In today's musical ever-volatile environment which finds rock music almost completely pushed off the public radar, it seems appropriate to share a few words about what I feel is undoubtedly one of the greatest rock and roll albums of all time, Iggy & the Stooges' Raw Power.
Though it's become associated with a plethora of sub-genre labels including glam, garage, punk and the obnoxiously misappropriated "classic rock", Raw Power can only be accurately described as rock and roll in all its visceral purity. It almost seems bizarre to write about about an album whose experience is so intensely physical. As a matter of fact, if you haven't heard the album and you're reading this review, get off my blog and TURN IT UP, pronto. Thank me later.
Raw Power couldn't be more aptly titled. Decades of more extreme forms of Rock music (all of which owe something to the Stooges and Raw Power) have followed in its path, but very little Punk, Metal and Grunge have matched its grand intensity and aggression. The Stooges raise hairs not simply with volume, speed and attack but with their nihilistic attitude and approach to playing rock music.
For those new to Iggy & The Stooges, here's a brief history. Led by extreme rock icon Iggy Pop, The Stooges rose out of the late 1960's Detroit rock scene, which was something of an antithesis to the hippie movement. Along with New York's Velvet Underground and the Motor City's own MC5, the Stooges directly prefaced Punk, Metal, Grunge and "Alternative" music as a whole with their violent, noisy and technically primal take on Garage Rock. Their early shows regularly featured Pop smearing himself with blood and peanut butter over the band exploding their gear or using vacuum cleaners as instruments.
With two albums and a growing reputation as cult favorites under their belt by 1973, The Stooges were all but finished due to internal strife and the members' regular consumption of drugs, until rising star and Stooges fan David Bowie swept Pop off to England to revitalize his fading career. This resulted in the Stooges reforming, with guitarist Ron Asheton taking over the bass and the more technically accomplished yet just as violent James Williamson taking the guitar.
This combination and newfound focus resulted in the genius of Raw Power. Whereas their previous two albums featured fuzzed out, primal jams which often resulted in classic songs, Raw Power features more ambitious songwriting. Rather than mute the band's intensity, this approach resulted in the band's most punishing and aggressively melodic songs yet. Pop screams and howls hauntingly violent lyrics of sex and war over Williamson's eardrum-slashing guitar riffs, which sound like a deranged mix of Keith Richards and Jimmy Page on 11.
In terms of songwriting, the album's track list never lets up. The rampaging opening track "Search & Destroy" has become the album's (and arguably the band's) signature song, which blends a statement of purpose with Vietnam war imagery. The sophomore ballad "Gimme Danger" almost gives the audience a rest as a minor-key acoustic ballad, until the bridge kicks into an inferno with Pop's ambiguously threatening refrain "Swear you're gonna feel my hand..." Nearly straightforward hard rock songs like "Penetration" and "Raw Power" feature an unsettling menace with extreme sexual overtones and serene instruments like piano and celesta sprinkling in the background of the band's aural chaos. By the time the album closes out on a pair of rockers ("Shake Appeal" and "Death Trip") more intense than the opening, your heart is racing and everything else will be numb from the experience.
There has much been contention over the years over the album's production. Bowie's original mix has been critiqued as being thin and brittle, yet that very sound ended up influencing many punk bands as it brought out the album's primitive qualities. Pop's late '90s remix with Bruce Dickinson has been categorized as the single loudest album of all time at -4 dB's, with the original group criticizing its natural distortion. I personally prefer the latter mix, as the album's very nature is not in its subtlety but its brute force. Why not let Williamson and the rhythm jump out of your speakers and tear them to shreds?
Though the new lineup of the Stooges only made this one album, it's endurance in Rock history has been a lasting one. No other album has captured the genre's commanding, exciting and dangerous nature as effectively as Raw Power. Thanks to Almost Famous, "Search & Destroy" was introduced to the mainstream in a memorable scene featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman as iconic Rock critic Lester Bangs. While their popularity will never approach that of Black Sabbath or even the Sex Pistols, the Stooges' influence is just as important. Artists from disparate sub-genres cite Raw Power as an influence including Nirvana, Guns 'N Roses, Rage Against the Machine, the Clash, Sonic Youth, Metallica and even Cee-Lo Green. Its importance is immeasurable.
As I said, it's somewhat moot to write about this album. It simply must be turned up to 11 to be experienced. Just be ready for irritated neighbors, torn eardrums and heart palpitations. But it will all be worth it to have your life changed.
