Why We Should Stop With This Pre-/Post-Sopranos Nonsense

I thought long and hard about whether I should write this post [1]. In addition to being the sort of contrarian opinion that tends to seem kind of pompous (see footnote), it also concerns a subject (the role of The Sopranos in TV history) that only a small subset of TV watchers even care about, a subset I'm not even sure overlaps with this blog's readership. In the end, though, I decided to go ahead with it, consequences be darned. So, if you're part of that subset who cares about this stuff, welcome! Hope you enjoy the post! If you aren't, well, you're in for a long post full of stuff you don't care about, but welcome all the same! Really, though, this is a long post, so I guess I should just get on with it before it gets any longer.

Here's what I think: the way most critics[2] position The Sopranos as an unprecedented, watershed event in television history that brought the medium to new heights of artistry is fundamentally wrongheaded.

Now, first of all, note that I am not saying that The Sopranos sucks, or even that it isn't great, or that television isn't in the middle of one of its most artistically fruitful periods ever. I'm a relative newcomer to the show (having been only eight years old when its pilot aired), but I definitely believe The Sopranos is an extremely accomplished, sophisticated series worth celebrating. And I also believe that the last fifteen-ish years of television have been an embarrassment of riches, full of stylistic diversity, challenging programming, and a whole lot of innovation. And honestly, The Sopranos has a lot to do with this embarrassment of riches, too (more on that later). However, the prevailing narrative among certain TV-viewing intellectuals that The Sopranos saved TV from perennial mediocrity or that The Sopranos is the genesis of serious TV drama or that The Sopranos was the moment that TV became an art form—I just think that shows either an ignorance or a misunderstanding of television history.

I've got a lot of reasons for thinking that the critics are wrong about The Sopranos—enough that it's kind of unwieldy to explain them in the argumentatively linear, essay-style way that I normally do on this blog. So, for the sake of readability, I'm going to just list a bunch of things The Sopranos is given credit for innovating and then do my best to explain why each one doesn't hold water for me. It's not the most eloquent way to structure an argument, but there's a kind of structural simplicity to it that's appealing. Or maybe it's just that I'm still stuck in year-end list-making mode.

Obviously, I'm going to be making generalizations about opinions and ideas surrounding The Sopranos, so let me admit up front that I'm aware that more nuanced versions of these ideas exist. But, for the sake of argument economy, I'm just going to hit the most common denominators in Sopranos adulation.

Sex, Violence, and Language
This first one's the easiest to refute, especially since the refutation stems from facts that are pretty well-known. But for some reason, it's also one of the most common points of discussion when bringing up The Sopranos' innovations. Here's the popular narrative: due to the standards of decency on the once-dominant broadcast networks (i.e. ABC, NBC, CBS, and, eventually, FOX), television's treatment of sex, violence, and "blue" language was repressively coy and rife with censorship, but the 1999 debut of The Sopranos on the censor-free HBO showed television's possibilities for unbridled profanity, nudity, and gore.

The first problem with this idea is that it completely ignores how cultural watchdogs have always criticized television for being a cesspool of violence, sex, and, to a lesser extent, foul language. It's a stance that dates back decades prior to The Sopranos. That's not to say that broadcast networks didn't have censoring practices (one of the most infamous being the prohibition of showing married couples sharing a single bed in television's first few decades), but for the most part, sex and violence have always been a presence on the TV landscape. Profanity is a more recent addition, first appearing in the late '60s, but even then, that's still thirty years before anyone had heard of Tony Soprano.

Oh yeah, and Lucy couldn't say "pregnant." So yes, censoring existed.

Now, there's no question that The Sopranos' use of sex, violence, and profanity is more explicit than, say, Columbo's. But, by 1999, it wasn't exactly unprecedented, either. Premium cable channels like Showtime and HBO had been around since at least the early '80s, and almost from the beginning, such networks realized that their freedom from broadcast television standards allowed them to show content that NBC, CBS, etc. couldn't. So The Sopranos wasn't exactly the first time cable TV had heard the word "fuck" or seen a breast. It wasn't even the first artistically serious series (i.e. not porn) to have that sort of content; on HBO alone, Oz, The Larry Sanders Show, and Sex and the City are scripted shows that all predate The Sopranos and feature nudity, profanity, and (at least on Oz) graphic violence. Even network television was tending toward more explicit content and had been since at least the '70s. By the mid-'90s, ABC's NYPD Blue had characters saying "shit" and baring buttocks, and although that series was edgier than most network series (and, in fact, routinely received FCC fines for said edginess), there's no denying that network television had gotten pretty violent and pretty sexy by the time The Sopranos rolled around. Now admittedly, the language on The Sopranos was much coarser than even NYPD Blue, but honestly, to this observer, the list of sexual and violent content The Sopranos has over its broadcast contemporaries is pretty small [3]. In fact, as far violence goes, The Sopranos is, save for a few extremely gruesome moments that don't even occur in every season, basically on-par with several broadcast network shows, explicitness-wise (The X-Files, anyone?).

All that is to say, The Sopranos' use of explicit content[4] wasn't so much groundbreaking or innovative as it was in line with ongoing trends in the TV medium—a conclusion that we're going to see a lot of before the end of this post.
 
Serialization
Another innovation The Sopranos is regularly credited with is the rise of serialization in TV. The story goes that before The Sopranos, TV was an episodic medium, with all its stories wrapping up before the credits rolled each week, but the interlocking storylines and accumulating character history on The Sopranos showed the world TV's potential as a serialized medium. For a good articulation of this idea, look at this article, which has a lot of fascinating things to say about modern serialization and blames The Sopranos in particular for the tendency for modern dramas to air "installments" instead of "episodes."

There's a vague truth to the timeline here: broadly, primetime TV[5] after the millennium (and, therefore, after the arrival of The Sopranos) relies more on continuing storylines and a general memory of past character events than primetime TV before the millennium. However, I think people tend to give The Sopranos way too much credit for this shift. First of all, the beginning of the new millennium is largely a false dividing line between episodic and serialized television, a dividing line established around the idea of The Sopranos' influence. Basic forms of serialization such as character arcs have been around since at least the early '80s with Hill Street Blues and Cheers, and by the '90s, shows like Twin Peaks, Seinfeld, Babylon 5, and My So-Called Life were innovating serialization with a complexity and sophistication that approached that of The Sopranos. So, yes, while TV after The Sopranos is generally more serialized than before The Sopranos, that's only because it was already tending in that direction. The millennial proliferation of continuity and ongoing storylines is just the accumulating influence of that trend, not an indication of any one show's unprecedented influence [6].

In fact, if I had to point to a single series where TV serialization "came of age," it would not be The Sopranos but rather Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Go watch Buffy's second season (1997-98, ending months before The Sopranos even debuted); it not only features the season-long accumulation of storylines that The Sopranos is often credited for innovating but also more closely approximates the propulsive, cliffhanger-based feel of modern serial storytelling than The Sopranos ever does.

I hope we can all agree the Buffy's second season rocks. Spoilers, I guess.

