Whatever world Tangerine Dream traveled from on their way to the Hollywood Hills via dronetown, a metal world wired for sound and breathing thought and pleasure, then Kylie once visited this planet under the name Barbarella. Wires were inserted into her body, circuits slotted into her mind, and years later she emerged, video-driving towards a city on the other side of imagination, as a finished mix of dream machine and celebrity. Somewhere in some universe down some wormhole on the edge of some supernova, Tangerine Dream were a time-traveling science fiction boy band, and Kylie, as a coltish, bare-cheeked Barbarella, guested on their biggest hit, a song that went on for centuries and who’s lyrics simply consisted of the sounds “la la la la la la la la” . Here she is on another adventure – it looks to me as if she, with a song and a smile, is being magnetised onto videotape, digitised and projected electronically miles into space, angled off the face of a satellite, back down to a central relay system, amplified, synthesized, redigitised, sent to peripheral relay posts, forked out to local signal sites, re-magnitised, and sent on her way along primitive copper wiring into homes around the world.
- Paul Morley, Words and Music (aka my favorite book all-time)
Soundtrack to alien invasions. Like, cover of The Genocides-style.
Well it’s Guy Fawkes day, so I guess we’ll talk about V for Vendetta. How about this one?
V is the story of a supervillain who does what he does for arguably the right reasons. He murders, destroys, tortures, drives insane, manipulates – he commits so many evil acts that calling him a hero is interesting. Alan Moore himself has described it as “a terrorist superhero story”, but for any similarities to Batman and the Shadow are superficial at best. No, V’s every action and aspect are objectively what supervillains do. He has an origin story built on medical experimentation and dehumanization, a lingering kind of insanity throughout his dialog, let alone his actual not-fun insanity throbbing underneath. He has a Winchester Mystery House kind of lair, with interlocking rooms and doors that lead nowhere. He has racks and racks of disguises, a dead (non-romantic) love he’s dedicated his life to. He grows roses, he stockpiles plastic explosives. He subjects people to torture in order to force them to think like he does, to recreate versions of himself. He kidnaps a young girl, has her help him commit murder, she leaves him, he kidnaps her again, destroys her personality through concentration camp-style tactics bringing her to the brink of death, and then on the event of his death he asks her to literally become him.
V is a bad person, who does what he does because it’s right. He wants to make the world a better place, and the only way he can do that is by burning a society down to its knees, just to prove a point. The brilliance of V for Vendetta is that not once do you ever think V is wrong. Not once. He is completely in the right, killing his way across his past so as to clear a path to bringing down an entire fascist government. He is either enacting a Hitchcockian revenge plot and then escalating to a society, or misdirecting the cops. Still – because of the way he moves, the way he talks from the first scene on – V is doing what he does because he knows it needs to be done. Moore and Lloyd are truly interested in portraying the terrorist, the villain, as a moral force.
That, of course, does not mean that he’s not evil.
That’s whats worth rereading V for Vendetta for the millionth time again. Because instead of a morality play in which we learn that fascism is wrong, we are given a story with no easy answers. V for Vendetta’s core is Evey’s experience in the prison, and the framed story of Valerie. There’s no disputing what that means. But in the story around it, we learn that ideology almost always hurts someone when its put into practice. That putting ideas over people is always damaging, and no matter what lengths are gone to and how right you are, you’ve ultimately compromised any ideals you had in the first place.
The end of V for Vendetta is Evey taking on the face of evil in order to do the right thing, because there’s no other way to complete V’s plot. It’s a malicious force asserting itself on a character we know to be innocent to commit its last wish on the earth. It is a possession, the demon of anarchy taking another host. It forces us as readers to see the horror in the moment, as well as the beauty.
The shitty fucking movie left that part out.
via his site, which also has maybe the only Alien comic you need to read other than Woodring and Plunkett’s Labyrinth.
