My new book, Connected, Or, What It Means To Live in the Network Society, is now in print! (Amazon.com doesn’t seem to have it yet, but I have received my own copies, and they now have it at my campus bookstore). It’s a book about cyberculture and globalization, in which I use science fiction novels as my main sources of social theory. The book discusses all sorts of things from copyright piracy to psychedelic drugs to evolutionary psychology to ubiquitous surveillance and corporate control to the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle.
I am hoping at some point to have the entire text of the book available online; I’m still negotiating with my press, which is willing to let me do this in principle, but would like for me to wait until the book has been for sale for six months or a year.
My new book, Connected, Or, What It Means To Live in the Network Society, is now in print! (Amazon.com doesn’t seem to have it yet, but I have received my own copies, and they now have it at my campus bookstore). It’s a book about cyberculture and globalization, in which I use science fiction novels as my main sources of social theory. The book discusses all sorts of things from copyright piracy to psychedelic drugs to evolutionary psychology to ubiquitous surveillance and corporate control to the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle.
I am hoping at some point to have the entire text of the book available online; I’m still negotiating with my press, which is willing to let me do this in principle, but would like for me to wait until the book has been for sale for six months or a year.
Kill Bill is gorgeous and ice-cold. Pure formalism. Where Tarantino’s earlier films were filled with humanity, with unforgettable characters and genius dialog, Kill Bill reduces these to an absolute minimum. Nothing is allowed to interfere with the pure kinetic beauty of the fight scenes. That is to say, Kill Bill is to Pulp Fiction as Kubrick is to Howard Hawks. In fairness, Kill Bill never feels anal or constipated the way all of Kubrick’s films do. Nor is Tarantino doggedly repetitive, the way Kubrick insists on being.
All the set-ups, all the elements of cinematic form in Kill Bill are fantastic: the decors, the camera angles, the editing of the fight scenes are so brilliant that they reveal in comparison how lame and unimaginative nearly all other English-language action cinema is. Even Lord of the Rings, powerful and lyrical as it is in bringing to life its (admittedly) dubious source material, can’t hold a candle to Kill Bill in terms of sheer visual inventiveness.
But Kill Bill‘s formal mastery comes at a price. Near the very start of the film we read the title: “Revenge is always best served cold” (which Tarantino, with characteristic cinephile in-joke wit, tags as an “old Klingon proverb”). And this story of Uma Thurman’s revenge is indeed served cold. The film is so utterly devoid of emotion it feels reptilian. (Perhaps I am slandering reptiles?). The fight scenes are awe-inspiring, but they have absolutely none of the sense of fun that makes Tarantino’s models, the Hong Kong fight scenes, so exhilarating. Nor is there any of the sense of fatality that imbues Leone’s (and others’) spaghetti Westerns, another obvious source of Tarantino’s iconography.
Even Tarantino’s racial obsessions are cut to the bare minimum. Uma Thurman gets the people of color out of the way in Volume One, killing Vivica Fox and Lucy Liu; in Volume 2, to be released next year, she will get to go after the white villains, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, and David Carradine (unless Carradine is a fake Asian, as he was in the frequently-Tarantino-referenced Kung Fu).
So Tarantino has proved that he is as brilliant a visual director as he is a writer/director; but at what cost?
Kill Bill is gorgeous and ice-cold. Pure formalism. Where Tarantino’s earlier films were filled with humanity, with unforgettable characters and genius dialog, Kill Bill reduces these to an absolute minimum. Nothing is allowed to interfere with the pure kinetic beauty of the fight scenes. That is to say, Kill Bill is to Pulp Fiction as Kubrick is to Howard Hawks. In fairness, Kill Bill never feels anal or constipated the way all of Kubrick’s films do. Nor is Tarantino doggedly repetitive, the way Kubrick insists on being.
All the set-ups, all the elements of cinematic form in Kill Bill are fantastic: the decors, the camera angles, the editing of the fight scenes are so brilliant that they reveal in comparison how lame and unimaginative nearly all other English-language action cinema is. Even Lord of the Rings, powerful and lyrical as it is in bringing to life its (admittedly) dubious source material, can’t hold a candle to Kill Bill in terms of sheer visual inventiveness.
