consume

35-for-35: 1990 – “Pump Up The Jam” by Technotronic

November 9, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Yes, “Vogue” was released in 1990 and this post is not about Vogue. You’re on to me, I’m actively avoiding using this series to just gush over Madonna. I can do that any day.

“Vogue” was part of a trend – maybe its apex – of bringing elements of popular club music to the mainstream (in this case, House music). The popularity lasted only a brief period and had few popular antecedents before going underground again thanks to the radio takeover by alternative rock in the following years. You could hear it again on Cathy Dennis’s “C’Mon Move This,” Ce Ce Peniston’s “Finally,” and all over the next albums by Paula Abdul and Prince.

While those tracks are all glossy, radio-ready examples, a lot of the significant songs of the period weren’t so polished. Some of those fell into the sub-genre of “hip house,” a subgenre born in Chicago which fused hip hop break beats and bassline samples with house elements. One of the bigger crossover hits was “Pump Up The Jam,” by Technotronic – who I saw open Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour in 1990!

technotronic_-_pump_up_the_jam-_the_album “Pump Up The Jam” is really stripped down. Its drum machine sounds cheap and is almost all snares and hi-hat rides. It eschews the clanging piano of House completely and inserts only the most passing of synths to dress up its bass loops. The vocals from Ya Kid K are half spoken and half sung, tinged by the inflection of a hip hop MC (though she does not appear in the video – the singer there is model Felly Kilingi, who also graced the cover of the LP).

I played the hell out of this song on tape in 1990 and I cannot explain why. I liked all of those House singles I listed above, but I wasn’t remotely into hip hop or anything with the bracing starkness of this song. But, as Mother of Krisis would say, “Does it have a good beat? Can you dance to it?” Both answers were yes.

Thus, at sundown I would drag my boombox out to the edge of my grandmother’s postage-stamp urban front lawn, pull on my denim jacket, turn this song up to 10, and execute my choreography in the middle of the street for all to see.

(Seriously, was there any doubt that I was going to be on stage later in life? What the hell was everyone in my family waiting for.)

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – WildCATs #8-9

November 8, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug] WildCATs #8-9 represent a two-issue breather after two substantial arcs (or, at least, substantial for the pre-writing for-trade 90s). The pair of issues are both extra-long, with a full-length Brandon Choi / Jim Lee A-story plus a substantial backup with art from Travis Charest (#8 is written by Steve Seagle and #9 by Jeff Mariotte).

wildcats-v01-0009 Issue #8 slams the breaks on all the action so we can finally see these characters’ personalities develop. It’s not too effective considering they break into the obvious chunks – the already awesome Grifter/Zealot, the boring as dirt Warblade/Maul, and the slightly interesting Spartan/Voodoo AKA what if Cyclops was more of an unfeeling automaton and really did get with Psylocke.

The sad truth this arc brings to light is that WildCATs simply isn’t stocked with the right characters for good chemistry. I’d suggest that maybe I’m just not in the right mindset to appreciate early Image, except Choi is killing it on Stormwatch issue after issue!

The difference is all down to archetypes and how they are balanced.

Stormwatch certainly has them (the strong female 2nd-in-command, the huge and cheerful foreign tank, the taciturn Russian), but it also has the decidedly non-stereotypical Battalion as a point-of-view-character and relies on real-world intrigue blended with its fantasy. There are not one, but five bland, energy-projecting dudes that I cannot always tell apart, but they exist in the service of the story.

WildCats is a team that’s as deliberately-balanced as a football squad when it comes to powers (energy projection, psychic, strength, sharp bleedy things, guns). In terms of personality archetypes, there’s hardly anything to work with as we hit issue #8 (#12, if we count Trilogy and Special).

We have a lot of information about the complex relationship between Zealot and Grifter, and a hint of tension between Voodoo and Spartan, but little else to go on. The book continues to flatline whenever Grifter and Zealot aren’t on panel (and these issues give up Grifter in the opening pages so he can star in Kindred). The Spartan romance subplot is especially clunky because the book does such a bad job of defining just how sentient Spartan truly is.

What does work here is the streamlined plot – a single villain with a singular beef with Jacob Marlowe. Choi writes Lord Entropy like rogue fencepost that a tree grew around, where that tree is the modern world. He’s not the most interesting antagonist, but his actions raise the question – where are all the other pureblood Kherubim that didn’t wind up Coda like Zealot? Lord Entropy is one, and he’s got a twisted history with our Jacob Marlowe AKA Lord Emp. We’ve yet to meet any others, but even if they definitively lost the war there are bound to be a few.

