A while back someone on a mailing list asked for recommendations on recent music. I sent back a list which included the Strong Bad Sings and Other Type Hits CD. A response came back to the effect of: I like HSR as much as the next guy, but are you really going to listen to that more than once?

To which I had to reply: how can you not listen to it more than once?! Aside from the fact that it's really funny and good, little bits will get stuck in your head and you'll HAVE to listen to it again or you'll just have lines running through your brain all day, like "oh there's The Cheat in the place where the tropical breezes blow..."

The obvious comparison here is the first Cartoon Planet album (note to uncareful readers: no, not the first Phantom Planet album, the first Cartoon Planet album, i.e. Space Ghost). This, indeed, stands as the pinnacle of cartoon soundtracks, being quite simply one of the funniest things ever. It's the best comedy album of the 90's, and probably in my personal top 20; it's given more pure pleasure per person than anything besides your own genitals, as far as I can tell. "Don't Touch Me" is, quite simply, perfect; it's one of those things that is so good that I have a hard time talking about it.

So given that this is the gold standard, how does Strong Bad Sings (or SBS cause I'm lazy) compare? Well, at first, not so good. There's no grabber as immediate as "I Like Beans" or any of the other standouts of the Space Ghost CD, and by and large the metal pastiches, from fake bands Limozeen and Tarantula, are just annoying. (They get slightly less annoying over time, but only slightly, although I do appreciate the GnR reference that leads off "Nite Mamas.") There's really not a lot of immediately grabby, funny lines, which is mainly what you're listening for with these sorts of CDs; near the end, song-with-commentary "Sensitive to Bees" and more straightly narrative "Theme From Dangeresque 2" get in a few good ones ("The mighty oak has fallen / if movies have taught me anything, he'll get the girl"), but by and large it seems to be lacking in the kind of absolutely mind-blowing hilarious lines that are common coin on the main homestarrunner site. (About which I won't say much here since you're probably already familiar, but trust me on this, if you're not, it's well worth your time. Especially Teen Girl Squad.)

But what hooks you is, well, the hooks: the damn thing is one of the catchiest collections of songs I've ever heard, and holy crap, they get stuck in your head. Really, really stuck. And so, somewhat by force, you revisit it, and then you realize that these guys can really write a pop song. They write some of fucking poppiest, most addictive stuff you've ever heard, regardless of the content of the lyrics. (But not regardless of the lyrics themselves, which are hooky, too.) What the album shares with the website, aside from various characters and voices and references, is the presentation of seemingly tossed-off writing in a way that's clearly had a good bit of effort and thought put into it. In the case of the website, that turns out to be skits with grammar and pronunciation errors proudly left in animated in a very precise and pleasing style. In the case of the album, it's songs whose lyrics seem to be improvised on the spot over very good, very straightforward (in some cases) production. This stands in marked contrast to the Space Ghost CDs, which sport admittedly charming but clearly half-assed MIDI-ized backing tracks.

The songs are so good, in fact, that they achieve that magic alchemy: they're very specific parodies that are so good that they could pass for slightly silly (or, in some cases, severely truncated) entries in certain genres. "Let's Get Started On Doing All Those Awesome Things I Suggested," for instance, is a dead-on imitation of a slow-jam featuring an extended Strong Bad intro monologue that then flows into one maddeningly short, exhilarating recitation of half of the title phrase before the song abruptly cuts off. "Oh Yeah Yeah" sounds very convincingly like a high school girl-punk band that just learned to play their instruments, and is as exciting as a lot of instances of said genre. And "The Cheat is Not Dead," a nearly perfect track upon closer examination, is a dead-on approximation of white Casiocore gospel--yes, an entire new genre--that really, actually rocks, growing from the kind of tinny keyboard arrangement you might be used to from the site to a full-chorus rave-up. Now, admittedly I might be biased on this one due to a) my love of Strong Sad, who gets in a line, and b) the presence of the line "just the claps!" but regardless, it's an absolutely wonderful artifact. The way it takes a pretty much unexplained concept to a logical place in much the same way many pop songs too, the singer's seemingly honest amazement at finding a choir joining in, the way the organ and drums and whacka-whacka guitar all nails it at the end--all of this just does it in the same way, say, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" does. Honestly. And it's funny, too--as Miss Clap pointed out, what it does, as the album itself does constantly, is take all the little pop song touches that get taken for granted and point them out, to great effect.

