kick-ass songs of the '90s: curve, "faît accompli" (the '90s, pt. 2)

I inaugurated my '90s series last week with this way too long introduction to the subject. Between its premise (which is mostly "the '90s sucked musically compared to the '80s") and my Jay Tarses(es) series this weekend, I've gone on too long about things I don't like. It's time for some positivity about things that I love.

So today, we're gonna talk about one of the greatest songs of the '90s, Curve's "Faît Accompli." This 1992 single from their debut album, Doppleganger, is one of the most badass things I've ever heard - or in the case of the video, seen. The opening electro-percussive twitchery immediately intrigues the listener, and then - vroooooom! - there's the whole band, led by Dean Garcia's giant wall of guitar. But instead just raining a hail of feedback through the whole song, as fun as that would have been, the band immediately displays a sense of dynamics by having the guitar drop out.

What comes to the fore then is ominous low-end that was there all along, a bassline that sounds less like a bassline and more like something cold and evil rumbling up through the earth. And then Toni Halliday starts singing:

Every day, there is some kind of darkness
That just won't go away no matter how hard I try

As Toni intones that last line, the guitar reengages, and though the tone's already set, the pivotal line's next:

It crawls into your system while your guard is down

The first few times I heard "Faît Accompli," I heard this as "while your God is down," which I also like. But either way you hear the line, the same thing's happened: God, or one's guard, like a firewall, has crashed, and something cruel and evil exploited the gap immediately.

By the time Toni sings the last line of the chorus, she's either shifted perspectives or become fully possessed. Because when she sings

My name is Fate

it's not her anymore. It's something ancient, powerful, dark, and deep that's speaking, something older than the Christian God and Lucifer - something like, well, Fate.

And when Fate speaks its come-on in the song's bridge - and by now the low-end menace has congealed into a pulsing, primal rhythm - you can't turn your head away, you can't refuse:

I've come to crush your bones
I've come to make you feel old
I've come to mess with your head
Cos it'll make you feel good
I've come to make you feel good

Few songs conjure up this kind of primal power for me - P.J. Harvey's Rid of Me and "Down By the River" (contenders for this series within a series) and Shriekback in the days of Jam Science and Oil & Gold. Even the darkly punning title of the song is perfect: Fate is a done deal.

I enjoy the rest of the Curve catalog, but nothing they did before or since has matched "Faît Accompli"'s impact on me. This thing is a sonic tour de force, and if it's not the best song I heard in the '90s, it's damn close.

It's a rare thing for a video, but the one for "Faît Accompli" actually adds to the experience. It's sort of a performance clip, as the band is playing instruments in it, with smoke and wind machines aplenty. The choice to have the camera thrust up into the band creates motion and energy, and the perspective helps unsettle the viewer - guitarists everywhere but with the instrument centered in the frame and heads and feet often cut off, and often the only visible face is Halliday's sultry visage, at the height of its full "my name is FATE!" power.

Despite the band playing their instruments for the length of the video, it's less like we're seeing Curve play a song, and more like we've intruded on a ritual. There's a group of ominous hangers-on in the wings who appear to be waiting for something besides the load-out. The most prominent one among them is a Jean Kasem-like blonde woman, whose purposeful arm gestures and dancing lend a cult feel to the proceedings. But even more disturbing to me is the presence of the sheep - I immediately wonder if he or she is going to survive the evening, and several times later in the video, the hangers-on appear to be wrestling it to the ground. The sense of power and menace is just as keen in the video as in the song, and I highly recommend both.

