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fayewonglibrary · 3 years

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Wong’s Way (2011)

An anomaly in the cookie-cutter world of Cantopop, FAYE WONG has paradoxically found success by playing against the rules. Prestige Hong Kong follows her down the road less travelled

FIVE YEARS MAY not seem like that long, but it can be a lifetime in an entertainment industry that feeds off the right-here and the right-now. So it came as a surprise when, half a decade ago, Faye Wong decided to step back from the limelight and resume as much of a normal life as might ever be possible for a woman whose music has sold in the millions and who has combined that side of her existence with an acclaimed acting career.

From an existence playing before tens of thousands, what the Beijing-born Wong longed for at that point in time was a life tucked away in the peace and tranquillity of home – and after almost 20 years in the spotlight, and with her every move followed by a fan base that can be tallied in the millions, who could really blame her?

But as an artist who in an age of corporate conformity flatly refuses to play to any predetermined stereotype, Wong has always preferred to play by her own rules. It may come as a surprise, then, to find out that Faye Wong was not always “Faye” – diehard fans will remember a period in which the artist was known as Shirley Wong Ching-man, an affectation suggested by her record company early in her career, because of the stigma associated with the hip factor (or lack thereof) of mainland Chinese artists and names.

Even Wong’s early hits weren’t what you would call “original” – her first few albums were filled with formulaic Cantopop: collections of saccharine, predictable tunes that failed to properly utilise her delicate, lilting soprano. When she broke out of that shell in 1992, after a short travel hiatus, she finally found success, initially with a cover of a Japanese chart-topper in Cantonese, “Fragile Woman.”

Despite her disinclination to be impacted by her local contemporaries, Wong was not without her influences. She covered songs by The Cranberries, took quirky style cues from Björk and collaborated with the Cocteau Twins. The further she strayed from Cantopop, the more fame she found, penning her own songs and admittedly self-indulgent lyrics. She rapped on “No Exit,” yodelled through “Di-Dar” and even won the hearts of nerds by wailing the English-language title track to the hit video-game Final Fantasy VIII, “Eyes On Me.”

Even when her albums weren’t critical or commercial successes, her fame continued to grow, exponentially and uncontrollably. Her handful of acting roles, including in Chungking Express and 2046, showcased a curious, simultaneous aloofness and magnetism, an infectious, ravishing oddness.

In 2005, two months before she married actor Li Yapeng, she announced that she would take a break from show business. And so for five years there have been sightings, the occasional public appearance and the work for her own charity, but otherwise it’s pretty much been silence from Wong, as her fans – and the world at large – waited.

With that in mind, we should not have been surprised at the reaction to the news that Wong would finally be reemerging, to stage comeback concerts that started in Beijing last October, then took in Shanghai and Taipei before coming to Hong Kong, the place where Wong’s career was launched, for a series of shows in March. Tickets – for all nights, at all venues – sold out in a matter of days and the critical response has been overwhelming.

The headlines said it all: “The Diva is Back.”

What the Wong faithful have found is that their idol has lost none of the passion for the music that forms, as she puts it herself, part of her fate. They’ve been treated to nights filled with the songs that have formed the soundtrack for the lives of a generation here in Hong Kong – and beyond.

When Prestige Hong Kong found the interview-shy 40-year-old, she was in between shows and letting that fate take its course. What Wong wants the world to know is that throughout her storied career there has, she says, never been any real plan. She’s simply a woman who lets the cards fall as they may.

Can you talk a little about your return to the stage and playing live? What brought about the decision to play your recent concerts? I consider this a natural move for me. I’ve been doing several commercials as well as releasing some new singles over the past few years. So this was a natural progression back to live performances. It’s all part of my career.

How did you go about deciding what form the concerts would take and the songs you played? There’s no special form or arrangement that’s deliberately conceived for my concert. I believe my singing is the main source of interaction between the audience and me. Every show is unique and my mood is different, depending on the atmosphere. It’s not my practice to talk much with people or have any planned speech in my concert, because I don’t want the conversation to ruin the whole integrity and mood of the arrangement of the concert. I hope my audiences can indulge themselves with my music, while also digesting the message my show is delivering.

After the recent concerts in Shanghai and Beijing, what’s your feeling about coming back on stage? It feels so good to see all my fans again.

Do you have any plans to work on a new album? If so, will you be writing songs yourself? There’s no plan to work on a whole new album. But there is a possibility to release singles, and maybe I’ll write some songs myself.

How different to you is the experience of playing live now as compared to when your career began? What have you learned and how much has the experience for you changed over the years? I’ve been working with different sets of crews, composers, producers etc since the beginning of my career. Each of these collaborations has opened up a whole new experience and been an amazing inspiration for me. Call it a fireworks feeling.

What was it that initially drew you to the music business? What was it that you found most exciting? I believe singing is my destiny, and it’s fate that this became my career. I find it gratifying that I’m able to touch people’s lives with my songs. It’s a form of good karma.

Have your musical tastes changed or evolved as you matured as a person and as an actress? I admire different types of music and things depending on the different stages of my life.

Did becoming a mother change how you approached both your singing and your career? There was no change. I still sing with the same commitment and feeling, and it’s the same with my career.

And how much, do you think, did this change you as a person? The process of raising a child is part of my evolution as a human being. If you’re not a parent or don’t fully involve yourself as a parent, you’ll never realise this traditional, fulfilling role of parenthood. As a parent, it’s natural to want to show your best side and provide the best example to your child. However, sometimes it’s hard to break habits that may surface from time to time. It’s a painful cycle, because even though you realise your own faults, to change yourself completely requires a lot of courage and determination.

We’re curious about a typical day for Faye Wong. What’s your routine when you’re not performing? What time do you go to bed, what’s your favourite meal and what activities do you share with your kids? Basically, I go to bed and wake up the same time as my kids do. I got used to enjoying the regular pattern of a healthy lifestyle, but that won’t happen coming back to work.

Frankly, there’s so much to do when you take charge of a whole household. My life in the past few years was completely occupied by family and there was no time for me ever to feel bored. Sometimes I feel that I was even busier than when I was working as a singer.

Do you think your children share the same character as you? When I look at my kids, it’s like looking into a mirror and seeing the deepest side of myself.

What are the things that make you most happy now, compared with when you were younger? What do you now cherish most? I cherish everyone and everything. I’m fortunate to appreciate what I have and the people I know.

How do you see your image now? Are you an artist who is careful to control her image, or is it more a case of come what may? The most effortless style suits me best. I aim to be the most natural, honest in my approach. I want it to be pure, not something that seems too contrived or created just to fit the latest trend.

What are you most passionate about? To find the real meaning of life, and share it with lots of people.

What about acting? Is this something you’re keen to pick up again as well? If so, what kinds of films and roles might interest you? Right now, I have no plans on filming.

What are the challenges you see ahead in the next few years? What can your audience expect? My life has no planning, and I’m not a person who conceives everything in advance. It always depends on what’s being offered and what I feel like doing at that moment. There’s no pressure on myself – I leave everything to chance and fate.

The Smile Angel Foundation was founded in Beijing in 2006 by you and your husband, Li Yapeng, after your own child was afflicted with a cleft lip. It’s helped a lot of other children suffering from cleft lips and palates. Has the foundation changed your life or your character in any way? My contribution to Smile Angel Foundation is not as much as my husband’s involvement. He’s very busy working on plans to support the foundation. For me, basically, I’ll attend annual charity events and activities to lend my support.

On this project, we started everything from scratch and are very gratified to see how much it has accomplished. My husband is definitely the driving force behind the foundation, and I really admire his passion, courage and capability.

At your current stage, do you think you have evolved in your perspective of things compared with when you were younger? Can you share your road of growth a little bit? I was a bit stubborn, objective and capricious when I was younger. I’m now more willing to be open-minded and flexible, and always try to remind myself about this. It’s quite difficult to stop old habits surfacing from time to time. But I’m trying hard to accomplish it.

Do you have any advice on how to maintain a woman’s beauty and charm after the age of 30? First of all, you have to accept your age. I believe everyone has their own unique way to create their own charm and maintain their beauty, which is sometimes a very personal approach. One should find one’s own best way; there really is no standard formula for everyone to maintain their beauty. I believe the most natural side of a person is the most beautiful.

You’re acclaimed as a pioneer of alternative music. Does that mean you won’t compromise with the commercial market? I never define my music as “mainstream” or “edgy” or “alternative.” I just do what I like.

Photography / Shameless Eye Production AG Styling / Titi Kwan Hair / Alain Pichon Make-up / Zing Wardrobe / Céline Spring 2011 collection

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SOURCE: PRESTIGE HONG KONG

#2011

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shirtlesssammy · 4 years

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3x10: Dream a Little Dream of Me

Then:

The show keeps reminding us that Dean’s going to Hell, so enjoy his pretty face while you can

Now:

Bobby stalks his house at night. He’s suddenly attacked ---and we flash to him in a motel room, unconscious. A maid wanders in and finds him. He’s inside his mind fighting whatever haunts him.

Dean finds Sam getting day-drunk at a bar. Sam laments the fact that he tried saving Dean. Dean settles in beside his brother and orders a “whisky, double, neat.”

Sam is beside himself thinking about where Dean’s going, and what he’s going to become. “How can you care so little about yourself?” Sam wonders. (WE ALL WONDER.) Dean’s saved by a phone call and the brothers rush to the hospital to find Bobby comatose. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with him.

(Ooh, I forgot that Cathryn Humphris wrote this episode. So good.)

The brothers look around Bobby’s motel room. Sam finds his murder board in the back of the closet. They find an obit of a doctor that went to sleep and never woke up. Bobby must have been looking into the doctor’s death.

Dean heads to the doctor’s office and interviews his lab assistant. Apparently the doctor was an expert in dream and sleep disorders. The lab assistant doesn’t really want to talk. She already talked to the other detective, the “very nice, older man with a beard.”

Dean threatens the woman with a trip down to the station. The assistant swears she didn’t know anything about his side experiments. Dean bluffs his way into getting the doctor’s research. Good job, Dean!

He next heads to one of Doctor Greg’s test subjects. Dude offers Dean a beer, and Dean accepts. Hmm, I’m questioning your professionalism as much as the dude is Dean. Anyway, turns out the guy can’t dream. The study was the first time he had a dream since he was a kid. The guy didn’t continue with the study.

At the hospital, Dean and Sam meet up. Sam brings research on the African Dream Root that was part of the dream study. This stuff has been used for dreamwalking (but not like Jack and Kaia dreamwalking…). It lets someone wander in someone else’s dreams. With enough of the root and practice, you can start to control things, changing dreams. “Killing people in their sleep,“ Dean suggests. YEP.

The boys wonder why Bobby is still alive.

We get a glimpse into Bobby’s dream. He’s barely holding on. BOBBY.

The brothers theorize who the killer is --probably one of the test subjects. Sam laments the fact that they can’t talk to Bobby about the case. Dean suggests taking the dream root. They realize that in order to do that they need Bela.

Later, Bela arrives at the motel. Sam’s there alone. Bela almost instantly turns on the sexy time, and Sam is VERY responsive.

Alas, it was just a dream and Dean wakes Sam and tells him he was making some “serious happy noises.” OH SAM.

Dean wants to know who Sam was dreaming about but Sam wont tell. Let’s take a moment and add that Dean’s guesses are: One (1) Angelina Jolie. Two (2) Brad Pitt. DUDE, quit projecting so hard.

Anyway, Bela arrives, much to the discomfort of Sam (and his pants).

She’s brought the African dream root for Bobby. Dean puts the root with the Colt in Bobby’s safe and kicks Bela out of the room. Sam awkwardly bids her adieu.

The brothers concoct their dream potion to save Bobby. It includes some of Bobby’s hair.

They drink the concoction and feel no change. Sam then notices that it’s raining. It’s actually raining upside down --and they’re at Bobby’s house. It’s cleaned up. They start walking around calling for Bobby.

Sam tells Dean he’s heading outside to look. He walks outside and it’s sunny and the birds are chirping. And when he tries to go back inside, the door won’t open. Dean can’t hear him from the inside either.

Dean continues to wander the house. He wanders to the back closet and finds Bobby.

Dean tells him they’re using dream root to share his dream, but Bobby’s locked firmly in Dream Mode. He’s more focused on the flickering lights in his house. “She’s coming,” he pants. And his wife walks in, bloody and terrible. Oh Bobby :( She asks him why he stabbed her to death. He pleads for her to understand that he didn’t know about monsters back then. OOF. Hard stuff.

Meanwhile, Sam’s walking through a laundry detergent commercial.

The doctor’s former test subject suddenly shows up, whacks Sam with a baseball bat, and then declares himself “a god” in the shared dream. Well, that ALWAYS ends well on this show!

Dean pleads with Bobby to let go of the nightmare Karen who’s pounding and wailing on the other side of the door. “I’m not gonna let you die,” Dean promises, because Bobby’s “like a father” to him. BRB WEEPING. Bobby uses the power of FILIAL LOVE to control the dream, and the pounding stops.

Sam, Dean, and Bobby snap awake at the same time (preventing Sam “Head Trauma” Winchester from getting another blow with a bat).

Later, Dean asks Bobby about Karen. THIN ICE TERRITORY! “Everybody got into hunting somehow,” Bobby explains. Sam breaks into the soulful moment with an update on the dream dude. Jeremy Frost is a genius whose dad whacked him in the head with a bat as a child. Jeremy never dreamed after that - not until he started using dream root. Now he can trample into people’s dreams with a bit of their body - like hair, or in Bobby’s case, saliva. Bobby sipped some beer when he talked to Jeremy. Dean looks abashed. He….MIGHT have drunk a beer at Jeremy’s as well. Now that both Dean and Bobby are targets, the stakes are raised. It’s time for operation STAY AWAKE.

Two Days Later

Dean is EXTREMELY GRUMPY. It’s been two days, they haven’t found Jeremy, and he is missing his sleep desperately. #RELATABLE Bela and Bobby continue to work the case from the hotel with no luck. At the end of his tether, Dean pulls the car over and settles in for a snooze in the danger zone. He’s going to confront Jeremy on his own turf. Sam swipes one of Dean’s hairs and prepares to join Dean’s dream root nap.

They wake up in the car, still in the woods at the side of the road. Suddenly, Dean’s movie reel mind spins up a gentle song and soft autumn colors and THERE sits Lisa in a clearing. She’s wind-rumpled and gorgeous, dressed in soft yellow and waiting for Dean at a romantic picnic in the park.

For My Heart Aches for Dean Science:

Excuse me while I cry in Dean’s face for thirty minutes. Sam did not expect his brother to be so damn soft. “I’ve never had this dream before,” Dean protests.

Lisa blinks out and Jeremy peeks around a tree. It’s chase time! The dream transitions to the hotel hallway, now papered in a forest print. At the end of the hallway is a door that leads to a dimly lit room. Inside the gloomy room, Dean sits at a desk.

Other!Dean greets himself (very polite) and tells himself that it’s time to talk. “I’m my own worst nightmare,” Dean smirks. He GETS the symbolism, and it’s BORING. Except that Other!Dean immediately peels away Dean’s bravado. He tells him that Dean is dead inside and worthless (and we bundle this man up into blankets and plop him into therapy!)

Dean can’t make the apparition disappear, and Other!Dean quickly takes control. The door slams, trapping them inside the hotel room.

Sam wakes up back in the Impala and tries to wake up Dean, but Dean’s turned into Jeremy. Jeremy explains that he killed the doctor so he can keep using dream root and DREAM. He binds Sam to the ground.

Other!Dean continues to say every terrible thing Dean thinks about himself and it is HARD. TO. LISTEN. TO. THIS. SHIT. Everything about Dean is patterned after his father, and geared towards protecting Sam. There’s nothing TO Dean, Other!Dean argues, other than being “Daddy’s blunt little instrument.”

Dean snaps at last. “My father was an obsessed bastard!” he shouts. And the fight begins. “I didn’t deserve what he put on me, and I don’t deserve to go to Hell!” DEAN!!!! BRB weeping some more! Dean shoots his other self, but what should be a moment of psychological triumph quickly goes south. Other!Dean wakes with black eyes and Demon!Dean gleefully tells him that there’s no escaping his fate. He’ll die, go to Hell, and become a demon.

Sam’s in dire straits. He’s still bound to the ground, with Jeremy hovering above him with a baseball bat. In a moment reminiscent of Princess Bride, Sam metaphorically switches the sword to his right hand and reminds Jeremy that he ALSO took dream root and has control of the dream. Jeremy’s dad barges out of the forest, a screaming terror of a parent, and Jeremy’s eyes go wide. Sam whacks Jeremy with the bat while he’s distracted, and both Sam and Dean’s dreams dissolve. They’re back in the waking world, in the Impala. Jeremy’s threat has been neutralized.

Later, Sam and Bobby debrief in the hotel hallway. Bobby’s glad Sam saved them, but wonders if Sam’s psychic abilities came into play. Ummmm definitely not? Probably definitely not? Almost certainly definitely possibly.

Dean’s having trouble tracking down Bela. Bobby wonders why she was helping them in the first place. “Flagstaff,” Dean explains. This doesn’t make sense to Bobby - he just cut her a good deal on a sale there, that’s all. It dawns on the Winchesters that they may have been played. They head to the hotel safe to discover the Colt missing.

At the Impala, Dean asks Sam what he saw in the shared dream. UM NOTHING. Dean also says he didn’t see a damn thing! He was just focused on trying to find Sam. Bbys plz. Dean clears his throat awkwardly and confesses (in a tone one might use to confess to wearing ladies’ undergarments) that he doesn’t want to die. Sam promises to find a way to save him. Dean flashes back to his dream one more time, just so it’s seeped into our hearts. We see Demon!Dean taunting Dean about his fate. Demon!Dean snaps his fingers, a cruel grin on his face, and the episode cuts to black.

