This Summer’s Super-Scapegoat: The Amazing Spider-Man
Leave. Spider-Man. Alone.
Following a vigorous and challenging public colloquy with one of my fellow twittellectuals, I feel the need to herein collect my views on The Amazing Spider-Man film, out this July.
The vox populi I keep hearing on this film can be summed up as a collective sigh of jadedness, decrying the idea of rebooting a superhero franchise only five years after the conclusion of Sam Raimi’s successful and groundbreaking trilogy. Additionally, there is a frustration that the new film appears to be “unneeded,” because there is no obvious stylistic or thematic departure from the Raimi series. As the smug and increasingly lazy tastemakers at Grantland’s Hollywood Prospectus recently put it,
[O]utside of some lingering loyalty to the character and minor curiosity as to why this series needed another reboot, I have minimal interest in seeing The Amazing Spider-Man.
They go on to compare the film, which no one has even seen yet, to Gigli and Glitter. Like I said; lazy.
And quite simply wrong, too. The fact of the matter is that superhero franchises are rebooted all the time, and will continue to be rebooted over and over again until at least up through the apocalypse. Renewal (or recyclability) is a patent inevitability of the superhero genre itself, and a familiar affliction to monthly comic book readers everywhere.
The genre’s propensity toward recyclability has been especially pronounced in the genre’s contemporary filmic manifestation, since for the past decade or so textbook studio strategy seems to be pumping out as much summer superhero fare as humanely possible. The volume is further amplified it seems, as if studios perceive that the Golden Age of Spandex won’t be around forever, and this window -in which producing reliably profitable entertainment by simply dipping into the infinite content pool of comic book culture- won’t be around much longer.
Recognizing this “urgency,” the time between film series’ artistic conclusion (or functional demise) and the inevitable reboot has typically been less than a decade, i.e., easily consumate with the five years elapsed since Spider-Man 3 (2007) and The Amazing Spider-Man (2012).
• Batman Begins (2005) rebooted the Batman franchise, eight years after the painful fiasco of Batman & Robin (1997).
• The Incredible Hulk (2008) came five years after The Hulk (2003), and everyone still hates both movies.
• The Man of Steel (2013) will reboot the Superman franchise, seven years after the inexplicably bland Superman Returns.
• X-Men: First Class (2011), part reboot and part prequel, came five years after the generally disappointing X-Men: The Last Stand (2006).
• After Dark Knight Rises (2012), Warner Bros. is planning on rebooting the Batman franchise again post-Nolan in 2015, after a mere three year break.
So the practice of rebooting a superhero film franchise solidly within ten years is the modern rule, not the exception. Moreover, the gap in between series is reliably proportional to the success of the previous series’s last installment. Huge failures like Batman & Robin and Superman Returns require over five years, while a stunning success like Nolan’s Batman trilogy needs only three years. Spider-Man fits right in the middle.
The groans over The Amazing Spider-Man are thus very hard to understand as anything other than arbitrary scapegoating. This is the same thing that happened last summer with Green Lantern, and the year before that with Iron Man 2. Although neither film was any masterpiece, both films were beat up on less for their individual merits and more for the saturated context in which they happened to appear. Since we feel so swamped by superhero movies at this point, pop culture pundits need at least one comic book film each summer to slam, otherwise they are not doing their job.
People feel the need to categorize superhero films because they’re still solidly considered lowbrow entertainment, and intelliquent Americans aren’t supposed to just openly admit they enjoy lowbrow entertainment. So they construct an arbitrary taste narrative: Avengers is acceptable but not Spider-Man; Thor was legit, but not Green Lantern; Scott Pilgrim is okay but not Iron Man 2.
What’s happening then, is The Amazing Spider-Man is not even being pre-judged on its merits, but was always the heir apparent for this summer’s super-scapegoat because it happens to be competing with The Avengers and Dark Knight Rises.
And that prejudgment sucks, because the film’s merits look pretty strong. We have a new take on his origin focusing on the mystery of Peter’s parents, and the villain is a giant mad scientist reptile. Spider-Man is using web cartridges rather than mutant spinnerets, and to OG Spider-fans that’s a big deal.
