fantastic!" then watch 'em all. If you think it's moderately interesting, then watch the first two categories. If your patience is tested...well, sorry about that, but it does get good. I swear. Watch the critical episodes and get to Season 2 as quickly as you can.
Critical Episodes
1-01 - "Midnight on the Firing Line"
1-02 - "Soul Hunter"
1-05 - "Parliament of Dreams" *
1-06 - "Mind War"
1-08 - "And The Sky Full of Stars"
1-13 - "Signs and Portents"
1-16/17 - "A Voice in the Wilderness" pt. 1/2 **
1-18 - "Babylon Squared"
1-21 - "Legacies" *
1-22 - "Chrysalis"
* In terms of plot, these aren't absolutely necessary. However, they both introduce important characters, and are better-quality than others.
** If you're really, really disliking the show after the first couple of episodes, skip to this one. It's early B5 at its best - good character development, interesting storyline, and for the first time, it has a successful sense of humor! If this doesn't grab you, it may be that nothing will.
Watchable Episodes
1-03 "Born to the Purple" *
1-09 "Deathwalker"
1-10 "Believers"
1-12 "By Any Means Necessary"
1-15 "Eyes"
1-19 "The Quality of Mercy" *
* These episodes are directly referenced later on, more than once in certain cases, so they're somewhat important. On the other hand, they're not terribly good, particularly "Born to the Purple." A plot summary may be the best way to go.
Eminently Skippable
1-04 "Infection" (this is pretty clearly the single worst episode of the entire five seasons)
1-07 "The War Prayer"
1-11 "Survivors"
1-14 "Grail"
1-20 "TKO"
Season 2
Most of the second season is a step above the first in quality and importance. One episode, though, just kind of raises a stink: 2-04 "A Distant Star"
The Movies
Babylon 5 had one pilot movie, and five other made-for-TV movies.
"The Gathering" - This is the pilot movie, and has several problems. First of all, it's kind of bad. Second, it was scored by a totally different composer than the rest of the series, and B5's music is one of its most distinctive and good qualities. It was later re-edited for TNT with proper music and some of the crap eliminated, but it's still not terribly good. I advise skipping it, or watching the edited version after you're sure you like the series.
"In the Beginning" - A prequel movie made for TNT. It's a little contrived, but has some occasional moments of excellence. I would recommend watching it, at one of three points: as the entry into B5; after the two-parter in season 3; or when it was produced, between seasons 4 and 5.
"Thirdspace" - Made at the same time as "In the Beginning," it's kind of a reimagining of Babylon 5 as a big dumb action movie, and reasonably successful at that. Watch after its chronology at any time (around the middle of Season 4).
"River of Souls" - Set after the end of the last normal episode, but before the grand finale. It's pretty good. Watch anytime in the second half of the fifth season.
"A Call to Arms" and "Legend of the Rangers" - Two pseudo-pilots for spinoffs, one of which came to be, the second of which didn't. I didn't like "A Call to Arms" and I heard "Legend of the Rangers" was worse. I'd skip 'em.
In conclusion, I am a geek.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Glee: It's gonna be a bumpy ride
Glee has a wonderful premise for a show, and it happily lives up to the promise of that premise much of the time. Its combination of wicked humor, talented performers, the fertile setting of a high school glee club all combine to make a show that seems like it can't miss, right?
When it plays for farcical laughs, Glee is great, and when it adds songs that play off that energy, it's fantastic. However, most of the time, it doesn't do that. Glee has a big problem: it can't decide if it's Arrested Development with songs or Desperate Housewives with songs. There is a lot of melodrama. An excess of melodrama. Mostly involving babies. For several episodes in a row, the main plot was something involving one character's pregnancy. It's not terribly funny, and because we don't really know the characters, it's not terribly moving. It's like the Simpsons quote: "There is no moral, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened."
Glee is occasionally praised for its insane energy with regard to plots and subplots, but in the first season of a show, that can often mean burnout. It's occasionally compared to The O.C. and Grey's Anatomy, two shows that lost a lot of their drive early on, but it reminds me most of Battlestar Galactica. That too had a sensational pilot and first thirteen episodes, but it just moved so quickly that it forced the writers to come up with more and more outlandish things as the show moved on, eventually resulting in a near-complete collapse. Glee is moving faster and doesn't have as much of a core. At the rate it's going, it could be a disaster by the middle of the second season.
There is some hope, though, but only if the writers manage to pull it together. Glee focuses on the teachers and adults as people more than its teen-aged students, who only occasionally move beyond one-dimensional stereotypes into, well, two-dimensional stereotypes. If it takes some time and turns them into people instead of Wheelchair Guy or Asian Kid and Other Asian Kid, it should be able to take a deep breath and improve its quality. In roughly the same number of episodes, Freaks and Geeks managed to make its student characters three-dimensional and likable - Glee can too.
Second, Glee's music choices vary wildly, and they represent two different visions for the show. The first vision is of Glee as musical theater. This is when the show takes itself literally. A kid who's sad decides to sing a sad song. The plot exists to provide a vehicle for the characters to experience emotional swings, and sing about those swings.
I tend to get tired of Glee when it goes in this direction. The serialized nature of television, combined with the melodrama required to make the musical theater work, seems like it contrives to make every episode end on one character gazing longingly at another/into the distance, singing about how sad they are, while the energy required to maintain the melodrama simply cannot last. The songs also tend to be montages, and decidedly unrealistic in a way that musical theater just can't do.
The other version of Glee is a a comic show about musical theater. Much of the time, Glee works this way. The music is diegetic and, in order to work within the show, it has to resort to absurd and farcical situations. The best example of this is, of course, "Single Ladies:"
Making the show about a musical theater troupe, instead of musical theater itself, also allows for the occasional take-the-brakes off number, where hey! This cast is talented. Let's let them show just how damn talented they are, in exactly the kind of competition that glee clubs do. The final episode of the first 13, "Sectionals," finally allows Lea Michele and the rest of the cast to show off just how well they can sing.
I hope that Glee's show-runners get together and figure out just what kind of show they're doing, and go with it full-force. But that's just a hope. I expect that it'll burn out within a year or so. Which is unfortunate. Still, it's fun now, and it should be fun for a while.
When it plays for farcical laughs, Glee is great, and when it adds songs that play off that energy, it's fantastic. However, most of the time, it doesn't do that. Glee has a big problem: it can't decide if it's Arrested Development with songs or Desperate Housewives with songs. There is a lot of melodrama. An excess of melodrama. Mostly involving babies. For several episodes in a row, the main plot was something involving one character's pregnancy. It's not terribly funny, and because we don't really know the characters, it's not terribly moving. It's like the Simpsons quote: "There is no moral, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened."
Glee is occasionally praised for its insane energy with regard to plots and subplots, but in the first season of a show, that can often mean burnout. It's occasionally compared to The O.C. and Grey's Anatomy, two shows that lost a lot of their drive early on, but it reminds me most of Battlestar Galactica. That too had a sensational pilot and first thirteen episodes, but it just moved so quickly that it forced the writers to come up with more and more outlandish things as the show moved on, eventually resulting in a near-complete collapse. Glee is moving faster and doesn't have as much of a core. At the rate it's going, it could be a disaster by the middle of the second season.
There is some hope, though, but only if the writers manage to pull it together. Glee focuses on the teachers and adults as people more than its teen-aged students, who only occasionally move beyond one-dimensional stereotypes into, well, two-dimensional stereotypes. If it takes some time and turns them into people instead of Wheelchair Guy or Asian Kid and Other Asian Kid, it should be able to take a deep breath and improve its quality. In roughly the same number of episodes, Freaks and Geeks managed to make its student characters three-dimensional and likable - Glee can too.
Second, Glee's music choices vary wildly, and they represent two different visions for the show. The first vision is of Glee as musical theater. This is when the show takes itself literally. A kid who's sad decides to sing a sad song. The plot exists to provide a vehicle for the characters to experience emotional swings, and sing about those swings.
I tend to get tired of Glee when it goes in this direction. The serialized nature of television, combined with the melodrama required to make the musical theater work, seems like it contrives to make every episode end on one character gazing longingly at another/into the distance, singing about how sad they are, while the energy required to maintain the melodrama simply cannot last. The songs also tend to be montages, and decidedly unrealistic in a way that musical theater just can't do.
