It’s always strange to get to the end of the TV year. May sweeps ends today, at which point everyone will know what they can charge people of advertising.
So now, a wrap-up. Of sorts.
The Walking Dead:
The season ended. It was slow, but it held a few surprises back and went for the season-ending shocks, and next year they’ll bring in two of the most iconic, well-loved characters from the comic, along with the prison.
People keep hoping for more from this show, but AMC would rather put the big money into other things. That’s fine. Next season will also be the same combination of fun and boring that this one was. People will watch, and if the show improves, they’ll hang around a few more years.
But if next year is boring, I suspect we’ll see the ratings start to erode, and quickly, as the prison is kind of the last bit people have been waiting for. (At least, from what I’ve seen.)
Spartacus:
Hands down my favorite show on right now. Great writing, surprises that are actually surprising, really well-done action. If the show has a flaw, it’s that the CGI is going to age very badly. I don’t care. If you can handle a show that’s very R rated, you need to check this out now. Right now.
Game of Thrones:
My wife nailed this one. Inevitably, we’ll get to the end of every 55 minute episode and go, “What? That’s it? It’s over?”
Apparently it’s the most expensive show on TV, and HBO sunk of bunch of extra money into a big upcoming battle.
All that said, even with a massive budget, it isn’t a movie budget, and sometimes the seams are going to show.
Well, okay. I’m good with it. This is almost certainly the best possible version of these stories we’re ever going to get onscreen, and I’m really enjoying myself.
Glee:
I wrote a huge essay (actually, two) about all the problems with Glee, and, well, here we are, and it’s the end of the third season.
The show has wandered to a lot of places I think we’d rather all forget by now, but it nailed a lot of solid emotional moments in its finale. It even had the guts to (turn away if you don’t wanna know) take a hammer to the Kurt/Finn/Rachel trio, in the best and worst possible way.
I wish there was a way to start an anti-write-in campaign. The season ended beautifully, with only a little plot thread stupidity, and Rachel walking into New York City was an image that would have ended the show in the perfect way.
Next year, the show will come back, and all the issues will still be in place, plus new ones created by the fact that the show just can’t let Rachel walk off into that final image. Ah well.
American Idol:
Eh. Today, either Jessica or Phillip will win. Jessica’s song was eh, and Phillip reminded me of a cross between Willy Porter and Rich Mullins, both of who create okay albums that contain three or four sparkling, perfect gems.
Actually, I just want Phillip to win so I can hear his song a second time. That would be nice.
Modern Family:
Still funny. Still a strong show, though you can tell when the writers are really trying and when they just need to get another episode out.
Pretty sure it’ll make it seven years. Maybe ten. Can’t say I’m looking forward to the “unexpected pregnancy” plotline that’ll happen around year five or six, when they’re dying for new plotlines.
The Big Bang Theory:
Still a show that’s about “nerds” that contains mostly easy nerd jokes. They broke 100 episodes this season, and the show continues to pull huge ratings, even as it exits its fourth year.
I sometimes feel a sense of ambivalence about this show. And yet I watch because every once in a while they nail a joke so hard I have to stop the show so I can laugh. This one will run ten years, I’m sure.
Parks and Rec:
Thanks to Idol and Big Bang and The Vampire Diaries and Parks and Rec all being on all being on at the exact same time, I’m just now starting this season.
Four episodes in, and I’m just so very happy to have it back. It gets everything right that Big Bang gets wrong, from creating a true ensemble cast to using brilliant political satire without drawing attention to itself.
Maybe next year I’ll try to find a way to roll Big Bang off the DVR and watch it over the summer instead.
Or perhaps not. This is a show that’s fun to gulp.
The Vampire Diaries:
The other day, I wrote and deleted 1500 words talking about the various flaws Diaries has slowly introduced over the last half-season. It’s always been a lightning fast show, telling everyone where they shouldn’t go, and then going there two episodes later.
It’s still doing that now, but it’s rapidly running out of shocks and cast members. I started writing about it, planning to put together a series of thoughts and complaints and praises, and then I realized it was 1500 words long and I was nowhere near an ending and I erased it.
Look: The show is going into a loop now. They spent a season building up The Originals, and a second season fighting them, and now we’re going to blunder right into a third season that will involve fighting them some more.
They’ve now dragged out the whole “the girl must choose between the two brothers” thing for three seasons now, and that’s also going to get stale pretty quick.
Also, the show is approaching supernatural critical mass. We’re down to one frequently used character (Matt) who isn’t supernatural or in possession of a Supernatural ability. And if they’re going to take Elena in the direction it looks like they’re taking her, she is probably going to get even more mope-y.
In other words, this is now a very, very tall house of cards. In the past, they’ve managed to reinforce and keep on stacking the cards. But soon, and possibly very soon, they’re going to either need to blow it all up and start over with something cooler, or watch it hit an unbreakable wall, and then the cards will start to slip and it’s not going to be fun or pretty.
The Secret Circle:
Circle was cancelled at the end of the year, and I’m still not sure whether they made the right call on that one.
Part of the reason I’m not sure is that I’m behind on the show. We let it stack up for a long time while we watched other things, and then came the depths of winter, when nothing else is on, and we caught up. Then everything else returned and it sat there and sat there, and now we’ve got most of the back half of the season to watch.
Will it be worth it? I dunno. There were some really good episodes in there, but no great ones. I’ve read that there are some very good episodes yet to come, but I’m guessing we’ll watch it to the end and delete the last episode with no regrets.
Supernatural:
Somewhere around season five this was my favorite show. Six was good. Seven was better. As my friend Avi says, a lot of good episodes, some very good, and no bad. Every new season is a gift.
Sometimes you can really see the budget cuts these days. The final fight was three guys, and it lasted about sixty seconds. Outside, someone fought an “army” of three people.
But still. A good season with fun subtext (Americans are fat and lazy!) and a fun cliffhanger. It’s coming back next year, and according to a friend of mine it’ll probably come back for another year after that.
Much like Diaries, this has lost some of its appointment TV luster, and it’s no longer my Very Favorite Show, but it’s an incredibly fun way to spend 45 minutes, and I’m happy it’s coming back again.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Glee: Why Not End It Now?
I stick with things to the bitter end. I was, for example, that guy who kept watching Heroes from week to week, even when my wife started saying things like, “Well, we have three now. We may as well watch them and get it over with.”
Granted, in the end we got a few good, but not great, episodes. An interesting story here and there. And surprisingly, a fun setup for a fifth season that never happened.
And then the show was gone, and we shrugged and got on with our lives. Though I do enjoy the occasional internet poster who jokes, “It’s too bad Heroes was cancelled after its first season, it had such potential.”
Fox has gotten a little weird this year, racking and stacking their sitcoms for season finales, and maybe other reasons, I dunno. But I had to laugh when my mother-in-law informed me that the season finale of Glee was last night. Not because she was wrong, but because she was the fourth person I had encountered who was wrong.
Nope. Rest assured, whatever Glee fans are still out there: Next week is the season finale.
A few months ago, I wrote a long essay that detailed the various problems with Glee, what might fix the problems, and listed the reasons that the problems won’t get fixed. And most of my thoughts have proved to be more-or-less accurate. But now we’ve had a couple of really good episodes, and I think it’s worth talking about what they’ve done with the show, and what they’re going to do to the show.
And how they haven’t fixed the show, but they patched up bits of it, so that maybe you’ll notice the wear a little less.
So let’s start with last night, where they gave us two episodes, one of which was a culmination of something they’ve been working for over the last three years. They won nationals. They won because they had to win, really. That was sort of the point of the show.
But to the show’s credit, for a minute there, I thought they might lose. Even after they won, I was waiting for it to all be one long dream sequence, and really they lost again and now they were seniors and they would never get to win, and that’s life.
(And that is life. My home school football team didn’t build and build until my senior year, and then come out on top. And even if they had, it meant that 10 or 15 or 20 other teams were NOT the winners that year.)
I kind of liked that ending in my head. But no. They won. And Rachel, who lost her shot at going to the only school she tried to get into, never mind that there are probably two dozen schools just as good that she didn’t bother to audition for, got another chance to “audition,” which is something I figured out weeks ago.