As for the citations and allusions: I got the sense that nearly everything in the film was sampled from one or another obscure samurai or martial arts film that I don’t remember or (more likely) haven’t seen. The effect was like the best hip hop: the film is rich in its web of references, and this works even if you don’t know what the references are to.
But Kill Bill‘s formal mastery and meta-cinematic referentiality comes at a price. Near the very start of the film we read the title: “Revenge is always best served cold” (which Tarantino, with characteristic cinephile in-joke wit, tags as an “old Klingon proverb”). And this story of Uma Thurman’s revenge is indeed served cold. The film is so utterly devoid of emotion it feels reptilian. (Perhaps I am slandering reptiles?). The fight scenes are awe-inspiring, but they have absolutely none of the sense of fun that makes Tarantino’s models, the Hong Kong fight scenes, so exhilarating. Nor is there any of the sense of fatality that imbues Leone’s (and others’) spaghetti Westerns, another obvious source of Tarantino’s iconography.
Even Tarantino’s racial obsessions are cut to the bare minimum. Uma Thurman gets the people of color out of the way in Volume One, killing Vivica Fox and Lucy Liu; in Volume 2, to be released next year, she will get to go after the white villains, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, and David Carradine (unless Carradine is a fake Asian, as he was in the frequently-Tarantino-referenced Kung Fu).
So Tarantino has proved that he is as brilliant a visual director as he is a writer/director; but at what cost?
Aki Kaurismaki‘s most recent film to date, The Man Without A Past (2002), is as good as anything he’s done. I’ve gradually come to realize that Kaurismaki’s films are inverted melodramas. That is to say, they are just as stylized and anti-naturalistic, just as reliant on music and decor, and just as socially critical as the melodramas of Douglas Sirk or anybody else; only Kaurismaki’s films are stylized by restraint, where traditional melodramas are stylized by excess. Kaurismaki’s deadpan minimalism – the way the characters are stoic and restrained, and do not indulge in any emotional displays; but also the way the scenes are framed, and the way the camera lingers on desolate details, or pauses while a melancholy song is being sung, but elides determinate action almost completely – all this formal restraint is almost Bressonian, although Kaurismaki is a humanist, and has none of Bresson’s spiritual severity.
The Man Without A Past is about a man (Markku Peltola) who suffers amnesia after he is attacked, and beaten severely on the head, by a trio of punks. He slowly and patiently rebuilds his life, although he has nothing. That’s just about it. As in more conventional melodrama, the characters are crushed and betrayed by social forces beyond their control — here, as usual in Kaurismaki, by the bureaucratic uncaringness of the state, and the ruthlessness of big Capital. But in this film, as in Floating Clouds and a very few others, Kaurismaki even allows himself a bit of hope at the end, which would be sentimental were it not so wry and understated. (Well, in a sense it is sentimental — this is a sort of melodrama, as I said, rather than Bressonian tragedy — but it is an entirely justified, “earned” sentimentality).
The film is devoid of the gorgeous youth you see in Hollywood movies. The female lead and love interest, as so often in Kaurismaki’s films, is played by the utterly sublime Kati Outinen, who has never looked so worn and haggard. (She’s older now – a decade older than she was in Match Factory Girl – and it shows).
Great soundtrack: the music is a mixture of 50s-ish rock (Finnish imitations) and more traditional melodies; usually a song is introduced diegetically, and then continues non-diegetically, which was neat.
Aki Kaurismaki‘s most recent film to date, The Man Without A Past (2002), is as good as anything he’s done. I’ve gradually come to realize that Kaurismaki’s films are inverted melodramas. That is to say, they are just as stylized and anti-naturalistic, just as reliant on music and decor, and just as socially critical as the melodramas of Douglas Sirk or anybody else; only Kaurismaki’s films are stylized by restraint, where traditional melodramas are stylized by excess. Kaurismaki’s deadpan minimalism – the way the characters are stoic and restrained, and do not indulge in any emotional displays; but also the way the scenes are framed, and the way the camera lingers on desolate details, or pauses while a melancholy song is being sung, but elides determinate action almost completely – all this formal restraint is almost Bressonian, although Kaurismaki is a humanist, and has none of Bresson’s spiritual severity.
