This week on the Memphis Flyer Podcast, it’s RiverBeat time! Alex Greene talks about his cover story interviews with Chuck D, Bobby Rush, Cage the Elephant, and DJ Zirk. Plus, Memphis rock legend Greg “Oblivian” Cartwright visits to give us the skinny on his latest project The Hypos.
I recently attended a lecture by Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University. Snyder’s specialty is the study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. His 2017 book, On Tyranny, was essential reading during the first Trump administration, and earlier this year, it topped the New York Times Bestseller list. If you’ve recently heard the phrase “don’t obey in advance,” that’s Snyder’s work.
His new book, On Freedom, asks hard questions about the way we use the word “freedom” in America. Too often, we think of freedom only as the absence of anyone telling us what to do. But it’s much more than that. Freedom is not merely individualistic in nature. There are times when banding together with other people will make both us and them more free. The American Revolution is one example. People with diverse interests from diverse places banded together to throw off the chains of monarchy and prevent any one person from ever having that much power over them again.
George Lucas called the good guys in 1977’s Star Wars the Rebel Alliance. The bad guys were the Galactic Empire. The names weren’t important. He just needed an excuse for lasers to go pew pew. Sure, Obi-Wan Kenobi was fighting to restore the Old Republic, but his number-one ally was Princess Leia, who was royalty. And where did this plucky group of rebels get a fleet of expensive-looking spaceships? Who cares? It’s a story about space wizards trying to get their mojo back.
Lucas himself was the first to realize he had half-accidentally created a political story, and the prequel trilogy is really about how democracies die. In the Disney era, Rogue One stood apart for its glimpse into what everyday life was like under the rule of Emperor Palpatine. When Tony Gilroy, who was on Rogue One’s creative team, continued the story with Alliance operative Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) on Disney+, it was as much about how revolutions begin in authoritarian regimes as it was about a street hustler who finds a purpose in life.
Season 2, which premiered last week on Disney+, leans into the ensemble cast Gilroy created and adapted. This season is unique, in that its twelve 30-minute episodes are being released three at a time, with each batch telling a complete story and then skipping ahead one year. From the very first scene, Gilroy and his crew show they’re taking Star Wars to an emotional place it has never been before. Cassian has infiltrated Sienar Fleet Systems to steal an advanced TIE fighter prototype. As she is handing him the keys to the ship, the young tech who has helped him (Rachelle Diedericks) asks, “If I die today, will it be worth it?”
Yes, Cassian assures her; no matter what happens, she’s made a decision to be free in the face of oppression. Then he leaves her to her fate. It’s a brilliant bit of writing, revealing Cassian’s moral calculus. Many more people will be faced with the same bad set of choices. On the prosperous world Chandrila, Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) is facing the consequences of the deals she made to finance the Alliance to restore the Republic. She’s giving her daughter Leida (Bronte Carmichael) away in a loveless arranged marriage to the son of a shady oligarch. It’s the social event of the season, which means Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård), the deep-cover Rebel leader, can use it as an excuse for a visit. Meanwhile, Mothma’s own marriage is falling apart, her daughter hates her, and her banker Tay (Ben Miles) is considering ratting her out to the Empire.
The most chilling sequence in these first three episodes is a boardroom meeting. Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) has assembled a secret team of Imperial brass, including ISB investigator Dedra Meero (Denise Gough). Under the guise of “energy independence,” Krennic plans to mine the peaceful planet Ghorman, famous for its fine silk exports, for the enormous quantities of minerals it will take to build the Death Star. The problem is, how to remove the population without causing too much of a stir. The bureaucrats calmly pitching genocidal ideas is a reference to the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazis planned the Final Solution. By taking the question “Where did the Rebellion come from?” seriously, Gilroy has elevated this space fantasy into a work that’s sadly relevant to our moment. What is freedom? When push comes to shove, how hard will you fight, how far will you go, for freedom?
New episodes of Andor premiere Tuesday nights on Disney+.
Synthpoppers Recent Future are prepping a new full-length album for Red Curtain Records, expected later this year. The first single from the duo of Charlie Davis and David Johnson, “Crosstalk,” gives you an idea of what to expect. It’s got a little industrial grind and some pleasing bleeps and bloops. The video explores the group’s duality via incessant split screen and some retro graphic. Get into the groove:
If you would like to see your music video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Kailynn Johnson talks about her cover story on the Memphis Roller Derby and the latest on the xAI controversy. Plus, a new documentary on John Lennon and Yoko Ono and why haven’t you seen Sinners yet?