If you want this song and video to crawl into your system, let your guard down here:



By the way, the best mix of the song, in my opinion, is the one used in the video. It's neither the album version on Doppelganger nor the long mix on the Pubic Fruit compilation; instead, it's the punchier Flood mix that, as far as I know, was only on the Faît Accompli EP. So if you really like this song as presented here, that's the version you should seek out.

jay tarseses throughout the decades, pt. 3: the 2000s

Prior Installments
pt. 1: the 1980s
pt. 2: the 1990s

The Jay Tarses of the 2000s
Judd Apatow. First came Freaks and Geeks, which I really, really wanted to like. It looked smart and funny. It was set in 1980, right in my cultural and musical wheelhouse. And the titular Geeks were 7th graders, as was the real-life me in 1980! And it had SCTV's Joe Flaherty in it! I thought, "at last, a show for me! a show that speaks to me!"

Instead, I couldn't stand it. The music they got right, I'll give them that. But the clothes and hair, aside from Linda Cardellini's character wearing her dad's army jacket, seemed way off for 1980. Worse, the show was clearly written not only from the sole perspective of the geeks, but with no understanding of the other half of the titular equation.

Initially the "freaks" - a gang of pot-smoking high school teens whom Cardellini's character befriended - were depicted as menacing, and engaged in behaviors such as mailbox destruction that I much more closely associate with jocks, not potheads. To me, this demonstrated that the show's creators and writers had no actual experience with "freaks," who would have been the least likely kids in school to beat up the geeks or engage in bullying and violence. In fact, the "freaks" I knew usually had a genial live-and-let-live attitude, and bullying would have gotten in the way of more rewarding pursuits like getting stoned in the boys' room while listening to 8-tracks of AC/DC. (Also, Flaherty's over-the-top performance made it seem like he was acting in an entirely different show, but I digress.)

As Freaks and Geeks' lone season progressed, the writers transitioned the "freaks" from menacing goons to lovable lummoxes. But this showed just as little insight into the "freaks" as depicting them as thugs did, plus it reeked reeked of rote series-writing methodology (hey, let's make the bad guys turn out to be the good guys!). Many of the pot-obsessed folks I knew growing up were actually bright, funny people who weren't sufficiently challenged in school - they were often Mitch Hedbergs, not idiots. Apatow needed to spend less time in junior high cowering in the lunchroom and more time actually getting to know these folks. And if you want to see high school life in the '70s and '80s rendered in loving accuracy, rent Dazed and Confused; Freaks and Geeks misses on all counts.

But Freaks and Geeks found a loyal audience among critics, whom, one assumes, empathized with the show's "geeks" to such a degree that they failed to notice the program's many faults and chronic unfunnyness. Apatow followed it with another canceled-in-its-first-season TV show, Undeclared, which failed to connect either with me or with audiences, though it too had reams of favorable press.

But we shouldn't cry for Apatow too much: he's become the reigning mogul of movie comedy. The 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up did major box office as well as garnering Apatow's usual critical raves. Throw in protégé Seth Rogen (Superbad, Pineapple Express), whose movies Apatow usually produces, plus a host of recent Will Ferrell comedies that Apatow has written and/or produced, and Apatow Inc. has become an unstoppable comedy factory.

But I'm still not laughing at his stuff. I haven't seen every movie that I just named above, but what I have seen doesn't strike me as either that smart or that funny.

Honorable Mentions

• David E. Kelley, who isn't a Jay Tarses, but more of a category unto himself. He ruined the latter seasons of L.A. Law, and his subsequent series crimes are legion.
• Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick. thirtysomething alone should earn them a special place in hell. However, since I actually liked My So-Called Life and the first season of Once and Again, they're disqualified from Tarsesdom. Lately, they were up to their old freighted-with-unearned-meaning tricks with web series Quarterlife.
• Amy Sherman (I think she's dropped the "-Palladino"): I tried really hard to love Gilmore Girls. After investing nearly two seasons' worth of watching - I thought it was a lost cause after the first three episodes, but since several of my friends were avid fans and their recommendation meant a lot to me, I kept on trying - I would have even settled for just liking it. But I hated it, from its pretentious dialogue to the cardboard-cutout Stars Hollow greek chorus (if only Sherman had been a little smarter, she could have had major allegory action going on). Right now, Sherman's a leading contender for Jay Tarses of the 2010s. Keep an eye on this one, she's going places! Not places I want to visit, but places!

