#'and then you read it and its just about hating poor people' punchline was essential to the point i was trying to make

[valtsv]

[passionate-reply]

This week on Great Albums: a fresh look at quite possibly the 80s’ most hated band, A Flock of Seagulls! Spoiler: their music is good, people in the 90s and 00s were just mean. If you want to find out more about how having the absolute best hair in the business ended up backfiring on these poor sods, look no further than my latest video. Or the transcript of it, which follows below the break!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! Today, I’m going to be diving into a discussion of quite possibly the most derided and lambasted music group of the 1980s: A Flock of Seagulls. With a strange name, a perhaps painfully stylish aesthetic, and equally trendy and of-the-moment music, that was, for a time, inescapable in popular culture, their legacy forms a perfect target for the ridicule all popular things must face in due time. But even moreso than that, I think A Flock of Seagulls have become not only a punchline in and of themselves, but also a summation of everything that was dreadful and excessive about the early 1980s, with its “Second British Invasion” of synthesiser-driven New Wave. I can think of no better example of this kind of abuse than a famous line from the 1999 comedy film, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. The film is largely a love letter to the 1960s and its Mod aesthetics, and the protagonist, a super-spy unfrozen from this era in time, dismisses the history and culture of the 1970s and 80s as nothing more than “a gas shortage, and A Flock of Seagulls.” But at the time of this writing, we’re about as far away from Austin Powers as the film was from the release of this album, the band’s 1982 debut LP, so I think it’s been long enough that we can start to re-evaluate A Flock of Seagulls’ rightful place in music history.

While this self-titled album was the group’s first long-player, their first release was the 1981 single “It’s Not Me Talking.” Notably, this track was actually produced by the legendary Bill Nelson, who also released it on their behalf via his personal label, Cocteau Records. Ever since discovering this for myself, I’ve found the connection between Nelson and A Flock of Seagulls fascinating, and also satisfying. Despite the gulf between their respective reputations, I do think their work has a lot in common, at the end of the day: swirling washes of synth disrupted by screaming guitars, not to mention that shared interest in Midcentury rock and roll aesthetics.

Music: “It’s Not Me Talking”

These two acts would, of course, go their separate ways shortly after, and they ended up in completely opposite camps, with Nelson becoming a cult favourite with little crossover success, and A Flock of Seagulls going on to create what is, undoubtedly, one of the most iconic songs of the entire decade.

Music: “I Ran”

What does one even say about a song like “I Ran”? Over the years, it’s certainly gotten somewhat overplayed, but I can’t really hold that against it. It’s just a damn good song. Both ethereally menacing as well as catchy and rather accessible, “I Ran” takes the atmosphere suggested by “It’s Not Me Talking” and kicks it into another gear, with a harder-hitting hook and the introduction of that highly distinctive and of-the-moment echoing guitar effect. Some will hear it as little more than evidence that the song is hopelessly dated, but I’ve never thought of it as anything other than satisfying to listen to. If you ask me, I figure all art that exists is essentially “a product of its time”--nobody ever said Michelangelo Buonarroti’s David was a lousy sculpture, just because you can easily tell it was made during the Italian Renaissance. At any rate, I’d encourage everyone reading to go back and listen to it again, trying to maintain a little neutrality. I’d recommend the album cut of it, which is significantly longer than the single version, and features a rich intro that sets the scene before that famous guitar ever makes an appearance, which I think really adds to the experience. By some reckonings, A Flock of Seagulls are sometimes considered a “one-hit wonder,” but while they certainly are remembered chiefly for “I Ran,” this album’s other singles were moderately successful as well.

Music: “Space Age Love Song”

“Space Age Love Song” is perhaps the band’s second best-remembered single, and takes their sound in a markedly different direction than that of “I Ran.” “I Ran” won popular acclaim by finding a new home for the guitar, in the midst of a sea of synth, and pushed A Flock of Seagulls into a similar space as acts like the Cars and Duran Duran, who had enough mainstream rock sensibilities to sneak a lot of synthesiser usage onto American rock radio...much as one might sneak spinach into tomato sauce when feeding picky children. But I think “Space Age Love Song” is much more palatable to listeners of pop, synth- or otherwise. It’s softer in texture, and really almost dreamy, capturing the hazy, buoyant feeling of limerence as well as any pop song ever has. I’m tempted to compare it to another synth-driven classic, whose influence towers over this period in electronic music: the great Giorgio Moroder’s “I Feel Love.” Much like “I Feel Love,” “Space Age Love Song” combines simple, almost banal love lyrics with an evocative electronic soundscape, painting a picture of an enchanting, high-tech future where human feelings like love have remained comfortably recognizable across centuries or millennia. A similar theme of futuristic love pervades the album’s second single, “Modern Love Is Automatic.”

