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All posts tagged "reviews"
A letter to Lupe Fiasco.
Dear Mr Fiasco (if that is your real name, and I know it isn’t),
We go back, man. Way back. We were pretty tight. We grew apart for a while there, I know; you took unnecessarily loud breaths between sentences, I got annoyed and ventured into the back-catalogues of other rappers. But we were tight, man.
I thought you were the new standard-bearer of intelligent rap. Humble, poetic, more into the music than the image. One time, I cried on the bus while listening to you on my iPod; yeah, sure, maybe that’s lame, but you touched me, dude. Touched me deep. I even got that mix-tape you did with that guy from Linkin Park. It wasn’t that bad, I guess, but the point is: I actually purchased something involving someone from Linkin Park. I didn’t even do that for Jay-Z, bro. Not even for Jay-Z. But I did it for you.
Remember when I saw you at the Metro a couple of years ago? Yeah, I know you kind of showboated a little bit, and yeah, you did mess up a couple of verses. And yeah, you took your shirt off, but you kept your sunglasses on. Indoors. At night. But that was alright: the crowd loved it, and you were charismatic, poised, and skilfully on point. That night stuck with me, man, and since then, whenever live hip hop came up as a topic of conversation, I’d point to you as a prime example of how to do it right.
So when exactly did you start smoking crack?
That’s the only reason I can come up with your performance at Big Day Out. You were pompous, erratic, bewildering and yeah, maybe even a little scary. What happened, man? You used to be cool.
Okay, fair enough, I missed the start of your set, so maybe I didn’t get the contextual set-up for the finale… But my first thought when I walked into the weird slow jamz session with you pelvic thrusting on stage was, “Wow, I didn’t know R. Kelly was here.”
Standing at the centre of the stage, nodding your head like, “Yeah, I’m awesome”, and generally just revelling in your own glory for extended periods of time does not count as a performance. Unless you’re Kanye West, I guess, but you’re not. And that’s what I liked about you, man. That you weren’t like Kanye, even though you dudes were old Chi-town friends or whatever.
And so it was kind of ironic that you decided to close with a song about the vapidity of the hip hop industry, a song I used to think you believed in. But dude, yelling the lyrics, and missing every second line does not make the song more poignant. It makes it annoying. And it kind of makes you a shitty rapper.
But that wasn’t the biggest problem. Oh no. The biggest problem was that you are now, in fact, insane. What the hell was up with all that squirming around on the floor shit? What was that? Seriously, what the hell was that? Why did you lay on the floor of the stage with your legs raised perpendicularly in the air, and keep the beat by knocking your feet together in a scissor-like fashion? I don’t understand, man. Only ODB could have ever gotten away with that shit. You’re not ODB, man, not by a long shot. And if you wanted to be OMG SO ZANY, you should have been honest with me from the start. I understand that performers change and grow, but… no. No. No no no no. How you gonna play me like that?
That’s it, bro. I’m done. This is a betrayal I can never forgive. I’m actually glad I didn’t get a ticket to the sideshow this time. I’m not even worried about you retiring anymore. Oh, and I’m definitely not buying your next album.
I might download it, maybe, but only because I’m the kind of person who enjoys pressing my bruises.
Procrastibation.
Now that the assessable component of this blog is over, I’ll be frank about what has been consuming a large hunk of my time over the past few weeks: GIANT PENIS MONSTERS.
No, it’s not some Freudian fantasy gone horribly awry (or horribly right, depending on how gross you are); it’s SPORE, Maxis Software’s latest successful effort at destroying my soul.
SPORE is like Age of Empires meets The Sims: it’s utter shit, but totally addictive. The game’s Wikipedia entry describes it as “a multi-genre massive single-player online metaverse”, but it’s best summed up as a complete waste of time. You begin the game as a single-cell organism, swimming ‘round the evolutionary sludge, chomping down lesser organisms and earning tokens and points that allow you to evolve into some ungodly freak of nature in the user-controlled Creature Creator. The next thing you know, it’s seven hours later: you’re sweaty, confused but strangely satisfied, and you’ve evolved your species into a space-faring civilisation.
