A 40 Full of Pop: Week of January 2nd

Jordan Smith - "Mary Did You Know" (#24)

The tradition of having a #1 Christmas single seems to be a British institution; when I watched Love, Actually over the holidays with my family there was a considerable subplot about Bill Nighy's character, an aging rockstar, doing a publicity tour to promote his new Christmas single to take the top holiday spot. And then, of course, there was the furor in 2011 when a grassroots campaign took Rage Against the Machine's “Killing in the Name” to #1 in protest of the continual domination of Christmas singles by whoever the latest X-Factor winner was.

Which is the format that Jordan Smith's “Mary Did You Know” seems to exist in – a Christmas standard recorded by the winner of a televised singing program. I don't have much to say about The Voice, which is the program in question. I've not watched it, but it seems self-evidently superior to American Idol (formerly a country-dominating institution that is being mercifully put out to pasture this next year). What's notable about The Voice is that, for all its commercial success, it's never produced a genuine star. Sure, American Idol gave us some truly mediocre artists like Carrie Underwood, Chris Daughtry, and Jordin Sparks, but even years after their appearances on the show those artists continue to maintain a commercial and popular relevance that none of the winners of The Voice even had in the first place.

Sure enough, I don't expect that to change for Jordan Smith. Right now he sits at #24, and the #1 song, as it has been for eight weeks, is Adele's “Hello”. This particular tune will drop off the charts rapidly, and Jordan Smith will come out with his debut album around October, hopefully with some original songs. Because, strangely, that's what you need to succeed as a singer with a reputation for having a great, distinctive singing voice – original songs. It's what Adele has done, after all, and she's dominating the world right now.

And you can see why that would be a preferable alternative to this. It doesn't help that “Mary Did You Know” was never a good song in the first place – its only value as a Christmas song compared to all the others is as a demonstration of vocal skill. Even then, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is the better song you could use for that purpose, but also by far the more overplayed. So this is a sensible pick – an easy song to show off Jordan Smith's chops.

But it also misses the point – there's a reason why the most iconic version of this song is from Kenny Rogers and Wynona Judd, neither of which are singers renowned for their terrific voices, at least not to the exclusion of their songwriting sensibilities and other talents. Rogers and Judd fight like hell to make the song feel personal and inspirational, against the song's inherent glurge and sappiness. That they succeed is a testament to their passion for it, however misplaced.

In Smith's hands, it flounders, but of course it would. He hits all the notes perfectly and gives a performance that at once belies his considerable skill while also never even coming close to going overboard. But he can't save the song.

What is it about the song that's so bad, anyway? For my money, the best straightforwardly religious songs tend to trade in a kind of bright-eyed ecstasy – see Hank Williams's “I Saw the Light” for the best example of this. “Mary Did You Know”, though, is didactic in the extreme. No, worse – it's patronizing. The exhortation of the song's title repeats throughout and only serves to ingrain the idea that we, the listener, are the ones being told about the glory of Jesus by the singer, who is of course put on a pedestal above us because of his total knowledge of the Lord's works. It is the closest any popular religious song has ever dared to come to sounding like a sermon, and sermons were always my least favorite part of church services.

I don't have a particular aversion to Jordan Smith, nor to singing competitions in general, but that's the trick with “Mary Did You Know”. You have to, like Kenny Rogers and Wynona Judd, pack your vocal delivery with tics and decisions to communicate the ideal tone of passionate evangelizing that works best with it. Jordan Smith's problem here is that he plays it too straight, that he hasn't realized what basically everybody else in the world has already: “Mary Did You Know” kinda sucks.

C-

Taylor Swift - 1989 [2014]

1989 is fucking amazing. Let's just get that out of the way. It's Taylor Swift's best album by far, and the best pop album since The Fame Monster. If you want to be even more fun and say that The Fame Monster isn't an album, then it's the best pop album since FutureSex/LoveSounds. It's the kind of album that makes you want to go back and reevaluate her back catalog in order to write a series of reviews that position 1989 as the pinnacle of Taylor Swift, toward which they were all progressing. Every single song is a winner. It's paced magnificently. It cuts all of the fat that caused her last three albums to suffer. It's my favorite album of 2014 and damn high up on my list of favorite albums, period.

I could just leave it there – all these reviews were just an excuse to gush about 1989 and I've done that. But let's dig deeper into that, because not everyone agrees with it (some people, somehow, think Red is better than this). The second strand running through my Taylor Swift Review Project has been Swift's ascension as a cultural figure and fixture of the radio. The only place to start with that discussion has to be “Blank Space”. It wasn't the first song from this album released to the radio, but “Shake It Off” felt like a false start and a dead end as soon as it came out (I'd put it as the worst song on the album, personally). It's tough to call right now, but “Blank Space”, right now, as I write this, just feels like it will become her definitive anthem – Taylor Swift's own “Bad Romance”, her “Hey Ya!”, her “SexyBack”. It's as perfectly unique and unmistakably Swift as those previous anthems were unmistakably their artists – it plays to her particular strengths by seamlessly weaving together a complex lyrical conceit into an incredible melody that never feels like it's struggling to contain the turns of phrase necessary to set it up. A song like this only comes across every once in a few years.

But – and I'm going to sound like a bit of a curmudgeon saying this – it's not my favorite song on the album, not by a long shot. I can sure acknowledge its importance in the pop canon, even as my own feelings diverge from it. “Blank Space” is merely one of many incredible songs on 1989. So let's talk about the others, shall we?

First scene – curtains come up, lights come on. “Welcome to New York” is a table-setter. It doesn't have much to recommend it beyond its nice guitar riff and the general air that it could only work as an album opener, because it feels very airy (appropriately enough for a song partially about air travel). Fortunately, it is an album opener, and it does very well for itself. Any other place and it would have suffered. Moving on... okay, it's “Blank Space” again. We just got done talking about this thing. But this is not the same “Blank Space” you hear on the radio – not the “Blank Space” that's been cut from its context and placed in a world of lesser songs to tower over them. This is “Blank Space” at home, among equals and, occasionally, betters. In this new context it's the place where the album really starts - “Welcome to New York” was a held breath and the chorus of “Blank Space” is the release. It feels like a soft reset for Taylor Swift - there's a sense of craft and care over the experience of listening to the album that there wasn't in previous years, where she would just write a bunch of great songs dump them on a CD in a haphazard order. This momentum continues into “Style”, the peak of the three-song run at the beginning of 1989. It's incredible – sassy, catchy, unique. An absolute triumph. Everybody should like this song. It's not even my favorite on the album.

