#that they thought were general classics only to find out it’s extremely niche?

[shihalyfie]

About the Adventure: reboot, the likely reason why it exists, the question of target demographic, and whether I would recommend it or not

I think this reboot has been kind of a strange outlier in terms of Digimon anime in general, in terms of...well, just about everything. I also feel like everything surrounding it has kind of been giving us mixed signals as to what the intent and purpose behind the anime is -- well, besides “cashing in on the Adventure brand”, but looking at it more closely, that might be a bit of an oversimplification.

I’m writing this post because, having seen the entire series to the end for myself and thinking very hard about it and what it was trying to do, I decided to put down my thoughts. This is not meant to be a review of what I think was good and bad, but rather, something that I hope will be helpful to those who might be on the fence about whether they want to watch it or not, or those who don’t want to watch/finish it but are curious about what happened, or those who are curious as to why this reboot even exists in the first place, or even maybe just those who did watch it but are interested in others’ thoughts about it. I'm personally convinced that -- especially in an ever-changing franchise like Digimon -- how much you like a given work is dependent on what your personal tastes are to the very end, and thus it’s helpful to understand what kind of expectations you should go in with if you want to watch something.

With all of this said and done, if you want to go in and best enjoy this series, I think it is best to consider this anime as a distinct Digimon series of its own. The relationship to Adventure is only surface-level, and by that I mean it’s very obvious it’s doing things its own thing deliberately without worrying too much about what prior series did. Of course, I think everyone will have varying feelings about using the Adventure branding for something that really isn't Adventure at all, but we are really talking about an in-name-only affair, and something that’s unabashedly doing whatever it wants. So in other words, if you’re going in expecting Adventure, or anything that really resembles Adventure, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. But if you’re able to approach it like yet another distinct Digimon series, and the other aspects of it fit your fancy, you’ll probably be able to enjoy it much better. And, conversely, I think it’s also important to remember that this series seems to have a writing philosophy with a fundamentally different goal from most Digimon series, and since it’s understandable for most long-time Digimon fans to have their tastes built on those prior series, it’s fine and completely understandable that this reboot may not be your cup of tea, for reasons that probably don’t actually have much to do with whether it’s an Adventure reboot or not.

There are no spoilers in the following post. (Although I use some emphatic language for the duration for it, these are mostly just my personal thoughts and how I see the series and the overall situation.)

On what exact relationship to Adventure this series has, and why it’s an “Adventure reboot”

If you ask why they did an Adventure reboot, the easiest answer to come up with is “Adventure milking, because it’s profitable”, but that’s kind of an oversimplification of what the issue is. This is especially when you take into account a key fact that official has been very well aware of since as early as 2006: most kids are too young to have seen Adventure, and therefore have no reason to care about it.

That’s the thing: Adventure milking only works so well on today’s children, and Toei and Bandai know this. This is also the reason that the franchise started going through a bit of a “split” starting in around 2012 (after Xros Wars finished airing), when the video game branch started making more active attempts to appeal to the adults’ fanbase with Re:Digitize and Adventure PSP. (Although they were technically still “kids’ games”, they were very obviously aimed at the adults’ audience as a primary “target”.) The generation that grew up with Adventure and other classic Digimon anime was getting older and older, and targeting that audience would require tailoring products more specifically to them -- ultimately culminating in 2015 and the solidification of “very obviously primarily for adults” media in the form of both games (Cyber Sleuth and Next Order) and anime (tri.). Note that Appmon ended up getting its own 3DS game, but since it was targeted at kids, it seems to have been developed by a completely different pipeline/branch from the aforementioned adults’ games, so even that had a split.

So if we want to talk about full-on nostalgia pandering, that’s already being done in the adults’ branch. In fact, Appmon development specifically said that they felt free to not really care about the adults’ audience because that was tri.’s job. Of course, the hardcore Digimon adults’ fanbase is still keeping an eye on the kids’ shows, and it’s good to not upset them -- and, besides, even if we’re all suffering under the hell of capitalism, people who work in kids’ shows still tend to be very passionate about the content and messages they’re showing the kids, so they still put an effort into making good content that adults can enjoy too. But, nevertheless, adults are still the “periphery demographic”, and a kids’ show is not a success if the kids (who have not seen and do not care about Adventure) are not watching it or buying the toys. Appmon ended up being extremely well-received by the adults’ fanbase, but that all meant nothing since the kids didn’t get into it.

Most kids are not super incredibly discerning about so-called writing quality (it’s not like they don’t at least unconsciously know when something is good, but they’re much less likely to be bothered by little things adults are often bothered by), so there’s a certain degree you have to get their attention if you want things to catch on with them. Critical reception does matter a lot more when we talk about the adults’ audience, but for the kids, the more important part is how much you’ve managed to engage them and how much fun they’re having (especially in regards to the toyline). Moreover, there’s the problem of “momentum”; Digimon’s sister shows of PreCure, Kamen Rider, and Super Sentai have sometimes had really poorly performing shows (critically or financially), but have managed to recover it in successive years to avoid getting cancelled. Digimon never managed to get to that point, with sales nearly dropping to half with Tamers and again with Frontier. So in essence, Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon were all attempts at figuring out what was needed to just get that “kickstart” again -- but things just never lined up for it to work.

So if kids don’t really care about Adventure, why would they do Adventure nostalgia pandering? The answer is one that official has actually openly stated multiple times: they want to have parents watch it together with their children. Both Seki and Kinoshita said this in regards to watching the reaction to Kizuna, and it was also stated outright as a goal for the reboot, but, believe it or not, there’s reports of this having been stated back as early as Savers (followed by an admission that maybe 2006 was a little too early for people who grew up with Adventure to be old enough to have their own kids). So the little nostalgia references in Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon aren't really meant to magically turn the series into Adventure as much as they’re supposed to be flags waved at the parents to get them to pay attention, so that they can introduce their kids to Digimon and watch it together with them, until the kids eventually take an interest on their own and they don’t need to rely on that kind of standby as much. (I say “as much” because of course PreCure, Rider, and Sentai all are still very indulgent in their anniversary references, but they’re not nearly as reliant on it to the point of life-and-death.)

This is also why Kizuna’s existence and release date two months prior to the reboot is a huge factor in this. The reason tri. wouldn’t have done it is that it never actually reached a properly “mainstream” audience. It’s a huge reason I keep emphasizing the fact that tri. and Kizuna are two separate things with completely different production and release formats, because tri. being a limited OVA screening released in six parts over three years means that, although it was a moderate financial success that did better than the franchise’s other niche products, in the end, it didn’t actually reach the “extremely casual” audience very well. We, as the “hardcore Internet fanbase”, all know people who watched all six parts, and the difference between tri. and Kizuna’s release formats doesn’t hit us as hard because of international distribution circumstances, but even on our end, if you talk to your casual friends who barely remember anything about Digimon except what they saw on TV twenty years ago, you will almost never find anyone who got past Part 1, maybe 2 at most. (That’s before we even get into the part where a good chunk of them got turned off at the character design stage for being too different.) Sticking with a full six-part series over three years is a commitment, and if you’re not someone with a certain level of loyalty to the franchise, you aren’t as likely to put aside the time for it!

Kizuna, on the other hand, was a full-on theatrical movie with full marketing campaign that was aimed at that extremely casual mainstream audience, including a lot of people who hadn’t even heard of tri. (due to it being too niche) or hadn’t bothered to commit to watching something so long, and thus managed to “hype up” a lot of adults and get them in a Digimon mood. (Critical reception issues aside, this is also presumably a huge reason Kizuna isn’t all that reliant on tri.’s plot; Adventure and 02 both averaged at around 11% of the country watching it when it first aired, but the number of people who even saw tri. much less know what happened in it is significantly lower, so while you can appeal to a lot of people if you’re just targeting the 11%, you'll lock them out if you’re overly reliant on stuff a lot of them will have never seen in the first place.) We’re talking the kind of super-casual who sees a poster for Kizuna, goes “oh I remember Digimon!”, casually buys a ticket for the movie, likes it because it has characters they remember and the story is feelsy, and then two months later an anime that looks like the Digimon they recognize is on Fuji TV, resulting in them convincing their kid to watch it together with them because they’re in a Digimon mood now, even though the actual contents of the anime are substantially different from the original.

So, looking back at the reboot:

There’s a huge, huge, huge implication that the choice to use Adventure branding was at least partially to get Fuji TV to let them have their old timeslot back. Neither Xros Wars nor Appmon were able to be on that old timeslot, presumably because Fuji TV had serious doubts about their profitability (perhaps after seeing Savers not do very well). This isn’t something that hits as hard for us outside Japan who don’t have to feel the impact of this anyway, but it’s kind of a problem if kids don’t even get the opportunity to watch the show in the first place. While there’s been a general trend of moving to video-on-demand to the point TV ratings don’t really have as much impact as they used to, I mean...it sure beats 6:30 in the morning, goodness. (Note that a big reason PreCure, Rider, and Sentai are able to enjoy the comfortable positions they’re in is that they have a very luxurious 8:30-10 AM Sunday block on TV Asahi dedicated to them.)

Since we’re talking about “the casual mainstream”, this means that this kind of ploy only works with something where a casual person passing by can see names and faces and take an interest. This is why it has to be Adventure, not 02 or Tamers or whatnot; 02 may have had roughly similar TV ratings to Adventure and fairly close sales figures back in 2000, but the actual pop culture notability disparity in this day and age is humongous (think about the difference in pop culture awareness between Butter-Fly and Target). 02, Tamers, and all can do enough to carry “adults’ fandom” products and merch sales at DigiFes, and the adults’ branch of the franchise in general, but appealing to the average adult buying toys for the kids is a huge difference, and a big reason that, even if they’re clearly starting to acknowledge more of the non-Adventure series these days, it’s still hard to believe they’re going to go as far as rebooting anything past Adventure -- or, more accurately, hard to believe they’ll be able to get the same impact using names and faces alone.

This advertising with the Adventure brand goes beyond just the anime -- we’re talking about the toyline that has the involved character faces plastered on them, plus all of the ventures surrounding them that Bandai pretty obviously carefully timed to coincide with this. One particularly big factor is the card game, which is doing really, really well right now, to the point it’s even started gaining an audience among people who weren’t originally Digimon fans. Part of it is because the game’s design is actually very good and newcomer-friendly, but also...nearly every set since the beginning came with reboot-themed Tamer Cards, which means that, yes, those cards with the Adventure names and faces were helping lure people into taking an interest in the game. Right now, the game is doing so well and has gained such a good reputation that it probably doesn’t need that crutch anymore to keep going as long as the game remains well-maintained, but I have no doubt the initial “Adventure” branding was what helped it take off, and its success is most likely a huge pillar sustaining the franchise at the current moment.

Speaking of merch and toys, if you look closely, you might notice that Bandai decided to go much, much more aggressively into the toy market with this venture than they ever did with Savers, Xros Wars, or Appmon (Appmon was probably the most aggressive attempt out of said three). They put out a lot more merch and did a lot more collaborative events to engage the parents and children, and, presumably, the reason they were able to do this was because they were able to push into those outlets with the confidence the Adventure brand would let them be accepted (much like with Fuji TV). Like with the card game, the important part was getting their “foot in the door” so that even if it stopped being Adventure after a fashion, they’d still have all of those merchandising outlets -- after all, one of the first hints we ever got of Ghost Game’s existence was a July product listing for its products replacing the reboot’s in a gachapon set, so we actually have evidence of certain product pipelines being opened by the reboot’s precedent. (The word 後番組 literally means “the TV program that comes after”, so it’s pretty obvious this was intended for Ghost Game; in other words, the reboot’s existence helped ensure there be a “reservation” for this kind of product to be made.)

I think one important thing to keep in mind is that Toei and Bandai have as much of a stake in avoiding rehashing for their kids’ franchises as we do. Even if you look at this from a purely capitalistic perspective, because of how fast the “turnover” is for the kids’ audience, sustaining a franchise for a long time off rehashing the same thing over and over is hard, and even moreso when it involves a twenty-year-old anime that said kids don’t even know or remember. Ask around about popular long-running Japanese kids’ franchises and you’ll notice they practically rely on being able to comfortably change things up every so often, like PreCure/Rider/Sentai shuffling every year, or Yu-Gi-Oh! having a rotation of different series and concepts, or the struggles that franchises that don’t do this have to deal with. And, after all, for all people are cynical about Toei continuing to milk Adventure or any of the other older series at every opportunity, as far as the kids’ branch of the franchise goes, this is only capable of lasting to a certain extent; if they tried keeping this up too long, even the adults and kids would get bored, and there is some point it’ll be easier to try and make products directly targeted at the kids’ audience instead of having to rely on the parents to ease them into it.

So it’s completely understandable that the moment they secured a proper audience with the reboot and finished up their first series with this, they decided to take the risk with Ghost Game right after. And considering all that’s happened, this is still a risk -- they’re changing up a lot (even if not as much as Appmon), and there’s a chance that the audience they’ve gathered is going to shoot down again because they’ve changed so much and they no longer have the Adventure branding as a “crutch” to use -- but they’re taking it anyway instead of going for something at least slightly more conventional.

Which means that, yes, there’s a possibility this will all explode in their face, because the Adventure branding is that huge of a card they’re about to lose. But at the very, very least, Ghost Game is coming in with the “momentum” and advantage that Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon all didn’t have: a brand currently in the stage of recovery, all of the merchandising and collaborative pipelines the reboot and Kizuna opened up, a fairly good timeslot, and a premise somewhat more conventional than Xros Wars and Appmon (I’m saying this as someone who likes both: their marketing definitely did not do them many favors). There are still a lot of risks it’s playing here, and it’s possible it won’t be the end of more Adventure or reboot brand usage to try to keep that momentum up even as we go into Ghost Game, but it’s the first time in a long while we’ve had something to stand on.

Okay, so that’s out of the way. But the end result is that we now have 67 episodes of an Adventure “reboot” that actually doesn’t even resemble Adventure that much at all, which seems to have achieved its goal of flagging down attention so it can finally going back to trying new things. This series exists, we can’t do anything about the fact it exists, the period where its own financial performance actually mattered is coming to an end anyway, and we, as a fanbase of adults hanging out on the Internet keeping up with the franchise as a whole, have to figure out how each of us feels about this. So what of it?

About the contents of the reboot itself

One thing I feel hasn’t been brought up as a potential topic very much (or, at least, not as much as I feel like it probably should be) is that the reboot seems to be actively aimed at a younger target audience than the original Adventure. It hasn’t been stated outright, but we actually have quite a bit of evidence pointing towards this.

Let’s take a moment and discuss what it even means to have a different target audience. When you’re a kid, even one or two years’ difference is a big deal, and while things vary from kid to kid, generally speaking, it helps to have an idea of what your “overall goal” is when targeting a certain age group, since at some point you have to approximate the interests of some thousands of children. Traditionally, Digimon has been aimed at preteens (10-11 year olds); of course, many will testify to having seen the series at a younger age than that, but the "main” intended target demographic was in this arena. (Also, keep in mind that this is an average; a show aimed at 10-11 year olds could be said to be more broadly aimed at 7-13 year olds, whereas one aimed at 7-8 year olds would be more broadly aimed at something like 5-10 year olds.) Let’s talk a bit about what distinguishes children’s shows (especially Japanese kids’ shows) between this “preteen demographic” and things aimed at a much younger audience (which I’ll call “young child demographic”, something like the 7-8 year old arena):

With children who are sufficiently young, it’s much, much more difficult to ensure that a child of that age will be able to consistently watch TV at the same hour every week instead of being subject to more variable schedules, often set by their parents, meaning that it becomes much more difficult to have a series that relies on you having seen almost every episode to know what’s going on. For somewhat older kids, they’re more likely to be able to pick and pursue their own preferences (the usual “got up early every week for this show”). This means that shows targeted at a young child demographic will be more likely to be episodic, or at least not have a complex dramatic narrative that requires following the full story, whereas shows targeted at a preteen audience are more willing to have a dramatic narrative with higher complexity. This does not mean by any shake of the imagination that a narrative is incapable of having any kind of depth or nuance -- the reboot’s timeslot predecessor GeGeGe no Kitaro got glowing reviews all over the board for being an episodic story with tons of depth -- nor that characters can’t slowly develop over the course of the show. But it does raise the bar significantly, especially because it prevents you from making episodes that require you to know what happened in previous ones.

The thing is, the original Adventure and the older Digimon series in general didn’t have to worry about this, and, beyond the fact that their narratives very obviously were not episodic, we actually have concrete evidence of the disparity: Digimon has often been said to be a franchise for “the kids who graduated from (outgrew) a certain other monster series”. Obviously, they’re referring to Pokémon -- which does have the much younger target demographic. That’s why its anime is significantly more episodic and less overall plot-oriented, and Digimon wasn’t entirely meant to be a direct competitor to it; rather, it was hoping to pick up the preteens who’d enjoyed Pokémon at a younger age but were now looking for something more catered to them. This is also why, when Yo-kai Watch came into the game in 2014, that was considered such a huge direct competitor to Pokémon, because it was aiming for that exact same demographic, complete with episodic anime. When Yo-kai Watch moved to its Shadowside branch in 2017, it was specifically because they had concerns about losing audience and wanted to appeal to the kids who had been watching the original series, but since they were preteens now, they adopted a more dramatic and emotionally complex narrative that would appeal to that audience instead. So you can actually see the shift in attempted target demographic in real time.

Adventure through Frontier were aimed at 10-11 year olds, and here’s the interesting part: those series had the protagonists hover around the age of said target audience. We actually have it on record that Frontier had a direct attempt to keep most of the kids as fifth-graders for the sake of appealing to the audience, and so that it would be relatable to them. You can also see this policy of “matching the target audience’s age” in other series at the time; Digimon’s sister series Ojamajo Doremi (also produced by Seki) centered around eight-year-olds. Nor was Seki the only one to do this; stepping outside Toei for a bit, Medabots/Medarot had its protagonist Ikki be ten years old, much like Digimon protagonists, and the narrative was similarly dramatic. The thing is, that’s not how it usually works, and that’s especially not really been how it’s worked for the majority of kids’ series since the mid-2000s. In general, and especially now, it’s usually common to have the protagonists of children’s media be slightly older than the target age group. This has a lot of reasons behind it -- partially because kids are looking to have slightly older characters as a model for what to follow in their immediate future, and partially because “the things you want to teach the kids” are often more realistically reflected if the kids on screen have the right level of independence and capacity for emotional contemplation. Case in point: while everyone agrees the Adventure through Frontier characters are quite relatable, it’s a common criticism that the level of emotional insight sometimes pushes the boundary of what’s actually believable for 10-11 year olds...

...which is presumably why, with the exception of this reboot, every Digimon TV series since, as of this writing, started shifting to middle school students. That doesn’t mean they’re aiming the series at middle school kids now, especially because real-life 13-15 year olds are usually at the stage where they pretend they’ve outgrown kids’ shows (after all, that’s why there’s a whole term for “middle school second year syndrome”), but more that the narrative that they want to tell is best reflected by kids of that age, especially when we’re talking characters meant to represent children from the real world and not near-immortal youkai like Kitaro. In fact, the Appmon staff outright said that Haru was placed in middle school because the story needed that level of independence and emotional sensitivity, which is interesting to consider in light of the fact that Appmon’s emotional drama is basically on par with that of Adventure through Frontier’s. So in other words, the kind of high-level drama endemic to Adventure through Frontier is would actually normally be more on par with what you’d expect for kids of Haru’s age.

But at this point, the franchise is at a point of desperation, and you can see that, as I said earlier, Appmon was blatantly trying to be one of those “have its cake and eat it too” series by having possibly one of the franchise’s most dramatic storylines while also having some of the most unsubtle catchphrases and bright colors it has to offer. Moreover, one thing you might notice if you look closely at Appmon: most of its episodes are self-contained. Only a very small handful of episodes are actively dependent on understanding what happened in prior episodes to understand the conflict going on in the current one -- it’s just very cleverly structured in a way you don’t really notice this as easily. So as you can see, the more desperate the franchise has gotten to get its kids’ audience back, the more it has to be able to grab the younger demographic and not lock them out as much as possible -- which means that it has to do things that the original series didn’t have to worry about at all.

Having seen the reboot myself, I can say that it checks off a lot of what you might expect if you tried to repurpose something based on Adventure (and only vaguely based on it, really) into a more episodic story that doesn’t require you to follow the whole thing, and that it has to break down its story into easy-to-follow bits. In fact, there were times where I actually felt like it gave me the vibes of an educational show that would usually be expected for this demographic, such as repeated use of slogans or fun catchphrases for young kids to join in on. That alone means that even if the “base premise” is similar to the original Adventure, this already necessitates a lot of things that have to be very different, because Adventure really cannot be called episodic no matter how you slice it.

Not only that, even though the target audience consideration has yet to be outright stated, we also have interviews on hand that made it very clear, from the very beginning, what their goals with the reboot were: they wanted the kids to be able to enjoy a story of otherworldly exploration during the pandemic, they wanted cool action sequences, and they wanted to get the adults curious about what might be different from the original. Note that last part: they actively wanted this series to be different from the original, because the differences would engage parents in spotting the differences, and the third episode practically even goes out of its way to lay that message down by taking the kids to a familiar summer camp, only to have it pass without incident and go “ha, you thought, but nope!” Moreover -- this is the key part -- “surprising” people who were coming from the original series was a deliberate goal they had from the very beginning. They’ve stated this outright -- they knew older fans were watching this! They were not remotely shy about stating that they wanted to surprise returning viewers with unexpected things! They even implied that they wanted it to be a fun experience for older watchers to see what was different and what wasn’t -- basically, it’s a new show for their kids who never saw the original Adventure, while the parents are entertained by a very different take on something that seems ostensibly familiar. 

