The Music Video for MC Hammer's 2 Legit 2 Quit

I remember the day that M.C. Hammer released the video for the song 2 Legit 2 Quit…

It seems like a weird day to remember, if you weren’t there, but if you weren’t, I can assure you: It was huge. It was a huge, culturally important day.

At least, it felt like one.

His classic album “Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em” had completely dominated the previous year, spinning out monster hit after monster hit on its way to eventually selling twenty-two million copies worldwide, putting hip-hop on the commercial map in a way that no one had previously thought possible. He was more than a popular recording artist, he was a cultural force, a milestone, and nothing in pop music would ever be the same. And, just as importantly, he knew so.

Much Music, a television station that at the time played music videos, made a day of it, setting up a countdown clock in the corner of the screen ticking down to the video’s premier as I, like many my age, stayed tuned in, breathlessly awaiting this new missive from a man who’d quickly made himself one of the biggest stars on the planet. As I said, he was an important force in popular culture, a man in the midst of his moment, and there was a sense of bigness to the release of this new video, a video that was expected to lead the way forward, both for the man himself and the genre he’d managed to lead out and into the mainstream.

Obviously, a good deal of this was marketing, but I was thirteen years old at the time and very susceptible to marketing at that stage of my life. Regardless, the moment felt big.

And Big, if nothing else, the video most assuredly was. To this day the eighth most expensive music video ever made, 2 Legit 2 Quit ran a shocking 15 minutes long, featuring appearances by James Brown, Wayne Gretzky, Mark Wahlberg, Easy-E, Tony Danza, Queen Latifah and the actual Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, among many, many others. It was an assault to the senses, a video where everything was happening simultaneously, more dancing, more pyrotechnics, more hype, more sound, more fury, always MORE. It was a man at the peak of his powers who didn’t believe there was any such thing as overreach. Hammer was ascendant and believed he would never descend.

He ended the video with a straight-up run at Michael Jackson, implying that the now former King of Pop himself conceded that Hammer was the better dancer and, more bizarrely still, we all took him at his word, seeing nothing at all out of place in this claim. At that moment at least, they were equals, two titans hovering over the rest of pop music like colossi, unimpeachable, unrivaled except perhaps by one another…

Of course the moment didn’t last, no moment ever does, and by two years later the world was pretty much over Hammer, but his quick descent from the pop firmament is as irrelevant as the speed of his equally meteoric rise, to my mind. What matters is that he was there, he had his moment and he grabbed hold of it, owning it with more confidence than most could even imagine themselves capable of. There is no doubt that 2 Legit 2 Quit, though overblown at the time and hopelessly dated with hindsight, was exactly the statement that Hammer wanted to make, the purest distillation of artist and art, the most “Hammer” that Hammer ever got. It was what came when he was allowed to work without limitations of any kind and, even if it did signal the beginning of the inevitable end for him, in this it was his masterpiece.

And, as artists, we should all be so lucky as to have such an opportunity, even if only for a moment…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFCv86Olk8E

An Essay: Watching Dark Knight Rises

As you may well know, Kat and I, like everyone else in the world, recently went to see Dark Knight Rises. I’d have written this earlier, but couldn’t, as I only saw it Thursday last due to my longstanding policy of waiting to see movies with Batman in them until I could see them in IMAX.

Totally worth it, by the way. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.

You see, the couple sitting behind Kat and I talked the whole way through the first part of the film, and for a good long while that was unbearably irritating. The one who’d clearly not been in charge of choosing the film, a woman in her late thirties, maybe early forties, kept asking inane questions about what was going on in the movie. Things she should have known, and for a while it took me completely out of the moment. Kat, also, was annoyed by this, because this is annoying in an objective way. You don’t just talk the whole way through a movie, especially a movie where tickets are $19 due to the IMAX nature of the theater, and ESPECIALLY when the movie features Batman. It’s natural we’d be bothered by it.

However, I never got around to politely but firmly requesting her silence that I might enjoy a movie I’d waited years to see, because soon something happened that changed my view of the situation entirely.

During one of the early scenes with Alfred, the woman behind us turned to her date and asked “Is that his father?”

And that’s the moment I realized: This woman had never experienced Batman until that moment.

It wasn’t a simple case of her coming to the film franchise late, she’d literally never had a Batman experience of any kind before that moment. She’d missed the cartoon, she knew nothing of the comics, she’d somehow managed not to see seven major blockbuster Hollywood films of varying qualities. She was too young for the ‘60s television series, no doubt, but it still plays in reruns now and again. And yet, somehow, she’d managed to navigate somewhere near four decades of life without ever having been exposed to Batman in any meaningful way.

