Maybe It's Just Late...

...But 2008 is feeling like the weirdest damn year (at least this early in it) I can think of. I mean just LOOK at my friggin' top eight albums:

Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)
Black Mountain - In the Future
Efdemin - s/t
Dolly Parton - Backwoods Barbie
Britta Persson - Kill Hollywood Me
September - s/t
Taylor Swift - Live from SoHo EP
V/A - Step Up 2 OST

I mean, just look at that for a second. WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT.

What is going on in this Erykah Badu album? Everything at once? I described it privately like this: "Having a tough time parsing the new Erykah Badu album. I'm not really familiar with her other stuff, except for a few songs they've played on the radio, but this shit is NUTS. Like 8-minute soul jams w/ cyborg ambiance mixed with "America is fucked" slam poetry + Parliament-style group party theatrics."

And I'm still having a tough time with it on third-fourth listen, and several more to a few tracks. There are so many cakes being had and eaten I start to think I'm not liking it and then realize that it's just DATA OVERLOAD. And actually the production is damn near understated in some parts (I'm listening to "Soldier" right now, a flute pattern repeated and only two or three Badus, as opposed to the dozen-plus on some of the crazier tracks) so the data's not just coming from stuff. I'm just...trying to figure this thing out, and it's coiled in on itself so tightly it feels impenetrable until you just sit down with the thing and go moment to moment -- like untying a giant ball of knots. I dunno, this album excites and scares the shit out of me. Still not sure if I like it, but I think it'll probably keep growing on me.

Why do I suddenly really like Black Mountain when they do the MORE BORING version of the impeccable but kinda wooden trad-rock genuflection I didn't particularly like to begin with on their self-titled album? How the hell did I even find this thing? I don't remember acquiring it. Anyway, it's obviously not boring, I think they just found some classic rock pastiche that fit them a little better, plus no incongruous indie-pop novelty false starts. (Have they even had any other albums since the one with "Modern Music" on it?)

So can I just buy one Dial Records album a year and never have to worry about minimal-techno-the-genre again? Efdemin's Pantha du Prince sequel is pretty great, like he just got the baton and went with it.

Holy crap, Dolly Parton just put out a really good album. I know fuck-all about Dolly Parton, but this is pretty much perfect -- I love her Fine Young Cannibals cover, I love her bread 'n' butter ballads ("I Will Always Hate Roses," "Made of Stone") and her pseudo-edgy country empowerment ("Love from Shinola," "Backwoods Barbie") and sweet Christ, even....uh, sweet Christ. "Jesus and Gravity," in which Jesus lifts her up but gravity keeps her feet on the ground, is really charming and funny. And tongue-in-cheek about just about everything except how great Jesus is. It's like required reading for wannabe Xtian country/rock/pop crossover people revving up for the Disney Incubator.

Britta Persson might be the Marit Larsen with a regrettable case o' mushmouth, because every time I use my decoder ring to figure out what the hell she might be saying, it's like brilliant. "You look like a mirror to me / I'm not saying that I think you're ugly, just hard to look at." She doesn't use the contraction (it's "I am" not "I'm") I just want to give a sense of her sharp comedic timing which of course she buries in the HUGE LAYER OF MUD that is her (nice so whateva) voice.

I mean for god's sake, what if there are more lines in that song ("At 7") worth hearing that I'll have to spend another fifteen listens figuring out?? It'd be like finding [famous person]'s final manuscript of [legendary lost work] only to find that someone has spilled [dark liquid] on it! I do say! My my! Tut tut!

And WTF is up with this totally samey cheese-central SEPTEMBER album, mentioned some time ago by Jessica Poptastic I think and my loving it, seemingly because the production is so barely-interesting that I've actually found personality in a singer about as devoid of human characteristics as Girls Aloud or some such blank-ass group?

And WTF is up with my considering counting a LIVE EP of Taylor Swift's material which I've listened to since 2006 just to prove to Jane Dark that one reason some critics didn't vote Taylor country alb of 2007 was because they hadn't clicked by the end of 2006 and figured they just missed the boat on that one? And then perversely REFUSED to figure out where she'd be on a 2007 list (probably after Britney and before Miranda Lambert?) if included? And then thought, well, this "Umbrella" cover is pretty great and I love her solo version of "Place in This World" and like how her delivery loosens up with each passing chorus in "Our Song" (which I think she also does on the album but I can't remember because I can't FIND the damn thing anywhere so this EP is all the Taylor I have except for "Barnyard Song" which is totally a freestyle session she did for some radio station and YES I'm going to go ahead and call her the Eminem of teen starlet mainstream country).