On Simpsons first-draft king John Swartzwelder, from John Orvted’s Unauthorized Oral History of the Simpsons:
We would have story meetings with him outside. And I remember distinctly one time being a young comedy writer, and Swartzwelder just happened to be sitting there, smoking a cigarette on the lawn. And I though, Man, I’m just gonna ask John Swartzwelder a random question and see what he says in return. And I said “John, what would you do if you had all the money that you could spend?” And without a moment’s hesitation he said “I would buy a battleship and the Empire State Building. With the Empire State Building, I would just let it run down and get decrepit. Because people would say, ‘You can’t do that! That’s the Empire State Building!’ I would say ‘No, I can! I own the Empire State Building!’ The battleship,” he said, “I just think it would change people’s conversations with me if they knew that I had a battleship.”
- Brent Forrester
“Also, the day of OJ’s Bronco chase, John didn’t show up for work. He told us that he had been walking around Encino with a baseball bat – looking for him.”
- Jennifer Crittenden
Found, of course at the House Next Door. If you love anything about movies, this will fuck your head up, even if its just a little. Finally, someone has topped Jamie Thraves on re-utilizing the Vertigo soundtrack. See also Zombie 101.
So you’re there, and you’re trying to be creative, but over these long stretches of time. There were periods of time where you felt like, Gee, I think I lost my mind a bit during certain stretches.
I used to walk around the Fox lot, and once I found two pieces of a broken pool cue in an alley. There were two pieces that screwed together, with a brass fitting, and then unscrewed. Jeff Martin and I developed a whole game around unscrewing it, flipping both pieces in opposite hands, and screwing it back together, and seeing how many times you could do that in one minute. And then we developed all these complicated rules involving how far your wrists had to be apart, and we really took it seriously.
It got to the point where Jeff had the record for forty-five flips in one minute, but then there was the time I broke it and got to forty-six; we were elated. And other people in the room would watch sometimes. I remember times where Jeff and I were doing it, and there was a circle of people around us watching and it got very intense.
If you’re trapped on a deserted island, you can build an entire religion around a seashell. It was that feeling. That’s an illustration of how we were driven to the edge of something, I don’t know what.
- Conan O’Brien, from John Orvted’s Unauthorized Oral History of the Simpsons.
Excerpt from the anthology film Chacun De Cinema starring Josh Brolin and Grant Heslov
I am like 90% sure only David Allison will laugh at this, but I had to do it.
Motherfucker took me out of the ghetto. That’s my dude, man. He’s been like a dad to me. I remember when I was on Saturday Night Live my first year and I wasn’t getting much. I was down; I was ready to quit. It was three o’clock in the morning, man, I’ll never forget. Makes me want to cry sometimes when I think about it. I love that man. I love that man. [long pause; starts to cry] I’m sorry, man. Excuse me. [another long pause] Son of a bitch … motherfucker’s good. I remember one time Lorne took me to his office, and he said, “Tracy, you are here not because you’re black. You’re here because you’re fucking funny, man.” [bursts into tears again; wipes face with shirt] Changed my whole perspective … They say every Jewish man is supposed to love one black motherfucker in this life. I’m glad Lorne Michaels chose me.
You need to listen to this interview with him at NPR too, it is seriously the most amazing thing ever.
A collection of Velvet Underground posters, some from Warhol’s Factory. (thanks for the link Beaucoupkevin)
A narco-fueled angry rant of a Mad Men writeup in TV of the Week at the Factual along with Matthew J Brady’s great Venture Brothers piece (also Fringe) and Tucker Stone, Our Man in X on House. Actually I haven’t linked but I’ve done most of the season, click back if you feel like it, its the only consistent writing I’ve been doing the past couple weeks. Last weeks is really crappy though, it was written when I was all jacked up. I don’t know if the Mad Men pieces are as good as the Boosh ones, as I’ve only really gotten an angle in the past few weeks. The Boosh pieces were about how Adult Swim was botching the US release of a possible comedy classic (and how much the show was about rape). The Mad Men pieces are just kind of angry and unfocused and I don’t know if they’re funny, but pretty much every week I talk about Betty and Don and how much I hate the rest of the cardboard cutout cast. Then again, maybe Mike Sizemore’s right and the show is about the only people in the entire decade who weren’t armed to the teeth so why the fuck should we care? Joan Holloway isn’t even on the show any more to stare at.
“DO YOU WANT PAUL VERHOEVEN TO FINISH THIS MOTHERFUCKER?”
Hey all.