When John Lennon was shot in front of his apartment at New York City’s Dakota building in 1980, Time magazine called it an “assassination.” Noting that the term is usually reserved for the murder of a head of state, the Time editorial board called Lennon “the leader of a state of mind.” Before his murder by a deranged fan, Lennon was a musician — albeit one of the most famous in modern history. Afterwards, he became a martyr.
But martyrdom, it turns out, does not suit Lennon. Sure, they open every Summer Olympics with his secular hymn “Imagine,” but the Beatles Backlash is real, and Lennon’s legacy has gotten the worst of it. Sir Paul McCartney is still playing shows and wowing audiences at age 82. Ringo is still the floppy mascot guy he always has been (and, let’s be clear, one of the greatest drummers of all time). George Harrison’s solo work is now venerated as the best of the post-Beatles output. But spend a few minutes on any social media network these days and you can find people who say the Beatles were massively overrated, and, most cruelly of all, John Lennon would probably be MAGA if he were alive today.
Lennon the iconoclast would have understood. A couple of generations have had the Fab Four’s music shoved down their throats by the Beatles industrial complex. That the band “changed the world” is a Boomer catechism. So when young people hear the music made by a bunch of moldy old white guys, of course they’re predisposed to hate it.
In One to One: John & Yoko, director Kevin Macdonald aims to demystify Lennon and reveal the human being behind the mythical martyr. The meat of the film is performance footage from Lennon’s Madison Square Garden show on August 30, 1972. The concert was a benefit for the victims of the Willowbrook State School in New Jersey, which journalist Geraldo Rivera had exposed as a hellhole where developmentally disabled children were basically imprisoned and left to rot. It was the only full-length concert Lennon played after the Beatles’ Shea Stadium swan song in 1966.
The shocking footage from inside Willowbrook is a part of the hundreds of clips from TV and film that flesh out One to One. Macdonald begins the story in 1971. The Beatles have been broken up for more than a year, and John Lennon has been living with his new wife Yoko Ono in a posh English country estate outside London. As Lennon recounts in a taped interview with a print journalist, Ono was the one who hated living in a mansion and wanted to simplify their lives. On a short vacation to New York City, Lennon and Ono discovered that they loved the hustle and bustle, and the cultural scene. Lennon tells the interviewer that he felt at home because “no one bothered us.” So the couple sold their English estate and moved into a two-room flat in Greenwich Village. There, they mostly smoked weed and watched the TV they had propped up at the foot of their bed, which had been left by the apartment’s previous owner.
A couple’s therapist would have a field day with the picture of John and Yoko’s relationship Macdonald draws. The “Yoko is the villain who broke up the Beatles” narrative was exposed as misogynistic agitprop by Peter Jackson’s epic Get Back documentary series. Jackson found a sound clip where Sir Paul himself calls bullshit on the notion that the group was in trouble because “Yoko sat on an amp.” But Lennon and Ono were clearly codependent, years before the psychological term was coined. By the time they moved to New York, they had both gotten hooked on heroin and kicked the habit. Lennon was tired of being a prisoner of his own fame and fascinated by the avant-garde art world which had embraced Ono, whom he called a “creative genius.” (One of the film’s running gags involves taped conversations between Ono’s staff who are trying desperately to secure a thousand house flies for one of Ono’s art installations.) In a clip from one of the panel-type talk shows that was popular on TV at the time, Lennon opens up about being abandoned by his mother and reconnecting at age 16, only months before she was hit by a truck. For her part, Ono was the daughter of a rich Japanese family who had been made into destitute refugees by the American firebombing of Tokyo. It’s no wonder that two people with abandonment issues would cling so fiercely to each other.
