Earn This

I have no right to review Slippery When Wet.  I can’t break down Born to Run.  To me, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds are beyond approach.  I lack the bona fides to critique such eternal landmarks, not least of all because I wasn’t there to experience them.  Awareness of the musical zeitgeist of a decade is no substitute for being a part of a movement.  I want to be there when the next album that defines its time drops.  Maybe, I thought, maybe Ursa Major will be that album.

This was wishful thinking from the start.  Third Eye Blind already had their breakout.  The self-titled debut sent fully a third of its tracks coasting into the Top 20, including Semi-Charmed Life, the No. 1 hit famous for the shock it creates when your sing-along is shattered by the realization of what the verses are describing.  Still, the six-year hiatus that followed their third release (throughout which there were no signs of a break-up) served to infuse the band with mystery and hype.  Maybe, I thought, maybe Ursa Major will be that album.

Available only by digital download, the Red Star EP heralded a return to the band’s true form.  Then a new website appeared, 3eb.com, that put community interaction at the forefront.  The fan-centric aesthetic and an “Assembly” full of blogs, along with claims from frontman Stephan Jenkins that the upcoming album would be their most political yet, steered the hype away from melody.  Why would a band whose cornerstone was a song with overlooked lyrics and a hook for the ages predicate their overdue return to the limelight on opinion and activism?  New grounds trembled in anticipation of breaking.  Maybe…

“I want a riot, yeah!”

The rallying cry of the lead-off track has my fist in the air!  The guitars are surging back with familiar energy.  The pitch is rising, so I crank the volume and get caught up in the rasp of passion in Stephan’s voice:

“Yes I am dying to be freaked!”

Yes, I am d– wait, what?

Instantly I’m back in 1997 reliving the shock.  So, what kind of riot was he talking about?  A quick check of the lyric liner tells me the whole song is open to at least two interpretations: grassroots firepower or a plea for sex.  Alright, Stephan Jenkins, you got me.

But the music goes on.  Brand-new hooks revive with full confidence the old Third Eye Blind swagger.  Rolling snares and bam-bam rhythms lead you in and carry you like a wave from verse to verse.  The slurred lilt of the vocals are so instantaneously familiar that I had little trouble singing along not just on the first listen, but even at the first iteration of a chorus.  Then again, I was a pretty big fan.

Weren’t we all?  Who among us, born on the far side of the great divide that is the year 1990, wouldn’t hop on board at the first chord of Jumper?  Thank your lucky red stars, because fully a third of Ursa Major could have coasted into the Top 20 at the end of the last millenium.  Not to delude you; without the full promotional force of a major label (they recorded on their own as Mega Collider Records), these singles won’t see multi-platinum sales.  Besides, kids today are much more taken by their angry Seethers and their dreamy Jason Mrazs.

But the punchline is missing.  The melodies are what we all want, but this was supposed to be an intellectual firestarter!  Members of the Assembly may dissent, but what I heard was less a call to action and more what I’ll label “forward-dating.”

Through lyrics that remain as fluid and deft as ever, Stephan Jenkins has attempted to emphasize that he is here and now.  Explicit references to online dating, flat screen tv, and mp3 players appear distinctly unromantic amidst the surrounding metaphors and emotional outpours.  An entire song about “trying to flip butch chicks” and (elsewhere) an isolated mention of “Africa where life is cheap” might equally elicit groans from apathetics who find vocal activists oppressive.  Opening the cd case, you run into an advertisement for Third Eye Blind ringtones before you find the cd itself.  But all of these prove to the listener when Ursa Major was written.  Right now.

The Assembly – in fact, the overall intent and form of 3eb.com – now makes perfect sense.  Third Eye Blind is not retrieving the roots of political rock and roll by emerging from their hiatus reborn as Bob Dylan in three persons.  Instead, they’re eschewing the traditional way in which musicians relate to the public.  This record wants to kick off a new era; not of what music is, but of how it is communicated.

Thoroughly modern issues feature alongside buzzwords that are neutral but strictly contemporary in order to engage the listener.  We are meant to feel that Ursa Major is our album.  And to leave posterity with no doubt as to the exact date of its release, Jenkins sings: “Wanna be hustler school M.I.A. / Make a paper plane and then you fly away,” a shout out to last year’s multi-platinum single.  He even slips in “I’m your mega collider” which, as I mentioned, is the band’s invented label.

Finally, notice that the website tries to use open membership and encourage blogging and forum posts in order to hand over the reins of Third Eye Blind’s web presence to the fans.  This is our album, because the focal points of our daily lives make guest appearances in the songs.  This is our website, because we provide 95% of the content, unedited.  This is our time, defined.

Maybe, I thought.

To commemorate the return of “Gossip Girl” tonight, let’s revisit a well-known but flawed 1999 movie that should be required watching for anyone who likes Josh Schwartz’s show…

Rating: two stars (out of four)

Watching Cruel Intentions today, in 2009, it was almost impossible not to think of “Gossip Girl,” the popular TV show that relishes the lascivious, mischievous, and devious exploits of uber-rich, uber-preppy high school students living on the Upper East Side of New York City.  The teenagers in this movie, backed with the both comforting and numbing knowledge that their careers and financial situations lack any semblance of uncertainty, introduce excitement into their lives with beguiling games to lure members of the opposite sex, snarling plots to humiliate enemies, and discreetly mentioned but explicitly realized sexual exploration.  Sound familiar?

Indeed, now I won’t be able to watch this movie again without seeing Chuck as Sebastian and Blair as Kathryn.  And my moderate knowledge of contemporary teenage dramas makes it easy for me to buy the capacity of these individuals to engage in such elaborate schemes, most of which are underpinned by the goal of enhancing their popularity.  Cruel Intentionsis based off Choderlos de Laclos’ novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (which has been translated into film an astonishing four times), and some reviewers couldn’t buy the shift of the characters’ situations.  James Berardinelli wrote that, “What works with mature individuals in 1782 France seems false when applied to high school kids in 1999 America.”

