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Exile in Main St. is a high water mark in the history of rock & roll, so it’s no surprise that The Rolling Stones struggled to maintain their creative momentum after its release in 1972. Subsequent albums Goat’s Head Soup and It’s Only Rock & Roll had their fans, but, by the time The Stones got working on 1976’s Black and Blue, they were undeniably in some sort of a rut. Essentially, the sessions for Black and Blue were auditions to find a replacement for guitarist Mick Taylor, who had joined the band just prior to the release of Let It Bleed, at the beginning of what many would argue was The Stones’ most fertile period. As a result, the guitar work on the recording of Black and Blue was stretched between Harvey Mandel, Wayne Perkins, and Ronnie Wood, who eventually replaced Taylor in the band. The songs on Black and Blue were designed to allow their prospective guitar players to wank around, but The Stones also adopted a healthy dose of funk and disco sheen for the recordings, with Mick Jagger comparing the band to the Ohio Players in the pages of Rolling Stone. The resulting album has a certain amount of charm, including a cover of early reggae song “Cherry Oh Baby,” and some jazz piano played by Billy Preston. Largely, though, it’s a hot mess. To make matters worse, The Stones felt that the best way to advertise the album was with an enormous billboard on Sunset Boulevard that depicted model Anita Russell in a torn dress, with her arms tied up and her legs tied open, the album cover nestled in between them, and a huge purple bruise on her chin.
The Rolling Stones have always had, let’s say, an interesting relationship with their own unyielding misogyny, ever since “Under My Thumb” compared Mick’s girl to a squirming dog, but the Anita Russell advertisement took it to a whole new blatant level, and it played no small part in their declining popularity. Of course, there were plenty of other factors contributing to The Stones’ lack of record sales and dismissal by critics that marked the time. This period from 1972 to 1977 created a lot of the negative associations that hang with The Rolling Stones today—that they were a group of drug addicts, that their best music was far behind them, that they were bigots, that they were millionaires completely out of touch with the working class blues they attempted to play, that they were dinosaurs, relics that had no place in the scene now that punk had come along and made them irrelevant. It was under these circumstances that The Rolling Stones began work on their last truly classic album, Some Girls.
Without ever tipping over into self-awareness, Some Girls wraps up all of the personal and musical turmoil surrounding The Stones in the late seventies, and shoulders it in one defiant, cohesive statement of purpose. Thought the funk, jazz and reggae explorations on Black and Blue were mildly embarrassing? Here’s “Miss You,” a song that could stand alongside the best rock songs of the decade, while still being able to get asses shaking on the dance floor—enough so that the band even released an extended version for the discos. Think Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are too strung out to play? Worried that Ron Wood isn’t fit to clean up Richards’ vomit, to say nothing of filling Mick Taylor’s spot in the band? Here’s some of the most dynamic and diverse music in The Stones’ catalogue. Think they’re incapable of producing more than one hit per album anymore? How about four charting singles in the U.S. and U.K.? Think the band is misogynist? They’re even more misogynist than you think! Think that Mick Jagger is gay? He’ll drop “When the Whip Comes Down” just to fuck with you. “Shattered” features a vocal performance that could almost be considered rap. “Imagination” is such a ballsy reclaiming of The Temptations’ soul that The Stones don’t even bother to use the song’s full title. “Beast of Burden” is so emotional, it might just prove that Jagger is not a sociopath.
The Rolling Stones’ work in the sixties, and their ridiculous Let It Bleed/ Sticky Fingers/ Exile On Main St. hot streak made them legends, but Some Girls turned them into a band you could never count out, no matter how much was leveled against them. Rarely has one album refuted so many nay-sayers. As their popularity waned, and a new generation rose up to take their place, The Rolling Stones were supposed to retire and fade into the sunset. Instead, they set themselves up for one of the longest, most financially and musically successful careers in rock. Plenty of bands are at their best when they have something to prove; when The Rolling Stones have something to prove, they rewrite history.
