Daft Punk is Playing At My House: Random Access Memories Reviewed

Tags

Daft Punk, Goblin, Jimmy Nolen, Nile Rodgers, Random Access Memories

Sometimes you don’t know you have an itch until its scratched. Random Access Memories should be the most important album of the year, but I don’t think its going to be, and that’s a catastrophe for a reeling music industry. (Warning… this is going to be a Grantland length column.)

Last week, my wife was playing a typically vapid terrestrial (I can’t believe I have to say that now) radio station. I was in the room, trying to get my socks out of a drawer. Katy Perry was singing a song I didn’t recognize. When the song ended, the DJ said it was someone called Jessie Jane. I didn’t know who that was. More importantly, even with my ear, I couldn’t tell the two apart. I can’t tell most pop singers apart.

That’s not a slam on Katy Perry, who seems to have a decent voice. But her voice has been processed to the point where it is indistinguishable from anyone else. In fact, that’s pop in general. Lady Gaga has genuine musical talent for instance, but she created a highly artificial studio sound that has dominated popular music for the last five or so years (at least.) Mixing studio wizardry with live instruments creates a combination of limitless imagination and spontaneity. It’s why thirty years later, all the Michael Jackson music that Quincy Jones produced sounds better than anything out there.

Back then, there was a different studio system. There were nomadic session musicians, masters of their instruments who were called in by producers to record for various albums. They were so experienced that they could immediately understand what was wanted from them by sight-reading the music, but so talented, they could improvise or add flourishes when needed.

As the years went by, the studios stopped using session musicians. More and more, producer began to rely on canned, computer-generated music. At its best, there were new textures and sounds to explore. But pop music most got lazier. A computer looped a sound every few beats. Consequently most music is quite dull.

When Daft Punk dropped their single “Get Lucky,” it felt like a seismic shift. I was already waiting for their collaboration with “The Hitmaker” industry legend Nile Rodgers, but I still wasn’t prepared for this song.

It was an expression of sheer joy, impossibly catchy, with great work from Pharrell. But it’s a four chord song, not exactly earth-shattering at its core. But as a guitar player, I heard shades of Jimmy Nolen’s chicken scratch style.

As a rhythm guitar player, when you have to be disciplined and hold the beat down with your playing, then there are things you can do to make the song interesting.  Nolen changed the texture of his chord by pressing gently down on the strings and then releasing them faster than he stroked the right hand.

Then I heard, “Lose Yourself to Dance.” Another four chord romp, soulful, catchy, and great guitar and bass work.

Here Rodgers adopted the efficient chord fingering that Jimi Hendrix innovated. Hendrix found a way to have one finger cover more than one note, leaving one or two fingers free all the time. “Lose Yourself to Dance” could have been a straight A#m, G#, F# A#m song, but because Rodgers has extra fingers free, he can add notes. From the A#m chord alone, he jumps between a C#6, A#m7, A#m9 and an A#m13. That four chord song got a whole lot more interesting. And nobody does it anymore.

“Alicia Keys is the most boring pianist I think I’ve ever heard,” I told my horrified wife.

But all of music is a balance between beauty and discordance, go too far to one extreme and the music is forgettable and bland, too far the other direction and its abrasive. Keys plays the notes as they fall on the keyboard. My wife didn’t understand what I meant.

“Giorgio by Moroder” explains why, in a way I couldn’t. For all the people subjected to Keys high school practice arpeggios, Daft Punk works them properly going back to the mid-seventies, in what feels like vintage Goblin doing an alternate theme for Scarface. And then it slips into lounge jazz and finally into rock. It would have been noteworthy if Random Access Memories had simply stuck to a sort of funky pop sound but they didn’t. There are strains of chillwave, cabaret, rock opera, and God knows what else.

Random Access Memories runs thorough one style after another, but it doesn’t ape them. It is at once fresh and calculated. I would like nothing more than for this to open people’s eye and make them step their game. But I don’t know if that will happen.

It is a testament that I actually went to the store and bought it the day it came out. I never buy albums anymore. But I don’t think this is going to be a hit. I don’t think its going to appeal to the average person.

For now, just enjoy a great record, for once. And maybe we can hope.

Brother Can You Spare Twenty Bucks?

On my way to work this morning, I stopped by a legendary local sandwich shop. By the door was a woman, obviously suffering from mental distress who stopped her animated conversation with herself to ask me (quite aggressively) if I had a couple of dollars for her on the way out. A couple dollars?

And that’s when it hit me that bums are asking for way more money now.

I remember when bums used to ask you for a quarter so they could make a phone call, which was preposterous, because if you’re homeless or staying at a shelter, who are you calling, exactly? But it’s not like it was a lot of money. Who was so stingy they couldn’t come up with a quarter now and then?

