Author: JD Byrne

Highs and Lows

/ JD Byrne / 2 Comments

When I found out earlier this year that a new Spike Lee Joint was on the way, I was excited. When I found out it was an adaptation of an Akira Kurosawa film – one I’d not yet seen – I was doubly thrilled. So how does Highest 2 Lowest compare to High and Low? Not as well as it might have, but I kind of think that’s the point. There will be spoilers aplenty!

It’s worth noting that both movies have their roots in a 1950s hard-boiled detective novel, King’s Ransom by Ed McBain.

No, not that McBain. “Ed McBain” was a pen name of Evan Hunter, who also wrote the book The Blackboard Jungle (on which the movie was based) and the screenplay for The Birds. King’s Ransom was part of a series of books dealing with a particular group of cops and tells the story of a wealthy magnate (named King, hence the title) who, while angling to take over his company, learns that his son has been kidnapped. The twist is that the kidnapped kid is actually his driver’s, which leads to a conflict as to whether King will pay the ransom or not.

Neither film, it turns out, is a particularly faithful adaptation of the book for a simple reason – in the book (so far as I can tell – I’ve not actually read it) King decides not to pay the ransom. The plot is entirely taken up in a will he/won’t he. As we’ll see, both movies use the ransom stuff as more of a jumping off point, although they go to entirely different places.

Both movies, though, at least use the same setup as the book. High and Low, which came out in 1963, stars Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune in the King role (since the names are basically the same in both movies I’ll refer mostly to actors’ names instead) as an executive leveraged to the hilt in an attempt to take over the shoe company he runs.

In Highest 2 Lowest, by contrast, Denzel Washington plays the aging head of a music label of which he’s trying to regain control.

He’s not in quite as much financial peril as Mifune, but the nature of his business raises bigger concerns (about, for instance, a historical driver of black culture being stripped for parts after a takeover). It’s a subtle difference, but an important one.

The relationship between mogul and driver is quite different, as well. Mifune’s relationship with his driver is purely business and plays out through rigid class distinctions. Their kids play together, but there’s never any forgetting who is the boss and who works for whom. Denzel, by contrast, has a much deeper relationship with his driver (played by Jeffery Wright), one that suggests common roots, if different life paths. The pairing of Denzel and Wright is great and Highest 2 Lowest is often best when it focuses on them, but the deepening of that relationship drains some of the suspense out of whether the ransom will eventually be paid.

Although there’s not really any doubt on that. Beyond the fact that there’s no back half of these movies without the ransom being paid, the fact is there really isn’t much of a moral argument against paying it. Practical, yes, but not moral. To have either Mifune or Denzel hold out would have ruined their characters (or made for very different movies). That said, how the decision gets made is also subtly different. Mifune never decides to “do the right thing” (so to speak) and pay the ransom, but agrees to a police scheme to pay it as part of an operation in which, he’s promised, they’ll get the money back. It’s unclear exactly why Denzel has a change of heart, although getting the money back is also mentioned by the cops he works with, too. I suspect that vagueness is intentional, but it’s a little frustrating.

Where both movies shine, in different ways, is the sequence where the ransom money is actually turned over. Both take place on trains. The kidnapper lures Mifune onto a train where he thinks the handoff will take place, only to be instructed to toss the bag with the money out a window going over a particular bridge. It’s a taut, tense sequence where it looks like everything is spiraling out of control, but actually isn’t. Denzel is likewise lured onto a train, a subway train bound for Yankee Stadium (allowing Spike Lee to indulge in some amusing Red Sox hate). It’s more sprawling than taught, but equally vibrant in a completely different way, accented with chanting Yankees fans and a chase through a Puerto Rican Day parade. Musically this is where Highest 2 Lowest is at its best, both in the propulsive jazz piano score and the sweet Latin fusion of the late Eddie Palmieri and his band (performing for the parade).

It’s here where the movies diverge greatly, leading one to ask whether “adaptation” is the right description for what Highest 2 Lowest is. Which one works better for you will probably come down to what you look for in movies.

