Guide to Modern Saturday Night Live Disappointment

                Saturday Night Live is such an abject failure it’s not even funny. I know it goes through stages of relevancy but this is ridiculous. Nothing it has presented lately has left a lasting impression on my mind. At the end of it I only have one thought in my mind: “Why”. Why did I decide to stay in on a Saturday night when I could be out living it up, singing Karaoke, drinking, going to a concert, joking with friends, going to bed early, writing blog posts, clipping my fingernails,  literally anything is a better use of time than the succubus of time Saturday Night Live. 

                I have come up with a way of charting the decline of the average episode. Obviously this isn’t true for all cases, but for a majority of their recent output. Without a breakout star, there isn’t anything drawing you to it. Rather, people watch it out of a mindless obligation, like moths to the light. Each time people watch it hoping “Maybe it will be good tonight”. Such thinking is hopeless delusion. Perhaps some time in the future it may regain its marbles and begin to offer biting satire. Until such time, it continues to get smoked by “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” despite having an entire week to write it. During that week period, the writers work diligently to water down jokes to a point so bland it could be served as airplane food. 

                Below is the breakdown:

1.       Cold Open – This usually is an extremely weak political sketch taking on some relevant topic that’s been blaring loudly on the front page of the New York Times for about a month. If the open is anything other than a spoof on a current event (cultural or political) it will be a particularly weak show. 

2.       Guest Monologue – Whoever the guest is gets a chance to ramble on for about 5 to 15 minutes. Generally speaking since the writers don’t write it this happens to be one of the funniest moments of the show. Those who are ‘flash in the pan’ popular fail at this segment, resorting to childish skits. Better guests bode well for a better show. Exceptions do appear but as a rule of thumb it is fairly solid. 

3.       Immediate skits following the Monologue are more enjoyable than what comes later. Saturday Night Live front-loads the quality of the program knowing how old its target audience is getting. Writers know as a fact how hard it is to stay awake until 1 AM for people above the age of 50. Thus, these skits tend to fare better than the rest of the show. 

4.       Andy Samberg Sketch – Andy Samberg is Saturday Night Live’s token young person’s comedian. Most of the sketches mock things the elderly would find funny (Vincent Price, Communism Jokes, William Howard Taft jokes). These are called “Digital Shorts” and vary in quality. What Andy tries to do is create something ‘meme-worthy’ where he consciously knows people will share it on their friends’ Facebook Walls. Digital Shorts with a song involved have a better shot of accomplishing this goal. Laser Cat episodes fail in this attempt. But all Andy Samberg sketches try to create the false illusion that Saturday Night Live is a cool, hip show intended for relevant twenty something viewers. 

5.       Weekend Update – Weekend Update inspired comedians such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to create their own successful shows. Now Weekend Update consists of those shows’ rejected jokes. In the off-chance the material is good; the Weekend Update person makes sure the delivery sucks to completely kill the joke. As a side note, this segment can be funny if they make fun of local New York politicians. I’m not sure why, but they have a knack for eviscerating any New York based politician. To be fair though, New York politicians make jokes about them too tempting and easy.

6.       Last Half Hour in the Program – If you’ve made it this far you’re pretty tough or a masochist. This is the dregs of the show. No matter how good the program has been this is truly terrible. You know how people bring magazines with them into the bathroom? Well, in this case, the writers bring a blank notepad with them whenever they use the restroom. Whatever they write in that couple minute period becomes a full bodied skit. It is generally about as good as the excrement those writers pumped out of their bodies. 

7.       Final Ten Minutes of Saturday Night Live – These ten minutes wish they were as good as human excrement. You should probably turn off the TV before this happens. 

My hope is you learn from these basic steps. I don’t want people ruining their Saturday nights for such nonsense. Even Wednesday afternoons in college in between classes watching recent repeats on Comedy Central sounds like a true waste to me. Perhaps one day I’ll see a change in this, in how Saturday Night Live gets better writers and better material. Who knows if that will happen, though I’d like to be one of the ones who finally bring the franchise back to greener, funnier pastures.

Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues

                    After a long period of time, the new Fleet Foxes have arrived. Of course, like all highly anticipated albums, this one leaked long ago. To give a short summary of the album, if you enjoyed their first album, you’ll enjoy the second. “Helplessness Blues” is an effective follow-up to their first blockbuster album. I’d be surprised if this one does worse, I think it is roughly as good, no better no worse. For those who were expecting a dramatic change of pace, no. Bearded weirdoes living in the forest aren’t exactly the people to look to for change unless that change involves protecting Middle Earth from the forces of darkness.

                People seem to be into this one a little less than the first. Timing seems to have played a part. When their first album came out, it came out in the dearth of 2008. For me, 2008 was not a great year in music. Usually I can list off the albums I really enjoyed for each year, but for that one nothing comes to mind besides No Age. Compared to all the mediocrity strewn about for that year, Fleet Foxes came out as a breath of fresh air. 

