The revelations of this episode should have been much more dramatic. But, like all the stunning developments of this season, they lack the proper oomph because I knew they had to happen.

When I reviewed Epitaph One, one of my critiques was that the remote imprinting was impossible given the current system of the Dollhouse; putting Active architecture in place was a complex process, as we saw in the first episode of the show, and if it were to happen something had to change, something beyond a mere remote wipe, and in this episode it did.

It was interesting how it played out, and the twist with DeWitt made the event more than merely going through the motions, but it still felt mostly empty to me.

I don’t think I’ve brought this up except in my tweets but the biggest problem with the jump into the future is that Dollhouse hadn’t earned it yet. When Battlestar Galactica jumped forward, it was daring and ballsy, but it would’ve been a cop-out if they’d done it too early. Similarly, Lost’s flashforward set up a future to be fulfilled in the upcoming season, but it worked because the story was dense enough, the history rich enough, to make those future events significant.

Dollhouse didn’t have the strength of its character’s histories to make the vision of the future impact the viewer, so they took the other route: story. But while Jack’s flashforward was exciting because we saw that people got off the island, it was stronger still because Jack wanted to go back. Character trumps story. Always.

Anyways, I don’t want to overwhelm this review with even more railing against the almost unanimous love of Epitaph One, because the episode was still a great one on its own merits.

Echo is rummaging around the real world, still AWOL from last week’s episodes, when she happens to screw up an already screwed up (possibly illegal though that’s not really clear) immigrant’s life. Meanwhile, at the Dollhouse, DeWitt is getting pressured to find Echo.

Jumping ahead three months, DeWitt is no longer head of her Dollhouse, with her Rossum boss Harding taking over the day-to-day. Other things have changed at the Dollhouse. Topher has been given a mandate to develop a remote wipe technology, under the guise of simplifying the Handler’s life, and Harding seems more open to sending a Doll out on a recklessly dangerous mission, as the sadist client in the first act makes more than clear. After Topher unveils the remote wipe gun he’s developed he secrets DeWitt away to his hideaway room where he reveals he’s been done the remote wipe tech for months but feared what Rossum would do with it.

He saw Bennett working on a similar small project for Rossum when he was in DC in the last episode, and figured out that each Dollhouse is building a component for a larger system: a remote imprinting device. A technique that doesn’t require the Active architecture in the person’s brain before imprinting. In fact, Topher built it. Shortly afterward, DeWitt brings Topher’s designs to Harding, despite Topher’s desire that Rossum never get their hands on such a terrifying power. And so, in a vain attempt to regain good graces with Rossum, DeWitt has assured the apocalypse.

Meanwhile, Echo has been living a strange sort of domestic life with Ballard, who she sought out after screwing up her attempt to help that immigrant, Galena. She’s been working as a nurse, thanks to her ability to recall previous imprints on demand, and eating mac and cheese — none of her clients ever seemed to want a woman who could cook — as Ballard teaches her to use her imprints to their fullest. Echo plans on going back to the Dollhouse when she’s ready, and she thinks she’ll be ready when she can free Galena from prison.

Thanks to her nurse position, she goes to the jail and sets up a fake death for Galena, but the plan goes awry when she wakes from her death a little too quickly. After that, Echo uses her ‘Blue Skies’ persona from early last season, to break herself and Galena out of the jail. Now that Galena is free, Echo and Paul have constructed a new life for her, as Lisa, and then come back to the Dollhouse where DeWitt, drunk on her restored power, banishes her to solitary confinement until she can find out what happened to Echo for those three months. And then the episode is over.

Thematically, this episode had a few nice touches. The idea of Echo and Paul giving Galena a new identity, to escape her sordid past, is an excellent parallel to the idea of the Dollhouse. Also, Echo’s love for Ballard is another in a long line of developments in Echo’s personal life, one they emphasized this episode when she talked to him about how she’s not Caroline, she’s Echo, and what if Echo shouldn’t be waiting for Caroline to talk her body back. What if Caroline isn’t all she’s cracked up to be? The most interesting development of this episode was that we now have a love triangle between two bodies: Echo loves Paul, but Paul loves Caroline.

Similarly, Topher is continuing his growth, becoming one of the more reliable dramatic pivots the show has. And at the same time, his inventive mind couldn’t help but build the remote imprinting device. He loathed the very idea of that technology, but he built it nonetheless. Topher works as a rough analog of human scientific progress as seen through the eyes of someone afraid of scientific progress. The fact that it mostly works for someone like me who believes in scientific progress, and that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” is a testament to the writers’ ability to create a compelling story.

