118. i-Genres
I’ve been under the habit of arguing against the “no genre” thing (whereby someone says “it doesn’t fit into a genre”) and the “genres have to be specific” thing (as in, you can’t move outside the boundaries of it). It’s a difficult balance to maintain, particularly with music, where the standards and conventions of each genre are perhaps less obviously defined than those in TV and film. Oh yeah, you have instrumental setups and such, and a general aesthetic, but what you do with those instruments is completely up to the band in question.
Which is why, for instance, I consider Radiohead to be – putting it in the most simple way possible – rock. For some people that seems to be a weird thing to do, as if I’m bringing them down to the level of Wolfmother and AC/DC, but “rock” doesn’t indicate quality, and neither indeed does genre. You could be a fan of the conventions of a certain genre – you like guitars, which is why you like rock, or you like people being stabbed to death with lots of gore, which is why you like horror – but it hardly means everything in that genre has to be like that.
So that’s why saying “We don’t fit into a genre” is of course a pack of shite. A genre is as rule-breaking and non-specific as you want it to be. I don’t see the problem with being labelled “rock”, even if you don’t rock out, or rock ‘n’ roll, or... well, you see what I mean.
But... looking over my iTunes list... it seems my younger self was a pretentious little sod who disagreed with me.
See, on iTunes, you of course have the name of the song, the duration, the artist, the album, and then... the genre. I must admit that seeing “rock rock rock rock rock” over and over again is a tad boring, but you’d have to be a tad boring to actually look at the genre of each song so obsessively.
And of course, back then, I was.
Now I’m not that sad; I do far more worthwhile things, such as write dead-boring and overlong blog entries, and endless Doctor Who reviews. Ahem.
But yes. Thing is, my younger self didn’t go with the “doesn’t fit into a genre” thing either; what I did was make up new genres to house and define what each song was. It’s a rubbish technique, and thankfully one that didn’t survive that long. And of course, due to the not-that-diverse amount of bands I was listening to at the time, the genre pretension mostly centres around Muse, and maybe Radiohead. I’ll look for more on the way too.
Okay, here’s the tracklist of (going in alphabetical order) Absolution, and the genres:
‘Intro’ [Introductory]
‘Apocalypse Please’ [Apocalyptic Pianissimo]
‘Time is Running Out’ [Brit Rock]
‘Sing for Absolution’ [Soft Rock]
‘Stockholm Syndrome’ [Heavy]
‘Falling Away With You’ [Soft Rock]
‘Interlude’ [Interlude]
‘Hysteria’ [Rock]
‘Blackout’ [Soft Rock]
‘Butterflies and Hurricanes’ [Classical Rock]
‘The Smallprint’ [Rock]
‘Endlessly’ [Brit Pop]
‘Thoughts of a Dying Atheist’ [Punk Rock]
‘Ruled by Secrecy’ [Ballad]
Oh, dear god. Some of them aren’t bad, and are quite nice and simple, although it’s evident that I really didn’t know what the hell the difference between “pop” and “rock”, and “Brit Pop” and “Brit Rock” were, respectively. Hell, I don’t even really know now, but at least I’m not going to pretend I do. And considering I called ‘Intro’ “Introductory”, it’s a bit of a shame I didn’t coin a similarly ludicruous “Interludey” for ‘Interlude’.
But... classical rock? Huh? Ballad? Huh?
The worst offender is Apocalyptic Pianissimo, though, which was me stringing two cool looking words together and calling it a genre. Hey, it’s a cool name for a song, maybe. But a genre? What the fuck was I on?
Amnesiac by Radiohead
‘Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box’ [Creative Rock]
‘Pyramid Song’ [Egyptian Ballad]
‘Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors’ [Computer Dance]
‘You and Whose Army?’ [Ballad]
‘I Might Be Wrong’ [Rock]
‘Knives Out’ [Rock]
‘Morning Bell/Amnesiac’ [Organ Rock]
‘Dollars and Cents’ [Creative Rock]
‘Hunting Bears’ [Interlude]
‘Life in a Glasshouse’ [Brass Rock]
Creative rock? Egyptian ballad? Computer dance? Organ rock, brass rock...? What the fucking hell was I on about? Though I do like the irony that I labelled both ‘I Might Be Wrong’ and ‘Knives Out’ as rock, even though, being as pretentious as I was, I shouldn’t have done. It’s obviously because I couldn’t think of what to call them.