Putting aside the ability to create phallus-monsters and other awesome opportunities to let your inner child wreak havoc, SPORE is appealing because of its choose-your-own-adventure style of gameplay. Each seemingly insignificant decision dramatically changes the available outcomes of the game. For example, if you choose to be a carnivore in the primordial ooze stage, it will affect what you can evolve into in the creature stage, which in turn affects available options in the subsequent tribal and civilisation stages. This presents seemingly limitless storylines and optimum replayability.
Funnily enough, this is also what makes the game mind-numbingly boring. With no real sense of cathartic completion and with its cutesy graphics, SPORE remains a game better suited to ten-year-olds. Maxis has cleverly attempted to overcome this by creating a complex playable online universe into which hardcore SPORE players can transpose their own creations, but I’m not pathetic enough to have ventured that far. Yet.
I don’t know what it is about repetitive and menial open-ended gameplay that gets my motor running. Maybe somewhere in my psyche, I have a buried Messiah complex that fills me with the urgent desire to make entire species bend to my will, and it’s best exercised only in the virtual world. Or maybe I just like wasting time. Either way, Maxis has definitely perfected the formula for the never-ending game: with an expansion pack already due for release this November, they’re making massive coin out of procrastibators like me.
But with over 41 million user-created entries in the SPOREpedia, it’s at least a tiny iota of comfort to know that I’m not the only idiot wasting my time.
Double extra cheese.
Tits & Guns by flood. Image courtesy of Jeremy Prondoso.
IS IT PORN, or is it art? The age-old question is one that you should be afraid to bring up around feminists and/or skeevy old dudes, but I’ve always thought it was simple: it’s just porn. But flood’s installation at the second stage launch of Extra Cheeese showed that even gross old porn can be part of art, too.
You might remember me blogging about it when it was in the planning stages, and now the Extra Cheeese collective’s second foray into the world of recycling rubbish into art has been and gone. It showcased some of Australia’s most exciting artists, and with contributions from Eamo, Minigraff, Apeseven, Beastman and Kareena Zerefos, flood’s artfully arranged stack of old lady porn magazines wasn’t the only thing getting punters at Redfern’s Medium Rare Gallery a little hot under the collar.
And as the some 400-strong crowd at the exhibition’s opening night will tell you, cornering artists and designers with such a challenging limit to their creativity creates some interesting results. Katherine White’s clever reuse of spent Polaroid film cartridges in her monochromatic installation Expired created a ghostly, ethereal piece which jolted the viewer into an immediate sense of nostalgia. On the other side of the spectrum (and indeed, the other side of the room), James Jirat Patradoon’s piece Untitled suspended in midair a child’s gridiron helmet in a frenzy of surreal, hypercoloured comic book-style fantasy. Meanwhile, Daryl Prondoso and Nic Warnock’s mixed media collaborative effort FOAD brought misappropriated (and inappropriate) cross-stitch to the table: what would your granny think if you embroidered ‘Fuck off and die’ over her favourite cross-stitch panel?
And it’s exactly this kind of culture clash that makes Extra Cheeese such an interesting artistic exercise. It blends the old with the new, the high with the low, and harnesses creative ability into thinking outside the box. Even if the box in question is just full of old porn magazines.
You can see more images from the night in this gallery by Nathalie Sun.
Where rap went wrong.
I have a shameful confession to make. I love rap. Seriously. I often go weeks without listening to any music other than rap. Once upon a time, I dreamt of becoming a rapper, but that career path hit a wall in year 12 when I battled some Russian kid during class, and my teacher subsequently called me a bitch for upsetting him.
Also, I couldn’t rap for shit. Nowadays, such a small detail seems completely irrelevant.
In this era of “Apple Bottom jeans and the boots with the fur,” liking rap has become, by definition, a shameful confession. And it’s no wonder, when some 17-year-old kid posts a YouTube video of himself doing a silly repetitive dance, gets over 38 million views, and thus becomes a successful rapper off the back of what is essentially just an internet meme: Soulja Boy’s Crank That rested at number one on the American Billboard charts for two consecutive weeks.
