#if I was trying to write a parody of a pop song I would use these lyrics

[runawaymarbles]

not to sound overdramatic but I do actually think “I’m Good (Blue)” by David Guetta and Bebe Rexha is violence against music, actually

[katethevampire]

All right so the new episodes just came out like 20 minutes ago for me (oh yeah me from the future here it ended up taking me about 3 hours to finish watching the episodes cuz I kept pausing to write stuff in between so uh yeah lol) so everything under the cut will be my live reaction to everything. I'll add time stamps so you know where I'm at in the episodes. I can guarantee you that I will be sticking to my promise about potentially eating paper if I'm wrong about Sir Pentious not dying. Which honestly now I'm not sure if anyone will die, it was pretty much confirmed in a live stream that angel dust isn't going to be the one to die so my money is on one of the Angels. Also I'm using voice to text and while I'll try and fix any misspellings or wrong words I might miss them.

LOTS OF SWEARING PROBABLY also I very much abuse capslock

EPISODE 7

00:51- I love Sir Pentious looking at Keke I just thought I should mention that

01:03- OH MY GOD NO KEKE MOVED TO HIS LAP AND HE'S PETTING HER I LOVE HIM SM

01:10 aw Alastor was sleepy you guys woke him up!

01:22- I CAN'T EVEN APPRECIATE RAZZLE AND DAZZLE BEING CUTE CHARLIE IS CRYING

01:29- he did the gay little hand thing

01:50- okay so I've already seen this part because of the small leak but I cannot get over the fact that Alastor has his shoes on the bed!! Like man take those off you're getting it dirty!!!!

01:59- mfs kicking his feet on the bed acting like a high school girl about to ask out her crush on the phone at a sleepover like dude you're a serial killer you can't do this to me 😭 also I should probably slow down cuz I'm making an update literally every 2 seconds

02:18 BROS CHECKING HIS NAILS AND DOING THAT POSE WHILE MAKING FUN OF HER ABOUT THE FACT THAT SHE UNINTENTIONALLY MIGHT HAVE CAUSED THE DEATHS OF MILLIONS 💀💀💀 so fruity i love

2:33- Alasto be like "it's called masking deary. Ever heard of it?"

2:44- if he wasn't saying this in such an evil manner right now I'd be saying he's so me frfr

3:07- what do I even say to that line. He popped off but also like respectfully I think I've heard a third grader say the exact same thing

3:53- OKAY SO I WAS GOING TO SAY SOMETHING BUT I'VE COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN LOOK AT THIS FRAME, this could easily be the profile picture for someone's film review channel and I'm not 100% sure that people will understand what I mean by that unless you know a very specific person

04:38- Alastor is in his hat man era

4:33- okay so a few things, thank you subtitles for telling me that the music is edgy I feel like just the word tense would have worked on its own but I appreciate it nonetheless. Number two, I don't like seeing the girlies be mad at each other :(

05:34 I will support my boy Sir Pentious through and through he did nothing wrong!!

06:54- not the voice I was expecting for Rosie but pop up Queen she speaks the truth

07:24- ROSIE KNOWS WHAT YOU ARE ALASTOR. Also his confusion, I love him so much

11:04- she's kind of like that one Pokemon

Ad time!- I DON'T CARE ABOUT VITAMIN PILLS THAT DOUBLE MY LIFESPAN

11:13- catabettes! Cannibals and catabettes!!! This is going into my vocabulary from now on. Also this frame that I paused at I love her face.

11:57- ugh, susan. All my homies hate Susan

12:54- I have a dream, I'm here to cause a scandal in the cannibal square

13:37- :( well it wasn't obvious to me I just thought the x over the eye was to look cool :(

14:35- SONG FUCK YEAH

15:26 If this song came out years ago I know for a fact there would have been an undertale parody version of it. Also I just got a cosmic brownie and some chocolate milk let's go guys we're eating good tonight

16:00 HOLY FUCKING SHIT SHE CAN JUST GROW BACK HER WINGS

16:30- therapist Rosie is not something I thought I'd be seeing today but honestly I love it. Also I don't think I'm going to be able to finish these episodes today because I'm only a little over 15 minutes through and I've been watching for like almost over half an hour and also I just realized that what if Lucifer is the one that dies?

18:12 ALASTOR GAVE HER HIS MICROPHONE I'M GOING TO EXPLODE INTO A BAJILLION CRYING PIECES RAHHHHHH

19:38 I'm going crazy I'm going insane right now bro literally what how I don't know what to say I love this act I don't know, it's just really good I don't know what to say like this is cool I don't I DON'T KNOW! IT'S I I LIKE IT everybody in cannibal town is cool and I like them and it's like 10 seconds later now and they're literally So based like free food like so me I don't know I'm just rambling at this point

20:56 ALASTOR AND ROSIE'S LITTLE DANCE THEIR LITTLE TIPPY TAPS OH MY GOD YES

21:06- alastor, you know it's not right to make someone your political puppet. Your little dances are cute though so I'll allow it for now.

I don't know why it thought I was speaking Spanish for a second but anyways that episode was really cute and good and I liked it but I'm also scared for the next episode cuz like now I'm wondering is someone actually going to die or were people just lying. I feel like either Adam is going to be the one to die or it's going to be Lucifer cuz they mentioned a lot in the previous episode about how Charlie needs to take up the throne and get ready to take her place on the throne like why does she need to take her place on the throne? Isn't that her dad's job??? Please don't kill Lucifer off please please please 🙏 also I'm still not on board and probably will never will be on the whole political puppet thing. Like I just know I just have a feeling in my bones that alastor's favor is going to be something like "Let me be the ruler of hell lololol" or something anyways

EPISODE 8

01:01-Why are you watching other men get fucked?🤨 (/j)

01:19 🥺 I love 🥺 I oove him so 🥺 so much 🥺🥺🥺 does he have a spatula like spongebob

02:02- wait so how is Vox watching them like does he have bug cameras in the air like those little guys in v3 (woah now I have to put a Danganronpa spoiler on this)

03:42 SOFT ALASTOR FANFICTION WRITERS QUICK WRITE THAT DOWN WRITE THAT DOWN!!!

04:18- I'm not even the biggest huskerdust shipper but awwwww also I don't ship him with anyone but I just want to see Sir Pentious happy pleaseeee also the little Melody of loser baby in the background

04:48- ugh I am clutching my heart right now Sir Pentious is my SON and I LOVE HIM

04:58- what the fuck that ao3 tag was canon this WHOLE TIME???? WHEN DID YOU GUYS HEAR ABOUT THIS?????

05:05- I told you angel dust wasn't going to die

05:38- it's like the song but different! Reprise it's called a reprise also is Mimzy gonna come back

07:15- Vox, you know that you guys are going to die if they lose too right?

Okay I can't timestamp this cuz I'll just be pausing every 2 seconds but just know that everything I'm saying after this is from 07:52 to whatever number I put after later right here->09:47

Okay, so this might be a weird comparison but you know like My Little pony Battle scenes? This feels like that in the very best way possible where they have the scenes with all the different characters fighting with the different music.

Oh my God yes Cherry bomb and angel dust I love them also that was a fire transition also I JUST NOTICED THAT SIR PENTIOUS HAT ALSO HAS THE EYE DOES HE JUST HAVE I HATS FOR EVERY OCCASION

Uh oh Adams angry he's going to do a my hero academia

Oh shit it actually worked that's not good.

I TOLD YOU I CALLED IT VOX IS HORNY

Oh my God that is such a cool shot guys someone should make that frame of Alastor their computer background

OH MY GOD WHOEVER ANIMATED THAT SCENE I LOVE YOU I'M LITERALLY GIVING YOU A METAPHORICAL KISS ON THE MOUTH IN THE PLATONIC SENSE ALASTOR LOOKED SO COOL

Guys I think Adam's going to die

😨 okay so Alastor's microphone just broke and I paused it to add that emoji but as I did the people I live with got home so I'm going to have to pause it for there? I'll update if I get prime working on my phone. Also isn't alastor's microphone alive? Maybe that's the character that died.

Update: all right I got it set up on my phone about 30 minutes later now we're resuming

09:47- okay so I think it's interesting that Alastor pretty much lost all his powers as soon as his microphone broke, my guess is probably that whoever has his soul (lilith, eve, or anyone else) gave the mic to him.

09:53- I like the detail that Alastor is still smiling even though he literally just got slammed against the wall, also Vox has the biggest hate boner for Alastor like

10:02- Alastor: "Have to disagree with you there, radio's not dead." Hun you are bleeding out I'm sorry but I don't think you can gaslight girlboss your way out of this one, also I'm sorry to tell you but the only thing they play on my local radio station now besides music is like, a show that's only on at like 7 in the morning where people call to complain about how their husband wraps Christmas presents

10:38- haha silly also EGGS!!

10:43- NO WAIT MY BRAIN DIDN'T REGISTER THAT THAT EGG WAS CRACKED THEY KILLED THE FUCKING EGG!!!!!! Angel, kill them.

11:12- no no no Sir Pentious you better not I don't want to eat paper

11:21- good for him

11:44- NO GOD DAMN IT PLEASE HAVE A REVEAL THAT ALASTOR OR LUCIFER OR SOMEONE ELSE SAVED HIM PLEASE 🙏🙏🙏 I AM BEGGING ON MY HANDS AND KNEES

12:03- okay this is really cool but is he actually dead cuz I'll legitimately be really sad if so

12:50- *that one vine* "*gasp* Adam."

13:23- KILL HIS ASS CHARLIE

14:12 yes Vaggie, queen shit

SIR PENTIOUS ARE YOU DEAD /J OR /SRS?????

14:35 I KNEW IT I KNOW HE WAS GOING TO COME BACK I MEAN I GOT KIND OF SPOILED CUZ I I SAW THE COVER OF THE EPISODE BUT WOAH 10/10 ENTRANCE

14:44- gasp! His face!

15:00- he is, so stupid. I love him.

15:51-okay I went quiet for a minute cuz there were so much happening but oh my God what do I even say this is just so cool also I don't know if this is intentional or not but the blood stain on Charlie's hair is shaped like an apple

16:34- NIFFTY RAHHHHHHH

17:08- wait okay I had a brief thought that maybe lute was actually Eve but I think I'm wrong on that

17:13- Sir Pentious would've liked pancakes :((((((

Ad Time! I don't care about hard Rock Cafe I just want to know whether or not Sir Pentious is actually dead please I'm going through all the stages of grief right now and Brandan Rogers just came on my screen as Katie killjoy please

18:04- Keke :(

Oh my God they're going to find him in the rubble right? ... Right?? Right guys right???????

18:10- fat nuggets survived that's good I see a rock that looks suspiciously shaped like Sir Pentious military hat whoa guys I wonder if that means anything and it looks like it's up like someone is standing? Whoa I wonder if they'll check behind that rock please

18:16- wait is he actually dead I'm genuinely about to cry

19:16- I am not crying about his death until the episode ends I am not crying until it is 100% CONFIRMED that he died

20:50- omg alastor's alive, he's in his Jack's skeleton era that means that maybe Sir Pentious is also-

21:08- friends :) he said friends just saying

22:04- I TOLD YOU I FUCKING TOLD YOU I TOLD YOU THAT BY DYING IT WAS JUST A CHARACTER BEING REDEEMED I TOLD YOU I'M SO SMART I'M NOT EATING PAPER HAHAHAHAHA I'M THE GREATEST MAN ALIVE HE'S NOT DEAD MY SNAKE BOY ISN'T DEAD HOW DID I GET SO ATTACHED TO HIM I DON'T KNOW BUT I LOVE HIM YES I CAN'T EXPRESS MY EMOTIONS RIGHT NOW I'M GENUINELY SO HAPPY THIS IS WHY THIS IS WHY I WAITED UNTIL THE VERY END TO CRY ABOUT HIM I KNEW HE WASN'T GOING TO BE DEAD THEY WOULDN'T KILL HIM OFF THEY WOULDN'T KILL MY SNAKE BOY OFF JUST LIKE THAT

22:34- you're telling me Lilith was just doing hot girl shit on the beach for 7 years.

[mywifeleftme]

363: R.E.M. // Murmur

Murmur R.E.M. 1983, IRS

Some Short, Disconnected Statements on the Matter of Murmur

1. Insert the following into Waring blender

The Velvet Underground, Pylon, the Byrds, Gang of Four, Patti Smith, the Feelies, Joy Division, the Method Actors, Big Star, the dB’s, the Monkees. Press “Blend” button. (I’ve never owned a blender; I don’t know what the buttons say.)

2. Easy formula for a great band

Having one temperamental genius songwriter guy sounds kind of hard to maintain. Have you considered simply getting four people who are really excellent and distinctive at the respective things they do (at least three of them great singers), who all write well, get along, lack substance abuse issues, have good taste, and modest egos? Why don’t more bands do this?

3. Notes on the early discourse

A lot of the things people wrote back in the early ‘80s to champion this band were dumb as hell. R.E.M. weren’t good because they didn’t use keyboards or synths; pop music didn’t need to be returned to its "honest" folk-rock roots; giving them a thumbs up for not wearing flashy clothes and makeup is dork behaviour.

They were good because they made weird music that derived organically from their time (early ‘80s), place (a college town in the South), and selves (bright, independent, adventurous, sincere, ¼ gay).

Anyone who listened to Chronic Town or Murmur, with their post-punky murk and lyrical references to Laocoön and Marat, and thought to themselves, “As yes, the second coming of Roger McGuinn, this will put those effete new wavers to flight,” was an idiot.

