Why Accessibility Matters: Achtung Baby 20 Years Later

U2's album Achtung Baby was reissued for its 20th anniversary just a little over a month ago in a variety of editions, including a ginormous Uber Deluxe set (with a price to match the heft - Amazon originally listed this at $659.04). While I haven't settled on which reissue to get, the original album embodies everything I think music - and even pop culture - should be. Before I explain, it helps to have  a (not-so-brief) primer on Achtung Baby and its concepts.

I remember when I first heard the album. I was still in high school, was just beginning to explore music, and still had a cassette Walkman. I bought the tape while I was out with my parents one day and on the ride home, they popped it into the car's stereo. Within a few seconds, the opening track "Zoo Station" starts with a single repeating guitar riff sounding as if it's trying to break through some barrier. After a few bars, industrial drums kick in, an alarm is added low in the mix, followed by a distorted voice:

I'm ready
I'm ready for the laughing gas
I'm ready
I'm ready for what's next
I'm ready to duck, ready to dive, ready to say I'm glad to be alive

This was clearly not the U2 that built the albums with themes of yearning and exploring America as a concept. The music was immediately engaging, unlike previous material that required repeated listens to absorb the material. The next song, "Even Better Than The Real Thing," opens with an equally grabbing circular guitar, maraca shaking, and contains lyrics that are an ode to embracing artificiality. This is music with a danceable groove, a trait rarely seen on rock albums.

Even Achtung Baby's cover indicates a sense of being part of the nightlife scene. And the title itself is playful, coming from Mel Brook's The Producers. The inviting rhythms, effects laden guitars, and too-cool-for-you vocals combine with the album art to create a slick and glossy package. But that's a front: U2 is presenting a playful image and immediately accessible music to hook its audience so the band can reveal the true motivations of the album.

Achtung Baby's brillance is that it weaves stylish songs with a darker personal journey throughout, forming a narrative with a definite beginning, middle, and end. The idea that fuels Acthung is we suffer repercussions when we do harm to people around us. The most well known song on the album, "One" immediately follows the rush of "Zoo Station" and "Even Better..." It's a muted ballad that details a plea to reconcile a greatly damaged relationship. The glossy sounds that start the album are not reprieves from the personal wreckage: they serve to give us a sense of the main character's actions that cause his later torment. "Zoo Station" is announcing an intention to taste a side of life that's outside of the norm. "Even Better..." takes place in the middle of a party where seemingly anything goes. "One" shows the consequences of these actions. Closing out the first half of the album is "So Cruel," which starts with an admission that "we crossed the line" but asks "who pushed who over?" Making matters worse, "it doesn't even matter to you." The second half kicks off with "The Fly", which is as close to hard rock as U2 is likely to approach. But it's not your typical guitar shredding for the sake of guitar shredding. It's been described as "a phone call from hell" by U2's singer. "Mysterious Ways" is next, featuring chunky guitars, congas, and a music video with an Arabic feel that prominently features belly dancing (a live dancer would become a staple of the song's performance on tour). But despite the imagery of the video and bounce in the song, it's not a regression of the character's behavior. It's actually a faithful reassurance that things will work out because of the Holy Spirit. (This is actually a U2 hallmark: disguising spiritual overtones in songs that will only be picked up on if you know what to look for.)

The album closes with a trio of songs that serve as a microcosm of the album's ambitions. "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" is filled with pop sensibilities. The chorus consists of a single line with a simple sentiment: "Baby, baby, baby, light my way." The bridge declares "your love was like a light bulb hanging over my bed." But the song's title reveals a duality: ultraviolet light is invisible. Despite the chorus and bridge, the lyrics clearly reveal that something uneasy lies under the surface:

There is a silence that comes to a house 
Where no one can sleep
I guess it's the price of love
I know it's not cheap

The penultimate song "Acrobat" uses a 6/8 time signature, which my guitar teacher told me provides a more relaxed rhythm compared to the 4/4 time that most songs are written in. But in yet another seeming contradiction, the guitar and drums are downright menacing with lyrics that has the main character confronting his own hypocrisy. The album closes with "Love Is Blindness." We find our narrator beaten and battered by the events of the album. He begs for relief and just wants to crawl back into the safety he finds in darkness:

Love is blindness
I don't want to see
Won't you wrap the night around me?

