Intensities in Ten Suburbs

10 Years, 100 Songs: #17. “Gonna Have You Naked By the End of This Song…”

intensities — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:54:05 +0000

Over the final months of our fine decade, Intensities in Ten Suburbs will be sending the Naughty Oughties out in style with a series of essays devoted to the top 100 songs of the decade–the ones we will most remember as we look back fondly on this period of pop music years down the road. The archives can be found here. If you want to argue about the order, you can’t, because we’re not totally sure what the qualifications are either. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy.

The funny thing about Justin Timberlake–well, not funny, but mildly notable–is that I don’t even remember him being a real standout member of N Sync back in the day. You’d see the monstrous success that followed in his solo career and think that he probably always seemed like he was biding his time in his boy band life, just humoring the other members and management until all the pieces were in place for him to make a clean break for a solo career, like Beyonce with Destiny’s Child. And maybe that was true if you were paying close attention, but to me, he was just one of the guys (well, one of the guys who happened to be dating Britney Spears, but still). To find out that he was going solo seemed like a matter of little consequence–boy bandery in general seemed on its way out, and Nick Carter’s solo album (released just a couple weeks before JT’s solo debut Justified) came out to predictably little fanfare. I don’t see how anyone could have known that Justin Timberlake was about to become Justin Timberlake.

The thing that really strikes me looking back on it all now is just how easily disastrous JT’s solo career could have turned out right off the bat. It’s true that N Sync had started to move in a more hip-hop direction on third album Celebrity–most notably, Nelly was given a guest appearance on the “Girlfriend” Remix–but they were still thought of as a fundamentally pop, fundamentally white act. For Timberlake to come out with a debut single like “Like I Love You”–produced by the Neptunes, and featuring The Clipse, in one of the all-time great cred-for-crossover bargains in pop music–and instantly slot into a far more adult, more sexual persona…I mean, there’s a reason why Brian Austin Green’s rap career never really took off, you know?* If the songs weren’t good, and if Justin couldn’t sell them in his new style beyond a shadow of a doubt, the chances for him to become the laughing stock of the pop world were pretty high–hell, just look at what happened to JC Chasez about a year later.

Good thing, then, that the songs were good, and that Justin Timberlake pulled them off so easily and naturally that images of the “Tearin’ Up My Heart” video immediately became the most distant of memories. Whether he was delivering soulful kiss-offs in “Cry Me a River,” creeping up with the sly funk of “Like I Love You,” or leading latin-tinged gender-roll-call and responses in “Senorita,” JT was always his own man, and he always sounded good. He got some BIG help from some A-List producers bringing their A-Games to the table, sure, but if Timberlake had sounded like he was trying too hard to prove something, if he looked uncomfortable in his own skin, or if he just wasn’t nearly as good at falsetto as he thought he was, than it wouldn’t have worked even if he had 1982-era Quincy Jones on his payroll. Mostly, Timberlake seemed like a true, legit star–someone who maybe took a less-than-traditional path to artistic respectability, but who had arrived there nonetheless, and demanded to be recognized.

And the best (and most improbable) of all his hits was “Rock Your Body.” It was the third single off Justified, but the first I remember really liking–this was still when I needed to be sold a little on a pop song to give it a chance, although those days were rapidly coming to a close thanks to songs like this. I caught the video once on MTV one day when I was home from school–sick, I think–and was struck by it, for several reasons. First, the song sounded like a surefire hit, in a historic sense–I could tell that it had a kind of classic structure, with the male/female interplay that harked back to cheesier pop songs of the 70s and a lithe disco-funk hybrid of a backing track that was early-80s through and through–but with enough of a modern production style to it that it never felt pointedly retro. Second, the video was a visual stunner–the most psychedelic-looking disco set-up since U2’s “Discotheque,” and believe me when I say I mean that as a compliment. And third–he beatboxed in the video. Justin Timberlake. Beatboxing. For like, a long time. Uh, what?

The Neptunes were at the very height of their powers in 2003. I’ll spare you the stats, but suffice to say, if Pharrell Williams was involved with a song in some capacity in the year of trucker hats, chances are it as something you were going to be hearing a couple of times. “Rock Your Body” bore a couple of their trademarks from that period–the reliance on lite, crisp guitars and synth (or just synth-sounding) bass especially was vaguely reminiscent of their work on their biggest hit to date, Nelly’s “Hot in Herre.” But to refer to a superproducer previously mentioned, I didn’t really make the comparison at the time, but in a year-end singles poll, one of my compatriots referred to the Neptunes aping Quincy Jones for the song, and it was a moment of semi-revelation. The song does feel like something Michael Jackson would’ve come out with maybe in between Off the Wall and Thriller, with the energy and sensuality of the former and the slightly harder edge of the latter. And like I need to spell it out, but when talking about pop debuts–especially those of ex-child stars looking to make a break from their kiddie past–peak-era MJ is a good musical reference point to shoot for.

The beat didn’t go to waste, either. Timberlake had no trouble whatsoever finding his stride over Pharrell and Chad’s slinky floor-filler, hitting ‘em equally with the come-hither falsetto (“Don’t be so quick to walk away“), the slow-and-low hush (“So go ‘head girl, just do / That ass-shaking thing you do”), the urgent yelp (“HURRY UP, ‘COZ YOU’RE TAKING TOO LO-OOONG!“) and the loverman grumble (“Are you feeling me?”) He sounds equally adept at all his seductive personas, even as he has to bob and weave his way around chorus-and-bridge partner Vanessa Marquez (who fills in her parts adequately, even as she leaves little to no doubt about who the song’s true star is). And yes, JT beatboxes–more in the video than in the actual song–and while it’s not exactly revelatory , it serves as sort of a statement from Timberlake that the normal rules and boundaries of pop music (specifically, the one about white, boy-band-alum pop stars not beatboxing in their own songs) no longer apply to him, that he’s now on a plane where he gets to decide what works for him and what doesn’t. Fair enough, I guess–and after all, it is pretty fun to faux-box along to.

Justified sold three million, and remarkably, it was just the opening act. JT’s career took a minor tumble after his performance of “Rock Your Body” at Super Bowl XXXVIII, when his promise of “Gonna have you naked by the end of this song” proved all too prophetic and America got to find out precisely what Janet Jackson’s right tit looked like, but three years later, FutureSex/LoveSounds followed, and all was forgiven. FS/LS spawaned three number one hits, stayed on the charts forever and officially made Justin Timberlake the biggest name in pop music. Where he goes from there is one of the most interesting musical subplots going into the 2010s, since everything about the guy suggests that he’s smart, talented and ambitious (not to mention good-looking) enough to continue on his success for the next decade if he wants–even though history suggests that stars of his ilk rarely shine so brightly for such an extended period of time. Can he keep it up? Well, I never would’ve imagined that he could get this far, so maybe it’s best if I just avoid making pronouncements about Justin Timberlake’s future altogether.

*I do have to maintain that from the brief clips I’ve heard, it would appear that Brian Austin Green’s solo career wasn’t nearly as dreadful as we were all led to believe. Respect is due.

(Have any thoughts or remembrances of this song? Want to correct our lyrics or call us out for relying too much on Wikipedia? Please feel free to leave a comment here, or (gulp) Tweet us about it at twitter.com/intensities. Your input is lusted after and appreciated.)

The List So Far (Now With Links!):

100. Green Day – “Jesus of Suburbia”
99. The Ying Yang Twins – “Wait (The Whisper Song)”
98. Crazytown – “Butterfly”
97. Taylor Swift – “Teardrops on My Guitar”
96. The Fray – “Over My Head (Cable Car)”
95. Fergie – “Fergalicious”
94. Lidstrom – “I Feel Space”
93. Chevelle – “Send the Pain Below”
92. T-Pain f/ Yung Joc – “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’)”
91. The Arctic Monkeys – “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”
90. Cassie – “Me & U”
89. Nelly Furtado – “Maneater”
88. Mike Jones f/ Slim Thug & Paul Wall – “Still Tippin’”
87. Bat for Lashes – “Daniel”
86. The Darkness – “I Believe in a Thing Called Love”
85. Dynamite Hack – “Boyz n the Hood”
84. DJ Khaled f/ T.I., Rick Ross, Fat Joe, Birdman, Lil’ Wayne & Akon – “We Takin’ Over”
83. Matchbox20 – “Bent”
82. The Game f/ 50 Cent – “Hate It or Love It”
81. 311 – “Amber”
80. 3 Doors Down – “Krptonite”
79. Nas – “Made You Look”
78. Royksopp – “Eple”
77. The Pussycat Dolls – “Don’t Cha”
76. DMX – “Party Up (Up in Here)”
75. Junior Senior – “Move Your Feet”
74. Twista f/ Kanye West & Jamie Foxx – “Slow Jamz”
73. The Streets – “Weak Become Heroes”
72. Jimmy Eat World – “The Middle”
71. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Maps”
70. Snoop Dogg f/ Pharrell – “Drop It Like It’s Hot”
69. Alice DeeJay – “Better Off Alone”
68. Xiu Xiu – “I Luv the Valley OH!”
67. Incubus – “Stellar”
66. Mariah Carey – “We Belong Together”
65. Andrew W.K. – “Party Hard”
64. Jurgen Paape – “So Weit Wie Noch Nie”
63. Taking Back Sunday – “MakeDamnSure”
62. Kid Cudi – “Day n Nite”
61. Paramore – “That’s What You Get”
60. System of a Down – “Toxicity”
59. dNTEL f/ Ben Gibbard – “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan”
58. Three 6 Mafia f/ 8Ball & MJG – “Stay Fly”
57. Good Charlotte – “The Anthem”
56. The Lonely Island – “Lazy Sunday”
55. Darude – “Sandstorm“
54. Yellowcard – “Ocean Avenue”
53. The Killers – “Mr. Brightside”
52. Luomo – “Tessio“
51. Blink-182 – “Stay Together For the Kids”
50. My Chemical Romance – “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)“
49. Freelance Hellraiser – “A Stroke of Genius”
48. Daft Punk – “Digital Love”
47. Snow Patrol – “Chasing Cars“
46. Sean Paul – “Like Glue”
45. Ludacris – “Stand Up”
44. Britney Spears – “Toxic”
43. Kings of Leon – “Sex on Fire“
42. Jennifer Lopez f/ Ja Rule – “I’m Real (Remix)”
41. Lifehouse – “Hanging By a Moment”
40. Plain White T’s – “Hey There Delilah”
39. MGMT – “Kids”
38. Gym Class Heroes f/ Patrick Stump – “Cupid’s Chokehold”
37. Franz Ferdinand – “Do You Want To”
36. Kylie Minogue – “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”
35. Vertical Horizon – “Everything You Want”
34. The White Stripes – “Fell in Love With a Girl”
33. Jay-Z – “Takeover”
32. Maroon 5 – “This Love”
31. Silversun Pickups – “Lazy Eye”
30. M.I.A. – “Paper Planes”
29. Timbaland f/ OneRepublic – “Apologize”
28. Beyonce f/ Jay-Z – “Crazy in Love”
27. Coldplay – “Yellow”
26. Lil’ Wayne – “A Milli”
25. Shaggy f/ Ricardo “RikRok” Ducent – “It Wasn’t Me“
24. The Strokes – “Last Night”
23. Kelly Clarkson – “Since U Been Gone”
22. Radiohead – “Idioteque”
21. Fall Out Boy – “Sugar, We’re Going Down”
20. The All-American Rejects – “Move Along”
19. OutKast – “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)”
18. Interpol – “PDA”
17. Justin Timberlake – “Rock Your Body”

