The Beatles

Holy crap, an update.

On the internet there has apparently formed a rather large backlash against The Beatles from people saying they suck various things they probably did not (I say "probably" because it was the sixties).  Anyway, the backlash seems to come less from the band's music and more from the fact that they are so often billed as "the greatest band of all time".  So let me state clearly: the most important and influential rock band of all time?  Perhaps.  The best?  Probably not.

Rock and roll, like most genres, changes and evolves as time goes by, and every once in a while it needs to be reshaped, typically whenever the existing style has started to grow stale.  The grunge revolution of the 90s, for example, or the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll attitude of the 70s.  The Beatles were one of the bands that did this, famously starting the British Invasion of the late 60s and early 70s.  So to understand why the Beatles were so huge, you should understand the stale state of rock and roll before they arrived.

Record company executives are not a new phenomenon, nor are they particularly worse now than they were in the 50s and 60s.  For years the basic formula was "pick up a bunch of kids that might or might not know how to play instruments, call them a band, sell a million albums, repeat".  And it worked.  Enter The Beatles.  The thing that made the Beatles so big wasn't so much that they were especially good, it's that they were better.  Now, I happen to own a pretty solid collection of vintage Mad Magazines from the era, and for several months after their introduction Mad was willing to brush off the Beatles as another one of the over-hyped talentless kludges of the era, albeit one that deserved a bit more attention due to their ridiculous hair and silly British accents.  They came around, but the fact that they could keep this up shows that the Beatles were not mind-blowingly talented performers or song-writers.  A lot of the backlash towards the Beatles comes from this period of music, and whenever someone says "The Beatles are the best band ever!", someone else is sure to bring up "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."

The thing is, though, the Beatles were at least competent.  They could carry a tune, and pretty soon people were willing to admit they could hum along with most of their songs.  This is what I mean when I say "they weren't good, they were better"; they were better than just about anything else on the radio or in the record store, at least when it came to rock.  And unlike many performers, they didn't stop improving once they got famous.  They kept practicing and experimenting and getting better.  When people talk about the Beatles in hushed, reverent tones, they're almost referring to their later stuff, typically starting with Revolver or thereabouts.

Anyway, we all know the story.  John goes Yoko-loco and the band breaks up.  This is where we get to the other crucial part of the Beatles: their legacy.  The Beatles were pioneers of a number of things that have become mainstays of pop and rock: the I-V-vi-IV chord progression, the use of instruments besides guitars, bass guitars, and drums in rock music, multi-track vocals, even just the idea of slower, more methodical rock like "The Long and Winding Road"; even if they didn't invent the ideas or use them first, they were the ones that codified their usage and they're the reasons we still use them today.  A pretty impressively massive number of musicians will claim their inspiration was the Beatles or an artist or group who were themselves inspired by The Beatles.

Famously, when asked if he thought Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world, John Lennon replied "He's not even the best drummer in the Beatles."  So, no, I'm not going to ask you to like the Beatles.  Like any band, they have a particular style that some people like and some people don't.  But I am a little sick of hearing they suck.

Trends, Music, and the New Decade

I'm sure anyone with a decent memory or an old yearbook could tell you that trends change.  That jacket you thought was so cool in the 80s now looks ridiculous.  Personally I like to divide eras up into decades, since they have a tendency to approximately punctuate American (and in many cases, international) culture.

For example, we can look at trends in music.  I like to define each decade by who was, in retrospect, the most popular, lasting, and/or influential example of the biggest genre or style in music for the time.  Counting up from the 40s:

1940s: Sinatra

1950s: Elvis

1960s: The Beatles

1970s: I'm not really sure.  I'm not particularly familiar with disco.  The Bee Gees?  In terms of the also-prevalent rock and roll of the time, Queen definitely deserves a mention.

1980s: Michael Jackson

1990s: Nirvana

Naturally, a lot of this is subjective, and of course the decades are only a rough cut.  The 80s were not all explosive, high-energy pop; 1987 saw Kenny G's "Songbird" reach #3 on the pop charts.