Perhaps because of “Gossip Girl” and “The O.C.,” not to mention films like Thirteenpresenting young people growing old quite fast, and a sprinkling of my own experience thrown in, I wholeheartedly disagree with the above statement—it now seems more natural than ever for this kind of plot to be attributed to teenagers rather than old-fashioned Frenchmen.  That said…there wasn’t much more about the film that I could throw myself into.  This particular nefarious plot allows Sebastian (Ryan Phillipe), his school’s reigning Don Juan, and his stepsister Kathryn (Sarah Michelle Gellar, from TV’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and most teenage boys’ fantasies) to work for and against each other at the same time (these things get complicated).

Kathryn, irritated that her ex-boyfriend preferred the nubile and naïve young Cecile (Selma Blair), solicits Sebastian to work his magic on her and help ruin her reputation.  He complies, but he’s more interested in a greater challenge—deflowering (the back cover of the DVD actually uses that word) Annette (Reese Witherspoon).  Annette, who conveniently happens to be the daughter of the school’s new headmaster and is thus moving to town, wrote an article for a teen magazine extolling the virtues of virginity before marriage; this, combined with her looks, makes her irresistible to Sebastian.

Kathryn wants his car if he can’t seduce her; if he can, he gets Kathryn herself.  So there’s a bit of Clueless (with half-sibling relationships seemingly avoiding the stigma of incest) sprinkled over the “Gossip Girl” undertones. (The GG episode wherein Blair asks Chuck to seduce Vanessa with the promise of herself later bears a particularly uncanny resemblance.) Unfortunately, Cruel Intentions has little of the charm and zest of Clueless or the damn-the-stiffs embrace of decadence of “Gossip Girl.”  It’s too somber, too watered-down and safe, and, ultimately, too bland.

This is the kind of movie that should be described as a “doozy,” that should be full of delicious lines and lively acting and come-on-that’s-impossible-but-really-fun-to-watch plot twists.  But unlike “Gossip Girl,” Cruel Intentions doesn’t really seem to cherish its characters, faults and all—it makes noise about embracing them, but it’s really just disguising a morality play, and that’s no good here.  The heart of the matter is revealed by director Roger Kumble in the DVD’s special features, where he explains that he wanted to show nudity around Sebastian to illustrate his nature but cut the scene for fear of us not buying Sebastian’s eventual transformation into a PG-acceptable sweetheart—a direction that, I think, misses the heart of the story.

Elsewhere, we don’t see enough evidence of Sebastian and Annette melting away each other’s icy exteriors, and thus the central romance, vital to the film’s success, doesn’t resonate.  When Sebastian is fretting over his possible missed opportunity, or Annette is flashing back towards previous cutesy scenes, we aren’t emotionally engaged.  That’s not necessarily a knock on the actors, but rather on the script, which tries to fit too much into a 95-minute movie (would another few scenes have killed us?) and doesn’t allow for much character development.  There’s nothing embarrassing, but no dialogue, characters, or scenes really convince us that they’re worthy of our attention.

Brotherly love in New York City.

Phillippe is alright as Sebastian, although I got the feeling that, as the charming playboy, he was too dour—like the film, he doesn’t seem exhilarated by his character’s nature (compare with the wonderfully slimy Ed Westwick as “Gossip Girl’s” Chuck, who oozes an irrational fascination with both himself and his lifestyle).  Gellar too is relatively acceptable as Kathryn (though, again, she lacks Leighton Meester’s zest for bitchiness), as is Witherspoon (who looks more attractive than in anything else I can recall).  But too much credibility is lost with the insipid script, not to mention the ending, wherein both the moral lesson and the death are unnecessary.

One of the film’s best scenes features Kathryn lying on top of Sebastian and shamelessly teasing him, with no intentions of following through, to encourage him to keep his end of the bargain up (in more ways than one)—just the kind of devilishly entertaining moments we needed more of.  There’s another moment where Kathryn teaches Cecile how to French kiss, and by the end, the latter looks like she desperately wants more…and so do we.

Rating: 2 stars (out of 4)

I didn’t like the sixth Harry Potter movie. I really expected to; I’m an apologist for the series, and David Yates’ effort before this was my favorite yet. Unfortunately, Half Blood Prince let me down. I’m here to tell you why it got way too much positive press from critics and viewers everywhere.

But before I start ripping into it, let me compliment the parts of the movie I loved:  its incredible – almost naturalistic – visual style, the best acting in the series yet, and a surprising amount of comedy. It’s easily the funniest Harry Potter yet. And the movie, at its core, is an interesting story that I’m very attached to. Overall, though, there’s just too little payoff to make this a rewarding film.

On to the complaints…

Like Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, it took a second viewing for me to really decide how I felt about this Harry Potter movie. This time, though, the result was less favorable.

Most of my complaints stem from two major problems: The film doesn’t take the time to 1) understand evil or 2) give us much meaningful romantic payoff. I’ll discuss these two complaints separately.

Side note: Notice how I work hard to separate my feelings from the book and the movie; I’m attempting to avoid an error often made by those evaluating adaptations. I expect the film to be “different” from the book, I just hope it will turn into a compelling film.

Major complaint 1: The movie doesn’t care about its bad guys.

One reason I like the fifth movie so much is we really get a sense of what makes the two bad guys (Umbridge, Voldy) tick, and we can compare this to our heroes. Voldemort is attempting to take over Harry’s mind, Umbridge is villifying everything Harry loves, and it forces Harry to question what the line between good and bad really is.

But in the sixth movie, we’re not given much insight into the villains, even with a few revelations at the end. Why is Draco skulking around and plotting bad things? Why are the Death Eaters flying around blowing stuff up? What are their goals and their motivations? Nothing gave me a good grasp on the danger the characters were in.

