SIXinternational.txt

El-P : Deep Space 9mm (Fantastic Damage 2002)

Sweet beats have been fallin like discreet sleet for me this past week (i made that all by myself, give me a high-paying contract).

I’ve been immersing myself this past week or two in ‘underground’ hip-hop, with artists like El-P, Aesop Rock(both on the Def Jux label which is phenomenal), and Sage Francis. Not exactly unknowns or anything, but the style isn’t anywhere near the BLIIIING CRUNK CLUBZ bullshit of many mainstream artists. I’ve always enjoyed hip-hop to a certain extent, particularly when there’s something behind it like in Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”. I like hearing the urban existentialist poetry and I love interesting production that’s catchy without being too cheesy and poppy. If all it is is bitches and dranks and gunz yo then it can stay in the frat parties thankyouverymuch.

So I’d recommend if anyone’s interested in getting into some much more listenable and intelligent hip-hop, check out Aesop Rock’s latest “None Shall Pass” or El-P’s “I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead”. Two different styles for sure, Aesop being a bit more upbeat and El-P being more… apocalyptic?, but both are interesting and exciting to listen to.

First time I got into hip-hop was in 7th grade with Busta Rhymes (that’d be 1997-1998). I was in a similar groove back in freshman year of college (again, that’d be 2003-2004 for those keeping track), and it’s been until now where I’ve really had the urge to get back into it. At the same time though I feel a much bigger connection to it than I did then. So we’ll see how long this lasts… and if it’ll be another five years until I get into it again next time.

Alright, one more new awesome music update. This one’s by the French electronic duo, Justice with their album †. Similar to how Daft Punk is an amazing genre-defining French electronic duo, these guys do it their own way and to absolutely phenomenal results. Very unique, very listenable, very composed unlike a lot of boring repetitive dance music. I don’t really know how to describe it but I recommend you head over to Amazon and listen to the sound samples. My highlights thus far are “Genesis” and “Phantom Pt. II”.The big hit is “D A N C E” but that doesn’t do as much for me. The rest of the album is much more interesting in my eyes.

I have been blessed with great music lately and I am thankful for it. I blame GTA IV for turning me on to Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights”, which immediately made me remember how awesome music is in general and made me go seek out that feeling of discovering great stuff that’s out there underneath my small personal radar. Speaking of that, GTA IV is fucking phenomenal. Best of the series by far - one of the few games I’ve played with a truly engrossing storyline, and I hope I’m not spoiling anything by saying it doesn’t end in the typical GTA way of the street scum guy who you’ve been playing for 30 hours ends up happy and rich and without a care in the world. It’s deep and it’s tragic and it’s great.

Another new minor release on the radar…

BRAND NEW NINE INCH NAILS ALBUM, THE SLIP.
COMPLETELY FOR FREE.

HOLY SHIT.

Here comes Trent again to fuck your mind up. At this rate, the man will release more new music in 2008 than he has in the twenty years previous. Think about that. Sure, maybe the quality’s not as absolute-god-perfect as The Downward Spiral or The Fragile was, but taken as a formula where you divide quality by time-per-release (Q over TPR of course), this definitely wins out. I’ll take ten really good albums every five years than one awesome one. Plus it fits more in with the modern disposability of music where albums seem to dominate for a week then disappear… I don’t know. Maybe I’m reading more into it than I should be.

Also, it’s got vocals and is much heavier than Ghosts I-IV was. Much more of a NIN album for sure. Feels more in the vein of With Teeth, and I mean that as a good thing.

Either way, DOWNLOAD THIS GODDAMN ALBUM! You don’t have a reason not to! Seriously, there’s not even a “donate here” box. It’s free, no strings attached.

Enjoy.

Just wanted to quickly pimp out their fourth and latest album, Late Night Cinema. It’s instrumental hip-hop from a producer duo, Kingston and Young God, that has a very distant and unique feel to it - doesn’t really sound like hip-hop at all. The production on this album is fantastic and I highly recommend it as background music for everyday life.

As a side note: I should have given Kanye West more of a listen years ago. His stuff is great and groundbreaking for the genre.

New episodes return next week. I think it’s the best show on TV, and although some elitist Arrested Development fans think it’s not even in the same league, I think it has taken pages from both that excellent show and Office Space to create one of the best sitcoms ever made. I enjoy this show for many reasons. One of them:

Pam.

I love the word postmortem, by the way. It’s by far the coolest term you could use to talk about things you’ve learned in hindsight. Also probably the most succinct. And most metal.