Probably the most mind-blowing-upon-further-inspection track, though, is "Everybody To the Limit (Live)." The song itself had already appeared in full on the website, billed as a "#1 Summer Jam!" and, amazingly, kind of living up to that billing; for a bit of twee weirdness, it was amazingly enjoyable. But what the album version does is something that I really can't think of anyone else even thinking of doing: parodying, in a stunningly accurate way, live tracks. (I suspect it's a fairly specific reference to "Frampton Comes Alive," but I could be wrong.) What's so incredible about it is that it parodies elements of live tracks that you yourself wouldn't even have been aware of as cliched before you heard this, but there they are: the crowd-rousing vocoder opening, the keyboard part obscuring the melody and a bassline that mainly serves to elongate the groove, the call-out of the breakdown (integrated into the lyrics) into the breakdown, the audience call-out during the breakdown encouraging them to be loud, the audience sing-along on a rising and falling fifths version of one line from the chorus (the rising and falling fifths thing making it easier to sing along, since it's likely that you'll hit some note in that range), the reduction of the band part during the breakdown, the band comein with the audience cutting out and cheering, the call-and-response over the beat at the end, the lead singer leaving before the band is done. And what's especially amazing is that this is all done in service of a song that's never been played live and, even if it was, would never garner this size of an audience, but it's engineered in such a way that it's remarkably convincing. Some indie band should do this.

And, of course, once you're drawn in you start to notice the lyrics more, and they really do resonate, although more with their weirdness than their gaggery. There's a whole bunch of great stuff in college-folk pastiche "Circles" ("...something about the ages..."), a whole host of wonderfulness in the Strong Badia National Anthem (Miss Clap is particularly fond of "and the ones are always cold," although I also like "there's probably lots of chocolate"), and the sheer oddity of shuffle-dance Teen Girl Squad yeller "I Think I Have a Chance With This Guy." It's really quite impressive. And this isn't even getting into the amazing hidden track, "Secret Song," which I'm pretty sure is, besides a parody of hidden tracks, a reference to Tori Amos' Boys For Pele closer "Twinkle," although I might just be making that up; nevertheless, it's a great track.

So, in sum, if you like Musical Barbeque, you'll probably like this, and if you don't like Musical Barbeque, well, I'm not so sure I want you reading this blog, quite frankly. No, just kidding, come back! But do listen to "I Like Beans" again. And then listen to "The Cheat is Not Dead."
posted by Mike B. at 6:49 PM 0 comments

Also: Faulkner's religious overtones making Southern families "gothic"; Tolstoy's religious knowledge tying together multi-family sagas; Dickinson's religion making her closeted personal dramas mythical; Twain and Letters From the Fucking Earth, like Vonnegut in his worst mood ever; Vonnegut's humanism needfully tied with an acknowledgement of the community of God; Hawthorne and Melville and America as the New Jerusalem, the City on the Hill, making myth out of the frontier; Garcia Marquez's melding of transcendentalism with touches of native religion turning it into a kind of reversal of European "noble savage" imagery; the existentialists' whole fictional philosophy based around the absence of a key character in the religious narrative; Milton, of course...