Not only is the director’s last name Webb, but he directed the indie-appreciated (500) Days of Summer and an episode of The Office. The lithe and chill Andrew Garfield is leagues better as Peter Parker than the effete and shrill Tobey Maguire, and if you’re like me, Tobey Maguire made the Raimi trilogy practically impossible to fully enjoy.
And who, tell me who, doesn’t love Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy?
So do yourself a favor. Get off the hater bandwagon and give The Amazing Spider-Man a fair shake.
Black Lodge Vol. 1 is some of the dopest and most exciting avant-garde hip hop I have heard to date. I mean that sincerely. I don’t know who this kid is, but he raps like A$AP Rocky on acid, and references Twin Peaks, Taxi Driver, American Psycho, The Night Stalker (Richard Ramirez), Land Before Time, Street Fighter, and Spider-Man.
You’re right to be skeptical. I discovered Face Vega after reading this review over at the Mishka Bloglin, and assumed a Twin Peaks themed hip hop record was probably too good to be true. I expected poor production and a serious lack of flow. But I was dead wrong.
His flow is tight, nuanced, and dense with content and imagery. The record is epic and grandiose with Kanyesque effortlessness and concomitantly avoids artistic overreaching. He conjures nihilistic images from an early Bret Easton Ellis novel, and overflows with the frank weirdness of Danny Brown. I’m also reminded of Angels Exodus era Lil B, rapping over spacey decompressed electronic beats with a swagged out detachment that feels like gazing into the Void. But instead of a Messianic/autistic reformed criminal, Face Vega a legitimately intelligent and talented kid from Washington who’s into David Lynch.
This guy just gets it. So follow him on twitter, follow him on tumblr, and pay him a couple bucks for Black Lodge Vol. 1. The record is instantly addicting, and your money would be going toward a worthy cause.
The Digital Mixtape Era has had an arguably negative effect on the development of contemporary hip-hop. Where previously underground or aspiring artists promulgated skillz via promotion of a vinyl single or modest hard-copy EP, boasting only a few of their most solid and brandworthy tracks, today’s rap artists have succumbed to a promotional system of continually releasing freely downloadable zip files, each parcel containing dozens of tracks.
So today, the game is characterized by quantity and not quality. And that’s not such a good thing.
Take a look at the piece of work that first piqued my passion for rap back when I was a lost, impressionable 12 year old.
These two tracks alone had tremendous impact in the late 90s, and it wasn’t on me alone. These were succinct, potently expressive, and legitimately formative manifestations of Cage’s unique hip hop ethos.
“Agent Orange” dirty, clean, instrumental. “Radiohead” clean, dirty, instrumental. That was all one needed to get Cage. You instantly knew what he was about.
But now, Cage would have had to release (at minimum) 20 times as much content just to get noticed. And then once he did get noticed, would he have anything left to say?
I’ve been disturbed by this trend for some time, but have kept my mouth shut. Because who hates free music, right? But then I saw what Kid Cudi, of all people, had to say recently:
“We’ve never really done mixtapes because I just feel like, you know, it’s a waste of time….when someone goes in to do mixtape, their mindset is instantly like ‘I’m not trying to make the best music here, I’m just trying to make something to satisfy the people.’ And we don’t really like that. We kinda go into the studio and think ‘album’ instantly.” (~1:23)
That’s a very frank way to put it, I think. The goal of a mixtape is not to produce anything passionate, progressive or profound. Rather, it functions as a way for an artist to keep his head above relevancy water until his “album” is done. But like Cudi said, making a mixtape takes up time. And for upcoming artists who have yet to be given the kind of success they deserve, the game’s pressure to release vast quantities of free music before ever getting a record deal can be artistically draining.
Take a look at a guy like Mac Miller. Before the release of his first real “studio album” this past November, this kid had put out six different mixtapes, at an approximate average of fifteen tracks a piece. So even before his album, Mac Miller had produced a body of work we’d easily consider a career’s worth.
And then his album was met with only lukewarm reviews. “Serious” Mac Miller fans can correct me if I’m wrong, but perhaps he’s already tapped out. His creative juices drained. And who could blame him? He’s already done 100 songs for free, and we’ve all already enjoyed them.
And it didn’t have to be that way. Mac Miller could have hustled about in a promotional atmosphere akin to that of New York in the late 90s peddling a little single containing nothing more than “Nikes on My Feet” and “Kool Aid & Frozen Pizza,” and he’d get noticed.