On top of that, the head writer directly cited V-Tamer as an influence -- and if you know anything about V-Tamer, it’s really not that much of a character narrative compared to what we usually know of Digimon anime, and is mostly known for its battle tactics and action sequences (but in manga form). In other words, we have a Digimon anime series that, from day one, was deliberately made to have a writing philosophy and goal that was absolutely not intended to be like Adventure -- or any Digimon TV anime up to this point -- in any way. And that’s a huge shock for us as veterans, who have developed our tastes and expectations based on up to seven series of Digimon that were absolutely not like this at all. But for all it's worth, the circumstances surrounding its production and intent don't seem to quite line up with what the most common accusations against it are:

That it’s a rehash of Adventure: It really isn’t. It’s also blatantly apparent it has no intention of being so. The points that are in common: the character names and rough character designs, some very minimal profile details for said characters, Devimon having any particular foil position to Angemon, the use of Crests to represent personal growth, the premise of being in the Digital World and...that’s it! Once those points are aside, it’s really hard to say that the series resembles Adventure any more than Frontier or Xros Wars resembles Adventure (which are also “trapped in another world” narratives) -- actually, there are times the series resembles those two more than the original Adventure, which many have been quick to point out. The majority of things you can make any kind of comparison to basically drop off by the end of the first quarter or so, and trying to force a correlation is basically just that: you’d have to try forcing the comparison. The plot, writing style, and even the lineup of enemies shown just go in a completely different direction after that. So in the end, the base similarities can be said to be a marketing thing; if I want to criticize this series, I don’t think “lack of creativity” would actually be something I would criticize it for. (Of course, you’re still welcome to not be a huge fan of how they’re still guilty of using Adventure’s name value to market something that is not actually Adventure. We’re all gonna have mixed feelings on that one.)

That they don’t understand or remember Adventure’s appeal: Unlikely. All of the main staff has worked on character-based narratives before, which have been very well-praised while we’re at it. The producer, Sakurada Hiroyuki, was an assistant producer on the original series, and I would like to believe he probably remembers at least a thing or two about what they were doing with the original series...but, also, he’s the producer of Xros Wars, which definitely had its own individuality and style, and, moreover, was more of a character narrative that people generally tend to expect from Digimon anime. (Still a bit unconventional, and it has its own questions of personal taste, but a lot of people have also pointed out that this reboot has a lot in common with Xros Wars in terms of its writing tone and its emphasis on developing Digital World resident Digimon moreso than the human characters.) All signs point to the idea they could make a character narrative like Adventure if they really wanted to. It’s just, they don’t want to do that with this reboot, so they didn’t.

That they misinterpreted or misremembered the Adventure characters: There’s been accusations of said characters being written in a way that implies misinterpretation or lack of understanding of the original characters, but the thing is, while I definitely agree they have nowhere near the depth of the original ones, there are points that seem to be deliberate changes. (At some points, they’re actually opposites of the original, and certain things that operate as some very obscure references -- for instance, Sora complaining about having to sit in seiza -- seem to also be deliberate statements of going in a different direction.) The lack of human character depth or backstory doesn’t seem to be out of negligence, but rather that this story doesn’t want to be a character narrative to begin with -- after all, we’re used to seven series of Digimon that are, but there are many, many kids’ anime, or even stories in general, where the story is more about plot or action than it is completely unpacking all of its characters’ heads. In this case, this reboot does seem to have characters that are taking cues from or are “inspired by” the original, but, after all, it’s an alternate universe and has no obligation to adhere to the original characters’ backgrounds, so it stands to reason that it’d take liberties whenever it wanted. (Again, the head writer outright stated that he based the reboot’s Taichi more on V-Tamer Taichi than the original Adventure anime Taichi. He knows there’s a difference!) Even more intriguingly, the series actually avoids certain things that are common misconceptions or pigeonholes that would normally be done by the mainstream -- for instance, the Crest of Light (infamously one of the more abstract ones in the narrative) is fully consistent with Adventure’s definition of it as “the power of life”, and, if I dare say so myself, Koushirou’s characterization (emphasizing his relationship with “knowledge” and his natural shyness) arguably resembles the original far more than most common fan reductions of his character that overemphasize his computer skills over his personal aptitude. In other words, I think the staff does know what happened in the original Adventure -- they just actively don’t want to do what Adventure did, even if it’s ostensibly a reboot.

That it’s soulless or that there’s no passion in its creation: Well, this is subjective, and in the end I’m not a member of the staff to tell you anything for sure, but there are definitely a lot of things in this anime that don’t seem like they’d be the byproduct of uninspired creation or lack of passion. It’s just that those things are all not the kinds of things that we, as Digimon veterans, have come to develop a taste for and appreciate in Digimon anime. That is to say, there is an incredible amount of thought and detail put into representing Digimon null canon (i.e. representing special attacks and mechanics), the action sequences are shockingly well-animated in ways that put most prior Digimon anime to shame, and the series has practically been making an obvious attempt to show off as many Digimon (creatures) that haven’t traditionally gotten good franchise representation as they can. Or sometimes really obscure “meta fanservice” references that only make sense to the really, really, really, really hardcore longtime Digimon fan (for instance, having an episode centered around Takeru and Opossummon, because Takeru’s voice actress Han Megumi voiced Airu in Xros Wars). If you follow any of the animators on Twitter, they seem to be really actively proud of their work on it, and franchise creators Volcano Ota and Watanabe Kenji seem to be enjoying themselves every week...so basically, we definitely have creators passionate about having fun with this, it’s just that all of it is being channeled here, not the character writing.

So in the end, you can basically see that this series is basically the epitome of desperately pulling out all of the stops to make sure this series lands with the actual target demographic of children, dammit, and gets them into appreciating how cool these fighting monsters are and how cool it would be if they stuck with them even into a series that’s not Adventure. The Adventure branding and names to lure in the parents, the straightforward and easy-to-understand action-oriented narrative so that kids will think everything is awesome and that they’ll like it even when the story changes, and the merchandise and collab events booked everywhere so that they can all be reused for the next series too...because, remember, they failed with that during Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon (I mean, goodness, you kind of have to admire their persistence, because a ton of other kids’ franchises failing this many times would have given up by now), so it’s a bit unsurprising that they went all the way to get the kids’ attention at the expense of a lot of things that would attract veterans, especially since the veterans already have a well-developed adults’ pipeline to cater to them. This does also mean that this series is more likely to come off as a 67-episode toy commercial than any previous Digimon series, but it’s not even really the toys as much as they’re trying to sell the entire franchise and the actual monsters in the hopes that they’ll stick with it even when the narrative changes.

Nevertheless, here we are. The series is over. Ghost Game -- which, as of this writing, is looking to be much more of a conventional Digimon narrative, complete with older cast, obviously more dramatic atmosphere, and pretty much everything surrounding its PR -- is on its way, presumably thanks to the success of this endeavor. It’s hard to gauge it; we have it on record that they also intend it to be episodic, but remember that this doesn’t necessarily prevent it from having an overall dramatic plot or nuanced drama (especially since the abovementioned Appmon and Kitaro were perfectly capable of pulling off this balance). Nevertheless, it seems to be a lot more of the conventional kind of Digimon narrative we usually expect, so, as for us, adult long-time fans of the Digimon franchise (many of whom don’t have kids anyway), what exactly should we make of this? Well, as far as “supporting the franchise” goes, you’ll get much more progress supporting Ghost Game than the reboot; I highly doubt view counts and merch sales relative to an already-finished series will do nearly as much for the franchise’s health as much as the currently airing series, and, besides, it’d probably do us all a favor to support the endeavor that’s actually new and fresh. So when it comes to a “past” series like this, it’s all just going to come down to a question of personal preference and taste: is this a series you, personally, want to watch, and would you find it entertaining?

For some of you, it’s possible that it just won’t be your cup of tea at all -- and since, like I said, the majority of us here have based our expectations and preferences on up to seven series of Digimon that were not like this, that’s also perfectly fine, and in that case I don’t actually recommend you watch this. Of course, I’ve never thought that it was ever fair to expect a Digimon fan to have seen all of the series released to date; the more series we get, the more inhumane of a demand that’ll become, and I think this franchise becoming successful enough to have so many series that most people won’t have seen it all is a good thing. (It’s actually kind of alarming that the percentage of people who have seen it all is so high, because it means the franchise has failed to get much of an audience beyond comparatively hardcore people who committed to it all the way.) But I think, especially in this case, with a series for which adult fans like us were probably lowest on the priority list due to the sheer amount of desperation going on here, it’s fine to skip it, and if you’re someone who lives by a need for character depth or emotionally riveting narrative, the fact this series is (very unabashedly and unashamedly) mostly comprised of episodic stories and action sequences means you won’t have missed much and probably won’t feel too left out of any conversations going forward. That’s before we even get into the part where it’s still completely understandable to potentially have mixed feelings or resentment about the overuse of the Adventure brand for something like this, especially if Adventure is a particularly important series to you.

But for some of you out there, it might still be something you can enjoy on its own merits. I’ve seen people who were disappointed by the limited degree of Digimon action sequences in the past or the fact that the series has gotten overly fixated on humans, and had an absolute ball with the reboot because it finally got to represent parts of the franchise they felt hadn’t been shown off as well. “Fun” is a perfectly valid reason to enjoy something. It’s also perfectly possible to be someone who can enjoy character narratives like the prior Digimon series but also enjoy something that’s more for being outlandish and fun and has cool Digital World concepts and visuals -- and, like I said, it does not let up on that latter aspect at all, so there’s actually potential for a huge feast in that regard. I think as long as you don’t expect it to be a character narrative like Adventure -- which will only set you up for disappointment, because it’s not (and made very clear since even the earliest episodes and interviews that it had no intention of being one) -- it’s very possible to enjoy it for what it is, and for what it does uniquely.

[k7l4d4]

Owl House AU Ideas, ZA FIRST!!

Hello all, this has been a long time coming on my part. After procrastinating on the subject, I have decided to upload my personal AU ideas for the Owl House. Here’s hoping ya’ll like them, and feel free to make your own stuff based on them as you please!!

Tough Love: This AU is my own twist on the classic Siblings AU, in which I fleshed it out into my own little niche using whatever I had available in my brain.

Victoria Noceda: My name for Beta Luz, who in this Idea is the oldest of the three Noceda sisters. Brash, belligerent, always ready with a smart remark, Victoria is a tough girl who takes no crap from anyone, with her weapon of choice being a metal bat carved with glyphs. A short temper mixed with both a strict demeanor and a flippant attitude has earned her a reputation as a thug, one which she has done nothing to reject or deny. Growing up, Victoria quickly grew familiar with the uglier side of humanity, and when her sisters were born vowed to shield them from the harshness of the world, by any means necessary. She is highly cynical, yet being around Luz chips away at this persona of hers. Despite her attitude and behavior, she is highly intelligent, graduating from school as valedictorian to the shock of everyone bar her teachers. Victoria first ended up in the Isles by chasing down Owlbert after the Palisman tried (and failed) to pickpocket her. She and Eda, to their mutual surprise, hit it off rather well, with Victoria often acting as her Stall Manager, Gopher, Muscle, etc., and has amassed a large quantity of glyphic spells, which she keeps as tattoos climbing up both arms (she actually has enough to cover nearly her whole torso and part of her neck, but uses illusion glyphs to hide them so Eda doesn't ask how she discovered them... some of them were highly unpleasant for lack of a better word). Using her work with Eda to avoid getting a job on Earth, Victoria has a LOT of money, mostly due to Eda paying her with whatever bills and coins Owlbert brings her without consideration for how much they actually are worth. Offered to house her sisters so they could "branch out and get some real world experience," really an excuse to get her sibs away from the toxic environment at school. Convinced (threatened) Principal Hal to have Luz sent to stay with her for the summer. Her aggressive tendencies and willingness to use incredible violence to solve her problems has resulted in her relationship with her sisters partially atrophying, though she is unaware of it herself. Her first encounter with Boscha, in the body swap episode, is meant to illustrate this as she very clearly and deliberately tormented and ridiculed the girl for bullying Luz, refusing to let up even when Luz begged her to stop until Boscha apologized and begged for forgiveness; Luz rushing off to help bandage Boscha's nearly broken hands implies this isn't the first time she has done this, or at least something like this. Victoria has a bad temper when roused and often resorts to extreme verbal haranguing when she's cross with Luz, not knowing that this reinforces the idea that she doesn't like or care for her youngest sister, as she can't bring herself to raise a hand to her sisters. Finds Amaryllis hot and enjoys teasing her. Will answer to Victoria, Tori, or Ria, NEVER to Vic or Vicky, which will result in her threatening to break the offender's legs, THIS IS NOT A BLUFF SHE HAS DONE IT TWICE BEFORE. Mari Noceda: My name for Pilot!Luz, the middle child. Easily the most well-behaved of her siblings, though that isn't saying much. Unlike her hyper-impulsive younger, and her super aggressive elder, Mari is calm, logical, and significantly more easy going. However, she is an absolute snoop with a very poor understanding of personal privacy, resulting in her being sent to the principal for breaking into other students' lockers, on multiple occasions. After Victoria basically dropped off the map, she became hellbent on tracker her down, resulting in her discovering the Boiling Isles and magic. As is her usual, she quickly got over whatever shock she felt and proceeded to brow beat her mom, Victoria, AND EDA to let her stay in the Isles by homeschooling (Camila doesn't know she went to the Isles, just that she wanted to move in with her sister... it hurt her more than Mari thought it would), she soon set herself to studying everything the Isles has to offer, to Eda's chagrin. While her repertoire is much smaller than Tori's, she knows quite a few spells herself, all of which she has studied to a ludicrous degree. After reading up on some of Luz's fantasy novels, she has started viewing herself as an artificer, blending magic and technology together. Is VERY GOOD FRIENDS with Vela Blight (they are dating but don't want anyone to know). Often puts down Luz's fantasies as ridiculous. Luz Noceda: Canon cinnamon roll, sorta. Plucky, sweet, optimistic, and, oh yeah, Kinda mental. Was introduced to the Boiling Isles and Eda via Victoria picking her up and driving through a portal that opened up in Eda's living room. When she asked her sisters' to share what they know about magic with her, they both laughed and told her they would teach her how to use any spells she figured out on her own, and no more. Basically the same as canon, she is somewhat more fragile emotionally as a result of Mari's unintended put-downs, and Victoria's angry rants. She is convinced that part of the reason she didn't have friends was due to everyone being afraid of Victoria beating them silly, or Mari invading their privacy. While very similar to her original self, this version of Luz has a lot of repressed anger, which manifests as a slight twitch in her left eye and a compulsive hiccup when stressed. Eda: Due to taking in Victoria and Mari, she is much more in touch with her caring side earlier on than Canon, welcoming Luz easily and more willing to play the mentor role. Quickly picks up on the warning signs in the sisters' interactions but is repeatedly shut out, to her frustration and concern. King: Mellower than in canon due to having Mari, who considers him a fount of demonic knowledge, and Victoria, who appreciates his street wise wisdom when it peeks through his megalomania, to talk and interact with. Clings to Luz as a "new general in my Army! Rejoice, Mr. Ducky, REJOICE!!" Amaryllis Blight: My name for Beta!Amity, and the eldest sibling. Ruthless, ferocious, and feral, Amaryllis always possessed the hallmarks of a problem child, bucking her parents authority at every turn, which she got away with due to her immense magical power even as a toddler. Wears green hair dye to spite her parents after they virtually disowned her. Regularly forgets any and all information that she deems useless, which includes her parents' names, resulting in her always referring to them as Mr. and Mrs. Blight at all times, even in her head. Leads the Predators, an elite section of the Emperor's Coven tasked with locating and sealing dimensional breaches, as well as purging anything that crosses through. Has a severe survival of the fittest mindset; if you don't have the strength and will to survive and succeed, you are nothing. Ironically, she hates bullies, claiming them as weaklings who tear down those with true potential for greatness, and often curses herself for being too weak to separate from Belos. Her sheer power and accomplishments have forced the Blight parents to recognize her as their child, if only to capitalize on her success and prevent difficult questions being aimed their way, yet none are comfortable with the arrangement. Strongly admires Eda, genuinely believing her to be the greatest Witch of all time, which leads to her verbally, and sometimes physically, tearing a new one in anyone who speaks ill of her in Amaryllis' presence. The biggest inspirations for Amaryllis were Katsuki Bakugo from My Hero Academia, and Esdeath from Akame Ga Kill, being strangely friendly and amicable to her fellow Predators and anyone who she finds sufficiently impressive in terms of combat, though she has no ability to register those she thinks of as weak, often being incapable of recalling any real information about them beyond whatever part of their appearance stuck out most to her. She has no respect or regard for Emira and Edric, regarding them as fools and cowards, and is genuinely incapable of telling them apart, despite the fact that they are different genders, and often needs a moment to remember who they are. Often verbally scolds Vela for being weak, with the first "kind" thing she has ever said to her since graduating was congratulating her for taking the first steps to realizing her true potential. Admires Amity's dedication to be the best, but detests her kowtowing to their parents. Has a huge crush on Victoria, but is both better at hiding it than Amity, by a mile, and severely conflicted over it, due to regarding humans as "the weakest existence on the whole of the Isles." Amaryllis' animalistic mentality is considered extremely unusual, even by the standards of the Boiling Isles and results in everyone being incredibly wary of her. Amaryllis is insanely loyal to those she holds regard to and works with, viciously destroying anything that dares bring harm to her comrades, or "pack" as she insists on calling them, and has a win by any means necessary mindset, being genuinely puzzled by the crowd and Amity's distress at Lilith's cheating during the Covention, seeing the power glyph as a perfectly acceptable tactic and applauding Luz and Eda's mines to circumvent the Human's lack of spells, however even she disapproves of cheating that can result in permanent injury, which is her sole complaint about the duel. Vela Blight: My name for Pilot!Amity, and the Middle child of the Blight Triplets. Timid, meek, and polite to a fault, Vela is near totally lacking in confidence. Is hopelessly mediocre in every form of magic, despite her higher than average power, and regarded as a failure to the Blight name. Her parents disowned her shortly before Canon, but allow her to stay in the Manor as her siblings' attendant, even Amaryllis is better regarded than she is by the Blight parents. Is good friends with the Detention Track kids, and eagerly jumped on the bandwagon when they became multi-track students, joining Luz as an All-Tracker, which also exposed her immense talent for magic mixing, allowing her to merge different forms of Magic with ease and fluidity. Vela's sheer passion for learning magic exceeds both Amity and Luz combined, and is genuinely puzzled why more witches weren't trying to multi-track too. Is something of a teacher's pet, to her own embarrassment, as even with her poor abilities her sheer passion for learning has caused many of the Teachers and Bump himself to develop a soft spot for her. Has a complicated relationship with Ed and Em, as while she loves them, she envies their talent, and despises their pranks, as she is often punished for them whether she had a hand or not, and often when she tried to stop them. When her trip-mates decided to prank Amity, she lividly tore into them with a brutal "The Reason You Suck" Speech before storming off in tears, resulting in Ed and Em chasing after her and leaving Amity and Luz alone in the library. During the trip to the Knee, she was still bitter, and went out of her way to be as difficult for Ed and Em as possible, only forgiving them after took on the Slitherbeast. Vela is very close to Amity, as well as the Nocedas. Vela regards Amity as a treasure and has the healthiest relationship with her out of all their siblings, instantly pegging to Amity's crush on Luz (She ships them so hard), though she doesn't call her out on it. Vela is scared of Amaryllis. Ed and Em: Are wilder than in Canon, willing to resort to harsher pranks to meet their goals. They adore Vela, and assumed she adored them; having her verbally tear them a new one served as a massive wake-up call to how jerky they could be, and often were, provoking them to be better siblings and people all around, still tricksters though. Are jealous of Amaryllis due to her being unshackled from their parents, and are often rendered livid by her casual dismissal of them. Amity Blight: Mostly the same, but a bit more assertive against the toxic influences in her life. Idolizes Amaryllis due to her power and freedom, and trusts Vela with the same secrets as her diary. Sallix Park: Name for Beta!Willow. A maverick and an agitator, she enjoys stirring up trouble for the heck of it, but only when she's the one to cause it. Adores her little sister, but insists on her fighting her own battles, and enjoys training Willow through random plant attacks. Has been secretly gaslighting Boscha, in the hopes of the brat having some kind of epiphany and cleaning up her act, not knowing that her actions were causing the triclops to develop conflicting impulses and feelings regarding Willow, as well as an unhealthy fixation. Is good friends with both Victoria and Amaryllis, resulting in her serving as referee whenever they fight, which is often. Willow Park: Same as canon, but more assertive over her behaviors.

Let me know if any of you have any questions or opinions on it.

[chicoriii]

🎶Made for @lovesquarefluffweek Day 1 - Concert 🎶

Please, click on the picture to see it in full resolution, it looks awful when small and Kwamis are hardly seen.

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It’s the first time I take part in event like this. When I noticed concert day, I knew I need to do this, since instrumental music is my the biggest passion. I love jazz and classical piano so much, even though piano is not my favourite instrument.

It's great to combine my love for Miraculous and instrumental/classical music. I'm not a musician, but I can do it by drawing a fanart which illustrates music scene with my favourite side of Love Square.

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It’s one of my first attempts at drawing humans from years, I’ve never been good at it, Miraculous gives me lots of motivations to improve my terrible skills. I prefer drawing things like animals or various creatures (so also Kwamis), but humans are getting more and more enjoyable. So there’s lots of anatomy mistakes and so on, but it’s not too bad for now, I guess. Despite I made many improvements during drawing it, there’s still something wrong with Marinette’s face and I couldn’t fix it enough.

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Some background for this fanart:

I imagine it’s a first private concert which Adrien is playing specially for Marinette, he even rents a concert hall (he’s rich and romantic enough to something as much extravagant) when it’s not used. It’s not just one piece or two, he’s playing about 1-hour long piano recital (look at playlist below) only for his girlfriend (and magical creatures). It’s post-reveal, so Kwamis also can enjoy it without being hidden. While Tikki is excited about it not less than Marinette, Plagg is more interested in his Sugarcube, since he’s used to listening to Adrien’s piano and sometimes he’s playing with him. But rather cheerful jazzy-like improvised pieces, because he doesn’t like classical as much, especially sad compositions (Feast gave me some thoughts like these). Adrien decides to give a concert in a melancholic theme (so slow, soft, beautiful etc. pieces are played) to make this date as much romantic as he can. Even though blond boy is usually closing his eyes while playing on piano (like many instrumentalists), he can’t stop staring at his sweet girlfriend with his signature soft look™.