A lot of American and Continental authors in there; not a lot of Brits, and not a lot of women. Having a hard time coming up with them, for some reasons; maybe because they're "littler" and...OK, I'm stumped. Also not a lot of modern authors. Can't even do it for ones I like, really. Jonathan Lethem? Robert Coover? A.M. Holmes? People talk about the humanism of David Foster Wallace, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of religion in there, aside from certain instances--the stress of blind faith in 12-step programs in Infinite Jest, the Biblical reference in "Burned Children," etc. Dare I make the argument that humanist post-structuralist fiction must explicitly rely on blind faith now that the essential groundlessness and danger of language and narrative has been exposed--that there's a kind of religious narrative in knowing that something makes no sense, and doing it anyway? Or am I just missing something? Maybe Holmes' Nabokov play in The End of Alice has enough of Nab's explicitly modernist half-faith to carry it on? Or are we entering a whole new narrative era, where the whole art-under-oppression philosophy sets up a--OK, I want to say dialectic, so I'm just going to--a dialectic that you respond to or don't depending on your stance and the whole grand scheme is carried through that way? Has the standardization and increased importance of pop culture allowed references to that to replace references to religion? Was religion just the pop culture of the last 2000 years?

Maybe more pointedly: if an acknowledgement of religion's importance has been one narrative technique that has persisted for most of our recorded artistic history, have there been parallel techniques that gain power depending on the particular historical circumstance that could wholly or in main part replace such acknowledgement? Shakespeare's not all that religious, but so much of what he does takes place in the context of the aristocracy that perhaps that's one parallel technique? Has politics been an alternative?

And speaking of politics, it's important to note that a great number of progressive causes in America were proposed in terms of Christian morals, of good Christian behavior. We can start with abolitionism and go on to the "cross of gold" speech and temperance and so on and so forth. It held a power, but was this power solely based in the fact that Judeo-Christian religious values were the only shared morality in the nation? Is there such a shared belief system today? Maybe the kind of civil religion of democracy and republicanism and human rights? (I think civil religion is awesome, by the way.)

You can't make your case for a progressive cause in reference to religious values today because if you say something like "I think we should feed the poor because it's the good Christian thing to do" or "I don't think we should execute prisoners because it's the good Christian thing to do" most people likely to support your cause will just hear "I hate gay people" or "I'm basically conservative," regardless of whether or not that's true. Those sudden intrusions of religious belief into public policy make leftists verrrrrry nervous, despite the fact that it's been a key component of our rhetoric for the last 250 years. (See previous post re: humanists and deists finding things to love in Christianity.) If someone could come along and successfully make pleas in these terms, I think it could be very powerful, because as I say, there's something very convincing about someone like Leonard Cohen or Faulkner who can say very smart things and tie them into the great religious traditions of the West.

posted by Mike B. at 3:54 PM 0 comments

Do you need to believe in God to be a good writer?

Well, I guess that's not exactly what I mean. You can be an atheist and still work it. But do you have to care about God to be a good writer? To believe that, in some way or other, religion matters, and that religion can have an effect on your life?

It's kind of embarrassing where this thought comes from, but fuck it, might as well start there anyway: the Simpsons. I was thinking about how weird it was for a show that was denounced by a Republican President to have one of its phrases co-opted in service of a Republican war, i.e. "cheese-eating surrender monkeys." Good for the right for realizing that it's easier to co-opt a cultural artifact than to criticize it, but Matt Groening hates you, and the Simpsons writers clearly do, too.

But of course, it's not all liberal propaganda--that's one of the things that makes it a sight better than Life in Hell most of the time. For instance, there's its complicated and frankly weird attitude toward religion. Flanders is a dick, mainly, although he's gone from a straight dick to more of a sympathetic foil to Homer's unthinking boorishness; in later seasons the writers honestly seem to be more appreciative of his faith, even if he's occasionally used as a vehicle for anti-xtian jokes. ("Now aren't you kids glad we didn't get those flu shots?" "Y-y-y-y-es." "Mommy?") But I'm thinking most specifically of an earlier instance: the episode where Bart sells his soul to Milhouse for $5. What ends up happening, of course, is that his life takes a turn for the worse: automatic doors won't open, his pets start to hate him, and he seems to change dramatically in terms of his personality. Even though it's a purely symbolic transaction, the suggestion is that this actually happened, and because it actually happened Bart becomes less than human. His then casual faith in God goes from not-caring to caring-deeply, because of empirical evidence (and this is where their secular roots shine through--if it'd been a Chick tract the empirical evidence would've been him going to purgatory or something). He cares because he needs to, and after caring for a while and doing some stuff he gets his soul back and everything's fine.