That's another thing that rarely gets mentioned when discussing The Sopranos' influence on TV serialization: the way that The Sopranos treats its storytelling is totally different from the modern storytelling conventions it supposedly inspired. The type of serialization most commonly used today (and for the past decade of TV at least) is just about what that linked AV Club article says: episodes serve as installments that are not standalone but in service of a longer story, often end with cliffhangers, and progress in a generally linear fashion (e.g. episode 3 must be watched before episode 4). Think Breaking Bad or the later seasons of Lost. The Sopranos, on the other hand, tells its stories on a largely episodic basis. While the show occasionally has the cliffhangery forward momentum of a modern serial, most of its episodes feature self-contained plots that, by the end of a season, add up to a larger story. Look at the Season One episode, "College." Tony taking Meadow on a college visit is a plot that has very little to do with the episodes preceding "College" and does not directly feed into the episodes that follow it; it's basically independent. However, by the end of the season, it becomes clear that this episode, albeit standalone, provides valuable thematic and character work that the rest of the series draws upon. That's how The Sopranos works: each season is like a collection of short stories that add up to a larger narrative. It's a kind of storytelling that is really rare in modern television, at least among the shows The Sopranos seems to have influenced (one could argue that this was the main storytelling mode prior to the rise of more conventionally serialized TV, but that's another topic for another day). Mad Men (created by Matt Weiner, not coincidentally a Sopranos alum) is one of the only series currently working in this mode.

So, basically, yeah. It seems like the current trends in TV storytelling would have happened anyway, with or without The Sopranos.

Antiheroes 
Here's another one The Sopranos gets credit for inventing: the idea that a TV protagonist can be a morally reprehensible, generally unlikable character. To be sure, Tony Soprano is an antihero—you won't hear me holding him up as any sort of moral exemplar. And also, it's definitely true that a whole host of shows created after The Sopranos have featured characters similar to ol' Tony. You could make a pretty extensive list of post-Sopranos shows with arrogant, middle-aged, white, criminal protagonists: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, and The Shield all fit the bill. So I'm not denying that The Sopranos didn't have at least some influence on the types of characters featured in TV dramas.

But again, the gradual hardening and de-moralizing of TV protagonists (especially male ones) was something that was already happening without the help of The Sopranos. NYPD Blue is probably the most obvious pre-Sopranos example of this trend, but I think you could argue that The X-Files also dabbled in antiheroism, especially circa its fourth and fifth seasons (1996-98) when the character of Fox Mulder became increasingly arrogant, criminal, and blinded by obsession (exhibit A: Season Four's "Never Again," which suggests that Mulder is too self-absorbed to maintain normal human contact). Seinfeld, with its four central narcissists, is another show that did a lot of groundbreaking for antihero characters; there's an argument to be made that the Seinfeld character's nearly weekly rationalization of reprehensible behavior is as much of a precedent for Breaking Bad's Walter White as anything in The Sopranos [7].

Douche Mulder, chillin' like... an antihero. Nice shades.

So yes, The Sopranos did help to create a character type that became pretty prevalent in a certain breed of television. But Tony Soprano's antiheroism is more a product of a trend already in its mid-stages than an unprecedented innovation. Credit where credit is due.


Cinematic Finesse
I don't think there's any arguing that The Sopranos is a "cinematic" show; that is to say, its camerawork, musical cues, visual inventiveness, and pacing are frequently beautiful and reminiscent of the level of polish found in a certain brand of prestige filmmaking. The Scorsese influence is all over The Sopranos, not just in its narrative content but also in the overall cinematic style, and if you pay attention, it isn't too hard to see all sorts of other art house cinema flavors in the show as well, particularly those flavors of the "New Hollywood" blend. Yes, The Sopranos' crew clearly learned a lot of lessons from film, and those lessons are part of what makes the show good. And so, not without reason, many critics argue that it was The Sopranos that first brought the cinematic finesse of sophisticated filmmaking to the small screen.

But (wait for it) The Sopranos was also not the first series to take advantage of sophisticated cinematic techniques. Putting aside the fact that television basically has always had to use filmmaking techniques because it is itself a form of film (at least from a technical standpoint[8]), the list of pre-Sopranos TV shows that are in some way artistically "cinematic" is notable. The most important of these is probably Twin Peaks, which debuted nearly a decade before The Sopranos and is almost unquestionably an influence on the cinematic style of The Sopranos. Here's the thing: not only does Twin Peaks have a "New Hollywood" art house visual style, psychologically complex imagery, and imaginative visual and musical cues (all things normally attributed to The Sopranos), but it was also created and occasionally directed by David Lynch, Mr. Art House himself! Another key "cinematic" show is, again, The X-Files, which (though admittedly more often influenced by blockbuster/thriller cinematography than Scorsese) as early as its second season played around with artful surrealism and absurdity that anticipates a good deal of The Sopranos' overriding aesthetic. Go back even further, to the first decades of TV drama, and you have The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (in addition to any number of anthology shows from the '50s) sporting a style with obvious roots in film noir, another Sopranos cinematic touchstone.

Now, The Sopranos had a bigger budget than any of these series, and it shows; I'll grant that The Sopranos looked nicer than almost any show that came before it. But to say that it brought a host of unprecedented cinematic influences to television seems a little short-sighted to me.

Quality 
Okay, this last one is a bit more subjective, so your mileage here may vary depending on how closely your television sensibilities adhere to mine. But this topic also taps into my biggest pet peeve in the critical conversation surrounding The Sopranos, so bear with me as I climb into my pulpit. Here we go.

The Sopranos did not save television from mediocrity. Or, to put it another way, television did not magically ascend to the pedestal of high art once The Sopranos appeared.

Just look at the opening line from the first chapter of Brett Martin's Difficult Men (see footnote #2), in reference to the television landscape prior to The Sopranos: "In the beginning, there was the Vast Wasteland. And it was bad." And that's a really common opinion among a certain class of critical elite. Seriously, why do people say things like this?

Listen, I know television has always had its share of crappy shows and that at certain points in history, said crappy shows have had more dominance over the airwaves than at other times. And I readily acknowledge that TV is in a sort of Golden Age right now and that the sheer number of quality shows currently running is pretty much unprecedented. But I refuse to believe that any medium that produced The Twilight Zone, The Andy Griffith Show, Cosmos, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Cheers, Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, The Cosby Show, Twin Peaks, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Sesame Street, Star Trek, Batman: The Animated Series, Roots, My So-Called Life, and so, so much more could ever be a "wasteland."

Seriously, y'all. We had The Simpsons.

There's an alternate version of the "Sopranos made TV good" line of thinking that I also don't get, which is that after The Sopranos, good TV drama became that which followed the rules "established"[9] by The Sopranos—that is, mature content, cynicism, existentialism, antiheroism, cable-length seasons (13-ish episodes[10]), serialized stories. To be fair, there have been a decent number of good-to-great post-Sopranos shows to fit this description, some which I have seen (Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire) and some which I know only by reputation (Deadwood, The Shield). But there have also been a lot of good-to-great post-Sopranos dramas that haven't followed those rules. Consider the following list of shows (broadcast on major networks, no less) that debuted either alongside or after The Sopranos and bear little resemblance to any of the dark, antihero trappings of that series: Friday Night Lights, The West Wing, Freaks and Geeks, Firefly, Parenthood, Pushing Daisies. Not all of these shows were hits or were respected by their networks, but all of them managed to achieve sophisticated artistic success in non-Sopranos-influenced ways.