Mister Quoteman, Send Us a Quote:

No one can save you, because you don't wanna be saved. How can you care so little about yourself?

Thanks for the news flash, Edison!

Dean. I love you

What are the things that you dream? I mean, your car? That's Dad's. Your favorite leather jacket? Dad's. Your music? Dad's. Do you even have an original thought?

You can’t escape me, Dean. You’re gonna die. And this? This is what you’re gonna become!

Want to read more? Check out our Recap Archive!

#spn recap #spn rewatch #spn 3x10 #dream a little dream of me #dean winchester #Dean Winchester Sam Winchester #bobby singer #Bela Talbot #Lisa Braeden #Supernatural season 2 #supernatural season 3

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curious-minx · 4 years

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October 2010s Music Deep Dive!

A mock up poster for the only possible music festival line-up I would be willing to risk my life attending. Tony Allen’s passing has caused the entire Octoberfest to be cancelled indefinitely, but all proceeds from ticks will be given back to the community.

Hope all of you special nobodies and overblown somebodies reading this right now are having a smashing start your first o November. All last month I had taken it upon myself to listen to as many albums and fragments of albums released sometime during the month of October spanning the entire 10’s decade, 2010 through 2019. This is all probably a result of drinking too much dead water, Quarantine brain, undiagnosed Autism, magical thinking and the death of boredom. I have created a Spotify playlist sporting 25 hours and 4 minutes worth of music with an arbitrary amount of albums getting multiple songs, but largely one song/album. This project did create a sense of madness because of the volume of music that gets cranked out. How can we expect anyone to properly criticize music when it is nearly impossible to keep up with it all? I largely culled these albums from Allmusic’s Editorial Choice section, but I did have to use Rateyourmusic to fill out the hip-hop and R&B gaps. In gathering up all of this music I am attempting to see if spooky music was relegated to the October season and any other possible trends. Even though October has been laid to rest her swelling calendar breast still contains a treasure trove of music worth discussing. Grab your broom, sharpen your heels and get the cobwebs out of your ears because we’re going on a Deep Dive!

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The 2010s Old Souls and Musical Auteurs

I consider any musician or band that endures more than a decade worthy of this veteran label. Music biz lifers seem found solace in the October release schedule. A trend that has carried onto the new decade with October 2020 offering revitalized releases by Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen reunited with the E Street Band. All three main members of Sonic Youth, Moore, Gordon and Renaldo are still harnessing that spooky Bad Moon Rising energy and carrying it over into their solo releases.

KIM GORDON’s NO RECORD HOME

The first truly proper solo album by Kim Gordon following up her pretty good noise rock releases under the Body/Head moniker with Bill Nace. No Record Home towers over Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo’s mostly okay solo releases because of how truly experimental and refreshingly modern sounding No Record Home is. This album sounds like it could easily have come out from a young Pacific Northwest Trip-Angle (RIP) label upstart. Instead, Gordon is defiantly aging gracefully and remains an all around important feminist voice in experimental rock music. No Record Home did not pop up on a lot of “Best of the Year” lists in 2019, nor did Gordon embark on any kind of touring for the release. I am hoping that more people will eventually discover this great album and realize that Gordon was truly the best, most truly experimental aspect of Sonic Youth. Her vocals on this album are the best she’s ever sounded because she built these songs and sounds with the intergral collaborator, producer Justin Raisen. A glimpse at Raisen’s Wikipedia page is a who’s who of great artists of the past decade: Yves Tumor, Charli XCX, and Sky Ferreira. The collaboration occurred at an AirBnB shared between Gordon and Raisen and birthed the first single of the project “Air BnB.” A song that completely sets the tone of the album and features one of those amazing music videos in the same line us Young Thug’s “Wyclef Jean. “

Björk - Biophilia

Can you name the last album the rolled out with its own app? Nine years have come and gone and I certainly can’t think of another album with such wholesome ambitions. Björk was getting passionate about ecological concerns in her native Icelandic home with Sigur Ros and using her sphere of influence to try to good. 2014 the app has found a permanent home in the MOMA, but outside of this curio status the album itself is still a worthwhile addition to the Björk canon. Biophilia finds Björk in musical scientist mode using sounds captured from a Tesla coil and making a whole musical universe onto herself. The rest of the 2010s found Björk going for bigger and more ambitious projects that continue to frustrate those who wish she would go back to her poppier roots. She remains one of those most consistent solo artists around and someone no one will be able to predict what she does next. The only thing is certain is that it will be visionary and will probably include a wildly ambitious rollout and a new piece of physical art like Biophilia’s $800 tuning forks.

NENEH CHERRY - BROKEN POLITICS

Featuring production duties for the second time from Four Tet (who also pops up in the October playlist with his 2013 album Beautiful Rewind). Broken Politics in Cherry’s words, “is about feeling broken, disappointed, and sad, but having perseverance. It’s a fight against the extinction of free thought and spirit.” The music video for single “Natural Skin Deep” was filmed in Beirut, a backdrop made even more painful given 2020’s Explosion. Cherry is an artist with deep spiritual and blood connections with artists central to jazz’s history. Broken Politics also features songs built around Ornette Coleman samples. This is all to say that Neneh Cherry is always going to be someone tapping into a creative cosmic vein that spans generations, and with that comes a hard wisdom. Two years later we’re still dealing with the same god damn guts and guns of history.

OTHER NOTABLES:

(Cat Power - The Wanderer; John Cale - Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood; Tony Allen - Film of Life ; Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Psychedelic Pill ;Bryan Ferry - Olympia; Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Ghosteen ;Yoko Ono - Warzone; Vashti Bunyan - Heartleap; Elvis Costello & The Imposters - Look Now; The Chills - Silver Bullets; Weezer - Everything Will Be Alright In The End;Laurie Anderson - Heart of A Dog;Janet Jackson - Unbrekable;The Mercury Rev - Light In You; Rocketship - Thanks To You; Van Dyke Parks & Gaby Moreno - Spangled; Donald Fagen - Sunken Condos; Prefab Sprout - Crimson Red; Pere Ubu - 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo; Negativland - True False )

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TRILOGY OF BLACKSTARS

Three last albums released by three titans of 20th century songwriting. Two of them follow the trajectory of an older artist getting rejuvenated by a younger backing band. Lulu is beyond a meme at this point and is considered one of the most confounding flops since Metallic Music. Like Metallic Music, Lulu will get a reappraisal and find its audience. Mr. Blackstar himself Bowie considered Lulu one of his favorite releases. “Junior Dad” alone makes this album a worthy addition in Lou Reed’s discography. Scott Walker invited some similarly hairy and intense younger rock studs into his private castle and pulls off a far more natural combination. Soused fits like a velvet glove on a elegant corpse hand swirling thick slabs of guitar and demonic percussion. Scott Walker effortlessly orchestrates between elegance and moribundity whereas Lulu wallows and thrashes against the ugly riffage.

No riffs or oozing wall of sound are anywhere to be found on the sparse and pointedly elegiac You Want it Darker. Leonard Cohen never went full on sleazy I’m Your Man ever again but he didn’t become adult contemporary either. You Want It Darker finds Leonard and his son Adam Cohen. When Leonard passed away he was the only one to get a full David Bowie like museum tribute, Lou Reed only got a corner of a library. Cohen is far and away the most accessible mystical Jewish Buddhist monk with a penchant for fedoras and having a masked man with a leather belt beat him in the recording booth [citation needed]. You Want It Darker is the only one of these mortality laden kiss offs to win a Grammy. I do wonder if Cohen would have ever allowed a more adventurous production to touch his staid and timeless old fashioned sound. Tom Scharpling divides Leonard Cohen into his Pre-Fedora and Post-Fedora days. If you are being literal about that demarcation that still gives you a pretty vast body of music I just want sad bloated blurry black and white Leonard Cohen with a banana or the smiling cad on Songs of Love and Hate. Even the floppy fedora era has worthwhile albums and he sounds like if Serge Gainsbourgh was a muppet Gargoyle, he’s reliable. I will always beat myself for not buying that official Leonard Cohen raincoat at the Jewish Museum Leonard Cohen exhibit, but I hope someone has and they are finding comfort with Cohen’s music. A lot of his latter day period is comforting in a sardonic sexy mind bending nursing home sort of way.

I am glad that these men were ultimately spared from having to deal with Covid times and even someone as tasteless as Brian Wilson’s Ghost can acknowledge that it’s more important than ever to keep your elderly loved ones locked away in a well ventilated pod.

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(INSERT ARTIST HERE) SEASON

For a few sticky sweet select few artists the month of October proved to be a suitable release launch pad for more than one album. The Mountain Goats and clipping. have just joined the October two-timer club this year. The reigning queen of October releases is Taylor Swift and Adrianne Lenker. In chronological order swift released Speak Now, Red and 1989 probably Swift’s biggest run in terms of critical and commercial success. None of these albums have a particularly big place in my heart, in fact speaking on behalf of Brian Wilson’s Ghost Ltd. I’m not the biggest fan of America’s Sweetheart, Sweet Tea Poet Laureate. All three of these albums all came out in the latter part of October and based on the Target brand synergy roll-out felt as inevitable as pumpkin spice. Haunted. Sad Beautiful Tragic. Out of the Woods. These are either song titles taken from these three albums are the names of the under utilized Romantic Halloween Horror Comedy genre. Lady Gaga might have been spooking it up on American Horror Story, but Swift gives a far more chilling performance in Tom Hooper’s midnight madness of Cats and I could envision Swift excelling really well as a horror film actor. Especially in a role like Scarlett Johansson’s Under the Skin.

You cannot get more polar opposite from Swift than Adrianne Lenker. Who released her first solo album abysskiss and the second Big Thief album of 2019 Two Hands. Lenker will have also gone on to make her third October release this year with her second solo album songs & instrumentals. Striking that such a ghostly autumnal band would have only released one album in October, but autumnal feeling albums are not beholden to release calendars. The song “Not” from the Big Thief album Two Hands is a watershed breakthrough moment for the band and put Lenker and her band on the map. In 2019 Big Thief became a band that could get booked onto a Goodmorning American performance slot and more or less made Big Thief one of the rare 2010s indie bands to become more or less a household name.

Other notable artists to have released more than one album on October 2010s:

Less notable artists to have multiple October releases: James Blunt Korn

Calvin Harris

Kings of Leon

Pentatonix

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FORMER HARBINGERS OF HYPE

These are October releases from artists that once felt like whenever they put out an album a wider array of outlets and publications seemed to care more and would spill more digital ink over them. The big three artists that had the biggest drop off in attention and acclaim that stick out to me the most are Titus Andronicus, Justice and Why? All three artists debuted with strong starts back in the aughts, but according to critical reception more or less crashed and burned. Titus Andronicus’ Local Business was one of the last times Titus Andronicus would get positive marks from Pitchfork. Local Business a fun and shaggy follow-up to one of the most self-serious concept albums of the 2010s.

Justice’s Audio, Video, Disco similarly is a follow up to a highly acclaimed album that set the bar high enough to doom Justice into never living up to the hype. Justice’s 2007 s/t heralded them as the next Daft Punk, but unlike those soulful and thoughtful robots Justice mainly wanted to make big ridiculous unfashionable synth prog rock. Audio, Video, Disco is simply cheesy fun and even though we live in a world better off without parties and gatherings this album helps you feel like you are in high-def IMAX monster mash on the moon.

The leaves us with Why?’s Mump’s Etc. an album that already had the job of following up an already divisive follow up record Eskimo Snow. Why’s Alopecia is a really important 2008 indie blog rap album that helped thrust the online indie blogs into the hip-hop genre hybrid experimentalism. Why? would never make another universally beloved album again and with Mump’s Etc. ended up permanently in Pitchfork’s hate pit. In the original release review the Pitchfork writer essentially deems this album an act of “career suicide.” The whole review is essentially an assignation of Why?’s figurehead Yoni Wolf and taking him to task for all of his awkward lyrical blunders and the fact he is narcissistic enough to be a musician writing about his career in a meta fashion. Yet when I listen to Mump’s Etc. I am more or less enjoying Yoni Wolf’s personality and find the whole thing to be pretty charming. A perfectly serviceable 3.5/5 release that a media outlet like Pitchfork turns into a flexing opportunity to show how that they have the power to make or break a career.

A.C. Newman, an artist who appears on this playlist with his terrific 2012 Shut Down The Streets took to Twitter to scoff at the idea that a good Pitchfork review has done anything for his career. Shut Down The Streets currently remains the last solo album Newman has released under his name choosing to focus on his main gig with the New Pornographers. The Internet based hype machine is even more ADHD addled and twitchier by the day. The joy of doing this deep dive allowed me to revisit a lot of these artists and acts that I had fallen out of touch with. I had completely forgotten about King of Convenience’s Erlend Øye who released the album Legao in 2014. I rediscovered a good deal of bands like the Editors, The Dodos, Kisses, Black Milk, Crocodiles, Empire of the Sun, Juana Molina, Jagwar Ma, Here We Go Magic, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., YACHT, Peaking Lights, The Twilight Sad, Elf Power, Swet Shop Boys, Radio Dept, Allo’ Darlin, Foxes In Fiction, and HOMESHAKE are all bands not trying to change the world or challenge listeners with avant garde experimentation. Instead I feel like I maintaining relationships with old friends on the edge of obscurity.

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A HISTORY OF CHRISTMAS IN OCTOBER

A tradition stretching back as far as 2014 not October’s Idina Menzel’s Holiday Wishes, but Seth McFarland’s Holiday For Swing sweatily released on CD, digital, and vinyl on September 30, 2014. 2015 then brings us a Chris Tomlin and Ru Paul Christmas albums because every force of Neo-liberal good must be balanced with evangelical contemporary Christian music *shutters.* 2016 finds the Christmas in October era reaching a complete and utter nadir with R. Kelly’s final official LP 12 Nights of Christmas and A Pentatonix Christmas, but also buffered by Kacey Musgrave’s Christmas. 2017 only had time for Gwen Stefani’s You Make It Feel Like Christmas and no one else could evoke this feeling in October. On 2018, Michelle and Barack Obama’s combined one and only Christmas wish comes true, no not cancelling those drone strikes, but getting John Legend to join the October release jamboree; Eric Clapton claps open his guitar’s butt cheeks and hatefully squats out a half assed Xmas album defiantly opening the album with “White Christmas” [eyeroll emoji]; and finally 2018 found the Pentatonix announcing in October that Christmas Is Here. I apologize for all of that crude butt talk about the hateful racist Eric Clapton, but(t) I have festive gluteus Maximus on the mind, because in 2019 Norah Jones got her alternative country gal trio back together to remind us to shake our Christmas butts. Eat shit commercial shit, today’s Santa’s birthday! That’s the magic of the October release schedule!

The hallowed Christmas in October tradition continues on in 2020 with Dolly I-Beg-Thee-Pardon releasing A Holly Dolly Christmas right on time on October 2, 2020 (Carrie Underwood missed the memo and unwraps her unwanted My Gift in September 2020). Meghan Trainor, Goo Goo Dolls, and Tori Kelly released Christmas albums. Can you believe Seth MacFarlane comes up twice in this article, because his sleazy J. Michigan Frog croon is processed and grated like Parmesan cheese snow flakes all over a rendition of White Christmas. What a time to be alive!

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WHERE DID THEY GO?

A Brief Case For Class Actress’s Rapproacher

Among my October music travels I encountered one artist that really impressed me with her proper LP debut Rapprocher. The trio fronted by Elizabeth Vanessa Harper is essentially peddling the kind of competent moody 80’s inspired synth pop that belongs on a lost Donnie Darko sequel. Harper’s vocals are striking and expressive and they are melded with constantly propulsive bed of shiny synths and glossy barely-there gated percussion. Outside of an 2015 EP called Movies featuring exciting production contributions from Italo-disco icon Giorgio Moroder there has been nothing else from Class Actress. Highly recommend you check them out especially if you want to find the sweet spot between Chromatics and Kylie Minogue.

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THE OCTOBER 2010s MASTERPIECES

(Robyn - Honey, Big K.R.I.T. - 4eva is a Mighty Long Time ,Miguel - Kaleidoscope Dream, Crying - Beyond The Fleeting Gale , M83 Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming ,SRSQ - Unreality, Sufjan Stevens - age of adz, Joanna Newsom - divers, VV Brown Samson and Delilah, Kelela - tear me apart , Neon Indian - VEGA Intl., Fever Ray - Plunge , Antony and The Johnsons - Swanlights (goodbye album) , Caroline Polachek - Pang , Sky Ferreira - Night Time, My Time . Bat For Lashes Haunted Man, James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual , Grouper - Ruins , Kero Kero Bonito -Bonito Generation , DJ Rashad - Double Cup)

Maybe if I surround this VV Brown album with more well known artists she’ll finally get some more clicks? I should also mention that Joanna Newsom’s Divers is nowhere on my Spotify October Music playlist because Joanna Newsom thinks Spotify is bananas, and she hates bananas. I know I should also mention Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city and Tame Impala’s Lonerism. That’s the maddening thing about October music that just when you think you covered all your ground you find another hidden hump underneath the carpet. I feel remiss without mentioning striking debut and instant hidden gem Tinashe’s Aquarius, which did you know has a new album art on Spotify. Death Grip’s No Love Deep Web. T_T I didn’t even get around to making a big verbal mosaic to Thom Yorke’s witchy Suspiria soundtrack.Corpus Christi! I forgot to highlight The Orb album in the collage with my other veteran artists! As you can see this project nearly ruined me. I did not necessarily listen to all of these albums from front to back, but I did listen all of the songs on the playlist and chose them from the immense collection of October releases. I am pretty sure this is the kind of content for no one in particular but I really needed to get it out of my system. Let’s meet back up October 2030!!!!!

