I Can See My House From Here

Pineapples, "Come On Closer" - Last night I sat down for the first chunk of the long haul of watching Sleeper Cell, Showtime's most recent attempt to dethrone HBO as king of King Of Television Where You Can Say Fuck A Lot. It went, of course, exactly as well as you might think; The Sopranos may not be as great as it was back before nineteen guys inadvertantly gave Showtime the idea for a miniseries, but the chances of a show merely as good as Sleeper Cell dethroning it are probably somewhere in the neighborhood of me getting hired by the New Yorker on the basis of this blog posting. It's hardly a bad show, of course - it's an exceptionally well-written show in terms of forcing you to follow the narrative blindly (probably not an accident, given the subject matter), and Michael Ealy's performance has been pretty stellar - but it hasn't been transcendent yet, and if you're going to run up against Tony and his ducks, you better bring your a-game from the first image. I mean, I guess this show couldn't run on broadcast networks as-is, what with the unique brand of violence and the no-commercials pacing and the hilariously judicious use of nudity, but so far it still kinda feels like I'm watching a super-charged episode of CSI - everything still feels very archetypal, like it's all been engineered to convey that this kind of thing happens every day anywhere a viewer might be living. Which is fine, I suppose, except that if you're going to take on the Sopranos' majestic attempt at making you feel like you're somewhere very, very specific, you're going to come out the other side looking like the "Candy Shop" to its "Still Tippin'", and Paulie Walnuts has a bad motherfucker of a grill.

It's just that I happen to live in Los Angeles, the city in which Sleeper Cell is set and (more importantly) shot, and therefore I can virtually guarantee you that I'll watch every second of this entire series at least once. There aren't many things on this earth more immediately involving than recognizing real-world landmarks in a fake reality, and that counts for more with me than you'd think; it may be at least somewhat disrespectful to pay more attention to the coffee shop where characters meet for an important plot point than to the plot point itself, but at the very least my attention is, in fact, being held, and that counts for a lot in an entertainment climate that can't shut up about poisonously tiresome-looking movies which only seem to be missing a pudding-eating scene or two. Fuck, I lived in Koreatown for a year not too long ago - do you think my appreciation of Collateral had anything to do with its plot?

ANYWAY. I'm bringing all this up because I think it underscores two very important points about how I like my entertainment, namely (1) that I'm willing to forgive a lot of sins if I can recognize my own experiences in the final product, and (2) that my own experiences aren't neccesarily all that profound. The first part, at least, is incredibly obvious stuff; "Since U Been Gone" may be a great pop song in terms of its construction, but you'll probably find just as many people willing to back it to the Judgement Day as a result of it being such an atypically articulate use of the pop-music idiom to express "Hey, I don't need you in my life after all, ass". Of course, part of the reason why people like it when pop music articulates those kinds of sentiments is precisely because nobody else tends to give a shit in real life; this is both why emo exists and why emo is so eternally funny. So I guess the difference (or at least one of the many differences) between me and the rest of the world is that I don't fundamentally see a difference between recovering from heartbreak and recognizing the freeways they're talking about in Sleeper Cell; both strike me as being equally personal and, therefore, equally interesting to the rest of the world.

Which of course brings me to italo disco.

I've said it before, but once again, if you're coming here to get up on the Hottest and Latest, you've made a huge mistake; the heyday of italo soundtracking the various bumpings and grindings of the cool-kids set seems to be receding from view, meaning once again I've (and, by extension, you've) failed to pick up on a sound with quite a lot to offer until there's no way I can look cool talking about it. But good god, I doubt I'd ever be able to sound cool talking about a track like Pineapples' "Come On Closer", an (apparently) lost gem which randomly showed up on the internet and blasted a giant it-shaped hole in my weekend listening. Part of this is due to the fact that I'm always painfully appreciative of anything that makes it clear why the cool kids like anything (and make no mistake, "Come On Closer" is absolutely my italo Rosetta stone), and another part of this is due to the fact that it's inarguably, undeniably, obviously great right there on the surface, but really, if you want to get down to root causes, I like "Come On Closer" because I haven't had a song do what it does to my head since I was first familiarizing myself with Daft Punk's "Digital Love".