Jared here. Sean kept wanting me to post on here so he gave me the permissions, but I’ve only used a couple of times.
But since he hasn’t posted in a while, I figured I’d just pop on to keep it going. It’s largely because he’s been awfully sick as of late. If you follow his twitter, you’re probably already aware. If not, well now you know. So while he’s off on a cough syrup & horror movie bender on the road to speedy recovery, let’s use this as an excuse to wish him well! Seriously!
And he doesn’t know I’m doing this so chances are, he’ll probably get pissed & delete it right away. But give your well wishes nonetheless!
Because I’m not going to be around for the weekend and this week consisted mostly of me running around like an extra in The Magnificent Three, here is some content I normally wouldn’t put up. Yay! No, this is a short fiction thing. Explanation – I have started doing these weekly prose sketches for a weekly writing challenge started by the very nice and smart people I do bar trivia with. Each week, someone decides on a single element that has to be included in the story, and it has to be a maximum of one page. It’s excercise, and I try to write them in one-shot in-the-moment style rather than thinking about it ahead of time. They’re theater and prose people and I tend to go for visuals, so three weeks in I’m still getting my legs. This one is not as terrible as the previous ones, though, and the two characters in it are probably going to end up in one of the two books I’m writing right now. The theme for this week is masks.
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That Keeps Her Peace, Most Every Day.
The mask covered her eyes and nose – black fabric of some kind, slightly too rough for what it was. It looked amazing. Her brown hair was tied up, she was wearing a pair of black trouser, a white buttoned down shirt, a black dress jacket, and a gray cape. She smiled. “There’s something particularly decadent about all this, I feel like we should be doing cocaine and denying someone a bank loan”. She turned to the woman at her left, a synthetic blonde with pale skin and sad, wide eyes. The blonde was wearing long opera gloves and a minidress, long legs ending in six-inch black pumps with a yellow heel. Her hair straight back out of her face. She stared out off of the bridge, out onto the water — the two of them leaned against the cobblestone railing. The blonde leaned forward on one elbow, “It’s not decadent, not to enjoy yourself”. Fireworks went off in the distance, cascading bangs arpeggiated – strange time for fireworks at sunset, but it was gorgeous. More explosions, now from behind them. She took the mask off and let it drop off into the water. The sirens were blaring now too, klaxxons thrumming off in the distance. Perfectly timed. She leaned over, her head on the blonde’s shoulders. The blonde’s expression didn’t change – a kind of impenetrable blankness. She exhaled and closed her eyes a halfsecond “So what’s the plan for tonight?”. The blonde blinked and stared into the sunset, neon orange with constellations of color cutting it in two. “How about we go back to the hotel — I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning. Tapas?”. She looked up at the blonde, staring at her eyepatch for a minute. “You’ve never looked better.” “Neither have you”. The sirens get louder. A fleet of ambulances scream by, and both girls can’t help but laugh uncontrollably.
The very cool guys at The Art of Storytelling are having a magazine release party at 8pm Max Fish this Friday. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make it out, but if you’re in NYC this weekend, you should definitely check it out. I haven’t posted anything up about it yet, but I’m going to have my first published article in their first issue along with interviews w/ Derek Riggs and Andrew WK. I’m really excited to see it because this would totally be a magazine I would read even if I didn’t inexplicably find my name in it.
