How Not to Have Your Wisdom Teeth Removed

Posted by xaviergeorge on
A third molar.

This bad boy was the very least of my troubles.

Today I had my wisdom teeth removed. It was a uniquely harrowing experience, and I shall recant it thusly:

Firstly and immediately most apparently, the surgeon’s place was run by what is probably Melbourne’s hottest cadre of receptionists. It seemed to be staffed exclusively by a squad of cloned Tori Blacks. Upon sighting this crack squad of trained leaning-over-their-desks-just-tantalisingly-too-far paper staplers, my jaw detached and smacked into the ground like an anaconda with a running start trying swallow whole the prey of its turned on-ness. One of the homunculi turned to me boobs-first and asked me of my purpose here, and I am sorry to say that I failed the crucial test of my Ladsmanship, stuttering like Professor Quirrell on anabolic steroids, throwing some sort of doctor paper at her face before retreating backwards into a billowing cloud of my own Gimp. I oozed into the waiting rooms and consoled myself with what was probably the most condescending science magazine I have ever read, until thankfully the only non-quasi-babin’ nurse in the whole building called me up to meet the anaesthetist.

The anaesthetist is important. He’s the one you want to slip a fifty to make sure he keeps his peepers firmly peeped on the proper knobs and gauges. Without wishing to cause offense in the seedy anaesthetist underground, my guy was basically the Joker out of the Dark Knight. If you haven’t seen the Dark Knight, then you do not exist, and I don’t remember friending any metaphysical anomalies. He came across as basically a heroin addict, or an alcoholic, judging by the way he pronounced the words “general anaesthetic” and how he kept trying to show me his tattoos. I christened him Noodles, after the lunatic guitarist of The Offspring.

I spied my surgeon only fleetingly. He entered the operating theatre as Noodles injected me with something I am trying so hard to believe was anaesthetic, carrying, I shit y’all not, a newspaper and a cup of Gloria Jean’s brownest. It was here that anybody not accidentally pumped full of home-brew would have postulated that a surgeon who brings something to do into an operating theatre was perhaps in sore need of a priority reshuffling, however I was rendered unable to do so by the feeling of liquid nitrogen being poured into my veins. Gay and Gayer the Eminently Smackable Male Nurses turned to me and put on their surgical masks, to which I instinctively glurbled ‘stick ‘em up, partner!’ If they had a sense of humour, they wouldn’t be a surgeon’s nurses. They have a job because they prefer hanging around people that can’t talk to them. I got halfway through a hilarious ‘ha ha oh shittt-‘ before suscepting to Noodle’s Medicine Bile, and drifting off into a toothy paradise.

I was roused from my slumber by a Welsh nurse yelling ‘wakey wakey!’ and, continuing the motifs of my tale, injecting me with what appeared to be a massive dose of methamphetamines. I promptly fell back asleep, causing her to do and say exactly the same thing again. Due to my post-op stupor, I failed to heed the human brain’s natural caution against the words “nigga you said that twice,” but luckily due to an overzealous and increasingly certainly intoxicated anaesthetist my jaw had all the elite muscle control of a wet salmon flopping away in a plastic bag, and her sensibilities remained uninsulted. For her height, I dubbed her Frodo, and silently bestowed upon her the dubious honour of Most Likely to Actually Have a Medical Qualification. Mother Dearest came to pick me up, and Frodo shoved me down the ex-patient chute just in time for collection.

I’m doing well thus far. I seem to have recovered from the operation ahead of schedule. Perhaps it’s the drugs. Cadbury the Ant King seems to agree with me on this, but then he would, wouldn’t he. While I still feel numb in half of my jaw, the swelling is not too bad, pausing only for a moment to exercise the old arrogance, remarking that no surgeon could ever ruin this face, bitches.

All in all I rate my unconscious sojourn 3 ½ Dr. Frankensteins out of 5, and recommend it to those who like to hang around hospitals and sniff things that weren’t made to be sniffed. But if that’s you, then I guess you already work at one! Oh sheet!

Things to Click

Dubious Reviews – Christopher Nolan – The Dark Knight Rises

Posted by xaviergeorge on

What’s the point in this review? Everybody desperately wants The Dark Knight Rises to top the previous, Rises-less entry in the series, and naturally that is going to taint our expectations. It tainted mine: I spent the first quarter of the movie furious at my disappointment, desperately cursing whichever god saw fit to plague this movie with only mere greatness.

Above: Bruce Wayne giving Catwoman a massive pearl necklace.

The Dark Knight Rises is good enough to rate as one of the greatest comic book adaptations of all time. But in this case, good enough is simply just not good enough.

