Month: February 2013

Dispatches From The Mainstream: 2/26/2013

Austin Mahone feat. Flo Rida – “Say You’re Just A Friend”

Newcomer Austin Mahone is the latest artist to build a song around an interpolation of Biz Markie’s greatest contribution to pop culture, and even though it comes out as 100% cooke-cutter Top 40, “Say You’re Just A Friend” gets a pass for the huge nostalgia buzz it gives me. Not because of Biz Markie—man, I wasn’t even born until 1989—but because “Just A Friend” by Mario was a hit when I was twelve years old and just getting into pop music. Most things that remind me of the seventh grade send me spiraling into self-doubt and confusion, so that should give you an idea of how much I liked that song.

But the real noteworthy part of this song is Flo-Rida, who continues his transition from rapper to singer with a guest verse that relies more on melody than lyrics. His work here is closer to rapping than his section of “Troublemaker,” but the melody is too prominent to be ignored. Hey, do you think people will buy it if I start referring to Flo-Rida as a “one-man Bone Thugs-N-Harmony?” Probably not, right?

Lyrically, this might be some of Flo-Rida’s best work ever. He plays the Ludacris to Mahone’s Bieber, reminiscing about a young love that went sour. When has Flo-Rida ever sounded this relatable? Even when he’s listing off a bunch of his singles, it comes off as genuine enthusiasm rather than self-aggrandizing. Maybe that Biz Markie interpolation just makes anyone seem charming.

Another thing: I don’t want to be mean to Mr. Mahone, because dude is only sixteen, but I think he and Flo-Rida are about on the same level of singing ability. It sure sounds like they’re equally reliant on auto-tune.

Will.I.Am feat. Britney Spears, Diddy, Hit-Boy, Lil-Wayne & Waka Flocka Flame – Scream and Shout (Remix)

Right, because the original wasn’t awful enough, why don’t we make it longer and even less fun? “Scream and Shout” was a club song that failed on every conceivable level: not only did the low-key, repetitive music have zero chance of getting anyone on the dance floor; it makes being in the club sound dull and irritating. That’s an accurate impression of my clubbing experiences, but I doubt it’s what they were going for. And now the official remix is out and I had trouble getting through even two listens of this six-minute song. That’s twelve minutes that I could have used to watch an episode of Adventure Time or go on Tumblr or listen to this one Morrissey song I’m really into five more times. A little gratitude would be nice, that’s all I’m saying.

Will.I.Am’s post-2008 musical output is across-the-board annoying, but it can sometimes be interesting to hear him try to shift pop-music towards low-fi chiptune. Anyone who remembers “The Hardest Ever” knows that it’s never interesting to hear him rap, and the fact that he gave himself such a prominent verse in this remix feels like a straight-up insult. I don’t know which part is more annoying: the blatant plug for his tacky iPhone add-on IAm Foto Sosho or his drastic misapplication of the term “rock ‘n roll.”

How does everyone else do? Even though he’s a thousand miles from his sonic home-turf, Flocka gets the best verse by far, and that’s coming from a late-period Lil Wayne apologist. Yeah, he’s been on auto-pilot ever since he got out of prison, and his verse here adds to our dangerous national surplus of “All Eyes On Me” references, but you can almost catch a glimpse of that old-school Wayne charm. If you squint.

Hit-Boy uses up the only semi-clever line he’s ever going to have, so I hope it was worth it, and Diddy’s contribution is laughable where it’s supposed to be exciting. His hype-man persona is surprisingly awful for someone who’s done little beside hype people up for decades. No one has ever made me want to “turn up” less. And then he ends the song by repeating the phrase “This is a super black man remix” over and over. I don’t know, man, this whole thing’s just a mess.

Maroon 5 – Daylight

Maroon 5 is going through a lot of trouble to distract you from the fact that “Daylight” is a dull song, musically listless and lyrically far too reminiscent of “Save Tonight” by Eagle-Eye Cherry. And I hate to admit it, but they’re doing a bang-up job.

The version that the band put together with the reliably awesome Playing For Change is especially successful at tricking you into enjoying a Maroon 5 song. Their best decision is keeping Adam Levine and his whiny voice off-stage for a full minute, and their worst decision is bringing the whole band in for the rest of the song. It’s not enough to totally ruin the song, but I do flinch whenever the video cuts from someone doing their thing with a cello or a didgeridoo to some cell-phone quality footage of those doofuses playing in a crowded arena.