Granted, I had a whole different direction I wanted that to go, too, where Rachel DOESN’T get what she wants, and spends the next year of her life in New York watching her man and best friend succeed in numerous ways while she works as a maid.
And then, at the end, she begs April Rhodes just for a chance to work backstage at her still-a-smash show. And it’s humiliating, yes, and it will be years before Rachel gets anywhere at all, yes, but she finally knows that she doesn’t get to be a special snowflake in New York, and things are not magically handed to her, and that you can break your back working at something and still fail.
I’d be more interested in that show than the one we’re going to get.
I digress.
Let’s go back to what they did right.
The thing about Glee is, a lot of times the show forces its characters into various weird situations and then refuses to let anyone do anything an actual human would do. And then we get something really nicely written, and we get to remember that these actors are really good at what they do when they get to do it. This time around, we got to see Dot and Puck have this huge wonderful moment, and even if it got a little weird (Dot has a knife under her pillow? Puck gets to retake a test because he showed passion? Or something?) I didn’t care because they tapped an actual emotion.
And as far as I’m concerned, they’ve been on fire with the Mr. Shu storyline, as he’s come to realize his first real batch of kids is heading out into the world now. I only taught for a year, but when you see a group of kids that often, you get enmeshed in what’s going on in their lives whether you want to or not. There was a picture going around Facebook not long ago, about how teachers aren’t in it for the income, they’re in it for the outcome, and that’s true.
You meet these wonderful people and you become a part of their live for five hours a week, and you give them information and you root for them to succeed, or to do something cool, and then one day, they’re gone.
Glee is capturing that. And Shu is a little over-the-top on that score, and is reaching a point where he could use some adult friends, but otherwise? Nearly note perfect.
And Sue has gotten a fresh coat of spackle, which almost covers the dings, though not quite. They got another character to slap her around a bit, and are trying to humanize her, using this weird baby thing. I think they’re trying to pretend her bizarre run for a government slot never even happened, at this point.
And now there’s talk of what comes next.
Truth be told? I wish there wasn’t a next, because I can’t see it ending well.
Because we’ve had our three years now, and it adds up to a complete, if somewhat random, story. The team has won, and people are graduating, and the ratings have slipped quite a bit. This week was pretty lovely, and next week will almost certainly tie up a few more plot threads before everyone goes off to live the rest of their lives.
It would be, as the saying goes, a good death.
There’s already retooling talk, as well. The big three, Kurt, Finn, and Rachel, are all headed to New York, and now there’s babble about how instead of letting them leave, because their time is done, there’s going to be a “show within a show.” There has been discussion about how this has “never been done before.”
But, um… No. Degrassi did it for several seasons. Kids graduated, and went to University. And we followed everyone, and sometimes they intersected, but mostly they didn’t.
(Also, both shows used Perez Hilton, which to me is the final wink to the audience that, yeah, Glee is just wholesale taking ideas from Degrassi now, like the religious character struggling with faith issues, and the transgender character.)
I think in everyone’s mind, Glee was going to continue to be a huge hit this year, and next year the trio would get a show, and the Glee folks would keep their show, and sometimes they’d cross over. It would be like Buffy and Angel, in a lot of ways.
But… The ratings slipped, and now everything is all jumbled up.
And now Glee is being moved to Thursdays, where it will sit behind the results shows for The X Factor, which didn’t do all that well, and American Idol, whose ratings had eroded somewhat this year.
And with the last season being so downright bizarre, I wonder how many people are going to exit the Glee train after next week Tuesday?
You’ve got me.
One of the creators of the show, Ryan Murphy, has a new sitcom coming on the air next year, and another show besides. If he’s smart, he’ll call up Fox and quietly ask to pull the plug.
If he doesn’t, I see a slow bleed, and maybe the show makes it through its fourth season and into syndication. And yay if it does, I suppose.
But I imagine that a lot of people will stop now and, much like Heroes, go, “It was nice the way it ended. Graduation, a passing of the torch to the next group of people. Too bad we never got to see that…”
Granted, in the end we got a few good, but not great, episodes. An interesting story here and there. And surprisingly, a fun setup for a fifth season that never happened.
And then the show was gone, and we shrugged and got on with our lives. Though I do enjoy the occasional internet poster who jokes, “It’s too bad Heroes was cancelled after its first season, it had such potential.”
Fox has gotten a little weird this year, racking and stacking their sitcoms for season finales, and maybe other reasons, I dunno. But I had to laugh when my mother-in-law informed me that the season finale of Glee was last night. Not because she was wrong, but because she was the fourth person I had encountered who was wrong.
Nope. Rest assured, whatever Glee fans are still out there: Next week is the season finale.
A few months ago, I wrote a long essay that detailed the various problems with Glee, what might fix the problems, and listed the reasons that the problems won’t get fixed. And most of my thoughts have proved to be more-or-less accurate. But now we’ve had a couple of really good episodes, and I think it’s worth talking about what they’ve done with the show, and what they’re going to do to the show.
And how they haven’t fixed the show, but they patched up bits of it, so that maybe you’ll notice the wear a little less.
So let’s start with last night, where they gave us two episodes, one of which was a culmination of something they’ve been working for over the last three years. They won nationals. They won because they had to win, really. That was sort of the point of the show.
But to the show’s credit, for a minute there, I thought they might lose. Even after they won, I was waiting for it to all be one long dream sequence, and really they lost again and now they were seniors and they would never get to win, and that’s life.
(And that is life. My home school football team didn’t build and build until my senior year, and then come out on top. And even if they had, it meant that 10 or 15 or 20 other teams were NOT the winners that year.)
I kind of liked that ending in my head. But no. They won. And Rachel, who lost her shot at going to the only school she tried to get into, never mind that there are probably two dozen schools just as good that she didn’t bother to audition for, got another chance to “audition,” which is something I figured out weeks ago.
Granted, I had a whole different direction I wanted that to go, too, where Rachel DOESN’T get what she wants, and spends the next year of her life in New York watching her man and best friend succeed in numerous ways while she works as a maid.
And then, at the end, she begs April Rhodes just for a chance to work backstage at her still-a-smash show. And it’s humiliating, yes, and it will be years before Rachel gets anywhere at all, yes, but she finally knows that she doesn’t get to be a special snowflake in New York, and things are not magically handed to her, and that you can break your back working at something and still fail.
I’d be more interested in that show than the one we’re going to get.
I digress.
Let’s go back to what they did right.
The thing about Glee is, a lot of times the show forces its characters into various weird situations and then refuses to let anyone do anything an actual human would do. And then we get something really nicely written, and we get to remember that these actors are really good at what they do when they get to do it. This time around, we got to see Dot and Puck have this huge wonderful moment, and even if it got a little weird (Dot has a knife under her pillow? Puck gets to retake a test because he showed passion? Or something?) I didn’t care because they tapped an actual emotion.
And as far as I’m concerned, they’ve been on fire with the Mr. Shu storyline, as he’s come to realize his first real batch of kids is heading out into the world now. I only taught for a year, but when you see a group of kids that often, you get enmeshed in what’s going on in their lives whether you want to or not. There was a picture going around Facebook not long ago, about how teachers aren’t in it for the income, they’re in it for the outcome, and that’s true.
You meet these wonderful people and you become a part of their live for five hours a week, and you give them information and you root for them to succeed, or to do something cool, and then one day, they’re gone.
Glee is capturing that. And Shu is a little over-the-top on that score, and is reaching a point where he could use some adult friends, but otherwise? Nearly note perfect.
And Sue has gotten a fresh coat of spackle, which almost covers the dings, though not quite. They got another character to slap her around a bit, and are trying to humanize her, using this weird baby thing. I think they’re trying to pretend her bizarre run for a government slot never even happened, at this point.
And now there’s talk of what comes next.
Truth be told? I wish there wasn’t a next, because I can’t see it ending well.
