Song of the Day: Skee-Lo, "I Wish"

Skee-Lo will forever go down in history as a one-hit wonder, but his hit made a hell of an impact in the summer of 1995. Aided by a cheeky heavy-rotation video, "I Wish" was a breezy belt of hip-hop heaven delivered at the height of the East Coast/West Coast rap war. Though the gangsta paradise of Tupac and the Death Row crew was still relatively new, the pendulum had already swung a bit in the other direction, yielding the road to a brief period where summertime jams were the norm: Coolio's "Fantastic Voyage," Naughty By Nature's "Feel Me Flow," even Hammer's "Pumps and a Bump" provided a counterpoint to the dominant sounds of the era. 

"I Wish" is a total jam, though Skee-Lo's series of requests have always struck me as off-kilter and often hilariously modest. Let's break them down. 

I wish I was a little bit taller. This is a pretty lame request, though Skee does go above and beyond in the first verse. According to the Internet hive mind, Skee stood about five foot eight, and in my mind "a little bit taller" would translate to about six feet or so. That would be a huge increase for him, and certainly open up his opportunities on the basketball court. But then Skee demands that he were "six foot nine," which really elevates the scope of his hope. That's over a foot taller! While it certainly would put him in an elite streetball league, he would also undoubtedly have a hard time adjusting to his new elevation. His center of gravity would be all thrown off. 

I wish I was a baller. If Skee means "baller" in the sense of "a guy who generally lives large," then that's a pretty decent request. But considering how much he fetishizes the ability to play hoops in this song, I think he just means, "I wish I had more talent within the confines of the triangle offense." 

I wish I had a girl who looked good. Who wouldn't want this? But again, his goals are pretty modest—he doesn't want a model or anything, he just wants a non-ugly companion. 

I wish I had a rabbit in a hat with a bat and six four Impala. There's a lot to unpack here. First, there's a whole contingent of people who contribute to terrible lyrics archive Genius who apparently believe that there's some sort of complicated slang running through this line, and that "a rabbit in a hat with a bat" is a reference to either a car or a loose woman. But considering how on-the-nose most of Skee's raps are, we can only assume that he want's an armed magician's pet. That's a super silly demand, but I sort of admire it. Meanwhile, the 1964 Chevrolet Impala is indeed a classic, but considering the '64 was still part of the Impala's problematic third generation, he'd probably have a lot less trouble with maintenance if he sought out a '66. 

I wish I had my way. This is the key wish! It's a yearning for universal control over every aspect of your life. It's the only one that is buried in a verse (and the third one at that). However, Skee-Lo doesn't have a very ambitious set of goals for his sudden omnipotence—he merely declares that every day would be Friday, there are no more speed limits, and he would be allowed to name one of his children after Spike Lee's character in Do The Right Thing. 

Song of the Day: Oasis, "Underneath the Sky"

When I am by myself, I am most comfortable wearing headphones. Even when I'm home, where there are a multitude of listening options, I tend to want to throw on the cans and let them sit there. When I lived in New York, I put headphones on when I left work and did not take them off until I arrived by at my apartment, and I rarely ran an errand or went for a walk without them as well. Here in Los Angeles, I put them on when I park my car and don't take them off until I get into the studio.

It probably seems anti-social (and there's probably a part of it that is), but it's mostly about my own personal comfort. I've been like this for a long time—in fact, before I shared a bed with somebody, I would fall asleep wearing headphones most nights, dating back to when I was 12 or so. In the beginning, it was more about cramming in as much listening to my albums as I could over the course of a day; when I got a new CD, it was mostly about getting to know that piece of work from front to back. Later, in my post-college years, I would fall asleep at night listening to stand-up albums, which I guess I found comforting—after all, if I could hear someone else talking, how could I be alone? 

I still spend most of my day wearing headphones, and now do a job that basically requires them. I no longer sleep with them, which I consider a victory, but back when I couldn't sleep without them, one of my go-to sleep albums was a compilation of Oasis b-sides that was one of my prized possessions circa '96 or so. In that era, there was a certain type of music store that dealt in bootlegs—typically live captures of concerts or homemade rarities compilations. Some came from (mostly foreign) indie labels, but looking back a lot of them seemed to be the results of a dude getting his hands on a CD burner.

There were a couple of stores that I could rely on for these types of releases, and I relished finding them. Some of my favorite recordings in history came from these not-quite-legal releases. I had a Pearl Jam live compilation that featured a lot of acoustic rarities, the entirety of Nine Inch Nails' Woodstock '94 performance, and a Foo Fighters live disc from their first world tour that also tacked on some of Dave Grohl's Pocketwatch demo and some in-progress versions of songs that ended up appearing on The Colour and the Shape (and a live cover of Angry Samoans' "Gas Chamber," which Grohl introduced as "one all you boys can bang around to," which remains a favorite phrase of mine). Some releases in the bootleg world took on a life of their own and are kinda-sorta considered canon in the discographies of some bands, like the Outcesticide series of Nirvana bootlegs that surfaced in the wake of Kurt Cobain's death. (Some research reveals that the Foos disc I had was called Fighting the "N" Factor and remains an oft-passed-around piece of ephemera for Grohl completists, particularly because it adds high-quality versions of some Nirvana SNL rehearsals.) These types of releases are pointless now, but in the time before Napster and iTunes and Spotify and YouTube, the only way to bring together rare tracks from your favorite bands was to either purchase a bunch of expensive CD singles or find a taper to trade with on a creepy message board or parking lot. 

My favorite of these releases was a group of Oasis b-sides from the Definitely Maybe and (What's the Story) Morning Glory? era (and if my memory serves me correctly, there was also one recording from Oasis' entry of MTV Unplugged, which featured Noel on lead vocals). I really loved Morning Glory, and after hearing this group of tracks I came to a conclusion: Noel Gallagher must be the greatest songwriter in the world, because the songs he threw away were better than most anything else on the radio. 

A bunch of these songs ended up getting released on the compilation The Masterplan in 1998, but I was pretty proud of the fact that by the time most of the world heard them, I was already intimate with their little details (the cough at the beginning of "Talk Tonight," the weird inconsistencies in the echo of "Rockin' Chair"). It always seemed like most of the tracks on The Masterplan were put there as-was, but I'm convinced that the version of "Underneath the Sky" I had was slightly different than the version that ended up officially released. I like that it sounds a little muddy while still shimmering, and the falsetto on the chorus often helped me drift off to sleep. 

Song of the Day: Snoop Dogg feat. Mia X, Fiend, C-Murder, Silkk the Shocker, Mystikal & Goldie Loc, "Ghetto Symphony"

Snoop Dogg's discography is completely insane. Doggystyle is one of the most incredible debuts of all time, featuring a fully-formed MC rapping over some of Dr. Dre's most dynamic beats. (The fact that they were both at the peak of their powers in 1993 remains one of the more powerful minor miracles in music history.) Then he got embroiled in a legal battle, had a complicated extraction from Death Row Records, and eventually settled into a multi-faceted role of hip-hop ambassador that simultaneously involves a Woody Allen-esque schedule of releasing music and co-hosting a cooking show with Martha Stewart. 

What's most impressive is that after the crossover success of Doggystyle (both "What's My Name?" and "Gin and Juice" were Hot 100 top 10s), Snoop essentially vanished from the pop mainstream for the better part of a decade (he re-emerged with the Pharrell-assisted one-two punch of "Beautiful" and "Drop It Like It's Hot"). During that in-between time, he was given a post-Death Row boost by Master P's No Limit Records, for whom he released a trio of albums at the turn of the century. They're all of reasonable-enough quality, though the best one is the middle entry, 1999's No Limit Top Dogg. 

At the time, No Limit was a huge commercial and critical force in rap music. Lead star and central impresario Master P graduated from selling burned CDs out of his trunk to moving nearly a half million first week copies of the double album MP Da Last Don. At the time, Snoop's fluid, refined style seemed like it would not blend well with the minimalist trunk-thumping undercarriage provided by P's Beats by the Pound crew. It didn't always work, but No Limit Top Dogg has two things going for him. First, there are a handful of outside producers that contribute (including a returning Dr. Dre and old West Coast cohort DJ Quik), which makes it feel like a more dynamic record. The other thing that works remarkably well is that just about all the other rappers on the album (and there are a ton of guest spots) are operating at their peak and have finally figured out how to gel with Snoop's style. There's no greater example of that than on "Ghetto Symphony," which transposes the same sample of Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle" that Marley Marl used on "The Symphony" back in 1988. (Remarkably, that same sample has been used a bunch of times by a number of different hip-hop acts, including the Diplomats, 2 Live Crew, Everlast, GZA and Big Daddy Kane.) Everybody is on point here, particularly a not-yet-famous Mystikal (he was a little over a year away from "Shake Ya Ass") and a remarkably sharp Mia X (who on balance was probably the best pure rapper in the No Limit crew). It's a banger of a posse cut, and it lets Snoop be both playfully nimble and a tough roughneck simultaneously. It's the best version of Snoop, and my favorite. 

Song of the Day: Invincible, "No Compromises"

In 2002, Spin published an article called "Not Bad For a White Girl" that was about the then-current quest within the music industry to discover and promote a white female rapper. Eminem was in the midst of his initial rise, buoyed not only by multi-platinum sales but also plenty of Grammy love (he was just coming off losing Album of the Year to Steely Dan). Marshall Mathers' rare combination of raw skill and head-turning novelty was too much to pass up, and the Spin story tracks a bunch of producers, executives, managers and wannabes trying to find (as one subject indelicately puts it) "the Britney of rap." 