Really, I was just talking out of my brass when I wrote that. Uh, arse.
Big Day Out by Muse
‘Newborn’ [Rock]
‘Muscle Museum’ [Spanish Metal]
‘Hysteria’ [Rock]
‘Bliss’ [Rock]
‘Time is Running Out’ [Brit Rock]
What? How is ‘Muscle Museum’ more metal than ‘Newborn’, which only gets “rock”? And how is it “Spanish Metal”? Since when was that a bloody genre?
For the Greatest Hits by the Cure, most of the songs are classified as “80s Rock”, except for:
‘Lullaby’ [Disquieting Lullaby]
Sorry? Huh? It’s a cool phrase, but a genre? How many actual songs could fit into a genre like that?
Anything Madonna sings to her children to get them to sleep, I suppose.
Hail to the Thief by Radiohead
‘2+2=5’ [Rock]
‘Sit Down. Stand Up.’ [Creative]
‘Sail to the Moon.’ [Ballad]
‘Backdrifts.’ [Wave Beat]
‘Go to Sleep.’ [Rock]
‘Where I End and You Begin.’ [Creative Rock]
‘We Suck Young Blood.’ [Slow Ballad]
‘The Gloaming.’ [Creative]
‘There There.’ [Rock]
‘I Will.’ [Rock]
‘A Punchup at a Wedding.’ [Soft Rock]
‘Myxomatosis.’ [Rock]
‘Scatterbrain.’ [Slow Rock]
‘A Wolf at the Door.’ [Word Painting]
Word painting? What the fucking fuck? Wave Beat? “SLOW BALLAD”? Yeah, as opposed to the fast ones you tend to come across...?
Little thing I’ve just worked out; with the Radiohead albums, if I’ve just written “rock”, it’s likely that I actually didn’t really like the song enough to think of a “genre” for it. Which is why ‘Go to Sleep’, ‘There There’ and ‘I Will’ are just “rock”.
Kid A by Radiohead
‘Everything in its Right Place’ [Synth Ballad]
‘Kid A’ [Lullaby]
‘The National Anthem’ [Brass Rock]
‘How to Disappear Completely’ [Ballad]
‘Treefingers’ [Interlude]
‘Optimistic’ [Rock]
‘In Limbo’ [Rock]
‘Idioteque’ [Dance]
‘Morning Bell’ [Organ Rock]
‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ [Soundtrack
Ah-ha! You see? “Rock”. That means I didn’t much like the songs then.
Seriously, though... “synth ballad”. Christ.
OK Computer by Radiohead
‘Airbag’ [Alien Rock]
‘Paranoid Android’ [Rock]
‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ [Alien Slow Rock]
‘Exit Music (for a Film)’ [Acoustic]
‘Let Down’ [Slow Rock]
‘Karma Police’ [Slow Rock]
‘Fitter Happier’ [Word Painting]
‘Electioneering’ [Indian Rock]
‘Climbing Up the Walls’ [Ballad]
‘No Surprises’ [Acoustic]
‘Lucky’ [Rock]
‘The Tourist’ [Ballad]
I swear to God, the next time I say “ballad” when describing a piece of music, just shoot me. Because not only is it irritating how often I used it back then, it’s also terrible that I’m writing a paragraph that made me think of David Spade.
Alien Rock, though. I mean, it’s lucky I wrote “Alien Slow Rock” and not “Slow Alien Rock”, or I could have potentially been making some interspecies slur. Mind you, ‘Fitter Happier’ perhaps is closer to “word painting” than ‘A Wolf at the Door’ (both contain elements of it, but it’s hardly a genre). But on the other hand, “Indian Rock” is perhaps the stupidest thing I’ve ever said. Only someone as daft as Mungo could possibly believe in such a genre.