10 Years, 100 Songs: #18. “And Now There is This Distance…”

intensities — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 04:35:44 +0000

Ever since I started getting back into basketball, there’s only one phrase that comes to mind whenever I think of Interpol: Draft bust. Interpol arrived on the scene in the summer of 2002 with a self-titled EP of three songs, which was greeted with a whole lot of Joy Division comparisons and a great deal more rapturous acclaim. The hype was tremendous, and it seemed mostly deserved, but even debut album Turn on the Bright Lights–which relied heavily on two of the songs from the EP–was maddeningly inconsistent, scattered with moments both beautiful and stupefying. Then like The Strokes, Interpol never really evolved particularly–but unlike the Strokes, they were never reliably good enough at any one thing to coast for the rest of the decade. Interpol ended the Naughty Oughties like Kwame Brown, Darius Miles, or any other of a number of preps-to-pros disappointments: Endless potential, flashes of brilliance, little to no development.

But holy shit, the three songs on that EP. “The Specialist,” “NYC” and “PDA,” the songs that sustained Interpol’s buzz for nearly half a year, were absolute benchmarks in 00s indie, setting the standard for the kind of angular, tense, post-punk-derived rock that permeated the underground before Arcade Fire and the freak-folkers took over for the second half of the decade. Interpol would have other good songs to follow–”Slow Hands,” “Obstacle 1,” “Say Hello to the Angels”–but they never really pulled away from the greatness of these three, and it would be generally diminishing returns from there. Gorgeously textured, inspiredly composed, and lyrically…well, we’ll get to the lyrics later, but they at least didn’t take that much off the table here. And of these, “PDA” was absolutely the best, one of the most immaculate rock songs of the decade and a song that by its very lonesome would justify Interpol’s existence a couple times over.

Mathematically speaking, there’s just no fucking with a rock song where all four core instruments are at the top of their game individually and exquisitely complimentary collectively. As previously mentioned, Interpol was absolutely dogged by comparisons to Joy Division early on (Andy Kellerman’s All-Music Guide review of TOBTL began thusly: “One might go into a review like this one wondering how many words will pass before Joy Division is brought up. In this case, the answer is 16″). Most of these comparisons were due to vocalist Paul Banks’s constipated baritone sounding vaguely like that of Ian Curtis, which was a fair if somewhat lazy relation to make. But the real way they were like Joy Division, in their good songs anyway, were the way they used all four instruments in a potential lead capacity, without anyone coming off sounding like a freelancer (and no one was better at this than Ian, Barney, Hooky and Stephen). The drums set the pace, the bass anchored the song, the guitars gave it lift and the vocals tied it all together. You can’t ask for better musical interplay than that found on “PDA”–unsurprisingly, making it one of the best songs for Rock Band group play.

About those lyrics–well, let’s say, I’ve had my beefs with certain pieces of Banks’s artistry over the years, culminating in a Stylus article about Turn on the Bright Lights that was probably the most popular (and by popular I mean most hater-baiting) piece I ever ran on the site. Banks was pretty far from a poet (although as long as we’re making the comparison, Curtis was always somewhat overrated in that respect himself), and shot himself in the foot on a disturbingly high percentage of his otherwise-good songs, most infamously on the “NYC” line “The subway, she is a porno.” It’d be something of a lie to say that “PDA” is an exception to this, especially since it turns out a line I previously thought to be “I am breaking all around me” (acceptable) is actually “I am raping all around me” (unacceptable). But there are some nice moments too, specifically on the song’s lyrically-climactic second verse, where Banks makes the song’s breakup/estrangement roots obvious: “You will not reach me, I am / Resenting a position that’s past resentment / But now I can’t consider / And now there is this distance.” It’s impressively understated by Banks standards, and makes an enigmatic chorus (“Sleep tight, grim right / We have 200 couches where you can sleep tonight”) seem oddly moving at times.

But let’s be honest–this song is 100% about the guitar coda. About three minutes into “PDA,” the vocals and drums drop out completely, while one guitar line continues on. Eventually a second guitar joins in harmony, and then the bass comes back in underneath. The three guitars–two lead, one bass–continue on for about forty-five seconds on their lonesome, twisting and twining around each other in a way as stunning as any other guitar breakdown in rock history. Interpol deployed their guitar attack like few alternative bands had since the days of bands like U2 and Simple Minds back in the early 80s, for maximal reach and impact, meant to reverberate and pierce and just sound huge.The three guitar lines take up so much sheer sonic space that you barely even notice that the drums aren’t in the song–that is, until the bass goes back into its low chug for just a second, and all of a sudden the drums are back for an absolutely sublime full-band outro. Indie rock in the 00s got no better–zero better–than those 45 seconds of “PDA.” It’s beautiful. (And, of course, the radio/video edit chops off the whole thing, which would be kind of like USA nixing the final five minutes in a re-broadcast of The Usual Suspects for time considerations. I linked to the full version above, since the video kinda sucked anyway).

In their own way, Interpol would prove to be nearly as influential to the scope of 00s alt-rock as The Strokes, making the success of a number of dour, anthemic guitar-led rock outfits (Bloc Party, The Editors, and most hysterically and shamelessly, She Wants Revenge) possible over the course of the decade. Meanwhile, the band themselves became minor New York celebrities, famous for their club cameos and fashion sense (Honestly, how long has it been since you last thought about bassist Carlos D and that fucking belt holster?), and got that ultimate indie rock seal-of-approval, being featured in an episode of The O.C. (And who could forget the strains of “The Specialist” playing in the background as a vengeance-swearing Eddie spied on Ryan and Teresa in their hotel room?) But as people came to realize that the band’s best days were instantly behind them, their popularity visibly waned, to the point wear I wonder if they released an album today, if the kids who currently read Pitchfork would even be aware of what a cause celebre the dudes were back in the day. (They probably would–the kids know everything).

But unlike other artists I’ve talked about recently, where the disappointment over the way their career turned out tainted the way I came to view their early material–if anything, I think Interpol makes more sense as a draft bust, or a couple-hit-wonder. In fact, I hope their rep only continues to diminish over the years, to the point a crate-digging (well, digital-crate-digging) listener in 2025 picks up Turn on the Bright Lights on a thoughtless whim, the way I would buy a Chameleons or Section 25 album, and (assuming he can get through the “Her stories are boring and stuff” line in “Obstacle 1″) gets absolutely blown away by the power of “PDA.” Or maybe they’ll be too busy retro-fetishizing Breaking Benjamin, who knows.

The List So Far (Now With Links!):

10 Years, 100 Songs: #19. “Power, Music, Electric Revival”

intensities — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:47:56 +0000

I don’t want to sound too negative in a series that should be mostly if not entirely about love, but I have to get it out of the way first and foremost: OutKast were probably the biggest disappointment of the Naughty Oughties. There was greatness there, no doubt–maybe too much of it, too soon. The frenzy surrounding the release of Speakerboxxx / The Love Below, hot off the juggernaut success of lead single “Hey Ya!,” was like nothing I can remember before. OutKast seemed prepared–destined, even–to become the first musical act since Nirvana (possibly Eminem) to assume the status of being both the most popular and critically beloved artist in the world, a feat only a handful of outfits have done in all of pop history. They seemed a perfect fit for the position–a roots-grounded, forward-thinking rap duo with grand aspirations who could appeal to just about all markets. The world was theirs for the taking. And they just couldn’t seal the deal.

We’ll get back to exactly what went wrong later, since of course, it’s more important to primarily focus on what went right. And perhaps the most impressive feat on OutKast’s resume to this day was how over the course of their first four albums, they improved in just about every possible respect. They broadened their sound, they wrote better songs, they increased their fanbase exponentially. The path from “Players’ Ball” to “Elevators” to “Rosa Parks” to “Mrs. Jackson” was a fascinating and not entirely linear one, but it spoke to an artistic growth that only the true greats are usually capable of pulling off. (Some people insist that their early stuff is still the best, but…eh.) These were two very talented, very different guys whose sensibilities meshed like a hip-hop Lennon/McCartney, and it was clear (or at least I assume it was–truth told, OutKast wasn’t even on my radar so much until the 00s) that great things were on the horizon. Even with all that in mind, though, I can say with relative confidence that nothing–nothing–could have prepared audiences for “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad).”

To say that “B.O.B.” was the weirdest hit of the decade is inaccurate for a couple reasons. The first is that, in actuality, it wasn’t really that much of a hit–barely managing to scrape the hip-hop charts and missing out on the Hot 100 altogether. And really, think back–do you remember hearing it on the radio all that much this decade? (Well, you probably didn’t hear it at all after the next September, for obvious reasons, but I mean even before that). Still, it was a song that everyone seemed to know about, if for no other reason than the fact that you only needed to hear it once to remember for the rest of your life. And the second is that…well, it’s just weird to compare it to other pop songs this decade, because there’s really none that could be considered in any way to be in this song’s peer group. With the release of “Bombs Over Baghdad,” OutKast, as my critic friend might say, now existed in their very own paradigm.