And WTF is up with the Step Up 2 soundtrack being so good. Oh wait, least surprising inclusion on my list. Which is kind of surprising! This album is as close to hitting the broad side of a barn that sez ENJOYABLE on it as you can get, but I wouldn't expect it to act as, like, comfort food. In fact I expected to slowly delete/scatter the thing into shuffle oblivion but I've listened to it as an album quite a bit.

And WTF is up with so many albums being so immediately ingratiating with such pitifully low aims that I just know I'm never ever ever ever going to listen to them again except for two or three songs? A list that includes the Feeling and Lykke Li and Magnetic Fields and...uh, YEASAYER, which is nice for reading. I think that makes Erykah my album of the year by default, because whatever the hell it is, it certainly doesn't lack ambition. SERIOUSLY, how hard are some of these people really trying? If they don't watch it I'm gonna create a special MUMBLECORE section for idiots who think that mild competence plus lowered expectations plus head-in-bellybutton equals something that deserves more than ten minutes of anyone's time. Wait, make it five minutes for actual mumblecore, just enough time for Cute Indie Girl to unconsciously stick her tongue out like my retarded cat for the first time.

Seeing as How I Just Saw the Hannah Montana Movie...

I figure I might as well, uh, (more) publicly bring up the first part(?) of William Bowers's Hannah Montana piece for Pitchfork. I bring it up because I'm seemingly one of a pretty small handful of critics who actually does engage with HM on a fairly regular basis (and I enjoy a lot of her stuff), and having seen the movie now...I'm not getting this as an argument, or as a joke, or as a semi-fiction.

My first instinct was that the piece was just fabricated -- fair 'nuff, I'm not going to go around decrying good-enough doc/fiction pieces that got the facts wrong so that some writer can get ethically ad hoc'd into oblivion for a gag that went awry. But that's not really true -- too many specifics that you'd need to see in the film (the obtrusive camera equipment in the 3-D, though for me the best part was the DRUM STICK TOSS UP WOOOOO!). Actually I thought the 3-D was pretty amazing, leaps and bounds beyond...what, Muppets 3-D over at Disney World (witnessed once at age seven)? Captain EO? (Same.) When we first see Miley on stage, the 3-D helps give her this commanding presence that she sustains pretty easily for the rest of the film. The girl is an amazing performer, and I say this as someone who's been watching her staged clips from day one and didn't really buy her as a performer at all until...well, I guess until I heard a few of her new songs and heard some real personality there. But definitely after tonight -- there's one point where she goes up her little platform, to the edge of a sea of children, and says "I want to know who's the BIGGEST Hannah Montana fan out there in the audience tonight," and afterwards you're kind of amazed she delievered it without some Samuel L. Jackson motherfucking qualifier. I mean she's FIERCE.

So anyway. Second instinct says that SOME is fabricated, like the date. Beyond the general premise, I find it hard to believe that this revelation of hers ("Children! Africa!") happened during the second song in the movie. (Hey stop making fun of me for not getting jokes, lemme get to my point here, which is that the jokes aren't funny, and they don't make a lot of sense.)

Third instinct says...I don't have a clue what's going on in this piece. I'd say it's received contempt for the audience, but it covers its bases about that, at length, before proceeding to basically do the same dance with more self-knowing (possibly fictional) rhetorical flourishes -- and I basically misread the damn thing the first time around in thinking he should have talked to an audience member (as I can attest, if you pick the right/wrong show, there will be NO ONE in the audience. Except two people, which did keep me from getting up and running through the aisles like a four year old). He's talking about the film audience.

Well, same difference, same idea. I just don't want to lose points for poor reading comprehension (I'm willing to lose points for being a stick in the mud JUST LEMME FINISH ALRIGHT??). I mean...what's the argument here? That sometimes you just don't like corporate schlock no matter the length lone loonies in the critical community are willing to go to seem contrarian? This kind of misses out on the fairly ambivalent relationship most critics who take Hannah Montana seriously have to her music. That kids are being duped? This kind of misses out on the many good songs that are in this movie. (Like, seriously? There was no differentiation of production, style, guitar tone across like twelve songs?)