And then apparently inflation hit the itinerant community hard, I guess. I got stopped by a guy who told he only needed $9.50 to catch the Greyhound out of town and then he stopped talking, and it hit me.

Did he want me to give him ten bucks? Was this the point of the hustle?

That’s more than minimum wage. If somebody worked at Walmart, that $9.50 is like an hour and twenty minutes worth of abuse and debasement and some guy on the street just wants you to turn that money over. Walmart abuse is serious. Its customers flipping out over everything, it’s being so understaffed that you’re too demoralized to work, its someone constantly doing something awful to the bathroom, its being exposed to lousy Chinese products that are probably poisoning you in new and horrible ways and somebody wants to just take that money you earned.

And there’s no actual reason why you should give it to them. No matter what they think.

Also bums are getting entitled. More and more are complaining about how much they are receiving in contributions. Some accuse me of being cheap if I don’t give enough, because of course, I got dressed up tonight to take my wife out to dinner and support the vices of five or six random people I meet on the way. I can’t afford my own vices. I am pre-disposed to like expensive clothes and cheap women. I eat everything I see.

At the very least, I want a voucher. If I start my evening and I give someone a little change, I don’t want to get the stinkeye from next ten bums I meet. I already came up out my pockets. I would like to flash them my voucher, and be left alone. I was in Baltimore, and a homeless guy chased my grandmother down the street, yelling at her the whole time, because she only gave him $1.49. We had to physically restrain him.

Why are they asking for more? Did the cost of not having a house, not commuting to their job, and not having utilities go up? Is there a cost of living I don’t know about?

Goodbye Le Show and Comics Alliance

Tags

comic books, Comics Alliance, Harry Shearer, KCRW, Le Show, Scans Daily

I believe it was 1996. I was scrolling through the radio, (like we did in the old days) and I heard a radio show I wasn’t familiar with. I remember thinking that it sounded like the guy who does the voices on the Simpsons.

It was. It was Harry Shearer, a long-time actor and writer and his weekly show “Le Show” on KCRW. It made me laugh, but as time went on, I realized that I was learning a great deal about – well – everything. “Le Show” was incisive, a non-partisan romp that sought out absurdity in every avenue and revealed it.

“Le Show” was full of skits, obscure music and tons of personality, and Harry Shearer maintained the whole thing for over thirty years.

In the end, he didn’t even get to say goodbye to his audience. The program was unceremoniously cancelled for reasons that I still don’t understand. Immediately after, every forum for feedback to KCRW mysteriously malfunctioned at the same time so Harry’s fan never even got to add their two cents about the whole move.

At the same time AOl shut down the Comics Alliance website.

Comics are an odd business. They are by their nature old-fashioned, an episodic, printed medium based on characters that have existed for decades, and nearly every attempt they make to go digital or update them is like your grandpa trying to be cool by wearing a leather jacket.

Then all the sudden, movies ran out of ideas and there were those struggling comics companies. It made more sense to buy the company and have access to 2,000-3,000 characters at a time than to buy the rights individually. But despite their value, few people were interested in comics.

There were other comics websites, but Comics Alliance was my favorite. I used to love Scans Daily, but battles with short sighted creators (Peter David anyone?) had made the mods gunshy about posting content, and the community had become a caricature of the liberal mindset… literally everything was offensive to say or write.

Comics Alliance was interesting, diverse and genuinely funny, so of course there was no place for it on the Internet. I’ll miss the tag team reviews of comic book movies, great lists and the spotlighting of deserving indie comics.

And that’s the worst thing about getting older. There comes a time where the things you love keep getting replaced with inferior things and I suppose after a while you can’t find that many things that you enjoy, so you spend all your time trying to recreate the past as best as you can remember it (I think I just described the Tea Party!). I don’t have anything to replace Le Show and Comics Alliance. And I don’t think KCRW or AOL does either.

The Horrifying True Story of the Filthy Fifteen

Tags

Prince, Prmc, Purple Rain, Tipper Gore

To be clear, Tom already knew about the Filthy Fifteen, since he has worked in the music industry for some time. I didn’t. When I actually reviewed the songs in question, I didn’t understand why they had been selected or what the PRMC (Parents Resource Musical Center) was all about. But in the end, the PRMC was way more jacked up than any of the songs they went after, and several rather basic truths became apparent when you examine the story of the Filthy Fifteen.

