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Friday's best pop song ever

February 25, 2016, 9:00 pm
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The Creep Behind the Camera (United States, 2014)

February 26, 2016, 3:44 pm
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I was still in high school when I first saw The Creeping Terror. This was during one of my many late night trawls through that perilous cultural outback only accessible via the UHF dial on my family’s hulking Trinitron. If you can imagine, this was back in the days before The Golden Turkey Awards, MST3K, and Mill Creek 50 Movie Packs, so I was coming to The Creeping Terror fresh, with absolutely no idea of what it had in store. The thrill of that experience was one that is now difficult for me to convey—for this, to my novice sensibilities, was truly the worst film ever made (the previous contender had been Mesa of Lost Women, which I had discovered in much the same way.)

The Internet being many years off (get it? It was a LONG time ago), I did not have the option of conveying my excitement by way of a blog or Facebook post, but instead had to settle for breathlessly haranguing my friends about it at school the next day. These friends expressed reactions that ranged from annoyance to borderline tolerance—and in the case of those friends who were later cajoled into watching The Creeping Terror, rage.


Had this been a Pixar movie, I would have sullenly slunk back home to belt out a power ballad about one day living in a world where everybody was as excited about The Creeping Terror as I was. Little did I know then that, all these years later, I would be part of an international community of people for whom shared knowledge of The Creeping Terror was a given, and for whom The Creeping Terror was even a touchstone of sorts. Face it, nerds; The Creeping Terror is now part of the nerd fabric of our nerd lives.

Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that someone would make a movie about the making of The Creeping Terror. What is surprising, however, is just how fine a film The Creep Behind the Camera is—not only novel in its construction, but much more well-acted, written, and directed than it probably needs to be. The key to this is that Creep is less a film about the making of The Creeping Terror than it is about its producer, director, and star, Arthur “A.J.” Nelson, aka Vic Savage.


As a profile of the director of a notoriously bad film, The Creep Behind the Camera invites facile comparisons to Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. But where Burton endeared Wood to us by presenting him as an outsider version of an enduring American archetype—i.e. the irrepressible dreamer with an unshakeable personal vision--Creep writer/director Pete Schuermann examines a much darker version of that archetype. Because, for every wide-eyed aspiring auteur who arrived in Hollywood during the 50s with a dollar in his pocket and a dream in his heart, there were probably two like A.J. Nelson, a sociopathic grifter who would stop at nothing, and use anyone, to get ahead.

Schuermann takes a unique approach to telling Nelson’s story, crafting a film that unpredictably switches back and forth between drama and documentary. Neither of these elements prop up the other, as is the abiding style of most documentaries made in the wake of Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, but instead have the depth and power to stand on their own. The documentary portions consist largely of talking head interviews with the likes of Terror producer and co-star William Thourlby, writer Allen Silliphant (brother of Sterling), Golden Turkey Awards author Michael Medved, and, perhaps most important of all, Lois Wiseman, Nelson’s then-wife, upon whose book, Hollywood Con Man, the film is partially based. It is the presence of Wiseman, now seemingly enjoying a ripe old age, that makes The Creep Behind the Camera something of a survivor’s tale—as the film’s depiction of her abuse at Nelson’s hands is harrowing.


The dramatic portion of Creep begins with Nelson arriving in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale with Lois dutifully in tow. He wastes no time in enthralling the town’s residents with tales of how he is going to make “the best monster movie of all time” and is soon soliciting them for funds in exchange for roles in both the film’s production and the film itself. In Josh Phillips’ intense portrayal, Nelson is a horror movie version of the classic small-time huckster, oozing both oily charm and unhinged menace. Behind closed doors we see that he has made a virtual slave of Lois, whom he savagely beats for, among other things, objecting to his flagrant womanizing. This portrait of Nelson as a psychopathic narcissist is as stark as it is grim, exemplified by a scene in which he admires his naked body in a full-length mirror as Lois (given heartbreaking life in a quiet, empathetic performance by Jodi Lynn Thomas) looks on in terror. “I am God,” he growls.

