The Living Deadbeat

I saw this for the first time this evening. It’s extraordinary, and there’s really no way it should work, but somehow it does. Mr. Malkovich is a very fine actor, and the rest of the cast is solid too (although the Cameron Diaz character takes some getting used to; she’s very much playing against type in this movie). I don’t really have anything else to write about it. Just try to see it, if you haven’t already; it’s very rare to see quirky film ideas realised this well.

Last night a friend of mine told me that Muse is a heavier band than Nine Inch Nails, or at least that Muse can be a heavier band, when Matt Bellamy puts his mind to it. As a NIN fan I was offended, but arguing the point proved to be surprising difficult. How exactly are you supposed to define ‘heavy’; is it simply a measure of album production, or does it derive from multiple factors, such as lyrical content, song keys, etc..?

It seems to me that defining ‘heaviness’ in terms of distortion levels is pretty useless. I love countless bands who ramp up the distortion now and again, but who I would never consider as ‘heavy’ bands. A good example is Brand New. Brand New pile on the gain for segments of some songs, but they’re very much an indie band and whatever dark songs they have are mostly done in a stripped down fashion.

‘Dark’ is a useful word in this discussion. Nine Inch Nails is a pretty dark band by most standards. Trent Reznor has released very few upbeat songs over the past 20 years, and the names of his Halo releases hint at their bleak content: Pretty Hate Machine, Broken, The Downward Spiral, and so on. To me, ‘heaviness’ is more than simply turning it up to eleven. Throwing more distorted guitar into the mix on a Katy Perry track will not make it ‘heavy’.

I’m very hungover so this is argument is not nearly making as much sense as I would like, but I hope I’m getting the point across. Muse may, on occasion, knock out a heavy song, but they don’t sound like a heavy band to me. Matt Bellamy whines quite a lot and his voice doesn’t lend itself well to heavy songs. I’m not saying they’re a bad band, but calling them a heavy band is quite a stretch, and claiming that they’re a heavier band than Nine Inch Nails is just ridiculous. If Matt Bellamy ever writes something even nearly as dark as The Downward Spiral I’ll be extremely surprised.

This post is going to read as all kinds of ignorant, perhaps, even, as the uneducated jabberings of a know-nothing rube, but I hate watching old movies because the music in them absolutely stinks. I’ve just been driven away from Hitchcock’s 1964 film Marnie on account of a typically awful soundtrack that was laden with shrill soaring strings at every turn. Sometimes it genuinely seems like there was some kind of law back in the day that required every bright outdoor scene to begin with some startling, ear-piercing violin progression, as if that’s the sound that sunlight makes when it’s recorded on camera. It’s just too much to bear.

There’s a lot about old movies that I dislike but can tolerate: the lousy picture quality; the over-use of wholly inorganic sets during outdoor scenes; the totally unnatural speech patterns and accents; the staid, uniform beauty of the most of the actresses; the obsession with the bullshit romantic entanglements of the over-privileged. These are all ticks and idiosyncrasies that I can endure in isolation or in combination with each other, but when some archaic violin soundtrack is lashed across this then it all becomes too much for me.

Obviously this is a gross over-generalisation, and obviously I know of strong counter examples, but 2001 is really the only old film I know of with a soundtrack that I consider worth listening to, and that’s full of classical music and not the typical high-pitched fare.

So it appears that Dr. Deadbeat has taken matters entirely into his own hands, and has even gone as far as to sabotage some of my contributions to this august publication. While this unarguably a commendably daring feat on his part, it is also incredibly futile, because I have no life and thus spend about 16 hours a day on the internet, so I notice any changes to this site almost as soon as they happen.

In fairness to Dr. Deadbeat, the post he deleted wasn’t very good anyway, and the animal picture in it probably wasn’t up to the the high standards of cute-animal-picture-ness that he expects and demands, so here’s a picture of an anteater and its dinner bowl.

If this gets deleted then expect many, many posts about football, American politics and my sundry imagined neurosis in the coming weeks.