“Out of the Woods” is the first real deviation from the “upbeat-pop” mode of the album, and it's a wonder. It has the heaviest, most pounding drums of any Swift song, and the barely-contained explosive paranoia of the song all climaxes with the whirlwhind chorus – breathless, run-on sentences accompanied by the oppressive synth arpeggios create one of the only songs in her oeuvre that could be described as “atmospheric”. After emerging from the woods we hit sunlight - “All You Had to Do Was Stay” was my first pick for favorite of the album, the best upbeat-pop song yet. The verses seem perfectly explicable: they're like a coiled spring leading up to hit you with percussive force when the chorus comes. But then, when that chorus actually does hit... it absolutely overachieves. In a good way! The way the song gets punctuated with a falsetto “STAY!” is maybe the cleverest production touch on the album. All in all, it's been just an unbelievable run of songs so far.

“Shake It Off” mucks that up a bit. I mean, I like “Shake It Off”. But I only like it. The rapped bridge is embarrassing. It doesn't quite feel like it fits on the album. That's about it, though – the descending “shake, shake, shake” lines that kick of the chorus are wonderful and a kind of melodic trick I wouldn't have expected from Taylor Swift. But it's hard to avoid skipping this one considering how great everything that surrounds it is and how much it pales in comparison. “I Wish You Would”, meanwhile, comes up right after it, and even though I liked that one a lot when I first listened to this album, upon repeated lessons it comes across as too similar to “How You Get the Girl”, but there's some canny track placement, because of course “I Wish You Would” comes first on the tracklisting so it doesn't seem to be an inferior version of anything yet. Plus, it leads off perfectly into the next track.

“Bad Blood” forms a kind of mini-suite with “I Wish You Would”, at least to me, because the last sentence of that track flows seamlessly and immediately into the first sentence of this one. “Bad Blood” is the slowest-tempoed song we've gotten yet, but it's hard to call it a ballad as such – it's loud, big, and dramatic, carried entirely by the overbearing tone of Taylor's voice, but of course at this point she's subtle and precise enough a singer to carry the emotional affect of a song like this. No, the first ballad comes immediately afterward: “Wildest Dreams”. Look, I know I have effusively praised every song on this album to high heaven at this point, but “Wildest Dreams” is just a stunner – one of the three songs that constantly fights for the title of my favorite 1989 track. The dynamics of this song as it starts moving, drawing back, and hammering you with the breathless chorus are absolutely immaculate. I've heard it compared to Lana Del Rey, and I suppose I can see it, but I kind of get the feeling that Lana could never get her mouth around the “You see me in hindsight / tangled up with you all night” bridge without having to significantly slow down – Taylor's melodic sense is far too malleable and sprightly to sit comfortably alongside Lana's endless grey dirges.

We get a more catchy number right afterwards, just to remind us we're still in a land where ear candy matters. “How You Get the Girl” might be the song so far that reaches the hardest to attempt to get stuck in your head, but much of its success is only because it's willing to reach that far. By which I mean that of course it's catchy because Swift can't not write a great chorus. This one is particularly clever – a series of trochees (stressed syllables followed by unstressed syllables) that give it a nice rubberbanding effect. With that we're in for the final stretch of three songs, starting with another ballad! I can't help but wonder if situating two slower, more romantic songs as close together as “Wildest Dreams” and “This Love” are isn't a bad idea, but I think it mostly works because of the ebullience of the song between them. Plus, “This Love” is still totally distinct from “Wildest Dreams”. It's softer, more sympathetic, more relaxed. A lot of its weight is carried by the little variations Swift brings to counterpoint the chorus, especially the backing vocals.

Back in 2010, when the first Hunger Games movie came out, Swift released a song for it called “Eyes Open”. I don't think it's one of her best songs or anything, but at the time it was the first Taylor Swift song I liked, a suggestion that she could move on to really good things. I mention this because “I Know Places”, the next song, reminds me of nothing so much as The Hunger Games – it's dark and dramatic, following a tale of two lovers who are relentlessly pursued by an oppressive and powerful force. Yes, it's about the paparazzi following Swift and all her boyfriends, but she makes me believe it's something more important than that, and so I always just think of the Hunger Games, probably because that connection already exists. I probably get that impression from her incredible singing on the chorus – it's almost certainly her single best vocal performance ever.

And then... “Clean”. This is my favorite song on the album, honestly. I love “All You Had to Do Was Stay” and “Wildest Dreams”, but this is just so unique for Taylor Swift! That's mostly down to Imogen Heap, who co-writes and does backing vocals for the song, and with the plinking percussion seems to have influenced it sonically as well. She's the real MVP of the song, and her voice provides a perfect, tasteful counterpoint to Swift's lead vocals. That, and the fact that it's, atmospherically, so pure and refreshed-sounding (appropriately enough for the title and lyrics) makes it the perfect closer.

“Mitch,” you may ask, “why did you just break down every single song in excruciating detail?” Well, because they're all worth it, as far as I'm concerned. And it's the first Taylor Swift album I can say that about – every single song on 1989 is distinctly great, and they flow together near-flawlessly so that the album passes by in a flash. There's a sense of care and craft here that there isn't on any of her other albums. You really can't ask for more than that – not just from a pop album, but from an album in general.