(Thank you to my beloved partner, best friend and Spotify provider Maddie Johnson XD)

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7sdLaNNaqWpKEKXRZ3jNqY?si=SLZxUwLMQYOQ5wA1xuZc7w

#spooky #spooktember #spooktober #spooktacular #octoberfest #autism #best of #music festival #Joanna newsom #sufjan stevens #kendrick lamar #tame impala #Taylor swift #big thief #Adrianne lenker #ru paul #kelly klarkson

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disappearingground · 5 years

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The Jenny Lewis Experience

The New York Times July 24, 2014

A version of this article appears in print on July 27, 2014, Page 18 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Jenny Lewis Experience.

By Jeff Himmelman

“They’d put the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on,” Jenny Lewis said. We were sitting in a restaurant in Laurel Canyon, not far from her home, and she was describing her early childhood with parents who made their living performing as an itinerant Sonny-and-Cher-style lounge act called Love’s Way. “We lived in hotels,” she said. “My sister and I, they would just keep us in the hotel room, and they’d go down and play.” When Lewis was born in 1976, her parents were doing a stand at the Sands. They split up when she was 3, and her mother — herself the daughter of a dancer and a vaudeville performer — took Jenny and her sister to Van Nuys, in the San Fernando Valley, where she worked as a waitress and struggled to keep her family afloat. “We were on welfare,” Lewis said, before describing the day their fortunes changed, when an agent picked young Jenny out of a crowd at her preschool. “I think mostly because I was a redhead,” she said. “And I was a weird little kid, a weird little tomboy.”

She soon landed her first commercial, for Jell-O, and came under the wing of Iris Burton, an eminent children’s agent who represented River and Joaquin Phoenix and Fred Savage. Lewis started working steadily in commercials, television (“The Golden Girls,” “Growing Pains,” “Mr. Belvedere”) and film (“The Wizard,” “Troop Beverly Hills,” “Pleasantville”), living the surreal and somewhat communal life of a child star in the ‘80s. She spent her days being tutored on set and her evenings at places like Alphy’s Soda Pop Club in Hollywood, which catered exclusively to kids in the industry. At a party there when Lewis was 10, the actor Corey Haim handed her a cassette tape with Run-D.M.C. on one side and the Beastie Boys on the other. “There have been a couple of cassette tapes that have changed my life,” she said, “and that was the first one” — the tape that got her hooked on hip-hop, which eventually led her to songwriting.

I asked Lewis when she first fully realized the role she played in her family, the depth of their dependence on her. “Eight years old,” she said. “I remember the moment. That’s a pretty big thing for a kid to realize. And I remember the power in that.” By the time she was 14 or 15, with nobody to answer to, she could be as wild as she liked as long as she showed up to work and hit her marks. “I was up for it, honestly,” she said. “I loved the work and I loved the people, and it kind of prepped me for what I do now.”

What Lewis does now, the music she makes, is hard to characterize. She is often compared with Joni Mitchell and Emmylou Harris, and there is a kind of timelessness to the way she writes and sings. But the throwback stuff doesn’t quite capture her. Among some music fans — including many other well-known musicians — Lewis is considered a kind of indie goddess, a stylish performer who defies genre and salts her songs with a sly and off-kilter intelligence. Her first band, Rilo Kiley, signed a major-label deal with Warner Bros. Records in 2005; her first side project, the Postal Service, led by Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, sold more than a million copies of its debut; and she has released two well-received solo records since then. Next week, she will release a third, “The Voyager,” her first solo effort in six years. It has been a battle to get it out. Among other things, she has dealt with the death of her father, writer’s block and bouts of insomnia so severe and debilitating that she said they left her almost unable to function for nearly two years.

You’d never guess that from meeting her, though. She talks like a true child of L.A. — the “bro"s and “dude"s flow freely, without affectation — and her go-to traveling costume is a vintage Adidas track suit, Adidas shell-top sneakers and, on the day I first met her, hot-pink lipstick and oversize sunglasses. She lives with her longtime boyfriend and collaborator, the musician Johnathan Rice, up a long canyon road in the hills that separate the San Fernando Valley from downtown Los Angeles. Her house (called “Mint Chip” for its brown-and-light-green exterior) is set into the hillside, looking out over a ravine. There is a rehearsal space with a drum kit, a P.A. and some vintage gear, an old piano in the living room and a vinyl edition of James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James” propped up beside the fireplace. Beyond the small pool in the back yard there’s a windowed gazebo that Rice uses as his songwriting space. Whatever you are imagining of the California light and the laid-back lifestyle: yes.

Historically, nearby Laurel Canyon has been synonymous with a certain kind of lush ‘60s acoustic-and-multipart-harmony sound, but Lewis’s musical roots spring from the ‘90s and the smart indie rock of Elliott Smith and Pavement. When she was 20 or so, her acting career wasn’t where she wanted it to be, and she saw that she needed to make a change. “I was the best friend,” she said. “I was the friend, forever. I wanted the big, juicy roles, and they didn’t come to me.” (She read for the part of Bunny in the Coen brothers’ film “The Big Lebowski,” for one, but didn’t get it.) She had known Blake Sennett, another former child actor, since she was 17, and they began writing together and eventually formed Rilo Kiley.

She and Sennett dated and broke up and kept playing together. The relationship was always fraught (Gibbard remembers Lewis screaming at Sennett over the phone during the first Postal Service tour), but Lewis said it gave her the confidence she needed to become a real songwriter. “Through my partnership with Blake, I found a voice within myself that I didn’t know I had,” she said. “It sounds kind of cheesy, but I figured out who I was.” From the first lines of the first song on Rilo Kiley’s debut record, a track called “Go Ahead,” you can hear the DNA of the musician Lewis has become nearly 15 years later — a floating, distinct voice, an unpredictable melody, a wryly subverted rhyme.

The link between songwriting and autobiography is a tantalizing but tenuous one, and Lewis prefers to preserve as much mystery as she can. But she affirms that she has never written anything more personal than “Better Son/Daughter,” one of the strongest tracks off Rilo Kiley’s second record, “The Execution of All Things.” The song is about waking up in the morning and being unable to open your eyes or get out of bed: “And your mother’s still calling you, insane and high/Swearing it’s different this time.” Eventually it opens into an anthem of wounded fortitude, the kind you can imagine cars full of young women screaming along to. The actress Anne Hathaway, one of Lewis’s close friends, told me that she still turns to that song whenever she’s struggling. “It’s become almost like a prayer,” she said.

Outside whatever veiled references she makes in her music, Lewis doesn’t talk much about her mother. She acknowledged that it was a “difficult relationship” and that she didn’t have a “traditional upbringing,” but that was about it. At one point, I referred to a report in The Boston Globe in 1992, when Lewis was 16, noting that she owned a house in Sherman Oaks and a townhouse in North Hollywood. “We lost all of that,” she said, with a blankness I hadn’t seen from her before. I asked her why. “We just lost ‘em,” she said. “I achieved a lot as a child, I supported my family, but in the end we lost it all.”

In 2004, Rilo Kiley toured with Coldplay, but Lewis was still scraping by, living in a small apartment in Silver Lake with an Iranian rockabilly musician she found on Craigslist. In her bedroom, when she wasn’t on tour, she wrote the songs that would become “Rabbit Fur Coat,” her first solo record. The idea for it came from Conor Oberst, the songwriter (also known as the frontman of Bright Eyes) who helped form Saddle Creek Records, which had put out “The Execution of All Things.” “I encouraged her,” Oberst told me. “You know, why don’t you step away from this thing that is obviously causing you a lot of distress and make a record on your own?” Sennett had already made a solo record, which upset Lewis. “I was so jealous if someone else got Blake’s musical attention,” she told me. “I was shattered by it.” She made “Rabbit Fur Coat,” she said, in part to prove that “I can do it too on my own — I don’t need you.”

The songs on “Rabbit Fur Coat” are ethereal and haunted, rooted in deep Southern and gospel-inflected melodic traditions. On the record’s title track, Lewis’s lyrics again invite comparison with her family life:

Let’s move ahead 20 years, shall we? She was waitressing on welfare, we were living in the valley A lady says to my ma, “You treat your girl as your spouse You can live in a mansion house.”

And so we did, and I became a hundred-thousand-dollar kid . . . But I’m not bitter about it I’ve packed up my things and let them have at it And the fortune faded, as fortunes often do And so did that mansion house

Where my ma is now, I don’t know She was living in her car, I was living on the road And I hear she’s putting stuff up her nose . . .

After the record was done, Lewis went on tour with Rilo Kiley. When the band played the Showbox in Seattle in 2005, Gibbard picked her up after sound check. They’d become friends during the Postal Service tour a few years earlier. As they drove around in Gibbard’s car, Lewis played the new songs for him. “I just remember, all hyperbole aside, being completely blown away,” Gibbard said. “It was undoubtedly the best thing that she had done.” The press shared Gibbard’s reaction, and Lewis got more attention on her own than Rilo Kiley had ever gotten as a band. “Everything was so easy for the first time,” she said. “It just unfolded so naturally. And then going out on the road and touring was the most fun I’ve ever had on tour. There was no tension for the first time.” Rilo Kiley would put out one more record, but it soon became clear that it would be their last.

“I want to show you something,” Lewis said. We were talking in her kitchen about her second solo release, “Acid Tongue,” which she recorded over three weeks in 2008 at the legendary Sound City Studios in Van Nuys. The record had a bunch of special guests on it — Elvis Costello, Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes — but the most meaningful one was Lewis’s dad, who died in 2010. In the living room, she pointed out a glass vitrine on top of the piano that held one of her father’s chromatic bass harmonicas. Before the “Acid Tongue” sessions, she hadn’t spoken to her father in years, but she felt comfortable enough with the musical family she had created around her — Rilo Kiley’s drummer, Jason Boesel; Johnathan Rice; some other musicians from the Laurel Canyon set — that she thought she could handle having him around. He played on the track “Jack Killed Mom,” and the reunion helped Lewis forgive him for leaving the family all those years ago. “He was playing lounges in Alaska,” Lewis said of when she tracked him down and asked him to play on the album. “That’s why I never saw him. It was not a malicious thing. My dad was a savant. He never drove a car, he never had a bank account,” she said. “I don’t even know if he realized that he wasn’t around, you know? I think he was just playing his gigs, trying to make a living.”

“Acid Tongue” was also a step toward recording everything all at once, live, to an analog tape machine — instead of in pieces to a computer. It’s a process that Lewis has developed a devotion to, and one that the songwriter and producer Ryan Adams would push to an extreme on “The Voyager.” (After “Acid Tongue,” Lewis and Rice released “I’m Having Fun Now” in 2010, an underrated duo record that failed to get the kind of traction they hoped for.) For the last few years, Lewis had been sitting on many of the songs that would make up “The Voyager,” battling insomnia and struggling to get them down. She ran into Adams in Los Angeles and told him she had some songs she was working on, and he invited her to come by his studio, Pax-Am, on the Sunset Strip. She played a few of the tunes for him on her acoustic guitar.

‘My dad was a savant,’ Lewis said. ‘He never drove a car, he never had a bank account. I don’t even know if he realized that he wasn’t around, you know?’

“My initial impression was there were some really minimal but necessary things that had to happen,” Adams told me. “I could tell that she had sat with them a little too long.” (Lewis agrees: “I was like: ‘Dude, go for it. Help me.’ ”) On the first song that they worked on together, “She’s Not Me,” they changed the key to relax Lewis’s voice, and then Adams and his production partner, Mike Viola, strapped on electric guitars and rolled through the full song, three times, with Lewis playing and singing live with a backing band. Adams pronounced the track finished for the time being and said they would move on, without even listening back to what they’d done. “For Jenny, revisionism wouldn’t have worked,” Adams said. “The version she would play on the couch in the control room, we would just stand there, like, ‘Wow, this is classic songwriting.’ Every time. So that was sort of my mission. How do we get an ‘unmind’ vibe here and then go back later and look at these beautiful raw takes and just splash a little bit of watercolor on them.” Lewis ended up recording the bulk of the record with Adams over 10 days. (She worked on the single, “Just One of the Guys,” separately with Beck before she and Adams went into the studio together.)

“The Voyager” is an older and more direct record than her previous two. Her characters are still drinking and doing blow and cheating on each other, but there is a kind of weariness to it all. One line in particular has caught the early attention of some of her many female fans, during the bridge of “Just One of the Guys”: “There’s only one difference between you and me/When I look at myself all I can see/I’m just another lady without a baby.” She has been hesitant to acknowledge what that line specifically means to her. “I wanted to communicate some very basic things,” she told me, without saying what they were. She was already starting to regret having talked about some of her other struggles while making the record, including open discussion of the insomnia that plagued her. “Now everyone’s asking me about insomnia, which I’m terrified is going to happen to me again,” she said. “You can’t think about it too much, and everyone’s asking me about it, and I’m like, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’ But, [expletive], am I not going to get to sleep again?” You could hear the fear in her voice. “It’s my fault for putting it out there,” she said.

The video for “Just One of the Guys,” which got more than a million views in its first 24 hours online, was made with the actresses (and Lewis’s friends) Anne Hathaway, Brie Larson, Kristen Stewart and Tennessee Thomas. It’s an entertaining video, part Robert Palmer, part Beastie Boys, with the women spending half the time playing a sleek female backing band and then switching into male roles, clowning around in Lewis-inspired Adidas track suits and fake mustaches. Lewis, as herself, holds up a positive pregnancy test, to which Lewis-in-drag-and-fake-goatee responds, “It’s not [expletive] mine.” When she gets to the “just another lady without a baby” line, she smiles at the camera and then dances. It’s a house of mirrors, a romp through emotionally treacherous terrain.

When I visited Lewis in June, she and Rice (she calls him “Rico”) showed me an early cut of the video in the bedroom of their house, with Lewis calling out “bra shot” whenever we caught a glimpse of her cleavage. Driving down the hill toward dinner later, we got to talking, if somewhat obliquely, about the expectations of her female fans and the sexuality that is inseparable from who she is and the music she makes. She didn’t like to talk about feminism, she said, and in particular the trend of women criticizing one another for not being feminist enough: “What does it matter what I think of Lana Del Rey?” In the months before the release of “The Voyager,” Lewis has taken to wearing airbrushed suits for her live shows, rather than the sexier get-ups she used to wear onstage; she has said she feels “androgynous” these days and wants her costume to reflect that. But not always. As we made our way down the ravine, she told a story about the day President Obama came to visit a compound not far from Mint Chip. She wanted to go out for a run, but a Secret Service member stopped her and told her she needed an ID if she wanted to get back through the security cordon. “I was like, ‘Dude, I’m wearing short shorts,’ ” Lewis said. " ‘You’ll remember me.’ ”

After recording and touring mostly with men in the early days, Lewis now consistently seeks out women for her band and even tried to put together an all-female crew for the “Just One of the Guys” video, which she also directed. She said her desire to work largely with women was a response to the dissolution of her relationship with her mom. “The more I surround myself with women, the easier it is to reconcile my past in a way.” It seems to be serving a kind of psychic need, to replace the female relationship that once dominated her life with a kind of surrogate family of her choosing, a family that has stood behind her through the struggles of the last few years.

“I’m happy to see her making records,” Beck told me. “I just feel like music needs her. It needs someone doing what she’s doing. She’s got a special voice, as a writer, and then as a musician. She’s this great combination of so many things.” Conor Oberst shares that view, describing Lewis as one of the most important songwriters and performers in contemporary music. “Go see her play,” Oberst said. “Because we should all feel lucky to be around while she’s doing her magic.”

On a night in early June, at a sold-out show at the 9:30 Club in Washington, Lewis had her magic all lined up and ready to go. Backstage, she was relaxed, joking with her band and casually doing her makeup in the mirror on the wall. Just before show time, one band member disappeared, but Lewis was unperturbed. “It’s O.K.,” she said with a smile when he showed up, apologizing, just as they were about to go on. “You made it!” She took a sip of red wine out of a plastic cup and then walked up the steps to the stage.

‘I just feel like music needs her,’ Beck said. ‘It needs someone doing what she’s doing. She’s got a special voice, as a writer, and then as a musician.’

To watch Lewis perform live is to understand what Beck and Oberst and other musicians admire in her. “She turns into this other person on stage,” Gibbard said, “this unbelievably powerful performer” — and it’s true. Lewis is both a natural and a pro. Throughout the night, she had big middle-aged guys and teenage girls — “teeny little chickens,” as she called them later — singing along to every word. During the encore, Lewis sang the ballad “Acid Tongue” accompanied only by her acoustic guitar and the rest of her band grouped around a microphone behind her. “To be lonely is a habit,” Lewis sang, her voice ringing out in the near-silent room, “like smoking or taking drugs, and I’ve quit them both. . . . " The audience and her band belted along with her as she finished the line: “But man was it rough.”

It was one of those lovely moments you hope for in live music, when everything in the room connects. But it was also a kind of emblem of where Lewis has been and of where she is now. She has overcome all kinds of obstacles to get here, often with great style, but it hasn’t always been pretty. Whatever demons stole her sleep for these last few years, they’ve surely been with her forever, in one form or another. But they are also what gives such depth and soul to what she does. “I’m not looking for a cure,” Lewis sang, and as she stood in the spotlight at the 9:30 Club, nobody there would have thought she needed one.