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One of my the biggest wishes is to see a scene when Adrien is playing on piano specially for Marinette, any good composition (I don’t like that one from Heart Hunter), preferably classical one. And I’d love to see an episode with a classical instrumentalist based akuma, rock and pop are not the only musical genres out there.

Classical music (and instrumental music in general) is highly unappreciated, so I'm happy when it’s represented in media, especially kid shows. This is what I love the most about classic cartoons, there’s lots of classical music. The Cat Concerto, Tom and Jerry episode which won an Academy Award, is one of the best examples of very creative use of classical piece for a slapstick comedy. Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 was even played by two pianist, by classical and jazz ones.

Classical music can be enjoyed by anyone who has some passion to music at least. It’s a very eclectic type of music where you can find everything. Classical is not only over 1-hour symphonies, there’s also compositions shorter than typical radio-friendly song. It’s not only serious music, classical can be also playful with very catchy melodies. Everyone can find something for themselves.

🎹🎹🎹🎹 Playlist 🎹🎹🎹🎹

I'm also enjoying choosing played pieces so much and it's too hard, since there's tons of beautiful piano music, though I know only a very small part of classical world. It’s about one-hour long concert, so also recordings were chosen to last about 1 hour together.

As sonata is a musical form with several movements (usually three or four) and since not all of them fit melancholic theme of this concert, Adrien play only one or two selected movements. For example only the first movement of extremely popular Beethoven's Moonlight sonata - Adagio sostenuto - is that dark and sad piece which everyone knows. The shortest second movement Allegretto is still not fast but quite cheerful, while the last Presto agitato is... Check it yourself, it's one of my favourites music moments ever. 😊

I also decided to try selecting lesser-known compositions (but it doesn't mean they are all little-known) to promote them, so there's a chance than maybe someone gives this music a shot and discover something new to appreciate.

Fryderyk Chopin - Nocturne in B flat minor, Op. 9 No. 1 - I couldn't choose anything else for the beginning. Nocturnes are my favourites Chopin's compositions and this one I love the most. No word describe how much I adore it, it's the most beautiful piece ever composed.

Franz Schubert  - Minuet in A Major, D. 334  - The first time I heard it, I thought about Adrien. I think this short sweet piece describes his childlike innocence quite well.

Fryderyk Chopin - Prelude Op.28 No.15 in D Flat Major, "Raindrop" - This thing is shown on the screen of Adrien's smartphone in few episodes (like Captain Hardrock), but for some reason it's not what's actually played. I have no idea if it was supposed to be played, but was changed after rendering was done or it's just an error. It's so nice composition, though not my favourite Chopin's prelude, even if it's the longest one. Unfortunately, the piece which is actually heard in the show is unknown for me, I'd love to discover it, but I can't. All I know it's definitely not any other Chopin's prelude.

Ludwig van Beethoven - Piano Sonata No. 31 in A-flat major, Op. 110 - I. Moderato cantabile molto espressivo and III. Adagio ma non troppo – Allegro ma non troppo - It’s almost the whole sonata, the only missing thing is the shortest second movement. It's probably my favourite piano sonata, so I couldn't not choosing it.

Franz Liszt -  Consolation No. 3 in D-Flat Major, S. 172 - If once I wonder why I love this, this is because it's so Chopin-esque.

Franz Schubert - Piano Sonata No.16 in A minor D.845 -  I. Moderato - I discovered this wonderful composition thanks to Nodame Cantabile, my favourite anime and manga ever, which is focused on classical music college students and professional classical musicians. Two main characters are also opposites who learn much from each other. I gave a link to the performance made specially for Nodame Cantabile, because I'm mostly attached to it. Usually this piece is played faster and it kills the atmosphere in my opinion. This rendition is the most emotional I've ever heard.

How would be this list without any French composers? I believe Ravel and Debussy are a mustm since they are the most known and important, I believe, and I also added something from Satie, because he wrote lots of soft compositions for piano solo. Chopin was also half-French (from his father), but: "Chopin's biographer Adam Zamoyski writes that he never considered himself to be French, despite his father's French origins, and always saw himself as a Pole." (source: Wikipedia) Besides Chopin's music is very Polish.

Maurice Ravel -  Jeux d'eau

Claude Debussy -  Rêverie

Erik Satie -  Gnossiennes: No. 1 - Lent

Maurice Ravel  - Ma mère l'Oye, M. 60: I. Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant  - finish it with something very short but so beautiful.

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Many beautiful things are missing, probably the most fitting for this concert would be Liszt's Liebestraum No. 3, since it's love music essentially, but it's too well-known (one of the most popular if not the most popular compostion by Liszt) and I'm kind of tired of this. I'm also very sad because of Chopin's Prelude in E Minor, but two pieces of the same composers are enough and this is his the most known prelude, too. I couldn't not recommend this jazz trio cover, because it's too good, too atmospheric though a different take on this theme.

Jazz musicians are often turning compositions into something much different. Everyone knows Beethoven's Für Elise, one of the best- known and (in my opinion) boring classical pieces in existence, but this jazz trio cover (sorry, I can’t find it outside of Spotify and other streaming services, it’s a very niche band) is just outstanding, I can't stop listening to it! Jazz arrangements of classical music is something I love so much.

[landlordrecords]

Bassline (& 2020 in general): Re-e-wind

 What a strange year, as everyone, everywhere has said a million times… Writing-wise, I’d been doing Record Collector magazine since 2014, and uDiscover (the Universal Records online mag) for not much less, & that all just seemed to (understandably) stop dead with the onset of the pandemic. Since then, I’ve polished off my chapter on the work of Simon Morris and the Ceramic Hobs for Palgrave, & that’s about it, so you’re more likely to find me over on Twitter at Sniffy (@philblackpool) / Twitter these days, blurting out the odd sentence. I hence thought it might be time to revisit a very old piece…

Like many, I’ve been working from home for much of the year, and although I’ve occasionally wanted to pull out my own eyeballs, it has generally been very pleasant for a voracious music-lover. I started by catching up on the vast majority of my insane, years-deep second-hand vinyl buy piles, and then chomped through a load of ‘long listen’ stuff I’d had on the backburner forever (including, astonishingly, eventually getting through something like 40 hours of Pan Sonic live sets someone had dumped online). I graded hundreds of releases for sale on Discogs, and revisited umpteen musical thangs extensively, including 90s gabba, Sun Ra, music hall, Schoenberg, dancehall reggae, the acknowledged worst albums ever, happy hardcore, Italian house, bounce and makina (I’ve lost track of how much time I’ve spent checking out youtubes to try to identify a couple of most-wanted bounce and makina tunes), Britpop (!), cosmic disco, and Belgian popcorn. It’s been an extraordinary year, packed with cultural discovery and rediscovery. In amongst this, in no way ashamed of my abject love of Discogs, and already having used and edited it for many years, I read the entire guidelines and decided to go hard on sorting out stuff I care about on there. Seeing they’d finally added various more recent ‘styles’, I’ve spent the last month and a half doing a ridiculous amount of edits on a dozen or so niche genres of importance in recent times (footwork, Jersey Club, yadda yadda). My tweakings around Bassline and UK Funky eventually drew me to the attention of UK Garage legend Karl ‘Tuff Enuff’ Brown, a fellow Discogs obsessive not so keen on the editing side of the site, who wondered if I might give him a hand sorting out the mess of his own and his label’s (2Tuf 4U) discographies. His entertaining phonecalls were enough to convince me.

I dug out all my stuff related to Karl’s label to listen to along the way, and found myself noticing how much UKG has been back in the spotlight of late (key, and brilliant, article here: RA: Like A Battle: The Push For UK Garage's Future (residentadvisor.net) ). While by no means unaware of this (I’ve had some lovely promos from Kiwi and the like of late, plus some moodier bits from various El-B worshippers), my status as a confirmed middle-aged semi-retired raver had hidden much of this from me. This leads me onto one of my big philosophical points of recent years: I listened to dance music avidly before I ever went out dancing, and listen to it now in lockdown, and in semi-retirement. There is far too much an emphasis among ever-rejuvenating dance music correspondents on ‘the club’ as the only way to enjoy dance music, but we know that OG disco fans are 60+ and unlikely to be out every weekend these days – is their experience now worthless? Online fans talk up their love of dance music for exercise soundtracks, bedtime calming soundtracks, etc: this is reality. Dance music is as valid to all these people as rock is to people who haven’t been to a gig in 40 years.

The style I felt myself most drawn back to was bassline (largely via Karl’s low-key issue of some DJ Q material). My love of UK Garage and all its offshoots largely stems from how physically removed I have been from it from virtually its entire history. Only my 2000-03 stint in Essex perfectly matched the garage waveform, and that was the 2-step era, quite the opposite of bassline. Despite being largely a northern phenomenon, Blackpool is largely untouched by bassline, being all about punk and bounce to my mind. An instant love for me circa 2007, bassline feels like one of those genres with unfinished business, but remains one I’ve rarely danced to. Cut off in its prime, it is now back, enormously popular, and rightly so, but, due to the vagaries of the digital music world, some of its key material remains tough to access in any decent form.

I originally wrote the piece I have butchered for this one in March 2008, on Myspace (remember that), in reaction to the exciting waves of bassline and UK funky then reinvigorating the world of UKG. It looks a bit embarrassing now, with more writing experience, although I continue to applaud my own willingness to be open about my innocent appreciation of things I love but am not truly part of.

 The most notable misstep in my original piece was the presumption that bassline would become the latest enormous chart sensation. Like happy hardcore before it, the ball was, in reality, fumbled. Instead of hoped-for freaky innovation, the producers also opted, as many in years gone by, for smoothed-out commerciality (in unholy alliance with low-grade grime crossovers), although the main adversarial issues seem to have been police crackdowns and the London-centric ‘cool police’. Although I was long aware of such problems with Niche in Sheffield (the genre’s spiritual home), it appears that the police interference had a devastating effect across the board ( Banned From Sheffield: How Jamie Duggan fought for bassline… And won (ukf.com) ). This largely explains why many of the bassline producers gravitated towards the largely wack bass house/house & bass style so beloved of teenyboppers in recent years. Thank heavens that era is now largely over.

Niche reputedly specialised in an arguably unholy mixture of dated late 90s speed garage and ‘bassline house’ (think ‘Let Me Show You’ by Camisra, and MK’s ‘organ house’), way past their sell-by date (I still only really like a handful of Shaun Banger Scott bits in this style, one single 2009 Brummie CD EP, and one Virgo remix). Ultimately, though, this experiment unexpectedly created something magical. The crucial element here is the 4/4 beat. While undoubtedly skippy, the vast majority of the material favoured had a firm 4/4 beat, always favoured across all key scenes in the north of England from northern soul onwards. When they ran out of tunes to rinse, in time-honoured fashion, they made their own. Long, rumbling walls of bass, organs, and hoppy-skippy beats, with raggafied samples and gunshots over the top. Popular in Birmingham as well (pretty much the centre of a vinyl glut at the time, and now notable in the popularity of DJs such as Chris Lorenzo and Hannah Wants), B-side titles hinted of coke overload. Disenfranchised by London’s movement away from the holy 4/4 (despite a slight revival in the early noughties), and via messenger services and the like, northern producers began to exchange a new hybrid in the mid-00s which took these speed garage and bassline house influences and updated them with current R’n’B bootlegs, with influences from grime (regional grime producers were key here) and, most notably, with rococo basslines. Its most obvious comparison point was Sticky’s garage productions, concurrent with the early grime era. Southern producers such as Agent X, Delinquent (who featured Gemma Fox on their magical 2006 ‘Boxers’), and Dexplicit (Fox again, 2005’s ‘Might Be’) ran with that, and the north lapped it up. Key early pointers also included DJ Narrows’ superb 2001 4/4 tune ‘Saved Soul’, and early 00s DND work (Artwork, later part of dubstep supergroup Magnetic Man). A notable increase in output came in 2006, and 2007-9 were the genre’s original glory years. And the bulk of producers and up-&-comings delivering serious anthems to the scene came not from London and the south-east, but from Leeds (T2, Wittyboy, Nastee Boi), Bradford (TS7), Manchester (Murkz, Burgaboy, Subzero), Nottingham (Virgo, IllMana), Leicester (JTJ, H20, FB & Zibba), and Wolverhampton (EJ, TRC, Brett Maverick). EJ’s Ejucation mix series (all up on Soundcloud) is a good place to start, beginning as the bassline house began to be overtaken by the pure bassline numbers.

Distribution for serious UK garage music has often been woeful, with only high street compilations & the chart singles (‘Heartbroken’ by T2, ‘What’s It Gonna Be’ by H20, etc) making it all over the country, and this helped stymie the true development of bassline, although vinyl prices, dreadful video promos, and the leap to digital in some ways didn’t help. Years on, as an incorrigible vinyl fanatic, I still only have handful of bassline 12”s. Yes, you can now access this stuff the world over via Youtube etc, but decent, high-quality copies of full-length tunes (they are often hacked about to great effect, but in a way which obscures the original intentions, in the mix) are not always the easiest to come by, although the classic producers are increasingly putting out digital compilations of their original work. Material that would, for previous genres, be fiended after, is lost to being just more online links. At the time, I looked high and low for 12”s, succeeding only rarely, largely on the flip of UK Funky releases. The (mixtape) audience, going by comments online, were often extremely young, are probably now still only in their mid-twenties, and are seemingly happy enough with this chaotic model. Bassline originally, as all rave genres, largely ran off mixtape boxsets, and a 2007 ‘Pure Bass – Fantasy’ box from Stoke remains my key document of that era: seven bassline CDs, with many tracks repeated, but packed to the gills, with most tracks only lasting a minute or two in the mix. As with all rave mixes, it has taken me years to suss the majority of the track IDs. In the Resident Advisor piece linked above, DJ Q (from Huddersfield) talks about thousands of lost bassline tunes, the bad side of the digital revolution. My recent Discogs ferreting suggests more bassline tunes than one might imagine did make some sort of decent release, but too many only made white labels, promo CDs for commercial releases (before being snipped from the main release), mix CDRs, or Youtube’s grainy depths. Classics such as TS7 featuring Bianca’s ‘Seems Like’ appear to never have had any decent release whatsoever, despite TS7 going on to be a big name in bass-oriented house, and Bianca Gerald having kept at the vocal turns ever since.

T2 hit biggest, with ‘Heartbroken’, a gorgeous, smashed-vocal garage dub so popular that it even inspired a Jersey Club refix. His catalogue was immediately deep, although I get the impression he has stopped adding to it. One complaint about bassline, including some of the T2 work, regards the untutored vocals, which can sometimes be rather flat, and certainly lacking in dynamics compared to the dazzling US vocalists featured on some earlier UK garage pieces (I refer here, as always, to TJ Cases’ remarkable ‘Do It Again’). I kinda like that - it shows amateur enthusiasm not far removed from punk, and most obviously links to lover’s rock, as does the production at times: it gives a feeling of melancholy entirely suited to the vocals. Other bassline heroes include TS7, who briefly brought to the fore sassy female garage MC T Dot. His productions also include ‘Smile’, one of my very favourite bassline tracks, full of that Simon Reynolds-quoted 'weird energy’ possessed by DJ Hype & co in the early nineties. Male bassline vocalists such as Ideal also remain unfairly forgotten, although some of the female vocalists have gone on to work in related genres since bassline’s peak.

Paleface, an ex-member of London garage rap crew Stonecold GX, runs Northern Line Records (FB, TRC, Wittyboy, Nastee Boi), something of a quality mark for bassline productions, while also making highly successful UK Funky tunes as part of Crazy Cousinz, and later progressing into commercial house territory. He chronicled much of bassline’s high-water mark (including being married to Kyla, since sampled by Drake). Wolverhampton-based Northern Line signing TRC proved particularly adaptable, spewing out a legion of original tunes and remixes before retreating for a while to grime. Leeds’ Nastee Boi was a favourite of mine at the time, with his pitch-black gangsta bassline tunes, but pushed on towards a mixture of underwhelming R’n’B vocal cuts and nursery grime toons. Wittyboy started similarly punishingly but also went smoother, unbalancing the classic bassline rough and smooth combination.

Now that the dubiously poisonous rep of Niche has been dispatched, the key bassline acts have returned to their key battleground, and the genre seems in full throttle again. Much of the new material seems a little one-dimensional to me: producers invariably big up Bristol’s My Nu Leng as, I suppose, a bridge from bro-step to 4/4. Everything, as acknowledged by the DJs, is huge drops and nothing much else. It still sounds pretty hot though – not the updated lover’s rock of a decade ago, but worth supporting. Bassline is NOT finished!

[aeon-borealis]

Give us fanfic withsome aleheather viewing themselves separately in the future. In Area 51 the pair fight over an object that sucks them in.. heather and Alejandro see two different points of their future life together. Alejandro sees their honeymoon and heather sees Alejandro with their child.

Note:

This doesn’t exactly fit the prompt. I wanted to try writing a one-off from just Heather’s perspective. I might take a crack at another one-off from Alejandro’s perspective in another day or so.

Every time Chris announced the next challenge, soaking in howspectacularly stupid or dangerous it was made Heather question herlife choices for at least a nanosecond. Again, why did she sign up for thisdamn show?

Butthen she thought of her list of motivators. Honestly, pure raw greedwasn’t quite enough for how insane Chris could get. So these othermotivators were what fueled Heather’s iron-clad determination andpersistence. These thoughts helped her overcome and push through thepangs of guilt, chipping her nails,losing her hair, and getting embarrassed on national TV. Everythingshe’d endured on this stupid show was bearable compared to what shecould potentially gain with that massive pile of Scrooge McDuck fuck-off money.

Thistime she thought about her boisterous younger siblings. Theyterrorized her room with reckless abandon, ripping her designerclothes, knocking over her glitter pen collection and losing rarelimited-edition pens, destroying her make-up, etc. The list went onand on. Heather had to hide every precious thing she owned behind thehighest security locks she could find in order to keep her valuablesout of her siblings’ grubby little hands.

Thelittle gremlins came to mind as she watched her competitors andteammates scatter across the warehouse. After the minefield and theelectric fence, everyone was on high alert and feverishly searchingfor alien artifacts like ants desperately chasing down that elusivepiece of candy little Timmy just dropped behind the stove. Heathertried to resist the urge to chase after and claw everyone else out ofher way. That would be the worst possible thing to do right now,especially considering she finally had a hot minute of not being thesource of everyone’s ire.

No.She was going to approach this with the same calm and measuredmindset that bastard Alejandro would. Maybe she could keep tabs onone of the savvier scavengers…Duncan, maybe? He was probably busymaking goo-goo eyes at Gwen and avoiding Courtney like the plague.The fact that he was sandwiched between those two was exactly why itwas better to observe him from the sidelines. He was very aware thathe was a prime candidate for someone looking to leverage his dramafor an alliance. There had to be someone she could twist and kneadlike putty in her hands. There had to be something unconventional shecould try. Admittedly, she had to get pretty underhanded and creativethis time if she wanted to stoop to la cucaracha’s level.

Justas the thought crossed her mind, she noticed Alejandro idly diggingthrough a pile of junk nearby. He was bent over in such a way that his tight,finely sculpted-

Heatherblushed furiously and looked away, clearing her throat to redirecther focus. To her chagrin, this caught Alejandro’s attention. Heturned and smirked up at her with so much smugness and smarm shewanted to punch his face in so far it’d leave an unsightly,cartoonish dent.

“Enjoyingthe view?” He stood up and chuckled softly.

“No.You’re in my way.”

“Goon.” He stepped aside and made an exaggerated gesture. “I’mcertainly going to enjoy the view.”

“UGHH!”She stomped towards the same pile he’d been digging through earlierand roughly shoved Alejandro along the way. He chuckled again as helightly bumped into a tower of cardboard boxes.

AsHeather knelt down to take a closer look at the junk, she feltextremely self-conscious. Alejandro’s scrutinizing gaze was like aheavy weight on her back. Sweat beaded at the base of her neck.Seconds dragged on like agonizing years. Of course, Alejandro madethings worse by humming the classic Jeopardy theme. She quicklyrifled through the pile of crap, yanked out a random nondescriptthing, then zipped back up faster than a successful apple-bobber at afrat party.

Thething she’d just snatched up glinted in the low light and Heatherforgot about Ale-jerkface for a hot minute. It was roughly the sizeand shape of a gold pocket watch, but it didn’t have a clasp on theside. Maybe it was a piece of jewelry? There was a circular redgemstone in the center surrounded by two concentric rings of whatappeared to be Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Heatherremembered overhearing a random conversation Harold had with Codywhen he was still in the game. Somehow, they’d stumbled onto thetopic of conspiracy theories and Harold was raving about somearchaeologist’s crackpot thesis about the Egyptian pyramids beinglanding pads for alien spacecraft. According to Harold, the mostominous part was that said archaeologist had disappeared off of theface of the Earth shortly after putting this theory out there. Ofcourse he did. He’d committed career suicide by officiallypublishing something that should have stayed in the niche corners ofthe internet on obscure forums with other incredible claims fromother like-minded whack-jobs…

Heatherrolled her eyes. This was just some useless trinket a member ofmilitary personnel dropped. And it was an incredibly tacky one atthat.

Justas she was about to throw the weird necklace back, she noticedAlejandro’s piqued interest. His pupils were as wide as dinnerplates and his expression was a mix between utterly baffled andmystified. Heather had this weird feeling that he knew exactly whatthis thing was but he sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her.

“Letme see that…”

Hewas reaching for it now. Heather quickly closed her fingers aroundthe weird trinket and shifted her arm far from Alejandro’s grasp.“What’s it to you?”

“It’smine. A gift from my mother.” His words were buttery and smooth.Heather’s grip loosened for a moment. He’d turned the full forceof those beautiful green eyes on her and she could feel her heartmelting a little.