Because we’ve had our three years now, and it adds up to a complete, if somewhat random, story. The team has won, and people are graduating, and the ratings have slipped quite a bit. This week was pretty lovely, and next week will almost certainly tie up a few more plot threads before everyone goes off to live the rest of their lives.
It would be, as the saying goes, a good death.
There’s already retooling talk, as well. The big three, Kurt, Finn, and Rachel, are all headed to New York, and now there’s babble about how instead of letting them leave, because their time is done, there’s going to be a “show within a show.” There has been discussion about how this has “never been done before.”
But, um… No. Degrassi did it for several seasons. Kids graduated, and went to University. And we followed everyone, and sometimes they intersected, but mostly they didn’t.
(Also, both shows used Perez Hilton, which to me is the final wink to the audience that, yeah, Glee is just wholesale taking ideas from Degrassi now, like the religious character struggling with faith issues, and the transgender character.)
I think in everyone’s mind, Glee was going to continue to be a huge hit this year, and next year the trio would get a show, and the Glee folks would keep their show, and sometimes they’d cross over. It would be like Buffy and Angel, in a lot of ways.
But… The ratings slipped, and now everything is all jumbled up.
And now Glee is being moved to Thursdays, where it will sit behind the results shows for The X Factor, which didn’t do all that well, and American Idol, whose ratings had eroded somewhat this year.
And with the last season being so downright bizarre, I wonder how many people are going to exit the Glee train after next week Tuesday?
You’ve got me.
One of the creators of the show, Ryan Murphy, has a new sitcom coming on the air next year, and another show besides. If he’s smart, he’ll call up Fox and quietly ask to pull the plug.
If he doesn’t, I see a slow bleed, and maybe the show makes it through its fourth season and into syndication. And yay if it does, I suppose.
But I imagine that a lot of people will stop now and, much like Heroes, go, “It was nice the way it ended. Graduation, a passing of the torch to the next group of people. Too bad we never got to see that…”
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
American Idol: Last Call
Here are a few thoughts to roll around in your brain:
In a couple of weeks, Kelly Clarkson will have been an American Idol winner for 11 years. Probably 100 one-hit wonders have come and gone in that time, but Kelly stands firm. Not bad for a girl who won a singing competition.
What interests me most about this process is that when she auditioned, she was only up against about 10,000 people. Now, contestants have to beat off more than ten times that amount to get to the top.
I remember someone joking, years ago, that everyone in the top ten would get a record deal. I don’t think that was really true the first year, but it’s getting pretty close to that now, as record labels get more and more desperate for their artists to scratch and kick their way to selling a million units. James, who was ejected last year, said with some pride that his album had sold about 100,000 units.
Something to be proud of? Maybe. But the guy had a national platform. Millions of people voted for him to keep singing. And in the end, despite getting a nice placement in Wal-Mart (a store that sells more CDs than any other in the country, I’d wager) he only moved 100,000 copies.
That’s kind of sad. Par for the course, probably, but still kind of sad.
It also demonstrates one of the problems with the show, in that it doesn’t produce all that many idols. Perhaps five people with any sticking power at all, many of whom lost the competition.
Which I guess brings me back to this year.
We’re down to the final three, which is nice because it means in two weeks the show will be over and done with and I can resume not thinking about any of these people. It’s not that I hate them. I just don’t care all that much.
As I stated some time ago, there has been talk of the show coming to an end, and I made an assumption and it appears I was wrong. Turns out Ryan is making 16 million dollars a year on the show, which, frankly, seems a lot higher than it needs to be. Apparently, Jennifer Lopez gets the same.
To which I must say: It’s strange how popularity feeds popularity. Lopez’s movie career was pretty much at a standstill and her music career wasn’t much to write home about either, and then suddenly she’s on Idol and her records are selling and she’s on the cover of People and she gets a new show and so on and so on and so on.
Good for her, I guess.
At any rate, here are the last three people:
Jessica: I might have said this before, but it’s really been hitting me harder the longer I watch the show. Jessica isn’t an artist, she’s a human jukebox.
There’s a comedian who does a bit where he sings Bohemian Rhapsody in the voices of 24 different singers. (Or more. Or less. I can’t remember off the top of my head.) That’s Jessica. She’s not up there feeding her emotions into the crowd. No. She’s offering up nearly note-perfect renditions of big hit songs. It’s impressive, even kind of amazing. But it’s also karaoke, and it’s not going to help her when someone hands her a new song and says, “Here, sing this.”
When I was in college, one of my singing teachers told me he’d had a student who didn’t want to learn how to pronounce the various languages. He just figured he’d have his voice teacher read it off, and he’d learn it phonetically, and only use those songs for performances.
That’s Jessica, too.
She’s young. That may change. But my suspicion is that if she wins, and I don’t think she will, her album will tank, because it would be technically impressive and also very boring.
Phillip: I know that Phillip hasn’t been well, having heard he underwent surgery. But I heard, recently, that he’s been holding off having more surgery while he tries to make it through the competition. That’s impressive, but it’s also a little crazy.
To that end, I think it becomes very difficult to judge the guy. It’s like watching a baseball player who broke his leg running the bases. Do you applaud because he made it to second? Do you complain because he didn’t make it to home?
Without seeing him at his best, there’s just no way to know.
He’s been hassled for not singing the melody, but when you literally can’t get your breath under you, it’s hard to fault you for being flat.
What most interests me now is, if he gets to release an album, what will it sound like? I truly want to know. Of the three, I might consider buying what he puts out. But I’m not clamoring for it.
Joshua: Jimmy nailed my thinking in three areas. One: He doesn’t know who is going to win. Two: Joshua’s version of one of James Brown’s signature tunes was amazing. Three: And he doesn’t know what songs Joshua would record if he wins.
I suspect this is what kills a lot of people who just wanna be singers. Much the way a writers loves to write, a lot of singers just want to sing. They don’t care all that much what, though they might have a few avoids.
So we’ll pretend, for a second, that Joshua really wants to be an old-fashioned soul singer, ala James Brown.
How do you sell that? Who do you sell that to? Jimmy said “maybe we’ll just record that song,” and okay, sure, you can, but putting out a string of karaoke-style tunes isn’t going to do much for your intended audience.
No. It just isn’t.
So then what?
I dunno. I don’t have to sell the guy. I think if they were smart, they’d let him be the next Reverend Al Green, and hope that his people find him.
In the end, I agree with Jimmy. Any of these three could take it. Phillip was in the bottom two last week, with Jessica already getting a save, and her and Joshua being so similar, I suspect Jessica is gone this week.
Or perhaps I’m wrong.
As for the winner? I’m going to give that to Joshua as well, only because I thought Phillip would have been gone long ago.
Best of luck, you silly little trio. Hope you enjoy your upcoming obscurity…
In a couple of weeks, Kelly Clarkson will have been an American Idol winner for 11 years. Probably 100 one-hit wonders have come and gone in that time, but Kelly stands firm. Not bad for a girl who won a singing competition.
What interests me most about this process is that when she auditioned, she was only up against about 10,000 people. Now, contestants have to beat off more than ten times that amount to get to the top.
I remember someone joking, years ago, that everyone in the top ten would get a record deal. I don’t think that was really true the first year, but it’s getting pretty close to that now, as record labels get more and more desperate for their artists to scratch and kick their way to selling a million units. James, who was ejected last year, said with some pride that his album had sold about 100,000 units.
Something to be proud of? Maybe. But the guy had a national platform. Millions of people voted for him to keep singing. And in the end, despite getting a nice placement in Wal-Mart (a store that sells more CDs than any other in the country, I’d wager) he only moved 100,000 copies.
That’s kind of sad. Par for the course, probably, but still kind of sad.
It also demonstrates one of the problems with the show, in that it doesn’t produce all that many idols. Perhaps five people with any sticking power at all, many of whom lost the competition.
Which I guess brings me back to this year.
We’re down to the final three, which is nice because it means in two weeks the show will be over and done with and I can resume not thinking about any of these people. It’s not that I hate them. I just don’t care all that much.
As I stated some time ago, there has been talk of the show coming to an end, and I made an assumption and it appears I was wrong. Turns out Ryan is making 16 million dollars a year on the show, which, frankly, seems a lot higher than it needs to be. Apparently, Jennifer Lopez gets the same.