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douxreviews · 6 years

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Quantum Leap - Season Three Review

"I always do the right thing, Al. And where does it get me?"

Season three is when the formula started to wear thin a bit... and I got a little tired of "Oh, boy," even though Scott Bakula valiantly did his level best to make it sound different every single time. Al hitting his hand link also got a little old. It was also pretty obvious by this point that God has a sick sense of humor. The way Sam is dumped into ridiculous and/or dangerous situations with no knowledge of what is going on is like an ongoing practical joke. Why would God leap Sam into a magic box being pierced by swords, or just in time to sprinkle talc on a naked guy's underwear?

What works

Just like season two, the best episodes of season three are the premiere and the finale. In fact, the premiere is considered to be the best episode of the series, because Sam finally got to leap home. Sort of.

3.1 "The Leap Home, Part 1 (November 25, 1969)": How many of us would give nearly everything for a chance to go back in time and fix what went wrong in our own lives? It's tragic that when Sam leaped into himself at sixteen, he longed to save everyone in his family, but had to face the fact that it was not what God sent him there to do.

In a way, "The Leap Home" paralleled "M.I.A.", where Al refused to believe Ziggy's projections because he wanted the leap to be about saving his marriage to Beth. Here, Sam also refused to believe what Al was telling him because he was certain he was there to save his brother from dying in Vietnam, his father from dying of lung cancer, and even that he could keep his little sister Katie from ruining her life by marrying an abusive man. It's so easy for the audience to put themselves in Sam's shoes. I confess that I've often fantasized about going back in time somehow so that I could find a way to save my sister's life.

But no, you really can't go home again. With the possible exception of Al dancing with Beth in "M.I.A.," "The Leap Home" gave us the strongest scene in the series as Sam told his little sister Katie the truth about time travel and the bad stuff that was coming, and tried to prove it by singing his favorite song that hadn't been written yet. (A beautiful vocal by Scott Bakula, and by the way, "Imagine" is, coincidentally, my favorite song of all time, too.) Katie's face as she slowly realized that she'd never heard the song before and that it meant their brother Tom would die was genuinely heartbreaking, and Sam was forced to say that he was making it all up. This scene was made even more poignant, if that's possible, by Al almost wordlessly telling Sam not to share with Katie what happened to John Lennon. Honestly, I'm dripping tears just writing about it.

In the scenes that followed, Sam for the first time expressed his anger at what God was forcing him to do, to save other people but not the people that Sam himself loved. Al, who had also lost his chance to fix his life with time travel, was the one to remind Sam that God also gave him an amazing gift: the chance to spend Thanksgiving with his family one more time.

Scott Bakula played both Sam and Sam's father. That was okay, but it felt too much like a gimmick. I wonder if maybe some of the scenes might have worked better if I hadn't been distracted by Bakula playing two roles?

That's a nitpick, though. This is an excellent, emotionally resonant episode.

3.2 "The Leap Home, Part 2 (April 7, 1970)": Part two was also terrific. It felt like God was rewarding Sam for his sacrifice in part one by allowing him to save Tom's life. Andrea Thompson (Babylon 5) gave a good performance as dynamic reporter Maggie Dawson, who died for her Pulitzer. It made me think about whether or not it would be worth dying to create something that would live forever.

But I was unhappy that the unsuccessful mission was all about rescuing Al from his POW prison back in 1970. It felt like the writers were rubbing in the fact that Sam and Al couldn't use time travel to change their own lives... except that Sam actually could, this time. Why was Sam rewarded but Al punished? (Maybe I'm taking this too personally.)

3.6 "Miss Deep South (June 7, 1958)": I dislike pretty much everything about beauty pageants, but couldn't help loving this episode. Maybe I really liked the feminist slant, that Sam had to perform well in the pageant so that the young woman he'd leaped into could become a doctor and save a whole lot of lives — or maybe it was that he was also there to save another young woman from making an epically bad choice in life, like his sister Katie.

Okay, okay, it was probably Scott Bakula singing "Great Balls of Fire" while dressed like Carmen Miranda.

3.12 "8 1/2 Months (November 15, 1955)": Another excellent episode where Scott Bakula played a woman, this time an unmarried, pregnant sixteen-year-old girl. I particularly liked the emphasis on how helpless an underage pregnant girl was and how few choices she had back in the fifties. I also want to mention again what a strong actor Scott Bakula is. He's a masculine-looking guy, but he can wear women's clothing, even flowery maternity clothes, and I'm still focused on his performance instead of what he's wearing.

3.13 "Future Boy (October 6, 1957)": Sam leaped in to help Moe, the star of a children's TV show about time travel. Moe constructed a faux time machine in his own basement, and his adult daughter Irene believed that Moe was losing his marbles and wanted to have him committed. Touchingly, Moe built the machine because what he wanted more than anything was to go back in time and be a better husband and father. I don't know whether or not it was intentional, but there was some ambiguity in this Moe situation, since it was pretty clear to me that Moe really had lost touch with reality and should have been hospitalized. But it was still touching that Sam was able to bring Moe and Irene back together as family.

3.22 "Shock Theater (October 3, 1954)": As I've mentioned before, many Quantum Leap episodes feel like homages to specific movies. Here, it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as Sam was subjected to shock treatment against his will, which made him dissociate into various personalities. The best part was that all of those personalities were the real people that Sam leaped into, and that this time, Sam wasn't faking it -- he actually was his leapees: Tom Stratton, Jesse Tyler, Samantha Stormer, Jimmy, Kid Cody.

Nearly every episode of Quantum Leap puts Sam in some sort of danger, but we usually feel that he'll be okay in the end. In this one, it felt like things were spiraling out of control as Sam suffered abuse and was in genuine peril. In the end, Sam was forced to ask for the shock treatment that he dreaded, and he and Al somehow wound up leaping together, leaving us with a pretty serious and unusual cliffhanger.

Okay, there were a couple of problems with this one. Al rapping to teach Scott Lawrence's character to read made me uncomfortable. It was also hard not to wonder what happened to Sam's unfortunate leapee after the treatment, and how unfair that whole thing was to him.

Honorable mention

3.17 "Glitter Rock (April 12, 1974)": It's always fun when an episode features Scott Bakula singing, and for some reason, I absolutely loved the technicolor pseudo-Kiss makeup. But what the hell was Al wearing? A decorative stop sign? Wouldn't that be dangerous if he were walking down a road somewhere?

3.18 "A Hunting Will We Go (June 18, 1976)": It's hard to pull off this much slapstick in a single episode and do it well, but I thought they did: this episode was pretty darned funny. Good job by Scott Bakula as well as Jane Sibbett, who gave a vibrant performance; I always saw her as David Schwimmer's bland ex-wife on Friends, and didn't realize she was capable of stuff like this. I also appreciated the homage to the famous Clark Gable/Claudette Colbert hitchhiking scene from It Happened One Night.

What doesn't work

There are a few weak episodes, but this one's awfulness stood out from the crowd:

3.5 "The Boogieman (October 31, 1964)": This truly idiotic and poorly written episode is about a dream Sam had, while unconscious, of mysterious murders at a Halloween spook house. It included a replica of Al as the devil trying to stop Sam from fixing things while leaping — possibly Dean Stockwell's poorest performance of the series — and a teenage Stephen King with his dog Cujo.

Bits and pieces:

-- Famous people: Jack Kerouac, and as mentioned above, Stephen King.

-- Notable actors: C.C.H. Pounder, Kurt Fuller, and Peter Noone from Herman's Hermits. And Olivia Burnett, who did such a terrific job playing Sam's little sister Katie, also played another little girl named Susan in season two's "Another Mother."

-- Here's a question for those of you better at this online app stuff. Is Quantum Leap available for free at nbc.com (with commercials)? If it is, what did they do about the music replacement issue?

To conclude

I thought season three was good, but not quite as good as season two. And in fact, rewatching season three drove home for me that as a series, Quantum Leap was episodic, not serial. Honestly, I'd forgotten. But as my mother used to say, it is what it is.

On to season four.

Billie Doux loves good television and spends way too much time writing about it.

#Quantum Leap #Sam Beckett #Al Calavicci #Scott Bakula #Dean Stockwell #Quantum Leap Reviews #Doux Reviews #TV Reviews #something from the archive

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theparaminds · 6 years

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A new face in music, Binki is exactly what many have been looking for but have been unable to find. His style contrasts a stark relaxation in sonics with an introspective understanding of lyrics and emotion.

An theatre student, Binki truly understands what it takes to connect with an audience, what it takes to express emotion honestly and how to be a truthful soul within sound itself. His first song, Marco, does so perfectly, reminding us of youthful innocence and the troubles that come with it.

In his first interview ever, Binki tells us of his baggings and what it took to make the jump into music, as well as has upcoming move to New York set to put a lot into focus.

PM: First question as always, how’s your day going and how have you been?

It’s been pretty uneventful. I had to go to court earlier for this speeding ticket, but other than that I've just been cooling. Later I’m gonna go jam with my buddy though.

PM: For those who don’t know, who is Binki? What does he represent and what is his vision?

Yeah I'm pretty sure nobody knows me! Binki was actually my nickname growing up, not really sure how it came to be, but it stuck. I recently decided to release music as Binki to remind myself to not be too self-serious with my music. I definitely care about what I'm doing but if it's not fun then what's the point? Overall though, I want to make music that connects and makes people days easier.

PM: What was the spurring moment that really told you to start releasing music as opposed some odd demos here and there?

A few things, but my brother played a big part in it all. He would always gas me up when I showed him a song he thought was good. I always had desire to go full tilt with the music but I always held myself back. I was in school studying theatre and acting for the past 4 years; and I had it in my head that I couldn't do both for some reason. I thought people wouldn't take my acting seriously if I had this music career on the side. But life's really too short to not do the things you love. There's also plenty of people who have done both successfully. It was really just fear.

PM: Were there others around you inspiring you to push into musical ventures?

Yeah, there's definitely a "house show" scene at the school I went to. I was definitely inspired because I wanted to be a part of it and perform. I also really enjoy live music. I didn't have a band though, and it's really hard to get people excited to hear some random dude perform over an instrumental.

PM: To move a little back to the past, what did your environment and location look like growing up and how did it manifest into your sound and style?

Suburbs as fuck. I spent my early years in Hershey, Pennsylvania. A lot of white people and not a ton of culture. I wasn't miserable though, I had a lot of friends and I was outside playing most of the time. My brother put me onto a lot of stuff growing up, but in highschool I kinda veered off into my own lane. I remember this girl I had a crush on showed me Pink Floyd, which spiraled into me listening to a lot of classic rock. Then in college, I watched this Jimi Hendrix documentary, which is no longer on Netflix unfortunately. But after that, I started learning how to play guitar. I don't know though, the internet kinda changed the way everyone consumes music and other people's culture. I feel like it's super valuable for artists who might feel like they're in a bubble geographically. I'm moving to NYC in like 2 weeks though so we'll see how that changes things.

PM: What’re some of your fears and aspirations with living in new york? What is it you hope to find in the city you wouldn’t find anywhere else?

It's actually just starting to hit me that I'm moving to NYC. It's something I've always wanted, feels a bit surreal. I guess a fear would be that the city will just expose me as a talentless hack and I'll have you move back to the burbs. Or that it'll take me 20+ years to make it. I'm really not afraid of much at the moment. I feel like a big part of being successful in any field, especially creative endeavors, is just being bold enough or naive enough to think you have something to add. So many people give up before they even try. My goals are pretty nebulous at the moment. I really just wanna connect and collaborate with talented artists. I'd love to perform my music in some capacity, that's been the mission for awhile. NYC represents opportunity in my mind. There's an energy. If you live there, you might inherently have it. If you move there you're looking for something, and you gotta be driven to survive there. I'm looking for that energy.

PM: On the topic of the music itself, how have you come to develop your sound over time? What changes are you working on and improvements as time goes?

Most definitely still developing my sound. I think the best thing has been working with different people. The same way you communicate with other artists if you're having a jam. I think my writing changes when I'm exposed to different sounds. I never understood when artists say they only listen to their own music when they are creating, I can respect it, but I feel like I'd lose my mind if I tried that. I take pieces from all of my favorite artists, but it's all filtered through me so it's always gonna sound like me. Going forward I just want to keep taking risks and remain ambitious. I'll always want my music to be enjoyable. Not commercial necessarily, but I don't want my music to live in a bubble where only a select few enjoy it. That said I really want to do a concept album at some point, something along the lines of My Beautiful Dark Fantasy.

PM: What is about the concept album that you love and why is the idea of making one appealing to you as an artist?

When it's done well, it adds another layer to the music. Also albums are just in a strange place right now. I really hate this trend of artists releasing 30+ songs and calling it an album. Something really cold about it. I think concept albums, and more ambitious video projects, show a different level of passion. Even when done poorly, I'm like: “okay there's intention behind this.”

PM: What’re some of your personal ambitions and goals going forward? Do any include live shows?

The biggest one is to just put out music that I'm proud of. There will be live shows in 2019. I'm kinda just speaking that into existence but it can't be that hard right? Even if it's just like 20 people, that'd be tight. I'd love to go on tour eventually. Also more videos! My brother and I made the video for "Marco" in like 48 hours with no plan. So we just want to keep getting better and stay consistent.

PM: Tell me more about that Marco shoot, how did come together and how did it conceptualize through the day?

So I called off work and drove down to Atlanta, we started just shooting random bits around my brother's apartment complex. Then we just bounced around the city starting at a museum, then a park, and we ended at dance party. It was a super fun day, it felt like we really had something. The next day I said we should get a shot of me falling in a pool. Totally inspired by the 'Untitled' video by Rex Orange County. I didn't think we'd get any shots of me underwater though because we were shooting on an iPhone. My brother was like "I'm pretty sure this is water proof." I was like, I don't know man but we ended up just going for it. We got the shots and then his phone died. He plugged it up to charge and then the screen started glitching and shit. I was so hurt man, I thought we lost all the footage, but like thirty minutes later it started working again and we transferred everything to his laptop. It was wild, I'd never seen a phone come back to life after something like that. After that shoot, everything kinda shifted for me. I was like "oh, I can really just do this shit." Been riding that wave ever since.

youtube

PM: That’s an amazing story. Do you have a best memory of the last year, if it’s possible for you to pinpoint?

When I went to NYC in March. That was pretty dope, but to be honest, I feel like releasing Marco might be the highlight. The response has been wild. This Russian YouTuber put it on his playlist and now there's a bunch of people in Russia playing my music. Crazy. It's one thing for your friends and family to support you but getting support from strangers, people with no stake in my well-being, is the best feeling. I don't know if I've ever felt that to this extent.

PM: And as a final question, if you could recommend one movie to everyone reading currently, what would it be and why?

Well my favorite movie is "Superbad," but I feel like everyone's seen that right? So I'll go with "Rushmore." The main character in that movie is full of contradictions and on the surface he's pretty shitty. But you root for him, and you understand why he is the way he is by the end of the film. I feel like the world is lacking empathy right now. It also has Bill Murray in it so that's a plus

PM: Do you have anyone to shoutout or anything to promote? The floor is yours!

Yeah! shouts out to Chasen, Justin, and Sam for helping me make this shit. Also big shoutout to Raymond & Jerry! And check out "Marco" if you haven't yet!

Follow Binki On instagram

Listen on Soundcloud and Spotify

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maxthommusic · 3 years

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Vinyl Time.

Daisuki Baby on vinyl. It's finally happening. This is a dream come true, folks. It cost me an arm and a leg and I doubt I'll sell all the copies. But I'm 31 years old and there was a part of me that said, "If you don't do it now, when will you?"

Part of creating music is leaving behind a legacy. There's a desire to be successful, be notable, not because you want riches and fame, but because you want to know you mattered. Take Minus the Bear for example. It seems very obvious those dudes are pretty fulfilled and happy with their legacy. Are they "famous"? Not by any majorly commercial standards. But they're definitely successful and they built their little indie rock kingdom. And that's all I ever really wanted. But as time marches on, I'm seeing I'm actually destined to not have that. Despite my best efforts, every year I just get a little more jaded, a little more tired and I simply can't sacrifice what I used to. In some ways I sacrifice even more... but it's about economy of goods, right? What do I have available left to sacrifice?

Getting Daisuki Baby on vinyl was an important step because I'd always been waiting for a record label to foot the bill. Someone would want to publish me, right? Despite my best efforts I either can't afford the right PR, the PR I can afford does nothing, or I just don't seem to connect with the right people. I've gotten close. Many, many times. The stars look like they're about to align and then something falls through. I ain't mad. It's just how it happens. And printing Daisuki Baby myself was my way of forcing the stars to align.

What really sparked the concept was that people were really liking DB. Songs were resonating and I was getting a lot of plays on streaming sites. But what I realized is that when you're done with the album, what did I have to keep you strung along? How was I keeping Maxwell-Thomas in your life beyond that single stream? Having something physical to represent the music seemed crucial. Because I know that's exactly what I do. If I love your sound, I want to know how I can support you. Honestly, I don't wear band merch outside of like... hats. I find the prices of hoodies and sweatshirts to be outrageous and designs often feel like after-thoughts than a truly inspired concept. It's why I really strove to create premium products for my fans when I decided to print tried and true staples (bags, hats, shirts, tanks). But I surely feel different about an actual record. Records are great keepsakes. I love buying a record to add to the collection and know I supported someone along the way. Even look at John Mayer's new album, Sob Rock. I spun that record ONCE. And I loved every second. But I'm even more happy to know I got to keep something tangible that's evidence of my adoration for the guy -- even if it's not something I engage with every day or even once a month. Maybe it's only once a year.