Unsettlingly, Aussies weren’t immune to the stupidity. The song peaked at number two on our ARIA charts, and has now spent 45 weeks in the Top 40. With lyrics as powerfully emotive and insightful as “Soulja Boy up in this ho / Watch me crank it, watch me roll / Watch me crank that Soulja Boy then / SUPERMAN THAT HOOOO,” or alternatively, “SUPERSOAK THAT HOOOO,” Soulja Boy is a perfect example of what is wrong with rap.
To be great, rap needn’t be good. Neither does it have to be profound nor intellectually-driven to be entertaining or intellectually impressive. While there’s a lot to be said about intelligent rap (Nas, Blackalicious, De La Soul, The Roots, Lupe Fiasco, and Talib Kweli are amongst the most popularly named), some of the most engaging and enjoyable rap is about nothing more than — as Biggie put it in his first single —“party and bullshit.”
Take, for example, Spank Rock’s 2006 album YoYoYoYoYo: like Soulja Boy, it’s basically just about sex, partying and other frivolous stuff, yet its composition manages to be inarguably clever. Or even Wu-Tang Clan’s 2001 song Gravel Pit: it addresses no topic other than how awesome Wu-Tang Clan is, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a classic. Because the lyrics? They’re not nonsensical. (The video clip might be, but I’m letting it slide because Method Man has a lisp, yet still manages to sound harder than a furry watching Sesame Street. Also, it has ninjas and dinosaurs, together at last!)
The difference between decent pointless rap and straight-up pointless rap is in the poetics of wordplay; the skill and finesse it takes to rhythmically twist sentences so that the average listener can simultaneously be disgusted, amused, impressed and heck, maybe even a little turned on.
Eminem, the infamous enigma everybody loves to hate, capitalised off this most cleverly: he doesn’t owe his success to his novelty as a white rapper, or even to his propensity for causing controversy, although those factors probably helped. He’s successful because even when he makes songs about whack shit like sticking a gerbil up your butt, he does it skilfully.
By leaving out the skill, all Flo Rida, Chingy, T-Pain, et. al., are doing is getting rich off of insulting our intelligence. Shit, what does Lil John even do other than get mad crunk and intermittently yell “YEAH” and “H’OKAY”? How has he made a career out of that? And why the fuck did we let him?
At least we can all take comfort in the fact that it’s socially acceptable to yell unintelligibly in public about the sweat that drips down your balls while you shoot your load in a chick’s face. By those standards, the crazy homeless dude on your local street corner could be some record company’s next cash cow. Or, you know, I could finally start living my dreams. Y’ALL SKEET SKEET, GODDAMN.
Nineteen Eighty-Four sucks, and four more of the most overrated books of all time.
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.
The best book George Orwell ever wrote was Down and Out in Paris and London. I once got into a fist fight defending the validity of this statement. Well, I guess it was more just a bunch of girly slapping, but whatever. Nineteen Eighty-Four was groundbreaking in its time, and in many ways its cautionary depiction of a state-controlled dystopia shows remarkable foresight, and a well-honed, dramatic writing style. Nevertheless, it sucks. And Aldous Huxley kind of did the same thing with Brave New World, but slightly better. And, you know, first. Down and Out is definitely Orwell’s magnum opus.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
Truman Capote once said of this classic Beat novel, “That’s not writing. It’s typing.” But then again, Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s, so what does he know? Actually, that book is also somewhat overrated, although admittedly it’s the inaccurate film adaptation that is inexcusably overrated: WHAT IS WITH MICKEY ROONEY AS MR. YUNIOSHI???
WHUT??? Anyway. On the Road is actually a pretty good book. I just have real difficulty believing people who are all “omg it like, changed my life.” All it did to me was make me think in nonsensical run-on sentences all day, which is really not that much of a change at all.
Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger.