4. Veteran of the psychic war

Somewhere around age 22, R.E.M. took over the mantle Metallica had held as My Favourite Band in the World Forever and Ever, and I proceeded to be almost as annoying about them as I had been Hetfield and the boys. I posted a lot about them; rigged “best music” polls on random message boards I didn’t even post on in their favour; cornered people at parties; crowbarred them into playlists; grumpily chose to dislike bands I saw as stealing their shine; etc. etc. Some (some) of this is maybe cute in retrospect, but really: don’t be like this about music. If you love a band this much, learn how to play their songs on an instrument; write a few poems; paint something. Worst case: review them.

5. Learning nothing, 2024

6. Athens: Lyrics & Enunciation

The matter of what exactly Stipe was singing on the early R.E.M. records was a subject of intense speculation, and eventually, parody. Some of the mystery’s in the mixing, some’s in his Georgian accent, and some’s in his enunciation (never quite as mushy as people claimed, but not exactly Ella Fitzgerald either). But most of it’s in the arbitrary decisions he makes with regard to syntax that cause even accurate transcriptions to seem implausible. Stipe is probably a little bit autistic, which goes some way to explaining the impressionistic intuitiveness of his words, and also went to art school, which fetishizes that sort of thing, but he was always shy of people seeing the words to something like “Sitting Still” on the page because he thought he might be exposed as a nincompoop. “Up to par and Katie bars / The kitchen side, but not me in / Sitting top of the big hill / Waste of time sitting still,” goes the chorus, according to at least one gnostic sect, but the important passage is the one everyone agrees on, when the stream of impassioned babble releases into a howled “I can hear you / Can you hear me?”

Later on, when he would sing more clearly over airy arrangements, with the lyrics neatly printed in the booklet, he’d occasionally try one of those old sound-over-sense moves and embarrass himself (“Leaving New York was never my proud” still rankles). But Murmur’s eternal elusiveness is in the way fragments of sense catch your ear from out of its sleeptalk glossolalia:

“The pilgrimage has gained momentum” “Conversation fear” “Lighted, lighted / Laughing in tune” “Hear the howl of the rope / A question” “A perfect circle of acquaintances and friends / Drink another, coin a phrase” “Shaking through / Opportune” “Take oasis” “Heaven assumes / Shoulders high in the room” “Did we miss anything?”

7. Permission to be arbitrary

I remember sitting in the basement of my college house with my old hometown buddy Brad (mostly a metal/classic rock guy), playing him “Shaking Through” and explaining one of the things I love about old R.E.M. is that it’s great music to yell to. I don’t know how much he really got it, but we were drunk and it’s a catchy song, so we howled and made keening, wordless, Stipean noises along with it and the next few until one of my roommates came and asked us to keep it down.

Also: one theory for why cats purr when they’re injured is that the vibrations somehow reduce pain and encourage healing. From many experiences humming these songs while wrapped up in headphones and bedsheets in the middle of a day that’s passing like a kidney stone, I can confirm.

8. Note on the modern discourse: Influence?

Black Francis, Kurt Cobain, Bob Mould, Steve Malkmus, Bob Pollard, and Thom Yorke loved R.E.M. So did, to his own apparent consternation, Metallica’s Cliff Burton. Still, you sit down with someone and listen to those musicians with the goal of showing them the R.E.M. influence (don’t do this, why would you do this?) and it’s honestly pretty oblique. Most of the bands who directly aped aspects of R.E.M.'s early sound were at best pleasantly minor (see Captured Tracks’ Strum & Thrum comp), and the ones who seemed to be listening most closely to their ‘90s efforts were not who you want.

Their ultimate influence was probably simply showing what an art-first, indie-adjacent rock band could accomplish by sticking to their guns and bending the system to their desires instead of being bent by it. They were like a Velvet Underground for the college rock era, except everyone talented who heard them was inspired to start a band that didn’t sound much like them. They always used their spotlight to introduce people to other bands and, when they really got huge, they modeled how to deal with success. There don’t seem to be many R.E.M. stories, Peter Buck’s airplane incident aside, about them being anything other than kind. That’s a fundamentally less exciting type of influence than most other “great” bands have. But I do think it’s kinda cool they were the wise old heads for an entire national movement of alternative music.

8b.

Of course, it still bugs me people don’t think they’re cool. Murmur at least, should be considered cool. And Reckoning, mostly. Chronic Town for sure. Some of Fables. Am I crazy for saying some of Monster and New Adventures even? I’ll stop. I’ll go on.

9(-9). The music

They were a pop band, they were an art band; they sounded like children, and like craggy old men buried in kudzu weed; natural and pretentious; date-stamped and timeless. Decide yourself. Happy 41st birthday Murmur.

363/365

[elzphine]

𝄞⨾𓍢ִ໋ About me! ⭑.ᐟ

This post IS LONGGGG Hi I'm Ella, this page is mainly for me to rant and talk about things I like. Below is more about me as a person and my interests, I do like talking about my personal life to a degree without giving much information out just so you know. Ella isn't my real name either it's a nickname I go by on some of my socials.

Name: Ella

Age: I don't like going into specifics, but I do follow dnf's that restrict certain ages according to my actual age, just keep creepy things to yourself! <3

Just so you know I do tend to overshare on my posts, I try keeping an open mind most times, due to my personality and the way I was brought up I am relatively mean when talking about others even if I don't exactly mean to be. I don't necessarily trash talk people in specific but I tend to be overly honest with people which causes feelings to get hurt etc, etc. I speak what I perceive to be the truth so I lack friends irl..

Personality: It's changed almost every time I took the MBTI test, probably because I took it on 16p.. But I also self typed too and looked into how people who actually are the MBTI I call myself act and respond as a person and compared it with myself I so I guess it's self typing? I don't know. But INTJ is what I find most relatable to myself and how I perceive the world and interact with people. Not too sure of an enneagram I haven't found a free test for that yet.

Interests: Ani-manga, Horror genre things, JJK, PMM, Death note, tbhk, danganronpa. Drawing, Character design, Fanfic reading or writing, world building, character writing, Reality shifting, japanese folklore, I love using folklore when creating characters it is so much fun to interpret and create a design incorporating elements from history, or just irl things in general. I like hazbin hotel, don't come for me I hate the humor in it but I love the idea of the show being an interpretation of heaven and hell and the society in it. Harry potter kind of not really.. Never was much into it. give anime reccomendations pls I need more things to watch!!

Music taste: ANYTHING LITERALLY ANYTHING IM IN THE MOOD FOR I WAS ABLE TO LISTEN TO A 6 MINUTE SONG ABOUT CORNDOGS PERFECTLY FINE IDK HOW. I have bad hyperfixations when I comes to music genres so these are my tops, Emo claimed bands, female manipulator music, pop punk and some hardcore bands, I don't have any at the top of my head, but I was able to listen to black metal, death metal, parody songs the electro swing remix was fire! I can get down to taylor swift and baby shark, I can listen to drill, rap, phonk, songs in spanish or even swedish. country, folk idc. My playlists due to my recent revamp, Are more fixated on ariana grande, sabrina carpenter, mitski, lana, and very few taylor swift, I like alternative music too, I know I'm forgetting so many different genres but those were what I could list off best so keep that in mind. early 2000s-2016 music is top tier fyi. though frank Sinatra is a G oms.

Other random things: I'm all for self improvement and learning more about myself and other topics if I ever magically start liking something you know about by all means info dump, My fav seasons are fall and winter. I'm a winter baby <3 I prefer "cunty" music made by women rather than gay men or trans women (Love y'all too dw.) It just feels more authentic to me if you know what I mean, I can't properly like describe it for some reason but just trust me it's not because I hate that group of people. (I hate everyone equally !!!) I'm a medical NERD, my favorite medical dramas are HOUSE!!! HOUSE I LOVE YOU HOUSE PLS ADOPT ME AND TEACH ME EVERYTHING HE'S THE ICON PLEASE PLEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASE. He's funny and I love his way of thinking. (I just realized we have the same personality type live laugh love that!!) My personality does kind of differ online due to the character limits on tumblr, because if it were up to me every one of these sections would have 5 different paragraphs per thing thank you. I'm an honors student idk if thats shocking to anyone but yea. This also probably will be more shitposting based just random takes from my perspective like reviews on starbucks drinks and just random events. the format is probably going to be more like, diary like idk? its just me posting my thoughts and leaving it out for you all more anonymously if ykwim? I was bullied all of my elementary years over a single unsanitary habit I had. (Picking my nose, like everyone made a point to leave me out due to this. EVERYONE collectively even when i stopped it still happened.) I'm insanely delusional not in a cute or quirky way like "omg he likes me guys" like no, I convinced myself for a month that I had schizophrenia even though I had 0 symptoms or auditory hallucinations or visual hallucinations. I did constant research and found myself on schizophrenia tiktok. Like dawg is trippin fr fr, overthinking and analyzing every little thing is my favorite hobby, so is daydreaming!! One time during a finance class I had I daydreamed that I was a single mom who lived a walking distance from the beach and I had the job i'm going for in the medical field. I loved that daydream so much, would've preferred to have a partner ngl.

Thanks so much for reading, apologies for it being so long my mind is so rampant and i have so much to say and so much input to give that it kind of gets hard to put it in simple sentences. If you're similar to me please follow and moot me or wtv yall do on tumblr I love people with similar mindsets and aspirations it makes me wanna do better in order to keep up.

[jeanmoreaux]

what do you think of ttpd? would love to hear your thoughts! personally it didn’t hit the spot for me 😫

i am sorry you didn’t enjoy it as much as you hoped!! that’s always a bummer :/ i have to say the album and it’s 31 tracks kind of steamrolled me djdjjd my first listen i was like 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫 because it was So Much. like. not just a lot of songs to digest but a lot emotionally as well. i think this might be her rawest, most direct piece of work to date. i think she Needed to write this album. desperately so. it’s grappling with a lot of messy things and feelings that are very human while still playing into the mythology of her stardom which creates some fascinating tension (for us listeners a well). it is a little bit in conflict with itself trying to reconcile the person taylor swift with the pop star Taylor Swift, while also not completely aiming for that sort of reconciliation at all, which, in a way, makes it very interesting, artistically speaking. it’s devastating, it’s self-mythologizing, it’s self-aware, it’s delusional, it’s full of highs and lows (very mental illness), it’s raw, it’s messy, it’s heartfelt, it’s pointing fingers at Everyone (including herself), it’s melodramatic and boardering on parody (not necessarily in a bad way. very intentional at times, i think). it’s an agglomeration of so many things. also including old conversations about her (like the victim narrative, searching for love etc) in indirect ways. idk it’s so many things more i haven’t mentioned. it’s supposed to make you uncomfortable and leave you hanging and confuse you a little. i have a hard time doing the album justice because it really feels like i am being reductive trying to put it into words and dissecting it like this.

have to say the vibes definitely drew me in right from the start tho. sonically it really spoke to me. i have to admit though i needed a second and third listen to even start fathoming the album. i liked it on my first listen, but it didn’t blow me away at first??? but now after i sat with it for a bit and had some time to let it sink in, this initial liking is slowly turning into something more. a very complex more. i am sure some songs will become new favourites, while i don’t think i’ll go back to others outside of the context of the album. so from where i stand right now i cannot really make a definitive statement about Any of My Feelings about ttpd, but i can say it elicited a lot of emotions in many different ways and i really appreciate it as an artistic portrait of taylor swift.

[giantkillerjack]

Junji Ito makeup test #1

OR

Figuring out what I need in order to create a music video parody of the song "Gloria" by Laura Branigan, but make it about Tomie. I will be playing the part of a 1980s pop disco singer in the style of Junji Ito. This is high art in progress, people! 😘😂😅

photos of first test:

additional digital notes made using Clip Studio:

main takeaways:

So first off, where the fuck did my stage makeup go??? I had no idea it was missing until today!! I ended up using the makeup from when I used to perform as a mime. (Not a joke, but in a larger, cosmic sense, kind of a joke. 😆 I'll probably do it again sometime. I was adorable as a little soft butch gay mime!)

I now remember why I stopped using the dry cake face paint and switched to wet paint in a tube BUT I CANNOT FIND THE TUBESSS

I'm out of eyeliner in general, but for this, I need some kind of extra thin/fine eyeliner and preferably more than a thimble-full of paint for it.

Maybe I can thin out some matte black face paint and also get like a really nice fine brush? I guess it depends on if the paint is water-soluble.

I should probably check to see if I already have these materials, which would be SO MUCH EASIER IF I COULD FIND MY FUCKING STAGE MAKEUP--

Either way the lines need to be super thin, straight, clean, and parallel to each other. Or I could look at the rougher cross-hatching Ito sometimes uses, but I suspect tidier lines will look best with makeup.

Luckily, I already have an entire burlesque/drag act where I make myself look like a character from a black and white film. Between that and the mime thing, I theoretically have all the white gloves I will ever need lol. I guess I'm going to need white leggings, since the light gray ones won't work for this. Junji Ito is not generally greyscale as much as literally black and white.

Do I own makeup primer? I feel like yes. It definitely sounds like a good idea.

I KNOW FOR A FACT I DIDN'T THROW OUT MY STAGE MAKEUP because I had quality skin-safe glitter in basically every color, and only a FOOL would throw that out!!!!

Gloria is a song from 1983 with disco balls in the music video. Do I want to incorporate more style choices from 1983? Should I buy a wig? Something with shoulder pads maybe?? I guess that means I can keep the thick eyebrows...