Origin of Symmetry by Muse
‘Newborn’ [Rock]
‘Bliss’ [Rock]
‘Space Dementia’ [Alien Classical]
‘Hyper Music’ [Rock]
‘Plug in Baby’ [Rock]
‘Citizen Erased’ [Heavy]
‘Micro Cuts’ [Falsetto Metal]
‘Screenager’ [Ballad]
‘Darkshines’ [Rock]
‘Feeling Good’ [Jazz]
‘Megalomania’ [Ballad]
Oops, there I go saying “ballad” again. *shoots self*
Although, I’ll just rise from the dead to point out that ‘Darkshines’ receiving the label of “rock” means I didn’t give a stuff about that song either.
Now, “falsetto metal” and “alien classical” are – particularly the latter – both quite cool phrases, BUT, but, but but, they’re not genres, goddammit. I mean, we haven’t even met aliens, so how the hell do we know if they had rock and classical periods? Worse still, judging what music we could have sent to represent us through those radiowaves we send out to intelligent lifeforms, they could snub us completely, thinking we’re all AC/DC fans.
I wouldn’t blame them, mind you.
Now, I may look like I’m being mean to myself here. But to be fair, I was a git. And also, I find the best way to criticise other people is to relate their gittiness to your younger, more naive gittiness at a previous time in your life, and that way you get away with being gittish about their gittishness. Or something.
119. TV or Not TV. That is the Crappy Joke.
Now, to be a git about other things...
Empire, through its website, released its 50 Greatest TV Shows Ever list, or something like that. As usual, you can’t entirely trust these because opinion on both sides gets in the way (as a reader, and as whoever-wrote-these-things)... but of course, because I’m snide and prickly, I’m going to mark down a few issues I have with this list.
First, the list itself;
50. Quantum Leap (89-93)
49. Prison Break (05-now)
48. Veronica Mars (04-07)
47. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (93-99)
46. Sex and the City (98-04)
45. Farscape (99-03)
44. Cracker (93-96, 06) Best ep: ‘To Be a Somebody’
43. Star Trek (66-69)
42. Only Fools and Horses (81-03)
41. Band of Brothers (01)
40. Life on Mars (06-07)
39. Monty Python’s Flying Circus (69-74)
38. Curb Your Enthusiasm (00-now)
37. Star Trek: The Next Generation (87-94)
36. Father Ted (95-98) best ep: ‘Entertaining Father Stone’
35. Alias (01-06)
34. Frasier (93-04)
33. CSI (00-now)
32. Babylon 5 (94-98)
31. Deadwood (04-06)
30. Dexter (06-now)
29. ER (94-now)
28. Fawlty Towers (75-79) best ep: ‘The Germans’
27. Six Feet Under (01-05)
26. Red Dwarf (88-99) best ep: ‘Quarantine’
25. Futurama (99-now) best ep: ‘Godfellas’
24. Twin Peaks (90-91)
23. The Office (01-03)
22. The Shield (02-now)
21. Angel (99-04)
20. Blackadder (83-89) best ep: ‘Goodbyeee’
19. Scrubs (01-now)
18. Arrested Development (03-06)
17. South Park (97-now) best ep: ‘Make Love, Not Warcraft’
16. Doctor Who (05-now) best ep: ‘Blink’
15. Heroes (06-now)
14. Firefly (02) best ep: ‘Out of Gas’
13. Battlestar Galactica (03-now)
12. Family Guy (99-now)
11. Seinfeld (90-98)
10. Spaced (99-01)
09. The X-Files (93-02)
08. The Wire (02-08)
07. Friends (94-04)
06. 24 (01-now)
05. Lost (04-now)
04. The West Wing (99-06)
03. The Sopranos (99-07)
02. Buffy (97-03)
01. The Simpsons (89-now) best ep: ‘King Size Homer’
Okay. Now. I think it’s fair that The Simpsons got first place (though I don’t think ‘King Size Homer’ is anywhere near the best episode, but never mind). But... well...