The other version of Glee is a a comic show about musical theater. Much of the time, Glee works this way. The music is diegetic and, in order to work within the show, it has to resort to absurd and farcical situations. The best example of this is, of course, "Single Ladies:"
Making the show about a musical theater troupe, instead of musical theater itself, also allows for the occasional take-the-brakes off number, where hey! This cast is talented. Let's let them show just how damn talented they are, in exactly the kind of competition that glee clubs do. The final episode of the first 13, "Sectionals," finally allows Lea Michele and the rest of the cast to show off just how well they can sing.
I hope that Glee's show-runners get together and figure out just what kind of show they're doing, and go with it full-force. But that's just a hope. I expect that it'll burn out within a year or so. Which is unfortunate. Still, it's fun now, and it should be fun for a while.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Lust, Caution
Ang Lee may be the most interesting and gifted director alive today. He's done comedies of manners (Sense & Sensibility), comic book adaptations (Hulk), martial arts epics (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), trifling comedies (Taking Woodstock), and the quintessential gay romance of our times (Brokeback Mountain), amongst others. In 2007, he branched out even further, to the near-pornographically sexy Lust, Caution.
It must be said, right off the bat, that I'm a sucker for resistance stories about the amorality and difficult choices in occupied territory. World War II, with Germany and Japan trying to take over the world, is the best recent setting for such storytelling, although it's usually in Nazi-occupied territory like Paris. For Lust, Caution, Ang Lee chose Japanese occupied coastal China, which may arguably be even more fertile territory for storytelling.
20th-century China was a nation falling apart and constantly reinventing itself at the same time. The last imperial dynasty, the Qing, had been overthrown and replaced with a constitutional republic, which was threatened by warlord-based civil war as China had seen dozens of times in its between-dynasty history. As the republicans began to win the civil war, a new communist movement started gathering momentum, and the Japanese began to attack Chinese possessions in 1937, when the film begins. The film is set in Hong Kong and Shanghai, two major coastal cities which also served as two of the main entries for non-Chinese into China. Shanghai, in particular, was one of the cosmopolitan centers of East Asia, with enclaves of Japanese, American, English, German, French, and more inside the city. The political nature of the time and setting allowed a massive importation of "Western" ideas into China - republicanism and communism being two obvious examples.
The film begins with a flash-forward in which we meet the protagonist, Tang Wei, a student in Hong Kong. She and a friend are quickly recruited by a handsome man and a theater troupe. The politics of the main characters are quickly made apparent when the friend suggests they do a play of Henrik Ibsen's. Ibsen was a favorite around the world of those inclined towards republican and bourgeois ideals, especially in China. The young actor shoots this down as too bourgeois, and recommends a patriotic play to help China win the war, a tacky little piece of socialist realism that wins instant patriotic success. The little troupe doesn't want to just be actors, however, and begins to plot against traitorous collaborators.
Although the film doesn't expressly say it, they're entirely incompetent other than Tang Wei, who is also the least willing to join in, but does so to chase a crush. She succeeds in getting into Leung's social circle, and is ready to start an affair with him in order to facilitate the assassination, when things suddenly go wrong and she sees just how violent and amoral her friends can be.
When the film picks up again three years later in Shanghai, Tang Wei's friends have found here - and Tony Leung - and recruit her again to achieve the same goal. She goes along with them again, but only after seeing that her life is even more cast adrift than it had been - her family life has gone to hell, and she doesn't appear to have any new friends, and only escapes into movies.
Once the the resistance recruits Tang Wei back into the plot to kill Leung, she returns to a world of carefully tailored dresses and endless games of mah-jong, combined with stilted flirtations with Leung, a poised, careful gentleman of the collaborationist government.
Everything in the film at this point, like Tang Wei, is brilliantly conceived, but empty artifice. There's a plot, there are characters, and it's all gorgeous, but it not real. It's an act. And when Tony Leung and Tang Wei finally consummate their flirtation, both the characters and the film tear away the artifice in a shockingly intense, brutal sex scene.
As the affair continues, Tang's alienation from her life continues - her resistance contacts prove to be shockingly incomprensive of her desperation, even when she breaks down and screams it at them. A romantic advance from her former crush proves awkward and rebuffed for being far, far too late - she is completely attached to her affair with Leung.
Tony Leung, meanwhile, is absolutely superb (as always) as Mr. Yee, the chief of police of the collaborationist government. His performance gives the impression that he is a perfect gentleman, stuck in a terrible situation outside of his control. Early in the film, it even seems like he might be likable enough that the young resistance troupe are entirely in the wrong to want to assassinate him. Slowly his character is revealed to be a despicable sadist, albeit a recognizably human one.
It is when he shows Tang Wei a moment of human kindness that everything unravels. When it occurs, it seems clear that she hasn't had a moment like that since the very start of the film, and her reaction is both entirely human and horrifically stupid. She is revealed as totally compromised, and her character is shown as starkly naked as the sex scenes for which the film is famous.
Lust, Caution is not an easy film to watch - no good resistance movie should be - but it is a stunningly beautiful, deeply compelling one. Highly recommended.
It must be said, right off the bat, that I'm a sucker for resistance stories about the amorality and difficult choices in occupied territory. World War II, with Germany and Japan trying to take over the world, is the best recent setting for such storytelling, although it's usually in Nazi-occupied territory like Paris. For Lust, Caution, Ang Lee chose Japanese occupied coastal China, which may arguably be even more fertile territory for storytelling.
20th-century China was a nation falling apart and constantly reinventing itself at the same time. The last imperial dynasty, the Qing, had been overthrown and replaced with a constitutional republic, which was threatened by warlord-based civil war as China had seen dozens of times in its between-dynasty history. As the republicans began to win the civil war, a new communist movement started gathering momentum, and the Japanese began to attack Chinese possessions in 1937, when the film begins. The film is set in Hong Kong and Shanghai, two major coastal cities which also served as two of the main entries for non-Chinese into China. Shanghai, in particular, was one of the cosmopolitan centers of East Asia, with enclaves of Japanese, American, English, German, French, and more inside the city. The political nature of the time and setting allowed a massive importation of "Western" ideas into China - republicanism and communism being two obvious examples.
The film begins with a flash-forward in which we meet the protagonist, Tang Wei, a student in Hong Kong. She and a friend are quickly recruited by a handsome man and a theater troupe. The politics of the main characters are quickly made apparent when the friend suggests they do a play of Henrik Ibsen's. Ibsen was a favorite around the world of those inclined towards republican and bourgeois ideals, especially in China. The young actor shoots this down as too bourgeois, and recommends a patriotic play to help China win the war, a tacky little piece of socialist realism that wins instant patriotic success. The little troupe doesn't want to just be actors, however, and begins to plot against traitorous collaborators.
Although the film doesn't expressly say it, they're entirely incompetent other than Tang Wei, who is also the least willing to join in, but does so to chase a crush. She succeeds in getting into Leung's social circle, and is ready to start an affair with him in order to facilitate the assassination, when things suddenly go wrong and she sees just how violent and amoral her friends can be.
When the film picks up again three years later in Shanghai, Tang Wei's friends have found here - and Tony Leung - and recruit her again to achieve the same goal. She goes along with them again, but only after seeing that her life is even more cast adrift than it had been - her family life has gone to hell, and she doesn't appear to have any new friends, and only escapes into movies.
Once the the resistance recruits Tang Wei back into the plot to kill Leung, she returns to a world of carefully tailored dresses and endless games of mah-jong, combined with stilted flirtations with Leung, a poised, careful gentleman of the collaborationist government.
Everything in the film at this point, like Tang Wei, is brilliantly conceived, but empty artifice. There's a plot, there are characters, and it's all gorgeous, but it not real. It's an act. And when Tony Leung and Tang Wei finally consummate their flirtation, both the characters and the film tear away the artifice in a shockingly intense, brutal sex scene.
As the affair continues, Tang's alienation from her life continues - her resistance contacts prove to be shockingly incomprensive of her desperation, even when she breaks down and screams it at them. A romantic advance from her former crush proves awkward and rebuffed for being far, far too late - she is completely attached to her affair with Leung.