To which I must say: It’s strange how popularity feeds popularity. Lopez’s movie career was pretty much at a standstill and her music career wasn’t much to write home about either, and then suddenly she’s on Idol and her records are selling and she’s on the cover of People and she gets a new show and so on and so on and so on.
Good for her, I guess.
At any rate, here are the last three people:
Jessica: I might have said this before, but it’s really been hitting me harder the longer I watch the show. Jessica isn’t an artist, she’s a human jukebox.
There’s a comedian who does a bit where he sings Bohemian Rhapsody in the voices of 24 different singers. (Or more. Or less. I can’t remember off the top of my head.) That’s Jessica. She’s not up there feeding her emotions into the crowd. No. She’s offering up nearly note-perfect renditions of big hit songs. It’s impressive, even kind of amazing. But it’s also karaoke, and it’s not going to help her when someone hands her a new song and says, “Here, sing this.”
When I was in college, one of my singing teachers told me he’d had a student who didn’t want to learn how to pronounce the various languages. He just figured he’d have his voice teacher read it off, and he’d learn it phonetically, and only use those songs for performances.
That’s Jessica, too.
She’s young. That may change. But my suspicion is that if she wins, and I don’t think she will, her album will tank, because it would be technically impressive and also very boring.
Phillip: I know that Phillip hasn’t been well, having heard he underwent surgery. But I heard, recently, that he’s been holding off having more surgery while he tries to make it through the competition. That’s impressive, but it’s also a little crazy.
To that end, I think it becomes very difficult to judge the guy. It’s like watching a baseball player who broke his leg running the bases. Do you applaud because he made it to second? Do you complain because he didn’t make it to home?
Without seeing him at his best, there’s just no way to know.
He’s been hassled for not singing the melody, but when you literally can’t get your breath under you, it’s hard to fault you for being flat.
What most interests me now is, if he gets to release an album, what will it sound like? I truly want to know. Of the three, I might consider buying what he puts out. But I’m not clamoring for it.
Joshua: Jimmy nailed my thinking in three areas. One: He doesn’t know who is going to win. Two: Joshua’s version of one of James Brown’s signature tunes was amazing. Three: And he doesn’t know what songs Joshua would record if he wins.
I suspect this is what kills a lot of people who just wanna be singers. Much the way a writers loves to write, a lot of singers just want to sing. They don’t care all that much what, though they might have a few avoids.
So we’ll pretend, for a second, that Joshua really wants to be an old-fashioned soul singer, ala James Brown.
How do you sell that? Who do you sell that to? Jimmy said “maybe we’ll just record that song,” and okay, sure, you can, but putting out a string of karaoke-style tunes isn’t going to do much for your intended audience.
No. It just isn’t.
So then what?
I dunno. I don’t have to sell the guy. I think if they were smart, they’d let him be the next Reverend Al Green, and hope that his people find him.
In the end, I agree with Jimmy. Any of these three could take it. Phillip was in the bottom two last week, with Jessica already getting a save, and her and Joshua being so similar, I suspect Jessica is gone this week.
Or perhaps I’m wrong.
As for the winner? I’m going to give that to Joshua as well, only because I thought Phillip would have been gone long ago.
Best of luck, you silly little trio. Hope you enjoy your upcoming obscurity…
Friday, May 4, 2012
Why MCA?
It’s weird.
I’m quite sure that my first memory of the Beastie Boys was You’ve Gotta Fight for Your Right to Party. It has to be. The song was everywhere, and even for a kid like me who barely listened to the radio, and never watched MTV (my parents didn’t allow it), you couldn’t escape the song.
It was the first time I ever remember anyone using a call-and-response, even. In grade school, there was a field trip, and there we were at a skating rink, and some DJ would wait for the chorus, and say, “All right, EVERYONE” and all the kids would yell. He’d dial down the actual rap portion, so the kids would go, YOU’VE GOTTA FIGHT (guitar riff) FOR YOUR RIGHT (guitar riff) TO PAAAAAAAARTAAAAAYYYYYY.
And this wasn’t some special version of the song, so he was just dialing the volume by hand, the buzz fading in and out.
I remember that. I also remember taking a wrong turn and running into a girl’s ankle, and then standing there feeling helpless and ashamed as her friends took her away while she cried. We’re Facebook friends now, so I guess she forgave me.
Paul’s Boutique came out, and was never quite as ubiquitous. I didn’t hear it. We were kids, we didn’t get what was happening, that music was going to be changed by samples, that the Boys got away with something by putting hundreds of samples on one record and not paying anyone a dime for them. Today, I don’t know if anyone could do that again. They’d have to pay everyone for each little riff and vocal shout, probably. Who could afford it?
But that didn’t matter to me. Not really. I had been told that the Beastie Boys were potty mouths, and I wasn’t really into that kind of thing. And they yelled a lot. Not something I enjoyed.
At some point, I was in middle school, trapped at the library while my parents were looking for something, and I flipped open a random magazine. There was an article in there about how Stephen King’s novel The Stand was too long and boring and changed points of view at awkward times.
I disagreed. I liked it.
In the same magazine was an article about how the Beastie Boys were a bunch of foul-mouthed non-musicians who drank beer and had scantily clad women in cages on their stage when they performed. But I only knew the one song. It didn’t have any meaning to me. But there was something about that level of hedonism I found fascinating. Drinking? On stage? And girls?
Today, I’m not sure rap shows are allowed to go one if there isn’t at least one scantily clad female up there somewhere. I could be wrong. I probably am.
I got to high school, and the Boys put out Check Your Head. That one was weird. The kids in my school loved it, and I found it used, and I put it on in the CD store, and my brother wanted to buy it. But it had one of those parental warnings on it, so I knew that would never fly with my parents.
I bought it for myself, and put all the songs my brother would be allowed to listen to onto a tape for him.
So What'cha Want was the big “hit” off of that one. I saw the video. Three guys jumping at a fish eye lens. I couldn’t say that I really “got” it, but there was something weirdly compelling and low rent about it. It felt like the kind of thing you could do with your friends.
I found Licensed to Ill and Paul’s Boutique at the library. I understood the former to be dumb fun. The latter left me cold. I was young. It happens. Regardless, I got into a conversation about the two recordings with an acquaintance. I told him I liked Ill more. He said, “You’re so wrong, and I have so many reasons why.”
I went to college. Sabotage became a big hit. My brother was now “old enough” to own something with bad words on it. He wanted Ill Communication, so I ordered it for him on vinyl. It came out three days before the rest of the world got it. Somewhere along the line, my brother found CD copies of the first stuff the Beastie Boys ever did: Pollywog Stew and Cookie Puss. He bought both of them.
A year later, they would both be released together on a much cheaper CD.
Hello Nasty came out right as I left college. I heard Intergalactic. I shrugged. The boys put out a Best of, and I saw the receptionist at my workplace listening to it, and I got one of those first hits of nostalgia you get when you hear something you “used” to listen to.
I eventually found The Sounds of Science used. When I was job hunting, I’d listen to Hey Ladies on the way to interviews. It woke me up. It made me happy. I’d listen to it over and over, getting a tiny bump of joy, trying to pump myself up so when I got to my interview I wasn’t just some sad guy desperately looking for work.
The boys released three more albums after that. To the 5 Boroughs, The Mix-Up, and Hot Sauce Committee, Part 2. I’ve never heard a note.
MCA died. There are probably a bunch of half-done tracks sitting around, and the remaining Boys will put them together, and that little lump of my childhood will sigh, and look at that sad number (MCA? Dead at 47? A guy partially responsible for changing the face of an entire genre of music, gone, and only 12 years older than me, and who am I and what am I doing with my life and where is my childhood?) and all that stuff will go into a little mental box and someday I’ll tell my kid, “Well, we used to listen to this group. They were kind of considered dirty when they started, but they changed the musical world, which is more than I can say for myself.”
And maybe I’ll put on Hey Ladies one more time. Because Paul’s Boutique really is better than Licensed to Ill.
