Akira / Homer / Prince Love Symbol
Watched Akira again on the weekend (and all this posting reminds me, are we more than mere culture reviewers, endless analysts of our own consumption, of slightly fetishised products?) and was frankly surprised at how much more there is to the film than previously seen on crappy video copy with bad subtitling… Of course one has to wade through the at-times thick American accents trying to do Japanese over-emotion, but the animation is superb (was it
all cell-anime?) and the pacing has just the right amount of indirect suggestion, ie very little you need to see this in order to understand what goes on later. Oh, s’pose very much like comic book panelling. And impressively long. And at times similar to Spirited Away. But an amazing ability to make suggestive/affective environments.
Homer moment: ‘Homer is a double bacon genius burger…’
Ay, that Prince Symbol album is walkman-heaven-bound. There was a time when my Sony had it on heavy rotation, I remember it during my Seattle stopover, busrides and burgerstands and rain. Now I’ve got a new discman/mp3 player it’s on rotation again. And it’s a huge behemoth tour de funk. Very 90s funk. Big package funk, glitzy shiny and cheesy. So much bigger in scale than diamonds/pearls, so much more double-album-live-at-budokan heavier. So much variety, so much rudeness. And lots of key P moments, all wrapped in sexfunk wrapped in pop: let me see the booty boom, what am I guilty of?, like a flame she came and I was no longer cold, the very jazzy-stacked horn motifs on Sexy MF, the Jackson-esque rhythm-singing on My name is P, the amazingly tasteful, economic guitar solo on Damn U, the big-tight snare sounds all through the album, there’s P the educationalists’ friend, the girlfriend-sympathiser, the avant-mystic-obscurist, the cornball rap-isms like In da House, And I’m Out etc, and as always with P I love his amalgamation of sex and outrageously-overdriven lead guitar, and all the grinding grinding grinding. And if you listen closely to the hammy Kirsty Ally bits — you can hear the edits.
Also, I remember Michael B complaining about having to nail 3 chains o’gold in
one take — that’s some demanding work — was
murder he says. Did you know P made a video clip for almost every song on that damn album. I wanna Melt w. You features Prince on rollerskates. I did a quick google for Tony M but he seems to have disappeared off the planet, along with his raps. There must be a support group for ex-Prince musos who’ve slid into deep failure/obscurity (amalgamated with the ex-Zappa bandmember’s union). But Sonny’s a great bass man.