Overall, my big concern with this list is how many TV shows there are here that, you know... don’t change themselves all that often. Seinfeld is a show about “nothing”, which is fine... except for how many bloody seasons it went for. Friends was similarly – though not deliberately – about “nothing”, and was a hunk of shite all round. I don’t care if the writing was apparently more “sharp” than it first appeared (um, what? If the episode doesn’t entertain straight away, how can it actually be sharper than we realise? Good writing surely comes from good first impressions too, right?), it’s the “essential” sitcom with a bunch of people that sit around doing the same things all the time. Now any Friends fan is going to leap down my neck here and shout, “No they don’t... sometimes they go dancing, sometimes they...” Oh, wow. Forgive me if I don’t spin out in wonder. They still follow endless patterns, the sort of repetitious shite that you get in real life, and unfortunately sitcoms make it worse because not only do they have cyclical lives for their characters, they also have cyclical gags. Making it all feel like an endless loop, as if you’re watching a marathon at the Olympics being run for ten years. So what if Cathy Freeman’s good-looking? So what if one of them stumbles along the way, and one’s fitter than the other? For god’s sake, it’s the same thing over and over and bloody over.
Buffy. Oh Christ, not Buffy. I have numerous issues with Buffy (the writing is smart-arse), but my biggest is the central premise; love lives and teenagehood whilst surrounded by, you know... vampires and demons and stuff. Sure, this is a perfectly serviceable premise, and it’s fine, and... well. The problem is length. Shaun of the Dead may be a brilliant rom-com set in a brilliant zombie film, if you see what I mean, but its brilliance lies in the fact that the movie’s only about an hour and a half, and we don’t have five sequels that do the same thing and continue the relationship. Even Alex Mack, a show that similarly mixed relationship/real-life stuff with superpowers and stuff, only went for four seasons. Buffy went for, what, ten? So Spike’s cool. Great. So there’s some great individual episodes, mostly the weird ones (the musical one). Great. But overall the concept is so repetitive and dull that, well, I think it’s repetitive and dull. It certainly didn’t deserve second bloody place; if any Whedon show deserved a high placement, it’s Firefly. Which, as well as having a far greater mix of characters (prostitute, doctor, captain, mechanic; and these roles define them, in a way that “vampire slayer, witch, vampire” just didn’t with the characters of Buffy), better storylines, and far better writing (I’d rather listen to pseudo-Chinese cursing than crap “witty” one-liners any day), also, you’ll notice, only went for one season. Sure, that wasn’t planned, but for me – and Firefly fans may be in uproar for me saying this – one of the greatest things about that series is that it only went for one season. Thus keeping the concept fresh. It had a fairly natural ending in itself, and it played out as well as could be expected. It’s done and dusted.
Dusted? Is that a Lawrence-Miles-Buffy joke I’m making there?
The inclusion of Lost is a fucking joke. It’s... not... finished! Yes, yes, The Simpsons hasn’t ended its run either, and nor has Doctor Who (New Series), but you can take those shows on their own merits, an individual episode or a single season, without watching any others, and can appreciate its quality. With Lost, you have to be there from the start. Which is... um... crap. It’s the kind of thing that works better perhaps as a straight-to-DVD thing, and not for television which is, let’s face it, not designed to be a viewer-rewarding medium. That’s why episodes use flashbacks, why they always establish their characters excellently from the off in every episode. You need to be able to start freshly every time. You don’t rely on your audience having seen the show before.
And for all we know, the ending of Lost could turn out to be utter pigshite and fucking crap in every respect. So... putting it in the list at all, let alone so high, just seems horribly pre-emptive and wrong to me.
Family Guy over Futurama? Hmm. Perhaps if Family Guy had only run for one season (ala Firefly). But Family Guy has run on for far too long. It’s no longer well-written. Funny, yes. Well-written, no. I much preferred the writing for Napoleon Dynamite than any Family Guy episode I’ve seen in the last year or two (I haven’t seen one for months, of course. I’m actively avoiding it).
Heroes over Doctor Who? That’s a bit pre-emptive.
Now what really gets me is this... only the New Series of Doctor Who? Why not the old? Why not, in fact, both? Seriously, what the fucking crap? A show that ran from 1963-1989, that holds the record for longest-running sci-fi show, simply cannot be ignored like that. It had its low points, but they’re exaggerated by the public, and indeed, everything has its low points. It’s a pile of crap to not even acknowledge the original series at all.
Mind you, if they had, they probably would have only referred to Tom and maybe Jon and Pat as being great, and dismissing the 80s as “where the series died a painful death” or something as equally stupid and moronic and unresearched and heavily biased.