I’m quite sure that my first memory of the Beastie Boys was You’ve Gotta Fight for Your Right to Party. It has to be. The song was everywhere, and even for a kid like me who barely listened to the radio, and never watched MTV (my parents didn’t allow it), you couldn’t escape the song.
It was the first time I ever remember anyone using a call-and-response, even. In grade school, there was a field trip, and there we were at a skating rink, and some DJ would wait for the chorus, and say, “All right, EVERYONE” and all the kids would yell. He’d dial down the actual rap portion, so the kids would go, YOU’VE GOTTA FIGHT (guitar riff) FOR YOUR RIGHT (guitar riff) TO PAAAAAAAARTAAAAAYYYYYY.
And this wasn’t some special version of the song, so he was just dialing the volume by hand, the buzz fading in and out.
I remember that. I also remember taking a wrong turn and running into a girl’s ankle, and then standing there feeling helpless and ashamed as her friends took her away while she cried. We’re Facebook friends now, so I guess she forgave me.
Paul’s Boutique came out, and was never quite as ubiquitous. I didn’t hear it. We were kids, we didn’t get what was happening, that music was going to be changed by samples, that the Boys got away with something by putting hundreds of samples on one record and not paying anyone a dime for them. Today, I don’t know if anyone could do that again. They’d have to pay everyone for each little riff and vocal shout, probably. Who could afford it?
But that didn’t matter to me. Not really. I had been told that the Beastie Boys were potty mouths, and I wasn’t really into that kind of thing. And they yelled a lot. Not something I enjoyed.
At some point, I was in middle school, trapped at the library while my parents were looking for something, and I flipped open a random magazine. There was an article in there about how Stephen King’s novel The Stand was too long and boring and changed points of view at awkward times.
I disagreed. I liked it.
In the same magazine was an article about how the Beastie Boys were a bunch of foul-mouthed non-musicians who drank beer and had scantily clad women in cages on their stage when they performed. But I only knew the one song. It didn’t have any meaning to me. But there was something about that level of hedonism I found fascinating. Drinking? On stage? And girls?
Today, I’m not sure rap shows are allowed to go one if there isn’t at least one scantily clad female up there somewhere. I could be wrong. I probably am.
I got to high school, and the Boys put out Check Your Head. That one was weird. The kids in my school loved it, and I found it used, and I put it on in the CD store, and my brother wanted to buy it. But it had one of those parental warnings on it, so I knew that would never fly with my parents.
I bought it for myself, and put all the songs my brother would be allowed to listen to onto a tape for him.
So What'cha Want was the big “hit” off of that one. I saw the video. Three guys jumping at a fish eye lens. I couldn’t say that I really “got” it, but there was something weirdly compelling and low rent about it. It felt like the kind of thing you could do with your friends.
I found Licensed to Ill and Paul’s Boutique at the library. I understood the former to be dumb fun. The latter left me cold. I was young. It happens. Regardless, I got into a conversation about the two recordings with an acquaintance. I told him I liked Ill more. He said, “You’re so wrong, and I have so many reasons why.”
I went to college. Sabotage became a big hit. My brother was now “old enough” to own something with bad words on it. He wanted Ill Communication, so I ordered it for him on vinyl. It came out three days before the rest of the world got it. Somewhere along the line, my brother found CD copies of the first stuff the Beastie Boys ever did: Pollywog Stew and Cookie Puss. He bought both of them.
A year later, they would both be released together on a much cheaper CD.
Hello Nasty came out right as I left college. I heard Intergalactic. I shrugged. The boys put out a Best of, and I saw the receptionist at my workplace listening to it, and I got one of those first hits of nostalgia you get when you hear something you “used” to listen to.
I eventually found The Sounds of Science used. When I was job hunting, I’d listen to Hey Ladies on the way to interviews. It woke me up. It made me happy. I’d listen to it over and over, getting a tiny bump of joy, trying to pump myself up so when I got to my interview I wasn’t just some sad guy desperately looking for work.
The boys released three more albums after that. To the 5 Boroughs, The Mix-Up, and Hot Sauce Committee, Part 2. I’ve never heard a note.
MCA died. There are probably a bunch of half-done tracks sitting around, and the remaining Boys will put them together, and that little lump of my childhood will sigh, and look at that sad number (MCA? Dead at 47? A guy partially responsible for changing the face of an entire genre of music, gone, and only 12 years older than me, and who am I and what am I doing with my life and where is my childhood?) and all that stuff will go into a little mental box and someday I’ll tell my kid, “Well, we used to listen to this group. They were kind of considered dirty when they started, but they changed the musical world, which is more than I can say for myself.”
And maybe I’ll put on Hey Ladies one more time. Because Paul’s Boutique really is better than Licensed to Ill.
Friday, April 27, 2012
Why I Hate My Publisher
In theory, a book update should be the easiest thing in the
world. I’m doing this, and writing this,
and, and, and…
And then it should be over.
And yet, I’ve been writing this post, and wiping it out,
over and over and over for about three weeks now. And I can sum up why in two words:
I’m tired.
A couple weeks back, I went to see New York Times
bestselling author Patrick Rothfuss speak.
He was hilarious, and his books are great, and you should read all of
them.
But he hit on something.
He said, roughly, that writing is like having a garden. If you do it for fun, it’s a win all the way
around. You get out in the sun, you have
some fun planting seeds and watering and such, and at the end, maybe you get
some yummy eats.
But, if you get into gardening with the expectation that you
must get a certain amount of yummy eats, the whole endeavor is stressful. Too much rain, not enough rain, bunnies in
the vegetable patch, and suddenly all your hard work (not fun, work!) provides
little or no reward.
And that’s writing.
If you do it for fun, you get to de-stress and create, and at the end
maybe you have something cool you can show to people.
Unfortunately, being an indie author means that you double
(or triple) the work of being an author, but with a strong chance that you’re
not getting much in the way of a harvest at the end.
Consider: When Patrick writes a book, he finishes it, then
send it to his publisher. The publisher
finds someone to make art for the cover.
And brings in an editor or two or three.
And tries to figure out how to get the book in front of as many people
as possible.
When I finish a book, I have to do all that stuff myself.
Right now, books and the stuff that goes with them is
Patrick’s only job.
I, on the other hand, have to work at a regular job at least
40 hours a week.
We’re both dads, so Patrick gets a pass on that one.
In the last year, Patrick put out one book, and he didn’t
have to publish it himself.
I put out eight.
(I say none of this to fault Patrick. Having met the dude, he’s nice and funny and
a good egg. He’s just at the tip of my
brain because of his metaphor. I mean
him no harm.)
And so, to sum up?
Here are those two words again:
I’m tired.
The fact is, I’m still working pretty steadily. I just finished writing what was supposed to
be a short story, but turned out to be a novelette, and I hope it fits into a
compilation a friend of mine is putting out.
Of course, I have to get it copyeditied first.
That’s been holding me up quite a lot, lately. If you don’t know already, copyediting is my
wife’s super-secret ninja power. And she
generally enjoys my writing. But trying
to find enough time to sit her down and edit something I wrote? It’s easy to put off. It’s too late. She/I/We are/is too tired. There are two-dozen things in our household
that need to be taken care of (as in all households) and editing often gets
tossed to the bottom of the pile because, frankly, it can.
It can because there isn’t a publisher, or thousands of
readers, clamoring for it.
And that’s where it gets even more complicated. Patrick finishes a book, it goes to the
publisher, and they take over a big chunk of the work from there.
In my case, I’ve pushed the rock up the hill, and finished
the book, and now? There’s another
hill. And it’s a marketing hill. And I am not a brilliant marketer.
Which makes the second hill ever more of a slog than the
first hill.
That’s the issue, really.
When I finish a book, it’s an object, and I generally feel I know when
I’ve done good work. So I feel good
about that.
Then I put out my book, and it just kind of does okay, and
then I’m not really able to feel as good about the book. It is actively difficult to separate my
inability to market all that well with my ability to write an entertaining
read.