If we go off of this, we can see some of the other trends of the period.  In most of culture, the 90s were a period when things became grimmer, darker, more serious.  This was the Dark Age of Comic Books, when basically every name that could be derived from "death" or "blood" was in use as the trends started years earlier by Watchmen started sinking in, but with none of the intelligence or relevance that justified the darker tropes.  This was the decade of Batman: The Animated Series and Gargoyles; of gangster rap and dark, quarter-hungry arcades.

The reason I bring this up is because it is now 2012, and we're starting to get some clarity on the trends of the last decade.

What are some of the things on which we can now look back and laugh?  The most pervasive trend in music for the last ten-twelve years or so has undoubtedly been, in the words of Todd in the Shadows, "club dance music about dancing in clubs to club dance music".  The decade started off with the boy bands and pop idols and quickly turned sluttier.  While it is still too early to decide accurately who will be venerated by history as the most significant contributor, I believe we can declare the Black Eyed Peas as the frontrunners of the genre, as many other artists take their influence, knowingly or otherwise, from them.

Not to mention, The Black Eyed Peas also represented perfectly the inevitable collapse of the same genre, when their latest album "The Beginning" bombed.  I don't think it was just the music; I think people are finally getting sick of club music.  Though to be fair, the album did suck.

Remember the Atkin's diet?

Looking at the pop charts this week, not one of the top five songs could really be called a dance track, and that suits me just fine.  As I said, decades are not definite markers, but two years into the 2010s it's finally being shaken off and cast into the fires of Mt. Doom.

So, I want you to look at the period from about 2000-2010.  What seems silly now?

I figure this is as good a time as any to talk about nostalgia goggles, since I've seen this image (and dozens like it) circulating:

Music now is exactly as good as it ever was.  You just either don't remember the stuff that sucked or your actively filter it out.  1976, often hailed as one of the best years in music (and it did give us some pretty amazing songs; I'm not saying it isn't), still had crappy music.

Both of these charted.  "Afternoon Delight" was the year's number 12 hit song, while "Baby" hit only number 44 in 2010.  This also means looking at only the very worst modern examples and ignoring all the well-made popular songs made around the exact same time.  Your adolescent memories are not an appropriately objective gauge by which to make cultural judgements.

Valentine's Day

"Pshaw!  Valentine's Day.  Nothing but a false tradition invented by greeting card companies to sell useless crap!  I don't need some corporation insulting me.  I'm single and I like it!  I'm not going to put any significance into this day, because there's no significance to be had!"

...well, yeah.  That's how a holiday works.

With a couple exceptions (Veterans', Memorial, Presidents', and MLK Jr. Days come to mind), there are no major holidays with any actual meaning.  Let's run down the list, shall we?

-New Year's Eve/New Year's Day: Really not something worth celebrating, and more importantly, an arbitrarily chosen date.  Literally any day could be called New Year's Day.  Also, considering a year is not 365 days long but closer to 365.3, we should really be celebrating each subsequent New Year's six hours later than the previous until Leap Year sets it back.  It used to be April 1, to celebrate the coming of spring.  I'm not sure why we've decided the coldest month of the year deserves fireworks and unnecessary noise.  There's a product literally called a "noisemaker", and New Year's Eve is keeping it from burning in merchandise hell where it belongs.
-Oh good, Ireland is Catholic.  Let's consume alcohol and wear a certain color on that basis here in a country that isn't Ireland with our friends who aren't Catholic.
-April Fool's Day probably started to make fun of the people who were still celebrating New Year's.  It's been four hundred years.  We can let it go.
-Arbor Day makes sense, and of course no one celebrates it.  Let's move on.
-Easter is set on the first full moon after the vernal equinox.  It involves painting eggs and a giant rabbit who hides them along with candy, though in some countries (such as France) it's a chicken.  You know, just like the crucifixion.
-I'll give Mother's Day and Father's Day a pass, since I don't think I can describe why I dislike them without angering some people.
-Independence Day celebrates the day the United States became a sovereign country.  Actually, no it doesn't, since America went unrecognized by any other countries until years after the Revolutionary War, which itself ended years after 1776, and while the Declaration of Independence was finished on July 2 (not July 4) it wasn't published until later.  I'm not sure where July 4 came from, and I especially don't understand why we celebrate it with German food and Chinese explosives.
-Halloween is when we ensure our autumn harvest will not be assaulted by demons.  I think it's working.
-Yes, the pilgrims would occasionally break bread with the Native Americans when they weren't killing them or taking their land and then killing them.  But there wasn't any set time of the year for it, there was rarely an appointed purpose, let alone giving thanks (not that giving thanks wasn't the goal, it's just that the pilgrims were a mote religious and everything they said or did was giving thanks somehow), and of course they didn't have turkeys, nor did anyone at Thanksgiving until World War II.  They had bread, some vegetables, and eels.  I don't see many eels at Thanksgiving nowadays.
-Every December 25th, millions gather in the spirit the winter solstice when polygamist Celts born 2500+ years ago bring trees into their homes to appease the spirits, sang songs to appease the spirits, and dance around a fire, before a Scandinavian folk hero and his demonic assistant Krampus bring sweets to good children and beat the naughty ones with birch branches and then drag them to hell in rusty chains.  I mean, Christmas.  On an unrelated note, Jesus of Nazareth was born sometime in early April.