One of the most admirable things about The Creep Behind the Camera is its evenness of tone, which must have been achieved at no small effort. Schuermann accomplishes this in part by letting the ridiculousness of The Creeping Terror speak for itself. The introduction of its titular beast, surely one of the most threadbare and misbegotten creations in all of B monster cinema, is handled with delicious deadpan. For truly, no elbow to the ribs is necessary with a sequence like the one where a pickup truck carrying that costume, a leafy tarp crowned by an unholy construction of paper mache and radiator hoses, careens through the streets of downtown Glendale, disrupting a parade and sending a troop of Girl Scouts scattering in panic. Equally side-splitting is the scene in which we are shown what awaited those compliant actresses who so gamely pushed themselves into the Terror’s vagina-like mouth—i.e. that they came under threat of being vomited on by one of the several heat stroke suffering teenagers charged with giving the beast life.


By leaving the job of discerning Terror’s innate comedy in our quite capable hands, Schuermann frees himself to be unforgiving in his portrayal of Nelson as a hateful piece of shit. We are spared nothing, from Nelson’s increasingly sadistic abuse of Lois, his stalking of female celebrities, and his eventual heroin addiction, to his implied involvement in kiddie porn. There is even an anachronistic-seeming encounter with Charles Manson to put him in the proper sinister context. All the while, Josh Phillips—as if reveling in the seething contempt of his potential audience--brings his A game to showing us, not only Nelson’s towering self-regard, but also his monumental self-pity. Clearly this is a man who is as shameless in getting his way through abject weeping as he is by brute intimidation.

As The Creep Behind the Camera draws to a close, Nelson, pursued by creditors from the worlds of both high finance and organized crime, abandons The Creeping Terror, leaving its completion in the hands of his bilked investors. I don’t think that anyone knows what really happened to the film’s audio tracks, but here it is posited that Nelson destroyed them, thus necessitating that the finished product be wallpapered with the stentorian-yet-somehow-still-nattering narration we know and love today.


But will it still be possible to love The Creeping Terror after seeing The Creep Behind the Camera? I don’t know. It certainly seemed to me like Schuermann was positioning the film’s monster—in all it’s tacky, audacious shittyness—as an expression of Nelson’s tacky, audaciously shitty, and ultimately empty soul. That’s an association that will be hard to shake. On the bright side, though, something I did not know as a teenager, but know all too well now, is that there are many more captivating oddities—and, dare I say it, worse films--where The Creeping Terror came from. It’s just that now I might not be as curious about the people who made them as I once would have been.
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Friday's best pop song ever

March 3, 2016, 9:00 pm
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Tuesday! The 4DK Monthly Movie Shout Down cast their big eyes upon LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD AND THE MONSTERS

March 4, 2016, 10:00 am
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The 4DK Monthly Movie Shout Down makes its long awaited return this coming Tuesday, March 9th. Our feature for the evening will be Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters, K. Gordon Murray's English dubbed version of the fractured Mexican fairytale Caperucita y Pulgarcito contra Los Monstruos. If the moth eaten animal costumes on view in the trailer linked below cause you traumatic flashbacks to Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny, fear not. This film is way better than that. For one thing, stuff actually happens in it; characters go from place to place, ambulate from one end of the room to the other, etc. Oh, and there are songs, but the less said about those the better.



So here's how it's going to go down. On Tuesday, I will post a link to the complete film on this here blog. The rest is on you. Simply log in to Twitter at 6pm Pacific Time and, using the hashtag #4DKMSD, tweet along with us as we all watch the movie together in the greatest expression of the internet's community building potential ever. We will have a seat with a specially engraved nameplate waiting for you and will be gravely disappointed if you don't show.
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Tonight! The 4DK Monthly Movie Shout Down wolfs down LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD AND THE MONSTERS!

March 8, 2016, 12:30 am
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Tonight's Shout Down feature has it all: Ogres, robots, Mexican Dracula, Malificent, Red Riding Hood, a pinhead, Mexican Frankenstein, dragons, Tom Thumb, a little person in a skunk costume... The only thing that's missing is  you! So why not join the 4DK Monthly Movie Shout Down crew tonight on Twitter at 6pm PT and, using the hashtag #4DKMSD, tweet along with us to Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters.

A link to the full feature is below:

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Friday's best pop song ever

March 10, 2016, 9:00 pm
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TONIGHT! POP OFFENSIVE returns!