Nothing that I've said here is news for someone familiar with the material or pop culture history. What's crucial is that U2 has made something so immediately accessible that the audience almost has no choice to become hooked. And once that hook has been set, the personal journey of Achtung Baby becomes apparent. The band intentionally used a veneer of style to reveal substance. If the 12 tracks all focused on the darker subject matter, listeners could very easily put it off as too slow or overwhelmingly bleak.

This accessibility is the key to Achtung Baby's success, and the best of our pop culture uses a similar blueprint. Weirdness just to be weird is off-putting. We can find this in Radiohead's music. OK Computer, from 1997, has some strange textures and depicts a dystopian society but it still can grab immediate attention with songs like "Karma Police." It's considered one of the best albums of its time, and possibly ever. But since then, the band's output has become indecipherable. The result: critics love the band but sales have dropped off.

Mainstream entertainment can raise big questions. Are people inherently good? How far can someone be pushed before they mentally break? How do they react to these trials? These are questions about the human condition. Christopher Nolan leveraged the backdrop of Batman vs the Joker to explore these concepts in The Dark Knight. People showed in droves because of Batman and Heath Ledger's Joker performance. People were wowed because of the depth of the storytelling. It's couching the real message in something that's immediately engaging.

This can also expand the audience's palette. An album like Achtung Baby, filled with its club inspirations, primes traditional rock listener's ears for this type of music. Listeners may not have even realized they liked music from the genres Achtung invokes, simply because they were not exposed to it. This effect is seen in other forms of pop culture: The Matrix franchise is best known an action movie trilogy, but it contains many allusions to philosophy and mythology. The TV show Lost similarly started off as a deserted island story, but early in its run revealed its incorporation of literary and philosophical themes. Both The Matrix and Lost inspired their massive audiences to dig into all of the references and explore subjects they may not have otherwise.

This is where pop culture gets short-changed. There is a value to appealing to the mainstream. It's not literature or art-house film or progressive rock, but it doesn't have to be. As long as the material is accessible enough to capture an audience, pop culture is in a unique position to entice people into asking questions and exploring concepts. Achtung Baby, The Dark Knight, The Matrix, and Lost are just a handful of many examples of this. We shouldn't knock pop culture for being cheap, disposable, or unintellectual. It's not just "entertainment."

Somewhat-timely, spoilerific movie review: Super 8

Release Date: June 10, 2011

Note: Spoilers abound. The tl,dr version of this post is: Super 8 is well made, but lacks the heart and soul of its inspirations.

Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was released less than two months after I was born and is one of the first movies I ever saw, if not the very first. I know this because my parents often recount a story of how I needed to be escorted out of the theater when the titular character first meets Elliott and starts screaming in panic, causing a certain infant to start screaming in panic. Funnily enough, years later, I would jump at the same scene when rewatching the film. 

But more than just a story about a homesick alien, his quest to go home, and how a boy helps get him there, E.T. illustrates the emotions of friendship in ways that realistic settings still can't capture. I find it hard to believe that anyone can watch E.T. and not tear up or outright cry in certain scenes (let me know otherwise). 

Which brings me to Super 8. 

Super 8 is written and directed by J.J. Abrams with Steven Spielberg serving as executive producer. I'm a big fan of both, so I was eager to see it. Spielberg has made the most diverse movies out of any other major director that I can think of. It takes an amazing amount of skill to tackle Raiders of the Lost Ark, Schindler's List, Jurassic Park, and Saving Private Ryan and excel at all of them. Abrams has had a hand in TV shows such as Alias, Fringe (my current sci-fi addiction), and Lost (otherwise known as the show I've been obsessed with every day of its existence). In addition, he rebooted the Star Trek films, making it more accessible for a mainstream crowd.