The nine-minute “Daylight Project” version is less of a musical achievement, but anyone interested in seeing a cross-section of humanity represented through vlog should check it out. The breadth of the human experience this video contains is limited by the fact that it’s made up of Maroon 5 fans (a demographic that tends towards the young and female), but it’s still a fascinating glimpse into the lives behind the fandom. This song is a bizarre fit for the two world-spanning videos propping it up, but if you can ignore the extra-long instrumental playing behind this version, you’d be stupid not to be just a little moved.

And since it’s been a while since I reminded everyone what a mushy, emotional wuss I am, I’ll just say that I got choked up at what happens at 7:48.

Continuum, “Time’s Up”

After last week’s emotional examination of a classic time travel trope, Continuum turns its attention to more political maters. Aside from a few subplots that get advanced and a few bits of intriguing backstory, “Time’s Up” is all about the beliefs and methods of Liber8. This brings us back to one of the big questions of the series: whose side are we supposed to be on?

We’ve danced around this issue before, but we’re at a point in the series where the writers have given us enough material to really address it. When the series begins, it’s clear that Kierra’s world is not one any of us would want to live in. I know there are, ahem, certain factions of our society that think the government is crazy out-of-control with power, but I doubt that even they would prefer we be ruled over by a council of corporations.

From the moment Kierra is introduced as an unthinking cog in the dystopian future of 2077, the series sets up a cognitive dissonance—our hero is fighting on behalf of a system we despise—that can only be resolved in one of two ways: either the show demonstrates why Kierra’s future isn’t all that bad, or Kierra slowly comes to understand the viewpoint of Liber8, even if she despises their methods. “Time’s Up” has a few moments indicating that Continuum is committed to the latter course. It’s nice to see the beginnings of a moral dilemma in Kierra’s mind, but it’s handled in a pretty awkward way, with flashback-Kierra stumbling upon a plot by the council to withhold rations. Actually, the fact that Kierra experiences a moment of sympathy for Liber8’s cause in a flashback could potential undermine her entire character arc, but I choose to view that as a single poor piece of writing rather than a series-destroying mistake.

The depiction of Kierra’s future and the continued exploration of Liber8’s beliefs make the group’s actions in the pilot seem… not justified, because they do murder thousands of innocent people, but understandable. The mass murder itself is rendered in a distant, CGI explosion, so while the audience is intellectually aware of Liber8’s awful crimes, we don’t get an opportunity to sympathize with the victims. This has held true for the rest of the series so far: the most emotionally upsetting thing that Liber8 has done is the murder of Kellog’s grandmother, and even that act is decried by Kagame as soon as it happens.

“Time’s Up” continues this trend. Aside from the cold-blooded murder of the security guards (again carried out by Travis, the same member who violently strayed from the plan last week), Liber8’s actions in this episode take the form of vigilante justice. They force a criminal to confess and hand out millions of dollars to the public. Sure, the audience knows that Liber8 is a terrorist group, but it’s not hard to see why the Vancouver public of 2012 would like them.

All this could have been better explored in an episode with a little more breathing room. The plot of “Time’s Up” is too conventionally twisty for its own good, crowding up a story about Kierra and Liber8 with boring scenes about two Exotrol employees working to take down their own company. The whole thing was unnecessary, and all it got us was another chase/fight scene. To the writers of Continuum: I don’t actually need you to include a fistfight in every episode, especially if it’s going to be as lame as this one.

Liber8 had enough going on this week to fill two episodes, but the corporate espionage plotline crowds them out. I could have watched an entire episode about Liber8 infiltrating and winning over the anarchist group, but that gets breezed over in the first few scenes. Once the CEO of Exotrol is kidnapped, the entire episode could have just been a cat and mouse game between Liber8 and Kierra. The gimmick of having citizens vote for whether someone lives or dies is a storytelling device that has been popping up here and there ever since the internet became a massive cultural force, and it’s usually connected to the worst kind of “the-internet-is-destroying-our-souls” alarmism, but here, it doesn’t even matter! The voting goes live and Alec tracks down Liber8 almost immediately. Continuum had an opportunity to do something worthwhile with this semi-cliché, since the idea of Liber8 holding a public tribunal for a CEO is completely in character, but the writers dropped the ball.