See, I’m also working on a new novel called Frank, the
Lonely Unicorn. I let a Twitter buddy of
mine read the first third of it, and she really likes it. And that makes me happy, so I’m pushing
through with it, and already the marketing side of my brain is going, “Why
bother? It’s not like anyone is going to
BUY the thing.”
Some will, yes. But
it’s like the opposite of the Old Testament story where the guy bargains with
God, and says, “If I can find one good man in the town, will you spare the
town?” Only it’s, “Do I write this book
is only twenty people want to read it?
How about fifty? A hundred?”
That same issue has held me up editing But the Third One Was
Great. I’ve edited 583 pages of
manuscript so far. But I still have
several hundred pages to edit, and probably another 50 pages to write.
Then I’ve got to get my editor to edit it, and she’s not a
horror movie fan. So pushing to finish
it, my brain is fighting me the whole time, like so: “It’s going to take forever to edit this, and
then it’s going to come out, and you’re going to have a bear of a time selling
it.”
The movie-making book?
We’re 80 pages form finishing the edit, and we just keep pushing it off
for other stuff. It’s been that way
since Christmas.
In all honesty, I’ll probably get all these books finished
by a year from now. But it’s all been
getting held up by the part of my brain that’s supposed to be a publisher.
And that’s why it’s taken so long to write this post, I
think.
Because when you type all this stuff out, it sounds kind of
whiny, and I’m not really a complainer by nature.
What I am is tired.
Because I write and write and write and I get to feel happy for ten
minutes and then? Everything after that
is even more work, on top of the writing and on top of being a dad and on top
of working 40+ hours per week at a real job.
I see people I know who sell 10,000 copies of their book, or
start making more than they do on their day job, and quit their day job, and I’m
happy for them, and I think, “Why not me?”
And I know it’s that my marketer isn’t very good.
And that’s me too.
So that’s it, really.
I’ll keep writing, and stuff will come out, and the people who like my
stuff will be happy, and I’ll get that little hit of happiness from that.
And then my sales will slow down again, and I will sigh, and
decide to write another book, and try to figure out why my marketing efforts
are for naught.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Books I Love: Memoirs
I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, but I have this thing for autobiographies/memoirs. Mostly of famous people, though sometimes not. I once spent a summer going through the music biography section of my library, picking up whoever looked interesting.
I’m not entirely sure why I gravitate towards those kinds of books, mostly because the idea of “famous people” is one I find confusing. A person in a local theater production is an actor, and so is the guy on my TV, but because the guy on my TV is seen by more people, I should buy his book?
Nah. This is why I get most of these things from the library. They’re generally short, contain quick entertaining stories, and more often than not have giant print so you think you’re getting an actual 300 page book when really it’s more like 100.
I enjoy them, for the most part, but right after I’m done reading them they sort of fall out of my brain. But there are a few that have stuck with me over the years.
So, if you ever find yourself in a mood to read about famous/semi-famous people, here are some books to consider:
Meatloaf: To Hell and Back: Not a brilliant book, but he’s clearly honed his favorite stories to a fine point, and he lays them out randomly, but entertainingly.
Tom Green: Hollywood Causes Cancer: I never watched a lot of his show, and his movie was pretty awful but after reading his book I at least knew why. (He was trying to imitate Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, which even the Python guys think is pretty dang flawed.) Green writes with honesty, a little anger, and not a lot of ego.
Frank Zappa: The Real Frank Zappa Book: Part biography, part political screed, and one of those things your read and think, “This guy is the smartest man alive, or completely bonkers.” Most interesting, he laid out how iTunes would work in about 1988. Before the Internet actually became a thing. I just reread it and its’ scary how right-on he was.
Michael Ian Black: You’re Doing it Wrong: It’s rare you see something this strangely honest. To the point where one of the chapters of his book was called, “I Hate My Baby.” Dark. But fun dark.
David Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day: Get the audiobook, if you can. And listen to Jesus Shaves, wherein a bunch of people speaking bad French attempt to explain Easter to each other. “One may eat of the chocolate. One may also eat of the ham.”
Mankind/Mick Foley: Have a Nice Day. Mick Foley is a weird little dude. He portrayed a complete freak on WWE wrestling. He did things like wrestle in a ring strung with barbed wire. Not fake barbed wire. The real stuff. And then he wrote this book, which is massive and surprisingly entertaining. Then he went on to write three more books about his wrestling days, plus two novels and some children’s books. None of them are as good as the first one.
Paul Reiser: Couplehood, Babyhood, Familyhood: Paul Reiser has, over the years, evolved from this nice guy who everyone kind of likes to something like of a punchline, and I kind of see both sides of the equation. On one hand, he created Mad About You, which captured some aspects of marriage and relationships so well that it was really kind of freaky. On the other hand, he starred on a TV show for five years, wrote two books mostly taken from his standup material, and then stopped working for about a decade, just because he could. This is the kind of thing that wins you no fans, which is why, I’m guessing, that his new TV series vanished without a trace. Still, the books are solid examinations of relationships and parenting.
Robert Rodriguez: Rebel Without a Crew: Any time someone tells me they want to make a movie, but don’t know where to start, I tell them to read this. $7000, and the guy came out with El Mariachi and a career. Great stuff. Even people I know who don’t want to make movies tend to fall in love with the book, then go out and do something cool.
William Goldman: Adventures in the Screen Trade/Which Lie Did I Tell? If you want to know how movies don’t get made? Read these books. They’ll tell you.
I’m not entirely sure why I gravitate towards those kinds of books, mostly because the idea of “famous people” is one I find confusing. A person in a local theater production is an actor, and so is the guy on my TV, but because the guy on my TV is seen by more people, I should buy his book?
Nah. This is why I get most of these things from the library. They’re generally short, contain quick entertaining stories, and more often than not have giant print so you think you’re getting an actual 300 page book when really it’s more like 100.
I enjoy them, for the most part, but right after I’m done reading them they sort of fall out of my brain. But there are a few that have stuck with me over the years.
So, if you ever find yourself in a mood to read about famous/semi-famous people, here are some books to consider:
Meatloaf: To Hell and Back: Not a brilliant book, but he’s clearly honed his favorite stories to a fine point, and he lays them out randomly, but entertainingly.
Tom Green: Hollywood Causes Cancer: I never watched a lot of his show, and his movie was pretty awful but after reading his book I at least knew why. (He was trying to imitate Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, which even the Python guys think is pretty dang flawed.) Green writes with honesty, a little anger, and not a lot of ego.
Frank Zappa: The Real Frank Zappa Book: Part biography, part political screed, and one of those things your read and think, “This guy is the smartest man alive, or completely bonkers.” Most interesting, he laid out how iTunes would work in about 1988. Before the Internet actually became a thing. I just reread it and its’ scary how right-on he was.
Michael Ian Black: You’re Doing it Wrong: It’s rare you see something this strangely honest. To the point where one of the chapters of his book was called, “I Hate My Baby.” Dark. But fun dark.
David Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day: Get the audiobook, if you can. And listen to Jesus Shaves, wherein a bunch of people speaking bad French attempt to explain Easter to each other. “One may eat of the chocolate. One may also eat of the ham.”
Mankind/Mick Foley: Have a Nice Day. Mick Foley is a weird little dude. He portrayed a complete freak on WWE wrestling. He did things like wrestle in a ring strung with barbed wire. Not fake barbed wire. The real stuff. And then he wrote this book, which is massive and surprisingly entertaining. Then he went on to write three more books about his wrestling days, plus two novels and some children’s books. None of them are as good as the first one.
Paul Reiser: Couplehood, Babyhood, Familyhood: Paul Reiser has, over the years, evolved from this nice guy who everyone kind of likes to something like of a punchline, and I kind of see both sides of the equation. On one hand, he created Mad About You, which captured some aspects of marriage and relationships so well that it was really kind of freaky. On the other hand, he starred on a TV show for five years, wrote two books mostly taken from his standup material, and then stopped working for about a decade, just because he could. This is the kind of thing that wins you no fans, which is why, I’m guessing, that his new TV series vanished without a trace. Still, the books are solid examinations of relationships and parenting.