Overall, Meet Jane Doe was a great episode, only slightly hampered by the ever-looming shadow of Epitaph One. I’ll publish my review of episode 2×08, A Love Supreme, shortly.

Battlestar Galactica ended on Friday, and given that I’ve devoted a decent chunk of time to watching that show over the years, I thought I’d quickly write up a few of my thoughts. Overall, I liked it. There were a few odd moments, Cavil’s and Helo’s ends come to mind, the second hour felt tonally off when compared to the rest of the series, and the attempts to tie in the disparate mythological elements they’d established over the years felt too mechanical, but I enjoyed it in the moment, for the most part. At some point, maybe I’ll go back and really critically examine the show as a whole, or give more than a glib sentence-long blurb about this episode in particular, but at the moment, I’ve other television to watch.

Up until now, Dollhouse has been a good show. Even a great show at times. But it wasn’t a Joss Whedon show. The first five episodes were hindered by network interference, but with this episode Whedon finally got out from under the thrall of Fox’s “creative consultancy” and Dollhouse finally became a Joss Whedon show. Before now, you could see inklings of Whedonism in the show — Lubov’s “Sweet Home Georgia” line from a couple weeks ago, in particular — but this episode brought it all together; there was intrigue, philosophical pondering, humour, and plot twists galore. More (a lot more) after the break.

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Three years ago I noticed a bunch of CDs on sale on amazon.ca for 99 cents each. I already had an order that needed a few more dollars to get free shipping and I love music, so I added a few for the sake of curiousity. A few weeks later the order arrived and I immediately started going through the CDs I purchased. The first I opened up to listen to was The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place by Explosions in the Sky. Immediately, I knew that I had discovered something amazing. Hidden in this seeming pile of refuse was an album that from its first echoed notes took hold of me and drew me in to a world I had never experienced previously and left me wanting more.

Eight months ago, I walked into a low capacity hall at San Diego Comic-Con for an early morning panel about an upcoming show from NBC called Kings. After a short discussion of the basic premise of the show — an alternate history drama set in a monarchy named Gilboa inspired by the biblical tale of David and Goliath — they screened the first twenty minutes of the pilot episode, and I experienced that same enraptured envelopment into a brand new world that that amazing album had beset upon me. Now, eight months after that initial burst of interest followed by a relative dearth of new information, Kings has finally premiered and my first impression has only been enriched by the complexities I once imagined were possible now made manifest by the remainder of this amazing premiere.

Over at Ain’t It Cool News, they’ve compiled snippets of the many reviews of this show. Some of them are fairly positive, but it seems as though most of them chide the show for having cheesy aspects, or soap opera trappings, comparing it to shows like Dynasty and Dallas. I’m not sure why any show that manages to tell a serious story is immediately a soap opera. Is Battlestar Galactica a soap opera because of its intense dour depiction of life? Of course not. It’s merely a show willing to deal with things seriously, as is Kings. To call the show a soap opera is to call Deadwood, or other such character drama, a soap opera: it’s not disingenuous to do so, but it belittles the show to use such a pejorative. All of the criticisms, though, are not unfounded. But the good, and more importantly the potential for good, more than outweighs what little there is to legitimately criticise.

The main story of the premiere, and likely of the rest of the series, is of David, played by Christopher Egan. Taking his name from the biblical slingshot-wielder, the show begins with David living the rural life as King Silas of Gilboa — Ian McShane in a typically brilliant performance — unveils the shiny new capital, Shiloh, built upon the ashes of the cities destroyed by the years of war that ravaged Gilboa before Silas united the lands in the unification War, a costly conflict that left David fatherless with a disenfranchised mother.

Before the inaugural speech is over, tensions are rising with the neighbour nation Gath and two years later the war carries on with David now at the front lines. When the survivors of an ambushed squad are taken hostage by Gath, David defies the orders and, crossing the front lines, rescues the hostages, including the King’s son. This rescue is no small feat given that the front lines of the war are lined by Gath ‘Goliath’ tanks, a menacing visage to all Gilboan soldiers. And so David returns as the hero who slayed a Goliath and saved the King’s son. That’s the first twenty minutes wrapped up in a few sentences. There’s much more there, but I find that the more I like a show the more I want to detail every nuance of the scene (which is why I rarely write about Lost; I don’t want to end up writing 15,000 words per episode) so I’ll leave the rest to the viewer to relish. I will say however, that those twenty minutes are the best and most effective exercise in world building I’ve ever seen.