Perhaps this isn’t the case, but if you can think of a better explanation for the fact that she honestly didn’t know that Bruce Wayne was an orphan, I’d love to hear it.

And with that, my annoyance dissipated, replaced by a cauldron of more complex emotions. I did still want to enjoy the film, of course, but also I was fascinated by what was happening one row back. I was bearing witness to a fully-grown human being, being exposed to Batman for the first time in her life. I was jealous, in a way, of the sense of wonder now available to her, wonder that she’d never known to that point and which I, obsessed with the character as I am, can only distantly recall. I was deeply, deeply glad for her, obviously, because she was finding, late or not, something amazing about our culture, and I wondered if, coming to it later in life than anyone I’d ever met, she’d be able to take the same kind of joy in Batman that I’d spent a lifetime cultivating.

For the record: She absolutely was able. By halfway through the film she’d stopped asking questions regarding what was going on and was simply letting the experience wash over her, drinking in as much as she could of it while it was happening and trusting that she could fill in the gaps in her knowledge at some later date. Which is correct, I think, as far as approaching a movie like that goes. And at that point I was glad that she’d done this at one of the Nolan Batman films, rather than at one of the Schumacher ones. She’d never heard of Batman, only to stumble into one of the most perfect examples of the form available for public consumption.

A point with which she seemed to agree, as I overheard her asking the gentleman who’d brought her to watch the DVD’s of the other two films in the trilogy with her at some point as they were leaving the theater.

My point? Merely this: I saw Dark Knight Rises on Thursday, and it was awesome, but more importantly, I learned what kind of geek I am, because no matter how irritating the chatter behind me got, I was overcome with joy to hear it. Joy at witnessing somebody coming with fresh eyes, untainted by prior knowledge of the franchise, to experience something I care very deeply about and, having seen it, coming to understand what it is I love about Batman. And that made the annoyance I felt completely worthwhile, in my opinion, because I am, it turns out, the kind of geek that wants to share his love of culture with the world, and who believes that sharing Batman is the REAL joy of loving him in the first place.

Dark Knight Rises was, in short, awesome. A breathtaking piece of filmmaking that I want to see again at least once before it leaves the big screen. An immensely satisfying conclusion to a trilogy that only grows in importance in my mind with the passage of time. But the real show I saw Thursday last was taking place right behind me.

An Essay: On Zombies

Here’s something unusual for me on here.

As many of you might already know, I am, in addition to various other creative projects, tooling around character and plot ideas for a novel set during the zombie apocalypse. And, in order to give myself a better sense of what it is I‘m trying to accomplish, I figured it might aid me to put down on the page my thoughts on the genre, and in doing so sort out what zombie apocalypse means to me.

No, I was not visited by three spirits last night who taught me the true meaning of zombie apocalypse. There has been no major revelatory event in my recent life that’s caused me to focus on this particular branch of speculative fiction. Rather, I just love them. I love zombie books, I’m a sucker for zombie films, and I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about what I’d do in the event of an actual zombie apocalypse (spoiler alert; I’d be delicious). And with the time I’ve spent considering zombies and zombie apocalypse, I think I’ve come up with three major points that must be kept in mind whilst writing zombie fiction. These points aren’t immutable, no rules are ever written in stone, but I’ve found that they’re pretty solid guidelines for writing engaging, interesting zombie fiction, and using them you can write zombie tales with a little more depth than you otherwise would. And I’m hoping to write a zombie tale with a little depth. So; If you’re writing a zombie story of your own (and you should) these might prove helpful to you.

1) Remember: Your story is NOT about zombies.

This seems counter intuitive, insomuch as you are writing a zombie story. However, if you stop to look at the great zombie fiction/films of the past fifty years, you find the zombies a fairly incidental part of the narrative. Dawn of the Dead is not a movie about zombies, it’s a movie about out of control consumerism that happens to involve legions of the ravenous dead. The excellent World War Z is a book about societal breakdown in the face of a global pandemic, and the fact that the pandemic involves the dead rising and shambling across the earth is awesome, but not strictly neccessary. Even a zombantic comedy like Zombieland winds up being more about the need to connect meaningfully, to form families even while deprived of your own than it is about zombies, or indeed land. Zombies in fiction work better as metaphor for some larger issue you wish to address than they do as zombies, and there’s a very good reason for this.

Zombies are boring.