Taylor Swift is a special artist – in this age of dwindling album sales, her popularity and commercial success only continues to grow. Not even Beyonce could do that for five albums in a row. She's crossed over from being a Disney Channel-associated teen pop star to a legitimate contender for most popular musician in the world (not unique to her, but still impressive). She's racked up so many hits that her cultural gravity seems inescapable, as if anything she does is assured for success. And this is what I mean when I say, as I have several times, that this is her imperial phase. She's critic-proof. I mean, 1989 got good reviews – very good reviews for a pop album, even. But the criticism has absolutely no effect on the fact that this is her biggest album yet, and probably her biggest album ever. What we will remember in 2025 and 2035 is not that 1989 got 4/5 stars in Rolling Stone, a B from Entertainment Weekly, and an A- from Robert Christgau. What we'll remember is that, in late 2014 and early 2015, 1989 was the biggest and most important album in the world. And there's a damn good reason for that.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

About a year ago, I stopped watching anime. I had always loved it, and thought it presented some of the most striking and unique artistic and aesthetic experiences I had ever seen. But it had always had a lot of... problematic aspects. I don't mean “problematic” in the modern sense, as a left-wing snag word that's just a euphemism for “misogynist” or “racist” - I mean “problematic” in the sense that some of the things it presented (a lot of which, yes, were tied up in gender issues) caused a tension that was worth examining. To put it simply, there were a lot of extremely questionable things that were common to a lot of anime – a bizarre psychosexual streak, for example, or a totally fucked sense of drama and pacing – that were (and still are) totally accepted protocol in a lot of shows. And, for some reason, these tendencies are totally allowed, or even worse, codified as genre tropes, as something inherent to the experience of watching anime.

So I'll just go out and say it: most anime is very conservative. I mean that politically. That's what comes out of a culture like Japan – and look, I adore Japanese culture, but I don't think I'm overstepping my bounds by saying that the whole country has some bizarre, puritanical hangups about gender, sexuality and race. Is it worse than in America? I don't know, and it's not my place to say. But it manifests in a fundamentally different way, and seeing that manifestation as an American, we're confronted with a weird and alien version of some other country's subconscious. Maybe that causes us to have an adverse reaction, to not want to judge it or even touch it with a ten-foot-pole.

But some things should transcend national borders, and some things need to be said. A lot of anime is just fucked up and awful. Objectifying and minimizing women the way a lot of it does is awful. There's a tendency to sexualize little girls, which is awful. Whenever it comes time to present someone from another country, it's almost always done with stereotypes, which is awful. It's just awful and there have been some anime shows that have left me feeling truly scummy from even watching them.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood isn't one of them. It is absolutely, shockingly progressive for an anime. I mean, most of the reason I decided to give this one a shot was because it seemed like it wouldn't have that much embarrassing fanservice. It fulfilled that promise, sure enough – there's only one skimpily-dressed woman in the show, and it's a demon named Lust. It's maybe predictable to personify the idea of lust as a temptress, but it's probably the most acceptable situation to show a scantily-clad woman and have it be relevant or important.

But... it's more than just the refreshing lack of fanservice. This show is progressive in many, many ways – I'm willing to credit that, by the way, to the fact that Hiromu Arakawa, who wrote and illustrated the manga that this show faithfully adapts, is a woman, a relative rarity among manga writers. It shows a large variety of strong and distinct women – I'd estimate, offhand, that there are equally as many women characters as there are men, and even though the two most prominent women in the show are both more-or-less of the shouty, violent, STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER archetype, this accusation stings a lot less than it should because of the wide backbone of the many female characters who may not be as important, but manifestly do not fit that mold. Not only that, it's very skeptical of the institutions of religion, government and military, not only in terms of their treacherousness but also of the material harm they do to innocent people. Speaking of which, there's also a couple different races represented, one of which is clearly an analogue to the Palestinian people in the way they've been killed and displaced from their homes, and the series treats this as a legitimate and unforgivable moral horror. Its attitude towards disabled people is probably the quietest and most subtle of its many socially-aware tendencies, but also the most unreservedly triumphant; Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is resplendent with a variety of sympathetically-rendered disabled people, up to and including its main characters.

It's not a perfect show by any means, but so much of what it does just seems like a breath of fresh air considering the stultifying conservativeness of almost every anime surrounding it. The bigger complaints to raise here are mostly aesthetic – the show, especially in its early going, relies entirely too much on lame-duck comedy and stereotypical anime reaction shots. It also suffers a lot from stilted pacing; roughly the first half of the show is attempting to adapt material that had already been covered by the previous Fullmetal Alchemist anime series before it can branch off into its own storyline, and this leads to some really disjointed storylines. This all starts to smooth out towards the end, though, when all the backstory dumps and character motivations start paying off in the final arc, which is essentially a series of sequestered confrontations in which characters are confronted with tough decisions that lead to some very satisfying character arcs. For all I could complain about the weird feeling of the show's first half – and I could – it manages to pull off a pretty magnificent ending.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood isn't necessarily a series I'd show to an anime hater to convince them that the artform is worthwhile. At the same time, if an anime hater did see it, I imagine it would rankle them a lot less than most anime. When it chooses to straightforwardly recite its genre tropes, they're always the less reprehensible ones, and a lot of what the show does is totally comprehensible with a Western sensibility of pacing and drama, again unlike most anime – it's totally clear why this series is so relatively popular over here in America. This is a base that more anime should, but probably won't, draw from. And while that's really unfortunate, it's also lucky that we got it – a breath of fresh air, an anime I can appreciate unreservedly without feeling like a creep or a weirdo, and a show with an unmistakably positive, forward-thinking outlook. It's impossible to understate how much of a treasure that is.

The Soft Pink Truth - Why Do the Heathen Rage? [2014]

The story of Mayhem is the quintessential tale of the black metal scene. Before even releasing their debut album, they became famous for their striking aesthetic and violent live shows. In 1991, however, their singer, Per Yngve Ohlin, a.k.a. Dead, committed suicide. He was found by the band's guitarist, Øystein Aarseth, a.k.a. Euronymous, who, instead of reporting it to the police, bought a camera, arranged Dead's corpse and took photographs of it, then make a necklace with pieces of his skull.