March 15, 2016, 7:10 am
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There are a few things you can count on from an episode of Pop Offensive: Jeff will at one point speak in a string of baffling non sequiturs, Todd will once again fail to find a Eurovision song that is enjoyable without some degree of irony, a giggling reference to "nuggets' will be made, etc. But most importantly, you can always depend on us to bring you an astonishing mix of highly danceable pop obscurities from around the world. We'll be doing all of that again tonight, Wednesday, March 16th, at 7pm. As always, you can stream us live from kgpc969.org. Also, if you look out your window right now and you can literally see the KGPC studio, you are probably close enough to pick up our mighty 100 watt signal at 96.9 FM. Of course, you can also stream the episode at a later date from the Pop Offensive Archives, but, please, listen to it live. That way you can hear all of the mistakes that we will edit out of the archived version.
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Friday's best pop song ever

March 17, 2016, 9:00 pm
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The Last Pinoy Action King (Australia/Philippines, 2016)

March 23, 2016, 7:06 am
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Weng Weng is a hard act to follow. I suspect no one knows that better than Andrew Leavold, who directed 2013’s The Search for Weng Weng, an at once fascinating, touching, and hilarious documentary about the Philippines' notorious three foot tall action star. Yet follow Weng Weng Leavold has, co-directing--with his Search for Weng Weng co-writer Daniel Palisa--The Last Pinoy Action King, a documentary about the beloved Filipino action star Rudy Fernandez. Now, Fernandez is a star about whom I know little to nothing (I haven’t even seen one of his films), but I chose not to do any preliminary research in order that I might better judge how well the film makes a case for his importance. Also, I’m lazy as fuck.

I should say first off that King is a much more conventional documentary than its predecessor. Telling the story of Fernandez, a superstar whose life story was amply documented in the media of his day, requires far less excavation than Weng Weng’s—with the result that, as opposed to Search’s labyrinthine detective yarn, King is much more of a straightforward tribute, told through numerous talking head interviews with family, friends and colleagues. Consequently, Leavold contents himself with remaining a behind-the-scenes presence here and does not appear on screen. This diminution of the “hero’s journey” aspect seen in Search (let us pause while Joseph Campbell spins in his grave), of course, renders less likely the occurrence of those happy flukes—like Leavold being granted a sit down interview with Imelda Marcos—that gave Search a lot of its unexpected charm.


By all this, I’m not trying to say that Leavold’s absence from the screen is a strike against The Last Pinoy Action King; no one is expecting him to become the Michael Moore of Filipino cult movie documentaries, after all. It’s just something that I think fans of The Search for Weng Weng would want to know going in. I think it’s also salient that what Leavold and Palisa do bring over from the previous film is a tendency to use their subject as a jumping off point from which to paint a much broader picture of Filipino popular cinema as a whole, which makes this film every bit as essential for world pop cinema fans as Search was. (I should also mention here that Andrew and I are longtime internet friends, though I have repeatedly missed out on opportunities to meet him in person.)

Using the aforementioned interviews, along with plentiful film and television clips, Leavold and Palisa reconstruct Fernandez’s rise to fame. Coming from an entertainment industry family (his father was prolific golden age director Gregorio Fernandez), Fernandez, who is known to family and fans alike as “Daboy”, signed with Sampaguita Pictures in 1970. After an unfulfilling run as a romantic lead, he finally made his mark as an action star with 1976’s Bitayin si… Baby Ama!, in which he portrayed real life criminal Marcial “Baby” Ama. From there, he went on to star in a string of successful features that made him, at his peak, second only to Fernando Poe Jr. as the Philippines greatest action star.


Indeed, FPJ casts a long, generously muttonchopped shadow over The Last Pinoy Action King, on account of him being both a towering figure in Filipino popular cinema and a pioneer of the then prevalent turn toward independent film production (Sampaguita, at the time of signing Fernandez, was the last surviving of the Philippine’s “Big Four” major studios). At the same time, it is easy to see Fernandez as a departure from the cinematic archetype that Poe had established. With his delicate features and quiet demeanor (interviewee after interviewee describes him as “shy”), Fernandez stood in stark contrast to Poe’s brute masculinity, and as such became something of a teen idol in addition to a scrappy hero of the people.

When considering Rudy Fernandez’s career, it’s difficult for me not to compare him to Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan. Both men reached their peak of fame at a time when their countries were under martial law, and thus allowed their audiences, suffering under the constraints of despotic rule, to rebel vicariously through them. Like Bachchan, who embodied the archetype of the “angry young man”, Fernandez was consistently cast as an enraged everyman fighting against corrupt authorities and venal fat cats. Also like Bachchan, he capitalized on his populist appeal by entering politics in middle age, making an unsuccessful bid to become the mayor of Quezon City in 2001.