Actually upon further research, I do need a sequinned shirt for this. Possibly a sequin leotard with a shiny belt. And leg warmers. OH! And a jacket with just the biggest shoulder pads I can find! Or at least the closest thing I can find to this outfit in one trip to a thrift store

Every 1980s music videos seems to have a person with their hair and clothing flowing in the wind. Now, I could buy a fan. But much funnier and cheaper would be a shot of my hair blowing in the wind that then pans to a friend furiously fanning me with a piece of cardboard or something. (Which means I'd need either two people helping with this shot, or I just have to accept that the shot's going to look kind of blurry by doing the zoom-out in post. Oh gods, I would have to write a proper shot list ahhhhhh--)

Honestly, blurry footage seems fine in some parts. I'm probably going to add some dreamy soft filters anyway to make it look like pre-digital 35mm film from an 80s vid.

I'm going to need some fake blood to splatter at me in the middle of the video. Obviously. So I guess that bit will need to be filmed outside.

The good news is the fact that the nearest easiest filming location for me is a alley full of dumpsters is actually really appropriate for this video. XD

Should I do the distressed eyebrows that a lot of Junji Ito characters have? Note to try that in the next test along with a The Crow-like smile. (My go-to high school Halloween costume. Damn, I have been painting my already pasty-pale face even whiter for a while now! 😅)

Other progress made on this project today:

I recorded myself singing a voice memo along to the rhythm of the karaoke version of Gloria that's on YouTube, but in it, I'm singing in the key that is appropriate to my voice. (A couple half-steps down, I think.)

Next step will be to load that clip onto my computer and adjust the karaoke version to match its pitch. And then like, practice the song with my new personalized backing track.

If i actually finish this, I'll have to re-record the backup vocals to say the right name.

Also the next step will be to see if my interest in this lasts long enough to at least get me to find my frickin' stage makeup.

Additional notes:

The original music video for Holding Out for a Hero is exactly the right energy for this, and now I absolutely need shots of me in front of (badly green-screened) flames, on my knees while singing passionately and directly at the camera and presumably wearing kneepads tbh

Omg what if I included a little "photoshoot" sequence and really fucked with the photos to make them all blurry-body-horror nasty as they flash by real quick?? Get like, a glitch effect in the mix hell yeah 😎😎😎

Edit: Omg i just remembered I have these short-shorts with a reanimator quote on the ass! ("Blasphemy? Before what god?") i know what shorts to wear for this now!!

Oh! Another idea! What if the video starts with me reading Tomie and then closing the book and picking up the nearest microphone-shaped thing and using that to start singing - and every 30 seconds or so of footage, it quietly changes to a different item (one of which is absolute the black wand vibrator that I have XD)

Note: I can easily shorten the song if I only have funny shots planned for like 2/3 of the song length. No need to get too repetitive.

[psalm22-6]

Source: Synapse, the UCSF student newspaper, 1 December 1989 I think the author of this article is now a doctor. 

The Emperor's Hit Musical Librettist Alain Boubill and composer Claude-Michel Schonberg acknowledge that they had many obstacles to overcome in writing "Les Miserables," including the daunting fact that the story of Jean Valjean is nearly sacrosanct in France. Puccini tried to stage it and gave up because it was too complicated.

Upon recognizing this, one wonders why they did not follow their own better sense and leave intact the integrity of Hugo's epic novel. Instead, they insist on reducing the intricate plot to a chaotic heap of melodramatic climaxes with musical numbers that are either mired in banality or so hyperbolic that true sentiment is overcome by kitsch. As a result, all the nuances of the novel disappear and we are left with a pop opera as sketchy and repetitive as a bunch of music videos. 

Hugo wrote "Les Miserables" while in exile during the reign of Napoleon III; he was protesting the egoism of Louis Napoleon and the conformist policies of Classicism in the arts. He had already become the leader of the Romantic movement, which concentrated on the limitations which the real world set upon the individual spirit in its search for an ideal world. Jean Valjean is a real man, tempted by passions, who is surrounded by an imperfect world replete with dissonances, cruelty and evil.

By setting the novel in 1815, only 40 years before he wrote it, Hugo placed imaginative characters in an authentic historical background, adding Homeric grandeur to a recent time period. The plot represented a comment on contemporary society, and the ending, based on Valjean's reformation, was optimistic. 

The current production so commercializes Hugo's original endeavor that it becomes a trite parody. Melodrama stamps out any true emotion, and for lack of good acting as well as an unbearably superficial plot, we do not get to know any of the characters well enough to sympathize with them. Fist-raising students stage a revolution (against exactly what we are never informed), whores lewdly solicit us, and young protagonists sing insipid love ballads about their passionless attraction. The injustices do not rile us, the songs do not make us shiver, as we are rendered insensible by sensationalism and extravagant set concoctions constantly moving off and on stage.

Admittedly, John Napier's set designs and David Hershey's lighting are quite breathtaking, and certainly deserve mention if only for adding visual stimulation and the technical genius needed to keep me from squirming in my seat (the show is three and one half hours long).

Michele Maika shines as Eponine, giving the only individual performance that balanced musical talent with acting ability. Plus she had the best songs by far, including "On My Own," a refreshing opener to Act Two. Richard Kinsey gave the relentless Inspector Javert a correctly threatening presence and did well with the repetitive material and ridiculously meager part he had to play. Gary Beach and Gina Ferrall were excellent as the conniving Thenardiers, adding the only comic elements of the evening.

However, Rich Herbert's falsetto Valjean lacked any of the struggling, compelling personality of Hugo's character. We see none of the Romantic hero's despairing sense of incompatibility with his natural environment and intense identification with the oppressed around him. The Jean Valjean of this production is forgettable and his example of human morality is lost in spectacle.

The score of "Les Miserables" does not come close to hit musicals like "Evita" or "A Chorus Line." The choreography is simplistic and the numbers methodically mimic Andrew Webber. In any case, it is beyond me why anyone would try to create a pop musical based on one of the most literary of French historical novels. Fortunately, the Curran is offering $16 student tickets good for all performances except Friday and Saturday evenings available with valid ID, so that if you still feel compelled to see the musical hit of the year (maybe for lack of competition), disappointment may be a little more palatable.

[mbvvacationbibleschool]

What does the Past say to the Present?

It says "haven't I met you before?"

History is never as simple in the moment as it appears from the lofty perspective of a decade since - where we have categorized individuals and ideas into tidy ideologies, trimmed away the ambiguity, identified key players, and told them what they would say about what they were doing. History ought to be understood on the terms of the time in which it occurred. This is the real trappings of a self-described intellectual or historian who only studies texts written about the past, never the first-hand reports- the things that "went without saying" in the past often went without being said.

To bring Newton or Galileo to the present and celebrate their contributions and legacy, it would be ruined to allow these individuals to speak of their own accord and spoil our notions of what their mighty work meant.

When an artist or an individual is striving towards creating something. . . they inevitably are a product of their own time. Often there is a constellation of individuals and ideas that co-create the flavor of the times, the guiding paradigm of aesthetic. For example, to many people the band "Nirvana" summarizes grunge, invented it, epitomized it, and we need not ask any further questions. Did Kurt Kobain invent the word? Were there other bands in the area participating in a scene with a similar sound? (I'd wager "yes.") Yet as a casual music historian, it is tempting to point to a specific moment in time, a specific individual, who crystalized something out of the platonic hyperspace. Evolution seems to take place in punctuated or abrupt shifts at times, but it also seems to blur the edges of distinction. Which then is more true? Weezer didn't consider themselves to be "grunge," yet they are often lumped in with a constellation of bands that happened to have downtempo rock songs with less punctuated strumming and simple chord voicings, loads of distortion, a distancing from pentatonic scales, and a more raw production than was fashionable in the 80s.

I ought to check my sources before saying things so matter-of-factly. Rivers Cuomo particularly would cite the vocal harmonies of the beach boys, the rock-n-roll heroes like Kiss, and the pop-sensibility of The Cars as the source of their sound. Some people in the 21st century might even consider Weezer to have more in common with pop-punk than grunge, with a song written in 1994 ending up in "2000s rock" playlists that include Blink 182, The Killers, Fall Out Boy. In my opinion, there are better comparisons to Weezer in "Power Pop" groups like Fountains of Wayne, Ozma, Matthew Sweet. I digress.

All this is to say that there is a paradox - do the neat categories we use to parse through nebulous things like aesthetics retrospectively more closely align with the truth than what the artists would use to describe themselves? Why do so many artists resist being classified?

I think I know why.

Once a genre has been distilled into tropes and can be emulated, watered down, mass produced, it has lost what made it so spontaneous and fresh, and the tropes it relies on can seem to be parodies. It has always been the hope of the radical that their movement is immune to being appropriated. It is always the market that wins - when tourists add in a splash of accessibility and hit the airwaves with a caricature.

When I create music I'm usually specifically emulating a style- retreading familiar aesthetic ground- in order to capture the feeling of that moment, or to celebrate that aesthetic or feeling. An homage, an ode to another art piece and how it made me feel. In a sense it is human nature to appropriate. I consciously try to write music that is able to address the anxieties of the 2020s. It would be cool if I could synthesize an idea that could "save the world."

These questions often come to light for me when I try to synthesize or apply ideas from the past to the present. If the ideas of the ideas of the past created the contradictions of the present, do they have anything to say about the present? Can I apply the deconstructive subversion of Avant-garde or Dada to the political schizophrenia of the internet age? Is there a sense in which history is repeating itself in a way that makes these memes and metaphors applicable? Do they speak to a universal "human experience?" Should they be appropriated to the present, or stay in the past? I think it is great to know that we have these ideological tools in the drawer. Some very smart people have said some pretty insightful things. It's just really hard to see what threads of thought that can be traced into the present are worth following, emphasizing, or even where exactly the lines in the sand are drawn.

The everything everywhere all at once-ness of the 2020s makes it extremely difficult to point to an aesthetic and say that it is unique to the time. It has taken until the 2020s for me to be able to parse through and categorize the iconic moments of the late 2010s.

[pwblogarchive]

July 2006

July 1, 2006

“sex and the city (the part theyll never tell you)”

its strange here this time of year. because the weather never changes.it is always summer here. so it doesnt feel like the same desperate love of these three pages on the calendar. or at least not what i am used to.patrick and i wrote a song yesterday. not a hit single or maybe anything that would even turn your head.noone knows how it goes.sometimes the worst wishes are the ones that come true.yellow and white lines to the coast.you can learn to love anything if its around enough.some people learn to love their mistakes.shakes hands. "thank you, our time is up".what keeps you coming back?i got a long rap sheet.(the statute of limitations is running out on you pretty fast).the powders wet. the sparks arent coming.the hammer isnt hitting. its spinning.you can learn to love anything.posted by xo @ 11:22 PM

July 5, 2006

the last thing i think of before i fall asleep and the first thing i think of when i wake

regardless of what stars i end up under- for the best and for the worst- you have made me who i am. and i try to make myself more decent and better only because of you.

haveanicelife

Posted by xoat 6:06 AM

June 5, 2006

Stick around long enough and everyone becomes parody of themselves 

you dont hate me, you hate the part of you that is like me. i cant sit here and ride my flaws until the end because the truth is i live the charmed life because of you and them. we are a gang. maybe its time to disband. im not sure i am thinking clearly but i just want you to know that i waited on you guys calls all night- they never came. i just wanted to say i miss you or im sorry or you know something that would have meant something to you. i would have made it poetic and memorable or at least something you could laugh at while drifting off to sleep. always trying to relive the glory days.

i dont care how poorly these sentences were constructed or how in the light of day i will wish i had not written them- right now i can only curse the fucking light off of this stupid western city because it wont ever get dark enough for sleep but otherwise how could you guide your way back here?

my head always feels warm right before i pass out, i always worry that there is something wrong and i wont wake up or you know i will. promise me that you wont take anything i ever say too seriously.

July 7, 2006

“his and hers”

sometimes i cant wait to be forgotten.i wish i could put up an away message in real life and just go to sleep forever.posted by xo @ 3:10 AM

July 7, 2006

“im so sorry, but not really. ('straighten up and die right’)”

i said i want to be rebuilt like a frank lloyd wright only without all of the water damage. or painted over like a monet only less blurry. she said “no, youre something different”. like what? “something better”. it gave me the rush of warm blood like you see in cartoon dogs right before their eyes pop out and all of the bells go off. my head is spinning like a car off of an icy guardrail. show me what you are made of. your eyes were always rolling but youd tilt your head so they were somehow always still stuck on me (have your cake and eat it too). i feel safe but not like a bet more like the way mothers feel when the lock the car doors in bad neighborhoods. i am blue waves across the red rootlike veins in the bodies drawn flat in medical books. i wonder at the way that someone can write thousands and thousands of pages about my insides. when i met you i gave you a name- not your own- but in my head so i wouldnt ever mix you up with anyone so ordinary- i cant tell you- but to me it meant salvation. you only wanted reaction. but i cant be bothered. not anymore. ill see you in the spring. first pew on the left. wear your white veil and dont forget the words. warped tour. sun drenched days. bestfriends. new roads. so long salvation. dont worry your pretty little heads. i am sleeping safe tonight.

July 8, 2006

“the fraternal order of the handsome boy”

ive been watching you from afar

my breath on the inside window as you walk in from the car

candy caned lies in red and white against clashing patterns bending in and out of understanding.

"youre the stranger ive been dreaming of", stranger than any ive ever known.

love through a telescopic lens. when the air is clear i can see how perfect you are for me.

late at night when the city sleeps i cast a spell on you

to make you think of me the very same way i think of you.

i only love how the words feel in my head when i write them.

fireworks over the valley. how can i tell you i gut people for a living.

that everything you say is likely to end up as evidence when i rewrite history.

over and over again.

how everything you do reminds me of something else, someone else.

how im humble and arrogant at the same time,

chased and never caught.

that i just want to stay up late and wake up early to talk to you.

that i want to show you all of my jealousy and insecurity and have you not care.

youre like a light switch and i just want to turn you on and watch them all shrink away.

the words come out of my fingertips on impulse. it is instinct. my head cant keep up.

i envy the comatose. i admire the bedridden.

i am addicted to the way i feel when i think of you.

