bafflegab.org

Gather ’round, children, and I shall tell you a tale of my wond’rous webs’te wand’ring.

Through a path of links too gnarly and overgrown to even retrace, I ended up at the TV Tropes Wiki.

Said wiki is (from the site’s front page):

“…a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction. We dip into the cauldron of story, whistle up a hearty spoonful and splosh it in front of you to devour to your heart’s content. Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.”

So, basically, a big ol’ wiki of tropes you would find in fiction, with examples. The site started out concerned only with TV tropes, but now has examples from film, TV, lit etc.) Now I understand that this mightn’t sound terribly interesting to you, but that’s because you’re wrong. Allow me to furnish you with a few examples to demonstrate why you are in error (I have stolen the terms verbatim, but the definitions are paraphrasia):

• Hollywood Healing - The ability of characters to recover near immediately from physical damage to the point of not even showing a bruise, even when beaten nearly to death.
• Flanderization - Certain aspects of an initially well-rounded minor character coming to dominate how that character is portrayed. Often comes about for cheap laughs initially.
• Growing the Beard - Opposite of Jumping the Shark - the point at which a series comes into its own, and ceases to suck. Named for the point in Next Generation when Riker grows his beard.
• Villain Decay - The reduction of an initially cool and dangerous villain into a shadow of their former self through repeated appearances where they inevitably lose to the heroes.
• Every Car is a Pinto - The propensity for vehicles to explode, given the merest excuse.

If only there weren’t such an enormous list of these (nicely categorised though they are), it would be an excellent source of rules for a drinking game. Be warned if you intend to go check this site out, if you are in the slightest bit inclined towards literary criticism in any form, or you just like popular culture, you might well lose multiple hours to this site.

I think a goodly part of the appeal of this site is that they take many of their examples (and often the terms themselves) from a set of shows they call the Deconstructor Fleet, which includes a lot of stuff I think worth watching; Buffy, The Simpsons, Watchmen comics, Saun of The Dead, Freakazoid, Robot Chicken, The Bards’ Tale computer game, etc.

So, a little while back the local radio station, the “yoof” radio station, organized a contest whereby you could submit your twenty favourite music video clips of all time, and if you wrote the list they liked the best then you could come in–invade–and be a guest-programmer for the evening. I should have entered.
(Tangent: I went years before I realized that the guest-programmers must just be sitting in a hotel room somewhere with a video camera, and they have been sent an enormous list of video clips; or p’raps just written their own list and sent it off with a video of them intro-ing and outro-ing their faves. It isn’t like they are actually in the studio. I presume. Also, Trent Reznor guest-programmed a few years ago, and I was very surprised by his picks: plenty of hip-hop.)

So, I should’ve entered. If I had done so, I think that I would have included some of the following clips.

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1. Teenage Fanclub, ‘Sparky’s Dream.‘
So, this song must have come out when I first started listening to the radio a lot, around 1995. Yes, 1995, the album was Grand Prix. Not that I knew that at the time; I just knew that there was a fucking awesome song that got played a fair bit. (This pattern will repeat itself, unsurprisingly–I do not know the names of some songs which I heard often when I started to listen to music; these songs are, in my opinion, awesome, though they often remained anonymous for a long while.) So, in 2003 my housemate whacked this album on the stereo, and I could put name to sweet harmonies and bliss. Basically, this song is great. End of story.

2. The Beat, ‘Save It For Later.‘
Another great song. Some of the blokes in The Beat went on to form Fine Young Cannibals. Of this later band, I like ‘Good Thing.‘ When I was a young thing myself, I remember hearing ‘She Drives Me Crazy’, which at the time used to give me the shits, as did pretty much everything on the Max Headroom video hits show, since as far as I was concerned it was just an interruption between TMNT and Doctor Who. Seeing the video clip now, I actually think it is pretty good. And the song is none to shabby, also. Here’s a cover by the Muppets. Fran Drescher and others also appear.

3. Nine Inch Nails, ‘Happiness in Slavery.’
Banned many times, and hence included in my selection. Had this been disallowed–although I am pretty sure that I have seen it screened on telly before–I would have picked the Johnny Cash cover of ‘Hurt’, which I think is actually better than the original. I think that there are better NIN songs, even from “Broken”, the very album on which ‘Happiness in Slavery’ appears. But it’s not just about the songs, but also about the clips. Here’s another good clip, someone has done a very convincing job remixing footage of Star Trek to NIN. Genius.

4. Pearl Jam, ‘Oceans.’
After I heard this song–actually, I saw the clip–I went home from my mate’s place, scrounged up every cent that I had, and went out and bought the album. It’s the first time I ever paid for a CD with handfuls of five-cent coins. So, it’d have to be this or ‘Corduroy’, I think: BWP said of the latter, ‘How did they write a song all about me?’ Of course, for ‘Corduroy’, it’d have to be a live clip, for various Pearl-Jam-versus-the-Man reasons.

5. Public Enemy, Feat. Anthrax, ‘Bring Tha Noise.‘
Such a great son–although I haven’t actually heard the original, sans Anthrax–and such a dated clip–I was amazed how primitive the special FX looked. I guess this was, what, 1991? Aerosmith and Run DMC had cooperated in a similar venture several years earlier. (Was Steve Tyler ever attractive?)

6. The Go-Betweens, ‘Was There Anything I Could Do?‘
A friend of mine describes her experience of seeing the clip for a song she really, really liked–and it is none too bad–and being horrified at the singer, vamping about and visually spoiling the aural experience. The very next night after she told me this, I saw the Go-Betweens (great, great band) and I think it was this clip–I had a similar experience, of being unable to really meld the visual experience with the auditory. Still, a great song, although I think that pretty much everything I have heard of theirs is great.
(’Caroline and I’ was the first clip of theirs I ever saw, the first song of theirs I ever heard, too–but I couldn’t find it on YouTube.)

7. The Cars, ‘Drive‘.
Dad used to turn the radio on when my sister and I went to sleep, and I have no doubt at all that this has produced in me a soft spot for mid-80s hits. Here’s another, ‘Take On Me‘, by A-ha. Possibly better than The Cars, I think.

8. Everything But the Girl, ‘Missing.‘
To think that I used to hate this song and think that it was the perfect example of everything that was shit about music. But then I wised up. Sneaker Pimps, ‘Sick‘, also good.

9. Dead Kennedys, ‘Police Truck.‘
I can still sing along after all these years.
Can’t believe its on fucking Guitar Hero, though.

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Well, that should do it from me, for now. And just think, so far nothing by The Doors, Talking Heads, Ministry, Green Day, The Necks, parody songs or songs in bad taste, Monty Python, Midnight Oil, etc., etc. …
Tune in for more, at an unspecified time in the future. Soupytwist!