“Please…”Alejandro smiled sweetly, slowly extending a cupped hand towards her.For a moment, Heather looked down at his hand, then back at his face.Damn was that gaze hypnotic. Heather wouldn’t be surprised ifAlejandro had sold part of his soul to the Devil for some of theuncanny abilities and talents he possessed.

Shetook a step back from him, blew a raspberry, and smiled fiendishly asshe crammed the weird trinket in her shorts pocket. Then she took offat a quick sprint. She was mildly surprised when Alejandro starteddoggedly chasing after her, a weird determination set on his face.

“Heather!”

Upcomingrows of cardboard boxes were starting to narrow. Grinning, Heathertook advantage of her more slender frame and slipped into a narrowspace between two towers of boxes. She crawled along the space untilshe was so far in Alejandro could only peer in. For a moment, hefrowned and she shot a victorious smirk at him. Then he sighed andwandered off.

Alejandro’sbizarre reaction had only sparked Heather’s curiosity. Chris couldwait a minute for her to turn in the artifact. She pulled the trinketback out of her pocket to take a closer look. The red gemstone glowedin an especially eerie way under the dimmer lighting back here.Gingerly, she touched the smooth gemstone and then slid her fingeronto the closest ring. Her eyes widened when she realized that therings were movable.

Sheadjusted the ring slightly counter-clockwise and…

….Heatherwas temporarily blinded by bright white light.

Thelight started to fade into a spatter of bright green and yellowbokeh. A couple of blurred figures stood in front of Heather. One ofthe figures was small and crazily darting around.

It was like she waslooking into the view screen of a high-end camera as the cameramanprepared for the next shot in the hypothetical movie. Finally, themysterious figures slowly became more crisp, clear, and defined. Thetaller one was a lithe, fairly muscular, and handsome young man. Hehad tanned skin, shoulder length brown hair tied back into a rattail,light stubble, and striking goose egg green eyes. He wore Coke bottlelens glasses, a button-up red shirt with the sleeves rolled up to hiselbows, a black vest, washed out blue jeans, and black boots.Recognition swelled through Heather and her heart took off like afanatical rocket.

Thiswas a slightly older, more matured Alejandro. He was a dreamboat now,but oh God, Heather never thought he get this much hotter. WhenHeather was able to collect herself enough to stop drooling buckets,she turned her attention towards the smaller and more energeticfigure.

Itwas a little girl with light tanned skin, big and shining dark eyes,and long black hair. Those were the same eyes and hair Heather sawevery morning in the mirror. But, that slightly hooked nose andthicker eyebrows were….Alejandro’s. This little girl had the twomost distinctive features on Alejandro’s face aside from hismesmerizing eyes.

Asif Heather didn’t feel like she’d been hit over the head with asledgehammer already, her older counterpart walked into the scene.She was graceful. She wore a long white sundress and matching sunhat,strappy sandals, and had her hair tied up and casually tossed overone shoulder. It was a look Heather couldn’t ever imagine she’dwear in a million years, but Mom Heather was definitely rockingit.

MomHeather scooped up her adorable little brat, laughing and smiling insuch a sweet, saccharine way it made young Heather want to throw upand horribly envious all at once. When older Alejandro walked overand slung an arm around Mom Heather’s shoulders the scene becamesomething out of the filler page in a garden magazine or the mostgeneric stock photo ever. Of course these two were gorgeous modelswith the most photogenic family on the face of the planet. Or maybeHeather was just horribly biased.

Thescene dissipated as quickly as it’d appeared. Heather blinkedseveral times, snapping back to reality with a weird pit in herstomach. Part of her felt incredibly warm and buzzing with happinesswhile another part of her felt confused and slightly horrified. Itwas weird to think of Alejandro that way, let alone imagine what it’dbe like to have a kid and a life together. Admittedly, yes, theirchild would be the hottest person on in the known universe. But still.

Heatherhated her younger siblings and Alejandro with an equal white-hotfiery intensity. So that weird snapshot of the future was utternonsense. She sure as hell didn’t want Alejandro. She was sure she didn’t want to havekids. Both factors would seriously get in the way of the active, glamorous lifestyle she imagined having by her mid-twenties.

Yet the image stayed in her mind, drifting between otherthoughts and musings. Some small scrap of her wanted to cling to thispicture, have it professionally framed in a glitter-glue covered woodframe, and proudly displayed on her living room wall.

Shewas regaining her bearings now. She was still crammed into this smallspace. But her hand was empty. The weird trinket was just gone.Vanished. Almost as if it’d never existed in the first place. Thiswas too weird for Heather. A hard lump settled in the pit of herstomach and she felt like some eerie, unseen force was watching her.

Swallowinghard, she scrambled out of that narrow cardboard box alley and tookoff running like a bat out of hell. Everything was a blur as sherushed for the nearest exit. Instead, she ran right into Alejandroand they tumbled into each other, rolling right into a nearby towerof cardboard boxes. The boxes fell and a few hit Heather as she triedto push herself back up.

Thenshe was looking into Alejandro’s face, her gaze locked with his.She was drowning in those dazzling eyes. Her insides were twistedtogether in a crazy knot. The image of an older Alejandro and theirfuture daughter flashed in her mind’s eye a few times as shebreathed heavily and her heartbeat roared in her ears like crashingocean waves.

Aneternity later, Heather felt like she was actually just looking atAlejandro. He looked as startled and unsettled as she did. A lightblush spread across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. There wasan unspoken realization between the two of them.

Thatweird trinket had shown him some kind of weird crystal-ball futuresnapshot, too.

Thetwo of them awkwardly pulled away from each other, stood back up, andparted ways without another word. Heather took a few seconds tocollect herself, taking a few deep breaths and waiting for her bodytemperature to lower a few degrees.

Thiswas, by far, the weirdest thing that had ever happened to her on thisshow and it’d be a secret she’d take to the grave. She was definitely going to be lurking on some of those obscure conspiracy theorist forums for awhile, though…

[goofygoldengirl]

Ok Everyone I’m On A Roll Today

I’m gonna give you a proper explanation as to why we’ll never get a Led Zeppelin movie.

Buckle up cause this is gonna get long. 

We, as classic rock fans live in an age of reminiscence. We take out our records, cds, mp3s and sit back, relax, and think of the glory days that we’ve never experienced if we’re under the age of 50. Even though we’re decently mainstream, The Queen movie Bohemian Rhapsody took interest in classic rock to new heights. It was critically acclaimed, Rami Malek won an oscar, and fans of other bands of the 60s-80s stirred with anticipation for the day they would get their band in the limelight. A fan, like myself, and many others, knowing that 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of Led Zeppelin’s (also referred here as LZ) creation (although they officially got together in 1968) perhaps are wondering if they are going to get a surprise biopic announcement in the near future.

However, I have come to crush everybody’s dreams. The answer is never as long as the remaining band members are still alive. Now before y’all get out your pitchforks, let’s focus our attention to the most important member of this debate: guitarist James Patrick Page, also known as Jimmy Page, Pagey, and Jimmurs back in the deviantart LZ community in 2010.

Although Led Zeppelin arose from the planning and careful selection of the higher ups at Atlantic Records (mostly manager Peter Grant although Jimmy was the one who went out to find members) Led Zeppelin, is Jimmy Page’s masterpiece, his opus magnum, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought of his band to be like one of his children, perhaps his favorite. Understandably, he was devastated when the band broke up after drummer John Bonham’s death from alcohol poisoning, and everybody knows he wants the band to be back together in some shape or form. This of course sparked a feud with singer Robert Plant, who also understandably was doing well in his solo career and wanted to move on. Depending on who you talk to, it’s never really been officially resolved despite the 2007 concert and Robert’s final declaration that he will never do anything Led Zeppelin related ever again, Jimmy has focused on other matters such as remixing LZ albums and releasing concert dvds. In addition to that, there are several other matters worth pointing out. In the past, and even to this day, it was extremely difficult to get ahold of LZ songs to use in tv and movie soundtracks because Jimmy, unofficially “in charge” of LZ music distribution is overprotective of how his music is used (probably stemming from LZ’s hatred of concert bootleggers but that’s a different story). We also have a long history of lawsuits that accuse LZ of plagiarism and ripoffs stemming from the 70s, that have taken a hit to LZ’s musical reputation. Looking at Jimmy’s defensive stance over the band’s music and public image, we segway to our next question.

Can a Led Zeppelin movie give an authentic and enjoyable experience for audiences?

We know from the nearly ten year saga to create a Queen movie that there was a lot of contention between the remaining band members and directors over portrayal of the members’ personal lives within Queen, and Queen pushing for a more family friendly image. In the end, the movie earned a PG 13 rating, an acceptable negotiation for both parties, and a good rating to draw in an audience. Assuming that using this model will bring in the most amount of money and recognition for future biopic movies, we shall apply it to the band Led Zeppelin.

A PG 13 rated Led Zeppelin movie would be impossible to do. No offense to Queen (they’re my second favorite band behind Zep so I’m allowed to say this) but they are tame compared to the antics that Led Zeppelin got up to back in their heyday. We’re talking about what you imagine when you think of the rock n roll lifestyle. Loud music, jet setting, partying all night, sex, drugs, trashing hotel rooms, groupies, more drugs, more sex, getting trashed at the club, pump it up baby a whole hecka lotta YOW times10! Led Zeppelin were a bunch of party animal freaks (Bassist John Paul Jones is debatable but there was New Orleans)and well you could attempt to focus directly on the music, but a lot of the music in the later years ties into that crazy rock n roll lifestyle (Sick Again from Physical Graffiti and For Your Life from Presence) and Jimmy Page’s descent into heroin addiction and John Bonham’s gradual and tragic deterioration from years of alcohol abuse had a profound affect on how the band members got along during the In Through The Outdoor sessions and is the reason why it still has a very mixed reception and is ranked low on favorite LZ albums.

A rated R movie could work, you may say. I mean look at the Doors movie. Yeah but even though The Doors got trippy and Jim Morrison was a character man, a Led Zeppelin rated R movie would be a very hard rated R. Again, this goes back to all the tour commotion, where especially in the early years, a lot of sordid stuff happened. And I know you’re thinking, I can live watching a couple of sex scenes. Oh sweet summer child who has not gone through the threshold of transitioning from a Led Zeppelin fan who strictly listens to their music to searching out their history, inspiration, stories from the countless biographies out there, we are talking about some fucked up stuff that I am not gonna even talk about in this post for fear of invoking the wrath of the tumblr flag gods, and that the more sensitive leaning people might consider to be NC17 stuff. And there is a difference between detailing this information in a niche book that only diehard fans will pick up, and putting it in a movie intended for everybody and no shit sherlock you will get controversy. 

And you may ask, who are the subjects of such controversial tales? Basically everybody, although as we said JPJ falls into bassists are usually boring category, Robert Plant had a pretty good amount of moments because no shit he was hot back then and who wouldn’t go wild over him. And our main offenders of depravity and strife? John Bonham, Jimmy Page, and special mention to tour manager (and subject of much controversy within the Led Zeppelin fandom itself) Richard Cole. And if based on director’s tendencies to capture the authentic even if it involves shock content, the depictions of these three men will garner a lot of attention. While John Bonham is dead and cannot speak for himself, the other two can. Based on Richard Cole’s tell all contributions to the classic 1980s publication that detailed LZ’s rise and fall, Hammer of The Gods, he’ll probably just pop up out of the woodworks and bask in the next 15 minutes of fame. But Jimmy? James Patrick I will do anything to keep Led Zeppelin’s reputation in a good light Page? Oh he’ll have a field day alright. And it’s not just bracing ourselves for the inevitable telling directors what they can and cannot put in, it’s also opening the huge, sticky, labeled with a giant TRIGGER WARNING can of worms what exactly Jimmy was doing that would be so controversial both then and now. Now, I know that everyone in the Led Zeppelin fandom knows what I’m about to say, probably some in the classic rock fandom in general who knows things here and there, too, but this is for everybody who doesn’t know. Jimmy Page in the 1970s dated teenage girls. And to clarify, I’m not talking about that gray line that people debate about of 18 technically signaling adult years, yet is still a vulnerable age, I’m talking about girls, minors, who were14-16 when he was nearly or in his 30s. And the relationship that is the most documented (Lori Maddox for the LZ fans reading) oh my god, it is just messed up. Like basically stalked and kidnapped her so they could meet, and in the relationship locked her up in hotel rooms while he was in concerts messed up. You might say it was the 70s, they just turned a blind eye well honey it’s 2019, and a topic as dicey as a grown ass man going after children is not gonna be ignored in this day and age where people are starting to pay more attention to issues like these. I know that if a director decides to devote a segment of that movie to that part of Jimmy’s past (and present if you think about him going out with 20 something year old women when he’s in his 70s) it will basically destroy his own reputation. Which is very, very much intertwined with Led Zeppelin’s. So if he takes a hit, LZ does too, and he cannot afford to let that happen. And if this means having to decline an offer for a biopic in order to preserve a sliver of integrity that is just dangling by a thread as old news becomes common knowledge, so be it. 

Oh yeah the christians will probably get wound up again about LZ being satanic or some shit due to Alestier Crowley and the whole playing Stairway to Heaven backwards thing but hey they’re irrelevant to this discussion

So the TLDR: We’re never getting a Led Zeppelin movie. Reputation is everything to Jimmy Page and a movie that goes into some hardcore detail about band “shenanigans” will serve us a whopping discourse for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, that will get the movie, and the band slammed hard. 

[starwarsnonsense]

Top 10 Films of 2018 (So Far)

Since I quite like continuing old traditions, I wanted to do a post rounding up what I consider to be the ten best films of 2018 so far. This list includes a few films that came out in 2017 in the US, since they were only released here in the UK this year.

Have you seen any of the films I cover below? Have I piqued your interest in a title you might not have heard before? Let me know, and do share your favourites too!

1. Annihilation, dir. Alex Garland

This was my most anticipated film of the year, and my hype for it was more than rewarded. This is a marvellously rich and transporting science fiction film that isn’t afraid of taking the viewer to some very weird places. However, Annihilation doesn’t simply rely on its strangeness to succeed - it is also firmly rooted in its characters and themes, which has made it incredibly rewarding to return to. Natalie Portman is fantastic as Lena, and Annihilation is a brilliant showcase for her - Lena is a complex and frequently self-destructive character, riddled by guilt and regrets that shape the pulsating, luminescent world of the mysterious ‘Shimmer’ that she has to venture into. The Shimmer might seem like an environmental phenomenon at first, but it’s really more psychological, being a space that adapts according to the people who enter into it. This film overflows with fascinating and thought-provoking ideas, and it was entirely worth the hike I made over to Brooklyn to catch one of the final showings at the theatre (since Annihilation was denied a theatrical release in the UK, I made a point of seeing it while I was on holiday in New York). I think it will go down as one of the great science fiction films, and it belongs in the same conversations as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris.

2. Beast, dir. Michael Pearce

This little British film - shot mostly on location in Jersey by a first-time director - was easily the biggest (and best) surprise I’ve had so far at the cinema this year. I literally had no idea this film existed until a day or so before I watched it, and that made the experience of viewing it even more wonderful. Moll (Jessie Buckley) is an isolated young woman who is stifled by her controlling family and quiet life on a remote island, as well as a secret sin that bubbles away underneath the surface. Her life is predictable - safe, repetitive and dull - until she meets Pascal, a mysterious local man who she finds she has an affinity with. However, there is a murderer haunting the island, taking the lives of young girls in the night. Who’s to blame, and what impact will the killings have on Moll and Pascal’s swiftly escalating romance? While that is a synopsis more than a review, I felt it necessary to explain the premise to try and compel you to seek this one out. Beast is raw, woozy and utterly absorbing - the love story between Moll and Pascal is one of the most passionate and gripping you’ll ever see on screen, and their chemistry is simply sensational. There’s a real gothic, fairy-tale edge to the story which appealed perfectly to my (admittedly rather niche) tastes. This is a real hidden treasure of a film - do yourself a favour and make it your mission to watch it.

3. Lady Bird, dir. Greta Gerwig

This film was so, so relatable, despite my not really having experienced an adolescence anything like “Lady Bird’s”. While the details of her life are very different from mine, I think anyone can relate to the sweeping brushstrokes - the tensions that can arise between parents and children, the thirst for freedom and independence that builds the closer you get to the final days of school, and the feelings of love and loyalty that are always there even when they’re unspoken. Greta Gerwig captures all of this and so much more with marvellous delicacy, balancing little moments that add colour and spark with more serious scenes so deftly that it’s amazing to think that this is her first feature. Lady Bird is a very specific and very beautiful film, and it’s special precisely because it feels universal even as it feels small and personal to its director. 

4. Eighth Grade, dir. Bo Burnham

This is the perfect double bill with Lady Bird, and the people who have dubbed this film “Lady Bird Jr” are right on the money. Elsie Fisher has a real star turn as the heroine Kayla, who is a very special child - she’s kind, sensitive and thoughtful, which basically means she’s my kind of superhero. But even as she is a good and sweet person, she is also going through all of the trials you’d expect a 13 year old to be facing in 2018, as she wrestles with acne, confusing feelings about super-dreamy boys, and the escalating anxiety that comes with a comment-free Instagram post. Like Lady Bird, this film succeeds in being both very specific and highly universal - the only social media I had to deal with as a teen were MySpace and Bebo, and I found that seeing Kayla wrestle with a whole kaleidoscope of feeds, devices and platforms made her strong grip on her integrity as a  funny and deeply warm-hearted individual all the more remarkable. Bo Burnham, as with Gerwig, made a pretty incredible film here - in particular you should watch out for the father/daughter dynamic, which is my favourite part. Eighth Grade is funny and generous, and the perfect medicine if you’re feeling demoralised by the state of the world right now.

5. The Breadwinner, dir. Nora Twomey

The Breadwinner is a really lovely animated film telling the story of Parvana, a young girl living with her family under the Taliban. When her father is taken off to prison, Parvana sees no other choice but to dress as a boy to provide for her mother and siblings. But how long will her disguise last? The story here was what really gripped me - it’s very simple, in both the telling and the themes, but it is truly beautiful in that simplicity. The emotions are very raw, and this film goes to some shockingly dark places at times - while I think it can be watched with children as long as they are mature enough for some challenging themes and upsetting moments, it’s likely to speak most strongly to adult audiences with a fuller appreciation for the context in which the film is set. It’s a great and moving alternative to more mainstream animated efforts, and is well worth your time.

6. Phantom Thread, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

This was a delightfully twisted film with an absorbingly complicated and twisty relationship at its centre. Vicky Krieps is an absolute marvel as Alma, and it’s wonderful to see how she battles to bring the fragile and austere designer  Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) to heel. It’s also a beautiful film with rather fabulous fashions - if you love couture, particularly from the ‘50s, this will be a real treat. I also appreciated the many allusions to classic cinema - there are strong shades of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, as well as the underrated David Lean film The Passionate Friends. Check this out if you like your romantic dramas weird and entirely unpredictable.

7. Revenge, dir. Coralie Fargeat

Revenge is angry, sun-soaked and batshit insane - and it is pretty great for all of those reasons. It follows Jennifer, the teenage mistress of a sleazy married man. After a horrifying assault Jennifer returns, phoenix-like, to wreak her revenge upon her attackers. This movie was very much inspired by exploitation flicks, with their penchant for showing scantily clad (and frequently bloody) women wielding shotguns to hunt down the brutes who did them wrong. However, first-time director Coralie Fargeat takes every one of those tropes and owns them, ramping up the blood and giving the action a propulsive energy that keeps you gripped even as you know exactly where things are going. The soundtrack here is also one to look out for - it’s all pulsating synths that do a great job of building the suspense and tension from the get-go.

8. Lean on Pete, dir. Andrew Haigh

This is a very painful film in many ways, but it’s only painful because it does such a great job of earning your emotional investment. The lead of this film is Charley, a sensitive and quiet teenage boy who becomes attached to an ailing race horse as he seeks to escape his troubled home-life. When he finds himself in crisis, Charley takes the horse and they head off on a journey across the American heartland. Charlie Plummer is extraordinary as the lead here - Charley is the kind of character that makes you want to reach through the screen so you can offer him a hug of reassurance and support. The photography of the American countryside is exquisite, and means this film really deserves to be seen on the big screen - the breadth of the landscape gives all of the emotional drama some (richly deserved, in my view) extra punch.

9. You Were Never Really Here, dir. Lynne Ramsay

This is a very weird film (you’re probably noticing a theme at this point) but it’s completely absorbing. It’s very much actor-led, and the film rests on the shoulders of Joaquin Phoenix’s gripping and unpredictable performance - in some scenes he’s muttering in deference to his mother like a modern-day Norman Bates, while in others he’s portrayed almost as a lost boy in an overgrown body, disorientated by his environment and engaging in acts of extreme violence as if in a sort of trance. The narrative is fuzzy and unfocused, but I didn’t find that mattered much since I was too busy following every evolution of Phoenix’s face.

10. Thoroughbreds, dir. Cory Finley

Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy make fantastic foils to one another as two appallingly privileged teenagers whose obscene wealth is only matched by their resounding lack of morals. This is a film that plays with your loyalties, trying to wrong-foot you at every turn - it’s frequently difficult to figure out what’s genuine here, and while that did sometimes leave me feeling a bit emotionally detached that’s usually the point. This film is more of an intellectual puzzle than a lean, mean, emotion-extracting machine (see: Lean on Pete), and it succeeds brilliantly on that level. The simplicity of the story means the fun lies in picking apart lines and expressions, so go in prepared for some close viewing.

[vmheadquarters]

Twelve years ago today, UPN (RIP!) premiered a cult-classic neo-noir about murder, class warfare, sexual assault, and forbidden love. It was quippy and campy and smart as hell—and it just happened to center on a pint-sized blonde who looked like a cheerleader but thought like Sherlock Holmes. The show was Veronica Mars, and even if the last decade has muddled its legacy with a much-hyped but ultimately disappointing fan-funded follow-up film and, of course, the extremely meh third season, the high school years remain an unparalleled success. Veronica Mars seasons one and two were better than anything that had come before, far surpassed its competition in quality, and set a high bar for future shows that has only barely been met by a few episodes of television here and there. So give my regards to Friday Night Lights (a family show, not a teen show) and Degrassi (please), but Veronica Mars is the best teen show of all time*. 