Super 8 has gotten a lot of attention for being a tribute to Spielberg's science fiction films from the late 70s and early 80s, namely E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  The plot follows a group of junior high friends attempting to make a zombie film in their small town. While filming a late night scene at a train station, a military train derails releasing...something. The something seems to be malevolent: people disappear and destruction follows in its wake. We don't see it early on and catch only glimpses from the film's midway point until the end, when we get a full reveal. But we do hear it throughout. This is very much like Lost, which took pains to not reveal anything until absolutely necessary (if at all). A word of advice: if you live in the Super 8 town and hear sounds similar to Lost's smoke monster, it's time to run. (I'm sure this is purely coincidental.) The mystery is engaging and effects are great throughout. There is also a sweet adolescent love story. 

The kids argue and call each other names, just like E.T. But the similarities don't end there. The something turns out to be an alien. It was captured by the government and escaped. All it wants to do is go back home. Refrigerators get emptied out. There's a government cover-up. It's kids vs adults. The kids rally together to save one of their own. Ultimately, it's the bond between alien and boy that allows the boy to survive dangerous situations and the alien to leave Earth. 

The big problem is there are too many plot elements reminiscent of E.T. that it practically begs for comparison, however unfair it may be. E.T. is a beloved classic. It is a story of how two children (E.T and Elliott) come together to forge a relationship that defines both of them. They are outcasts until they meet. Their bond evolves to the point that there is a literal symbiotic relationship. E.T is about the love of friends and how without it, we'll flail about.

Abrams tries to straddle two lines in Super 8. We think the alien is on a murder spree until we find its true motivation and for some inexplicable reason, kills the villains while only incapacitating the good guys. But all it wants to do is rebuild its ship and go home. So ultimately, it is well-intentioned. This is where Super 8 fails: because we spent the vast majority of the movie seeing the devastation of the alien, we can't flip the switch and think the alien is sympathetic (as much as the story reminds us of E.T.). The bond formed between the main character and alien occurs in the equivalent of a Vulcan mind meld, lasting for maybe a minute total. E.T. spends its entire middle section defining the relationship between its alien and human. When E.T. (the character) leaves, we're saddened that Elliott has lost what seems to be his only friend. But there's also a happiness that the friend is moving into a better situation. We don't feel anything when the Super 8 alien leaves Earth, except that the film is over. 

So in the end, Super 8 would stand better on its own. If it didn't recall E.T. so consciously at times, we would accept what the film asks of us more easily. But with so much debt owed to E.T., we can't help notice that we haven't connected with the alien or the human character as much as we did with E.T. and Elliott. Instead of reflecting on the adventure that transpired in Super 8, we feel a bit empty and just want to see E.T. again so we can relive the most pure of human emotions. Super 8 is too good of a tribute to Spielberg that it suffers for it.

tl;dr: Adapting All Writing To Match Social Media?

I've always been a writer. When I was much younger, before my family could afford a computer, I would use a typewriter to create fan fiction. During my final years of grade school, I was on the school paper's staff serving as a movie and game critic. In undergrad, I took an Intro To Writing Fiction class as a pass/fail instead of getting a traditional grade. The reasoning was that in theory I could focus on my other, "more important" classes without worrying too much about writing. In practice, I liked the class so much that I ended up spending most of my semester thinking and working on it. I've often said that in another life, I would have been a writer.

I'm always thinking how to phrase things more clearly or trying to figure out why an author elected to use a particular word choice over other possibilities. Structure is important: how well does the beginning, middle, and end hang together? With these tendencies, it was with great interest that I read this article on ZDNet. The premise is that as we live in an increasingly fast paced world where the tweet or short status update rules and younger people use these tools as a primary form of communication, then we should adjust our writing styles into bite-sized chunks. And to prove the point, the post is written entirely in 140-character or less chunks.