For mainstream examples, look no further than Drake and Nicki Minaj. Both enjoy tremendous success, but in seriously degraded and “tamed” versions of their “mixtape selves.” Nothing Drake does will ever really match the magic of So Far Gone, even though Take Care makes an admittedly valiant pass at it. As for Nicki Minaj, anyone who was a real fan of what she was doing on her early mixtapes was in for a rude awakening when Pink Friday, essentially little more than a mundane girly-pop album, dropped. She’s been reduced to knock-off Gaga garishness, spitting the same repetitive onomatopoeic and light-on-lyrics verse she wrote for “Monster” track by track.
The fact is, the quantity over quality digital mixtape culture doesn’t help artists, and it doesn’t help fans. The art has been significantly diluted and cheapened, such that a form of music once held intimate now does little more than occupy space on our bottomless harddrives, ninety megabytes at a time.
Of course, this critique proliferates its own conundrums.
First, you have a visionary avante-garde deconstructionist like Lil B, who has taken the high-volume free music schtick to a legitimate level of existentialist Absurdism. Whether you enjoy him or not, it’s a historic fact that no rapper ever dropped a 676 track mixtape before Lil B. This kind of vigorous hyper-experimentation can be heralded as bonum in se for hip hop.
Second, you have outliers like Rick Ross, known for conspicuously flouting the idea that a mixtape should be as disposable as any other form of advertisement. His recent mixtape “Rich Forever” was deservedly met with abundant critical acclaim equal to that of Teflon Don. And (who knows?) it very well may end up out-shining his upcoming album God Forgives, I Don’t. This is controversial, but even I say his Ashes to Ashes mixtape was better than Teflon Don.
Third, the competitive idiosyncrasies of the rap game and its creative processes are perhaps especially conducive to the digital mixtape smorgasbord. Increased access to participation in the rap promotional process may be fairly described as a radical democratization of rap, with a concomitantly greater likelihood that the cream will rise to the top. More so than other musical genres, rap often depends less on individual artistic merit and more on tenacious penetration of obtuse and exclusive power structures. “Somehow the rap game reminds me of the crack game,” Nas famously remarked.
Lastly, what digital mixtape culture is really about is our sleeping in the bed that the internet -i.e. Napster, Kazaa, OiNK, and all of the various contemporary methods of file sharing this generation has enjoyed- has made for us.
We have spent the last decade or so progressively designing methods for achieving 100% free content consumption, ingeniously circumventing technological and legal obstacles at every turn; but simultaneously, we expect artists to continue producing art actually worth paying for. Those goals are fundamentally at odds with each other.
So digital mixtape culture says, “You want free content? Here. Take as much as you want.”
But none of that leaves me satisfied. As I peruse through my iTunes library, it’s frankly disturbing how much “mixtape” music I have, and how little any of it means to me. Try it yourself.
I’m willing to bet the most precious corners of your iTunes library are those MP3s that you ripped from hardcopy CDs that cost you $20 as a teenager, while a new digital mixtape sits there with barely a full listen.
Madonna came out of de facto retirement to record MDNA, saying she “felt like a caged animal.” First thing I did was groan.
I’m an enormous Madonna fan, but it’s utterly depressing to watch an aging artist like her try and fail over again at other mediums, only to crawl back to the music scene a shell of her former self.
The record’s first single “Give Me All Your Luvin’” was a disaster. It wasn’t the banality, the superficiality, or even the apparent wholesale lack of effort that bothered me. Often I don’t mind those things. It was her pairing with monotonous feux-rappers Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. that was just painfully unbecoming, and smacked of desperation.
“Is this what the kids are listening to these days?” she forced us to imagine her asking. Everyone gave her a pass on that in 2008 with Justin Timberlake and “4 Minutes” because the song was hot and they actually made a cool pair.
All signs pointed to an embarrassing effort, a crabby “last shot” before her career finally sputtered to a halt.
Those signs were wrong.
MDNA is an awesome record. I honestly have no clue what happened with the first single, because it’s not representative of the record as a whole. We have #DOPE dance tracks on here, most notably “Gang Bang,’ “I’m Addicted,” and “Turn Up the Radio.” Other straight pop gems are “Turn Up the Radio” and “I Don’t Give A,” which actually features an admittedly great verse from Nicki Minaj. Plus a good “slow” joint called “Masterpiece”
There’s always some garbage on a Madonna record, like any pop album, but you’re not supposed to make those songs the singles! It’s the other way around!