As the story points out, not only has the hip-hop world been hostile to white women, but it has in general been twitchy about women at all. Back in '02, the most notable female MCs at the time were Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliott and Eve, all of whom had scored the rare combination of commercial success and critical respect (though ironically none of those women has recorded very much since then). Lil Kim and Foxy Brown were already on the downswing of their brief pop window, and Salt-N-Pepa and Da Brat were already considered nostalgia acts even though neither was all that far removed from their commercial peak. Fifteen years later, the landscape doesn't look all that different. Nicki Minaj has certainly carved out a place for herself, but she has made plenty of moves that seem like she's not that interested in rap (and is currently being dunked on by a just-out-jail Remy Ma). After Minaj, who is the second-biggest MC with two Y chromosomes? Is it MIA, who only sort of raps and works very much outside the hip-hop universe? Is it Twitter novelty act Azealia Banks? By attrition, it might actually by Iggy Azalea, a woman I've always found talented but seems destined to be relegated to one-hit wonder status. There are plenty of extremely talented women working the mixtape circuit like Rapsody and Angel Haze, but the mainstream remains relatively bereft of the fairer sex. 

The Spin piece highlights a handful of potential Feminems, but pretty much all of them outside of the already-established Princess Superstar became nothing at all. One of the rare exceptions is Invincible, a Detroit-based rhymer who was spoken about glowingly in the article but ironically declined to be interviewed for it. She still raps and functions as a local activist in Motown, and her 2008 album Shapeshifters is a pretty dope slathering of beats and rhymes. I'm a fan of the slightly jazzy aural assault "No Compromises."

Song of the Day: Mighty Joe Plum, "Live Through This (Fifteen Stories)"

I've been going through Apple Music and putting together some playlists from various mid '90s summers to try to re-capture the thrill of modern rock radio in that era (it's partially for a writing project idea and partially just to make me feel good). In going through a bunch of old archived issues of Billboard to check out old rock charts, I have run into two problems. First, there are a ton of major label alt-rock also rans whose music is missing from the major streaming services (another reason I value my burdensome collection of compact discs); and second, even though I consider myself an academic-level expert on the radio hits of that era, there are still a ton of songs and artists who had relatively long chart lives but I have no awareness of at all. 

Here's a great case in point: In the summer and fall of 1997, a band called Mighty Joe Plum got a ton of spins of a tune called "Live Through This (15 Stories)." It arrived about six years too late for the grunge revolution but still retains all the hallmarks of your average Skinyard record: Classic rock-leaning riff, angsty vocal, slightly delirious lyrics and a hook just sweet enough to make the medicine taste good. They emerged from the same central Florida swamp that produced butt rock heroes Creed, and the marks of what passes for a scene dot both bands. Mighty Joe Plum didn't last past their 1996 full-length debut The Happiest Dogs, but they were the only band bold enough in '97 to ask the question, "What if I were sticky enough to walk the ceiling?"

Song of the Day: The Oooh Baby Gimme Mores, "Beat Up Kidz"

The South By Southwest festival is underway in Austin, Texas. I am not there, and there's a small part of me that wishes I was. Austin is obviously a cool town, with a ton of great food and one of my favorite record stores in the country. I've been in the business long enough and work for high-profile-enough outlets to justify getting into just about any show I like. My last few trips to SXSW were more or less positive. But it's also an exhausting couple of days that are spent almost exclusively by myself. Even among the countless shows and detours along the way, it makes for long, lonely, and sometimes boring days. My memories of SXSW always juxtapose the amazing performances I've seen (an intimate performance by Bruce Springsteen here, a rooftop jam by Soundgarden there, barn-burning shredding care of Courtney Barnett on the other side of town) with the burden of having to kill time between obligations and walking around with no specific purpose. Like a lot of media-centric events of its type, SXSW is the type of thing that I always looked forward to, then hated it while I was there, but was then glad to have gone. 

That's a common cycle of events for me, by the way. With most anything I do professionally, there's a real longing to be a part of a thing that is followed by crippling anxiety (and the hope that the thing will be canceled altogether). I have a hard time experiencing those things in real time, as I'm merely focused on getting to the other side of the event. Ultimately, I end up looking back on those festivals and events with a relatively positive light, even as I remember cursing it and declaring "Never again!" in the moment. 

Over the years, SXSW has grown from an indie rock proving ground to an overly-commercialized branding bonanza, though it's still possible to make musical discoveries in a way that would otherwise be impossible outside of the context of a huge industry event. When I was full time at EW, my personal mandate was split between the artists I was obligated to see (typically the big artists playing small venues, like when Lady Gaga performed a few years back), bands I had heard but was curious to see live (this tended to be metal acts or rappers), and straight-up wander-in-off-the-street discoveries. There were a few visits to SXSW where I would simply pick a band based on its name and check them out, or I would try to find the oddest thematic showcase and give those groups a try. 

The latter two philosophies once led me to a relatively small bar in Austin to see a bunch of artists presented by the Canadian consulate. I was mostly curious about hardcore punk band Single Mothers, whose album Negative Qualities I had already heard and enjoyed. But I was also intrigued by a group called the Oooh Baby Gimme Mores. That evening did not have a promising start, as I arrived to find out that Single Mothers had run into some transportation trouble and would be missing the show, and the singer-songwriter who was on stage when I entered interrupted one of his songs to walk out onto the street and vomit (which was an apt metaphor for his set). Luckily, the Oooh Baby Gimme Mores (or OBGMs) made up for all that unpleasantness with a bananas set. They're a combo from Canada who traffic in jittery garage punk but also drop in the spirit of Parliament funk and organic hardcore club thump. Combined with its trippy video, "Beat Up Kidz" is an excellent example of what the band does best, but it should not be understated how unbearably charismatic frontman Densil McFarlane was that night. He worked a modest crowd into a funky froth and made the room feel 14 times bigger than it was. He was awesome. It's a performance that has stuck with me years after I saw it. 

If the Internet is to be believed, they've been sort of quiet for a while, but hopefully that means new music and a fresh tour are on the horizon. I'll be there, because they were there for me. 

Song of the Day: Rufus Wainwright, "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk"

In researching Morphine yesterday, I ran across another DreamWorks Records signing. I had completely forgotten about Rufus Wainwright, whose first two albums were in constant rotation during my musical theater years. It made perfect sense: Wainwright clearly had a penchant for the stage even before he made a bunch of faux-opera albums (which I'm less into). But Poses, his second album that arrived in the summer of 2001, was a gem, packed with pop-folk balladry and cheeky lounge moves.

I instantly loved Poses and was particularly enamored of its leadoff track "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk." It was pretty and funny and dark and sweet, and it was also fundamentally a New York album—an aspect that became even more pronounced in the wake of 9/11. When I first heard it, the lyric "I'm drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue" merely felt like a decadent expression of wasted youth. Later, it became almost an act of defiance. I'm mildly embarrassed how often I was drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue. The follies of youth. 

Song of the Day: Morphine, "The Night"

For years, few things made me uncomfortable and anxious like the impending specter of my birthday. It doesn't have anything to do with aging—I fully embrace the passage of time— so it's difficult to pinpoint exactly where this fear came from, though I do have a handful of birthday-related traumas that almost certainly contributed to it. Some time in high school, I once threw a party that nobody came to (it wasn't for my birthday, but something like that is bound to put you off gatherings for a while). I once took my birthday off to go watch basketball, and during the game I got a frantic series of phone calls from my boss so she could yell at me about something. And the one time I had a surprise party thrown in my honor, I could tell that fully three-quarters of the people in attendance were not into it at all. 

That last one might be the nut of this whole mild disorder: I do not like the idea that people are somehow obligated to do anything just because I didn't die in the past 12 months. I've gone to plenty of birthday parties that I was not that into attending. I hated that feeling, and I wanted to be able to absolve everybody—particularly my closest friends and loved ones!—from it. 

But because she's awesome, my wife has gently brought me back to the world of birthdays. This year I still got a little wound up in the walk-up to the actual day, but I was able to enjoy myself once it finally arrived. She took me out to dinner. She made me a pie. She threw me a party where we played board games. She's the best. 

She also bought me a cool Sonos digital speaker system, and the song above is currently playing on it. Morphine is one of the weirder bands to get signed to a major label during the alternative music gold rush of the '90s. Hailing from the Boston area, Morphine was fronted by an aptly-named dude named Mark Sandman, who played a slide bass and crooned in an espresso-rich baritone. He was backed by a drummer and a sax player, and their weird hybrid of lounge jazz, Memphis soul, Delta blues, and dirgey post-rock earned them a cultish following during rock radio's most bizarre and unpredictable era. Their song was described as "low rock," and it had a certain after-hours quality to it, as though the songs could only be taken in during booze-addled post-coital embraces or in the only bars where you can still smoke. 

Morphine's final album The Night was nearly complete when Sandman passed away in July of 1999. He was performing on stage in Italy when he had a heart attack, and since he led an aggressively secret life, it's unclear whether or not he had any health problems leading up to his passing. (His interviews were legendarily obtuse.) The rest of the band tied up the loose ends on the album and released it in February 2000 before quietly disbanding. The Night was not made by a guy who knew he was going to die (like Leonard Cohen's You Want It Darker or David Bowie's Blackstar), but it does retroactively feel that way. Death always haunted Sandman's songs, and even when he wasn't explicit about mortality in the lyrics, his group still churned out a sound that even at its most playful would be considered funereal. The title track of The Night lives in that uncanny valley between haunting and sexy—like the best Afghan Whigs songs, it sounds simultaneously seductive and depressing. I love it. 

The Night is something of a missing album—it's still available for purchase on CD from Amazon (in fact, you can get the entire Morphine discography for under 30 bucks), but it does not exist digitally. The reasons are probably more complicated than this, but I imagine that's because The Night was released on DreamWorks Records (their previous albums had arrived via then-indie RykoDisc) and the distribution rights are either lost or ignored by whoever currently owns that catalog. It's likely the latter. I can't imagine there's a ton of demand for the final album by a band like Morphine. But the lesson here is that you should save your CDs. 