BioShock, along with Portal, are probably the two most listed contenders for game of the year in most gaming mags and sites, both for uniquely awesome reasons. Portal started as a side project by six kids from the Nintendo-affiliated Digipen Institute of Technology, known as one of the premier schools for game design. It’s a relatively short affair - the game can be beaten in the area of about four hours of playtime which may seem short compared to the 100 hour Final Fantasy style sagas but is really a perfect length game for most people, particularly adults who don’t have the entirety of summer vacation to devote to a single game anymore. Portal lets you pay your $20 (or as part of the $50 Orange Box which is the goddamn best deal ever in gaming: HalfLife2 + Episodes 1 and 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal all in one pack), spend a weekend or long night playing it, and get out. Though some people complained about the ’shortness’ of the game… well, screw those people. Short and sweet is the new hotness. It’s becoming plainly obvious that many developers these days are artifically extending their single player campaigns in order to create the 8-10 hour “experience” that gamers apparently demand. These forced extensions can bcome painfully obvious though - some of these 8-10 hour games are like watching a four-hour extended cut of Die Hard 4. All games have a particular length that works for them - whether it be four hours for portal or 80 for Suikoden. Hopefully the success of Portal makes directors realize that it’s not always longer = better when it comes to games.

But that was a total tangent - let’s get back to BioShock. I played it this past week, a pirated copy which I feel awful about. Piracy in PC gaming is really becoming a severe problem (I feel another tangent coming on, skip to the next paragraph if necessary).  A story I read quoted the director of THQ saying that PC piracy essentially killed a studio, Iron Lore, that created the fantastic Titan Quest series of games. Piracy in games is different than pirating music or movies. Most people who play PC games are smart enough to pirate them, and it’s estimated that 50% of sales are lost due to piracy. This is costing severe talent in the gaming industry with geniuses becoming unwilling to put in the 80+ hour weeks to build a game if they can’t break even, let alone be profitable doing it. It’s also pushing good developers over to consoles where piracy is much less rampant - only having to develop for one set of specs also helps, versus the infinite number of hardware combinations possible with PCs. Personally, I love buying games, especially through products like Valve’s Steam program/platform that lets me buy a game directly online, download it immediately from their hugely piped servers, and play it almost immediately - then uninstall and reinstall as necessary as long as I have access to my account. But still, a new game usually costs at least $50 - add that to the fact that I need a $250+ upgrade to my computer to play the games the way they’re supposed to be played… I can buy a goddamn console for that amount of money, and I need to upgrade far more often than if I stuck to my Xbox360. But now that I’m out of college and have a steady income, I feel that I should support the games I love - I don’t want to pirate another PC game as long as I live. Will I break that promise? Yes. But I’ll at least vow to purchase the game if I enjoyed it afterwards. I guess that’s only fair. I still give no such automatic promises to movies or music however.

Seriously though, BioShock. It’s awesome. The setting is the first thing that stands out as you play the game - it’s set in the 1960s in an underwater art deco objectivist dystopian city called Rapture dominated by people gone mad due to genetic over-experimentation. The objectivist/Randian motifs are everywhere and the commentary is not subtle for those familiar with her ubercapitalist philosophies. This game is not just a flashy FPS-cum-RPG but also demands that the player examine morals, free will, and the aspects of pure capitalism that led to the downfall of Rapture. Games often try to make people think, but it’s the rare one that succeeds. BioShock not only succeeds in making us think, but is also a very enjoyable gameplay experience featuring a healthy mix of the FPS and RPG genres as mentioned above. I won’t get too in-depth with a review; if you care enough, read Sean Molloy’s writeup for 1up or any of the glowing reviews gathered on Metacritic. Granted, most game reviews are written by enthusiasts were an 8 is below average (because these dudes just looove games sooo much, brah). But in this case, the 10s garnered are more than worthy. This is the type of game that elevates the entire medium and allows developers to rethink their boundaries.

The wonders of breaking ties with major music labels.

Last night, Nine Inch Nails released a new double album of instrumentals without any warning - Ghosts I-IV. Part I is available for free download on the site and officially sanctioned torrents on The Pirate Bay and other sites. For $5, you can get the entire album in your choice of 320kbps MP3 or lossless FLAC (or whatever Apple’s thing is) download from their site.For $10, you get the download and a physical copy mailed to you (+$7 S/H) on April 8th when it’s released. There’s also a $75 deluxe edition with DVD multitracks of all the files ready to be remixed and a Blu-Ray disc featuring a high-def 96/24 stereo mix and accompanying slideshow. Then there’s a $300 mega uberdeluxe limited version including prints and LP copies of the album hand signed by Trent.