In High and Low, once the money is dropped Mifune is almost entirely absent from the rest of the film. The focus shifts to the police who, with the kidnapped kid safely rescued, work on tracking down the kidnapper and the money. There’s some time spent with the kidnapper himself, as well, but we’re mostly with groups of cops trying to track down leads. The driver helps with one, but aside from a couple of quick check ins Mifune is absent. What proceeds is almost like a time capsule from an era were cops were dedicated and incorruptible, going above and beyond. It’s almost like a fairy tale.

Highest 2 Lowest, by contrast, slips into action movie mode. The cops here range from ineffectual to flat out racist and are more wedded to procedure than anything else. When Denzel, who we’ve been told over and over again has the best ears in the business, delivers a pretty damned good clue as to the kidnapper’s identity thanks to them, the cops shrug it off. The dedicated police procedural of Kurosawa’s film instead becomes a kind of buddy movie, with Denzel and Wright teaming up to find the kidnapper and get the money back. This allows Denzel to come face to face with the kidnapper (a rapper played by A$AP Rocky) in a cracking scene in a recording studio that has the rhythm of a rap battle. It also personalizes the motives of the kidnapper, for better or worse.

Oddly, then, both kind of come back together at the end. In High and Low Mifune, who has lost just about everything (some of the money was recovered, but not quickly enough to save his home, much less the corporate takeover), has a final confrontation with the kidnapper in prison, during which the kidnapper explains his motives. Highest 2 Lowest has a similar scene, although Denzel comes into it in a much better position, and it feels a little redundant given the prior confrontation in the recording studio. The motives are also quite different, with Mifune’s tormentor choosing him as an avatar of wealth lording it above the rest of society, while Rocky is bent out of shape at not being recognized specifically by Denzel for his musical talents. Highest 2 Lowest then ladles on a coda showing Denzel’s relaunch in life and business, a stark contrast with High and Low’s decidedly downer ending.

With all that said, does one work better than the other? Like I said, I think that it depends on what you’re looking for. In spite of their common roots, the movies are quite different and it’s unfair to judge Highest 2 Lowest against High and Low in the way you might judge a movie version of a book. They are different things getting at different ideas. And, if anything, the thing they’re least interested in are what they take from King’s Ransom.

Highest 2 Lowest has, for my money, more highs and lows than the prior film. Some scenes – the money drop and chase, Denzel’s initial confrontation with the kidnapper – are electric. Some others are a little sluggish, particularly in the first half. In fact, the critical consensus seems to be that the first half is bad, the second half good. I think that’s overly simplistic – High and Low’s first half skates by on a lot of technical mastery (framing, shot composition, etc.), which kind of overlooks how non-compelling the actual moral dilemma is. Highest 2 Lowest doesn’t get the same break. Highest 2 Lowest also offers the Denzel/Wright pairing, which is unlike anything in the other film. That said, while it does lead to some great work on screen, it also slightly undermines what tension there otherwise could be over whether the ransom is ever going to get paid.

Where High and Low shines is in its broader themes. My understanding is that some critics initially read it as an indictment of capitalism and I definitely get that. This is where Mifune’s business venture being less compelling than Denzel’s pays off because it makes his choice even more stark – he’s going to risk some poor boy’s life for shoes? Additionally, because it ends with Mifune basically stripped of everything it implies that he’s paying a price for not doing the right thing for the right reasons. High and Low also really lives up to its title, shifting from one milieu to the other halfway. Its kidnapper could have targeted any rich guy as a blow against the system.

In the end, I don’t think Highest 2 Lowest is going to supplant High and Low, but I don’t think that was its intent, either. It is, to borrow the musical terminology of the movie, a riff on a common theme. High and Low is a classic for good reason and one of the highlights of Kurosawa’s career. Highest 2 Lowest is pretty good, but I don’t think anybody will think it’s knocking any earlier Lee movies out of his top five or so. It’s definitely worth a watch.

Fall Events (Come See Me!)

/ JD Byrne / 2 Comments

Since I haven’t had anything new come out this year I’ve been taking a pass on most events during the year, but there are a couple coming up that I’m part of and should be a lot of fun.

First, on September 16, Cicada Books & Coffee in Huntington, WV, are having their second (?) annual (??) “Spooky Storytelling” open-mike night.

