jane dark's sugarhigh!

26 singles of the year/"melodic range"

As ever, the singles list excludes songs that appear on the albums list for this year (though, idiosyncratically, it doesn't exclude songs that appeared on last year's list (Miranda Lambert) or are likely to appear on next year's list (M.I.A.). Moreover, the list is generated from iTunes play counts aggregated from all the sugarhigh! terminals, modified by a simple algorithm that accounts for song's release dates (so that "Wunderkind," e.g., added on January 8th, places lower than "Hell Yeah," which had nine fewer listens but wasn’t added until June 23rd. The main thing this algorithm does is count how many listens a song got in the first week, first month, and over the entire span, and then calculate both a song’s rate of “decay” in popularity, and what the stock analysts would call its “beta”: its relative volatility. This equation is highly proprietary.

1) "Do It To It," Cherish feat. YoungBloodz. See note here.
2) "Too Little Too Late," JoJo. Best achievement in melancholy AutoTune since Cher. Machines sing with more feeling than people. When Donna Harraway and Kathryn Hayles talk about the posthuman, this is what they mean. Best-case scenario, that is.
3) "18 Dummy," The Federation. In a year in which the hyphy movement the truly euphoric subgenre, The Federation were its purest product and greatest failure. The album long whispered to be in the can never came out, the movement failed to find a focal point once everyone realized E-40 was on some other melange, and we were left with nothing but a few impossibly great mixtape singles that left us wondering what exactly the Federation was: indie-undie little label localism from California's unlikely Central Valley gone wild? Production whiz kids passing them off as superthugs? "I'm from Fairfield, that's where my mind stays — strapped in my backpack, nothing like Kanye." No doubt.
4) "Unwritten," Natasha Bedingfield. You’d know if you saw the video. Free indirect gospel presented as elevator music.
5) "Check On It," (Beyonce ft. Slim Thug). Though this appeared on a Destiny's Child hits collection, it remains officially credited to Beyoncé. The main writer is, get this, named Angela Beyince. Could who does what get any more meaningless? Er, except to the accountants.
6) "Promiscuous Girl," Nelly Furtado feat. Timbaland. Furtado is more of a Simpson than an Aguilera, vocal skills-wise. But lesser artists would have wilted in front of this beat, even recycled as it is from a better Xzibit song; Nelly steps in there and holds her own, and that's all it takes. Quite possibly the best-natured song of the year (and, as we know from the long version of Aaliyah’s greatest moment, good-natured rumbling is really what rapper Tim Mosely should stick to).
7) "Tim McGraw," Taylor Swift. Sounds sort of like everyone else. Isn't.
8) "Hell Yeah," San Quinn (feat. E-A-Ski). "Yep yes si with a hell in front of it."
9) "Wunderkind," Alanis Morissette. We here at sugarhigh! are awful. Just terrible.
10) "Ain't No Other Man," Christina Aguilera. GIven that, jazzercizing in abeyance, this is basically a concept album about how much she digs her new husband, we can conclude that Jordan Bratman is pretty much one good single's worth of one good man. See album review here.
11) "Get Drunk and Be Somebody," Toby Keith. Without much by way of inventiveness, and an attitude more than a worldview, Toby Keith has turned out to be one of the most insistent, playful hit makers of the decade, ever since he grew out of his youth, filled out his baritone, and hit his stride with 2000's "How Do You Like Me Now" — as a sure thing, he's somewhere between Nineties Sheryl Crow and Nineties Tori Amos. See note here.
12) "I Don't Feel Like Dancing," Scissor Sisters. It is a fundamentally good thing that someone decided their project would be to marry the queer rock classicism of Elton John and the queer glam underpinnings of early disco; they leapt for the BeeGees and landed on Leo Sayer and that's just fine by us. Hey Williamsburg, you should try to enjoy this a lot; it's the only payback you have coming for enduring the misery of the Fischerspooner years.
13) "New Strings," Miranda Lambert. A song so clear that children youtubing their versions from their bedrooms to the world can see right through it.
14) "Standing In The Way Of Control," The Gossip. See note here.
15) "Fast Cars And Freedom," Rascal Flatts. Everyone talks about how country "is really old-fashioned melodic pop-rock," which is still a way of liking country while pretending not to like, you know, country. Except in the case of Rascal Flatts, which is really old-fashioned melodic pop-rock.
16) "Bumpin' My Music," Ray Cash. More fun.
17) "One," Mary J. Blige feat. U2. Pet Shop Boys, Johnny Cash...this is not the first great U2 cover, and it won't be the last. There's a reason for that: however swell the songs might be (and this is one swell song), Bono can't sing. His vocals are thin and mawkish and have a stident need to be liked, and each of these covers provides a massive benefit, be it Neil Tennant's yearning irony or Johnny Cash's singular gravitas. Mary J broadens out the tones to the Baptist breadth to which they always secretly aspired, and gives them an emotional thickness that, well, Bono doesn't have and she does, in spades. Secondary lesson in all this: The Edge may be more of a genius than we thought.
18) “Life Ain’t Always Beautiful,” Gary Allan. See note here.
19) "Men And Mascara," Julie Roberts. Ballads are easier to write than uptempo numbers, but much much harder to sing.
20) "Call Me When You're Sober," Evanescence. Listen, no one is more annoyed than we are at the capacity of self-righteous religious zealots to write good melodies.
21) “With You,” Jessica Simpson. One of the two best guitar loops of the year, along with some track in the middle of the Clipse album.
22) “Irreplaceable,” Beyonce. Looking forward to comparativist study of the way this last syllable is pronounced by Mick Jagger (“Respectable”) and Beyonce. Also: as sugarhigh! adviser Chris Nealon notes, “does she know her album is named Bidet?”
23) “The Way I Live,” Baby Boy. Fun.
24) “Fergalicious,” Fergie. At first it’s hard to know which crude Eighties triumph of trocheeic dimeter this is ripping off mercilessly; if it seems at first like “You Be Illin’,” but when the double-time electro kicks in halfway through, one twigs to the fact that it’s ye olde “Supersonic,” by JJ Fad. The metre varies for effect here and there (most peasingly in the “try an’ tell”/”clientele” rhyme), but mostly it’s intent on its extended, virtuosic trochees: “FERgaLIcious’ DEFiNItion: MAKE them BOYS go CRAzy” and on and on.Ever since rap’s rigid vocal metricality yielded to the conversational vernacularity of hip-hop — that is, ever since rap’s Rakim-midwived modernity — few songs have paid as much attention to classcial lyrical beat patterns as this, one of the most precise songs of the times.
25) “It's Okay (One Blood),” The Game. As close as sugarhigh! has ever come to voting reggae.
26) “XR2 (turbo mix),” M.I.A. Well, where were you in ’92? This is “The End of the World As We Know It” or “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” or maybe Joe Brainard’s “I Remember,” except redolent of M.I.A.’s Londonized machine nervosa. The proposition that all memories can be stored in acronyms used to seem like a fact about the music biz (who here remembers Reunion’s “Life is a Rock”?) but now seems like a fact about memory in these times, in some way a kind of negotiation with computers and digitization — which is to say, a lyrical negotiation with the formal and technological history of pop music itself. As a final note: those still wondering about the derivation of Maya’s foundational quasi-word “galang” (Who the hell is hunting you/in your BMW?”) might wish to spend some time with sub-sub-Tom Clancy author Jack Buchanan, who has a novel titled M.I.A. Hunter/la Gang. We don't make this stuff up; we just report it,

ON MELODIC RANGE IN POPULAR MUSIC

Sometime in the Nineties — say, after "Waterfalls" and well before "No Scrubs," to use the TLC calendar — mersh R&B narrowed its melodic range. It didn't necessarily use fewer notes (though this was often the case), but chose notes from within a narrower scope in any given song. Largely gone were the transcendent/ludicrous ascents and resolves, the struggle/release/euphorias of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" or "Man in the Mirror"; the duotone themes of "No, No, No, No" and "Say My Name" carried the day.

This condensation was meant to convey coiled sensuality, tense menace, moral seriousness. In part it borrowed these sensibilities from hip-hop, the center of authority in popular culture. One might argue that the structures of tune in American pop float between forms where affect is largely conveyed by speech, and where it's indexed to variations of melody keyed to the Western scale: upper limit country, lower limit rap, as Louis Zukofsky surely meant to say.

In the event, R&B was successful enough in expressing its revised set of feelings that it had a dialectical effect on the entire Billboard Hot 100. On the one hand, a new genre arose immediately for the express purpose of rescuing melodic range: this got named teenpop, and its genius took up the explicit project of extending the melodic scope of the Top 40 through complex modulations, moments after R&B narrowed its own scope. But on the other hand, the new significations of R&B, every time someone in an adjacent genre was feeling, well, dippy, they could emulate the move to refashion themselves as mature, controlled, serious.

And so, for example, when Mariah Carey of the famous range, of "Dreamlover" and "Fantasy" and "Emotions," needed to indicate she was no longer Glitter-y and/or crazy, she stopped down to the minimal palette of "Shake It Off" and etc. And when Britney, who had become synonymous with teenpop, needed to "grow up," she just repeated history: the passage from "Oops..." to "Slave" tells the story of modern R&B again, offset by a few years, with the naked significatory intent that had always been her stock in trade. The genius of "Toxic" lies exactly in how much it manages to do within the late phase's restrictions, between the low ceiling and high floor.