It all began when Tipper Gore brought Prince’s Purple Rain album for her 11 year old daughter. She was entering her daughter’s room when Prince infamous ‘Darling Nicky’ began to play. (Lousy timing for the kid, BTW). Panicking, she called Susan Baker (wife of the treasury secretary) who had just caught her 7 year old with a Madonna album and wasn’t too happy about it. They called other housewives, including Sally Nevius (wife of DC’s City Council chair) and Pam Howar (wife of a powerful realtor) and they too were unhappy with the musical landscape. Gore tried to return the record, but the store would take it back because it had already been opened.

So she did what any concerned mother would do. She listened to her kid’s albums before she handed them over to her minor children and got her pedicure every Thursday. Business as usual.

Just kidding. She formed an advocacy group to try to change the entire music industry, because that is a normal and proportional response. And so began years of legal battles, controversy, and eventually infamy.

My God! What about the children!

(Photo from drunkleather, another wordpress blog, BTW)

One of the reasons, the Filthy Fifteen is so odd is that some of the songs are rather mild, even in their own time. They certainly weren’t the best songs to underline the PRMC’s point to indicate that the industry needed change. That’s because Tipper Gore didn’t actually do any research. Gore watched MTV for a few hours, and that was enough for her… and the reason the list is so random. None of these women actually knew what they were talking about, and they weren’t exactly inclined to ask for input.

Which lead to the next problem. The stuff the PRMC was asking for was utterly impossible to comply, mostly because none of the wives knew anything about the music business. It is difficult to successfully legislate an industry when you don’t know anything about it, and don’t ask people that do. The PRMC wanted a rating system for albums… and live concerts, although I have no idea how you rate something that hasn’t happened yet. They wanted song lyrics to be printed on the cover of albums which is an insane idea. They wanted albums with explicit covers to be kept under the store counters, because apparently stores have infinite counter space, I guess. They wanted record companies to terminate the contracts of artists who did objectionable things onstage at live concerts, because – blargle!

Another problem was that the PRMC had no idea how to interpret any song. Gore thought that Twisted Sister song “Under the Blade” was about rape and S&M. It was about Dee Snider’s scheduled surgery. Out of Rick James entire repertoire, the PRMC fingered the Mary Jane Girls “In My House,” for sexual content, but the song was not about sex at all. In the end John Denver testified before Congress that the proposed censorship wouldn’t work because people keep misinterpreting an artist’s songs… and the PRMC fell right in his hands.

To boot, this was probably a political hustle to find a platform for a young Al Gore to get a shot at the Presidency, or at least that’s what several of the persecuted musicians thought. But we know that Al Gore wouldn’t misrepresent a real problem just to make himself more prominent. Now what’s this about global warming?

Perhaps the most bitter irony of all, is that the PRMC played right into the RIAA’s hands. The RIAA already had research that kids would buy more albums if you put warning labels on them. As soon the PRMC got their way and got Parental Advisory stickers put on albums, heavy metal sales went through the roof, and those albums were bought by the white suburban kids that the PRMC was trying to protect. Content became coarser as well, because once the sticker was on your album, you could literally say whatever you wanted to now. Simultaneously, the RIAA was able to get a tax on blank cassettes and eventually blank CDS passed through Congress while everyone was focused on the PRMC. Tipper Gore ended up costing you a lot of money.

(Sidebar: You know all the money the music industry says they lose on piracy? Yeah. They’ve been getting money on every CD sold, even though blank CDs are mostly used in the computer industry, and they got that specifically to offset their losses from domestic piracy even though the overwhelming majority of piracy occurs in Asia. They told Congress if they got that money, they wouldn’t have to take such lousy deals from artists)

The one person the most responsible for all this was Tipper Gore. And Tipper ignored bands she liked. Tipper Gore was a rock drummer, and a huge Grateful Dead fan, in fact she played drums onstage at a “The Dead” gig. Funny thing is, few groups have ever advocated and spread the use of recreational drugs more than the Grateful Dead did. She ignored popular groups of her generation to attack newer ones that she didn’t personally like. In case of Tea Party like myopia, she lamented the innocent days of her childhood with “I Love Lucy,” and “Twist and Shout.” Apparently she had never heard of any off-color rock, blues or swing music growing up in an upper middle class bubble in Northern Virginia (traditionally among the wealthiest areas in the country.)

What? What? This is completely innocent and has NOTHING to do with drugs.

But it was all for the kids, right? In the end, I suspect that three generations of broken marriages (Tipper’s parents, her marriage to Al Gore, and 3 of her 4 children’s marriages) would cause more trauma than one or two dated eighties records.

And so, in the end, the music industry became uglier, consumers were shaken down, artists got cheated, and all because one bored housewife didn’t like a Prince CD she hadn’t researched before giving to a minor. And that is the horrifying true story of the Filthy Fifteen.