1. Nuanced Class Conflict

Gossip Girl and The OC did it well, but Veronica Mars did it better. Even though Neptune, CA, is technically fictional, it's as real a place as has ever been portrayed on television. Its particular problems and reputation informed everything from law enforcement (the question of whether or not to incorporate the town into a city and make the sheriff's office into a police department) to the biker gangs riding through on their way up and down the PCH. The levels of privilege/lack thereof were so nuanced and specific. Other shows divide people into the Haves and the Have Nots; on Veronica Mars, everyone has something a little different. At the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder is Weevil, whose background is not only impoverished but criminal; the only community he can "afford" is a gang (though his crew isn't all bad—you'll find nary a broad stroke or generalization in the world of Veronica Mars). In the center of things are Veronica and Keith, who lived comfortably when Keith was sheriff, but have buckled their belts since he became a private eye. On the one hand, they own a small business! On the other, they live in a pretty crap apartment complex and have nowhere near enough saved to send Veronica to college. Then there's the nouveau-riche Echolls', who have all the glamorous trappings of wealth (cars, booze, mansion) and pretty much none of the cultural capital. At the top of the heap are the Kanes; while the Echolls' have enough money to "get away" with murder, the Kanes have enough money to get away with it, cover it up, frame someone else for it, and get the sheriff fired for looking into it. Money problems are basically the least-juicy of TV plots, but by using wealth disparity as a way to develop the characters, essentially building it into the DNA of the show, Veronica Mars created a TV universe just as interesting and complicated as that of Friday Night Lights or Parks and Recreation.

2. Lianne Mars

A girl with a missing mom is a fairy tale trope as old as time, rooted in a deification-of-the-female version of misogyny that I don't have time to get into right now. Suffice it to say, a dead or absentee mother is usually a sign of lazy writing. It's a way to reduce the character count and set a heroine adrift while, not coincidentally, making it so the (usually male) writer doesn't have to think of what a grown woman would think or talk or act like. At first, this is the fate of Veronica's mother, Lianne Mars. She was just conveniently...gone, another casualty of the fallout from the Lilly Kane murder investigation. Her absence lets Veronica be angsty and ill-supervised even as Keith Mars entered the canon of Bestest TV Dads of All Time (which he is! Love Keith forever and ever). But then she came back, with baggage, and the trope was, if not redeemed, at least put to good use. Lianne is an alcoholic who couldn't deal with the disappointing turns life took, and she finally cracked when her husband ran directly into conflict with her lost love Jake Kane, for whom she still pined. Even when she decides she wants to be a mom again, she can't quit being an alcoholic. And as heartbreaking as it is to watch Veronica play the parent, it's also a moment of growth. Veronica realizes—or rather, decides—that she isn't doomed to repeat her mother's mistakes. She is a stronger, better person than Lianne. A person big enough to love her flawed mother, even strong enough to forgive her. In the third episode, Veronica says, "The hero is the one that stays, and the villain is the one that splits." By the end of the series, Veronica has learned what true villainy looks like, and it ain't her mom. Showrunners, take note: This is how you do a realistic redemption story.

3. The Guest Stars and Bit Players

The casting department at Veronica Mars did flawless work. Obviously, the core cast is great, but the semi-regulars and guests are also amazing. There's an entire season devoted to Steve fucking Guttenberg. Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin play the negaverse versions of themselves. Ryan Hansen and Ken Marino do their Ryan Hansen/Ken Marino Shtick, and why shouldn't they? Max Greenfield (a.k.a. Schmidt on New Girl) and Tessa Thompson (from Dear White People and Creed) both had recurring roles long before they were famous, and even Tina Majorino (Mac) and Michael Muhney (Lamb), who didn't really "break out" in a major way after the show, are perfect in their roles. The second (SECOND) IMDb credit for one Jessica Chastain is an episode of Veronica Mars, and of course, Leighton Meester appears in two episodes. Yes, there are other teen shows that feature young actors who went on to bigger, better things, but I maintain that Veronica Mars is notable for encouraging real actors to do real work.

4. The Mysteries Were Smart AF

The show trusted its audience to keep up and pay attention. Maybe even a little too much. In the era before binge-watching and old episodes being able on demand, Veronica Mars suffered from the same issue that plagues the first few seasons of The X Files: Viewers who weren't "caught up" on the season-long mystery arc found it difficult to get into. VM had low ratings throughout its run, and when it used the shift from high school to college to introduce shorter, quicker mysteries, well, we all know how season three went. But looking back, it's clear that the show was ahead of its time, telling smart, twist-y weekly stories while teasing out a longer mystery that deeply impacted the main characters' lives. (Can't you just imagine how they'd advertise the show now? Moody teaser trailers with the tag line "Who Killed Lilly Kane?" and fansites and podcasts devoted to all the clues and hints and easter eggs from every episode?) There are other teen mystery/crime-fighter shows, sure, but they tend to put their characters in immediate peril, which makes the audience ask, "What's going to happen?" Instead, Veronica Mars is an intellectual exercise, evidence and theory based, and the question becomes, "What has already happened, and what does it mean?" That's the kind of meaty writing that inspires, if not legions of fans, a loyal audience to sing its praises. Veronica Mars was so smart it was niche. I'm not making a case for VM as overlooked prestige television, but then again I totally am. WHY didn't it win any Emmys?

5. They Didn't Explain Every Little Thing

See: above "trusting the audience smartness" factor. They didn't explain why sleeping with a "consenting" teenager is still wrong, or why Logan and Veronica went from adversaries to lovers in the space of like, a week, or why money equals power. They got that the audience got it. So, the exact opposite of a show like, say, Secret Life of the American Teenager. There were episodes that touched on privilege and entitlement and infidelity and the abuse of power by law enforcement, but it was subtle and real instead of, you know...Degrassi.

6. The Humor

It wasn't dark and humorous, it was darkly humorous and humorously dark. (Think combining the creepy weirdness of Twin Peaks with the banter of Moonlighting.) Logan's poignant answering machine messages, Veronica's epic takedowns, even Lamb got to be withering and snarky while he systematically fucked over the whole town.The humor kept us invested even when stories dipped into sentimental, Dawson's Creek-esque territory and deflected the romance-y moments that might have turned it into a mystery-style Felicity. Veronica's and Logan's jokes, in particular, also serve a psychological purpose: mask their pain at any cost. Unlike in Gilmore Girls, where every character speaks like a hyper-intelligent stand-up comic and not at all like a teenager or real human being, Veronica and the residents of Neptune make comments that feel true to their characters and relevant to their circumstances. If you watched any episode of Scream Queens and thought, "I guess they're trying to imitate...Scream? Heathers? Clueless? With the smart/bitchy blondes and the snappy comebacks and the eye rolls?" I understand. But actually, they were trying (and failing. Hard.) to do Veronica Mars. Smart sassy cute mean heart of gold flirty clever repartee? Yeah, that's Veronica Mars, and Ryan Murphy, bless his soul, is not Rob Thomas.

7. The Rape Plot(s)

From the very first episode when, in a flashback, golden-haired, white dress-clad Veronica walks, almost in a stupor (have you ever seen a more "perfect" victim?) into the sheriff's office to tell Lamb that she was raped—because she is a good girl and good girls go to the authorities—only to have him, basically, shrug it off, rape and sexual assault were core themes of the show, central to its purpose and story engine. Creator Rob Thomas initially envisioned the story as a YA novel with a male protagonist, and changing the lead's gender to female is arguably the best and most important decision he ever made. Veronica's sexuality is everything. How she flirts her way out of scrapes, plays innocent when it can help her, distrusts it when she's attracted to the "wrong" person, is allowed to enjoy it with Logan and, of course, how her virginity was taken from her one night she can't quite remember. The show takes Veronica's rape seriously as not just a plot point or easy motivation, but as a defining part of her character. She cleans obsessively and looks over her shoulder. She's sensitive to the potential aggressors—and victims—at her school. She knows that her rapist was someone she knew, and she has to live with that mystery every day. But it's complicated. That night she can't remember might have been semi-consensual, but then we learn, no it wasn't. Yes, there's a story about a false rape accusation (against Adam Scott!), but the truth only makes the situation murkier. And in an unfortunately rare move, Veronica Mars also depicts the aftermath of the sexual abuse of boys, including an exploration of how the stigma against male assault survivors re-traumatizes them. (The third season is, in my opinion, a missed opportunity to tackle the campus rape epidemic. By blaming the rapes on a psychological experiment gone awry, the show unfortunately ignores the fact that toxic masculinity isn't a role-playing aberration but a pervasive national issue. But its heart is in the right place, if not its logic.)

8. Veronica

Choker-wearing, dog-owning, private-detectiving blonde badass Veronica Mars. She's most often compared to Buffy, that other crime-fighting cutie with a ragtag army of friends and a ne'er do well love interest, and the comparison is apt. Both possess skills their peers do not and use those skills to solve problems both thrust upon them and sought. But the difference is that in the space that Buffy uses to explore the supernatural, Veronica Mars plays with loyalty and ethics. Is it wrong to snitch on your friends? Is a rumor evidence? Can you break the law to serve a higher good? These are issues Buffy doesn't wrestle with; it's pretty much a given that evil vampires are worth defeating (yes, there are definitely instances when Buffy is tested because she's fallen for a vamp or one of her friends is possessed or whatever, but that's not like, the thing of the show). And while so many other "outsider/observer/new kid" teen show protagonists (Ryan, Dan, Dawson, Lindsay Weir) long to get "in," Veronica's been there. She's been popular, and (a little) wealthy. She's not exploring a new world, she's re-learning her old one. In that she has more in common with Angela Chase, but way less whiny. You watch My So-Called Life and think, I'm totally Angela. You watch VMand think, I wish I were Veronica. When people talk about the strong but vulnerable but smart but flawed but cool but real but beautiful but relatable but empowered but conflicted but modern but iconic but a good role model but not unattainable with a job not defined by that job "interesting" female characters on television, a few names tend to come up again and again: Carrie, Murphy, Ally, Roseanne, Olivia, Dana. To that (very white!) pantheon I humbly submit: Veronica.

*....except for Freaks and Geeks.

[weekendwarriorblog]

Interview: “Traffik” Director Deon Taylor on His New Thriller Starring Omar Epps and Paula Patton, and Production Company Hidden Empire

Deon Taylor is a filmmaker who has created an interesting niche for himself as a director, having made movies in relative obscurity for ten years.

Things really took off for Taylor in 2014 when he formed the Hidden Empire Film Group production company with partner Roxanne Avent.  The company had its biggest hit in 2016 with the horror-comedy Meet the Blacks, starring Mike Epps, which was self-released through Freestyle and grossed $9 million based on a budget of under a million. The company has really stepped up its productions since then.

Taylor is back with Traffik, a tense thriller starring Omar Epps (only his second movie in the past ten years!) and Paula Patton (Mission: Impossible), as a couple who travel to a remote cabin for a romantic getaway, only to get caught up in a feud with a gang that’s been kidnapping women as part of a sex trafficking ring.

The movie is being released by Codeblack Entertainment on Thursday night into 1,000 theaters, and it’s a surprisingly solid thriller that really puts Patton through her paces as an actor, and also stars Luke Evans, Miss Pyle, Laz Alonso and William Fichtner.  

I spoke with Taylor on the phone this past weekend, and it was quite refreshing to talk to a filmmaker who I never had an opportunity to talk to before, who has been able to build this independent production company that makes movie with such amazing talent. It’s no surprise that Taylor’s movies are being released theatrically to a wider audience where other similarly-budgeted thrillers are being dumped to VOD.

ED: I’m glad I got a chance to see your movie, because Codeblack doesn’t generally show their movies in advance to critics, so I consider myself lucky.

Deon Taylor: Yeah, and I think this is not the typical Codeblack movie either, so yeah, I'm beyond excited for the movie, and I'm happy to talk to people about it. As an independent filmmaker, you only get a shot every now and again to finance your movie and make it yourself, and I'm actually extremely happy with my decision to make this film.

ED: I wanted to ask you a little bit more about Hidden Empire, but let’s start with “Traffik” first. I haven’t seen your earlier movie “Supremacy” but reading the premise, it sounds like that was also a thriller based on true events. Did that lead the way into this one?

Taylor: I've always been a fan of thrillers, number one, but number two, I always love things that are grounded in reality. Being able to watch a movie that has, number one, some substance but, number two, there is something that is speaking to me that is real, I find myself being attracted to it. And Supremacywas that for me, very much so. Supremacy, I built that film, but that was much more of a festival movie. This movie here is a much more broader audience film, but it is a true, gritty reality-based movie. I just think that what we were able to do with the movie and the storyline and to be able to kind of blend this issue into a thriller was really cool to be able to do it with the talent, the cast, Roxanne Avent, who produced it. It just to me was a perfect storm.

ED: Did you have to do a lot of research into trafficking? How do you even begin to do that?

Taylor: I was never gonna write this movie. I'm a black filmmaker. I'm always looking for things that touch me, and it was very weird how this happened. It came to me organically through my 13-year-old daughter, because we were actually getting emails about kids being trafficked in our area. I was just like, “What? What is this?”As a parent, you experience everything. You hear about guns. You hear about shootings. You hear about whatever the normal hype you get on the news, right? And this was one of the things that I had never experienced, especially as a black man. This is like, “Trafficking? What does that mean? What are they saying?” I was blown away when I did the research and realized, “Wow, man, this is not only this city. This is a domestic issue and it's happening at an alarming rate.” That's what drew me to the project, man. I just kinda took myself, put myself in the room. I'm gonna figure out how to make a story around these events. I'm gonna try to make a story around these headlines. It's millions of headlines.  And do something where I thought it could actually live in a real place and people would actually want to see it and then at the same time get a message.

ED: You ended up casting what might be one of the sexiest movie couples I’ve seen on screen. Omar and Paula Patton were incredible together.

Taylor: No, you're right.

ED: If I didn't know Omar already had a beautiful wife at home I would have thought they were a couple.

Taylor:  Right. They look great together, man. Paula was my first choice for the film. I just thought she was amazing, and I was a huge fan of what she had did in Déjà vu. When I started getting ready to do this film, I just remember saying to myself, like I told her. I said, “Man, I'm not sure if iyou wanna do stuff like this or not but I said it just would be incredible for us to strip you down in terms of make-up and hair and just have you stretch out as an actress because I know you're amazing.” You know? Because this is a woman who went from being a really, really incredible actress to Deja Vu, to Mission Impossible, whatever it is, to comedy. You have to have a gauge to be able to do that. You know? So this movie to her was like, she said, “D, you're exactly right. I wanna do this,” and she's prolific in this film. No one can tell me anything I know Paula did and I'm blown away by it.

ED: The movie really puts her through her paces. She really goes through a lot in this movie as it goes along.

Taylor: Yeah. It doesn't stop. The movie is relentless and I think that's kinda what we wanted to go after, because there is no cool way to get trafficked. You know what I mean? I said that if we're gonna do it, I wanted to do the movie where it was respectful for people that've been trafficked to be like, “Yeah, that's hell,” not try to figure out some cool, elegant way to be like, “Now, you're trafficked.” No, man. This is hard. This is what happens. You know what I mean? They are literally killing women, they are bondaging women. They are beating women. They are traveling women across the country in the back of trucks.I just thought this was a really, really dope thriller to be able to build for people to see and then obviously [at the end of the] movie, you get the stats and then you quickly understand, “Oh, man,  this is real.” You know what I mean? And I thought that was a very interesting take for today's audience.

ED: Also, you brought Omar Epps back into theaters. It’s crazy, but he really hasn’t done many movies in recent years as he’s transitioned over to TV. I think he’s done maybe one movie in the last ten years or so?

Taylor: Yeah, it's crazy. What's great about him is he's a movie star. And it's a difference between an actor and a movie star. A movie star is someone where you can recall numerous films where you're like, “Oh, man, I loved that. Oh, that was Omar.” That's a movie star who stays with you, and [I was] obviously a fan of him from Juiceto Love & Basketball. You go on and on, but being able to take him and put him back into this medium was incredible, and he didn't miss a beat. I felt like in the movie when you watch it, that's Omar Epps. You know what I mean? He's so good. There's moments with Omar where… what's so beautiful about him is there's moments where he's one of those actors that don't have to use dialogue to communicate on strength. Omar is able to give you a feeling just off of a look, and I thought that was what was so dynamic about him and Paula in this one.

ED: Despite the subject of this thriller, it actually feels like a great date movie, because it does have a little of everything including romance, action…

Taylor: Man, me too! Love, drama, and you're right. It's one of those movies where as it gets intense, you hold hands, and it's a good ride, and it's also a good movie in terms of, like I said before, I think when it's over, it's a talking point. Unlike most movies you walk right out of the theater and 10 minutes you forgot it. This one, I think, you go to bed, you wake up, and like “What? Do you remember that one part?” I think that's what's cool about it.

ED: I’m not sure if you’ve heard of this movie from the ‘70s called Race with the Devil, but it seemed like a twist on that.

Taylor: You're the second person that brought that up. I know that film extremely well. That's a great movie and one of the movies that I referenced was The Vanishing. I was a huge fan of that movie because it broke every rule to me. It was the first movie when I was younger that I watched. I said, “Okay, yeah. He's just trying to find his wife. He's gonna find his girl, and then it's just like, no, he's actually not gonna find her. And, oh, by the way, not only is he not gonna find her but what you thought happened, it did happen.” I just remember that movie breaking the rules and staying with me, and I remember just at the time how prevalent gas stations and kids and people getting abducted was. That was during the time when people started being kidnapped.

ED: Speaking of rides, I gotta ask. Where'd you find that amazing car Omar was driving?

Taylor: It's a '70s Chevelle Supersport. When we were making the movie, what I wanted to do was ... A lot of the locations and the equipment in the film, I wanted them to be used as characters, so what was interesting was the Chevelle represented Omar. He was classic. He was timeless. It was something that he built with his hands for his girl versus spending a bunch of money. He was more of a man's man, and that was just a very cool car to be able to use, opening the movie, feel it, see it. It's sexy, it's beautiful, it's strong. And ultimately, to use it in a chase sequence was really cool as well, and then the other thing that I was able to use that I really wrote as another piece of equipment was the big-rig truck. It is introduced the same exact way. It comes into a big shed. It's ginormous. It's lit. It's strong. It's like a monster, and I just thought both of those automobiles, the truck and the car, were dynamic in the film as characters.

ED: You made this movie independently, but was there any kind of mandate to make it PG-13 or was that a personal decision?

Taylor:Well, I don't think we ... No. I think it is rated R.

ED: Oh, it is?.

Taylor: It is. Yeah, but we made it independently, man, and for me, like I said, I just couldn't find a way to make a PG-13 movie about trafficking, not that could resonate and hit home. The movie doesn't have sex in it and all that stuff, but what the movie does have is it deals with a subject matter that is very, very dark and very scary, and for that, I think you're gonna get rated R.

ED: I guess so, but I'm kind of surprised, because I feel teens should know about the fact this is happening, and it doesn’t seem too dark for them to learn from it.

Taylor: I definitely think it's one of those movies that you could sneak in and a kid could get it and understand it and not be appalled, if that makes sense.  I do think it has a really good lineup. I think the Rated R tag on it is simply based on the subject matter, versus what we're doing in it.

ED: I want to ask you about Hidden Empire, because I didn’t really know about the company until I was doing research for this interview. You have a pretty amazing bio, actually. You even were a basketball player! How did Hidden Empire get started? Is it fairly self-contained?

Taylor: Thank you so much. Yeah, it's just myself and Roxanne, my producer and partner, my partner in life, and we have our other partner, Robert Smith, and that's it, man. When people ask about us making our films independently, I am the definition of independent, right? (chuckles) You don't get no more independent than us, right? I mean, we're literally at home writing scripts, raising our money, casting out of our house, asking for favors and ultimately shooting a movie and then hand-delivering it and trying to figure how to get it out. I mean, we've been doing that now for 10 years and we chose “Hidden Empire” because we've always realized that we are building something that's needed in the culture, needed for minorities in terms of being able to make movies that speak to multiple genres and multiple people. But at the same time, no one's ever known about us. What’s been great is now people are starting to see our work, and that is basically becoming the light for people that shines on us and people to understand our story, which I think is beautiful.

ED: Is it true you have three movies in post right now? Does that mean you have made three more movies since finishing “Traffik”?

Taylor: Yeah. So last year I shot all year, so I have another movie coming in. It's called The Motivated Sellerwith Michael Ealy and Dennis Quaid and Meagan Good. We have another film, 38, which we're doing with Dante Spinotti, and then I did a comedy called The House Next Door. Yeah. All of them are scheduled to start dropping.

ED: That's amazing. That's still all with Hidden Empire?

Taylor: Yeah, all 100%, man. No studios. No management. No agents. Just us. So yeah. I mean, hopefully now what's beginning to happen is we're starting to get some incredible people around us to help us in terms of the journey that we're on and to learn where we're going and help us navigate, but yeah, this is solely, 100% independently-done.

ED: The talent you're getting for your movies is amazing, even going back to “Meet the Blacks” with Mike Epps.  Do you just have a lot of friends in the business?

Taylor: Yeah. You know? I think what happens is, I always tell people, “Light attracts light.” I try to really pride myself on integrity and energy and being a real person. And I think what ultimately happens is when you do that, you attract other people that are looking for the same thing and I've been really blessed over the last years to meet a lot of people and then to have the ability to ask them to work with me and Mike Epps is one of those people. The same with Paula Patton. And it's just been proven that it works and I think as long as we're staying true to the art and we're not blinded by some false agenda, I think we continue doing this for a long time and making really, really dope movies.

ED: Whatever you're doing is working right now and I'm really hoping that this movie gets you out even more. 