This was a weird episode because it took the concept of a soul so seriously. Bart really lost it, and it was really a problem, and he really tried hard to get it back. They sort of pull it back to half-sectarian Aquinasian theory at the end with Lisa's pantheistic notion of a soul being won through effort, like "having a lot of soul" or "paying your dues," but it's ultimately an episode that takes the traditional American view of religion very seriously. The Simpsons is a great show, and a fiercely humanist show, but even the humanists and the deists found a lot to love in Christianity, or at least found a way to adopt it to their purposes; the ones that didn't now look a little foolish and juvenile. Would the Simpsons be such a great show if they didn't take religion seriously in some way? Is this attitude one that informs all of their writing, and does that view, no matter how hidden, the view that this old thing matters, does that make all the rest of it matter?

What I'm trying to suggest is that the Judeo-Christian narrative is so firmly rooted in our expectation of narrative, such a huge part of the way we are raised to appreciate art, that without some sort of nod to it, no matter how subtle, the work can't really be taken seriously--or, more accurately, that the more seriously you take it, up to a certain point of diminishing returns, the more gravitas and perceived worth your work has. Many of Leonard Cohen's songs, for instance, take Christian imagery very seriously and do absolutely mind-blowing things without, despite any indication (or, I guess given "The Future," very little indication) that Cohen himself strictly speaking believes in these things. He doesn't believe in God, but he believes that God makes a good story, that the story of God is not so destructive that it needs to be avoided entirely, and that the story of God is as important and worthy of study as anything else, as anything in human nature or nature itself. That this unnatural thing is, in some ways, a real thing.

PJ Harvey, too: her religious songs are fantastic, despite drawing purely on received narrative and not personal belief. But on the other hand, her relationship songs are fantastic, and she's said that almost none of those are based in real experience. She just draws from this very old stock of story and makes new things out of it.

Think about those teenagey bands that casually toss around Christian imagery, often to criticize it: seems pretty stupid, because they don't take it very seriously. They take it, indeed, as something ridiculous or destructive.

Maybe this works because it's an effective way of making small things into big things without resorting to the usual big tropes of epic sci-fi or historical drama. A man sitting at his desk thinking is boring, but it's interesting if he's thinking about space aliens or about attacking the Russians or about saving the world--or about some religious experience. It ties that small, individual experience into something old and respected. Especially old--especially old. Those particular interlocking sets of narratives become a kind of crypt or library, a baseless historical reservoir of all sorts of experiences and stories and ideas. Very little else does that, not without some work. But it's not just the signs and signifiers and quotes and ideas, it's the methods, too, the way stories are resolved that gain credence, gain power. It's not just someone nailed to a cross, it's someone winning by dying, by sacrifice. It's not just someone parting a sea, it's someone triumphing because of oppression. It's the ways things make sense to be resolved when we can't explain how they resolve, or when they really don't resolve but our sense of narrative demands something anyway.

Why I'm thinking about this, I guess, is because I'm thinking about why I dislike all those little stories, why I have such doubts that they represent good writing. Stories about families and marriages, about relationships and divorces. All those little things seeming so inconsequential and so uninteresting. But at the same time, some work. Why? Why not? Why in some forums--songs, for instance--but not in others, like novels? Why care sometimes but not others? Is it a simple matter of narrative efficiency or is it indeed, as I say, something deeper? Does there need to be that old technique, that learned narrative sense, beneath it all for it to be effective? But isn't that old technique what makes it so boring? Isn't it, instead, the ability to make it seem big, to make it seem important, to make it seem like it matters to you?