Is it really that crazy a song? Well, it’s sort of hard to say from listening now–give anything a couple of years a couple hundred listens and it’s shocking how quickly it became normative. But I can definitely say that from about 2000 to 2003 or so, no song took my head for a trip like this one. It was like a simmering cauldron of 40 years of funky, pissed-off black culture, from Sly & the Family Stone to P-Funk to Prince to N.W.A. You didn’t put “B.O.B.” on in the background–you just couldn’t, since no matter what you were doing, it was huge and powerful enough that it quickly pushed its way to the forefront. In fact, after a while, I specifically remember that I would hear that twinkling intro and the beginning of Andre 3000’s whispered “One…two...” and race to change the station or the CD track, since I knew that if I got to ‘Dre’s “YEAH!” and the song kicked in before I could stop it, I would have no choice but to spend the next five minutes in dutiful headbanging silence.

And the weirdness only has a little to do with it. Yeah, it didn’t sound like everything else, and that was cool, but more importantly, it also sounded better than everything else. “B.O.B.” was easily one of the five most purely exciting songs released in my lifetime, a song that instantly raises your blood pressure, that makes you reflexively press down on the gas pedal when driving. Once that beat took off–that alien, whirring, drum-and-bass-but-not-nearly-so-dated beat–I was officially in the red, and with Dre and Big Boi putting Busta Rhymes to shame on the verses, the song never let up. Even the chorus chant, which by ‘Dre’s own admission was entirely meaningless, just sounded so fucking cool and violent and visceral that nary a beat was lost. For my money, though, the best part of the song was the breakdown section leading up to the outro, where the beat skitters at near double-time and just about everything that can be thrown in–guitar solos, synths, context-less scratching noises–just get thrown in why not. It was the sound of that simmering cauldron starting to boil.

Then there was the actual outro. I’ve always loved songs that start to sound kind of evil at the end, even if it’s for no reason in particular. I’m still not quite sure where that transformation in the song comes from, but then again nothing else in the song had really made sense in a conventional sense either, so I guess it was fair play. And that chant–”Power, music, electric revival.” Of course I didn’t know what it was for years, and I almost kind of preferred it that way–not knowing what the chant was actually saying made it sound kind of like an incantation, which probably would have explained a lot about the song in the first place. Now that I know what it means, though, it’s just about the perfect four-word summation of the song’s awesome force, or at least the awesome force it was for those four years. Just don’t ask me to explain why.

“B.O.B.” established beyond a doubt that OutKast were a fucking musical force to be fucking reckoned with, and “Mrs. Jackson” (their first-ever #1 hit) proved they could put up pop numbers with the big boys as well. Parent album Stankonia topped the Pazz & Jop poll (an asssemblage of year-end lists from various critics around the world, for those of you that don’t spend your lives on the internet) and sold four million copies. Then “Hey Ya!” dropped, and the world was briefly sent into free-fall. A combination of 60s bubblegum pop hooks, modern hip-hop production and more catchphrases than an episode of How I Met Your Mother, “Hey Ya!” took little time in becoming the consensus Most Beloved Song of the 00s, topping the charts for nine weeks, winning just about every conceivable kind of award, and even revitalizing the Polaroid Corporation, despite being, in its own less-intimidating way, about as unusual a song as “B.O.B.”

Stock in OutKast could not have been higher for the release of Speakerboxx / The Love Below, the double album featuring one disc each by both of the group’s members. I remember when the thing leaked online, it only came out a song at a time, and every single new song caused people to go into rapture. This was going to be one of the great albums of our time, the collection that cemented OutKast’s status as the Band/Artist/Whoever of the 00s. Slight hold-up, though: The album kind of sucked. OK, not really–Big Boi’s Speakerboxxx disc was impressively solid, and moments on Dre’s The Love Below were predictably inspired. In time, most people would come to agree that if the two discs had been merged into one best-of, it could have been something close to a great album. But try as they might to convince themselves that the album was everything they were hoping for–lord knows I spent a good deal of time doing just that–almost everyone had to admit, in time, that the album fell well short of expectations.

The solo split between the two was more harmful than expected. Some songs on Dre’s disc were alarmingly bad–cloying, cheesy, or just plain strange and off-putting songs that had no place on the kind of five-star classic we were expecting. They brought out aspects of his personality which had always been there and always been kind of annoying, but had always been tempered by Big Boi’s reality check. Meanwhile, though there were plenty of good songs on the Big Boi disc, there weren’t too many great ones, as without Dre there to push him, Big Boi started to sound like a fairly above-average ATL rapper, little different from Killer Mike or Cool Breeze. It was almost kind of touching to see the obvious ways that the two rappers needed each other to reach their own full potential, and tellingly, after the initial smashes of Dre’s “Hey Ya!” and Big Boi’s “The Way You Move,” S/TLB struggled to spin off more hits–besides the deplorable “Roses,” which I’ve done my best to block from memory. But it was still sad to see such obvious potential starting to go to waste.

It only got worse. I don’t know what the fuck happened with Idlewild–I never saw the actual movie–but the singles from its soundtrack were virtually unlistenable, the thing flopped in just about every way possible, and outside of a few guest appearances, we haven’t heard from OutKast since. Ultimately, what went wrong with OutKast was the very opposite of what I previously talked about going wrong with Fall Out Boy–whereas Pete Wentz was determined to control his band’s fate and did everything in his power to make them as popular and beloved as possible, OutKast (and Dre specifically) went in the other direction, becoming insular and pretentious and throwing caution (and commercial success) to the wind, unconcerned with the consequences. Maybe like Lennon and McCartney they were too different to stay together forever, maybe like Prince they were too essentially weird to stay continuously popular forever. OutKast’s demise defies easy explanation, but it continues to be a humongous shame, especially considering how when the two can actually get their act together long enough–as on the excellent “Royal Flush,” supposedly due on an eventual Big Boi solo disc–they can still make magic.

I can’t even listen to “Hey Ya!” anymore, since it only reminds me of what could have been, and only makes me think of how irritating Dre has become since. For me, their greatest legacy will always be “B.O.B.,” a song which almost ten years later, still stands monolithic, a song that no one would ever even think of attempting to match. Listen to it and join me in the hope that one day, they’ll return to the tenets of “Power, Music, Electric Revival” once more.

The List So Far (Now With Links!):

10 Years, 100 Songs: #20. “Speak to Me…”

intensities — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:22:30 +0000

Some songs just manage to defy the odds. The All-American Rejects never seemed like a particularly notable band–”Swing, Swing” was pretty underrated, sure, and “Dirty Little Secret” had a fun video, even if the song itself was kind of shockingly mean-spirited, but little about them seemed destined for any specific greatness. And honestly, that didn’t even change all that much the first couple times I heard “Move Along.” But the success of that song was that same kind of slow-burn effect that I talked about with “Lazy Eye,” where the song just kind of seeps into the pop culture of the time (the song only peaked at #15 on the pop charts, but spent an astounding 38 weeks in the top 50) until it eventually feels like an inextricable part of its DNA . Soon enough, it was a lot easier to recognize “Move Along” for what it was–one of the ultimate anthems of the emo era.

It’s probably bad timing of me to have this song in a back-to-back with “Sugar, We’re Going Down,” since if the emotive affectations of one turned you off, it’s pretty certain that it did so for the other as well. Indeed, I imagine many people would take one look at Tyson Ritter’s face in the “Move Along” video–squinty, pouty, half-covered by moppy hair, and just impossibly pained-looking–and decide that this kind of song is probably not for them. But then again, this was rock in the 00s, in essence–perhaps the people who complained about the piercing, overly-wussy vocals of Fall Out Boy and the All-American Rejects were the same type of people who cried foul at Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots for having vocals so mush-mouthed that no one can understand what they’re saying. I certainly would know better by now than to give those people any real credence, so perhaps the same hard line must be taken to those who still complain about whiney vocals in the year 2009.

Really, though, I’m not even sure who I’m acting defensive against here. I’ve been consistently surprised with the kind of people who have willingly voiced support for “Move Along.” I remember it finishing well on an indie-dominated music webboard I used to post at, sandwiched in between Wolf Parade and M.I.A. singles. Meanwhile, my oldest friend, the experimental poet who wrote the Xiu Xiu piece I linked to back in my #68 post and barely even listens to music anymore, loved playing the All-American Rejects in Rock Band. Clearly, something about this song stood apart, raised it to a level of quality perceivable even by non-mainstream rock/pop acolytes. (And it certainly wasn’t the kiddie/teen chorus that joins in before the song’s climax, the one part of the song that continues to grate on me to this day).

Of course, a good intro goes a long way to explaining the appeal of just about anything, and the beginning to “Move Along” is as solid an introduction as can be found in the Naughty Oughties. The menacing and thudding drum intro leading into the rumbling one-note bass line (And I feel like I’ve used the phrase “rumbling one-note bass line” like a half-dozen times in this series already–sorry, I guess rumbling, one-note bass lines were just that big this decade) makes the song sound like it should be seconds away from erupting either into a Sepultura or Dead Kennedys song, but then the choppy, major-sounding guitar part zooms in to provide relief from the impending threat–a neat little musical microcosm for the self-preservational themes about to be related in the song. You kinda get what the deal is with “Move Along” before Ritter sings word one.

And the lyrics are a little cheesy, no doubt. According to songfacts.com (who never lie as far as I can tell), Ritter–an Oklahoma boy by nature–wrote the song in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but decided to eschew specifics in order to make it more of a universal message. Indeed, “Move Along” reads like a song that was inspired by something specific but expanded to be all-encompassing–coming off as genuinely felt, but still largely spoken in general truisms. (If it had been written four years earlier, it would’ve been gobbled up in post-9/11 montagery and never would’ve made it to the end of the decade.) It’s never distractingly cringeworthy, but taken on their own, some of the lyrics (“Another day and you’ve had your fill of sinking,” “Could be a night where your life ends”) just seem kind of tired and pandering.