The Man Without A Past is about a man (Markku Peltola) who suffers amnesia after he is attacked, and beaten severely on the head, by a trio of punks. He slowly and patiently rebuilds his life, although he has nothing. That’s just about it. As in more conventional melodrama, the characters are crushed and betrayed by social forces beyond their control — here, as usual in Kaurismaki, by the bureaucratic uncaringness of the state, and the ruthlessness of big Capital. But in this film, as in Floating Clouds and a very few others, Kaurismaki even allows himself a bit of hope at the end, which would be sentimental were it not so wry and understated. (Well, in a sense it is sentimental — this is a sort of melodrama, as I said, rather than Bressonian tragedy — but it is an entirely justified, “earned” sentimentality).
The film is devoid of the gorgeous youth you see in Hollywood movies. The female lead and love interest, as so often in Kaurismaki’s films, is played by the utterly sublime Kati Outinen, who has never looked so worn and haggard. (She’s older now – a decade older than she was in Match Factory Girl – and it shows).
Great soundtrack: the music is a mixture of 50s-ish rock (Finnish imitations) and more traditional melodies; usually a song is introduced diegetically, and then continues non-diegetically, which was neat.
Brief notes on a few things I’ve been listening to lately.
Brief notes on a few things I’ve been listening to lately:
–Missy Elliott’s new single “Pass That Dutch” is the best thing out there right now, aside from Outkast. I’m not sure it is quite as brilliant and innovative as her last two monster hit singles, “Get Your Freak On” and “Work It,” but the Timbaland rhythm is irresistible, the monster bass is intense, and I’m still in awe as to how Missy manages to be so ecstatic and so down-to-earth at the same time.
–I pretty much like the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where Is the Love.” The sentiments, though noble, are too sappy; but it’s catchy and plaintive in a way I like. I’m not sure what I think about the rest of the album Elephunk, from which the single is drawn: it’s really catchy, beautifully produced pop, but I have the uneasy feeling that there’s something icky behind it all, as if Black Eyed Peas were saying that the answer to the negativity and nihilism of gangsta rap is upbeat party music for frat boys (not to deny that gangsta rap itself is all too often just party music for frat boys at this point).
–Hitman Sammy Sam’s “Step Daddy,” is hilarious in a sick sort of way; he’s yelling at his woman’s child to behave, and she isn’t listening; the chorus is a call-and-response, “you ain’t my daddy”–“shut up!”
The short stories in Jeffrey Thomas’ Punktown are eerie, and creepy, and sometimes strangely affecting. This is science fiction, set on another world, with many sentient species in addition to human beings; but with an emotional tone that is closer to horror. (The author’s note at the back of the book defines Thomas’ genre as “emotive dark fantasy”). Tone and feeling are more important than plot; the stories’ moods range from gentle melancholy to outright disgust and self-loathing on the part of the protagonists. Not all the stories in the volume are equally powerful, but the best ones are genuinely disturbing: such as “The Reflections of Ghosts,” about an artist whose medium consists of mentally crippled clones of himself that he sells to rich patrons to be tortured and killed, and “The Library of Shadows,” about a cop who has a chip in his brain that preserves all his memories in perfect and complete detail, so that he cannot stop remembering all the grotesque and sickening murders he has investigated. Strong stuff, all the more so in that Thomas does not revel in the horrors he invents, the way Poe and Lovecraft arguably did.