Tony Leung, meanwhile, is absolutely superb (as always) as Mr. Yee, the chief of police of the collaborationist government. His performance gives the impression that he is a perfect gentleman, stuck in a terrible situation outside of his control. Early in the film, it even seems like he might be likable enough that the young resistance troupe are entirely in the wrong to want to assassinate him. Slowly his character is revealed to be a despicable sadist, albeit a recognizably human one.
It is when he shows Tang Wei a moment of human kindness that everything unravels. When it occurs, it seems clear that she hasn't had a moment like that since the very start of the film, and her reaction is both entirely human and horrifically stupid. She is revealed as totally compromised, and her character is shown as starkly naked as the sex scenes for which the film is famous.
Lust, Caution is not an easy film to watch - no good resistance movie should be - but it is a stunningly beautiful, deeply compelling one. Highly recommended.
Monday, December 07, 2009
The Hidden Fortress: Flawed Experiment
Akira Kurosawa is one of the most influential storytellers in the history of cinema, using primarily samurai-based films to toy with different narrative devices. Arguably the most well-known of these is Rashomon, whose method of different people telling irreconcilable variations of the same event has become something of a subgenre on its own. The Hidden Fortress tells a fairly epic story: a samurai family has been crushed in battle, and now its final heir and loyal general must try to escape to safety with the family treasure. However, Kurosawa attempts to tell the story through the lens of two peasants caught up in the middle of the war.
The idea of telling an epic story from the point of view of the little people involved is respectable, and can produce marvelous results. The primary problem with The Hidden Fortress, however, is that Kurosawa takes two characters who are usually minor stereotypes in stories like this, and expands their roles dramatically while leaving the characters as stereotypes. In this case, the two peasants are greedy, selfish cowards, concerned only with making a quick buck and saving their own skin. Kurosawa may have some insulation against charges of classism by having another lower-class character introduced later in the film, but while she is more noble, she's still primarily a trait (loyalty) over a well-developed character.
The story of a young princess suddenly thrust into full responsibility for her entire family and nation, while a loyal - but defeated - general (played by Kurosawa favorite Toshiro Mifune) attempts to deal with her stubbornness and grief is a strong core, and many of the film's best scenes focus on that. It's just something of a pity that the story is watered down by the often-grating antics of the two-dimensional peasants.
A modern description of The Hidden Fortress is somewhat incomplete without mentioning its influence on George Lucas and Star Wars. Lucas is a huge Kurosawa fan, and the Criterion edition of the film includes an interview with him on Kurosawa's influence. The Hidden Fortress is most often cited as the direct inspiration for the characters of R2D2 and C3PO in the roles of the two peasants (although the robots are much less obscene and violent). The opening of The Hidden Fortress begins with the two fighting, separating, then becoming captured and enslaved before an unlikely reunion, much like the beginning of A New Hope.
It's also easy to see Kurosawa's influence on Star Wars in perhaps the best scene of the film, a duel between Toshiro Mifune and an enemy samurai.
The slow buildup of dramatic tension, followed by moments of dramatic action combined with the use of terrain and props bring to mind the best lightsaber duels from Star Wars, most notably the finale of The Phantom Menace, arguably the best section of all three prequel movies.
Although I've been fairly critical of it, The Hidden Fortress is still a fairly likable film, but it pales in comparison to some of Kurosawa's other masterpieces. Star Wars fans and Kurosawa fans should find it extremely interesting, but a Kurosawa newbie may be better off with The Seven Samurai or Rashomon.
The idea of telling an epic story from the point of view of the little people involved is respectable, and can produce marvelous results. The primary problem with The Hidden Fortress, however, is that Kurosawa takes two characters who are usually minor stereotypes in stories like this, and expands their roles dramatically while leaving the characters as stereotypes. In this case, the two peasants are greedy, selfish cowards, concerned only with making a quick buck and saving their own skin. Kurosawa may have some insulation against charges of classism by having another lower-class character introduced later in the film, but while she is more noble, she's still primarily a trait (loyalty) over a well-developed character.
The story of a young princess suddenly thrust into full responsibility for her entire family and nation, while a loyal - but defeated - general (played by Kurosawa favorite Toshiro Mifune) attempts to deal with her stubbornness and grief is a strong core, and many of the film's best scenes focus on that. It's just something of a pity that the story is watered down by the often-grating antics of the two-dimensional peasants.
A modern description of The Hidden Fortress is somewhat incomplete without mentioning its influence on George Lucas and Star Wars. Lucas is a huge Kurosawa fan, and the Criterion edition of the film includes an interview with him on Kurosawa's influence. The Hidden Fortress is most often cited as the direct inspiration for the characters of R2D2 and C3PO in the roles of the two peasants (although the robots are much less obscene and violent). The opening of The Hidden Fortress begins with the two fighting, separating, then becoming captured and enslaved before an unlikely reunion, much like the beginning of A New Hope.
It's also easy to see Kurosawa's influence on Star Wars in perhaps the best scene of the film, a duel between Toshiro Mifune and an enemy samurai.
The slow buildup of dramatic tension, followed by moments of dramatic action combined with the use of terrain and props bring to mind the best lightsaber duels from Star Wars, most notably the finale of The Phantom Menace, arguably the best section of all three prequel movies.
Although I've been fairly critical of it, The Hidden Fortress is still a fairly likable film, but it pales in comparison to some of Kurosawa's other masterpieces. Star Wars fans and Kurosawa fans should find it extremely interesting, but a Kurosawa newbie may be better off with The Seven Samurai or Rashomon.
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
The Best Songs of the Decade: 25-1
See also:
The Best Songs of the Decade: 100-76
The Best Songs of the Decade: 75-51
The Best Songs of the Decade: 50-26
The 10 Best Albums of the Decade
25. "Run" - Gnarls Barkley
My favorite Gnarls Barkley song. Almost impossible not to throw up my arms at the background 'wah!'s.
24. "Rehab" - Amy Winehouse
The most bitterly ironic song of the decade. Although I don't think all of Amy Winehouse's stuff is as fantastic as some do, songs like this show that she can be something special. So get off the crack and into the recording studio, lady!
23. "Entertain" - Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney's breakup wasn't all that surprising, especially as their later albums added more and more songs like this one, dealing with the perils of fame. With its thudding drums and intense riffs, this song may have been the best combo of the fuzzed-out classic rock of their final album and the anthemic punk of their earlier work.
22. "How To Disappear Completely" - Radiohead
If it's not clear from the songs on the list, I'll say it straight-out: I like fast songs more than slow songs, anthems more than ballads, rockers more than love songs, etc., etc. So it takes a damn fine slow song for me to grasp a hold of it. The primary attribute I'm interested in is lyrical evocation - does it make me feel a certain specific way? "How To Disappear Completely" reminds me of being on my college campus as one of a handful of people over Thanksgiving break, listening to Kid A, reading Watchmen, and dealing with a massive fog bank that made everything ethereal. It's a great song for anything along those lines.
21. "Mass Romantic" - The New Pornographers
Not to get all High Fidelity on y'all, but when they talk about the top five side 1/track 1 combinations? This would be my first pick, and also my pick for the best opening ten seconds of a song.
20. "Love Lockdown" - Kanye West
Although Kanye's shift away from more conventional rapping/producing is a bit disappointing considering the quality he brings to those, his auto-tuned breakup album 808's and Heartbreaks was still good enough that I can't complain too much. "Love Lockdown" is easily the standout track thanks to its complex rhythms and intense vocals.
19. "Seven Nation Army" - The White Stripes
To call this song "anthemic" would be something of an insult both to the song and the term. This was the biggest and best rock anthem since "Smells Like Teen Spirit."
18. "B.O.B." - Outkast
Do I have too much Outkast on this list? Given that there are more Outkast songs to come, after three so far (and two more I just barely left off), that seems like it might be a worthwhile argument. But while Andre 3000 and Big Boi are most often compared to Lennon and McCartney, no doubt due to their somewhat fractured personal relationship, a better comparison might be to The Rolling Stones: would you complain about having too many Rolling Stones songs in a Best of the 60's list? Cause I'm not taking "Sympathy for the Devil," "Paint It Black," "Gimme Shelter," or "Satisfaction" out of the top 20 of THAT list.
17. "All For Swinging You Around" - The New Pornographers
Picking favorite New Pornographers songs is like picking children. This is my favorite child, then. Pity the poor cat in my lap when this song plays, cause they're getting swung around.