This premiere has already established that, while this is an alternate history with kingdoms where America once reigned, this world only diverges from ours in the last two centuries. David’s love of classical piano, and more importantly his playing of a piece by Liszt, underscore an implicit history that will certainly get explored as the series continues. How did the world of Liszt change such that not America but Gilboa and Gath were formed? Hopefully, the writers already know the answer.

Perhaps as impressive as the world building is the character building, with every character having complexity and ambiguities which can be developed and exploited over time. The King’s wife, for example, is a quiet but manipulative woman who publicly expresses a distaste for politics while privately and silently ensuring her family’s skeletons stay in their respective closets. Similarly, his son portrays himself a womanizer to the paparazzi to keep up appearances, despite his homosexuality. His desire for power is clear but he is neither the villain nor the brat in this story. At least not yet.

The King’s brother-in-law, the head of a large corporation, Crossgen, which has bankrolled Silas’ rule for years is the most villainous character introduced thus far. His need for war to ensure quarterly profits impel him to push Silas to war despite peace being offered. It’s not until David, once again defying the will of the King, bravely reaches out to their faceless enemy, as the Goliaths stare him down, and brings about renewed peace talks, that his lust for war is sated. Even then, his plots and machinations continue apace to replace the King and continue the profitable war.

David is the archetypal hero. He is a farm-boy turned war hero who doesn’t understand nor desire the world into which he’s been thrown. He quickly falls for the King’s daughter, herself a passionate supporter of improving the nation’s health care much to the King’s dismay. His star rises precipitously, first due the the rescue of the hostages, then later from his part in the reestablishment of peace talks with Gath.

And of course, King Silas himself, around whom all this intrigue revolves, is one of the great draws of this show. Ian McShane, playing a character as conniving as Al Swearengen in a world much more civilized yet just as brutal as Deadwood, is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale network television environment. Silas is a complicated man, a melange of numerous regal stereotypes. His opening speech, and most likely every speech after that, describes a story from the founding days of Gilboa when a flock of butterflies came upon him and perched upon his head in a ring as if they were a living crown. A sign from God. And yet, he has none of the trappings of the typical religiously driven leaders of our time: he knows full-well that evolution is a truth, and devotes a family breakfast to the topic; he accepts his son’s homosexuality as a part of his nature; he is an eloquent leader, who uses his words for both good and ill; he is a brilliant tactician whose military experience lent itself to the political travails of a King. Of course, his religiosity is tempered by his desire for power, and when the Reverend Samuels disowns Silas near the end of the premiere he is more than willing to abandon God. But despite these two conflicting aspects of his larger-than-life personality, beneath it all is a long dormant desire for a quieter life. He is a tragic yet terrifying hero, one we know will eventually fall away for David to rise.

The two weak points of the premiere are the wartime scenes and the relationship between David and the King’s daughter. That Gath would hold hostages just past the front lines of battle, even temporarily, strain credulity. In addition, David’s impassioned speech to Gath asking for compassion and common ground would have likely ended with David brutally destroyed by the numerous tanks trained on him throughout the speech. But I take both of these points in stride because a) this is a different world, with different alliances and territories, strategies and tactics could be slightly different b) David held a white cloth stained in his brother’s blood as he delivered his speech; had Gath fired upon a white flag, there surely would have been international repercussions and c) it is David’s destiny to become King — the final scene where the butterflies land atop his head to signal his coming reign is a sure sign of that — and so I’m willing to accept a few well-timed mistakes on his enemies’ parts; many of the most successful kings and emperors of the past have had such luck in the ascension to power.

The other weak part, the love story, is weak because it happened too easily. There’s no real conflict there, they both seem to already be smitten with each other and in a relationship. I was hoping for it to take a while for their bond to grow before all that happened, but this is a minor quibble as the show could easily still get those things done over the course of the season by introducing conflict. It’s also very daring that the show took what appears to be the only romantic relationship on the show and resolved it so quickly. It’s like if the writers of The Office got Jim and Pam together in the first episode. So I’m willing to believe, for now, that they’ve thought about this and are subverting the stereotypes again for effect.