GAWD!
I know you don’t believe me. But you should. Because MDNA is a stimulating, fun, well-rounded record. And there’s even a lil’ dubstep.
Although dressed up in a ton of bubbly production, this record is probably the most vulgar and provocative we’ve seen Madonna since 1992’s Erotica triptych (consisting of the album, coffee table book Sex, and film Body of Evidence). Song titles like “Girl Gone Wild,” “Gang Bang,” and “I Fucked Up” are suggestive if not as facially pornographic as Erotica’s content, and lyrics like “Drive, bitch/You’re gonna die, bitch” are almost unsettling coming from a 52 year old Madonna.
This is a notable shift in content for Madonna, because somewhere over the past twenty years the Queen of Pop had all but lost her ability to shock. After Erotica we got the low-key but decent Bedtime Stories (1994), followed by Ray of Light (1998), easily her most sophisticated and mature work to date, but pretty uncontroversial in content.
Madonna’s seeming acquiescence to avoiding controversy became patently obvious when she was retained earlier this year to perform at the Super Bowl, a program which has kept things strictly conservative ever since 2004’s “Nipplegate” fiasco.
Madonna was presumably being lumped in with boring, aged rockers like Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, The Who, et. al; all reliably safe and inoffensive acts. And for an artist who once got into a public spat with the Pope and did more to infuse mainstream American pop culture with kink and fetish than all the myriad pornographers and Beat writers combined, being classified as “reliably safe and inoffensive” is just plain hurtful.
Indeed, just a few months after the above video was shot, feminist scholar and Harold Bloom protege` Camille Paglia wrote an editorial for the NYT declaring Madonna to be the future of feminism, lauding her profound vision of sex, “both the animality and the artifice.”
“Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising total control over their lives. She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive and funny — all at the same time.”
Elsewhere Paglia wrote,
“Playing with the outlaw personae of prostitute and dominatrix, Madonna has made a major contribution to the world…She has rejoined and healed the split halves of woman: Mary, the Blessed Virgin and holy mother and Mary Magdalene, the harlot.”
I’ll be the first to admit that perhaps Madonna could/should have stopped at 1998’s Ray of Light. With this record Madonna’s work had taken on a cosmically maternal, ethereal tone, and felt like an graceful conclusion to an utterly unprecedented career. Listening to Ray of Light felt like a yearning smile from a sad person, someone who had come to understand the sublime ambiguities of the Universe, and burned with its uniquely bottomless Love.
She sang in Sanskrit with lyrics adapted from yogic texts and interpolated elements of Hungarian jazz. It should be absolutely no surprise this was the most critically celebrated work of the world’s best-selling female artist of all time. So inspired and enlightening was Ray of Light that fans may have fairly concluded she was wrapping things up artistically.
Literally, she sang, “Learn to say goodbye/ I yearn to say goodbye.”
But she didn’t say goodbye.
She went on to release four more studio albums in the 2000s; they were decent if somewhat overplayed (“Music”), and underrated where she really shined brightest (Confessions on a Dance Floor and half of Hard Candy). On the whole, Madonna had produced a respectable but underwhelming Act Three of her career.
Act One (1983-1989) consisted of Madonna, Like a Virgin, True Blue, and Like a Prayer, a vibrant artistic adolescence, characterized by rapid releases and playful girl power.
Act Two (1990-1999) was Erotica, Bedtime Stories, and Ray of Light, an ambitious, unprecedented deepening of her celebrity persona focused on audacious sexual power, avante-garde imagery, and experimental methodology.
Act Three (2000-?) was Music, American Life, Confessions on a Dance Floor, Hard Candy, and now MDNA. When we look back at this stage in her career, the months between her Super Bowl performance and MDNA’s release will be what we remember. I sense she perceived that the past decade was inexcusably innocuous, and thus wanted to gain our attention again, if for no better reason than for old time’s sake.
What else could explain the one-eighty she recently pulled with respect to Lady Gaga and “Born This Way”? In January, while building hype for the Super Bowl performance and promoting her new album, Madonna indelicately attacked Lady Gaga and specifically intoned she had been ripped off.