Should I start taking religion a little more seriously? I don't know...

posted by Mike B. at 12:13 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 03, 2004

Now, I know that one of the main criticisms of pop is that you're going to be ashamed of it in 10 years--that you're going to look back and say, "Why the hell did I like that crap?" Or, at least, "Why the hell did I say I liked that crap in public?" Pop's temporality is assumed to be a source of embarassment and shame, the theory being that if you're not embarassed by it now, as all the indie kids are, then you will be later. (Unless, of course, the indie kids decide that a certain pop artifact was worth appreciating, in which case you look sort of ahead of the curve but sort of pathetic, like the aging metalheads who really sincerely like Slayer.)

But what seems overlooked is that the heat that pop's temporality can generate produces an often corresponding heat in response, and if this positive sincerity is embarassing in its short-sightedness, then so is the antipopism. Exhibit number one for this theory: this old text file on NKOTB. Now, isn't that kind of embarassing now?

Of course, there are those bands that you still can't say a bad word about, somehow, without people getting offended: the Pixies, Tupac, etc. I was going to say Nirvana, but then I found this...

(Totally unrelated: some good musician jokes.)

posted by Mike B. at 6:27 PM 0 comments

Great post from Joe on the Scissor Sisters:

In case I'm not making myself abundantly clear, we should all be exceedingly grateful that as of yesterday, Scissor Sisters have made it into the Top 10 of the UK Singles Chart. Top 10 motherfucker! It's like Britpop all over again. Except with better clothes. And better music. And no British people. Yes.

Just want to emphasize that if you're like me, you'll love the SS even more after you see 'em live. So go see 'em live. (Presumably there will be more US dates at some point.)

posted by Mike B. at 4:40 PM 0 comments

Dear the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance: if you want people to take you seriously, you might want to stop comparing fat jokes to racism. If we lived in a country where people were regularly lynched for being fat, you might have a case. But when they just get made fun of, you sort of look like idiots. You don't dislike fat suits for the same reason black people dislike whites in blackface. Blackface has the specific connotation of minstrelry, which was a key componant in the post-Civil War campaign to keep blacks repressed. Fat suits have the specific connotation of "Shallow Hal," which while not the best movie, is not really the same thing.

posted by Mike B. at 3:51 PM 0 comments

Holy Jesuscrap, the new Janet Jackson song makes me want to eat grapes and stomp all over someone's tombstone, it's that good. I guess this just tags me as a guitar partisan, but damnit, I don't care. I like it that there's muted string hits being used basically as a closed hi-hat, with straight eigths/sixteenths instead of the more funky syncopations you'd expect from such a sound. I love that opening riff, I wish I'd written it, and I love the sound when the drums and bass kick in--that great big-beat bass note that glisses down after two beats, and that drum sound that just sounds, I don't know, almost twee. The guitar tone is great--really thin and rough. The opening reminds me a good bit of the opening of Mandy Moore's "One Way or Another" cover, actually.

Speaking of JJ--and this is the only thing I'll say about that Super Bowl thing--the funny thing about CBS getting all huffy about it is that they're the same network that refused to run the Bush in 30 Seconds ad. I'm just saying.

posted by Mike B. at 3:10 PM 0 comments

Decent analysis, horrible conclusion.

NAFTA has thousands of impacts, even if you just look specifically at labor conditions at the US/Mexican border. One of them is the horrific wave of murders of Mexican women in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua since NAFTA's onset. Another is a labor market that totally depends on paying workers in devalued currencies -- the exportation of immiseration that is America's great historical invention in "world systems." One effect of that is that the urge to find ways to make a buck rather than a peso for a work-unit skyrockets. This effectively guarantees an influx of unskilled and undocumented workers, who have no legal recourse once they cross the river. Combine this with a systemic sexism (on both sides of the border) which just plain cares less what happens to women, and it's boom times for the sex trade. This is just one example of ways that the *legal* organization of our country provides for such outrages. We should all worry about the villains we folks mostly never meet. But if we supported Bill Clinton, engineer of GATT/NAFTA, we shouldn't feel too proud of, say, thinking the current president is a dick. So (a) being on the side of the law has no moral authority here, and (b) changing lawmakers within current structures won't make a difference. Believing in the law, or the lawmakers offered us as choices, is a defensive delusion here; change won't happen at that level; we're complicit, among other ways, in every moment that we imagine sex slavery and rape culture can be dissolved without massive, deep shifts in social organization. It's gonna take a riot, and then another, and then...