16. "5 Million Ways To Kill A C.E.O." - The Coup
15. "Laugh, Love, Fuck" - The Coup
Funky beats, radical politics, and wicked humor: it's like The Coup are aimed directly at the heart of my musical aesthetics. The only real surprise is how many people with similar tastes haven't even heard of them.
14. "Portions for Foxes" - Rilo Kiley
Is this song happy? Sad? Pro-relationship-with-bad-girls? It's kind of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind of rock songs, in that it can be interpreted as meaning a variety of different things, but it's excellent on the surface.
13. "You Know I'm No Good" - Ghostface Killah ft. Amy Winehouse
One of my few criticisms of Ghostface is that his intensity can be a little bit overwhelming, especially over and over. One of my criticisms of Amy Winehouse is that while she has a beautiful voice, her songs often seem to lack, well, intensity. So put Ghostface together with Winehouse, and the gestalt is incredible.
12. "Furnace Room Lullaby" - Neko Case
The last slow song on the list. If I want evocative and ethereal, I really can't do better than Neko Case's stellar voice. She's great doing power pop with The New Pornographers, but songs like this are simply transcendent.
11. "My Favorite Mutiny" - The Coup ft. Black Thought & Talib Kweli
There is a specific subgenre of hip-hop song that I don't know the name for, but I'm mesmerized by. Its attributes are: 1) a medium-to-slow, simple, rhythmic beat; 2) a wide range of guest stars; and 3) aggressive, usually self-referential and -aggrandizing lyrics. "My Favorite Mutiny" fits this subgenre almost perfectly, although with its "who's who" of "socially conscious" rappers, it's much more political in nature than others of the sort.
10. "Prisstina" - Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney is ofter heralded for their politics, a somewhat overrated trait having more to do with the historical context of the band's creation than the radical nature of their lyrics. They do have an amazing faith in music, which shows up clearly in this magnificently catchy tale of a good girl going bad for rock'n'roll.
(I'm really sorry about the video, non-anime fans. But it's all the internet gave me.)
9. "Get By" - Talib Kweli
You can tell a song is great when hearing it for the first time causes you to immediately go back and play it again. My jaw hit the floor at hearing "Get By" and I played it again. And as time went on, again and again and again.
8. "Everything's Just Wonderful" - Lily Allen
Another entry into the catchy-as-hell-pop-song-about-depression subgenre. Between Lily Allen and Justin Timberlake, amongst others, this decade threatened to give disposable pop a good name. Who saw that coming?
7. "Hold On, Hold On" - Neko Case
Neko Case, on the other hand, threatens to give country a good name. Good thing they haven't noticed her.
6. "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" - Jay-Z
It's not only an excellent song, but it's stunning cultural impact may best be demonstrated in this clip.
5. "Flip Flop Rock" - Outkast ft. Killer Mike & Jay-Z
This may be the Platonic example of the subgenre of rap that I mentioned with "My Favorite Mutiny." Any Outkast song with Killer Mike has a great chance at being excellent. Add in a superb Jay-Z guest verse, and it's about as good as hip-hop gets.
4. "Kilo" - Ghostface Killah ft. Raekwon
I've called Fishscale my favorite album of the decade, and, with some very strong competition, I'm calling this its best track. The sample, swiped from an educational song about kilograms, starts it off right, and it's got Ghostface and Raekwon doing the cocaine-based storytelling they excel at.
3. "Hey Ya!" - Outkast
The most consistent criticism of "Hey Ya!" I hear is that it's overplayed. Yes, it's played a lot. A lot. But for it to be overplayed, don't you have to get tired of it? Ever? Cause I sure as hell don't.
2. "Breakin' Up" - Rilo Kiley
This combines two of my favorite types of songs: the breakup song, and the peppy song about depressing content. And it does it damn well, gospel, disco and all. The sheer joy and relief it conveys are refreshing in a world where pop songs are almost entirely about wanting to get into relationships or hating getting out of them. Listen now, and break up with someone close to you!
1. "The Whole World" - Outkast ft. Killer Mike
One of the big Outkast debates often centers on their first four albums vs. Speakerboxxx\The Love Below. Their earlier albums, though occasionally very experimental, still reside in the genre of southern gangster hip-hop, while the massive double album moves off the street and onto the stage, as it were, where hip-hop and pop mingle together. Both are excellent, but better yet is the bridge between the two: their 2001 greatest hits album, Big Boi and Dre present.... They recorded three new tracks for the album, including the standout "The Whole World" (another track of the three, "Funkin' Around," just barely missed this list).
"The Whole World" has Outkast at their best, with pop appeal but still some grime in the vocals, over a marvelous swinging beat. "The Whole World" is pretty much impossible not to like, and even grows on repeat listens. When I began putting this list together, I had it as my tentative #1, but was pretty certain that I'd pick something from the top 8-12 that would replace it. And yet, as the list took shape, I never really considered any other song better. "The Whole World" is the best song of the 2000's.
The Best Songs of the Decade: 100-76
The Best Songs of the Decade: 75-51
The Best Songs of the Decade: 50-26
The 10 Best Albums of the Decade
25. "Run" - Gnarls Barkley
My favorite Gnarls Barkley song. Almost impossible not to throw up my arms at the background 'wah!'s.
24. "Rehab" - Amy Winehouse
The most bitterly ironic song of the decade. Although I don't think all of Amy Winehouse's stuff is as fantastic as some do, songs like this show that she can be something special. So get off the crack and into the recording studio, lady!
23. "Entertain" - Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney's breakup wasn't all that surprising, especially as their later albums added more and more songs like this one, dealing with the perils of fame. With its thudding drums and intense riffs, this song may have been the best combo of the fuzzed-out classic rock of their final album and the anthemic punk of their earlier work.
22. "How To Disappear Completely" - Radiohead
If it's not clear from the songs on the list, I'll say it straight-out: I like fast songs more than slow songs, anthems more than ballads, rockers more than love songs, etc., etc. So it takes a damn fine slow song for me to grasp a hold of it. The primary attribute I'm interested in is lyrical evocation - does it make me feel a certain specific way? "How To Disappear Completely" reminds me of being on my college campus as one of a handful of people over Thanksgiving break, listening to Kid A, reading Watchmen, and dealing with a massive fog bank that made everything ethereal. It's a great song for anything along those lines.
21. "Mass Romantic" - The New Pornographers
Not to get all High Fidelity on y'all, but when they talk about the top five side 1/track 1 combinations? This would be my first pick, and also my pick for the best opening ten seconds of a song.
20. "Love Lockdown" - Kanye West
Although Kanye's shift away from more conventional rapping/producing is a bit disappointing considering the quality he brings to those, his auto-tuned breakup album 808's and Heartbreaks was still good enough that I can't complain too much. "Love Lockdown" is easily the standout track thanks to its complex rhythms and intense vocals.
19. "Seven Nation Army" - The White Stripes
To call this song "anthemic" would be something of an insult both to the song and the term. This was the biggest and best rock anthem since "Smells Like Teen Spirit."
18. "B.O.B." - Outkast
Do I have too much Outkast on this list? Given that there are more Outkast songs to come, after three so far (and two more I just barely left off), that seems like it might be a worthwhile argument. But while Andre 3000 and Big Boi are most often compared to Lennon and McCartney, no doubt due to their somewhat fractured personal relationship, a better comparison might be to The Rolling Stones: would you complain about having too many Rolling Stones songs in a Best of the 60's list? Cause I'm not taking "Sympathy for the Devil," "Paint It Black," "Gimme Shelter," or "Satisfaction" out of the top 20 of THAT list.
17. "All For Swinging You Around" - The New Pornographers
Picking favorite New Pornographers songs is like picking children. This is my favorite child, then. Pity the poor cat in my lap when this song plays, cause they're getting swung around.
16. "5 Million Ways To Kill A C.E.O." - The Coup
15. "Laugh, Love, Fuck" - The Coup
Funky beats, radical politics, and wicked humor: it's like The Coup are aimed directly at the heart of my musical aesthetics. The only real surprise is how many people with similar tastes haven't even heard of them.
