A list. By a guy. On the Internet.... how novel!
For "I've Got A Feeling," while many of us may not think it's a great song, it has successfully lodged itself into the longterm culture (at least for another 10-20 years at sporting events... like a modern "Whoomp... There It Is"). Along the same lines, "Seven Nation Army" has had a similar level of fame.I'm comfortable with BEP being compared to 1994's whoomp there it is, sort of a pop culture foot note. I've got a feeling has become one of the more forgettable part of my nights. It literally has been one of the first songs played at the wedding receptions I've been too this year, but I didn't realize it till someone pointed it out. Honestly it reminds me more of Party in the USA than it reminds me of... oh... I dunno... Hey Jude? My Generation? Walk this Way? Big Pimpin? Creep?
For this final issue of the '00s, we have decided to dedicate the Features page to a round up of the pieces of pop culture from the past decade. There's simply too much greatness to try to boil things down to the best example of anything, however – the New Millennium was a watershed for television, a grand leap for games, a new age for music, and for film, well... there were a number of very good movies as well. This article is by no means definitive, but simply a time capsule of sorts for some of the best the past ten years had to offer us.posted by Navelgazer at 6:14 PM on November 7, 2011 [6 favorites]
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Dir: Michel Gondry) Film. 2004
After playing with our minds with Being John Malkovich, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman added our hearts into the mix, and emerged with one of the most emotionally true and effective movies in recent memory. The premise itself is heartbreaking – a man learns that his ex-girlfriend has had him erased from his memory, and spitefully chooses to undergo the procedure himself, only to have regrets midway through and struggle in vain to hide away memories of his lost love – but it's Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, cast opposite their normal roles as a impulsive wreck and a restrained, straight-laced homebody, respectively, who bring it home. The climax in a beachside house washing away despite the lovers' best efforts to change their past is one of the most devastating, and ironically most memorable, of modern moviemaking.
The Life Pursuit (Bell & Sebastian) Music. 2006
Belle & Sebastian have a reputation for twee, fragile indie music that is probably well-deserved. No matter, The Life Pursuit answered those charges with gusto, with frontman Stuart Murdoch stretching his ambition and flexing his muscles to prove that he could rock out as well as his contemporaries, and with more artistry as well. Opener “Act of the Apostle” sounds like much of the same that we'd heard before – which isn't a bad thing – but what follows defies expectations, and songs like “Another Sunny Day,” “Sukie in the Graveyard,” “We Are the Sleepyheads.” and “Funny Little Frog” get your toes tapping in spite of themselves. You can practically hear Murdoch smiling through all of them. And then comes “Act of the Apostle II.” When, mid-song, the other shoe drops and the melody from the first iteration comes back in a haunting piano version, you know that this is a fully-formed album of genius.
Lost (Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse) Television. 2004
The final season, set to begin airing next year, has a hell of a lot to answer for, and to tie up everything that's already come will likely prove impossible, but this ABC drama about survivors of a mysterious plane crash and the lives they lived beforehand snagged viewers who have managed to keep up with everything despite the writers' sometimes maddening refusal to answer even the most basic questions. The show probably could not have existed at all in the pre-DVD era, which is the only concession allowing new viewers any entry to the thick and convoluted mythos, but the ensemble, and the writers' love for each and every member of it, creates an emotional hook even when we know as little or less than the characters themselves.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda Softworks) Games. 2006
You could easily describe it as GTA: Middle Earth and not be too far off, but it's so much more than that. Oblivion is not just one of the most involved and expansive (and gorgeous) console games yet imagined, it's also one of the most involving. After creating a character from the ground up, deciding not just gender and race, but moving through a tutorial designed to ascertain your best skills (among magic, stealth, and combat, but it's oh-so-much more complex than that) it's hard not to feel a kinship with your newly-released prisoner and his or her journey to save Tamriel, the game's world. The trick is that everywhere you go in Tamriel is different, and every individual you meet is unique, so the deeper you get, the more it all feels like a world worth fighting for, even if it's against the forces of hell itself.
