Every day my metal friend
Shakes my bed at 6am
Then the shiny serving clones
Run in with my telephones
Talking fast I make a deal
Buy the fake and sell what's real
What's this pain here in my chest?
Maybe I should take a rest
They send the heart police to put you under,
Cardiac arrest
And as they drag you to the door
They tell you that you've failed the test
Let's say you were driving down the street in 1979, listening to some tunes and wondering if you should get rid of your 8-track player and replace it with a new cassette deck when suddenly "Y.M.C.A." comes on the radio. Your girlfriend left the radio on some $#@! disco station last night. You hastily hit a preset button, but it always shifts the tuner a little to the left so you have to fiddle with the fine tune to get the station to come in. You settle back to the sound of Tommy Shaw's voice crooning
oh mamma I'm in fear from my life from the long arm of the law... Yeah, this
rocks! You reach under your dash to punch the button on your 40-watt Radio Shack power booster that you keep in reserve for the most rockin' songs. Unfortunately you have been distracted long enough that you have wandered into the opposing lane and you collide with an oncoming car. The resulting crash puts you in a coma for 11 years. You awaken in 1990 and the first thing you hear on the hospital's radio is "We Didn't Start the Fire" and you wonder what the heck happened to Billy Joel. You recover and, upon being released from the hospital, make your way to the nearest record store to try and catch up on the current music. Except there are no more record stores. Now they're all "music" stores and they sell these tiny, shiny, plastic-encased "compact discs."
How can these play music, you think,
there aren't any grooves! On the radio you hear nothing but whiny female vocalists singing through their noses and bouncy, catchy tunes played mostly on the synthesizer. You assume that aliens--or possibly Europeans--have taken over the music business and you are determined to discover where it all began.
This is where it all began.
The Age of Plastic is
the quintessential 80s album. Make all the arguments you want, but I am decided and nothing will shift this immutable fact from my mind. If you think you have a music collection that definitively covers the history and development of pop and rock music, and this album isn't part of it, you have a gaping hole in your collection. When Rolling Stone released their bloated boxed set
25 Years of Essential Rock
and didn't include "Video Killed the Radio Star" they totally dropped the ball.
They invalidated the entire set by the omission of that one song. Okay, maybe that last statement was a little over-the-top.
But only a little.
Rock trivialists always like to point out that "Video" was the first ever video to be shown on MTV.
Ever. But like all things 80s, the video eventually became passé; it didn't really kill the radio star, it was only an annoying pimple on his butt for a few years.
There is more than one good reason to own this album. This is where 80s music began. This is it. I'm not kidding. From here it spider-webbed into Euro-pop, electro-pop, American and Canadian imitators of Euro-pop and electro-pop, the punk backlash, the post-punk New Wave sidelash, the post-post punk bubblegum-girl eyelash, post-New Wave irony bands, the metal whiplash, bands named after obscure science fiction movies, duos who were more artificial than the Monkees ever dreamed of being, and mindless legions of Madonna-drones.
The Age of Plastic is more than an album; it is a nexus in the space-time continuum. Countless albums came before it, countless more have come and will continue to come after. But it stands alone atop its silicon and plastic tower, smirking in ironic and slightly neurotic detachment at all who pretend to its significance. Sure, the music sounds a little goofy, but the synthesizers are cool, and the songs are catchy. It has a good beat and you can...no, don't do that. Just listen. Throw in some sci-fi themes with vaguely dystopic undertones and yeah, it's not that bad. Elvis is dead; the best the Stones can do is "Emotional Rescue," Styx is falling apart, your little sister is keeping your new REO tape, Boston has vanished from the face of the Earth, and this is as good as it's gonna get for a while, brother.
Also the music is pretty good, if you like that sort of thing, which I do. It's also an essential album for you if you are interested in the interweaving of Yes Musicians and Associated Artists (The Buggles, Yes and Asia).
Some might dismiss the Buggles as a one-hit wonder. This would be a mistake. The album is very consistent throughout. At times nostalgic, wistful, frenetic or bleak lyrics are disguised by catchy synthesizer-based dance beats, because
they knew that the world would not be able to swallow such a musical vision of the future without a heavy sugar coating. A few years later William Gibson dispensed with any pretense and gave us the unadulterated truth. He showed us in stark digital clarity the future at which the Buggles could only hint. What could not be accepted in pop tunes could be hammered home in fiction. So we read his books, and we looked at each other with quiet understanding. No one said it aloud, but we were all thinking the same thing:
the Buggles were right.
So go buy it. Put the CD in your car stereo and pay close attention. Pretend you're listening to your old cassette deck with the Radio Shack 40-watt power booster. Remember that gas was less than a dollar a gallon, and it would be years before the world is even aware of Mariah Carey. Pretend, but don't get too comfortable. Because in your mind and in your car, you can't rewind, you've gone too far. And don't forget that once upon a time a new decade was coming at you. A decade that couldn't be avoided, and it wouldn't be happy until you had a MIDI cable hard-wired into the base of your skull.
But you still survived. And eventually, a new Boston album did come out.
I noticed this number this morning. That's the number of subscriptions to the RSS feed that Feedburner has detected. That's a new record. Thanks to everyone who thinks this blog is worth subscribing to.
Caught by the vampire priest, and she is still not entirely sure of what is happening. In distress, we get a shot of her huge blue eyes. Seras is drawn like a typical young anime female: disproportionately large eyes, tousled hair, and breasts that threaten to pop the buttons of her uniform at the slightest provocation.