14. "Portions for Foxes" - Rilo Kiley
Is this song happy? Sad? Pro-relationship-with-bad-girls? It's kind of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind of rock songs, in that it can be interpreted as meaning a variety of different things, but it's excellent on the surface.
13. "You Know I'm No Good" - Ghostface Killah ft. Amy Winehouse
One of my few criticisms of Ghostface is that his intensity can be a little bit overwhelming, especially over and over. One of my criticisms of Amy Winehouse is that while she has a beautiful voice, her songs often seem to lack, well, intensity. So put Ghostface together with Winehouse, and the gestalt is incredible.
12. "Furnace Room Lullaby" - Neko Case
The last slow song on the list. If I want evocative and ethereal, I really can't do better than Neko Case's stellar voice. She's great doing power pop with The New Pornographers, but songs like this are simply transcendent.
11. "My Favorite Mutiny" - The Coup ft. Black Thought & Talib Kweli
There is a specific subgenre of hip-hop song that I don't know the name for, but I'm mesmerized by. Its attributes are: 1) a medium-to-slow, simple, rhythmic beat; 2) a wide range of guest stars; and 3) aggressive, usually self-referential and -aggrandizing lyrics. "My Favorite Mutiny" fits this subgenre almost perfectly, although with its "who's who" of "socially conscious" rappers, it's much more political in nature than others of the sort.
10. "Prisstina" - Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney is ofter heralded for their politics, a somewhat overrated trait having more to do with the historical context of the band's creation than the radical nature of their lyrics. They do have an amazing faith in music, which shows up clearly in this magnificently catchy tale of a good girl going bad for rock'n'roll.
(I'm really sorry about the video, non-anime fans. But it's all the internet gave me.)
9. "Get By" - Talib Kweli
You can tell a song is great when hearing it for the first time causes you to immediately go back and play it again. My jaw hit the floor at hearing "Get By" and I played it again. And as time went on, again and again and again.
8. "Everything's Just Wonderful" - Lily Allen
Another entry into the catchy-as-hell-pop-song-about-depression subgenre. Between Lily Allen and Justin Timberlake, amongst others, this decade threatened to give disposable pop a good name. Who saw that coming?
7. "Hold On, Hold On" - Neko Case
Neko Case, on the other hand, threatens to give country a good name. Good thing they haven't noticed her.
6. "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" - Jay-Z
It's not only an excellent song, but it's stunning cultural impact may best be demonstrated in this clip.
5. "Flip Flop Rock" - Outkast ft. Killer Mike & Jay-Z
This may be the Platonic example of the subgenre of rap that I mentioned with "My Favorite Mutiny." Any Outkast song with Killer Mike has a great chance at being excellent. Add in a superb Jay-Z guest verse, and it's about as good as hip-hop gets.
4. "Kilo" - Ghostface Killah ft. Raekwon
I've called Fishscale my favorite album of the decade, and, with some very strong competition, I'm calling this its best track. The sample, swiped from an educational song about kilograms, starts it off right, and it's got Ghostface and Raekwon doing the cocaine-based storytelling they excel at.
3. "Hey Ya!" - Outkast
The most consistent criticism of "Hey Ya!" I hear is that it's overplayed. Yes, it's played a lot. A lot. But for it to be overplayed, don't you have to get tired of it? Ever? Cause I sure as hell don't.
2. "Breakin' Up" - Rilo Kiley
This combines two of my favorite types of songs: the breakup song, and the peppy song about depressing content. And it does it damn well, gospel, disco and all. The sheer joy and relief it conveys are refreshing in a world where pop songs are almost entirely about wanting to get into relationships or hating getting out of them. Listen now, and break up with someone close to you!
1. "The Whole World" - Outkast ft. Killer Mike
One of the big Outkast debates often centers on their first four albums vs. Speakerboxxx\The Love Below. Their earlier albums, though occasionally very experimental, still reside in the genre of southern gangster hip-hop, while the massive double album moves off the street and onto the stage, as it were, where hip-hop and pop mingle together. Both are excellent, but better yet is the bridge between the two: their 2001 greatest hits album, Big Boi and Dre present.... They recorded three new tracks for the album, including the standout "The Whole World" (another track of the three, "Funkin' Around," just barely missed this list).
"The Whole World" has Outkast at their best, with pop appeal but still some grime in the vocals, over a marvelous swinging beat. "The Whole World" is pretty much impossible not to like, and even grows on repeat listens. When I began putting this list together, I had it as my tentative #1, but was pretty certain that I'd pick something from the top 8-12 that would replace it. And yet, as the list took shape, I never really considered any other song better. "The Whole World" is the best song of the 2000's.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
The Best Songs of the Decade: 50-26
See also:
The Best Songs of the Decade: 100-76
The Best Songs of the Decade: 75-51
The Best Songs of the Decade: 25-1
The 10 Best Albums of the Decade
50. "The Legionnaire's Lament" - The Decemberists
The Decemberists were the "it" band in indie rock in the first half of the decade, which of course meant that they were the symbol of all that was wrong in the genre in the second half. But they've put out album after album of pop songs about subjects that aren't love - which is called "quirky." This is my favorite of theirs, a peppy little number about a French Foreign Legion soldier addicted to laudanum in 19th-century Paris.
49. "He War" - Cat Power
The final entry in the indie-rockers-with-one-song-I-love. See also: Guided By Voices - "Everywhere With Helicopter." Although I did find it easier to get into Cat Power when she was backed by The Dirty Delta Blues Band for The Greatest.
48. "Umbrella" - Rihanna
It's always easy to pick on radio songs. By and large they stink, though Sturgeon's Law, of course, states that 90% of everything stinks. If you shovel away the crap that's endemic to any media, you find that many of the decade's biggest hits were also some of its best songs. "Umbrella," "Toxic," "Lose Yourself," "Crazy," "Hey Ya," "Rehab," "Jesus Walks," and more. I'll take that over 90's grunge-wannabes and Puff Daddy hip-hop any day of the week.
47. "Bamboo Banga" - M.I.A.
For all the writing about how M.I.A. was making the future of music, she's remarkably focused on the past. Her breakthrough album, Kala, samples The Clash on its biggest hit, "Paper Planes," quotes The Pixies on another track, and begins this stellar track with lines from The Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner." The combination of influences including punk rock, world beats, and danceable hip-hop works about as well as anyone could hope on tracks like "Bamboo Banga."
46. "No Sunshine" - Rhymefest
Mixtapes, the staple of underground hip-hop and up-and-coming rappers, received a massive jolt in the arm from internet downloads. Perhaps the best of these is Rhymefest's Man in the Mirror, "the world's first Michael Jackson dedication album." This track works with the deliriously sampleable "Ain't No Sunshine" and turns it towards one of Rhymefest's favorite subjects, the difficulty of maintaining authenticity in the rap world.
45. "15 Step" - Radiohead
This is first track on Radioheads latest album, In Rainbows, and it achieved some notoriety simply for being a happy Radiohead song. But it's not just a happy song, it's also a fantastic one.
44. "He Did It" - The Detroit Cobras
I'm somewhat surprised that The Detroit Cobras aren't more well-known than they are. They do garage rock covers of famous and not-so-famous R&B songs. This one, originally by The Ronettes, is my favorite.
43. "Free or Dead" - Atmosphere
Atmosphere's MC, Slug, is about as clever as they come. This track demonstrates the pathetic arrogance of a young would-be rebel, and abounds with wordplay like "and I do believe in God/cause I keep coming across/all these fine women with low self-esteem."
42. "Say It Right" - Nelly Furtado
I'm mesmerized by Timbaland's beat for this song. There's an ineffable sadness in the spaces, that makes it sound oddly tragic. Plus, of course, you can dance to it.
41. "Electric Feel" - MGMT
The thing I like about this song is how it utilizes a lot of the tricks of much more upbeat songs, while maintaining its slow pace. It makes it sound wonderfully familiar and new at the same time.
40. "Gossip Folks" - Missy Elliot ft. Ludacris
While Missy Elliot had some of the biggest hits of the decade with "Work It" and "Get Ur Freak On," I found myself more drawn to her somewhat more conventional hip-hop tracks. This one's a great song already in the first couple of minutes, before Ludacris comes along and blasts it to a new level with one of best guest appearances ever.
39. "Smiley Faces" - Gnarls Barkley
While "Crazy" turned into the mega-hit, I preferred this other catchy-as-hell number from Gnarls Barkley's debut.
