Anime Reviews
Hooray!
Idolmaster episode 5
Surprised they did this sort of everybody episode, figured they'd keep doing individual/small group focused ones. I guess though if they do a beach episode they essentially have to do this 'cause otherwise people would complain that their favorite character got left out of the beach fun. Yeah sure a lot of the characters didn't do a whole lot but they had a scene or two at least for, y'know, fanservice really more than anything. Actually though I was impressed with their restraint in that regard, I mean, it was pretty bad, yeah, but it could have been a lot worse. I was expecting it to be a lot worse. In general this was a pretty dang fun episode. All the minor plotlines were entertaining and did some mild character trait expansion. Good to see that shy girl and singing girl still have relevance after their episodes. Also what's with this CLIFFHANGER ENDING? Is there some PLOT coming up?
Usagi Drop episode 5
Oh and here's another twist: Usagi Drop and Oyasumi Punpun (aka Bunny Drop and Goodnight Punpun) take place in the same universe!!! Joke being that Punpun is dating an aspiring manga artist and Rin's mom is an aspiring manga artist with a boyfriend. Yeah. Anyways great episode! Seems like the mom aspect is sort of resolved for now? I dunno. Semisatisfactory resolution. Wasn't anything too dramatic, pretty realistic in that regard, but also not really that engrossing. Also sort of surprised the whole “whose name does she use” issue was brought to the forefront so immediately over all sorts of other issues I can come up with, but whatever, I'll chalk that up to cultural differences maybe. I guess my question is, what next? I see some sort of plotline with the rebellious kid's mom but it looks like they did the most pivotal plot first. I really don't know though.
Nichijou episode 19
Wow. This is almost getting a bit too good, maybe? Like it's ruining the rest of the shows. The opening Helvetica Standard is just the craziest thing I have ever seen. Who else would do this esoteric, extended parody based off just one line two episodes ago? Amazing. And the episode just gets better! Like, like, the other group of girls, the ones in /k/-chan's class, you just know they're great characters and have had their own great adventures this whole time offscreen. Just from that little scene! And the high jump scene! And the temple scene! These are like, top of the top of the top tier. They've gotten so good at every aspect of their comedy. They've built up such a repertoire of gags that they can add humour to anything very efficiently, and build even further from there. And I really gotta give special mention to the soccer and go scene at the end. I cannot tell you how much I love when something does like, parody of the obscurity of advanced competitive games. I also cannot tell you how much I love the idea of competitive games based more on artistic ritual than anything else, which I think this might have been. I cannot tell you these things because I feel like I don't really know myself.
Music talk
Watch the Throne
Alright so this finally came out and I was pretty excited for it. I figured it'd be the best surface hip hop album of the year by a pretty wide margin. There's a really broad range of music that I listen to for my fun partytimes songs. Usually a Kanye West album is a goldmine of such songs. Yeah, MBDTWSFDFHS had a few boring songs, but the value of some of the catchy songs were so high that it redeemed all the rest. That's basically how I choose to qualify albums like this, I mean, if there's some catchy songs I'll listen to those no matter what, but the quality of the album depends on just how catchy they are and how much they outnumber the whiny ones, instead of some sort of overall judgment on the artistic merit of it. Lame? Sort of. But it's pretty functional.
So, the fact that there's quite a few songs on here that just do absolutely nothing for me isn't a huge dealbreaker. I think like, “Blame Game” and “Runaway” crush “Made in America” in a heartbeat, but none of them make my heart beat much so what do I really care? And for that matter, the fact that this album has pretty much no actual rapping is fine too. Jay-Z just seems like he's run out of interesting things to say. Kanye has, in the past, varied widely between sorta groan-clever to cringe-worthy bad, sometimes even line to line, but here he's more inoffensively mediocre. There's a handful of decent lines and a couple verses with above par flow but nothing really noteworthy. As for the subject matter, I can hardly even muster up the energy to wonder if I should care about the latest problems and inner conflicts of the somewhat young and ridiculously successful.