Daisuki Baby on vinyl is that chance to give listeners an opportunity to support Maxwell-Thomas with something that is physical and eternally rewarding. Adding Maxwell-Thomas to your collection will be an opportunity to flip through your music and some days think, "Oh, man, I forgot how great this album is," as opposed to the constant new-ness of algorithms like Spotify and Apple Music. The deluge of playlists and new releases make streaming an entirely modern affair, focused very much on keeping things fresh. Whereas owning records, listening to records -- that's about nostalgia and reflection. Taking a moment to go, "When was the last time I heard this?" and then really get an opportunity to engage with it on a superior medium.

I listened to Daisuki Baby on my bike ride home last night. God, it's good. It's not perfect -- nothing is. But it's really fantastic. The poetry on it is really mesmerizing sometimes. Definitely the hallmark of the album, in my opinion. And I just know that when people rip it on vinyl they're going to finally, actually hear just how 3D Nomatic's mix is. Streaming sites murder those mixes, man. It's a damn shame. And I pressed it on unadulterated black vinyl so the audio quality wouldn't be affected at all. Though I understand colors are dope. It was my hope that the music would be as untainted as possible so my vision could come through as well to you as it does to me when I hear these songs.

Especially the sequencing. The way Daisuki Baby flows is just masterful. Side A and Side B are complete experiences on their own and then transitioning between them is a perfect roller coaster of emotion. I've been wanting people to hear it this way since the day I thought up the track listing. Before I even had vocals down, or written, I knew how the songs would flow. I was out for a run in San Bernardino, staying with my parents before I'd move back to Chicago. I was playing around with sequencing because everything had been recorded besides vocals. I was hoping putting the songs in some sort of order might inform the lyrics (and it did), so I moved things here and there... but by and large, the way Daisuki Baby rests is the way I heard it from the start. Like the songs could exist no other way.

Anyways, I wax pretty poetic IN the liner notes. Lyrics, stories, credits and more are all included in the gatefold packaging. I haven't even seen the final product and I bet you it's just wildly beautiful. Eddie Navarro's design is out of this world. I'm eagerly awaiting the records to arrive at my shipping warehouse (aka mom and dad's) and will start ordering ASAP afterwards.

This is truly a landmark moment in my musical career. One I created for myself. One I took for my own. I'm done waiting on others. Done waiting for opportunity. I gave so many years to so many other projects; people who didn't want to elevate to the level I always dreamt of. This is me making up for lost time and saying, "screw it, let's just go." I'm probably going broke as opposed to going for broke, as the saying goes, but at least I can die knowing I tried. The last thing I want is to wonder if I could have done more.

At the rate I'm going? Doubtful. Success doesn't have to be in my future. But I do need to know I tried everything.

Cheers.

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bodhilevin · 6 years

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uhhh it’s ya boy,,,,,,, 👀bodhi. i’m not even going to try introducing myself this time we’re going straight into it. like/dm me if you’d like to plot you know the drill!

「 THOMAS DOHERTY, MALE, 23, BRENDON URIE/P!ATD. 」┈ did you read that latest viral gossip issue on BODHI “BO” LEVIN? he is the LEAD VOCALIST in AFTERPARTY, one of my favorite POP ROCK groups. they’ve been releasing music for TWO YEARS now, but viral gossip has only been talking about them for the last TWO YEARS. get this, i think i heard THAT DESPITE THEIR BAD BOY IMAGE, THEY’VE NEVER HAD ANYTHING HARDER THAN WEED. they’re known as the RECALCITRANT of the music industry, since they have a rep for being GENEROUS but DISTRUSTING, but who knows. maybe that will change once they become #1. ( ADMIN MONA, 18, EST, SHE/HER. )

INTRO !!

let’s start at the beginning. to anyone who asked, his mother used to say that the world stopped when bodhi was born, and that the moment that he opened his eyes she knew he would become something amazing---even if he was about to get whisked away by the nurses in the next second.

which is sweet and all... but the thing is, his mom was a really well-known celebrity pr manager, and bodhi was the fourth child in his family. what his mom really saw in bo was a spark for potential that she hadn’t seen in his older siblings.

so when he turned four, his mom decided that he should start getting into modeling. and with his round cheeks and pretty blue eyes, sure enough, he was soon gracing ads for different toys and even gap posters.

a few years after appearing in various commercials and having small cameo roles on tv shows, he had his breakthrough role where he played one of the lead roles in some tear-jerking, inspirational film alongside a hollywood movie star that was a major heartthrob at the time. it was nominated for and won multiple oscars (he didn’t win any personally though).

and after that, the roles only continued to come in, and he started to get homeschooled. whenever he landed another role, he knew that he should be grateful for it, but part of him resented it when he heard his other siblings talking about having friends and going shopping and trying out for football and just generally having a normal life in general. especially because this was a life that bodhi never chose to have.

so he started applying to colleges behind his mom’s back with his teacher, and when he turned 18 there was this huge legal battle that was covered in the media that he ended up winning where he cut off all ties with his mom. he enrolled in nyu, and effectively disappeared off the map. bar a few dumb disney covers he uploaded from his dorm on youtube. he was never a disney channel boy, but ya know. disney music’s lit and it was still his childhood.

in college, bodhi started to go by bo, and college was where he really started to develop his voice and his musical style (he had taken vocal lessons for a few of his roles but hadn’t really released any music of his own). the videos were uploaded with little fanfare or notice, and often were one take and still included all of his mistakes and ad-libs. a lot of media outlets (viralgossip included) probably made fun of him for being part of a oscar-winning film to becoming a youtuber who didn’t even have a regular uploading schedule. said he peaked early and all that.

the last video he uploaded was a cover of ‘i will go the distance’, and he was still in his purple graduation robes. and the comments were all sad and stuff b/c they thought he was finished with being in the public eye foreVER.

THE BAND !!

「 AFTERPARTY, DNCE. 」┈ lyrics hastily written on café napkins, smoking breaks on city penthouse rooftops, pens with missing caps, torn contracts, an endless pursuit for perfection, a turned-off cellphone, using a platinum amex card to order in pizza

WILL EDIT THE BELOW LATER!

a few months after his graduation, he dropped his first album titled self-titled (it wasn’t actually self-titled that’s just what it was called) with his band out of no where. the band was a secret project he was working on, and the first album had mixed, but generally positive reviews? and it was edgy as fuck b/c bo never got to have a rebellious phase in his teen years and basically most of the songs have this vibe where you can just tell that he wants to LIVE and be free!!11!!

some of his fans were super blindsided by this because he was singing disney music for four years lookin really soft and shit in his dorm? and suddenly he’s screaming at the top of his lungs and wearing guyliner it’s liT.

the band was something he was thinking about for AGES ever since he first befriended SOMEONE (wanted connection!) at a college party (and they are now one of his best friends) and they inadvertently gave him the idea to do something that would piss off his mom the most. so instead of acting, he invested his time into music. and instead of going solo and having his name plastered everywhere, he decided to produce music with band whose name doesn’t even have “bodhi” anywhere in it and he’s not even singing.

don’t want to be to presumptuous, but the band kinda has a modern the rolling stones vibe? in that bo (at least) is upper class, but the music is catered to a rebellious working class audience if that makes sense.

also, since he still had a ton of money from his acting career days, he started the band by holding auditions and selecting talented musicians to join their roster. it was super lowkey and under wraps, but it worked.

the band is super into experimenting in the studio with different sounds and stuff, and bo doesn’t mind spending his money on different types of recording techniques and multiple takes if that’s what it takes to get the sound that he wants.

and along the same vein, bo and his bandmates were definitely not the closest at first? since they had just met and i feel like sometimes bo can’t help but be a spoiled white boy sometimes because he’s never known a life outside of wealth and fame (even in college he was probably recognized a loT and given preferential stuff). but now they’re like the family bo never really had, and maybe even because they weren’t the closest at first they’re that much closer, you know?

after they released their first album, they dropped their second album only nine months after, and are now slowly working on a third. because even bo knows when to take a break.

when i post an aesthetic moodboard for afterparty, i’ll link it here.

PERSONALITY & SECRET !!

bo is super sweet and super nice and super soft! aka the total opposite of simon. despite everything that’s happened to him, he’s still super soft and hasn’t let himself get jaded. well done, bo!

like i said earlier, sometimes he’s always had money, and never had to worry about his next meal. and nyu is one of the wealthier private schools? so there are definitely times where he forgets his privilege but when that happens just let him know. and he’s the type to buy presents for his frienDS? and not think that much of it. it’s his love language so let him spoil your muse.

DRUGS MENTION FOR THIS BULLET ONLY afterparty mentions drugs, sex and all that good stuff in their music. but bodhi has never tried drugs and never plans to. he’s tried pot at a college party once and it made him sick so he’s never touched it since and he wasn’t really a fan of drinking underage or at parties sooo he’s v pure.

and is he inspired by trish walker? you bet he is!

also, my boi bo is bi. hahaha jk he’s pansexual like all my muses are sdjfkls so give me all the ships

TL : DR ;

bodhi---but please call him bo---is a former famous oscar-winning child actor who cut off all ties with his momager four years ago to go to college where he uploaded videos of himself singing covers on youtube. after he graduated, he started afterparty, a teenage rebellion pop punk band. *finger guns*

IDEAS FOR PLOTS/WAYS TO MEET !!

will be linked HERE once i finish writing that up!

thanks for coming to my ted talk !!

#viral:intro #aY

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howaminotinthestrokesyet · 3 years

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Behind The Album: Broken

In September 1992, Nine Inch Nails released its first extended play or EP through TVT Records. This acted as the follow up to Pretty Hate Machine released three years previously. The record saw the band change from a heavily infused synth pop sound to a much heavier metal sound. After the success of Pretty Hate Machine, TVT Records put heavy pressure on Reznor to create a similar album with singles the label could release. CEO Steve Gottlieb stuck his heels in the ground and insisted that Reznor release something just like Pretty Hate Machine or they would not release it. The singer resisted and asked the TVT to terminate his contract citing restrictions on his creative control, but the record company refused. He then fought with the label over their ongoing interference with every part of his intellectual property or his music. Throughout this project, Reznor called it a wide variety of things in order to avoid any legal issues with TVT Records. For this reason, the EP was recorded in six different studios in a variety of places. In the end, Trent was eventually released from his contract allowing him to sign with Interscope Records. He would say this about the entire situation. “We made it very clear we were not doing another record for TVT. But they made it pretty clear they weren't ready to sell. So I felt like, well, I've finally got this thing going but it's dead. Flood and I had to record Broken under a different band name, because if TVT found out we were recording, they could confiscate all our shit and release it. Jimmy Iovine got involved with Interscope, and we kind of got slave-traded. It wasn't my doing. I didn't know anything about Interscope. And I was real pissed off at him at first because it was going from one bad situation to potentially another one…”

As recording began, the Nine Inch Nails front man brought in Flood once again to work on “Wish,” “Last,” and “Gave Up.” He would use a number of pseudonyms when working on this project, so the executives at TVT Records were none the wiser. Looking back, he had this to say about the sound he was going for on the record. “Broken [...] had a lot of the super-thick chunk sound, and almost every guitar sound on that record was [tapes consisting of] me playing through an old Zoom pedal and then going direct into Digidesign's TurboSynth [software in a Macintosh computer]. Then I used a couple of key ingredients to make it [be heard as being] unlike any 'real' sound." Reznor’s’s dog Masie also participated on it as he used his dog’s barking and a recorded moment when the canine bit engineer Sean Beavan on the track “Physical.” One can hear the engineer yell “owww” Sadly, the dog would die three years later during The Self-Destruct tour after a fall from a balcony. Recording took place all over the country in studios in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and Miami. In September 1992, he took the finished record to Interscope Records, which they accepted as the first release from their label.

Broken has a much heavier sound, which comes from a strong influence inspired by bands like Ministry and Godflesh. These groups were seen as the major contributors to industrial metal at the time. Reznor would say that his hope for the listener was to “make their ears a little scratchy” with the music. The lyrics take aim at society at large with many references to alienation, angst, and struggles over being dependent on society, while at the same time controlled by it. Broken also saw Reznor start to use profanity selectively as heard in“Wish” where he uses f*** three times throughout the course of the song. He would use a couple of samples on the album that never got credited including David Bowie’s “It’s No Game” and the film, The Empire Strikes Back. You really could not get away with that in today’s music world and commercially release it. For most CD copies of the EP, Reznor included 91 one second silent tracks followed by two bonus tracks including the song “Physical” originally recorded by Adam Ant. In 1995, the singer would perform the track live with Ant on two consecutive nights. On the second night, Ant thanked Reznor for allowing him to sing with “the best fucking band in the world.” The other bonus track came in the song “Suck”, which Reznor had sung on a year earlier for the band, Pigface. This version was radically different than the original in tempo and feel.

Critical reception to Broken remained mostly positive with most critics noting the major change to an industrial metal heaviness. Danny Scott writing for Select had this to say about it. “It’s loud and it'll rip your stinkin' head from your shoulders if you so much as breathe without permission." New Musical Express noted that Reznor was no longer following any other band, but instead had carved out his own unique niche within the genre. Peter Kane of Q observed that the drums represented the equivalent of going to the dentist. The Baltimore Sun Review stated that Broken was “everything industrial music should be.” Making Music probably said it best when they wrote, “It’s an intensely vicious and shocking 30 minutes.” The EP would go on to be certified platinum in 1992, despite the fact that Nine Inch Nails offered up no tour to support it. The first single came in the song “Happiness in Slavery,” which included a very explicit video, where performance artist Bob Flanagan could be seen being eventually raped and killed through the course of the music. MTV banned it outright, which significantly slowed the popularity of the single. For the second single “Wish,” Reznor produced a video that merely acted as a live show clip. He would go on to win a Grammy for the song for Best Metal Performance. He would later say in a joke about his grave. “Reznor: Died. Said 'Fist Fuck', Won a Grammy." The video for “Happiness in Slavery” did air a few times successfully despite being banned around the world. One program called Raw Time represented a public access show in Austin, Texas, who would air it at 3 AM one morning to a mostly positive reaction. A film by the same name Broken would be released personally through Trent Reznor, but not commercially because he did not want it to be confused with the EP. This movie shall be looked at later in this book in the article on the videography and films of Nine Inch Nails.

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noiseartists · 4 years

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FLEUR DU MAL: A perfect blend of Shoegaze, Post-Rock and 80s indie pop

FLEUR DU MAL is a duo from Paris, France, created in 2019.

“We offer a seamless blend of a wide array of sounds, from French "chanson" to Post-Metal, and everything in between.”

It is an apt description. I am really fond of their music that cleverly includes some of the music I have loved (and still love) with clear influence from 80’s French Pop (Etienne Daho), French Shoegaze (Welcome to Julian, Dead horse One) and French Post-Rock (Alcest) .

It seems an unlikely mix, but FLEUR DU MAL managed bringing everything together, never copycating, creating their own unique blend of music. They may be the only band to have suceeded such an extraordinary feat. Etienne Daho would been proud (listen to the cover below).

Their way they singing also reminds me of one of my favourite French Shoegaze bands of the 90s, the Sigh, that you can find in exclusivity on Noise Artists Bandcamp portal (LP is available, EP will be soon).

Needless to say that I quickly became a huge fan of their music, with so many sounds I love and so many memories arising from listening to their music. I recon that many French indie fans of my generation will have the same reaction and hopefully all the following generations.

The music work to date is:

2020: Spleen II, EP

2019: Spleen I, EP; Regrets, single; Soleil, single

Their 2 EPs have a similar structure:

An intro mixing electronica an guitar indie without Lyrics but with simple and captivating melodies and structures.

Song 3 is a cover (Etienne Daho and Jean-Louis Murat respectively, 2 of the godfathers of the French 80’s Indie movement).

Song 5 is a finale with a more Postgaze feel that draws longer, over 7 minutes

And now the (great) interview.

Who are the group members?

The band is comprised of Obermann and Faber. We are two veterans on the Parisian indie scene, played in too many bands to mention them all. Suffice to say we played almost everything, from French pop to Stoner.

How did you meet?

We met through friends and began to go to concerts together and talk about music. When you’re both fans of Prince and Deafheaven, there’s a lot in between to chew over!

How did you come up with your name?

FLEUR DU MAL, the name as well as the overall concept, was Obermann’s idea. We wanted to have something literary, which refers to French classicism with a hint of subversion thrown into it. And romanticism, too. Our nicknames, also, refer to literary figures.

What is your music about?

Our music is mostly about feelings and atmospheres as opposed to tangible things. We favour escapism and sentiment over reality. Besides, we prefer to have people make their own minds about our lyrics, which are very general and open to interpretation.

What are your goals as an artist artistically/commercially?

First, we want to play for ourselves and the people we love. Almost all good music, from Stax soul music to old school hip hop, has been created to bring people together, not to make money. That being said, we want to be heard by as many people as we can.

What are you trying to avoid as a band?

Doing things solely for commercial purposes, copying things that are fashionable. Being really indie and getting to a certain age brings you some perspective. We probably won’t get rich doing this so why bother doing things that get in the way of artistry just for success?

Why do you make the music you make? Is it in you? Is it your environment?

Both, we guess. We don’t believe in revelation, this idea that music comes at us naturally and that we’re just vessels for it. It’s first and foremost a lot of work. That being said, once we come up with a new idea for a song, things progress very quickly.

What inspire you for the music or for the Lyrics?

We are ardent fans of music. We listen to a lot of things and love “pop culture” in the largest sense of the term. For this project, specifically, we dug deep into the records we were listening to when in our teenage and early adult years: 90s alternative rock and metal, early post-rock, etc. Our lyrics, on the other hand, are very personal and always in French. It makes for an interesting encounter, we think.