-Martin Brown, 2009
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For better or worse, The Cars’ self-titled debut laid out the blueprint for a decade’s worth of radio-friendly rock & roll. Without it, there would never have been a Huey Lewis & the News, a Greg Kihn Band, a Robert Palmer (who reviewed the album for Rolling Stone upon its release), or a Duran Duran—and while those names might not immediately set your toes a-tappin’, it’s difficult to overstate how omnipresent their sound was in the early 80’s, until Guns n’ Roses came along and flipped the script. What’s fascinating about The Cars is how disparate the styles are that the band attempts to weave together—taking cues from psychedelia, bar rock, punk, new wave, Roxy Music-style glam, and proto-punk along the lines of The Modern Lovers (whose Dave Robinson was their drummer), among other things—and how fully formed the band sounds upon arrival, two traits that almost none of their successors shared.
The Cars begins with three stone classics. “Good Times Roll,” while dressed up as a party-starter, is something other than what it pretends to be. Rick Ocasek sings “Let the good times roll” as if he’s been forcibly strapped into an easy chair, made to eat cake until he vomits as the party goes on around him. Synthesizers blast and guitars scrape and scramble, while an army of back-up singers harmonize in the same slightly-icky monotone. The whole thing ambles along in a decidedly un-raging mid-tempo strut. Ocasek’s lyrics almost immediately begin mocking the party: “Let the good times roll/ Let them make you a clown/ Let them leave you up in the air/ Let them brush your rock & roll hair.” The whole thing is, well, totally weird—but the song has been so absorbed into mainstream culture, nobody notices. The Cars might be one of the most subversive bands ever.
“My Best Friend’s Girl” opens with the kind of surgical bass riff that would make Wire or The Strokes wet themselves. Rick Ocasek somehow turns Jonathan Richman’s stuffy-nosed, half-ironic, speak-singing technique into something that could rock a stadium, aided by call-and-response vocals and hand-claps (side note: a man who doesn’t love hand-claps is a sad, lonely man). Elliott Easton makes a case for himself as one of the most underrated guitar players in rock by shoehorning a rockabilly solo into the mix. Then, “Just What I Needed” is all like, “uh-uh,” and tops it. The opening bass notes are more staccato, and punctuated with full-on guitar kerrangs. Bassist Benjamin Orr takes over the vocals and turns a performance even more distant, more sullen, and, somehow, more anthemic; Easton’s guitar work is even cooler.
None of the other songs reach the same iconic stature as the first three, but they’re just as substantial. “I’m In Touch With Your World” is a deconstructed ballad, built on throwaway percussion and keyboard noises. “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight” begins defiant and turns pleading, while personal favorite “Bye Bye Love” crams an epic amount of feeling into its three-word chorus. And, of course, “Moving In Stereo” later took on a whole new life as the song that soundtracks Brad Hamilton watching Linda Barrett removing her bikini in his imagination in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Yet, “Good Times Roll,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Just What I Needed” are classics because they follow the blueprint of early rock & roll—essentially, they’re songs for teenagers. The difference being that this was a post-Watergate, disaffected generation of teenagers, and The Cars fittingly tricked out their songs with irony, distance and a healthy amount of cool in order to reach them. Fine, yes, we’ll party all the time, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to be happy about it.
-Martin Brown, 2009
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This week, we've got the season finales of Dollhouse and The Celebrity Apprentice, the first installment in the BBC's Wallander series, and your regular doses of 24, The Mighty Boosh, Lost & Fringe.
24: "5:00AM-6:00AM" by Tucker Stone
Did you catch it? The inside joke. The one about Kim and her 2009 version of cougar problems. Yeah, it wasn't very funny. It was nice to see the coporate bad guy from The Shield show up as Kim's doomed protector, in a subtle tweak on the old "hire a warhorse character actor to trick the audience into being surprised when he's slaughtered in a bathroom", but they blew the trick a bit when they brought in Don McManus as the neck-snapper, who you might remember from Magnolia, The Shawshank Redemption or any of the eighty television shows he's appeared in over the last twenty years. In the battle of "hey, that guy", a friend of Paul Thomas Anderson is always going to be more important to the plot then a grown-up Alex Diaz from 90210. Either way, McManus is a definite step-up in the role of "somebody who will eventually die for the crime of threatening Elisha Cuthbert in an attempt to get Jack Bauer to do something."