Which is to say, the idea that the only way to make good TV drama is by the methods of the cable dramas that cropped up in The Sopranos' wake is ludicrous. I feel like (and maybe I'm wrong, so please correct me if I am) most people nowadays see that the majority of good shows are on cable networks, note that The Sopranos was one of the first truly great cable shows, and then draw the false equivalency that the cable model seen on The Sopranos is the only way to make great shows. However, I'd like to present a different analysis of the data: the reason why a majority of good shows are on cable networks is that the majority of networks making original content are cable networks. When you've got, say, fifteen different channels with original programming and all but four of these channels are on cable, the statistical reality is that the ratio of good cable shows to good broadcast shows will skew at least a little toward the cable end. And when every drama series produced on these cable networks sets out to play by the perceived innovations of The Sopranos, it stands to reason that a decent number of the great shows will end up being similar to The Sopranos.

Way back at the beginning of this post, I said I'd eventually explain why I think The Sopranos is both undeserving of its "most innovative show ever" crown and yet also largely responsible for the recent explosion of good shows on TV. Well, the explanation is that statistical reality in the previous paragraph. The Sopranos is basically the reason why there are currently more cable networks than broadcast networks producing original series. See, even though HBO had been making original content for a decade prior to 1999, the media hype and subsequent ratings boom surrounding The Sopranos was unlike anything HBO or any other cable network had ever experienced. The Larry Sanders Show may have proved that HBO could create an original show, but The Sopranos proved that HBO could create an original show that would attract a critical and popular audience. And that made other cable networks realize that they could create their own original series and attract that same audience. Enter FX, Showtime, AMC, et al. Now, thanks to the example set by The Sopranos and the hype-envy it inspired, we have a whole gaggle of networks producing series, hence the increased number of good shows produced. 

In Conclusion
I'm sure those of you who've stuck it out this far felt a thrill of excited when you read that heading. Yes, dear readers, you've made it to this post's endgame. Just a little more rambling, and you can be on your way.

Basically, what it comes down to is that a lot of critics treat The Sopranos as the Citizen Kane of television, whereas I see it more as TV's Nevermind. What do I mean by that? Well, think back to 1991 when Nirvana released Nevermind (which is ridiculous for me to say, considering I was one year old then, but let's not quibble with the details). Nevermind is a great album, but even back in '91, it was not an innovative one, not in the sense that it broke new sonic territory. It's well-crafted, but the sounds of '80s indie rock (especially the Pixies, an influence Kurt Cobain openly acknowledged) are all over the record, in addition to early-Beatles, punk, and country. Extremely good, even classic, but nothing completely new. Yet because of the context of its release and the media hype surrounding it, Nevermind started a mini-revolution in the music industry, inspiring the signing to major labels of many previously underground bands and the formation of many new "alternative" groups that mimicked the Nevermind formula. Nevermind wasn't a beginning of a new sound or an out-of-nowhere innovation, but its position in the media made it the most visible work to point to when analyzing accelerating trends.

Same with The Sopranos. The things it's known for—the mature content, the antiheroism, etc.—are a conglomeration of trends that had already been going on for a while in TV when it debuted, bolstered by a tidal wave of media attention. That makes it sound like I think the show is derivative, but I promise I don't think that. In fact, despite what I've been saying this whole post, I do think it's a show with new ideas, but those ideas are philosophical ones, not the supposedly convention-breaking ones that seem to get a lot of press. Maybe one day I'll write a post that tackles those themes—it really is a great show that has interesting things to say about the human condition. But for now, can we just stop with making The Sopranos some giant boundary between TV past and TV present, bad and good, sophomoric and sophisticated? It makes the history of television unnecessarily divided.

After all, The Sopranos isn't a beginning. It's a middle.

Phew. And that's it. That's the end of this long, long post. Thank you so much for sticking it out. Now that you've read it all, what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Am I completely out of my mind with this stuff? Do I think too much about television? Yes, yes I do.

Until next time!

1] Okay, okay, that's the sort of thing someone would usually say at the beginning of some post that takes an unpopular stance on a controversial issue or that discloses some deeply personal narrative or belief. This post is none of that, so I apologize if that first sentence has the pretensions of introducing a topic with more gravitas than television criticism. But the truth is, I really did debate whether or not to write this post, the reason being that it is really hard to say things like "[such and such majority] is wrong about [this and that widely held opinion]" without coming off as a contentious asshole, especially when the aforementioned majority is much older and more experienced than the contender. That's not to say that such things shouldn't be said (this post still exists, after all), but there's a right way and a wrong way to say them, and it's quite likely that parts of this post veer into the wrong way. So, preemptively, I'm sorry for sounding like a contentious asshole. Know that I had every intention of not sounding like one, and the existence of my sounding like one anyway is irrefutable proof of me being a sinful human being still in dire need of more sanctification. End of cop-out apology.

2] I admit that a vague institution of "most critics" is a kind of weaselly straw man to invoke (and, full disclosure, I continue to invoke it throughout the post), but believe me when I say these ideas are not only out there but also widespread. It's a little bit beyond the scope of this post to give a comprehensive run-down of every single major TV critic's opinion on The Sopranos, but for the sake of integrity, here's a good overview of the general critical climate when discussing the show. Here's another one. For further reading, look to Brett Martin's informative-but-entirely-symptomatic-of-the-problem book, Difficult Men, whose depiction of David Chase (Sopranos creator and showrunner) as some sort of television messiah verges on insufferable.

3] It's also worth mentioning that The Sopranos isn't even that violent or that sexual. It has one or two instances of nudity per episode, a few sexual references (that were, admitted, a little dirtier than a network would allow), and a handful of violent encounters per season (compare that to network cop shows, which have a handful of violent encounters per episode). Granted, none of those are anything to sneeze at; it's definitely an R-rated show. But for a series that has a reputation for pioneering explicit content, the majority of a given episode of The Sopranos consists a lot of non-explicit stuff (language aside—that's pretty rough throughout).

4] Not quite sure where to say this in the article proper, but I do think it needs to be said: explicit content is not synonymous with sophistication or artistic excellence. I know that's a pretty obvious thing to say, but sometimes it seems like critics attribute the artistic success of The Sopranos to the writers' freedom to be as violent, sexual, and profane as they pleased. I think that's a silly thing to say; The Sopranos is good because it has good writers, directors, actors, etc. Of course these people used violence, et al. to accomplish their artistic goals, but the mere permission to use this explicit content did not guarantee a masterwork. The lack of permissiveness also does not preclude a series from being a masterwork; if The Sopranos had aired on Fox or CBS (two networks that showed early interest in picking up the show), it would not have been the same TV-MA show, but, given the caliber of its staff, it's quite possible that it still would have been very good. For whatever reason, there always seems to be a certain subset of consumers that equates dark, explicit content with artistic greatness, and I guess I just don't get why people think that. I mean, look at it this way: one of American cinema's greatest decades is the 1940s, and the standards and practices for explicit content at the time were less permissive than TV in the '70s. Yeah, so, there's that. End of digression.

5] I specify primetime because daytime dramas have been doing serialization since, like, forever. Heck, they even did it before television, when soap operas were radio broadcasts instead of televised broadcasts. So really, you could say that every show with an ongoing storyline has its roots in soap opera tradition. That's right, folks: The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men are indebted to All My Children, General Hospital and the like. Deal with it!