The short stories in Jeffrey Thomas’ Punktown are eerie, and creepy, and sometimes strangely affecting. This is science fiction, set on another world, with many sentient species in addition to human beings; but with an emotional tone that is closer to horror. (The author’s note at the back of the book defines Thomas’ genre as “emotive dark fantasy”). Tone and feeling are more important than plot; the stories’ moods range from gentle melancholy to outright disgust and self-loathing on the part of the protagonists. Not all the stories in the volume are equally powerful, but the best ones are genuinely disturbing: such as “The Reflections of Ghosts,” about an artist whose medium consists of mentally crippled clones of himself that he sells to rich patrons to be tortured and killed, and “The Library of Shadows,” about a cop who has a chip in his brain that preserves all his memories in perfect and complete detail, so that he cannot stop remembering all the grotesque and sickening murders he has investigated. Strong stuff, all the more so in that Thomas does not revel in the horrors he invents, the way Poe and Lovecraft arguably did.
Quite wonderfully, the conceptual artist Jonathon Keats (great name) has copyrighted his brain, and now is selling futures contracts on his neurons (via Die, Puny Humans). Since copyright holds for 70 years after the death of the creator, Keats is offering the rights to use his neurons for any computational purpose the buyer may wish, during that extended period. You buy now, and cash in when Keats actually dies (which may not be for quite some time, as he is 32). (The actual text of the IPO is available here).
This is brilliant on so many levels. In terms of “intellectual property,” and the commodification of art and intellect; in terms of what personal identity might mean, after death; in terms of the expectations of artificial intelligence research and interfacing neurons with silicon chips. Keats poses all these issues in a quite hilarious and provocative way (even though, or rather precisely because, Keats insists that he wants to be taken seriously).
Quite wonderfully, the conceptual artist Jonathon Keats (great name) has copyrighted his brain, and now is selling futures contracts on his neurons (via Die, Puny Humans). Since copyright holds for 70 years after the death of the creator, Keats is offering the rights to use his neurons for any computational purpose the buyer may wish, during that extended period. You buy now, and cash in when Keats actually dies (which may not be for quite some time, as he is 32). (The actual text of the IPO is available here).
This is brilliant on so many levels. In terms of “intellectual property,” and the commodification of art and intellect; in terms of what personal identity might mean, after death; and in terms of the expectations of artificial intelligence research and interfacing neurons with silicon chips. Keats poses all these issues in a quite hilarious and provocative way (even though, or rather precisely because, Keats insists that he wants to be taken seriously).
Since it’s only $10 for a million neurons, I sent in a check, requesting neurons located in the artist’s anterior cingulate cortex
A Place So Foreign, Cory Doctorow‘s new collection of short stories, is always charming, and sometimes profound. In these stories as in his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which I blogged previously), Doctorow achieves a breezy and low-affect style that nonetheless turns out to be sneakily incisive, making points or suggesting emotional implications which almost sneak by you before you notice them. Some of the stories are simply entertainments, but several of them have real power. My favorites were: “Return to Pleasure Island,” which combines Doctorow’s Disney/theme park obsession with a strange updating of Pinocchio in a way that was both creepily disturbing and rather moving; “To Market, To Market:,” a satricial piece in which 11-year-olds, have marketing strategies and use branding and product endorsements to secure their status in the school playground; and “0wnz0red,” which takes the privatization of “intellectual property” to its logical conclusion. I also had a warm spot for “The Super Man and the Bugout,” which imagines a somewhat hapless Jewish Superman with left-wing sympathies.
A Place So Foreign, Cory Doctorow‘s new collection of short stories, is always charming, and sometimes profound. In these stories as in his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which I blogged previously), Doctorow achieves a breezy and low-affect style that nonetheless turns out to be sneakily incisive, making points or suggesting emotional implications which almost sneak by you before you notice them. Some of the stories are simply entertainments, but several of them have real power. My favorites were: “Return to Pleasure Island,” which combines Doctorow’s Disney/theme park obsession with a strange updating of Pinocchio in a way that was both creepily disturbing and rather moving; “To Market, To Market:,” a satricial piece in which 11-year-olds, have marketing strategies and use branding and product endorsements to secure their status in the school playground; and “0wnz0red,” which takes the privatization of “intellectual property” to its logical conclusion. I also had a warm spot for “The Super Man and the Bugout,” which imagines a somewhat hapless Jewish Superman with left-wing sympathies.