Music: “Modern Love Is Automatic”

While “Space Age Love Song” uses simplistic lyricism to portray the relatable universality of falling in love, “Modern Love Is Automatic” gives us the album’s most complex narrative. In a world where “young love’s forbidden,” we meet a pair of star-crossed lovers prevented from being together by some sort of dystopian authority. The male member of this union, introduced as the “cosmic man,” is apparently imprisoned for the crime of loving, but the text suggests that he may escape from this prison--or, perhaps, even be freed from it. The title, repeated quite frequently throughout the track, is perhaps the mantra of this anti-love society, a piece of propaganda being drilled into us as thoroughly as it is into these subjects: Modern love is automatic, with no need for messy, unpredictable human input.

It’s also worth noting that the song is consciously set in “old Japan,” deliberately locating it in the “exotic” East. While East Asia was strongly associated with refined, perhaps futuristic culture, I can’t help but think there’s a more pejorative sentiment operating here, rooted in stereotypes of Asian cultures unduly policing sexual freedom, and other forms of personal expression and self-determination. Ultimately, despite its futuristic trappings, “Modern Love Is Automatic” isn’t really a song about technology at all, but rather authoritarianism. “Telecommunication,” on the other hand, engages more directly with that theme.

Music: “Telecommunication”

“Telecommunication” was also released prior to the self-titled album proper, and was also produced by Bill Nelson. While structurally similar to “Modern Love Is Automatic,” with an oft-repeated title, brief verses, and a generally repetitive musical structure full of meandering guitar, its text quite plainly discusses the titular field of technology, in a seemingly non-judgmental fashion--though it could be argued that the fairly upbeat music suggests a positive outlook on things like radio and TV. The one hitch in all of it is the very end of the last verse, which sets the song in the “nuclear age”--a nod, perhaps, to the darker applications of 20th Century technology. “Telecommunication” is perhaps indebted less to figures like Moroder, and moreso to Kraftwerk, who first solidified the rich tradition of stoic synth thumpers about everyday machines like cars, trains, and, of course, nuclear energy. I’m also tempted to compare it to an earlier work of Bill Nelson’s group Be-Bop Deluxe, “Electrical Language,” another bubbly number that playfully bats this concept back and forth.

The theme of “quotidian technology” is also present on the cover of this album, which features an interior shot of a living room, centered around a television set. The TV displays a figure playing guitar--perhaps one of those heroic rock pioneers of the Midcentury like Buddy Holly, whom Nelson was so keen to imitate. But what’s most immediately striking about this cover is its beautiful colour palette, full of deep, saturated jewel tones, treated softly with an “airbrush” style effect. Despite being a somewhat mundane scene, the image also features fanciful, imaginative touches: the floor of this room is actually a miniature beach landscape, with the “floor” beneath the TV actually being the surface of the ocean, and the TV appears to be surrounded by a colourful, glowing group of birds. Given the beachy surroundings, we could perhaps interpret them as the titular seagulls. It’s tempting to think of this scene as a representation of how technology can sweep us away, out of our everyday existence and into something richer and more exciting.

But perhaps it’s not so simple--note also the open window in the top left, whose curtain appears to be agitated by some sort of motion in the air. Perhaps these birds are not the products of television fantasy, but rather have flown in from the window, and hence hail from the “real world?” Given how tracks like “Space Age Love Song” and “Modern Love Is Automatic” tackle the theme of the mundane meeting the fantastical, I think this complex and arresting image is a great fit for the album.