"im blowing smoke rings around the moon...."

i wish i was the exact opposite of how the world knows me.

Posted by xoat 2:36 AM

July 11, 2006

we used to talk on the phone every single day (nooneknowshowitreallygoes).

its strange the way people will window shop on your life or score it for style and grace.

my personality and everything about me is just a carefully constructed collage of magazine articles and flashy pictures.

i am (not) real.

sometimes the days spent all by myself in my head are the scariest.

its enough to make you want to pack it up and call it a day.

all i can do is read and write and wait.

ihavecodedmessagesforyou.aretheygettingthrough.

Posted by xoat 6:32 PM

July 14, 2006

a little life, alot of death (i want to be known for my hits not my mrs.)

i should probably not be typing in this mood. i wish there was a lock on the keyboard. it is too enthralling in a state like this. just like all of this has always been. the world around me has changed as if overnight. "for someone so smart you are acting pretty stupid". i cant focus on but like three thoughts in my head but i am compeltely wrapped in them. they keep me warm at night. i pray for something to crash into me and smash me back to something more simple. i pray for fistfights so i cant be knocked out and wake up in the e.r. i wish for disaster so i can be razed. im telling you if i could do any of it again, im pretty sure i wouldnt.

fuck your life under the microscope.

fuck your conclusions.

you have no idea.

it never got me anywhere but here.

over and over again.

every single time.

i wish for five months ago. and not in the way you would imagine either. "you are unfixable". my eyes are washed out but they dont feel clean. they are strong you know not the athletic type, but could definitely used to carrying heavy bags. im guessing in any real light i will delete this, apologies in advance. whatever caption is written next to the picture is the exact opposite of me. i am mapless. you are caught. lets go out and get forgotten.

bad news travels fast. and i am the worst of it.

i will always remember the day i met you.

"leave you feelings in your heart boy".

Posted by xoat 12:57 AM

July 22, 2006

“my phone cuts out in the same place every single day ("the gospel of gossip").”

it feels like there is so much to say.but it can only be said in songs.please dont go so quickly."The city with fires of night seemed an archipelagoWomen asked the love and for the dulieBut in my eyes of male horror I rememberThe busy ones of the evening were never prettyThen the day returned but sometimes without sunTo draw up the houses coast at coast at the edge of streetsWhere our lives with the other smilar lives are mislaidLives trailing their shade while passing in the streetIntercalated in the year they was widowed daysBloody and slow Fridays of burialsWhite and whole blacks come from the skies which cryWhen the woman of the devil beat her lover"guillame appolinairesend me a flashlight. i cant seem to find my faith.iwishicould.posted by xo @ 2:17 PM

July 23, 2006

“we used to talk on the phone every single day (nooneknowshowitreallygoes)”

its strange the way people will window shop on your life or score it for style and grace.my personality and everything about me is just a cerfully constructed collage of magazine articles and flashy pictures.i am (not) real.the puppy is purple after spilling a grape soda on himself. he then ate the tropic of cancer by miller. paperback, so i guess it went down easier.sometimes the days spent all by myself in my head are the scariest.its enough to make you want to pack it up and call it a day.all i can do is read and write and wait.ihavecodedmessagesforyou.aretheygettingthrough.posted by xo @ 8:32 PM

July 26, 2006

you spend every waking moment and many sleeping ones thinking of one heart, one person. you let it slip, they let it slip. who knows where it all begins or ends. but as it falls to pieces you keep grabbing them and collecting them less like for a museum of things that used to matter and more like you are going to keep putting it back together. except there are akways a few pieces missing each time. deep breaths. slow your heart beat. the road winds. there was a time before you always felt like this. try to remember pete. you are being pulled in every direction. everything is bigger under the microscope. you want it to be simple. you make it complicated. "hey, pete- i am middle ground. how come we've never met before". sometimes i wish i could re-engineer the path from my heart to the tip of my tongue and let my head have a shot at it. i dont got bigdreams, i just want to be okay. it comes down to my word versus your word versus the worlds word and i dont think i want to anymore. im worn out. my head is full, my eyes are empty. the dog loves the salt in the corners of my eyes and on my cheeks- i am nervous about cutting it from his diet. and i could and should be, and jealous of it, from the children on the street walking hand in hand with their mothers to the homeless man content with his world of a bench. and noone knows the way i spend my nights counting the individuals grains in the tiles in the bathroom, the coolness of the floor the only comfort- or if anyone does they dont want to ehar it, i cant blame you... i dont even want to hear it anymore. in the mornings the world is blurry. it comes in and out of focus. this is when im the worst. when i awake from a dream to realize that none of it was real possibly ever.one of the things stranger than realizing you are alone in this world is realizing that you are not.pupils the size of baby worlds.every bad decision is put on file for later viewing. mapquest your way back to me, take a turn for the worse and then continue for .5 miles.i want to file a restraining order against myself.and i want to be myself again looking at my reflection in your eyes from the first time i failed you. i am nostalgic for disaster. i want it back.he sleeps sound. he has no care for what buzzes and changes in the world around him.because of this i envy him.run away from a city because of one single heartbeat. it doesnt make sense.its not that i dont trust you, actually it is. and i dont trust myself when i think of you. i sell myself out.i wish you were awake right now. i just want to let myself be happy.posted by xo @ 3:53 AM

July 28, 2006

as i run away from everything i have ever known. just whisper in my ear."and the tears come streaming down your facewhen you lose something you can't replacewhen you love some one but it goes to wastecould it be worse?Lights will guide you homeAnd ignite your bonesAnd I will try to fix youHigh up above or down belowWhen you're too in love to let it goBut if you never try you'll never knowJust what you're worthLights will guide you home"so obvious. so much more brilliant than i could ever imagine to be.be bright and shine. its dark. im sorry ive come so off course.tell the pilot to clear us to land in your backyard.posted by xo @ 11:02 PM

July 30, 2006

regardless of what stars i end up under- for the best and for the worst-you have made me who i am. and i try to make myself more decent and better only because of you.happybirthday.posted by xo @ 3:05 PM

[lonelyasawhisper]

Records

Creem, 1st March 1979

The Royal Screw, Part VII

QUEEN Jazz (Elektra)

by Mitch Cohen

For a few weeks in 1978, an FM radio station in New York City was trying, earnestly and imaginatively, to create rock ’n’ roll counter-programming. A ratings turnaround didn’t happen fast enough, so it changed its format to something called “the Rock Champions” (i.e., more AOR elitism). This was around the same time that every film clip of The Yankees on television was scored with “We Are The Champions,” and the movie FM attempted to pass off “We Will Rock You” as the “We Shall Overcome” of the rock revolution. I started to despise Queen; a two-sided platinum single of aristocratic, pompous, triumphof-the-will arrogance in 4/4 time (if marches are to resound over the .airwaves, better Ace Frehley’s “New York Groove” any day) summed up for me the worst in royalist rock, and I couldn’t remember more joyless, numbing, contemptuous music reaching a mass audience. Frankly, I was wary of the implications.

I needn’t have been. I still despise Queen, but their music is so absurdly dull on Jazz, so filled with dumb ideas and imitative posturing, that it’s impossible to feel threatened by a barely competent rock group singing “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” (real 70’s-think: can you imagine a Queen Army, a pack of mascara’d lounge lizards walking in lockstep?). “Fun It” is their disco number for Christ’s sake, and it still sounds like a funeral march, with lyrical babble about dynastic movements. And no lead singer who evokes Joel Grey’s slimy Cabaret smarminess and who writes “the first Moroccan rock ’n’ roll song” (it sounds more like his haftorah) can truly be scary, just genuinely awful.

Queen used to make enjoyably ludicrous records like “Liar” and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and Roy Thomas Baker gave their music an entertaining art-rock veneer that he adapted so successfully for The Cars. But now, even their best jokes—“Let Me Entertain You”, a parody of their own worthlessness; “Dreamer’s Ball,” an extravagantly condescending jazz-blues—are pummeled by the approach to the material. All four of Queen’s writers seem to know what a song is (they’ve learned and stolen from the worst of The Beatles just as Cheap Trick have absorbed and adapted the best) and when to stop, qualities lacking in many of their progressive competitors, and stripped of their pretentious overlays, the tunes on Jazz turn out to be swipes from The Cowsills, “Holly Holy,” Magical Mystery Tour, Disraeli Gears, Mott The Who-ple. If only Queen could lock into the simplest formula without attaching dead weights, if Freddie Mercury weren’t such a screeching bore (even his cock-rock, like “Don’t Stop Me Now,” is flaccid), if their arrangements weren’t on the basic level of Mel Brooks’ “Prisoners Of Love,” then Jazz could be studied as a catalog of pop-rock sources.

Mercury, surprise of surprises, may have turned into the weakest link of the quartet (although the rhythm section does plunge to deeper depths, it does so less frequently); his compositions dominate side one and they are, without exception, earsores: “Mustapha” (the weirdest lead-off track in the history of rock albums?), “Let Me Entertain You” (a pure rocky horrorshow). Guitarist Brian May handles all the jazzing up around here, with his rollin’ and tumblin’ “Dead On Time” and “Dreamer’s Ball,” the only song that even approximates the LP’s title (if Queen pulled a Kiss and released four solo albums, May’d be the best bet (o be their Ace), but as he is also responsible for the sniggery “Fat Bottomed Girls,” it would be a misrepresentation to exempt him from blame.

Maybe Queen thinks all this is funny, that their undisguised condescension (“rock ’n’ roll just pays the bills”) and operatic mannerisms atop a beat more Rockette than rock is entertainment, but it’s not my idea of a good time. For me, their snappiest one-liner is on the inner sleeve: “Written, arranged and performed exclusively by Queen.” As if anyone else would want to.step forward and take credit.

Bonus:

Mail

Creem, 1st May 1979

FAT-MOUTHED BOYS This letter is dedicated to some guy who calls himself Mitch Cohen,' they sapling who dares take credit for the review of the LP Jazz by Queen. (CREEM, March 1979)

The review he presented to us CREEM readers finally solved the mystifying question that has been baffling us since the beginning of time. The question being: Does listening to hours of shit (some assholes prefer to refer to it as "music") performed by such tirds (Or "musicians" as those same ball heads call them) as the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Dead Ted Nugent, and other similar assorted nymphos deteriorate the brains and eardrums of rock critics? For those of you who are suffering from the listed ailments (Or worse. You could be trapped in a closet with a hi-fi crooning Black Sabbath shit), the answer is Y-E-S. That spells yeah.

One of the few remaining remedies for those conditjons is Q U-E-E-N. That spells excellency.

Disco is dying.

Punk is putrid.

But QUEEN is KING.

Fun it.

All Hail Their Majesties,

Fresca A. Randazzo Dover, NH

(And this month's winner in the Critic Hatred Sweepstakes is Mitch Cohen! Previous record holder Billy Altman distinguished himself with the hate mail received after his Who Are You review. Queen fans: we wanted to run some representative of your many amusing letters, and this is it; unfortunately the rest concentrate on what you see as Mr. Cohen's sexual and medical problems, and are hopelessly rank with spittle, with nary a defense of their music. Instructive, no?—Ed.)

THAT'S NOT A BANANA... Hey! RE: Your review-putdowns of Queen's latest, Jazz in your March issue:!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YOU'RE SO DAMN RIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You told 'em!!!!!

Baby Face Toronto, Ontario

P.S. And that's not an opinion. That's a FACT!

Retrieved from The Creem Archive

[maxwell-grant]

i have been watching old (and sometimes new) gmod animations and i grew up watching enough ytps to know the general idea behind them, and i recently gained a sort of fascination for them. there's something special about them that i couldn't quite put into words, but i think you got it down perfectly in your post about grand guignol. basically, thanks a bunch for that.

Well thank you! And, yeah, I pretty much grew up watching GMOD and YTP constantly and even today I still come back to those a lot when I'm restless and taking a break from work, and I think there's genuinely a lot that can be learned or discussed from them as uniquely 21st Century art forms.

I've been rewatching a lot of Raxxo's content lately and I think it was his content in particular that kind of convinced me that the "GMOD/SFM - Grand Guignol" analogy wasn't nearly as much of deranged word salad as I assumed it was, because in all honestly, if you had to try and condense his videos into a genre or definition or something of the sort, what the hell else can you possibly call this that in any way comes close to describing what you experience?

Like, all of his videos are described as "GMOD animated in SFM", because SFM is usually associated with more straightforward dramatic content while GMOD has been cartoon madness from the start (and it's fascinating to watch just how tame even the early Rubberfruit videos are compared to the kind of stuff Eltorro64 or Dr Lalve are putting out), and Raxxo is the latter in the style of the former.

And his videos are not just a non-stop barrage of brain-breaking, because they have weirdly dramatic pauses, and moments of straightforward action, or simple sentence mixing, and there's continuity between his videos, and incredibly smooth and natural gestures following by the characters stretching and deforming like jello monsters on the next second as their screams warble to drown the soundtrack and then everything's back to normal, and then they start doing things that kinda even make some sense as a narrative, but you cannot even begin explaining properly why, and I've watched these so many times that I even kinda start to see what makes sense and what doesn't, even though literally no one other than Raxxo is ever going to guess why he made the choices he did, and god these jokes must have taken hours if not days to render, why does the scretching Soldier head saying "Sputnik!" shows up in everything he does, and oh did I mention he also makes up the soundtracks he uses himself and they don't match in the slightest most people's perception of his content?