There was ripe potential for the film to dig deep into the mind of Voldmort for the heroes (and viewers). The writers could easily have developed great insight into Voldemort’s descent and compared it to the decisions the current Hogwarts students had to make, but it’s not there. Chalk it up as a missed opportunity. The professors just keep saying “he was a kid here like you students, but he turned EVIL.” Fine, then. Show us how or why, make us care and compare it to the characters we know and love after 14 hrs of movies.

What bothers me is how much emphasis was placed on the love triangles. It’s not that the characters’ raging hormones and love triangles aren’t compelling. It’s just that they’re not nearly as compelling as the over-riding saga and rising villain which are given a short deal here. Love is a big part of these characters’ lives, but what makes this series special is its balance between the conflict in the characters’ relationships and the conflict in the overall saga, good vs. evil.

Major complaint 2: The romances are pathetic and overcooked.

The Harry-Ginny romance doesn’t seem to happen for much of a reason. Sure, Harry lists some of the things he likes about her at one point, but we’re never given a reason to feel their pull together. You never feel them really growing towards each other except for a few nice moments. Nothing substantial.

Compare that to how excellently Order of the Phoenix portrayed the rise and fall of the Harry-Cho romance, and it makes this one feel a bit empty. I’m hoping the seventh/eighth films dig into it a bit more and really makes me care about the two as a couple. Because, for now, I feel like the filmmakers are telling me to want them together without really giving me a reason.

The Ron and Hermione situation is treated more organically, but the execution is bungled. There’s just too much, with not enough payoff. The bickering drags on and on. You’d think with all of the setup this movie and the last, there’d be a big payoff scene or something, especially after the last two movie had so much build up to it. I guess this is a romantic cliffhanger and we’ll get a good moment later. I still wish there was a bit more resolution this movie.

Here’s hoping Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is rights these wrongs.

Rating: 2 1/2 stars (out of five)

Having successfully entered their third decade together with 2000’s acclaimed All That You Can’t Leave Behind, U2 may have been forgiven for thinking they didn’t have any challenges left.  Having already changed up their sound enough times to stay relevant and popular for over 20 years, they’d silenced the Pop naysayers and once more inserted themselves into the national consciousness.

Such contentment, indeed, may be responsible for the limpness of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.  Despite arriving after what was to date the longest layoff of the band’s career, Bomb represents the most uninspired, superficial, and, quite frankly, boring record they’ve ever made.  They’ve lost both the interesting sound of their past and the songs themselves (ATYCLB at least had the latter).  The unfair reaction to Pop has apparently compelled U2 to distance themselves from their experimental 90s as much as possible, but in the process they’ve forgotten what made them great.  AllMusic Guide hit the nail on the head in saying, “They’ve overcorrected for their perceived sins, scaling back their sound so far that they have shed the murky sense of mystery that gave The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree an otherworldly allure.”   

The sound on Bomb, thus, invokes generic, meat-and-potatoes rock that has never, ever been U2’s specialty.  Producer Steve Lillywhite was behind the boards for the taut and fierce War, but now that they don’t write songs with the passion of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “Like a Song…” the straight-ahead production doesn’t serve them well.  The songs need the post-punk influences evident on Boy, the wintry atmospherics of The Unforgettable Fire, the wide-open desert feel of The Joshua Tree, or the danceable but dark stylings of Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and Pop.  They don’t do meat-and-potatoes well, at least not anymore.  The Edge isn’t captivating enough, nor is Bono, who’s voice has never sounded worse and yet is placed too far forward in the mix.

Meanwhile, the rhythm section is relegated to the distant back, as Lillywhite and the band have apparently forgotten that most of U2’s best songs feature memorable contributions from bassist Adam Clayton and/or drummer Larry Mullen Jr.  At the end of the first verse of “Miracle Drug,” you can feel the rhythm section trying to kick in, but they’re buried too deeply in the mix that you can hardly hear them over Bono’s cries.

Yet, as ATYCLB proved, sonic innovation is not a pre-requisite for a successful album, but this collection of tracks is without question the weakest U2 has ever put forth.  The songs lack heart and energy, relying on recycled sounds and those repetitive bridge solos.  “A Man and a Woman” informs us—in case anyone was still straddling that fence—that U2 should never attempt an R&B crossover.  Everyone sloughs his way through the turgid “Love and Peace”; and “One Step Closer” and “Yahweh” have neither the lyrics nor the melody to justify their instrumental minimalism.  

Our esteemed frontman, for his part, does little to quell concern (at least in myself) that his ever-increasing amounts of public activism have degraded the band’s music.  The band has acknowledged that Bono’s studio time has decreased over the past few years; and although they claim that his absence isn’t a problem, he—not the Edge or anyone else—is the band’s heart and soul.  Without him in top form, little else matters.      

None of this is to say that Bomb is unlistenable.  Indeed, the feeling provoked by a casual listen easily supersedes the lingering, unpleasant aftertaste.  “City of Blinding Lights” is so far and away the standout that it feels as though it belongs on different album, a gorgeous, elegiac song the likes of which they’ve never written before.  “Miracle,” about a paraplegic former high school classmate of the band who was able to write poems with the help of drugs, features similarly pretty chiming guitars and an ecstatic-sounding bridge.  Yet, besides “City,” all the pleasures here are moderate—“Vertigo” may get your toe tapping, but its best environment remains that fantastic 30-second iPod commercial; “Crumbs From Your Table” pleasantly meanders; and “Original of the Species” has the album’s prettiest melody but suffers from its words. 