While their self-titled debut spawned multiple recognizable hits, A Flock of Seagulls never came anywhere close to recapturing its success. For the most part, they struggled to remain relevant as time wore on, largely abandoning the sonic footprint of their first album, and chasing after new trends in music technology such as digital synthesisers. They would eventually break up during the mid-1980s, and though they’ve reunited in order to perform live several times, the book is probably closed on A Flock of Seagulls. Personally, I can’t help but wonder what might have been if they had stuck to their musical roots a bit more. You get a bit of that on their third LP, 1984’s The Story of a Young Heart, which thankfully brings back that iconic echoing guitar, and does so without sounding too much like a simple retread of “I Ran.” Out of all their other work, it’s the album I would most recommend to admirers of this debut LP.

Music: “Remember David”

My favourite track on A Flock of Seagulls’ debut LP is “Messages”--not to be confused with the track of the same name by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark! Moreso than anything else on the album, “Messages” has this aggressive, insistent, driving quality, and feels less like yacht rock, and more like punk rock. Despite not being released as a single, I think it’s a very strong track that’s quite easy to get into. That’s everything for today--thanks for listening!

Music: “Messages”

[justforbooks]

I’ve been trying to remember, was it The Sorrow And The Pity they were lining up for when, sick to death of the medium-is-the-message windbaggery of the pseudo-intellectual – now there’s a term to blast me back – in front of him, Alvy actually produces Marshall McLuhan from behind a lobby card? The association strikes me as a natural one, since I’m about to gather with the other acolytes in an art house cinema. Will anyone in the queue reference or be moved to imitate the McLuhan moment, I wonder?

And where were they? Was it at the Regency at 68th street? (Was it even called the Regency? It hardly matters, since it’s gone now, like the New Yorker at 88th, the movie house at 72nd and Broadway, the Thalia {{which does show up at the very end of the movie, when he runs into Annie after they’ve stopped dating and introduces her to a young, young Sigourney Weaver, fresh out of Yale}}, the Metro, the Bleecker and, of course, Theater 80. With all the rep houses having ceded their real estate to condos and their authority to Netflix, who is curating the tastes of the city’s undergraduates? How will they even know about The Sorrow And The Pity? Mondo Cane? How can the budding homosexual flower without the occasional force-feeding of a double feature of Now Voyager and All About Eve? To wit – and to extend this parenthetical yet further: in senior year, at the last meeting of our Japanese literature seminar before Spring break, the professor – ageing, erudite, one of the few, perhaps only, Western recipients of countless Japanese cultural laurels – asked us our plans for the coming week. I allowed as how I would be staying in town in order to write my thesis. ‘Well then, of course you’ll be going to the Bette Davis festival every day down at the Embassy.’ He said it as if stating an obvious prescription, like recommending medical attention for a sucking chest wound, or ‘You’ll want to call the fire department about those flames licking up the front of your house.’ Only a self-destructive lunatic would think he could survive the week by missing the Bette Davis festival. I took his advice and went every day. Did it help my thesis any? Hard to say. It was a long time ago.)

The time when a Woody Allen retrospective would have evoked that kind of fierce cinéaste devotion seems long gone, having been tempered out of us not just by the years (such performative loyalty is really the province of the youngsters who nightly go to Irving Plaza right near my apartment, passing the hours sitting on the pavement singing the songs of the artists they are about to see), but by Woody Allen himself. The tsunami of mediocrities like Hollywood Ending and Melinda And Melinda effectively obliterates why Manhattan mattered so much. I can’t help feeling like he’s dismantled the very admirable legacy of his earlier work by his later, overly prolific efforts. It’s a more benign version of Ralph Nader (with the key difference that I hate Ralph Nader, whereas Woody Allen simply makes me a little bit sad).

Then again, no one worth a damn doesn’t make the occasional bit of bad work: there are episodes of The Judy Garland Show that are absolute train wrecks of creaky squareness, made all the more ghoulish by the presence of an aphasic gin-soaked Peter Lawford, and I take a back seat to no one in my love for Judy Garland, the most talented individual who ever lived (ladies and gentlemen, my Kinsey placement); I read a lousy late Edith Wharton novel this summer, The Children, that was a tone-deaf, treacly muddle; I don’t care for Balanchine’s Scherzo à la Russe and I’ve said it before, even though it is considered a cinematically signal moment by the Cahiers du Cinema crowd (zzzzzzz), I’m no great fan of the movie Kiss Me Deadly.