Last year was really fun, with several folks reading or telling scary stories (I did this one), capped off by the folks from Eerie Travels, who will also be in attendance this year. What will I be reading this year? Good question! See if I wind up with a good answer. Come on by (check Cicada’s Facebook page for details) and join in the fun.

Second, on October 11, the fine folks at Henlo Press are hosting the Writer’s Block 2025 Indie Author & Artist Festival (also the second annual) in Hurricane, WV.

I’ll be there with books for sale, as will numerous other authors (check the Facebook page for upcoming announcements), and I’m sure the Henlo folks will sell you a copy of either volume of their Old Bones anthologies, which are jam packed with nifty short fiction (and a couple of my things). Things kick off at 11am.

See you then(s)!

Some Cheesy Thoughts

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Consider The Leftovers, but funnier. And full of cheese.

That’s a good way to think of John Scalzi’s latest, When the Moon Hits Your Eye.

In The Leftovers (both the very good book and the excellent TV series based on it) a small portion of the world’s population simply vanishes. The story is about what comes next, the grappling with a strange new world and your place in it. Fixing it, or figuring out what happened, really doesn’t enter into it.

So, too, for Moon in which, suddenly one day, the Earth’s only satellite turns to cheese. Sorry, NASA, I meant into an “organic matrix.” Terminology aside, what follows is a lot like The Leftovers in that Scalzi is more interested in how people deal with their new reality rather than probing how it happened or how the problem might be solved. That will surely frustrate some, but I suppose I’m a sucker for “the world’s gone weird, how do we feel about that?” stories.

And “stories” is what Moon provides. In fact, it’s worth asking just what Moon actually is in the first place. It looks like a novel – work of fiction, of several tens-of-thousands of words, takes place in a fairly limited timeframe – but it reads like a collection of short stories. They’re not even particularly connected ones, either. There are characters from some stories that appear in others, often in the background after having been main characters themselves, but aside from a series that tells of a voyage to the cheese/moon that is told from several POVs, there isn’t really an overall “story” happening. I liked this setup, but folks who go into it wanting a novel might be put off (my wife, who doesn’t really care for short stories, said she’d been miffed in that situation).

Some of those stories are really good, too. There’s a chapter that’s a meeting of bankers trying to squeeze the last penny out of what appears to be the end of the world (how long before people stop working, etc.?) that sharp satire. There’s another involving a dying musician that’s touching as it deals with loose ends and regrets. There’s another matched pair that involves young lovers caught in a duel between cheese shops owned by estranged brothers. Not all land this well, but that’s the nature of the beast for what is, essentially, a short story collection. They’ll always sort themselves out (I’ll regret having said that one day).

That said, do any of those stories really require the who “moon turns to cheese” setup? Not really, although the one with the bankers comes close, since it requires some kind of apocalypse. The others would work just as well without it, though, which makes me wonder if Scalzi had some ideas lying around that he shoehorned into Moon. Not really a complaint – sometimes the best track on a concept album is the one that’s mostly a killer instrumental that doesn’t move any plot along – but it’s an interesting thought.

Moon also asks a question of just what genre it is. Scalzi is most well-known for writing science fiction, but can one really say that a story where the moon, for no explicable reason, turns to cheese is anything other than fantasy? To a certain extent Scalzi feels like he’s trying the alternate history approach – the critical event is pure fantasy, but the aftereffects are as realistic as possible. As an example, when the moon changes to cheese it retains the same mass, which means it gets bigger since cheese is less dense than rock (the good stuff, at least!). That makes the moon brighter in the sky. All that said, in an afterword Scalzi concedes that he wasn’t really that interest in scientific rigor, so there’s no harm is saying that Moon is pure absurdist fantasy.

There’s one way in which Moon falls short of The Leftovers, which is the ending. Without getting too spoilery the book manages to return, sitcom style, to the status quo in the same mysterious way as it began. It didn’t work for me, but given that this wasn’t a book that was all leading up to that ending, that didn’t bother me much.

If you’re willing to indulge some dispersed storytelling and don’t have a deep desire for answers, When the Moon Hits Your Eye is a lot of fun and my favorite of Scalzi’s since Redshirts.