38. "Idioteque" - Radiohead
Kid A may be one of the most bizarre albums of the decade, where a successful rock band moved into the realm of electronic soundscapes (in addition to foregoing almost all conventional marketing ploys, like releasing singles). "Idioteque" combines a driving techno beat with Radiohead's rock instincts and Thom Yorke's ethereal wail to magnificent effect.
37. "9 Milli Bros" - Ghostface Killah ft. the whole goddamn Wu-Tang Clan
No song heralded the resurrection of the Wu-Tang Clan quite like this stunner from Fishscale, featuring every member of the group including Old Dirty Bastard from beyond the grave. Bonus points for Method Man bumping it in his SUV on The Wire. In fact, despite the music from The Wire being primarily diegetic, three songs on the show made it onto this list (I don't suppose it's a spoiler to say that "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" and "B.O.B." are yet to come.)
36. "Love and War (11/11/46)" - Rilo Kiley
35. "A Man/Me/Then Jim" - Rilo Kiley
Praise for lyrical density is almost always given to hip-hop MCs, or perhaps a particularly wordy singer-songwriter type. Rilo Kiley's third album, More Adventurous, demonstrates a traditional rock band's lyrical density. "Love and War" is an outright rocker and excellent at that, but discusses the plight of veterans of both struggles as well. "A Man/Me/Then Jim" is a gorgeous song in its own right, but the lyrics tell a dense, non-chronological story from multiple perspectives that requires multiple listens to fully grasp.
34. "Monster Hospital" - Metric
33. "Succexy" - Metric
Metric's best songs seem to come when they explore the intersection between sexuality and warfare. "Monster Hospital" explicitly does so by combining lyrics like "I fought the war/and the war won" with "hold my arms down/I've been bad" over a driving garage-rock beat. But it may be surpassed by its predecessor, the slightly more poppy "Succexxy," a sultry performance about the televised spectacle of war.
32. "Night Light" - Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006, having released their final album, The Woods, the year before. The Woods was a radical stylistic departure from their punk-to-pop previous sound, wallowing in the fuzzed-out guitars, driving beats, and musical disintegrations of 70's classic rock and pre-punk. The final song(s) on the album are "Let's Call It Love," a three-minute song which turns into a 10-minute destruction of music, rebuilding at the end to segué into the evocative farewell track, "Night Light." A long goodbye with the tiny, flickering possibility of hope, "Night Light" isn't just a great song, it may be the best final song any great band has ever done.
31. "The Way You Move" - Outkast ft. Sleepy Brown
It's probably not too much of a spoiler for me to say that "Hey Ya" is further up on this list, but let's not say that that means I'm picking sides in the great Speakerboxxx vs. The Love Below debate. The megahit single from The Love Below may be a tiny bit better, but I still think that Speakerboxxx has a more consistently good set of songs, particularly in the first half.
30. "No Children" - The Mountain Goats
Alcoholism and horrific breakups have never sounded like more fun.
29. "Jesus Walks" - Kanye West
Kanye (and songwriter Rhymefest) talked about Jesus and got their record played, which is impressive enough. But how much more impressive is it that the song kicks ass?
28. "Catalina" - Raekwon
This is actually the only song from 2009 that I have on the list. I'm hesitant to rate something too highly when I might hate it in a year, but it also seems like maybe this hasn't been the greatest year for music. One of the high points, of course, was Raekwon's Only Built for Cuban Linx 2, which had previously seemed like it wanted to be hip-hop's Chinese Democracy - always worked on, never finished. In one of it's incarnations, it was attached to Dr. Dre's Aftermath label, but that marriage ended with Raekwon getting just a few Dre beats. But oh what a beat - the combination of Wu-Tang grime with Dr. Dre's production skills sounds like gangsta rap at its best.
27. "Paper Planes" - M.I.A.
How unlikely was this song for a massive hit? Sampling a somewhat unknown Clash song, espousing radical/criminal politics, from an artist controversial for allegedly supporting suicide-bombing terrorist groups...it seems like a perfect storm of cult hit. And that would have been okay, but sometimes the world gets it right, and a cult hit becomes a crossover hit.
26. "The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism" - The New Pornographers
There are a handful of sub-sub-genres of songs that I'm a sucker for. One of them is the incredibly catchy pop song about equally incredibly depressing content. This is one of those.
The Best Songs of the Decade: 100-76
The Best Songs of the Decade: 75-51
The Best Songs of the Decade: 25-1
The 10 Best Albums of the Decade
50. "The Legionnaire's Lament" - The Decemberists
The Decemberists were the "it" band in indie rock in the first half of the decade, which of course meant that they were the symbol of all that was wrong in the genre in the second half. But they've put out album after album of pop songs about subjects that aren't love - which is called "quirky." This is my favorite of theirs, a peppy little number about a French Foreign Legion soldier addicted to laudanum in 19th-century Paris.
49. "He War" - Cat Power
The final entry in the indie-rockers-with-one-song-I-love. See also: Guided By Voices - "Everywhere With Helicopter." Although I did find it easier to get into Cat Power when she was backed by The Dirty Delta Blues Band for The Greatest.
48. "Umbrella" - Rihanna
It's always easy to pick on radio songs. By and large they stink, though Sturgeon's Law, of course, states that 90% of everything stinks. If you shovel away the crap that's endemic to any media, you find that many of the decade's biggest hits were also some of its best songs. "Umbrella," "Toxic," "Lose Yourself," "Crazy," "Hey Ya," "Rehab," "Jesus Walks," and more. I'll take that over 90's grunge-wannabes and Puff Daddy hip-hop any day of the week.
47. "Bamboo Banga" - M.I.A.
For all the writing about how M.I.A. was making the future of music, she's remarkably focused on the past. Her breakthrough album, Kala, samples The Clash on its biggest hit, "Paper Planes," quotes The Pixies on another track, and begins this stellar track with lines from The Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner." The combination of influences including punk rock, world beats, and danceable hip-hop works about as well as anyone could hope on tracks like "Bamboo Banga."
46. "No Sunshine" - Rhymefest
Mixtapes, the staple of underground hip-hop and up-and-coming rappers, received a massive jolt in the arm from internet downloads. Perhaps the best of these is Rhymefest's Man in the Mirror, "the world's first Michael Jackson dedication album." This track works with the deliriously sampleable "Ain't No Sunshine" and turns it towards one of Rhymefest's favorite subjects, the difficulty of maintaining authenticity in the rap world.
45. "15 Step" - Radiohead
This is first track on Radioheads latest album, In Rainbows, and it achieved some notoriety simply for being a happy Radiohead song. But it's not just a happy song, it's also a fantastic one.
44. "He Did It" - The Detroit Cobras
I'm somewhat surprised that The Detroit Cobras aren't more well-known than they are. They do garage rock covers of famous and not-so-famous R&B songs. This one, originally by The Ronettes, is my favorite.
43. "Free or Dead" - Atmosphere
Atmosphere's MC, Slug, is about as clever as they come. This track demonstrates the pathetic arrogance of a young would-be rebel, and abounds with wordplay like "and I do believe in God/cause I keep coming across/all these fine women with low self-esteem."
42. "Say It Right" - Nelly Furtado
I'm mesmerized by Timbaland's beat for this song. There's an ineffable sadness in the spaces, that makes it sound oddly tragic. Plus, of course, you can dance to it.
41. "Electric Feel" - MGMT
The thing I like about this song is how it utilizes a lot of the tricks of much more upbeat songs, while maintaining its slow pace. It makes it sound wonderfully familiar and new at the same time.
40. "Gossip Folks" - Missy Elliot ft. Ludacris
While Missy Elliot had some of the biggest hits of the decade with "Work It" and "Get Ur Freak On," I found myself more drawn to her somewhat more conventional hip-hop tracks. This one's a great song already in the first couple of minutes, before Ludacris comes along and blasts it to a new level with one of best guest appearances ever.
39. "Smiley Faces" - Gnarls Barkley
While "Crazy" turned into the mega-hit, I preferred this other catchy-as-hell number from Gnarls Barkley's debut.