And for the finale of the Soldier Dispenser saga he created maybe the most batshit collaborative animation effort on Youtube, which is about an hour's worth of 200 animators all creating their own little batshit mini-stories in reference to his own and, seriously, who the hell could have possibly predicted something like this existing back when computer game Team Fortress 2 was announced in 2007? Or when Youtube was created?

Who could have possibly predicted something like this existing at any point in human history? Where else could anyone possibly experience this much audiovisual chaos anywhere? I can't even bring myself to watch the video in full again, but that this exists at all, and that it's far from the only one of it's kind, and that Team Fortress 2 fan content has spiraled so hard past anything the creators could have possibly predicted that it has self-sustaining meme ecosystems (Remember when smexuals were a thing? Or the Freaks?), that it's still fucking going 15 years past the game's debut, is, it's kind of a lot, is what I'm saying.

Like, I'm speaking as someone who studies a lot of pop culture and combs through it's most obscure and weirdest recesses to find stuff to write about, I'm still just as baffled by how far these things have gotten as I was when experiencing it for the first time. And you can find a lot of stories like these digging through Youtube Poop and the specific styles of certain creators or certain developing memes for franchises that grow and grow and permutate.

Think about what has to have happened to make a video like iteachvader's What'll It Be? happen.

Long John Baldry, blues musician extraordinaire, voiced cartoon villain Dr Robotnik in a Sonic cartoon. Said Sonic cartoon and performance was lucky enough to survive through Youtube clips. People noticed one of said clips of his performance has him saying a word that sounds like penis in a funny way, so they start making jokes about it, and parodies, and then literally hundreds of parodies popularizing the concept as a source of comedy, some of which take the form of music. Said music is done by cutting, remixing and splicing audio from said performance over music beats, which can be a PAINSTAKINGLY LONG PROCESS as someone who's tried doing that several times now, all this to make something with "Poop" in it's name (which I guess isn't that different from pulp writers spending weeks and months breaking their fingers to put out a novel's worth of content every month, for newspapers and magazines that were literally going to be used as toilet paper later)

These parodies catch on a bit and die out for a bit, until iteachvader comes along, and he proceeds to build a career not just by making funny parodies of said cartoon, but also knocking out genuinely really, really good musical parodies, editing voice clips of said performance to make it sound like the villain's singing (and additionally, he also creates his own tunes, and he's shown that literally every sound he uses is taken from the show, which is just, absolutely mind-boggling effort). He's also created over the years a running joke of Tails being Dr Robotnik's son that people liked enough to ask for more, and then we come to the video above, which is a song about Dr Robotnik spoiling his son Tails asking him what he'll want, which is not at all in line with how the two characters are canonically. And said remixes would eventually get remixed even further, even with crossovers with other characters or musicians, and so forth.

And that is the story of how dozens of creators working separately, and with little intent other than goofing around, single-handedly revived a dead man's music career, as the voice of the fan reinterpretation of a animated adaptation of a videogame villain, popular to the billions if not dozens of billions of views over a decade in the making, on a broadcasting platform said man didn't even live to see being created.

I think sometimes we like to think of ourselves as advanced and jaded enough that nothing surprises us anymore, and if we went back in time and showed an iphone to our great-grandparents they'd start screaming in sheer confusion. And, maybe they would, yeah, but imagine if you were Long John Baldry at any point in his life, even after he finished recording his lines as Robotnik, and someone showed up to you and explained that all of this was going to happen to you, to your voice, to your performance. Imagine if you were one of Valve's lead developers working on Team Fortress 2 during the nine years it spent in development, and someone showed you Raxxo's work and Soldier's Dispenser Quest and just, everything that had happened to characters you hadn't even fully created yet.

I imagine Long John Baldry would have taken it well enough eventually, by all accounts he was a fun person who loved to try new things, and he was an openly gay British vocalist in the 1960s when it was literally illegal to be gay in Britain, so I imagine nothing could possibly rattle his cage that deep in the long run.

But can you honestly tell me you wouldn't freak out at least a little trying to understand just what exactly the future was showing you? Can you honestly tell me your cynicism and world-weariness would be worth anything in the face of all this knowledge about what the world was going to do with your creations and work?

Can you honestly tell me, just now, that you have any idea what the hell is your legacy or reputation as an artist, or even what your art is known for, going to look like in a decade or two from now? And that things aren't going to get weirder than they are now?

I find that fact both frightening and strangely assuring at points, and exciting above all.

[manjuhitorie]

Hitorie Interview - Skream! Magazine - Feb. 2021 Issue

First and foremost, I'd like to address REAMP as a whole. I couldn't help but pick up on signs inner turmoil and sorrow over wowaka's unfortunate passing, among a brand new resolve. What's your opinion on this such take?

Shinoda: We voluntarily chose to vent those feelings without any beating around the bush. This band has taken a huge twist in terms of the one who sings, writes, and produces the music, after all. There’s no point in hiding that, we felt. To be completely honest, even after all this time we still haven’t exactly regained our balance at all. Sad is sad. In order to express our choice to push onwards, the cards we had in our hands are.... -Actually the word “cards” was a poor choice. We merely had no other option but to express our feelings outright. ygarshy: We weren’t in the place to put together a theme or concept for the album or anything like that either. We felt baffled and confused by the very fact that we were making songs at all, but nevertheless I felt we had to do it, we just have to. We were wishy-washy so, we decided to hold the times we 4 made songs together close to our hearts, and use that as our foothold: to just try and write as we always do. Shinoda: Squeezing a song out was our one and only objective. Yumao: Yeah. The universe wowaka alone had created and his structures and all that.. To be honest, this new album is cut off from it... We chose to not agonize over trying to recreate it, and to rather let whatever we could just flow out of us.

I have a question about the timeline. After wowaka’s passing, when did you make the concrete decision to keep Hitorie alive?

Shinoda: To be real, we still haven’t even made that decision. Yumao: We haven’t concretely said “Let’s keep this up.” or anything. Our mixed emotions are still churning, or how to say it... When we wrote the music we become immersed and even excited about it but, once our songs were laid out on the table we came back to our senses, like “Uhm? Is this okay?” ygarshy: Even now I’ll have sudden thoughts like “Hm? What am I doing here?”, even when we toured as a trio for the Hitori-Escape Tour 2019, I never thought ‘Let’s keep going on like this’ as well, owing to the circumstances. Just, if we didn’t do it we would’ve lost out minds is all. Shinoda: He speaks the truth alright. ygarshy: If we had to make a thoughtful commitment, I think it would’ve taken us hundreds upon hundreds of years until we finally made a move.

Was there not any type of critical moment during the tour wherein you realized “We can do this?”

Shinoda: Truthfully, during the tour I was so deep into it that I barely even the foggiest memory as to what was going through my brain back then. What I can say for sure is that 2 years ago on June 1st at the Memorial Concert (At Shinkiba Studio Coast), before that day I hadn’t stood on the stage in months. For the past 10 years of my life I haven’t gone that long without the stage. So when I got up for the Memorial Concert, despite it being a tragic event, I felt that when I’m up on stage with this band my mental state is the most stable it ever is. We even all went out for Chinese food after that.

The three of you did?

Shinoda: Yep. We drank our heads off and talked about how “We could totally manage a tour too, eh?” Yumao: Since our HOWLS tour (Hitorie Tour 2019 “Coyote Howling”) was cancelled, we felt we owed something, that we had to do something. We may be sad but, even more important than that was the urgency of the situation.

So there was no resolve or concrete decision to tour and make an album then.

Shinoda: Yep, looking back, I think that’s right.

Were you writing songs while touring?

Shinoda: We started writing around March of 2020? Yumao: Due to COVID-19 we had a lot of free time on our hands, so we took the oppurtunity. Though it wasn’t as if we said “Alright, let’s get going!”, we just all knew it was imminent, and that we had to do it at some point. That point was then.

Which was the first song you wrote?

Among the ones which made the cut, “Marshall A” was the first one consummated at the studio. Though “Utsutsu” was the first one made in my head. Around the end of the tour in 2019 the idea for the phrases took form. I felt that if I was to ever write for Hitorie again, this would be it.

”Utsutsu” stresses sorrow way thicker and heavier than any of the other songs in the album, so it makes sense that it came first.

Shinoda: It gets my feelings across, doesn’t it... The lyric and sung melody of “Utsutsu da ne” were around since the beginning.

Did you each make a song voluntarily?

Yumao: Yessiree. It was like “I’m’ere writing, so you'd better pick it up too." Shinoda: We had the slogan "Let's make 10 songs in one month". Yumao: Even if it was one chorus of a song, that would be okay. Shinoda: In the end, the ratio of songs I, ygarshy and Yumao completed was 8:1:1 (Though in the album itself it became 6:2:2). It might seem unbalanced, but this is perfectly balanced for us. ygarshy: Shinoda just makes a heap ton of songs. Shinoda: From there we picked and chose.

Did you have any standards for which would make the cut? Such as befitting of the current Hitorie or not?

Shinoda: That too was all over the place. Personally when I write, I place importance in how it will pan out with Hitorie as a whole but, I also contemplated what would fit our band's current climate. "Should the guitar not be too distorted?" "Should it not sound too 'rock band-ish'?", my mind was going crazy, I thought it would be best if it was entirely chilled out and mellow. There  was a moment when a switch flipped.

It is true that songs such as 'tat' do take that direction, but after listening to the complete album I have to say, the rock band-ish style is in full bloom. There's a lot of distortion too.

Shinoda: Yep, it's distorted. Yumao: And it's rock (giggling). ygarshy: Listening to Shinoda say that just now made me upset.

Why is that?

ygarshy: Because I had purposefully intended for it to be distorted. Everyone: Ahahaha!

So you like distortion (laughing). To push this point further, would it be true to say that those are core aspects of Hitorie's style? Shinoda: Ahh, there’s definitely truth in that.

Yumao: The one most mindful of that had to have been ygarshy. Whatever we release next can’t be too distant from classic Hitorie, he was the one who secured how best to keep the string in tact.

Where was the poster song ’curved edge’ made in the creative process timeline? Shinoda: We upheld the slogan of 10 songs a month for about 2 months, and ‘curved edge’ was the final one. I wanted to make a classic Hitorie style riff-based song, but I didn’t want high-tempos. ‘curved edge’ was where I finally found the perfect balance between my wishes and Hitorie’s standards.

Hitorie never made songs with unwavering low tempos that take off into an uplifting dance breakdown at the chorus up until now after all.  

Shinoda: Yeah. We all made the silent agreement to absolutely not try and make songs like wowaka’s.

I can definitely detect wowaka’s influence on your music, which is natural after being in a band together for so long. So, you kept it at.

ygarshy: We’ve each grown a keen sense for this. Suppose we were to show wowaka a song we wrote that mimics his style... He would make a really disgusted face. We just know, we just have a sense for it.

Shinoda: That’s the thing he despises the most after all.

ygarshy: That’s right. It would be but as a parody. And we wouldn’t want to do that.

ygarshy, you wrote the songs ‘Image’ and ‘dirty, correct. The melody of them feel nostalgic and longing, yet simultaneously evoke a rush and shivers.

ygarshy: In my current state letting the music flow out of me is all I’m capable of. Last spring, or summer was it, where we were showing each other our songs I.... Felt sad. So sad. Like “Why am I writing songs for Hitorie? Why is this what it’s come to?”

Yumao: Yep yep.

ygarshy: That’s why “dirty” and “Image” both are not very elaborate pieces. There’s much room to mix up chords or arrange it to be complex but, I just really had no heart to do that. Whatever popped out of my head wasn’t tinkered in the slightest, my wish was to keep in its organic simple form.

So when you handled the arrangement of music as a band, did you change as little as possible?

ygarshy: For the two songs I brought in, they were nice and stayed as close to demo version as they possibly could. “dirty” especially has a garage-style melody and tone which clicks immediately, so the lyrics and singing were molded to follow suit. Shinoda: Him (ygarshy) and I are the same age and all, so I pretty much can grasp whatever he goes for. Like he was probably going for those late 1990’s declining vibes. ygarshy: Exactly. I had thought to myself that I wanted dirty lyrics, and he actually delivered just that. I’d like to hear the story behind the two songs Yumao wrote as well, “YUBIKIRI” and “faceless enemy”. Both melodies are pop.

Yumao: That just kind of happens with me. Shinoda: He makes my contemplating and agonizing look stupid, because those songs are just as clear as fresh water. Yumao: All I did was squeeze out whatever I could (laughing). To be honest, I think my songs will be the most unacceptable to Hitorie’s listeners. I may be a member of Hitorie, and understand Hitorie like the back of my hand but, from the start I knew I’m incapable of writing songs to Hitorie’s standards. I took a realistic approach. ygarshy: Though I really enjoy the music Yumao wrote before Hitorie. So when he brought it those genuine honest pieces, I was so happy. I think I like the songs more than he himself does.

The fact that you chose to keep Yumao’s songs in the album despite them not being perfectly Hitorie fashioned, sounds like proof that you’ve found your answer for this album.

Yumao: Pedaling to the mettle is what I have to do, it’s all I can do. No matter if it’s acceptable or not, I’m doing what I can. That’s one message behind my songs.

Your song “YUBIKIRI” as the final track of the album has a lot of impact as well. It’s a bright and cheery song yet somehow it brings a tear to the eye.

Shinoda: Doesn’t it?

Yumao: It’s very cheery and it’s the brightest of the mix, isn’t it. When I wrote I was riding the groove in over my head, so I asked Shinoda to make the lyrics sound immature, like something a teenager would click with. I felt knotted up inside, and I needed something to break the chains for me. Completely divert from what Hitorie should or shouldn’t do, I alone needed to express and vent myself. And that’s how this song happened.