So come and sail the seas of cheese!

A Statement About AI

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

Just before I went on hiatus courts in two separate lawsuits by creatives against generative AI companies handed down similar decisions indicating that AI isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Both concluded that using existing copyright-protected works to train AI engines falls under the doctrine of “fair use.” As one article explained:

The doctrine of fair use allows the use of copyrighted works without the copyright owner’s permission in some circumstances.

Fair use is a key legal defense for the tech companies, and Alsup’s decision is the first to address it in the context of generative AI.

AI companies argue their systems make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content, and that being forced to pay copyright holders for their work could hamstring the burgeoning AI industry.

Anthropic told the court that it made fair use of the books and that U.S. copyright law “not only allows, but encourages” its AI training because it promotes human creativity. The company said its system copied the books to “study Plaintiffs’ writing, extract uncopyrightable information from it, and use what it learned to create revolutionary technology.”

Copyright owners say that AI companies are unlawfully copying their work to generate competing content that threatens their livelihoods.

Alsup agreed with Anthropic on Monday that its training was “exceedingly transformative.”

You can read more about the nuances of the various cases here. And this column points out how restrictive copyright can be when a real human being wants to use something that’s currently protected.

While I’m not a party to either suit, I do know that some of my books (likely scraped from pirate sites) are included in at least one collection that’s used for AI training, so I do have some skin in the game. In light of that, I wanted to say a few more words about AI and make some public promises about it.

Part of the trouble we’re having with AI is down to the fact that the law has never really grappled with the nature of computer power in the 21st Century. The pro-AI argument for training on existing works is that it’s the same thing that humans do – all artists and creators are building their own work on whatever they’ve read or seen or heard before. Nobody could seriously argue that a young would-be writer who borrows a bunch of books from friends or families and then writes their own story was fucking with anybody’s copyright. The problem with AI is that it can do that on a massive scale that the law can’t quite fathom.

It’s somewhat similar to what’s happened with criminal records and arrest reports over the past few decades. Those things were always (for the most part) public and accessible to anyone who had the time and desire to go to the courthouse and wade through files to find them. But who actually did, outside of people doing it for a living? Now it’s just a matter of a quick Web search to see if your neighbor was arrested for DUI over the weekend. The law is mostly concerned with the public/private dichotomy, without factoring in accessibility.

Years ago, the Supreme Court was confronted with how to deal with GPS trackers placed on cars and whether they implicated the Fourth Amendment. Generally speaking, to assert a Fourth Amendment violation you have to have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in the place that was searched. By definition, there’s no such expectation when you’re out in public, so there’s never been a problem with the police following people who they suspect of something (but lack the probable cause necessary to arrest them). GPS trackers take that and multiply the amount of data available exponentially in a way that flesh-and-blood cops could never handle. Rather than confront this head-on in the case, the Court took a step back and concluded that the actual placement of the tracker was the problem. We’re still trying to figure out what mass data means when it comes to the Fourth Amendment.

It’s the same with AI and it’s doubtful the law is going to get itself in gear anytime soon.  With that said, I have a few promises I’ll make to readers when it comes to AI:

I will not knowingly allow my work to be used for AI training. A good chunk of the AI discourse when it comes to creators is the copyright angle, but even if the AI companies came up with arrangements to compensate creators for the use of their work in training there are still huge issues with generative AI. It’s horrible for the environment. Its products are the worst kind of unimaginative slop. It’s bad for the soul – creativity is a large part of what makes us human and we best not be willing to outsource it to machines. Count me out, regardless of potential reward.

I will not knowingly use generative AI in my writing or music. This should come as no surprise, particularly in light of my NaNoWriMo post linked above, but I won’t knowingly use generative AI in my work. There are other AI variants that are much more common and less problematic (like spell check) that I have always used and will continue to use, but every idea that gets put on a page or in a song is only going to come from my own head – for better or worse! Otherwise, what’s the point?

I will not knowingly work with others who use generative AI. I am happy to say that Deranged Doctor Designs, who have done the (current) covers for all my books, are committed to going forward without resorting to generative AI in their work. I will strive to ensure the same with anybody else I work with in the production process.