Indeed, though I would take stronger melodies for a start, Bono’s lyrics unquestionably dampen the album, as he spits out lines that make you want to tear your hair out.  The subtlety and genuine emotion from earlier in his career have been completely wiped away.  Nonsense lyrics are fine on “Vertigo,” but by the time you’ve heard “Freedom has a scent / Like the top of a newborn baby’s head,” or “Some things you shouldn’t get too good at / Like smiling, crying, or celebrity,” or found Bono trying to rhyme choice and tortoise, romance and distance, you’ll want out.  (What, exactly, would be wrong with being too good at smiling?)  13 years ago, he wrote on “So Cruel,” “I gave you everything you wanted / It wasn’t what you wanted.”  Now, he writes “I’ll give you everything you want / Except the thing that you want.”  The first is poignant; the second, faux profound and merely contradictory.
 
The most surprising misfire, however, is “Sometimes You Can’t Make it On Your Own,” the ballad written in memorial of Bono’s late father that took up the most studio time and garnered the most hype.  For Bono, and some fans, it was the heart of the album, but it’s remarkably uninviting.  Their love songs now all sound too calculated and safe, lacking the quality lyrics and/or musical elements necessary to ensnare the listener.  It’s hard to say whether U2 will ever find that part of themselves again.  One can only hope they haven’t completely lost the desire to be different—an ambition that took them to the top in the first place.

Rating: 2 1/2 stars (out of five)

You can’t read eight words on Allmusic’s biography of Muse without reaching the word Radiohead; and given lead singer Matthew Bellamy’s obvious love for Thom Yorke, that’s not a surprise.  Musically, though, Absolution, the band’s third album, doesn’t really resemble any Radiohead discs.  There are hints of The Bends here, but with its dark stylings and heavy dose of drama, Absolution reminded me more of Placebo.  The problem, though, is that Muse, a relatively unknown band quickly gaining in prominence, sounds like Radiohead- and Placebo-lite, without the skill to transcend their influences. 

Absolution is filled with Bellamy’s paranoid and stark observations about the future of the world lined up next to the band’s oppressive sound.  The two forces fit each other, there’s no doubt about that, but the combination just doesn’t work.  This is largely because the music, and the production, sounds horribly claustrophobic.  The songs are not allowed to breathe whatsoever, and by mid-way through the album, the listener craves a break.  More talented bands and producers have created albums that are depressive and/or haunting, to be sure, but here Muse miss that target and end up sounding swampy and muddled.  The production further becomes a problem because there is very little melody anywhere to be found here; these two facts leave Muse playing intense but indistinctive and sludgy rock.

Fans of alternative rock may find enough to like here, especially on “Time is Running Out” and “Falling Away With You,” but repeated listens reveal too many imperfections in the songs and the lyrics.  Tracks like “Stockholm Syndrome” arrest attention on first listens, but after a while they don’t seem to hold together, simply fading away into irrelevance in the listener’s mind.  “Blackout” sounds appealing at first, but by the end of the song, Bellamy’s words starts to grate.  He moans uber-pessimistic lines like “This love’s too good to last” without ever really telling us why.  “I’m too old to change”—really?

Elsewhere, he rants that “This is the end of the world!” and “The end is all I can see,” which represent the tone of the entire album, but none of it registers much of an emotional impact.  As “Blackout” makes clear, Bellamy doesn’t take the next step of telling us why he’s so paranoid, what makes him so pessimistic, what perspective he can offer us besides apocalyptic visions.  He also slips up lyrically on “Falling Away,” where a multitude of absolutist clichés (“I’ll love whatever you become”; “I know I won’t forget a thing”; “All of the hopes we cherished fade”) de-mystify an otherwise stately song.

“Time is Running Out” deserves keeping around, possessing both a melody and a skillful build of tension.  The mischievous lyrics—easily the album’s best—express that undeniable but often unexplainable interest in unstable relationships (“You’re something beautiful, a contradiction / I wanna play the game, I want the friction”). They’re less successful at relating to the album’s overall theme (as expressed in the song’s chorus and title) that we’re all doomed, as Bellamy likely wanted them to, but they work in the four engrossing minutes of the song.

But ultimately, Absolution, despite being just 12 earnest songs (two brief Morning Glory-style instrumentals not included), feels overwhelmingly long, a fact traceable to the oppressive sound and unmemorable songs.  Rolling Stone’s Album Guide describes an album by Scott Walker as “top-heavy with pretentious abstraction, self-consciously difficult and often actively unpleasant,” which sums up my feelings on Absolution pretty much to a T.  In small doses, Muse’s music works better, but they have a long way to go before an entire album is worth listening to.

Rating: 2 stars (out of 4)

It’s easy to write Yes Man off as “Liar Liar 2″ as so many critics have. But Yes Man, a zany Jim Carrey movie about a man who can’t say no, has a more true and powerful center. Moreso than other high-concept Carrey comedies — Liar Liar, Me Myself and Irene, The Mask, Bruce Almighty — Yes Man contains a relevant, powerful truth at its core: Life is best experienced proactively.

That’s why I wanted to like Yes Man as I was watching it. Certainly, Yes Man is probably a notch or two above the disaster that most newspapers and magazines have it pegged as. But it misses out on greatness, and even goodness, because the film is so poorly executed.

The biggest flaw is that there’s not much to Carrey’s character. I felt no connection with him. I didn’t believe his despair at the beginning, didn’t feel his newfound passion in the middle, and didn’t taste any redemption in the end. Why are he and Bradley Cooper’s character best friends? I see no reason for that relationship other than every main character of a romantic comedy needs a best friend.

As he said yes to anything and everything, I felt like I was watching him read a script, not act. It’s partially his fault, partially the script’s fault. It’s frustrating because I believe this movie could have been so good if the film-makers had just let us feel Carrey’s journey a bit more. Even if Carrey had put a bit more thought into his words and a bit more hurt on his face, I might have been sucked in more.

Another big problem is that the movie doesn’t trust its viewer to think at all. It seems forced to point out everything. Right, we know Carrey would never have met Zooey Deschanel if he hadn’t started saying yes. You already made that pretty obvious, Yes Man, you don’t need to make that point the crux of the climactic speech.