Boy oh boy.

First, let's follow this logic. A Democratic administration institutes a policy that results in what leftists would consider negative consequences.[1] Despite the fact that these consequences are undeniably unintended (say what you will of Bill Clinton, it's unlikely he sat in the Oval Office rubbing his fingers together and gloating about how NAFTA would encourage sex slavery), and that unintended consequences, while eminently condemnable, are probably more a result of poor policy design than malevolent intentions, this proves that Democrats don't care about the poor, and since obviously the Republicans don't either, this means the government is of no help and the only alternative is rioting.

Now, there's a few problems with this. One is that rioting has almost never led to more freedom; even 99% of the successful revolutions throughout history have relied on organization and hierarchical structure, to say nothing of riots. You may have problems with the particular policies of our organized government, but it's a bit odd to extend that to a problem with the idea of organized government itself, although if you honestly think that entrenched attitudes toward women are better changed by violent revolt than by a tragically slow process of acculturation, well, I guess it starts to make a bit more sense.

There's also the issue of confusing de jure with de facto. No question that NAFTA has effectively, i.e. de facto, made it easier for illegal aliens to enter the country and for employers to pay those undocumented workers without giving them any benefits. And, true, no question that this phenomenon benefits owners financially and they have an incentive to discourage enforcement of immigration policies. But the fact remains that, de jure, these workers are still illegal, and so, in fact, if you support the law, you're still right so long as you simultaneously acknowledge that enforcement has been extremely problematic, and I'm unsure that anyone in the debate hasn't been doing that; indeed, that's sort of the problem that we're dealing with. This is to say nothing of the idea that the US-Mexico border is orders of magnitude more porous than, say, the Russian border, or the Bosnian border, or any number of other borders in areas of the world where countries are a lot more tightly packed-in than they are here.

There are a whole host of problems with America's immigration policies right now, and they urgently need to be addressed. But if I'm implicated in sex slavery--and I'm not denying that in some ways I am--it's unclear why taking to the streets, or ceasing to buy pornography and treating women better, is going to do more to alleviate the problem than me running for public office and working to address the problem along with the non-systemic root causes, or learning everything I can about human trafficking and immigration issues and devising a sensible policy to address those issues. If it's a problem of enforcement, and all signs seem to point to this being the case, then why would you abandon the policy in favor of, well, nothing at all, instead of trying to improve the enforcement?

The problem I have with the "I've said it before: democracy doesn't work!" line of just not trusting the government to do anything ever is that it mainly seems to alleviate us, the right-thinking and right-acting left, of actually doing anything, since we're so disempowered as citizens that it's not even worth the effort to, you know, organize and vote and run for office and like that. If the only option is rioting, and, let's be honest, our pussy asses ain't rioting anytime soon, then what do we do? Buy organic food and hope everything gets better? Doesn't sound like responsible citizenship to me.

No denying that purely statist solutions are a bad idea in general. But purely non-statist ones are, too. In my view, and in the view of not a few other smart people, civic democratic government is one of the most amazing inventions of the human race, and it would be a shame not to use it to improve conditions that we see as negative. At the very least, it would seem like the state can do what it's done for a while now and override the dumb rights-ignoring attitudes of sexists and homophobes and racists and so forth and insure that these people are actually treated according to standards of human rights. Does that seem like too much to ask?

[1] Not that righties wouldn't, but they're not the issue here. I think it's fair to say that conservative ideology considers undocumented workers flying under the radar of government minimum-wage and worker-protection regulations less of a bad thing than liberal ideology would, though.

posted by Mike B. at 12:59 PM 0 comments