Dollhouse: "Omega" by Matthew J. Brady
Thank god for Alan Tudyk; let's get him to star on the show regularly, mmkay? Yeah, that's not going to happen, but he does things right. Last week, he was revealed as the villainous Alpha, a rogue doll who has dozens of personalities sharing space in his head. He plays that craziness to the hilt, flitting between personas from instant to instant, with the help of some skipped-frame editing. It's pretty awesome, especially compared to Eliza Dushku's incompetence when trying to do something similar. Yes, even in what might be the final episode, I can't stop beating that horse. Alpha's scheme involves implanting Echo with a bunch of personalities, hoping she'll join him as a godlike ubermensch and take over the world or something, but she wants none of it. There's probably supposed to be some moral debate going on here, but it mostly boils down to the idea that even with a wiped mind, the dolls retain some of their original character, so this means that Alpha, who we discover was a serial killer in the making, is evil, while Echo is all nice and shit. Simplistic, but it works pretty well. Better still is the moments where Alpha downloads Caroline, Echo's original personality, into a random girl that he kidnapped and forces her to face "herself". That was kinda cool.
In other news, we find out that Dr. Saunders, the Dollhouse physician who got some nasty facial scars when Alpha escaped, is actually another doll who was (permanently?) imprinted with her doctor persona. We get some flashback scenes of her life as a doll, including a nice bit in which she and Alpha play a Mickey-and-Mallory-style pair of psychos (although who knows why somebody would pay for that). Amy Acker isn't nearly as convincing as a blank slate though; that's one area where Eliza Dushku actually outperforms someone. It is kind of neat to see her come to the realization that she's a fake person though, and a scene where she berates poor Victor and calls him useless after Alpha carved up his face is pretty effective.
And we also get a sort of new status quo, with Agent Ballard deciding to work for the Dollhouse for some reason, even though he's highly morally opposed to their very raison d'être. He does bargain to have a doll released, which surprisingly isn't Echo (or not all that surprisingly, really, since they're not going to get rid of the show's nominal star). Instead, it's November, probably because he was guilty about fucking her. He does get a pretty awkward goodbye with her though.
And I guess that's it? Not a bad season-ender, although Alpha just kind of conveniently escaped, able to return and menace people another day. That's going to be the hope for a possible second season: that Alan Tudyk shows up at some point. Let's see more of that craziness and less of Eliza Dushku desperately trying to act her way out of a wet paper bag.
Fringe: "The Road Not Taken" by Matthew J. BradyThis isn't the season finale, but it could be considered part one for next week, since it sets up most everything for whatever the big event is going to be. It is a relatively self-contained affair, but a good portion concerns the meta-plot and it ends with a bit of a cliffhanger. Fun? Well, at least one of the ideas is, with Olivia suddenly having weird visions that don't line up with reality, including seeing two bodies at a spontaneous combustion/pyrokinesis crime scene when there's really only one. As always, Walter guesses what's going on, and gives us a science-fictional lecture while explaining it: she's jumping into parallel universes! You know, the kind that result whenever anybody make a decision, with the other possibility going on to form its own cosmos, like if I forgot to brush my teeth this morning and as a result everybody turned into Nazis. (I'm sorry?) That's of some sort of interest, although it's never explained why this is happening, or why it's happening now. It does help her solve the case though, by finding out the identity of the second body and tracking them down. Also solved: that obnoxious FBI guy who hates Olivia and kept screwing with her earlier in the season. Turns out he's evil (well, more evil), working with the bad guys, but he gets a nice bit of flaming death. And when Olivia confronts Walter about whatever experiments he was up to in the past, he still can't remember the details (because he's crazy, you know), but it was all for a purpose: to prepare for some coming disaster. Ooh, portentous! Walter also gets spirited away by the Uatu-esque bald guy who has shown up previously, so something big is in the offing for next week.
On the debit side of the equation, there's a pretty ridiculous bit of pseudo-science in one scene, even more silly than the usual stuff in this show. We hear details about a secret project Peter is working on, providing some not-very-subtle foreshadowing that he's going to reveal it at a key moment. It turns out that he was building a device to digitize Walter's records (which is pretty fucking overkill; you don't need an electron microscope for that sort of thing, you just need a turntable that you can connect to your computer), which he uses to read the audio that was melted into a pane of glass when a character burst into flame (I would say that it makes sense in the story, but it really doesn't). This involves cutting a circle of glass from the window, taking an image from it, then somehow playing the grooves in the glass to hear what was happening at the time. And for some reason, he has to spin a turntable like a DJ to control the playback. Good god, that makes no sense whatsoever. I blame Akiva Goldsman, who has apparently stuck his fingers deeply into this show; he didn't completely write the episode, but he's credited with "story".