A Night At the Hip-Hopera (The Kleptones) Music. 2004
Perhaps the only album more sample-dense than the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique, DJ Eric Kleptone's masterpiece could perhaps stymie more copyright law professors than The Grey Album. Not available in stores due to a cease-and-desist order from The Walt Disney Company/Hollywood Records, those who've heard it have found a brilliant reworking of everything sacred in rap culture, all bounded by classic Queen tracks. The album's centerpiece, “Sniff,” shows off all of The Kleptones' skills, mixing Queen/Bowie's classic collaboration, “Under Pressure,” with Vanilla Ice (naturally), Belinda Carlisle, Prince Paul, De La Soul, The Avalanches, Adam Freeland, and Lil' Jon & the Eastside Boyz, creating a track that melds with everything else, while becoming a clear, gorgeous apotheosis in itself.
The Incredibles (Dir: Brad Bird) Film. 2005
How do you choose between Pixar movies? And why, among them, would we choose this one? Ratatouille was smarter, Finding Nemo more emotional, Up more affecting and Wall-E more daring and beautiful. I guess The Incredibles just goes for all of these things, and bursts with humor besides, while taking Pixar's first attempt at a story centered around actual humans and knocking it out of the park. It's subversive, in a way, in its twists on the normal superhero movie: the opening is sneakily about the villain's origin, as a hapless kid, the story centers around the wife and kids rescuing the heroic dad, and the “be yourself” allegory is (controversially) undiluted by the idea that everyone is equal in all they try to do. Add in the subplot of Helen suspecting Jack of adultery, which is handled in a way that would fly over any child's head and yet is distressingly real and obvious to adults, and it's clear why Pixar is leagues beyond everyone else in animation.
Arrested Development (Mitchell Hurwitz) Television, 2003
Hurwitz's long-mourned three-season wonder might have simply debuted five years before it's time. It certainly would've helped people feel more in common with the formerly-wealthy, now-disgraced Bluth family, but would'nt have done anything to help audiences get their bearings among the show's series-long running jokes, alienating characters, and plot points that take full seasons to pay off in ways hilarious to fans and simply baffling to newcomers. This is a show in which a middle-aged man in prison rushes for gang-affiliation, a show in which a car slips on a giant banana-peel, a show in which the chief romantic subplot is presumably incestuous, and most of all, a show that makes you care and root for almost entirely unlovable people. If you haven't seen it yet, for the love of God check it out now, from the beginning.
10/15 that seem solid-to-indisputable. That actually seems like a pretty high hit rate for a list of this kind. I wonder if this list would have had anything like the same reception here if it hadn't included the Black Eyed Peas one?Well, BEP was just the low laying fruit; there are deeper problems here. I'm partial against click-bait lists and pointless, "greatest" list of that rank by some arbitrary unmeasurable quality. Rolling Stone, I feel, is the worst offender. But this is particularly egregious because its completely random in its scope and purpose.
Mulholland Drive? Even critics admit they don't really understand it, most of America hasn't heard of it, and my friends are split as to whether its worth the effort even now, (a mere 9 years after its release?) to go back and watch it to see what Lynch was doing. So what criteria make it classic again?
maxwelton: What I find kind of interesting about this is that it only is "important" for a few years. Name anything culturally important--off the top of your head--from the 1900-1910 period. 1910-1920? You can probably come up with one or two things, maybe a fashion trend from the 1920s and the Model T from the 1910s, and Prohibition. But it's doubtful if someone asked you to name the most iconic song of the 1900-1910 period you'd come up with one, or what advertising shaped the decade.I'm with you on this. The list is more a comment (unwittingly or otherwise) on ephemerality than anything else. But the comparison with the teens and twenties is an interesting one. Economically, there are so many parallels between the '00s and the Gilded Age and "roaring '20s" that it's hardly surprising that their artifacts of popular culture should feel eerily similar. Steeped in the ephemeral material culture of their time; hostile to any aesthetic categories that aren't market-based; populist in a "we all know where that was leading" kind of way; utterly hubristic in their failure to see the inevitable crash coming: the '00s and the '20s seem practically interchangeable. And I think future generations will find pretty much all '00s culture—"Hey Ya" as much as "I Gotta Feeling"—about as timeless, classic, and enduring as The Little Ford Rambled Right Along. It's future landfill and we all know it.
yoink: Seriously? Pre WWI, during WWI and immediately post WWI? If you can't name a slew of significant cultural milestones around that period you're just not very interested in such things.Not to speak for Max Welton or anything, but I'm pretty sure that he was responding in kind to the nobrow/know-nothing, corporate-mindedness of the FPP. The kind that happily pretends high culture never existed. Hence his limiting of examples to advertising and popular song.
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posted by chavenet at 3:57 PM on November 7, 2011 [6 favorites]