 

 

 

 

Tom Reviews Five Songs From the Filthy Fifteen

When I first sat down to review the songs assigned to me, I wasn’t too positive. This wasn’t exactly a talented bunch of artists. I didn’t think these were going to be very good songs.

Even weirder was the selection. It was almost like these songs were chosen at random. I couldn’t figure out why these songs were so awful that they needed to be presented to Congress. I also couldn’t understand how a roomful of lawyers, liars, fornicators, extortionists and drunks were going to claim moral authority over a different bunch of lawyers, liars, fornicators, extortionists and drunks. It was Congress vs. the RIAA. And nobody won.

Let me provide a little context. The movies had already gone through things like this, most notably with the “Video Nasties” list, a series of films that ended up being banned in various countries for their violent content. Although controversial, the reaction against the Video Nasties were sort of understandable, and the position to censor or ban them is pretty defensible. When the mad cannibal from “Anthropophagous” rips the fetus out of a pregnant woman and eats in front of her as she dies, or the actors in “Cannibal Holocaust” hack real, live monkeys and giant turtles to pieces with machetes, you can make all the First Amendment arguments you want: you’re going to lose your case in court.

This is what a slam dunk censorship argument looks like.

And that’s what the Filthy Fifteen should have been. It should have been fifteen songs so vile, so intolerable that just playing them aloud should have caused their opposition to sink into their chairs and take their medicine. If the Filthy Fifteen songs were selected properly, we would be able to look back even now and understand how ahead of their time the PMRC were.

1.

Out of everyone on my list, this is the best song, and the most talented artist. When I look at the written lyrics, it’s surprisingly ribald, but when you listen to it, it is nearly impossible to understand what Lauper is saying. I don’t know how a song can be dirty if it’s indecipherable. This entire song is a masterpiece of obscuring what its actually about, which is what songs used to do before you could slap a Parental Advisory sticker on an album, and then say whatever you wanted.
This is not a song you can base an industry-changing argument on.

The most objectionable thing about She Bop is that it gives me a visual of Cyndi Lauper I’d rather not have, which no human mind should have to tolerate, even for a second.

2.

Let me start by saying that I don’t know the significance of a deaf leopard or “Def Leppard.” I would imagine that not hearing would be a severe handicap for such a deadly predator. I don’t know why you name your band after it. Why not “Toothless Mamba,” or “Arthritic Pit Bull?”

For some reason, the PMRC picked this song as glorifying drugs and alcohol, because they’d hadn’t heard any music since the late 1800’s. There is literally nothing about this song that exceptional, and it doesn’t belong on a list like this. The real criticism of this song should be that they are clearly aping AC/DC, and they did a piss poor job of it.

3.

This is terrible. This is like that scene in Spinal Tap where all the midgets start dancing around Stonehenge, or when Ritchie Blackmore went folk. This is a song that scared middle-aged soccer moms… and no one else. If the PMRC wanted to go after a band that had half-hearted occult overtones, they could have gone after Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin, but they didn’t have the guts to go after bands that white people who were born in the fifties (their peers) would like, so they picked a Scandinavian metal band.

One big problem here is that they backed the wrong horse. There were genuinely upsetting Black Metal bands coming out at the same time in the same handful of countries. Had they picked – say – Mayhem, they would have looked like prophets later that decade when lead singer, aptly named Dead, blew his head off with a shotgun… and then his bandmates made a stew out of his brains and ate them. (They also took fragments of his skull and sent them to bands he admired.)
But they didn’t. They knew about as much about the occult as they knew about every other subject – which was nothing, and so they selected the most toothless tiger possible.

4. Vanity – Strap On “Robbie Baby”

Out of five songs I cover in this article, this might be the most legit song on the list. It’s still not a slam dunk (if I may draw another parallel: Video Nasty “I Spit on Your Grave” had a 45 minute rape scene) but it’s not exactly what you want your kids listening to. Of course, at this point, NOBODY was still listening to Vanity, which is why we have this underproduced track that sounds like there was a bored guitarist and a drum machine recording in the basement of a microbrewery. I couldn’t even find a link for the song for you to hear it.

5.

Tipper Gore objected to the video of this song, which is how it made the list. Which is basically like wanting a movie banned because you don’t like the novelization of it. There is nothing actually objectionable about this song, which reminds me of Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out.” (Of course, they weren’t touching that one.)

Hmmm.

So far this list makes no sense. At this point, I have no idea what this list and this controversy is all about. I don’t know why these songs were picked or what anybody was thinking. Wasn’t this just a giant waste of everyone’s time?

