I thought a lot about this as soon as I read Gabe's statement about how the show is live every week, and how it needs to pull off something huge every time and cetera. And to your point about having it taped every week, and the first seasons that you can watch on Netflix and everything, I just think it's amazing what SNL has become as compared with what it started out as. It seems like in the early days, it was a send-up of the dying art of live TV as spectacle, the sort of George Burns and Gracie Allen type thing. You can see this manifest in the older episodes where they have these old guards of live TV on the show, trying to interact with a show that mocks what they once did with cheap sets, intentionally poor production values, and absurdist humor. Take a look at the old Milton Berle episode, where he should be a show-biz legend able to pull off a show like that in his sleep, instead he's awkward, crass, unfunny, borderline racist, and pretty openly hostile with a lot of the cast. So what was my point? Right, that SNL seems like a herculean feat now, but I suppose it is only in the context of now, and that the live TV spectacle was once more common, and what supported a lot of the original mockery on the show. But SNL is a beast unto itself, as Chris Trash mentions, so there's really no way to change. Pity SNL, unable to change and so unable to get back to being a hip television alternative to the status quo. I mean, they once had Sun Ra as the musical guest!
I'm just upset because apparently, this is the new Stravinsky. One day a graduate thesis will be written about how Brokencyde helped to usher in the post-post-post-modern era of music, and the riots that ensued on the Videogum comment boards.
You've got to see them in the theater! I can still recall seeing The New World, and during that shot where the boat approaches the swamps of Virginia, and the overture from The Rheingold is playing, oh that's something marvelous when writ large across the sky, my friend.
I say existential crises because, as I realized watching the trailer, I am in a much different place than I was when The Thin Red Line came out. And this one seems to be such an all-encompassing film (which, honestly, other Malick films certainly were as well, but none of them were so grounded in contemporary life as this one seems to be) that I'm actually nervous about where it will take me.
Also, I think that I'm investing far too much in a film. And yes, Thin Red Line is my favorite.
Yes! Just saw that on Kottke. Ever since The Thin Red Line took a black cat to my frontal lobe, I've been a die-hard Malick defender, which can get difficult sometimes.
But Tree of Life, I almost feel like I will need to watch this in the comfort of my own home, because I like to have my existential crises on my own time, thank you very much.
I'm so glad she escaped from the giant at the top of the beanstalk, for now I get to watch her play with my head on my hand, smiling like a fool. Oh it is so good.
I was completely surprised by how much I liked this song when I first heard it just a few days ago (I am a slow child when it comes to the internet). Love how natural it sounds, as if they just picked up the guitar and happened to drop a catchy riff, like it was there the entire time.
But I agree with furries above, this video is not natural. I just have a hard time believing this is a day in the life of these three. Unlike, say, any given P(uff) (Daddy) Diddy (Dirty Money) video, with the jets flying over Times Square and the yachts and the models and the champagne, that's the believable stuff right there.
I didn't know they made a movie of Norwegian Wood! I love that book! And in the Murakami canon, it will definitely lend itself to a film adaptation the easiest.
And as I learned from the There Will Be Blood tunes, I will wait to listen to these songs in context of the film, because it usually adds the proper dimension to really "get" them.
Tis the truth. I was having a conversation with a co-worker at a holiday office party many moons ago, and she asked the age-old question of which superpower you would want to have: flight or invisibility. I chose flight, because that is a fucking gift! When I fly in an airplane I'm so excited I can barely sit still, and I spend the entire time staring out the window like a baby because you are 30,000 feet in the air! How could you give that up?
But then she said no, I was lying. That we would all choose invisibility because then we could sneak around and watch celebrities have sex with each other. So there is plenty of allure to the cult of celebrity.
You're right! Oh curse the day! And excellent eyes, deafgoeff. I was too busy with my traditional dance of jubilation to read anything but "free" and "gorillaz" and "album."
Do you think Santa Claus is a member of the fan club? Maybe I can ask him for a download...there's still a chance!
How many times do we have re-watch Hitchcock's favorite plot painfully acted by aging demi-gods? At least Hitchcock got the humor right, and most importantly in his films he made it extremely hard for the unwilling hero to actually kill or even temporarily hurt the bad guys. Give me Jimmy Stewart awkwardly running away from two nameless thugs over Johnny Depp destroying the Russian Embassy with one well-placed bullet any day of the week.
Does anyone else find that as they get older, the ultra-serious or suspenseful films from the old days have actually become quite funny? I find myself laughing often at Hitchcock films, and even plenty of Kubrick as well. Why do I find Eyes Wide Shut to be kind of hilarious now?
An iPad ALBUM?!?!? Now I've heard of everything. But the album better not be just a bunch of audio of Damon tapping different apps on his new iPad, giggling and saying to himself "oh wow, this is so cool, this really IS gonna revolutionize how we compute!"
I kid! Of course I'm excited, I even preemptively voted it album of the year in the gummies!
Thanks you two. And you know, I've been in and out of a few bands that are still playing in some respect, and a part of me wants one of them to make it REALLY big just so that I can be the Pete Best for a new generation, as if I would derive some perverse pleasure out of being King of the Almosts.
Wait...this is my therapist's office, isn't it?