Tonight, at the Little Theater, I saw two reels of Andy Warhol “Screen Tests” from the mid-1960s. Each reel had ten Screen Tests; the subjects included Lou Reed, Mama Cass, Baby Jane Holzer, Salvador Dali, Susan Sontag, and Nico, as well as many people I hadn’t heard of.
The idea behind the screen tests was simple. Everyone who visited Warhol’s factory was asked to sit still in front of a silent, black and white film camera for three minutes, the time of a single reel. (The reels were then supposed to be screened at silent speed, 18fps instead of 24fps; unfortunately they were unable to do this tonight).
It’s hard to sit still for three minutes, doing nothing. Some of the subjects try their best to sit still (though they fail). Others make faces, or otherwise mug for the camera. Baby Jane brushes her teeth. Dali is suspended upside down. Nico is subjected to flash cuts and unmotivated zooms (such as one finds in Warhol movies of 1966 or so, such as Chelsea Girls, which she was also in); whereas for everyone else, the camera is stationary, one continuous shot.
Watching the screen tests is a strange experience. It’s hard to watch a face for three minutes, in silence, without any action taking place on the screen. No matter how hard you concentrate, your attention wanders (unless, I suppose, you have trained yourself through Buddhist meditation to avoid this wandering). It’s almost like, the more rapt your attention, the more you catch yourself drifting away. The faces on screen invite such rapt attention, because they promise everything, but give so little away. What do outsides tell us about insides? These “portraits” never show us enough. We keep on thinking that we will penetrate to the essence of the person on screen, but all we get is vacancy: an emptiness that is equivalent to the emptiness of the subjective experience of sitting in front of a camera for three minutes, doing nothing, expressing nothing. Everyone is the same, in a certain sense: there’s a lot of self-conscious, self-reflexive posing in awareness of the camera, and this is oddly impersonal, identical from one person to the next. What’s different from one person to the next, on the contrary, is unconscious, or perhaps absent altogether. All of the subjects of these Screen Tests are empty, but everyone’s emptiness is unique. Your emptiness, not your positive identity, is what makes you singular in the world. An identity isn’t singular; everybody has one. But modes of absence cannot be replicated from one person to the next, or even in the same person from one moment to the next.
Tonight, at the Little Theater, I saw two reels of Andy Warhol “Screen Tests” from the mid-1960s. Each reel had ten Screen Tests; the subjects included Lou Reed, Mama Cass, Baby Jane Holzer, Salvador Dali, Susan Sontag, and Nico, as well as many people I hadn’t heard of.
The idea behind the screen tests was simple. Everyone who visited Warhol’s factory was asked to sit still in front of a silent, black and white film camera for three minutes, the time of a single reel. (The reels were then supposed to be screened at silent speed, 18fps instead of 24fps; unfortunately they were unable to do this tonight).
It’s hard to sit still for three minutes, doing nothing. Some of the subjects try their best to sit still (though they fail). Others make faces, or otherwise mug for the camera. Baby Jane brushes her teeth. Dali is suspended upside down. Nico is subjected to flash cuts and unmotivated zooms (such as one finds in Warhol movies of 1966 or so, such as Chelsea Girls, which she was also in); whereas for everyone else, the camera is stationary, one continuous shot.
Watching the screen tests is a strange experience. It’s hard to watch a face for three minutes, in silence, without any action taking place on the screen. No matter how hard you concentrate, your attention wanders (unless, I suppose, you have trained yourself through Buddhist meditation to avoid this wandering). It’s almost like, the more rapt your attention, the more you catch yourself drifting away. The faces on screen invite such rapt attention, because they promise everything, but give so little away. What do outsides tell us about insides? These “portraits” never show us enough. We keep on thinking that we will penetrate to the essence of the person on screen, but all we get is vacancy: an emptiness that is equivalent to the emptiness of the subjective experience of sitting in front of a camera for three minutes, doing nothing, expressing nothing. Everyone is the same, in a certain sense: there’s a lot of self-conscious, self-reflexive posing in awareness of the camera, and this is oddly impersonal, identical from one person to the next. What’s different from one person to the next, on the contrary, is unconscious, or perhaps absent altogether. All of the subjects of these Screen Tests are empty, but everyone’s emptiness is unique. Your emptiness, not your positive identity, is what makes you singular in the world. An identity isn’t singular; everybody has one. But modes of absence cannot be replicated from one person to the next, or even in the same person from one moment to the next.