The self-deprecation stuff plays as prep caveat for the reiteration of something that's fairly common -- this is a "them" thing, and I'm not down with it. But why write about this if, of all the points one might be engaging, getting to know "them" is basically the ONE point that's being danced around or flat-out avoided at all costs? Especially if by doing this dance you're basically goofing around for laffs? So many assumptions have to get a free pass (evil business practices at the distribution and marketing level not being particularly bankrupt assumptions, but then these are points that get swallowed in the smug/sour tone of the rest of the piece) that I'm just left a little puzzled. Frankly I want him to stop bullshitting me (me being someone who DID see this film because he wanted to, and really enjoyed it) and make an argument I can use. Which you say would mean it's not funny. To which I'd say, well, if yer premise is wrong, your punchline probably isn't going to work either.



Oh shit, right, the movie. Miley OWNS this movie. I've never gotten a sense of her as this kind of performer from the live stuff she's done, from her television show, from about 50% of her songs, even. She sold everything, even the songs that, uh, suck. (Although there were only one or two bad songs, terrible Jonas Bros. ballad doesn't count, and a few I haven't liked so much sounded better live, "G.N.O." and "Nobody's Perfect" that I remember.)

Almost all were picks for my Mostly Wanted comp from last year (except the aforementioned two improved live numbers, plus the acoustic ballad "I Miss You" that she performed back in the first season -- which was a lot better in its...what, thirty-second form? Without winks and Jumbotron candid pics of grandpa, RIP -- yikes, tacky!).

And, uh...to be honest, the production wasn't that tacky. It was understated compared to the spectacle I was expecting. The 3-D was used fairly tactically to isolate Miley up front and give some space to the instruments, but only a few gimmicky shots of drumsticks and confetti etc. One great moment where she points the mic at the audience, i.e. the camera, and there it is, right in front of you. SING ALONG. STAND UP. I DON'T WANT TO SEE A SINGLE PERSON SITTING DOWN. I mean, she just kicks ass in this movie. (Holy shit, I'm like the Harry Knowles of tween concert flixx.)

Yeah, there was fake-Hannah and T-shirt coordination, but for the most part its like a four-piece band plus Miley plus two back-up singers. I mean hell, there were more people onstage in Stop Making Sense.

I guess what I'm saying here is that this movie is good. Like, "good" good. Like, "like" like. Like like like. I liked it! A lot! It's a great intro to the phenomenon, good-enough intro to the music, excellent use of 3-D, pretty damn savvy concert movie -- great use of extras footage in particular, would have actually liked ANOTHER backstage segment with Miley just shooting the shit at the expense of one of the heinous numbers, like "Let's Dance." She's going to be a pro for a long time, even if she loses Disney and works her way into Shelved Territory over the course of a few years. And I don't see her ever going into total self-destruct mode -- I think that an interesting paradox of the tighter image control Disney has over its stars is that they can be seen as rebellious without literally endangering themselves. Nudie pic for boyfriend = SCANDAL? Damn, some people need to SMOKE CRACK to get in the papers these days.

I'm picking on WB as a framework for these musings here not because it's easy to uh nit-pick (e.g. $15 is hardly "double" the normal price of a movie ticket, unless you're seeing a student discount or the last matinee show or something; when the band "Skynrded out," they were playing a refrain from a song they'd already performed, and weren't improvising or soloing over it, so I don't see how it might have been different than what they were playing the first time around, or throughout the film vamping on a given song (like "Start All Over" or "See You Again," both with extended intros"; and Hannah's "two albums" in the Billboard top ten include a Disney chaff tossed-off remix money-maker called "Hannah Montana Non-Stop Dance Party," which like most of these kinds of efforts made a splash in its first week on impulse buys and then fell down the charts -- it's like determining the "significance" of HSM tracks showing up in the Billboard top ten in week one but failing to notice that they promptly fell down and off the charts because they were basically a downloading fluke; the story wasn't in the "singles"). Uh, yeah, so I'm not NIT-PICKING (anymore) but pointing out that to even have the urge to do a "project" like this, fictional as it wants to be, it helps to understand what you're doing with it first, or you'll end up with a compromised or weak conclusion almost by default.