“The Filthy Fifteen”: Tom and Tom review the most vile songs of the 80′s (according to the PMRC)

Tags

Prince, AC/DC, PMRC, Tipper Gore, Cyndi Lauper, Filthy Fifteen, Vanity, Motley Crue, Def Leppard, Sheena Easton, Madonna, Black Sabbath, Mary Jane Girls, Twisted Sister, Judas Priest, Darling Nikki, Sugar Walls, Eat Me Alive, Strap on Robbie Baby, Bastard, Let Me Put My Love Into You, We're Not Gonna Take It, Dress You Up, Animal (Fuck Like A Beast), High 'n Dry, Trashed, In My House

If you have kids, turning on the today’s radio is a bit like playing Russian Roulette with your children’s ears – the only difference being that all but one of the chambers are full. Almost every song on the radio is filled to the brim with innuendo, drug references, and filth-flarn-filth as far as the ears can hear – and that’s just the latest track from Selena Gomez.

Kidding aside, the explosion of filth on the radio can be directly attributed to one group of individuals, whose tenacity and combined efforts sent popular music into a decency death spiral:

Guess again.

It was the Parent’s Music Resource Center, or the PMRC.

There you go.

The PMRC was founded in 1985 by a group of four women known as the “Washington Wives”: Tipper Gore, Susan Baker, Pam Howar and Sally Nevius. These women were appalled by the content in the music their kids were listening to, and vowed to make sure no child would ever again be corrupted by the evil influence of pop stars like Cyndi Lauper.

Pictured: The face of true evil.

To that end, they identified the “Filthy Fifteen“, a collection of songs so rife with lyrics about sexual innuendo, drug abuse, and violence they threatened to undo the very fabric of adolescence in one fell swoop – or worse, make yuppies have to talk about uncomfortable subjects with their kids.

I’m pretty sure that was the plot of a horror movie back in the 80s.

Their efforts led to the “Parental Advisory” stickers that are plastered on all CDs today – and that’s where it all went downhill.

Prior to the creation of the PMRC, artists and musicians were forced to use another tool to ensure that their adult messages were not reaching the ears of children- creativity. Most of the more offensive content in the songs of yesteryear were veiled in metaphor, so the average child would have no idea what was being said. A kid who heard the song was like a toddler who accidentally heard cursing- he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but its damn fun to say.

After the advisory system went into effect, there was no need for artists to continue using common sense or thinking about how their music would effect impressionable youth – that was now the job of the parents. Artists were now free to say whatever they wanted, and the floodgates were now wide open.

They thought the Mary Jane Girls were bad? Wait til’ they get a load of us.

Tom Here. I understand, in the most abstract sense what they were trying to do, but the actual execution ends up making them look like Maud Flanders.

Their argument had two major flaws.

The first problem was the the fifteen songs they picked were pretty much random, and indicated that they knew nothing about music or filth. Ideally, when making an argument that some songs are so awful that the entire industry should be changed, you wouldn’t partially base your argument on the Mary Jane Girls single, “In My House,” or Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”

The other problem is that they knew nothing about how movies are rated. Asking music to be rated like movies are is insane. The MPAA is a hot mess. The biggest problem is that there are very little written guidelines for what content goes into what rating, so producers have to guess or use their influence to affect ratings. The previous year, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom had a scene where a heart was extracted from a living victim in a movie that was pitched to children, in the ensuing melee, a new rating (PG-13) had to be created.

This was the system they wanted to imitate. A nebulous board that rated the Transformers movie an R but G.I. Joe the Rise of Cobra a PG-13? (G.I. Joe had a bodycount of roughly 186, and was in the top five most violent film I’ve seen in the last couple years.)

Since the creation of the NC-17 rating, it is a crapshoot to figure what was an R rated movie, and what went too far. Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, where a man had his head cut open and his brains eaten by himself and others while he was still alive? R rating. It was just fine.

Trying to apply the movie ratings system to anything else is like trying make gun laws that replicate war torn Afghanistan. Actually…

This week, Tom and I will review all fifteen of these nefarious tunes, and try to understand why, for a brief time in the 80′s, people thought these songs had the potential to stain this country’s moral fabric permanently. And if, in the process, we somehow become drug-addicted, sex-crazed, bloodthirsty hooligans – we’ll know we should have listened to Tipper.

Curse you, Vanity!

In Memory of Roger Ebert

Tags

Adventures in the Screen Trade, Roger Ebert, William Goldman

Roger Ebert finally passed away after a battle with cancer. He still lived to 70, which isn’t too bad. He got a mention on some news shows, a byline in the papers and some clucks of the tongue from people that saw it. And then things went on, as they always will.

But Roger Ebert was special to me. And, no… I didn’t watch the show.