It was an interesting experiment by the ZDNet author, but the writing is very stilted. The comments do rightfully point out that shorter is better in certain environments, such as readouts to management. Short and concise allows something to be more easily digested by extremely busy people. This is a weakness in my own writing: often too many flourishes and small passing phrases (fun fact: I use parenthetical comments...a lot).

But I come from a background of writing narratives or trying to persuade people of something. In both cases, adding or subtracting words is a critical part of keeping the audience engaged. So naturally, after reading this, I wanted to post here and illustrate the value of things like pacing and the rhythm of a piece of writing. It turns out... that I kind of already did. (Talk about tl;dr: I now have two very similar posts. On a side note, less than 10 posts into this new blog, and I'm already in reruns.)

A bigger point is that I don't think we should enable a culture where the ability to focus is the exception rather than the rule. Malcolm Gladwell made famous the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master at something. How can we possibly reach that level if we're constantly switching tasks? As I write this, I've got the TV on and my iOS devices within arm's reach, pausing once in a while to watch political commentary, play a game or check Facebook. I'm also a 10+ year guitar player who's barely moved past the absolute beginner stage, in large part because I can't sit still long enough to sustain a solid practice session. This compulsion to take mini-breaks every few minutes from whatever I'm doing is one of my biggest limitations in realizing my potential. Shortening writing styles until only the main ideas remain is just another way of reinforcing that hurry up and move on to the next thing mentality.

I also fear that we're heading down a path where nuances that add depth and expressiveness are lost. Prose and argumentative writing is not poetry, but vivid language is part of the toolkit that helps convey the author's intent. Someone can write "The city had a single building taller than 50 meters." Someone else can write "The building stretched high into the sky, casting a shadow over everything else in the area." With the style advocated by ZDNet, everything would read like the first example. Which one is better at creating a world?

I'm not advocating that we turn the English language into a static construct. Language does evolve and change over time. High schoolers learn the works of Shakespeare through annotated editions that explain the slang and idioms of his day. I regularly twist and combine words into new variations. But simplifying our writing can lead to a slippery slope. We may end up with a variant on George Orwell's Newspeak - where we lose ideas because the words that express them are extinct. Freedom of expression is a powerful thing and we should hang on to everything to keep that alive.

The Entitled Millennial?

Labeling personalities is a curious thing. The Western zodiac says that all people born in the same approximate 30-day window has the same general personality. The Chinese zodiac extends the concept into an yearly interval for personality types. In both cases, millions of people form a homogeneous group based on when they were born, completely ignoring the environment they were brought up in and other factors that may shape a person.

(For the record, I'm a former Taurus/current Aries and Dog in the respective systems. The personality change from Taurus to Aries was painful. I woke up one day a lot less loyal and stubborn, which was replaced with a hyper-competitiveness and tendency to tell it like it is. Kidding aside, and despite my skepticism, I have to admit that all three personality archetypes can be combined to describe me in broad strokes pretty well.)

If the nurture part of nature-vs-nurture is ignored in these systems, then what am I to make of labeling generations? We may want to believe that the terms Baby Boomers and Generation X have more authority because this is the purview of sociologists and not palm readers. But the scope is so much grander. The labels imply there is a tendency for people born - not in the same month or year but the same quarter-century (roughly) - to have the same general traits.

The danger of applying labels in this way popped into my mind when I recently went to a workshop on generational differences in the workplace, focusing on Millennials (defined in the workshop as being born in 1980 - 2010).  This was of particular interest to me, being a Millennial (albeit born toward the beginning of the timeframe) that works almost exclusively with people older than me. What struck me is some of the traits used to describe Millennials:

• sheltered - parents of Millennials often accompany their children on job interviews or argue grades with professors.

• pressured - Millennials are raised to always be achieving something: get into the right preschool and do well so they can go to the right grammar school and do well, and on and on. 