Okay so let's move on from the bad things I don't care about to the good things. And uh the bad things I do care about. Basically the value of this album comes from great beats that don't have offensively bad rapping over them. There's a decent amount of this. The “bonus beat” at the end of “Niggas in Paris” is absolutely stunning and isn't really capitalized on. It's like they knew they couldn't touch it and just did an uncreative hook as a bit of a cop-out. It's OK since said hook oozes grandeur that unfortunately isn't seen in many other places on the album. It's on “Otis”, too, which is still the most legitimate banger outside of some of the deluxe extras. The beat on “Gotta Have It” sounds like some surface approximation of a Das Racist beat and some of their flow is eeriely similar too. I mean “LOLOLOL white America assassinate my character”? It just doesn't sound natural coming from them. Still really catchy though. “New Day” I found hugely disappointing. I read an interview with the RZA where he talks about Kanye asking him for beats, and him sending him some “really dark Wu Tang type stuff”, dark enough that he was surprised when Kanye went for it. This made me really excited, when RZA gets in his steel opium sweet spot excellent hip hop is sure to follow. So where is it? There's a few like, “spooky”-type sounds on this but not much else. The auto tune singing just doesn't do it for me, I get this sense it should be like, ghostly and distant? Geez I dunno. It's an interesting idea I guess. “That's My Bitch” is basically a banger. The beat goes hammer and so do they, rapping harder than they do on most of the rest of the album. It's good, but not great, like, just sort of standard? Not the sort of thing I'd hope to see out of these two. Same with “Welcome to the Jungle”, minus the hard rapping. “Who Gon Stop Me” I was really hyped up for, and the beat is pretty cool. Flux Pavillion is the sort of “pure brostep” that I haven't really seen rapped over too much. Usually it's grime rappers going over really filthy stuff, and while that's great, there's some great cleaner stuff too. Thing is, these two really can't match the energy of the beat. When the big drops come they still seem just sort of nonchalant. And not the sort of really swag indifference the grime rappers do, sort of lazy indifference. And geez I dunno this beat really could stand to go a lot harder too. I guess there's a few parts where they really try to do some heavy fire lines but it just kinda falls flat. It just seems like they're trying too hard and they're a bit too reserved when they should just be going with it. “Murder to Excellence” has a classic sort of Kanye beat and it goes over well. The rapping isn't great but Jay-Z seems to be comfortable with it and does some fairly smooth flows. The second beat at the end is, like the one on “Niggas in Paris”, amazing, and I'm almost glad they didn't try to tackle it, 'cause it might have gotten bogged down. “Why I Love You” is EXACTLY the sort of song I want. I will play this to death and back. Mr. Hudson transforms an already catchy Cassius song into something like, mind conquering. Again, rapping isn't great but is better than nothing, (although their timing on the traded lines is so below the great rap duos it sorta makes me cringe), like, it keeps it interesting and bridges nicely up to the hook, which, again, drills right into my heart. And actually I should change that, Jay-Z does go pretty darn ham here. I think maybe my standards for that sort of thing are too high lately due to DR. Good finish. Oh wait there's the deluxe tracks and a few of those have hype. Oh well I'll worry about that later. Lemme finish up this with what I really didn't like.
Frank Ocean, I love you, but only in certain doses. When you have a whole song to yourself, you can craft something beautiful. When you have the tiniest little sung hook in the middle of some OF verbal beatdown, you shine. Where we have you now is in a spot where you need to do like 30 seconds of what might have been a beautiful 4 minute song in the middle of plodding whiny talk. And what's worse, it's in a spot where the sort of beauty I'm interested in is glossy golden beauty, not heartfelt tear-stained beauty. It's not your fault, it's just that I can't listen to whiny surface rap. It just isn't interesting compared to the hidden crop of anticon existential crisis and geez even your friends OF have problems like 99 times more interesting than that of Ye-Z and J-Z. Yeah they had rough lives at one point, but they can only mention that so many times. Now they have some like moderately interesting anxieties, like, Kanye's overwhelming desire to be thought of as the best entertainer of our generation is really fascinating, but that's not the sort of thing that actually properly manifests itself in his music. Oh and while I'm on the subject, does it seem like Kanye still thinks it would be really cool to rap like Li'l Wayne did four years ago? It's a bit painful. But really those are my chief complaints. I dunno I keep going between thinking “man you're just trying to hate it” and then I listen to it some more and I think “nah you're just trying to like it”, it's weird.