I’ll give you a little bit of background. I grew up right before the cellphone/Internet age, in fact, my family didn’t get the Internet until I was about 17, and we didn’t have cable. If you wanted information, you walked to the local library. Another peculiarity of my family was that I wasn’t allowed to watch television during the weekdays. So as a kid I devoured about two-three books a day, most of which I got from treks to the local library. (This is part of why I’m so weird!)

On the weekends, when I wasn’t otherwise occupied, I was either at my grandparent’s, where my aunt had assembled one of the greatest collection of bootleg movies in the Western hemisphere, or I watching TV.

Television is corporate now, and corporate means safe.

When I was growing, it was GLORIOUS! In the morning, you had cartoons on about five different stations, the classic ones, the clever ones. Then at about eleven o’ clock on Channel 48, the kung fu movies began. At noon, on Fox, there was pro wrestling, and then on Channel 57 and Channel 17, there were at least six straight hours of B-movies, rare horror and adventure films. At one, Fox started their own B-movie programming. At night, it switched to horror or superhero related syndicated shows, which ran until two or three in the morning, when the television used to stop running programming.

All of these were half-heartedly edited, if at all. And my only guide for information about them was Roger Ebert.

Roger Ebert wrote constantly. He wrote movie guides thicker than Bibles. In them, he explained movies without any of the haughtiness that critics usually use to separate themselves from their audience. The majority of what I’ve learned about film comes from Robert Ebert (and William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade) which influenced everything I’ve ever written on worked on that relates to movies.

And from when I was a little kid, not only did he do a pretty good job negotiating which movies were worth watching and why, but also gradually explaining why the good ones work, and how to replicate them.

Roger Ebert was the fairest minded critic I’ve ever seen. He recommended movies he didn’t even like, because he stuck to one standard, he insisted that a movie deliver on expectations for the audience. If you got what you wanted by the end of the film, he gave it a thumbs up. Unlike other critics, he actually wrote a screenplay that got made. And he wasn’t aiming for high art, at all, which was sort of endearing.

Because he was so fair-minded, there were certain films he championed that led me into new journeys. I knew nothing about  Alejandro Jodorowsky, or that weird period where Scorsese did King of Comedy and After Hours, and when I was wondering whether to investigate Jules Dassin’s Rififi Chez Les Hommes, I immediately checked out his review.

When I read what people have written about him, especially in his own community, it seems reserved, too reserved, really. Ebert didn’t write traditionally structured reviews, because he wanted us to relate to them, and that turned some people off. He okayed some populist films, that snotty critics wouldn’t have. He was a middle-aged man that loved giant boobs and movies that had them, and didn’t hide them. He was a common man with uncommon talent, and that’s a lot for people to handle.

With Ebert gone, some of the magic of film has gone away. And Lord knows, we could use it.

Madden Football is Driving Me Nuts

Tags

A.J. Smith, Denver Broncos, Detroit Lions, Dick Night Train Lane, EA Sports, Green Packers, Greg Jennings, Jack del Rio, JerMichael Finley, Joe Schmidt, Madden Football, Michael Vick, NFL, Paul Allen, Richard Seymour, Roger Goodell, Washington Redskins

Like my most men my age, I consistently endanger my marriage by obsessing over Madden football on my PS3. Every July, most of the men I know spend extra time with the women in their lives, taking them out to dinner, movies, going to see her family, whatever. They do it because in August, they will disappear to a room in the house, where they will barely eat, move, or change clothes for at least a month.

Madden comes out in August.

Madden might be our last chance to see real football. The NFL has gotten insane, a combination of lawyers and billionaires (the overwhelming majority of whom have never played a down of football) that are determined to take apart the game in the stupidest way possible.

The last time this guy had anything to do with football, gas was 62 cents a gallon, and stamps were 13 cents. Flash fact.

Recently, as a concern for player’s safety, the NFL voted to keep running backs from putting their helmet on defenders (while constantly showing highlights of running backs doing just that) that are trying to obliterate them but haven’t passed any determination on cut blocking that consistently destroys knees every year.

Between this and the usual things that your team does that drive you nuts (Hey Packer fans! You just lost Greg Jennings to Seattle for nearly $9 million a year. Instead you paid your TE Jermichael Finley $8.25 million a year… and he can’t catch.) you need Madden. Its real football that you can control.

When my beloved Broncos lost in the playoffs (because Jack del Rio’s entire defense was predicated on ancient cornerback Champ Bailey shutting down the man on his side, and when Torrey Smith started burning him, we had NO backup plan.) I calmly turned off the television and played Madden.

The defensive future of the Denver Broncos. Just give me a second while I put this gun in my mouth.

The problem is… its a love/hate relationship.