But really, with a song like this, subtlety and originality isn’t really what we’re going for–the lyrics are far less critical to the song’s meaning as the dynamics and emphasis put behind them. And dynamics are the key to “Move Along,” as it masterfully drops and adds intensity for the proper maximal effect. Take the first verse, as after a stanza of tensely vocals and forebodingly minor bass work, the bottom completely drops out, as Ritter’s wail turns into a tremble (“Hands are shaking cold / These hands are mine to hold”) before a voice from the background/subconscious exclaims “Speak to me!” and the all-out chorus is triggered. Then take the second verse, which basically pulls the same trick, but builds on the first one, as now when the song drops, some shuffling drums are added to keep the song’s momentum going, while Ritter now moves an octave up on his subtly-tweaked “YOUR HANDS ARE MINE TO HOOOLD!!!” and the subconscious voice now shouts “Speak TO ME!!!” to bring the chorus back. It’s absolutely textbook stuff, and provides much of the song’s power.

The rest is in the hook. You can’t have an anthem without a shout-along chorus, and “Move Along” is certainly more than happy to oblige on those grounds. The general rule with these types of choruses is that they have to sound personally meaningful without actually stating anything specific, and the song checks those boxes with gusto. “When all you’ve got to keep is strong / Move along, move along, like I know you do.” What, if anything, does it really mean? Hard to say, but shouted by Ritter like it was the most important vocal he would ever lay on tape, we understand well enough. Also helping the chorus achieve lift-off are the drums, which previously just a grumble now soar into a frenzy, and the guitar, which goes from a jarring stop-start to sweetly flowing wave. By the end, what you’re screaming along to isn’t nearly as important as how loud you’re screaming it. It’s a chorus that elevates from whatever emo trappings it might possess to just become fantastic, timeless pop music.

In case you had any lingering doubts about the song’s potential for universal reach, the Rejects ram it home with the song’s Marc Webb-directed video (#3 for him on the countdown, for those keeping score at home), in which Ritter both semi-literally casts himself as Everyman (a montage of Ritter in about a dozen different personas, cut together to make one continuous lip synch), and asks the rest of the world to save him from drowning (a scene of Ritter falling backwards into an empty swimming pool, where a sea of hands suddenly emerges to carry him to safety). It’s a little thick on the We’re All in This Togetherness, but it’s undeniably effective, and instantly comes across as the exact video that the song was reaching out for. (What’s more, it made for two semi-iconic videos in a row for the Rejects–pretty damn good for a band in the second half of the Naughty Oughties).

“Move Along” always felt like a song that the Rejects were as lucky as anything to stumble upon, and this has been a little borne out by the singles that followed in its wake–namely middling ballad “It Ends Tonight” and fun but slight kiss-off “Gives You Hell” (technically the band’s biggest hit, which makes less than no sense to me). But this is no great tragedy–not many rock/pop bands are likely to come across a song as elevating as “Move Along” more than once in their lifetime, and we can only hope that those that do make sure to get themselves heard. Speak to us, indeed, Tyson Ritter.

The List So Far (Now With Links!):

10 Years, 100 Songs: #21. “Is This More Than You Bargained For Yet?”

intensities — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:52:22 +0000

I remember hearing about Fall Out Boy a bunch throughout the first half of the 00s, although I couldn’t have told you a thing about them. They were one of those bands that clearly had a cult following, but whose cult involved no one that I actually interacted with in my day-to-day life. Still, I could tell that the buzz around them was definitely building, and when I saw MTV2 was advertising for the video premiere of “Sugar, We’re Going Down,” I knew that if the song was any good, it’d probably be the thing that broke them into the mainstream and actually forced me to listen to them for the first time. Needless to say, it was. It was really, really good.

Fall Out Boy might not have been the biggest rock band of this decade (though for a little while, it certainly looked like they were pushing for the top honors), but they were probably the one that most made me think “OK, so this is what 00s rock is going to be best remembered as sounding like.” And we really kind of needed a band like that, as even by the middle of the decade, rock had yet to develop a decade-specific identity. Take a look at the list of #1 modern rock hits from the year 2005. Anything jump out at you? How about this: They’re all 90s artists. The only two artists on this list who weren’t at their commercial peak in 1995 are Gorillaz and Audioslave, and they both were comprised of dudes from other bands (Blur, Rage, Soundgarden) who were big then. Five years into the 00s, and still, the best we could do was decade-old leftovers. Even as awesome as the 90s were, you’d have to admit that was kind of pathetic.

Fall Out Boy didn’t necessarily change that–they never even topped the MR charts themsevles, and the next year still saw plenty of retro acts at pole position–but they gave the 00s something that was uniquely theirs, the first legitimately huge band who (along with My Chemical Romance) felt like they owed relatively little to the 90s. Not that what they were doing was revolutionary by any means–pop-punk had been a dominant musical force since Green Day fucked up a coach in 1994, and bands like Weezer and Blink-182 provided some more direct musical and lyrical precedents for the Fall Out Boy sound. But there was an attitude to Fall Out Boy that felt distinctly new, a snark, a pop-culture literacy, an overly-emotive preciousness. Basically, listening to them felt very much like reading a friend’s LiveJournal–and I mean that very literally, with all the semi-spun-honesty, the warped perspective, and the embarrassing moments of self-indulgence that that implied. They were often riveting and just as often cringe-worthy, and they felt important in a way that no mainstream rock crossover had in years.

I can’t really stress how important it was that “Sugar, We’re Going Down” was the first bit most of us heard from them, though. Many of their other songs would have been too esoteric, too self-pitying, or just too clever-clever for audiences to take as a first blast. There was an essential sweetness (no pun intended) to “Sugar” that allowed us to open our hearts to Fall Out Boy, or maybe just a relative lack of bitterness. Many of the lyrics were incomprehensible–viral videos were made about it, even–but it just felt nice, and the simple cheesiness of the puppy-deer-love video gave it all the extra push it would need. It didn’t seem like it was trying to be a huge rock single, but it was inherently big enough that it was obvious that it was only a matter of time before it would become one.

And you wanna know the song’s dirty little secret, as well as the key to its musical appeal? Like many of the biggest skeletons in the 00s’ closet, it has to do with Scott Stapp. You remember the Creed song “Higher,” don’t you? Well, do you remember the intro to “Higher” being virtually identical to the intro (as well as the main chorus hook) to “Sugar, We’re Going Down”? Take a listen if you don’t believe me, and then check out the “Sugar” riff again–the pounding drums and muted guitar strums, bursting into the wall-of-guitar lift-off? Oh yeah, it’s there. It probably took me two to three years to put my finger on the connection, but once I did, it became totally inextricable. And really, it’s not such a bad thing–the intro and riff to “Higher” is actually Creed’s finest moment by some distance, and we owe Fall Out Boy something of a debt from freeing it from the rest of the terrible lyrics and worse video also attached to the song.

It’s a fantastic musical backbone for the song, but what really made Fall Out Boy was always their lyrics. As previously stated, many of them are incomprehensible, either because they’re too garbled by singer Patrick Stump or they just don’t seem to make much sense (“We’re always sleeping in, and sleeping for the wrong team,” “Lie in the grass, next to the mausoleum,” “A loaded God complex, cock it and pull it”). But where Wentz’s strength really lay was in crafting short, quirky phrases that stuck in your head like catchy little riffs, lyrics whose mixture of jealousy, horniness and narcissistic self-loathing quickly became a FOB trademark (“Watching you two from the closet, wishing to be the friction in your jeans,” “I’m just a notch in your bedpost, but you’re just a line in a song”). Even a line as simple and essentially meaningless as “I’ll be your number one with a bullet” quickly took on a life of its own, just by virute of the fact that it didn’t seem like something any other band would say. To go back to the internet connection, they felt like the first band who seemed to compose lyrics specifically to be put up as teens’ AIM away messages. (And sorry if you don’t think that’s an historically significant designation, grandpa and/or grandma.)

Of course, it helped back then when we thought that the guy who wrote those lyrics was Stump, whose tense, just-on-the-verge-of-shrill tremble was the perfect voice of the band. It quickly turned out, though, that Stump was just a mouthpiece for the band’s actual lyricist, as well as their true creative and commercial driving force, bassist Pete Wentz. The video for “Sugar” was, as well as I can remember, the last time when Wentz would be anything but the band’s concentrated focal point, as even by follow-up video ”Dance, Dance,” he was giving himself the starring role. It seemed sort of fair at the time–Wentz was clearly the brains behind the operation, as adept at playing to a fanbase and acting as his band’s own PR manager as he was at writing these brain-latching pop lyrics. The fact that Wentz far more looked the part of the frontman than Stump (who seemed to gain about 15 pounds each time the band came out with a new video) also certainly helped the shift in spotlight seem natural.

Unfortunately, Wentz’s increased visibility and creative control ended up hurting the band far more than it helped. At their core, Fall Out Boy still felt like a cult act, one whose personal connection to their fanbase seemed as important to their success as their hit songs. But Wentz wanted Fall Out Boy to be the biggest band in the world, and started playing the part of the controversy-baiting pop star–getting Jay-Z to appear on their album for no particular reason, taking over hosting duties on MTV shows, and even marrying pop semi-star Ashlee Simpson–a move which stated to his fans, in no uncertain terms, that no matter how much you still related to his lyrics, you officially no longer had anything in common whatsoever with Pete Wentz. Meanwhile, FOB’s songs and videos started becoming more and more about their own image, and you could start to actually feel Wentz’s increasingly-cloying hand in orchestrating every plot point of the band’s career, desperately trying to get Fall Out Boy to the very tippy-top of the pop world.

Ultimately, I think it was Wentz’s too-acute self-awareness that lowered the band’s ceiling–real rock stars might be able to control their own fates for a few years, but they don’t spend their whole lives trying to do it without completely losing touch with reality. Fall Out Boy still sounds like they think they’re the biggest band in the world, but the facts no longer bear this out–latest album Folie a Deux sold far less than their first two smashes, and only spun off one semi-hit single, the slightly-above-average “I Don’t Care.” And it’s a shame, because if the band had just let things develop organically, I think they had the talent, the timing and the following to become as big as they ever wanted to be just on their own. Hell, look at Green Day, who spent nearly a decade actively fighting the over-saturation that Fall Out Boy spent nearly as long trying to embrace, and ended up being far huger as a result than FOB will likely ever be again.

The one part of Fall Out Boy’s legacy not touched by either their slight fall from grace or Wentz’s after-the-fact douchery, however, remains “Sugar,” a song with as glorious a riff and chorus and as unforgettable a verse as you were likely to find in all the 00s. We can still listen to it today and remember a time when it seemed like the 00s finally had an outfit worthy of taking the alt-rock mantle from the heavy-hitters of the 90s–even if they were making their bones on a Creed rip-off with non-sensical lyrics. Hey, that’s just what the Naughty Oughties were like sometimes.