The kidnapping plot is eventually revealed to be an elaborate method of getting the CEO to confess and winning the public over to Liber8’s cause. If the writers had left it at that, I would have been fine. The final shot of Liber8’s logo being spray-painted on a wall is suitably ominous: how will Kierra fight against Liber8 if they have a whole army of citizens behind them? But then the show returns to the stupid corporate espionage plot, wasting another five minutes just to show that Liber8 was also playing Exotrol from the inside in order to… get a lot of money? Huh?

The best motive I can ascribe to the show’s writers here is that they wanted to address the unspoken question of how Liber8 is funding their terrorist activities. But that question had gone unspoken because no one cares. This is a show about time travel. I don’t care about how the bad guys get their money; I care about how they exploit their unique position to accomplish their goals. If the writers really wanted to explain how Liber8 gets their funding, they could have found a better way to do it.

How about this: in the imaginary version of this episode that I wrote in my head—the one all about Liber8 allying themselves with anarchist groups—Liber8 manipulates their new allies into robbing banks for “the cause.” There! That would take up maybe a scene or two and it would have been much more interesting than this.

Continuum is a show with a unique premise that trips over itself when it tries to introduce plotlines from a standard procedural show. Unlike the case of the week in episode three, the events of “Time’s Up” at least connect to the rest of the show, but they’re obscured by a big lumpy subplot about an attempted corporate takeover. Continuum, I know you want to be like those other shows, those American shows that run on CBS and NBC, but you don’t have to be like them! You can be your own show! You just have to believe in yourself, Continuum, you just have to believe.

I did appreciate how much “sci-fi stuff” was used in the main plotline, like the re-appearance of the truth serum and Kierra using her H.U.D. to shoot out a weak point in the chain-link walkway.
It seems like Alec’s step-father owned a farm until he was forced out by corporations, and he’s understandably a little tense about it. Hey, that’s way more backstory than I thought we would get for that character!
The photos that SyFy released for this episode make it seem like it was going to be all about Alec’s family, which would ALSO have been better than what we actually got.

Dispatches From The Mainstream: 2/15/2013

Kelly Clarkson – Catch My Breath

Kelly Clarkson is weirdly likeable. We should be resistant to her, because her entire career is non-organic and extremely forced. But I guess we love her because we picked her. You might even say that Kelly Clarkson is the last thing our country agreed on. The very next season of American Idol was beset with controversy about homophobia and missing votes. And even when someone actually does win American Idol these days, do we give them a career? Sometimes we do, but sometimes we end up with Taylor Hicks. Yeah, I said it.

I like Kelly Clarkson so much that I’m disappointed in myself whenever I don’t enjoy her current single, but I couldn’t stand “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You).” I’m no minimalist, but that junk was too noisy. The chorus was like the inside of a car factory. That entire album was kind of wash for singles, really: “Mr. Know It All” was a slightly less annoying version of “Just The Way You Are” by Bruno Mars–but only slightly–and do you even remember “Dark Side?” I do, and I’m not too happy about it. I guess that was Kelly’s “unlistenable, non-catchy chorus” phase.

“Catchy My Breath” succeeds by dialing it back a little bit: “Stronger” was exhausting before the first verse even started, but this song uses a repetitive melody to great effect. The construction of the chorus is great, too: it’s simple and it gives Clarkson a chance to show off her fantastic voice. “Catch My Breath” also has that same life-affirming, in-your-face, no-screw-YOU power that “Stronger” had, but with a wider appeal—hey, people who aren’t escaping a toxic relationship need anthems, too! Just sayin’.

Rihanna feat. Future – Loveeeeeee Song

Rihanna’s music has always had a streak of unsentimental iciness. Maybe it’s because her voice doesn’t allow her to sound truly nurturing or emotional or any other stuff that codes as “feminine,” but there’s always been an air of hardness about her. Then in 2009 she went through some seriously bad stuff and put out Rated R, an album that channeled the darkness of her life into some of the most aggressive music ever to be put out by a pop diva. There aren’t a lot of MALE R&B stars that make music that aggressive.