Perhaps taken as a whole, the twenty-eight films will start to exert their own internal logic and I will see and delight in how Allen mines his themes over and over again. Or perhaps it will be like the Broadway show Fosse, where a surfeit of the choreographer’s vocabulary made all of it suffer and the entire thing looked like the kind of shitty entertainment that takes place on a raised, round, carpeted platform at a car show. I’ll see, I guess.

As one might expect for the 1:30 p.m. showing on the Friday before Christmas, there are only about a dozen of us waiting. Our ranks swell to about thirty people closer to show time, but at first it’s just me and more than a few men of a certain age (whose ranks I join with ever greater legitimacy each day), about whom it might be reasonably assumed that we spend an inordinate amount of time fixating on when next we might need to pee. Thoughts of age stay at the forefront in the first few minutes of the film, when Woody Allen himself (who, it must be said, in later scenes, stripped down to boxers, kind of had a rocking little body in his day) addresses the camera directly and tells us that he just turned forty. I’m older than that by two years.

How many times have I seen this, I wonder? Unquantifiable. The film is canonical and familiar and memorized, almost to the point of ritual. Perhaps this is the spiritual solace the faithful find in the formulaic rhythms of liturgy. It’s as comforting as stepping into a warm bath. Diane Keaton is enchanting, there is no other word for it. She comes on the screen and you can hear the slightest creaking in the audience as corners of mouths turn up. There is Christopher Walken, a peach-fuzzed stripling. And there, doe-eyed, with drum-tight skin: Carol Kane playing Alvy’s first wife, Allison Portchnik.

Allison Portchnik. Oy. I am generally known as an unfailingly appropriate fellow. I have very good manners. But when I fuck up, I fuck up big time. Suddenly I am reminded of how, three years ago, I was on a story for an adventure magazine, an environmental consciousness-raising whitewater-rafting expedition in Chilean Patagonia (about which the less said the better. It’s really scary. Others may call it exhilarating, and I suppose it is, the way having a bone marrow test finally over and done with is exhilarating. And Patagonia, Chilean Patagonia at least, while pretty, isn’t one tenth as breathtaking as British Columbia). On the trip with me were Bobby Kennedy, Jr., hotelier André Balazs and Glenn Close, among others. Everyone was very nice, I hasten to add.

After lunch one day, my friend Chris, the photographer on the story, came up to me and said, ‘I’d lay off the Kennedy assassination jokes if I were you.’

I laughed, but Chris reiterated, not joking this time. ‘No, I’d really lay off the Kennedy assassination jokes. The lunch line . . .’ he reminded me.

And then I remembered. I had been dreading this trip (see above about how totally justified I was in my trepidation) for weeks beforehand, terrified by the off-the-grid distance of this Chilean river, a full three days of travel away; terrified of the rapids and their aqueous meatgrinder properties; terrified of just being out of New York. All of this terror I took and disguised as an affronted sense of moral outrage, that such trips were frivolous, given the terrible global situation. I explained it to Glenn Close thusly:

‘I was using the war in Iraq to try and avoid coming down here,’ suddenly, unthinkingly invoking the part of Annie Hall where Alvy breaks off from kissing Allison because he’s distracted by niggling doubts: if the motorcade was driving past the Texas Book Depository, how could Oswald, a poor marksman, have made his shot? Surely there was a conspiracy afoot. Then, with Bobby Kennedy, Jr. helping himself to three-bean salad on the lunch line not five feet away, I switched into my Carol Kane as Allison Portchnik voice and said, ‘You’re using the Kennedy Assassination as an excuse to avoid having sex with me.’ Then I followed that up with my Woody Allen imitation and finished out the scene. Nice. No one pointed out my gaffe or was anything other than gracious and delightful.

Despite how well I know the material, the film feels so fresh. All the observations and jokes feel like they’re being made for the first time, or are at least in their infancy. By later films they will feel hackneyed (in the movie Funny Girl, the process of calcification is even more accelerated. You get back from intermission and Barbra Streisand already feels like too big a star, a drag version of herself ), but here it’s all just terrifically entertaining. And current! Alvy tells his friend Max that he feels that the rest of the country turning its back on the city – It’s the mid-70s. Gerald Ford to New York: Drop Dead, and all that jazz – is anti-Semitic in nature. That we are seen as left-wing, Communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. And so we remain, at least in the eyes of Washington and elsewhere, a pervy bastion of surrender monkeys. There was an Onion headline that ran after a sufficient interval of time had passed post-9/11, that essentially read, ‘Rest of country’s temporary love affair with New York officially over.’