Sort of connects to Carl Wilson's Celine project (a little, tho I hesitate to make this connection too many times since I already brought it up once ina clearer context: note, read Tom's comment in the comments section) in that for any information I get (and in all fairness there's not a lot of information to be gleaned from the column, but apples and oranges versus apples and...y'know, penguins, maybe) I nod for a second, then furrow my brow, then think "well maybe what I see as poor reasoning is really just a stage of social engagement, or fear of it, seen as something to 'get past'" and then thinking...wait, why couldn't y'all get past these stages before you sat down to write this thing? And meanwhile I have NO ISSUES WHATSOEVER, I'm TOTALLY CURED. Trust me on that! (Why aren't you trusting me on that?)

These kids aren't cattle, and the music they're listening to isn't as bankrupt as their parent company's corporate practices. It's good music. Well, it's uneven music, never said otherwise. It has problems. But at least one song ("C U AGENN") is the second-best song from last year according to no fewer than...y'know, three-ish people, and about ten more I'd consider sticking on a mix for someone. I just don't understand why we have to waste any time even considering all this doomsday "where do I draw the LINE, maaaaan" bullshit, when I don't see any argument that could be made to support the basic premise here -- even a clever one, or a sorta resonant one. "Hey, I hate this and I hate how the marketing and distribution and corporate whatever ugliness works...I mean, why shouldn't I just congeal 'em into one ugly mass entity, and let their audience get sucked into a black hole with the whole shebang even as I pretend like I'm 'struggling' with such a concept?"

I'm not even totally being sarcastic there, because there are lots of similarly (contemptuously) motivated impulses in, uhhhh ME, because I often reaaaally want to keep my contempt intact. And in most cases I plan to keep it intact. Because I think contempt is often a merited reaction, and it can be used really effectively when directed at the right targets in the right ways, in the right situations. It might be (might be) the most effective form of rock criticism, in the sense that I tend to respond to rockcrit ideas born of contempt, or joy-from-contempt ("fuck all that jazz THIS IS WHERE IT'S AT!"), more viscerally than ideas sparked from compromise and/or understanding and/or some vision of a democratic form of listening or "fair" criticism. (I didn't say I wanted FAIR I said I wanted GOOD. And because you're being unfair in this case, and your unfairness is easier and wronger than my fairness, your criticism is NO GOOD.) (Not to say I write very well in this mode myself, as that last parenthetical would be implying if I hadn't gone off the rails at least fifteen minutes ago, but I do like to think that when I'm not missing the point completely I can draw blood. That is, I see myself as having fairly powerful jabs that make precise wounds, but usually in every place directly around THE POINT. A neat little circle, and you might be able to intuit that point, or nudge me toward it, but it's hard to just NAIL it, maybe my depth perception is off. Whatever it is, it's my problem.) But these sortsa "I really want to get this but I'm sorry it's just not my thing" (at most "fair," and usually best) tend to shove all that wrong contempt in all the wrong places, and this piece isn't an exception. But I do get a sense of struggle in it, and a sense of humor, and real ideas getting buried in a fuzzy structural concept, that most writers don't have. I just don't get a point, I don't get something I can really respond to, despite the fact that I've now spent several thousand words not-responding. I get lots of decisive stabbing motions that are hitting some target out there that I just totally fail to recognize. Well, I recognize it, don't need to be totally dishonest here, but it doesn't interest me. What you call a target I call a coffee stain that everyone is convinced is a target [PLEASE GOD STOP THE METAPHOR BEFORE SOMEONE GETS HURT] I just wish people would give that target a rest and...y'know, look like THREE inches to the left and see if there's something over there worth targeting.

[EDIT: If you're having trouble sloggin' through all that VENT, just check out Ross's shorter -- and uh eerily similarly worded! Coincidence, f'real!!! -- review of Miley Movie in the second half of this post.]

Skye Friday: Luke/Max Edition

Point/counterpoint: Skye versus Amy and the Four Seasons [note: due to budget limitations, Amy was only able to book two of the Seasons]

Well, "Girl Like Me" is out there in the world, thanks to the Japanese edition of Sound Soldier.

It's kind of a trip. A flashback, actually -- I'm not sure exactly how to place this, except to backtrack through Max Martin's career, with the lessons he learned in his Luke collabs, to 2002 and, um...setting him up with Avril Lavigne.