All this may be pointless, standing on the tracks of “progress” while the train inevitably barrels over me. I may be shouting into the void (I did use to have a blog called Feeding the Silence so it wouldn’t be the first time). As one snappy commenter put it:

Gone Writin’ – Back In A Bit

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Y’all may have noticed that I haven’t had a lot to say about actually writing here recently. There’s a good reason for that. My final NaNo project, The Fall, is continuing through the editing process – slowly but surely. That leaves me trying to figure out what to do next, with several interesting options in the aether. So I’m going to take a summer siesta from blogging and try and dig into my next book.

Talk again in a month or so when I have some idea what I’m doing – stay cool!

Revisiting the Prequel Problem

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

A couple of years ago I wrote some about the inherent problem with prequels:

But there’s an inherent problem with prequels – they’re playing in a universe in which the future is already known to us. That can box writers in and sometimes make it difficult for the prequel to stand on its own as a piece of compelling drama, something we should care about for its own merits.

I was specifically talking about Obi-Wan, the Star Wars prequel series that covers the time leading up to the original Star Wars movie. It has a kidnapped Leia in danger and multiple show downs between the younger Obi-Wan and Darth Vader, but there was a lack of tension since we knew that all of them have to make it into Star Wars in one piece.

Ironically, I contrasted that with another Star Wars prequel:

Star Wars knows how to do this. Rogue One is regarded by a lot of people as the best Star Wars movie since the original trilogy, even though we knew precisely how it was going to end. What made it work was that existing characters were largely absent and we got to know and care about a whole new cast so that when they made the necessary sacrifices to complete their mission it landed with some heft.

I say “ironic” because having finished up the second (and final) season of Andor I realized how much of a prequel problem that show had in the end.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise, of course, given that Andor is a prequel of a prequel – Rogue One. What was surprising is that the issue wasn’t so much knowing who was “safe” draining the tension. It was that the series was so set on getting to Rogue One that it dashed along from event to even without leaving a lot of time to breathe and develop characters more.

By modern streaming standards Andor had a long run – only two seasons, but 12 episodes each, which feels positively indulgent compared to some (looking at you The Last of Us). While the first season was basically a straight running chronology, the second seasons breaks the episodes into four three-episode hunks, with each hunk separated by a year or more.

As a result, what at first felt like a slow burn character study of Andor and the people in his orbit turned into a sprint through important events necessary to get him to the beginning of Rogue One.

Does this mean that the sprint wasn’t rewarding? In a lot of ways it was. Apparently Ghorman and its fate is something that’s come up in other Star Wars properties, but I knew nothing about it, so the whole development there I thought was really well done. When the final hammer comes down it does feel earned, even if you wanted to know more about some of the locals before we saw them cut down.

Not too long ago I wrote about how, sometimes, form dictates how fiction turns out. I didn’t think about it then but “prequel” is another kind of form that forces creators to do certain things in certain ways. That’s not an inherently bad thing, but just as I talked about with the formal restrictions in that piece, it makes a difference in the end product.

Would Disney have ever let Andor play out over four or five seasons to dive really deeply into who all these people were (between Andor and Rogue One I still have no solid idea of Saw Gerrera or what exactly he’s up to)? Probably not. For all its quality and praise, my understanding is that Andor is not one of the Mouse’s hottest streaming properties. Without that time would it have been better not to rocket through years of things happening just to make sure we get to where we need to get? Maybe, but that was always the assignment and it’s impossible to say that Andor failed in it. What I am fairly certain of is that if the same folks had been given the freedom to tell a Star Wars story that didn’t have to plug into an existing narrative at some point the end result probably would have been even more rewarding

Can’t Anyone Rest in Peace These Days?

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Many many years ago, there was a Bloom County cartoon in which Opus learns of new companies that allow you to freeze-dry a deceased pet and keep them around forever. His reaction was a tad overwrought:

Or at least I always thought it was. More and more, however, it’s becoming clear that we can’t just let the dead be dead, we’ve got to keep bringing them back to serve various agendas.