From an article by Daniel Akst in the business section of today’s New York Times:
Internet music sharing represents a profound assault on the very idea of intellectual property. Today it’s music, but tomorrow it will be movies and then books, and the justifications will be the same. The implications should be obvious to producers of intellectual property, but the outcry has been muffled in part because universities have come to own and operate so much of the nation’s intellectual life.
I am inclined to say, this is precisely the point. The notion of “intellectual property” is an egregiously bad one, and needs to be overturned. Congress will never, on its own, overturn the laws that define and govern “intellectual property”, because they get too many contributions from the industries that “own” such “intellectual property.” The widespread public feeling that there is nothing wrong with file sharing, and a public outcry at the spectacle of grandmothers and 12 year olds being sued by the RIAA, is the one thing that might cause a change in the laws.
Copyrighted material is not private property. The assimilation of copyright to property is itself deplorable; but the Supreme Court ruled, as recently as 1985, that copyright infringement and theft are two completely separate things, as I have already noted in these pages.
The whole notion of “intellectual property” is an extension of this false claim that copyrighted material is private property. Indeed, it represents a massive privatization of what used to be a common good. As such, it is anti-democratic, anti-freedom, and benefiting big corporations rather than the great mass of people.
The notion of “intellectual property” is incompatible with the freedom of ideas.
Limited copyright – which emphatically does not mean property ownership – was originally instituted in order to encourage innovation, by giving creators financial rewards for such innovation. But the virtually unlimited copyright laws of today in fact stifle innovation, since they prevent the reuse of previously existing cultural material.
Akst notes (correctly) that “If you live on an academic paycheck – instead of royalties – then the free electronic distribution of your scholarly works is probably preferable to having a university press print 500 copies bound directly for the deepest library stacks.” This is indeed my own situation, which of course could explain why my own self-interest is not tied up with preserving draconian notions of copyright.
But when Akst says that copyright is ” the legal concept that is essential to freedom and prosperity in the information age,” he is just engaging in doublespeak.
He ends his article with a terrifyingly totalitarian view of how to manage the Internet: “Sooner or later we will need to know who everyone on the Internet is, and who confirmed their identities. Internet access providers who admit unauthenticated users will have to be shut out, even if that means shutting out whole countries.”
Preserving “freedom” for corporations (who have benefited for a century from the inane legal fiction that they are “individuals”) means denying freedom to all those individuals who don’t happen to be wealthy corporations.
From an article by Daniel Akst in the business section of today’s New York Times:
Internet music sharing represents a profound assault on the very idea of intellectual property. Today it’s music, but tomorrow it will be movies and then books, and the justifications will be the same. The implications should be obvious to producers of intellectual property, but the outcry has been muffled in part because universities have come to own and operate so much of the nation’s intellectual life.
I am inclined to say, this is precisely the point. The notion of “intellectual property” is an egregiously bad one, and needs to be overturned. Congress will never, on its own, overturn the laws that define and govern “intellectual property”, because they get too many contributions from the industries that “own” such “intellectual property.” The widespread public feeling that there is nothing wrong with file sharing, and a public outcry at the spectacle of grandmothers and 12 year olds being sued by the RIAA, is the one thing that might cause a change in the laws.
Copyrighted material is not private property. The assimilation of copyright to property is itself deplorable; but the Supreme Court ruled, as recently as 1985, that copyright infringement and theft are two completely separate things, as I have already noted in these pages.
The whole notion of “intellectual property” is an extension of this false claim that copyrighted material is private property. Indeed, it represents a massive privatization of what used to be a common good. As such, it is anti-democratic, anti-freedom, and benefiting big corporations rather than the great mass of people.
The notion of “intellectual property” is incompatible with the freedom of ideas.
Limited copyright – which emphatically does not mean property ownership – was originally instituted in order to encourage innovation, by giving creators financial rewards for such innovation. But the virtually unlimited copyright laws of today in fact stifle innovation, since they prevent the reuse of previously existing cultural material.