I've never been on board with Avril comparisons, unless they go in the other direction: I'm glad that Skye basically came out and said straight out that her conversations with Dr. Luke had a direct influence on "Girlfriend," which is something that I suspected even when I first heard that song. But there are a lot of retro flourishes in "Girl Like Me," the Matrix-like lilt, the rhythmic vocal breakdown in the bridge (second bridge?), the canned "record scratching" at the beginning.

So it's early Avril in its sensibility, which is to say it's mid-period post-Britney teenpop in its sensibility. Which is weird, because that mid-period had a sort of LATE mid-period with Kelly C. and Ashlee relatively recently (about 2004-2006?), so it feels more like an aberrant lag rather than a sorta post-teenpop (e.g. Shut Up Stella, who's basically ripping on early Radio Disney/UK teenpop perennials, B*Witched etc. now w/ curse words) formal experiment.

And I know I'm giving this all waaay too precise descriptions, but I guess this is actually starting to help me figure out what doesn't quite sit right with Skye's new stuff -- I think she was walking sort of a fine line of referentiality that still allowed her to sound earnest even when she was being tongue-in-cheek. And what's gone is that underlying earnestness, that sense of a precocious girl who took her music seriously and was aware of its frivoloties without feeling WEIRD about it (like the new Be Your Own Pet, which is so terrified of being "in" on frivolity that it sort of drags all of its songs through mud first -- it sounds like an album of self-sabotage).

Skye's not like BYOP, because her mixed results this year aren't the result of self-conscious shooting in the foot (hm, I'm trying to figure out why the Dollyrots, just as self-conscious as BYOP, don't succumb to this i.e. are consistently delightful instead of seeming smug or lame?). They seem to be results of just...the damnedest things. So many of them. And a different damnedest thing for a different song -- there's nothing else on her album that feels late-bandwagon-like (and for the record, I like most of the confessional late-bandwagon stuff better than Avril's early stuff, but to hear it in 2008 is just giving me a sense of cognitive dissonance for some reason, because I can hear the influences of Marion Raven or the Veronicas on "Girl Like Me" along with it being "older"), just as there's nothing else on the album that's peculiar in the ways that a lot of the tracks are. So if these songs are failures (and I'm not ready to make that strong a claim), they're each a different species of failure; and actually there's something a little exciting about that conceptually. Because when I think "each is a different species of success," my mind goes immediately to relatively under-the-radar successes, many of them coming from Euro- and Scando- dancepop -- Margaret Berger, Rachel Stevens. And for half-and-half success/failure, maybe Marie Serneholt (more than half, but that's only out of a total ~ten tracks). And maybe that places Skye somewhere close in sensibility to the newish teenpop stuff -- Jordan Pruitt, Aly and AJ. They go all over the place with a lot of confidence, and a lot of good songs between them. Skye suggested as much on her first album, and in particular on the B-Sides/one-off tracks that followed it: she's a pop omnivore. But she's just missing something...some sense of grounding. She's aimless, and weirdly her aimlessness results in songs that lose some spark of spontaneity. So you get something like the best song that sounded strangely dated in 2005.

Maybe Amy Diamond's "Stay My Baby" is a good counterpoint -- Max Martin again, working in a mode that's about half Amy and half Max, and the half that's Max goes all the way back to early Britney. So there is a veil of nostalgia over it, or would be if anyone but Amy Diamond was singing it. Amy has a weird way of appropriating just about anything and infusing it with some sorta talent show/child performer prodigy bombast that's usually frowned upon in recent pop stuff (see: all of the fairly timid HSM alum vocals, a timidness not on display in the movies themselves...possible exception in like 10% of Ashley Tisdale songs?). Skye's got a streak of that bombast, too, but it's not as incongruous in the kind of music she does -- it's just a little cleaner and a little sharper than her peers, where there's something outside-the-genre about Amy Diamond's child star voice (a bit like Celine Dion, maybe?).

Funky Sore Patina

Great conversation about a little-discussed love o' mine at Clap Clap (and its lower-rent sister site) about CARTOONS and their relative lack of strength in the media canon. Sure, Looney Tunes and "Rocky and Bullwinkle" and even "Ren and Stimpy" have their place in cultural commentary arsenals, but Mike brings up an important point: "What you see above is an episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and I would challenge anyone to find a show predating it with which it shares any formal qualities."