Nine Inch Nails – Year Zero
PART THREE
Trent Reznor is probably my favorite performer and musician, period. I realize that might be a strange choice to some people, and if you told me I’d said that five years ago, I’d be surprised. Beck crapped out, the Beatles are too universal, David Bowie clearly had a point where he gave up even though I love him, I came to Scott Walker too late, DJ Shadow and the Pixies couldn’t make it past the third album, My Bloody Valentine too hard to pin down, the Wu couldn’t be trusted for quality, neither could Sonic Youth, and Radiohead… well five years ago it would have been Radiohead. Hell, I’d even be up for argument – Radiohead are amazing. If there’s a Beatles of the past 20 years, it’s certainly Radiohead, from the way they process their influences to the way they work to the crazy division of labor in that band. They are smarter than everyone else, they make music that grabs everyone in their head and their soul at the same time. They experiment with format, and have spearheaded massive changes in the way we as a society listen to music. But… Radiohead weren’t the band that kicked me in the face and changed the way I listened to music. One day I was listening to Korn and Limp Bizkit shit on the radio and the next I was blaring “Heresy” and dying my hair black and taping Chris Cunningham videos off the tv. I’m not saying it was healthy, but goddamn if it wasn’t a step in the right direction. I don’t even remember how I got into Nine Inch Nails, to be honest. But that change was so palpable. Without, NIN I don’t buy Odelay, I don’t watch Eraserhead. I come out as a fundamentally different person. But this was late, I was going through this crap older than I should have been – I didn’t really get into music at the right time and when I did it was right in time to get caught up in a whole heap of bullshit. If I hadn’t heard the few bands I heard at this time, I probably wouldn’t have been a music person for much longer. I was a reader, I was kind of starting to be film nerd – but not music. Really, I’m not sure I would have stuck with it. NIN was THAT BAND for me and then Radiohead were the second and then I was a music person.
I kind of thought of it as a gateway band after a while, to be honest. The Fragile came out in Sept. 99 and Kid A came out in Oct. 00 – in that time I went from being a nu-metal kid to being a music snob. I discovered all this great stuff – from the obvious stuff like the Pixies and Bjork to Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emporer to Massive Attack and Primal Scream to Atari Teenage Riot to the Smashing Pumpkins to Mos Def to Aphex Twin to PJ Harvey to the Sex Pistols to Public Enemy. No, Radiohead were a real band and Trent Reznor was a guy who made some records I liked when I was 14. When With Teeth came out six years later I was off that, listening to Gorillaz and Broken Social Scene. I remember a friend of mine (who’s name I don’t remember so… yeah, probably not that good a friend but this was pre-back injury and therefore is hazy) telling me they heard the title track and hated it, going “with-uh teeth-uh”, and me deciding that I should probably skip it and trying and steal some more Ultravisitor-era Squarepusher white labels off the internet.
I was an angry, fucked-up, overweight kid who had just been kicked out of a catholic school and wasn’t dealing with it well, had no friends, and the facile anger of the stuff I was listening to really wasn’t doing the job. The difference between the angry twelve year old gritted teeth and tears of Korn’s “Kill You” and an album that’s first song has the lyric “TEAR A HOLE EXQUISITE RED FUCK THE REST AND STAB IT DEAD” screeched with religious conviction is night and day. I may have wrote it off as angst at some point, the way most people do – but it’s not just angst. If you lay out all the records that I screamed along with in high school none of them hold up the same way. Rage Against the Machine? Nirvana? Tool? Metallica? It’s all shit for teenagers. There’s no depth to it, musically or emotionally and once you understand that there’s more to music than guitar solos, there has to be something. Even if it’s frivolous crap, there’s got to be something there. But a few year on I had moved on. From a lot of stuff, I had a lot of health issues and had just started writing comics – like when I got into the band, it was a transitional time and I wasn’t really up for NIN anymore. It didn’t help that the intervening years saw Reznor bitching about the way Kid A was sold against The Fragile, the perception of With Teeth as a “safe” album (which is debateable but “Hand That Feeds” didn’t help that image), the shitty song on the Tomb Raider soundtrack, Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt” which kind of invalidated the original for a while, Reznor getting clean – which sounded like a bad idea for a dude who made the kind of music he did. I didn’t buy or steal With Teeth, the most I heard of it was the stuff sampled on 24 Hours. There were a few things – I’d heard that the band was kind of stunning live now, but they already were, and then I heard about the radio sessions he was doing with Tv on the Radio and Peter Murphy. That’s probably where my interests were piqued – there’s a real ease to those sessions. It’s a maturity in a way that’s not Sting-maturity. Reznor wasn’t recording an americana album or hiring Brian Eno or Rick Rubin to fix him, he wasn’t recording in a villa in Spain, going classical or jazz, choosing a cause, allowing his side members to write songs, doing a covers album, becoming a live-only band – none of that. Here he was, touring with legitimately interesting bands (Tvotr, Ladytron) that weren’t obvious. And with the choices of songs he was making, he was understanding (and maybe positioning) himself in a tradition of stuf like The Idiot and Unknown Pleasures. He was recognizing that 15 years into his career if you don’t define these things yourself – maybe the biggest problem with NIN in the 90s is he defined his peers as Helmet, Soundgarden, Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson. Reznor is still a valid, current artist and literally no one he was compared with in 89-99 are either around or still worth a damn. He’s the only one who’s not a joke or a casualty. Maybe it’s because he was too singular a person and musician or maybe it’s because he toured with David Bowie and learned a few things.
