Thursday May 20 2010 Music

The God-daughter-bot of Soul

Ladies and gentlemen, the hardest-working dancing android in show business, Janelle Monáe.


Every once in a while I see something that just makes me glad I live in the future. If it weren’t 2010, how else could you see a mash-up of Metropolis, 70s glam rock, 70s prog rock, 40s musicals, disco, millennial hip hop, and James Brown?

Well, if you were more hip than I am, you could’ve seen all that in 2008, apparently, with Metropolis: The Chase Suite from Janelle Monáe. It was a concept album EP about Monáe’s alternate identity Cindi Mayweather, a rogue android who — actually, the liner notes explain it better than I could:

The year is 2719. Five World Wars have decimated the earth. To escape from the ecological destruction, mankind has banded together to create one last great city named Metropolis. Under the rule of the evil Wolfmasters, the city becomes a decadent wonderland known for its partying robo-zillionaires, riotous ethnic, race and class conflicts and petty holocausts….

Into this turbulent world is born Android No. 57821, an Alpha Platinum 9000 named Cindi Mayweather. Unlike other androids, Cindi’s programming includes a rock-star proficiency package and a working soul….

And the videos “explain” the brilliant nonsense better than that. In particular: the “short film” video for “Many Moons” from the Metropolis EP., which handles all the introductions:

She’s doing a big push for “suites II and III” of the story, her new album The ArchAndroid, and that includes a great performance of “Tightrope” on Letterman.

And ArchAndroid is pretty much awesome; it’s tough to think of a musical style she doesn’t touch on in there — funk to big band to Hendrix-style psychedelic rock to straight-up disco. And I liked one of the comments in the Amazon reviews, that described it as somehow sounding even more cinematic and theatrical than a genuine soundtrack.

Big Boi of Outkast is a collaborator and executive producer on both records, and in fact you can’t hear the song “Violent Stars Happy Hunting!” (yeah, that’s the real title) from Metropolis without being reminded of “Hey Ya!” But more than that, I can’t watch or hear any of this stuff without being reminded of how “Hey Ya!” seemed to come out of nowhere — again, for the less hip among us — and blow me away.

But this is like if you took that and added robots!

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Sunday May 16 2010 The Internet

The Arts and Crafts of Noise

Kutiman remains brilliant, Craftsman® Tools remain durable.

I’m hoping everybody’s seen the brilliant Thru You project by now. The editor/composer of that, Israeli musician Kutiman has put together a new project: a video for Craftsman tools:

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Thursday May 13 2010 Lost

Shaggy's Little Boys Look Just Like Allison Janney

There’s LOST everywhere in this bitch. Spoilers for episodes “Across the Sea” and “The Candidate.”

ICPFuckinMagnets.jpg I didn’t want to say anything until I knew for sure, but I’m pretty convinced now that Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are juggalos. How else to explain this insistence that electromagnetism is the source of all magic?

I don’t have any problem with the idea of devoting a whole episode, this late in the series, to Jim Henson’s Island Protector Babies. I even appreciate their trying to create their own mythology, with their own garden of Eden and Cain and Abel and, I suppose, Lillith? Or setting up the notion of similar stories playing out over and over again on the Island throughout eternity.

My problem with “Across the Sea” is my problem with the rest of the season: the pacing is off. Since the beginning of the season, they’ve spent a bulk of each episode on stories with no real context, so we don’t get any clear idea of why we should care about what happens in them.

And it’s had the side effect of making the stuff we should care about — the story we’ve been following for the past five years — less significant, too. The stakes are basically erased: if somebody dies, so what? There’s still another version of them in this alternate universe. Except I stopped caring about that alternate version, too. It’d be like making Run, Lola, Run and trying to wring tears out of the audience at each ending.

With “Across the Sea,” they establish the hell out of that cave, and make absolutely certain that we make the connection between the “Adam & Eve” from Season 1. And yes, that’s one of the questions that’s been lingering through the whole series, and yes, it’s good that they’re wrapping stuff up. But isn’t that the kind of thing you’d just toss into an episode as kind of a “didja notice?” detail, and not linger on it with a flashback? Especially when the closest thing you’ve delivered to a real answer to the main mystery of the entire series is a woman pointing at a hobbit hole and saying, “That’s where magic comes from?”

Pacing in the previous week’s episode “The Candidate” bugged me too, but explaining that takes spoilers

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Tuesday May 4 2010 Apple, Spectre Collie, The Internet

Everyone's entitled to my opinion

Only the finest things are recommended by Spectre Collie.

I got a totally not-lying, for-real request from an actual human being to make a list of my favorite iPhone apps and put it online. Seriously — making lists and giving out my opinions unsolicited are two of my favorite things to do, and now I’m being encouraged to do them.

So I put up a Tumblr log, called Recommended by Spectre Collie, which I’ll eventually expand on and possibly incorporate on this site, depending how ambitious I get and if I ever get more free time. For now it’s only got a few iPhone games, but eventually it could be a repository for anything I’d like people to buy, read, or watch, and then come back and thank me for pointing it out to them. The RSS Feed is here for people who swing that way.

Incidentally, if you weren’t aware, and you’re interested, there’s already another Tumblelog called SpectreCollie Annex that links to my favorite stuff from YouTube, Flickr, and random websites (when that works).

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