A few of the jokes are really lame, too. The terribly uncomfortable dentures scene should never have been filmed, let alone made it past the editing room. There’s way too much of Rhys Derby’s boss/dorky friend character, who gets old fast.

Easily the best character in the movie is Zooey Deschanel’s. We know from an early encounter that she’s destined to be Carrey’s romantic foil, but she has vivacity in the face of predictability. The spontaneity and adventure-driven life this movie endorses is so much better embodied by her than Carrey, even after Carrey’s transformation.

All in all, I tolerated Yes Man. I didn’t love it, only barely liked it at places, and recognize that it’s far from a great movie. But at times, it’s a fun ride. The best portion is the frenzied second act when we get one set up and payoff after another. It’s the funniest and richest part of the movie. Plus, Carrey and Deschanel play off each other pretty well for the better portion of the movie even though Carrey’s character is underwritten. It’s an uplifting, simple, fun romantic comedy.

So – alright, stop me if you’ve heard this one – a German, an Israeli, a Chilean, an American, and a Japanese guy walk into the Royal Conservatory of the Hague in Holland. They all pull out experimental, one-of-a-kind electronic instruments and start jamming. Then after four years of touring and recording they come to Williamsburg, VA to play a badass show at my college.

The band’s name is NiCad. They bill themselves as a power rock band with homemade electronica instrumentation. They’re visiting my school for a three-day stay, culminating in a true concert. Tonight they presented a live demonstration of some of their toys.  Normally I would consider a review of an isolated live performance to be unfair or poorly informed, but in light of my recent exposition on the borders of music and the nature of this group, I couldn’t resist.

You see, the boys of NiCad didn’t play a single “song” tonight in the traditional sense. A brief introduction set the stage for Lyset Fra Nedenunder, a “tape piece” – a term they use to specify that it was pre-recorded and not interactive in nature.  Pause to process that.

The entire room was left dark and no musicians stood on stage while it played.  For fifteen minutes, we were treated to (in the artist’s words) “a thoroughly planned walk through the garden” of “sound materials originally generated for another of the composer’s electronic pieces.”  To my ear, it began with a robot breathing heavily, proceeded to electronic slurps and ribbits, then some harsh winds, a city-destroying robot laser battle, and continued with various other non-rhythmic, pitchless, otherworldly ambiences.  Listen to it here.

Several of the other pieces followed suit. In fact, the immediate follow-up was a one-man Study on Feedback. Here, interactivity was the heart and spirit of the work. Two microphones were pointed directly at the two speakers in the auditorium. The artist sat on stage at his computer – did I mention that most of the pieces tonight were presented by the individuals who made them rather than the band en masse?

The composer – or inventor – was Roberto Garreton, who used one hand to input occasional bips and whirrs via one of two handheld iPod-like devices and the other hand to control stereo volume knobs on a nearby hard electronics box. This, again, went on for what might have been 10 or 15 minutes. The variety of sounds produced in that time went beyond what your imagination is likely to conjure from my sketch.

Let me give one more example. There is a museum in The Hague that houses an exhibit of glowing neon tubes, installed there by Gilad Woltsovitch of NiCad. Each tube is damaged in some way: a wire may be frayed, a transformer may be malfunctioning, etc. The erratic electric signals due to the imperfections make noise, but that noise is far too faint for a person to ever hear, even if you held the source to your ear.

Gilad designed a device to pick up these “microsounds” and amplify them to an audible level. One of the pieces performed tonight was Hunting for Fireflies, a “tape piece” that was simply a 10-or-15-minute recording of sounds made by malfunctioning neon tubes in Holland.

To all the avant garde loonies out there (and I mean that lovingly) whose eyes are growing wide with thrills: I must now apologize.  There was a severe downside to this show.  Many of the pieces performed were concepted as both aurally and visually interactive, but the visual components were simply not available.  Hunting for Fireflies begs for the sensory stimulus of the crackling neon tubes themselves!

Watch Satoshi Shiraishi’s Hystere, featuring his invention, the e-Clambone, at work.  It’s “an aerophone supplied with haptic sensors and digital signal processing algorithms,” complemented in this piece by real-time video processing that “seeks moments of convergence and divergence.”  The entire visual component was absent at NiCad’s demonstration.

In short, this was a tragically incomplete presentation of novel and exploratory art.

See, NiCad makes albums filled with music that people can appreciate as such. But tonight was a demonstration of their deep personal interests, the sonic experiments they pursue voraciously in their free time. Clicks and bloops and buzzes and every manner of distortion came out tonight. These don’t add up to “music” by themselves the way we’re used to thinking about it. That’s not their point.

The guys don’t imagine a sound – or tune – and go try to make it; they imagine a source and go find out what sound it makes.

What they find leads, in turn, to inspiration. They take the sounds they discover and use them in their construction of (slightly) more traditional music.

I will add that, to end tonight’s demonstrations, three of the five guys got up on stage to play an improvised jam. One of them had a mic, one a drum set, and one a guitar, but goodness knows there was more to it.

The mic had a keypad on its stand and operated essentially as an advanced Yakkity Yak, the old toy voice recorder. The German would gasp, click his tongue, stutter frustrated growls, and so forth, using his mic to record and play back loops of a few seconds or so, perhaps with volume, tempo, or distortion effects added.

The guitar had pads and pedals and extra buttons (oh my!) and rarely made the sorts of noises you would expect, sticking mainly to pick scrapes across strings, warm string synths, clicks, etc. The drum set was played very quickly and in no consistent time signature.

The German would sometimes lean his mic over to the drums to start looping their sounds instead of his own. It was equally likely that the mic would be used to crash a cymbal or that a drumstick would be used to play the mic.

This all was so out of the ordinary that I can’t possibly describe all the action on stage or all the sounds that were achieved.  If this rough outline of the show intrigues you, seek more information at NiCad.org.

