Scooby Road
Jan. 21st, 2006 08:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkI blew my January download allowance on luminosity's Scooby Road and it was worth every millibyte.
Side One - the Slayer
Really the slayer is a simple beast compared with the girl. Able to be summed up by the answers to two questions. Come Together addresses her origins her "How did it all begin?" in the form of a murder-mystery and I Want You gives a most viscerally satisfying response to the immortal words of the Judge, "What does that do?" In between lies a series of hit singles, Spike/Drusilla, Faith, Spike/Buffy and Jonathan!
Come Together
I love this song but did even Lennon have any idea what he was talking about? Buffy smiles and morphs into Sineya, Miss Kitty Fantastico into a mountain lion. Who is she? Who made her? What did they do? A sinister secret lurks out in the desert, at the edges of the visible. Random words in the lyric get a literal representation and my crossword solving brain goes into overdrive. Eyeball, roller, hair, knee, joker. Please rhymes with cheeseman? Buffy in chains to "you have to be free." The bridge and everyone's searching for something. Images repeated, each time revealing a little more of the story. Finally a straight answer. "One and one and one is three," scoobies superimposed over shadowmen. It ends with a violation and the nagging suspicion that even freely consented to, some burdens are more than any of us have the right to ask one person to carry.
Something
You know if Spike ever had access to the technology he would make the Lord King Bad Vid to rule them all (and in the darkness bind them). Which may sound like a backhanded compliment but it's really not. A transcendently bad work of art isn't incompetent. It's all too competent. It just makes you profoundly grateful that you're never going to feel that intensely about anything ever again.
Octopus's Garden
Jonathan showing grace under water. It really shouldn't be vidable but it works and falling, as it does, just before I Want You usefully foreshadows Buffy the girl. Her kindness not her strength.
She's so heavy
I know it's really called" I want you" and that aspect is covered by every would be badass wanting a piece of her power. But my 15 year old self only picked up on the lyric inside the brackets and filed this song under She's so heavy. She still does. Slayer…slayee. And the final twist kills me.
Oh! Darling/You Never Give Me Your Money
The difference between these two feels like the differences between sides one and two of the album. Oh! Darling is an exercise in high concept perfection, a completely addictive lyrical hook on lather, rinse, repeat until the shower curtain falls. It hurts to keep watching and yet you must, as it spirals down inexorably, familiar images starkly emphasising the sincerely unintended irony of the singer's repeated declaration that "I'll never do you no harm."
You Never Give Me Your Money on the other hand is a strange chimeric little song whose contrasting parts brilliantly showcase Joss Whedon's great invention, the "plot-twist." For the first part of the song single piano, minor key melancholy is matched by a selection of shots of Buffy and Angel meeting always in semi-shadow, graveyards and unlit rooms, never quite seeing each other, never quite connecting. He never gives her his money, he only meets her gaze directly when in game face. It's subtly done. The shot of her looking round in the Bronze and he's already gone, the repeated clips of her turning her head towards him that fade into him continuing the motion. Away from her. When they're in frame together they're kissing not looking.
The music makes one of those very MaCartneyesque shifts into music hall, faux jolly, honkytonk piano, sinisterly funny voices. Presto Angelus who is all too able to look his victim in the face. "That magic feeling" recapitulates the former tender embraces as assaults and we build towards the inevitable climax, the one sweet dream that comes true with bitter irony. Angel restored in light and now he looks at her but it's too late. "Close your eyes" and fade to black.
Side Two - the Girl
Here Comes the Sun
Buffy, the girl, dreaming of vampires is an inspired beginning and positively dances to the beat. She enters on lyric and her face lights up the room and all the people in it. But it's a truly ensemble effort and they soon return the compliment. Working together to fight that evil and it ends as it begins with a sunrise both narratively and lyrically justified.
Sun King
Something that made me laugh the first time I saw Come Together was the idea at one point that Lennon’s yippie protagonist might turn out to be Giles. Well he had that funked out electric kool-aid past. This song has a psychedelic edge but shows quite the other side of Giles. Very understated in the beginning, a flower unfurls and Willow mainlines magic in matching tempo more dreamlike than dangerous. Mentor Giles makes everybody feel safe, it’s like that feeling you had when he turned up to save the day at the end of Two to Go but extended and softened out to fill minutes rather than seconds. Most of all I love the ending with its sheltering umbrella.
Medley
Beatlesque vaudeville with Warren the chief of the three evil stooges and the Buffybot a page three, plastic fantasy. All the transitions are masterful and Warren and Andrew waving for the Queen is most amusing but my favourite is Dawn coming in through the bathroom window and their juxtaposition suggests a connection between her and Glory that I'd never thought about before. That they represent respectively the innocence and the superficiality of pre-lapsarian Buffy.
Golden Slumbers, Carry that Weight, The End
From comments I had expected Carry that Weight to bring on the pain but it's Golden Slumbers opening with Dawn bringing newly-resurrected Buffy to an empty home and the memories of absent parental figures set against a world turned hard and bright and violent that truly hurts. Carry That Weight continues every one of the images to find her resilience, her strength in fighting back. Most satisfyingly wrenching herself free from the Shadowmen's chains, last seen in Come Together, before claiming and using the Scythe in my favourite ever 'Buffy to the rescue' scene. This precedes a last rapidfire recap of the whole series, hitting every possible note and ending with the walk down that corridor and the passing on of the fire. Before finally and symmetrically closing on the beginning of a beginning of a smile.