Shifts, of course, never happen all at once: uneven development, three-steps-forward and two-steps-back, little gestures here and there, these turn out to have been key junctures in a story that the market is trying to tell. And this is the story that "Irreplaceable" begins to narrate. It's a good song, not a great one; nobody thinks its within seven rungs of "Crazy in Love" on the ladder of the Ideal Pop Song. That song had decent range as well, but it also had other things on its mind, and returned relentlessly to the three-note theme. "Irreplaceable" seems to have as its main purpose the restoration of melodic range to pop. That it found traction with an audience that had proved itself indifferent to the far-narrower B singles that preceded it is the most telling fact — not in the least in that it demonstrates how Beyonce had better dance to the tune of the times, having lost the imperious capacity to make the times dance to her own tune.

That song answered by the finally far more appealing "Too Little Too Late," by JoJo, which hauls out Cher's AutoTune (and here we recall that "Believe," sung by a gorgeous octogenarian, was a pivotal moment in teenpop's story, collapsing the tween and disco audiences into a coherent mass) to describe explicitly the new opening-out, as the song modulates from its close opening melody into the full, ecstatic chorus via the machine, as if to suggest it requires industrial force to put that gloomy history in the past, as if that set of melodic moves was too little and it was too late for that indeed — at which the song turns to recalibrate itself, not without a melancholy sense of loss, to the deliriums and euphorias that had once sounded like a natural condition

eleven albums of the year/"generationality"

1) Scritti Politti, White Bread Black Beer. See review here.
2) E-40, My Ghetto Report Card. Standing on the shoulders of children who are standing on the shoulders of grown giants, one of whom is him.
3) Nadiya, Nadiya. See notes here.
4) Ghostface Killah, Fishscale. The most curious thing is how many enthralling details there are on an album which offers as its main appeal the fact that it could just go on and on with its endless nonsense and soulspace shuffle without anything in particular mattering very much. What did Q-Tip say, "Infinite on my mind every minute"? Yeah, that, exactly inverted: moments in the midst of the infinite.
5) Justin Timberlake, FutureSex / LoveSounds. See review here.
6) The Wreckers, Stand Still, Look Pretty. When teenpop loses interest in broad melodies, broadly melodic teenpoppers will build a home in the country.
7) Charlotte Gainsbourg, 5:55. Somehow this all makes Zero 7's aping of Air: A French Band make sense by reversing the Channel crossing. Or: never has anyone sounded so much like Sarah Nixey. Especially a French person.
8) Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury. Four years ago, it took the Neptunes' sounds to make sense of Los Bros' crude'n'curious style; herein, the favor is duly returned, as the real Yin Yang Twins' brutal intricacy provides a context for Chad'n'Pharrell's astringent loops to sound once again like minimalist elan rather than dispirited sparsity. Moreover, moments like these explain why popular culture as a general sphere is such a remarkable place: it's where you can still be too raw and too literary at the exact same time, via the very same gestures, and sell only 78,000 out of the box. Hubert Selby, Jr. should be so lucky.
9) Dixie Chicks, Taking the Long Way. See review here. Their least lovely studio album since Natalie joined is still about three songs better than most of the year's popular country albums. This is a fact both about the year in country and the actual greatness of the Dixie Chicks. Natalie Maines, by the way, is one of the greatest singers. Ever.
10) Tori Amos, A Piano. A bunch of tracks that anyone who cares already has, and a few they might not, which is just fine as long as the music's basically free (what's up, allofmp3.com!) Kind of nutty: "Dolphin Song." Kind of slept on: "Sweet the Sting." Kind of unbelievably great: "Ode to my Clothes."
11) Pretenders, Pretenders (reissue). Sometimes a reissue is just reminiscence. Sometimes it's rear-view mirror magic. The live version of "Stop Your Sobbing" is, in some degree, quite predictable, with its slow, emotionalized vocal first passage eventually opening out into a full-force charge. And yet, leaving almost no cliché unturned, the song succeeds in sounding like a torn, tragic elegy in advance for James Honeyman-Scott, who reaches into the solo and fearlessly tears up his own funeral.

NOTES ON GENERATIONALITY:

[We do not claim any Christgauvian/Archimedean overview of the year in music, nor is this note particularly relevant to the Albums List, as opposed to the forthcoming Singles; we're just putting things in places distributively]

Every year bears some traces of generational shift. Sometimes it takes the form of Oedipal agon; sometimes it appears as a necessary refurbishing of the industrial machine along its cycle of planned obsolescences; and sometimes it seems to be little at all until long after the fact: a novelty hit that turns out to have founded a genre; an ignored debut that revivifies a form; a star's album that stiffs a little, secretly presaging the unremarkable moment when a whole cohort loses its juju.

Generationality happen. The market requires it, as do Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud, and Machiavelli. More interesting in any given year is where it happens, and what that says.

This is not to say that it's always surprising, and this year it wasn't surprising at all. It didn't happen much in rock, unless the fermentation of emo as the ubiquitous form of guitar-combo pop counts as a generational shift, which it really doesn’t, and didn’t produce much good music (you miss Fall Out Boy now, bitchez, don't you?) The best moment of the year in emo was probably the truly stupendous mono-argyle on that Panic! At the Disco guy’s top hat.

Conversely, hip-hop made a big point of generational shifts, most notably via Jay-Z finally getting out of the rap game. This millennium’s pantomime retirements were ways of sustaining his spectacular rule, his justified domination of hip-hop’s centrist regime; only an actual yawn-worthy album could have removed him from the throne, and he finally obliged. Meanwhile, though it may just indicate a clearing of the golden throat and mind, this was the first year in memory that Missy Elliott, the other best rapper alive, didn’t do something that was complete and absolute genius, and in fact didn’t really do anything at all.

The vacuum in the national consciousness wasn’t filled by longtime critical demi-gods like Cam’ron or his Dipset dudes (snooze), nor the even-more-fetishized second coming of The Clipse; it was filled by actually juvenile fellows who figured out how to turn the local sound of southern rim cities just enough toward the center to consolidate national audiences. What was once a few frontier scenes is now the capital of the hip-hop century, stretched along the length of the Southern Smile: it starts in the Bay Area’s hyphy movement, dips down through Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, and rises again to complete the grin right there in the syncopated surf of Virginia Beach that laps against the decaying wood paneling of Teddy Riley’s old 48-track analog console.

Plenty good hip-hop from elsewhere (peace to Miami, and to The Game, probably the most pleasing total cartoon poseur since Robbie Williams) — but the generational action is along that Smile, which might be a grimace, concealing a confederated grill from whence shines the brightest diamond, Lil Wayne himself, who clarified the whole situation by being the first person ever to say he was better than Shawn Carter and mean it. Meaning it doesn’t mean you’re right. Yet.

The generationality of country was kinder and gentler, natch, but even tidal shifts seem dramatic on a molasses sea. Johnny Cash was really really dead, Garth supernally irrelevant; meanwhile, Carrie Underwood morphed from up’n’coming talent to king of the world over what seemed like no more than weeks, and ex-pop stars and their backup singers were going country just like Alan Jackson promised, and Taylor Swift...well, Taylor Swift.

By country’s measures, Tim McGraw is still a pretty young thing: he showed up a while after Clint Black showed up a while after Randy Travis showed up a while after George Strait showed up, and George Strait’s still making hits on the regular down at the Young Country station. For what it’s worth, Tim McGraw is five years younger than Trace Adkins, who made everyone and their mother throw up in their mouths a little with last year’s “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” (maybe that’s what Missy’s doing; she’s gone country, if she wasn't there already). And yet, there was Taylor Swift, born a month after the border between East and West Berlin was opened, treating Tim McGraw like a distant memory in arguably the best country single of the year (its competition was “Leave the Pieces,” by Michelle Branch and Jessica Harp, twenty-something escapees from teenpop’s decadent era).

“Tim McGraw” is more or less a rewrite of Deanna Carter’s “Strawberry Wine,” firmly in the long country tradition of adolescent summer love narratives; it’s delicate and quietly pissed off, a feeling that keeps converting to melancholy by the end of every bar, so that it can’t figure out if it’s truer in the first or third person, and the final gesture reads as both a romantic bid and a knife-sharp kissoff, albeit impossibly sweet. Part of its mystery, what kept the song alive all year long, was the way that that Tim McGraw shows up: “when you think: Tim McGraw, I hope you think my favorite song, the one we danced to all night long, the moon like a spotlight on the lake.” This is not like Garth giving props to an unknown Chris LeDoux; it's the forced conversion of a star to a legend. Converted to hip-hop years, it's like misting up when you say, "Remember way back when we used to listen to Juvenile?"

In this single gesture, Tim McGraw — not yet 40, about Jay-Z’s age — is banished to the realm of the dead, like Johnny Cash or Sinatra or Billie Holiday, surviving only in recordings and myths, a totemic figure whose recollection, whose absence, gives structure to the lives of the living. For real, how did she think she was going to get away with that? Or, more importantly, by what manner of magic did such a curious idea allow the writing of a perfect song?