The same place, but a shot that shows her entire face instead of just her eyes. The vampire priest has her in a chokehold, she is dirty from fighting and running all day, and she's still trying to figure out if all this is real.
Moments later, she makes eye contact with Alucard. A new resolve now shows in her eyes, she has apparently figured out what Alucard is about to do and is already in agreement with him.
Alucard tells her he is going to shoot through her to kill the priest, and offers her the option of becoming a vampire rather than dying. She says yes, and closes her eyes.
Now she lies dying, her head supported by Alucard's hand, her face besmirched with her own splattered blood. This is the last time we see her blue eyes.
After Integra lights up her cigar, a thin stream of understated digital smoke trails upward from the cigar. A very nice touch, in my opinion.
And here she exhales a puff of digital smoke.
Here is a "prop" shot, a close-up of her box of cigars.
I almost missed this one: an unusual shot of Integra almost smiling. The guy behind her has just asked how many agents the Hellsing Organization has dispatched to deal with a new vampire outbreak, and she answers, "One." This shot also shows a couple of animation techniques that are used extensively in Hellsing. First, the glowing eyeglasses thing. In this case, a shaft of sunlight leaking through the blinds she is facing glares from her spectacle lens, which I think presents a more dangerous and perhaps feral appearance. (I have been using "feral" a lot lately, but it fits). Second, only a part of her face is shown, while using the rest of the screen to portray a secondary character who the main character (Integra in this case) is interacting with.
This is the first vampire killed at the beginning of the series. The scene doesn't give us her name, or anything about her except that she is posing as (or is) a prostitute. That thing in the center of her forehead is the bullet from Alucard's pistol just before it hits her. This scene serves mainly as an introduction to Alucard and what he does. It's sort of a teaser for things to come.
A close-up of the vampire priest's face. This is the second vampire killed by Alucard at the end of the first episode. This time Alucard shoots him in the chest rather than the head, but it doesn't make any difference. He's dead either way. There doesn't seem to be any real consistency to the way the false vampires' eyes are drawn.
Integra enjoys smoking small cigars. This shot is from a scene in which she lights one up. The animators effectively show contrasts between light and dark as the light from the flame flickers against her face, hands and hair.
This is a close-up shot of the metal cross she wears on her tie, or cravat. It is common for metal and glass objects to be shown reflecting light like this.
Integra is definitely female. She is, however, referred to as Sir Integra Hellsing. As far as I have seen, she is the only female in Hellsing to be drawn with the more normal-sized eyes that are reserved for male characters. We'll see an example of the more typical huge female eyes when we get to Seras Victoria.
Another shot of a very stoic Integra. This and the shot just above are somewhat unusual, in that she is usually shown with at least one lens of her glasses reflecting a glare of light.
This is about as close to irritation as she comes in the first episode, when Alucard disagrees with her regarding the fate of the newly-minted vampire Seras.
First, here is a close-up of his face being ripped apart by bullets. This is always very irritating.
No shades. He is in the process of fighting the vampire priest in the first episode.
Here he is moments later, after inserting a fresh magazine into his pistol, he racks the slide with his teeth. This is not a recommended procedure unless you are a vampire with superhuman strength.
Unshaded eyes in the middle of a fight. That blurry sphere on the left is the bullet exiting from the barrel of his pistol.
After being terribly shot up by a horde of ghouls, he reforms into one of his feral, or monstrous forms. The shades are nowhere to be seen and we get a good look at a single, maniacal eye.
Moments later, he appears to be enjoying himself and this totally freaks out the vampire priest.
A Google search for "obscure music" leads directly to the previous post. Only a coincidence (or is it?), but still funny.
Script for a Jester's Tear was their first studio album. As far as I know, the concepts for all these covers was from their lead singer/songwriter Fish (real name Derek Dick), but the actual artist who created them is named Mark Wilkinson. The Jester is a running theme throughout these covers, and there are other items that appear in more than one, such as the records scattered on the floor, the chameleon (in this one climbing on the chair just above the violin case), the magpie, and the television that is on but not being watched. The posters on the wall are reproductions of real posters advertising the band, and the records on the floor are real records. The one closest to the record player is Pink Floyd's A Saucerful of Secrets. It's hard to tell in this version, but it's obvious if you look at the full-sized record cover. I expect that the portrait of the woman is a real person, too, but I don't know for sure. Besides the Jester standing at the window trying to write a song, there is another jester image in the clown on the TV screen.
Fugazi was their second album. More jester images. The man lying on the bed is naked except for a rumpled sheet and the tattered remains of jester's leggings, however if you check the mirror behind him you will see that his reflection is fully clothed in the jester's motley. The portrait of a clown leans against the bed, an unfinished puzzle showing a jester lies on the floor, and there's a jack-in-the-box on top of the (ignored) television. The magpie and the chameleon are on the chair in the background. More records scattered on the floor. I don't know what the toy train engine means, but it seems to be in the same color pattern as the jester's motley.
Misplaced Childhood was their third album. The cleanest of the three visually. The chameleon is now trapped in a cage, the magpie is holding the key. The Jester escapes through a window, perhaps to chase another rainbow. A young boy holds a now tamed magpie on his wrist, his heart worn on his shirt, glaring defiantly at the world.