It wasn’t the accusation itself that was surprising, since the scant similarities are both well-known and admitted, but the timing. Why did Madonna wait a full year to air these grievances, and worse, why is she contradicting herself? Immediately following the release of “Born This Way” last year, Lady Gaga received an email from Madonna’s organization expressing their support of and admiration for the song.
And what about that light hearted SNL skit they did together? They’ve always been cool with each other.
So what changed?
One explanation brings us back to Camille Paglia. In September 2010 Paglia penned an absolutely scathing, somewhat devastating critique of Lady Gaga’s celebrity persona. She called her an asexual, “ruthless recycler of other people’s work” and noted that “drag queens, whom Gaga professes to admire, are usually far sexier.”
For all my appreciation of Paglia’s work, the fact is she’s overreaching and a bit out of touch on Gaga. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say she accuses Gaga of stealing from Madonna and then lambasts her for being absolutely nothing like her. Madonna’s influence is ubiquitous, pervasive, and distinct throughout pop culture; even the most casual observer knows this. There’s nothing disingenuous or inauthentic about Gaga’s more obvious examples of homage. She’s just expressing Madonna’s influence with honesty and verve.
Gaga thrives in a pop paradigm Madonna created, yes, but in reality she’s quite distinguishable artistically and still has her whole career ahead of her. The girl’s only been famous four years. Not forty. Lady Gaga has not yet written her “Like a Prayer,” and we honestly have no idea what it’s going to sound like when she does.
But let’s be real. Paglia’s article was out way before “Born This Way” was even a single.
The fact of the matter is Madonna did it to be mean, and to promote her new album. Plain and simple. And let me stress: I don’t fault her for that. It’s no secret Madonna can be a brutally mean person when she wants to be, or even when it merely happens to entertain her.
Such is the cold grace of the enthroned.
No one becomes Madonna by being nice, and Lady Gaga does not seem to have learned that yet. Only legitimate hurt could spur such rare, frank, and politically incorrect language from the heretofore inscrutable scion of positivity:
“Why would I try to put out a song and think I’m getting one over everybody? That’s retarded. I will look in your eyes and tell you that I’m not dumb enough or moronic enough to think that you are dumb or moronic enough not to see that I would have stolen a melody. If you put the songs next to each other, side by side, the only similarities are the chord progression. It’s the same one that has been in disco music for the last 50 years. Just because I’m the first fucking artist in 25 years to think of putting it on Top 40 radio, it doesn’t mean I’m a plagiarist, it means I’m fucking smart. Sorry.” (emphasis added)
The real reason everyone thinks “Born This Way” and “Express Yourself” sound the same isn’t the chord progression at all. Because Gaga is right about that. Music is a folk art that has always recycled its chord progressions.
The real reason is two part:
1) passionless, lazy Gaga detractors were citing superficial similarities between the two artists long before “Born This Way” came out, and merely continued down this reductive line of thinking.
2) people still think Madonna’s song is about expressing one’s self, when actually it’s about getting him to express himself. It’s a (rather shallow) girl power anthem about playing hard to get. Read the lyrics.
Another reason the Madonna/Gaga dialectic is interesting is MDNA’s release closely coincides with Lady Gaga’s ostensible descent into obscurity. She said, “I don’t want to hear nothing about anything that is going on in relation to music…I don’t intend to speak to anyone for a very long time.”
I think it’s mostly so she can withdraw and develop a new style, unfettered by the nonsense cultural influences lesser artists (*cough* Katy Perry *cough* Beyonce) are prone to absorbing.
But perhaps a small part of her is sick of hearing about Madonna, too.
Madonna’s “Give Me All Your Luvin’” Terrifyingly Remixed
Here is a fascinating remix of the newest Madonna single by ℑ⊇≥◊≤⊆ℜ of Mater Suspira Vision. It’s a disturbingly unique take on a disturbingly a bland song, complete with a music video constructed out of clips from Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (1992), which was pretty much the Citizen Kane of gore films.
The remix also sounds like it’s just a Type O Negative cover. And that’s amazing.
If you have time to waste and would like to further traumatize yourself, explore the Mater Suspiria Vision tumblr. It’s a scary, scary place.