Taylor: Man. Me, too. 

ED: This is going into 1,000 theaters, and it's a great weekend. I think you don't have a lot of competition., so get out there while you can.

Taylor: Yeah. I mean hopefully someone will go see it, right?

Traffik opens nationwide on Friday, April 20.

[blessuswithblogs]

On the anti-imperialist roots of the Super Robot genre

Tadao Nagahama is probably not a name you're familiar with. I won't reproach you for it, it's been a while, I had to look it up myself to help me remember. However, Nagahama is an extremely important person for my current subject of discussion: the anti-imperialist, anti-war roots of the Super Robot genre. Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister of Japan, probably most widely known in the west for wearing a Mario hat to promote the next olympic games, has been in his own quiet (and not so quiet) way contributing to the rise of hard right nationalism, historical revisionism, fascism, and a whole bunch of other nasty isms that have found traction in today's sociopolitical climate. Recently, I saw in passing a tweet about how the ever-popular, ever-mystifying Kancolle had an episode where Japan ended up winning the battle of Midway. Propaganda in media is nothing new, but that was quite egregious, even by my desensitized standards. It got me thinking a little bit about my own niche anime interests and how the common perception of the mecha genre is probably one either of random Gurren Lagann bullshit or simplistic, thinly veiled pro-Japan ideology packaged in a kid friendly, larger than life veneer. In a lot of ways, early Super Robots shared more in common with classical American Super Heroes than actual Japanese Super Heroes like Kamen Rider, which evolved into their own tokusatsu genre quite distinct from either paradigm.

I cannot rightly dispute these preconceptions as wrong, but I do want to at least bring up that some early, influential franchises rejected this narrative. One of the first of these, of course, is Mobile Suit Gundam. While now we have the distinction between Super Robot (robots that are like larger than life super heroes) and Real Robot (robots that are presented in a realistic context as weapons of war using standardized technology employed by military and paramilitary forces to project force) for tedious nerds to bicker over indefinitely, in the days of the original Gundam, that distinction did not exist. Indeed, to play for ratings, Yoshiyuki Tomino, famed creator of the Gundam franchise, had to make many concessions to his sponsors and make Amuro Ray's Gundam more like its more popular contemporaries, with goofy mid-season combination upgrades and some extremely anachronistic weaponry like a beam trident and a huge, MS sized ball and chain. On the back of his later success, Zeta Gundam and the seemingly never ending number of side-stories like War in the Pocket and Stardust Memory, Tomino would actually go on to revise the original series in a definitive movie compilation that cut out a great deal of filler and blatantly unrealistic (or at least immersion breaking) elements. This version is extremely good by the way. Give it a watch if you're interested in the genre's history or if you just like old sci-fi.

The reason I bring this up is sort of my roundabout way of arguing that while the Gundam of today is made of entirely different stock than Super Robots, the original article deserves a space in this discussion. The discussion being, of course, the distinctly anti-nationalist bent of a lot of early Super Robot shows. In all of its many incarnations, good, bad, and inbetween, Gundam is a story about war really sucking and how tragic it is that we fail to understand one another because it's easier to just kill one another instead. Now, of course, a lot of fans are either too thick to understand this subtext (and text-text) or simply willfully disregard it because they like cool robots that shoot lasers. Basically think of Dan Ryckert's relationship with Metal Gear. While certainly not all Gundam series have been good, they have always been faithful to these ideas, which is laudable. In broad strokes, anyway. SEED Destiny was pretty weird in spots.

Mobile Suit Gundam 079, which chronicled the One Year War, was not at all shy about this. The One Year War began as a movement for Spacenoid (a slightly ridiculous term for a person living in a space colony or on the moon) independence from the hopelessly corrupt Earth Federation. Naturally, the Federation did not take kindly to this and moved to suppress the movement, but found itself overmatched by the Principality of Zeon's advanced Mobile Suit weapons. To keep an even footing in the war, the Federation resorted to using nuclear weapons and other atrocities on largely civillian colonies to buy time as they developed their own brand of Mobile Suit. In retaliation, Zeon counterattacked with an even more devastating new weapon: dropping space colonies on earth. All told, the One Year War was not a good time to be alive, and nearly half of the Earth Sphere's total population died in one way or another. While all this was happening, the original founder of the independence movement died under suspect circumstances and power was seized by the Zabi family, who were Really Bad News. The Federation, meanwhile, turned to conscripting child soldiers in a desperate bid to keep pace.

This all culminated in the creation of the Gundam by Tem Ray, Amuro's emotionally absent father. Due to Circumstances, Amuro finds himself in the cockpit and becomes the most important soldier in the war overnight because the Gundam is several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything Zeon can field. The character of Amuro is explored most fully in Char's Counterattack, when he is a fucked up adult instead of a fucked up kid, but from the outset, Amuro is defined by forces completely out of his control and his fatalistic acceptance of his own lack of agency. Despite his nigh legendary piloting skills, Newtype powers of precognition and telepathy, and status as hero of the One Year War, Amuro might actually be the most passive motherfucker in the god damned galaxy. This puts him immediately at odds not only militarily but interpersonally with the dreadfully overambitious if mostly well-intentioned Char Aznable, his lifelong rival. Their entire history of conflict is based entirely upon the simple irony that they both want the same thing but, despite being Newtypes, lack the ability to understand this. The One Year War's violence and brutality defined them and their relationship to another, because of a petty twist of fate that put Amuro in the Gundam's pilot seat instead of some other sap.

Gundam uses many more overt methods of conveying that the One Year War is not glamorous or cool or just. Characters die regularly on both sides of the conflict, oftentimes for no real reason other than "this is war, sucker." Tomino developed quite a reputation for this style of storytelling, earning the moniker Kill-'em-all Tomino, especially in some of his non-Gundam works like Aura Battler Dunbine and Space Runaway Ideon. The entire continent of Australia got rendered uninhabitable by colony drops. The White Base, the federation battleship housing the Gundam, is crewed and staffed almost entirely by people who have yet to reach 20 years of age and they've got a pack of prepubescent toddlers running around on the ship because they've got nowhere else to go. I personally find the interpersonal conflicts acting as microcosm for ideology and war to be the most interesting, and most intrinsically Gundam thing about the franchise, but you don't have to go looking between the lines to find evidence of the show's ardent anti-war, anti-nationalist proclivities. The intensely nationalistic Zeon is surreptitiously usurped by a power-mad dictator without anyone even catching on after Ghiren Zabi uses a giant ass space laser to kill both his father and an influential Earth Federation general while they're trying to broker a peace deal. The death of that general, in turn, allows the worst elements of the Federation government to run amok and eventually create the deeply fascist Titans in Zeta Gundam, who make it a point of policy to oppress spacenoids as brutally as possible.

So Gundam, at least, has profound roots in the denunciation of military power as a metric of moral superiority. That's not really news to most people. Oddly enough, it's the most obsessive of fans that tend to miss the memo because they're presumably too busy making sure Mobile Suit measurements are exactly as documented and all character motivations are completely rational and logical, like them. Let's dig a little deeper for some more surprising examples of this kind of ideology in unlikely places. It should be noted, of course, that I am not heralding Gundam as some sort of bastion of progressive thought. Tomino's sexual politics are located roughly in the Stone Age until about 2000's Turn A Gundam, where they progress to about on par with inudstrial revolution social mores. Progress, I suppose. This is a problem with a distressing amount of media, especially in the 70s and 80s, but I'm trying to look at the bright side of things. At least it's not Cross Ange, right?

Moving on, when we look at the genesis of Super Robots as a genre of animation, we will invariably look to Go Nagai. Though a number of shows about large robot men fighting evil like Tetsujin 28 and the live action Giant Robo came first, the seminal Mazinger Z had the popularity and iconic staying power to define everything that came after. Though I could write a great deal about Go Nagai and his Dynamic Robots, they don't really pertain to my particular topic of discussion today because Go Nagai was about as progressive as a sack of bricks. His work was largely apolitical, at least in the sense that he did not intentionally make his stories about contemporary political issues, so at very least Kouji Kabuto never waxed nostalgic about the time Japan was allied with Nazi Germany. In fact, one of the show's major villains, Count Brocken, is a reanimated SS officer cyborg who carries his head around with him because of a decapitation in a previous life. Generally speaking, not a good or sympathetic guy, despite his protests to the contrary. Go Nagai focused on themes of brotherhood and being outcast by society for just being too damn hotblooded and having sideburns that were just too damn thick, though these mostly manifested in his manga. The TV adaptations of Mazinger, Getter Robo, and Grendizer were largely sanitized and inoffensive.

I mentioned Tadao Nagahama at the beginning of my piece, and it is now with him we come to a very important point in the genre's history. Nagahama was the director of three particular Super Robot shows: Combattler V, Voltes V (here the V is treated as the roman numeral, so it's really Voltes 5), and Toushou Daimos (roughly, Brave Leader Daimos). Colloquially, these three are known as the Nagahama Romantic Trilogy, and they are denoted not only by the iconic designs of the robots themselves, towering, blocky things made out of many constituent parts in a fairly sensical way (as opposed to the famously Unpossible Getter Robo), but also by the injection of genuine interpersonal and ideological drama into the proceedings. They were also super popular in other areas of the world, much like Go Nagai's Dynamic Robots. Voltes V in particular was popular in Southeast Asia. Combattler V was instrumental in cementing the notion of The Honorable Rival in the genre, a character aligned with evil that still conducted themselves with decorum. While you would find few such characters in the ranks of Dr. Hell's armies or King Vega's invasion force, in the Romantic Trilogy, they were critical to the show's success. Combattler V was not especially revolutionary, but it laid the groundwork for Voltes V, which in many ways was.

Voltes V is the tale of the Boazan Empire, an interstellar civilization with an expansionist streak and a highly stratified caste system. Unlike previous villainous organizations, the Boazans are noteworthy for being three dimensional and not painted in shades of black and white. The Boazans invade earth for the purposes of annexing it to their growing empire, with the crown prince Hainel leading the charge. Their battle beasts are too much for earth's military (and the militaries of many other planets), but the super electromagnetic robot Voltes V, piloted by a team of five headed by Kenichi, appears to beat them back. Things become interesting when we learn about Kenichi and his two brother's lineage. Their father, the brilliant scientist behind Voltes V's construction, is actually a Boazan expatriate. Not just any expatriate, but former royalty, no less. Boazan's strict caste system is based solely upon whether or not a citizen has horns. If they do, they're nobility. If they don't, well, uh, sucks to be them. Such a system, already untenable, is exacerbated by the fact that the vast majority of Boazans don't have horns. It's a rare genetic mutation. The whole Boazan war machine is powered by a gigantic underclass of slaves-in-everything-but-name. Kenichi's father believed that this was morally reprehensible and that reform was necessary. Unfortunately, this was not a popular opinion among the nobility, and he was disgraced, de-horned, and ousted for his ties to rebellion movements.

Complicating matters even further, he had a son while on Boazan, the aforementioned Prince Hainel. After relocating to Earth to escape persecution and devise some way of bringing change to the empire, Kenichi's father settled down and had a family. Now bereft of horn, he was largely indistinguishable from the average earthling. Parallel evolution is a concept emrbaced heartily by old sci-fi in both Western and Japanese media, probably because people thought alien babes were hot. Fair, honestly. At any rate, Kenichi engages in mortal combat with his half-brother's forces on a regular basis, which creates interpersonal tension mostly lacking in earlier shows. Sometimes Duke Freed got snippy at Kouji for being all love and peace at the Vegans but that was usually resolved at the end of the episode. Hainel himself gradually changes, too, starting out as arrogant, dismissive, and openly ashamed of his connection to a disgraced expatriate and his sons but gaining more depth as time goes on. The end of the show takes place on Boazan itself, with Voltes V spearheading a hornless revolution while Hainel turns on the emperor, vengeful and disgusted by his cowardice. Or maybe it was a movie. Look it's been a long time and I'm going from memory give me a break.

For a kid's TV show at the time, this was honestly pretty wild. Voltes V was not shy about displaying its moral core: people are not defined by the circumstances of their birth, and systems of government based upon the oppression of an underclass deserve only to be destroyed. Voltes V is not as morally complex as Gundam, but it is leaps and bounds ahead of many of its Super Robot contemporaries. Nagahama believed in a sort of fusion of genuine human drama and moral complexity with the more simplistic, bombastic style of storytelling common to his predecessors, and it resonated with viewers all over the globe. At the time of airing, a number of Southeast Asian countries were under the thumb of repressive dictatorships, and the final episodes had to be heavily censored and edited so as not to promote seditious ideas. That, more than anything to me, is the mark of something that is genuinely anti-nationalist in nature. Who would know better than fascist dictators themselves?

The final entry in the Romantic Trilogy, Toushou Daimos, continued the trend of creating morally and politically complex circumstances in which the karate robot made of transforming trucks must punch bad guys. The aliens of the day are the Barmians. The Barmians, however, buck convention and come to earth in genuine peace. Their story is a tragic one - their planet was destroyed in a catastrophe, and the survivors were evacuated on the aptly named mobile space city Small Barm. Due to severe space and resource constraints, a billion Barmians have to remain in cryogenic sleep while a skeleton crew of nobles and military officials keep Small Barm afloat as they search for a place to live. Naturally, they find earth to be a charming place as any to settle down (as it must have seemed in the early 80s before the environment started collapsing) and initiate negotiations with the governments of earth to try and accommodate their people. Expert martial artist and principle protagonist Ryuzaki Kazuya is the son of a brilliant scientist who created the robot Daimos and the special Daimolight energy that makes it so scary strong. Said scientist is part of the diplomatic delegation sent from earth to Small Barm (in some universes alongside the illustrious Rilina Peacecraft, but that is a story for another time entirely) and is a major proponent of the Barmian's request for peaceful integration into earthling society.

Regrettably, this all goes awry when the Barmian hardliner military faction assassinates the King of Barm during the meeting with poison and blames the earthling delegation on it, engineering their own perfect casus beli for a war of domination against Earth. Fascists are remarkably bad at sharing and getting along with others, as has been demonstrated. Prince Richter, the honorable if somewhat dim and hot tempered son of the King wasn't too hot on the assimilation idea because of his prideful belief that the superiority of Barm's culture and technology should allow them to dictate more favorable terms, but was ultimately loyal to his father above all else and acquiesced to the idea. When his father is assassinated, of course, he flies into a rage and declares earth to be the enemy of Barm and kills Kazuya's father. So there's a lot of bad blood between the two of them. Kazuya and Daimos stand up against Barm's battle beasts and prevents the invasion from progressing. He eventually meets and falls in love with princess Erika, Richter's sister. Where Richter is brash and hasty, Erika is intelligent and patient, and much more compassionate. These qualities allow her to see that the circumstances of the King's death, and any motivation the Earthling's might have had to assassinate him, were extremely suspect. They part ways, but Erika eventually joins a resistance faction on Small Barm against the military hardliners who had assumed power. Richter continues to dance to their tune, too consumed by misplaced anger and vengeance to see what is really going on. Erika's relationship with Kazuya only makes him more unreasonably mad.

Of course, Earth has its own hardliners, and in his battles, Kazuya not only has to contend with Barm's battle beasts, but General Miwa, an odious Earth-supremacist convinced that all Barmians, regardless of their disposition, must be eliminated immediately and without mercy. If we want to talk about more alternate universe scenarios, for reference, Miwa was a fucked up enough dude to cast his lot in with the Blue Cosmos organization after his Barmian extermination ambitions never panned out. He really fucking sucks. Ultimately, Kazuya and Erika manage to uncover the plot to assassinate the King, defeat the military holdouts, and bring the peace their fathers wanted about. Where Voltes V presented a scenario of a civilization run by ultra-nationalists needing to be restructured from the ground up, Daimos offers the inverse: a peaceful, tolerant civilization in a time of crisis gets hijacked by a few selfish, warmongering fascists and nearly destroys itself. Coming to understand and love one another, even when from different planets entirely, is an even bigger theme in Daimos than Voltes V, and is in many ways a more personal story. A romance, if you will, for a romantic trilogy.

Nagahama's Romantic Robots were well loved around the globe and left a lasting impact on their genre, encouraging those who came after to experiment with more complex themes and characters, even in the larger than life universe of Super Robots. While not all (or even very many) of these successors live up to this high minded ideal, it's an important part of the history of Japanese animation, proving that drama and politics were not just for Gundam or more "serious" shows. We can see the legacy of Nagahama in a number of more contemporary titles. Evangelion is so much more about interpersonal conflict than actual robots that the final episode of the TV series didn't even have any fighting in it (albeit mostly due to budget constraints). People hated it, of course, and Hideki Anno went on to make End of Evangelion to either appease or piss off further the angry fans, but it happened nonetheless. Gun X Sword represents an evolution of the genre into that of a pseudo-western, where heroes and villains are separated by the thinnest of ideological margins despite the fantastical robots and setting. Gurren Lagann briefly flirts with political complexity before promptly imploding on itself (maybe this one is a bad example). Even Shin Mazinger, an unabashed love letter to older Go Nagai properties, managed to create a surprisingly affecting and compelling character (dare I say, Protagonist?) in its reimagining of Baron Ashura.

The Mecha Genre used to be, and still kind of is, one of my big guilty passions in life. This essay is more personal in nature than a lot of my others, because from time to time I feel like I have to justify to myself why I like this garbage even when it's weird regressive shit. I guess the compromise I have found is that, in certain circumstances, it can be weird progressive shit, too.

[shirlleycoyle]

The YouTubers Keeping Pets Entertained During the Pandemic

Since the pandemic started, I've been using YouTube far more than I used to. Workout routines, sewing tutorials, mindless feel-good clips of babies hugging animals: YouTube has all of these in abundance. But all of these pale in comparison to the type of video I put on most frequently. In our house, kitty TV reigns supreme.

YouTube is filled with content aimed at dogs, cats, and their owners. The varieties are endless. Birds alight at a feeder, a GoPro hidden nearby to record their comings and goings. An invisible hand drags a string toy back and forth. Fish in a koi pond bobble to the surface of a pond. A camera moves smoothly through a park, capturing trees and squirrels. These videos are long, often over four hours, and the most popular ones have millions of views. I put on at least one video per day, which amounts to, at minimum, 28 hours of pet TV per week. Most YouTubers would kill for those numbers.

It wasn't always like this. But one of our cats, Graymalkin, got much more attached and energetic when I started staying home all the time. He used to sleep during the day, while I was at grad school. Then, in the mornings and evenings, he'd sit on my lap and purr as I worked. In the spring, he lost his tiny mind. He spent all day zooming around the apartment, mrrrring and chirping for attention. He begged for treats. He planted himself on my keyboard. He constantly fought my partner for control of his gaming chair.

Greymalkin the Cat, watching someone attempting to play Control / photo by author

One afternoon in July, I searched "cat tv" on the advice of a friend. Maybe some videos of birds or squirrels would take Gray's mind off the gamer chair. And it worked, at least for a little bit: Graymalkin hopped up on the TV stand and parked himself as close to the TV as he could. In his glassy, green eyes were reflections of hummingbirds. When he was most engaged, he reached up to bat at the screen with his weird little cat-hands.

After about five minutes, he curled up in my lap, bored. But I wasn’t bored. After the video ended, I put on another. And another. There were so many videos for cats and dogs. I sat on the couch, watching Graymalkin watch TV.

For both of us, it was a portal into the strange, sometimes eerie world of The Algorithm. In one video, an enormous cockroach skittered across the screen, freaking us out. In another, an otherwise tranquil recording of a bird fountain, a Minion toy loomed ominously above the birds. Every few minutes, the footage would jump cut to a slightly different angle, making it look like the Minion teleported a few inches to the left or right. Eventually, I selected so many videos from Japanese creators that YouTube, confused, started serving me ads in Japanese. While I tried to follow the plotlines of commercials in a language I don't speak, Graymalkin swished his tail, impatient for images that triggered his hunting instinct.

A still frame from a video by TV BINI

No video captivated his attention for more than a few minutes, but for those minutes, he was rapt. Sometimes I caught him staring at the screen even if it was switched off, as if he was trying to suss out the TV’s inner workings.

Eventually I noticed the viewer counts on the cat videos: hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions, of views. Many of the videos came from the same channels, and these top channels were monetizing their content by running ads. How much money, I wondered, were these creators making from pet TV? Had they stumbled upon success by accident, or had they worked hard to win the chaotic gamble of making money through YouTube? And were animals really watching these videos for hours at a time?

Identifying the inner workings of the pet TV biz became an obsession. I wanted to know more about the people who had figured out this YouTube niche, harnessing the power of SEO plus the fretting of helicopter pet parents for ad revenue. So I reached out to two YouTube creators: entrepreneur Amman Ahmed, the founder of Music for Pets (which includes the YouTube channels RelaxMyDog and RelaxMyCat), and Bini, who runs TV BINI.

RelaxMyDog and RelaxMyCat both post new videos almost every day. No two are the same, but many follow a similar formula. The first element is either still photos or slow footage of expansive natural landscapes, sometimes with wild animals in the background. The second element is slow, soothing piano or strings, the kind of music you’d hear at an upscale spa. The audio loops infinitely and the video plays on and on, sometimes for up to fifteen hours.

Ahmed really is a savvy businessman who saw an opportunity, then threw everything he had at dominating it. Though RelaxMyDog now has 587,000 subscribers and RelaxMyCat has 472,000, they started out much smaller. “I self-funded it, had no investors. I 100% owned the company. It's luckily, over the years, got bigger and bigger,” Ahmed said, video-chatting me from his temporary home in Kiev. Music for Pets is headquartered in Manchester, in the UK, but Ahmed travels frequently for work. He spent the beginning of 2020 in Brooklyn, but then saw the COVID-19 writing on the wall and left the country. Fortunately, Ahmed told me, many of Music For Pets’ fifteen employees – including filmmakers in Indonesia, South Africa, and Romania – work remotely. Music For Pets is a complex operation, with lots of cogs and levers. Luckily, Ahmed can make sure all those cogs are turning properly from anywhere in the world.