The focus of their lives in 1971 to ’73 was radical leftist politics. Ono’s feminism was a revelation to Lennon, who had been abusive to his first wife Cynthia. Macdonald drives the point home by showing footage of Lennon getting kicked out of the First International Feminist Conference, where Ono was speaking, for being the only man there. Protests against the Vietnam War were raging in America, and the Ono-Lennons were in the thick of it. They were planning an American “peace tour,” where some of the proceeds would have gone to bail funds for imprisoned Black men. Lennon tried to recruit Bob Dylan as a co-headliner but never quite got it done. He wrote a song about the Attica prison revolt that his manager begged him not to perform in public. In the end, the tour plans fell apart. Three months after the Plastic Ono Band’s MSG show, Nixon was reelected in a landslide, and his State Department tried to deport Lennon. The restored concert footage shows what might have been. Lennon and the band (which includes a bass player dressed as Jesus and a Stevie Wonder guest vocal on “Give Peace a Chance”) are loose and playful. Lennon delivers a transcendent version of “Imagine” at a piano while casually chewing gum. One imagines a world where, with a little more practice, they coalesced into a touring powerhouse that freed prisoners across the country. But that is not the world we got.
One to One: John and Yoko
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Malco Ridgeway
Bruce Newman, folk singer/songwriter, host of WEVL’s Folk Song Fiesta, and frequent friend of Music Video Monday, is also a burner. Every year he makes a pilgrimage to Burning Man, the week-long art and music festival held in a remote desert. Around 80,000 people gather on a dry lake bed outside Gerlach, Nevada, during Labor Day week to build Black Rock City. There, burners create giant art installations, dance to some of the biggest names in electronic music, and generally reclaim the freedom they don’t have in the mundane world.
Newman wrote one of his first songs about his time spent in Black Rock City, and collected images and videos of the wild days and nights on the playa over the years. Edited by Laura Jean Hocking, and containing a few shots I took on my one trip to Black Rock, here’s “Burning Man”!
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Ryan Coogler has proven himself to be one of the great masters of genre films. Every time he’s tried a new kind of film, he has mastered it and made it better. In 2015, he made the Rocky spin-off Creed, starring his friend and frequent collaborator Michael B. Jordan as the son of Rocky’s frenemy Apollo Creed. It was, incredibly, better received than Sylvester Stallone’s attempt to revitalize the inspirational sports picture he had pioneered. Remember 2005’s Rocky Balboa? Of course you don’t.
Then Coogler moved on to the superhero space with Black Panther, the consensus choice for the best chapter of the never-ending Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Coogler saw the potential of his star Chadwick Boseman to transcend the shallow and banal crash-bang and become a hero for the people. And I’m not just talking about Black people, who were finally able to see on-screen both a hero and a culture which looked like them. T’Challa was the MCU’s moral center, the person who took time to wrestle with the right and wrongs of the situation, rather than just punching the bad guys. Marvel’s vision of good leadership is not the American President Thaddeus Ross, a barely reformed war criminal, or Tony Stark, the technocratic billionaire. It’s T’Challa, the King of Wakanda, who prioritizes justice for all humanity and puts his nation’s (and his own) blood and treasure on the line to achieve it.
Now, Coogler ventures into the horror genre with Sinners. The 21st-century superhero film cannibalizes genres so they can be digested by the corporate body. Captain America: Winter Soldier was a ’70s paranoid thriller in colorful tights; Guardians of the Galaxy is a sci-fi adventure with the occasional super-heroic flourish. Even Black Panther more closely resembled The Adventures of Robin Hood than it did Thor: The Dark World. The horror genre gives its practitioners more freedom. Throw in an atmosphere of creeping dread, a few jump scares, and a little monstrosity, and you can call it horror. After all, this is a genre that encompasses both David Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
Coogler takes the opportunity to play fast and loose in Sinners, bringing in elements from all over the cinematic map. One of its biggest influences is Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, a decidedly not-horror psychological portrait of two deeply damaged people trying to find themselves in the squalor of North Mississippi. Another major tributary is Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, the vampire neo-Western that provided Bill Paxton’s finest hour. If I had to pin it down, I would call Sinners folk horror. Like The Wicker Man and Midsommar, it finds terror in the inscrutable laws of pre-Christian pagan beliefs.
The film’s animated preamble introduces us to the concept, handed down over millennia through dozens of different cultures, of shamanistic figures whose music-making was so powerful that it became magic and temporarily tore the veil between our world and the spirit world. We then meet Sammie Moore (Miles Caton). It’s October 1932 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and times are tough. Sammie’s a preacher’s son who quotes scripture from the pulpit on Sunday morning after playing the blues on Charley Patton’s resonator guitar on Saturday night.