VH1’s Mob Wives provides one of the most stimulating and controversial depictions of the Italian American lifestyle on television, second perhaps only to Jersey Shore. When I say “Italian American,” I of course mean nothing in terms of national origin or authentic cultural heritage. I merely refer to that set of popularized stereotypes that have been sensationalized and commodified for decades as thematically idiosyncratic of “mobster” sensibilities.
This is why it makes no difference that Drita is Albanian and Jwwow is Spanish/Irish, because for all pop culture intents and purposes, they are both “Italian.” And on the other hand, quite paradoxically, it doesn’t matter that Vinny is objectively the most (authentically) Italian Jersey Shore cast member. He rather seems to stand out as the least “Italian” member of the Jersey Shore cast, since he exhibits the least trashy fashion sense and has the least orange complexion of everyone.
And this is also why bemoaning comments like Governor Christie’s fall on deaf ears.
Viewers are quite simply not interested in the genealogy, but rather remain primarily concerned with substantially entertaining caricatures that exist independently of blood relations and complex familial institutions.
And it’s easy to see why. American pop culture is enamored with the “Italian” symbology because it represents a white subculture at once steeped in lavishly high-class luxury and embarrassing lowbrow quirks. Mob Wives is compelling because it gives us a chance to gawk at attractive middle-aged women drowning in sorrow and dirty money. When having enough money and working is not a problem- indeed, not even a cognizable issue- mobwives still have their share of problems.
Rather than paying bills or climbing corporate ladders, mobwives worry about the next brutal fistfight, significant others’ impending jail sentences, the “street cred” of long-deceased relatives, strenuous plastic surgeries… all cloaked in ineffable notions of rough justice and philistine honor.
Now.
Getting down to specifics (and superficialities) for season two of Mob Wives…
Renee as radioactive nucleus
I think analyzing the show’s structure first requires we put Renee in the center of it all. She seems to have the attitude, experience, and connections to be properly considered the leader, and indeed appears to be the only substantive link (other than mob ties!) between Team Drita and Team Karen. She engages in what appear to be mediating tactics between the two factions, but have consistently amounted to exacerbations and fiascos.
I love Renee, but she makes for about as stable a center as a plutonium isotope. Since literally the very start of this season, Renee has been saddled with a laundry list of personal problems (depression, anxiety, body image issues, romantic distress, her son acting up, her parents incommunicado…) and it appears that they are starting to really weigh on her. Drita and Carla very candidly expressed their concern last episode.
This is not to say that any of this is Renee’s fault, or that she’s anything other than well intentioned. But her injection of her personal neuroses into the other mobwives’ problems has become patently obvious, and isn’t terribly healthy for anyone involved. Most strikingly, when Drita’s marital issues reached a poignant watershed with an apologetic phone call from her incarcerated-and-questionably-soon-ex husband, Renee immediately began projecting her problems and insecurities with Junior, and this made Drita feel, well, weird.
Same thing happened with the conversation Renee and Ramona had outside the courthouse. Arguably, this came from a place of authentic sympathy and experience. But it is notable the extent to which Renee seems to “see herself in” the other characters.
Is Renee simply giving valuable sage advice to Drita and Ramona, or irrationally projecting her own neuroses?
Ramona as captivating and admirable
I firmly place my ideological preferences with Team Drita, but I think you’re crazy if you can’t admit Ramona is “one bad bitch.” She is simultaneously the show’s most intelligent, beautiful, and cruel character. She stikes me as focused and ambitious, fearless and inscrutable.
Her talents are most clearly on display whenever she interacts at length with any of the other characters. She is the character that most consistently speaks in logical form and with entertaining contemporaneousness (Drita is good at this too). Her sophistication regularly baffles whoever she is talking to, often such that the interaction can no longer fairly be called a conversation.
Usually, it’s just Ramona trying valiantly to deal with a storm of non-sequiturs. Her discussion with Renee about how she HATES crumbs is the clearest example.
All I can say is it’s a shame she’s Team Karen. A damn shame.
Karen as the worst human person of all time
If anyone out there is Team Karen, speak up. Defend yourself. Justify your ridiculous position. Name ONE thing Drita has done wrong. Name ONE thing you like about Karen’s personality.
One could go on and on about how truly horrible Karen is, on multiple levels, from every reasonable angle. But I’m going to focus on just one that I found particularly disturbing.