Robert Rodriguez: Rebel Without a Crew: Any time someone tells me they want to make a movie, but don’t know where to start, I tell them to read this. $7000, and the guy came out with El Mariachi and a career. Great stuff. Even people I know who don’t want to make movies tend to fall in love with the book, then go out and do something cool.
William Goldman: Adventures in the Screen Trade/Which Lie Did I Tell? If you want to know how movies don’t get made? Read these books. They’ll tell you.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Like So Many Threads: Thoughts on Oingo Boingo
In 1988, if you were anywhere between the ages of 11 and 18, you were by law required to go see Tim Burton’s take on Batman.
The movie has aged okay, though not perfectly, and parts of it still work. The biggest and best bit is the opening credits, with the swooping shots through the Batman symbol.
And that music. Oh, that music.
It was from that movie that I learned the name Danny Elfman.
I’m not much of a hipster. I read music columns that cover everything under the sun, and when I do, I discover that my musical tastes are quite shallow. And like most folks, as I’ve gotten older it’s gotten worse as opposed to better, as most of my discoveries and tastes slowly angle towards middle of the road.
But in that moment, I got to make a kind of discovery, and it was pretty awesome. I wasn’t much ahead of the world when it came to the discovery of Danny Elfman, but I was just far enough in front of everyone that, for maybe a year or two, instead of going, “Danny Elfman, who’s that?” I got to say, “Oh, I love Danny Elfman. I have all his stuff. All of it.”
And for a period of several years, I did. I got myself a list (pre-Internet!) of all the scores he’d ever written, and I went to my local Indie record store, and I filled out slips to have them get everything Elfman had ever released on CD. Ever.
I had to pay a dollar per CD, as a reserve cost. Five or six years later, I finally got a refund when they couldn’t find me a copy of Wisdom. That was an awkward conversation.
Somewhere or another, I heard that Elfman also had a band, though I couldn’t find the name of it. For some reason, I was under the impression it was another group called Giant Steps, though for the life of me I can’t figure out where I got that information. Which was wrong.
Somehow, thanks to some magazine or another, I did get my hands on the name of his group. Oingo Boingo.
I had to know more. I was deeply in love with this man’s movie music, and I had to know what he created when he was in an actual band.
As it happened, my local library had two Oingo Boingo CDs. The first was Dark at the End of the Tunnel. The second was a Best Of called Skeletons in the closet.
I came home. I put Dark in the player. I listened for about five minutes. I started flipping through the songs. And I was done. Whatever it was that I liked about Elfman’s movie music, I wasn’t finding it in there.
Then I put Skeleton’s in the Closet in there.
I want to say that the moment was somehow revelatory to me, that my world was forever changed, but mostly I found myself puzzled. I lived in a top 40 world, where everything was carefully stuffed into boxes for easy consumption.
There was no Richard Marx or New Kids on the Block or Neenah Cherry or Madonna or even Prince to be found here. These were people who sang about love and lust and relationships. Maybe they’d tell a story sometimes.
Skeletons, on the other hand, started with horns. Just a big old horn-style introduction, not unlike the 20th Century Fox theme. And then… what? Keyboards. Bass. A riffy kind of guitar, but not really chords.
And then the lyrics: “I love little girls, they make me feel so good. I love little girls, they make me feel so bad. When they’re around they make me feel like I’m the only guy in town.”
Even typing that now, I’m not totally sure what to make of it. Madonna and Prince were considered “dirty” at the time, but this… what was this? Satire? A song about the joys of very, very young girls? Was it tongue in cheek, or serious?
No idea.
And that was one of the more straightforward songs. On the same CD, you’d find the song Insects, whose chorus is, repeated again and again, “Those insects make me wanna dance (dance) they make me wanna dance…”
Or Whole Day Off: “Have you seen my girlfriend? She lives in a pig pen.”
And so on. There were also songs about the book 1984, and a tune talking about using your brain (Grey Matter) and so on, and so on, and so on.
I couldn’t parse out the musical style to save my life. Punk? No, too much stuff going on. Ska? Kinda. But what was with the keyboard riffs? Most of the music I heard day in and day out, there was the main instrument (guitar, or piano) and everyone else just kinda filled in, falling in behind. You could strip everything out but the primary thing and the song would have still kinda worked.
But not here. Here we had horns, and then an answering keyboard, and then an answering guitar. Drop any one of the three and there would be a huge hole.
I didn’t really know what I was listening to, but I did know that I needed to listen to it some more. So I broke the law, taped a copy, and started walking around the house with it in my Walkman. (There will be no jokes about ancient versions of MP3 players here.)
Skeletons, as it turned out, pulled music from the first three Oingo Boingo releases, which I eventually went out and grabbed. I learned about, and joined, the Oingo Boingo fan club, and learned there was more to find. Boi-ngo. Dead Man’s Party. Dark at the End of the Tunnel. A two-CD recorded-live on a soundstage thing that contained a couple of lost songs, and allowed Oingo Boingo the chance to make more money off their previous “hits” which were now on a different label.
And wonder of wonders, there was a Danny Elfman solo album(!) that was actually recorded with the band(?).
In contrast to the early albums, Boingo began to develop a bit more of a pop sound. The nasty snarl of punk was replaced with… something else. The lyrics sometimes still bordered on beat poetry, but they were less and less about using the rhythm of the completely random, and more about setting a mood.
And I encountered the first Boingo song I would describe as pretty, and kind of heartbreaking. We Close Our Eyes, from Boi-ngo, with words like, “I looked Death in the face last night, I saw him in a mirror. But he simply smiled. He told me not to worry, he told me just to take my time.”
That and Dead Man’s Party bridged the gap. My love of those discs brought me all the way to Dark at the End of the Tunnel, which now felt like a progression, instead of like a rock album that didn’t quite work.
To be sure, it was (and mostly remains) the weakest of the Boingo recordings, but at least I finally understood it, and there were some gems there, in particular Out of Control, which is lovely enough that I’m surprised it was never covered by a pop star and turned into a hit.
And then? Then it was filling in gaps, mostly. There were, as it turned out, a couple of greatest hits collections, with extra liner notes and songs. I got on the internet, and “met” a couple of people who were, out of the goodness of their hearts, putting together compilations of lost remixes and bootlegged tracks, many of which were wonderful and enjoyable and impossible to come by.
And there were two more releases.
The first, Boingo, came out when I was in high school, and it was kind of magical to me. These other recordings had been out for a while. And while I knew no other fans (I still know very few, and most of them were created by me) this was my first chance to, you know, get there first.
I bought. I listened. It was another step forward, really, and you could hear all the work Elfman had been doing creating musical scores in there. The horns were mostly gone, and in their place was, quite frequently, an orchestra.
And then. Then there was the talk of a break up.
Boingo was famous for doing Halloween shows every year, something I knew from the various newsletters. They did a couple more that year, after announcing they were breaking up, bringing the horns back and doing songs that went as far back as their only available on cassette first release.
I was trapped in Indiana. California might as well have been on the moon during those shows.
But I got the CDs. And the video. And I watched them, and they made me kind of happy, though I felt a sense of loss there too. Danny would go on to score lots and lots and lots of movies, and I’ve bought some of those scores over the years. But as the band has gotten further and further into the past, I find that his gift for giant, sweeping, fun to hum melodies has been replaced with more tricks, like counterpoint and variation and making his themes smaller and smaller and more into musical wallpaper and less like, you know, MUSIC.
It demonstrates growth and progression as a composer, yes. But just once, I wanna see him come back and do something like Edward Scissorhands, with its lovely, singable melodies.
It was Edward that brought me back to Boingo a few days ago. I was getting rid of my old car, and the very first music I ever listened to in that 14-year-old near-beater was Edward. And so I popped it in on the drive to pick up my new car. The speakers had been damaged by years of weather and overuse, and the notes hummed and crackled as I drove.
As I came home in my new car, though, I heard those strings and notes and bells better than I had in years.
I was stuck what to put into my car next, and I thought I’d pull out some of my old Oingo Boingo and see what I thought of it today.
How do I explain it?
Years later, on a much better stereo system, the mixes often sound thin. And at 35, I find I have often forgotten just how surreal the lyric choices are.