jay tarseses throughout the decades, pt. 2: the 1990s

read "pt. 1: the 1980s"

The Jay Tarses of the 1990s
Aaron Sorkin. From the godawful script of A Few Good Men (I guess between Nicholson's rendition of the "you can't handle the truth!" speech, which is constantly replayed on TV as a "classic scene," and Pacino finally winning the Oscar for Scent of a Woman, the moral of the story is that scenery chewing pays!), to his self-righteous White House posturing (The American President and TV's The West Wing), Sorkin continually sounds clever, while not actually being so. A specialist in the category of "dialogue no actual human would ever say," Sorkin's barrage of verbiage and many wise casting choices have beguiled critics, who really ought to be able to discern how second-rate and hollow his material actually is.

The only Sorkin creation I could stomach longer than five minutes was the first season of Sports Night. But in retrospect, I think that had more to do with an extraordinarily gifted cast - Josh Charles, Peter Krause, Josh Malina, and especially Felicity Huffman - transcending the torrent of words, and less to do with Sorkin's words themselves. Quality control on the second season fell off dramatically (Dan's sudden Jewishness being the most egregious "wtf?" example), so I went right back to hating Sorkin again.

Like Sports Night, The West Wing also featured a pretty darn talented cast, and I'll always be grateful that the show gave veteran character actor John Spencer his long-overdue day in the sun. But here we not only got the Dialogue No Actual Human Would Ever Say, but it came in deadly combination with Heavy-Handed Moral Posturing (see also Sorkin's script for A Few Good Men). I'm not against tackling tough moral issues on TV; heck, favorites like Homicide and the new Battlestar Galactica sometimes cover six such dilemmas before the opening titles. But Sorkin doesn't seem to know how to do such things subtly and naturally like the aforementioned shows did; instead, every "important" plot might as well have a flashing red light attached, screaming at the audience "IMPORTANT! HEY, OVER HERE! WE'RE DEALING WITH REAL ISSUES HERE! HEY!" Sheesh, it makes me tired just thinking about watching that show. No wonder that I watched the sublimely silly Drew Carey Show instead.

While The West Wing straddles the 1990s and 2000s, I'm not going to let a technicality like that deprive Mr. Sorkin of this much-deserved honor. So Aaron Sorkin, congratulations! You are the Jay Tarses of the 1990s! Don't spend that Arby's gift certificate on something I wouldn't!

Tomorrow: we reveal the Jay Tarses of the 2000s! Plus honorable mentions!

jay tarseses throughout the decades, pt. 1: the 1980s

Most of the time, I enjoy "critically acclaimed" television shows. Hill Street Blues is still my all-time favorite show, and it pretty much defined "critically acclaimed," particularly during its early years when it struggled mightily in the ratings but took home a boatload of Emmys. And I have loved oodles of other programs that swept critics off their feet: The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Office (British and US versions), Twin Peaks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica (the current-day one, not the original) are just a few examples where I think the hosannas are well deserved.

But there are shows that never click with me, no matter how much good press they get. One of the first "critically acclaimed" shows I remember not liking at all was Buffalo Bill, which starred Dabney Coleman as a crass, mean-spirited local talk show host. Its low ratings were often blamed on the deliberate unlikability of the main character.

For me personally, liking or relating to the characters isn't a prerequisite for enjoying a movie or TV show, so that wasn't a problem. I think Dabney Coleman is a fine comic actor, and his presence made me want to keep giving the show a chance. Heck, it even had Geena Davis in a supporting role, and I was harboring a major crush on her at the time (a crush that came to an end when she went into Streep/Close "I'm a serious wonderful actress so worship me, peons" mode sometime after Thelma and Louise). I should have liked this show!