Since judging other people’s personal lives is the whole point of reality television, that’s exactly what I’m doing with respect to Karen’s decision to abandon her daughter. Karen’s talk with her daughter in the restaurant about shipping her to Arizona almost made me cry. The distance between them was indescribable.
The whole interaction was just really, really sad. Not because Karen was making a “hard” decision. Because Karen was making an awful decision, and her daughter quite clearly feels unloved.
Karen isn’t even able to reasonably justify it, even in her staged confessionals. She basically says that she wants to stay in Staten Island so she can be famous and unfettered, throwing spa parties and doing photoshoots, and she doesn’t want her daughter around for it.
What’s worse, it doesn’t appear she had any kind of honest discussion with the father about this (who himself seems like a piece of crap), because he could barely contain his surprise upon learning the daughter was “his” now.
One may find the “Karen is a bad mother” analysis unfair, because it’s based on something that was taken wholly out of context, we don’t have any real knowledge as to the situation, and we saw it as part of a superficially constructed reality show, which expressly functions to warp and dramatize reality.
But I don’t buy it. Two recent child-mother interactions stand in sharp contrast: Drita’s talk with her daughter about the potential divorce, and Ramona’s talk with her kids about her boyfriend’s arrest. I found both to be powerfully human and personal moments, which unfolded organically despite the cameras. It’s obvious Drita and Ramona are still “real people” in a sense, who care about “real” things.
But not Karen.
All Karen cares about is developing a reputation for being a tough and aggressive “Mob Daughter” around town. She wants a strong Staten Island persona so she can sell her pretentious Mob Daughter book, and then bask in unearned adoration.
Karen has a problem with Drita, because Drita is a manifest threat to the “nobody messes with Karen” theme, which she wishes to develop as a narrative permeating her book’s release and promotoin.
So yeah. I h8 Karen.
Big Ang as brilliant rising star
There is not much I can say about Big Ang that hasn’t been said before. As the show’s uncontroverted breakout star, she is far and away the most incredible distillation of Italian American cartoonishness I have ever seen. In fact, she is the closest thing to a living breathing cartoon anywhere, ever. There is just no precedent for her species of being.
Her every move leaves me speechless in this regard. She most definitely deserves her own show.
It’s a bittersweet realization, when it dawns on you that an artist’s debut effort is so fantastic, so groundbreaking, and so personally resonant, that nothing they do subsequently will ever compare.
In film there’s Richard Kelly and Donnie Darko. In rap, it’s Nas and Illmatic. With TV, you’ve got season one of practically everything.
And in the world of digi-noise/popcore, smart money was on Sleigh Bells and Treats (2010).
This was a unique listen for a number of reasons; the stunning production, ethereal vocals, genre-bending versatility, etc-
But mostly we loved Treats because literally every track had the listener thinking, “OMG! I’VE NEVER HEARD ANYTHING LIKE THIS BEFORE!”
Needless to say, Reign of Terror doesn’t enjoy this luxury. It is in fact a very good album, but seems to quiver feebly in the shadow of Treats. This, its major flaw, fuels perhaps the record’s most consistently induced feeling: the sense that we have heard this before and, alas, it was better the first time.
The record starts off startlingly weak with a wholly unneeded, obligatory overture track “True Shred Guitar.” The already cartoonishly epic tone of all Sleigh Bells songs makes this one a waste of our time. This leads into the frankly boring “Born to Lose,” the disappointing promotional track released a few months ago.
But things pick up notably with the beautiful ”End of the Line,” which they are shockingly good at performing live. Did you know Sleigh Bells could perform live? I sure didn’t.
The single, “Comeback Kid” (below) just absolutely rocks, and kicks off an incredibly enjoyable second half. From there on, the record just shines and shines. I can’t stop listening to a few of these, especially ”Demons,” “Road to Hell” and “You Lost Me.”
A magnanimous but quite fair reading of Reign of Terror is the Brooklyn duo’s move away from the jagged garishness that made Treats a bit too much on softer ears, and a renewed commitment to graceful melody. On the other hand, less sympathetic fans may simply be unimpressed with Reign of Terror, with its best tracks measuring up to only the decent ones on Treats.
So basically, enjoying this record will depend how pretentious and jaded you feel like being today.