Song of the Day: Four Star Mary, "Pain (Slayer Mix)"

On this day in 1997, the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on the WB. The pitch for this show was impossible: Based on the original script for a mostly forgotten movie from 1992 starring Kristy Swanson, Donald Sutherland (!) and Luke Perry, it showed up on a barely-there network (the WB has only just launched two years prior, and its only moderate hit at the time of Buffy's premiere was 7th Heaven) and didn't do a blow away ratings number. But it did draw in a healthy teen audience and quickly became a topic of conversation about young TV watchers on the still-nascent but growing Internet (I remember seeing Buffy-related chat rooms pop up on AOL in the late '90s). 

I came to Buffy way too late. I think the only episode I saw when the show was actually airing was the musical episode in season six, but I ended up watching the entire series on DVD shortly after it wrapped up (I'm pretty sure that was the first show I properly binged). I can't figure out why I wasn't a regular Buffy watcher during its peak, as I watched a ton of other WB programming (particularly Dawson's Creek) and would have been itching for a proper genre show at the time. Plus, Buffy had awesome music, full of the edgier versions of the sorta-alt tunes being ground out on Dawson's. Both of the official soundtracks from the show are great, but the first one is all killer no filler. Four Star Mary were known better as Dingoes Ate My Baby, the band that Oz played guitar in during the high school seasons. They're not the strongest combo in the universe, but "Pain" is a pretty great version of a terrible post-grunge song you write when you're in high school. 

Song of the Day: The Notorious B.I.G., "Somebody's Gotta Die"

The thing that strikes me most about the death of Biggie Smalls (which occurred on this day a full 20 years ago) is how depressingly mundane it felt at the time. I had only recently embraced hip-hop beyond what the radio had deemed acceptable—a BMG Music Club purchase of the debut album by Wu-Tang Clan had shown me that there was far more to rap music than one-hit wonders like Tag Team or Snoog Dogg's filthy playground rhymes. I had mixed feelings about Biggie's forthcoming Life After Death. Thanks to a steady diet of Spin, I was comfortable with the idea that the man born Christopher Wallace was one of the finest MCs working, and that his debut album Ready to Die stood in the pantheon of top-tier rap records (and alongside Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction, it's probably the best debut album in history). But I also had quickly grown weary of the dude who often stood next to Biggie, an obnoxious little twerp named Sean "Puffy" Combs who operated as label chief, hype man, and producer. I loved the way Big was able to construct narratives—I can still recall every story beat of "Warning" because it is such a compellingly constructed story, a remarkable feat for a song with no chorus—and the first single from Life After Death, "Hypnotize," was all bitches and bling. (The accompanying speedboat-based video did not help matters.) Combs seemed to be a guy who took compelling rappers and buffed out their edges for the sake of dance tracks, all the while mumbling stuff in the background. 

Despite my reservations, I was excited for Life After Death—so excited, in fact, that I had pre-ordered the album at my local Coconuts. The demand for the two-disc collection was theoretically going to be so high that stores were encouraging people to reserve a copy in advance of its arrival. I remember that a big part of the walk-up to Life After Death was the idea that the audience was so thirsty for it that supply might not be able to keep up with demand. Looking back, that just seems like a marketing trick, though ironically the demand for Life After Death did skyrocket in the weeks leading up to its release because Biggie was shot and killed two weeks before. 

I can't remember if I found out about it via MTV (Kurt Loder tended to be the guy who let me know when one of my favorite musicians had passed), or if I discovered it in the newspaper a day or two later (I definitely know that's how I discovered that Shannon Hoon had died), though I'm leaning towards the latter. It was a drag for a number of reasons, but retroactively I remember thinking that this is just what happened to good rappers. Tupac had been murdered less than a year prior, and as somebody who was relatively new to the rap world, I just sort of assumed this is what went on in that universe: Rappers got shot like rockers overdosed on heroin. It was mildly racist of me to assume that, but it's vexing to me now how quickly I accepted what was obviously a fucked up new reality. 

Life After Death did end up selling a ton of copies, moving 690,000 units in its first official week of release (though so many stores ended up selling it early that it actually charted the week prior, making its leap from 176 to 1 the greatest single week gap-closer in Billboard history). It was reviewed relatively well, though like a lot of double albums, there are only enough great songs on it for a single disc. The singles from Life After Death tend to be sort of a drag, full of glossy nonsense and obvious samples (as was Combs' custom at the time), but the crime narrative stuff on that album still paints a hell of a picture (though they are even more impossibly bleak than they were on Ready to Die). "Kick in the Door," "Long Kiss Goodnight," and the above album opener "Somebody's Gotta Die" all illuminated Biggie's incredible ability to turn narrative phrases and wrap cinematic details around minimalist grime. I still miss him. 

Song of the Day: Stabbing Westward, "Shame"

My memory worries me. I'm not so much concerned with the volume of what I am able to remember, as I still hold a pretty good grasp on everything that is necessary (I'm even getting better at remembering names and faces, which has always been a problem). No, I'm more bothered by the quality of what is left in my memory. 

It's not the memories themselves, but rather the emotional charge attached to them. There's no shortage of joy or exhilaration lurking in my grey matter, but I find that the stuff that hits the hardest—and the stuff that surfaces for no good reason on an otherwise pleasant day—are the moments in my life of which I am ashamed. 

As somebody who wanted to spend his life on stage and has always had a complicated relationship with the metaphorical spotlight, I have lived portions of my life with a particularly blunt approach. I always believed that since my intentions were relatively pure that I could not be held accountable for certain actions, and that any interpretation to the contrary was merely a case of miscommunication. Of course, I now know that people can only be judged on their words and actions, and looking back on how I conducted myself in the past—to friends, to family, to complete strangers—dredges up an incredible amount of guilt. (Honestly, it's a wonder I did not spend every day from ages 15 to 24 getting constantly punched in the face.) 

So while it's certainly healthy to be reevaluating those circumstances and to recognize the error of my ways, I do wish that I had a bit more control over the sting that those recollections can create. Here's a small example: When I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, I went to a neighbor's birthday party. He had it at one of those indoor play emporiums, a giant warehouse-sized space that housed an arcade, a basketball court, a bouncy castle, and one of those jousting set-ups like they had on American Gladiators. (Looking back as an adult, it's insane that this place even existed, that parents let their kids go there, and that it was able to get any form of insurance.) Anyway, there must have been eight kids at the party, plus the birthday boy's little brother. When the time came to play basketball, we broke up into two teams of eight, and then tacked the little brother onto one team (because how much could he really contribute anyway?). But a few minutes into the game, something in my poisoned little brain decided that these current stakes were unacceptable, and I asked the little brother directly, "Hey kid, do you have to play?" 

I don't need to tell that that this fucking destroyed this kid, and he ran off the court crying. I have no recollection of what happened next. Did I apologize? Did we just go back to playing? Did the game break up? It's a blank. But I remember the moment when that kid looked at me and his eyes expressed very clearly that I had torn something apart for him. This happened over two decades ago, before I had hair on my balls or a sense of how the world worked, and yet I sometimes randomly recall that very moment and it makes me feel exceptionally shitty. 

So I'm actively trying to take my own brain back. I should be able to deal with the emotional fallout of that moment (particularly considering I should have dealt with it years ago, as is the case of most of these incidents), and then compartmentalize it and let it be. It should not be the sore on the inside of my mouth that I can't help but rub with my tongue. It should be expunged, and yet there it lingers. 

Some songs are like that, too. Since we're talking about shame, why not consider "Shame" by Chicago post-grunge industrial combo Stabbing Westward. This is a terrible song, and yet I still recall every lyric and moment in it. How is it that I could still karaoke this bullshit and yet still need the words on the screen for songs I love? 

Here are some thoughts about Stabbing Westward, in no particular order. 

• I first became aware of them when I caught a late night screening of the video for "What Do I Have To Do" on MTV. It was exactly the type of catchy self-loathing that I reacted to in 1996. That song, as well as "Shame," came from their second album Wither Blister Burn + Peel, which I thought was an impossibly cool title but now I see it as trying to hard. 
• Stabbing Westward was the favorite band of a dude I knew named Colin, who was one of my freshman roommates at NYU. He was a fucking idiot, primarily because his favorite things were all insane in comparison to stuff he considered his second favorite. Case in point: His favorite movie of all time was Bride of Chucky, and his second favorite was The Godfather Part II. His second favorite band? Led Zeppelin. 
• That guy's hair in the "Shame" video is just fucking goofy as hell. 
• I thought for a long time that the lyric "How can I exist without you?" was "How can I have sex without you?" I was dumb. 
• I thought for a long time that I had seen Stabbing Westward perform live at a radio festival in 1996, but it turns out the actual memory I have is the crowd at said festival going fucking bananas and singing along to "Shame" while it was played over the PA in between sets by Poe and Goldfinger. 

Anyway, TL,DR: My brain is broken and I still know all the words. 

Song of the Day: Blind Melon, "St. Andrew's Fall"

In the summer of 1996, I was 14 years old and had just completed my run in middle school, with high school on the horizon. I couldn't get a job in a record store like I wanted because I was too young, but I was allowed to do farm work to pick up some extra scratch (mostly so I could buy CDs and passively save for a car). So I went to work for a guy my dad knew who ran a vegetable farm and greenhouse in town. In the early part of the season, I was in charge of knocking out weeds, and as the crops came in my job became handling the picking of various squashes, cucumbers, and tomatoes.

I got paid a ridiculous sum of money to do this (I can't remember my hourly rate, but it was unnecessarily ample) but there was a catch: Because of the nature of the plants and the savagery of the Connecticut summer, I had to do the bulk of my work exceptionally early in the morning. If I remember correctly, I would get up at 4:30 to be in the field by 5 and theoretically wrapped by 7 or 8. It only ended up being a few hours, but those hours ran fast and furious, and I was filthy and exhausted at the end of every day (and this was a job I went to seven days a week). 