I guess we'll see if anything interesting is going to come of all this next week in the finale. But given the trend of increased stupidity in the show, I don't know if I'll bother sticking around next season. Fuck you, Akiva Goldsman, you ruin everything.
The Celebrity Apprentice: "Season Finale" by Martin Brown
The first season of The Celebrity Apprentice was revelatory; the second was a mess. But this season, which concluded this week with Donald Trump hiring Joan Rivers over Annie Duke, seems to have created more hype than any season of The Apprentice since the first. Mostly, that’s because it did the same things most VH-1 caliber reality TV-shows do—the screaming matches, and the self-parody, and, you know, all the Bad Girls Club shit, just cleaned up a little for NBC and with “celebrities” competing for “charity.” When it comes down to it, Joan Rivers is not a whole lot different from Tykeisha Thomas (AKA “Somethin” from Flava of Love 2), except that she didn’t shit on the floor in the first episode THAT WE KNOW OF. Rivers treated her competitor Duke like absolute garbage, berating her at length, and not allowing her to speak in her own defense—or even wish Rivers good luck—and Trump refused to acknowledge a single bit of it. Even his response to Melissa Rivers’ conniption fit in Week 9 was a muted “That wasn’t your best moment.” It’s possible that Trump didn’t know going into the season that he was going to pick Joan as his apprentice, but it’s likely that he knew he might pick Joan as his apprentice, which is more than could be said for 75% of the others—including, apparently, Annie. Hence, his absolute unwillingness to say anything remotely negative about or around her. What probably happened was this: Joan picked up on, or already knew about, Trump’s fondness for her, and instigated a fight with the best player in the game, Annie Duke, in order to ensure her spot in the final two (Trump picked the finalists last season based on the fact that he wanted to see Piers Morgan and Trace Atkins face off.) That’s why the inciting incident behind Joan and Melissa and Annie’s feud was a supposed conversation that took place off camera.
I’m harboring no illusions that Annie Duke is anything remotely resembling a good person. It’s pretty easy to pin her right off the bat as a self-obsessed, narcissistic egotist—and, yes, those all mean the same thing, and, yes, Annie Duke is all of them. Damn it, though if she didn’t play the game perfectly. She knew exactly what she had to do to win—raise money, win challenges, bring in celebrities—and she did it 300% better than anyone else on this season. However, while Annie played the game, Joan played the show. By actively breaking the glass ceiling of decorum that usually accompanies these shows and these celebrities trying desperately to enhance their self-images, she created some incredibly compelling television (if not qualitatively good television, which I remember the first season being, though now I might have to rewatch it to see if I was right)—and she was rewarded by Trump and producer Mark Burnett for it, just as they were rewarded by NBC for it. Season 3 airs next Spring.
The Mighty Boosh: "Mutants" by Sean Witzke
"Look at your face - ambient, pure ambient. It's like The Orb's third album."
So this week, "Mutants". This is the second episode of the series, and while it would be nice to see a season run in order, it's kind of pointless now that Adult Swim started off with Boosh season 3. That season, the latest, is definitely the most weird and dark that the show has gotten. It was a strange decision, and I had assumed that Adult Swim had only been able to clear the overseas rights for S1 and S2. But here we are, "Mutants" immediately following "The Chokes". Six episodes in, and suddenly Howard and Vince are much younger. Everyone works at a zoo. Richard Ayoade is completely gone. Howard's crazy after a lady who looks like Sara Palin only w/ a french accent. Vince has terrible hair. Matt Berry is here as the scenery chewing karate-chopping billionaire bad guy. No crimping, and Bollo doesn't talk. It's a good thing that this show has absolutely no continuity episode to episode or season to season. People might get confused.
Stuff that's cut - the Kenan and Kel variety show opening with Howard and Vince giving introductions is out. That's a shame, those are the funniest parts of these early episodes. Bob Fossil dealing with a class of kids, trying to convince them there's an elephant in front of them but it's camouflaged. The credits skit is actually a payoff for a line that's been cut between Vince and the cobra. Relatively little compared to the Argento film that was the American edit of "The Chokes" last week.