But wait, there's more! Soon after Dead's suicide, Mayhem's new bassist, Varg Vikernes, took to burning down churches with Euronymous. However, their relationship soon went sour and the two got into an altercation that resulted in Varg killing Euronymous. He was sentenced to twenty-one years in prison.

Of course, Mayhem, as well as Varg's other band, Burzum, are now considered absolute fixtures of the development of black metal and between them have several all-time classics of the genre under their belt. So, you know, there might be a bit of a problem in your scene when one of the biggest idols of it is a violent convicted murderer. Did I mention Varg's also a Neo-Nazi?

My point is that black metal is a genre where you have to go very far in separating the art and the artist, because most of the artists are terrible people. It's simply an insular, hostile community, and both the artists and fans reflect this attitude.

With all that said, this is an album of techno covers of black metal songs, done by a gay artist.

There's a lot to say about the codes of meaning inherent in Why Do the Heathen Rage?, and I'll get to all that in a second, but firstly I want to ask the question: what does this end up doing in a musical sense? Techno and black metal are two genres that really don't have a lot of obvious stylistic overlap – anybody who has even cursorily listened to either will be able to tell you that. But somehow the fusion of these two contradictory things creates a fascinating tension – turns out when you translate a piercing tremolo guitar riff to a synthesizer, you get something that has its own unique kind of sound, of the kind you wouldn't think of just by messing around with a synthesizer on your own.

This odd juxtaposition is in place all over the album – black metal's strengths being played in an environment where they're totally alien, and yet continue to function. The emphasis on structure and discrete parts inherent to black metal songwriting gives these songs a sense of progress, composition and deliberateness that is unusual for electronic music, which broadly tends to have variations on a theme or riff rather than verse-bridge-guitar solo parts. The tension is also there in the vocals, which are obviously and unapologetically “black metal vocals done with a gay man's voice”. The fact that Daniel Drew, the man behind The Soft Pink Truth, is better at black metal vocals than the next guy doesn't really obscure the fact that he's just not really cut out to be the vocalist of a black metal band. And yet in the context of the album it works perfectly, because the vocals end up being held at a slight remove from the material, much in the same way that the music itself is.

So the black metal style ends up meaning something completely different when placed in a different context, and this is reflected throughout the album, including what is in my mind the most gloriously cheeky thing about the whole project – the cover, which depicts a gay orgy full of dudes spraying pink cum that forms a symbol that looks an awful lot like a black metal band's. Not any specific one, mind you, just evoking the general style.

At first, Why Do the Heathen Rage? might seem like nothing but cheek – a gay man tackling a notoriously hateful and homophobic community by doing a camped-up pantomime of their classics. The album cover certainly seems to point towards that. What is it if not an album-length middle finger?

But this assumes a person who would, purely out of spite, listen to a variety of black metal music to select enough songs for an album of covers, take the time to reinterpret them on entirely different instruments, learn to do a black metal voice, and recruit guest artists like Antony and Jennifer Walshe to provide extra vocals and instrumentation (and we'd also have to assume the guest artists are dedicating their time to covering black metal songs out of spite as well). This seems like a bridge too far.

No, the only kind of person who would do a black metal covers album in a completely different style – moreover, an album that features obscure picks from artists like Sargeist and AN – is a person who really, devotedly loves black metal. Look up any interview with Daniel Drew about Why Do the Heathen Rage? and you'll see how legitimate his love for the music is. Here's one where he dons black metal face paint and talks about going to see Emperor live! The thing is, he has every reason to hate the subculture of black metal for being, as I said, inclusive, hateful, and homophobic. He talks in that interview about seeing Emperor live and the dissonance involved in being a gay person having a blast at a concert where the drummer killed a gay person in 1992. In fact, here's an incredibly revealing quote from Drew in the interview:

'So I went and saw Emperor live, and they are fucking awesome. It was my birthday and I remember the drummer threw out a drumstick and I caught it. But the whole time I thought, “I'm a kind of Uncle Tom motherfucker if I'm going to see Emperor and support what they're about. They killed a gay man.” My record can't redress that kind of a crime, but it's part of a queer response to that subculture. I've also embroidered my Emperor shirt with "Rest in Peace Magne Andreassen."'

It's clearly something that weighs on Drew's mind fairly often, but at the same time, look at that last sentence. Confronted with this huge dissonance, he responded to it by adding on a message of healing and love to the iconography of a black metal band. It perfectly represents what Drew does with this album as a whole.

Because more than anything, Why Do the Heathen Rage? is just that: an act of healing. It confronts the checkered and hateful past of black metal and, while never quite forgiving it, validates its essential goodness. It's a powerful argument for the genre: that in spite of all its terrible connotations, it can still inspire someone who by all rights should hate it to make art – to make an album that, even if it weren't making a statement about black metal, would still be a fascinating and compelling techno album. Fortunately for us, it's both – an album that sounds like nothing else before it that also happens to be an exorcism and a promise that there can be something better. Why Do the Heathen Rage? is pure alchemy – the transmutation of a base and black thing into something purer and more inspiring.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

Prequels are always a weird thing, because the question inevitably arises: “If this was such an important part of the story that it needed a whole other installment to tell it, why wasn't it shown in the first place?” Most successful prequels don't so much solve this problem as plug their ears and ignore it, and then just tell a really good story anyway. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, though, is lucky in this respect, as that question isn't applicable to it. Most of the content here was covered in dialogue or alluded to in Twin Peaks, so there's no worry that it's an extraneous or tacked-on part of the plot. It just has the advantage of showing and dramatizing things that we had taken for granted before.

What the movie turns out to be, then, is a character piece for someone we (out of necessity) never spent much time with in the series: Laura Palmer herself. It's also an acting exercise for Sheryl Lee, who does magnificent work in the role. In the series, Madeleine Ferguson was conceived to give Lee an excuse to be on, since she had shown so much skill just being Palmer as a corpse or in flashbacks. But Ferguson was always just a contrivance, and was never as multifaceted or interesting as the deeply flawed, charismatic figure of Laura Palmer. And this movie finally rectifies a long-standing wrong and gives us an unflinching focus on her final days.

But Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is oddly at war with its own role as a follow-up to an unresolved television series. It would work so, so well as a standalone film, the tragic tale of a young woman whose circumstances are the exact wrong place for a person with her self-destructive tendencies to be in, and end up leading to her death. Take out most of the first thirty minutes and replace that length with proper introductions for the characters and their situations, and you've got something that could easily be watched and understood by itself.

Even though the film finds itself having to pull double duty in this regard – the lip service paid to the question “what happened after the end of the original show?” is basically perfunctory and doesn't actually resolve anything at all except for offering a possible escape for Dale Cooper from the Black Lodge – it doesn't hurt it all that much, just kind of distracts from the main thrust of the film. And you can forgive the film for these distractions because, after all, this is a movie made to follow-up a TV show and one could assume the biggest connoisseurs of it will be fans of the TV show that won't mind seeing these characters again.

The only part where the film suffers for show-watchers is, actually, the ending, where Laura Palmer spends the last night of her life aimlessly drifting between scenes whose existence and specifics had already been successfully surmised and summarized for us in the show proper by Dale Cooper. On the show, it played better, because it was just a monologue describing her actions, and it was the end result of several episodes worth of investigation and poking at the edges. Strung together and shown on-screen, though, it plays more like Laura Palmer drifting aimlessly around and checking up on the film's subplots. But I can mostly forgive that for the ending shot of Laura in the afterlife, laughing and crying, superimposed over the image of an angel as the orchestral soundtrack slowly deafens everything else. Few enough movies end with what is essentially a purely tonal shot, and fewer still feel like they deserve it. But as the “final” image of Twin Peaks, that shot captures in one fell swoop the feeling of the series – unsettling, surreal, but oddly beautiful and easy to get invested in. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me feels like one last scoop of Twin Peaks and wraps the whole feel of the show up in a microcosm, and in that sense it's a good reminder of what was special about this show.

Twin Peaks: Season 2

Received wisdom is a weird thing, because even when it's right in spirit there's always some catch or complication. The standard brief on Twin Peaks season 2 is either “the show loses track after Laura Palmer's killer is revealed”, which is not quite true for two reasons. For one thing, there's a gap of about three episodes after Laura Palmer's killer is revealed and when the killer is caught, and that gap (as well as the lead-up to it) contains probably the best run of episodes in the entire show – I'd go to bat and say that “Lonely Souls”, the episode that finally shows the audience who killed Laura Palmer, is Twin Peaks's finest hour. Even though the show stumbled a bit speeding up so that they could get to the point where that scene takes place, they certainly don't blow their one shot – they deliver a memorable, horrifying, astonishing sequence to reveal the killer.

It's also not quite true that the show loses track, or at least that's not quite the right word for what it does – it makes what the show does sound boring. And it is boring, with the latter part of the season being a big slog to get through, but it's not boring because nothing happens – rather, everything happens. Twin Peaks just throws itself at several ridiculous plot points and can't get any of them to stick. Nadine spends most of the season thinking she's a high-schooler, James ditches the town and gets framed for murder, Andy gets caught up in the behavior of an adopted child he thinks might be the devil.. these are all plot threads that act fine and dandy, having beginnings and climaxes and resolving, but they're not in any way derived from who the characters are. Is there any reason Pete Martell is a chess expert and we had no clue about it? It's certainly not baked into the character and not remotely foreshadowed. Ben Horne has a psychotic break and starts reenacting the Civil War, but what on Earth does the Civil War say about Ben Horne? He's never shown any interest in it in the past. The only compelling plot in the season is that of Bobby and Shelley, which sets itself up as a tragic tale of a relationship coming apart as a couple that has only ever been in its electric honeymoon phase starts getting in over its head and falling apart. But, of course, that's squared away and reset by the end of the season. A huge letdown.

The reason it's so disappointing is that it so clearly violates what Lynch and Frost started the series for – instead of having a show focused on the lives of the characters, in the last half of the season the characters start taking on frivolous and ridiculous subplots and become infinitely less interesting than the newly developing metaplot of Dale Cooper's power struggle with Windom Earle. And that part, at least, is something that can't be squarely laid at the feet of the network. The new overarching story is, frankly, great. I loved Windom Earle's character. The developing exposition about BOB and the White and Black Lodges was great, especially since the Laura Palmer plot opened those doors and left them unresolved. One can only chalk this up to Lynch and Frost having a much more hands-off approach this season because of other commitments. It shows every sign of the writers not having a firm guiding hand, approving plots that they only casually looked at and didn't realize how they would come across to viewers when filmed and transmitted.

It's not a bad season of television – the first half or so is quite propulsive and the final episode benefits greatly from having David Lynch back on board, including a cliffhanger ending that's so evidently one of the all-time greats that it still worked when Fringe essentially lifted it 20 years later. But, as I said with the first season, the elements contained in this show were such a volatile mixture that without its previously strict overseers, it spilled out and ended up focusing on the wrong things. One imagines that given a third season with tighter control and more hands-on management from Frost/Lynch, Twin Peaks could have pulled it together again. Fortunately, we are in the age of revivals and as soon as next year we could see the show done justice. Here's hoping.

Taylor Swift - Red [2012]

If there's a singular, most important turning point in Taylor Swift's career, it's “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”. It's tough to talk about something that just happened three years ago and try to explain it as a historical phenomenon, so others may have had completely different experiences, but for me, the release of that song is definitely when I started noticing people becoming interested in Taylor Swift who were previously totally outside her demographic. It was the first time she stepped up and looked like she could compete with artists like Kanye West, Lady Gaga or Beyonce in terms of far-reaching appeal. The difference between “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, a catchy pop song about a failed relationship, and all her previous catchy pop songs about failed relationships is that this one was imbued with humor and a layer of ironic removal that makes it more palatable to people who would normally dismiss that kind of thing. There's an overriding sense in the song that Taylor Swift knows how silly it could come off and decides to play it up and mug for the audience, and that's something she'd never shown before; “Mean” was a funny song in its way, but it didn't go out of its way to puncture the self-importance of the performer.