That sounds like a terrible way to spend one of the last truly free summer vacations in one's life, but it was simultaneously the best and worst job I ever had. It was physically draining and the hours were nuts, sure, but I also was making a bunch of cash and still had the bulk of my days free to do whatever I liked. Also, because I worked on my own in the outdoors, I spent the entirety of every shift listening to music on an old beat-up walkman that I'm pretty sure my dad pulled out of a school lost-and-found. I tended to listen to the radio, always tuned into the morning show on my local modern rock radio station, where I was treated to heavy rotation tracks like Primitive Radio Gods' "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand," Nada Surf's "Popular," the Refreshments' "Banditos," Dishwalla's "Counting Blue Cars," Sponge's "Wax Ecstatic," Goldfinger's "Here In Your Bedroom" and Superdrag's "Sucked Out." (As you can see from that playlist, it was a great time in rock radio because nobody knew what to do with anything.)

But I also had raided a local record store that was closing and picked up a handful of albums on cassette for a buck or so a piece. One of those albums was Blind Melon's Soup, the second record from the band who brought us "No Rain." I always hated "No Rain" (and the cloying video with the Bee Girl that made it an MTV hit), and never actually got around to listening to Blind Melon's self-titled debut until a few years ago. (It is garbage.) But I remembered enjoying the video for "Galaxie," the first single from Soup that I must have caught during one of the few times it actually aired on MTV. I remembered liking the song, but in that era there was no real way to access music like that without actually purchasing the record, particularly in the case of an album that was dismissed when it first arrived (which precluded its presence on listening stations). 

But for a dollar, I figured I could at least find out if I still liked "Galaxie." (I did.) I also found that Soup, released only a few months before frontman Shannon Hoon died, was a classic sophomore slump album that found a band trying to reconfigure its identity after it had a taste of fame. While Blind Melon's debut is a parade of hippy-dippy faux-jam nonsense, Soup is super weird. "Galaxie" is a chugging bit of space rock, "Toes Across the Floor" is something of a blues prog tune, "Car Seat (God's Presents)" is freak folk, and "Skinned" is a book number from a parallel universe musical about Ed Gein. There's no real central thread, which is probably why people disposed of it, but I think that's it's greatest asset. No matter how many times I listened to it front-to-back on my dusty walkman, I still found something new. 

My favorite song from Soup is "St. Andrew's Fall," a song that begins as a Stonesy strut but soon spirals into a breakdown and gives way to a psychedelic bit of melancholy. I'm devastated to find that I cannot for the life of me remember why it meant so much to me, but I was particularly obsessed with one of Hoon's slightly trippy lyrics that shows up after the breakdown. I still remember the whole thing by heart: "And I can't tell you how many ways that I sat and viewed my life today/ And I can tell you I don't think that I'll find an easy way/ So if I see you walking hand in hand in hand with a three-armed man/ You know I'll understand/ But you should've been in my shoes yesterday." I don't know what the hell that means, but it retains some mystery for me. 

The Best & Worst Movies of 2016

I couldn't narrow it down to just ten. I saw more movies than ever in 2016, and even though there were plenty of stinkers (I had a harder time keeping my worst-of list to five), I kept having spectacular experiences at the cinema. Part of that owes to my new surroundings: In my first year in Los Angeles, I had access to a ton of wonderful movie theaters and LACMA's Film Club. Those venues obviously don't have any effect on the content of the films, but they do make the process of going to a movie theater a much more pleasurable one. (Plus you can drink in a lot of theaters out here, another boon for the system.)

So here are my favorites. I don't believe there were any major releases that I felt like I missed out on, though as of the time of this writing, I have a screener of The Edge of Seventeen that I have yet to watch and never did get around to checking out Passengers (hey, maybe it's good!). But after narrowing my list of 106 down to an exceptional 29, I settled on 13 movies that I genuinely loved in the last calendar year. 

13. Darling
A remarkably creepy no-budget mood piece, Darling acts as both an homage to the great real estate horrors of the past (most notably Roman Polanski's apartment trilogy) and as a continuation of those ideas brought into the modern world. Lauren Ashley Carter plays a caretaker charged with watching a old Manhattan townhouse that may be consumed by evil spirits (or maybe she just needs some fresh air). In the annals of Terrifying Movies About A Woman Walking Around a House, it's right up there with House of the Devil. 

12. Oasis: Supersonic
Obviously every piece of music in this rock doc, which tracks Oasis' run from unknown bar band to one of the biggest bands on the planet, is a total jam (and as it only incorporates the years that produced Definitely Maybe and (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, there's nary a dud in the bunch). The footage that makes up Supersonic, particularly the stuff from the group's pre-fame days, is both remarkable (you really do get a sense of where Liam and Noel's rivalry begins) and expected (obviously dudes with egos their size would be rolling cameras with the expectation that some day somebody would need it for a big time retrospective). But the thing that really makes Supersonic stand out is the way it captures the spirit with which people used to consume music. Sure, Oasis kept themselves on the tabloid pages with drug and sex exploits, but the only reason why anybody thirsted for more of these monobrows is because they cranked out anthems that could make you feel infinite. The idea that so many different types of people could come together and feel the same way about a rock band sometimes makes Oasis: Supersonic feel like a work of historical science fiction. 

11. Hell Or High Water
People treated this like a Western, and I guess it is considering the amount of dust and facial hair contained within. But Hell or High Water is also a heist movie, a meditation on the decaying economy of rural America, a pretty clear-eyed look at everyday conversations about race, and a heartbreaking portrait of brotherhood (both literal and figurative). Jeff Bridges and Ben Foster have the showier roles, but Chris Pine gives the performance of his life in the quieter part—in just about every scene, his eyes do more heavy lifting than Denzel Washington's histrionic speeches in Fences. The shootout is pretty incredible, but that potboiler of a showdown between Pine and Bridges that wraps up the film is unforgettable. 

10. Hail, Caesar!
Like most Coen comedies, nobody knew what to do with this when it arrived, but it's undoubtedly going to be remembered alongside The Big Lebowski and Burn After Reading as unsung masterpieces. It would have made this list based on the Channing Tatum section alone, but the rest of the film—from its Old Hollywood set pieces to the elocution exchanges between Alden Ehrenreich and Ralph Fiennes—is just as buoyant and joyous. 

9. Arrival
It is deeply possible that context is casting an interesting shadow on my reaction to this one: My wife and I went to a screening of Arrival the day after the election, and we mostly went to get away from the sense of dread that still hangs over everything (and got more intense on January 20). So maybe it was the hopelessness talking, but I adored this movie. It's about communication and cultural identity and, fundamentally, about the power of language. I liked it more when it was just a mood piece for the first hour (once that Renner narration—and thus the plot—kicks in, it becomes slightly less magical), but the revelations at the end pack an emotional punch that was both devastating and strangely hopeful. 

8. American Honey
I love Andrea Arnold's other movies (Fish Tank is a stunning character piece, and her Wuthering Heights actually took a text I hate and turned it into a compelling drama), but this is her greatest achievement. It's a true ensemble piece, held up by a raw and charismatic newcomer (Sasha Lane) and a dude I didn't think I would ever be able to care about again (Shia LaBeouf). It's gorgeous and sprawling and almost nothing happens, which makes it a perfect movie for me. But it also really understands the relationship between youth and pop music—the kids in the movie really seem to be fueled by the fantasies cast by Rihanna, Lil Wayne, Rae Sremmurd and the like, and as somebody who has mostly taken a dry, academic approach to the relative merits of those artists and songs, it was fascinating to see a group of people from a different part of the world react and relate on a more visceral level. 

7. Christine
The story of Christine Chubbuck is fundamentally dark (she shot herself on live TV; she died 14 hours later), and it could have been very easy to make this into a sensationalistic bit of opera (as much as I loved The People Vs. OJ Simpson, there's a Ryan Murphy-produced version of this movie that is super gross). But Christine is remarkable in its portrayal of Chubbuck as a three-dimensional human and not just a sensationalistic historical footnote. Part of that is the script: despite the fact that everyone knows how this movie ends, its structure lies in the emotional journey of Christine. The other thing that keeps it afloat is the work of Rebecca Hall in my favorite performance of the year. It's the realest representation of depression this side of BoJack Horseman. 

6. Everybody Wants Some!!
This is the kind of film that seems like it should be easy to make because it doesn't really have a plot or rely on any real story mechanics to make it run—it's mostly 90 minutes of dudes bullshitting. But the thing that makes Everybody Wants Some!! such a rare treat is that these movies are actually impossible to make because inevitably the characters all end up running together and because screenwriters tend to be completely at sea when not able to lean on traditional structural crutches. Linklater's script is so good that it makes everybody in the cast (most of whom are relative newcomers) seem like an inevitable star (and considering the hit rate for people who were in Dazed & Confused, that might actually be true). Nobody makes a movie about talking like Linklater, and the fact that each one of these characters has depth and empathy that is missing from movies where stuff actually happens. 

5. 20th Century Women
Another screenwriting triumph. The log line of this movie is "The story of three women who explore love and freedom in Southern California during the late 1970s," which is somehow both irritatingly vague and deeply incorrect. The specificity of the whole affair (the soundtrack, the clothes, even the way the sunlight shines through the vintage curtains) leads to an immersive experience that is on par with any fantasy bullshit you can conjure. At the center is a beautiful, breezy, sensitive, deeply charismatic performance by Annette Bening, a genius we do not deserve. 

4. Sing Street
The best musical of 2016. 

3. Jackie
Structured like a horror movie with the pacing and score to match, Jackie doesn't care about crafting a historical record or even about documenting Jackie Kennedy's interior life following her husband's assassination. It's about putting away those visceral moments—and there are many—for the sake of narrative. I love that the movie doesn't necessarily take a side—Jackie sometimes seems like a villain in her own movie—and that divide also splits the title character in two. Natalie Portman's performance seems cold on the surface, but it's really a marvel of Portman juggling a woman whose life was both incomparably mythic and unbendingly human. 