I’m done reading off the bullet points though, but as a huge NIN fan and digital distribution fan, this hits me in all the right ways. Radiohead’s In Rainbows was the first major player to try it, while Saul Williams’ Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, produced by Trent, was the second. I think the model has gotten better with each release. Offering 1/4 of the thing for free is smarter than giving the entire album away for free and hoping they choose to give you money out of guilt (think of ’90s shareware like Wolf3d/Doom - give them one episode for free, pay if you want the rest). Also $10 for a download and physical double album is a phe-fucking-nomenal price. Again, it’s the beauty of keeping the major labels hands to themselves - music should not cost what FYE charges.

Aside from the business aspect… the album is great. It’s got something for all moods - from sad piano to happy xylophone and even a bit of ethnic flair. I can listen to it safely at work without worrying about Trent screaming “FIST FUCK”, which is nice. I can see myself listening to it wandering around the city at night, laying down and daydreaming in the spring, coding, anything. It features some guitar work by prog king Adrian Belew and some guesting from other people, but at it’s soul it’s still very distinctly NIN. I haven’t had time to fully digest, but regardless, this is yet another step in the right direction for the band, with the past few years bringing With Teeth (which I like despite what anyone says), Year Zero, Niggy Tardust, Ghosts, and the supposedly ’soon’ Year Zero 2. This coming from a man who released only four full albums between 1989 and 2005. I’m living in a bizarre, happy world right now.

I’m also digging back into comics after a long lapse. I started into the Earth X TPB last night - first few pages are great so far, I love the art style and it looks to put an interesting spin on the Marvel Universe. I need to finish Watchmen too, which unfortunately may necessitate restarting the damn thing from the beginning. I hate you, Alan Moore.

Another recent movie, slightly lower on my scale than No Country but still fantastic is There Will Be Blood, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano. These three people, and mostly the first two, are who make the movie what it is, everyone else is very minor. Each plays their role brilliantly and masterfully, no doubt there, but I think the fact that the movie can be summarized down to two people is both powerful and ultimately less fulfilling than a true ensemble like No Country. Though distinctly different, the two movies have many ties between them, not the least of which is the landscape as a character. In both of these movies, the harshness of the West plays a clear role in both setting the mood and forming the personalities of the characters. As a northeasterner who has never been to the southwest US, it is an alien and engrossing setting. Johnny Greenwood’s score is also fantastic, working to enhance our experience of the strange, desolate landscape and era, similar to how Ennio Morricone’s scores enhanced Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti Westerns.

However, unlike the general symbolisms that No Country discusses, Blood is more straightforwardly and plainly about American Capitalism and the greed, negativity, and isolation that comes with being a successful capitalist in America, particularly in the early 1900s. Daniel Plainview, as rich and unique a character as he may be, is clearly a capitalist everyman. Capitalism is a very mixed subject for most people; it has its excesses and inhumanities, but it also (ideally) provides opportunity and equality. I think Plainview embodies both sides of this to the keen viewer’s eye.

Paul Dano’s character, Eli Sunday, is also an interesting symbol for religion in America, though less so than Plainview representing capitalism. Interestingly, Sunday may not be his own symbol but may also be representative of the capitalist influence on religion.

Regardless of what symbolizes what, Blood is another fantastic movie with similar stylings as No Country. This will be another instance where I plan to buy the collector’s edition.

Soon: my take on the 2008 Presidential primaries so far.

I recently downloaded No Country For Old Men (:filez:) and absolutely fell in love with it. The adaptation from Cormac McCarthy’s work is impressive, and with an author well known for his symbolism, the Coen Brothers carry over the symbols effectively yet leave plenty up for interpretation. I could go into detail about what I feel the characters represent but I’d prefer to leave that to the viewer. Ultimately the movie is about the conflicts between old and young, fate and chance, good and evil - with good and evil having by far the most grey area between them in which where every character falls. The movie ends with a soliloquy from the Ed Tom Bell character, and while initially disappointing upon first impact with all of the action leading up to it and the expectation for a huge blowout at the end, it really is fitting that the movie end with an introspective, bleak whimper that makes us fear aging for more reasons than coming closer to death. Anyways, I’ve seen it twice and I can’t wait to see it again, and it’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way about a movie.

And although it was much better seeing it in its glory in the theatre, I was surrounded on three sides by old people ‘whispering’ about the movie (including 10 minutes spent trying to think of the name “Tommy Lee Jones”) at a level that is considered talking by 90% of human beings today.

I received some minor satisfaction when they all were disappointed by the ending.

For me, this movie is a “go see it in the theatre and then buy it the collector’s edition on DVD”. I loved it and look forward to further analyzing the meaning behind it for years to come.