The back-up tales in each book are a welcome chance to add depth and breadth to Voodoo and Warblade, respectively. Voodoo’s tale comes off more as a continuity-fix on her changing costume and attitude towards entering the fray. Warblade’s story does less plot heavy-lifting, but accomplishes more as a character piece.

Unless you are going all-in on a WildCATs re-read, I don’t think you need to pick up these issues. Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong later if Lord Entropy becomes a bigger plot point, but it seems like you could simply skip to the next arc or substitute The Kindred here.

Want the full details? Keep reading for a deeper breakdown of the plot. Here’s the schedule for the rest of this month’s WildStorm re-read. Though Grifter departs here for Kindred, before we get there we’ll read Union #1-4 and 0 tomorrow.

Need the issues? These issues have never before been collected! For single issues – try eBay (#6-8) or Amazon (#8 & 9 or 8 & 9 (try both)). Since further WildCATs series hit these same issue numbers, be sure to match your purchase to the cover images in this post.

35-for-35: 1989 – “Deadbeat Club” by The B-52’s

November 8, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug] b52s-cosmic-thing I was drawn to the B-52’s Cosmic Thing by the ubiquitous “Love Shack” and the magnificent “Roam,” the latter of which captured that Atlanta sound in a perfect female-lead analog to the increasingly popular R.E.M..

I didn’t like R.E.M. at the time, but I loved the B-52’s. They were whacky and whimsical. They wrote songs about aliens in the oval office and love shacks on the side of the road.

The thing I loved about them the most is that they were a real band – maybe the first rock band I really loved that wasn’t The Beatles. I was obsessed with reading liner notes at this stage in my life, constantly scanning the co-write credits and musicians.

Most of the artists I listened to were just singers, although by this point Madonna had wised up and garnered a co-write on every track of Like a Prayer.

The B-52’s were different. They wrote the songs and played the instruments. I pictured them in the studio, arguing over the sounds of their chiming guitars and high, sighing harmonies.

The leading edge of Gen-Xers were just graduating high school when Cosmic Thing was released, still several years away from the sorts of failures defined in Reality Bites. Yet, “Deadbeat Club” perfectly aligns to that misanthropic, listless future, constantly mocking the happenings “down in NormalTown.”

It’s a song full of atmosphere and images – dancing in torn sheets in the rain and heading down to the bar for their cheapest beer. None of these settings are pictured in the plain video for the song, but I can see them clearly to this day.

The B-52’s were also a band with caché. My family knew who they were and didn’t look down their noses at them the way they did my other 80s pop. I remember standing on the porch of my grandmother’s house, listening to my aunt and cousin talk about the B-52’s riotous earlier records.

“Ah, but it’s a shame about what happened with the guitarist,” one of them said.

“What happened?” I asked, wide-eyed. I hadn’t been aware that the guitarist in my liner notes wasn’t the original guitarist.

“Ricky Wilson, the blonde one’s brother. He was… you know. He died of AIDS.”

b52s-deadbeat-club This was still early in the AIDS epidemic, but I knew what it was and the implication of the words. He was gay and he died. I filed that information away. Maybe it’s part of what lead to the blowout with my tiny, conservative Christian school a few years later, where in a debate about AIDS in biology class was told by the teacher it was a plague sent to punish the immoral.

I didn’t have a club to call my own when I first heard the song. My only friends were classmates of whom I was only close to one. Yet, as I think back on the clubs I joined and that formed around me in life, this could have been the theme song to many of them.

In my mind, this was what it was like to feel one with your friends – a group that would otherwise be outcasts. Sitting around, stalking through town, and looking over our noses at the norms.

If we were the deadbeats and reject, who’d want to be normal?

35-for-35: 1988 – “Cold Hearted” by Paula Abdul

November 7, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug](Since Mondays were previously my #MusicMonday posting day, I’m giving you a double-dose of 35-for-35 to start the week and to fit all the songs into one month!)

Much of Paula Abdul’s debut Forever Your Girl is a cotton candy assemblage – whatever sugar they could spin around an inexperienced singer with an approximate relationship with singing in tune.

Don’t get me wrong – I love Forever Your Girl. I know every word on it. But, if you held it up to today it would be less Arianna Grande and more … I don’t know, who is a fake famous person who put out a record to maintain the illusion of their popularity? Julianne Hough? I’m not down with all the artists that kids like these days.

That’s besides the point. The point is that on this album filled with conventional spun sugar sounds (like title track “Forever Your Girl”) there are two singular, break-out moments that no one other than Paula Abdul managed to record.

One is the stark, funky “Straight Up.” The other is “Cold Hearted,” or as people more commonly know it, “Cold-Hearted Snake.”