It’s been a couple days now and the ratings have been tallied and they’re atrocious. Kings had a horrible opening. Kings has already finished filming for the season and I used to think that networks wouldn’t cancel a show with complete episodes ready to air, but Firefly and Daybreak shattered that misconception, so I have to hope that the word of mouth on Kings spreads fast and the ratings improve week-over-week, because this show is a real adventure. It’s an adventure in storytelling, it’s an adventure in world-building, and perhaps most importantly it’s an adventure in broadcasting. It’s the sort of high concept high drama story that’s been relegated to cable television in recent years, and yet here it is on a Big Three network (admittedly the smallest of the Big Three). If Kings becomes a ratings success, as it deserves to be, it could be a catalyst for the networks to reinvigorate the increasingly conservative and middling television they produce.

I loved the premiere. I’m  deeply impressed with the show so far. It’s an achievement in storytelling, and I’m sure the subsequent episodes will be as good if not better.

Well, the idea of an episode where Echo plays a backup singer/secret bodyguard wasn’t immediately appealing to me, the show managed to ask a few interesting questions and keep me entertained during those scenes while furthering the mythology of the show. The real accomplishment was, of course, having legitimately good original pop songs. When Chuck had its rockstar-in-trouble episode a couple weeks ago they had to fake it but this show busted a full-fledged dance number out to kick off the hour.

The superstar-gone-crazy storyline isn’t entirely original, but because this is Dollhouse you get a chance to compare the assembly-line construction of pop stars the industry operates on  – there’s even a line about Rayna, the pop star in trouble, having stalkers since “singing for the Mouse” a clear reference to the Disney Mousketeers and their continual stream of stars — with the programming the Dollhouse gives to its Actives. Of course, there are obvious advantages to a story such as this…

Meanwhile, in the Dollhouse story-line a new aspect of the Active’s programming was revealed in this episode: Actives are given a persona, the identity they’re portraying, and a parameter, the underlying requirements of the mission. Echo’s persona is a singer, but her parameter is to protect Rayna at all costs. It’s an interesting addition to the mythos that opens up lots of possibilities regarding the inconsistent programming of the subconscious and conscious minds of the Actives.

The story definitely goes over-the-top with the diva personality — the exasperated line “Is somebody eating a mint?!” comes to mind — but I suppose it helps in establishing that she’s crazy. Echo’s solution to the Rayna’s suicidal tendencies is simple: bring her close to death so she can realize it’s not that appealing. But it breaks from her mission parameter in a 3 Laws of Robotics sort of way, which is interesting but a cause of consternation. Because of Echo’s improvisation there’s talk of an Attic, where inactive Actives go to sleep forever, which harkens to the boxing of Cylon models on BSG. But in the end she saves Rayna from herself. She also seemingly remembering her earlier interactions with Sierra at the Dollhouse during the mission; even stranger, Echo and Sierra seemed to remember each other when back at the Dollhouse. Things are moving quickly here, and Echo’s awakening will surely be a “game-changing” event in Dollhouse should the show survive long enough to feel its effects.

On a related note, I have to say I was really impressed by the performance from Dichen Lachman, the actress playing Sierra. Her captivity scenes were very good. She played the fear very realistically. Kudos to her. I just hope she doesn’t play an Australian persona too often; I know she’s already Australian so there’s no need to work on an accent but the landscape of American television is becoming inundated by Australian actors playing American roles which on occasion have to pretend to be Australian. Not that it’s a bad thing when they’re all as gorgeous as Yvonne Strahovski, Dichen Lachman, and Alex O’Loughlin.

And finally, Ballard’s Russian mob informant is revealed to actually be a Dollhouse Active presumably on a mission to get Ballard killed. It’s not a huge surprise, again because of the press photos showing that actor as an Active, but it’s a new development and the reveals thus far only skim the surface of what Viktor’s mission actually is and what the Dollhouse has in store for Ballard. At first glance, the information given to Ballard was to set him up to be killed by the mob, but who’s to say what the real intention was. Ballard’s plots are all so minor and insubstantial right now, it’s hard to put any effort into examining them, but I’m sure as the show progresses he’ll get closer to the Dollhouse and more integrated with the rest of the show’s stories.