P.S. Hey, overpanicked moms concerned about your kids turning to Satanism because of rock'n'roll and Judy Blume?  You're the ones who taught them those Pagan traditions every year.
P.P.S. Oh yeah, Christmas is under attack?  Christmas dates to about 400 CE at the earliest, making Chanukkah between 500 and 900 years older than it.  Just sayin'.
P.P.P.S. Yeah, I just said CE.  Deal with it.

The point is, every holiday is meaningless, except for the fact that people have decided, "Hey, I should buy my significant other some dopamine-promoting foodstuffs, red paper in the shape of a female's buttocks, and some plant genitals, and go to an overpriced restaurant" or something else equally meaningless in the long run.  So if you want to knock Valentine's Day, be prepared for a very dull rest of the year, since there's nothing you can say about it you can't say about any other holiday.  I'm not going to force you to celebrate it, but I am going to request that you, in the words of B.B. Rodriguez, "kindly shut your noise-hole".

I realized at some point last year that the people protesting Valentine's day were collectively far more annoying than those who were celebrating or advertising it.  Yes, we know it's meaningless.  We just don't care.

Culture is what makes people do stupid stuff, but "stupid" doesn't necessarily mean "bad".  And if you don't believe me, let me ask you, what color do you associate with boys, and which with girls?  And let me ask you the follow-up question, why?

Yes, I realize there is absolutely no connection to the historical St. Valentine.  Yes, there is no actual reason to do any of the crap people do.  Those two clauses are true about absolutely any day of the year.  So just let them have their day.

The Mary Sue

Aah, the Mary Sue.  Bane of fanfiction readers everywhere, this horrible abomination against writing has managed to wriggle its way into every medium, dragging down its quality and ruining forever everything it touches.

Except, no.

The Mary Sue, despite all the hate against it, is a character archetype and, like any character archetype, can be used poorly or used well.  Very well, in fact.

First, it seems like we should describe exactly what makes a Mary Sue (which I will be using to refer to both genders; in other contexts you may see male Sues called Marty Stus or Gary Stus or some other variant).  This is not easy to do, since everyone has their own definition, and since it's hard to pin down exactly.

The original Mary Sue comes from A Trekkie's Tale and was actually a parody of other ridiculous self-inserts the author had seen in earlier fanfictions.  Some of the defining traits is that she is overly perfect, enough that he or she overshadows all the other characters.  The character does not grow or develop significantly.  The rules of the universe seem to be built or bent just for them.  We'll say that these are "the" Mary Sue traits, and the others are peripheral to it.

Her powers and abilities are vaguely defined so she can conjure new ones as the plot demands.  These powers and abilities may or may not fit in with the context of the world, may or may not be explained, and will always be more important than anyone else's.  If she dies, it's either because she was "too good for this sinful earth" or else she's coming back.