I realize that this may be somewhat misleading. I mean, yes, both songs do kinda have that washed-out blown-up musical mise-en-scene going on, and yes it would be both equally impossible and equally tempting to call either one a pop song without using air-quotes, and yes, for CHRIST'S SAKES, both their synth lines are just about warm and nourishing enough to cradle a newborn, but given how many songs there are out there that I probably couldn't describe without using some/all of those same parameters, all that stuff kinda seems like the trees people see instead of the forest. The larger truth about "Digital Love" is that it's the song that really once-and-for-all taught me how to enjoy this stuff - I mean, yeah, you'd have to have been blind to miss out on the awesomeness in something like "Da Funk" or "One More Time", but you can fully enjoy both of those songs without necessarily buying into the filter-house aesthetic. (I still remember hearing a DJ work a beat right smack in the middle of "One More Time"'s epic breakdown; the crowd, myself included, went predictably ballistic for it, but Arthur Russell's corpse would have spun like a jet engine to hear the logical progression of his experiments with dubby disco pissed away for an event presumably called "Hip Hip Hoorave" unironically.) But "Digital Love" - I mean, what else is there in that song other than the reasons filter disco exists? I mean, it's certainly the best example of how they can make Something out of someone else's Not Too Much (in this case, George Duke's otherwise-forgettable "I Love You More"), and if it's not the best use of a vocoder in a song then it's at least top five, and on and on and on.

I'm guessing that this is where I start in on the paragraph about how "Come On Closer" does the same thing for italo as "Digital Love" does for filter-house; it does, of course, but I find myself caring as much about that side of it as I care about what Sleeper Cell has to say on the subject of the reality it's supposedly putting forward. I like "Come On Closer" because it posits the existence of other songs great in similar ways, which in turn allows me to stay up until butt-ass o'clock digging around the internet to see if I'm right instead of, say, doing shot after shot of Drano. And if this sounds a little pathetic, that's because it is, but then again, like I said way up top, I'm the kind of guy who watches TV that isn't even all that great just because it takes place in his neighborhood. I don't ask for much from my entertainment; perhaps this is why I get it. (Click here to buy the "Come On Closer" single used from GEMM)

Killcity, "Just Like Bruce Lee" - Of course, just because a song doesn't throw open the curtains on the genre it happens to embody doesn't mean it's not worth listening to. I didn't learn anything about liking stuff from listening to Killcity's "Just Like Bruce Lee" that I couldn't have learned from a thousand John Hughes movies, any of which would seem to be a more appropriate setting for a song like this - and yes I mean that in a good way - than the bleeding-edge but-I-was-there-y UK pop scene currently captivating impressionable teenagers and dorky critics like me and seemingly nowhere else (q.v. New Rhodes bragging to the world about their [pyrotechnically awesome] "From The Beginning" rising to #37 on their website - I wouldn't doubt for a second that charting a single feels like having eighty-seven orgasms at once, but speaking for myself I wouldn't brag about a #37 for the same reasons I wouldn't brag about this blog's traffic). But fuck it; life is short and this song is at least as insanely catchy as anything on ex-Ash-guitarist Charlotte Hatherley's (relatively) recent solo album, and that's way more than enough for me. (Click here to buy the "Just Like Bruce Lee" single used from Amazon.co.uk)

ELSEWHERE
- I added a few more mp3 blogs to the sidebar, all of which are well worth checking out: Suite 303 has some monstrous Steve Reich up right now (which is of course only built 4 art-school linx like myself),
Chris has a whole buttload of recent alternative American music for you all to grab, and Tal brings all the leftfield dance-music thunder that I tend to eschew in favor of the big stupid anthems I'd shoot up if I could. To repeat: all worth checking out.

- And of course HEY! Don't be a dumbass! Go download the DFA radio mixes RIGHT THE MOTHERFUCK NOW if you haven't already. James Murphy isn't exactly Sasha-esque in his mixing but oh fucking well; it's stuff being put in order by the DFA and therefore we will all be listening to all of it.