Tell us what you are looking when trying to achieve your sounds. Do you experiment a lot or have a clear idea of what you want?

From the very start, we had a very precise idea of what we wanted to achieve sound-wise: a mix of shoegaze, post-rock and alternative metal. Very early in the creative process, we decided we would do this without live drums because a drummer tends to impose a specific aesthetics that would have undermined the overall coherence of our sound.

Also, because we sing in French and French has a specific sound that does not always match rock music so well, we wanted to have our voices slightly higher in the mix than what is usual heard in this type of music. This, we think, renders our sound more original than most non-Anglo-American Shoegaze and Indie Rock bands, who rarely sing in their native language.

One way to make sure our sound would have some personality was to record covers of our favourite French artists. We treated those songs as if they were originals and this helped us sharpen our sound.

Describe your palette of sound.

There is duality in everything we do. On the one hand, there are ethereal sounds, overdriven guitars that are drenched in delays and modulation effects.

On the other hand, there is a ground- shaking bass sound and heavily saturated rhythm guitars, both reminiscent of 90s alternative metal. Our gear is pretty straightforward, though.

We mainly use Boss and Electro-Harmonix pedals, either stock or modded, as well as a few fancier toys, but not too many. Drum machine sounds are kept as minimal and dry as possible, to provide a space of expression for anything else.

Who would you want as a dream producer, and why?

One of our pride has been to be able to produce a highly personal and recognizable sound without the help of a producer. We just have someone working on our mastering. But if we had to choose someone, and because we’re talking about dreams, here, why not Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross?

If you could guest on someone else’s album, who would it be and why? What would you play?

What would be fun to do would be to bring our heavily distorted and ethereal sound to artists that do not usually have this sort of musical universe, like a country or pop singer. If Etienne Daho, the godfather of modern French pop, wants us to produce his next record, we’re ready for this!

What musical skills would you like to acquire or get better at?

It’s great to play within your own limitations, right. That being said, we always like to try new things: practice palm-muted rhythmic parts at high tempos, for instance. Obermann likes to train playing technical prog death metal.

Which other musician/artist would you date?

We do not make music in order to get laid!

Is there a band that if they didn’t exist you wouldn’t be making the music you make?

Hard to name one but Alcest has been particularly influential to us. Neige has invented a style of music that merged the spirit of Black Metal with elements of Shoegaze and Dream Pop and there is no word to express how indebted we are to him. We strongly identify with his artistry and work ethic.

Also, he proved you can be French and make a strong impact abroad.

You are from France what are the advantages and inconvenient?

France has long had a bad image as a rock making country. John Lennon famously made fun of us by comparing French rock music and English food. But as English cuisine itself has gotten better and better throughout the recent period, French rock music has also improved a lot and does not pale anymore in comparison to the scenes in other European countries for instance.

Straightforward rock music sung in French will always sound quite appalling but French musicians are very good when it comes to step aside and mix rock with other elements, electronica for instance. Besides, French metal is now wonderful.

Bands like Gojira or Blut aus Nord are leaders in genres they sometimes contributed to forge. Simply put, there’s no inconvenient in being a French band, only advantages.

What are some places around the world that you hope to play with your band?

Anywhere possible .We had a couple of articles published by South American webzines. It would be great to play there.

When is the next album/EP due?

Our first EP was released in September on Shore Dive Records. The new one just came out , also on Shore DIve Records. It’s relatively brighter than the previous one. There will be a third, darker and metal-indebted one to complete the trilogy. Then, we’ll see… [it was released on Shoredive Records on 24th October]

Some artists you recommend.

Dead Horse One [hopefully soon on Noise Artist ndle], Computers Kill People, Venice Bliss, Brusque, Opium Dream Estate, Catherine Watine, La Féline, Pauline Drand, all good French bands/artists and, more importantly, people we love and respect as human beings. Check them out.

Anything else you want your fans to know?

We already revealed too much!

Where to find Fleur Du Mal:

Bandcamp

Facebook

Youtube

#Noise Pop #Indie Pop #Indoe rock #Paris #France

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avaliveradio · 4 years

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Tulum's 'Time Changes' aims to melt modern and vintage into a sweetly serene soundscape

Artist: Tulum

New Release: Time Changes

Genre: indie

Sounds like: Dizzy, Big Thief

Located in: Denver, Colorado U.S.A

We are Tulum, a duo from Denver, Colorado made up of Travis Keys and Rylee Zobel. Travis is 19 and Rylee is 16. We aim to make music that accurately represents how we feel at any moment in time. From a lyrical, musical and production perspective..

We want each song to take the listener on a journey within that sonic environment.

We aim for pure vocals and a mix of production/instrumentation that melts modern and vintage into a sweetly serene soundscape.

Tulum likes exploring ambient sounds, and dreamier soundscapes as well as more traditional techniques too. Incorporating more bass in our mixes and having a full sound is a big deal to us, and we like to embellish it with vintage tones.

Our musical influences both range from classical music, jazz, and most types of modern music. Our biggest shared influence is Mac Demarco. Time Changes is about the evolution of relationships. Sometimes they work out and sometimes they do not. And one has to deal with the fact that moving on has to happen no matter how painful it might be.

This song is very significant for both of us. It was written during quarantine, and it was the first song we wrote together. We wrote the whole thing over facetime after a few days of talking, and then decided to make an album. As far as influences for this whole album we both had a few: Rylee listed a few as being Alice Phoebe Lou, Haley Heynderickx and Beabadoobee. Some of Travis’ influences for this album and its production are: Salad Days by Mac Demarco, Blonde by Frank Ocean, 6 Feet Beneath The Moon by King Krule, Timeline by Mild High Club, Stranger in the Alps by Phoebe Bridgers and Abbey Road by the Beatles. As far as instrumentation in specific for this album, it is guitar based. We have one song with strings. But everything else is guitar, bass, drums and vocals.

‘Time Changes’ is our first release, and our first time ever making music together.

It's very much an experimental album. Its necessary for this process to happen so we can move on to the next one and make something even better. For the next album, we want It to be much more cohesive and have more of a story type/thematic progression and full album flow. We want to have better writing, better recording techniques, and overall better production. Again, this song (Time Changes) was/is a big milestone for us because it was the first song we wrote.The album is also titled Time Changes. (influences listed in previous question)

Right now we are really trying to plan ways to give back.

One example is free shows. We are trying to figure out how to make free, drive in COVID safe shows. Also, once we get the resources we would like to do giveaways to anyone that has supported. We would also love to offer help to anyone working on their own projects. Separately, we are working on a new album. Recording has already begun.

About the Artist…

My name is Rylee Zobel, I’m 16 years old and I live in Boulder, Colorado.I’ve been singing my whole life, and started writing my own music when I turned 15 after I got my guitar the previous christmas. A few months into quarantine, Travis and I started talking about music, and it eventually turned into us writing the song “Time Changes” completely remotely over Facetime. We then decided to make an album together, writing and recording in his basement(super professional stuff.) The majority of the songs I had previously written, so we used those and wrote “Song 2” and “Time Changes” together. The theme of the album is about the progression of relationships, people, and the world as a collective over time. I guess it's sort of a coming of age album. This is the first album I’ve worked on, and I can hopefully speak for both of us by saying it’s turned out really well and we’re proud of it. it’s quite an emotional series of songs, all of which are super personal to me. My hope is that others get as much joy out of listening to it as we did making it. I think I want to keep making music, regardless of the outcome or amount of plays this album gets. My name is Travis.Keys, I am 19 and from Denver Colorado. I first picked up drums in 1st grade and had lessons until 3rd grade and then had off/on lessons in middle school. I picked up upright in 4th grade and I have been playing since. I am classically trained and my highschool Orchestra is ranked 6th in the country (Michael played bass with me as well). I was the first chair as well. I am also trained in Jazz and my main instrument is Electric Bass and I am planning on going to school for Commercial Electric Bass. I don't consider myself a jazzer or classical guy, but I appreciate it alot and it garners a larger and more expansive/usable application of music theory and skill. But I prefer “commercial music”.

My favorite artist is Mac Demarco. I met Rylee through a friend/band member (Dakota) from Boulder because I used to live there. I went to Boulder highschool during freshman year and moved to Denver for my sophomore year. As Rylee stated, we worked on this project remotely starting in very late April and finished writing and recording in July. I tracked Bass on everything and Guitar on Song 2 (rhythm) and Mr. Grizzly Bear (electric guitar). Rylee tracked all other rhythm guitar tracks and vocals. Dakota played drums and Michael played lead guitar on all the tracks. I played in a couple bands with Dakota and Michael was in one of those bands (deepak, we have an album released that Michael produced). We still play together and Dakota and I are going to college together (Belmont, Nashville TN) (but who knows what that's going to look like now because of COVID). We recorded everything in my basement and pretty much borrowed all of the gear we used.

Everything we've done for this project has been done by us. Including production, which I have and will be doing for the rest of this project. My goal in life is to be able to create and make my own music or make music with others in a creative project like this. I am not a fan of session artistry solely for the purpose of serving and not being able to create my own music or music with people I love to make music with. I don't want to be stuck in a situation like that or a situation where I am not being able to access the art side of music and I am strictly doing skill oriented things. So getting signed to a label or finding independent success for a project like this and being able to provide for myself is my ultimate goal in life and I will work harder than anyone else for that and hopefully that is evident in what we have done with this project.

Featured on :

Listen on Podcast:

Featuring todays newest singles for December 2020.

Listen to Tulum’s Full Album…

Social Media: Instagrams- Tulum: https://www.instagram.com/tulummakesmusic Rylee: https://www.instagram.com/zyleerobel Travis: https://www.instagram.com/_.travis Twitter: Tulum:https://twitter.com/TulumMusic Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHU_4Wn06hYSiX43BRfEgsA/featured Music: https://soundcloud.com/user-416806437. (Sound Cloud for 3/7 tracks) Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7fQ9KevqFuI0bLd9ac9C59 (artist page) https://open.spotify.com/album/1DcdaAbZrnIujOI7Z6Rfc5 (album) https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/tulum/time-changes (pre save link for album)

Reviews:

Ryan Boyce wrote:

“This song is outstanding. I dig this so much.”

Jacqueline Jax wrote:

“I love discovering new creators. This singer has a lovely sound with cool new vibe.“

Soundflower wrote: “Hi, nice song! Pretty vocals! the whole rhythm sounds amazing too."

TUCANHITS wrote:

“Wow, nice song. Chill vibes and a intimate vocal. Wrapping my head on this.”

Indie Music Spin wrote:

“Thank you for sending me this song. After several listens I would like to say that I am particularly fond of the vocals and the songwriting is very good, I’ll keep a watch on this one and consider it. “

American Pride magazine wrote:

“"Thanks for submitting, nice vocals. Very pretty and easy to listen to. Much enjoyed. “

You may also like

#Tulum #Colorado #denver #singer songwriter #pop #indie pop #indie folk

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coll2mitts · 4 years

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#89 Head (1968)

From the minds of Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, is a 110 minute acid trip featuring The Monkees. Their television show had been recently cancelled, and this movie is essentially their former-Disney star “I’m an adult!” moment in an attempt to break free of their preassigned roles and become Serious Artists.

I cannot adequately express the despair I felt when Head literally announced there would be no plot to this movie, and would instead be a series of skits. It makes sense in the context of The Monkees, since they were formed for a television show. Each section of the movie has a different genre, ranging from a traditional Western, a boxing movie, a television commercial, a stage-performed musical number, horror... they are all here, which makes an overall narrative pretty hard to discern, other than The Monkees’ general discontentment with their current position.

It begins similarly to A Hard Day’s Night, where the Monkees are being chased by... we don’t know what yet, but we can assume it is not excited teenage girls. They then launch themselves off of a bridge, trip on LSD, find some mermaids, and hold a kissing contest that only triggered my Covid-spread panic. The movie doesn’t give you much time to breathe before it comes in hot with a football player attacking soldiers, a football stadium cheering for war, and The Monkees playing a live concert with a screaming crowd cut together with scenes of civilians being killed during the Vietnam war.

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Not gonna lie, I didn't think I'd have to address the Vietnam War at all during this project (unfortunately, Meet the Feebles took that assumption away from me rather quickly). To be honest, I was really expecting this more from The Beatles, especially with John Lennon's very famous pivot to anti-war protest songs. In college, I wrote a sociology paper on the Vietnam War's influence on popular culture and the function of the media created, and not once in all my research were The Monkees even seriously cited, other than some coy allusion that “Last Train to Clarksville” might have had something to do with a soldier travelling to an army base. I was so taken aback by the opening scene of this movie, that I literally pulled out my paper and the books I had purchased to write it to see if I had missed something. There was ONE sentence about Mike Nesmith singing a protest song before he joined The Monkees. Granted, if you were alive during the 1960s, to be ignorant of the war in general would have been so incredibly tone-deaf. Had I realized this movie would be political in any way, I would have expected this. In one book, the author had compiled over 750 songs that directly addressed the war. Record sales tripled during the decade, and Woodstock might be the most famous festival we’ve ever held in the US - processing the war through music was very much *a thing*. So, of course, I had to dive into this, because my brain can't just be like, "Well, I guess The Monkees hated the Vietnam War like the majority of the population, I guess.”

There wasn’t much to find, other than this bizarre clip of Davey Jones on an 80s talk show bragging and singing about how he had evaded the draft. Turns out, the writer/director of this picture, Bob Rafelson, really controlled the message of this movie, and he inserted these scenes as commentary on the performative aspect of war, and how television “...makes you inured to the realities of life. Oh yes, it brings it into the living room, but then you don’t have to fucking deal with it. There is no distinction made between the close-up of the young girl responding hysterically to the appearance of The Monkees and to the shot of the assassination at the same time. And then the hysterical girls attack the stage where The Monkees are playing and shred their clothing off. But they’re not The Monkees, they are wooden dummies. They’ll shred anything, as long as it’s the thing to do. Rape the stage, attack the musicians, real or unreal, who cares? And it was just pointing out that there was a sort of a mindlessness to, as The Beatles used to complain all the time, to the appreciation of the music.”

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There’s a lot going on in this statement... I’ll agree that the constant barrage of violence and unrest eventually numbs you to it. Especially now, with a 24-hour news cycle, and twitter just bombarding you with every fucking egregious thing going on in the world at once. A sense of hopelessness overtakes you; The doom-scrolling will only pacify you into not acting, because what the fuck can you do to change anything? There are too many problems, and they’re too large to solve on your own.

The second part of this statement, where teenage girls will do anything “as long as it’s the thing to do” is pretty insulting. I suppose the attitude of teenage girls being easily manipulated to enjoying things was amplified with Beatlemania. Its continued on, where bands like New Kids on the Block, The Backstreet Boys, and One Direction are immediately dismissed as superfluous because teenage girls like them, and teenage girls are shallow because they’re driven by their hormones. What’s unbelievably frustrating about this mindset is it has been disproved time and time again, INCLUDING The Beatles. I know more dudes who rep for them than I do women. Shit, in this dumpsterfire of a year, Harry Styles’ new album has been one of the few positive things that has kept me going, and that came out 10 months ago. With the success of kpop as well, a lot more people are starting to come around to “manufactured content that teenage girls like can be good, actually”.

The Beatles complaining about how their music is secondary to the mania about them is really rich, considering their legacy now. It’s not like they were that attractive or charming... I sat through 2 of their movies and the only person I even mildly connected with was Ringo, because he was a goofy dope. I’m fairly certain teenage girls were buying their records and going to their shows because they liked the music. As a former teenage girl, let me tell you, the illusion of depth and sensitivity is way more attractive than a pretty face.

Teenage girls made The Monkees and The Beatles successful, and for the director, who directly profited off of that success, to make a movie that criticizes them really rubs me the wrong way. Also, it was the fucking 1960s, about as volatile of a decade as you could get *until* now. Maybe teenage girls focused so much on The Monkees and The Beatles because it was one of the few uncomplicated things that could bring them reprise from the violence unfolding around them. But whatever, disparage their money lining your pockets, I guess.

The skits afterward are pretty unremarkable. Micky is in the middle of a desert trying to get happiness out of a Coke machine, only to find it, and the task itself empty. He then blows up the Coke machine with a tank given to him by the Italian army.

The Monkees are given a tour of a manufacturing facility, only to see what they are producing isn’t a quality product, and the workers themselves are either fake, or endangered by the endeavor. There’s a few scenes where they fight against their predetermined personalities in the band, or what their fans might think of their behaviors. They are used in a dandruff shampoo advertisement and vacuumed up and held hostage in a black box. There is an outstanding upbeat musical number performed by Davy (and Toni Basil!) about a boy whose father left him. He lays it all out on the dance floor, only to be criticized by Frank Zappa of all people, for not having a message in his music that will save the youth of America.

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While they are searching for answers on how to escape the box they’re trapped in, or purpose in what they’ve accomplished, they find nothing. Peter tries to enlighten them with a bunch of culty bullshit, but instead Davy loses his shit and starts physically attacking literally everything featured throughout the movie, culminating in The Monkees running from their movie studio and jumping off a bridge to free themselves. They unfortunately are captured and shoved back in the black box, awaiting the next time they will be carted out to market something else for The Teens to buy.

I probably don’t need to tell you that this movie flopped. The studio purposely left The Monkees out of all the promotional material because they thought it might detract from the serious motion picture they were trying to release. The problem with this, however, is if you don’t know anything about The Monkees, this movie is not going to make sense to you. I had to watch several behind-the-scenes clips to get any semblance of an idea what they were trying to achieve. Sure, the Capitalism and Manufactured Entertainment is Bad theme is pretty easy to pick out, but why The Monkees were the ones saying this after being immersed in the middle of it for three years is an important position to understand beforehand. And even if you were a Monkees fan, like my mother was, this basically shits on their entire experience in show business, so it probably doesn’t hit too well with their core demographic, either. I respect what they were trying to do here, but it’s no mystery to me why this movie has almost entirely been lost to time.