38. "Idioteque" - Radiohead
Kid A may be one of the most bizarre albums of the decade, where a successful rock band moved into the realm of electronic soundscapes (in addition to foregoing almost all conventional marketing ploys, like releasing singles). "Idioteque" combines a driving techno beat with Radiohead's rock instincts and Thom Yorke's ethereal wail to magnificent effect.
37. "9 Milli Bros" - Ghostface Killah ft. the whole goddamn Wu-Tang Clan
No song heralded the resurrection of the Wu-Tang Clan quite like this stunner from Fishscale, featuring every member of the group including Old Dirty Bastard from beyond the grave. Bonus points for Method Man bumping it in his SUV on The Wire. In fact, despite the music from The Wire being primarily diegetic, three songs on the show made it onto this list (I don't suppose it's a spoiler to say that "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" and "B.O.B." are yet to come.)
36. "Love and War (11/11/46)" - Rilo Kiley
35. "A Man/Me/Then Jim" - Rilo Kiley
Praise for lyrical density is almost always given to hip-hop MCs, or perhaps a particularly wordy singer-songwriter type. Rilo Kiley's third album, More Adventurous, demonstrates a traditional rock band's lyrical density. "Love and War" is an outright rocker and excellent at that, but discusses the plight of veterans of both struggles as well. "A Man/Me/Then Jim" is a gorgeous song in its own right, but the lyrics tell a dense, non-chronological story from multiple perspectives that requires multiple listens to fully grasp.
34. "Monster Hospital" - Metric
33. "Succexy" - Metric
Metric's best songs seem to come when they explore the intersection between sexuality and warfare. "Monster Hospital" explicitly does so by combining lyrics like "I fought the war/and the war won" with "hold my arms down/I've been bad" over a driving garage-rock beat. But it may be surpassed by its predecessor, the slightly more poppy "Succexxy," a sultry performance about the televised spectacle of war.
32. "Night Light" - Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006, having released their final album, The Woods, the year before. The Woods was a radical stylistic departure from their punk-to-pop previous sound, wallowing in the fuzzed-out guitars, driving beats, and musical disintegrations of 70's classic rock and pre-punk. The final song(s) on the album are "Let's Call It Love," a three-minute song which turns into a 10-minute destruction of music, rebuilding at the end to segué into the evocative farewell track, "Night Light." A long goodbye with the tiny, flickering possibility of hope, "Night Light" isn't just a great song, it may be the best final song any great band has ever done.
31. "The Way You Move" - Outkast ft. Sleepy Brown
It's probably not too much of a spoiler for me to say that "Hey Ya" is further up on this list, but let's not say that that means I'm picking sides in the great Speakerboxxx vs. The Love Below debate. The megahit single from The Love Below may be a tiny bit better, but I still think that Speakerboxxx has a more consistently good set of songs, particularly in the first half.
30. "No Children" - The Mountain Goats
Alcoholism and horrific breakups have never sounded like more fun.
29. "Jesus Walks" - Kanye West
Kanye (and songwriter Rhymefest) talked about Jesus and got their record played, which is impressive enough. But how much more impressive is it that the song kicks ass?
28. "Catalina" - Raekwon
This is actually the only song from 2009 that I have on the list. I'm hesitant to rate something too highly when I might hate it in a year, but it also seems like maybe this hasn't been the greatest year for music. One of the high points, of course, was Raekwon's Only Built for Cuban Linx 2, which had previously seemed like it wanted to be hip-hop's Chinese Democracy - always worked on, never finished. In one of it's incarnations, it was attached to Dr. Dre's Aftermath label, but that marriage ended with Raekwon getting just a few Dre beats. But oh what a beat - the combination of Wu-Tang grime with Dr. Dre's production skills sounds like gangsta rap at its best.
27. "Paper Planes" - M.I.A.
How unlikely was this song for a massive hit? Sampling a somewhat unknown Clash song, espousing radical/criminal politics, from an artist controversial for allegedly supporting suicide-bombing terrorist groups...it seems like a perfect storm of cult hit. And that would have been okay, but sometimes the world gets it right, and a cult hit becomes a crossover hit.
26. "The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism" - The New Pornographers
There are a handful of sub-sub-genres of songs that I'm a sucker for. One of them is the incredibly catchy pop song about equally incredibly depressing content. This is one of those.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
The Best Songs of the Decade: 75-51
See also:
The Best Songs of the Decade: 100-76
The Best Songs of the Decade: 50-26
The Best Songs of the Decade: 25-1
The 10 Best Albums of the Decade
75. "Funeral Song" - Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney is my favorite rock band, but lead singer Corin Tucker's challenging dramatic soprano voice is off-putting for many. "Funeral Song" is one of their most accessible, with the vocal drama toned down, and the interaction of the melody and the rhythm is some of S-K's best.
74. "Surprise" - Gnarls Barkley
73. "The Jessica Numbers" - The New Pornographers
Both Gnarls Barkley and The New Pornographers exercise a disproportionate amount of influence over this list. Both groups are excellent song-crafters, while their albums may not get quite as much play. Gnarls Barkley sounds like both the past and the future of pop music, with a Zombies-like flair to the chorus of "Surprise" added to the spacey hip-hop/R&B the duo are best known for. The New Pornographers, by contrast, seem attached very much to the present, with a fairly conventional rock band setup expanding the form of the pop song.
72. "Wake Up" - The Walkmen
Here's another entry in the critically-acclaimed-bands-with-only-one-song-I-really-like category. See also: "Librarian" by My Morning Jacket.
71. "Bang!" - The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' debut EP was built around this anthemic banger, but I've been mostly disappointed by their slightly-less-energetic albums ever since. So it goes.
70. "A Day Like Today" - Tom McRae
Like Springsteen's "Magic," "A Day Like Today" is a case study in how to make a haunting, beautiful, but oddly catchy gem of a song.
69. "Since We Last Spoke" - RJD2
The only instrumental track on the list. A handful of DJs built their reputations releasing primarily instrumental hip-hop mix albums this decade, although RJD2 has since began playing instruments and singing, somewhat bizarrely.
68. "Going On" - Gnarls Barkley
67. "Crazy" - Gnarls Barkley
Has there ever been a group that achieved as much success and critical acclaim, while having an absolutely horrible name, as Gnarls Barkley?
66. "For Women" - Talib Kweli
At nearly eight minutes, "For Women" clocks in as the longest song in the list. Kweli's dense, affecting homage to Nina Simone's "Four Women" specifically - and women of color in general - helped cement his reputation as one of the best "socially conscious" rappers of his generation.
65. "Toxic" - Britney Spears
I mean, I guess I could have expected Britney to have a good song or two in her, but this good? This is a great song, for anyone, let alone a singer who'd made her reputation and money on pandering to the lowest common denominator.
64. "Here's Your Future" - The Thermals
Like The New Pornographers, The Thermals are something of an indie-rock supergroup whose combined fame and effect far exceeded that of their previous groups. But where The New Pornographers deal primarily in lush power pop, The Thermals are entirely driving dirty garage rock - extra sacreligious.
63. "Don't Feel Like Dancing" - Scissor Sisters
As disco has experienced something of a critical re-evaluation in recent years, it's also experienced something of a revival with the Scissor Sisters and Junior Senior making it cool. This song is unlike "Move Your Feet" in that its title is a blatant lie, and just like "Move Your Feet" in that it's hard not to at least tap and smile along with.
62. "Take Me Out" - Franz Ferdinand
Sure, the "neo-New Wave" movement was overplayed, and allowed a lot of crap onto the airwaves. But better this than nu-metal. And better this song than most any other pop-rock of the decade.
61. "Standing In The Way Of Control" - The Gossip
The Gossip somehow transitioned from dirty blues-rock to massively popular dance-punk, without seeming like they were selling out at all. And more power to them - I can only hope that Beth Ditto becomes the Gwen Stefani of the early twenty-teens.
60. "Ghost World" - Aimee Mann
Best song based on a comic book ever? I mean, I'll make the argument that David Bowie's "Oh! You Pretty Things" is about The X-Men, but I'm still not sure that it's a better song than this.
59. "99 Problems" - Dangermouse/Jay-Z
Dangermouse's The Grey Album launched him into superstardom, and helped move the mash-up from the novelty section into the realm of potentially great music. I'd argue that most of its tracks are better than the original Jay-Z tracks, especially this driving, intense combination of "99 Problems" with "Helter Skelter."
