The Greatest Work Of Criticism I Ever Played

I apologize to all girls & non-nerds

Chicago, "You're The Inspiration" - My taste in music may (MAY?!?) be impeccable, but even I can't argue with the folks who would characterize my taste in musical reading materials as, in the words of my NorCal brethren, "hella suspect". I am, after all, a man who readily admits to being mightily influenced by Nick Hornby's Songbook, who can practically rattle off between forty and sixty percent of the singles described in This Is Uncool from memory, who called Borders so many times before Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself To Live came out asking if they'd gotten it in yet that the store eventually sold me a copy two days early just to shut me up; clearly I am not the sort of person who should ever be listened to by anyone about anything. Anyway, a few weeks ago my overpowering enthusiasm for Tom Breihan - whose inchoate enthusiasm for the Field's From Here We Go Sublime and apparently controversial preferences & perceptions of rap aesthetics seem to have thrust him into the same snarky crosshairs as most of the other music writers I tend to read with uncompromising voracity - led me to pick up Marooned, a modern-day attempt (to which Breihan contributed) to summit Stranded, Greil Marcus' legendary late-70s compilation of high-profile rock writers' "desert island albums" (hence the name). Of course, since I hadn't read Stranded either, I figured I'd go ahead and pick that one up too, and as such I've spent the last few days' worth of bus-rides plowing through a bunch of late-seventies critics longform opinions on Van Morrison, which is a position into which I can honestly say I never expected to see myself enterint willingly.

Still, it's kind of striking reading about how people used to write about music; Stranded, after all, was written decades before file-sharing was even a tenable premise, and nothing speaks to that fact more than extent to which the contributors are willing to go to explain how this stuff works. Think about it: if you had to make a case for why someone could and should take sustenance from the Velvet Underground knowing full well that you couldn't in any way count on their ability to hear the actual songs (or, for that matter, the referents you might invoke) for themselves, would you put more faith in an approach which describes what songs like "Heroin" sound like, or in one which describes the logic of its kinetics? Listening to music is, after all, a linear experience at heart, and if you really want to connect with an audience in a near-pure tabula rasa state, it only makes sense to cast light on just how that experience works since that's really all they'll have access to.

Which brings me - sorta - to Elite Beat Agents, a game put out last year for the Nintendo DS which might well be the single most devastatingly accomplished work of pop-art criticism since Orson Welles' F For Fake, albeit probably completely inadvertantly. EBA is, fundamentally, a rhythm game (apologies to those of you who don't need the following explanation - believe me, I'm well aware that everyone and they mama has like four DSes at this point and that going over a critical darling like EBA in such exacting, pedantic detail is like someone sticking their head in the door of your apartment and screaming about Pet Sounds, but well uh anyway), which means it has the same expressed goals as all those other stupid rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero, namely to do stuff in time with the beat displayed by the game. Its big innovation - and we're talking Copernican levels of insight here on the part of designers iNiS - is that instead of pressing buttons or dancing or whatever, you're using the DS' built-in touchscreen to tap a pattern of dots sequenced around the screen in numerical order. Obviously, there's more to it than that - you also drag balls along laid-out pathways, attempt to time your tapping to match circles collapsing inward on the dots, confront a storyline going on (sorta) on the top screen, and inevitably deal with a big spinning wheel which can most sincerely fuck the motherfuck off - but really, they're all just extensions of the fundamental, tapping-oriented formula.

Astute readers will, of course, immediately pick up on the aspect of EBA which makes it great criticism: the following. I mean, here's a game which gives you an unprecedentedly direct way to learn how to follow a song, to the point where it even lays out precise, intuitive instructions on how to follow it, which rewards you for following your cues correctly and punishes you for failing to follow them; at times, it's hard not to think about EBA as one of the first instances of criticism employing a medium whose power to engage the audience supersedes that audience's interest in engaging with the subject of criticism. And don't get me wrong - huge wads of the songs selected for the EBA soundtrack are just straight-up ass. Funny thing is, after enough ventures through a song in the hopes of landing that elusive S-rank, you seriously won't care anymore; you've studied the song closely enough to appreciate its less-ostentatious pleasures, or at least the way its wholly-ostentatious surface comes together. I mean, Avril Lavigne's "Sk8r Boi" is a song I could quite happily go the rest of my life without ever hearing again, but I'll be damned if I can't point to a baker's dozen individual elements of that song which aren't inordinately satisfying, even if they're just little minor things like chord changes or cannily-calculated instances of doubling or whatever, and I owe it all to my need to get a pregnant woman to an in-game hospital without being stripped of my taxi-driver's license. To call it an extraordinarily successful system would be an understatement of epic proportions; I'm pretty sure that if Lester Bangs could have had you tapping on a screen in time to The Marble Index, he'd have seized the chance, and it would have worked.