6] One thing that the linked AV Club article astutely points out is that the early-2000s arrival of seasons of TV on DVD is another contributing factor in the increase of serialization and the treatment of episodes as installments rather than self-contained stories. Audiences could pay closer attention to storytelling details when the DVD allowed for pausing, rewinding, and rewatching, and binge-watching a season caused episodes to blur into a continuous story.

7] I'm sort of kidding, but... hmm...

8] Although, to be completely accurate, only some of TV is actually "film," in the sense that it is shot on 35mm film or something like that. A good portion of TV history was shot on video tape. But let's not split too many hairs, because if we're doing that, we'll have to start calling Gravity and Zero Dark Thirty "videos" instead of "films," too, and that would be all kinds of confusing.

9] See rest of post for explanation of skeptical quotation marks.

10] If there's one thing I think The Sopranos definitely should take credit for, it's the innovation of the cable-length season for TV dramas. I think there are good things about the traditional 22-24 episode season that cable shows have lost (though that's a topic for another post—this one has gotten plenty long enough), but for crafting tight, well-paced, complex drama, there's no beating the shortened season length that The Sopranos popularized.

Favorite Movies of 2013

The list-making continues! My post for my favorite music of 2013 went over pretty well (in fact, it became the most viewed post yet on this blog; thanks for that!), so I thought I'd continue to contribute to the Internet's year-end obsession with lists. This time: my favorite movies of the year.

It's been kind of funny keeping up with the critical conversation of cinema in 2013. If you look back to June, July, and August, it seems like all anyone was talking about was how broken the current Hollywood system is, the emptiness of this year's plate of blockbusters, the suppression of unique vision in American cinema, the overemphasis on foreign marketing, etc. Even well-respected industry veterans bemoaned the state of film in America. But come mid-autumn, something changed. Well, actually, I'm not sure anything really changed—the Hollywood system, I assume, is still as problematic as ever—but what did happen was that a whole lot of good movies started hitting theaters, and now, you don't have to look too hard to find people calling 2013 one of the best years for movies in recent memory.

I don't think I ever got quite as cynical about the future of cinema as some professionals did, but I am still pleasantly surprised at how great a year for movies this one turned out to be (although I'd say 2010 and 2007 have it beat, as far as "best in recent memory" goes). Considering all the fantastic films that came out this year, it was really hard to narrow this list down to a Top 10, so I've added an appendix of sorts to recognize other noteworthy movies from 2013—because what pop culture list couldn't benefit from being a little longer, right? As always, if you disagree with me, I'd love to hear about it. I've said it before, but the most valuable thing about lists like this one is not the ranking itself (which, after all, is a kind of silly thing to do) but the discussion to come out of the ranking. So please feel free to post your own lists in the comments below or on Facebook or wherever. I'd love to hear from y'all.

Two more things before the actual list—first: the movies I considered for this list are ones that had a theatrical release in the US during 2013. That means a few movies here might have actually been released in 2012 but didn't reach America until this year. Second: unlike music or literature, it is actually technically possible to see every theatrical release in a given year; however, I didn't, so there are several movies out there that probably would have made this list had I gotten to see them. The two I'm primarily thinking of are 12 Years a Slave (semester got busy, then I couldn't find it in a theater) and Her (don't even get me started on how frustrated I get about movies that don't get wide releases in the same year that they're up for awards), but I'm sure there are others out there I would have enjoyed—All Is Lost, Frozen, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Short Term 12, and The Spectacular Now spring to mind already, not to mention the host of blockbusters I haven't caught up with yet (Star Trek: Into Darkness and Thor: The Dark World, to name a couple). I know there's technically still a day left in the year, but it's not looking like I'll be able to get out to see anything else, so I figured I'd just go ahead and publish this list now. Let me know if I missed something else awesome.

Now, the movies!

Favorite Movies

1. Before Midnight
Since the release of Toy Story 3, I've contended that the Toy Story movies are the best film trilogy of all time. And while I'm not exactly reneging on that idea just yet, the Before... movies are giving Pixar a run for its money. Part of what's so revelatory about Jesse and Céline's story is that each successive installment has a way of making the previous movies feel incomplete without it. Without Before Sunset, Before Sunrise is just the story of a coincidence, not the beginning of a majestic love story. Now, with the hindsight of Before Midnight, the previous two become blindly romantic (albeit masterfully crafted) fairy tales. Throughout its often harrowing 109 minutes, Before Midnight picks apart every little bit of idealism in its predecessors, forming a stunning depiction of two people as broken as any of us.

2. Gravity
If nothing else, Gravity wins the award for most stressful movie of the year, and by a considerable margin. But this isn't a nothing-else situation. Gravity is an embarrassment of cinematic riches, from the masterful use of CG effects to the swooping, inventive camerawork to the primal man-vs.-nature story that, despite the space-age setting, feels ancient, almost mythic. People have complained that the movie skimps on character development (and even I'll grant that the movie cheats majorly at one point near the end), but I don't really think character is the point, not in a modern sense. Sandra Bullock's character is more reminiscent of Gilgamesh or Odysseus than Ellen Ripley, fighting erratic gods in order to say something sweeping about humanity. Oh yeah, and it's also great blockbuster entertainment.

3. The World's End
Though not quite as funny as Hot Fuzz or Shawn of the Dead, The World's End is, for my money, the most mature, thematically rich, and flat-out best of the Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg "Cornetto Trilogy" (though to be honest, I didn't know the trilogy had that name until just recently, and I didn't know "Cornetto" was ice cream until even more recently—shame). But don't take "not as funny" to mean "not funny at all"; The World's End is often hilarious, with jokes that are at once silly, meticulously constructed, and satirically sharp. It's just that more than any of the previous Cornetto entries (and probably more so than any Wright creation, save maybe a few episodes of Spaced), The World's End focuses on the brokenness and misery of its characters. And it's all the more powerful for it.

4. Stoker
I've never seen Oldboy (neither the original nor this year's Spike Lee remake), but if Stoker is any indication of director Park Chan-wook's visual flair and twisted, twisted sense of humor, I should seek out Oldboy pronto. Stoker is a movie unhinged in the best way possible, completely mesmerizing in its over-the-top gothicness and self-aware cinematographic antics. The big hooks here are the camera work and editing, which are immaculate and darkly witty. It's the kind of film Alfred Hitchcock would have made if he'd survived into the post-Tarantino film world, form and function meeting seamlessly. The style and overall grisliness may not be for everyone, but for those of us who can dig it, it's a great ride.

5. Inside Llewyn Davis [1]
One thing Joel and Ethan Coen don't get all that much attention for is their use of physical humor (especially in their existential works, a category in which this film totally fits), but one of the many pleasures of Inside Llewyn Davis is that it's a great showcase of their talent for wringing comedy out of subtle physical interactions. The scenes with the cat, of course, are wonderfully choreographed bits reminiscent of old Disney shorts, but even beyond that, John Goodman, "Please, Mr. Kennedy," and so on provide great gags. What's even greater, though, is the emotional sincerity that comedy services. People rag on the Coens for being detached, but this film, along with their last feature, True Grit, seems to indicate a new period of emotional forthrightness for these guys. I'm cool with that.