2. Green Room
Just a badass piece of white-knuckle survival with a stellar cast and a full-throated attention to detail. Green Room is exceptionally violent, but it's been a long time since I've seen a movie that knows exactly how to use the sudden explosions of brutality that dot the action. It's an exceptional sense of escalation that takes quite a bit of craft and control. It's not only a testament to director Jeremy Saulnier but also to the late Anton Yelchin, who delivers his best performance as a punk rock kid just trying to get home. It's hardcore and heartbreaking—my favorite combination. 

1. Moonlight
Everything that has been said about Moonlight is true: The performances—particularly the alignment of the three Chirons—are perfect, the soundtrack is lush, the visuals are lovely and amazing. The thing that really elevated Moonlight for me is the fact that it told a story that I had never heard before that took place in a corner of the universe I had never seen. How rare is it to sit down in a theater and be genuinely surprised by what unfolds? Moonlight started fresh and remained there. The fact that it's a truly important movie is gravy, but Moonlight will be remembered because it is pure cinema. 

Now here are some pieces of shit that we need not ever mention again. 

5. X-Men: Apocalypse
Not a strong year for comic book movies (DC was obviously disastrous, and though I know I enjoyed Captain America: Civil War, I cannot remember a damn thing about it), and this was aggressively not good. I did sort of appreciate Oscar Isaac's willingness to chew scenery, but nothing here—neither in the incomprehensible story nor the cheap-looking effects—had any weight. 

4. Cafe Society
There was a time when I considered Woody Allen to be my favorite filmmaker, and while I'll still ride for stuff like Love & Death and Manhattan, I don't think I get Allen anymore. I'm a high-strung neurotic who loves dry humor and old Hollywood, and I found this completely inert. Who is the audience for this movie if I'm out? Allen also made an ill-advised foray into streaming television in 2016 (Crisis in Six Scenes, on Amazon) that was made slightly less inane by an unfiltered performance by Miley Cyrus. But Jesse Eisenberg is no Miley Cyrus. 

3. Hacksaw Ridge
Hour one is all Andrew Garfield's terrible location-free accent warbling about faith and family while Vince Vaughn yells at him in the year's worst performance. Hour two is an entirely gratuitous series of battle scenes that have no sense of geometry. It ends with a mini documentary featuring interviews with the real people who are represented in the movie, a completely inexplicable choice that ends a terrible movie on a sour note. Also, Mel Gibson is still a piece of shit. 

2. Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice / Suicide Squad
How is it that people who fundamentally do not understand why people love certain immortal comic book characters keep getting put in charge of quarter-billion dollar projects to put them up on screen? He gets no help from professional block of wood Henry Cavill, but Zach Snyder's vision of Superman is as fucking stupid as it is pointlessly bleak. That scene in Dawn of Justice wherein Bats and Supes yell about both of their mothers being named Martha is the worst scene in any movie last year. Meanwhile, I spent the first hour of Suicide Squad wishing that the story would show up, and then when that happened I wished we could go back to introducing every character another 19 times. I saw Nine Lives the same weekend I saw Suicide Squad, and you'll notice that Kevin Spacey as a horrible looking digital kitty is nowhere to be found on this list. 

1. Nocturnal Animals / The Neon Demon
These are the two worst times I had at the movies all year, and they both delivered similar experiences: Self-impressed auteurs wallowing in pretty nihilism and thinking that it's art. These are two exceptionally dumb movies that believe that they are smart, and there's nothing more infuriating to me than that. 

Song of the Day: Bliss 66, "Not Quite Paradise"

As someone who long ago decided that pop music was going to be his primary means of cultural expression, there rarely exists a moment when I do not have some snatch of a tune running on a loop in my head. Some of these are about routine: Typically the first song careening through my grey matter when I first rise is Biggie Smalls' "Warning," specifically because I set my alarm clock to 5:46 AM (though no one is ever paging me at that hour). Other times they show up as an emotional reaction. Lately, I've been running through some phrases of a metal song of my own making called "Dumbest Motherfuckers Alive" that more or less sums up my feelings about Drumpf's America. 

These bits of background sound tend to be welcome, as they act as motivational screeds and/or coping mechanisms. But sometimes they seem to exist solely for torment. There's an emo song I've been chasing for years that definitely contains the lyric, "To my friends/I am sorry/I am gone," and I have not been able to track it down despite a lot of insane virtual crate-digging. 

Then there's Bliss 66, a band I know pretty much nothing about but whose song "Not Quite Paradise" has an opening salvo that goes, "Took the path of least resistance/Into the great unknown/No directory assistance." That painfully banal series of lines had been bouncing around up there for a little while, and it was relatively easy to track down with a simple Google search. But the thing that bothers me about it is the context: I have no idea how or why I would have heard "Not Quite Paradise." It arrived as the lead single on Bliss 66's debut album Trip to the 13th in June 2001, and the tune's main claim to fame is that it was included on the soundtrack to the little seen animated feature Titan A.E. (which was released in theaters in June 2000). I have never seen that movie, nor does the image of the album's cover trigger any memories. It was never in rotation on MTV, I was not listening to the radio at the time (and even if I was, I probably would not have heard it—it wasn't much of a hit, even on modern rock radio), and a cursory look at some of the mixes I made myself during that time (some of which are admittedly lost to history) doesn't point to its being on my radar. It was also released before I started working in magazines—as of late 2001, I had access to endless promo CDs, so there are a handful of totally forgotten records from that period that have still stuck with me, particularly never-was rap-metal misfits Bionic Jive's Armageddon Through Your Speaker. I'm fairly certain Bliss 66 didn't sneak into that cavalcade of mediocrity either, though clearly I not only was exposed to "Not Quite Paradise" but also listened to it enough to log its opening lyric in the permanent files.

TL, DR: I don't understand my own brain and this is a very middling song that has somehow survived 15 years of binging and purging. Sometimes the survivors are illogical.  

Video Store Adventures: 'Evil Dead 2'

I never know what I want for Christmas. As my wife, my family members, and my friends can testify, I am terrible at expressing my desires when it comes to birthdays and holidays. But recently I came to a very clarifying and profoundly depressing realization: What I really want, more than anything, is to have access to some of the retail experiences of my youth. 

When Tower was folding, it seemed like the very idea of a record store was becoming an endangered species, though the rise of vinyl has saved local shops that picked up the slack for the corporate monoliths that were wiped off the map. But even though I know the idea of smaller, niche music emporiums is superior to soul-sucking mall chains like Strawberries and Coconuts, I still miss the experience of grazing in Virgin Megastores. The breadth of the selection was always intoxicating for an open-minded hound like myself, and I would get a buzz off of the idea of searching for something and stumbling on something else, or taking a flyer on a deeply discounted buzzworthy new release, or tracking down whatever was playing in the store at the time. I loved the sensation of connecting the dots amongst the racks, allowing the momentum of curiosity and discovery to fling me in a million different directions. 

I gained a part of that sensation back when I moved to Los Angeles, as having access to Amoeba Music is about the closest I've ever come to re-submerging myself back into the early adventures at the Tower in Boston or the Virgin in Union Square. That experience is lacking something, though, and it's the larger taint of the way the music world operates now. When I was first losing myself among the CD cases, digital music was a very nascent thing, and there was no iTunes, Napster, Spotify, Shazam, or any of the other ethereal products that have devalued recorded music over the past two decades. For 15-year-olds invested in music now, I cannot imagine any of them have ever purchased a physical piece of music that they didn't already know they liked. Back in '98, you had access to the single on the radio, the select albums deemed worthy of the listening stations, and the benevolence of the clerks behind the counter who had control of the CD changer. The record store was the final gateway between you and the full scope of an artist's work, and as such the stakes were always slightly inflated because there was always the possibility that the single was great and the rest of the album was a dud. The perennial possibility of being let down was part of the thrill, and for kids like me who could only buy an album or two at a time, copping a disc you ended up hating would change the complexion of your day-to-day dealings. Having two new albums you love at your fingertips was an incredible luxury, and that's why I still tend to buy music two-at-a-time. 

At least record stores still have a footprint. While digital music remains the primary means of delivery for kids with iPhones, the fetishization of vinyl (and to a lesser extent cassettes) has created a market for physical media that allows for shops to keep peddling. The same cannot be said for the lowly video store, which has been rendered extinct both by the rise of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu but also by the fact that television has supplanted film as the method of entertainment people indulge in when they want some time on the couch. There's a smaller subset of people who still value physical video media—there's a healthy secondary market for VHS tapes, and distributors like Criterion and Shout Factory continue to produce top-notch niche fare—but the legacy of the video rental establishment will die with the last of us who remember walking up and down the aisles searching for a tape. That is an experience genuinely lost to history, and the idea that such a big part of my development as a media-consuming human being is as dead as Dillinger fills me with unmistakeable melancholy. 

This series will be twofold: It will celebrate the classic VHS art of my youth, and it will be a conduit for stories related to those movies. Most of my personal narrative is tied up in media, so if I'm going to organize my life in any way, it's going to be by genre and alphabetically in the end. 

We begin with Evil Dead 2. Though I'm a huge fan of horror movies today, as a kid I did not tolerate them because I was a complete wuss. That scaredy-cattitude extended to VHS box art, which I could not tolerate. One of the local video rental houses in the town where I grew up was called Video Galaxy, a spot where I mostly rented WWF pay-per-view videos and Thundercats compilation tapes. But the wall between the kids' stuff was on the opposite end of the store as the new releases, where my parents would typically be grazing. The most direct way from one side of the store to the other was through the horror aisle, which to my young eyes was a cavalcade of nightmares waiting to be unleashed on my poor pitiful brain. I used to have to close my eyes and break into a full sprint to get from one end of that aisle to the other in order to show my folks what I wanted to rent. I got so good at this run that I was able to time it out correctly so as not to bang my head against the racks on the opposite side nor collide with other customers who did not want a spooked six-year-old taking out their knees. 