Though Fernandez stirred up a minor tabloid scandal with his live-in relationship with teenage “Bomba” actress Alma Moreno, his off-screen life appears to have been pretty tame—and no interviewee in The Last Pinoy Action King will describe him as anything but exemplary. Indeed, if the film could be said to have one major flaw, it is the fault of Rudy Fernandez himself and not of the creatives behind it: He was just too nice. One person after another tells us that, as a friend, he was loyal to a fault, as the president of the Actors Guild, a fierce champion of workers’ rights, and to his longtime spouse, actress Lorna Tolentino, an ideal husband. You might think that this would make it easy to dismiss the film as a hagiography--but, given that Leavold, with The Search for Weng Weng, managed the mean feat of being both affectionate and relentlessly probing, I find it highly unlikely that he would skew his narrative in such a fashion. Nonetheless, I wonder if it is terrible to wish that the actor had at least one unseemly flaw so that the story of his life might have a little more spice. Probably.

On the positive side, it is this ubiquitous adoration that makes the account of Fernandez’s premature death, from a particularly aggressive cancer in June of 2008, all the more moving. It is clear that he is still deeply missed by most who knew him and that his death was a cruel blow from which many of them are still recovering (superstar Sharon Cuneta’s stricken recounting of his painful last days is especially heartbreaking.) This section of the film is exemplary of how Leavold and Palisa commendably let the story be told by the participants themselves, without the aid of cinematic device. It is in this way that The Last Pinoy Action King, while perhaps a less “gonzo” film than The Search for Weng Weng, is arguably a more mature one. Whether you prefer that or not is up to you. To me, it’s a symptom of versatility that bodes well for the future of both men as filmmakers worth watching.
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The Infernal Brains Podcast, Episode 19

March 23, 2016, 10:16 am
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The focus on Filipino cinema continues at 4DK with the latest, long awaited episode of the Infernal Brains podcast, in which Tars Tarkas and I discuss the cult classic James Batman. Think you're excited about Batman vs. Superman? Well, you might think again once you've had a gander at this low budget Filipino adventure that features both Batman and James Bond. I mean, when you consider that it also features a cameo by the Black Rose, James Batman easily outweighs BvS in terms of sheer superhero poundage (which I think is what you're into.) Listen to the episode here.

(NOTE: This episode has a couple of audio problems in the form of intermittent mic. distortion due to a wonky connection. As you can still easily understand what's being said, Tars and I felt that it was not too severe to interfere with your enjoyment of this fun and informative episode.)
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The Offense of it all

March 24, 2016, 12:30 am
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If you listened to last week's Pop Offensive, you know that I and Pop Offensive's favorite substitute co-host, Aaron Harbor, managed the heroic feat of taking an episode that almost didn't happen at all and spinning it into pure musical gold. If you didn't listen, you'll just have to allay your skepticism about literally everything I just wrote by streaming the episode from the Pop Offensive Archives. Enjoy!

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Friday's best pop song ever

March 24, 2016, 9:00 pm
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Podcast on Fire's Taiwan Noir Episode 21: Magic of Spell and Magic Warrior

March 25, 2016, 11:00 am
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Before I start flakking yet another podcast, I want to remind everyone that I actually did review a film this week. That said, this latest episode of Taiwan Noir sees Kenny B. and myself waxing rhapsodic over another pair of crazy, fun, and crazy fun Taiwanese fantasy films, both of which star gender bending actress Lam Siu Lau as their male lead. In Magic of Spell she returns to the role of Peach Kid (reprising her star turn in Child of Peach, which we discussed in Taiwan Noir episode 20), and in Magic Warriors, she stars as the very Peach Kid-like Little Flying Dragon. And speaking of magic, if you listen to this episode, you will hear me being miraculously cured completely of a nasty cold somewhere around the midway point--something that can only be achieved through the technical wizardry of recording each half of the episode two weeks apart. Download or stream the episode here.
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Friday's best pop song ever

March 31, 2016, 9:00 pm
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The Elusive Avengers, aka Neulovimye Mstiteli (USSR, 1967)

April 4, 2016, 1:42 pm
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While many film enthusiasts would be content, upon seeing a passing reference to a genre of Soviet westerns made during the height of the Cold War, to think "huh, interesting" and then move on with their lives, I am the guy who has to immediately find and watch one of those movies. Of course, given the cornucopia of obscure foreign films that YouTube has become in recent years, this is a far less laborious task than it once was--which is why I'm hanging upside down in a gimp costume as I write the. You gotta suffer, people.