Against the wishes of his pa, who warns him against “playing music for drunkards who shirk their responsibilities,” Sammie takes a gig at the Delta’s newest venue, Club Duke. The owners are the Smokestack twins, Smoke and Stack, both played by Jordan. They left Clarksdale 15 years earlier to fight in World War I, then joined the Great Migration to Chicago, where they became enforcers for Al Capone’s Prohibition smuggling operation. After years of being good soldiers, they have unexpectedly returned to the Delta, throwing cash around and sitting on enough bootleg booze to stock a juke joint for months. How they came into this good fortune is one of the film’s early mysteries.
The twins buy a former cotton warehouse and proceed to get the band back together, Blues Brothers-style. Along with Sammie, they recruit piano pounder Delta Slim (the great Delroy Lindo) and the singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson) for opening night. It is one hell of a party. Every drunken shirker in a three-county radius packs into the run-down old building to party their butts off late into the night.
Did I mention that Sinners is also kind of a musical? And that some of the music was recorded here in Memphis by Boo Mitchell at Royal Studios? Coogler frames the big emotional moments with musical numbers performed by his cast. On Club Duke’s opening night, Sammie’s songs whip the revelers into a frenzy of ecstatic dancing. When people from other eras start to appear in the barn, from a masked San shaman of Kalahari to Eddie Hazel decked out in Parliament-Funkadelic-era Afro and star-shaped sunglasses, we know we’re through the looking glass.
The revelers are mostly oblivious, but someone notices the magic working. Remmick (Jack O’Connell) appears, smoldering from the sunlight. He’s an Irishman of indeterminate age, who knows all the old Appalachian folk songs. When he and his little band show up at Club Duke, the door man Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) won’t let them in. Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Smoke’s ex-wife, is a secret voodoo priestess who recognizes the undead when she sees them. But it’s going to take more than a mojo bag and a trunk full of guns to defeat the devils this time.
Sinners spends a long time giving backstory to its sprawling cast, so that when the action kicks in, we feel each loss and setback. Coogler takes big swings, but not all of them connect. Jordan’s double duty as twins could have been a disaster, but he pulls it off with bravado. On the other hand, a half-assed subplot involving the Klan bogs things down in the final reel. It hardly matters. Sinners is one of our great filmmakers exploring the outer limits of his gifts. Let Coogler cook.
Sinners
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This was the first weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the premier music festival in the United States. More than 125,000 people descended on the California town to hear a surprisingly diverse cross section of popular music. On Friday night, alongside the epic headliner set from Lady Gaga, the return of Missy Elliott (who will be in Memphis for RiverBeat Music Festival in a couple of weeks) and The Prodigy, and a scorcher from Seun Kuti & Africa 80 (another RiverBeat booking), two of Memphis’ hip-hop top guns wowed in the 100-degree heat.
Unfortunately, there are no good videos on YouTube (yet) of GloRilla’s stomping set, which whipped the audience into a frenzy. Luckily, we’ve got Three 6 Mafia’s volcanic opener, “Hit a Muthafucka,” to bring you up to speed if you couldn’t afford to spend the weekend in the desert. Get ready to get buck! (And do I have to tell you this clip is NSFW? ’Cause it ain’t.)
First of all, for the record, yes, I have played Minecraft.
I know I’m an Old, fellow teenagers. I come from the first generation of video gamers, and I know what it is to be obsessed with moving pixels on a screen. I like to at least try the latest and greatest games from time to time, so a few years after it was released, I paid my own money for a copy of Minecraft. It sounded fun in theory. Dropped into a procedurally generated open world, you have to gather resources and use them to create the tools you need to survive. It’s kind of like playing with Legos, only with a computer.
Once I got started, I could see the appeal. Combining different resources in different ways results in novel items, and it’s fun to learn how to use them. Watching complexity arise from very simple elements was the original appeal of Minecraft. But I gotta admit, it didn’t stick. I got frustrated wandering around looking for things and getting attacked by creepers, and lost interest. I guess it just wasn’t my kind of game.
Also, it’s time for me to admit that I kinda suck at video games.