The List So Far (Now With Links!):

Clap Clap ClapClapClap: What Would LeBron James’s Expiring Contract Be Worth?

intensities — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:17:15 +0000

Although I am by no means a LeBron James fan–he seems somehow lacking in character to me, something I unreasonably demand from my NBA stars–I am still, like many people, absolutely fascinated with the drama surrounding the expiration of his current contract in the summer of 2010. It seems unlikely that there has ever been a free agency so anticipated in professional sports, to the point where entire franchises have started planning their sales pitches years in advance, and speculation about the end game has reached such a fever pitch that JFK-level conspiracy theories have abounded about potential outcomes. Will he stick with the Cavs? Will he get seduced by playing at MSG with the Knicks? Will he hook up with Jay-Z and the crazy Russian billionaire in New Jersey? Will he invade Kobe’s back yard with the clippers? Will he join the Kings because fuck it, nobody expects him to join the Kings? Nobody knows, and try as we might to decode his cryptic statements on the matter, LeBron isn’t telling us. We’ll just have to see in the summer of 2010.

But then again–what if we didn’t have to wait so long to see LeBron on the move? What if the Cavaliers decided that the likelihood of LeBron hanging around past the summer of ‘10 was so low, that they decided to cut their losses, and see what they could get for him before he signed with another team for nothing? What would other teams–second and third-tier NBA powers, maybe, teams that aren’t championship contenders as currently constituted, but very well might become one if they added the best player on the planet to their roster–give up for only a guaranteed half-season with him? How much of their future would they mortgage to get a chance to play with the King?

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and it’s pretty simple: No fucking way would that ever happen. And for the most part, you’re right. Players of LeBron’s stature are never traded like that. Cavs fans would never forgive the administration for giving up on him. LeBron would never demand a trade to a contender, if for no other reason than the fact that just about any team with LeBron on it is automatically a contender to begin with. Besides, in basketball, it’s the lousy players with expiring contracts that get dealt mid-season–the ones with deals that were always over-inflated, who lousy teams covet because they come off the books the following season and offer much-needed cap space. You never see players even nearly as good as LeBron on the block at the deadline.

All true. But just hear me out for a minute. Let’s envision an absolute worst-case scenario for the Cleveland Cavaliers over the next few months. Let’s say Delonte West’s legal or psychological issues perk back up again, and he has to leave the team for personal reasons. Let’s say Mo Williams goes through another cold spell of missing open threes like he did in the conference finals last year. Let’s say that Shaq continues to talk a big game in Cleveland, but his effort starts to slide, and the team begins to call him out on it. Let’s say that Big Z becomes more and more disenchanted with being pushed to the bench, and struggles to gel in his new role. Let’s say one or two of the other rotation guys–J.J. Hickson, Boobie Gibson, Anthony Parker–get injured, and all of a sudden the team needs to resort to signing near-retirees and D-League guys just to get bodies on the floor.

Meanwhile, let’s say that the Cavs, who have already lost as many home games than they lost all of last regular-season, continue to put up L’s at a somewhat alarming pace. Let’s say that the city begins to voice a little discontent, and that some of it starts to fall on LeBron, for failing to integrate the new players into the system, for acting superior to coach Mike Brown, for becoming that most hated of sports phenomenons–the distraction–with all his upcoming off-season hijinx. Finally, let’s say that the Cavs come off a shellacking at home (say, a 95-71 loss to the Celtics), and LeBron looks around at the broken bodies he calls his teammates, and thinks to himself “People really expect me to spend the rest of my career with these losers?” So let’s say he goes to the post-game conference, and in a rare moment of completely unfiltered, unthinking honesty, offers the following quote: “I can’t wait till next season when I won’t have to deal with this bullshit anymore.“

Now, naturally, the odds of this perfect shitstorm happening are not good. If I was a betting man, I’d probably peg ‘em at somewhere between 150 and 200 to 1, and that’s just because I’m a pragmatist. But you could certainly see most of those things happening over the course of the season, couldn’t you? So what if they all did? Once LeBron made it clear that his heart and his future rested not in The Cleve, and once the team became too internally dysfunctional to hold out hope for a championship run, wouldn’t they be somewhat wise to at least get some combination of young talent, reliable vets, fellow expiring deals and future draft picks, rather than just letting him walk at the end of the season? Maybe they would, and just hope that one or two of the other big names this off-season–Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, Dirk Nowitzki–showed interest. But really, who would want to go to Cleveland without LeBron there? Who would want the shellshocked sloppy-seconds that even a player of LeBron’s unprecedented caliber couldn’t get a ring with?

So now that we’ve suspended disbelief enough to buy there being at least the slightest of possibility that the Cavs would trade LeBron, we come to the other side of the equation: What teams would be interested in trading him? The easy answer, of course, is everyone–when the best player in the world is put on the block, you answer the phone no matter who you are. But for some teams, the fit just wouldn’t make sense enough to really discuss here. Teams like the Magic, Celtics and Lakers are already too good, have too many untradeable players, and would be too unlikely to want to gut their team’s current structures to make such a dangerous deal. Meanwhile, teams like the Grizzlies, Timberwolves and Bucks are too far away from contending to risk crippling their rebuilding process by selling the farm for LeBron.

But what of those creamy teams in the middle, those for whom a half-season worth of LeBron might be enough to make it worth the gamble? Let’s examine the possible trade partners in alphabetical order–using that golden standard of objective arbitration, the ESPN.com NBA Trade Machine, to make sure the trades are at least financially even–and see who, on that 1/150th-1/200th of a chance, might end up being a taker this winter.

1. To Atlanta for Al Horford, Josh Smith and Jeff Teague.

Right off the bat, I kind of like this one. The Cavs completely re-stock their front lines with two high-upside (albeit still somewhat green) young’ns, meaning they don’t have to overpay in the off-season or re-sign the corpses of Shaq and Big Z when their deals expire in the summer, and get a promising back-up point in Jeff Teague to boot. Meanwhile, the Hawks can stop trying to use Joe Johnson as a franchise player and instantly turn him into one of the best second-best guys in the league, and still play a good back-court of Mike Bibby and Marvin Williams (imagine Bibby throwing alley-oops to LeBron–yikes).

The “yeah, but”s from this deal would mostly come from the Hawks’ side. They could maybe get away with moving LeBron up to replace Smith at the four–he’s only an inch shorter than Josh, and certainly no less athletic–but you’d have to start Zaza Pachulia at center, and trade for or call up some scrub to back him up. Meanwhile, if LeBron walked that summer, and they lost Johnson too, the franchise would have to undergo a complete retooling in the off-season. Still, I feel like the Cavs could have a shot at rebuilding with that front-court upgrading, and the Hawks could have a shot–much better than they have as currently constituted, anyway–at the title with a Bibby/Williams/Johnson/James/Pachulia starting five.

Ruling: Gold, Jerry, Gold! (Though the Trade Machine says I lessened the win expectancy of both teams by eight games with the deal.)

2. To Chicago for Luol Deng, Joakim Noah and Taj Gibson.

This is interesting to discuss, because Chicago was the team being discussed at the beginning of the ‘07-’08 season as a possible trade destination for Kobe Bryant, possibly the only other player in the league who would command such a strong package as a short-term rental. The main give-and-take here comes with how valuable you view Luol Deng as being as a player–he’s probably not quite worth six years / 71 mil the Bulls gave him two off-seasons ago, but he’s come back from injury this year and been kind of quietly nice so far. Would the King be enough of an upgrade over the Man from Sudan to give away his deal, as well as two quality (albeit somewhat low-ceilinged) role-players for a few months of his time?

The real question, perhaps, is if the Bulls would be willing to include budding-star Derrick Rose in such a deal, instead of any or all parts previously mentioned. I think the answer is pretty easily no–unless they were borderline-guaranteed that LeBron would sign on for longer, so much of the team’s future is currently tied up with Rose that there’s no way they’d risk being haunted by him for the next decade-and-a-half for one championship run. Ultimately, I don’t think the pieces are quite in place here on either side for this one to be much of a success.

Ruling: Not So Good, Al.

3. To Miami, Along with Zydrunas Ilgauskas, for Jermaine O’Neal, Michael Beasley, Mario Chalmers and a Future #1 Pick

This would be to answer the question that the New York Knicks hope that they’re lucky enough to be asking themselves in the ‘10-’11 season: Would you still be able to win a championship if your only half-decent players were LeBron James and Dwyane Wade? Assuming they made the above deal, their potential starting lineup would probably be Arroyo/Wade/James/Haslem/Ilgauskas, with the first guys off the bench being Quentin Richardson, Daequan Cook and, uh, Yakhouba Diawara. Not exactly the ‘86 Celtics here, but part of you has to feel that even with suiting up scrubs in roster spots 3-12, any team with LeBron James and Dwyane Wade–almost certainly the two best all-around players in the NBA–needs to be considered the finals favorite going into the playoffs. I mean, right?

The crazy thing, is that even with Miami sacrificing their only decent young talent, as well as their future #1 (and, uh, Jermaine O’Neal, who I included with Big Z just to make the salaries even out), I still don’t think it’s enough for Cleveland to part with the King for a half-season. And people think Wade is gonna be staying in South Beach the rest of his career? Maybe I should’ve written this column about him instead.

Ruling: Why Are the Pretty Ones Always Insane?

4. To Los Angeles [Clippers] for Chris Kaman, Eric Gordon, Al Thornton and a Future #1.

A whole lot of hesitation dribbles to be had concerning this deal. It’s hard to evaluate any of the Clippers players, largely because they have only played for the Clippers, and thus can not really be judged by normal-player standards. Kaman’s been absolutely dynamite so far this season, Gordon seems like a legit blue-chipper, and Thornton…well, Thornton probably sucks by just about any standards, but he comes fairly cheap. Still, are you going to risk giving up the king for three guys coming from the most cursed franchise in all professional sports? Who knows what they actually look like in the light of day?