Side One - the Slayer
Really the slayer is a simple beast compared with the girl. Able to be summed up by the answers to two questions. Come Together addresses her origins her "How did it all begin?" in the form of a murder-mystery and I Want You gives a most viscerally satisfying response to the immortal words of the Judge, "What does that do?" In between lies a series of hit singles, Spike/Drusilla, Faith, Spike/Buffy and Jonathan!
Come Together
I love this song but did even Lennon have any idea what he was talking about? Buffy smiles and morphs into Sineya, Miss Kitty Fantastico into a mountain lion. Who is she? Who made her? What did they do? A sinister secret lurks out in the desert, at the edges of the visible. Random words in the lyric get a literal representation and my crossword solving brain goes into overdrive. Eyeball, roller, hair, knee, joker. Please rhymes with cheeseman? Buffy in chains to "you have to be free." The bridge and everyone's searching for something. Images repeated, each time revealing a little more of the story. Finally a straight answer. "One and one and one is three," scoobies superimposed over shadowmen. It ends with a violation and the nagging suspicion that even freely consented to, some burdens are more than any of us have the right to ask one person to carry.
Something
You know if Spike ever had access to the technology he would make the Lord King Bad Vid to rule them all (and in the darkness bind them). Which may sound like a backhanded compliment but it's really not. A transcendently bad work of art isn't incompetent. It's all too competent. It just makes you profoundly grateful that you're never going to feel that intensely about anything ever again.
Octopus's Garden
Jonathan showing grace under water. It really shouldn't be vidable but it works and falling, as it does, just before I Want You usefully foreshadows Buffy the girl. Her kindness not her strength.
She's so heavy
I know it's really called" I want you" and that aspect is covered by every would be badass wanting a piece of her power. But my 15 year old self only picked up on the lyric inside the brackets and filed this song under She's so heavy. She still does. Slayer…slayee. And the final twist kills me.
Oh! Darling/You Never Give Me Your Money
The difference between these two feels like the differences between sides one and two of the album. Oh! Darling is an exercise in high concept perfection, a completely addictive lyrical hook on lather, rinse, repeat until the shower curtain falls. It hurts to keep watching and yet you must, as it spirals down inexorably, familiar images starkly emphasising the sincerely unintended irony of the singer's repeated declaration that "I'll never do you no harm."
You Never Give Me Your Money on the other hand is a strange chimeric little song whose contrasting parts brilliantly showcase Joss Whedon's great invention, the "plot-twist." For the first part of the song single piano, minor key melancholy is matched by a selection of shots of Buffy and Angel meeting always in semi-shadow, graveyards and unlit rooms, never quite seeing each other, never quite connecting. He never gives her his money, he only meets her gaze directly when in game face. It's subtly done. The shot of her looking round in the Bronze and he's already gone, the repeated clips of her turning her head towards him that fade into him continuing the motion. Away from her. When they're in frame together they're kissing not looking.
The music makes one of those very MaCartneyesque shifts into music hall, faux jolly, honkytonk piano, sinisterly funny voices. Presto Angelus who is all too able to look his victim in the face. "That magic feeling" recapitulates the former tender embraces as assaults and we build towards the inevitable climax, the one sweet dream that comes true with bitter irony. Angel restored in light and now he looks at her but it's too late. "Close your eyes" and fade to black.
Side Two - the Girl
Here Comes the Sun
Buffy, the girl, dreaming of vampires is an inspired beginning and positively dances to the beat. She enters on lyric and her face lights up the room and all the people in it. But it's a truly ensemble effort and they soon return the compliment. Working together to fight that evil and it ends as it begins with a sunrise both narratively and lyrically justified.
Sun King
Something that made me laugh the first time I saw Come Together was the idea at one point that Lennon’s yippie protagonist might turn out to be Giles. Well he had that funked out electric kool-aid past. This song has a psychedelic edge but shows quite the other side of Giles. Very understated in the beginning, a flower unfurls and Willow mainlines magic in matching tempo more dreamlike than dangerous. Mentor Giles makes everybody feel safe, it’s like that feeling you had when he turned up to save the day at the end of Two to Go but extended and softened out to fill minutes rather than seconds. Most of all I love the ending with its sheltering umbrella.
Medley
Beatlesque vaudeville with Warren the chief of the three evil stooges and the Buffybot a page three, plastic fantasy. All the transitions are masterful and Warren and Andrew waving for the Queen is most amusing but my favourite is Dawn coming in through the bathroom window and their juxtaposition suggests a connection between her and Glory that I'd never thought about before. That they represent respectively the innocence and the superficiality of pre-lapsarian Buffy.
Golden Slumbers, Carry that Weight, The End
From comments I had expected Carry that Weight to bring on the pain but it's Golden Slumbers opening with Dawn bringing newly-resurrected Buffy to an empty home and the memories of absent parental figures set against a world turned hard and bright and violent that truly hurts. Carry That Weight continues every one of the images to find her resilience, her strength in fighting back. Most satisfyingly wrenching herself free from the Shadowmen's chains, last seen in Come Together, before claiming and using the Scythe in my favourite ever 'Buffy to the rescue' scene. This precedes a last rapidfire recap of the whole series, hitting every possible note and ending with the walk down that corridor and the passing on of the fire. Before finally and symmetrically closing on the beginning of a beginning of a smile.
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Date: 2006-02-05 07:37 pm (UTC)