But, again, this just puts it on a par with games like the aforementioned DDR and Guitar Hero when, to be perfectly blunt, EBA actually takes both those games and all other pretenders to the throne out behind the shed and puts them down for the long sleep. The secret, I think, lies in the tapping mechanism, or rather the universality of the tapping mechanism - there's literally no learning whatsoever involved in this game (although there's about four minutes' worth of learning how to go about reading the visual language of the game's world). I mean, who hasn't caught themselves idly tapping along with a song stuck in their head? That's literally the complete level of abstraction EBA demands of its audience to make total, unfettered participation wholly open to them, and it's genius. Again, think back to Guitar Hero (a game fundamentally "about" acting like a rock star on stage which asks you to conveniently overlook the fact that you're pressing buttons on the neck of a tiny plastic guitar) or DDR (a game fundamentally "about" dancing despite the fact that most anyone who tries to dance like that in real life ought to be and usually is pointed- and laughed-at back to the stone age); by contrast, EBA simply seeks to elicit your innate tapping proclivities simply by offering up some truly ludicrous venues for songs which don't offend you enough to skip over them. And best of all, the overall quality of the experience is wholeheartedly up to you, the end-user; if you want to play for points, you can just concentrate on hitting your mark (as the game progresses, this becomes an adventure in itself) or, alternately, if you want to ROCK OUT!!!!!1!!11!, you can throw on some headphones and try and poke a hole through your DS' screen as you murder some lighthearted musical fluff with a smile on your face. (I'd be pretty hard-pressed to think of an action in which I regularly partake being secretly videotaped and put on YouTube than the way I absolutely attack EBA's version of "YMCA" in my MDR-V700s, and for god's sakes, I do yoga now.)

But the ultimate proof of concept - and arguably the best sheer proof of concept offered up by a videogame designer since Super Mario Bros all but singlehandedly validated the idea of the side-scrolling platformer - has to be the level in which you play through a version (all of the songs on EBA are covers, although it should be noted that they're really really really good covers) of Chicago's "You're The Inspiration". (I'm going to be giving away spoilers here, so those of you who don't want your video games in which you help a team of government-sponsored secret agents through dance routines to help instill confidence in the citizenry spoiled should avert thy eyes.) The immediate difference between "You're The Inspiration" and most rhythm-game fodder is, of course, the seeming simplicity of its rhythm section, which probably couldn't be characterized as "propulsive" under any definition of the word. EBA's great insight, then, is to simply match it up with a story which relies in no way on propulsion to lay itself out; the "You're The Inspiration" level recounts the story of a little girl whose father dies before bringing home her Christmas present and how, thanks to the steadfastness of her belief, she's able to gain some closure. (Note that the game does add a few layers of instrumentation to the original song which make it sound more dynamic, most notably a twinkling synth and some drum fills, both of which are implemented so well that now I can barely hear the original without my mind filling their presence in.) It's worth noting that, unlike the rest of the stories which EBA matches up with songs, the "You're The Inspiration" level scrupulously avoids any semblance of cutesy, "Oh those wacky Japanese"-y moments; the game designers clearly approached their scenario with the same level of unironic melodramatic seriousness that Chicago did when they originally wrote the song. And the effect is nothing less than transformative; it's possible that the "You're The Inspiration" level is simply a shining example of an arranged marriage working out for both parties, but at the same time it's awfully hard to ignore the poignancy lent to a scripted scenario which would otherwise leave me nonplussed at best by the schmaltzy - yet note-perfect - violin arrangements or those triumphant, purgative "WHAO-OH-OH-OHHH"s in the background of the chorus. You're learning, in other words, how to appreciate the song on its own terms, and it's all due to an incredibly brave attempt to do something completely contrary to the spirit of the entire rest of the game, one which works in the same way "Shine A Light" works in comparison to the rest of Exile on Main Street. And if anything, that may be understatement; the "You're The Inspiration" level remains the only level of a game that I have ever lost due to pumping my fist and cheering out loud in response to the content. I mean, hell, it's the only level in the game where the I Hate You Spinning Circle is nowhere to be found; how in the world is it not the greatest level in video game history?

Anyway. The other cool thing about this critical format is that it seems to be staggeringly adaptable, as evidenced by the Ouendan line of games which originally laid out the gameplay basics. Like EBA, Ouendan's songs have an eye towards easy accessibility, only with Japanese artists instead of American ones since the Ouendan games originated in Japan; after months of hemming and hawing I finally picked up one of these games (the sequel) last night and was summarily floored by how much I was enjoying the experience of riding along to super-fluffy J-Pop, an aesthetic I typically shy away from in all its forms. All I can do in this situation is give due praise to the medium, which seems to have stripped away all the musical signifiers having to do with preference or cultural cache; these games seem to more or less change the question from "Do you like this song?" to "Do you like following this song?", and that is an intoxicatingly auspicious feat to accomplish. It'll never happen, of course (and there's a thousand reasons why it never should happen), but can you imagine what you'd get if the Ed Banger crew were able to somehow license this technology and select it as the format for the inevitable release of Ed Rec Vol. 3? What about gentler stuff like Vashti Bunyan - do you think your friends would laugh quite as vociferously at you if you were able to physically demonstrate to them exactly where the fun in records like that can lie? And don't even get me started on the pipe-dreams that we'd see in a matter of hours if the technology to simply use user-created and -selected songs, patterns and artwork were somehow made available to the public; I may love mixtapes more than my mom, but that would be game-over for that whole personal artistic endeavor if that ever came to pass. Of course, since this world isn't located in the stem of some galactic crackpipe, none of this will happen; instead we'll just have to be content with yearly rehashes of the formula featuring more awful new songs which we'll learn to love. I for one cannot wait. (Click here to buy The Very Best Of Chicago, or click here to buy Elite Beat Agents, from Amazon.com)