Since then she’s gone back and forth between “dark” Rihanna and a more conventionally “feminine” role, ping-ponging between the two several times over the course of a single album. For example, “We Found Love” & “You da One” appeared on the same disc as “Talk That Talk,” “Cockiness” and—ugh—“Birthday Cake”. Unapologetic is no different, opening up with the aggressive and sonically unpleasant “Phresh Out The Runway,” switching back to love-struck-Rihanna for “Diamonds” then whipping around to “Pour It Up,” which sounds like it was pitched to about twenty different male artists before Rihanna snatched it up. Put it this way: when a female singer is talking about “strippers going up and down that pole,” you are dealing with some binary-breaking business.

“Loveeeeeee Song” is a more subtle inversion of gender norms than “Pour It Up,” but it’s more interesting because it pairs the a-typically aggressive Rihanna with Future, a rapper best known for his love of autotune and his unusual sensitivity. On the hook, Future pleads openly for “love and affection” without a hint of bravado or ego. In the verses, Rihanna plays a more guarded role, tossing out sexy come-ons and promising to “lay you down.” Not only is it one of the few listenable songs on Unapologetic, it’s a noteworthy pop song. Not because of how unusual it is, but because of how close it is to a normal Top-40 duet between a man and a woman. All Rihanna and Future did was trade places.

The Band Perry – “Better Dig Two”

I haven’t checked in with The Band Perry since “If I Die Young,” a song that was so poorly written I had trouble believing that the writer was almost 30 years old. Kimberly Perry is the first adult woman I’ve known whose death fantasies can rival those of a teenage LiveJournal user. Especially annoying was the winking bridge, with the lyrics, “maybe then you’ll hear the songs I’ve been singing/funny when you’re dead, how people start listening.” Not only is that a remarkably dull observation, it sounds like it belongs in a totally different song.

“Better Dig Two” wasn’t written by any of the band-members Perry, but it sure fits their lyrical style, right down to the fixation on white wedding dresses as a symbol of purity. The title and the music promise a much darker story than what we get–to me, it harkens back to that scene in A Fistful of Dollars when Clint Eastwood tells the guy how many coffins to build. So cool. Anyway, the chorus of “Better Dig Two” describes a woman who would rather die than go on living without her husband… but then the verses hint at a darker meaning to the titular phrase. She vaguely threatens to either kill herself or kill herself and her husband, which would be an interesting direction to go in if the song could just commit to it.

Other crimes include use of the contraction “I is”—as in, “I’s gonna love you till I’s dead”—and a jarring reference to meth in the middle of a song that otherwise sounds like it was written sixty years ago. The music is a step-up from “If I Die Young”, with handclaps and creepy banjo on the verses, and those electric guitars that take us right back into pop-country territory aren’t totally unwelcome. This is a muddled song that could be a fun little bit of darkness if the lyrics had gotten a second draft.

Continuum, “A Test Of Time”

This guy!

“A Test Of Time” is the best episode of Continuum so far. It crafts a story that only a show like this could do, but grounds it with emotional beats that resonated better than they have all season. There’s not many shows that could build an episode around the grandfather paradox, and Continuum makes the most out of it. This episode climaxes with a hostage exchange involving not one, but three different characters’ ancestors.

It gets a little ridiculous when Kellog reveals Kagame’s mother—after all, he is “very resourceful”—but it’s still sad when poor Maddie gets shot. Seeing Kellog kneeling over the dying body of his grandmother was moving in a strange way. It’s a scene that seems like it shouldn’t resonante emotionally, because there’s no real emotional precedent for it—as far as I know, most people don’t take on a father/daughter relationship with their grandparents—and yet, it works. After all, Maddie is an innocent caught in the crossfire, but to Kellog, she was more family. Time paradoxes aside, everyone knows how it feels to lose someone you love, and seeing one of the show’s most likeable characters in that state was wrenching.

I haven’t been feeling that kind of emotional connection with Kierra, but her separation from her loved ones actually clicked for me this week. I’m willing to chock it up to personal feelings about fictional proposals—I’m sorry, I think people devoting themselves to each other is just so beautiful AND NO I AM NOT CRYING—but it didn’t hurt that we actually saw Kierra and her husband loving each other, instead of arguing or talking about the baby. Seeing Kierra fret over her husband’s safety in the flashback was nice—as was her son not having to deliver horrible dialogue—and made her love for her family seem much more real. So, when Kierra gives that speech to her grandmother about being surrounded by love, it has actual weight to it. Having children seems like an absolute nightmare to me, but the way Kierra described it was really lovely.