Here's something I don't have that problem with:
Relax News
So there was briefly a radio rip of the Relax song “Shut Up, Man”, featuring El-P. I only got a chance to hear it a few times, and maybe that's for the best, 'cause the quality wasn't great and I ought to wait until I can hear it properly. What I know is that it will be great. My wonderful friend was good enough to transcript the lyrics on Rapgenius so I can review their brilliance in patient hype. Yes, patient hype. I'm so hyped for this album I've looped back over into some sort of meditative trance where I know that I must savor every second of what will be known after 9/13/11 as “my old life”. This “patient hype” is a sort of bizarre oxymoron or paradox or “contrary” to use the Blakean term is the sort of wonderful challenging thought that this song's lyrics are comprised primarily of. This is like “free jazzmataz” 2.0 in the way that “Michael Jackson” was “Chicken and Meat” 2.0. It also has stuff like “You ain't funny, you Robin Williams, you got me all mad/If you doubt I spit fire you probably a drag/Mrs. Doubtfire, you probably all sad”. That line there beats every line on Watch the Throne combined. And El-P! Geez! I think I like him best on DR tracks, when you have even less of an idea what he's talking about 'cause know you also don't know when he's just being silly.
The Shining
I will talk about later. Maybe. Probably will make another blog post shortly that has some stuff about that and a few other things. I want to get this one up sooner than later though.
Kafka on the Shore
No wait I'll talk about this first. I'm exactly half way through this according to the all-knowing Kindle. It is my first Murakami, not sure why I started with this one, I think someone recommended it as a starter at some point. Now I'm seeing that it's like his masterpiece according to a lot of people? And maybe I should have built up to it? I dunno, it's pretty good at any rate, but not what I expected. For some reason I had a picture of Murakami being very poetic, very restrained, light chamber music sort of writing. This comes from a vaguely racist (culturist?) understanding of modern Japanese literature. But hey why am I eager in this post-national internet world to think of literature as a cultural or regional export? Instead I should look at his influences. Here we seem to be in the school of like, Vonnegut weirdness by way of modern teenage sensibilities? Uhh how do I put this oh well I won't bother I ought to talk about that stuff when I'm finished it right now I ought to say a few words on how I've found it so far. “Really good!” The plot is quite suspenseful and novel and gripping and I really want to see what will happen next and all that. I'm still sort of off put by the difference in what I was expecting and what I got, though. I had given what I thought this novel would be a lot of thought before I started it, and I had drummed up this whole picture of like... Kafka on the Shore being this melancholy seaside tale... Hardboiled Wonderland was, I dunno, some sort of postmodern Alice in Wonderland experiment... 18Q4 was gonna be some critique of modern culture, I really don't actually know, I just had some vague idea of what it was gonna be and this isn't it. This sort of goes back to the whole idea of stories vs. literature I talked about way back in my post about Infinite Jest, like, am I reading it to find out what happens or to read more of the guy's prose? Here it is really strongly in the former. And again, I really gotta say this isn't an insult or anything. It's just sort of unexpected for me since I don't read a lot for that sort of thing these days. And it's not to say that he isn't talking about interesting things and having interesting ideas and all that, this isn't some Dan Brown mystery page-turner BS. Nor am I trying to say his prose isn't good, it's very functional, very descriptive. I'm just used to descriptions, for example, to be an area that goes absolutely ham in terms of poetics and all that. It isn't for everyone, but I love it when it's done well, although I prefer it to not be done at all instead of poorly. Anyways I thought about coming up with some theories about what will happen, but I dunno, I used to love doing that but now I don't find it quite as fun as just waiting until I've read the whole thing and then thinking about why things happened. But yeah, enjoying it. Probably will have a lot to say when I finish it.
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