EA Sports has an exclusive relationship with the NFL, because a bunch of conservative billionaires run the most socialist organization you can imagine. (1. The NFL is a monopoly that the government allows. 2. They use public funds for their stadiums, even though every owner can easily pay for them. 3. They have exclusive licenses that stifle competition.) So every year, Madden NFL doesn’t have to worry about any competition.

The yacht is $200 million with $384K in upkeep, but he needs your tax dollars to fix his stadium.

Madden football has been around for 25 years, but it never seems to turn out a finished product. The newest version looks photo real to people that aren’t familiar with video games… until the camera pans to the sideline where the sprites (the digital versions of people) look like the Stay Puft Marshmallow man. Because they didn’t finish the game before they put it out.

It happens every year. One year they boast about the improved offensive line blocking, but when you actually play the game you realize that the pulling guard misses every block on every outside run. After the tenth time Ray Lewis crumpled my running back into a pile roughly the size of a milk carton, I started to experience the first signs of stroke.

The next year, they changed the motion and the speed of the game… but not the acceleration, which meant that Chris Johnson and Adrian Peterson got the same running start as a drunken man with two broken legs.

I don’t know any business that is allowed to put out the same product EVERY year, charge top dollar for it, but never actually finish anything.

Oh. Right.

Madden Football works the same way as Catholic heaven. Once you’re good, you’re good for the rest of your career, which is why every time I play the Raiders, Richard Seymour (who has 57.5 sacks in 11 years) gets three sacks a game, beats triple teams every down, and either bats down or intercepts (!) every pass in his direction.

In fact, one year’s update was basically to correct how they had rendered Michael Vick, who was able to run backwards to his right 30 yards in one nanosecond and then throw accurately across his body to the left 70 yards down the field.

Things like this lead to Madden rage, which is the third highest killer of Black Males. (The highest killer of Black Males, of course, are other Black Males.)

Madden football also has this thing where they come out with an innovation and then it disappears like Crystal Pepsi. One year, you could write your own plays, a Godsend for people like me. Then it was gone.

One year, you could create multiple characters and assign them to a team. For a football geek like me, it was a dream. I looked up Hall of Famers, or really good players, created a profile and added them to their team. Every week on my schedule was a throwdown. (For instance… Detroit Lions. Add Dick “Night Train” Lane and Lem Barney at corner, Barry Sanders and John Henry Johnson as running backs, and Joe Schmidt at middle linebacker, and then try to play them. Add maybe Robert Porcher on the end, Herman Moore across from MegaTron and a healthy Chris Spielman. Your nickelback is Dick LeBeau. Even if you win, you’re limping out of this one.)

Of course, I haven’t even had the option to do this in years.

Even so, every year I live in hope that this flawed version of Madden will take away the pain of losing the game I love. (Oh look! The Redskins signed A.J. Smith, the guy who single-handedly ran the Chargers into the ground after John Butler died! Go Skins!) One day it will be worth it.

Great Women in Comics

Tags

Alan Moore, Amanda Waller, Barbara Gordon, Barda, Borderlands 2, Deathtrap, Dial H, Gaige, Jakita Wagner, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Mina Murray, Nelson Jent, Oracle, Planetary, Power Girl, Roxie Hodder, Warren Ellis

More and more, I’ve been thinking about feminism. As incongruous as it sounds, it all started when I was playing “Borderlands 2″ (also known as the video game that saved my marriage). In the game, there is a character named Gaige. She is a teenager with the special ability to summon a cycloptic robot with a destructive energy beam, and laser Wolverine claws, and it is every bit as awesome as it sounds.

Best buds.

And then it hit me. I’ve never played the girl in a video game. The girl is always the worst character, Chun Li, included. And Gaige isn’t just a token girl, she’s really useful. It isn’t exactly Gloria Steinem founding the Women’s Action Alliance, but maybe incremental change in the way we view women is progress.

Comics and video games are spiritual cousins. And the cousins are really sophomoric. At best, women that are depicted with any personality are bundled with sex appeal to make them palatable.

That armor doesn’t seem practical.

Now I am an avowed lover of the female form. But even considering that, it becomes a bit odd that there are a wide range of male characters in comics, but female characters are almost uniformly intended to be seductive.

She’s a sexy ant? Did they mean sexy aunt? I don’t understand this.

Again… there is a place for this character in entertainment, and in comics. But its sort of overused. So I will briefly highlight women that I think stand out of the pack.

Alan Moore used Dracula victim Mina Murray to lead his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Prickly, stubborn and defensive, Murray is also the most balanced and sensible of her rather imbalanced team. Although eventually she is involved in a romantic relationship, Mina is presented as intelligent, complex and at times, severe. Moore also later uses Mary Poppins (!) as the possible face of God, and at the very least, as an omniscient figure, dovetailing with his general themes of mankind returning to matriarchy of sorts. Not the typical female characters at all.