58. "Letter From An Occupant" - The New Pornographers
Music critics like to attempt to count just how many hooks can be fit into a single song. Some say "six" for this one. Go on, try and count.
57. "Clint Eastwood" - Gorillaz
I'm not sure how, but I'm both disbelieving that this song was from this decade, and that it was almost a decade ago that it came out.
56. "One Two Three Four" - Feist
Sure, it got overexposed, but damn if this ain't a great song.
55. "Rolling With Heat" - The Roots ft. Talib Kweli
I really want to get into The Roots. They're generally lumped in with a bunch of other hip-hop acts I really like (the Dave Chappelle's Block Party crews!). But I still haven't had any of their albums click with me. That doesn't mean that they can't turn out a great song, like this superb track.
54. "Combat Baby" - Metric
I kind of adopted Metric in the early part of the decade. I was amongst the first of my friends to hear them, and converted everyone I could. I don't think they've really musically transcended their initial steps into stardom, but I don't think they've regressed and I'm happy to see them becoming a bigger name.
53. "The Champ" - Ghostface Killah
While his Pretty Toney Album may have helped keep the Wu-Tang Clan in the public eye, Ghostface's Fishscale rocketed them back into the consciousness of hip-hop fans. An almost operatic saga of street life, featuring Wu-Tang members on several tracks. "The Champ" is Ghostface at his most combative, name-checking his previous successes but describing - and demonstrating - his continued drive.
52. "Silver Lining" - Rilo Kiley
Under The Blacklight took some flack for selling out from previous indie-rock darlings Rilo Kiley, but the thin veneer of pop shine only adds to the album's immense charms. Filled with catchy songs of quiet desperation and of lives gone horribly awry, it's one of the best albums of the decade.
51. "Overnight Celebrity" - Twista ft. Kanye West
How To Identify Chicago Hip-Hop: 1. Does it feature Kanye West or Twista? 2. Was it produced by Kanye West, or have his signature sped-up soul samples? 3. Do the vocals have a playful sneer? By this logic, "Overnight Celebrity" may be the signature Chicago hip-hop song of the decade.
The Best Songs of the Decade: 100-76
The Best Songs of the Decade: 50-26
The Best Songs of the Decade: 25-1
The 10 Best Albums of the Decade
75. "Funeral Song" - Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney is my favorite rock band, but lead singer Corin Tucker's challenging dramatic soprano voice is off-putting for many. "Funeral Song" is one of their most accessible, with the vocal drama toned down, and the interaction of the melody and the rhythm is some of S-K's best.
74. "Surprise" - Gnarls Barkley
73. "The Jessica Numbers" - The New Pornographers
Both Gnarls Barkley and The New Pornographers exercise a disproportionate amount of influence over this list. Both groups are excellent song-crafters, while their albums may not get quite as much play. Gnarls Barkley sounds like both the past and the future of pop music, with a Zombies-like flair to the chorus of "Surprise" added to the spacey hip-hop/R&B the duo are best known for. The New Pornographers, by contrast, seem attached very much to the present, with a fairly conventional rock band setup expanding the form of the pop song.
72. "Wake Up" - The Walkmen
Here's another entry in the critically-acclaimed-bands-with-only-one-song-I-really-like category. See also: "Librarian" by My Morning Jacket.
71. "Bang!" - The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' debut EP was built around this anthemic banger, but I've been mostly disappointed by their slightly-less-energetic albums ever since. So it goes.
70. "A Day Like Today" - Tom McRae
Like Springsteen's "Magic," "A Day Like Today" is a case study in how to make a haunting, beautiful, but oddly catchy gem of a song.
69. "Since We Last Spoke" - RJD2
The only instrumental track on the list. A handful of DJs built their reputations releasing primarily instrumental hip-hop mix albums this decade, although RJD2 has since began playing instruments and singing, somewhat bizarrely.
68. "Going On" - Gnarls Barkley
67. "Crazy" - Gnarls Barkley
Has there ever been a group that achieved as much success and critical acclaim, while having an absolutely horrible name, as Gnarls Barkley?
66. "For Women" - Talib Kweli
At nearly eight minutes, "For Women" clocks in as the longest song in the list. Kweli's dense, affecting homage to Nina Simone's "Four Women" specifically - and women of color in general - helped cement his reputation as one of the best "socially conscious" rappers of his generation.
65. "Toxic" - Britney Spears
I mean, I guess I could have expected Britney to have a good song or two in her, but this good? This is a great song, for anyone, let alone a singer who'd made her reputation and money on pandering to the lowest common denominator.
64. "Here's Your Future" - The Thermals
Like The New Pornographers, The Thermals are something of an indie-rock supergroup whose combined fame and effect far exceeded that of their previous groups. But where The New Pornographers deal primarily in lush power pop, The Thermals are entirely driving dirty garage rock - extra sacreligious.
63. "Don't Feel Like Dancing" - Scissor Sisters
As disco has experienced something of a critical re-evaluation in recent years, it's also experienced something of a revival with the Scissor Sisters and Junior Senior making it cool. This song is unlike "Move Your Feet" in that its title is a blatant lie, and just like "Move Your Feet" in that it's hard not to at least tap and smile along with.
62. "Take Me Out" - Franz Ferdinand
Sure, the "neo-New Wave" movement was overplayed, and allowed a lot of crap onto the airwaves. But better this than nu-metal. And better this song than most any other pop-rock of the decade.
61. "Standing In The Way Of Control" - The Gossip
The Gossip somehow transitioned from dirty blues-rock to massively popular dance-punk, without seeming like they were selling out at all. And more power to them - I can only hope that Beth Ditto becomes the Gwen Stefani of the early twenty-teens.
60. "Ghost World" - Aimee Mann
Best song based on a comic book ever? I mean, I'll make the argument that David Bowie's "Oh! You Pretty Things" is about The X-Men, but I'm still not sure that it's a better song than this.
59. "99 Problems" - Dangermouse/Jay-Z
Dangermouse's The Grey Album launched him into superstardom, and helped move the mash-up from the novelty section into the realm of potentially great music. I'd argue that most of its tracks are better than the original Jay-Z tracks, especially this driving, intense combination of "99 Problems" with "Helter Skelter."
58. "Letter From An Occupant" - The New Pornographers
Music critics like to attempt to count just how many hooks can be fit into a single song. Some say "six" for this one. Go on, try and count.
57. "Clint Eastwood" - Gorillaz
I'm not sure how, but I'm both disbelieving that this song was from this decade, and that it was almost a decade ago that it came out.
56. "One Two Three Four" - Feist
Sure, it got overexposed, but damn if this ain't a great song.
55. "Rolling With Heat" - The Roots ft. Talib Kweli
I really want to get into The Roots. They're generally lumped in with a bunch of other hip-hop acts I really like (the Dave Chappelle's Block Party crews!). But I still haven't had any of their albums click with me. That doesn't mean that they can't turn out a great song, like this superb track.
54. "Combat Baby" - Metric
I kind of adopted Metric in the early part of the decade. I was amongst the first of my friends to hear them, and converted everyone I could. I don't think they've really musically transcended their initial steps into stardom, but I don't think they've regressed and I'm happy to see them becoming a bigger name.
53. "The Champ" - Ghostface Killah
While his Pretty Toney Album may have helped keep the Wu-Tang Clan in the public eye, Ghostface's Fishscale rocketed them back into the consciousness of hip-hop fans. An almost operatic saga of street life, featuring Wu-Tang members on several tracks. "The Champ" is Ghostface at his most combative, name-checking his previous successes but describing - and demonstrating - his continued drive.
52. "Silver Lining" - Rilo Kiley
Under The Blacklight took some flack for selling out from previous indie-rock darlings Rilo Kiley, but the thin veneer of pop shine only adds to the album's immense charms. Filled with catchy songs of quiet desperation and of lives gone horribly awry, it's one of the best albums of the decade.
51. "Overnight Celebrity" - Twista ft. Kanye West
How To Identify Chicago Hip-Hop: 1. Does it feature Kanye West or Twista? 2. Was it produced by Kanye West, or have his signature sped-up soul samples? 3. Do the vocals have a playful sneer? By this logic, "Overnight Celebrity" may be the signature Chicago hip-hop song of the decade.
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