And on the other side, will the Clippers be good enough or healthy enough at mid-season to make the risk worthwhile? Promising as he seems, we still have no idea what we’ll be getting this season from Blake Griffin–whether he comes in the league in four weeks and instantly starts slapping up double-doubles, or whether he struggles to get right with his knee and never even gets on the court this season. Meanwhile, Baron Davis has been significantly better so far this year than his catastrophic ‘08-’09 campaign, but who knows how many bad losses it’ll take for BD to start backsliding? You’d certainly like any starting lineup with Baron, Griffin and LeBron as a big three in theory, but in practice, it could get a little ugly.

Ruling: Not So Good, Al.

5. To Portland with Daniel Gibson for LaMarcus Aldridge, Steve Blake, Rudy Fernandez, Travis Outlaw and Jerryd Bayless

Definitely a steep hit to Portland’s depth without these guys, as well as the loss of a legit (albeit likely overpaid) talent in Aldridge, but they probably have enough dudes on the bench to make up for it, and they solve their Too Many Point Guards dilemma with the ex-communication of Blake and Bayless (and get a quality backup back with Gibson). Cleveland gets one of the deepest back courts in the league and a couple nice, athletic forwards, though they might insist on getting Oden instead of a couple of the guards, which I don’t see the Blazers doing (Aldridge and Oden? Too much personal investment, I think, even if on paper right now it might not be that crippling a loss). Meanwhile, the Blazers get to trot out a Miller/Roy/Batum/James/Oden starting lineup, which might be a little awkward positionally, but talent-wise would have to rank near or at the very top of the league.

This might not even be the worst fit long-term for LBJ, though it’s less likely now that Portland spent so much money locking up Roy and Aldridge. Still, young team, loose-walleted owner, hyper-enthusiastic fanbase…it’s not the biggest market, but I think LBJ could have himself a time playing there, and I might even enjoy watching him do it, too. I’d throw in Portland’s situational baby bro Oklahoma City as another possible trade partner here, but as sexy as the idea of LeBron playing with Durant may be, I think the latter’s already taken too much to the alpha dog mentality to be willing to play second fiddle as he enters his prime, especially not to someone who basically plays the same position as him. Nah, Portland would have to be the move here.

Rating: Gold, Jerry, Gold!

Outliers if Their Records Were Up to Snuff: Washington Wizards, Detroit Pistons, Houston Rockets, Golden State Warriors (Ownership is crazy enough to do it, regardless of the logic)

Wouldn’t Take if They Threw In the Entire Team and Even the Home Stadium: New York Knicks

There’s Gonna Be a Showdown: Mad Men vs. Sopranos Divorce Episodes

intensities — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:28:50 +0000

After a season mostly consisting of tense meandering punctuated by brief moments of inexplicable action, we finally got a Mad Men season finale (“Shut the Door. Have a Seat.”) that justified just about everything that came before it this season. If you haven’t watched it yet, probably based to stop reading now, since there’ll probably be spoilers, although the actual result of the action really isn’t as important as the scene episode itself, which is quite possibly the best of the series to date. But throughout the episode, which largely focused on the demise of Don and Betty’s marriage (as well as a concurrent plot about Don and the other bigwigs at Sterling Cooper plotting their escape from the company before it gets sold again), I was reminded of another classic TV episode from this decade–”Whitecaps,” the season four finale of The Sopranos, which saw Carmela and Tony Soprano part ways for the first time.

The similarities between the two shows have always been striking to me–not entirely coincidental, since Matt Weiner was so heavily involved in both shows–especially in the protagonist and his wife. Tony and Don were hardly carbon copies of each other, but certainly cut from the same cloth–family men in an often shady industry who regularly indulged in narcissism and infidelity. Meanwhile, Carmela and Betty were both housewives who learned to live with a certain number of their husband’s known dalliances, but eventually reached a tipping point where they decided it was time for a clean break. “Whitecaps” and “Shut the Door” were both season finales that saw the tension bubbling under (and occasionally over) the surface in each relationships come entirely to the forefront, with transfixing and often devastating results. (In the most direct parallel, the final break in both relationships came with Betty/Carmela insisting “I don’t love you anymore,” although in Med Men that line actually came in the penultimate episode).

Of course, only one episode can go down as the greatest breakup episode in 00s television. Which one shall it be? Break it down, one time.

Heartbreaking Moment of Decision: In neither episode to we really know that things are over over at first. (Well, we sort of do by the season finale in Mad Men, so I’m going to have to go back to the final scene in the penultimate episode for this particular challenge–consider it a lead-in). Betty was more than a little put out after uncovering Don’s web of lies about his past life (which, by the way, is evidence exhibit #156A why one should never keep a treasure trove of damning documents and memorabilia in one’s own home), but appeared to maybe sorta semi-forgive him after he broke down in tears in his explanation, and then stayed strong for her throughout the whole mess with the Kennedy and Ruby assassinations. But something was clearly gone from her eyes–credit the occasionally-maligned January Jones for doing a good job selling this–and when she came down with the “I don’t love you anymore” bombshell, we knew it was definitely over.

It was a different story entirely with Carmela in “Whitecaps.” Not only had she seemingly forgiven Tony his indiscretions, she had just been positively swept away with his purchase of a family summer home by the seaside (“Anthony Soprano, you are full of surprises,” she wistfully rhapsodized). It was only later in the episode, when Tony’s old mistress called his house to rat him out to Carm for his new mistress, that she started throwing his golf clubs out the window. The emotional violence that followed was all the more crushing because we had just seen their relationship–always a far richer and more compelling one than Betty and Don’s to begin with–reach a new apex. To see it fall so hard and so fast…well, we didn’t really want to believe it was over either. There’s no contest here.

Winner: The Sopranos

Discovery of Wife’s Maybe-Affair: Neither Tony nor Don knew of their wives’ growing affections for different men in their lives over the course of the season, before springing their grounds for divorce on them. Carmela had been engaged in an epic romance of longing glances with Tony’s Italian-imported muscle man, Furio Giunta, and although she never even came close to consummating it–Furio contemplated killing Tony and inheriting Carmela, Scarface-style, but made the more pragmatic decision to just move back overseas instead–the glee she took in informing Tony about her wandering thoughts, and his subsequent facial transformation, was one of the episode’s more indelible moments. Meanwhile, when Don heard about Betty’s push-and-pull tango with government advisor Henry Francis from a gossipy Roger while drinking, and I couldn’t even remember if he was just learning about this, or had heard before and just didn’t care that much. Whatever, another easy one.

Winner: The Sopranos

Telling the Kids: I’m not sure if we ever actually see Carmela or Tony telling Meadow and AJ about their impending split, but I remember a teary Meadow talking with Carmela about how she always thought she was better than her friends with divorced parents, and how she wasn’t looking forward to having to split time between them on the holidays. It felt like a pretty honest reaction, and I remember it being one of the more affecting parts of the episode. But this was a huge strength of “Shut the Door,” as Don and Betty engage in a subtle battle of agendas while informing Sally and Bobby about Don moving out, Don trying to leave the door open for his return and Betty trying to emphasize as best she can the finality of the situation. Meanwhile, Sally’s expression of betrayal at Don’s breaking of his “I will always come home” promise (which sounded like a risky guarantee to make even as he was making it ten or so episodes ago), “You say things you don’t mean, and you can’t just do that”…yeah, it’s a litlte bit of a too-easy summation of Don’s character, but it hits home nonetheless.

Winner: Mad Men

Moment of Near-Violence. This is pretty directly tied to the “Discovery of Maybe-Affair” section, as this revelation so incenses both Don and Tony that they come as close to physically striking their spouses as they do in the entire show run. It’s more jarring to see from Don, not necessarily a violent person by nature (although one who certainly doesn’t mind getting a little physical with the ladies, as Bobbie Barrett’s vagina will attest), grab Betty with a look of abject malice and inform her “You’re a whore. You know that??” Despite his cheating, his occasional manipulation of his employees, and his man-of-his-time prejudices (his “You people” sneer at Sal for rejecting Lee Gardner Jr.’s advances, despite obviously being gay, was pretty harsh), Don basically seems like an OK guy, especially considered in contrast with some of his particularly reactionary peers. Nearly beating Betty is as close as his character may ever come to genuine unlikability.

That said, it still can’t quite complete with the hugeness of the moment when Tony nearly comes to blows with Carmela. Unlike Don, Tony does not basically seem like an OK guy, and over the course of four seasons of the show, we’d seen him do enough unscrupulous, conscienceless shit that no low or him would seem particularly out of the question. As Carmela begins to taunt him with the news of her wordless affair with Furio, anything seems possible–hell, he might even kill her if he reds out for long enough without coming to his senses. As he wound up for a punch, the entire character hung in the balance of that moment–we could get past, if not necessarily forgive, Tony for doing a lot of fucked-up things, but if he beat up Carmela, there would be no going back. At the moment of truth, he pulled back and punched a hole in the wall instead–maybe something of a cop-out for the show, but still arguably the most intense split-second in all of The Sopranos. (Although I’ll never believe that it’s even half as easy to actually punch a whole in the wall as Tony made it seem).

Winner: The Sopranos

Concurrent Side-Plot: An underrated part of “Whitecaps” (well, I’m not sure who I actually think is rating these things, but it probably would be underrated if people bothered to rate it) is the ongoing dispute that Tony has with the real estate agent that sold him the summer house, since he decides to rescind on his purchase after the fall-out with Carmela, and the agent doesn’t want to give him back his deposit. The ensuing battle of wills–mostly consisting of Tony blasting Dean Martin live albums from his boat towards the agent’s beach house to bully him into submission–adds much, much-needed levity to the episode. The side-plot in “Shut the Door,” though, is almost as compelling as Don and Betty’s split, with Don, Roger and Bert scheming to start anew while gutting Sterling-Cooper in the process, and gradually getting most of the show’s other principals in on the act as well. As Don’s home life crumbles, his little office coup serves to show that his S-C cronies are probably closer to being his real family, or at least the family he needs and/or deserves. It’s a fun little subterfuge, besides.