• structured - as kids, Millennials are often shipped from one activity to another often in the same day (e.g. school to soccer practice to piano lessons)

There is a common factor in the traits I listed above: they are all enabled by middle class, white-collar, suburban life. And with that statement, I run the danger of being overly general myself, but allow me to explain.  Structuring children's schedules with music and sports involves time and money commitments that aren't always possible with parents punching the clock. In many areas, the quality of education is not generally a choice in a child's early schooling, unless the parents have means to reside in a good school district or are willing to pay for private school.

Generalizing attributes of the well-off to an entire generation may be justified by the workshop's assertion that Millennials are part of the richest generation that the world has ever seen. The workshop essentially implied that the Millennials consist of rich kids, whose parents organize their lives and do much of the legwork for them. It's no wonder that the workshop also stated that Millennials are perceived as having feelings of entitlement.

But let's not forget that income disparity between the highest and lowest earners has been growing for the entire time Millennials were being born. The United States is also becoming more racially diverse, and minorities traditionally have less income.  At the same time, college enrollment is at an all-time high, meaning it's likely that many Millennials are the first in their families to go beyond high school. These statistics point a very different picture: many Millennials are overcoming disadvantages to increase their and their children's standard of living.

Do the Millennials who were able to break free of their given situation feel a sense of entitlement? I don't think so. If anything, it always feels like a continuous uphill battle. When you're the first, there is little frame of reference to look to: no one to guide the way and make sense of experiences. Also, when someone goes from a blue-collar background to a white-collar lifestyle, the perception is lots of schooling followed by a cushy desk job and that somehow this work isn't as real as a factory job. But it is possible to take the blue-collar work ethic (nose to the grindstone; do whatever it takes to get the job done) and apply it to white-collar work.

Millennials represent some of the most diverse walks of life that the United States has seen: some are privileged; others are severely disadvantaged; the rest are somewhere in between; some work extremely hard to move up in life; others expect things handed to them. We should expect to see a wide ranging set of personalities, making it extremely difficult to generalize all of these people into a few common traits. Yet, that's exactly what was done. We might as well start publishing horoscopes based on generations.

Belated Movie Review: Unstoppable

Release Date: November 12, 2010

Not all movies have to be thought provoking, revolutionize a new technique, or give us new twists on character archetypes. Sometimes we've seen it all before and in cases like this, it's the execution that matters, which brings us to Unstoppable.

The film is about a train that is...well, unstoppable. A train becomes out of control after a series of human errors and ends up on a collision course with school kids, other trains, and populated areas while carrying a toxic material. It's up to Detective Alonzo Harris and Captain Kirk to save the day. I was vaguely reminded of another movie about a form of mass transportation run amok. I think it was called The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down, but I could be wrong.

Besides the concept, the film is filled with familiar tropes: greedy corporations that won't do the responsible thing, tension between generations as long time employees are threatened by a new kid on the block, estranged families whose relationships are restored in times in crisis, and the old standby of grave danger just as one character is about to retire. Heck, even the two lead actors revisit previous roles: Denzel Washington's character finds himself overseeing a coworker's first day on the job while Chris Pine's is unexpectedly thrust into a role bigger than anticipated.

Despite this, the film is tightly constructed and has high production values. It wastes no time in setting up the plot. From there, it's all action sequences, with exposition smack in the middle of them. Some dialog scenes felt like this:

"Tell me about your family."
"Hang on, let me do this thing that may kill us both."
* Executes highly dangerous maneuver *
"I haven't seen my family in a month, due to regrettable actions I did."
* Move on to next set piece *

The editing can be frenetic: shots rarely last longer than a handful of seconds and flip constantly between trains, a sort of mission control of the train company, and the train company's HQ. While in most films, this can get annoying, Unstoppable makes it work. The jumping back and forth ratchets up the tension, which is the film's strongest asset.

Unstoppable takes what is essentially a two-hour chase scene and keeps it from becoming monotonous. The effects are impressive, and it's intense ride from start to finish. The acting does enough to support the story without getting in the way of things. The film doesn't add anything new to action movies, but it doesn't pretend to be do so either. It hits all of its elements so well, it serves as a prime example of paint-by-numbers done right. Highly recommended.