Loosely based on Little Red Devils, a novel by Pavel Blyakhin, The Elusive Avengers spawned two sequels, making it one of the more popular examples of the uniquely Russian riff on the Western genre known as the Ostern, or “Eastern.” Like most Osterns, it is set in Ukraine during the chaotic period of civil war that followed the Russian Revolution. This conflict saw a variety of anti-Bolshevik factions take arms against the Lenin regime, making uneasy provisional allies of everything from monarchists to capitalists to more democratically-minded socialists. Despite this smorgasbord of potential alliances, it should come as little surprise that the actions of the film’s titular heroes, while motivated by vengeance, are entirely in keeping with the interests of the Red Army.


In the film’s opening, Danka, a young village boy, watches in horror as his father, a spy for the Russian government, is summarily executed by the vicious warlord Lyuti (played with dissolute menace by Vladimir Treshchalov.) We immediately skip forward a few years to find that Danka and three of his teenage friends have since banded together to defend their home against the gangs of bandits, rebels, and rogue Cossacks that are preying upon the peasantry. In addition to Danka (who is now played by 16 year old Viktor Kosykh), we have Yashka, a gypsy (Vasily Vasilev), Valerka, an intense student-type (Mikhail Metyolkin, in Trotsky-like glasses to drive the point home), and Danka’s sister, Ksanka, a nun (Valentina Kurdyukova.)

At first the group focuses their efforts on the bandit gang led by Ataman Burmash (Yefim Kopelyan), interfering with the transport of his supplies and ill-gotten gains in a series of exciting horseback raids. When it later becomes clear that Burmash is taking orders from Lyuti, the offensive takes on a more personal—and violent—cast. The result is a series of increasingly risky, late night guerilla operations in which the young Avengers, true to their name, elude capture only by the skin of their teeth.


It is worth noting that The Elusive Avengers, in making nods to the Western genre, takes little influence from the American Westerns of Ford and Hawks, and rather more influence from the then-contemporary Euro-Westerns of Leone and Corbucci. This circumstance, as unsurprising as it is, is a happy one, as it means that we get lots of dramatic widescreen composition and sweeping vistas, moody nighttime action, and an expert ramping up of tension. Director Edmond Keosayan layers onto this an element of “Boys’ Own” adventure, building up excitement as we watch our teenage heroes pull off one daring caper after another. You almost expect the action to stop so they can give a thumb up to the camera and tell all the kids out there how “awesome” it is to fight the enemies of communism (there is indeed a fourth-wall-breaking wink at one point. )

The Elusive Avengers is served well by its energetic young cast, among whom I think Vasily Vasilev, who in the same year played a small part in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, is the standout. As Yashka, the group’s token “ethnic” (a Chinese in the book, an American black man in an earlier film version), he is not positioned as the film’s lead, but nonetheless steals that position by virtue of his sheer charisma and physicality. With Danka providing the vengeful fire that motivates the group, and the studious Valerka planning all of its operations, Yashka is the warrior of the group, left to be at the center of all of the film’s most exciting action set pieces. Among these is a scene depicting the Avengers’ defense of a military cargo train from a gang of bandits on horseback that is so similar to the iconic train sequence in Sholay that it is hard not to imagine it being an influence.


And this is all not to mention Vasilev’s singing and dancing, which are displayed in a scene that takes place after Yashka and Ksanka take jobs as entertainers at a tavern frequented by Burmash’s gang. Indeed, The Elusive Avengers is also something of a musical, with several diegetic scenes of characters breaking into song. This adds considerably to the picaresque sense of fun that intermingles intriguingly with the dark Spaghetti Western dynamic seen elsewhere in the film. Of course, I watched an untranslated version of this movie, so, if they were singing about burning the fat American capitalists in their beds, I might view it otherwise. I doubt that’s the case, though; Given the film seems largely directed at those young men most likely to be seduced by its romanticized depiction of Russian youth defending the homeland, I don’t think it would resort to such buzz-killing cold war proselytizing.

That is, until the end, when the Avengers receive an audience with Joseph Stalin himself, who thanks them for their exploits and makes them members of the Red Army on the spot. I assume this means that, in the film’s sequels (The New Adventures of the Elusive Avengers, in 1968, and The Crown of the Russian Empire/Once Again the Elusive Avengers, in 1971), the kids fight as soldiers of the Russian military, rather than as a ragtag band of teenage rebels. If that’s the case, it’s hard to imagine those sequels being as fun or exciting as The Elusive Avengers--although I do intend to find out.
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Tuesday! It's the DEADLIEST 4DK Monthly Movie Shout Down of them all!