The most alarming recent case came out of a court in Arizona. Christopher Pelkey was killed during an incident of road rage and Gabriel Horcasitas convicted of his manslaughter. It’s pretty common in such cases to have victims (or family members of victims) give statements to the judge before sentencing about what has been lost due to whatever crime the defendant committed.

Horcasitas’ sentencing went a step further:

Ms. Wales, 47, had a thought. What if her brother, who was 37 and had done three combat tours of duty in the U.S. Army, could speak for himself at the sentencing? And what would he tell Gabriel Horcasitas, 54, the man convicted of manslaughter in his case?

The answer came on May 1, when Ms. Wales clicked the play button on a laptop in a courtroom in Maricopa County, Ariz.

A likeness of her brother appeared on an 80-inch television screen, the same one that had previously displayed autopsy photos of Mr. Pelkey and security camera footage of his being fatally shot at an intersection in Chandler, Ariz. It was created with artificial intelligence.

“It is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” the avatar of Mr. Pelkey said. “In another life, we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness and in God, who forgives. I always have and I still do.”

Reporting on the hearing has been really bad – that article quotes the defense attorney as stating (perhaps correctly) that given the wide latitude judges have at sentencing that there’s probably nothing legally wrong with it, but he also says that an appellate court might find it to be reversible error – but it’s unclear whether an objection was lodged, so who knows? Regardless, Pelkey’s reference to forgiveness beyond the grave didn’t seem to move the judge any – Horcasistas got the maximum sentence.

I can sympathize with using AI to bring a dead loved one back to life to hear them make their own plea for justice (I also think it’s ghoulish and I’ve never been a big fan of victim impact statements, but at least feel for those involved). That’s a lot harder to do when it’s part of a cynical cash grab at the expense of a dead person’s reputation.

BBC Maestro is the British broadcaster’s version of Masterclass, in which you pay to access video lectures by big names in their given fields. When it comes to mystery fiction is there a bigger name than Agatha Christie? Ah, but she’s dead. That’s no longer a problem! Thanks to the “magic” of AI and some desperate descendants:

Agatha Christie is dead. But Agatha Christie also just started teaching a writing class.

“I must confess,” she says, in a cut-glass English accent, “that this is all rather new to me.”

* * *

She has been reanimated with the help of a team of academic researchers — who wrote a script using her writings and archival interviews — and a “digital prosthetic” made with artificial intelligence and then fitted over a real actor’s performance.

“We are not trying to pretend, in any way, that this is Agatha somehow brought to life,” Michael Levine, the chief executive of BBC Maestro, said in a phone interview. “This is just a representation of Agatha to teach her own craft.”

Bullshit. Anyone could take Christie’s writings, including drafts, notes, and other non-published works, and base a writing class on it. Such a class would probably be quite useful! But it wouldn’t bring in the bucks the way having “Agatha” actually tell it to you. People are attracted to the name, which is the whole point in using it in the first place. Add in the likeness and it’s like she’s in the room with you (are the space bees, as well?).

It reminds me of the Frank Zappa hologram tour that hit the road a few years ago. A band full of Zappa alumni played live, occasionally joined by a holographic projection of Frank playing along. It was a sad gimmick. It should have been enough of a draw to hear some amazing music played live (in front of your ears!) by amazing musicians, but that wouldn’t have been enough of a draw. But Zappa there in hologram form? Well, it did sell some tickets, although the fact that it’s been largely forgotten about hints at its impact (meanwhile, Dweezil and others continue to do the man’s music justice on the live stage around the world).

And now they’re reanimating one of the most distinctive voices in movie history:

Nearly 40 years after his death, Orson Welles is back — as a disembodied AI-generated voice in location-based storytelling app Storyrabbit.

Storyrabbit, from podcast company Treefort Media, inked a partnership with the Orson Welles Estate to launch “Orson Welles Presents.” The app now features the unmistakable voice of Welles, digitally re-created using Storyrabbit’s AI technology, as an option for users to hear stories about specific locations. Using the Welles voice is free in the app until June 1, after which it will cost $4.99/month.

I mean, the idea for the app is kind of neat – it provides you with short info blurbs about specific locations based on where your phone is – but what value is added by having not-Welles give you the info? Surely the into itself is what you want, right? Maybe you don’t want it read by Gilbert Gotfried, but surely any of the numerous voice over actors or audiobook narrators out there could do the job, right?