When Year Zero was released as a free stream on NIN’s site I gave it a chance and was kind of floored. I didn’t know about the ARG or that it was Reznor’s first real “concept album”, or that it was science fiction. I listened because it was free and a few people had mentioned it as being a step up from the previous. Every song shifts perspective, every song ends in a mess of shuddering noise. Reznor’s voice has grown far more expressive in the intervening years, and any and all structure is manipulated to do the exact opposite of what you expected. Its not just smart, it’s smart on every level – be it personal, political, musical, noise, pop, etc. Year Zero was the kind of album I needed to hear at the right time to hear it, just like Deltron was. It’s a musician I loved and understood using a genre I loved and understood to push himself forward. Year Zero is Deltron 3030’s nasty mirror image – where Automator’s production is evocative, Reznor’s is assaultive. Where 3030 is the rap equivalent of Neuromancer, Year Zero instead models itself on Akira – it is a world in collapse seen from every possible angle as it adds up to a picture of a society as a whole. 3030 is single-perspective vignettes and Year Zero is short stories from the pov of mouhtpieces, suicide bombers, religious leaders, the military, the debased. Deltron’s message is at it’s core about how you behave in comparison to the world around you, Year Zero is a warning of the the way the world is headed and the inability of the individual to change it. Where Deltron is reference laden,Year Zero is naturalistic. It is about losing yourself in the din of noise from all sides, and the extremism that results. It’s as important a work of science fiction this decade as Children of Men and Pattern Recognition, saying so much about the culture that produced it while succeeding on personal and artistic levels at the same time. Year Zero kicked my ass, and the next few posts here are going to be about it, and I might go a little overboard in the process. Consider yourself… warned.
The way I always looked at it there weren’t many great scratch djs, but probably the best was always a battle between Kid Koala and Roc Raida. And really, I don’t think Kid Koala could ever do something like this:
I’m late on this but David Allison, dropping science
Readers, I have to confess — I’ve often wanted to visit the set of The Prisoner! Which is odd, given the nature of that series, but then again this blurring of dreamlike promise and real horror is part of the substance of It Felt Like a Kiss.
UPDATED: Bowie, Rigg, Reznor, Steranko, Kubrick, Elektra: Assassin, Otomo, Omar, Pope, Rushmore, Blade Runner, the Conversation, Venture Brothers, Scott Walker, Bill Murrays, Python, McGoohan, Barton Fink, Beck, Desolation Jones, Planet of the Apes, Bond, Brownstein, Sisters, Hollloway, Automatic Kafka, Harlock, Burgundy, Cunningham, Rubin, Starks, Banksy, Doom Patrol, Grey, Kirby, Plainview, Rosemary’s Baby, FLCL, Paul’s Boutique, Winter Men, Shining, Hewlett, Taxi Driver, The Thing, LL, Casanova, Mr. Freedom, Jane Birkin, Laputa, J. Spaceman, Bengal, Harvey, Graham, Inglourious Basterds, Dick, Moon, Point Blank. Subject to change as usual.
New header is a panel from a Ditko Mr. A story.