Also, ‘Blink’, the best episode? Ahahaha, what? It’s brilliant, utterly brilliant, but to be honest I can see it working in other shows, in a way that I can’t with, say, ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ (to take another Moffat story), or ‘Love & Monsters’, or ‘Gridlock’. Surely the best episode should have been one from the man himself, Russell T Davies?
Speaking of sci-fi, there’s a lot of things like Battlestar Galactica, Farscape (again wrongly ascribed as an Australian show; that’d be like saying The Matrix was an Australian film) and Star Trek on this list too. Now, I personally am going to shake my head at these because I find them largely boring and pretentious crap, but I can at least understand why, say, Star Trek – in its original, and its Enterprise form – are on there. I mean, I think they’re shite, but they’re quite important in a lot of ways.
On the other hand, Empire acknowledged that Enterprise apparently had its ups and downs and yet still put it up, which smacks me as highly unfair considering that Doctor Who, in its original guise, still didn’t get in. And Empire is a British magazine, aren’t they?!
Life on Mars, enjoyable though it is, doesn’t deserve to be on there either. And Cracker really should be much higher up the list. Cracker being beaten by CSI just strikes me as ridiculous, particularly from a British mag.
Now, there are shows I think they’ve missed out on, of course; Funland, The League of Gentlemen, Hamish Macbeth, etc. But that doesn’t concern me too greatly. I’ve also seen it noted that there’s little before the late 80s in the upper echelons of the list, which is disappointing too, but not something I can really talk about considering my lack of knowledge of old TV (old film, maybe. Old TV, well, no). But there’s two rather glaring omissions I should point out;
Reality TV. Oh, I know a hunk of it is crap. But to ignore the entire thing is a tad irritating. And if I’m honest, unchanging and irritating as it is, I’d put Big Brother up there, purely for its importance, over a lot of shows on that list. Though I won’t name which, in the interest of not having flaming torches thrown at my house (lucky I don’t live there anymore, though I don’t particularly wish my family to die, I suppose).
Kids’ TV. This is the most irritating omission, and one that genuinely astonishes me. Is the list trying to tell us that only “adult” shows matter? Oh yes, there are shows that can be enjoyed by kids on there... The Simpsons, Doctor Who, the comedies. But... but... there’s no genuine kids’ shows. I don’t even mean something banally simple and educational as Sesame Street. I mean more like, where’s the Nickelodeon stuff? I don’t care if they’ve become crap as an organisation with their channel, they’re still responsible for some great stuff that’s brilliant and not just for nostalgic reasons. Give me Rocko’s Modern Life over Friends any day; it’s more creative, more absurd, more puerile, more hilarious, and just genuinely more. As is what is arguably the originator of that style of cartoon, Ren and Stimpy.
If I was going to put any kids’ show on that list, particularly from good old Nick, I’d have to put... well... Rugrats. That took me a while to decide on “best of Nick”, but I’d go with that with confidence now. Hey, other shows are more whacky, but Ren and Stimpy is no longer as special as it was because since then we’ve had shows like Rocko’s Modern Life that have followed in its wake. But Rugrats is, even now, still special; it’s quietly bizarre and weird, in a subtle and rather compelling way. The most mundane things are turned into insane creatures born out of the toddlers’ misunderstandings. More alarmingly still – and this is something you still don’t get with a lot of cartoons – the show isn’t just from their perspective, bringing the audience down to their level, it’s also half of the time from their POV. Watch the earliest cartoons, with the occasionally bizarre animation you see from the kids’ eyes, and tell me that isn’t surreal and demented. Yeah. Rugrats is brilliant, it honestly is.
And of course, there’s no anime in that list, though that hardly surprises me either. It’s very obviously a “Greatest Western Shows” list.
As in, western side of the world. Not Western as a genre. If that was the actual qualifier, you could barely fit in five decent shows, I’d reckon... and one of them would be Firefly!
So yeah. Biased and unfair and plain wrong, that list often is. And that’s just to be expected. I mean, I can’t pretend I know enough about television myself, despite being almost an enthusiast now, to write up a coherent and well-structured list right now myself. A “Favourite” list, maybe, but not a “Best” list. I simply don’t know enough.
Anyway. I’m supposed to do something that Jack Bz challenged me to do on this blog, but I can’t actually be bothered right now (sorry, man). So expect that... uh... next time, I suppose.