And you could probably argue similarly for a lot of early art animation (which gets accepted variously into experimental and otherwise "underground" semi-canons) and "Silly Symphonies" and Winsor McCay. And you'd find formal qualities around, but not in a "show," in the same package (obviously McCay's comics and animations share plenty of DNA, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find another film from 1917 that looks anything like this).

(Side note: I read it for the pictures, honest, but Ain't It Cool News had a great run-down of mid-30's animation, lots of Max Fleischer, that blows the early Bosko Looney Tunes out of the water here.)

-------

Anyway, I started thinking about the Looney Tunes Golden Collection, which I got for Christmas, and its relationship to "Ren and Stimpy," the cartoon that probably made the biggest mark on my childhood. John K. was hugely reverent to cartoon history and I was surprised to see so many direct formal similarities between "R&S" and LT. I knew that the baboon episode of "Ren and Stimpy" (one of, if not the, last episode ever directed by John K. before he left the show) amounted to direct pastiche, but I wasn't aware that even the more gruesome episodes -- like "Mad Dog Hoek", which made my physically ill to watch when they showed it on Saturday mornings -- are pretty directly indebted to Looney Tunes (cf. "Bunny Hugged").

I still don't think there's a categorical difference between Looney Tunes and "Ren and Stimpy," but Frank Kogan said this during the conversation:

Well, I hate the term "postmodernism" because (among many other things) it overemphasizes the importance of high modernism and it falsely calls things "post" that have been done before, but nonetheless I do think that stuff like Ren & Stimpy and South Park and the Simpsons and Powerpuff Girls all display a sense of "knowingness" that obvious predecessors (Looney Tunes, Honeymooners, Rocky & Bullwinkle) didn't. I put the scare quotes around "knowingness," since in no way would I say the earlier ones have less self-awareness or are less willing to enlist the viewer in calling attention to and having fun with the cartoon-process itself. But the newer ones all have a patina of what I was metaphorically calling "PBS," by which I don't mean the real PBS but more like "PBS for hipsters," where subversion and knowingness are sore-thumbed and sold, the idea that it's got and is giving an edge on the mainstream. Obv. all those shows sell to lots and lots of people beyond the "PBS"/hipster category (and I can see how Looney Tunes and Rocky & Bullwinkle (as opposed to Hanna Barbara) had aspects that were proto-"PBS" themselves), and I'm not sure how many hipsters even made their way to Powerpuff Girls, but I still perceive the sensibility.

(Back in WMS #2 Christgau perceptively suggested that my use of the term PBS was too broad in the end and what I really meant by "PBS" was "the quote-unquote postmodernist ('pop institutionalized,' as Willis says, although the institutionalization looks pretty ramshackle to me) sensibility of Lower East Side artists" - which in turn I think was too narrow a designation for what I was getting at, but it's not off-point.)

So what wasn't fully evidenced in the earlier cartoons was an appeal to a "hipster PBS" sensibility, since that sensibility wasn't in existence in a big way, yet.

I maintain the aversion to calling this sort of thing "postmodern," too, but I also do wonder whether or not the sense of "sore thumb" (meaning: a sense of extra-demonstrative knowingness -- a wink or a nudge too far, or songs/shows/etc. that in effect say "'look how weird we are, look what we can get away with,' and lose their 'tossed-off' quality") changes depending on its audience. For me, "Ren and Stimpy" always coded as a cartoon as valid as Looney Tunes for children -- part of it admittedly came from my parents not understanding some of what was going on. This was the difference between "The Simpsons" and "Ren and Stimpy" -- my parents could see the themes, the innuendo, the content, right in front of them (my dad was convinced he didn't like "The Simpsons," but every time I'd quote him something from it he'd laugh and ask, "what's that from?" I think he'd enjoy the show a lot if he watched it now).

Anyway, the point is that there was no patina for me, because I had no understanding of the hipster audience whose sensibility (if not butts in the seats as far as audience is concerned) this show might have reflected. And my sense at the time, seeing it occasionally play on MTV, was that the older audience didn't know what to do with it, either. Interesting that "Ren and Stimpy" began debuting on Sunday mornings as part of the original Nicktoons trilogy ("Doug"/"Rugrats"/"Ren and Stimpy") and then started showing new episodes on Saturday nights as part of "SNICK" ("Clarissa Explains It All"/"Roundhouse"/"Ren and Stimpy"/"Are You Afraid of the Dark"). Of course, there was simply a one-week lag between episodes -- the ones that debuted Saturday at 9:30 PM would be on TV again at 11:00AM the next Sunday.