Monday, October 10, 2016
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
Smile, You're at Mr. Smiley's! First Impressions of "American Beauty" (SPOILERS)
"I'm just an ordinary guy with nothing to lose" Kevin Spacey delivers this smugly defiant line as the unforgettable every-man protagonist in 1999's American Beauty, which earned Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor (Spacey) and Best Original Screenplay. Those of us who were watching television in 1999 may remember seeing parodies of a nude Mena Suvari covered in roses surfacing everywhere, particularly sketch comedy shows like Saturday Night Live.
It's been almost twenty years the film's release, but I finally made it through the entire film this year, thanks to Netflix. When I was younger, I was taken aback by the film's frank sexuality. How many Best Picture Oscar winners feature someone masturbating in the shower within the first two minutes? American Beauty is bold. It's stirring. It's dark, funny and of course it's very beautiful.
The film's beauty isn't found in a glamorously hot cast or lush scenery. In fact, director Sam Mendes assembled the perfectly drab looking cast and nondescript filming locations to construct what is essentially a post-modern farce. Everyone looks all-American and they all live in a picturesque town which is essentially Brentwood, Los Angeles standing in for a nameless Chicago suburb. The film is a complete send up of the archetypes which inhabit and characterize American suburban culture.
Though one learns more with subsequent views, American Beauty isn't a film of nuance. It is one of overtones and hyper-conscious symbolism. The film has inspired countless interpretations, and the filmmakers concur that there isn't a definitive way to view the film.
The heart of the film is Lester Burnham, whose spiritual journey is the film's centerpiece and driving story. But all of the main characters represent different facets of suburbia. Lester's wife Carolyn (played brilliantly by Annette Bening) is shrewd, materialistic and shallow, yet even she is pushed to the limits when her portrait of perfect life is shattered by her husband's nonconformity. Like her father, the Burnhams' daughter Jane (Thora Birch) gradually stands up to her parents' disguised dysfunction by running away with their outsider neighbor Ricky Fitts.
The Fitts' serve as secondary characters, yet their story reveals just as much about suburban life as the Burnhams. The family patriarch Colonel Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) dons the guise of a staunch, violent homophobic traditionalist, yet his malice is revealed to a repression of his own homosexuality. His wife has become nearly catatonic due to years of romantic distance and neglect. Their misfit son Ricky is conversely viewed as an alien in the eyes of conformist society, and as the free-spirited voice of reason when Lester and his daughter conclude their character arcs.
All of the characters are essentially actors within the film. As one character mentions in his best advertising voice, "In order to be successful, one must project an image of success". Many of the characters present images different from their true selves. Carolyn barely hides her contemptuous venom for her husband with a cold, wifely etiquette. Angela appears to be a lusty, sexually precocious young woman but she is in fact a virgin. This is an overall commentary of what lies beneath the postcard-ready image of the picturesque all-American culture.
Perhaps the most touching and insightful message of the film comes in the form of Lester rejecting middle age, one in which he spent the best years of his life developing. He sacrificed his youthful freedom to earn the American dream; a successful wife and a daughter who both appear to be normal on the surface. Yet he feels completely disillusioned and lost, as they both resent him and love is essentially implied to be dead in his household. When Lester finds inspiration in his daughters' friends Angela (Mena Suvari) and Ricky, he decides to reclaim his youth by working out, listening to rock music and quitting a corporate position to work at a fast food drive-thru.
That's how it appears on the surface, but really Lester is freeing himself from conformist imprisonment. Early in the film, there's an abundance of prison symbolism, from the reflection of bars in his work's computer screen to his demeaning wife, who is essentially a prison warden rushing him from one place to the next. When Lester begins to fantasize about Angela and envy Ricky's exuberance, he begins to free himself and reclaim his character. At the beginning of the film, Lester is a nameless inmate caught up in a system of conformity, and eventually gains enough confidence to push back against the system, symbolized by his by-the-book wife.
Lester's journey doesn't conclude with him abandoning adulthood and embracing a lost adolescence. While it was necessary for him to undergo his mid-life crisis to refocus his priorities, he comes full circle by learning to be a father again. At first he views Angela as an object of desire, but his fatherly instincts are reborn when he sees her as a naked, vulnerable child in need of comfort. When Lester is finally killed, he remarks that he's nonetheless happy, because there's so much beauty in the world.