Sometimes there was just no avoiding horror, however. The 7-11 down the street from my house rented a middling selection of videos, and the way it advertised that service was with a giant poster for Evil Dead 2. When confronted with horror imagery, I would construct a narrative in my head that helped justify the existence of the creepiness, and often these made-up movies completely centered around the image on the box (which meant that I was pretty certain that the entirety of Bloody Birthday was the making and consuming of a cake with human fingers in it). Of course, a lot of those movies rarely included the imagery on the box—most famously, Ghoulies did not, in fact, spend their entire movie biting people's asses. 

But I could not make heads or tails of Evil Dead 2. There was something deeply disturbing about the way the eyes stared directly at me while I chose between Hostess Cupcakes or a Whatchamacallit. I'm pretty sure that Child Kyle assumed that if you popped Evil Dead 2 into the VCR, you'd just get 90 minutes of that skull staring at you, like an entry in Faces of Death directed by Bela Tarr. 

It was years before I finally watched Evil Dead 2—I think I was in college by the time I got around to it, though I had seen Army of Darkness by then. And even though I'm a full convert to the Raimi/Campbell brand of high-energy splatstick, I still get mildly unnerved whenever I'm confronted with the above image advertising Evil Dead 2. Sometimes childhood nightmares are just too hard to kick. 

Kyle Anderson Answers The AV Club's 11 Questions

1. What's one question you wish an interviewer would ask you? 
Anything, honestly. I've spent most of my adult life interviewing other people, and I like to think that I'm pretty good at it. But in the few times when I've been on the other side of the microphone, I've been terrible at it. I suppose I'd rather be in control of the conversation (that's true in most of my life), but I would like to give myself over to somebody else's agenda once in a while. That's why I'm going through this exercise. So I guess the answer to this question is "Why are you so bad at this?" and the answer is "I'm a lunatic who wants to get better." 

2. If you could ride a giant version of an animal to work every day, what would you ride? 
My instinct would be some sort of cat (and not a jungle cat either—I'm talking about a giant, saddle-able version of one of my house cats), but I worry about the logistics of that. After all, my cats would probably only get about a block before curling up and grabbing a nap. Am I allowed to mount a giant bird? Because in that case I want to ride to work on a Kyle-capable falcon. 

3. What movie have you seen the most? 
I regret not having better statistics about my movie watching over the course of my life. There were a bunch of films that were in heavy rotation in my childhood: My brother and I inexplicably watched Clue on repeat (it was a VHS copy rented repeatedly from our local library). I've re-watched my favorite movie of all time, Dr. Strangelove, quite a few times, but I can't imagine it's the one I've watched the most. If I were to venture a guess, I would think the movie I have seen the most was one of the videos I got from my one shipment from Columbia House back in my teenage years. Columbia House was a mail order video service that gave you a handful of VHS tapes up front in exchange for tethering you to an overpriced monthly selection that you had to have the wherewithal to cancel. (They did the same thing with music—all the magazines I read in my youth were full of inserts touting "12 CDs for 1 cent.") I can't remember everything that arrived in my Columbia House box, but I do know that a copy of Men In Black was in there. I like Men In Black enough (and probably liked it slightly more in the late '90s), but the thing that likely puts it at number one on my list is the fact that I used to put Men In Black on in the background while i did homework. It was a pleasant movie that I could reasonably ignore, and it was the soundtrack to filling out my college applications. (Considering I only got into one school, perhaps I should have just worked in silence?)

4. What's a stupid thing that you incorrectly believed for a long time? 
I thought for a long time that the only real way to win a woman's heart was to smother her. That was my modus operandi for the better part of my dating life. I finally figured out how to play it cool just in time to meet the woman who would become my wife. I think back at how I treated old girlfriends (or, more particularly, women I pursued who wanted nothing to do with me), and I cringe. I was unfit for human consumption then. I'm glad I figured it out just in time. How I still got laid, I'll never know. 

5. What's the most interesting thing you've ever heard about yourself that isn't true? 
Everything I've ever heard about myself has mostly been true, and the untrue stuff has always been exceptionally boring. ("Hey, that guy is from Manchester!" when it turns out I'm from one town over—that sort of thing.) I suppose that during my freshman year of college, I remember hearing whispers among people who were also in my acting studio that I had a large penis, which is not really true. I mean, I'm not John Holmes or anything, but I'm doing fine. And in reality, that rumor was pretty common among that group. Not to lean into stereotypes, but there were very few heterosexual men in my music theater classes in college, which made the dating pool significantly small. When you add the fact that we were often walking around in dance clothes, it was easy for the women in the studio to let their minds run amok. So though I heard that rumor about myself, I'm pretty sure I heard that rumor about every other boob-loving dude around me. 

6. What's the weirdest thing you've ever eaten? 
It's probably something that remains relatively exotic to most people but would seem pedestrian to foodies. I like to think of myself as an adventurous eater, and as a result I don't consider a lot of what I've consumed over the course of my life to be all that unusual. But of course, there are plenty of people who cannot comprehend sushi, which is pretty boring (but delicious!) at this point. My answer is probably escargot, which I have only eaten in Paris and I count as a course within one of the most perfect meals I've ever had. (The main was some sort of duck that I've been chasing like a heroin spike ever since.) I've never eaten anything that was still alive (to my knowledge) and am not into chomping on bugs, so I feel like the truly adventurous in the food world would turn their noses up at this response. And I have attempted to eat durian, the Southeast Asian fruit that smells like a diaper-filled dumpster fire, but since I never actually got it past my lips I don't think it counts. 

7. What's the first concert you went to? 
In the fall of 1994, Tom Petty put out an album called Wildflowers. It was credited as a solo release even though most of the Heartbreakers played on the tracks. The first single was a song called "You Don't Know How It Feels," which featured the immortal bridge, "Let's get to the point, let's roll another joint." I had decided that it was my favorite song of all time, which is why I purchased Wildflowers and Petty's Greatest Hits on the same day. Petty was probably the first artist with whom I was fully obsessed, and I hungrily sought out interviews and documentaries and old footage and bootlegs to compliment my obsession. So when Petty arrived at the Meadows Music Theater in Hartford in the Spring of 1995 to tour behind Wildflowers, I had to go. My dad took me, along with my cousin Chris and his father Fran. We sat on the amphitheater lawn and joked about opening act Pete Droge (whose records I later adored), and left before the encore to beat traffic. Since Petty's songs were played on pop radio next to Jon Secada, I had no idea that Petty's followers would be such a hippie-centric bunch. That show was my first exposure to marijuana smoke, white guys in dreadlocks, and those goofy Cat in the Hat-style chapeaus. It was great. 

8. What's the most interesting opportunity you've gotten through your work? 
It's strange because it's another job, but the fact that I have my own radio show is only because of my work as a pop culture writer. My entire career has been more or less accidental: I took an internship at a magazine because it was paid and I was looking for something to do that didn't involve music theater, and that started knocking down the dominoes that led me to Spin, Rolling Stone, MTV, and Entertainment Weekly. I've learned and honed my skills along the way, and I'm deeply lucky that I found something that I like to do. But it does sometimes seem like all of that was leading up to my talking for a living and ultimately performing again. 

Of course, all those jobs have given me the opportunity to interview and spend time with some of the people I have idolized the most, like Iggy Pop, Billy Corgan, the members of Sleater-Kinney, and George Clinton. And all of my favorite shows I have ever been to have come because of work that I have done: Nine Inch Nails in a small club in Paris, Bruce Springsteen at a tiny theater in Austin, Metallica at the Apollo, Van Halen in the basement of Cafe Wha, and the bulk of multiple Lollapalooza performers from backstage. 

9. What embarrassing phase did you go through? 
I've gone through countless—after all, I was in a fucking ska band for a while in my youth and was deeply into Phish for a while. But honestly, the period of my life I'm most embarrassed about is my freshman year of college, when I tried on a whole bunch of personas all at once in a bid for universal coolness that ended up being painfully asinine. I dyed my hair black and started wearing a leather trench coat everywhere, probably in a bid to look like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix? But I was also getting into techno music and writing wannabe New Yorker short stories and reading Proust and drinking a lot of tequila and betting on football. It was an amalgam of nonsense that I'm glad is behind me. It's telling that I'm more embarrassed by that than by anything I did or wore during the ska phase. 

10. Have you ever stolen anything, and if so, what? 
You know what's weird? I always seemed to have a friend (or multiple friends!) who were avid shoplifters, though I never actually engaged in any of that myself. I did try a little petty larceny one summer, though. If I deemed a CD in Lechmere too expensive, I would replace its price sticker (which were very generic) with a sticker that was slightly cheaper. In doing this, I was often able to buy multiple albums in one sitting with my limited funds. I snagged a bunch of terrible records this way, mostly alt-rock also-rans from the mid '90s (Collective Soul's self-titled sophomore release and Better Than Ezra's Deluxe were definitely copped using this method). I ended up getting busted once because I thought Siamese Dream was too pricey at $13.99 and decided it should be $10.99. I still feel shitty about it. 

11. Who is the most famous person you have ever met? 
There have been a ton of famous people I've encountered over the course of my career, but it's hard to tell who I've truly met. Like, I've introduced myself and had interesting conversations with countless celebrities, some of them really truly huge. But even though I've interviewed Jerry Seinfeld multiple times, have I really met that guy? So I'm going to keep this answer away from my work and just focus on famous people I have met outside of the context of a brief, agenda-soaked interview. With that in mind, the answer is probably Joss Whedon, who I've had multiple non-work-related conversations with for some reason. He's a nice guy, and he almost certainly doesn't remember who I am, but I first approached him as a fan and have run into him several times since, and he always seems down to talk about whatever. Plus, I've seen him dance at parties. Dude is a good dancer. 