This episode was so good that it redeems last week’s underwhelming effort. “A Test of Time” reveals that last week’s episode was actually Continuum’s first pieces-setting episode. Heavily serialized shows are usually allowed a couple of episodes to set up payoffs further down the road, but this early in a show’s run, it’s hard to tell if it’s going to be good enough to deserve that sort of slack… and in Continuum’s case, it was unclear if the show was even serialized enough to deserve that sort of slack. But with “A Test of Time,” Continuum proved its dedication to telling a long form story with episodes so good that they don’t even need a shootout to be satisfying.

Last week’s time with Kellog set up the devastating turn of events in his storyline, but the most important piece that got moved around was Kagame, the leader of Liber8 who had been absent from 2012 (and the show itself) for unclear reasons since the pilot. Well, he’s back, and he’s already a fantastic addition to the show.

His presence gives Liber8 coherence and a level of motivation they didn’t have when they were flailing about just trying not to die. Now that their leader is back, Liber8 has transformed into a legitimate antagonistic force. Not only are they actively working against Kierra, but it looks like they’re going to devote all of their energy to starting the revolution that they lost the first time around.

It helps that Kagame himself is the sort of interesting, nuanced villain that’s been missing from the show thus far. We find out early on in this episode that Kagame doesn’t want to take a life when it isn’t needed, and that gets reinforced when he chews out Travis for shooting Kellog’s grandmother. Kagame’s philosophical clarity and moral code gives the massive terrorist act at the beginning of the series even more weight. If Kagame thought that all those people needed to die, he must have been serious about it. He may be dedicated to his cause, but you can see in his eyes that he feels the weight of every death.

Kagame is the only Liber8 member that’s almost likeable—except Kellog, but he doesn’t count—but the show never tries to make him anything less than a villain. Even when he gets a sympathetic flashback like last episode, it’s tempered a cold act of calculated evil. Kagame’s ordering the murder of an innocent Lily Cole, just because she might be Kierra’s grandmother, is a perfect example. Liber8 has not been more viscerally frightening than when Travis executed that screaming girl in the alleyway.

You can tell she’s bad news because she has two piercings. TWO!

This episode works so well that I can overlook the tiny bits that don’t make sense, because they get the wheel rolling on everything else. When Kellog shows up at the Liber8 base, I can understand why Kagame would want to speak with him, but why would the others let him in? The last time he showed up, he was carrying a tracking device. And then there was Sonya’s method of extracting a tissue sample from Kierra. If you can get close enough to stab her with a medical instrument, why not just stab her with a knife and deal with the problem directly?

I still don’t want to slide into the trap of over-praising Continuum just because it’s better than it should be, but I think it’s earned a little faith. You really have to give some leeway on plot-holes to any long-form fiction, especially a genre show like this one that’s so plot-heavy. And at least Continuum doesn’t let the really stupid stuff just lay there for too long, like when the second episode immediately addressed Kierra’s super-flimsy alias, or in this episode, when Kellog’s treachery was exposed almost immediately. This is a show with at least some amount of brains, and this episode proves that it may have a heart, too.

The fact that the REAL Lily Cole was a sterotypical “bad girl” seems kind of hokey in retrospect, but when she first showed up it was a nice little twist.
Proof that Kellog actually cared about Maddie: he doesn’t even care that her death didn’t wipe him from existence. Awww.
Alec’s speech to his stepbrother is probably going to have negative consequences. Wouldn’t it be crazy if he accidentally inspired his family to join Liber8? Maybe “crazy” is a bit much—“natural plot development” might be a better term.
The “FETUS DETECTED” thing that popped up in Kierra’s H.U.D. was so funny I almost missed the car crash that happened five seconds later.

Continuum, “A Matter Of Time”

I was disappointed when Kierra settled in with the Vancouver police force of 2012. It made sense from a plot and character standpoint—Kierra was a cop in her time, of course she would join up with a law enforcement team—but the setting was too reminiscent of the police procedural genre for my taste. I’m not knocking procedurals, they’ve got their place in the television landscape, but they’re not my cup of tea and they’re not what I was looking for in Continuum.