It’s worth noting, lastly, that as hip-hop has smiled southward, country has inevitably forwned north: Gretchen Wilson’s Illinois home was just a forecast of Taylor Swift’s roots in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. This is not to say that they don’t remain worlds apart, alas for Cowboy Troy. Progressive critics often want to note that people listen more widely across the genres than the imagination of encamped culture warriors suggests, and at a literal level this is true; that doesn’t mean that poptopia is a beautiful rainbow coalition. Folks are still real good at choosing the cores and borders of their own identifications, and merely indulging in the rest; the idea that all commodities are equally available turns out not to have collectivized the nation. This is why the “rockist” debate persists, even if a lot of critics like Justin Timberlake’s album.

Meanwhile, to put the matter crudely, generationality happens where genres are both historical enough to have generations, and alive enough to be worth renewing. That aliveness is, of course, as much a story about money as about other kinds of emotional or libidinal investment. That hip-hop and country were the scenes of substantial generationality this year in one ways tells us what we already know: that these are the leading forms of indigenous music here in the hegemonoculture, where the greatest investments are made. Or at least it reminds us of that, since we seem to be so good at forgetting it every fifteen minutes. It’s not just that these musics are popular, and thus abstractly “populist,” and so should be reckoned with on those grounds; it’s also that they’re the most musically vital, the living forms, and if one’s way of measuring songs can’t recognize that, it’s the measure that’s got to go.

the good shepherd

As another review had it, "all cloak and no dagger." But that doesn't quite account for this film's seemingly endless plod: sometime in the third hour, one starts to feel like one is at a Rivette movie, except there's nothing particularly Rivetting about it. Several parts of the plot are just nonsense. For example, the purported goal of one elaborate Soviet operation is to compromise spymaster Matt Damon's son, so that dad can be blackmailed . Except that the compromise in question doesn't make anyone especially blakmailable, and the real threat is that the Soviets might hurt the son. This is, as it happens, a threat that could be made without any of the subtle espionage nonsense on which the film spends about an hour of our lives — an hour which is in fact a total irrelevance (except as an excuse to huck a woman out of a plane).

From a certain perspective, such indifference to plot mechanics makes sense, since this film, by way of being more-artistic-than-your-ordinary-espionage-flick, is basically all subtext. Text be damned. Indeed, the endless unfolding of subtext turns out, exactly because it dominates the whole operation rather than informing the text, to itself be a sort of waste of time. Thus the movie spends even more of our lives working through suggestive homoerotic and gender cues — men wrestling naked, repeated cross-dressing, the way Matt Damon's freaking Soviet code name is "Mother" — to little point, unless it's some banality about spy culture involving repression. Since we can't imagine the explanation's so banal, we are completely set up for, say, Damon's quiet, wincing son to be gay. Except he's not! Or there'd be no narrative excuse to huck the woman out of the plane! No, that justification would then have to come from the sub-subtext, which is that women are awful: teases, betrayers, opportunists, spies. Perhaps in that regard this film does capture the "worldview" of lame, stunted imperial apparatchiks. So it's got that going for it.

the queen

The Queen has drawn praise for three different (albeit overlapping) reasons: 1) Helen Mirren's superlative acting; 2) the film's insightful portrayal of its characters and circumstance; and 3) how extraordinarily well-made a movie it is. These purported felicities are, respectively: boringly true, piffle, and the exact opposite of the case.

1) It's well-known that Oscar-bait roles involve playing disabled or wicked ugly. The other thing that critics just love is lead characters who are fundamentally inexpressive, at which point capital-A Actors can haul out their minimalist retinal tics, lip quivers and eyebrow twitches, allowing critics to blather on about how nobody so eloquently indicates a complex inner life with nothing more than a glance, a crinkled earlobe, blah blah blah. We should never have to read that sentence again. Sure, it's a skill: a mildly technical skill that's no more challenging than being appealing or sexy, witty, smart or funny, awful or fearsome. Probably less so. But it gives critics and others a chance to display their nuanced recognition of nuance, and so these nuanced Helen Mirren perfs will be with us indefinitely. Listen, she's perfectly good at that sort of thing, and the role called for it, so: good casting, guys! As a 2006 acting "achievement," it doesn't rank with Shareeka Epps, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Maggie Cheung, Sacha Baron Cohen (in Talladega Nights), Rob Brydon, Gong Li, Steve Carell, Lucy Liu (in Lucky Number Slevin), Nick Nolte, T.I (in ATL), Leonardo Nam (Tokyo Drift), etc. Not sure it's more compelling than that guy who played the lead in Crank.

2) The monarchy hasn't really kept pace with changes in the velocity of culture and the popularization of celebrity. But actual politicians have because they traffic in that stuff. The former will be broken on the wheel of the latter, but sympathetically. Whoo.

3) The best that can be said about The Queen's cinematic construction is that it's very taut; not a move is wasted. That's what "well-made" means, most often, and it's exactly the problem; it's as if the film were trying to make the case for "the art film" being every bit as rigid and determined a genre as anything Hollywood could come up with. At least Hollywood films have the courage of their lack of conviction, and the capacity thus to be excessive, muddled, absurd. There is no moment nor gesture in The Queen that escapes its fate as crudely telegraphic (at the beginning when he's just an uncertain commoner, the quite short person playing Tony Blair wears football jerseys; you can tell when he's come into his own because he starts wearing suits!); as a mechanistic part of the parallel plot structure (which guy in the PM's camp is like which guy in the royal retinue? We'll never figure it out!); or as broadly symbolic (the noble old stag being harried in its solitude across the vast spaces of Balmoral — this noble old stag with which the Queen is obsessed — a stag eventually slain not by an aristocrat but a mere businessman hunter up from the City — the stag stands for...the Queen!)

If there is anything interesting about this movie, it's the extent to which to like it requires a commitment to nostalgic values that were always markers of privilege in the first place, though in this debased age they just resonate as "quality"...which is to say, to like this movie is already to identify with the royals (though alas, such narrowminded "standards" resonate more with prickish Prince Philip's character than poor uptight Eliz). If the deck weren't stacked enough in setting up this parallel (and, as noted, the film doesn't hesitate to make these matters blatant), we know that Diana's funeral is a truly debased event because, in the news footage edited in, we see a sprinkling not of aristocratic dignitaries but mere entertainers captured in pointed slo-mo, pointedly including Stephen Spielberg. Boo! Hiss! Now if only this movie were one seventeenth as interesting as Jaws...

flushed away

They say that Washington, D.C, is Hollywood for ugly people, but so is animation. Or it should be. Thus the employ of perfectly attractive persons — persons who trade heavily on their perfect attractiveness — as mere voices is a bit of a mystery (or at least a humiliating sidelong glance at how thoroughly we fetishize prettiness, that we'll pay for its name on a poster even if we never get to, you know, see it.)

Kate Winslet, that is to say, is — shipbound again — more convincing as an odalisque than a swashbuckling rodent. And Huge Ackman, given his talents, has no business playing a prissy cartoon rat; he misreads the lines so consistently that the movie never sets the kind of breakneck-witty tone it needs to carry us along on its sewer screwball, and as a result feels mostly static despite (or in contrast to) numerous and accelerated chase scenes.

Indeed, unlike Winslet (who's actually done just fine in a couple of different scenarios, including the deprogrammed cultist in the Campion's Holy Smoke, whose escape from a desert safe house is abetted by volumes of Dostoyevsky strapped to her bare feet), Ackman should stick to the one role he's made for: the monstrously angry manchild seething under a protective layer of sardonic flirtation, oscillating between seduction and murder. He is finally nothing more nor less than Wolverine, and he rings only small change on that performance in...

scoop

Woody Allen has made two movies (review of Match Point) in swift succession. Both are set in the posh Britain of London townhouses and country estates; both dwell, in ways both different and more egregious than his Manhattan movies, on real estate porn; both star Scarlett Johansson (who is herself swiftly turning into something akin to real estate porn).

More pointedly for the director whose work we most associate with his "personal life" (not because of his charismatic appeal, but because no one has — paradoxically — sacrificed more to be an auteur), both revolve around a low woman who threatens to bring down an ascendant British pretty boy from his aristocratic perch by exposing sexual indiscretions. In both cases he kills her. A little weird to make that movie twice in one year, hmm?

In the earlier film Johannson takes on the low woman role, a striving but ungifted American actress; in this version, though Scarlett again "plays" a base American forced to employ her non-existent acting skills (so that's weird), the low woman in question is a British prostitute we never see. Here the suave monster is played by suave monster™ Huge Ackman, more capable but somehow less persuasive for it than Scoop's appropriately overmastered Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). The repetition compulsion (the director's, not the actors' or characters') is so pungent that it's hard not to wonder what's up, and from a small distance it seems like Woody has merely remade the first film so as to write a role for himself — as a bumbling magician, no less, doing the same lame trick over and over on a rickety stage.

One wonders how many times Woody Allen can parlay such a minimal scenario into (apparently) releasable films in the short window available to him. He's always been a prince of nostalgia; here the act of nostalgia is in having to recollect (despite contemporary settings) the lost moment when the United State's unrefined, upstart vitalism was last a source of anxiety for Britain's still-regnant aristocratic class (1944? 1923? 1898?), rather than itself a vanishing fact. That lost era has replaced (the conspicuously absent) jazz as the anachronistic tell of the Konigsberg project; it must somehow count as strange that, at this moment, the director has replaced a long-standing cultural fantasy with an explicitly nationalist one.