Rest of the country’s perhaps, but mine was just beginning when I saw the film at age eleven. By the time the voiceover gets to the coda about how we throw ourselves over and over again into love affairs despite their almost inevitable disappointments and heartbreak because, like the joke says, ‘we need the eggs,’ (if you need the set-up to the punchline, what on earth are you doing reading this?) I am weepy with love for the city. Although, truth be told, it doesn’t take much to get my New York waterworks going.

Walking out, my friend Rick, thirtyplus years resident said, ‘I had forgotten how Jewish a film it is.’ I really hadn’t noticed. But I’m the wrong guy to ask. It’s like saying to a fish, ‘Do things around here seem really wet to you?’ I wrote a book that got translated into German a few years back. There was a fascination among the Germans with what they perceived as my Jewish sensibility; a living example of the extirpated culture. I’ve said this before, but I felt like the walking illustration of that old joke about the suburbs being the place where they chop down all the trees and then name the streets after them. At least a dozen of the reviews referred to me as a ‘stadtneurotiker’, an urban neurotic, a designation that pleased me, I won’t lie. Especially when I found out the German title for Annie Hall.

Der Stadtneurotiker.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[mrmichaelchadler]

Twilight Turns Ten: What the Response to a Hit Franchise Tells Us About Who’s Allowed to be a Tastemaker

Ten years ago, the world was deep in the grip of a new film obsession called “Twilight,” released on November 21, 2008.

While the four-book series by Stephenie Meyer about the romance between a human teenager and a vampire was already extremely popular with its audience of teenage girls (and at times older women who were affectionately called “Twimoms”), the film opened it up to as-yet-untapped fans. With the good looks of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart gazing out from posters, the “Twilight” universe multiplied its fanbase tenfold.

Which also, naturally, opened up the fandom to as-yet unprecedented levels of hate. The book series had attracted some ire but mostly flown under the radar, whereas the worldwide, mainstream obsession with “Twilight” that followed the film's release attracted more haters than anyone could expect. Of course, this isn’t unusual for hit franchises. The success of "Star Wars," the Marvel universe, and Harry Potter have all taken their fair share of derision for A) not being “real” cinema and B) being grotesquely successful. But the way that “Twilight” is despised is uniquely gendered, with detractors mostly not dismissing it for its poor writing or filmmaking, but because of the teenage, largely female fans who propelled it past mere hit and into obsession.

“Twilight” was mostly criticized for one of two things: not being scary enough and not being sexy enough. It was almost forgotten that this film was aimed at tween-to-teenage girls, and was about young, female desire; crushes, lust and the fear of unprotected sex. It didn’t have to be horrific. It did exactly what it intended to: give teen girls someone to swoon over, a female lead to see themselves in, and a fantasy to get lost in that ultimately is safer than actually talking to a boy in real life.

The very concept of “Twilight” seemed to offend some critics. Manohla Dargis' review in the New York Times barely managed to contain its disregard, even discussing Bella’s inner monologue like so: “oh-so-confusing feelings, like, OMG he’s SO HOT!! Does he like ME?? Will he KILL me??? I don’t CARE!!! :)” It’s a barely concealed, vaguely misogynistic jab at Bella’s teenage feminine desire and the way that girls allegedly speak.

Empire’s Will Lawrence was more fair, but did call it “a sometimes girlie swirl of obsession”; Rafer Guzman said in Newsday that "Twilight" “seems best left to its impressionable teenage fans”; Edward Douglas for ShockTillYouDrop.com said it was “catering to the gooey-eyed fans of Meyer's novels and their unrealistic romantic expectations”; and many of the other reviews collated on Rotten Tomatoes mention the teenage fans disparagingly, with many others peppering in a "LOL." Only Roger Ebert appeared to discuss the fans without derision in his review, saying “'Twilight' will mesmerize its target audience, 16-year-old girls” and closing with “I understand who 'Twilight' appeals to, and it sure will.” His review shows that he understands that “Twilight” is not for him, but that he respects the people it is for.