So there was no real attempt to distance Ren and Stimpy from an exclusively kid audience, and my experience as a kid was that there was no wink in an older direction (even if there wasn't anyone to reciprocate the wink -- though John K. had an interesting anecdote in the R&S DVD features about how the characters were taken up as gay icons for their ambiguously homosexual relationship...John K. basically suggested that if this was intentional, it was no more intentional than any other homoerotic cartoon comedy team). For me it was first and foremost a children's show, and it simply didn't make sense to watch it on Saturday night instead of Sunday morning. It was the mainstream.

And just in the past couple hours I've been thinking about Liquid TV and "Beavis and Butthead"'s role in this conversation, since they're pretty obvious forebears to the Adult Swim style that Mike talks more about in his post. I think that Beavis and Butthead could have just as little happen in the course of a music video as Space Ghost could have happen in the course of a 5-minute set. Some of the best videos were the ones that just shut Beavis and Butthead up -- and we basically just enjoyed the video, presumably in the same way they were. There was no more wall between us -- we were equally dumbfounded (or bored).

Anyway, not to bring subjectivity in to things (because if I hear that word one more time I'm going to become a research scientist) but I wonder whether or not one person's sore thumb can be another person's free lunch? Or alternatively whether some thumbs are just sorer than others, and just as lots of things can have "a little PBS," lots of things can also have "mildly sore thumbs." The difference being, I can't imagine a sore thumb that would be better than a thumb that isn't sore -- I can't imagine a sore thumb that preserves (as PBS can preserve)...unless, I guess, we're asking for whom the thing is preserved (people who need to get gouged in the eye with a sore thumb to feel something?). Or maybe, instead of "better," what I'm really saying is "I can't imagine a sore thumb that would be less obvious and winky than a thumb that isn't sore," which would be redundant.

And anyway I guess the real conversation to be had here would be how the work winks and what winking does to do the work. Thing is, I can't think of a counter-example to "Ren and Stimpy" that winked less -- or if I can (sort of), the wink-less (not winkless) example is merely a watered-down version of what made "Ren and Stimpy" great (later "Ren and Stimpy" sans John K., "Rocko's Modern Life," and Mike brought up "Cow and Chicken" -- I might even include something like "Duck Man," even though it had a more cogent narrative; but I would hate for "semi-wink" to just be shorthand for "shows I happen not to like very much," because the semi-wink sensibility is valid and pervasive). There was "Rugrats," which was more of a short narrative in the "Simpsons" vein, but its sensibility was very different from that of "Ren and Stimpy."

Is it possible to have a thumb that isn't sore? Ashlee's new tracks jab me in the eye at every turn, and I'm starting to enjoy the sensation, even though she's never been particularly eye-gouging (just heart-rending and gut-ripping) in the past. I guess that's kind of what Mike is asking in the first place: Why do some TV critics need to get poked in the eye all the time to feel something? And why don't more people talk about "Roseanne," anyway?

Things I Learned This Weekend!

After a quick rush to bust one, Professor Robyn scores cool points with star pupil Leapy Lee. Er, Lykke Li.

1. Make sure the battery is right side 'round in your microphone BEFORE you start filming something that can't be re-shot. Wooooops.

2. Random iTunes thought of the day: I kind of like a Kate Nash song! "Skeleton Song." Well, I liked "Pumpkin Soup," too. But this one really codes Gnash. Oh lord, her lyrics are D-U-M. And this seems to end with her just bashing around in the lower register of the piano. Which makes it...PRACTICE ROOM POP!

3. Lykke Li is Lovely. In small doses. Video for "I'm Good I'm Gone" is nice, favorite track of hers at the moment is bossa nova-ish "Little Bit," in which her kinda shoddy vocals are subdued by the production.

4. Holy crap, I should probably see the Hannah Montana movie in its one-week, record-shattering engagement. And the blog about it.

5. Mary J. Blige's new album didn't do much for me.

6. Random iTunes thought of the day x2: Lex - You Came is total cheeze-house BLISS. Thanks to the Poptimist who shared it a while ago, just got around to hearing it for the first time.

7. OMG MP3 BLOG FLASHBACK!!!!!

Lex - You Came
Lykke Li - Little Bit
Snoop Dogg f. Robyn - Sexual Eruption (remix)