Akst notes (correctly) that “If you live on an academic paycheck – instead of royalties – then the free electronic distribution of your scholarly works is probably preferable to having a university press print 500 copies bound directly for the deepest library stacks.” This is indeed my own situation, which of course could explain why my own self-interest is not tied up with preserving draconian notions of copyright.
But when Akst says that copyright is ” the legal concept that is essential to freedom and prosperity in the information age,” he is just engaging in doublespeak.
He ends his article with a terrifyingly totalitarian view of how to manage the Internet: “Sooner or later we will need to know who everyone on the Internet is, and who confirmed their identities. Internet access providers who admit unauthenticated users will have to be shut out, even if that means shutting out whole countries.”
Preserving “freedom” for corporations (who have benefited for a century from the inane legal fiction that they are “individuals”) means denying freedom to all those individuals who don’t happen to be wealthy corporations.
Sometimes my tastes do coincide with popular opinion. I think that the new Outkast double CD is sensational. Outkast has always been eclectic in the best sense of the term: they mix hiphop with earlier strains of black music (soul, r&b) as well as with (both black and white) rock ‘n’ roll. Their last album before this one, Stankonia, was something of a peak – as close as popular music gets to a perfect rush. The new album doesn’t try to outdo Stankonia, but instead pushes onto new paths. Well, Big Boi’s disc, Speakerboxx, sounds to me like more of the same (not that there’s anything wrong with that). But Andre’s CD, The Love Below, is wildly experimental and strange – and yet, for all its risks, a complete success. Musically, it explodes in all sorts of directions – from lite jazz to hard rock to a sort of drum ‘n’ bass (!) stylization of Coltrane’s stylization of My Favorite Things. And it’s something of a concept album as well, being all about love. It moves from Dre’s conversation with God (who turns out to be a woman!) about how he just wants someone to love, through mounting excitement, and lust, the morning after, love, disappointment, terror at the prospect of giving one’s self away to another. Along the way, there are love songs, lust songs, seduction songs, out-of-love songs, hate songs, let’s-make-up-and-get-back-together songs, masturbation songs, even sort of a rap confessional. I’m not sure what more to say… It’s one of those rare albums that escapes, or squirms outside of, all the categories that I am usually so ready to tag nearly anything I listen to with – and thereby reduces me to incoherent babbling.
Sometimes my tastes do coincide with popular opinion. I think that the new Outkast double CD is sensational. Outkast has always been eclectic in the best sense of the term: they mix hiphop with earlier strains of black music (soul, r&b) as well as with (both black and white) rock ‘n’ roll. Their last album before this one, Stankonia, was something of a peak – as close as popular music gets to a perfect rush. The new album doesn’t try to outdo Stankonia, but instead pushes onto new paths. Well, Big Boi’s disc, Speakerboxx, sounds to me like more of the same (not that there’s anything wrong with that – and the album is full of wonderful little details, like the female chorus of “Ghettomusick” that doesn’t come in until several verses into the song; and see clap clap blog for a fabulous discussion of “The Rooster” that really gets inside the song in the way a non-musician like myself never could). But Andre’s CD, The Love Below, is wildly experimental and strange – and yet, for all its risks, a complete success. Musically, it explodes in all sorts of directions – from lite jazz to hard rock to a sort of drum ‘n’ bass (!) stylization of Coltrane’s stylization of My Favorite Things. And it’s something of a concept album as well, being all about love. It moves from Dre’s conversation with God (who turns out to be a woman!) about how he just wants someone to love, through mounting excitement, and lust, the morning after, love, disappointment, terror at the prospect of giving one’s self away to another. Along the way, there are love songs, lust songs, seduction songs, out-of-love songs, hate songs, let’s-make-up-and-get-back-together-songs, masturbation songs, even sort of a rap confessional. I’m not sure what more to say… It’s one of those rare albums that escapes, or squirms outside of, all the categories that I am usually so ready to tag nearly anything I listen to with – and thereby reduces me to incoherent babbling.