Her physical appearance is always perfect, but she'll rarely know it.  She might have some deformity (wings are popular) which she thinks make her ugly until someone tells her otherwise.

Expect them to be able to do whatever they want and no one will ever call them out if (I repeat: if) they make a mistake.  She'll probably have had a hard life, but it will never weigh her down.  She will have sex precisely as often as she wants to.  In most cases it's an insert of the author; the author's views are always exactly right in the universe in which the story takes place, and no good character will ever question them.

Sounds pretty boring, right?  No wonder every Mary Sue is a detriment to anything in which she appears, right?  Again, no.  While this describes many unpleasant characters (Ebony Raven Dark'ness Dementia Tara Way, Bella Swan, Wesley Crusher, Jenna Silverblade, SCI Spy), it also describes a surprising number of beloved pop culture and literature icons.  Don't believe me?
-Mary Poppins
-James Bond
-Gandalf (from The Lord of The Rings, The Hobbit)
-Sora (from Kingdom Hearts)
-Vash the Stampede (from Trigun)
-Mary Jensen (from There's Something About Mary)

We already know James Bond will never be defeated, and he'll always pull off some daring feat in the third act that results in perfect victory after sleeping with an attractive female lead.  So why do we watch movie after movie while ripping Sonichu to shreds?

Well, to be fair, Sonichu's kind of beyond saving.  But let's ignore that for now.

I currently have a multi-part model that explains this.  The first is the setting and storyline.  If you're going to have a perfect character, then the challenges they must face must be scaled up appropriately.  They must be challenged despite their seeming perfection.  Vash, the superbly skilled gunman, must win without killing anyone, while coping with the pain he's inflicted in the past.  Mary Poppins' perfection is actually the main point of her character, and she's used as a tool to develop the others.  If the audience is more concerned about how our hero will win this time, they'll be a lot less concerned about how unrealistic it is that they've made it this far.

In How Not to Write a Novel, the authors tell prospective writers that the more improbably something is, the more important it must be to the story.  If the protagonist wins the lottery, they must win it early on and the story must center on it (was there a caper involved?  How will they spend the money?)  Likewise, the more impossible a character, the more the challenge must be ramped up.

One of the cornerstones of the Mary Sue bashing is saying that it's just wish fulfillment for the author.  This overlooks the fact that this can be a good thing--as long as it can be wish fulfillment for the reader as well.  Ultimately, James Bond is built on this.

However, the third point is far more important, and it all comes down to that cardinal rule of writing: show, don't tell.  SCI Spy isn't all that different from James Bond, to the point where it's fair to call him a straight rip-off.  What SCI Spy does wrong, however, is that it focuses far too much on telling us why the titular character is so great, while a James Bond book or movie gives us the pleasure of watching him outsmart the bad guys and charm the ladies.  Instead of having someone tell us Sora is cheerful and lovable, then making him act like a sullen jerk the entire game, we see him being cheerful and lovable.

This becomes particularly important when it comes to dialogue.  Mary Sues are often built up as witty, charming, and uproariously funny.  As Dorothy Parker said, "I have yet to have an author inform me that a character is charming, and then, by that character’s deeds and conversation, convince me of that fact."  Again referring to James Bond, we know he's witty because we see him being witty, and we enjoy it.  In fact, the problem is not the Mary Sue; no character or story works well when telling overshadows showing.

However, none of this means that your fanfiction is good.  Signing out.

Alternative Rock

The other day, I was thinking about my delight that Foster the People's song "Pumped Up Kicks" managed to top the charts last year, a feat rarely accomplished by alternative rock songs after Devo fell out of vogue. Considering that was because MTV was playing their music videos should tell you how long ago that was.  This is also excluding the boom of alternative rock in 2004, considering most of those bands completely dropped off the radar soon afterwards or, at best, returned to their initial level of obscurity.