But I didn't. The sticking point for me was that it just wasn't funny or smart enough. Yeah, it was smarter than your average sitcom, but not as smart as it thought it was being. As far as comedies about unlikable characters go, the equally short-lived Cheers spinoff, The Tortellis, made me laugh hysterically (Dan Hedaya has to be one of the greatest unsung character actors ever), and had all the smarts and moxie that Buffalo Bill never mustered.

Jay Tarses was the creator and executive producer of Buffalo Bill. Despite his pedigree as a writer for The Bob Newhart Show, a show that I love, I just didn't like the shows he came up with on his own. Tarses went on to create The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, which was part of the great "dramedy" boom of the mid-'8os (Doogie Howser, Hooperman, my beloved Frank's Place, etc.). Molly Dodd was another show that critics ate up with a spoon, but, like Tarses' previous venture, it left me both unamused and bored.

Since then, it seems to me that to every generation of television, a Jay Tarses is born. Every decade has its signature creator of multiple shows that find favor with critics, yet whose creations aren't as funny or smart as their perpetrators think they are being, nor are they as funny or smart as they are made out to be in the press.

For your reading pleasure, I have selected a Jay Tarses for each of the last three decades. This weekend, I will discuss each of them in their own individual blog post. Today, it's the Jay Tarses of the 1980s, and the winner, please (cue drum roll)...

The Jay Tarses of the 1980s
Jay Tarses. (See above.)

Stay tuned tomorrow, when I reveal the identity of the Jay Tarses of the 1990s!

well, somebody has to be paul weller if he's not gonna do it

I reactivated my eMusic subscription the other day. They were dangling the 75 free download carrot, and Bugs Bunny-like, I bit.

I got a bunch of suggestions from the many eMusic-friendly friends o' mine, plus I stumbled upon some stuff I hadn't known was out, such as two newish Shriekback albums. As a result, by the wee small hours of today, I'd used up 104 of my 105 total October downloads (the 75 freebies plus the normal monthly allotment of 30).

Looking for candidates to be that 105th track, I did a number of fruitless searches. For example, I'd think "hm, I like Goldfrapp... do they have any Goldfrapp rarities/mixes?," but as it turns out, there's only one Goldfrapp track on eMusic, a forgettable mix of "Strict Machine."

Striking out with everything I could think of, I switched to alphabetically browsing the new arrivals in the "Alternative/Punk" section.

And there sat a live EP by From the Jam.

I knew that bassist Bruce Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler, the rhythm section of the Jam, had formed this group last year to play material by their classic band... minus singer/songwriter/guitarist / raison d'etre Paul Weller, who refused to participate in this reunion. It almost seemed like the punchline of a joke, to reform the Jam without the guy who wrote and sang almost everything.

But here was a chance to find out how it all turned out, so I chose "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight" as my final download of the month.

And holy cow. It's not only a spot-on, red-hot rendition without a trace of lameness or rote nostalgia, but new vocalist/guitarist Russell Hastings has Weller's voice down cold. Every intonation, inflection, and phrasing is exact. You'd never know it wasn't Paul Weller singing if you weren't tipped off.

What's funnier, at least for me, is that ever since the Style Council ended, my main complaint about Paul Weller is that he stopped singing like Paul Weller! Beginning with solo albums like Wild Wood and Stanley Road, Weller affected an unrecognizable ersatz soul voice. I mean, the guy is the world's best Paul Weller, but he ain't never gonna be Sam Cooke or Smokey Robinson, and why he wants to be something that he's just not, I can never figure out.

Heck, he not only stopped sounding like Paul Weller in '92, he stopped being interesting at all. Well, that last part happened sometime during the first full-length Style Council record, but even when Weller's post-Jam joint was awash in jazzbo didacticism, the man still sang like himself. Apparently there's not only no hope of a full Jam reunion, but no hope that Weller will integrate his rich past with whatever he chooses to do in the present, right down to not using the same singing voice.