My experience was far from typical. With 350 million copies sold, Minecraft is the most popular game of all time, and it’s not particularly close. In second place by more than a hundred million is Grand Theft Auto V — although GTA V is, by some measures, the most profitable entertainment product of all time, having earned $8.5 billion on a $260 million budget. (That’s roughly four times Avatar’s take or seven times Barbie, for those keeping score.)
In the recent Apple TV+ series The Studio, Seth Rogen is promoted to head a major film studio, but the first assignment thrust upon him by the chairman of the board (a hilariously orange Bryan Cranston) is to make a movie based on Kool-Aid. Rogen’s chagrin must have been familiar to the parade of people who have tried and failed to exploit the Minecraft IP over the last decade. Five people have writer credits, and three received “story by” credits. It’s a difficult nut to crack because Minecraft famously doesn’t have a story. It’s an open-world sandbox game. Granted, many quests have been added to the game over the years, but many, if not most players are content to clear out a few blocks and build a cool little house for themselves. Or, if you grind out a lot more crafting hours, you own a personal amusement park. Or maybe a Turing-complete difference engine, aka a primitive computer within a computer, which is a feat for extremely advanced nerds.
My level of gamer is represented by Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), a neon-sunglasses- and pink-leather-jacket-wearing fugitive from 1989. Actually, he’s not my level of gamer because he was once really good at it. He was the 1989 World Champion of Hunk City Rampage, a fictional beat-’em-up arcade cabinet that I admit looks kind of fun. These days, he’s the owner of Game Over, a video game and nostalgia store in Chuglass, Idaho. Trying to rescue his failing store, Garrett has a side hustle buying the contents of abandoned storage lockers at auction. In one, he spies the Atari Cosmos, a (fictional) rare game console from the ’80s that sells for big bucks. He digs deep to buy the lot, only to be frustrated when the box is empty. But what he does find among the junk is a pair of crystal cubes that fit inside each other like nesting dolls.
Also stuck inside of Chuglass are Natalie (Emma Myers) and her brother Henry (Sebastian Hansen), who moved to town when their mother passed away. Natalie’s got to raise her little brother, while adjusting to a new life as a social media manager for the local potato chip company.
After a bad first day of school, where Henry’s experimental jet pack destroys the potato chip factory mascot (don’t ask), Henry retreats to The Garbage Man’s store, where he discovers the crystals and wonders what they do. As you might have guessed, when combined, the crystals create a portal where our heroes, plus their (don’t ask) real estate agent Dawn (Danielle Brooks), are sucked into the Overworld of Minecraft, Tron-style.
The real star of the show, and the only thing that makes A Minecraft Movie something other than an wildly successful corporate branding exercise (Variety reported more than 40 tie-in promos!), is Jack Black as Steve, one of the skins players can choose to represent themselves on the map. The person who finally caught the falling knife and got the assignment to direct this film is Jared Hess, who also directed Napoleon Dynamite and, crucially, Nacho Libre, a completely over-the-top cringe comedy starring Black as a friar who secretly moonlights in the wrestling ring as a luchador.
Black and Hess are on the same manic wavelength, and the Tenacious D star outshines literally everything in this sprawling production. Despite some nominal attempts to give them personalities, or at least motivations, Henry, Natalie, and Dawn are blank slates. Maybe that’s the intention, in an effort to make them more relatable to a wider audience. But it’s Black’s job to take these nonentities on a tour of the Minecraft universe, gesturing wildly at points of interest and dodging arrows from the minion of Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House). The leader of the piglins rules the Nether, a hellish underworld that looks a lot like the Mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings, only, you know, in Minecraft. She is the avowed enemy of creativity and just wants to enslave everyone to collect gold.
Imagine that, a country ruled by a piggish tyrant who only values money, and wants to destroy and subjugate everything to feed their megalomania. I dunno, sounds bad.
A Minecraft Movie
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Memphis music maker Brennan Villines is a longtime friend of Music Video Monday. Check out “Ahead of Your Time”, get stabby with “Better Than We’ve Ever Been”, feel “Free”.
His latest, “Worst of the World” combines a heartfelt and soaring melody with images of people and spaceships soaring high into the heavens, while Villines bares all. “I just wanted to feel something,” indeed! Watch this video, and you’ll feel it, too.
If you would like your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.