Shinoda: Yumao made that direct request of me, so I steered my word choices far away from any purple-prose. The keyboard was played by NariHane of Passpied, and when those 3 were off recording the music without me, I finished the lyrics. That’s how quickly they were zipped out.

After completing a whole album, how do you feel, do you think you will be able to continue on like this?

Shinoda: I don’t know yet. We’ll have to hear the people’s opinions. ygarshy: And what are we going to do after hearing them? After performing all these concerts? is one apprehension I have but,.. everything feels so up in the air.

Yumao: I know we haven’t said anything conclusive but! I want people to know we have a mountain of hypotheses on how we could move forward, on how we could keep Hitorie going, on how we could keep wowaka alive but, for now this album was just a do-or-die for us!

Shinoda: We made it, that’s all we needed.

Yumao: Yep. It was an absolute for us. I want to get that point across. This album is our declaration: that “We’ve taken one step forward”!

[doakaptan]

Shrek 2 is the hero we needed and here is why

You see I could have just embedded this clip and that would be enough for an answer. Nobody and when I say nobody I mean literally nobody can argue with me about the greatness, the elegance, the excellence of this scene. The song surpasses the original in delivery, and the scenes that are recreated within the castle sequence, is even better than the ones it’s mocking... Overall, it is a theme within the Shrek franchise to do better than the ones you’re mocking, even when the movie itself is not taking anything serious.

On a more serious note, Shrek is a movie that started out as a parody of overused Hollywood tropes, but, through great writing, the franchise found its soul, right here in this film. While the first installment did not have much story to begin with (other than the fact that it was mocking Hollywood and Disney) Shrek 2 is a genuine attempt to have depth in characters and storylines while still mocking everything the fairytales stand for. 

The movie takes of from where it left in the previous installment. Before delving into the story we see Shrek and Fiona’s honeymoon in a montage and all is well within Shrek’s universe. Until, a letter gets delivered to their suite and they learn that Fiona’s family are expecting them to visit the kingdom for a celebration. This moment is a crucial one for me, because finally we are about to get answers to questions we had in the first movie. Like, where is she the princess of, why did her parents leave her at the castle, who are her people and the movie expands on these in a great way. Not only that but the movie also expands on its own universe. The newly introduced concepts are not foreign to us. Like of course an evil Fairy Godmother recruited people through a deal he made with King Harold long long time ago to make sure his son Prince Charming married the princess and became the king. By the way King Harold turns out to be the Frog Prince so the deal he made with Fairy Godmother for his happily after makes sense.

While, Shrek 2 is a great follow-up movie it's also a great standalone story. It is told in such a way that we are unburdened by a need to know what happened in the previous movie. The movie introduces new characters and places with such ease that we don’t question whether something like that belongs in this universe. New characters such as Puss in Boots, Prince Charming, king and queen, and Doris are all fan favorites. The way these characters rose to favor kind of reminds me of the Star Wars Sequel but don’t quote me on that. 

I will use this section to point out insane attention to detail and great scenes apart from the final scene. Specific scenes like the dinner scene, thank you mother; mother!? are some of the greatest scenes that were ever produced. There is also the scene where Shrek, Donkey and Puss get arrested and a bag of ‘catnip’ is retrieved from Puss, the reference went over my head at the time but now, it is even funnier knowing the context. I would also argue that the dinner scene is a masterpiece on its own but sadly I don’t accept objections. The delivery of the characters are great as well. All the actors are on their best game and you can tell by the way they mend so well together. 

Other than that, the details such as Far Far Away being modeled after Los Angeles is such a great idea. It plays more into the fact that Shrek doesn’t belong into the life Fiona previously had. The villain being a commercialized character within the Far Far Away makes a lot of sense as well. The pop culture references are integrated into its world don’t stand out, almost like they were always there. There is a burger king knock off named Friar’s Fat boy and Farbucks. It has been more than a decade (almost two) but the jokes they made about the consumerism culture still stands; like when Mongo (giant gingerbread man) destroys a Farbucks people who escaped from there go to the one across. 

Don’t worry this is the semi-final segment of my rant on Shrek 2. One of the most important parts of Shrek is its soundtrack. The songs are great at setting the tone and enhancing the viewing experience. A fair example of that would be Fairy Godmother’s Holding out for a Hero. It ties into the story better than it did in Footloose and I can fight you on it, try me. In the first movie soundtrack was good too but this… this is above that. Every single song has a meaning and contribution to the overall story and nothing stands out. While the first movie used the music to subvert expectations that this wasn’t your typical Disney movie second one aims for the neck. That is why still to this day you associate All Star by Smash Mouth, Livin La Vida Loca, and Holding out for a Hero with Shrek. It is that good. 

Now, let’s talk about the greatest scene in animated movie history. I referenced it probably too many times but still... Fairy Godmother’s Holding Out For A Hero... Who came up with it, how can one come up with this, we are unworthy of such viewing. Jokes aside the scene is both suspenseful and funny. The rules are set straight and we know this has to have a good ending but there is a what if Shrek can’t make it, in the back of our minds while viewing that makes us scoot to the edge of our seat. The sequence has so many remarkable moments to point out like when Mongo slowly drowns or Puss fights with the knights, even the simple dancing is amplified and I’m not even talking about the vocal performance. This scene outdoes every scene ever existed full stop.

I cannot let go of this movie I’m so sorry but to close this one off I will share my thoughts with you on a more serious note. 

I think everyone falls in love with Shrek at least once, because we can relate to the way he feels and thinks on so many levels. Shrek was told time and time again that he was unworthy of being loved by a society that hated him for simply existing. He believed that until he met Donkey and later Fiona. Shrek 2 comes in when Shrek has learned how to love and be loved and to open up to someone but he is not ready to face society and, society is not ready to face him. Despite being loved by who matters to him the most he’s not the ideal husband for Fiona according to her family, friends and people. So he starts second guessing his worth. It’s when you get something you’ve always wanted but don’t feel deserving of it and it is something we experience everyday until we settle within our minds about who and what we are. Like a great philosopher in the name of Shrek once said: Ogres are like onions, they have layers; Humans are like onions too we have too many layers to be one thing. And That’s exactly why it is easy for us to connect with Shrek.  

[adultswim2021]

The Brak Show #1: “Leave It To Brak” (AKA “Mr. Bawk Ba Gawk”) December 21, 2000 - 5:15AM | S01E01 regular series version aired October 7, 2001 @ 11:00PM

I’m trying to break the habit of assuming only my friends are reading my various blogs, but I failed in one fundamental way: I didn’t really describe the premise of Sealab 2021, like, at all. Despite digging into it’s roots somewhat by watching it’s various pilots, I failed to include even a paragraph with the basic premise of the show. I’ll try not to make the same mistake with Brak. Instead I'll make a DIFFERENT mistake by writing way too long of a blog entry.

On December 21, 2000, after Sealab 2021, The Brak Show, then titled “Leave It To Brak” debuted. Who the fuck is Brak? Brak began life as a villain on the 1960s iteration of Space Ghost, a fairly garden-variety Saturday morning action kid’s show. He appeared in, I wanna say, a very small handful of episodes. I’ve seen the whole series, and I don’t think he was like, a regular or anything. Without looking it up I'll say he was on it twice. In the show he was a space pirate and had whiskers. He has a very memorable design. I’ve never been sure if we’re actually looking at Brak’s face or if he’s wearing a helmet. His fangs imply that we’re looking at his actual face (or at least his actual jaw), but that little curtain thing that hangs down from his, uh, ears? Is that a naturally occurring part of his head? It suggests that his wardrobe is actually his body, and vice-versa. He just looks absurd, making him perfect fodder for an absurdist revision.

Brak as we know him today was first used (barring some kind of Cartoon Network commercial that I’m unaware of) in Space Ghost Coast to Coast, appearing with Sisto. Sisto is his twin brother who appeared in the 60s show. Why Brak was targeted for comedic revision and not Sisto eludes me. I’m guessing “HI MY NAME IS BRAK” just sounds funnier than “HI MY NAME IS SISTO”. Anyway, in the first Coast to Coast episode they are voiced by C. Martin Croker (RIP) doing a Beavis and Butt-head parody. Eventually Andy Merrill took over the role, basically turning Brak into a, uh, childish adult. Okay, he’s basically doing a retarded guy voice. Sorry, but it’s time to grow up.

Space Ghost Coast to Coast debuted in 1994 and remained a cult hit on the network until it was moved to Adult Swim and eventually canceled in 2004. The concept of Space Ghost Coast to Coast was Space Ghost, a super hero from the 60s, now hosts a modern 90s late night talk show, interviewing live-action celebrities on a monitor that hangs over the set. Random obscure Space Ghost villains would show up with skewed personalities from their original 60s counterpart. Brak was easily the runaway star of the touted rogues gallery. He would come in and cheerfully sing a song about beans or something else equally wacky. He rarely had a definable role on the show, he was just a figure that was around and would wander into the set.

A second 90s Space Ghost spin-off was commissioned called Cartoon Planet. This was an actual kiddy show that aired during the day as opposed to Space Ghost Coast to Coast which was kid-friendly but meant for adults. This time Space Ghost, Zorak (Space Ghost’s bandleader on Coast to Coast), and Brak would host an hour of classic cartoons, with little absurd skits between segments set in a studio SORTA like the Space Ghost Coast to Coast set but different. LOTS of Brak’s fandom is based on these skits, which were a little more silly and lighthearted than the material on Space Ghost Coast to Coast. The skits were popular enough that they repackaged them into their own half-hour show, sans classic cartoons. This was an early point of confusion for me. Beloved Brak songs turned out to be from Cartoon Planet and NOT Space Ghost Coast to Coast, so I'd tune into Space Ghost wondering if they cut out all the Brak segments or what?

Cartoon Planet would answer viewer letters (conceivably real ones; they DID include various ways to contact “Ghost Planet” at the end of both Space Ghost Coast to Coast and, I’m guessing, Cartoon Planet, which I never did see in it’s original form). They actually answered the reason for Brak’s lack of intelligence (brain-damage caused by Space Ghost, using an actual clip from the 60s show). I bring this up not out of genuine concern for continuity or canon; these aren’t huge concerns for the writers of these shows. The real reason Brak is dumb is because Andy Merrill thought the voice was funny, probably. I bring it up because generally the premise of Space Ghost in the 90s is that even though he IS a super hero with super hero abilities, he’s also an actor who makes cartoons about being a super hero. So, it can be concluded Brak’s brain damage is from a stunt gone wrong and not carried over from the fiction of the show.

The premise of Space Ghost Coast to Coast is that Space Ghost has captured evil villains Zorak and Moltar and is forcing them to work on the show. But they also freely reference their personal lives outside of the show, breaking character. They are actors who are sticking to a premise only when it’s convenient. Yes, it’s fun for the kids to pretend that Space Ghost has enslaved his enemies to work on his talk show, but the reality is that when the camera turns off they all go home to their apartments or wives or whatever. This concept feeds directly into The Brak Show: we aren’t watching Brak’s real home life; Brak, cartoon character and actor, is playing himself in a sitcom. His mom isn’t his real mom. His Dad isn’t his real dad. Zorak isn’t his real best-friend. They are all actors. This isn’t played up in any significant way on the show itself except for a few moments and certain episodes, but THAT IS WHAT’S HAPPENING and you wouldn’t really understand that just by watching this episode and nothing else. You would have to have been paying attention all this time to Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Cartoon Planet, and also, yes, Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak.

Okay, Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak isn't REALLY required viewing for this series. But guess what? I watched it for the first time ever in preparation for this and now we all have to deal with Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak. Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak (sorry I keep repeating the full title which is Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak) was a two-episode special presentation that aired on Cartoon Network while Space Ghost was on hiatus and before The Brak Show's stealth premiere. It (Brak Presents The Brak Show Starring Brak, that is) was a Sonny and Cher style variety show, featuring Brak and Zorak on stage together performing songs, intentionally corny sketches, and a LITTLE BIT, but NOT A LOT of backstage drama; which could be argued to have been part of the show itself. Variety shows doing sketches fictionalizing the backstage antics of the production is nothing new. There are also live-action integrated celebrities, and the show comes to a screeching halt whenever they show up. Maybe their performances are hampered by having to perform on a green screen, but these segments come off lame and pandering. Space Ghost Coast to Coast would make it's name featuring washed-up, kitschy, or counter-culture celebrities. Here we are treated to Monica, Freddie Prinze Jr. (whose segment in particular really drives me up a wall), some wrestler guy, and a lady who's name I don't remember. Okay, I admit I fast forwarded through the second of the two episodes a LOT. Sitting through one episode in real time was just too much to bear.

Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak is written off by a lot of Brak fans as a substandard product, and they're not wrong. I myself never sought out the whole special until I started writing this blog. But there's one thing I'll give it, the visuals (minus the live-action celebrity parts) are actually pretty fun. There's a lot of weird character designs, and the same playful use of stock footage and kinetic editing from Cartoon Planet carries over into this. Skipping past the celebrity guests and watching the special on mute would be the preferred viewing method here. Honestly, I've never been that charmed by Brak's songs. I never cared much for Cartoon Planet.