This version of the Boosh is a lot more like a children's program, only written and performed whilst fucked up on mushrooms. Howard and Vince work at a zoo, animals talk, and the stories are more adventures than situations. This time, zoo owner Dixon Bainbridge (Matt Fucking Berry) is kidnapping animals and people to create multi-species mutants, supposedly to drive up zoo attendance. Whereas in season 3 it's less Scooby Doo, more standard sitcom, only both formats processed through the Boosh's ramshackle Douglas Adams/Muppet Show aesthetic. It's also a lot less packed with jokes - by the time they got around to "The Party", these guys really knew how to cram in the gags, callbacks, and extended conversations that are in themselves funny on top of the silliness and crazy costumes. Coming off of their radio and live shows - of which I am sorely ignorant - they took some time to figure out the pacing needed for episodic TV. Matt Berry is a fucking force of nature, as one who knows his work cannot deny. Dixon Bainbridge doesn't have much to do here other than be a mad scientist and a dick, he doesn't even have much dialog, and he still owns this episode from start to finish. If anything, the man becomes a star when you see him in full surgical scrubs holding a beaker full of scotch. The mutants are appropriately hideous and noticeably handmade, which is fantastic. The Mutants song that closes out the episode is one the Boosh's best songs - up there with "Love Games" and "Tundra" for pure children's TV simplicity and pop song catchiness. The problem with S3 is it's the least musical, and the great music in it is mostly crimps. Of course, a full fucking minute is cut of "Mutants" for the US airing, which is just a fucking slap in the face for anyone who'd actually wanted to listen to the songs on this show. But of course, I don't think they give a shit. If they do, they've got a mean way of showing it.
Next week "Bollo". Only it's the first season, so he's not funny, because Dave Brown's not in the gorilla suit until season 2. But we do get to spend a lot of time with Death, who talks like Alan Ford in American Werewolf in London.
Lost: "Follow the Leader" by Zeb L. West
Is Lost Fantasy or Science Fiction? Although any savvy TFO reader already knows the difference, there’s still some people who think they’re just one big lump category involving dragons or space or some shit. So what’s the difference?
The simplest I’ve heard it laid out is in terms of the plausible vs. the impossible. If you show a viewer a dragon, they say ‘okay, that’s impossible’ because conventional wisdom says that fire-breathing serpents don’t exist. But if you show them a space ship moving faster than the speed of light the viewer says ‘okay, that’s plausible.’ Even though they know it’s impossible according to current scientific theories, if they had to go toe to toe with a Trekkie at a SciFi convention, they wouldn’t be able to prove that it might someday not be possible.
So where does that leave Lost? Time Travel, teleportation and even psychic activity are usually dropped in the SciFi category depending on how they are treated. If you time travel by making a wish, teleport by wiggling your nose, or read minds through the use of a mystical crystal, you’re in the realm of fantasy. But if you bend the laws of physics to visit the past, listen in on the thoughts of others through a chemical imbalance in your brain, or teleport by molecular deconstruction and reconstruction, then suddenly we’re in the realm of SciFi!
There’s no doubt that Lost is laying a heavy foundation of pseudo-science involving the Dharma Initiative and a massive magnetic disturbance that sucks down airplanes. But the nagging fact remains that there are also elements of the fantastical everywhere! At this point it seems that Richard Alpert is immortal, Jacob is a ghost that haunts a shack, and that the island has an anthropomorphic will! Although each of these may eventually be given the pseudo-scientific treatment, at current count, Lost has one foot planted in each genre!
Don’t worry faithful reader: although I’ve appreciate you allowing my philosophical indulgence, I won’t forget to speculate on why it even matters if it’s SciFi or Fantasy! It matters because viewers who have been strung along with the promise of plausibility will probably be sorely disappointed if everything is chalked up to the magical. If it’s all a dream, if religious mysticism plays too large a part (i.e. Locke turning out to be Jesus), or if Atlanteans appear to explain everything, then we’re going to have quite an ugly Deus Ex Machina on our hands.
So if you watch the finale in a couple years and feel like it was all a bit too easy, don’t say I didn’t warn you about the red flags.
The major revelations of this week’s episode:
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Tags: 24, Celebrity Apprentice, Dollhouse, Fringe, Lost, Mighty Boosh, Wallander
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Bruce Springsteen
Darkness On The Edge Of Town
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Tags: 1978, Music, Wire
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Power Girl # 1
Written by Jimmy Palmiotti
Art by Amanda Connors
Published by DC Comics
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