April 7, 2016, 6:58 pm
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Hunting humans. We've all done it. Come on, admit it. But why do we do it? Because, as has so often been said, human beings are the most dangerous game of all. That is true even if said human is a monosyllabic muscle farmer with a mullet and a spray-on pair of daisy dukes. I speak, of course, of Mike Danton, the hero of the 1980s straight-to-video classic Deadly Prey, which is essentially The Most Dangerous Game in Zubas. And so it is that this Tuesday, April 12th, Deadly Prey will be stalked by the most dangerous hunters of all--by which I mean the Monthly Movie Shout Down Crew, whose weapons of choice are their pithy tweets and snarky attitudes. If you want to join us, all you have to do is log on to Twitter at 6pm Pacific Time and, using the hashtag #4DKMSD, tweet along with us as we watch the film via the Daily Motion link that I will provide here on 4DK.

Now prey on this trailer:

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Friday's best pops song ever

April 7, 2016, 9:00 pm
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Tonight! The 4DK Monthly Movie Shout Down stalks DEADLY PREY!

April 12, 2016, 12:30 am
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Tonight's 4DK Monthly Movie Shout Down feature is rated AVMPSWFMGMJ for Absurd Violence, Mullets, People Screaming While Firing Machine Guns, and Man Jerky. Yes, it's DEADLY PREY and it's stupid as hell--but, of course, also awesome. You have no choice but to join us on Twitter at 6pm PT and, using the hashtag #4DKMSD, comment along with us to this redolent fossil of 1980s direct-to-video action flotsam using the link below. See you in hell!


Deadly Prey (1988) - Featureby FilmGorillas
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Wednesday! POP OFFENSIVE returns!

April 19, 2016, 7:59 am
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When Jeff Heyman and I recorded the first episode of Pop Offensive, back in April of 2014, I could not have imagined that we would still be doing the show a full two years later--and that it would still be as fun as it has continued to be. In honor of that, this Wednesday's episode, which will be our 25th, will be on one of our favorite themes. That's right: For the better part of two hours, we are going to be playing nothing but female artists, singers and groups--putting, as I like to say, the men on mute and the ladies on blast. If you like the girl group sound, ye ye girls, Northern Soul divas, Japanese idols, Riot Grrrls and rockabilly sirens, you cannot miss it. Unless you live within a stones throw of Oakland's Laney College and can pick up KGPC's mighty 100 watt signal (found at 96.9 on the FM dial), you can stream the episode live from kgpc969.org.
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Prince

April 21, 2016, 3:37 pm
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Celebrities, like the rest of us, die all the time—with the difference being that our deaths don’t inspire an outpouring of eulogies and remembrances from mass media's every outlet. That kind of outpouring can often create the false sense of a national state of mourning, and inspire in some of us the opposite reaction. For many of us—especially those of us who have experienced the loss of someone actually close to us—the idea that we should grieve someone just because they were on TV or had a hit record can seem ridiculous, obscene even. That’s how I feel about most celebrity deaths.

But then there are those celebrity deaths that make us feel like there is a hole in the world. For me, David Bowie’s death was like that, and now Prince’s. Part of that is due to the way an artist like Prince’s work intertwines with personal memory. Having come of age in the 80s, I have many vivid recollections of which Prince is as much a part as the flesh and blood people who were actually there. These include going to see Purple Rain with a new girlfriend whom I knew was going to stomp on my heart, listening to “Lady Cab Driver” on my roommate’s stereo while she was at work, and playing the cassette of “Sign O’ the Times” over and over in my band’s tour van for an entire Summer. In this way, the hole is a personal one.

And then there is the matter of the imprint that these artists leave behind, which, in the case of Prince and Bowie, is measured, not in memory, but in the actual change they have wrought in the world. Both artists brought about profound changes in pop music--in the way that songs were written, recorded, and performed and, in turn, how they were perceived. A simple decision like removing the bass track from "When Doves Cry" opened up broad new vistas in terms of how a pop song could be produced and even what could constitute a pop song in the first place. That the artist takes with him or her into death the possibility of influencing more such change accounts in large part for the hole they leave behind.

Of course, these kind of ruminations are really a sort of cheat when all I want to say is that the loss of Prince is really hurting me right now. For now, I plan to grieve constructively, filling the hole with music--I already have a playlist planned--and probably a few tears.
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