I love history – that was my undergrad degree before I went to law school. I love the history of art, too. I’d give a lot to have been able to talk with Kurt Vonnegut or see Frank Zappa play live, but that’s never going to happen. An AI simulacrum of either of them isn’t the same thing – it’s a modern construct based largely on who we think those people were, not who they really were.

The dead are gone. They can leave us incalculable gifts, but what they can’t leave is their presence. Animating their virtual corpses in pursuit of a buck (or pound) demeans them – and us as well. Maybe Opus had it right all along.

Is There a Fourth Album Curse?

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I never thought about whether there was a “fourth album curse” until the other day when I saw this AV Club article about fourth albums that beat the curse. The concept is pretty thinly sourced – a 2011 discussion forum thread and an article about Franz Ferdinand, in which its leader said:

Alex Kapranos once found himself dreading an inevitable milestone with his band, Franz Ferdinand: their fourth album. “At that point a lot of people are going, ‘Why are you still here? Why are you still doing stuff?,’” he recalls.

I can sort of see his point. By the time an artist has been around to release a fourth album the novelty has worn off and, depending on who they are, things can start to get a little familiar. With Beardfish, for example, I jumped on the train with their second album, The Sane Day, which is great.

I really liked the next two as well (the Sleeping in Traffic duology), but by the time Destined Solitaire rolled around – my fourth album with them, their fifth overall – the sheen had worn off. It’s not a bad album, by any stretch, but it failed to wow me and nothing they’ve done since has sparked the same sonic joy for me.

But let’s assume the premise is true – arguendo, as they say in the legal world – and see if there are some other artists who knocked it out of the park on their fourth (studio) album and avoided this so-called curse.

The one that immediately sprang to mind when I read the article (it showed up in the first comment, too), was 2112 by Rush.

Although their self-titled debut had gotten some traction, Rush’s second and third albums hadn’t really moved the needle. Faced with a record company giving them one last chance to produce a hit they decided to say “fuck it,” do their own thing and, if necessary, go down swinging. Alas, the album, particularly the side-long title track, really clicked with a certain group of fans and the rest is history. 2112 is literally the album that made Rush what they turned out to be.

Another band whose fourth album, propelled by a side-long title track, signaled their trailblazing future was Kraftwerk with Autobahn.

Up to that time, Kraftwerk had been of a piece with the rest of the Krautrock scene, experimental and not generating much particular notice. Autobahn marked the full embrace of electronic sounds (although there’s still some guitar and flute in there) that would find full flower on later classics like Trans-Europe Express and The Man Machine and set the scene for the synthpop and electronic music boom of the modern age.

An artist of a completely different variety, but with a similar swerve, is Bruce Hornsby. After the megahit of “The Way It Is,” his next two albums with the Range produced reduced commercial returns (although they’re both pretty good). For Harbor Lights, his fourth album, he changed things up.

For one thing he ditched The Range, not just in name but in body, aside from drummer John Molo. In their place he brought in a host of players with jazz (and related) cred, including Pat Metheny, Branford Marsalis, Jerry Garcia, and Phil Collins. The music brings in more influences from jazz, bluegrass, and classical music that would define Hornsby’s music in the years to come. It’s not a Kid A seismic shift, but it’s pretty significant.

Somewhat closer to the spirit of Kid A was Dazzle Ships by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

After several successful albums, capped by Architecture & Morality, the band did a swerve into samples, found sounds, and collages. There are a few pop-facing songs, sure, but it’s more experimental and, as a result, kind of bombed compared to previous releases. It didn’t shift OMD’s style or anything, but it’s a solid example of a band using its success as a chance to do something different and mostly succeeding.

Finally, echolyn’s fourth album, Cowboy Poems Free, certainly belongs on this list.

It was their third album, As the World, that was supposed to be the big one, an unabashedly progressive rock record released by a major label (Sony) in the middle of the grunge-fueled 1990s. However, personnel at the label changed, the album was released with no real support, and the band broke up. But they returned in 2000 with Cowboy Poems, a little older and wiser (?), at least about the mechanisms of the record business. They’ve kept going (slowly, at times) ever since, release some really brilliant albums. For them, the fourth album was a “yeah, we can still do this” moment.