Winner: Mad Men

Where Do We Go From Here Ending. “Shut the Door” ends with Don in his new office/hotel room, calling Betty and essentially admitting defeat in his (really fairly half-hearted) fight to keep their relationship together, as well as taking back his threats to take the kids and leave her penniless. “I hope you get what you’ve always wanted,” he offers to her, and that’s just about that–the books appear to be closed on Don and Betty, as she and Henry jet off to Reno and he re-focuses all his energy back into his work. With the “Whitecaps” finale, things couldn’t have been much more open-ended, as Tony reluctantly moves out of the Soprano mansion, tells his kids to be good to their mother, but leaves with a kind of “I’ll be back” hitch in his goodbyes. The episode doesn’t even end with Tony and Carm, but rather with T’s continued harrassment of the agent, whose wife begs him to give in, and who ultimately seems to conclude that you just can’t fight New Jersey Sanitation. Neither ending really stands out ahead of the other, and without knowing what’s to come with Mad Men, it’s basically impossible to make a ruling anyway.

Winner: Draw

Yeah, it was a hell of a Mad Men episode, but in the end, there’s still no fucking with The Sopranos in its prime, and “Whitecaps” was as good as the show–or any TV drama this decade, really–ever got.

ULTIMATE VICTOR: “Whitecaps,” The Sopranos

10 Years, 100 Songs: #22. “This is Really Happening…”

intensities — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:31:57 +0000

Perhaps the greatest testament to Radiohead’s excellence and stature in the rock cannon has been how little fun they’ve become to talk about. Like no other band since maybe The Beatles, serious music listeners (and by serious I guess I mean “willing to discuss it ad nauseum over the internet”) have debated the finer points of the Radiohead discography, mythos and just about everything else to do with them to the point where someone bringing them up in conversation now elicits something of a shudder. (Of course, that didn’t stop me from devoting an entire week to talking about them before the release of In Rainbows two years ago–that’s just the kind of selflessness you get here at Intensities in Ten Suburbs). Radiohead’s greatness has become ridiculously close to just being assumed at this point, and much of that has to do with Kid A–their 2000 artistic left-turn that solidified their status as the most critically beloved band of the last 20 years.

You know the deal behind Kid A already, but I’ll recap. Three years after OK Computer, the post-alt-rock classic that catapulted them into the discussion of the best bands in the world, Radiohead eschewed the guitar virtuosity that had once defined them in favor of things like drum machines, ambient synth soundscapes and just general knob-twiddling. It should have been a commercial disaster, especially with the band now shunning things like music videos and traditional promo tactics, but thanks to the band’s constantly ballooning cult and crit rep, as well as an unofficially sanctioned leak of the album online (hello 21st Century) to build the hype to a fever pitch, Kid A debuted at #1 on the US charts and had certain critics speaking in tongues. Overall reception was initially mixed–many old-school fans were thrown for a loop by the lack of rawk–but in time, just about everyone seemed to come around to Kid A, recognizing it as the daring, cohesive and stunning masterpiece that it was, and eventually building it to the consensus Album of the Decade, a status that has yet to be convincingly unseated by anyone else.

Of course this is all about an album, and you would be within your right to mention that this is actually supposed to be a songs list. Fair enough–the main reason for the lengthy Kid A preamble is that for possibly one of the last times in rock history, you absolutely can’t talk about the songs on Kid A without talking about the album itself. In the iTunes era, it’s become rarer and rarer (and will only get moreso) for albums to feel like too much more than mere collections of songs–or maybe it’s not the albums that have changed, but just the way we listen to them, it’s hard to tell. Either way, it’s unlikely we’ll get too many albums like this again, where the flow and structure feel absolutely crucial to the maximization of each of the songs’ potential–a dying cliche, but one that rings true none here nonetheless. But all that said, there is a song on the album that continues to stand out for me, which would be an absolute stone classic even if it showed up as a Hail to the Thief b-side–”Idioteque,” possibly my favorite-ever Radiohead song, and one that perfectly exemplified just why Kid A shone so brightly.

The most tiresome debate that emerged about Kid A over the years was whether or not the album was legitimately innovative, or merely adventurous by North American Indie Rock standards. People would point out how much it borrowed from 90s IDM pioneers like Aphex Twin and Autechre, art-rock heroes like Can and Brian Eno, even old-school proggers like Pink Floyd and King Crimson. All true, yes, but this: I have never heard another song like “Idiotheque” in my life. Not that it sounds so mind-blowingly weird or new or anything–just the opposite, in fact: It sounds like a great, great, great pop song, just one built with different elements (skittering drum loop, tonal synth sample, multi-tracked vocals) than we were used to from Radiohead or any of their 90s UK peers. In a way it presaged the laptop pop movement that would simmer in the electronic underground for much of the decade, but it still sounds more muscular, more adrenalized, more sheerly undeniable than any other bleeps + hooks combinations that would follow over the course of the decade.

To me, the key was always the sample. I’ve spent some time on this blog professing my love for producers that create brilliant hooks out of obscure and/or unlikely sources, but what Radiohead pulled off with “Idioteque” puts even Just Blaze and Jay Dee to shame. Ever heard of American electronic composer Paul Lansky? Yeah, me neither. Ever listened to his twenty-minute computer-music epic “Mild und Leise“? Yeah, I doubt I ever would have quite gotten around to that one myself. Lucky for us that Radiohead did, then–they took a pattern of four chords from about the one-minute mark of the piece (which never appears again for the rest of the song, by the way) and built the “Idioteque” hook around it. It’s impossible to understate how inspired a sample choice this was–the pattern is just about everything you could want from an electronic hook, shimmering and vibrant and a little haunting. “I really like what they did with the sample,” Lansky has since proffered. “It is quite imaginative and inventive.” (No kidding).

Radiohead did the hook a tremendous favor by building such an amazing beat around it as well. It’s hard to explain just what it is about the skittering drum pattern that makes it so compelling–the way the thumping faux-bass drum juxtaposes with the crisp airiness of the faux-snare, the way it glitches and bubbles at just the right times, up to the way it reverses on itself brilliantly on the song’s bridge. It’s at once incredibly tense and thoroughly satisfying, a glorious creation that would have ensured that even as an instrumental, the song would’ve been an obvious keeper. But Thom Yorke’s vocals are still critical to the song’s success, his hand-tremblingly anxious rants in the verses (“Who’s in the bunker? Who’s in the bunker?” “Ice coming, ice age coming!” “This is really happening!”) giving way to the (defeated?) relief of the chorus (“Here I’m alive / Everything all of the time”). The way the harmonies on the vocals in the chorus reflect against the harmonies of the chords in the hook…you just don’t find musical epiphanies like that every day.

Songs like “Idioteque”, and other Kid A tracks like “Everything in Its Right Place” and “The National Anthem” introduced a generation of music fans–budding indie kids, arty metalheads, stoners-in-training–to whole new universes of possibility in music. Whether they then continued on that path into the new and unusual or decided to go back to the Shins and/or Incubus is mostly unclear (I did a little bit of both, I suppose), but that it even gave those disparate groups of listeners something weird and different and cool to rally behind is something worth celebrating. Radiohead never made an artistic deviation quite so radical again for the rest of the decade, but they kept the flame burning with a series of good to great albums, and memorably attempted a coup of the music industry by releasing 2007 album In Rainbows online for fan-optional payment, a move which may turn out to be more enduring than just about anything they did this decade musically (or just a “Man, Remember When?” laugh ten years down the line, who knows).

But I’m getting ridiculously sick of talking about Radiohead. Just go listen to the song again or something.

The List So Far (Now With Links!):

10 Years, 100 Songs: #23. “Here’s the Thing…”

intensities — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:48:37 +0000

And the award for “Most Unexpectedly Beloved Song of the Naughty Oughties” goes to… Nobody could’ve expected this happening at the time. After winning the inaugural season of American Idol, it seemed like singing treacly ballads like the medicore ”A Moment Like This” and lukewarm teen-pop blasts like the abhorrent “Miss Independent” would be the definition of Clarkson’s post-Idol career–a career of pre-teen heroism and Adult Contemporary ownage, without ever really crossing over to any other audience of significance. Even her first single off 2004’s Breakaway was the plodding, feel-good title track, which I actually kind of liked, but hardly probed any sort of new ground for Ms. Clarkson. We never saw “Since U Been Gone” coming–a song which even in its use of the slangy “U” instead of “You” showed more rebellion and attitude than Clarkson had in her entire career up to that point. (Unless you considered From Justin to Kelly an act of revolution, which I guess would be fairly arguable).

Everyone liked “Since U Been Gone.” OK, not everyone–I’m sure at least one person reading this perked up at that last sentence and now can’t wait to get to the end of this article to voice their dissneting opinion. Let me spare you the time and effort: Yes, I’m sure there were a decent number of people out there who couldn’t stand the song. But with no other song this decade did I hear so many unexpected people come out in support of it–the kind where people at first only hesitantly suggest their support of it, “You know, I kind of like that Kelly Clarkson” song, until they find that enough people feel similarly that soon enough they’re screaming along to it on the radio at the top of their lungs. It was good enough to completely change the public perception of Clarkson’s career, single-handedly transforming her from Reality TV Pawn to Serious Pop Artist.

The funniest thing about “Since U Been Gone,” for me was a conversation that I had about a month before the song started to become popular. My friend had gone through some falling out with a guy she’d been seeing, but rather than acting sad or angry about it, she just seemed frustrated and irritated that the guy apparently thought he could do better than her. She wondered aloud if there was a song that vocalized her feelings, one with a “What were you possibly thinking breaking up with me? I’m way more awesome than you are!” message. I racked my brain but couldn’t really think of anything. The song didn’t exist yet. Then all of a sudden, “Since U Been Gone.” Never in my life has a song so specifically filled a pre-existing void in pop music.

Of course, it wasn’t a perfect fit. The final message of “Since U Been Gone” is less “What were you thinking? I rule!” and more “What was I thinking? You suck!” But the thing that kept it from just being the latest cheesy kiss-off girl-power song, a Max Martin-produced “I Will Survive,” is that same sense of incredulity that Clarkson expresses about the whole situation. She’s not screaming for vengeance, she’s not trying to teach anyone a lesson, she just seems kind of amused and mildly irritated about what an idiot she used to be for dating this guy, and what an idiot this guy is for leaving her. “You had your chance, you blew it.” That simple. It’s one of the most well-adjusted break-up songs in the history of pop music, really.

Tune was good, too–and surprisingly hard-nosed for a previously all-too-eager-to-please little pixie like Clarkson. Indie rock fans came around to it about as quickly as anyone, mostly for two very specific reasons–the opening guitar line kinda made it sound like an Interpol song, and the breakdown section was instantly reminiscent of a similar section in The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” (so much so that enterprising underground hero Ted Leo even memorably combined the two songs in a live cover medley). It’s hard to say if either or both of these recalls were intended purposefully–you’d have to ask Martin and Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, I guess–but they were both nice musical touches, and they gave the song the sort of edge, however slight, needed to convince non-Top 40 audiences to give the song a chance.