Brak Presents the Brak Show Staring Brak eventually became The Brak Show, but with one more step: a scrapped audio-only pilot. This pilot appears as an audio commentary track on The Brak Show Volume 1 DVD set. I discovered it by accident. In preparation for this blog I popped the DVD in, saw there was commentary for Mr. Bawk Ba Gawk, and pressed play. Instead of Andy Merrill and Pete Smith dryly talking about their creative process, I was treated to what would have been the audio for a Brak Show pilot (there are stage directions being read in lieu of visuals), roughly the length of an 11 minute episode. This version plays up the backstage antics of Brak's variety show much more, kinda like Larry Sanders meets Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak. Returning from the show is Brak and Zorak, along with Allen Wrench, a talking Allen wrench that appeared in Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak. On Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak, Allen had a crazy high-pitched voice. In this audio pilot he sounds closer to Meatwad from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Also present in the audio pilot is Thundercleese, who curiously sounds like the regular series version of Thundercleese. In “Leave it to Brak”, Thundercleese sounds slightly different. Maybe they went back and rerecorded Thundercleese for the DVD?

That FINALY brings us to the actual episode. “Leave it to Brak” was the first episode of “The Brak Show” proper to air (though if I remember correctly from what was reported way back when, they wanted to call the actual show “Leave It To Brak” but couldn't for legal reasons). It feels more like a first episode than Goldfish does, which was the first episode I saw when Adult Swim officially began in 2001. “Leave it to Brak” introduces each character with fake studio audience applause. They even introduce Sisto, who simply walks in front of the camera, farts, and is not seen again. The premise of the show is this: Brak stars in a family sitcom. His mom belongs to the same species as Brak, but his dad is a tiny human voiced by George Lowe doing a Ricky Ricardo voice. According to this episode; Brak is roughly high-school aged, but it's all a pretense to get this cast of weirdos together under one roof. Again, Brak is a cartoon character playing himself here, so we're not meant to actually think these are his real parents; Brak is not half-human, necessarily. It's all just for the sake of this dumb show.

The plot of the episode is this: Zorak, Brak's best friend and worst influence, convinces Brak to help him kidnap the mascot of their rival high school, a chicken named Mr. Bawk Ba Gawk. Having done this, Brak grapples with the morality of his actions, tries to deceive his parents by dressing the chicken up like a little man, is caught, and is taught a lesson. There's a comedic final scene that reverses the lesson Brak supposedly learned, and then it ends. Somewhere in there we are introduced to Brak's giant robot neighbor who blows up Zorak for ripping up his lawn.

The Brak Show was possibly the most anticipated show when Adult Swim was announced. We all quietly ignored how much Brak Presents The Brak Show Starring Brak sucked; mostly because this was touted to be a show for adults. Afterall, Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak's biggest shortcoming was the fact that it was the first Brak-centric product to pander directly to children. Brak was always seen as a uniquely weird creation that just so happened to appeal to kids, kinda like Pee Wee Herman or Joe Camel. Also the idea of parodying the sitcom genre seemed novel, despite the fact that it wasn't really a new idea. Now it just comes off like a shallow observation: boy, old sitcoms sure were corny, right?

I don't know exactly how to pinpoint what was so disappointing about this show. I can see there was a genuine effort to make it funny. Dad was a decently funny character. They weren't just trying to mock sitcoms, they were trying to build a genuinely strange world that resembled our own. Brak lived in the suburbs but there were aliens and robots everywhere. Sci-fi situations casually reared their ugly heads into the lives of these characters. I mean, look at the plot description of Brak stealing a high school mascot; it's an ACTUAL SITCOM PLOT. There's no real subversion to it other than the fact that Brak and Zorak from Space Ghost Coast to Coast are doing it. This could have been decent as a one-off special like Tim & Eric's Bag Boy staring Steve Brule. But they made more.

Oh wait, I figured out why The Brak Show sorta sucked. It's the fact that the show was a musical. Fuck, I hated that so much that I blocked it out of my head until this moment. Every episode had musical numbers in it sung by Brak and the family. Ugh. They were supposed to be funny nonsense but I never liked it. In fact if there were ever an edit of the show without the songs I would probably remember it much more fondly.

This version of the pilot had very simplistically drawn backgrounds. When the show went to series they redid the backgrounds with photo-realistic settings and props. It's a much more appealing look. This version of the pilot was briefly featured in an episode of Sealab, where Murphy was flipping through the channels on his monitor. He flips past this and Aqua Teen Hunger Force and maybe Space Ghost? This was back in the early days when every show seemed like it was connected to each other. I miss that. The “regular series” of The Brak Show used to give the show a different parodic on-screen title; “Mr. Bawk Ba Gawk”, which aired fifth on Adult Swim, had the opening title “B.J. And the Brak”. “Goldfish” used “Leave It To Brak”, which causes some episode guides to get confused over which episode is which. In fact, Adult Swim's website features the pilot version of this show and incorrectly uses the plot summary for “Goldfish”. I'm not linking to it because the listing says it expires today. But go look for it if you want.

The other big difference between this version and the “regular series” version is there are a few missing bits here and there. For example, the pilot version starts with Dad asking Mom for another biscuit. She sighs and says “maybe later”, to which dad just shrugs off. There's also a cut song I call “Kiss you hot” that dad sings to mom. There's probably other differences here and there. Oh, Brak's clock is the beeflog illustration from Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak. Isn't my life fuller for being able to make that connection? God, I'm so glad I watched Brak Presents the Brak Show Staring Brak last night instead of getting an extra hour of sleep.

So what's good in this? I REALLY like the scene where Bawk Ba Gawk is at the dinner table and everyone keeps stealing his little hat to wear. Mom scolds Dad for wearing the hat, to which he mutters “I'll do what I damn well please”. Mom then plucks the hat from his head. When we cut to the wide shot, she's wearing it. Funny! SOLIDLY VERY FUNNY. But the series generally suffers from them trying to cram in weird pointless bits of absurd comedy. Only sometimes does it work. Not sure why. But that's how it goes, I guess.

[lifeonashelf]

COLDPLAY

Let’s get this straight right off the bat: Coldplay is fucking terrible.

We all know this. Designating Coldplay as terrible isn’t a statement of personal opinion, it is an easily demonstrable fact. Just listen to them; Coldplay’s music proves the existence of Coldplay’s terribleness the same way that breathing proves the existence of oxygen. Surely, even the band’s staunchest supporters understand that their songs are pretentious, monotonous, and unimaginative—they’d kind of have to; I assume these people have listened to Coldplay, too. If you like music as superfluous as Coldplay’s, that’s totally fine. I’m not here to tell you that you shouldn’t, nor to convince you to stop listening to Coldplay (you can’t stop listening to them, anyway; no matter how hard you try to escape, wherever you go, Coldplay will find you). But they are unequivocally fucking awful, and I need to make that clear before we continue in case I end up saying anything courteous about them later. And, who knows? I may indeed find something positive to say about Coldplay—I mean, nothing comes to mind right now, but it’s going to take me a few hours to write this piece so it’s possible something will at some point.  

Okay, so we’re all clear on Coldplay being fucking terrible, right? Great. But that isn’t the main reason I hate them. I appreciate plenty of terrible bands just as I appreciate plenty of terrible movies. Listening to a really shitty group is sort of like watching a cast of really shitty actors—though they clearly suck at what they do, there’s something oddly appealing about the charming naiveté they demonstrate by giving it the best go they can anyway.

For instance, since I was still filing most of my Warped Tour emo discs in my punk section when I began this venture, I never got around to writing about a band called Adair. If you’re not familiar with them, don’t worry about it; they only existed for a few years in the mid-aughts and their diminutive discography merely consists of a self-released EP and one full-length album, The Destruction Of Everything Is The Beginning Of Something New. Sonically, Adair were so amusingly prototypical of every baby t-shirt screamo band that was thriving at the time, they essentially sounded like they were parodying the style of music they played (although, to be fair, a lot of those squads did). But, Adair were absolutely serious, regardless of what stridently nasal heights the vocals reached, regardless of how faithfully their compositions adhered to their genre’s textbook page by page, and regardless of the sublimely ridiculous realms some of their allegorical angst lamentations ventured into (the line “lock me up in Guantanamo Bay and throw away the key” from the song “I Buried My Heart In Cosmo Park” may very well be the lyrical apex of their entire genus).

Adair’s music is so inane that it makes me laugh out loud when I sing along to it—but here’s the thing: I do sing along to it. I have probably played The Destruction Of Everything Is The Beginning Of Something New a hundred times from start to finish since my copy was sent to me to review for some website back in 2006, and I have cued up individual high(low?)points like “The Diamond Ring” and “Folding and Unfolding” even more times than that. As silly as they sound—and trust me, they sound very fucking silly—I still sincerely enjoy their tunes and have spent enough hours listening to TDOEITBOSN for it to possibly qualify as one of my favorite records ever. Shit, even writing about it right now makes me feel like hearing the disc, so I’ll probably end up blasting it in my truck tomorrow (ed. note: I actually did). If they ever decided to do a reunion tour, I would absolutely go see them, and if vocalist Rob Tweedie did that whole “hold the microphone out toward the crowd so they can finish the lyric” thing which every frontman in every band that sounds like Adair does at least a dozen times per show, I would totally be able to fill in each of those blanks and enthusiastically do so.

Sorry, we were talking about Coldplay. To recap, they’re fucking terrible.

Unlike a frivolous whimper-core ensemble like Adair, the most off-putting thing about Coldplay isn’t their music. They’ve actually managed to excrete a few tracks that I grudgingly enjoy over the years. However, sporadically releasing songs which don’t sound like they were specifically written for Gap commercials actually works against Coldplay in this instance. Sure, most of their output is noxious twaddle, but since they occasionally come across as a marginally decent band, their work isn’t awful enough to at least ironically appreciate it for being awful.

In fact, there’s absolutely nothing ironic about Coldplay—other than U2 and Radiohead (more on them in a minute), I can’t think of another band that seems to take itself as dreadfully seriously as Coldplay does. There isn’t a single lighthearted number in their entire catalog, and the demeanor of their music is so staid and cheerless that it’s hard to imagine the dudes ever cracking a smile while they’re making it. Their approach to songwriting is rigidly Pavlovian—when the music gets louder, ring ring ring, that signals the listener the *really* poignant part of the tune has arrived and cues them to emotionally salivate in kind—yet despite their calculated use of sonic dynamics to manufacture sentiment, the vapid and unspontaneous nature of the delivery saps their tunes of anything resembling genuine soul or passion. Even when thrusting through the more energetic tracks in their litany, the musicians in Coldplay always sound like they’re actively striving to not play their instruments too hard. The result is that they consistently deliver some of the safest and least edgy rock ever created, shaping their ethos around a formula so willfully tepid and cuddly that they barely qualify as a rock band at all. Coldplay aren’t quite the musical equivalent of plain yogurt (that would be Jack Johnson, an artist so comprehensively flavorless that even his name is fucking boring) but the granola in their mixture is always judiciously distributed so as not to agitate anyone’s tastebuds.

And at the center of this slow-motion kaleidoscope, you have Chris fucking Martin (I find it difficult to cite his name without including the “fucking” in there; he’s just one of those guys—like Jason fucking Mraz, Blake fucking Shelton, or fucking Bono). Coldplay’s music may be stagnant, but you’d never know it from beholding the practiced arsenal of slinky paroxysms their vocalist bursts into while that music is playing. In performance and in their videos, Martin’s appendages are incessantly in motion, his hands ever-swaying gently through the air like he’s waving a pair of invisible cigarette lighters or finger painting on the goddamn sky, ostensibly so deeply lost in his band’s reverie of sound that he simply can’t help himself from moving his body in a cadenced pantomime of the way their music is meant to superficially move your spirit.

For the three non-ballads the group has written in their career, Chris usually switches things up by crouching in an incongruous bobbing panther-stance like a battle rapper delivering a diss track about fucking his opponent’s mama in the mouth, until it’s time to freeze in the tried and true messiah-statue pose as the number’s final notes chime into the ether. But it is in the quiet moments when Martin truly shines—which makes perfect sense given that he’s the leader of a group so systematically anodyne they probably should have actually named themselves Quiet Moments. These are the obligatory interims where the frontman takes the stage on his own to sit down at the piano, resplendent in the spotlight, and perform an intimate solo rendition of one of his most tender hits to show everyone in the audience that Chris fucking Martin is a bonafide fucking musician who, if he really felt like it, could totally do the whole Coldplay thing without the other three dudes whose names no one knows. His soaring falsetto croon is custom-feigned for the arenas the band was destined to coldplay from the moment they dropped their breakthrough single “Yellow” and caused a nation of book-sensitive sociology majors eagerly anticipating the arrival of their generation’s U2 to cream their Dockers in unison. When Martin opens his pipes to summon those indelibly contrived choruses about birds and stars and other monosyllabic nouns, it hardly even matters what words he’s singing—the leitmotifs in most of the tunes are basically interchangeable anyway. What matters is that Chris sounds like he really, really, really means it when he says he will try to fix you.

That analysis probably makes it seem like I hate Chris fucking Martin as much as I hate his band. I actually don’t—he’s too benign a character to elicit such a fervid response; hating Chris Martin is like hating turtleneck sweaters, or actual turtles. In fact, I suspect he’s probably a really nice dude.  At least, I’ve never heard any creepy stories about him showing his penis to under-aged fans on Skype or anything like that.

Regardless, while I don’t specifically despise either Martin, Dude Who Plays Guitar, or the other two anonymous members of Coldplay, I do gauge their collective as the fourth or fifth worst band of all time. And the reason I loathe them more than any of their neighbors on that list is because they aren’t the kind of prodigiously abysmal group you can just ignore until their moment in the spotlight inevitably passes—which is how I dealt with Five For Fighting from September 2001 through February 2002 and how I’ve been dealing with Twenty-One Pilots for the last four years (seriously, are you fuckers done yet?). Coldplay is a far cagier nuisance because they are massively popular and have been for a ludicrously long time. I’ve been patiently waiting for them to go away for two decades now, yet they continue to pop up every third summer or so to drop a new album and remind us that, yes, they’re still here assiduously mining the middle of the road for new ways to write more tunes about clouds being pretty.