Of course, it coincided with the last step in a sonic shift that had been taking place over her whole career; none of the elements of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” are remotely country-ish. There's no country accent or drawl, and the guitar riff is chopped up and edited so as to be unmistakably synthetic and constructed. The chorus is an undeniably pop thing – and the rest of Red follows suit. This is what working with Max Martin will do to you. It seems kind of silly that Swift said in the lead-up to 1989 that it was her “first pop album”, because Red is by all reasonable measures a pop album.

More importantly, it's the kind of pop album that makes people stand at attention because they can see something important is going on here. It only took four albums of increasingly staggering and improbable success and record-breaking before people took Taylor Swift seriously and started putting her on year-end lists. Does Red justify that?

For the most part, absolutely. I mean, in terms of crossover pop spectacle it well outshone any of her previous output – racking up three or four huge chart-toppers where previous albums had only mustered one or two each. In terms of being a good album, it's not so titanic a leap, but it's still better than anything she'd released before. There are basically two ways to make a better product – either make your highlights even better or your lowlights more bearable. Speak Now took the latter approach for the most part, delivering some solid album cuts for the first time, but Red does the former, delivering some amazing best-of-the-year caliber pop songs. I mean, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” was already probably the best song of her career, but then she goes and matches it with “Red”, “I Knew You Were Trouble” and “22” and hot damn no wonder people really started liking her with this album.

And then there are the album cuts, which remain solid even at their worst. The pacing of Red is a bit odd – for the first ten or so songs it alternates ballads with the big pop hits, which has the end effect of being very listenable while at the same time ending up with far too many ballads. And, I mean, I've never been into Swift for her ballads. Someone like me who is as fascinated and delighted by the mechanisms of pop hype and spectacle? No, I'm here for stuff like “22”. That said, for someone who is predisposed to like singer-songwriter ballads, there's a lot to offer here; for one thing, Swift has finally ironed out all the kinks in her lyricism and is capable of spinning layered tales out of carefully-chosen details and imagery. Just listen to the chorus of “I Almost Do” and how it winds through a long, complex train of thought before ending with the rhetorical gut-punch of the song's title. She's finally mastered that aspect of her songwriting and it rewards us with some really deep stories and relatable emotions. And, hey, if you still really don't like the ballads, there's still “Starlight”, which is every inch worthy of being a single but was somehow never selected for that honor. It's a delight – something we album-listeners can have to ourselves and treasure how not-overplayed it is.

Waaay back in my review of Taylor Swift's first album I mentioned that she was in the middle of her “imperial phase”, the part of her career where she can pull off anything and the rest of the radio bends to her whims. I don't know where it will end – and it will, because the nature of the imperial phase is to end – but I know where it began, and that was with the Red era. Finally, with this album, we can look at Taylor Swift's career and say “she has arrived”. And yet the best is still to come.

Twin Peaks: Season 1

The second season of Twin Peaks is quite a thing. I'm not just talking about how it's supposed to be uneven and hard to love, but also how the tone and plot of season two completely subsumes all the discussion of the show's plot and approach as a whole. This isn't unfair – the first season only has 8 episodes, and the second season has 22, meaning that 73% of the show's content is in season two, after David Lynch, one of its principal creative forces, had left, and with Mark Frost, its other co-creator, having a much more hands-off position. Therefore – and I'm entirely going off a few disconnected plot elements here, because I haven't watched any of season two yet – as I understand it, the second season of Twin Peaks becomes something significantly different from its first season, as much concerned with mysterious supernatural phenomena as it is with the ongoing plots of its rural townsfolk.

Without the supernatural elements to discuss, one thing becomes clear about the show's approach – it's really just a soap opera. I do not mean that in a remotely degrading way, for the record, because soap operas in general are far too put-upon despite the fact that soap-opera plotting is a considerable influence in how many modern shows serialize their character arcs. When I say the first season of Twin Peaks is a soap opera I mean that, like a soap opera, it has a diffuse cast of characters, all with their own plotlines, and advances everyone's plotlines just a little bit every week. Seriously, if you cut out the part's of Cooper's dream that hinted towards the supernatural masterplot, and handed the show to some directors more mundane than David Lynch, this would be a straightforward, pure soap opera.

But of course I've always hated that “if X took away Y it would just be Z!” kind of criticism, because it's removing not only vital context but also important pieces of the work itself. Lynch's directing work (and the tight influence he exerted over the series's other directors) is, in fact, the vital piece that makes this show unique. What you have here is a series that manages to have it both ways – it both focuses on the mundane lives of its citizens and the ongoing murder investigation of Laura Palmer. It has an eye on the supernatural and uncanny enough to justify its cracked, often creepy take on small-town drama. But... see, here's the thing. The unresolvable tension that fuels this season can't last forever. Twin Peaks almost has to get worse from here.

There are many, many ways in which the show is already conceptually doomed – that it's traversing a tightrope act that it can't possibly walk forever. Lynch and Frost wanted the show to gradually transition away from Laura Palmer's murder and just focus on the townsfolk, which, fair enough, the townsfolk are in fact the more interesting part of the show, but at some point you have to either justify why Dale Cooper is still there despite the murder investigation plot being dropped, or you have to solve the murder. This is a challenge that could only work for maybe two or three seasons before you have to pull the trigger on one of those things happening. And of course, once you introduce supernatural elements like BOB and MIKE, you have to eventually explain them in some capacity, and once you do that, you've introduced something necessarily bigger and more important than the everyday goings-on of a bunch of people in Wisconsin or Michigan or wherever this actually is set, which undercuts the whole point of the show. You can do your best to introduce this aspect extremely slowly so as to preserve the mystery and tension for as long as possible, but how long can you do that before viewers get frustrated at a non-advancing plotline? Four seasons?

So much of what makes this season special is just the fact that it's in a place where it benefits the most from all these contradictory impulses – this early on is the only time when a show with this attitude and premise can have its cake and eat it too: invest us in the supernatural by placing it amongst compelling characters, and enliven the characters by having one foot in the supernatural. It's a good hat trick, but at some point the show has to pull the trigger and show its hand – the issue, just from what I've heard, is that it didn't need to show its hand as quickly and clumsily as it ultimately ended up doing. But that's a discussion for season two.