So more power to From the Jam and Russell Hastings! If Paul Weller's not interested in being Paul Weller anymore, somebody else might as well be! And I can't argue with these kind of results.

does anybody know what day it is? does anybody really care?

Weird Blogspot stuff:

Mandy just told me that she didn't see a post from me yesterday. But I so published this gargantuan entry yesterday - Tuesday, September 30th.

However, she's totally spot-on, as Blogspot shoes me as having published both it and the prior entry on Monday, September 29th.

I saved a draft of the post in question on Monday, September 29th, but I did not click "publish" until the the morning of the 30th. That shouldn't have messed up the post's date. Right?

Anyway, no matter what date Blogspot assigned to my initial foray into analyzing the '90s, I have kept my goal and not missed a day of blogging. Where are all the one-week anniversary gifts?

fate up against your will sergeant

On the way home today, I put on for the first time a live Echo and the Bunnymen CD. I hadn't even heard of it before I rescued it from the Great Escape this past summer.

This CD had even been in the car since early September, when I repacked my travel CD case (my car, a '98 Sunfire, doesn't have an iPod hookup), so I don't know why I hadn't played it sooner. I guess I hadn't been in the mood for it until today.

And maybe I was too in the mood for it today, because I cried at least twice while listening to it.

Me, I'm All Smiles, the album in question, documents a very nice 2005 London performance of the reunited Bunnymen. Even with boffo original drummer Pete de Freitas long dead and bassist Les Pattinson once again an ex-Bunnyman, the group still sounds great live. Ian McCulloch's voice seems a little rougher, whether from accumulated wear and tear or maybe just the particular circumstances of that evening, but it's still grand. And guitarist Will Sergeant just gets better with age. He's not often cited as one of the great guitarists, but hearing his always-creative rhythm work and the ring and burn of his precise, Verlaine-toned leads is one of the greatest guitar treats the world has to offer.

Both new ('96 and after) and old material come off well on this album. And I really like the number of Heaven Up Here songs (their difficult, sometimes underrated second album) that made the setlist.

But what made me cry were two other old standbys: the title track from "Ocean Rain," which closes the set ("sailing for sadder shores / your port in my heavy storms / harbors the blackest thoughts" always does me in), and especially "The Killing Moon." I realize "The Killing Moon" is up there with "Lips Like Sugar," "The Cutter," and "The Back of Love" as one of the most played and widely recognized Bunnymen songs. But I don't care if it's a crowd favorite or not. It absolutely wrecks me every time I hear it.

"The Killing Moon"'s lyrics seemed cribbed from the climax of a Thomas Hardy novel, so much so that I expect Eustacia Vye or Bathsheba Everdene to walk across the moonlit heath any second: doomed lovers meeting at night, "fate up against your will," the "you" of the song apparently pledged to another "him." I'm not sure if McCulloch has ever talked about a Hardy connection; maybe it was like how McCulloch hadn't actually read any John Webster, but absorbed enough from his girlfriend reading Webster to come up with Porcupine's "My White Devil." Such lyrical ventures risk pretension, but fortunately, McCulloch's phrases are just abstract enough to come off as pleasingly evocative rather than awkwardly literary.

But what really makes the song is Sergeant's playing. Whether it's the signature opening riff or the short, furious, urgent lead break before the last verse, the song is a showcase for everything Will does well. And has there ever been a more devastating use of the whammy bar than when Will transitions out of that lead and back into that gorgeous, grand riff?

Somewhere in that lead break is always where the tear always starts making its way down my cheek, no matter how many times I hear the song. Some of what produces that tear is the emotion of the song itself, and some of it is the quarter-century of affection I've invested in the song.

But most of it is the pure awe of experiencing a work of art so beautifully composed and executed. We get so few moments of transcendent joy in our lives. For me, this song is one of those joys, and hearing it always makes me feel connected to art and literature and music and life in a powerful, direct way.

I'm thankful that "The Killing Moon" exists, and I'm very glad I got to experience it again today - and that I can share that joy with you here.