Rating: two 1/2 stars (out of four)

John Hughes’s The Breakfast Clubhas become something of a cult classic in the decades since its 1985 release, equaling or surpassing other pictures from this talented writer, at least in the public’s eye.  In it, five high school students, who conveniently represent a few of their student body’s cliques, have been forced to spend one precious Saturday in detention.  There’s the jock, Andrew (Emilio Estevez); the princess, Claire (Molly Ringwald); the brain, Brian (Anthony Michael Hall); the weirdo, Allison (Ally Sheedy); and the criminal, Bender (Judd Nelson).

As a film, The Breakfast Cluboccupies a critical point in movie history.  The actors were all “Brat Pack” regulars—for Hughes favorite Ringwald, this bracketed Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink, and Sheedy, Nelson, and Estevez would star, with others, in the awful St. Elmo’s Fire later the same year.  As Roger Ebert pointed out, it’s an “all-star cast” of younger actors, and the film is worth watching for anyone about to enter high school, but not as much as, say, Mean Girls.  Ultimately, it’s a frustrating, contradictory movie, not nearly as consistent as other Hughes works Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or as heartwarming as Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.   

The stereotypical classifications of the main characters are meant to represent both the way the school principal Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason) and their fellow inmates view them.  The entire movie takes place at school during the day, almost all of that inside the library, where these five challenge each other’s misconceptions of themselves.  Learning tolerance, Hughes tells us, is a lot easier when you want others to view you more sympathetically. 

The de facto leader of the group is Bender, the obnoxious, loud, arrogant, and generally rebellious student who manages to infuriate everyone within about 15 minutes.  Bender, though not uninteresting, is a bit of a contrived character.  Judd Nelson does what he can with the character, and it’s not unrealistic for a high school detention to feature someone like him, but some of his antics feel forced, thrown in by Hughes to keep the plot moving.  

Though I’ll give the movie credit for not going the route of The Graduateby refusing to anoint the adults with first names, it’s difficult to deny that the principal is a hopeless caricature.  I suppose that’s the point, but it makes for quite a one-sided viewpoint.  Some of the things Vernon says to Bender have merit—in particular “You ought to spend a little more time trying to do something with yourself and a little less time trying to impress people.”—but it’s tough to take them seriously when he follows them with a promise to start “cracking skulls” the next time they misbehave.  Likewise, his fighting words to Bender later on in the film feel as out of place as the fight between Richard Gere and Lou Gossett at the end of An Officer and a Gentleman.  Andrew fighting Bender makes sense; the principal taunting him doesn’t.

A more balanced perspective is shown towards the faceless parents of the students.  Though everyone, naturally, professes to not get along with his or hers—If I said that I did, says Andrew, “you’d think I was an idiot.”—they’re not necessarily the problems in the kids’ lives.  Brian, we can infer, has supportive, loving parents; they may be overly concerned about grades, or he may just think they’re overly concerned about grades.  Likewise, Claire doesn’t like her parents, but it becomes clear that she has bigger issues with her friends and her school. 

A little less credible, though, are the personas of Andrew’s father, who demands athletic success from him, or Bender’s, who abuses him.  Those stock types could be believable if the film did something with them, but they’re just slipped in towards the end to try to make us view each person a little more sympathetically.

Hughes adds a few nice touches along the way to keep things interesting.  I admire his willingness to keep the entire film moderately paced, in one setting, with no special effects whatsoever.  I also like the use of music, as the students dance, whistle, or air guitar to the songs playing in the background.  Credit is also due to his inclusion of one of my favorite characters in movies, period, the “weirdo” played by Ally Sheedy.  The film’s most satisfying moments almost all involve her—when she empties her bag onto a couch and explains its contents, when she reveals why she’s in detention (a truly fantastic moment), and when Claire transforms her appearance to uncover physical beauty that had lain dormant.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t manage to quite transform anyone emotionally quite as much.  Because of its lack of special effects and series of conversations between people attempting to get under the other’s skin, it reminded me in some ways of Closer, but it manages to convey neither that film’s great sense of atmosphere and mood nor its heart.  Closer revealed the emotional breaking points of all of its characters, but nothing in The Breakfast Club strikes that deeply.  My love for Ally notwithstanding, I can’t deny that we don’t really get to know anyone that well. 

And Hughes, though he makes some good choices, adds too many distractions to the story.  In my opinion, the film never should have left the library once the principal put them in there.  By giving us Bender running around the school and needless conversations with the principal and janitor, Hughes ruins the atmosphere of the film.  I liken this to Cast Away, which would have crashed and burned if Robert Zemeckis had ever cut away from Tom Hanks while he was on the island to go back to Memphis.  Hughes spends about 90% of the time in the library and suddenly decides to roam to the principal’s office, the gymnasium, and Bender’s locker; a bolder move would have been to keep the students in one place the whole time.

The Breakfast Club also falters because its writing is not perfectly sharp.  When Claire is berating Bender for his refusal to get involved in the school, she expresses scorn for the academic clubs of which Brian is a member, and Hughes misses the opportunity for Bender to point out the hypocrisy in Claire’s viewpoint.  This is microcosmic of the film’s problems: a few of the conversations that take place are substantive—addressing sex, cliques, popularity, authority—but the movie never really goes anywhere with them.  I never got the impression that the students have learned anything or changed in any meaningful way from their day.  When Claire eventually falls for Bender, for example, it doesn’t feel like something stemming from a change in her attitude towards him; it just feels like a sudden and unexplained plot twist.  There has been little previously to indicate that her feelings for him have softened.    