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Deltron 3030 (2000 – reissued 2008 )
PART TWO
“Mastermind” is kind of what He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper would sound like in 1021 years – this is Del talking about how awesome his producer is, right? Ironically over one of the more conventional tracks on the record (which is also kind of the point), but it’s also Kid Koala’s showcase – he scratches the fuck out of this record, and whichever of them that dug out Aphrodite’s Child’s “Loud, Loud, Loud” pulls the coup and steals the record. This comes from the 666 album which at one point was going to be performed as a play under a massive tent covering most of Barcelona, directed by Salvador Dali that involved throwing live animals out of a plane at a church and full squads of men in Nazi uniform. It is Vangelis’ vision of the biblical apocalypse, and in this track the apocalypse is a blithe-sounding girl with a lisp talking about the day it all finally collapses. “The day the cars will lay in heaps”, the apocalypse is going to be an orgy of noise but it’s oracle is just someone who sounds bored. The way she’s speaking is not far off from Albarn at the top of the record – there’s some weight to her saying this, a gravity that she adds to a track might feel light in comparison to the rest of the album. But with her there – no this is still a world scarily on the brink of ending in fire and chaos, just like it is now, and taking time out to talk about music is a frivolous pointless act that still has to be done. “Automator, defy the laws of nature”. Don’t worry – after a commercial break, where we learn that our culture is awful and Strange Brew is consider high art from our time, and that nothing means nothing – we get to the heart of the album, it’s moral, musical, and technical center: “Madness”.
Rising spy movie strings, theramin, and Kid Koala’s trademark trumpet-scratch tension-building throb as Del lets loose with his best verse – until the Paul Simon sample lets some air into the proceedings. “I’m caught in the grip of the city, madness” repeating back and forth, a mantra. Del is downright dour here, oddly being self-confessional and taking the strange position of the introspective rapper. Which he’s a lot more successful than the two nutjobs who made it popular – he’s not nearly as artificial as Eminem or as self-sabotaging an egoist as Kanye – it’s not the kind of forced PR vulnerability or contradictory “i’m god/ i’m an asshole” raps. No it’s Del talking about how his ego makes him act like a dick at shows, act paranoid towards his friends, worries about corporate media, race and class( “Why should I hate you we ain’t that different, we may act different in some ways, but we still grouped together like a fucking survey”), his music becoming hollow, and thinking about killing himself ( “I’m glad I love music and life cuz it’s easy to see the pain and strife and end it all tonight”). Automator, in all his brilliance had figured out what to do on these confessional tracks in the middle of the album – to make these tracks the most evocative of the future. Del’s talking about some deep stuff but it has almost nothing to do with the future, even tangentially. Automator takes the Paul Simon line and uses it expand the scope of the song – in the specific lies the universal. Instead of Del’s confessional sounding exactly like what it is – now it’s a Del walking the streets of the future, soliloquizing Bug Jack Barron style. “Conquered, my sponsors are monsters and everyone feels like I’m on one”, it’s a man wrestling with his conscience, which is still the same damn thing a thousand years from now. Madness.
“Meet Cleofis Randolph the Patriarch” is clearly here just to break up the darkest tracks on the record, here’s probably one of the sponsors Del was just talking about – Paul Barman acting off-kilter even by his own standards. The kind of crazy person who would pay this guy to do what he does (former mech-soldier, now hacker/rapper? I think anyway). If cyberpunk has taught us anything its that the guy paying you is always crazy, no matter what you’re doing. “Time Keeps on Slipping” is so good they named the best episode of Futurama, in which time moves so fast the writers don’t have to write the funny parts of scenes, after it. Think of the Chatsubo scene at the opening of Neuromancer – Ratz behind the bar cleaning glasses with his pink robot arm, Case arguing with Lonny Zone, Damon Albarn’s time banker drinking himself to death right next to him, Deltron at an open mic-night rapping like he was in a battle but there’s no one there but him. It’s 4 in the afternoon. Albarn’s voice kind of sails over the song, melodica notes drifting underneath him. He’s singing his own song independent of the track, it just works together so well. Del’s rap is a goddamn assault (“let my lasers clap at you”), leavened by a kind of sunken-in weariness of this voice. Del’s going to destroy your moonbase, he says – practicing for the Fantabulous Rap Extravaganza but tearing it up, “gamma gramma far from B.A.M.A.” – he must be on the west coast. It has to be the microsoft-owned new program is in spanish. The rap cuts off mid song as Albarn leaves, singing to himself as he wanders out into the noise and sunlight.