Song of the Day: Vince Staples, "Norf Norf"

There's a video going around the Internet of a woman filming herself getting all riled up about having heard Vince Staples' "Norf Norf" on the radio. It's insane. Over the course of 11 minutes, she spins the tale of how she was dropping off her cadre of daughters at their various schools while listening to the local Top 40 station. (Based on the channels she brings up, this appears to all have gone down in New Mexico.) She explains that she had just finished listening to a Meghan Trainor tune when she was suddenly accosted by Staples' track, one of the highlights of his album-of-the-year-worthy 2015 debut Summertime 06. She notes that it bothered her "as a mom," and also brings up the fact that when she was younger, she listened to pop stars like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and the Backstreet Boys. 

Up to that point, she's merely a white lady whining about scary urban music. But then she just starts reciting the lyrics to "Norf Norf," and that's when it enters into absurdist theater. With a super young child crawling around in the background, she proceeds to run through "Norf Norf," leaving in all the n-words even though she notes that the "cuss words" were taken out of the radio edit of the track. She gets particularly upset at two spots: First, when Staples arrives at the track's understated chorus, wherein he mumbles, "I ain't never ran from nothing but the police." The other time she gets upset—and at this point, she is damn near weeping—is at the very mention of abortions (Staples explains that he needs to sell dope because "Folks need Porches, hoes need abortions"). 

I could fact check this woman, or poke fun at the fact that she for some reason pronounces "Norf" as "Nerf," but I'm mostly fascinated by the idea that this was recorded at all. The source material is a little unclear, though it does seem like this originally arrived online via Periscope (she notes at the beginning that she is waiting to get into the meat of her rant so more people can jump on, suggesting that she was waiting for viewers during a live stream). Periscope is a remarkable source of self-delusion; having just watched a bunch of random feeds on the Apple TV app, I am dumbfounded by the culture surrounding it. Log on at any time, and there are dozens (if not hundreds) of people live streaming events (last night, there were a handful of people broadcasting from concerts by Paul McCartney and Puff Daddy), but there are even more people broadcasting nothing at all. One video I clicked on was just a dude vaping while doing an impression of Gollum. Another was just a girl in a bathroom mumbling stuff about Houston. Still another was a dipshit sitting at a piano defending his use of Kim Kardashian's name in the title of his stream. Yet another was a guy walking around the streets of New York simply saying hello to people who were sending message—an endless information ouroboros lacking both text and subtext. 

All of these people, including the woman who doesn't like "Norf Norf," are obviously intelligent enough to embrace the type of technology necessary to deliver medium-quality video over the Internet airwaves. But they all lack something that seems to constantly come up when discussions of modern tech arrive: They lack the emotional intelligence and the guile to understand what they are doing. Self-aware people recognize broadcasting personal nonsense on Periscope as the narcissistic cry for help that it is. I would never bother knowing that if anybody did decide to drop into my stream, it would mostly be for the sake of trolling. (For women on Periscope, it's an inevitable invitation to remove clothing, which adds an extra creep factor.) But for people like the Norf Norf Lady, it's simply another platform that acts one of two ways: As an echo chamber (where like-minded people can simply congratulate each other for being right all the time) or as a source of victimhood (because feeling wronged by the outside world is an excellent excuse to entrench yourself in whatever nonsense your subconscious needs to justify, be it food, sex, or the subjugation of entire minority groups). 

So while part of me feels bad for the woman whose daughter will be alienated from a normal existence because she can't listen to Top 40 anymore (because she didn't ask to be notorious), but another part of me does not at all (because she kind of did). If somebody is making a scene in a public place (store, restaurant, gym, whatever), I tend to simply stare at that person, granting them the attention they so desperately desire. It's a small, subtle bit of public trolling that will probably get me stabbed one day, but I consider it a tiny little victory. 

Perhaps the most shocking element of this whole tale is that "Norf Norf" was played on Top 40 radio at all. It's a fantastic song, but it's not the stuff that crossovers are made of. Over an eerie, minimalist Clams Casino beat, Staples reps for Sprite, shouts out the various high schools he attended in Long Beach, calls out some Crip markers, and generally nails the detail-obsessed autobiographical tone that makes Summertime 06 such an incredible success. "Norf Norf" has an excellent video (see above), but doesn't appear to be an official single from Summertime 06 and does not appear to have charted. It's a song that simultaneously revels in the gangster lifestyle and pushes against it, and it's emblematic of Staples' unflinching look at his own life and the reality around him. If that is scary to people like the woman who thinks we need to pray for our children because of a rap song, I think that's a good thing. Pop music is supposed to terrify the generation slightly too old to be listening to it, but so much of the junk littering the Top 40 is centered around hedonism or sounds like the soundtrack to a Xanax binge (the former has always been the case, but the latter is a new and odious development). Since we don't have Marilyn Manson to fool parents into thinking their kids are worshipping Satan, we're going to have to stick with the clear-eyed rapper who won't pull punches for the sake of a radio hit. 

Oh, and DMX was also fucking huge when Britney, Christina, and the rest of the teen nymphettes were cranking out hits, so her memories of shiny caucasians singing about their pussies have conveniently left out X growling "Y'all n----s remind me of a strip club, cause every time you come around it's like I just gotta get my dick sucked." 

Song of the Day: Seeded Crown, "Feel No Shame"

It is mildly insane that three years elapsed between the turn-of-the-century rise of Napster and the arrival of the iTunes Music Store in 2003. Those 36 months blew a massive hole in the music world, essentially creating an entire generation of pop enthusiasts who quickly got used to getting all the tunes they wanted for free. At the time, many peer-to-peer users (myself included) claimed that they would be paying for all of the stuff they were downloading if only there was a useful clearinghouse for actually purchasing digital music. I'd like to think that was true, though even if I was ponying up for tracks on iTunes, I still would have used Napster a ton if only to embrace the weirdness it created. 

Remember that the Internet of 2000 was a vastly different enterprise than the one we know today: Many longstanding media institutions still did not have websites, and even the ones that did were criminally lo-fi or merely placeholders for the future. Outside of Pitchfork, web-exclusive content sites were more or less non-existent. Social media was years away from becoming an everyday reality. The bottom line was this: it was exceptionally more difficult to parse out information about music in 2000. Today, most songs can be identified with a simple lyric search or a Shazam, but it was hard to separate fact from fiction in the Internet's wild west. 

Case in point: I have had entire conversations about the bevy of mislabeled songs from the Napster era that became minor urban legends and kept fans confused for a good long while. There was a notorious cover of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice" that was attributed to Phish but was really done by the Gourds. The first version of the Hives' "Hate To Say I Told You So" I ever snagged had the Strokes' name on it. A ton of songs would be labeled "NEW WEEZER" or "UNRELEASED RADIOHEAD," though the songs in question tended to be the uploader's shitty band, some sort of soundalike, or a different band and song entirely. I fell for the Weezer stuff basically every time, as those tracks would surface during the fallow period between Pinkerton and Green wherein it was unclear whether or not Weezer was still actually a band (and without social media, Rivers Cuomo enthusiasts were left to guess). Most of the time these fakeouts enraged me, though I can't entirely be mad at the practice—after all, how else would I have been introduced to Ozma? 

In the latter days of the P2P wave, there was even an entire subset of files that flooded hard drives that were specifically designed to frustrate downloaders. They would often consist of little more than 8 second loops of a song's chorus repeated ad nauseum (I used to think that No Doubt's "Hella Good" was nothing more than four minutes of Gwen Stefani singing "You got me feeling hella good/ So let's just keep on dancing," which I thought was a bold but bullshit way to approach dancehall music) or a PSA about how bad it was to illegally download files. These were brilliantly disguised, typically with a running time that matched the time of the song you were looking for. 

The point is that it was difficult to determine what was legitimate on Napster, which is how I ended up haunted by a mysterious Slipknot song that I thought i might have made up. The band's second album Iowa arrived at the end of August in 2001, though I had snagged a leaked version of it from Napster a few weeks before it dropped. Napster didn't allow for the downloading of zipped files (or maybe it did, I just never saw them), so full albums had to be grabbed one by one. This could be tricky, as because of the aforementioned lack of information about even hot new releases like Iowa, it was often difficult to discern whether or not you had the full album at your disposal. Just to make sure I had everything, I often ended up with way more tracks than were actually on the album. That was how I ended up with a version of Radiohead's Kid A that had 14 tracks on it, even though the actual album only contained 10. (The remaining quartet of tunes were taken from Radiohead's Airbag/How's My Driving? EP, which consisted of outtakes from OK Computer and represented an obvious tonal shift from the rest of Kid A.) Slipknot's Iowa has 14 songs on it, but the version I burned to a recordable CD and listened to as I walked around Manhattan in the weeks after September 11 contained a fifteenth song. The file I downloaded was called "Untitled" and was placed in between "The Heretic Anthem" and "Gently" on the track list. I loved that it contained a sample at the beginning of somebody yelling, "Is anybody alive out there?" particularly because the vocalist seemed to answer the question: "No." It was the exact brand of nihilism that I embraced following 9/11, when it seemed like the world would be on fire forever and it would be impossible to feel anything ever again. Iowa was one of the few connections I had to humanity, as it allowed me to feel something primal and visceral that wasn't connected to anything socially or politically. It was just pure, unadulterated rage and seething hopelessness. Iowa saved me. 