6. American Hustle
Saying that "some of this actually happened" is probably the best way possible to introduce writer/director David O. Russell's latest film (or really, any "based on a true story" movie). Thankfully, that's exactly American Hustle's claim in its opening title card, preemptively dodging the tiresome trend of fact-checking every movie with any semblance of realism (an astronaut vouches for the realism of Gravity! Real-life PK finds Carrie highly inaccurate[2]!) while also announcing the film's commitment to both farce and "hey, this is kinda like real life" observationalism. And make no mistake: this is a farce. I mean that in the best way possible. Some have called it "Scorcese-lite," but that assumes a straighter face than American Hustle ever wears. Most of the movie is for yucks. And what yucks they are.

7. Frances Ha
If you're into the "indie" corner of the film world at all, you've seen this movie before: over-educated twentysomethings wandering NYC aimlessly, afflicted by ennui and the crushing burden of being sophisticated white people in the cultural center of the United States. If I'm being a little snide, that's only because the movie itself is a little snide. Several moments in Frances Ha (the "Everyone's a Winner" montage; the "you aren't poor" interchange) are refreshingly self-conscious about the shortcomings of its characters in a way that this sort of movie usually isn't. What makes Frances Ha a winner, though, is that it balances out this self-critique with a warm sense of humor and a sincere affection for Frances, despite her flaws. It's a movie deft enough to have both biting honesty and a beating heart at its core.

8. In the House (Dans la maison)
Remember the end of Atonement? Well, imagine that stretched into a full-length movie told by way of Stephen King's novella "Apt Pupil," and you'll have a pretty good idea of the kind of experience you're in for with In the House. What at first seems to be a critique of the French educational system quickly morphs into something much stranger, an exploration of the nature of literature and the relationship between author, audience, and art. It's at once a thriller, a black comedy, and a (sometimes) tender character study that never ceases to be inventive and insightful.

9. Monsters University
Reports of Pixar's demise are greatly exaggerated. While the studio's recent abundance of sequels in current and future projects is troubling in the abstract, as long as they keep making movies with the grace of Monsters University, we shouldn't be in too much trouble in practice. Look, I'm just as much of a fan of Pixar's more showily daring movies as the next guy (WALL-E and Up are awesome), but there's something to be said for their more accessible features. Scratch that; labeling Monsters University as "only" accessible or family-friendly sells it short and ignores how the movie is quietly daring in its own way. I've already talked about that idea at length, so I won't belabor the point. Just go see MU if you haven't. It's quite good.
 

10. Drug War (Du zhan 毒戰)
My exposure to non-English-language movies is sadly lacking, and my exposure to non-Western, non-English-language movies is even worse. So it's a happy coincidence that the only new non-Western, non-English-language movie I saw all year turned out to be one of the best films I saw all year, period. Drug War is a tight thriller about the policing of the drug trade in China. I don't know enough about Chinese crime to have anything intelligent to say about the social commentary this movie engages in (see again: my embarrassing lack of exposure to the non-Western world), but what I do know is this: it's exciting, smartly paced, thought-provoking, and fun in that meat-and-potatoes way of the best crime thrillers.



Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Favorite Movies, Documentary Division: Stories We Tell and Cutie and the Boxer—By all accounts, it was a great year for documentaries, too, and I'm bummed I didn't have room in my Top 10 to recognize any. So, lest they be ignored, here are two documentaries from this year that I enjoyed. Coincidentally, they're both observant, sensitive examinations of the intersections between storytelling and family relationships, and not so coincidentally, they're both very good. Harder, more journalistic documentaries came out this year, but these two were the most beautiful ones I saw.

Best Action in an Action Movie, Runner Up: Pacific Rim—Honestly, this award should go to Gravity, but since that's already getting glory aplenty at #2 up there, I thought I'd give a shout-out to Pacific Rim, which is a blast in its action sequences.

Best Non-Action in an Action Movie: Iron Man 3—The action is okay, but where Iron Man 3 really shines are the long, actionless stretches where the characters are just hanging out, shooting the breeze. It's fun, and some of the best character work in the Avengers-connected Marvel movies.

Biggest Surprise: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire—I liked the first Hunger Games movie okay (and even thought it was an improvement over the book it was adapting), but the bland competence of the first movie did nothing to prepare me for how immensely entertaining and just plain good its sequel would be.

Best Use of Outer Space, Runner Up: Europa Report—Gravity wins again. But really, Europa Report does a fantastic job of capturing an austerity and mystery that (I imagine) space instills in those who travel through it. Found footage has been overdone (and this one isn't without its shortcomings—lookin' at you, ending), but for fans of golden-age sci-fi, Europa Report is worth a look. 

Best Sci-Fi, Non-Space Division, Incomprehensible Division: Upstream Color—It's not as hopelessly confusing as Shane Carruth's other feature film, Primer, but I'd be lying to you if I said I understood everything about UC. That's not a bad thing, though. Like Primer, a lot of the power of this movie comes from the feeling of letting go, of allowing the narrative complexity wash over you. It's also like a thousand times better-looking than Primer, which makes the washing-over that much more beautiful.

Movie That Most Benefits from Being Based on True Events: The Bling Ring—Sure, The Bling Ring is beautifully shot, has a few killer scenes, and is generally well-made. But the thing I find most engaging about the movie is that people actually did this!! Maybe I'm more star-struck than I should be, but the absolute craziness of a bunch of bored teenagers robbing celebrities blind and the celebrities not noticing (!) feels more at home in satire than real life. But lo and behold, it's real, y'all [3].

Movie Almost Ruined by a Secondary Character: The Kings of Summer—Moisés Arias's character was so gratingly absurd and out-of-place in this otherwise winsome coming-of-age dramedy.

Movie I Want to Like More Than I Do: The Place Beyond the Pines—It's complex and interesting and sophisticated, but darn it all, it seems like every time I'm getting into it, the film switches gears, and I lose it.

Worst Use of a Director's Worst Tendency: Terrence Malick's To the Wonder—So. Many. Voiceovers.

Great Job, Michael Cera! Award: Crystal Fairy—I really didn't like this movie at all, but hopefully Michael Cera's utterly fearless turn as a douchey drug tourist will finally put to rest the misconception that he can't do anything besides pretend to be George Michael Bluth [4]. It's a phenomenal performance in a film that didn't sell me on anything else.

Great Job Yet Again, Jessica Chastain! Award: Mama—A pretty good horror movie with two great things going for it: first, it realizes that most great horror stories are really just great tragedies, and second, it stars Jessica Chastain. Her breathtaking work in last year's Zero Dark Thirty should have cemented her status as a legitimately great actress, but if you needed any more proof, look no further than Mama.

Pi Award for Bizarre but Oddly Compelling Black and White Movie About Early Computing: Computer Chess—It's a weird one, for sure, but if you can get on its level, it's a hilarious and kind of sweet exploration of intersecting fringe groups. Plus, for nerds like me, all that old computer technology is super nifty to look at.

Best Non-2013 Movie I Saw for the First Time in 2013: His Girl Friday—This movie is so good, I'm legitimately sad I can't experience it again for the first time. Comedy sometimes doesn't age well, but this one certainly did; that it has some of the most virtuosic dialogue I've ever seen in a movie no doubt helps.

That's all I've got for now. Don't forget to disagree with me.

Until next time!

1] If anyone's curious how Inside Llewyn Davis ranks in my previous rundown of Coen brothers movies, I'd put it squarely in the middle, right between Raising Arizona and A Serious Man. It's a testament to the ridiculously deep nature of their filmography that I have to put a movie as good as Llewyn Davis so low.

2] Unfortunately, this one's a fake. Real PKs never reveal the secrets of their trade!