The show’s improving. This week’s episode wasn’t as good as last week’s for the same reason the pilot was a little lackluster: the main story wasn’t that enthralling. But the show is getting better. The characterizations are getting richer, the long-term stories are getting layered in wonderfully, and the dialogue is getting smoother and Joss-ier. So freaking watch it, because the ratings are not good people.

I remember a few years ago when commercials for Medium were played on the radio. I’d heard the basics of the show and the commercial clued me in as well, and yet despite my love of sci-fi and supernatural stories I had absolutely no desire to watch it. The reason is because it sounded horrendous.

The lines they chose for that commercial were cliched, hackneyed, and emotionless. And I do mean emotionless. I was amazed at the utter lack of conviction from the characters speaking. I was convinced that no matter what I had heard of this new show ‘Medium’ these commercials had to be a joke. Either a parody making fun of the show or the show itself was an elabourate hoax design to get a few laughs from the horrible commercials.

So since then, Medium has managed to become a reliable not-quite-hit-but-still-fairly-popular-in-the-ratings show for NBC, a network with little to no real successes in the last five years. I’m not quite sure why, but there it is, chugging along.

Anyways, recently I noticed some of the writers on Aint It Cool News offering support for Medium, not the kind of support they would give for something like Battlestar Galactica or Lost, but support nonetheless. Tonight since I was watching President Obama’s Press Conference and then Heroes after that, and Medium was coming on after Heroes and this episode of Medium had Sam Trammell (from True Blood) guest starring I figured I’d watch a bit of the show. See what I was missing.

Not. Freaking. Much.

Let me lay out the opening scene for you. A guy and a girl are having network TV sex, that is they’re fully clothed but they’re moaning suggestively, and the guy decided he wants to choke a bitch. She indicates numerous times that he should let up on the choking, because as awesome as oxygen-deprived orgasms are they’re only awesome when you’re not dead. And I should reiterate that this was not awesome cable TV sex where it’s rough and wild. This was slow-thrusting, gentle-and-intimate network TV sex. And yet in the “throes of passion,” he managed to not hear her numerous calls for help until she was dead and he had come.

When he was done, he shook her a little telling her that the game was over, except in a broken phrasing that seemed like it would’ve come from a five year old, and then realized that (gasp!) she was dead. What an unfortunate accident! Oh well, time to dispose of the corpse…

So he drags her off to the nearby ditch and tosses her in. Well, what man hasn’t accidentally killed his date during erotic asphyxiation? He heads back to his car but then — Hark! — he hears her breathing in the ditch. She’s alive! Oh this unfortunate accident will no longer haunt him! Years later, they’ll regale their family with the hilarious-in-hindsight anecdote. Oh wait, no. He picks up a rock and finishes her off… WTF?!?!

That was just the opening scene. I was already amazed at how stupid this show was but it had so much more stupid to offer.

Here’s the thing about procedurals. They all have a basic schema. The crime/medical mystery/whatever occurs in the teaser, and then through intelligence, investigation, and ingenuity the mystery is solved and the story is wrapped up in 44 minutes or so. What Medium does is slightly different¹. The main character, Allison Dubois, get psychic visions of crimes while she sleeps and she can also talk to ghosts that are just hanging around waiting for their murders to be solved or whatever it is that ghosts do. So on Medium, she sees the crime — who did it, who died, where it happened — at the very beginning of the episode. What happens after that has nothing to do with the solving of a murder. She doesn’t have any particular investigative genius, she just gets the answers delivered to her without any effort. (Also, what little I saw of her family’s really stupid B-storyline was really stupid. I hardly paid attention to it because it was really fucking stupid so I’m not going to put any more words to it.)

So, I gave it a shot. I watched almost a full episode. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. But it was still much much worse than anything else I watch. It sucked then. It sucks now. Avoid it if you can.

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Footnotes

1. I am, admittedly, basing this off of a single episode but if any episode is this terribly plotted then they fucking deserve it. [↩]

Lately, I’ve been staying up later and later every night. While 2 in the morning was an uncommon but not unprecedented bed time for my self over the last year, more recently it’s become the earliest I make it to bed. Because of this I’ve been catching bits and pieces of episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise. I’ve spoken previously about my distaste for Voyager and how overall even Enterprise was a better show. I’ve espoused this for quite some time both here and in one-on-one conversations with fellow Trekkie friends. Clearly, I have some retractions to make.

Enterprise is not a better show. Once Manny Coto took over the show and shifted the plots away from the Temporal Cold War nonsense, the show got markedly better. And at that time, it was probably better than most, if not all, of Voyager. But overall? Not even close.