Addendum: given Allen's stature in France, perhaps his new obsession with Britain's old panic over ceding world-hegemonic power to the US becomes a way of pandering to French audiences.

stranger than fiction

A more confusing fable than it first seems. In the core narrative, a guy stops going to work and his life gets a lot better in every way except he fears he will die soon. He is an IRS agent In the shell narrative a woman discovers she can no longer do her work, or at least can't do it in the way that everyone agrees makes it meaningful work. She is a novelist. Both of their realizations pivot around the "reality principle" of his imminent death.

It would seem on first pass that we have thusly a tale about the primacy of first order, or "actual" labor over second-order cultural work — an old theme, seemingly renewed here in the mildest way by the insertion of the information worker into the role that, 20 or 50 years ago, would have been a manual or industrial laborer. Even the feint wherein Dustin Hoffman — mediating between the two orders (which is, apparently, the destiny of the English Prof; holy mackerel does he have a huge office!) — ruefully proclaims the social priority of great art and seems to sentence the worker to death, only serves to underscore the apparent conclusion, in which it becomes clear that decency is on the side of the IRS agent (ironic, innit?).

The film isn't quite that simple or resolute; at a minimum, it's clear that the agent's life has become worth saving exactly because he has, confronted with his own death, become for the first time truly alive — and the necessary condition for this is not showing up for work. A life worth saving is an autonomous life; it's the autonomy from work that makes the life real enough to be a matter of import to the novelist. This import, this caring about his actual life, is what grounds the author's relevance — is what gives culture a meaningful relationship to social reality. His autonomy is the condition of possibility for culture's famed semi-autonomy.

This is why he must be an information worker, of course. He already dwells in the intermediate zone between labor and culture, between the real, exploited proletariat and the purely exploitative owners of the means of production. He is an instrument which information and capital, both in utterly abstracted form, use to get from one place to another. It's no coincidence that he works at the exact juncture of "the economy" and "the government." He is, in short, a representative of the supposed "new class" much ballyhooed in post-Marxist social thought — a class which is literally a middle class.

This existence of this new class is, one fears, a fantasy, designed to allow the imagination that the era of fundamental class conflict is somehow over (a fantasy that the movie baldly restates in the inverse: the love interest, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, is an actual laborer — a baker! how prole can you get? — who nonetheless stands in the place of non-alienated labor, because she is pursuing both her pleasure and her vocation and, get this, abandoned the emptiness of law school for said pursuit. Take that, information workers!)

Thus the movie gets to have it both ways. This new class of information workers is socially unnecessary, and — just like artists and other cultural workers, who in fact are also members of this class — could cease to work on the morrow, without toppling the system of daily life (confirming the suspicions of many of the wealthiest and poorest members of society). However, they are far from irrelevant. Exactly by being able to abandon work without disastrous effects, they demonstrate that social existence is in fact not entirely determined by work. That is, they fulfill their "new class" duties not by doing new class work (for aren't tax collection and storytelling quite old jobs, really?) but by showing, not singly but collectively, that class struggle is itself an old idea, no longer consonant with new conditions.

Both of them — him with his freshly uncovered pleasure in the texture of daily existence, her in her final choice of a single life over a great artwork — embody the virtues of universalist humanism, which is the film's completed and total proposition. From the perspective of labor and capital, this middle class doesn't exist. But from the perspective of the social imaginary, they have serious work to do: their true function is to express outward the basic antirevolutionary ideology of liberalism itself, a message that must be endlessly received by the actually existing classes so as to not recognize themselves as such.

déjà vu

The amusing and the troubling thing about Enemy of the State were the same thing: that the glossy, staggering surveillance tools of the NSA were operated not by grizzled spies or desk veterans but still-adolescent video-game weasels (an uncredited Seth Green, Jack Black, and less colorful sorts) who might otherwise have been apprentice derivatives analysts, sitting around hi-fiving and still adjusting to their haircuts as they zeroed in on the Fresh Prince.

Déjà Vu is the Scott/Bruckheimer team's return to Enemy of the State, with couple notable exceptions, most obviously that "the State" is now the good guys, and their implausibly panoptic, futuristic surveillance technology is no longer sinister-going-to-murderous but neutral-going-to-redemptive. The operators are now pleasant, concerned, diverse; a kinder, gentler technocrat. Sweet sixteen's turned 31; 1998's turned 2006. Shit happens. Things change.

But you know what they say about things changing. It's still a movie that images total power as having the totality of images at one's disposal, and moreover, in this film's turn of the ideological screw, having access to them as reality. There's a book or two about this lying around somewhere. Even if the achingly slow among us are still discovering that this is fascinatingly metacinematic (I almost suspect this reviewer's lighbulb moment of being satire about credulous film critics, but alas, he seems so excited at this new idea! Has the Voice in its parlous reformation taken to hiring Rip Van Winkles?), it's not a film about film; it's a movie that struggles, rather ineloquently but not too boringly, to figure out what might count as plot in the era of total information awareness, while pasting a candy heart on the sleeve of the PATRIOT act. At least it is in some way of its moment.

Thus the last irony, which is that Déjà Vu pretends to be ahead of its moment, presenting a surveillance environment not yet in existence. Of course, so did Enemy of the State — but did anyone really doubt that technology was already in use in some bunker, and would be publicly offered soon enough? Fiction is just the beta build of fact. And Enemy of the State was merely the first official release of Google Earth Cinema; this must somehow be good news. By our calculations, we have no more than a handful of years to wait before we can download Google Time.

casino royale

After 53 years of James Bond; after an opening sequence rehearsing how he became a double-oh and got his license to kill, which is finally the great taboo exception on which the series is based; after all the ritualistic reiteration of formulae that establish "the Bond movie" as a genre unto itself with its own structuralist consistency despite finally empty changes in actors, characters, names, settings, political situations, historical backdrops; after the relentless repetition of Bond's drive to devour both enemies and lovers who inevitably wish to devour him equally; after all this, it's hard not to wonder if the underlying desire that's sustained the interest in the franchise concerns cannibalism, you know?

the framers

Near the end of October, cognitive linguistics guru George Lakoff, who writes books about how the Democrats can close the framing gap with rhetorically savvier Republican speechifiers, wrote this in The Gray Goose (reprinted at The Huffington Post):

"Stay the course" is a particularly powerful metaphor because it can activate so many of our emotions. Because physical actions require movement, we commonly understand action as motion. Because achieving goals so often requires going to a particular place -- to the refrigerator to get a cold beer, say -- we think of goals as reaching destinations.

Another widespread — and powerful — metaphor is that moral action involves staying on a prescribed path, and straying from the path is immoral. In modern conservative discourse, "character" is seen through the metaphor of moral strength, being unbending in the face of immoral forces. "Backbone," we call it.

In the context of a metaphorical war against evil, "stay the course" evoked all these emotion-laden metaphors. The phrase enabled the president to act the way he'd been acting — and to demonstrate that it was his strong character that enabled him to stay on the moral path.

This is perhaps the pivotal case of an idea Lakoff has been hammering for quite some time: the idea that language is connotative as well as denotative, basically, with specifics about how some language is better at motivating unspoken/unconscious images and attendant emotional freight, and thus more capable of persuading people of positions before they can be arbited in the full light of reason. Moreover, in classic cog-sci fashion, these responses are proposed to be more-or-less hardwired, as the cognitive activity happening in the shadows underlying rationality is quasi-automatic. "The laws of language are hard to defy," as he has it. His sense of the nature-of-the-beast quality of these linguistic actions verges on the absolute, and permeates his own rhetoric, as in this not from a year earlier, plumping his own product:

Negating a frame activates it in the minds of hearers, as Richard Nixon found out when he said “I am not a crook” and everybody thought of him as a crook. The very title of my book, Don’t Think of an Elephant makes the point: if you negate a frame, it reinforces the frame.

Charged with certainty about the invariable effectiveness of certain successful metaphors, he concluded that June 29, 2005 piece, "The Democrats can learn from Bush and Rove: Stick to your guns and stay the course." Meaning: get a well-crafted message that sends out the right cognitive codes, shows a clear and strong direction, and don't waver from that. To drive his point home with a rather obvious irony, he again highlighted the excellence of the Bush slogan, which works not just as a specific emotion-motivating phrase but as a general rhetorical strategy. Stay. The. Course.

If the phrase and strategy is such a winner, how did it lose so baldly earlier this month? The Democrats, as has been more than well-remarked, never found — much less hewed to — a vision to articulate beyond entirely vague forms of We're not them; after the election, one still heard the Party Chairman proclaiming "this was a call for a "new direction"; that was our slogan, and the American people have blah blah blah." Meanwhile, "stay the course" turned out to be the albatross around the neck of every Republican candidate, if not the anchor.

So how does a cognitive linguist explain that? That is the conundrum — and the occasion for Lakoff's late October essay quoted above. It turns out that "stay the course" stopped working because the president failed to stay the course in his speeches:

The Bush administration has finally been caught in its own language trap.

"That is not a stay-the-course policy," Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, declared on Monday....Listen, we've never been stay the course, George," President Bush told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News a day earlier. Saying that just reminds us of all the times he said "stay the course."

What the president is discovering is that it's not so easy to rewrite linguistic history. The laws of language are hard to defy.