“I envision turbulence and murder since it’s an everyday occurrence”, Del’s on the pure Spider Jerusalem rant here – angrily explicating the class system of the future as discordant blocks of string samples scrape over the stutter-start beat. “Aliens landed said our planet wasn’t worth invading”. It’s pure gonzo journalism of the future – he’s even drunk in a hovercraft. He sounds alternately like a raving paranoid buying bad drugs without ever letting go of his gun and a man speaking the truth. Turns out it’s both. Poor kids options being brainless factory workers or criminals/bounty hunters. Only the rich get to learn about tech, Diamond Age style. Back to caste system, the media is nothing but propaganda, the rich live in their own sectioned off homes, the constitution has been circumvented, people modify the hell out of their bodies flamboyantly because they have no control over anything else, curfews are enforced, religion is used as a tool of control, dissidents are raped by cops or lobotomized, and natural resources don’t exist anymore. Yeah so… that’s pretty much just watching BBC news and reading the internet for a couple days. He forgot the pandemics, I just sat through a guest lecture in my english class about communicable disease and then had to ride a bus so crowded people were standing in the aisles. One kid was coughing.
Be there for the rap battle! In outer space! First rounds is on Mercury! Oh yeah in between the songs, Del saved the planet, but he’s still got to pay the registration fee, because who cares about earth anyway. Play-by-play of a rap battle in the future where weapons are totally okay. He’s fighting creatures from outer space – a Plutonian sentient shadow, a Mercurian death squad leader, an eight-armed spider monster who lives in the space-port from Galaxy Express 999 – dueling his way around the cosmos. I’m sure if he’d recorded an album of just this, Del would a living legend. The idea of a rap battle as something that could kill you – either from being blasted by death rays or running out of oxygen in the middle of a rhyme – that’s exactly the kind of thing that could make battle rapping exciting again now that Eight Mile has destroyed the concept forever. The idea that the only thing that could save your life is an a capella, that’s entertainment, the track ends with Del tearing the spider’s brain out of his skull, and the next song starts off with him counting out his prize winnings. “Love Story” is Del in his downtime – he goes home to arctic Oakland, gets high, reads comics from the 20th century and Cosmopolitian, and misses a day at the Galactic Rhyme Federation. He renews his passport, loses his job goes freelance like Spike Speigal, and signs autographs for fans. He gets distracted by a fine alien woman, and sends an android duplicate of himself to hit on her. It’s a day in the life of a rap superstar/ hacker/ world saviour. “Memory Loss” is the big snap back to reality, the superstar fantasia of the past few tracks really just fun while he’s got some proper points to make before he wraps this up. He reminds everyone that Oakland is the founding home of the Black Panthers, and he’ll whup you; that you need to grow the fuck and treat the kids right; to be yourself on some real shit; know your history; know that you are not shit in the scheme of the universe; SING. “Looking up the sky is red, city’s burning overhead, you can make the best of this, in this post-apocalypse” Sean Lennon sings. That’s all you need to know, all you ever need to know. The world is going to be like this, that doesn’t have to change you.
The album closes out on a circle – Albarn’s back, this time identified as “The Assman 640″, on a tape reciting the same speech as he gave at the start of the album, pretty much the same way that Automator and DJ Shadow used the Prince of Darkness samples on Endtroducing. It’s time, it’s cyclical. The man says it himself “we came back, we were always coming back”. This album isn’t a groundbreaking masterpiece, it’s not a game-changer. But it is something that opened up my head about what could be done with science fiction, and how mutable it is as a genre. It was a game changer for me personally, a whole universe built out of concepts I understood and used to say something personal. “I’ll raid your grave, anything to save the day.” It’s a personal and political album. It’s a lot like your story, but it’s more interesting because it has robots. Like all great science fiction – it tricks you into thinking by distracting you with cool shit, and it’s biggest flaws aren’t really flaws at all, just time where it does it so well it distracts itself. What I love about Deltron 3030 is the same thing I love about Paul Pope, Burning Chrome, A Clockwork Orange and 2046 – it uses the future to talk about today, and uses the trappings of a genre to say something bigger (and smaller) than the fucking Heroes Journey, techie shit that scifi has long been associated. It’s music to listen to as the world burns, nod your head.
(Special thanks to Jared – for turning me onto the record in the first place, for the kind words, and because I honestly I can’t remember which one of us had the idea of Time Keeps on Slipping as a bar scene. I know one of us did and the other expanded on it, but this was years ago.)
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