“Twilight” started one of the highest-grossing franchises of all time; the books and the film series have made Stephenie Meyer millions. It ushered in a new era for fandom, with fans battling it out between themselves as members of Team Edward or Team Jacob. “Twilight” was, by all accounts, an incredibly fruitful and beloved franchise—a success. But throughout the reviews, and throughout popular opinion, the vitriol directed at those fans indicates that its fans are not only wrong to love “Twilight,” but that their obsession is somehow dangerous. Their love, essentially, means nothing—because they are brainless consumers powered only by their hormones, not valued tastemakers.

But it wasn’t just the reviewers who hated “Twilight.” Even star Kristen Stewart actively tried to separate herself from the series to become a more “serious” actress; Robert Pattinson often laughs about it in interviews, going as far as to say that were he not in “Twilight,” he would “mindlessly hate it.” At the time of the film’s release, there were entire communities dedicated to tearing apart “Twilight” as avidly, if not more so, than its perceived “obsessive” fans; anti-fans called it “Twatlight” and its fans “Twitards.” They read the books and watch the films, if only to go online and mock the series. They go as far as to produce their own fan fiction; such as New Moan: The First Book in the Twishite Saga, a parody rewrite of Twilight, and videos and memes online such as "Twilight" in 15 Minutes and Buffy vs Edward, putting obsessive effort into their hatred. Stephen King even called “Twilight” “tweenager porn,” further legitimizing the idea that teenage girls cannot be tastemakers. The public assumption that “Twilight is bad” served only to reinforce the idea that teenage girls are stupid and it’s OK to laugh at their interests. In the late 2000s, hatred of “Twilight” became a public performance of othering; you were either stupid for liking it, or smart for hating it. There was no in-between.

The fever surrounding “Twilight” was akin to the one surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey in 2012, as was the vitriolic hatred. The audience was slightly different; Grey, originally a Twilight fan fiction, appealed to an older audience. But both deal directly with the awakening of female desire and were feverishly adored by women. But instead of stepping away and saying, “this is not meant for me,” in both instances, detractors went public with their hatred. 

This is not something seen in media for boys that is frivolous or full of plot holes or poorly written. Huge franchises like "Star Wars" or "The Avengers," which are also designed mostly for male teens, are perfectly acceptable media for adults to consume and pick apart critically. But when a new Marvel film is released, even when it is poorly reviewed, there is nothing near the level of public takedown that “Twilight” attracted. Mediocre, even bad, films for men and boys are allowed to be enjoyed as disposable entertainment or at least fade into obscurity. 

That is not to say “Twilight” is perfect. Its lack of diversity, its absence of a sense of humor about itself, and its monochrome brooding make it both anachronistic and unwatchable for many. The film's treatment of female desire, its message being that abstinence is the only way to not get killed, is perhaps even dangerous for young women to watch. And Edward’s choice to attend high school as a man of over a hundred years old is nothing short of creepy, especially in a post-#MeToo era. But it offered something to a generation of teenage girls: an outlet for their burgeoning desires, a way of understanding the world, a heroine as plain and quiet as they felt. It seems strange that outlet is through a film that seems to be a rally cry for abstinence, but still. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” despite being critically acclaimed, tells women that bad things will happen if they have sex with vampires, too.

That isn’t to say, either, that we can’t say we don’t like films aimed at women and girls. But we need to think of a few things first: Why do we hate it? Because other people love it? Because its content is twee, or romantic, or campy, or anything else associated with young women? Were this a film aimed at men but similarly poorly written with campy acting, would we feel so much hate? It isn’t that people hated “Twilight”—it’s the gendered nature and language of that hatred.

“Twilight” is but a blip on the cultural map now, but a punchline still. It serves as a lesson for how we treat female fans, and ten years on, we seem to be making some headway in allowing teen girls to be tastemakers. Their raw, relentless passion doesn’t mean they somehow haven’t dissected their decision to love something: fans can be as smart in their love as any cynic can be in their hate. It’s just a shame nobody realized that when the Twihards were being eviscerated on forums just for purely loving something.

  from All Content https://ift.tt/2QXI3BD