Holy shit, was Holden Caulfield the first ever emo kid or what?! I have a theory that anyone who loves this book read it whilst in the grip of teen angst. Which is alright when, you know, you’re an actual teenager, and much less excusable post-pubescent blues. If I wanted to read some kid whinging about “lousy phonies”, I could just log onto Livejournal. The prose would arguably read better.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Actually, I think I just read a really shit translation of this one, and consequently did not get further than halfway. Nevertheless, a lot of people who just want to sound real smart tend to cite this as one of their favourites, and it is therefore overrated. Indubitably.
Like, pretty much everything written by Chuck Palahniuk.
There’s controversial writing, then there’s writing that is trying to be controversial. (Was that meant to be ironic?) We get it, Chuck: you’re nihilistic and anti-establishmentarian and eminently knowledgeable and ooooh-ever-so-fucking weird. If you’ve already seen the Fight Club movie, read his short story Guts here, and you’ll basically be a bona fides Palahniuk expert. Just like everyone else.
(DISCLAIMER: I actually really like these books. I just think they’re overrated. But hey, my favourite book of all time is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and I don’t even know how many times I’ve read the Harry Potter series, so my opinion is positively moot.)
Who will watch the Watchmen? Me, for sure.
Fact: if you say ‘I read graphic novels,’ you sound way wankier than if you just say ‘I read comic books.’ Surely, the phrase ‘graphic novel’ is just a desperate attempt to legitimise the art form, to bring comic books into a more literary, intellectually acceptable realm by sluicing away the negative connotations that imply light, pulpy reading.
At least that’s how I felt until I read Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. There is just no other way to describe it than as a novel that is executed primarily in graphic form. A graphic novel, if you will.
Ironically, Moore himself as been quoted as saying: “My book is a comic book. Not a movie, not a novel. A comic book.” But there is just something intangible about the multilayered work that transcends the implications of those words.
Since its first publication as a 12-issue series in 1986, it has remained a strong critics’ favourite, and featured in Time magazine’s list of the top 100 books of all time. Even Stan Lee – the industry’s demi-god creator of classic characters like Spiderman, the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk and Iron Man – called Watchmen his “all-time favourite comic book outside of Marvel.” Generally speaking, Watchmen is the comic book you recommend to the jerks who hate comic books.
And it’s the latest in a slew to get the Hollywood treatment, with the movie due to launch in February 2009.
It’s hard to not feel conflicted. Moore himself eschews the movie studios; he’s notoriously protective of the integrity of his work. Following a legal wrangle over Twentieth Century Fox’s adaption of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as well as Warner Brothers’ atrocious excuse for V for Vendetta, the writer has asked that his name be removed from those titles, and receives no royalties. To add insult to injury, Warner Brothers is also behind the Watchmen film. But holy shit, this trailer looks SO FUCKING AWESOME:
Written as the Cold War was winding down, Watchmen is a cautionary political commentary on the global insecurity caused by nuclear arms. Within an alternate history, Moore creates epically detailed characters who seem superhuman, and yet are all too susceptible to human foibles and failures. Through amazingly detailed vignettes, and intricately laced parallel stories, Moore touchingly tells of their personal crises in a time of crisis on a world-scale. Underpinning the tale is Plato’s haunting question, as relevant now as it was thousands of years ago: who will watch the watchmen? Nevertheless, Moore stops short of grandiose posturing. Shit, the dude even quotes Bob Dylan.
I’m by no means a purist; I like popcorn-bustin’, no-brainer comic movies as much as the next slavering tight-arse Tuesday-goer. I even own the X-Men film trilogy on special edition DVD, although I do enjoy smugly pointing out the inaccuracies. But for every exceptional comic-to-film adaption (300, Iron Man, Sin City, The Dark Knight, Ed Norton’s Hulk), there are at least two that make nerds around the world run home from the cinema to urgently register their distaste on internet forums (Wanted, Ghost Rider, Constantine, Batman & Robin, Eric Bana’s Hulk, Wanted, Wanted… Did I mention Wanted?)
And with a work as complex as Watchmen, it would be next to impossible to translate the subtle nuances of the writing, the innovative use of metafiction, and the excruciatingly detailed visual clues into film.
But having seen the trailer, I sure as shit can’t wait to see them try.