3] Part of me also feels exceptionally cloistered for not hearing about the robberies when they happened in '08 and '09. And another part of me feels kind of bad for being this excited about theft. Maybe I should stop criticizing those "Team Walt" Breaking Bad fans.

4] Even George Michael Bluth didn't act like George Michael Bluth this year. His transformation into a half-hearted Bluth-douche was one of the funnier things about this year's new Arrested Development (a season which I liked quite a bit, by the way). Perhaps Mr. Cera has found his new niche.

Christian and Non-Christian Influences in High Fantasy Literature

For the longest time, I was a big fan of high fantasy. The Chronicles of Narnia were some of the first "grown up" books (i.e. more words than pictures) I ever read, and by the time I got to middle school, I was devouring Lord of the Rings, Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books, and whatever Terry Brooks was writing at the moment (which I can now scarcely remember, such was Brooks's impact on me apparently). Sometime late in high school, I kind of fell out of the genre, though I still enjoy reading a good epic quest from time to time[1]. But anyway, the point is that I read a lot of that sort of thing.

One particular series that stands out in my mind is Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence, which is really the main event of this post. The more I think about this series, the more it feels to me like a complete anomaly in the high fantasy genre.

For those who don't know[2], The Dark Is Rising sequence is a series of five children's books (although they probably would have been classified as YA novels if such a distinction existed at the time) written in the '60s and '70s during the post-LoTR explosion of epic fantasy literature. The main premise of the books is this: throughout history two forces—the Light and the Dark—have fought for control over Earth. The Old Ones, an ancient order of protectors allied with the Light, have to collect five magical artifacts to defeat the Dark, which is (you guessed it) rising for one final battle in which the fate of the planet hangs in the balance, and in order to do so, the Old Ones recruit several British schoolchildren (among whom is Will Stanton, a sort of Chosen One) to help them save the world. Pretty standard high fantasy stuff, right? Well, sort of.

Now, there is a whole host of reasons why The Dark Is Rising stands out as a non-standard entry in the fantasy canon, but here's the one I want to focus on in this post: unlike almost every other fantasy series I read growing up, this series values its pagan influences over its Christian ones.

Pretty much every modern fantasy epic has two major influences on its storytelling and world-building philosophies: medieval Christianity and pre-Christian European mythology[3]. From medieval Christianity, we get the setting (castles, noble knights, etc.) and the overriding storytelling morality of absolute good vs. absolute evil (including the accompanying imagery—white=good; black=bad). From European paganism, we get wizards/druids, dwarves, magic rings, and pretty much all the other mythical trappings. Of course, that's an oversimplification of the factors at play in fantasy, but I do think (please correct me if I'm wrong) it's broadly accurate.

What ends up happening in most traditional fantasy sagas is that the pagan elements (aka the magic) work in service of Christian ones. Consider (as anyone must when discussing this genre) Tolkien. Lord of the Rings has pagan influences aplenty: magic items, monsters, cloaked figures who perform ancient ceremonies—all that comes from pre-Christian Norse and Celtic mythology; Tolkien even cribbed some of the names (Gimli, for instance) directly from Norse myth. But the storytelling ends to which Tolkien puts these influences to use are decidedly Christian. Lord of the Rings, with its redemptive plot arcs, corruptible humanity, and figures of pure good and evil, is an undeniably Christian work that uses its non-Christian elements as tools. The same thing happens in most other fantasy epics I'm familiar with. The individual components may harken back Norse, Celtic, or even Greco-Roman mythology, but the central philosophy and storytelling devices are more in-line with Christian thought[4].

Cernunnos, letting it all hang out

That's not really the case with The Dark Is Rising. Sure, the series has Christian influences (the books make frequent allusions to churches, King Arthur pops up in conversation from time to time, and iconography like crosses plays an important role in the plot), but as the sequence progresses, pre-Christian Celtic narratives crop up more and more. For example, Herne the Hunter (a folk figure often connected with Celtic deity Cernunnos) makes a prominent appearance in the second book, while the third book is entirely focused on a town's annual "greenwitch" offering, which seems to be a benign version (read: no killing) of the Druid wicker man tradition. By the fourth book, it's revealed that three powers (not just the Light and Dark) rule over the world, effectively doing away with binary morality. And these aren't just passing allusions; these are major mythological touchstones for the sake of themselves, without any sort of Christian endgame. By the end of the series, it's clear that The Dark Is Rising is first and foremost interested in ancient traditions that predate Christianity's arrival in the British Isles, and it uses its fantasy structure to build a story more in-step with those traditions than any Western ideology. In a way, it's reminiscent of the original Wicker Man movie, only without all the human sacrifice and horror—how a mostly Christian (or at least Western) premise gives way to an exploration of how ancient Celtic traditions override modern sensibilities.

In a way, The Dark Is Rising takes the medieval Christian tendency to appropriate pagan traditions for theological ends (just check out the historical origins of our Christmas and Halloween celebrations) and turns it on its head, using high fantasy, a genre typically associated with Christian mores, to explore old Celtic beliefs. That's pretty fascinating stuff, even if I for one identify much more (aka completely) with Christianity than Celtic paganism.

Not the bees... oh wait.

I feel like I need to end this discussion by reiterating that I haven't paid nearly as much attention to the genre recently as I did in my middle and high school years. If I ever was an expert on epic fantasy, I certainly am not one now. Furthermore, I've never been an expert on mythology. So take all these ideas with a grain of salt. This post is more of a rambling muse than a well-researched treatise on the subject. If any of you out there know more on either subject, I'd love to hear about it!

As always, I'm super willing to discuss anything you might bring up, and moreover, I'm sure I've said something reductive, stupid, or just plain wrong in the above paragraphs. So let me know what you think. Thanks so much for reading.

Until next time.


1] In fact, I just finished Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which is pretty much a high fantasy novel set in the contemporary USA.

2] Judging from its ubiquity in libraries, I think there must have been a time when this series was at least semi-popular, but I rarely hear it discussed nowadays. Aside from a go-nowhere attempt to adapt the books into a series of movies with The Seeker (which I haven't seen but is by all accounts pretty lousy), I get the impression that not too many people pay attention to The Dark Is Rising sequence anymore. Maybe I just fly in the wrong circles, though, so apologies if I'm pretending like these books are more obscure than they are.

3] You could probably say, more accurately, that every modern fantasy epic has one influence, Lord of the Rings, and that Lord of the Rings is the one directly influenced by Christianity and paganism.

4] I'm not saying that fantasy authors always have Christian intentions or identify with the Christian religion (though that certainly seems to be the case with J. R. R. Tolkien and his fantasy co-conspirator, C. S. Lewis), but the conventions of 20th-century English-language fantasy do tend toward broadly Christian ideology, even if not in an explicitly theological way. Maybe a better way to put it is that they represent the generally Western way of thinking most closely aligned with Christianity. Even Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, as explicitly anti-Christian as it may be, still uses Western Christianity as a primary philosophical touchstone, if only to refute it.

Watching The Twilight Zone at Night: It's Different

 Da da dee doo, da da dee doo...

"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call the Twilight Zone." - Rod Serling, Twilight Zone opening credits 

On and off for the last year or so, I've been working my way through The Twilight Zone. Now, I've seen a good portion of the show's episodes before on TV, but this is my first time watching through the series from beginning to end—thanks to the wonders of modern media, via Netflix and Hulu (which, between the two of them, have every episode). And I've noticed something that never occurred to me before: more than any other show I can think of, The Twilight Zone benefits from context.