They move slow, they don’t get a lot of lines, generally in film they’re played by legions of extras rather than real actors. Zombies don’t do much, and prove rarely to be dynamic enough characters to warrant significant screen time. As an unstoppable force outside, waiting for their moment to overwhelm your defences, ever vigilant for the moment your beleaguered heroes let their guard down, they are a fantastic device, but as a “Monster” they don’t have a lot going on. And this is, I think, part of their appeal. A zombie story is, at it’s heart, a human story, telling the tale of the survivors of a great tragedy, struggling through their day-to-day existence, knowing each moment could be their last. It’s the human conflict inside the room that builds tension, not the legions of rotting, pitiless dead outside the doors. The zombies in a well handled zombie story should be, in this light, easily replacable with aliens, a flood, radioactive fallout from a war, or any other of a host of natural disasters, so long as it allows the characters you’ve collected together to enact the personal story you wish to tell. They serve, ultimately, only as metaphor.

On an unrelated note, the only other genre I can think of that exists only as metaphor is movies about boxing. I’ve never seen a movie about boxing, but I’ve seen movies about the human spirit, class issues, the right to die with dignity, the cold war and the inevitability of old age that happen to feature boxers as lead characters. Does this mean that a book about zombies who are forced into a boxing ring would sell? I have no idea, but I’d certainly buy it, if only to find out what it was actually about.

2) Nobody, and I mean nobody, cares where the zombies come from.

But Munsi, you might say, readers love information, and moreover hate plot holes, if we don’t explain the source of the force that will eventually drive the story forward how can we expect the reader to suspend disbelief? And, while this is true in a general way, there’s a weird loophole when it comes to zombie fiction, and I’m thinking it relates back to point 1). Since the story’s not about zombies, the source of unlife is a lot less relevant.

Readers suspend disbelief enough to accept zombies because they’ve purchased a zombie book/tickets to a zombie film. And due to the conventions of the style, they understand on some basic level that the zombies, while necessary to push the plot forward, do not constitute the plot in and of themselves, and as such require no great backstory.

Put another way, your reader doesn’t give a rat’s ass where the zombies come from. They just want to know a) what zombies are meant to represent in your story, and b) if they will eat that guy. And they would prefer the answer to b) to be “Yes”.

The best example of this rule I’ve ever seen was in the film 28 Days Later, specifically the first scene, where they fail utterly to follow this rule. They explain via a tacked on scene about PETA and rage-infected monkeys, and the results come off, to me at least, as incredibly forced and ham-fisted. Seriously, I find the scene unwatchable, it very nearly ruins what otherwise could be an excellent zombie flick for me. When I pop in the dvd, I generally skip over the scene, and doing so improves the movie immeasurably.

3) Think small.

There’s a reason you don’t often see world-spanning epics involving zombie apocalypse. It’s a style of speculative fiction that lends itself to little, personal stories, about people forced to work together to survive or, more often, who find themselves unable to do so and die because to it. Survivors of zombie apocalypse wind up barricaded against the hoard together and, almost by definition, trapped by walls of their own devising. This does not lend itself easily to bigness.

World War Z seems at first glance to be an exception to this, being a story of the global response to a zombie epidemic, but upon closer inspection the book really is a number of small, personal stories that happen to interact with one another in ways that eventually lead to a larger whole. It nearly functions as a short story collection that happen to stitch together to form a global tale. And this isn’t accidental.

Because zombies approach horror in a uniquely small manner. They will never outsmart you, they will rarely batter down doors, they don’t have “plans” the way other genre icons do. They will simply wait for you to go mad, for the unity of your group of survivors to fracture and break down, and pick you off as you fight amongst yourselves. Does this mean writing a zombie epic is impossible? No. But in doing so you would be forgoing the tension and claustrophobia that are the greatest strengths zombies bring to the table, narratively speaking. So, while it likely could be done, there are very few reasons I can see to want to.

This, in a nutshell, is what I believe in, when it comes to zombie fiction, and it’s what I want from the story I hope to write. It’s a little rambling, to be sure, but it’s good to get a statement of intent out before going to work on a new project, so I think this helps me out enormously. Am I right in my assessment of zombies? I think I am, for the project I’m considering at least. I’ll certainly be keeping the 3 major bullet points nearby as I’m writing my book, assuming I ever get far enough along in the project that I need them.

Also; I know this isn’t the usual sort of thing I put on this blog, but it’s my blog and I can put what I like on it. So there

What do you think? Any rules you’d add to my personal zombie bible? Any counter-examples you’d like to bring up? Anything I’ve mentioned here you violently disagree with? I’m always interested in talking about zombies, and can always use the opportunity to think about them in greater depth. Either this was helpful to you or it wasn’t, I wrote it for myself but I hope you at least found it marginally interesting, and I’m very interested in hearing your thoughts on zombies in return. I’d love, pardon the pun, to pick your brains about it…