"Why is this?" I wondered. The most obvious answer, of course, is that it's a matter of Y thus X. The songs are alternative rock specifically because they fall outside the domain of what is generally considered popular. This may be why some bands, specifically The Black Keys, sell their music as "alternative" on iTunes despite clearly being good old-fashioned rock, in order to distance themselves from the more popular rock sub-genres and bands like The All-American Rejects and Green Day. For whatever reason, though, I've noticed the opposite: Join Us by They Might Be Giants, considered by some, namely myself, whose opinion on the matter is absolute and unquestionable, to be the cornerstones of modern alternative, was listed as "Rock" on iTunes.

Before continuing, I'd like to clear up my stance on an issue that is key here, and that's whether it should be called "Alternative Rock" and accepted as an offshoot of rock'n'roll, or if it should simply be treated as "Alternative" and treated as an entirely different entity. I believe it is not unreasonable to consider both of these correct; that is, there are "alternative rock" songs that are rock-based and "alternative" songs that are not thusly hinged. "I am the Walrus": alternative rock. "Revolution 9": Alternative. That sort of thing. (Though of course, that's a modern perspective, as both those songs were released as rock at the time.) When discussing alternative music, however, it is rarely necessary to make this distinction.

Something else I'd like to clear up: the difference between a "nerd" or a "geek" and a "hipster" is a razor-thin but important one. Nerds and geeks enjoy things, in this case music, that is weird and obscure. Hipsters enjoy things BECAUSE they are weird and obscure, and I personally will have no part of it.

If I may digress for a moment, the entire hipster attitude seems based on an unsustainable policy. If you only listen to things that are unknown, then you can't boast to anyone that "I knew them before they got big". If they do in fact get big, then you can't listen to them anymore. You must make carefully-placed bets to ensure that a band will remain unknown long enough to produce music you will claim to enjoy and establishing yourself as a fan while still eventually becoming popular enough that you can bitterly scorn them later.

Proceeding on with my point. I think one of the key reasons why alternative rock is so rarely entertained is that it is perhaps the hardest genre into which to break for new listeners. With pop or rock or jazz you can, to some degree, say, "Oh, you like Band A? You might like Band B, their sound is somewhat similar". Alternative does not have this option, as any alternative band worth their salt has a sound that is quite distinctive from any other. OK Go and Jonathan Coulton have both opened for They Might Be Giants, but compare the average They Might Be Giants song to the average OK Go song and you'll see they're quite dissimilar. "The average They Might Be Giants song" is already rather oxymoronic to begin. Compare "Climbing the Walls" to "In Fact" and it wouldn't be unreasonable to believe they'd been compared by two entirely different bands, though John Linnell's singing voice gives it away. Not counting childrens' albums, these were released on the successive The Else and Join Us. This means that just because someone likes "Float On" they will not necessarily like anything else by Modest Mouse, let alone anything by The Shins, Harlem Shakes, or Matt & Kim.

Another reason is that the world of alternative rock does not have the media coverage that other genres have. There are of course a number of reasons for this reason, but I'd like to focus on the demographics to which alternative music appeals. If you'll remember back to that dark period known as "when we were children", there was the pop star war between Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and the nearly-simultaneous Boy Band Battle. Each artist profited by turning fans against each other to ensure loyalty, even though they really did sound quite similar and in many cases (Backstreet Boys and N*Sync) shared a producer. In alternative music, someone who likes the sound of Fleet Foxes will not leave them for Mumford and Sons, they will simply buy music from both bands, in the cases where sounds do overlap. Thus you have people buying a large berth of music rather than a single song over and over, preventing most from entering the Billboard list, let alone topping it.

Another factor is because thirty-something nerds who spend all day practicing their instruments and sitting in front of a computer producing them are rarely quite as photogenic as whichever starlet is big this week.

Not that I'm bashing popular music in general or the pop genre. My policy is, if it sounds good, listen to it, regardless of how it was produced or how many other people have listened to it. Yes, I may harp on about how much I hate Justin Bieber or Ke$ha, but only because other people know about what I'm talking. I hate Dashboard Confessional just as much but it's much less satisfying to complain about them to a vacant audience. And guilty pleasure they may be, I do have The Killers on my iPod.


Still, as long as a decent number of bands continues to release a decent number of decent songs, I'll be happy.  Signing off.