In 2012, Music for Pets was just Ahmed and his new business partner, a music producer from El Salvador named Ricardo Henriquez. Ahmed had wanted to start a business centered around relaxing music for people, and in searching a freelancing website for music producers, stumbled across Henriquez. Henriquez's dog suffered from anxiety, and so Henriquez and Ahmed wondered if calming music would work just as well on dogs as it did on people.

A still from from a Relax My Dog video

Eight years later, Music For Pets makes much more than just music. There's a subscription service, which allows users to play ad-free videos for $4.99 a month. They even have a mobile app, called Games for Cats, that lets cats bat at fish and bugs on a smartphone screen. “In 2019, l think twenty million cats and dogs around the world consumed content on RelaxMyDog and RelaxMyCat,” said Ahmed. Music For Pets’ viewership numbers have hit an all-time high in 2020, and Ahmed thinks that worldwide COVID-19 quarantines are at least partially responsible. Pet owners who have started working from home are disrupting their animals’ routines, potentially causing anxiety. “Cats are looking at their owners like, ‘Why are you still here?’” he said. Another possible explanation for Music For Pets’ popularity is that people find the videos soothing. “Our content is now becoming more designed for humans and pets to watch together,” Ahmed told me. Music For Pets ran a survey that asked viewers if, during quarantine, they were watching RelaxMyDog alongside their pets. 87% of respondents said yes.

It’s easy for me to see – and sense – the human appeal. Focusing on a sunlit beach and mellow music is exactly what my meditation app asks me to do. I seem to get more out of these videos than Graymalkin, who wanders away after he realizes he can’t actually commit any bird murders. And I am not the only one who feels this way, according to Ahmed. “We see a lot of comments where people are like, ‘Look, I don't have a dog. I enjoy watching this while I'm high,” he said. But motivations notwithstanding, enough viewers have clicked on RelaxMyDog and RelaxMyCat videos to generate a business that Ahmed says is valued at seven to eight million dollars.

Bini runs a very different kind of operation, one that doesn’t generate the same kind of profit. While Ahmed said he regularly talks to journalists, Bini – who declined to give her real name – rarely does. When I reached out to her to ask for a phone interview, she said she would prefer to talk over email. "I'm an extremely private person," she wrote. Her reclusiveness contrasts with the popularity of her channel, TV BINI, which has 105,000 subscribers. Some of her 156 videos are filmed, while others are animated, but she makes and edits them all. "TV BINI is a one-woman production," she wrote.

Graymalkin, the author's cat, considers the fish in a video for which he is ostensibly (but doubtfully) the target demographic. / photo by author

Bini, who lives in California, started TV BINI in 2014. However, she's only recently gotten a high enough subscriber count to feel like her efforts are paying off financially. "It wasn't money that kept me going, that's for sure," she told me. What’s kept her going is the thought that she’s helping both cats and cat owners. Many viewers have posted clips of their pets reacting to her content. “The cat reaction videos and positive comments by pet owners motivate me to continue making videos,” she said.

Bini told me that videos of prey, or objects that move like prey (such as string dragged across the screen), help cats exercise their basic predatory instincts. And though she creates content with cats in mind, other species react, too. Bini sent me a list of videos depicting other animals, like a peacock, a praying mantis, a dog, and a lizard, interacting with her videos.

But how should we interpret animals’ reactions to pet TV? According to Dr. Kersti Seksel, a veterinary behavioral expert who practices in Sydney, Australia, it’s hard to know. “There’s very little research on [pet TV],” she said. Some studies have indicated that certain genres of music may decrease stress responses in dogs, such as a 2012 study in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior that linked classical music with more sleeping and less shaking or barking in shelter dogs. In addition, Ahmed pointed me towards a 2017 study in the journal Physiology and Behavior which suggests that soft rock and reggae music relax kenneled dogs.

However, Seksel says that the way cats and dogs perceive video is starkly different than the way we perceive it. Both species have a far sharper sense of smell than we do, which means that they rely on olfaction – a sense that video doesn’t cater to at all. They also hear a far broader range of frequencies than humans: dogs can hear up to 45,000 Hz (hertz), while cats hear up to 64,000 Hz. (We only hear up to 23,000 Hz.) Furthermore, the placement of both cats’ and dogs’ eyes means that their field of vision is much wider than a human’s, allowing them to sense more peripheral motion. “[Cats and dogs] live in their world. They hear ultrasound and infrasound sounds that you and I can't even detect,” said Seksel. “Maybe the birds outside are making noises that we can't hear, but the animal can hear.”

As a result, Seksel told me, it’s hard for us to know if the basic concepts conveyed by videos come across the same way to our pets as they do to us. While a video with fluttering feathers and a high-pitched song may convince us that it’s depicting a bird, cats and dogs may only perceive some of the signals they associate with birds. That’s what might have happened with my cat, Graymalkin. A video could suggest the presence of a bird, so he checks it out. But when he inspects the TV, he doesn’t smell a bird, or hear the ultrasonic frequencies a real bird would make. In the end, he might be wandering away because he’s bored.

Seksel said that pet TV likely caters more to our understanding of entertainment than to a cat or dog’s. “I think our expectations of what the animals will do are wrong,” she explained. “It’s based on, ‘Well, I can sit and watch a TV show, I can watch a movie.’ But even with humans, if the movie doesn't have something that changes every five to seven minutes, you lose interest. Same with video games.”

Ultimately, the audience that pet TV caters to isn’t pets. It’s us, the pet owners. As in the children’s publishing industry, the supposed target audience isn’t the one making choices. Little kids don’t have the purchasing power to buy books, so publishers market to their parents. Similarly, cats and dogs don’t have the opposable thumbs necessary to put on games or videos. Their owners are the ones who scroll through YouTube results and pick the option that seems best. In this context, the “best” video might appeal to a cat or dog, but it might also be “the video that appeals most to people.”

However, Seksel said that just because there isn’t research to support pet TV, that doesn’t mean it’s completely ineffective. “We need to think about animals as individuals,” she said. “Just because my dog doesn’t react to TV doesn’t mean that someone else’s dog wouldn’t react to it.” Seksel stressed that dogs and cats, like humans, respond to stimuli based on their preferences. Those preferences don’t have to conform to logic, or to scientific consensus. “You might like playing golf, I might not like playing golf. That doesn’t mean golf is good or bad,” Seksel added.

In a follow-up email, Ahmed agreed with Seksel’s analysis. Because there isn’t much research on how cats and dogs react to TV, “we took the approach to pump out loads of experimental content because we have a huge audience,” he said. That way, Music For Pets could engage with as many animals’ preferences as possible.

Bini hopes the popularity of pet TV will spark more research into animals’ responses. “It would be exciting to learn the differences between human and animal motivations and perceptions,” she said. Ultimately, she believes that any entertainment that makes sedentary indoor animals move around is a good thing.

Speaking with Seksel made me realize that, for me, pet TV is a small way of asserting control. It makes me feel like I’m taking steps to improve the life of a living creature. Existing in a pandemic, especially a pandemic that so many people in my country seem hellbent on minimizing, makes control over anything seem like a pipe dream. I’ve lost the power to make life much better for myself, or for people that I care about. But my cat? I can fill his days with endless clips of birds. Maybe that means something to him. Even if it doesn’t, it is still soothing for my world to contract, to become as compact and frictionless as a cat watching a TV screen, birds of prey reflected in his lambent eyes.

The YouTubers Keeping Pets Entertained During the Pandemic syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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ShopZPresso Review Discount And Huge Bonus

ShopZPresso Testimonial

I'm extremely excited due to the fact that I generated one more awesome solution to a big trouble and that is everybody is secured down because of this unfavorable pandemic scenario as well as because everyone's locked down. Nobody can pursue work. No person can earn money and also no one can shop. So the only method for us, you as well as our consumers to store is to shop online. So everybody is shopping on-line which is why Amazon.com is hiring over hundred thousand more people to handle this additional order deliveries. So when every person is shopping or buying online. This is the most effective time to offer online if you look at the web traffic stats of the huge market places like Walmart and also ebay.com and all you see traffic has actually been considerably enhanced since everyone is getting online. So this is the best time to market online and also this is the best time to instruct your customers as well as provide devices. So they can also market online earn money and this is where ShopZPresso comes in.

Just How to Offer Online: Your All-In-One Overview to Selling Products Online [Component 5]

When noting your ShopZPresso product, you'll require to describe what you're offering. Usage keywords wherever feasible to assist increase exposure in searches. You can pick in between an auction listing format and also a get it currently layout.

Next, select your shipping choices and you're ready to checklist. eBay has tools that assist you determine shipping, include tracking info, and produce and also spend for your labels. This makes running your eBay store even much easier.

Selling Products Online With Etsy

If you are a crafter, Etsy can be a fantastic system.

Rather than Amazon and eBay, Etsy just permits you to offer handmade or vintage things, and craft supplies. Reselling things you did not make is not enabled on the Etsy platform itself. Craft products can either be hand-made, classic, or commercial. Yet they need to have a key objective of crafting.

This guide is chock-full of helpful pointers as well as understandings that must help you adjust your listings as well as grow your eCommerce organisation with the help of Etsy. You'll learn the list of best-selling items on ebay.com, such as jewelry or stickers. You'll have a clear vision of what must NOT be listed under no conditions, exactly how you can shoot remarkable item images, the amount of items can be sold on the internet with Etsy, as well as just how to develop outstanding item descriptions.

CHAPTER 5: Exactly How to Sell on Etsy

You'll find out:

-- How to develop your Etsy shop and start marketing on-line right off the bat

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We have actually additionally included the very best suggestions and also techniques to drive even more traffic to your on the internet store-- from following-up with purchasers to simply being polite. Yes, that likewise works!

And, lastly, this article will assist you comprehend if Etsy is the ideal system for your eCommerce business.

Making use of Etsy for selling your items online is projected to be rather profitable in 2020 as the platform is growing rapidly-- from $74.6 m in earnings in 2012 to $381.1 m revenue in 2018. As of 2018, there were more than 1.98 million active sellers, up from 1.74 million in 2016.

Selling on Etsy is as very easy as creating a store account, listing your items, as well as promoting your shop. You'll pay a $0.20 listing charge per item and a 3.5% transaction fee.

Marketing Online on Pinterest

A report from KPCB reveals Pinterest is UNITED STATE buyers' social networks platform of choice, with 55% of users turning to it to locate or purchase products. For Facebook as well as Instagram? It's simply 12%.

People are currently there searching for your product or services. So make certain you exist to be located.

To start marketing online with Pinterest, you have to know the way this social media sites system functions-- what is the age, sex, place, and revenue of Pinterest's target audience; how much money they are ready to invest; what items they have an interest in, you name it.

A few years ago, for example, Pinterest was good just for a narrow group of designers, trying to find motivation. Today it's a large neighborhood fit for all kinds of rate of interests, consisting of dishes, books, mapping out, and also a whole lot extra. That's why choosing a product to sell on Pinterest is not a trouble anymore.

Stats reveal that art and fashion jewelry are the most trending ShopZPresso products that you can offer online with Pinterest. That's why we devoted the entire 2 chapters to help sellers market them on-line better ... particularly if the competitors is too rigid.

Introducing ShopZPresso

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Introduce Date: 2020-May-15

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What is ShopZPresso?

ShopZPresso is a three-in-one marketplace, customers can offer their physical items or other individuals's physical products like Shopify, they can market their digital items like Warrior And also. JVzoo and also Clickbank and they can market their software licenses like in beta and code Canyon and they can produce cost-free associate traffic by running their very own affiliate program from inside the program This is essentially a manuscript that they can set up in their hosting web server and also run from the holding server or alternatively they can utilize our hosting server and just proceed as well as sell their stuff. So they do not need to pay anything to Shopify or Clickbank or WordPress, Jvzoo. They can simply go back to square one making use of the total tool as well as the training. The complete training on just how to market physical items electronic items and qualified products inside ShopZPresso.

What Does ShopZPresso Do?

3 in 1 shop contractor. The world is buying. We constructed ShopZPresso software program to help clients offer anything they want. Digital or physical or Software application permit. And also drive complimentary purchaser web traffic from running their own associate program.

It's a cloud based software program script. To utilize it, Consumers will certainly need to adhere to basic, step by step instructions and install the script in their holding web server.

Sell physical, electronic & software application

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Your Customers can benefit in 3 various methods

1. create an electronic product shop and also offer digital products like selling on clickbank, warrior plus or JVzoo 2. physical product shop and offer physical products like shopify 3. software application licence Shop and market software program permit like envato/codecanyon

clients can market their items using their own associate program without paying any fees or % to the platforms like clickbank, warrior plus or JVzoo, amazon, walmart, compensation junction.

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9 Strategies To Your First Profitable Product

If You Can Find The RIGHT Product, Then The Job Of Selling Your Product Is Half Done And Your A Step Closer To Your First Profitable Product.That’s because an in-demand product will do half of the selling for you.On the other hand, the wrong product will mean you have to work ten times as hard to make a sale.How do you come up with great product ideas?It’s tricky.

“There is always a killer best-selling hot product that is just WAITING for you to find it, invent it or create it. You simply have to know where to look.”

It can feel like everything that can be sold is already BEING sold. You look at the marketplace and there seems to be products for everything. But think of it this way… 5 years ago people thought the same thing. And yet, in the last 5 years, look at all the new products that have hit the market.There is always a killer best-selling hot product that is just WAITING for you to find it, invent it or create it. You simply have to know where to look.The key is to find a hungry market and then give that market what it wants. And it helps to understand the psychology of why people buy, too.1: Solve a Customer’s Pain Point.Solving a customer’s pain point always has been and will be an effective strategy to develop a product people want.Pain relievers like aspirin literally take away pain. But more often than not, pain is a more abstract concept – the pain of stress, money problems, loneliness, low energy, out of shape, poor health, lousy job and so forth.All of these cause very real pain, and when you can relieve that pain, you make a sale.Let’s say you’re at the dog park with your dog, and over and over again you hear dog owners lamenting the fact that dog toys are expensive and they don’t last.This is a pain point.You could solve this pain point by selling cheaper dog toys, selling dog toys that last longer, or even selling cheaper dog toys that last longer.Pay special attention to when people say they are frustrated with a particular product or service.Notice when you find yourself thinking that something could be improved or something should be invented, if only somebody would do it.That somebody could be you.

2: Cater to Enthusiastic Hobbyists.The more passionate people are about their particular trade or hobby, the more money they’ll invest to get the exact product they want.The classic example is golfers:They’re well-known for investing hundreds or even thousands of dollars to lower their score by a stroke or two.I’ve personally seen collectors live on ramen soup for a month in order to afford their latest acquisition. And we’ve all seen online marketers buy yet another ‘how to’ course when they haven’t yet consumed the last dozen courses they already purchased.Look for passionate people and you’ll have a hot market.Listen to what they say and watch what they do, and you’ll find product ideas worth pursuing.Imagine you go through your day, observing people in their hobbies. You take a walk and you notice people out gardening. What can you offer them that helps them express themselves in their hobby, or makes their hobby even more fun?Maybe you invent funny garden signs they can place amongst their plants, or t-shirts they can wear, or hats or even zany garden gloves that make them smile. Maybe you create an info product on 101 weird ways to grow the biggest, baddest, most glorious bug and disease free garden ever.You see some people ride by on bicycles. They’d love some tshirts that highlight their hobby, too. And how about outfitting their bikes to represent their personality and style? Not to mention an app that shows them all the best places in the area to bike, including elevation gains for hilly areas and cautions against dangerous streets for bikes.Next, you walk by the gym, where you see people trudging through the door, carrying their duffle bags. They don’t look all that enthused to be there, do they? Is it because they get tired of having to drive there, compete with others for space and equipment and shower in public? Maybe they’d rather work out at home, or even at a park or the beach. You could create a series of exercise videos that use nothing but their own bodyweight to get fit and trim in no time, with no gym membership and no equipment needed.You get the idea.Keep your eyes open and watch for ideas because they are everywhere.3: Your Personal Passion.This one is a little tricky.There is an old saying that if you do what you love, the money will follow.Well, not necessarily.The key is that a lot of other people who are willing to spend money also need to share your passion. But if you can use your know-how to create and position a unique product in a niche you love, it can be extremely profitable.When you love your niche, the hard work of building a business, staying motivated and overcoming obstacles becomes a lot easier.

One blogger started writing about how to make money online. But she kept using her scuba experiences to illustrate points. The more scuba crept into her blog, the more she realized that her real passion was diving. Soon she started a diving website and is now making money promoting diving trips and selling diving equipment, as well as taking paid advertisements.Another entrepreneur had a real passion for artwork. She could spend all day hunting art online and finding the best upcoming artists. She finally quit her accounting job and started her own website, where she highlights new artists, sells art products and beautiful accessories designed by her artists, and caters to people who love art with a passion. She also donates 10% of all proceeds to benefit nonprofits that are close to her heart.4: Use Your Professional Experience.If you’ve been working in a particular industry, odds are you know more about certain aspects of that industry than 99.9% of people on the planet. Plus, you’ve likely made important contacts in the industry, learned certain skills and had your own unique set of experiences.Do you realize you’re more knowledgeable than the average person on these particular topics?Then turning your expertise into your own online business might be a smart way to enter the market with a leg up that isn't easy for others to duplicate or copy.For example, a plumber might start an online business teaching people to do their own plumbing maintenance and fixing small plumbing problems, as well as serving as a review site for local plumbers.On the flip side, that same plumber can help new plumbers by teaching them the ins and outs of the business, as well as how to build up a large clientele fast, how to structure their business to limit liability, how to collect on slow paying customers, how to hire the right employees and be an effective boss and everything else related to a plumbing business.5: Be an Early Adopter.Are you good at recognizing trends early enough to take full advantage of the opportunities?For example, maybe you spotted the opportunity with Bitcoin or cannabis before most people did. Being first allows you to carve out a place in the market and establish yourself as a leader before others have a chance to.Here’s the pitfall to watch out for when spotting trends – a trend is something long term with lots of potential. It should be profitable for at least a couple of years, and preferably a decade. A fad, on the other hand, is generally here today and gone tomorrow. To capitalize on a fad you have to be super fast on your feet, and ready to pivot at a moment’s notice.In the 70’s pet rocks were invented just for a kick.Each rock was nestled on a bed of straw inside a little box, with instructions on how to care for your new ‘pet.’ To everyone’s surprise, they sold like hotcakes.The problem occurred when others tried to copy the success of this product and couldn’t, because the pet rock was a fad, not a trend. Of course, if you had started the pet rock fad yourself, you would have become a millionaire.When you spot the right opportunity, act fast. It’s generally always the first movers who have an extreme advantage.Here are a few ways to watch for what’s trending.Social listening: Watch trending hashtags on Twitter or topics on Facebook. Use social listening tool software to identify and monitor trends over time.Google Trends: Watch and monitor the popularity of topics over time, looking for upward trends that show no sign of tapering off.Trend Hunter: https://www.trendhunter.com From the website - “Spark new ideas with the world's #1 largest, most powerful trend platform. We unlock insights with a global network of 237,694 Hunters, billions of views, AI and a skilled team of Researchers and Futurists. Join 3,500,000+ on the cutting edge.”

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com. This “Front page of the internet” showcases forums about nearly every topic under the sun – even cat toe beans. Visit the popular pages to see what people are buzzing about.6: Read Customer Reviews for Existing Products.There is a wealth of insight you can glean from customer reviews.Do you already have a line of products?See what your customers are saying about them. Look for areas where your product fell short. Look for trends and interesting feedback that you can use as inspiration for your next product.Next, go to Amazon and other sites to read feedback on products in your niche.What are their complaints? What do they love? How can you either improve on what’s out there, or completely reinvent something?This works especially well for information products.Make a list of everything customers love and everything they complain about on your topic. Then use this as a starting point for your next creation.7: Use Keyword Research To Find Product Opportunities.You might think this is doing things backwards, but by strategically looking for product ideas based on real search queries, you can gain valuable insight into what you can not only sell, but also get ranked high in the search engines.Imagine you launch a product that Google immediately places on page one of the natural results – you’ll have free traffic for as long as Google is loving what you offer.This approach is somewhat technical and takes a good understanding of keyword research and search engine optimization. But by pairing product demand to existing keywords, you really can capture consistent organic traffic from Google.Of course, if Google changes its algorithm, that free traffic could disappear.It’s important to remember that Google isn’t the only place where people start their search.Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, YouTube and other online marketplaces also have their own search functions, which means lots of keyword data as well.Here are a few tools you can use to uncover popular search terms, which may help you find the next product to sell:Keywords Everywhere https://keywordseverywhere.com/

Keyword Tool https://keywordtool.io/

Keyword Inspector https://www.keywordinspector.com/simple/index.php

Helium 10 https://www.helium10.com/

Sonar Keyword Tool (Amazon) http://sonar-tool.com/us/

Etsy Rank https://erank.com/

Alibaba Keyword Tool https://keywordkeg.com

8: Test Before You Launch.Here’s a nifty trick to find out ahead of time if there is going to be a market for your product.Create a webpage that explains what’s so great about your product. It’s a sales page you put together without overthinking – sort of a “just get it done” type of page.Send traffic to the page, either through your list and social media, or by paying for traffic.You can approach this in different ways – take preorders and let customers know the product will be finished and delivered on a certain date or explain the product and let them join a waiting list to be the first to purchase it.The first option will give you a much better sense of how well the product will sell, since people are laying out their money for the product. But be sure you know exactly when the product will be ready. If there is little or no interest in the product, and you’re fairly certain you targeted the right people, then count yourself lucky that you didn’t go through the hassle of creating the product just to find out it wouldn’t sell.9: Always Be On The Lookout.Above all else, just keep an open eye and an open mind.Write down every idea you get, no matter how bad or good it is. This prompts your subconscious to find even more ideas. Ideas can come at any moment, including in the middle of the night or the middle of a shower. Be prepared to write them down. Then review your lists and see what you’ve got. Somewhere in there is a pot of gold just waiting for you.Hopefully these ideas will get you on the road to lucrative product creation and your first profitable product online.Product Launch ChecklistRead Our FREE Product Launch Checklist Here ... Read the full article

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How To Save The Album | HumanHuman

Can the album be saved from continually declining sales?