But when I finally did get around to owning a physical copy of the album, it turned out that "Untitled" wasn't an actual track on the album. The song in question was a mystery to me for a long time, and though I have found the song that invaded Iowa 15 years ago, its origins still remain sort of murky. The song is sometimes credited as "Feel No Shame" and the artists listed are Slipknot and Korn, though no record of a collaboration seems to exist. (That version is also often credited as having appeared on the soundtrack to the 2002 Aaliyah-starring vampire flick Queen of the Damned, which is definitely untrue—the song is not on the soundtrack and Queen of the Damned came out a year after Iowa landed.) The artist in question actually appears to be a band called Seeded Crown, though their Internet footprint barely exists. Whatever the origin, this is definitely the song in question, and it undoubtedly changed my experience of Iowa when I was first experiencing it. I often gave it a top-to-bottom listen, and "Giving In" provided a useful buffer between the raucous shout-along of "The Heretic Anthem" and the dirge of "Gently." I still love Iowa, but "Giving In" remains the best song that Slipknot never did. 

Song of the Day: Montell Jordan, "This Is How We Do It"

There was a kid who rode the same school bus as me in the spring of 1995. I was closing out the seventh grade, and I'm fairly certain he was a year ahead of me. At some point I must have known his real name, but I cannot for the life of me conjure it at the moment. It's very possible I never knew it, as he was introduced to me as "Cockroach" and I can't ever remember anybody calling him anything but that. It was unclear how he picked up that nickname, though I'm fairly certain my inference that it was a reference to one of Theo Huxtable's best friends was deeply incorrect.

Anyway, Cockroach and I did not have much in common, and I'm fairly certain that we never spoke to one another outside of the 15 minute window on our way to Timothy Edwards Middle School. Still, we bonded over the fact that we both carried portable CD players to school (at the time, this was on the cutting edge of technology—I had recently invested in a device with new-fangled skip protection), and we would often have casual conversations about music. Our tastes did not overlap very much—I was enamored of grunge titans and was a budding indie elitist, while he was a pop guy who worshipped at the altar of post-New Jack Swing R&B (a genre and era I currently fetishize). However, we did have some stuff that we swapped: He was curious about pre-Dookie Green Day (I had recently discovered the greatness of Kerplunk), and we both agreed that Cypress Hill was pretty dope. 

I had heard Jordan's "This Is How We Do It" before (its video was in heavy rotation on my after-school MTV binges), but Cockroach had purchased Jordan's album of the same name and let me listen to it (though I can only really recall listening to the title track). I vividly remember the day he arrived on the bus with that album in hand—he was so excited, as his parents had taken him to the record store and let him buy three albums, and it had to have been the most new music he had ever come into at one time. In addition to Jordan's debut, he had also snagged Adina Howard's Do You Wanna Ride? (which featured the hit single "Freak Like Me") and the soundtrack to the about-to-be-released blockbuster Batman Forever (which I liked so much I bought my own copy the next day). 

The thing that bothers me about this story is that I have a very specific emotional memory of the songs and the excitement surrounding the music, and yet I cannot remember this kid's real name. I've never been good with names, but it seems like this exchange—which by all accounts was meaningful enough for my brain to file away—should have galvanized this kid's name for me. But no, I simply have the memory of quoting "This Is How We Do It" on the bus in the waning days of the seventh grade. Thanks, Cockroach.  

Song of the Day: Madder Rose, "Hung Up in You"

The danger in writing about trends is that no matter how precise the reporting or accurate the adjudication of the subject, there's always going to be something hilariously wrong following a decade or so of hindsight. This is especially true of any piece that declares the worries about the future of an institution or downright declares it deceased, because the risk is not only in seeing said touchstone continue to exist but also find fresh ways to hit what appears to be bottom (and then still finding ways to plummet after that). Wide-ranging, long-lasting, ever-evolving pop culture monoliths—rock music, independent film, Saturday Night Live—have all survived to simultaneously defy the naysayers and also discover new ways to disappoint devotees. 

MTV has been officially dead no less than a dozen times over the course of its 34 years on Earth, but like a Time Lord, it manages to change its face and direction just in time to thrill newcomers and turn passionate fans into cynical wonks. People were deriding MTV's approach to programming less than a year into its launch, complaining that the video playlist was too narrow, too focused on legacy acts, and not innovative enough. A version of that complaint has surfaced regularly since, often announcing that MTV's newest innovation—the VMAs, The Real World, MTV 2, Jackass, Jersey Shore—represented the downfall of the network and a violation of what they fundamentally represented. 

The age of the protestor tends to dictate the specific nature of the complaint, but they all tend to boil down to a singular idea: MTV used to be better. For the first few waves of watchers, that tended to mean that the network no longer played music that you enjoyed; as time marched on, the issues became more about the quality of the reality programming; nowadays, in its current YA-obsessed identity, it's more about the abandonment of issue-based programming. It's a useful shorthand for aging, though: the second you start complaining about MTV is the second you enter a world in which it is possible you are too old to properly consume youth culture. 

So all essays about the endtimes at MTV are wrong-headed on some level, but this piece from a 1997 issue of Spin is particularly hilarious in its wrong-headedness, both from the perspective of author Katherine Dieckmann (a director responsible for the not-terrible 2006 feature Diggers and the disastrous Uma Thurman vehicle Motherhood, as well as the two worst R.E.M. videos) and the people who were running MTV at the time (longtime MTV matriarch Judy McGrath comes across pretty well, but the rest of the executive class saddle themselves with buffoonish quotes about advertiser synergy that were anathema in '97 but are par for the course today). At the time, MTV was seemingly answering its critics by launching a strategy that re-committed the network to music-based programming that resulted in a handful of new video shows in primetime and shifted non-music programming like The Real World and Road Rules to 10 PM (MTV still uses "The 10 Spot" moniker to identify that block). The article touts a handful of shows that revolve around videos (including the clunkily titled Popular Videos People Prefer) but seems mostly obsessed with Amp, a series dedicated to showing clips from then-ascendent crossover dance acts like Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, Moby, and the Prodigy. If you've never heard of Amp, it's because it was pretty short-lived (the last episode aired in 2001, though it frequently disappeared over the course of its five year existence) and also hard to find (as noted in the piece, it tended to air weekends around 1 AM, exactly when the theoretical audience of people looking to watch drugged-out rave videos were at actual raves doing actual drugs). While none of these shows did much for MTV's outlook or bottom line, the shift back to focusing on music was successful in a roundabout way: the dual rises of Swedish teen sugar-pop and mookish nu-metal helped morph a lazy MTV request show into TRL, perhaps the last true musical juggernaut the network produced. 

Of course, TRL was never a bastion for artistic adventure or cultural discovery, and according to Dieckmann, the writing was already on the wall by the time 1997 rolled around. One of her other points is that the music video had run its course as a medium, and that a handful of big name dudes had colonized the entire landscape for video production. MTV's early business model was always pretty brilliant: since record labels footed the bill for videos, the network never had to pay a dime for the bulk of its programming. That same model continues more or less unabated today and was the same in '97. Though MTV's impact on music sales had diminished by then, it was still a key component in making or breaking new artists, particularly in the pop realm. So if a label wanted to give somebody a push, that artist had to make a video, and in order to get the right level of airplay necessary to move the needle, that artist had to make a certain type of video—one that tended to be directed by Samuel Bayer or Mark Pellington or Hype Williams or McG. That narrowing of the field had essentially turned music videos—a format wherein young filmmakers tended to be free to experiment, particularly during the alternative era—into empty tentpole blockbusters that brushed aside the personalities of the artist in favor of visual effects. Dieckmann does call out Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, both of whom were playful and innovative in a way the bulk of their peers were not (and, not coincidentally, ended up making the best feature films when the time came). Dieckmann singles out heavy rotation clips like Bush's "Greedy Fly" and Spice Girls' "Spice Up Your Life" as examples of flatness in music videos (and she essentially predicted the empty high-concept clips that Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys would supply through the end of the decade), but MTV has always operated in between the mainstream schlock and indie innovation. Surely it's worth stomaching well-executed junk like the Wallflowers' "One Headlight" for the sake of underwriting all that awesome shit Bjork was doing, right? 

There's also the issue of people pulling their hair out over the quality of MTV's original programming. The Spin piece seems particularly offended by The Jenny McCarthy Show, an unwatchable low-rent sketch show that was even more terrible than its reputation but mercifully only ran for six episodes, but the rest of MTV's programming was a wonderful cauldron of weirdness that included the cerebrally silly sketch show Apartment 2F (starring Randy & Jason Sklar), the Greg Fitzsimmons-hosted comedy game show Idiot Savants, and the iconic animated series Daria. Though it was beginning to lose its way, The Real World was still essential programming, though the 1997 season was the relatively dull trip to Boston. (Road Rules had a much better year, as '97 saw the airing of both Europe and Islands, two wildly entertaining pieces of reality TV nonsense.)

At the time, MTV was also briefly airing an exceptionally weird talk show called Oddville, which traded on the unusual obsession with carny culture that popped up a couple of times in the '90s (the most famous manifestation of this curiosity was the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, which used to be a key component of many of the Lollapalooza tours of the era). Hosted by a guy named Rich Brown (playing a character named Frank Hope), Oddville began as a public access show, and its early incarnation is not that much different than the version that ended up on MTV, with a rapidly revolving door of celebrity guests, animal acts, stupid human tricks, and a live band. Oddville was a lower-rent show but was still on MTV, so they were able to book a multitude of on-the-rise groups (Blink-182, Hanson) and indie stalwarts (Guided By Voices, the Frogs). Most often, though, they relied on bands that they took chances on but became nothing, like Manbreak, Skeleton Key, and Madder Rose, the latter of which performed on the show to promote their third album Tragic Magic. They were a New York-based act that played a brand of shoegaze-inspired Britpop-tinged alt-rock who I saw open for Bush in 1996 and were inexplicably signed to a major label deal despite the fact that they were not radio-ready even during the modern rock gold rush. But their middle two albums (Panic On and Tragic Magic) are both stellar, and "Hung Up in You" was a peach of a single. The idea that MTV was airing a goofball sideshow clearinghouse and giving a deeply uncommercial drone band a chance to play while a guy in a monkey costume danced along stuck in the collective craw of music critics seems like the kind of problem you want to have.