                2009 changed everything, including 2011 oddly. All those bands sitting on their laurels during 2010 came out (Neon Indian and Washed Out). There are just so many highly anticipated releases from other artists Fleet Foxes gets lost in the shuffle. Mesh that with the inherently easy-going non-offensive nature of the music and you can understand why there’s been a bit less attention paid. 

Fleet Foxes may be the indie answer to James Taylor. At times I hear stuff so positively likable I desire to put on anything edgier. A lack of edge is their selling point, but I usually need a bit of something dark to keep me interested. By editing out anything dark I sort of long for something evil. If this is blues, I don’t enough if I could handle them happy. Perhaps years from now they’ll become a vaguely ironic Karaoke pick as drunken fools sing about the “Blue Ridge Mountains”. Having such likability isn’t a bad thing; it just can get a bit much as times. Personally, I’m digging the new album. 

                Vocals are strong throughout the album, angelic almost. Each arrangement shows the tenderness and care. Considering all the electronic stuff milling around, they will at least manage to attract a few struggling with the deluge of artificial sound. Guitars sound natural. Raw emotion is untreated. Passion can be felt in each little twang, every small, low-key strum. Brushes of the drums work too in creating something more organic and fluid. Reasons like this are how they will manage to get an audience. 

                Sometimes I think timing is everything with critical reviews. As I listen to their album, I feel they might have done better in 2004-2005. By now the taste isn’t favoring them in any ways. Large bands that did what Fleet Foxes do now, with ornate lyrics and complicated arrangements, have fallen hard. In that era, Fleet Foxes might have been a bigger success than it is now. Perhaps if the audience was more in tune or more accepting of the sound Fleet Foxes might have been ever more of a critical darling (though they are still beloved by anyone’s standards).

                Basically, check out their album. Though there aren’t any real detours or surprises, excluding longer track lengths, it can be nice to sit out with a band knowing exactly what is coming. Having standards and expectations met is certainly no bad thing, considering how many sophomore albums miss the mark (Hercules and the Love Affairs, MGMT, etc.). Consider Helplessness Blues your spring album, preparing you for growth and sunshine.

Rules of Karaoke

If you happen to someone in a major metropolitan area this will be something you’ll no doubt get subjected to at some point. You may be sitting in front of a cheap laptop. You may be doing dishes. You may be doing any number of things when you get that call. The call to arms, the call to bring your voice out into the open, unleashed on an unsuspecting populace will happen. It is only a matter of time. 

Oddly, your ability to sing is the least of your worries. Karaoke is not taken seriously in the United States, rather it is a way for people to bond and see how they act. Think of it how businessmen view golf. It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, but your actions as the game is played. Can you keep cool if you make a bad pick? Do your songs reflect a hope to engage others in song, or are they more selfish choices? In case your singing is particularly awful, are you aware of this or woefully ignorant.

Nothing I say or do can fully prepare you for when this day comes. Keep in mind that this is a very interactive sort of activity so you may want to be attuned to some of those surrounding you. Since it is Karaoke, you usually have never been to the place before and you’ll only know half of the people there. My personal experience has varied between being a fun work-related gathering to a way to hook me up with other people’s friends. But whatever your circumstances, you might want to follow these basic guidelines:

1.       The 80s – For whatever reason, 80 pop songs brings out the best in any group. Picking out a band like Wham!, New Order, The Human League, and various 80s pop hits strike a particular chord among people. Mostly this is due to people’s familiarity with the material, but also due to that decade’s insistence on fun and accessibility.

2.       Avoid contemporary pop hits – I can’t stress this one enough. Just because you listen to the radio on your way to work doesn’t mean everybody does. In fact, most people don’t. That’s why the older the pop hit, the better. Older pop hits mean that the audience will know it, from when they didn’t have a choice and had to listen to the radio. 

3.       Bohemian Rhapsody – Everyone knows this. It is like in humanity’s DNA. Your group might consist of a Yak herder from Mongolia, an Amazonian tribesman who’s never had contact with those outside a 5 mile radius, and an Amish farmer, and they’d all be singing along with this. Don’t ask me why this works, I feel like Freddie Mercury might have engaged in some serious genetic testing in the 70s to come up  with something that appeals to literally every living thing on Earth. When I told somebody that people just knew this, he stated “That’s nonsense”. When I saw him on Monday, he said the song kept on finding him on the radio and he was hooked. People just love this song.

4.       Avoid too many Musical references – Let me explain. I like musicals but I do not love them. How I feel about them is generally most people’s opinions. What happens when a musical nerd gets hold of that remote and programs in a bunch of musicals no one knows, oh geez. Prepare yourself for a harsh, difficult night. One of these may be acceptable, but do multiple ones and people will get drunk off their ass to numb themselves.

5.       Use Irony – Irony was made for Karaoke. People don’t pick their favorite songs for Karoke, they pick the corniest ones. I’m not a huge Doobie Brothers fan, but singing their contrived nonsense is great fun. Taking any popular AM hit and singing it works wonders. Plus, another approach is to take a song and have a ridiculous singing style to it. Do these only once, once is all that is needed for the joke to work, otherwise it gets stale.