It may seem as though I dislike this film, but the truth is that I point out its flaws only because it intrigues me so much.  I think it could have been a great film, but instead it’s merely decent.  I love the set-up, and I laugh out loud numerous times in it.  I can relate, at least partially, to Brian, Andrew, and Ally, and Nelson’s Bender eventually turns around from being a mere simpleton to the character least afraid of telling the truth.  His comeback to Claire about supposedly not having any purpose at the school has real bite, and even if his parents represent a bit of a stereotype, Nelson just about makes it work, thanks to his spot-on acting in scenes such as the one when he describes his last Christmas: “It was a banner fucking year at the old Bender family.  I got a carton of cigarettes–the old man grabbed me and said, ‘Hey, smoke up, Johnny.’” 

Such scenes have edginess and power.  Unfortunately, the resolutions are somewhat pat and underdeveloped, which is why The Breakfast Club is best enjoyed with low expectations; otherwise you won’t be able to shake its tentativeness and unwillingness to make a strong statement.  There is a moment when the five students discuss whether they’ll view each other differently come Monday—but I’m not so sure they will.  The likelihood that Hughes is making a statement with that fact is all but impossible.

Some days I get the felicitous pleasure of correcting an idiot who thinks they like all music.  Have you met this guy?  When I ask what you listen to, I don’t mind noncommital answers like “a lot of stuff.”  Feel free to tell me that classical, country, rock, and rap are all fine by you.  Just don’t be ignorant enough to say that you enjoy everything.

Such headlong claims are propelled by one of two fallacious oversights.  Linguistic philosophy teaches us that operational definitions are prerequisite to coherent discussion.  In small words, we need to decide what we mean by “like” before we can talk about whether you “like” all music.  Muddled by your intuition, with no such leading clarification to guide you, it is tempting to overapply the word and convince yourself that you truly do “like” everything.  But these technicalities aren’t so interesting.

Allow me to walk you down the other troubled path.  Our lodestar will be the core question: When you say you like all music, what counts as music?

Don’t limit yourself to what’s familiar.  Realize that the word “everything” suggests far more than “everything I’ve ever heard.”  Maybe, when you said you like everything, what you meant is that you have yet to come across music that doesn’t work for you.  In that case we have a simple miscommunication and I won’t hold it against you.

Maybe you can’t name a genre without at least a few representatives in your last.fm “Most Played.”  So you like some rap songs, some pop songs, and so on, but not all rap songs and all pop songs.  If you fit that description, my apologies to you as well.

The people I’m challenging are those who  say something bolder: that they like (or expect to like) every last bit of music, even what they haven’t heard. They believe all music will, as if by definition or natural mandate, have enjoyable, appreciable elements.  For their schooling, we endeavor to answer (I repeat): what counts as music?

We’ll start with a simple parallel.  What counts as singing?  Easy, right?  All those words coming out of the frontman’s mouth!  But what if they aren’t words?  I doubt there are many who would deny that The Dissociatives are singing on the track Lifting the Veil from the Braille, which features only whistles and ahhhs.  What about the pitchshifted pornogrind stylings of Cock and Ball Torture?  Check out the track Enema Bulldozer and tell me if you think that guy is singing.  Come to think of it, do Cake songs like The Distance actually feature singing, or is that something else?

Even the liberal-minded individual might not know how to classify the vocal performance of Georgia Brown.  This Brazilian world-record-holder has been lauded for “singing” in the so-called whistle register, using a poorly understood physical mechanism a step beyond falsetto.

Still with me?  Nothing contentious yet?  Let’s go up a level.  Let’s build a box for songs and put all songs inside the box and anything that isn’t a song outside.  Oh – you’re alright with microsongs, aren’t you?  Because some people struggle with or deny “pieces” like the 1.316-second You Suffer by Napalm Death.  How about Green Carnation’s recent prog metal opus Light of Day, Day of Darkness?  The band declined to subdivide the 60-minute track into movements, but there are clear demarcations between passages.  Is that one song, or several songs presented wrong?

Again, terminology can get in the way here.  Everybody knows the Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairies from the Nutcracker, but is it a song?  It is one of several “scenes” from a single multi-part composition that spans an entire ballet.  Labels are tricky, but I want to avoid focusing on them.

To the heart of it, then.  People like you and I aren’t bothered by the foregoing ambiguities (as some unwitting fools are) because people like you and I are born with a mental knife for separating the fog.  Well, if you can handle what comes next, you’ve got a leg up on me and every historian of music in academia.  Polaris is still asking: what counts as music?

Exhibit A: the absence of a (discernible) beat.  When someone says they “like everything,” my go-to response is Panasonic Youth by The Dillinger Escape Plan.  Screaming and harsh licks pervade this hardcore ditty, but what’s more jarring is the deafeningly technical mathematic organization of rhythm.  No casual listener has an ounce of hope of tapping their toe successfully to the precise, plotted shifting of the time signature.  Can you digest music without a pulse?

Exhibit B: spoken word tracks.  Is the first track of Family Man, a classic Black Flag record, a song?  Exhibit C: noise.  Did avant-garde Japanese noise rockers Hantarash ever make a “song” in their career?  Arguably a generalization of this is Exhibit D: ambience.  If you stick your head out your front door, do you hear a song?

You should be familiar with John Cage, the bogeyman of western musical tradition.  If you’re not, Google him.  From a long career of questioning where people set their borders – with music on this side and chaff on the other – his best known heirloom to mankind is 4’33″.  Cage presents 4’33″ as a song in three movements.  There just don’t happen to be any notes.  He calls it “aleatoric” and emphasizes that the song is what each person hears while it is being played; thus, 4’33″ is different for each listener and upon each new listening.

Fewer students become familiar with Cage’s sequel to 4’33″, known as 0’00″.  If the former was a bastard of a piece, the latter is its mongrel son.  Free from notes, tempi, and (sometimes) even sound altogether, 0’00″ consists of this instruction: “Perform a disciplined action.”  Its first live performance – unsurprisingly, by Cage himself – consisted of the writing down of that instruction.

If you consider 0’00″ to be music and claim to “like all music,” you must have a bone through your head, because this taste of the extreme provides a hint that there is an unfathomable amount of space left to be explored in music.  To claim appreciation of the entire infinite domain would show an arrogant lack of skepticism of what might arise from it in years to come.