Even worse, I can’t disregard their music because it’s everywhere. I hear “The Scientist” while I’m shopping for cereal at the grocery store, I hear “Talk” when I sit down to eat at any chain restaurant, and I imagine I’ll be viewing that idiotic video for “Adventure of a Lifetime” with the posse of animated dancing monkeys on an infinite Clockwork-Orange-eyes-gaping loop for the rest of eternity when my mortal essence exits this world and I am cast into the fiery pits of Hell. I can’t even watch football without encountering Coldplay, as I discovered with horror in 2016 when they took part in the most fatuous jumbled fucking mess of a Super Bowl halftime show the NFL had ever presented (a zenith of suckery which seemed impossible to eclipse until this past February, when Adam Levine showed up covered with prison tattoos and said, “hold my beer”).

The pervasive level of esteem Coldplay has reached dumbfounds me. This is a group that has sold millions and millions of albums worldwide, even though I have never once heard a single person utter the phrase, “man, that new Coldplay song kicks ass.” I’m sure their most dedicated fans have favorite hits, tracks that are significant to them in some way, etc. But their remarkable success is patently disproportionate to how patently unremarkable the work which garnered that success really is. Nobody ever describes the band’s music as “awesome”, just as nobody ever describes a glass of pinot gris as awesome—the term simply does not apply to their province; actually, in this case, describing the mouthfeel of Coldplay tunes and recommending cheeses they best pair with is probably more relevant than discussing how they sound. Coldplay is as universally popular as they are precisely because they aren’t awesome. They’re not beloved because they’re extraordinary; most people love them because they’re innocuous, functional, and suitable for almost any occasion—Coldplay is akin to a pair of cargo shorts, and no one thinks cargo shorts kick ass. Coldplay isn’t an alternative band (on the contrary, almost every good band is an alternative to Coldplay); they are a lowest common denominator band, undemanding and ubiquitous and safe to like because everyone else likes them. Their work is specifically geared toward people who think appreciating music demonstrates sophistication, but don’t ultimately give enough of a shit about the artform to put any effort into finding music that is actually sophisticated or appreciable. You may assume Coldplay is erudite because they’re British and they cite books you’ve never read when discussing the lyrical themes in their work, but they’re merely recycling the same emotional territory as every other pop act that writes tunes about finding love, losing love, missing love, and the 18th Century French peasantry.

The best thing about being a Coldplay fan is that it’s easy. You don’t have to buy their records, go see them live, or make any concerted effort at all to receive their music. If you listen to the radio for any extended period of time (or eat at an Applebee’s), you will eventually hear one of their songs; all you have to do is not hate it and, voila, you’re officially a Coldplay fan. There, don’t you just love the security of venerating a critically and commercially acclaimed band that will never challenge you or be unpopular?

Okay, I do strive to be fair—even in this arena where I can say whatever I want and no one can argue with me. I gave this a lot of thought, so here are four things about Coldplay that are not terrible:

 1)      “Clocks”: I resisted it for many years, but I finally had to concede that it’s kind of a pretty song. Notes of red currant and blackberries, and it goes superbly with a nice aged brie.

2)      “God Put A Smile On Your Face”: It doesn’t put a smile on mine, but that’s why I enjoy it. Most Coldplay songs sound like they’re aiming to evoke what being hugged by a koala bear feels like, so I appreciate Chris fucking Martin delivering a darker number that seems intent on making me feel depressed instead. Well played, sir.

3)      Viva La Vida, Or Death And All His Friends: I sincerely respect their effort to broaden their palate a bit by working with Brian Eno and making Dude Who Plays Guitar buy a distortion pedal to use on one song. This is still an archetypal shitty Coldplay record, but at least it sounds a little different than all of the other archetypal shitty Coldplay records.

4)      Nah. They’re still fucking terrible; they were lucky to get three things.

 There is one additional facet of the group’s career which has fascinated me over these past several years, even though it relates more to bands that are not Coldplay rather than the band that is Coldplay. Earlier I dubbed them the U2 of their generation, and recent events in particular have coalesced to underscore that comparison. See, when Coldplay came out, the tributes to their Irish brethren in choreographed affectation were far from subtle. Chris fucking Martin’s warbling was plainly modeled after fucking Bono’s, Dude Who Plays Guitar served up an endless cycle of repetitive but hooky high-register licks that were striking similar to the distinctive methodology of The Edge, and both bands’ workmanlike rhythm sections held things down with competent yet discreet backing tracks which militantly fulfilled each song’s basic requirements rather than showcasing the musicians’ dexterity. I don’t think anyone ever disputed the collective homage in Coldplay’s dogma, and no one was terribly bothered by it either; at the time there were a lot of people craving a band that sounded just like U2, because U2 didn’t sound like U2 anymore.

When Coldplay’s debut album Parachutes was released in July 2000, fucking Bono and company’s career was on a downward arc after they largely vacated their signature approach to instead craft a couple poorly-received discs dominated by insipid rave-lite tunes that not even the members of U2 listen to anymore. Though they would temporarily rebound later that year with “Beautiful Day”, the last honestly excellent song they would ever record, U2 had left a gap that needed filling. And the most obvious inheritors of their kingdom, Radiohead, had grown tired of anthemic guitar rock; they were hunkered down creating their demanding but exceptional opus Kid A, which sounded nothing like U2, nothing like Radiohead, and indeed nothing like any other music being made on planet Earth. Kid A still had some anthems, still had some guitar, and still had a little rock, but its oblique delivery clearly demonstrated that Radiohead was chasing a far different muse and had little interest in claiming the crown (of course, this would be abundantly clarified in hindsight when they subsequently slid further down their rabbit-hole, gradually abandoning the anthems and guitars and rock altogether, until finally settling upon their current songwriting formula, which seems to mostly involve Thom Yorke masturbating on his laptop, naming ten of his climaxes, and calling it an album).

So while U2 were busy trying to figure out why they weren’t relevant anymore and Radiohead were busy doing whatever the fuck they were doing, the lads in Coldplay stepped up and said, hey, why not us? They seized the ersatz-earnest arena rock mantle with A Rush Of Blood To The Head and never looked back. Now, 17 years and seven multi-platinum albums later, they can ruin the Super Bowl, collaborate with the Chainsmokers, and even make the same kind of lameass dance music that essentially buried U2’s career with impunity. Even more significant, they have come full circle. A group that started out playing second-rate U2 facsimiles under the moniker Pectoralz (this is absolutely true, by the way) is now one of the hugest pop institutions in the universe, beloved by millions of music and wine connoisseurs across the globe. And the student has eclipsed the teacher; U2’s desperate efforts to play catchup have made their modern work sound unmistakably like second-rate Coldplay facsimiles. Chris fucking Martin and those other three guys are no longer pretenders to the throne—they are Coldplay, and this is their empire now, bitches.

These days, U2 has to reprise their old records in their entirety on nostalgia tours to get anyone to come to their concerts, and Radiohead continues to release unlistenable albums which their fans claim to love while sheepishly casting them aside to listen to OK Computer for the thousandth time instead. But Coldplay has strategically situated themselves for an eternity as the undisputed emperors of rock mediocrity. I think they’ve got another two decades in them, too; I have no doubt that long after Twenty-One Pilots is (finally) relegated to the county fair circuit where they belong, Chris fucking Martin will still be promising sold-out crowds that lights will lead them home and having a series of polite, gently-articulated seizures while he sings “Speed Of Sound”.

It seems I respect Coldplay a little more than I suspected. You know what? I’m going to amend my original valuation right here and now. As of this moment, I am formally designating Coldplay the sixth worst band of all time.

Your move, Godsmack.

 May 15, 2019

[solacefruit]

Hi there! First of all, you are a great source of inspiration to me, and I wanted to thank you for sharing your stories and insight on writing in general! I got a question and I hope you dont mind. What do you think makes a story sad or emotional, to the point where a reader may cry? I'm currently writing a story and I want to make sure to get emotions out of my readers but I'm struggling to figure out how to do that. Tips on how to set a sad and emotional tone would be appreciated. Thank you!!

(This has been in my inbox for about a century, I’m so sorry I’m only now getting around to answering it).

Hello! Thank you so much for saying so, I’m glad my work and chatter is both fun and useful to you. This is kind of a difficult question to answer, for the same reason this one is: a lot of writing is intuitive for me and so it can be a struggle sometimes to articulate the process in a helpful way. I’ll do my best, though!

I think it’s pretty safe for me to say that hitting emotional pressure points for people is a strength of my writing, usually. I don’t know if I can teach exactly how to do that, but I’m happy to give some insights and tips I’ve picked up along the way as I’ve figured things out for myself. 

Tip 1. Diversify the feelings.  There are lots of emotions and they travel in packs. Emotions are complex and layered and that’s good. Embrace complexity in your characters, because that’s more real than having just one feeling at any time. A character being “sad” or “angry” becomes a one-note tune really fast, because it’s very easy to accidentally hit your reader over the head with “sad, sad, sad, sad” or “angry, angry, angry.” What should be a moving scene can become bland if you sink too deep into just one feeling. A lot of what people describe as “angst” falls into this trap, but any emotion can become boring when it’s the only one present. 

By comparison, a character being “sad” and “angry” is far more interesting, because these feelings are in conversation with each other. It’s a more textured emotional space. Think about all of the ways a character is feeling and consider how these feelings would move against each other: what feelings are stronger than others, what feelings is the character more susceptible to believing as truth, what feelings conflict with each other and how does the character feel about that? 

It’s very possible to love someone very much and be furious with them for something they did and be hurt and sad for yourself and still feel pity the person who hurt you, and that’s human. I’ve always found scenes that try to talk about that huge complicatedness to be the most interesting and moving to both read and write. I also find sad and painful moments to hit better when there’s the counterpoint moments of sweetness and joy alongside them. Grief makes love more powerful; love makes grief hurt more. 

This might be a contentious suggestion but, in my opinion, no emotions are interesting by default. What makes them interesting is the relationship they have with each other and how the character acts and relates to the feelings they experience.

Tip 2. Set the tone for yourself first.  A lot of writing is based in empathy--i.e., being able to at least imagine what an experience is like, and then transcribing that in a skillful way for someone else, so that they can imagine it too. Because of that, it often helps if you’ve experienced some of what you’re writing about: that’s where the advice “write what you know” comes from. However, it’s not necessary in most cases and good writers are people who are talented at extrapolating what something might feel like and then describing that experience in a truly convincing way. That said, it can definitely help being in the right mood and mindset for the kind of scene you’re trying to write, so it’s worth figuring out how to set the scene for yourself before you begin. 

For me, I usually use music. I’ll pick a song, maybe two, that I’ll listen to more or less on repeat while writing a particular scene, because it’s like a tuning fork for me: it keeps me on key. However, it doesn’t have to be music! You might have a particular poem or passage from a book that really makes your heart feel like it’s going to burst, and that’s such a useful thing to tap into when you’re trying to pass that feeling on to your readers. Find what works for you and don’t be afraid to lean on it when you’re working on your scenes. 

Tip 3. The “light touch” then “piano” approach.  This is a theory I’ve had in my mind for a long time and it’s a big part of my writing practice, but I have no idea how well it’s going to translate outside of my own head, so I’m sorry in advance. 

I think belabouring a feeling can kill a scene, basically. If you go in too hard or you try to squeeze too much out of a reader, you become a parody of yourself. A reader can build up a tolerance to the barrage or become bored (as I do with a lot of “grimdark” media), and that’s really what you want to avoid. My advice for doing so is using a “light touch” most of the time--i.e., lightly tap your reader with a moment or feeling and then move on, try to be breezy with the fleeting feelings of your characters, and resist trying to make them have a big feeling at every moment. 

There’s a reason for this approach. It’s because you are about to drop a piano. In this context, I consider “a piano” (or a sledgehammer, whatever you prefer) to be a really potent moment, an intense feeling, a line of dialogue that cuts super raw, anything that really packs a punch and is intend to hit as hard as possible. I know it sounds goofy, but for a long time, that’s how I’ve envisioned those kinds of moments and honestly it fits. 

In some martial arts (weird swerve, I know), the first few hits aren’t intended to hurt: they’re intended to misdirect attention, or off-balance the target, or distract, or prime the spot for a bigger hit. I think the same theory can be applied to writing, because good writing a precision sport, not a brute-force one. You’re not trying to clock the reader over the head repeatedly with a blunt instrument of a feeling, because, as I mentioned earlier, that tends to be less effective the longer you do it. 

Instead, you want to prime your reader to take the most psychic damage possible when you finally find the right moment to drop the piano. Because of that, writing a great emotional scene is primarily about managing tension and lining up your shot. Unfortunately, I suspect a lot of this skill is something that you learn to do intuitively the more you do it, but you can still intentionally think about your writing in this way and consider how you can make your most meaningful moments really count. 

For instance, think about the core feelings you’re writing about and consider how you might prime those feelings throughout the piece by light references, fleeting moments, pieces of the puzzle that will take on new significance in hindsight when you drop the piano. Figure out where you’re going to put the lulls into your work and figure out where you’re going to build tension--and then figure out how you’re going to manage that tension after you build it. Will you pop it with a really big moment, or will you let it lull down again, or will you leave it unresolved? 

I don’t know how much help this will be in a practical sense, but I truly feel that ultimately what makes an emotional scene effective is landing that one powerful, resonant moment. That’s not to say there’s only one moment like that or that there can’t beautiful and moving lines that have less significance, but if you’re looking to really make that crescendo wave of feeling crash in a reader, you need to prime them for it, build up tension in some way, and then release with something that makes the heart ache. I personally don’t know any other way to do it. I hope this helps!