I’m sure there are plenty of fourth albums out there that fall flat, but, on balance, I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a fourth album curse if you can muster this many exceptions. Or maybe it’s more of a nuisance than a curse – in which case, why make such a big deal about it?

Form, Function, and Fiction

/ JD Byrne / 2 Comments

All art is driven by form, to a certain extent. Deciding to tell a story by writing a novel means a different form, with different strengths and weaknesses, than telling the same story by making a movie (which is why it’s often fruitless to compare adaptations to the source material). But sometimes creators will intentionally confine themselves even more, prioritizing form over traditional storytelling techniques. There’s recently been a couple of really interesting examples of this on TV.

The first to debut (although we came to it late), is The Pitt, the Max medical drama that is absolutely not a reboot of/sequel to ER.

Set in a takes-all-comers trauma center ER in Pittsburgh, the show’s catchy gimmick is that the 15-episode first season follows a single shift in the ER in real time (if you’re thinking such a shift couldn’t really be 15 hours long – it’s not an average day!). Noah Wyle (yes, of ER fame) plays the head doc as he rides herd over a bunch of residents, med students, and other medical professionals through the day.

The second to premier, which it did with a blast, was Adolescence, a British Netflix limited series about the investigation of a teenager’s murder of a teenaged girl.

As with The Pitt, Adolescence has a structural gimmick, too – each of the four episodes is done in one shot, so that it not only plays out in real time (for the hour – the series actually covers months of time in the end) but pretty much in one location. The first episode starts when police raid the suspect’s home, then follows him and others to the police station and the eventual reveal that he did, in fact, kill the girl. Other episodes feel a little more contained, particularly the third, which is basically a pas de deux with the killer and the psychologist trying to understand him.

In both cases, the format of the shows put limitations on how those stories were told. With The Pitt that began early, as they had to build the labyrinthine ER set before they could actually write anything. Given the “real time” framing, they had to know how long it took for people to get from place to place and what would be visible in the background of shots to know how all the pieces fit together. Likewise, in Adolescence the one-shot conceit meant there were no quick cutaways to other locations and other characters. That led to a tight focus on the killer and his family, to the exclusion of the victim or her family. As a public defender I found that focus refreshing, as often not enough attention is paid to the toll that crime takes on the perpetrator’s family. Nonetheless, it did lead to some criticism of the show for that focus.

What does that mean for how the form of these shows impact the viewing experience? I think the one-shot conceit for Adolescence makes a bigger, and more powerful, impact. The first episode expertly hands off from character to character, setting the scene at the station leading up to the killer’s interrogation and eventually admission. There are times when he disappears as the camera follows other characters around, reinforcing his isolation. The final episode, which includes a drive to the UK version of Home Depot after kids vandalize the killer’s father’s van, uses the drive time to supreme effect, giving us genuine human moments that, in other formats, might not land as well. The third episode, which is just the killer and the psychologist, is the least flashy but is intense. Only the second episode, where cops go to the school where the killer and victim went, feels a little hard done by the format, mostly because it’s a pretty big campus and there’s a lot of walking to be done.

The conceit feels less present in The Pitt. The most notable thing about it is that it avoids the typical medical drama pattern of wrapping up particular patients at the end of the hour. Some patients linger (and linger) for several “hours,” giving a better sense of how long ER visits tend to be. That said, aside from the slowly ratcheting up of tension over the hours there wasn’t one point where I was like “and that’s why they did it this way!” And the “one shift” idea drags down the reality of it a bit as no such horrible ER shift has ever existed in the history of the world. I would have liked to have seen a down hour where nothing major happens, people get a chance to breathe, and such. In the end the format works, and it doesn’t get in the way, but I’m not sure how essentially it is to the end result.

Art isn’t created in a vacuum. It’s shaped by the times in which it’s made and by the people who make it (who, themselves, are products of the times in which they’re made). Sometimes, artists will add additional barriers that shape their work and it can produce something really cool.