Listen carefully to the sounds in the intro. It combines the same synth bass as “Straight Up,” the same 2s-and-4s snare hits, paired with with whining guitar bends not too different from the infamous wah on that song. What mades “Cold Hearted” stand out is the frantically sawing sampled string section that is subtly doubled by computerized blips.

When the intro chorus hits the song would be nearly identical to “Straight Up” if not for those strings, which stop their sawing to carry a counter-melody that makes Abdul’s clipped, staccato phrases form a single legato melody.

paula_abdul-cold_hearted That’s it, really. Otherwise it’s just “Straight Up, Part 2: Faster and About Someone Else’s Lover.”

Were the strings alone enough to turn this into the massively memorable hit it became? Probably not. I tend to think it had a little something to do with the video – released almost a year after the LP originally dropped.

I was eight years old when that video hit. I wasn’t the kind of little boy who thought girls were gross – I was deeply in love with a girl in my class. I always wasn’t the kind of boy with prurient interest in scantily clad women – maybe because I was being raised by a cadre of women myself.

So please understand when I tell you that, even as an eight-year-old, I knew this video was heart-poundingly sexy.

Honestly, I think it kind of defined sexy for me. The moment that sticks in my mind is from the four-minute-mark, the image of the throbbing mass of limbs expanding and contracting around Abdul.

(Also, it was directed by David Fincher, who would go on to direct the video for “Vogue,” and later the films Se7en, The Game, Panic Room, Benjamin Button, and so on.)

Between the special alchemy of the song and the sexed up video, “Cold Hearted” was a memorable track that dominated my eight-year-old life. It seems like it’s slightly faded in the eyes of pop culture in favor of “Straight Up” and the whimsical “Opposites Attract,” but it remains among my favorite Paula Abdul songs.

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Stormwatch #6-8

November 7, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Are you ready to get political?

This trio of issues of Stormwatch play up the geopolitical aspects of the team in a big way while also serving satisfying action and backstory and fantastic arc. Despite some 90s tropes along the way, the title has hit its stride as a high-quality comic.

stormwatch_v1_006 The opening two-issue arc of this run is firing on all cylinders. Issue #6 is the heftiest WildStorm comic I’ve read so far. It has political intrigue, finally gives the team around Battalion some depth, and continues Stormwatch’s genius streak of nodding to its implied deep well of personnel and their accompanying stories.

Then, #7 is a well-paced battle that limits the amount of reversals and people back from seeming KOs. Thanks to the lack of see-sawing, it has a legitimate “hooray!” moment at the climax, especially when the dispassionate Weatherman joins in piling on the enemies.

Brandon Choi wisely leans heavily on the caption boxes in issue six, helping us get reacquainted with the team – who we haven’t seen together outside of the special since the opening of the first issue.

This is at once a strength and weakness of Stormwatch. It has a large enough cast with multiple teams, historical personnel, supporting staff, and enemy mercs that sometimes I can go issues without ever being entirely sure of someone’s name or power.

That’s emphasized by the fact that we’ve stayed almost entirely with Battalion (and, briefly, Backlash) as our POV characters so far. At this point we know enough about Diva, Fuji, and Winter, but past that trio things get hazier – especially as Choi seems intent for us to pick up on their countries of origin from a few spare foreign words, which is a bit less than we had to go on in Giant Size X-Men.

Issue #8 adds a few surprising names to the credits – H. K. Proger co-scripts, and Jim Lee contributes layouts along with Scott Clark for Trevor Scott to finish. It’s also surprises on just about every page, which makes for an engrossing single issue.

Amidst a lot of great material, two things stick out in a big way:

One is Ripclaw and Rainmaker as indigenous characters without a lot of stereotyping attached. Sure, we get the opening monolog about the Apache Warrior, but otherwise they’re two heroes who the story happens to focus on in a clear callback to the first issue. It’s not “A Very Special Indigenous Episode of Stormwatch.” It also gets the politics right, by identifying the US forces as rogue agents on sovereign land (an interesting contrast with Stormwatch’s role in the prior issue).

Two, is that we get a great, brief training session with Battalion and Backlash that actually deepens their characters and advances the plot! It leads to another strong conversation with Backlash. Sure, it’s just setting up Backlash’s spinoff series, but why can’t Choi manage that on WildCATs!

Want the play-by-play? Keep reading for a summary of these two teams going head to head. Here’s the schedule for the rest of this month’s WildStorm re-read. Though both Kindred and Gen13 are referenced in today’s read, we’ve got some more WildCATs ground to cover first, starting with #8-9 tomorrow. Enjoy the light reading day!

Need the issues? You guessed it – never before collected! You’ll need to purchase single issues – try eBay (#6-8) or Amazon (#6, 7, 8). Since further Stormwatch series hit these same issue numbers, be sure to match your purchase to the images in this post.