I’d like to say this ends my series on rock bands that decided to make musical movies, but next on the list is a little story about a pinball-wizard-that-could, Tommy.

#unwarranted opinion #100 best musical movies of all time rotten tomatoes

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recentanimenews · 4 years

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Anime in America Podcast: Full Episode 6 Transcript

We may not be able to go to the movies right now, but at least we can live vicariously through anime history in the latest episode of Crunchyroll's Anime in America podcast. Read on for the full episode 6 transcript!

The Anime in America series is available on crunchyroll.com, animeinamerica.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts.

EPISODE 6: AT THE MOVIES: EVENTUALLY

Guest: Jerry Beck

Disclaimer: The following program contains language not suitable for all ages. Discretion advised.

[Lofi music]

There is one name you HAVE to talk about when it comes to anime. A foundational influence on the entire medium and an enervating force in the animation market. A man without whom we may not even have the anime we know and love today.

It’s not Tezuka, but good guess.

When it comes to the world of animation, and honestly most media, all roads lead back to Walt Disney. The man who all the animators in Japan’s growing post-war industry were trying to emulate. Most prominent among them, the legendary manga author and Japanese national treasure Osamu Tezuka who truly lived up to Walt’s legacy both by popularizing the medium of animation and establishing many regrettable business practices still felt in the modern industry.

Disney’s beloved animated features were the envy of every studio on both sides of the Pacific and the pursuit of that special magic Walt brought to the silver screen was what kicked off the race to bring Japanese animation to America. So, I guess…we can start there.

[Lofi music]

In the ‘50s Toei Animation was basically the only major animation studio in Japan and had the stated intent of becoming “The Disney of the East.” Toei’s first 3 films, Hakujaden, Shonen Sautobi Sasuke, and Saiyuki were all released near the end of that decade and all stuck very closely to the Disney formula, retelling traditional folktales with colorful animation, plenty of cute animals, and, in the case of Saiyuki, musical interludes.

Back home in the U.S., Disney was deep in a run of blockbuster releases with titles like Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and, umm [cough] Song of the South. Just about every major studio was trying to figure out how to steal some of that thunder. Metro-Goldwyn Mayer was one such studio who considered Disney their rivals at the box office. If you wanna know how that turned out for MGM, uh, Disney acquired their parent company Fox in March 2019.

It was never much of a rivalry to begin with. MGM put out a behind the scenes docu series called The MGM Parade aping Disney’s “The Magical World of Disney” series in 1955 and decided to close their animation department in 1957, the heads of which, a Mr. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, would depart along with most of the staff to form the very successful Hanna-Barbera Productions.

So, what do you do when you want to compete with a company like Disney in animated features but don’t want to go to the trouble of producing any animated features? MGM became the first company to license and release a Japanese anime in the United States, premiering Toei’s Shonen Sarutobi Sasuke, retitled Magic Boy, in theaters in July 8th, 1961, winning a close race against Global Pictures and American International by only two months ahead their releases of Toei’s two other films, Hakujaden, retitled Panda and the Magic Serpent, and Saiyuki, retitled Alakhazam the Great.

They didn’t do too great, which probably explains why between those three movies released in 1961 and Hayao Miyazaki’s debut in American cinemas in 1986, only 3 other anime made it to theaters in the U.S.

Not even Tezuka’s magic could break open the box office for anime in the ‘70s. His production company, Mushi Production, had two films, A Thousand and One Nights and Cleopatra: Queen of Sex that were both released early in the decade and flopped. In the case of the latter, Xanadu Productions’s attempt to sell the erotic historical drama as a porno probably didn’t help.

The rest of the following two decades saw plenty of anime films being released in the West but only for direct to video releases with major Japanese studios leaning hard into this new market. Many U.S. distributors were now exploiting Japanese studios to animate their own cartoons, so many of the same era took on a sort of Western bend. Toei Animation in particular released a number of films during that period that seem pretty focused on replicating that Disney formula even more closely, using Western history and folktales as source material. Some of my favorite examples are The World of Hans Christian Andersen (originally Anderson Monogatari), Les Miserables (originally Jean Valjean Monogatari), 30,000 Miles Under the Sea (yes, miles), Animal Treasure Island, and even Puss n’ Boots (who became Toei’s logo) during the ‘70s.

[Music from “Toei Logo History” plays]

In 1986, Hayao Miyazaki finally appeared in the American scene. If you haven’t heard of him… how the fuck not? How is that possible? I don’t, I don’t understand. Often referred to as the Walt Disney of Japan, Miyazaki is the primary creative force of what would become the internationally renowned Studio Ghibli which we’ll get into a bit later. Their first film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was created before the studio even had a name, wowing American audiences with its beautiful art and epic story involving environmentalist themes... kind of. Well not really, actually. Manson International and Showmen Inc. got their hands on the movie and cut it up so bad you couldn’t really call it a Miyazaki work anymore. I mean, they didn’t, they changed everything. They changed the title to Warriors of the Wind, [Clip from 1985 commercial for Warriors of the Wind] renaming Nausicaa to “Princess Zandra” and doing their best to make it an action movie while cutting out any of the environmental themes at the core of the narrative by cutting out a whole 22 minutes of the film. Then they drew up a He-Man ass poster with a whole squad of dudes and a pegasus that were not even in the movie.

[Lofi music]

Enter Streamline Pictures.

Co-founded by Jerry Beck and Carl Macek. Each already working to spread the good word of anime, the two were disappointed in early dubs and brought a new philosophy to the localization game with Streamline.

Do. Not. Mess. With. It. Don’t do that. For your own good.

Beck: We were quite proud of them, because we had a theory on how to do this, which was to use the original music and effects tracks, not cut anything, uh and to do the dubs as accurately and as correctly as we possibly could, with the best actors we could get. Our model was the Warriors of the Wind, meaning we were going to be everything that movie wasn’t. We were going to be the opposite of Warriors of the Wind.

That was the man, Jerry Beck himself. The formula was simple, arguably a lot less work than completely changing a movie to shoe-horn it into some western film archetype, the two-man company began visiting Japanese studios… or rather their Los Angeles offices since every major Japanese studio had one of those in the 1980’s, and asking for dubbing and distribution rights.

Both passionate anime fans, the two had a ton of knowledge of emerging anime titles and an interest in bringing many of them over which larger studios would have passed up for dumb reasons like “profitability.”

Beck: We literally made a checklist that we got all the films. We wanted Fist of the Northstar, we wanted Wicked City, we wanted Vampire Hunter D, we wanted Castle of Cagliostro, we wanted- you know, we wanted Lensmen, but I’m not sure why, I actually know why at the time, but that’s such an odd film. So, but we ended up getting them all.

After handling the theatrical screenings of the Mangum Dub of Castle in the Sky, Macek secured a deal with Japanese publisher Tokuma Shoten to dub future titles, including My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service. After that they went on a tear, where they were basically the only company in the game theatrically releasing anime from 1985 to 1995, averaging almost 2 movies a year in a period where non-Streamline anime films could be counted on one hand with room to spare.

I cannot emphasize enough how much Streamline did for anime in America. They even helped the medium properly break into American television in the early ‘90s alongside Central Park Media by contributing to Syfy’s anime block which aired Dominion Tank Police, Robot Carnival, Project A-Ko, Vampire Hunter D, and another film brought to the U.S. by Streamline which could be considered their greatest achievement.

Akira. Or AH-ki-ra [first syllable stress], if you’re a purist.

Beck: Marvel Comics was printing an adaptation of Akira and we knew about the film [Requiem from Akira plays]. And at that point, that was like, of course like ‘88 or so, you know there were already bootleg VHS copies for sale at comic book conventions and stuff. But we looked at it and went “oh my God, this is like state of the art, you know? This is really a big deal for film.” And I don’t even think we had seen it on the big screen or anything, we just knew we wanted it, if it was gettable. And the good news was that the Akira Committee was kinda desperately wanted it to be shown in America, and they had gone to Paramount, Universal, Fox, everywhere, trying to get somebody to pick up Akira, and nobody would because it was too violent. The idea of that kind of thing being shown in America was, you know, unthinkable. So we were like “we’ll do it!”

Akira was a cultural and technological achievement in animation. It set a new record number of colors used in an animated feature at 327, 50 of which were unique colors created specifically for the movie. You could fill a mega size box of Crayons with colors that only exist thanks to Akira, which is insane. The film consisted of 160,000 frames, clocking in at almost 3 times the average for an animated feature of that same length. It was also the most expensive anime film ever produced at the time with a budget of 1.1 billion Japanese Yen. As Jerry said, it was also intensely violent, considered graphic in Japan and especially in America which still considered animation almost wholly a realm of children’s entertainment. The Akira Committee was desperate to get it in American theaters. And obviously, there were difficulties.

After being collectively shot down by Hollywood, the Akira Committee was approached by the small and unproven Streamline with a unique offer: if the Akira Committee could put up the cost to dub and distribute, Streamline would give them 100% of the profits up to a cap before beginning to collect their own percentage.

And it was not easy. Jerry had to negotiate for months with an agent from the committee who basically watched their operation at work to make sure they knew what they were doing. Then Streamline was given an opportunity to prove themselves by hosting a screening of the film in the Spreckles theater at ComicCon. Only once they pulled that off did the committee ink the deal, but with one demand. They were adamant about getting a quality dub and wanted someone who had, at the very least, been nominated for an Academy Award to manage it. At the very least. Carl Macek had one of his associates search around and eventually they landed on Sheldon Renan, who had previously received recognition from the Motion Pictures Association of America for a documentary short just to fit the bill.

[Akira versus Kaneda, english dub clip]

And it was a hit. Screenings pulled in profits on par with or even exceeding critically acclaimed live action foreign films. Streamline established their reputation in the industry on the success of Akira, and the next step was home video, which turned into another battle for Streamline as one of the principles of the committee, Kodansha, was intent on selling out the rights to a large distributor based on Akira’s success in theaters. Still they were turned down and once again, despite not even being a home video distributor, Streamline made an offer.

Beck: We said to them, you know, we’re gonna get you the reviews, you’re going to get reviews in every town. We got Siskel and Ebert, they reviewed it; we got it on Entertainment Tonight, we got it everywhere. And so we were doing all this stuff, the idea though, the goal, was to get all this coverage and then they would go, they would instead of going to movie studios they would go to the home video people and try to convince them to put it out on home video. No home video distributor wanted it. Nobody. Because there was nowhere, we found out later, there was no place in a video store, then, for them to put it. They couldn’t put it in the kids’ cartoon section, the idea of putting it in science fiction, I don’t know why that didn’t work, that should’ve worked, but they probably had Heavy Metal there, but they for some reason that was not a thing that- they didn’t, there was nowhere to put what we call “anime” in a video store at that time. They did say to us “you gotta have a bunch of them. Five, six, seven, and we’ll create a shelf, we’ll put a shelf in our stores.” This is what Blockbuster said, this is what Suncoast said. So we ended up, we ended up, what we did was we got the vid- they couldn’t sell the video rights, so WE got the video rights, even though we weren’t a video company! And so we ended up putting out Akira on VHS. We couldn’t sell it in video stores. So we ended up- and there was no Ebay or Amazon, that didn’t exist, so we actually went to comic book stores and obviously it was the perfect thing to do, because Akira was a comic book, it was manga, and Marvel was printing it. And we ended up selling them to comic book stores and we- it worked. It was exclusive to comic book stores, it was the only place you could get it. Oh my God, we sold… thousands.

Streamline hung up its hat with the release of Space Adventure Cobra in 1995 but many of their partners who handled the theatrical distribution like Tara Releasing and Fathom Events continued without them. Just as TV anime was headed toward its own watershed moment, the field for anime movies broadened in the second half of the ‘90s. Manga Entertainment brought over Ghost in the Shell with Palm Pictures in 1996. VIZ Media broke into films by capitalizing on Ranma ½’s growing popularity with the release of Ranma ½ the Movie: Big Trouble in Nekonron China alongside CBS theatrical in 1998.

And then the big one came. 4Kids partnered with Kids WB and dropped Pokemon: The First Movie in 1999. And to call it a smash hit for anime movies would be an understatement. [Pokemon: The First Movie, trailer 1 plays] I saw it. Because my dad bought the VHS from one of those dudes that sold bootlegs in the Kroger parking lot. The one he hand recorded himself. You remember those? We had ‘em.

The movie hit $10.1 million in the box office on its opening day, which was a Wednesday, by the way. Over its opening weekend it would climb to $31 million and eventually cap out at $85 million at the box office which has remained the record anime movie in the United States for 20 years. For a moment in time it even claimed the best opening weekend for an animated feature full stop until Toy Story 2 dropped two weeks later. [Pokemon Bumper - 2000] Plastic-faced newscasters began referring to its opening weekend as “Pokeflu,” since so many kids mysteriously called in sick from school the same day.

“Pokemania Comes to America - 1999, ABC News”: Pokemon is now in full mania! And others may follow suit, when a new Pokemon movie hit theaters this fall, spurring even more… Pokemania.

"’Pokémania’: 1999 MSNBC Pokémon News Report”: School officials are finding that Pokemon cards are responsible for fist fights and the constant trading is not only distracting kids from classwork, but turning the playground into a black market.

And ya know what? Given recent events, Pokeflu sounds very racist. But that’s what they called it.

Anime was still a few years off from its Oscar grab and even today hasn’t fully reached acceptance as a respected form of media, but the Pokemon movie proved there was lots and lots of money to be made from anime if you played your cards right. Although it’s difficult to tell if that's what 4Kids and Warner Bros did. Each subsequent Pokemon movie pulled in roughly half what the previous managed. Pokemon: The Movie 2000 scored a total box office of $43 million and Pokemon 3: The Movie grabbed $17 million before the whole thing fell off a cliff. Pokemon 4Ever pulled in only $1.7 million and Pokemon Heroes didn’t even crack $1 million. Mind you, this still gives Pokemon the 1st, 2nd, 6th, and 19th highest box offices of anime films in the U.S., so, you know, what do I know?

Pokemon’s explosive success at the box office inspired other attempts to grab some of that Disney demographic. Fox was the first to jump after the 1999 success of the first Pokemon movie with Digimon: The Movie which I’m definitely gonna talk about in a little bit. 4Kids itself also tried to recapture that Pokemon magic as the franchise was showing diminishing returns with Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie: Pyramid of Light.

Unfortunately the Pokemon movies were also a return to form for crazed American producers with scissors. 4Kids onigiri erasure in Pokemon TV series is notorious on its own, but its former president Norman Grossfeld also feared the Pokemon: The Movie movie would do poorly as written. Casting Mewtwo as a sympathetic antagonist confused and angered the profit-minded execs who produced content for children despite probably never having children of their own. They cut out the prologue describing Mewtwo’s past as the victim of genetic experiments and made edits to portray him as a generic villain and Mew as… like some kinda savior, messiah-type thing?

[Lofi music]

Fox, in its desperation to compete with the success of Warner Brothers’s Pokemon looked to Digimon, spawning the creation of the cinematic chimera Digimon: The Movie. You see, there wasn’t actually a movie called Digimon: The Movie in Japan, but several short Digimon films titled Digimon Adventure, Digimon Adventure:... um… Children’s War Game?, and Digimon Adventure 02: Digimon Hurricane Landing!!.

The first two had been directed by the acclaimed Mamoru Hosoda and the last by Shigeyasu Yamauchi. I really want to emphasize these were three different movies utilizing different art styles and creative processes with the last one even focusing on an almost entirely different cast of characters. So, like Harmony Gold before them, they took a knife to all three features, leaving more than 40 minutes on the cutting room floor to create a bizarrely paced, three-arc, Digimon feature before slapping on a mostly ska soundtrack and Angela Anaconda short in the beginning [Angela Anaconda part of the Digimon Movie]. The movie premiered in 2000 and was panned by critics but walked away with a $9.6 million box office, making it the 9th most successful anime film in the States, so I’m sure the producers cried all the way to the bank while the rest uh… learned that evil pays.

Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie: Pyramid of Light came later in 2004 and might be an even more bizarre feature than Digimon, since 4Kids produced the movie rather than just chopping it up after the fact. In fact, it might be the first anime film to be screened in the United States before Japan, releasing in August while Japan didn’t get the theatrical release until November. Somehow the Japanese version was still a full 14 minutes longer than the U.S. release. It’s not really clear whether Studio Gallop made the film whole cloth and 4Kids cut it down, as was their usual practice, or if they added some extra content after the fact that 4Kids didn’t want for the American audience. I guess we’ll never know.

Since it was produced for the U.S., we did get the bonus of having all the cards appear like the actual game complete with english text, even if it sometimes appeared upside-down. Pyramid of Light also had ska music unfortunately. Umm… the 2000s was a, it was a big time for ska. Once again the movie was panned, finding a place in Rotten Tomatoes’s 100 worst reviewed films of the 2000s, but became the 4th most successful anime film in the U.S. ever, with a $19.8 million box office.

But that is enough about box office for now. Now we can talk about home video releases.

[Lofi music]

If you’ve ever tried to catch an anime film in theaters, you’ve probably noticed that even today they usually have extremely limited showings. At Streamline’s peak, they weren’t the only company localizing anime films, they were just the only ones making a push to put them in theaters. Other publishers were going for the straight to video route, but there was one serious hang-up. Blockbuster just didn’t give a shit.