In a follow-up to our article Welcome to the Singles Era, in which we expressed the opinion that the music industry and listeners alike are all too dependent on hit singles, we’re tackling a new area of music consumption - the album. In the somewhat brief overview, we'll be looking at the different ways in which labels, PR companies and artists themselves are trying to boost album sales.

The questions that naturally arise are 1) can the traditional LP be saved from declining interest of the general public? and 2) does the album even need to be saved, or is it perhaps a change of perspective that’s in order? Let’s find out, shall we.

Stream It

Living in the digital age now means that streaming music is the most convenient way to access the albums that you love and have yet to discover. Until recently, these virtual libraries were seen as a thorn in the side of the music business, in which potential profit was forever leaking out. However, there’s a new message in the air these days - streaming is the future. We’ve seen such achievements as Fetty Wap’s debut album perform extraordinarily well online, which was certified platinum this month with 70% of the 1 million units belonging to digital sales and streams. This recent switch to counting streams as album sales (1,500 is now the equivalent to one physical purchase) now allows more artists to receive recognition for genuinely impactful releases. In light of this, let’s consider Lorde’s debut Pure Heroine which was released in 2013 and continued to sell records into 2014 with 750,000 units, but in neither year did the record manage to reach platinum status (according to Forbes), but perhaps the record would have if album streams had been counted.

On the other hand, this can also be a misleading representation of an album’s popularity. Looking back at the time when Rihanna’s ANTI LP was certified platinum, it had only managed to peddle a measly 460 real-life sales, and so it would appear that streams led the way to success for Rihanna’s sixth studio album. Well, that’s not really the case either. Shortly after the inexplicable 1.47 downloads in less than fifteen hours, it came to light that the star’s sponsors Samsung had actually pre-paid for 1 million copies of ANTI, which were then made available to TIDAL users as free downloads. This mass giveaway raises some questions about the lengths that industry behemoths will go to in order to fudge album sales. Even Billboard had to excuse the album’s sudden placement on the Billboard 200 chart, by bringing attention to their multi-metric consumption statistics. In direct response to this, one Indie Shuffle writer paints a bleak picture of the future:

“In an industry that has become increasingly dominated by streaming sites, this could be the new normal. The music executives potentially marketing an album as a huge success and citing figures from streaming and free downloads in order to enhance the product's reputation early on in the eyes of the general public.”— Mark Molyneaux, Indie Shuffle

Surprise!

Another form of an enhancement that has become a common feature in the music industry, and has so far proved to be extremely effective, is the surprise tactic. The searingly obvious example is of course Beyonce’s self-titled 2013 release, which led to many christening the day ‘Bey Day’. It wasn’t only the surprise element of the superstar’s fifth album that got fans so excited, it was also the set of full-length, highly choreographed and stylised music videos that represented the album in its initial form. More recently, we’ve seen other artists use visuals in order to signal an oncoming release, such as the late David Bowie who dropped a video for title track “Black Star” from what would be his final work. Much of the time albums appear without warning in order to create hype and a sudden burst of sales, but that’s not the only explanation. Kendrick Lamar’s unexpected release Untitled Unmastered wasn’t a money making scheme (at least not in any direct manner), but as MTV suggests it’s “a peek behind the curtains” of Lamar’s creative process. In this way he keeps fans as loyal as ever and secures sales of future, unwritten works.

Keep ‘em waiting

Artists who release records sporadically and after long periods of avoiding the limelight are able to cultivate a sense of suspense within their listenership, so that when an album does finally arrive, it’s a feeding frenzy of consumerism. We’re currently in the sway of anticipation for albums from artists like London Grammar, Jungle, Banks, Baby Alpaca, Sampha, and the aforementioned Lorde, just to name a handful. It worked for Justin Timberlake who released The 20/20 Experience seven years after his last album and an even more extreme version is My Bloody Valentine’s MBV LP which broke twenty-two years of silence. One artist who is widely known for not rushing a record is Adele, and so we were left to wait four years for her third album. Quality over quantity is one of many lessons that Adele’s affluent career teaches us. Her success also plays directly into the fact that selling CDs - a continually outdated format - is still a viable and profitable option for some artists. Adele’s 25 in particular was cited by many as saving the industry, such as chief executive of HMV Ian Topping who said it was their “fastest selling album for many years” and journalist Ian Sherwin who interred that 25 “may even have introduced a new generation to the delights of ownership” (The Independent). We only have to look to the statistics to see how Adele’s 2015 release eased the decline of falling industry sales. According to Forbes, this is represented by the sale of 1.71 million physical copies in its first week and 900,000 digital copies sold on its first day on iTunes. Whether it was the wait, the campaign, or because Adele is really, really good, 25 took the business from a potential 9% fall in sales to a more manageable 3%.

Get into vinyl

Since the growth of digital recording, this classic audio format of vinyl has long been thought of as the realm of the niche and obsessive music collector. Yet, over recent years this fringe market has grown considerably as more music-lovers try to tap into a physical relationship with their purchases, and in particular with 12-inch LPs. Mainstream endorsement came this year in the form of Sony and Panasonic’s showcases of next generation vinyl players at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. There was the luxurious Technics SL1200-GA from Panasonic and the extremely innovative Sony PS-HX500, which allows users to rip vinyl records onto hi-res audio files and therefore backs up your physical collection to a digital library. Whilst vinyl stores are yet to make a comeback as a high street staple, in the UK “vinyl sales [have] increased from £3.3m in 2009 to £25.9 million in 2014” (Wired). What’s probably most surprising about vinyl popularity in 2015 was that this format wasn’t dominated by rare recordings and obscure bands, but by pop favourites Adele who moved 116,000 vinyl copies of 25 in the US and Taylor Swift whose vinyl version of 1989 sold 74,000 units (The Verge). The other thing that makes vinyl an unexpected saviour of the music industry is it’s ability to resurrect old favourites, like Amy Winehouse’s breakthrough work Back to Black which was the second highest selling LP last year in the UK. Delving into our discoveries, we’ve seen excellent LP releases such as Holly Herndon’s Platform, Ibeyi’s self-titled, and Kamasi Washington’s The Epic (The 50 Best LPs of 2015, The Vinyl Factory). One thing is evident, music ownership is in.

All in a good campaign

With decreasing sales, there’s seems to be less revenue going around to spend on promotion (unless you’re sponsored by Samsung or some other business giant), so the answer is that emerging artists need to be more creative with their campaigns. Let’s take rising indie-pop pair Oh Wonder as an example. Their self-titled debut made a gradual appearance with one single every month throughout 2015, and this take-it-slow attitude meant that listeners had a whole year to get acquainted with Oh Wonder’s first album. This approach is exactly the opposite to the surprise tactic that many established acts appear to be using to promote albums. All of Oh Wonder’s monthly releases reached #1 on the Hype Machine chart and these newcomers also became the second most blogged about band of 2015. Continuing their trend for going against the grain, the duo of Josephine Vander Gucht and Anthony West released the record initially on vinyl, further emphasising their status as a band for the critics. If that wasn’t enough, their debut album came in at 26th place in the UK charts, which is pretty impressive for a band who had written, recorded, produced and self-released a record in the space of a year.

What not to do

As much as listeners love a freebie and even the savviest of buyers can fall for a well-orchestrated press campaign, music ownership isn’t something that can be forced, even when someone else, and at no extra cost, downloads it for you. Of course, we’re talking about U2’s iTunes debacle when their album Songs Of Innocence was pushed into the libraries of Apple devices without the consent of the users. After a wave of social media outrage, Apple had to issue instructions of how to delete this unwanted “gift” as CEO Tim Cook called it and U2 frontman Bono took it upon himself to air some kind of apology. The best input on this situation comes from living legend Iggy Pop: “The people who don’t want the free U2 download are trying to say, ‘Don’t try to force me,’ and they’ve got a point.”

“Part of the process when you buy something from an artist, it’s kind of an anointing, you are giving that person love.”— Iggy Pop via The Guardian

That’s the real reason we should all be working to save the album, for the artists, bands, concepts and music we love. If we want the music industry to continue, we have to invest in it.

https://humanhuman.com/articles/how-to-save-the-album

[swimintothesound]

Mumbling Music, Soundcloud Rap, and Feeling Like an Old Man

I never thought I’d be “over” a genre within the space of a year. My obsessions tend to be longer-lasting, or at the very least, something that I can return to later even if it’s solely for nostalgic purposes. After “discovering” hip-hop in 2015 I quickly gravitated towards the “trap” subgenre whose outlandish figures like Young Thug and Future provided a much-needed break from the years of straight-laced and hyper-earnest music I’d been listening to most of college.

In addition to trap’s personable artists, the subgenre has managed to become one of the most popular and dominant sounds over the past several years. This combination made the scene feel communal and accessible as it grew to become an undeniable a part of the cultural zeitgeist. In fact, hip-hop is part of the cultural landscape now more than ever as artists are propelled to success by internet memes which has led to a “look at me” mentality.

In 2016 a distinct new class of rapper began to emerge who utilized the path that had been paved by their trap forefathers to carve out their own niche and fortify themselves as the “next generation” of hip-hop. This group of (then) up-and-comers included people like Lil Yachty, Desiigner, and 21 Savage who quickly earned the derogatory label of “mumble rap,” a name inspired by the MC’s apparent lack of technical proficiency on the mic. These rappers took cues from people like Young Thug and Future (who are also often lumped into this group) but remain distinct for a few reasons. One: almost all of these artists blew up while still in their teens. Two: almost all of these artists used SoundCloud as a platform in their rise to prominence (paving the way for future artists). Three: Many of the most popular “mumble rappers” also happened to be members of the XXL 2016 Freshman Class.

This inclusion in XXL is the most important commonality to note because it elevated the genre instantly and placed these artists squarely in the spotlight. As these rappers gained popularity and publicity over the summer of 2016 many people criticized the freshmen class for their evident lack of technical skill. It quickly ballooned to a genre-wide discussion about what these rappers “brought to the table” if they were eschewing the things that were typically used as barometers of quality within the genre.

I’ve already put my flag in the ground on the topics of lyricism and proficiency in hip-hop in this post from last year on the importance (or lack thereof) of lyrics. In retrospect, comparing these rappers to groups like Sigur Ros may have been a step too far, but I still stand by the overall sentiment of the post.

Now, I hate to sound nostalgic for something that’s only a year old, much less hoist up these artists who I ultimately think are just okay… but these mumble rap artists were significantly better than what we see coming out of the scene a year later. Thanks to the 2016 Freshman Class, hip-hop became an ongoing debate of “style versus substance,” and we’re only now seeing the implications of this shift a year after the emergence of mumble rap with the birth of a brand new scene. But before I get into that, let’s take a look at two specific artists from the mumble rap movement to help us make a direct comparison.

Two Sides of the Same Sound

Lil Uzi Vert is a Philadelphia-based rapper who first made waves in 2015 with his third mixtape Luv is Rage. In 2016 he rose to prominence thanks to his fourth mixtape Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World which birthed two singles, ended up going gold, and solidified him a place on the 2016 XXL freshman list. In 2017 he’s reached unprecedented heights thanks to a (bad) verse on Migos’ quadruple platinum “Bad and Boujee” which paved the way for his own (much better) track, the monumental "XO Tour Llif3.” Tour Lif3 was originally uploaded to Soundcloud as a throwaway track and has since become a breakout phenomenon going x3 Platinum in 6 months, proving both the popularity of Uzi and cementing the platform as a viable test for mainstream hits.

Moving onto another “Lil” rapper from the same scene: Lil Yachty is an Atlanta-based artist who originally broke through in 2015 with what everyone presumed was a one-off viral hit “One Night.” Within a year his next hit “Minnesota” was being played on Drake’s radio show and he caught fire. This platform brought Yachty a newfound audience which elevated his just-released Lil Boat mixtape and propelled him to the forefront of the hip-hop stratosphere.

I chose to highlight these two because they became symbols of the mumble rap genre within the space of weeks. And while they’re often lumped together, they oddly represent two opposing sides of the same sound. So why these two guys? Aside from their inclusion in the 2016 Freshman Class, they both blew up at the same time, dropped high-profile mixtapes within a month of each other, and use many of the same tropes within their music. I also believe one of the more silly reasons these two were lumped together was because of their hair.

It sounds stupid, but Lil Yachty’s bright red braids and Uzi’s ever-changing dreads became emblematic symbols of the mumble rap movement. Most of the 2016 class had a unique look, but these two stuck out like sore thumbs with their distinct and brightly-colored mops. What’s more, these two rappers specifically started challenging hip-hop norms by disregarding classics and even going as far to state that they are “not rappers” but instead preferring to be labeled as “rockstars.” For better or worse, they became symbols of the new school: two figures that stood in direct opposition to the traditions of the genre. It’s easy to see why they sparked debates, spurred controversy, and turned off old heads the world over in 2016.

There was a clear line being drawn in the sand over the 2016 Freshman. One side saw this crop of artists as energetic, hair-dyed teenagers with little artistic substance beyond the beats they were rapping over. Meanwhile, the other side saw this scene for the fun, carefree, and easily-digestible entertainment that it was intended as.

If it wasn’t apparent by now, I’m fans of these artists, and I resented the fact that these 18-year-olds were being cited as the “downfall of hip-hop” as if their very existence was an offense to the genre’s history. I’ll admit that it took me some time to come around to each artist, but Uzi and Yachty’s 2016 tapes quickly became some of my favorites that year. With upbeat, colorful, summery songs, these artists were just teenagers, but there is a time and place for the type of music they were making.

I was decidedly on the side of these artists. I didn’t see these guys as the "end of hip-hop" that so many classic rap fans were quick to decry them as. I’ve already linked this previous post on why a lack of substantive lyrics doesn’t equate to lack of substantive music, but The Needle Drop’s Anthony Fantano explains this subgenre’s appeal well in this video where he draws a comparison to this new sound and the punk mentality of the 70’s. These artists became unwitting figureheads for a movement that they didn’t necessarily even create, but their music doesn’t invalidate traditional hip-hop or threaten other artist’s artistic output.

At the end of the day, Yachty and Uzi are two musicians are working towards very different visions with Uzi representing more of a moody, rock-inspired crooning emo trapper and Yachty being more of an upbeat goofball “bubblegum trap” artist. They got judged unfairly, lumped into the same group, and became polarizing figures within the matter of a few months. But on a more positive note, they engaged and energized the younger generation, which led to hip-hop becoming the most popular genre in the US for the first time ever. Their techniques and approaches to music also paved the way for a new type of rapper who took their styles and carried them to their logical extremes. That brings us to 2017.

Mumbles Begat Soundcloud

Compared to this innovative wave of energy that we saw in hip-hop last year, 2017 has felt like a step backward in many ways. We’ve had fewer projects from bigger names, and less “movement” in the genre as a whole. I’m also willing to admit this perceived drop-off in quality could be chalked up to personal bias because, while I feel less enthused by the genre, hip-hop as a whole has still experienced a major influx of activity this year. The problem is its momentum that’s hyper-specified and that I feel absolutely no connection to.

I’ve never wanted to be the old guy who doesn’t “get it” yet, within the space of a year I feel like I’ve already crossed over into old man territory. A year after the rise of the “mumble rapper” we’re now witnessing the birth of a new class of artists dubbed the “Soundcloud Rapper.”

One major artist to blow up from this scene is XXXTentacion. I first became aware of his existence in early 2017 as he was gaining rapid popularity online while behind bars after being arrested for assault at 18 (you read that right). Between Lil Wayne’s infamous stay in prison to Max B’s recent memed-out sentence, rappers are no stranger to trouble with the law. XXX was let out on false charges (which I don’t buy) but I’m willing to (again) admit personal bias because I find the assault of a woman more heinous than simple gun charges. This controversy was a bad way to first hear about an artist and left me with a negative first impression of both the artist and the “scene.”

Around this same time, a Georgian rapper named Playboi Carti released his eponymous debut to surprisingly-high reviews. While not technically part of the same subgenre, Carti’s “Magnolia” blew up inexplicably, earning him a platinum and granting him access to high-profile collaborators the genre over. Carti’s music is similarly lacking in substance the same way that Uzi and Yachty are, so I can’t fault him for that. What I can fault him for is featuring on two and a half separate tracks this year in which his contribution is solely ad-lib-based. God knows I’m not against ad-libs, but it’s incredible to watch someone make a career being propped up by decent beats and more talented artists as they shout “what?” in between each of their bars. Oh and Carti was also taken into custody for assault in 2017 as well, only to be let off a month later.

Despite the public and controversial beatings, Both XXXTentacion and Playboi Carti have enjoyed success and made it onto the XXL Freshman 2017 list, ensuring them both a moderately-successful career. Comparing these two freshmen with the two I highlighted from the 2016 lineup provides a stark contrast between one group of mumbling trap artists and the second group of women-beating teenagers. Even setting aside the quality of their music, elevating and rewarding the abhorrent behavior of the latter two is undeniably a step backward for the genre. And as I’ve been editing this piece, TV’s Eric Andre has publicly spoken out against these artists citing a similar concern.

The Dregs

Now we move onto the two artists that inspired me to sit down to write this post in the first place: Lil Pump and SmokePurpp. These two Florida-born rappers are making music in the same style as XXXTentacion with distorted blown-out bassy instrumentals and loud aggressive chant-like vocals. Pump blew up several months ago on the back of the mindlessly-repetitive “D Rose.” The track, which finds Pump explaining why his expensive watches make him feel like Derrick Rose, was uploaded in late 2016 and has since garnered almost 30 million plays on Soundcloud. There’s honestly very little else to say about the song beyond that.

Critics and journalists took note of this subgenre’s meteoric rise in popularity and began writing Hunter S. Thompson-style gonzo journalism pieces about the scene including this one from Rolling Stone and this incredible write-up by The New York Times. I’d had these articles saved to my Pocket for later reading, but it wasn’t until I stumbled across a Noisey interview whose title was so great that I willingly dove into it.

The article in question “Reading This Interview with Lil Pump and Smokepurpp Will Make You Stupider” is a particularly glazed-over interview with the two Floridians in which the interviewer searches desperately for any semblance of a deeper purpose to these two artists. Their answers, relegated mostly to single-syllable words half-formed sentences, quickly revealed that there is no deeper level to Lil Pump and Smokepurpp. They’re not in search of anything, not inspired by anything, and their self-described “ih-norant” music is their artistic end-all be-all.

Now, look. I listen to a ton of stupid music, some of it just as “ignorant” and turnt up as this, but this new wave of music feels so baseless and devoid that I don’t see any silver lining to it. In fact, I write this primarily from a “worried mother” type perspective because these kids are fucking sixteen. Lil Pump (born August 17th, 2000) was admitted to the hospital following a lean scare just ten days before his birthday. XXXtentacion (born January 23rd, 1998) has (aside from the assault charges) put on a litany of violent concerts including fist fights, two-story jumps, and barricade collisions. I’m not the first to speak out against these artist’s carelessness, and I have a feeling I won’t be the last.

It’s music that trades out the bare minimum artistry that was there before for pure adrenaline and shock value. And again, maybe this isn’t “for me” and that’s why I don’t get it. If anything, these artists are simply a logical continuation of the mumble rap scene taking visual, musical, and artistic queues from the generation immediately before them. And Desiigner and Lil Uzi Vert have pulled equally-dangerous stunts at their shows… but it’s interesting to watch this progression take place so rapidly over the course of a calendar year.

And to circle away from the onstage antics and back to the music: I'm not saying Yachty's music is high art. It's still pretty dissonant, off-putting, and even bad on a technical level. But what Yachty traded those qualities out for is a unique sound and image based around himself. It may be discordant music, but it retains an undeniable sense of bright fun catchiness. Meanwhile, I feel like this new crop of artists retained that similar lack of technicality but traded out any sense of fun for pure adrenaline.

I don’t know where all this is headed. I do think it’s exciting that all this has happened within the space of a year, and it just goes to show how quickly the hip-hop genre is evolving and shifting. Maybe it’s just part of a bigger splintering and within a few years, we’ll have all these subgenres of hip-hop with dozens of artists occupying each well-defined niche with their own space carved out. I fully expect many of these guys to fall off and fade into obscurity soon (or at the very lease encounter more trouble with the law) but overall I think this energy bodes well for the genre. I just don’t want a teenager to die for it.

As long as young people continue to be inspired they’ll continue to innovate and push boundaries. I may not like the music, but I’m always in support of innovation. I sincerely hope I’m still on board for the next “wave” of explosive creativity in music, but I also know I will hit a point in the future where I just stop “getting it” and I accept that.

I don’t necessarily resent the scene, the music, or these artists. I think some of their extracurricular actions are deplorable and shouldn’t be celebrated, but that’s really about it. I see the appeal of the music, but I also know that it’s not for me. If anything, it’s exciting that real, young, independent musicians have the ability to build as much of a platform as more established artists, but sometimes that fan base is built on the back of shitty behavior that nobody should emulate.

It’s also interesting to watch the “gaze” of hip-hop move so quickly from one crop of artists to the next. It seems that nobody gets to spend much time on the throne, and now the artists that were exciting last year are practically legacy acts by the scene’s standards. It’s weird when the “primary focus” (or at least most explosive scene) of a genre is one that I fundamentally disagree with on nearly every level, but again, maybe I’m just turning into an old man.

I can’t think of any other way to end this besides words of hesitant encouragement. I want kids to keep innovating and scaring the adults (and 24-year-olds) by blazing their own trail. There’s something admirable about a sixteen-year-old throwing a song up on SoundCloud and becoming a certified star months later… but when it breeds violence and drug abuse I’m decidedly against it. It’s a fine line, and I respect everyone’s freedom/artistic choices/blah blah blah, I just wish everything was more positive.

So keep it up I guess. We’ll see where this scene goes. Who knows what the next year’s hot topic will be. For the time being, keep doing you. Just don’t do anything too stupid.