And once they did, they were treated to one of the more expertly-assembled pop songs of our time. One of my favorite things about “Since U Been Gone” has always been the first line: “Here’s the thing–we started out friends.” Jumping in with the “Here’s the thing” intro drops you right into the action, like Kelly’s just sat you down to have a very meaningful conversation with you about this specific epiphany of hers. She teases at the chorus throughout the verses–”Yeah, yeah, since you been gone”–maybe making you think that that’s all there is to it, before jumping in full blast on the chorus. And I mean full-blast. “Since U Been Gone” uses the quiet-loud thing as expertly (and unsubtly) as any band of the grunge era did in their prime, but the chorus is more than explosive and exuberant enough to earn the obviousness of the formula. It works especially well after the second verse, where Kelly starts to drift back dangerously close to regret and self-pity (“How come I never hear you say / I just wanna be with you? / I guess you never felt that way…”), but then the chorus comes back to interrupt her train of thought and snap her back into reality: “But SINCE YOU BEEN GO-OOOONNNE!!! / I CAN BREATHE FOR THE FIRST TIME!!!“

“Since U Been Gone” ended up being extremely empowering for Clarkson’s career on the whole–maybe a little too empowering, since in her resulting success, she made the perhaps-unwise move of turning her back on Clive Davis, Simon Fuller and the rest of the powers that be that had launched her to stardom, deciding that she was now artist enough to make the kind of album she really wanted. Unfortunately, My December kind of tanked, Clarkson’s ensuing megatour was a disaster, and Kells went crawling back to her old friends. The lesson: We were pleased as punch with Nu Kelly and all, but only if the songs all kind of sounded like “Since U Been Gone.” (Unsurprisingly, her 2009 comeback single, “My Life Would Suck Without You,” sounded a whole lot like SUBG, except without any of the charm and with the biggest 180-degree attitude adjustment since Destiny’s Child came out with the disturbingly subservient “Cater 2 U“).

If nothing else, “Since U Been Gone” provided all the validation that American Idol would ever need as one of the legitimately dominant forces in 00s pop music. Before SUBG, all the songs that Idol contestants released after appearing on the show were unimpressive efforts whose limited pop success was mostly just a byproduct of the show’s enormity (with the possible exception of Clay Aiken’s superbly creepy “Invisible,” likely the only Hollow Man-inspired Top 40 hit of the Naughty Oughties). After SUBG, the ex-Idolator could now just as viable a pop star outside of the show, as Chris Daughtry, Jordin Sparks and Taylor Hicks (well…maybe not so much Taylor Hicks) have all gone on to prove. They all owe Kelly Clarkson a big ol’ thank you note for blowing that door open with her indie-rock-laced statement of post-relationship superiority.

The List So Far (Now With Links!):

Eugoogly: The 2009 Philadelphia Phillies

intensities — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:30:46 +0000

The Philadelphia Phillies lost the World Series tonight. They fell to the New York Yankees in convincing, albeit not embarrassing, fashion, getting closed out in a Game Six in The Bronx. It’s fairly unfortuante, very sad, and maybe a little disappointing, but the tragedy of the situation has long passed. The Yankees did Phillies fans a mild favor by putting the game out of reach fairly early–getting the game to 7-1 by the fifth inning, and at least saving us the heartbreaking late-game histrionics that have come to characterize Phillies losses of late. You could argue that the series was over even before that, with closer Brad Lidge failing to hold a late Phillies rally to tie Game Four in Philadelphia, after which point the Yankees went up 3-1, unlikely to drop three straight (and two in their own ballpark). For those of us with even slightly pragmatic tendencies, the result here was not a surprise.

Personally, I was very well prepared to deal with this loss, just because I’m still getting over my relief that the Phillies won Game Five. To me, that was an important game to win, regardless of whether they eventually won the series or not, mostly for the following reasons:

Taking the series to six games at least meant that they made it a longer series for the Yankees than the Rays did for them last year.
Winning that game would mean the Yankees would get to celebrate in Philadelphia, having won all three games at Citizens Bank Park, no less.
My Yankee fan co-worker smugly predicted a Yankees win in five from the get, and he would’ve been insufferable all off-season if he’d gotten it exactly right.

Still, I could’ve handled the loss–just not the way they were gearing up to lose it. Up 8-2 in the 8th inning, the pitching staff proceeded to give up four runs and let the tying run get to the plate (Mark Teixeira, regular-season AL home-run leader), before makeshift-closer Ryan Madson struck him out to seal the win. I don’t recall ever being so angry at the people on my television. If they had blown that game, I would have crawled under my covers and stayed there, comatose, for about a month. After living through that, I knew I could handle a Game Six loss with relative ease.

And ultimately, it’s hard not to feel that the best team won this series. I felt pretty strongly that the Phillies were the best team in the NL this year, and I felt pretty confident they’d end up with the pennant–as confident as you can feel about the relative crapshoot of the MLB playoffs, anyway–but the Yankees…well, they’re good. The Phillies’ lineup is ridiculously strong, but even there, tiny holes can be found. The leadoff guys don’t have great OBPs. The back of the lineup is relatively weak. The bench isn’t great. There’s no real reliable rotation anchor behind the #1 starter (Or there was, before the #2 turned out to be such a head case), and there’s no real shut-down lineup in the bullpen (Or there was, before the closer turned out to be such a head case…again). The Yankees, though? What’s the worst thing you can say about that team? That they don’t have a good fourth outfielder? That their back-up catcher doesn’t hit for power? It’s almost unfair.

Actually, scratch that–it’s the definition of unfair. Now, I’m not one of those guys that hems and haws about the Yankees shelling out more money than everyone else in the league–that’s the way baseball works, and so be it–and especially not with the Phils going over the 100 million mark themselves, a number that the likes of the Marlins and Athletics can only dream of. But the difference in finances between the two teams (209 mil for the Yanks this year, 111 mil for the Phils) is still somewhat staggering. With that kind of money going into an opposing team, you basically need something to go wrong for them–injuries, or clubhouse drama, or a prized signing who doesn’t pan out–to be able to play on their level. And minus a season-ending injury to Xavier Nady (Yeah, Xavier Nady, remember him?) early in the year, and the general failure of Chien-Ming Wang (Yeah, Chien-Ming Wang, remember him?) to return to form, everything went right for the Yanks this year. Sabathia, Burnett and Teixeira all justified their contracts. Jeter, Posada and Matsui had bounce-back years. Swisher turned out to be a nice pickup. A-Rod returned from off-season surgery and off-season drama to resume his position as one of the game’s elite, and even developed a clutch streak in the process. Even Pettitte and Rivera put off the ravages of time one more year. Were the Phillies a great team? Absolutely. Could they have beaten the Yankees had a few breaks gone their way? It’s the playoffs, anything can happen. Am I saying the Yankees don’t deserve their World Series? No, they used their resources well this year, and means + execution generally = success. But I’m not going to lose too much sleep over losing to a team that far ahead of the pack, where almost everything went right for them–hell, they should win.

And you know what? Even without the ring, this season was a humongous success for the Phillies. Going back-to-back would’ve been amazing, but this is baseball–only one or two teams in an entire generation get to go back-to-back, and simply making the World Series two years in a row qualifies the team as something of a mini-dynasty. I feel the Phillies did baseball a huge service this year by A) Proving that last year’s winning team wasn’t a fluke, and B) Giving the league its first World Series in at least four or five years where it really feels like the best two teams were the ones that made it. Everyone loves underdogs in sports, and so do I, but every once in a while, you want to feel like the playoff system is credible enough that at least some of the time, the right two teams get in, and the right one wins. (And if you still think the Cardinals were better than the Phillies this year because they had two good hitters and two good pitchers..well, I just don’t know what to tell you).

Besides that, I enjoyed rooting for this team more than last year’s. There’s nothing like a championship season certainly, but there’s a swagger in cheering on returning champs that I found absolutely intoxicating–like the Phillies were finally playing with the big boys. The atmosphere surrounding the team was incalculably different, too, from the sellout string at CBP and the presence of fanbases in opposing ballparks, to the fact that not only was the team a buyer at the trade deadline, they made probably the biggest deal of the season by landing one of the best pitchers in baseball (and barely giving up anything in return). The Phillies were now one of baseball’s bullies, the kind of team that inspired “____ SUCKS!!” chants in rival ballparks and seething jealousy from the league’s have-nots. Seeing five of our guys on the All-Star Team–including the entire fucking outfield–I’m sorry, that’s just one of the coolest experiences you can enjoy as a sports fan. Even last year, that would’ve seemed somewhat absurd.

And just in terms of the people, I also preferred this team to last year’s. Pat Burrell, my least favorite guy on that ‘08 team but a big middle-of-the-lineup guy, was replaced in left field with Raul Ibanez, and within about a month of hitting homers, making big catches, and melting us with his penetrating stare, Rauuuuuuul made us feel like Pat the Bat had been off the team for about a decade. Cole Hamels, always something of a pretty boy who felt too big for the city, saw his status in the rotation erode, as Pedro Martinez gave us tantalizing glimpses of how amazing he must’ve been to follow in his prime (even at 75% of what he once was, dude was simply electric), and J.A. Happ gave us hope for the future of the staff on the way to a likely Rookie of the Year award. And Cliff Lee…well, let’s just say that I can’t believe we’re lucky enough to get another year with the guy. With the minor exception of a painful week or two in June, this team was an absolute pleasure to root for all season, from the insane come-from-behind win against Atlanta in the opening series, through the 22-run game in Cincinnati, Jamie’s one-hitter in Florida, and right up to Chase going deep five times in the Series. It’s a special team, and one we should get at least a couple more quality years out of before folding up the tent.

So yeah, it would’ve been nice to win it all, and it’s certainly going to take a couple of days to get over (especially living in New York, where the celebrating of the Bad Guys Winning will be thoroughly unavoidable). But I shed no tears for the loss–this was one time when just getting there was pretty great in itself. I love this team and I can’t wait to do it all again next year. Now, how about those 76ers?