No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.3.6 - "Get Free" (The Vines)

 

The Vines had an oddly rocky introduction to the music world, given how desperate everyone was to talk about them. This is easily, if not happily, explained: the band owed an obvious (though ludicrously overstated) debt to one of the 90s better rock bands, and had was fronted by someone who was struggling to balance the stresses of touring with their neurodiversity. Back then, it simply wasn't possible for music journalisms to recognise that description, and to comport themselves accordingly. 

They probably also didn't know what neurodiversity was.

Undervalued in all this was the fact that The Vines' first three singles, released between April and November 2002, are all indisputable bangers. "Get Free" might be the best; a snot-nosed ascending spiral of rejection-sensitive teenage apoplexy. A call-and-response bludgeon of a song, an opening number for a gig in hell.

All of which made the endless comparisons to That Other Band not just tiresome, but unconvincing. There's none of the too-cool-for-school exhaustingly cultivated air of disinterest here. Craig Nicholls might as well be screaming "Never mind? Are you shitting me, mate? Have you actually seen this fuckery we got right here?". Teenage confusion isn't disaffected, it's a white hot fury, quenchable only by the actual fucking sun. She doesn't love me; why should anyone? Nothing to do but charge towards the freedom of death, in the most extra way humanity has to offer.

It's massive, and it's dumb, and it's impossible to deny. It completely embraces the stupidity of one's teenage years without glamorising them. Can you believe we shits had to go through that shit?

Once a year or so, I get together with a bunch of old uni mates to play games, drink beers, and take stock of how far we've come. Oftentimes, we'll break out various iterations of Rock Band, for the concatenated nostalgia of both the songs themselves and the game that lets us pretend to play them. Sooner or later, we'll spool up "Get Free", and it's glorious, four men in their increasing years just devouring a song two decades old about being barely two decades old. And once we're done helping Nicholls scream and thrash and bark at the sun, we turn the game off to do something else. 

Because how the fuck are you going to top this?

B-Side

I went through dozens of videos of covers of this song, and absolutely none of them stray far from the original. This is the most divergence I could find, by virtue of including a female vocalist. That to me is a mark of a brilliant song - there's just no other way to imagine it existing.

Friday 40K: Sick Scenes

Continuing my habit of painting things that I've had lying around for a frankly embarrassing amount of time, I present the contents of Warhammer Conquest Issue (published Feb 2019). I've not really got any burning interest in the sons of Mortarion, but after some time poking around the internet, I found a colour scheme for Plague Marines I rather liked: The Purge.

This is my version of that scheme. The green was extremely difficult to even approximate - I eventually settled on a 5:1 mix of Death Guard Green and Sotek Green.

I assume that, as with my Primaris Interceptors, we're well past the point that a mere three Plague Marines are playable as a complete squad, but it's not like I've bought a Chaos codex in the last twenty years. These guys can just chill out with my Red Corsairs in my miniatures cabinet, grossing out visitors with their red-raw tentacles and copious pus-holes. Delightful.

 

Friday Talisman: A Troll On The Internet

I've decided to try and finish my remaining Talisman miniatures in order of release, as part of my broader effort to paint everything left that I acquired during my twenties*. The character art from the game is pretty different for this lad: a very green, slimy, Flubberesque vibe. I decided to go with something rockier, with the only green occasional outbreaks of moss/lichen.

I tried a new approach to shading red here, as well as a new recipe for wood. You can't really tell here, but I've given him somewhat catlike eyes, figuring they'd be helpful for making out any adventurers who've broken into his cave, what need a good clubbin'.

*Seventeen Talisman minis, a quarter of Assault On Black Reach, four Bretonnian knights, three Bonesingers, and a Chaos Sorcerer to go! Unless I've forgotten something! Which I almost certainly have!

A Load Of Balls 2025

Right, then. My prediction. Feels unusually tough this year, because I'm not sure how much can be gleaned from the O'Sullivan collapse.

Still, it is what it is. Gonna go Xintong 18 - 16 Williams.

D CDs #468: No

You know what? I decline. We're not going to do this.

I mean, I know I do do this, all the time. Rating acts of cultural appropriation is all but unavoidable if you want to talk about music. Next up is Springsteen, for God's sake, an artist I love, but who I couldn't possibly doesn't owe a huge debt to the music Butterfield rifled through for this platter.

But an album which gets picked as important because of how wildly successful the thievery involved was - "Where American white kids got the notion they could play the blues", to quote the Rolling Stone article this series is based on - it becomes something different. The theft is no longer just some awkward, unavoidable fact about the "how". It becomes the "why", too. The applause isn't for something that has been stolen. It's for the act of stealing itself.

Are the songs good? Sure. They've taken from the best. Those lads who nicked the Mona Lisa from the Louvre knew what they were doing, too. And one can perhaps admire the competence, even the audacity of how they pulled it off. 

I'm not going to be calling them painters, though, am I?  

Ten creeping tentacles of white supremacy.

Friday Dreadfleet: Additional Squid

At last! The miniature I was born to paint! Four years after I first started her base, the Black Kraken is done.

And her little dog auxiliary, too!

I reckon this pushes me just past the halfway point of painting up the entire set (fourteen years after it was released), so here's a nice moody (read: without proper lighting) picture of everything done so far. Genuinely think this is the best painting I've ever done.

Trek Update: April

A double helping of Trek stuff from me this month. First, my essay on the first episode of Lower Decks is up on the other blog (along with a link to buy my first book in paperback, if you live in the UK).

Second is a podcast I was invited to do with the hosts of Pedagodzilla, an awesome site which uses sci-fi and fantasy stories as a starting point for discussions on pedagogy. I got to chat to them for a while about why the Kobyashi Maru is an absolutely wretched test from a pedagogical standpoint.

Go check all that out!