If you think 0’00″ is a fine piece but not “music” per se, then you’ve placed it beyond your border.  We can all set our borders how we please.  But once you say that Aerosmith writes music and John Cage writes something else, you’ve admitted that a line exists.  So where is it?

Yeah, I don’t know either.  I’ve been introduced to some wacky streams of sound in my time.  I tried to refer in this article only to songs accessible through an easy Google or YouTube search to help you probe your borders.  If you need me to suggest more outliers, just ask.

Gerrymander music however you like.  Put up a fence around it.  Leave it open to the wilderness.  But whatever you do, don’t look me in the eye and tell me you like “everything.”  You’d be lying to both of us.

September has arrived, and the weather seems to be starting to cool down, which means that it’s finally time for some football.  High schools are the first to start playing (there’s still another agonizing week before the NFL season kicks off), so this Friday is a perfect time to highlight the best football movie that I’ve ever seen.  Let the games begin…

Rating: three 1/2 stars (out of four)

“When you’re famous at 18, you spend the rest of your life fading away.”

The lead character of John Grisham’s delightful novella Bleachers spoke those words, and they apply perfectly to the attitudes explored in Friday Night Lights, which concerns the same material as that book: high school football.  This time, the focus is on not only the team but also the suffocating culture that surrounds it.  Based on H.G. Bissinger’s book chronicling the 1988 season of the Permian Panthers of Odessa, Texas, Lights excels with traits that rarely come with football movies.  Indeed, it’s hardly a sports movie at all (just like how the Bournes are much more than spy flicks) but rather a realistic, emotive, beautifully-acted film that’s about the lives of its characters.  Although the yawningly overwrought description on the back cover doesn’t reflect it, the film cares about a lot more than the success of its team.

The movie is unflinching in its depiction of the town.  Director Peter Berg uses washed-out colors to make the landscape look even more barren, helping us to at least partially understand why everyone you meet is so obsessed with the only thing that gives their area fame.  The Panthers are the winningest high school team in Texas history, with four state championships to their name, but that matters little in the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately culture.  Football is the easiest way to make someone in Odessa happy, yet because of the way the town approaches it, it collectively sucks all the joy out of it.  Note the grim expression on the face of quarterback Mike Winchell (Lucas Black) when college recruiters tell him the game is supposed to be fun.  Media frenzies surround the first practice of summer, and when the father of a player (played by Tim McGraw) comes out onto the field to castigate him for fumbling, people stare, but no one stops him.  Eventually, a player steps in to say, “Please…it’s the first day of practice,” as if to say that such an outburst would be permissible when the team was supposed to be in mid-season form.

Most sports movies are by definition ensemble pieces, but there’s generally a hero to root for, namely the coach or quarterback.  Lights is even more egalitarian—no one could be considered the star.  The movie focuses mostly on third-year coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton), Winchell, star running back Boobie Miles (Derek Luke), and fullback Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlund), and it almost sneaks up on you in the way it fully develops its storylines with grace and intelligence.  Billinsgley, for example, has to deal with his abusive father, still living his life based on his high school glory days.  When Don keeps fumbling, his father takes out the anger that stems from his dead-end life on him.  But he isn’t the devil, just a misguided, alcoholic man who’s been burned out by life—who’s been fading away since 18—and assumes that the same will happen to his son after high school.  McGraw subsumes himself into the role and delivers a heart-wrenching performance.

FNL simply excels in its depiction of the characters’ struggles with holding onto any measure of joy amidst the despairing situation in which they live.  Black, an asset in All the Pretty Horses, effectively presents a hesitant quarterback who isn’t sure he wants to leave the town because of his mother’s ill health.  Boobie, excellently played by Luke, carries not only the expectations of the town but also the burden of being the team’s centerpiece.  He’s effectively lost for the season to injury in the first game, yet he and his uncle do all they can to avoid listening to doctors.  There’s an emotionally stunning scene when he sits in a car after clearing out his locker and realizes that he has never planned on a life that doesn’t include football.

Thornton’s coach regards the football obsession with a bit of bemusement, as he understands that a loss isn’t the end of a pursuit of happiness.  He is an atypical movie coach, neither a tough guy in the mold of Denzel Washington’s character in Remember the Titans nor a “players’ coach.”  Thornton, whose performance is the epitome of controlled yet evocative acting, says more with his eyes than words, but Gaines does give the Panthers the best speech I’ve ever heard in a sports movie.  At halftime of the state championship, knowing that the game represents the end of the football era of his players’ lives, he doesn’t try to make them believe they can do anything.  He just says, “Put each other in your hearts forever, because forever’s about to happen out here in a few minutes.”

How refreshing it is to reach the final scenes of a sports movie and be concerned with things other than a game’s outcome.  Panther wins don’t generate much emotion–they’re expected and accepted, but not experienced the way losses are.  Thus, if you understand by the end that Friday Night Lights has nobler goals than most sports movies, you won’t find the conclusion surprising.  And just as a critical mid-season loss leads to important conversations between Gaines and Winchell and Billingsley and his father, the climactic heartbreak allows the characters to show who they truly are.  As another magnificent piece of the soundtrack (which is mostly from masterful conceptualists Explosions in the Sky and Daniel Lanois) mourns with the players and fans, Billingsley’s father walks onto the football field and completes his character’s arc, making everything that came before meaningful.  And in the process, he gives us what is, without question, the strongest and most emotional moment I’ve ever seen in a sports movie–and one of the best in any, regardless of type.

Most sports movies try to lift you to the rafters based on the athletic talents of the players on screen; here is the rare one that does so based on the inherent quality of its filmmaking, based on the feelings generated by things like the last smile on Winchell’s face and the shocking postscript.  A win for the Panthers is a relief, not a triumph.  Friday Night Lights is the latter.