6.       Don’t do Karaoke in the Philippines – This one is the only real one I have on here. People take it very seriously there, like life and death serious. A New York Times article described how one could get killed for poorly singing a Frank Sinatra song. So yeah, you might want to sing in Malaysia or something.  Getting beaten up for being a crappy singer seems like a poor evening indeed.

7.       Inflection – Use it. Even the most monotone of us has some kind of inflection. By not using it properly, you might embarrass yourself. I have an example: one of my friends can’t sing to save his life. Rather than realize this, he continued to pick out songs that specifically required important inflection on key words. One song came on, the Rolling Stones’ “(I can’t get no) Satisfaction”. As he was singing the “noes” he inflected incorrectly and made it sound like he just had an orgasm. Seeing what happened after he did that, please make sure to use it, at least a little bit.

8.       No Lady Gaga – Maybe this is a personal pet peeve, but whenever I’ve been out with friends and someone picks one of her songs, a few people decide that’s a good time to go to the bathroom. After enough time has passed, you can use her songs maybe. But right now, her music in particular is trashy without the fun needed to make it likable. I know I’ve stated “no contemporary” earlier, but this one is a definite buzz killer. Everybody does know her work, that’s not the problem. It is that it is still all around us and we have to deal with that garbage infecting our eardrums enough. So please, grant us an hour or two of salvation away from it.

9.       Pay your share – Uh, this one is after the singing. Karaoke translates for some people into “Leave early and have the host pay $400”. Thankfully this has never personally happened to me, but I’ve seen it done to others. It ends up putting people in a tough situation, and makes you less likely to be as close of friends in the future. So be kind, please make sure to pay your full amount before you depart into the night.

10.   Do this at night – I have no idea why this would be in the daytime. Apparently some people do that. That just looks like you’re currently unemployed or particularly bored. Wait until 5pm at the earliest. Just use the same cutoff time you have for alcohol. 

Hopefully this will guide you on the path to pure Karaoke enlightenment. I’m not guaranteeing that you’ll find perfection with this, but you can avoid a lot of the pratfalls that worry so many others.

Wham – Last Christmas Review (Christmas Edition)

**Side Note**

I wanted to originally post this for the holiday season. Seeing how this is Black Friday and all, I figure this might be an appropriate time to ease into the Christmas standard. So as you’re busy shoving your way through various lines and other difficulties, you can be prepared for the themed music which will dig itself down into your very soul. Enjoy!

Wham – Last Christmas Review (Christmas Edition)

I’m sure you’re probably more aware of this song than you want to be. Maybe this year you’d like to share this song with someone special. But a hallmark of the holiday season since the 80s deserves some sort of recognition. The amount of joyous fun I’ve had with this song, at Karaoke’s, driving down the highway a bit too late at night, or just hanging out in an ironic mood is just too great to count. Yet I bizarrely had never seen the actual music video for this. That is, until NOW.

The video’s beginning got me a little worried. For the first few seconds, I see a Jeep and a long Van come up a snowy mountain. I wonder whether or not this is the true music video for the song, or if I had in fact stumbled across the most ironic militia’s recruitment video ever. Around the 15 second mark, I’m assured that haircuts that bad and acting that poor cannot be good recruiting tools. Yet if you edited the clip very slightly it could give the viewer the impression that people with bad hair cuts were practicing in the mountains for the overthrow of our beloved US government. 

Acting quality is about is good as the phenomenal composing skills Wham! possessed. Immediately you are taken into a world of hinted upon hurt between the immaculately well groomed man and his gravity-defying former girlfriend’s haircut (she looks like Alice from Dilbert). Both of them are thrust into a winter wonderland where their hearts have frozen over.

George Michael belts out “I keep my distance, but you still catch my eye” as the dinner is set. Tinsel is dropped, and we witness an uncomfortable moment between the two former lovers. I guess this sort of reminds me how you couldn’t express in the 80s. Either that or people really were that corny. Perhaps he should have been collecting firewood instead of pathetically decorating a flaccid Christmas tree that made Charlie Brown’s look positively robust. 

Snowball fighting begins. Here it looks again like a militia recruitment video like the free-spirited nature of bringing down the government to mark a new order. It would work, if we didn’t have that cheesy close up. Though the close up might work as a “we’re fed up with the system” sort of style.

Dinner feels like the last supper with the 12 apostles, except they all appear to be self-absorbed shitheads who don’t want to contribute anything but disdain for society. 

“A crowded room/Friends with tired eyes” is depicted, word for word. We see the emotional “heart” of the piece. The camera brings us back to the happier times the two protagonists shared. Her piece of garbage jewelry apparently cost him a lot more than money, it cost him his heart, which still yearns deeply for her love and affection. But he’s there, watching her with another man, and feeling upset about his unfortunate loss of such a lovely woman.  

Sadly, by watching the video, you get the abridged version. You miss out on his tender screams out to no one in particular. That improvised instrumental at the end seals the deal for me. Listen to this with loved ones. Get vulnerable.