In truth, I’ve never even seen the majority of Enterprise. I missed most of seasons two and three and what little I’ve seen of it hasn’t made me want to go back to it. Watching almost any episode of Voyager makes me change the channel just as fast but that’s due to the accumulation of ill will. It took seven years of consistent underperforming to get me to that point. Enterprise did it in just one.

But, like Voyager before it, Enterprise had a great premise. Not the specific premise they had, but rather their general idea. Telling the story of the first exploratory crews of Starfleet before the Federation had been created could have been spectacular. There had been stories of pre-Federation colonization from the very beginning of Star Trek, and to see the first official envoys head out into those waters was a tantalizing prospect. There are elements of this in Enterprise but too little of it. Their ship is a little too tip-top. NASA put a lot of work into the Apollo capsules but they were still barely capable hunks of metal.

Beyond this, the very first premise the show pushes on you is that for fifty years after Zephram Cochrane’s first foray into Warp speed, Earth barely ventured out again. Not because the people of the world didn’t suddenly and miraculously form a global government, but because some Vulcans said we weren’t ready.

The real problem is that they wanted to show the birth of the Federation while ignoring all the aspects of humanity that would have led to Earth being impactful enough to be at the head of a large Federation. Aside from our ability to work with each other and form consensuses — a quality the show rarely brings to light — we’re also a fairly egotistical and brutal species. We wouldn’t have listened to the Vulcans, and while we’d play nice with neighbouring species, we’d also be constantly working on attaining military dominance. It’s a show that came out a decade too early. The kind of rough and ragged sensibility behind Battlestar Galactica would have been ideal for a Star Trek prequel.

Brannon Braga and Rick Berman are ultimately at fault. They were involved in TNG and DS9 but there must have been some checks and balances further up the food chain on those shows because once they were the lead architects of Star Trek it went down the crapper. So I hereby rescind any and all endorsements of Star Trek: Enterprise I have ever offered. That show fucking sucked. And I pray I never stay up late enough to see it on my television again.

Music today, popular music anyways, seems to rely much much more on catchy hooks and addictive beats. There’s nothing immanently wrong with music like this, but the fact is music can do better.

Verses have become afterthoughts, subsumed by choruses and pre-choruses. What’s worse is that songs often begin with the chorus now. Starting a song in media res is not daring, innovative, or Tarantino-esque. It’s simplistic song writing, relying on simple repetitive overgeneralized lyrics which water down the more complex issues dealt with in the verse. As OutKast said in “Hey Ya!” about the song’s message that Love is not magical and eternal: “Y’all don’t want to hear me, ya just want to dance.”

Our culture is far too invested in distractions. I can hardly act self-righteous about this point given the sheer quantity of television I watch. Escapism is something I do every day. But often my escapism isn’t into a shiny happy world of harmonies and melodies. It’s a gritty realistic sobering take on life in space that takes on issues our society grapples with daily. Or it’s a tale of battles between good and evil occurring in one of the darkest times in our recent history. The things I watch and listen to for entertainment inform my views of the world today. If the same is true for the people who listen to current pop music as their predominant music then future generations are fucked.

Music was most likely the first art form our species experimented with (this can be easily disputed by virtue of the ephemeral nature of sound, but at least intuitively makes sense) so its power should not be underestimated. We began with simple grunts and rhythms and as we grew more sophisticated we developed harmony and melody and with the advent of language we incorporated lyrics into the tribal drums and bone flutes. So don’t tell me lyrics don’t matter.

Lyrics do more than repeat tropes over newly generated beats. And if you have nothing of value to say with your words, then let your instruments do the talking. I have nothing against a catchy beat, and I have no fundamental issue with pop music. I simply believe that music doesn’t need to be watered down, nor should it be; it should be distilled into its harshest, most biting, most truthful. One of my favorite songs of recent history is Casey’s Song by City and Colour which contains the lyrics “With you on my mind and my heart held in your hand, screaming ‘Break me’” and that’s it. I don’t need a verse to elaborate on that, those few words along with the accompanying music tell a story better than most exposition-laden pop songs.

It may seem like those two points are contradictory but they’re not; I want terse and smartly written lyrics, but I’m not willing to put up with pop music’s current love of short verses and repetitive choruses with little substance. Pop music is popular music, not bubbly vapid superificial music.