I don't mean to put this season down just by implying that its ingredients are an unstable mixture that must eventually explode – they sure are, but for now they add some real, palpable fire and elevate what would be, even without them, a show of really compelling characters and dramatic events. This is probably the best season of television I've watched so far this year, and it's no wonder that it was such a huge smash and big talking point among people. As much as I've talked about the unsustainable blend of things that went into making this season great, they undeniably did make it great, and however season two turns out – maybe it's secretly brilliant, maybe it crashes and burns in the most fascinating way – I'm super on-board to dissect it, and that's in no small part due to the quality of this season.

Freaks and Geeks

Freaks and Geeks is an odd hybrid of a show – a heavily comedic high-school series that nonetheless has 45-minute episodes and a heavy enough focus on drama and character development that you can't really straightforwardly call it a “comedy”, but it's also much more laconic than your typical drama – things simply happen slowly on this show, with not a lot of structural zip. It sits at a crossroads of a few things, in other words, but how appropriate is that for a show about crossing boundaries and unifying disparate groups?

That's the thesis of Freaks and Geeks, if it has one – that different cliques and groups may have good, human reasons for being separated from each other, but that they would ultimately all benefit from some mutual understanding and learning to appreciate each other. Which sounds like a horribly dull Breakfast Club kind of theme to take away from the whole show, but the advantage of being a TV show as opposed to a movie is that you have time to be nuanced in that view. What does it mean to make a group of new friends? Why would you abandon an old clique? What happens when those two lives collide?

That's what the series explores over its unusual running time (18 episodes falls exactly between a 13-episode and a 22-episode order – both are normal, but this show, as is typical, falls somewhere in the middle) with the two Weir siblings – Lindsay, mostly a Freak, and Sam, mostly a Geek. And the most well-done aspect of the show is how it spirals out from these two characters to their surrounding social circles, the familial and romantic lives of their friends, to the point that at the end of the first season there's no main character without a substantial amount of development, entirely distinct from every other main character.

This lets Freaks and Geeks be very sneaky and unexpectedly brutal with its emotional moments. It is, like I said, a laconic show – there's very little soundtrack except for the many, many licensed classic rock tunes the characters jam out to, so there's not a shorthand for how you're supposed to feel at any given moment, and the show is edited pretty slowly. But when it sets up a truly awkward, humiliating, or emotional situation, that just means it simmers and burns that much longer.

There's a tendency I've noticed for shows that have been canceled too soon for fans to rationalize that it didn't need to say anything more than it did. I mostly reject this – I've been aware of Firefly's cancellation for far too long to be sore that it was cut short, but it absolutely did need to be longer than it ended up being. Freaks and Geeks, though? I'm more or less okay with it being just 18 episodes. You can see, over this season, the show setting up an approach, a worldview, and a set of characters that could have been followed for years, and you can also just about guess how it could develop and end up. And, God, it would have been so satisfying and great to see it.

But, you know what? It already feels like a treat to have a show with this approach – one like The Breakfast Club or Dazed and Confused that looks well and honestly at high school, but as a television series so that it has time to decompress and tell more stories in a longer form about the whole damn experience. From the very first moment it feels like stolen time. This is a show that definitely deserved to go on longer, but said what it had to say loudly and proudly enough that it didn't really need to.

Taylor Swift - Speak Now [2010]

I've made the case that Taylor Swift's album-to-album progression is incremental, but at the same time very measurable and visible. From a mainstream popularity perspective, however, Speak Now is the first (and, so far, I would argue only) album to be a holding pattern for her. It probably didn't win over any people who weren't already Taylor Swift fans, and served mostly to consolidate her position as a country crossover superstar for whom the “country” label was increasingly looking like an artistic dead end.

That's not to say that there's not a meaningful artistic progression in Speak Now, but it's in an area that, while valuable, is meaningless to the format of radio singles: this is where Swift legitimately writes a solid album, not just a couple great hits and some filler. So for all that it felt like a holding pattern from an MTV perspective in 2010, it's an invaluable step for her as a songwriter.

First, a rundown of the songs: “Mine” is the lead single and leadoff track, and it's a charming, catchy song that easily matches “Love Story” and “You Belong to Me”, if not necessarily surpassing them – which would be more of a problem if it was the best song on the album, but it's not. It's not even the best single! “Back to December” tops it, and was my favorite track by her for a while. But even that can't compete with “Mean”, which is just such a wonderful song – the first track of hers where she folds humor into her persona, and it proves to be the secret ingredient that she was missing all along. More on that aspect in the Red review. Even without it, it's the best possible kiss-off to her old country style, a tantalizing hint that maybe she had something special in that area after all.

Even more notable is that there are quite a few non-singles to recommend, for the first time in her career. I'm speaking especially of the mid-album run of “The Story of Us”, “Never Grow Up”, “Enchanted” and “Better Than Revenge”, which are a particularly strong run that successfully keep up the momentum of the hits in the first third. And I have to particularly call out “Enchanted”. That is an astonishing song – a time-stoppingly huge, heart-in-throat ballad that damn near decimates everything in its proximity.

As important and great as it is that Swift produced enough great material to have, for the first time, some worthwhile deep cuts, she can't keep it up quite enough for a 14-song, 65-minute album. And, spoiler alert, she won't be able to do it next time either. Or the time after that, frankly, where she decides to simply cut down on the songs per album, which is a legitimate solution. That's an approach that would have worked wonders on Speak Now, which could do with four or five less songs. Nobody would miss the last four songs or “Dear John” (dear god, Taylor, never make another seven-minute song).

So while Speak Now isn't quite Taylor making a great album for the first time, it's the first signpost that she can and will. And in the meantime she can hold down the charts and sales. It's a vital and irreplaceable step in her discography; when I finally decided to start downloading and listening to her music, it was at the release of Red, but this listen reveals that I really should have started one album sooner. All of us doubters should have started sooner. Fortunately, with Red she's about to finally deliver the album that definitively wins over not just her demographic, but the whole world.