I'm not talking about context in the sense of the social, political, or historical background surrounding the show's creation (though, given the sheer number of Cold War allegories, there's something to be said for that). What I mean is the physical context of any given viewer of the show, the literal space surrounding the TV set, computer screen, or whatever the view chooses to watch it on. Basically, how you watch The Twilight Zone has a huge consequences on its effectiveness.

Before my discovery of its availability on streaming services, my only exposure to The Twilight Zone was through late-night TV marathons of the show that aired during my middle and high school years. Often I'd be sleeping over at a friend's house, my buddy and I flipping through the channels at some weird hour of the night as the manic energy of the sleepover's escapades (video games, junk food, etc.) dissipated. Half asleep, we'd stumble upon some episode of the show, immediately arrested by Rod Serling's monologue or a singularly striking image of sci-fi weirdness, and before we knew it, we'd watched seven or eight of the suckers, and it was 4:30 am. The experience was nightmarish, sad, hazy, and a little funny, and we'd wake up the next morning with only sketchy memories of the episodes we'd watched.

That, I argue, is the single most effective way to watch The Twilight Zone: randomly discovered in the middle of the night, with the lights off, with your mind slowly falling asleep.

What I've found upon revisiting the show is that watching it fully alert in the middle of the day or at dinner time or over breakfast is a completely different experience. That's not to say that the show isn't still great (in fact, I'd still rank it among the best TV shows ever), but it is a decidedly different series at 3 pm than it is at 3 am. During the day, The Twilight Zone is a well-written (if occasionally over-written), immaculately paced, inventive show that vacillates between a twisted sense of humor and a deeply humanist impulse for sentimentality. But in the middle of the night, in the dark, all those intellectual characteristics take a back seat to the oppressive and altogether unnerving mood. Each episode begins with an uncanny feeling of displacement that grows over the next thirty minutes until it blossoms into the terrible realization that there is something irreversibly not right about the world. The logic of the show (which is occasionally shaky) ceases to matter, and the story on the TV becomes phantasmagorical, making only enough sense to convey twisted epiphanies and the fearful awe of encountering the unknown.

Okay, yeah, I'm getting a little over-the-top—that last paragraph was just about as purple (albeit not as eloquent) as a Rod Sterling intro. But it really is striking how much your state-of-mind and the surrounding environment affect how you view the show [1]. Or maybe that's just me. After all, everyone brings their own set of emotions, biases, and experiences to the art they consume. All I know is that I can watch shows like Lost or Seinfeld at any time and get roughly the same thing out of the experience; not so with The Twilight Zone. I dunno, maybe it really does take place in a fifth dimension.

Until next time.

1] Yeah, technically we viewers always bring different sets of baggage to different settings (e.g. if you're watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off in a hotel room by yourself, it's not the same as when you watch it in a friend's living room with a bunch of pals), but the extent to which I feel differently about The Twilight Zone based on the setting in which I watch it goes way beyond the normal effects of setting-shifting. The only other things I can think of that have a similar transformation are horror movies, a genre with which The Twilight Zone shares more than a little of its DNA.

Favorite Music of 2013

Well, folks, it's almost the end of 2013, and you know what that means for the pop culture world: lists. Being the shameless trend-follower that I am, I decided to make a list of my own. So here it is. My favorite music of 2013.

It speaks to my unhealthy addiction to obsessing about pop culture that I managed to craft this post in the midst of end-of-semester projects and papers. Yeah, making lists like these is pretty self-indulgent (even more so in my case, considering I really know next to nothing about music), but I've been doing the whole self-indulgent-blogger thing for about five months already, so why stop now? I do realize that it's only the 7th of December, so this is technically my favorite 2013 music released between January 1st and December 7th. Having looked at the release schedule for the rest of the month, though, I don't think I'll be interested in anything else released this month.

Still, it's probably in my best interest to admit that this list was not made with any sort of comprehensive knowledge of 2013's musical output. Even not counting these last few weeks of December I'm ignoring, I'm sure there are many, many great albums and songs I've missed, especially because I have only a narrow exposure to this year's releases. Metal and rap, for example, are almost completely absent from this post because I don't keep up with either genre very closely. So if you think I've missed something great, let me know! I'm always open for music suggestions. Alternately, I realize this list (as well as all other pop culture lists) is a bit reductive and arbitrary, so if you disagree with my rankings, let me know that, too! Discussion is the great product of lists like these, and I wholeheatedly encourage it.

Sorry for all the wordiness, both in the above introduction and in the commentary below. Feel free to skip it all if you want. It won't hurt my feelings. Now, without further ado, let the listing commence.

Favorite Albums

1. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
Vampire Weekend shed most of their world-music and twee influences and upped the thematic heft of their lyrics, and they managed to do so without losing their ear for lightweight melody, by itself a great achievement. What's even more impressive is that in the process they created something that is actually profound, something I never expected of VW (a band I considered good but mostly just "for fun," whatever that means). Modern Vampires of the City is about the disconnect between doubt and faith that in the end comes down on the side of doubt, but what's great about it is its nuance in that position, making the faith just as appealing, if only romantically so. Very compelling stuff.

2. Arcade Fire: Reflektor
The rumors are true: Reflektor is too long, the lyrics can be overbearing, and it lacks the chest-thumping climax of previous Arcade Fire albums. It speaks to the towering achievement of Reflektor that even with those flaws, the Arcade Fire's latest is a near-masterpiece of rock theatrics. You'll be hard-pressed to find a band out there right now (especially in the increasingly complacent indie world that birthed AF) so committed the marriage of sonic expansion and conceptual complexity. More so than ever before, Arcade Fire's approach to music recalls the '70s heyday of Neil Young, Pink Floyd, and David Bowie, when rock was not only a sound but a medium for philosophical discourse.

3. The Knife: Shaking the Habitual
Before Shaking the Habitual, I hadn't listened to The Knife very much outside of "Heartbeats," the closest this duo every got to a hit song. With Shaking the Habitual, though, The Knife is about as far from "Heartbeats" as you could imagine. Gone are the electronica hooks, and in their place are dissonance, ambiance, and polyphonic rhythms. It's hypnotic and tense music full of strange left turns (19-minute ambient interlude, anyone?) and dance beats to soundtrack the most paranoid party you've ever been to. The whole thing takes some close listening to get into, but once you're on its brainwave, it's entirely worth the effort.

4. Janelle Monáe: The Electric Lady
When I wrote about Janelle Monáe's first album, The ArchAndroid, in my 2010 year-end list of albums (in one of those old-fashioned Facebook notes, no less—hello, old-school social media), I wrote that she was the only contemporary R&B artist I really liked. Well, things have changed in the three years since (both in my own musical tastes and the creatively renewed R&B scene), but Janelle Monáe is still the queen of whatever genre she decides to try on. The Electric Lady isn't quite as colorful as the kaleidoscopic ArchAndroid, more focused on soul and funk grooves, but it's still an inventive, danceable, and infectiously fun entry into Monáe's android world. Power up!