This is to say, per Lakoff, that the presidential team had made the fatal error of saying "Don't think of an elephant" (indeed, he repeats wholesale that passage from a year earlier, book title and all). Bush's reversal, his failure to stay the course in his rhetoric, becomes utterly damning:

To not stay the course evokes the same metaphors, but says you are not steadfast, not morally strong. In addition, it means not getting to your destination -- that is, not achieving your original purpose. In other words, you are lacking in character and strength; you are unable to "complete the mission" and "achieve the goal."

"Stay the course" was for years a trap for those who disagreed with the president's policies in Iraq. To disagree was weak and immoral. It meant abandoning the fight against evil. But now the president himself is caught in that trap. To keep staying the course, given obvious reality, is to get deeper into disaster in Iraq, while not staying the course is to abandon one's moral authority as a conservative. Either way, the president loses.

Here the conundrum comes into full flower. The phrase can produce only one set of pre-rational, emotional responses. It always works. To abandon the phrase is to doom yourself; as Lakoff himself says, it's this "negating of the frame" that's "fatal." So why would the president even consider abandoning the phrase? Why would anyone trouble to change a successful formula with automatic, guaranteed results?

The answer passes swiftly amidst all framing stuff, and Lakoff buries it in a dependent clause, a bagatelle: "given obvious reality." We would not care to arbit the status of "reality" with Lakoff, insofar as our ideas about it are likely to be so divergent that there would scarcely be grounds for debate. But on this occasion we may find ourselves in a sort of agreement: the phrase "stay the course" stopped working because it referred to historical circumstances that changed. It indicates an idea, and the idea came more and more obviously to suck: to be fatal for bodies, to produce no pragmatic or ideological gains, to indicate a tangle of lies and manipulations.

This is not to pillory Republicans for the morass in the Middle East just now, but to hope to have done with Lakoff's lucubrations. For he himself has conceded, albeit in a three-word aside, that these powerful metaphors work until they don't work anymore; that the response is automatic and pre-rational until it isn't. Despite the scientistic frame that Lakoff invokes about his own studies, it turns out that there's no strong correlation between input and output; that cognitive science in fact can't give a steady account of how connotation works; that while metaphors may be "emotion-laden," there are no fixed (or even quasi-fixed) emotional responses. It may be the case that the phrase "don't think of an elephant" causes one to think of an elephant; how one feels about that elephant depends rather on shifting information about which cognitive linguistics may wish to keep silent, for fear of embarrassing itself.

One last averral. We do not wish to extol the primacy of the fact — to reduce this to the simplicities of Ah, but the real world had its way with language, eh? The historical conditions that changed, largely in Iraq, so as to change for a while the connotations of the phrase "stay the course," can't be reduced to "fact." They too involve rhetoric, spin, symbol management, "propaganda of the deed." The conception of a perfectly real world independent of language seems insupportable, and unnecessary; it's as futile as the idea of a sphere of language tied entirely to wired cognitive functions, fixed within a "frame," independent of the real of history — an idea that Lakoff has himself invalidated, against his own initial claims. Language, it would seem, is a mediation with history, and the way it works will apparently require negotiations at every turn. This is not a fresh proposition, except insofar as it is news that stays news.

The promise, from whatever political position, that symbol management is a total and self-determining reality, a frame that has achieved ultimate closure, has no historical truth — except as a symptom of a quite legitimate fear that there is no outside anymore, no history, no semi-autonomous sphere, no possible form of resistance other than participation at the level of symbol management. This is a basic banality of the spectacle, of course; one takes some small comfort in recalling that the spectacle itself is, if perhaps a kind of fact, necessarily one that is in all ways historical.

babel

Because we here at sugarhigh! HQ are limited in our grasp, we didn't understand this very complicated and conceptually ambitious film. However, we did mange to glean a couple useful lessons:

• Giving Brad Pitt a smaller role doesn't make him a better actor.

• When crosscutting between a third- and first-person camera to drive home some point via cinematic form comma dude, a director may pretend that deaf people don't experience bass.

• Deaf girls, or perhaps Japanese girls, are hot.

• Air power is the key to victory, just like on the History Channel, and is always on the side of good.

• Somewhere there is a cafeteria made of awesome synth, videogames, and plasma screens, named "J-Pop"; you should totally go there, if you can.

science of sleep

This movie might be imagined as Marie Antoinette seen in a reflecting pool, with some of the appearances repeated, others inverted. If the former is an American film in Versailles, the current title is actual cinema Versaillaise (that is to say, the director was born there; finance capital comes from everywhere, an everywhere that itself emanates from the United States). But both are built on a young lovely tossed naked into the Gallic tilt-a-whirl and forced to make her and his way, respectively — and, of course, both are dreamlives. Moreover, they share the basic quality of incidentally pretending, through their Frenchness (whether it be political history or aesthetic provenance) to a kind of significance to which they are signally indifferent.

That is to say that, like Marie Antoinette, The Science of Sleep is a petulantly slight and directionless movie. Because it's Gondry rather than Coppola fille, the flimsiness is one of whimsy rather than missing affect. Gondry tropes buzz about, inevitably temporal (time travel, reality blurring, memory failure, artisanal model-making); happily, they're separated from the maleficent influence of Charlie Kaufman, the faux-indie film industry's official metanarrative boor, with whom Gondry worked on his previous feature fictions, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Human Nature. Whimsy in the service of nothing is still better than whimsy in the service of maturbatory fake-inventiveness. And so we get to wander through the whimsy, in search of contentless satisfactions: sexy Gael Garcia Bernal's facial expressions and tone of voice, the cardboard sets, Charlotte Gainsbourg's sexy-is-for-lesser-beings knit minidress, très années Pop. When she's not busy smoking, she makes felt boats and ponies.

Unlike Coppola, Gondry doesn't quite maintain the courage of his lack of convictions, and the film eventually gets a lil heavy, just as — uncoincidentallly — his visual verve wavers; we're still waiting for a film as euphorically formal as his video for Kylie Minogue's "Come Into My World." Instead, we're handed an ambiguous ending. Is it a happy ending, or a final descent into delusion? Who cares. The real ambiguity is whether, lacking any idea how to get out of there, Gondry simply replicated wholesale an early Lyle Lovett song on purpose, or by magical accident, as Gael and Charlotte go out on the ocean, on their pony, which they ride on their boat.

the last king of scotland

One goes to watch the purported star do his thing, but for the most part can't see the Forest for the trees. Or not even: the view to his predictably wracked and troubling performance isn't obscured by a larger, holistic view of the Ugandan Seventies, but by, natch, someone else's story.

That social struggles ought be told as the dramas of individuals, and that this rule takes on force in direct proportion to the money involved in the telling, is not news, and would scarcely be worth mentioning except for how certainly it means to escape both mention and notice as a rule of art in the current dispensation. But we can at least take note of what is allowed and even demanded by this iron rule: the dominating form of the close-up, the apotheosizing of individual performance (which might otherwise have been left as a relic of the stage, had cinema taken up the formal possibilities available to it). So, in short, all there is to do, all there ever will be, is to enjoy individual performance and camera moves (in which we include various special effects).

But the effects of this cinematic determination are just as marked in the social activities depicted in the film. Surely it must be notable that the narration of the fall of Idi Amin (or at least the collapse of his regime's credibility) pivots, in this film, not around the political or the social but the personal. Even this is unexceptional, not worth mentioning, other than the fact that "the personal" narration of the political climaxes here — in way that would make even Faulkner blanch — in the fact of miscegenation.

This, finally, is a quite ludicrous structuration, even within the context of single-subject cinema: less a story of Africans getting fucked by the white man than yet another projection of the boundless historical power of the white dick. The best one could hope for in this movie, in other words, is to watch an actor's attempt to inhabit a consciousness unfamiliar both to him and to us, and to see what that might be like; one gets a bit of this, and its pleasure. For the most part, however, one endures not the worst but finally the most predictable substitute, a kind of "idea" that has the force of perfect idiocy.

white bread black beer

Once upon a time there was a boy named Scritti, and though this was a strange name, nobody teased him, for he had a beautiful voice, and a falsetto that was like honey injected into the veins. And he grew up with the desire to make jangly pop music woven from strands of romance, left politics, reggae, post-structuralist theory, black soul, and everything resting in the sentence, "the music of the Beatles and Bowie prepared me for every subsequent adventure, intellectually, politically, aesthetically, structurally."

One day a funny thing happened to Scritti, because funny things happen to everyone in history. As he was figuring out his jangly pop music and bringing discreet pleasure to several people, pop music itself became less jangly, in part because digital technology favored a sharper snap in general, and in part because it was part of a constellation that would eventually be called hip-hop. And Scritti liked this sound very much. He heard Michael Jackson and Run-DMC and it was good. So it came to pass that instead of giving this historical development the Heisman and insistently making a now-nostalgic jangle, Scritti made some romantic black-soul-loving pop music with digital snap, and brought indiscreet pleasure to many many people.

But this didn't make Scritti especially happy, and what's more, his headlong romantic leap into history's fastest pace meant that autumn would come as swiftly as summer, and before too long he found himself in a cool season with winter coming on. And so he retreated to the gloomy Usk Valley to spend a season drinking ale and thinking about what to do next.