In China Mieville’s Dial H, a senior citizen named Roxie Hodder guides schlubby hero Nelsen Jent in his crimefighting career. In Dial H, a mysterious pay telephone (a minor miracle in itself) grants them powers, and with the last issue it allowed them to bridge their difference in age and start a May-December romance. Nelson is overweight, incompetent and immature, but Roxie has been a terrific influence on his life.

I have a weakness for a well written female powerhouse. In Warren Ellis’s Planetary, Jakita Wagner is the team’s bruiser, and she’s quite good at it, although Planetary’s demanding plot structure makes her character a touch underwritten. Jakita is portrayed as attractive, but she is covered in body armor, which is how all women in combat should probably be designed.

There have been a lot of complaints about Power Girl and the infamous Boob Window outfit. It is unofficial DC canon that she has the largest bust in the DC Universe, but this tends to give her character short shrift. Power Girl is a weaker version of Superman, and usually the first person in a fight. Visually, Power Girl is one of the few super-heroines that is explicitly muscular and this is sadly unique. Power Girl is the hero you KNOW will knock you out.

Its worth noting that a step up from Power Girl is Barda, a Justice League member who is depicted as a powerhouse roughly as strong as Wonder Woman, and even more violent. Wonder Woman is an Amazon warrior who doesn’t have any armor, (also the Amazons were supposed to be archers who sliced off the breast of their dominant side, but we don’t need to go that far) but Barda is insulated, head to toe despite her beauty. Barda is also depicted as over seven feet tall, towering over Superman and Batman.

I saved the best for last though. Barbara Gordon was crippled by the Joker and became the Oracle, a faceless hub of information that supplied communication and data for nearly every major hero in the DC Universe. Barbara was a complex character who dealt with her handicap by being even more useful than she was as Batgirl. Nearly every writer that touched her did good work. (Of course, DC decided to heal her paralysis and not make her Oracle anymore.)

Amanda Waller ran the Suicide Squad, a batch of bad guys sent on covert government missions, but she found her way into in every bit of skullduggery imaginable. I cannot tell you if Amanda Waller is good or bad. I cannot tell you much about her, because she is that complex. I can tell you that she is one of the best comic characters ever, an overweight, black wife that beat abuse and poverty to become more powerful than anyone than Lex Luthor. (Of course, DC decided to ‘sex her up’ by making her look like Angela Bassett.)

Comics need more of these characters. There’s probably some that I missed, or some that you think I should have included (Catwoman? Yeah right.)

“The F*@k Is This Sh#t?”: Ace Hood ft. Future and Rick Ross – “Bugatti”

Tags

Ace Hood, Ace Hood ft Rick Ross and Future, Bugatti, Future, Hip Hop, Hip Hop Review, Music Reviews, New Hip Hop, Reviews, Rick Ross

If you’ve read this blog before, you probably already know my stance on modern hip hop. Rather than bore you with those details, I would like to present “Bugatti”, another in a string of ubiquitous productions from beatsmith of the moment, Mike Will Made It.

On the one hand, there is nothing on this track that you haven’t already heard. Ace Hood raps like starving man biting into a mountain of barbecue ribs, but somehow his hunger seems manufactured. That’s not to say that it is, but given the amount of singles I’ve heard from him that sound this way, I can’t help but get deja-vu from his delivery.

There’s also Rick Ross, once again using his self perpetuating mythical Don persona that no one seems to have tired of yet, and Future’s blunt-and lean inspired vocals belting out yet another hook. Also, Mike Will Made It’s production feels worn at this point, given how many similar-sounding beats he’s got out there at the moment.

Even with all that considered, I gotta admit -  this song is addictive. From the moment I heard it, I couldn’t unhear it, but in a good way. It’s stuck on repeat in my Spotify at the moment.

I hate and love this song, just as I hate and love myself.

And I’m so ashamed of that, I have to give our official symbol of disapproval to myself.

The official Tom and Tom symbol for disapproval.

Menacing tones coast along during Future’s pre-hook, giving the impression you’re heading into a storm. Then as he announces “TURN UP”! You’re thrust head first into the eye of the hurricane. And even though I’ve heard all these guys’ schtick before, it doesn’t sound any worse for wear. This is ignorant rap at its finest, from individuals who know their genre and audience like the back of their hand.

In the end, Ace Hood has done enough with “Bugatti” to make a lasting impression this time around – or at least enough of one to merit a cursory listen to what else he has up his sleeve.

“I…. immediately regret this decision!”

Rating: 3.7 out of 5 stars