Calvin Harris, "Merry Making At My Place" - Even the most cursory peek at the Hype Machine will show you that I'm way, way behind the curve on this one, which (hopefully) should give you some indication as to just how jaw-clenchingly infectious "Merry Making" really is; if the rest of Calvin Harris' debut album I Created Disco is anywhere in the same qualitative ballpark as this, then it looks like I'm about to be thirteen dollars poorer. Can you blame me? I mean, one of the most pronounced developments in my listening habits this year has been an increased appreciation for the precise kind of blase disco Harris so elegantly reduces to pure pop-song; am I supposed to not get all starry-eyed over those soulless claps or that single-minded bassline or those carefully-placed jerky "OH"s? And it really ought to be pointed out (yet again) that Harris' delivery is outright idiotically perfect for the song; there's a twinge of urgency in the way the words come barrelling out of his mouth even as he's unable to move past the scant few individual signifiers which make up the song (q.v. the word "house"). I kind of like to think of this as being what you'd get from a Streets record if Mike Skinner aspired to the status of a Prins Thomas record rather than, I dunno, a Roll Deep record or whatever, although it's certainly just as possible that I like to think of it like that due to my own selfish reasons. I guess the world will never know for certain; all I know for sure is that I can't stop listening to this song. (Click here to pre-order I Created Disco from Amazon.com)

The Young Republic, "Your Heart Belongs In Tennessee" - Last year, I was one of the thousands of Americans duped into buying into Bishop Allen's year-long monthly-EP project, quite possibly the lushest and most accomplished demonstration of the necessity for quality control in the history of modern indie-pop. Bishop Allen isn't a bad band and their EPs weren't bad records, but they did have the detrimental effect of all but dynamiting my faith in American bands grasp of the notion of "quality control", which would have gone a long way towards rendering those short doses of tweeness into something which could maintain any semblance of a compelling presence after the initial flush of AWWWWW HOW CUET circulated back down into the body. I kinda think that my reaction to those EPs initially colored my reaction to the Young Republic's debut single "Blue Skies", which really is quite lovely despite (due to?) sounding like exactly the record you'd expect from eight Northeastern multi-instrumentalists, right down to the wispy-voiced singer. Fortunately, though I may have been merely too disengaged to post "Blue Skies" here, I wasn't too disengaged to let their most recent single, "Girl From The Northern States" pass me by (which, I will readily admit, is partially due to the packaging - from the cardstock to the insert to the foil printing, these kids really know how to put together something which feels physically substantial in a rewarding way when you hold it in your hands), which turned out to be a pretty alarmingly fun little record which also bodes fantastically well for their forthcoming full-length. The titular A-side is, of course, the main attraction, but I've ended up playing "Your Heart Belongs In Tennessee" more often; I just love the way the band occasionally seems to be lunging forward (musically, at least), and then of course there is the standard-issue Huge Epic Hey Let's Wrap This Motherfucker Up In Style part towards the end which is, predictable though it may be, devastatingly well-done. Whether these guys & girls can ultimately sell as many albums as, say, Voxtrot or even Papercuts is an issue in the hands of their marketing company, but they've certainly got both the chops and the vision to come up with songs which would speak to either of those camps in an indelible voice. But really, though, the music alone should be enough; I needed no other prodding to sign on completely. They could still stand to rock out more if they want to really take advantage of their gift for arrangements (well, that or work with some of the scions of American tweeness - one shudders to think of what their album would sound like if it were produced by Jon Brion), but all that's just idle speculation; one needs no such ability to predict one's future dissatisfactions to appreciate the gorgeous little tunes they're cranking out at the moment. (Click here to buy the 7" of "Girl From The Northern States" from Rough Trade, or here to buy it on iTunes)

ELSEWHERE
- MAN OH MAN did I ever jump the gun on Pete & the Pirates; as it turns out their best song ever is their newest one, "Knots", and not (GET IT??!??!) just because it happens to be produced by Mr. Of The Moment Gareth Parton. I'm not going to post it simply because I'm trying harder to be respectful of musicians' attempts to actually craft careers for themselves which would enable them to quit their day jobs, but seriously, if you're into that So Hot Right Now angular post-Strokes Britpop sound, YOU ARE AN ABSURDLY RETARDED PERSON if you don't go to their Myspace and play the everliving bejesus out of it right now. (Although "Come On Feet" is still a good song, dammit.)