A season turned into a few and then into many, as they tend to do when one is brooding in the gloomy Usk Valley, ancient kingdom of Gwent, where the coal miners mine coal and the years pass. And still Scritti puzzled over what to do next, or not. After a long while he came to an idea, and it grew and grew. His idea was that, though he had taken up the sonic snap that has so entranced him in the early Eighties, he had not truly taken up the hip-hop that he greatly loved.

And so it came to pass that Scritti walked out of the Usk Valley sometime near the end of the second millennium according to the Christian calendar, and released an album that featured his beautiful soul falsetto equally with several extremely minor pseudo-hip-hop characters, who had perhaps been chosen because they were open to nearly-forgotten intellectual Welsh pop singers with leftist leanings, and affordable by production budget of same, rather than because of their excellence. Though this strange brew had its moments, it was somewhat confusing to have pseudo-hip-hop songs which were also lovely falsetto parables involving Heloise and Abelard, and everyone was confused, Scritti not the least.

Perhaps the greatest confusion was the last song on the record, "Brushed With Oil, Dusted With Powder," which was the prettiest song but at the same time a ballad, and a remarkably gentle, soothing ballad at that, with no pseudo-hip-hop elements in the music, though the sweetly breathy lyrics did concern rides in police cars and, in some haunting manner, the song seemed to be taking place in the beauty of the Usk Valley and the scenario of American hip-hop at the same time. This was a true oddity and there was no way to make sense of it, but that seemed okay because it was the last song on the album and they are understood to be outside-the-work, and forgiven their incoherence, as a general rule.

After the last inconsequential song ended, some more years passed.

In those years a strange idea took hold in Scritti's mind. The idea was this: that the inconsequential, beautiful song was in fact the key to everything, or at least the key to his next album. He would make an entire record with no minor or even major hip-hop characters, but one charged with his love of early Eighties hip-hop, and his melancholy distance from it. But it would be an album of rock so soft that "soft rock" couldn't do it justice, and album that would make Quiet Storm radio formats feel like they might need to calm down a little and maybe attend a yoga class. It began with Scritti sighing "the boom boom bap...." But he did not sound like KRS-One, he sounded like Scritti but older, honey dipped in morphine on a slow drip.

It was like the dream of Brian Wilson that Brian himself could never really approach, of an easy listening album that was at the same time a work of genius. And if Scritti was occasionally compelled to murmur the the titles from an entire Run-DMC album in a distantly pretty bridge, or coo angelically to the effect that punks jump up to get beat down, sounding exactly as if he was blessing the beasts or inventing a lullaby for a child who had been dead for two decades, well, this was the sense of the album, though sense was not very much at stake. Something else was, though it was hard to be sure what, exactly, and this mystery was the album's greatness, or perhaps it was the invention of a previously unknown category of pop music, or the way a voice can trace its own history, and the relation of the individual to history, or how it felt to live in a beautiful and perfectly numb present, at the edge of a hole into which years and things one loved kept falling.

futuresex / lovesounds

"Slash fiction" takes its name from the slash in "K/S": a subcategory of Star Trek fan fiction given over to desublimating the deep love between Kirk and Spock. The slash, that is to say, might be imagined as the blade that cuts out the mediating stuff separating the pair in the televised version; at the same time, it's the third term which separates the K and S, even as it opens the path to a lil consummation. As a linguistic mark, it takes the place of what keeps them apart while allowing them to come together — it's the slash between men. As a sign-function, it's almost helplessly suggestive of the more humanly-charged role of the woman in Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick's famous analysis of triangulation:

[Between Men] attempted to demonstrate the immanence of men’s same-sex bonds, and their prohibitive structuration, to male-female bonds in nineteenth-century English literature…[The book] focused on the oppressive effects on women and men of a cultural system in which male-male desire became widely intelligible primarily by being routed through triangular desire involving a woman.

— (Epistemology 15).

Surely this structural relation must have been on someone's mind in titling the current Justin Timberlake album. The two worlds of the title themselves don't do much but remind us that, though Justin sings and dances like a somewhat mechanical King of Pop, he'd rather be a Prince. But the slash tells a different story: the story of K/S, and of Sedgewick. The album itself, both in its sonic intertwinings and lyrics, is almost entirely about the great love between Justin Timberlake and Tim Mosely, who basically sing, rap and murmur romantic, sensual phrases to each other for about an hour, climaxing mid-album with the slinky, beautiful "What Goes Around...."

The album, that is to say, is J/T porn. Of course, per the analysis, this erotic drama must be disguised by the presence of a woman — so literally a figure rather than a person, or even a character, that she is named, in song after song, "Girl." She exists not at all, except as a convenience so Justin and Timbaland can rub up on each other in the sweetest and most lubricious ways; it's actually quite romantic, and probably better queer disco than Alcazar, Infernal, or Gnarls Barkley.

sherrybaby

D's for never dirty,
MC for mostly Clean.

the long tail

When sugarhigh! considers the white male artists of the post-WWII era whom we find most thrilling and exemplary, three stand clear: Jean-Luc Godard, John Ashbery and Bob Dylan, artists we sometimes have great dfficulty confronting because the certainty and power of their stuff theatens a kind of despair at one's own efforts.

The casual isomorphism of this troika's aesthetic narratives in evident: despite working in media and places with distinctly different relations to pop, each has been starkly prolific (albeit with celebrated pauses in their individual output), remaking their fields in the period from 1955-65; each has responded to the inevitable fading of their mass-critical star with continued and sometimes accelerated production, clear into their current advanced ages.

Of course, the differences are just as notable (and more media-specific): the way Ashbery's critical ascendence didn't come for two decades, while Dylan and Godard took each less than a handful of years to reach the apex of their fields. Or Godard's almost invisible prolixity; in the United States, how many of the 49 titles he's directed since Letter to Jane have we had a fair chance to see, especially if we don't inhabit a town with a film festival? Or Dylan's late pause, after his serial religious conversions and Eighties dreck, to ponder over ancient ballads and return as a resecularized Tiresias, "momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgottten message in surroundings utterly alien to it"?

Alright, that was an extremity; we enjoyed it. Still, it's the kind of extremity Dylan has demanded and received in spades, these last nine years and three original albums. So the least we can do is note how the singing is a lot better on this one than the last two.

The previous pair were defined by Dylan's croak; not quite tuneless, but impelled to let us know that he was a figure beyond the mere conventions of hitting notes, or trying to hit notes. These activities were for strivers, not immortals; the very measure of hiss historical greatness became the simple fact that he could miss, avoid, ignore the niceties of notes, and still win the Voice critics' poll. It would be pleasant to suggest that this gesture was somehow a throwback to his early years, when he was often written off as a hopeless, tuneless vocalist — something we now understand to be exactly false. He was, rather, singing differently, inventing a counter-style, and "Highway 61," much less "Visions of Johanna," now sounds deeply tuneful. We do not suspect anyone will make that case about "Million Miles."

So we must be appreciative that he's dropped the And You Shall Know My Importance By My Indifference schtick, and returned to a more sanguine vocal style, riding the melodies of old Western swing forms with a pleasing laissez-faire. Alas, that's the only pleasing thing about this album which is otherwise remarkable only for its boredom-induction: what a freakin' yawn. Nothing — nothing — of Dylan's greatness remains, and why should we expect it to? Or, more pressingly, why are we so compelled to pretend that it does? This can no longer even be compared to Bob Dylan; it would be dull and slight for a Lucinda Williams albm, and she hasn't been interesting in more than a decade. It's looking up at Ryan Adams, and sugarhigh! doesn't care for Ryan Adams. There are no especially bad songs (though the inevitable way-too-long last song is a bit of a groaner) but, far more substantively, there is nothing close to a good song, even a throwaway on the order of that burlesque he tossed to Sheryl Crow before desperately repo-ing for a lesser take, lo this last millennium.

Nothing here is worthy of invective, alas. At some point, in twent of 50 years, it might be productive to explore what conjuncture of forces allowed smart, serious people to hear this as pleasing, good, even great music. This is not to suggest that valuing this album is any more or less aribtrary and subjective than enjoying Bjork or Cam'ron; it is, rather, the particularities of this case have more to say about something like cultural momentum, and historical attachments — ideas which read interestingly against the suppositional temporariness of popular culture.

the black dahlia

Cinema note: Replacement of story with plot found to be the same historical motion as replacement of motive with psychopathology.

Movie review: "Mere psychology."

crank

A queerly macho fellow, loved by the ladies and the gays, cruises around heavenlit LA, sometimes on a motorcycle, visiting absurdly luxurious locations where white powder and the hidden schemes of power flow, trying to get out of the life, puzzling through a spiritual crisis, having a little public sex — an adequate remake of Shampoo.

the protector

Tom yum goong is not the first foreign-based film to take the English title The Protector, but it is the most recent, seemingly unrelated to the Indian silent Ajit Yoddho (1934), the French thriller Le Protecteur (1974).

Most reviews of the present film mention the torch-passing joke when Tony Jaa's character, arriving at Sydney's airport, exchanges a double-take with Jackie Chan, in turn exiting the country. It's a bit of an allegory, you see, about martial arts heroes breaking into the anglophone market. What these reviews don't manage to mention is that Jackie Chan's second effort at an EngLang incursion (after box-office bomb The Big Brawl) was Wei long meng tan, or as it was called in most markets, The Protector (1985). In that film, Chan's partner is killed and there's a kidnapped girl to recover; for Jaa, two decades later, his father is killed and the kidnapees are pachyderms. Didn't Karl Marx in fact say that everything happens twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as elephants?