Streamline’s own Akira release had limited theatrical showings, meaning they were leaning heavily into home video and the movie really beat the odds, finding success in the two markets mom and pop video stores and comic shops. Bootleg fansubs of Akira had been in circulation for months before the film’s official release, so Streamline sweetened the deal by including actual original animation cels with the VHS which seems less an intelligent marketing gimmick and more of a giveaway of cultural artifacts in retrospect. Those people are probably very wealthy, now. It was probably also unnecessary. Akira’s home video success was a moment in anime history in many ways, but it was also an exception.

The direct to video market would never find the same success in comic shops that Akira had. You could find anime in privately owned video stories but even then they were being crowded out by mainstream outlets like Blockbuster who were much less interested in putting anime on their shelves, especially of the famously violent variety like Akira. For anime to get its foot in the door, it would need a new face that was not only child friendly but also insanely popular. I know I just talked about Pokemon’s breakout success, but its home video wouldn’t hit the shelves until 2000. Instead, the man who would help open Blockbusters’s blue and gold doors for other anime in the late ‘90s was one of its creators who most famously hates home video. Hayao Miyazaki.

Miyazaki was already making the rounds in the U.S. via World Pictures and Streamline dubs of a few of his films which was probably fine by him, as he seems to resent the idea of people watching his movies in any setting other than a theater, but Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki had his sights set on dominating the animation industry and Disney just happened to be in the market for international films. Former Head of Disney Home Video International Division and current CEO of Herbalife Nutrition Michael O Johnson inked a deal with Ghibli in 1996 granting global distribution rights to their entire library of films.

This was thanks in large part to the effort of Disney’s Steve Alpert who went so far as to film a mini-documentary in Disney studios to basically show Eisner and his fellow suits that every single person they employed to draw moving pictures was already a diehard fan of Miyazaki’s work. Alpert himself would jump ship to Ghibli to work alongside Suzuki battling his former employer at every turn to make sure they kept their promise about not cutting Ghibli films.

Probably expecting Ghibli’s next film to be another Totoro or Kiki, Disney was shocked to see limbs flying off people's bodies in Princess Mononoke and pushed the distribution under their Miramax label to distance themselves from its morally objectionable content, which I can only assume came from a place of deep ignorance of both their own company’s history and the work of their HR department. Also the notion that um… just producing the same thing under a different wing of your company makes you any less morally objectionable… is also morally objectionable.

Unfortunately the Harvey Weinstein-lead Miramax was dead set on changing everything about Mononoke that it possibly could. And with Ghibli holding onto an iron-clad contract giving them final say, this transformed into all-out warfare with Miramax trying to weasel in every change they could and Alpert flying over the Pacific to nip that shit in the bud, only ending after Weinstein himself was twice humiliated in public. And to that I say: Good. First in a now iconic story wherein Suzuki presents him with a unsharpened prop sword at a meeting full of Disney and Miramax suits while shouting “Mononoke-hime NO CUT,” and then when Miyazaki and crew left in the middle of their own post-premiere party to carefully consider the suggestion Weinstein had been shouting at Alpert to chop 40 minutes off the movies runtime or they’d “never work in this town again.” And then several years later, the entire entertainment industry said “no, YOU’LL never work in this town again!”

Although Streamline had been following our modern era’s best practice of not messing with the source material for about a decade, Ghibli’s “no cuts” policy was one of the first pushes in that direction to come from Japan and doubtless helped to normalize the practice… eventually. As I said before, 4Kids and Fox raked in millions spinning out heavily edited films but Buena Vista bending the knee to Ghibli’s demands, the lasting cultural impact of Ghibli movies, and an increasingly saturated market of TV anime untouched by an editor’s razor eventually pushed the industry in the right direction. After all, no edited anime movies ever have been nominated for Oscars, but more on that later.

Despite being a global hit, Princess Mononoke didn’t really take off in the way Disney had hoped, only pulling in $2.3 million in its first eight weeks. But it recovered in… that’s right, home video releases! Boom. Got ‘em. They also started churning out actual VHS releases for other Ghibli titles like Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro and then, when Streamline’s rights expired, Disney produced their own lavish dubs for DVD re-releases featuring a star-studded cast with voices like Dakota Fanning, Kirsten Dunst, Patrick Stewart, and uh, Shia LeBeouf. What?! Blockbuster was finally persuaded to start moving in anime content when Disney’s Buena Vista came knocking and the doors were officially open for more anime content.

Ghibli was way ahead of its time in many ways and rights management was no exception. Or at least Miyazaki’s insistence on the purity of a theater-only movie-viewing experience had some unintended benefits. A mere two years before 4Kids would pull off the heist of the century screwing Shogakukan and Nintendo out of millions in profits in their deal of the explosively popular Pokemon franchise, Ghibli would deny Disney digital rights to their works in their contract. Disney was fine with that, the prevailing belief among executives being that those rights were basically useless. Ha-ha! Imagine that.

Disney wasn’t interested in digital and if Disney, the most powerful media rights holder in the world, wasn’t going to push into that new sphere of distribution, then it was doomed to failure. Which, looking at the titanic size of Netflix who recently acquired streaming rights to the Ghibli Films worldwide minus Japan and the U.S. and is now staring down the barrel of Disney’s own competing streaming service Disney+ and Warner’s HBO Max, is kinda funny in retrospect.

[Lofi music]

Buena Vista might’ve helped Ghibli in another way though. Let's talk about when anime won an Oscar. No one’s quite sure how it happened, really. Not that Spirited Away didn’t deserve it. It definitely did. It’s a good movie. It’s just, uh, this was the first and only of Miyazaki’s works to have even been nominated. Ever. In fact, no anime films before Spirited Away in 2003 received a nomination for best animated film in the Academy Awards, and only The Tale of Princess Kaguya has been nominated since. Maybe the stars aligned, maybe it’s because Spirited Away’s stiffest competition in the 75th Academy Awards was Lilo & Stitch and Ice Age [Spirited Away Wins Animated Feature: 2003 Oscars], maybe it's because Spirited Away carried extra credibility by being released in the U.S. under the auspices of Disney. Whatever the cause, anime, via Ghibli, had grabbed a piece of critical acclaim in the American entertainment industry that seemed otherwise determined to ignore it.

Not that Hollywood hadn’t noticed anime long ago. Two of America’s most celebrated directors, Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky, have both committed what can charitably be described as borrowing from a certain Japanese director by the name of Satoshi Kon to build their respective, uh repertoires. Aranofsky heavily borrowed story, themes, and imagery from Kon’s Perfect Blue in his film Black Swan and even recreated the bath scene from Perfect Blue in his Requiem for a Dream. Guess which two of those three movies were nominated for Oscars? Nolan’s Inception collected four Oscars in 2010 which contained several scenes that anime fans got a sneak preview of 3 years before in the limited screening of Kon’s 2007 Paprika. And also in that one uh, Donald Duck comic strip.

Uh, look, I’m not trying to roast anybody or anything like that. Maybe Aronofsky. But you just can’t talk about Spirited Away grabbing an Oscar without giving mention to not just anime films, but foreign films in general which Hollywood seems to find value in but only when filtered through one of its own creators. So what does this get us? It gets us Scarlett Johansenn playing a woman named Motoko Kusanagi and an Oldboy remake that completely misses the point.

Trust me when I say the only good adaptations by Hollywood are Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow and the Wachowski sisters’s Speed Racer. You heard it here. If you want a new Ghost in the Shell movie just open your wallet, call Mamoru Oshii, and ask him to make another one. Stop with this weird shit.

Although many films were in uncertain licensing situations until GKIDs started recollecting them, the works of visionary directors like Mamoru Hosoda, Satoshi Kon, and Isao Takahata have managed to find their way to American theaters over the years without edits and a minimal delay that recently has been reduced down to less than a year. Not quite simulcasting, but given none of them have had a real breakout hit, it’s long strides to think that fans have had consistent opportunities to watch their movies in theaters over the years and purchase them in home video.

[Lofi music.]

Since Miyazaki’s most recent retirement, Ghibli underwent a sort of identity crisis on what to make of their studio or even if they would continue making films at all. During this period many of their creators left to join other studios, some of them even forming their own Studio Ponoc itself dedicated to continuing Ghibli’s traditions of movie making. Ghibli itself was just kinda there until very recently, when the aforementioned GKIDs secured the rights to Ghibli within the U.S. and entered into a deal to stream the entire Ghibli library on HBO Max. Ghibli also recently announced that it's nearing the release of TWO new films, Miyazaki’s own How Do You Live? and the studio’s first entirely CG feature film Earwig and the Witch, by Miyazaki’s son, Goro.

And I know what you’re thinking. I thought the same thing until I saw the images and I will just say I’m definitely gonna go see it.

And y’know what? That’s great for Disney, but Ghibli’s downtime created an existential dread within the anime industry and fandom, because there wasn’t any other big name director to replace Miyazaki in the collective consciousness of America as “THE anime director,” or as Mother’s Basement on YouTube would say “the new Miyazaki,” until only recently...

Makoto Shinkai has been directing anime movies, arguably the SAME anime movie, since 1998 and has been a well known quantity in the fandom since his 2002 film Voices of a Distant Star. But something changed in 2016. His movies are almost always about young people in love separated by time, space, circumstance, or supernatural circumstance, but each iteration has refined his technique until one finally reached critical mass. Your Name became the most successful Japanese film of any kind in multiple countries, including China, and Japan’s second most successful anime film domestically behind Spirited Away. Didn’t even crack the top 10 in the U.S., though.

And no Oscar.

That said, Your Name was a resounding success in the United States, now surpassed by Shinkai’s newest film Weathering with You last year. Each pulling in $5 million in the box office is no small feat for anime films. Appearing more frequently in mainstream outlets may be slowly growing Shinkai into a household name which, matched with his own formula for successful films, could be the beginning of another single director legacy that will pull the industry up with it.

Now although we’ve seen less explosive releases since the children-focused anime movies around the turn of the millenia, it’s hard to describe our past decade of the 2010s as anything but a stateside renaissance for anime film. While the collective box office brought in by anime in the U.S. during the 2000s completely dwarfs that of the ‘90s, there weren’t all that many more films making it over. The real difference in the marketing and theater availability after Pokemon provided a proof of concept. Although there’s been roughly 50% more anime films coming out per year in Japan in the 2010s than the 2000s, the yearly average with theatrical releases in the states more than doubled between the decades.

And while TV anime are slowly being consolidated into a few select streaming services, more distribution companies have entered the industry to put anime films in theaters. Nowadays GKIDs, Fathom Events, and Eleven Arts have an almost monthly churn of screenings that actually top the daily box offices… on their Wednesday showings. Wednesday. Still, given the movies are airing in limited theaters and showings, the numbers are very good. Just last year Dragon Ball Super: Broly had the 3rd most successful box office for an anime film in the U.S. at $30 million.

Sounds like we’re in a pretty good place. Well, it’s all- I mean, it’s all relative. We have doubled the number of movies we license every year since last decade, but American theater-goers still only get the opportunity to watch maybe half of the anime films that come out every year in Japan. Meanwhile, there are an average of over 200 TV anime produced every year and, with rare exceptions, every single one is licensed and distributed in the United States across a number of streaming services. Next up, we’re going to talk about anime on TV and how it's grown into one of the largest, fastest, and most sophisticated localization industries in the world.

Bye!

[Lofi music]

Thank you for listening to Anime in America, presented by Crunchyroll. If you enjoyed this, please go to Crunchyroll.com/animeinamerica to start your 14-day free trial or just log on for some free, ad-supported anime.

Special thanks to Jerry Beck. You can find more of Jerry’s work over on cartoonresearch.com along with the history of Streamline Pictures written by Fred Patten, one of the co-founders.

This episode is hosted by me, Yedoye Travis, and you can find me on Instagram at ProfessorDoye or Twitter @YedoyeOT. This episode is researched and written by Peter Fobian, edited by Chris Lightbody, and produced by me, Braith Miller, Peter Fobian and Jesse Gouldsbury.

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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scotthogsett · 5 years

Text

Cut That Out

What is it?

This is a really cool book I found in the library, it is authored by the studio DR. ME and when I went on to their website the founders of the studio are Ryan Doyle & Mark Edwards.

The book is described as “The very best in contemporary collage by 50 of the world’s leading creative studios and graphic designers”. and further on Google books - “Cut That Out focuses on the compositions of 50 leading designers and studios from 15 different countries for whom collage has been the key to creating vibrant, effective work - among them Hort, Paul Sahre and atelier bingo.”

The book itself

The first thing I noticed was the cover of the book I has a really nice feel to the paper, it has small bumps and I think it adds a lot to the product itself when it can deliver something different in terms of quality and a unique take on how the book is a product.

It has small circle cut out on the front revealing small bursts of colour and then when you look inside a really nice illustration collage piece reveals itself and it looks really nice. The book makes a really nice introduction for itself and let’s the user appreciate the quality of the delivery of the content.

Cameron Searcy

Originally From Knoxville, Tenessee, Cameron Searcy is a graphic designer who lives and works in Seattle, Washington. His commercial work has seen him create pieces for large brands such as as Starbucks and Coca Cola alongside other more independent musical acts and venues.

Poster for MSSINGNO. Digital collage, 2015.

I really like this style of poster and I think that it’s a really good example of digital collage. the title is really interesting because it makes the person looking at it to put a little bit of effort to see what it reads as and it sort’ve goes against what a poster is meant to normally do which is get the attention of the audience and clearly give them the information. Here however there is a bit of give and take.

The unusual geometric visuals are really interesting and unusual in the way that they seem a bit more measured and considered in contrast to the rest of the elements on the page.

The inclusion of the statue is an odd move but I really like it. It always interests me when a modern style of graphic design dips into more ancient pieces of art because in this case it fits in really well and just becomes another visual element within the poster.

Poster for Bing & Ruth at SubCulture Arts Underground.

This is another cool example of a poster from Cameron Searcy in this poster he sticks to the geometric style we see in small doses in the other posters displayed in the book, but not as prevalent as in this poster here.

The black and white palette that pretty much dominate the poster brings a grunge and edgy quality to the poster and it is pretty nicely by the yellow used for the circle and it just makes the rest of the poster pop and stand out nicely.

The typeface (or lack thereof) is unusual and I probably wouldn’t suggest going this route but I understand the route he has went with here because the style he employs generally gives a sense chaos and projects more of an attitude rather than precision.

Damien Tran

Damien is a graphic designer and printmaker who works and lives in Berlin. He is the co-founder, along with Marion Jdanoff, of Palefrol, a micro-publishing company producing limited editions of artists’ books.

Poster for DAAU at Into the Great Wide Open festival

This is one of my favourite example from the book because the statue is rugged and looks like it isn’t in the best of shapes and I think it makes it look a lot more interesting to look at, I looked to see if there is any significance to the statue choice or any thought behind the effect on it.

The choice of blue really makes the image pop when it is in contrast with the grainy black and white statue and background. The acronym DAAU is a really simple and the audience can identify easily so the unusual layout chosen for the title is pretty creative but toes the line of being confusing really well.

Anna Peaker

Anna Peaker is a Leeds-based graphic artist who has worked on record covers, tape packages and posters for a range of musicians and record labels including The Tetleys, Soft Power Records and Too Pure Records. She has also had exhibitions in the UK and US.

Cassette Tape cover for ‘Life at the Planetarium’EP by Trogons

This is a really powerful Cassette cover and I love the monotone colours because it gets the balance perfect between it being to “out their” and easy on the eyes, I also think they would have a lots of conversations to discuss what the band wanted in terms of tone and feel.

The contrast between the purple colour and the unusual blue colour is really cool and they complement each other while matching each others tone and loo. I also really like the way both colours contrast with the black, it isn’t a pitch black as it appears to have a gradient over the top to give it a gritty and edgy look to it.

in terms of the different things on the cassette they all look like they are representations of something for the band or they reference certain things on the album (I couldn’t find anything) but I do think they all look really good, it doesn’t seem squashed with the amount of white space giving everything room to breathe as well as allowing every element to have prevalence on the page.

Robert Beatty

Kentucky based Robert Beatty is an artist and musician who creates wrk that transports the viewer to digital, otherworldly and often dystopian landscapes. Famed for his record design for Tame Impala, Beatty’s aesthetic stands out from the rest of his contemporaries.

Album cover for Currents by Tame Impala

I am really interested in album cover design and I feel like it has became it’s own sub category of design due to the way that you have your own style like any other designer but you have to mould it to suit the mood and feel of the band and maybe include elements that are conducive to the songs on the album.

For Tame Impala’s cover which has became famous as the music it represents, I love the way that Robert has dived into the trippy, ‘60s look and it meets Tame Impala’s music really well so I think it was a good match.

I love the colours used, it has the same ‘60s look as the elements on the page, I think they gel well together and suit the music really well, I usually don’t see the shading when it comes to a more flat design style but I think it works well here and helps to deliver the tone and feel.

Album cover for a Constant Moth by Lord RAJA.

Another great album cover that I like the look of and really delivers on the tone and feel of the artist and album, I think this cover has more of a ‘80s look to the colours and texture used on this cover, they are very complimentary of each other although they’re opposites in terms of the colour wheel.

I think the position and typeface of the logo is really cool and the use of making it the border as well is pretty cool but having certain element not adhering to the border is similar to what is normal for Roberts style.

Overall I really enjoyed this book and it had a lot of great example of collage style designers, the designers and pieces they chose to showcase all looked well, it was hard to choose which ones I would talk about.

I think it would be better if they took some time to discuss the significance of the piece and what the designer was aiming to do or what they were hoping to achieve with the art so that their decisions had context and reason.

#IXD304

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