Taylor Swift - Fearless [2009]

Fearless is not a big revolutionary step forward all at once, because I don't really believe Taylor Swift has those. They're more incremental steps and evolutions of sound that were always inevitable. Case in point, Fearless has her first two big crossover singles with “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me”. While “Our Song” did get picked up on mainstream radio stations, there was still a distinct sense that she was still a country artist first and foremost; it's here that she becomes a pop star, even though it would take until Red for her to finally shake off the last of the country roots in her sound.

Since this is her first pop crossover, let's examine that most sacred of all pop artifacts: the big singles. “You Belong With Me” is the one that I prefer less, so let's start with that. Swift retains the great production from the last album on this one that leads the choruses to hit with a huge and thrilling impact, but the big difference is that she's finally crafted a hook that is worthy of it. Considering that she would later hone so well her world-conquering confidence in songs like “Blank Space”, it's interesting that “You Belong With Me” expresses the opposite of that; 2008 is possibly the last time in her career that she could get away with positioning herself as an underdog, much less that the song's spark would come from that scrappy resolve - fighting, and succeeding, in attempting to win its subject (and, simultaneously, the audience) over.

“Love Story” has all the strengths of “You Belong With Me”, but replaces its nice-girl lyrical mugging for a more wistful and enchanting chorus, and it's the first song, at least I feel, where it's easy to get caught up in Swiftworld – the unique and undeniable gravitas she exudes. Although I wasn't so taken at the time it came out (I was a bitter teenager), certainly a lot of people were taken in by its Romeo & Juliet-referencing chorus. I saw a lot of people snarking and running around trying to remind everyone that, no, Romeo & Juliet wasn't really a true-love story, but can you blame them for feeling like they need to? For the length of the song, Taylor Swift really makes everyone believe it.

The rest of the album is a bit of a thornier proposition; it's generally strong throughout the first half (“Fifteen” was worthy of being a single, even though it feels more like her past than her future, and “Breathe” is an incredibly mature and graceful ballad that most certainly feels like what she would go on to do), but the problem comes after the eighth track, when it fades into a bunch of blah. Generally listenable blah, but at 53 minutes Fearless has a feeling of fatigue and “when-will-this-be-over” that never plagued the 40-minute debut.

But in a sense it's unfair to judge a pop album by its filler cruft; the point is the singles, and even though Taylor Swift would eventually ascend to the point where she delivered great albums that just happened to have songs on them that dominated the world, at this point it's more than enough that she's delivered two likable singles and secured her commercial success against being just a flash-in-the-pan. This is where she became someone who would stick around and become important.

Taylor Swift - Taylor Swift [2006]

I've had the same relationship with Taylor Swift that probably a lot of people have had, from back when she debuted in 2006 and I found her insufferable, to the era of "Mine" and "Eyes Open" where I had to begrudgingly admit that she was improving, to Red, which I found to be a horribly bloated album that nevertheless had several fantastic pop songs, to finally 1989, which is a strong contender for not just Pop Album Event of 2014 but Best Album of 2014, period. Taylor Swift right now is going through her "imperial phase", which is a phrase coined by Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys to describe periods where an artist is, in his own words, "critic-proof". That is, everything they do comes off incredibly well and the contemporary critical response to their music doesn't even matter. 1989 got great reviews, but not rave reviews, but that didn't matter even slightly, because 1989 is going to be remembered as a peak of Taylor Swift, if not the peak. So it's fair to go back through her back catalogue and see how she developed into the kind of artist who could have such a huge impact on even people who are not in her demographic.

Listening to her first album compared with her later stuff, what she comes out of the gate with is not necessarily even a strength of hers; the album has great production that allows all the choruses to hit with the proper amount of oomph, and this goes a great way towards covering up how the songs are mostly at similar tempos and have similar dynamics. It's samey, sure, but entirely pleasant. The best thing about the music on this album is, actually, from the accompanying violin lines in many of the songs. I'm going to guess that these are primarily the work of her co-songwriters or the studio musicians, since on her later albums when she starts writing more of her own stuff, these kinds of fills and countermelodies are entirely abandoned - it's just not the kind of thing Swift puts into her songs. In the interest of absolute fairness, though, she's a great singer from the get-go, which is undeniably a strength of Swift and not attributable to anyone else.

The major fault of the album, what it really needs, is a sense of lyricism; almost all these songs have lyrics that are too broad and vague to be meaningfully differentiated, which is especially a problem when, as I said before, they all fall into the category of "slightly-above-midtempo pop love song". In the future Swift really develops a knack for deft characterization, which is absolutely vital for an artist whose songs are unfailingly about interpersonal relationships; I would argue the first time this shows is in "Mine" on Speak Now when she tosses off the lyric "you made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter", which is a line that fleshes out at least three characters in rapid fashion while still seeming tossed-off and spontaneous in the way that great pop spectacle is.

The most fascinating thing is that she does try that on this album, but not through characterization, but rather through tactile, carefully-selected details about a setting. The first example is the opener, "Tim McGraw", where she evokes a relationship that's ended but where the two characters remember each other through their mutual love of the titular singer. It's not a complete way forward, since it lingers on this detail rather than developing the characters as Swift would rather do later, but it's an assured first step for Swift that's helped by having one of the best choruses on the album. The other example is... not so successful. "Our Song" was the big crossover hit from the album, but while its upbeatness is a nice respite from the tenderness of the rest of Taylor Swift, it tries to pack far too many details about its two characters' relationship into the chorus, and ends up feeling crowded and messy as a result. Certainly the hurricane of quirks and events that Swift rattles off pales in comparison to the sheer efficiency of "you made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter", but equally, that's in the future. There are things in need of development here, and develop them she certainly will. In the meantime, this album is perfectly pleasant. The actual sound is great, and it'd be great to get drunk and sing along to. It's just the first step, yeah, but it's Taylor Swift's first step, and that counts for a lot.