It's hard to say what this film is up to, investing so heavily in that lineage — but it's not misplaced, really. Jaa's kung fu style ("Muay Thai"), though ballyhooed per the rules of discourse as new and different, is deeply indebted to Chan's. This is not so much true in close combat (where the movie seems more interested in a parade of styles, from capoeira to "ultimate fighting") but in the movements of multiple combatants within enclosed, complex spaces. If the bravura sequence is a four-minute following shot where Jaa fights his way up the various levels of the familiar restaurant/club/thunderdome/kingpin's lair (getting noticeably exhausted and sloppy as he nears the top, which is a nice touch), the more eloquent choreography happens in some ludicrous crypto-warehouse containing, among other things, some strangely oriented chain-link fences and, oh yeah, a disemboweled bus. In these scenes, Jaa's particular kinesis, alternately highlit and obscured by the camera's deep desire to look at things from below, is plenty thrilling.

Jaa himself is peculiarly impassive — "peculiar" because it's not really the familiarly Orientalist imperturbability intent on suggesting an interiority that is at once absolute and inhuman, the subject without subjectivity. Jaa offers something like a negatve impassivity: while elaborating Chan's goofball ballet of violence, he seems intent on refusing Chan's comedic charisma. Physical comedy is Chan's gift to martial arts; Jaa returns seriousness to it , a comic seriousness of which the little elephant is the emblem. Indeed, Jaa is the little elephant; his character has, it seems, never aged beyond the opening scenes, when we see him as a child, bonding with his charges. Over the full course of the film, Jaa hasn't the slightest flirtation, nor moment of self-awareness. He is a serious boy, with all the implacable destruction that implies.

Or maybe Jaa the actor is just another Keanu, constitutionally unable to express anything at all beyond a vexed wonderment that people will still fight him, given his manifest physical superiority. Hollywood, too, suffers from that puzzlement, and is gruesomely acrobatic as a matter of course in going about its business. This just might work out.

half nelson

After Shareeka Epps finds Ryan Gosling, her high-school teacher, collapsed in the bathroom with a crack pipe, he eventually asks her to help him up, at which point the film has a choice. If it doesn't show her helping him, it abandons the moment to the purely metaphorical; if it shows the 13-year old girl reaching out and taking his hand or shoulder, it abandons itself to sentimentality. The film navigates this deftly, with a little jump-cut so that her hand is just suddenly there and then he's wincingly upright; it's a small choice but the right one, and indicative of the film's attention to its own risks. Indeed, in many ways the film is about navigating the tepid and silted waters of its own set-up, which it does with parallel care at almost every juncture. Other best thing about movie: even as it manages to get a name act to contribute a budget sondtrack, it stages Broken Social Scene as nothing but numbing sentiment for self-pitying hipsters.

accepted

Movies in many ways inherit their genres and their genremes (as we have come to call the minimal units that establish and fulfill genre expectations) from earlier forms, theater and literature most obviously. They have in turn modified old and developed new genre codes, with all the inevitability of medium specificity: the soundtrack accompaniment to episodes of horror, romance, or suspense, e.g., or the plot horizons required to manage the absurd beauty of Hollywood actors in "real" roles.

But once a genreme is in place, it can no more be abandoned than it could in the Russian folktale; to jettison such a thing would be to jettison the genre itself. And so it is occasionally amusing to watch a film wrestle with a genreme to which it is utterly indifferent, even if — perhaps especially if — this wrestling takes the form of cheerful laziness.

And so it goes in Accepted. Ostensibly the story of how the Mac guy starts an open, student-run university organized by elective affinities, literally a former insane asylum, now run by the inmates — and thus in distinction to the high-class, top-down bureaucracy up the road (is this still the Mac/PC parable? Or is it about the Sorbonne 1968? Who can tell anymore?) — the film still remains compelled to include a subnarrative about the hot girl after whom Mac guy longs, but who is of course dating blandly totalitarian PC guy. And of course, as these things go, she eventually sees that her alpha guy is actually a jerk, and that the sweet boy who used to mow her lawn is in fact a quirky charmer with a true heart blah blah blah.

What's actually charming is how this pro forma narrative is played out in a haphazardly pro forma way: no drama, no tension, not much time wasted. Presented with the choice, she makes the right one in fairly short order and that's pretty much that, excepting one later pro forma reversal which is itself reversed pro forma in about twelve seconds of screen time. Max.

The film doesn't have the desire to flout openly or mock genre conventions (itself a genre, natch); it just can't be bothered to treat them as requiring much investment at all, and dispatches them with cheerful laziness. It's just getting by, fulfilling the minimum requirements without ever pretending they have any value, not letting them interfere with the fun — doing just enough to avoid getting kicked out and sent home. In that regard, the film is a perfectly realist account of the college experience for any reasonable student, after all.

little miss sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine finally can't escape its fate as the feelgood movie of the summer. As the story of a clutch of struggling and troubled individuals coming together as a family — an elliptical circling of the wagon around the usual twin poles of the death of the elder and the defense of the kid's innocence, ending with the rebuilt nuclear family sacrificing pride for mutual dependence and dancing their defiance of the external world — it's exactly as limited as such a movie must be.

It must be said that it does as well within those horizons as it possibly could; it may be close to the best such feelgood flick. Its struggle not to subvert genre clichés (which itself is so often a yawn, anyway) but to make the most of them is pulled off sort of superbly; irascible grandpa's death, though played for pathos (again, rather effectively: "GO HUG MOM") turns out to be essential to the finale's unfolding. He's taught young Olive a dance, see, for her big finale in the Little Miss Sunshine competition — one which, though it's frequently rehearsed, we don't see until its actually performed.

The dance turns out to make a mockery of the pageant, and all children's beauty pageants. Here we must note that the film — which presents such pageants in all their vacuous horror, parading super-sexualized grade-schoolers who may or may not be in on the grotesquerie, and parents who clearly are — had the incredibly strange fortune to have its late-summer opening in parallel with the return of the national JonBenet Ramsey obsession, and the return of all her pageant images to the nation's television screens. In this movie, there's no doubt that the parents — any parents, at any pageant — did it; the only question is what "it" is.

The mockery of such pageants presents little challenge; the movie's stroke is to leave its status unknown and unknowable, exactly because grandpa's dead. Was that his plan, in teaching her the routine? Did he senilely believe it was a potential winner? Or was it simply the only "dance" he knew, as a crass, uneducated veteran? Any of these answers would be unsatisfying; the execution of all the possibilities to the exclusion of none is close on perfect.

The movie has that level of care at almost every level. One of its running sight gags is the famiily's need to push-start their VW microbus, done each time with much huffing and puffing and varying levels of exuberance; within the physical comedy, the film stages the family dynamics with choreographic ease in the order that each member hops into the accelerating vehicle. Again, it's an image with a limit, in that it must imagine familes as mechanisms, the separate parts working best when working together; the film's capacity to be eloquent despite such banal ideas is its nature and appeal.

Except for Steve Carrell, that is, who is appealing in and of himself; he's most engaging early in the film, when he's frozen and morose. In a very different way, he's as good with a squint as DeNiro. As his character's mobility and humor return over the course of the narrative, Carrell starts drawing from his general bag of comedy tricks, and the character loses some definition; one hopes he'll have the intelligence to take on a substantially serious role in the near future, just to see what he can do with it.

back to basics

Back to Basics forms a sort of complement to the White Stripes. Battening on to African-American musical traditions from the pre-rock era, they proceed as if that could make post-rock music good again. The difference is that the Stripes see the pop miscegenation as the problem, to the solved via purification: a staggering, hypocritical misreading both of musical history and their own role in it. Christina Aguilera is more interested in looking back through the miscegenation to choose her parents from a rattle-bag of race music, and then let the process of pop impurity run its course accordingly from those reimagined beginnings, to see what it can do. To say that this demonstrates that Christina Aguilera is eleven times smarter than Jack White — not canny, not "pop-savvy," but actual-synthetic-reasoning smart — will surprise only the few remaining humans who haven't yet understood that the talented lad Jack White is, alas, a moron.

None of this is to say that Xtina's retro-soul-chanteuserie is news, even for her. As the Village Voice review for her last album noted four years ago:

For 10 songs, Christina Aguilera's record is aggressively boring, unless you're fascinated by her half-repressed yen to remake "I Put a Spell on You" as it might be done by the Velveteen Rabbit.

There's something faintly amazing about taking the weakest idea on a record (none of the hits, you'll recall — "Dirrty," "Beautiful," "Fighter," "Can't Hold Us Down" — partook of this investigation) and deciding it must become the full-blown conceit for the next album. This is a bit like De La deciding after their debut that the follow-up should be all skits. It's just not likely to work; having a concept is not the same as having a good concept, or understanding your own strengths. The best that can be said is that the conceit is largely irrelevant: the album has three good songs, which is about what one would hope and expect from your basic Aguilera product (though the last had five or six; in a decade, we'll see that as a wild exception).