5. Foxygen: We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic
I don't really have anything to add to my initial write-up on this album and its position in the current musical landscape. It's a great album full of fun songs with great hooks, made even greater for people like me who hold an unabashed affection for the late-'60s underground scene its production mimics. Fans of Loaded rejoice!

6. Savages: Silence Yourself 
Sufjan Stevens may not have been a big fan of the font used on the cover (and I'm wont to agree with him—it's a bit cluttered, isn't it, folks?), but other than that, there's not much to complain about with Savages' debut. Propulsive tunes like "She Will" and "I Am Here" are give the record an awesomely primal punk sound, while pieces like "Waiting For a Sign" and "Marshall Dear" texture out the album with tinges of black metal and jazz. The way I'm talking about it kind of makes Savages' music sound academic, and in a sense it is. But really, Silence Yourself just rocks hard. Prepare to headbang.
 

7. My Bloody Valentine: m b v
I was still in diapers when the last (and long-presumed final) My Bloody Valentine record, Loveless, debuted, so I can't make any claims to the decades-long wait that some fans endured for this album. Still, having a new MBV album was an unexpected pleasure for me, and having that album somehow not turn into indie rock's Chinese Democracy (much less be this good) was an even greater pleasure. With the glut of dream pop/shoegaze that indie rock has experienced in recent years, it's pretty awesome that the granddaddy of the genre can still come back to teach everyone something new.

8. David Bowie: The Next Day 
Next in this year's "Surprise Art-Rock Return" is David Bowie, an artist who I (along with many others) assumed had entered that semi-retired, semi-nostalgic state of his career where he would churn a new single every few years just to let everyone know he was still alive (see also: The Rolling Stones). Boy was I wrong. With The Next Day, Bowie comes out of the gates swinging, delivering a smart, winning collection of hard rock ("The Next Day"), majestic ballads ("You Feel So Lonely You Could Die"), and classic-Bowie weirdness ("Dancing In Outer Space"). Semi-retired, nothing.

9. Jars of Clay: Inland 
I have a lot of problems with CCM (that's Contemporary Christian Music, for those of you unfamiliar with the wild, woolly world of Evangelical lingo). But Jars of Clay have always been a bright spot in the genre for me, and on this album, they've rarely been better. On Inland (without a doubt their best work since Good Monsters [by my money, still their masterpiece]), Jars of Clay deliver some of the most poignant and insightful lyrics of their career, set to some of their most adventurous musicianship in years. It's a compelling look at what it means to be aging, irrelevant, and Christian in 2013, and you'll be hard-pressed to find introspection that balances doubt and joy so well.

10. The National: Trouble Will Find Me 
Speaking of balancing doubt and joy... well, The National aren't so good at it. This Brooklyn quintet has always skewed much closer to the doubting (some might say despairing) end of the emotional spectrum, and this album is no different. Trouble Will Find Me shows The National in the rockingest mood they've been in since 2008's Boxer, but don't let the increased tempo fool you; these are still the same sad sacks we know and love, and the results are typically gorgeous. What's pleasantly surprising about this one, though, is that the band gets less and less dour as the album progresses, and by "Humiliation," the lyrics are actually playful. Maybe they're closer to joy than I think.


10 Great Songs Not On These Albums

Atoms for Peace: "Default"—While the Atoms for Peace album AMOK lacked the warmth and sparse sensuality that made Radiohead's underrated King of Limbs so enjoyable for me (was I the only one hoping Flea would play a more prominent role in AfP?), Thom Yorke's latest project yielded its fair share of good songs, most notably this one. "Default" is groovy and percussive and awesome in a way that Radiohead hasn't been for years.

Chance the Rapper: "Pusha Man (feat. Nate Fox & Lili K.)"—Chance the Rapper's mixtape Acid Rap was number 11 on the albums list, so really, the whole thing is worth a listen. But this song in particular captures the best of Chance the Rapper: the jazzy production, Chance's woozy delivery, the uneasiness with drug culture, and the tension between hedonism and social commentary that undergirds the whole mixtape.

The Civil Wars: "From This Valley"—This one's just gorgeous. There was apparently some intra-band turmoil leading up to the release of The Civil Wars' eponymous second album (so much so that it's kind of a surprise that there's an album at all), but you can't hear any of it on this song. It's a beautiful bit of country folk, and if we never hear anything else from The Civil Wars again, it might well be their mini-Abbey Road, for all the joy its 3:33 run time exudes.

Daft Punk: "Get Lucky (feat. Pharrell Williams)"—Daft Punk albums tend to run a little long and tedious for my tastes (this year's Random Access Memories included), but taken in single doses, this duo can sure crank out some excellent tunes. Of the veritable tsunami of neo-disco that's come out in the past few years, "Get Lucky" is among the best, funkiest, and catchiest of them all, not to mention a pretty great return to pop songwriting by Daft Punk.

The Flaming Lips: "You Lust (feat. Phantogram)"—Has there ever been a group so determined to defy aging-rock-band conventions as The Flaming Lips? Thirty years into their careers, these guys are still constantly pushing themselves into new territories, be it 24-hour-long songs, Virgin Mobile commercials, possible Ke$ha collaborations, or, as is the case with "You Lust," 13-minute krautrock jams. "You Lust" sounds more like a cut from a Can or Kraftwerk album than anything from the band that released The Soft Bulletin, but that doesn't stop it from being a fantastically aggressive, provocative piece of music. It's dark stuff, to be sure, but it's also riveting to hear unfold.

Laura Marling: "Master Hunter"—This British folk singer channels Joni Mitchell and especially Led Zeppelin III-period Led Zeppelin, and the results are fantastic. Laura Marling delivers an awesome three minutes of progressive folk, sounding at once mythic and personal.

Saint Pepsi: "Call Me Maybe (SAINT PEPSI Edit)"—I've already written at length about my love for "Call Me Maybe," so I'll just leave you with this proposition: what if it were an R&B slow jam? Wonder no more.

Justin Timberlake: "Mirrors"—Even for someone like me who doesn't listen to a lot of radio Top 40, 2013 was a great year for pop music. Exhibit A: "Mirrors." While I never really got into the whole "JT pretends to be Stevie Wonder" shtick that was The 20/20 Experience, "Mirrors" hits that epic, melodic, just-cheesy-enough sweet spot that all Justin Timberlake songs should aim for. Don't listen to the radio edit; let all eight minutes of the album cut wash over you. An added bonus: the song also has a seriously great music video set to the eight-minute version.

Kanye West: "New Slaves"—Yeezus. Good grief. For every brilliant moment Kanye delivers on that album (and there are quite a few), there are at least three more eye-rolling, narcissistic, and straight-up ugly ones in close proximity. "New Slaves," however, manages to condense everything great about Yeezus (the noisy production, the social commentary, the classic-soul allusions) without absorbing the worst (the misogyny, the self-obsession, the *ugh* "Jesus wept" line). There's still plenty of ugliness in "New Slaves," but I'd argue that it's necessary ugliness in service of the song's razor-sharp criticism of consumerism. Kanye's often a provocateur, but when he's using that status to call out the racism in consumer culture and big business, I don't so much mind it.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: "Sacrilege"—Mosquito is not a great Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, but "Sacrilege," the lead single and opening track from that album, is most definitely a great Yeah Yeah Yeahs song. One of their best ever, I'd say. It takes the high production values and sweeping scope of their more recent albums and mixes it with the visceral impact of their earlier work. The end product is stunning.

Until next time!