I say go for it, Colin! But be warned: now that Spider-Man is obliterating the common people's expectations for the Broadway musical, you'll need to step up the theatrics just a touch. Do you think the Decemberists could do a musical about a meteor destroying earth? And have the theater actually be destroyed at the end of the first act?
I dunno, it seems like the movies are finally starting to be a bit more faithful to how completely bonkers the original cartoon was. Watching that old stuff with the benefit of critical faculties, I'm not sure how I enjoyed it at all, though the intense Lucky Charms sugar high no doubt helped.
Yeah, I was thinking as I saw a list on AV Club or some other blog, that the year end lists this year are all over the board, and that's pretty exceptional. Aside from a few standbys, namely Kanye at #1, the rest of the top tens for any list are pretty divergent. I think it's great. It feels like it might just be the fruition of all the digital-delivery hype, that we now have the avenues for many different bands at many different experience/exposure/economic levels to have music heard by a lot of people, so when these lists come out you realize how much is available - enough for anyone to find something special.
This is the first time in a while that my luddite heart is being slightly warmed by the glow of the computer screen.
I agree. That album was the best of the year for me, with Joanna Newsom right on its heels. As strange as this sounds, it felt like a great leap forward for the cartoon band, and a great leap away from all the cheeky gimmicks that came with them in the early days; almost no filler, and just a great batch of songs. And with all the Gorillaz related posts on here, I'm surprised it didn't make the list at all. :(
The more I hear from Best Coast (or I guess just Bethany Cosentino) the more it reinforces that she has (to my ears at least) a real gift for melody. I like it.
Sure. It'll be like this Agree/Disagree split 7" I have. It's a Japanese import. Red vinyl. Limited edition. A black-out drunk Kevin Ayers is heard agreeing in the background of Side A(gree).
I WANT THIS! Damn U Facebook. But I can still proclaim my everlasting love for Under Pressure, a great Karaoke song if you can get a good partner up there with you. And if you have enough people, definitely do One Sweet Day.
My first inclination was to remark at how good his voice still sounds, that he hasn't missed a beat since the good old days, but really there is no reason it shouldn't sound good. The mythology around him has built it up to seem like In The Aeroplane was some lost relic from hundreds of years ago, but it was only just a bit more than ten years ago. He's not an old man, and he sounds as healthy and vigorous as he should be. It's like he was in some incepted fourth layer dream world, and now he's come back to be a young man again. Which is great. If it makes him happy, and it will obviously make a lot of other people very happy, do it to it Jeff Magnum. Welcome back, and hopefully you can make some new music soon.
Yay! The art of a fine mixtape never dies. Looking forward to this!
Sort of on the subject of tapes, with some folks on the indie scene releasing things exclusively as tapes, I wonder if I am at the right age to feel about that as the people back in the day felt about Vinyl coming back in fashion. I see something released as a tape, and all I can think is "I got rid of anything that can possibly play one of those so many years ago, there is no way I'm going back down that path." But in, say, 20 years, are we going to have Jack White releasing just 5 cassettes ringed in silver that you have to drop from a height of 10 feet to release the playable tape of a remastered Elephant, and the subsequent bidding wars on the post-2012 Ebay will ignite another internet riot? And am I going to be preaching to grandkids in the Republic of New Chicago about how everything just sounds better when listened through a tape deck?
Anyway, Happy Weekend!
Hey now. Be careful whose warrior gene you're tickling, or I just might go ahead and say that Sufjan Stevens is overrated, and that Kanye West is a big baby.
I couldn't agree more, very well said. When Skip James went in to record Hard Time Killing Floor Blues (among others), and they let him use a much nicer guitar for the recordings, he didn't say "no thanks" and kept using his crappy guitar, he used the nicer one.
Haha, what?!!? Snoop playing the princely bachelor party? Damn is it good to be the future king.
And if Snoop is doing the Princes a solid like this, the Queen should make him an honorary Knight, or an MBE at least.
When the song started and it was just the David Lynch-y synths and her voice filtered through the fifth and sixth and a half dimensions, I was worried. I thought it sounded out of sync, that her gift of melody wasn't quite there, that somehow it wouldn't work. But ah, the reggae chug and vocal samples put all my fears to bed once they came in, and suddenly made so much sense of everything.
I don't think you tried to do this, but the emoticon in front of the Black Keys is great. Black Keys isn't the #8 album of the year, it's the #coooooooool album of the year, daddy-o.
God, a year is a long time. If you had asked, without giving me the benefit of Google, whether Beach House, Vampire Weekend, Yeasayer, or MGMT released albums in 2010, I would have replied with much confidence that no, they did not, and all of those came out in 2009.
Am I getting unstuck in time? Poh-toh-wheet? As befits the endless listing of our time: so it goes.
I like it! But I am a sucker for guitar lines coated with just the right amount of fuzz and weaving a counter-melodic line for just the right length of time without delving into Clapton-wankery.
Sony Music is drunk with power! Who will Facebook stalk the watchmen?!
But really, even though I have only a poet's understanding of the law (ie, no understanding whatsoever), this sounds like it cannot possibly be legal on Sony Music's part. Unless they own blogspot or something?
Comments