Buried beneath all that jazz and discourse, however, is an interesting drama: there seem to be two discs exactly so that they can confront each other face to face. Disc Two is the Linda Perry disc; she co-wrote every song on it, and this has been widely noted. Considerably less-remarked-upon (though Sasha touches on it here), Disc One is the Kara DioGuardi disc; she co-wrote every song but one, though the's often credited lower down the list. But don't let that fool you; this is because the producer is credited second after Xtina in each case — then, on all three of the disc's excellent songs ("Aint No Other Man," "Slow Down Baby," "Without You") comes Ms. DioGuardi. One can hear her willing the project's conceit to work, even if it means rewriting "I'm Free" and Welsh one-hitter Donna Lewis.

By now you will have done the math. If the album has three good songs total and the first disc also has three...the second disc is left with zippo. It's deeply awful. This brings us no pleasure, as Linda Perry is one of the facts that has made popular music great over the last half-decade. But in this staged but unstated confrontation between the two popstar whisperers (a perfect phrase stolen from Garrett Kamps) who have underwritten much of the Top 40 since, roughly, 9/11 and the end of the High Teenpop Era — in this competition conducted through the medium of Ms. Aguilera and contrived historical style, DioGuardi turns out to be the girl with the most cake.

snakes on a plane

Snakes are born free and they are everywhere on planes.

world trade center

"You kept me alive," John McLoughlin says to his wife Donna, as he's wheeled past her at the film's conclusion; he has just spent a long day and night buried, slipping away from human thought. It might as well be "9/11" itself on the gurney, whispering to Hollywood. What was once unrepresentable has slipped, without much intermediate phase, into what must be represented every few weeks — for no reason other than to make sure we still feel the right way about the formerly historical events which have already been replaced by thoughtless shorthand. Oliver Stone's claim that the film isn't political, which received so much scoffing from "both sides of the aisle," is more or less true; the memorial (and this film is a celluloid Iwo Jima statue, nothing more, nothing less) isn't any more "political" than soundtrack music existing only to tell you exactly how to feel about a set of supposed facts, the discussion of which would somehow dishonor the very feelings you've just been instructed to have.

Meanwhile, the best talkie about 9/11 continues to be this, which proceeds from the fact of the event itself's escape into history, taking the dead with it. No one comes back. Everyone is fucked up. Those facts, unrecuperable and unresolvable, are the whirlpool on whose banks every action and gesture takes place.

An epic poem is a poem including history, sez Pound, but don't get it twisted. History and "actual events" are, at this point, mutually exclusive, and pointedly so. But this is simply another way of naming the spectacle.

the dozens: bombs over blogdad

Thirteen songs worth stealing. Sort of.

12) Nâdiya, "Tous ces mots." In the summer of 2003, the French-Algerian chanteuse had a disco-rap hit,"Et c'est parti," of such starts-with-a-boxing-bell, string stabs'n'horn blares, "na-na-na," thumping obviousness that it took days to notice, with gathering amazement, its subtlety. "Et c'est parti," it begins, a French stock phrase meaning "And here we go," but also sounding suspiciously like a stock bit of oldschool, "Hey, say party!" Next came "pour le show," a cunning, almost-unnoticeable slip into franglish, and then "le stade est chaud," which translates as "the place is hot," but enunciated so as to be identical to "let's start the show," and really the whole opening gambit is just unbelievable, Zukofsky's Catullus to a disco beat. The big hit from her new album, a piece of glam-soul bombast called "Roc," is negligible junk in comparison, but her other 2006 single, "Tous ces mots," almost holds its own. The musical bed is perversely, energetically insipid, with "Separate Ways" synths, revving engines 'n' squealing tires, a metronomic rhythm guitar going nowhere fast. But somehow she supplies the song with an implausible urgency, racing through the franglish ("I don't wanna go — contre le macadam," she says, liquidly triangulating her markets) with athletic exuberance, like a sprinter — which, oddly enough, she once was, the French national champion at 16.

11) U.S. Air Force, "Bombs over Baghdad." Hate the war but love the warriors. Mention with great frequency that poverty is, in effect, a stealth draft. But remember also that all the soldiers at the beginning of this graymarket promo clip for death take equal part in the charming call'n'response that opens this salute. Meanwhile, the video is, at the same time, like a joke about how much traction there is in denying the political, as Andre 3000 did about this song in 2000: "That’s where the title came from, like really, like "Don’t beat around the bush.” Our first single, we were trying to let people know we weren’t playing around at all. That’s what it meant.” Good luck with that.

10) Dixie Chicks, "The Long Way Around." The first single "Not Ready To Make Nice" (fifth-best song on the album) is "Heart of Gold" with an extra minor thrown down the shaft. "The Long Way Around," on the other hand (second-best song after "Lubbock or Leave It"), is like a gradeschool primer about the content of form: Look! Their friends from high school, with their circumscribed lives, get two dull chords repeated claustrophobically. Observe! How the introduction of the "I" is accompanied by a new minor chord, to indicate both difference and said difference's difficulties. Notice! How the chorus, with its story of departure and rambling freedom, passes through the minor chord to arrive at the heretofore withheld major, inhabiting for the first time the breadth of the key, giving the complete and spacious feeling of the "long way around." See also! The simplest ideas still work, at least a little.

9) Field Mob feat. Ciara, "So What." "So what" indeed. A track of such indifference that it reads like an experiment in how little you can do and still have an appealing song, which is perhaps a way of saying that Jazze Pha is still in the zone even when he's sleeping, and that Ciara, who so recently still seemed like a sort of convenience, Jazze's Aaliyah without the emotional reserves, now seems like the queen of all summer afternoons for the foreseeable future.

8) Jessica Simpson, "A Public Affair." A is for Autotune, B is for Bubbly Bassline, C is for Chic guitars; Daisy Dukes makes it work via the Janet Jackson retreat into breathy undersinging™, letting the machines and studio whizzes do the work at which they excel, without undo interference. Much has been made of the, er, similarities to "Holiday"; if we're on the subject of genius Eighties art-disco delivered by less-than-gifted vocalists, we hear those opening bells and think ABC just the same — not the alphabet, the band. Shoot that poison arrow, it'll be so nice! Trevor Horn, Nile Rodgers, fifteen minutes and an eight-ball; you'll gonna get something like this, and like it.

7) Big & Rich, "8th of November." This surprisingly standard-issue tragic survivor's story, marred by cliché ("like a dark evil cloud, 1200 came down on him and 29 more") still has some curious resonances among Vietnam veteran tunes. It's far more stately than precursor "Still In Saigon," Charlie Daniels' least likeable hit. The guitars' elegiac backward skirl invokes a quite different song to which this is a sort of pendant, "Copperhead Road" (the death knell of the New Traditionalist's heroic period, wherein Steve Earle's memory-moored vet has returned home to be a paranoid pot-grower, a taking-up of the family's anti-authroitarian moonshining tradition that is at the same time grimly memorial of his training so recently sponsored by those same authorities — "I learned a thing or two from Charlie doncha know; you better stay away from Copperhead Road"). But amidst all this history, certain details of "8th of November" keep tugging at stray brainstrings: the funereal/anniversarial ballad form, the date, the number 29. And these finally to the formal heart of the matter: it's a remake of a song set exactly a decade and two days later. As one memorial website summarizes it, "November 10, 1975. The Edmund Fitzgerald — 29 lost." Huh. History's just so...weird.

6) Jake Owen, "Yee Haw." "You take yer alright, you take yer can't wait, a lot of bring it on, and some damn straight, you mix it all up with some down home Southern drawl, y'all, you got yer yee-haw. "

5) Fergie, "London Bridge." London calling, speak the slang now. O Ambivalence of culture! Will you never end? Despite the numerous allusions — Fifty's rhythmic "I don't give a fuck"; Nelly et al's "urra" for "every"; hints of Masta Ace and Luke Skyywalker — as a total event, this song is part and parcel a feckless, avaricious theft of "Galang," from the staticky drum on down to that chorus sounding like the microphone's gloved in aluminum foil, each effect planed down and rounded off, forsaking the original's sinister fuzz and unexplained paranoia ("who the hell is hunting you, in their BMW?") for the vacuities of "I'm such a lady but I'm dancing like a — ." Just compare this song's "londy-londy-londeee" to that song's "get down get down get down," or any number of other jacked vocal rhythms and intonations simulated and dragged toward the middle of the dial by the ineluctable gravity of a million dollar bills. From the perspective of "Galang," this song is an abomination, a case study in the betrayal of spirit. From the perspective of "London Bridge," well, even a pale shadow of a shadow of a copy of a shadow is better than anything we might have suspected Fergie capable of. From a neutral perspective, this exchange is just a sort of education, the best one yet, in what happens — sonically, socially — when a sui generis song is recuperated into the SoundScan sweet spot. Lesson: the neutral perspective is fucked.

5) Tom Petty, "Square One." Unregenerate — is that the word? Unreconstructed? When Neil Young dies, those stations that play the contemporary form of what will later be classic rock will be left with a playlist of nothing but Tom Petty. Worse things could happen.

4) Julia Roberts," Men and Mascara," and Ghostface Killa, "9 Milli Bothers." There are tropes and there are tropes. Among the many reasons to love country and rap — the two living indigenous forms of pop music — is that their rhetorical tropework is hot to death, like, every day. In Julia Roberts' case, it's syllepsis: "men and mascara always run," ends each choru