But, well, you know. You put it on. You listen. You remember. And I’m my younger self, sitting and hearing and pondering and wondering just what to make of what it is I’m hearing. And that makes me happy.
Because, dangit, those insects DO kind of make me wanna dance.
The movie has aged okay, though not perfectly, and parts of it still work. The biggest and best bit is the opening credits, with the swooping shots through the Batman symbol.
And that music. Oh, that music.
It was from that movie that I learned the name Danny Elfman.
I’m not much of a hipster. I read music columns that cover everything under the sun, and when I do, I discover that my musical tastes are quite shallow. And like most folks, as I’ve gotten older it’s gotten worse as opposed to better, as most of my discoveries and tastes slowly angle towards middle of the road.
But in that moment, I got to make a kind of discovery, and it was pretty awesome. I wasn’t much ahead of the world when it came to the discovery of Danny Elfman, but I was just far enough in front of everyone that, for maybe a year or two, instead of going, “Danny Elfman, who’s that?” I got to say, “Oh, I love Danny Elfman. I have all his stuff. All of it.”
And for a period of several years, I did. I got myself a list (pre-Internet!) of all the scores he’d ever written, and I went to my local Indie record store, and I filled out slips to have them get everything Elfman had ever released on CD. Ever.
I had to pay a dollar per CD, as a reserve cost. Five or six years later, I finally got a refund when they couldn’t find me a copy of Wisdom. That was an awkward conversation.
Somewhere or another, I heard that Elfman also had a band, though I couldn’t find the name of it. For some reason, I was under the impression it was another group called Giant Steps, though for the life of me I can’t figure out where I got that information. Which was wrong.
Somehow, thanks to some magazine or another, I did get my hands on the name of his group. Oingo Boingo.
I had to know more. I was deeply in love with this man’s movie music, and I had to know what he created when he was in an actual band.
As it happened, my local library had two Oingo Boingo CDs. The first was Dark at the End of the Tunnel. The second was a Best Of called Skeletons in the closet.
I came home. I put Dark in the player. I listened for about five minutes. I started flipping through the songs. And I was done. Whatever it was that I liked about Elfman’s movie music, I wasn’t finding it in there.
Then I put Skeleton’s in the Closet in there.
I want to say that the moment was somehow revelatory to me, that my world was forever changed, but mostly I found myself puzzled. I lived in a top 40 world, where everything was carefully stuffed into boxes for easy consumption.
There was no Richard Marx or New Kids on the Block or Neenah Cherry or Madonna or even Prince to be found here. These were people who sang about love and lust and relationships. Maybe they’d tell a story sometimes.
Skeletons, on the other hand, started with horns. Just a big old horn-style introduction, not unlike the 20th Century Fox theme. And then… what? Keyboards. Bass. A riffy kind of guitar, but not really chords.
And then the lyrics: “I love little girls, they make me feel so good. I love little girls, they make me feel so bad. When they’re around they make me feel like I’m the only guy in town.”
Even typing that now, I’m not totally sure what to make of it. Madonna and Prince were considered “dirty” at the time, but this… what was this? Satire? A song about the joys of very, very young girls? Was it tongue in cheek, or serious?
No idea.
And that was one of the more straightforward songs. On the same CD, you’d find the song Insects, whose chorus is, repeated again and again, “Those insects make me wanna dance (dance) they make me wanna dance…”
Or Whole Day Off: “Have you seen my girlfriend? She lives in a pig pen.”
And so on. There were also songs about the book 1984, and a tune talking about using your brain (Grey Matter) and so on, and so on, and so on.
I couldn’t parse out the musical style to save my life. Punk? No, too much stuff going on. Ska? Kinda. But what was with the keyboard riffs? Most of the music I heard day in and day out, there was the main instrument (guitar, or piano) and everyone else just kinda filled in, falling in behind. You could strip everything out but the primary thing and the song would have still kinda worked.
But not here. Here we had horns, and then an answering keyboard, and then an answering guitar. Drop any one of the three and there would be a huge hole.
I didn’t really know what I was listening to, but I did know that I needed to listen to it some more. So I broke the law, taped a copy, and started walking around the house with it in my Walkman. (There will be no jokes about ancient versions of MP3 players here.)
Skeletons, as it turned out, pulled music from the first three Oingo Boingo releases, which I eventually went out and grabbed. I learned about, and joined, the Oingo Boingo fan club, and learned there was more to find. Boi-ngo. Dead Man’s Party. Dark at the End of the Tunnel. A two-CD recorded-live on a soundstage thing that contained a couple of lost songs, and allowed Oingo Boingo the chance to make more money off their previous “hits” which were now on a different label.
And wonder of wonders, there was a Danny Elfman solo album(!) that was actually recorded with the band(?).
In contrast to the early albums, Boingo began to develop a bit more of a pop sound. The nasty snarl of punk was replaced with… something else. The lyrics sometimes still bordered on beat poetry, but they were less and less about using the rhythm of the completely random, and more about setting a mood.
And I encountered the first Boingo song I would describe as pretty, and kind of heartbreaking. We Close Our Eyes, from Boi-ngo, with words like, “I looked Death in the face last night, I saw him in a mirror. But he simply smiled. He told me not to worry, he told me just to take my time.”
That and Dead Man’s Party bridged the gap. My love of those discs brought me all the way to Dark at the End of the Tunnel, which now felt like a progression, instead of like a rock album that didn’t quite work.
To be sure, it was (and mostly remains) the weakest of the Boingo recordings, but at least I finally understood it, and there were some gems there, in particular Out of Control, which is lovely enough that I’m surprised it was never covered by a pop star and turned into a hit.
And then? Then it was filling in gaps, mostly. There were, as it turned out, a couple of greatest hits collections, with extra liner notes and songs. I got on the internet, and “met” a couple of people who were, out of the goodness of their hearts, putting together compilations of lost remixes and bootlegged tracks, many of which were wonderful and enjoyable and impossible to come by.
And there were two more releases.
The first, Boingo, came out when I was in high school, and it was kind of magical to me. These other recordings had been out for a while. And while I knew no other fans (I still know very few, and most of them were created by me) this was my first chance to, you know, get there first.
I bought. I listened. It was another step forward, really, and you could hear all the work Elfman had been doing creating musical scores in there. The horns were mostly gone, and in their place was, quite frequently, an orchestra.
And then. Then there was the talk of a break up.
Boingo was famous for doing Halloween shows every year, something I knew from the various newsletters. They did a couple more that year, after announcing they were breaking up, bringing the horns back and doing songs that went as far back as their only available on cassette first release.
I was trapped in Indiana. California might as well have been on the moon during those shows.
But I got the CDs. And the video. And I watched them, and they made me kind of happy, though I felt a sense of loss there too. Danny would go on to score lots and lots and lots of movies, and I’ve bought some of those scores over the years. But as the band has gotten further and further into the past, I find that his gift for giant, sweeping, fun to hum melodies has been replaced with more tricks, like counterpoint and variation and making his themes smaller and smaller and more into musical wallpaper and less like, you know, MUSIC.
It demonstrates growth and progression as a composer, yes. But just once, I wanna see him come back and do something like Edward Scissorhands, with its lovely, singable melodies.
It was Edward that brought me back to Boingo a few days ago. I was getting rid of my old car, and the very first music I ever listened to in that 14-year-old near-beater was Edward. And so I popped it in on the drive to pick up my new car. The speakers had been damaged by years of weather and overuse, and the notes hummed and crackled as I drove.
As I came home in my new car, though, I heard those strings and notes and bells better than I had in years.
I was stuck what to put into my car next, and I thought I’d pull out some of my old Oingo Boingo and see what I thought of it today.
How do I explain it?
Years later, on a much better stereo system, the mixes often sound thin. And at 35, I find I have often forgotten just how surreal the lyric choices are.
But, well, you know. You put it on. You listen. You remember. And I’m my younger self, sitting and hearing and pondering and wondering just what to make of what it is I’m hearing. And that makes me happy.
Because, dangit, those insects DO kind of make me wanna dance.
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