Like Fight Club (released the same year), American Beauty is a message of hope wrapped in dark humor and sometimes disturbing content. It's a cautionary tale for one to treasure life before it slips away, and to not overlook beauty around us every day, even in the most unusual places. Through all of the sexual depravity and cynical humor, American Beauty is one of the few films I would say is truly thought provoking and has the potential to inspire real change in one's life.
Plus, the soundtrack kicks ass.
It's been almost twenty years the film's release, but I finally made it through the entire film this year, thanks to Netflix. When I was younger, I was taken aback by the film's frank sexuality. How many Best Picture Oscar winners feature someone masturbating in the shower within the first two minutes? American Beauty is bold. It's stirring. It's dark, funny and of course it's very beautiful.
The film's beauty isn't found in a glamorously hot cast or lush scenery. In fact, director Sam Mendes assembled the perfectly drab looking cast and nondescript filming locations to construct what is essentially a post-modern farce. Everyone looks all-American and they all live in a picturesque town which is essentially Brentwood, Los Angeles standing in for a nameless Chicago suburb. The film is a complete send up of the archetypes which inhabit and characterize American suburban culture.
Though one learns more with subsequent views, American Beauty isn't a film of nuance. It is one of overtones and hyper-conscious symbolism. The film has inspired countless interpretations, and the filmmakers concur that there isn't a definitive way to view the film.
The heart of the film is Lester Burnham, whose spiritual journey is the film's centerpiece and driving story. But all of the main characters represent different facets of suburbia. Lester's wife Carolyn (played brilliantly by Annette Bening) is shrewd, materialistic and shallow, yet even she is pushed to the limits when her portrait of perfect life is shattered by her husband's nonconformity. Like her father, the Burnhams' daughter Jane (Thora Birch) gradually stands up to her parents' disguised dysfunction by running away with their outsider neighbor Ricky Fitts.
The Fitts' serve as secondary characters, yet their story reveals just as much about suburban life as the Burnhams. The family patriarch Colonel Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) dons the guise of a staunch, violent homophobic traditionalist, yet his malice is revealed to a repression of his own homosexuality. His wife has become nearly catatonic due to years of romantic distance and neglect. Their misfit son Ricky is conversely viewed as an alien in the eyes of conformist society, and as the free-spirited voice of reason when Lester and his daughter conclude their character arcs.
All of the characters are essentially actors within the film. As one character mentions in his best advertising voice, "In order to be successful, one must project an image of success". Many of the characters present images different from their true selves. Carolyn barely hides her contemptuous venom for her husband with a cold, wifely etiquette. Angela appears to be a lusty, sexually precocious young woman but she is in fact a virgin. This is an overall commentary of what lies beneath the postcard-ready image of the picturesque all-American culture.
Perhaps the most touching and insightful message of the film comes in the form of Lester rejecting middle age, one in which he spent the best years of his life developing. He sacrificed his youthful freedom to earn the American dream; a successful wife and a daughter who both appear to be normal on the surface. Yet he feels completely disillusioned and lost, as they both resent him and love is essentially implied to be dead in his household. When Lester finds inspiration in his daughters' friends Angela (Mena Suvari) and Ricky, he decides to reclaim his youth by working out, listening to rock music and quitting a corporate position to work at a fast food drive-thru.
That's how it appears on the surface, but really Lester is freeing himself from conformist imprisonment. Early in the film, there's an abundance of prison symbolism, from the reflection of bars in his work's computer screen to his demeaning wife, who is essentially a prison warden rushing him from one place to the next. When Lester begins to fantasize about Angela and envy Ricky's exuberance, he begins to free himself and reclaim his character. At the beginning of the film, Lester is a nameless inmate caught up in a system of conformity, and eventually gains enough confidence to push back against the system, symbolized by his by-the-book wife.
Lester's journey doesn't conclude with him abandoning adulthood and embracing a lost adolescence. While it was necessary for him to undergo his mid-life crisis to refocus his priorities, he comes full circle by learning to be a father again. At first he views Angela as an object of desire, but his fatherly instincts are reborn when he sees her as a naked, vulnerable child in need of comfort. When Lester is finally killed, he remarks that he's nonetheless happy, because there's so much beauty in the world.
Like Fight Club (released the same year), American Beauty is a message of hope wrapped in dark humor and sometimes disturbing content. It's a cautionary tale for one to treasure life before it slips away, and to not overlook beauty around us every day, even in the most unusual places. Through all of the sexual depravity and cynical humor, American Beauty is one of the few films I would say is truly thought provoking and has the potential to inspire real change in one's life.
Plus, the soundtrack kicks ass.
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