After resisting the format for three episodes, Continuum finally went full procedural with “Matter Of Time.” The episode opens with Carlos investigating a the scene of a murder and from that point on, everything plays out exactly as you’d expect. There are a few sci-fi touches that gesture faintly towards the more interesting show happening off to the side: the victim, Martin Ames, was a scientist working on an anti-matter device that blew a hole through five floors when it killed him (which leads to a neat CGI-assisted zoom through the hole).

But for the most part, this plotline follows the standard beats of a police procedural. Kierra and Carlos interview the suspects a few times each, scrounge for clues and finally interrogate the perp until he confesses… but then, a bit of information discovered at the last minute leads to a twist and the discovery of the real criminal. It’s kind of bizarre and more than a little disappointing to see Kierra trapped in the rote plotline of CBS drama when last week she was engaging in a two-on-one fistfight with a terrorist from the future. I thought I was watching Continuum, not Law & Order: 2012! Wait, that doesn’t really work. Law & Order: Vancouver? No, that’s stupid, too. Well, you get the point.

Sometimes jokes can be hard

Episodes two and three both devoted time to self-contained storylines, but the one in episode two was directly related to the premise of the show (Kierra tries to return home) and the one in episode three took a backseat to character development for Kellog and a big punch-out for everyone else. The investigation into the murder of Martin Ames hints that it will tie into the overarching plot, but it never does, except in the broadest thematic sense.

It turns out that Ames’ partner, Dr. Dobeck, fearing that their work would be weaponized, murdered Ames to prevent him from selling out to the government. In the end, Kierra not only lets Dobeck go free, she lets her keep the work. It seems that this unnecessary plotline will be redeemed with a major bit of character development. Is Kierra finally beginning to see that there are more important things than upholding the law?

Actually, Kierra was just upholding a different kind of law, the law of time travel. In her time, Dobeck is widely hailed for developing an energy resource that saves millions of people. Kierra decides that Dobeck’s future work is too important to lose, so important that she lets her get away with murder. As Alec eloquently puts it, “That’s messed up.”

“I think I left the stove running in 2077.”

The whole thing is slightly redeemed by a bit of parallel structure. Kagame, leader of Liber8, has finally joined everyone else in 2012, and when Kierra shows up to take him in, he says that he’s spent his whole life “making decisions that affect millions of people,” and darn it, that’s just what he’s good at. At the end of the episode, Alec explicitly compares what Liber8 is doing with what Kierra has done: in a way, they’re both playing God.

It would have been a nice bit of character work if it hadn’t been set up with that extremely awkward line from Kagame. In fact, the entire scene where Kierra confronts him is awkward. During the episode, we see a glimpse into Kagame’s past, and it brings us dangerously close to sympathizing with him and his cause. The writers can’t have that, though, so when Liber8 shows up to rescue their leader, they threaten to murder an infant. Good work, writers, nice and subtle. Way to keep everything in good taste.

Everything around Kierra’s case of the week is still interesting. Kellog is getting more flagrant with his knowledge of the future, buying a boat and helping out a young girl who is pretty clearly his grandmother. He didn’t even interact with any of the main characters this week; he just hung out in the past and bought stock. It was still fun to spend time with him.

The rest of Liber8 didn’t get a lot to do this week, but at least they were having a pretty good time until their leader showed up. In their first scene, Canada’s favorite time-displaced criminals beat up a couple of marijuana farmers and take their house. Travis and Sonya immediately post up and start smoking weed, having sex and watching television. This was the first week where I at least knew what the group’s goal was: at the beginning of the episode, they just wanted a new place to live. After Kagame shows back up, they re-dedicate themselves to starting their revolution 60 years early. Right. Got it. Let’s try to keep things simple from here on out, okay?

Continuum needs to stay away from this kind of filler episode in the future. There’s only ten episodes a season, after all, it’s not like they have a lot of time to kill. Still, even “Matter Of Time” worked in a few interesting character moments and some developments that could pay off down the road… and there was plenty of Alec. More Alec is always good in my book.

I didn’t even talk about how Alec and Kierra finally meet face-to-face in this episode! And they have a cute bit of banter about dry-cleaning. It’s good to know their chemistry works just as well face-to-face.
Really, Carlos? You’re worried about Liber8 “adding to their numbers?” Relax, this is the first week where one of them hasn’t died.

jason edwards dot com

welcome to the narcissism