My capital beef lies with the characters: there’s too many of them, and none of them are the Joker. The Dark Knight changed the superhero genre forever, but it was only now, looking back through old youtube videos of Heath Ledger‘s face-meltery Jokering, that I remembered just how damn good the second movie was for his inclusion. The Dark Knight Rises does not have a Joker of its own to fill the void.

Bane is fine. He strikes me as a very comic-bookish character, in the sense that he’s interesting enough to hold our attention for a while, but a callous writer can chuck him at the end of a story arc and the audience will happily move on. I feel like a strong part of this is due to the gigantic mask he wears the whole time – Bruce Wayne takes his off every now and then, and that gives us an avenvue with which to connect with and empathize for his character. Bane doesn’t, all we ever really see of him is his eyes, and the human eye can only really look indimidating to a point. His voice is pretty cool, though, his dark brogue satisfying the comic-book-villain twitch we all came to feed, even if it can be juuust a touch comical at times. Basically I think te biggest problem with Bane is that he’s just too normal – he’s not so evil that we’re forced to hate him. He’s just a dude with a diction-obscuring mouthpiece. The Joker was great because we all loved him for his evil – Bane needed to be so twisted, so diabolical that we would have no choice but to hate him outright. As it is, we don’t.

It won’t make me popular, but I have to put it out there: Anne Hathaway fucking sucks as Catwoman. Not the character: Catwoman works well as a sort of foil for Batman, and the relationship between the two is well-written  – I just feel that she has been tragically miscast: I get the vibe that Hathaway’s performance was directly inspired by Michelle Pfeiffer‘s in the comically shiteful Batman Returns (actually, Batman Returns was great, but copy + pasting that sort of acting into a Nolan classic is absolutely not a way to climb the Hollywood ladder). Every time she turns around she flicks her head like the betrayed lover in a bad rom-com, and the amount of crappy one-liners Nolan puts her through is just staggering. Actually the one-liner problem abounds equally amongst the cast in this Gotham, which is funny, since it’s never been a problem before. I get the feeling that some Hollywood exec’s girlfriend spent all night drawing them up, and she wouldn’t put out until he insisted they hit the script. Oh, the world we live in.

So there’s that. One other problem I have with the script lies with the classic philosophical conversations that we grew to love in Batman Begins, the one-on-one tête-à-têtes between Bruce Wayne and those close to him. Basically there are too many and they aren’t all that interesting; it’s all very well to have Alfred break down in front of a rapidly evolving Bruce, but at one point we have to sit through about four of these dialogues in a row, and even someone as metaphysically inclined as myself (LOL) can get a little bored. They’re all written in the same format, too, with two characters spitting short and sharp lines, one of them having a slight moral edge over the other, and ending on a note that would ordinarily give pause to think were it not immediately transitioning into more and more of the same. You can’t develop a characer by yelling words at him and then shooting a close-up of his serious face, especially when there are heads going unpunched all around us every second. Show, don’t tell, Mr. Nolan. He gets this right about three-quarters into the movie, where there is a long exposition of Bruce overcoming all of his weaknesses in order to become an entity that can truly save Gotham, which is really rather cool. In fact, by then, The Dark Knight Rises becomes a paragon model of filmmaking. I only wish that the movie was consistent in its quality; there are good bits and there are the less good bits, and frankly it’s a shame that they even exist at all.

The themes of the film are perhaps less subtle than they were previously. Bane’s pseudo-communist revolution is clearly a direct parallel of the anti-capitalist sentiment that has found footing in many since the Global Financial Crisis, but I feel like including a scene where Bane literally attacks the stock exchange, the very symbol of capitalism, before setting up a French Revolution-style revolutionary tribunal to sentence the idle wealthy to death is just a touch too heavy-handed. There’s even a shot of an American flag ripped to shreds by bullets. Traditionally most superhero sagas have been a bit coy about their settings, but let there be no doubt this film is set in modern ‘Murrica. Still, it gives rise to some great set-pieces – my favourite is the ‘sentencing’ room, where Cillian Murphy manages to sneak back into a minor but recurring role, which is quite nice, even if he has to do it all from atop a barricade of tables and chairs. Les Miserables, herro?

The film actually gets better and better as it trucks along, and the ending in particular is Macaulay Culkin-in-Home-Alone-slapping-his-cheeks-and-dropping-jaw-to-the-floor shockingly good, if I can call the final scene out on being just the weeniest titch predictable. The twists start piling in as we near closure, and I’m pleased to say that by and large my eagle eyes didn’t see them coming, and I was even wearing my glasses. The character of Batman grows in accordance with the coolness of his gagetry, and there are some very high-quality action sequences featuring The Bat, Batman’s personal flying tank, as well as his sweet little motorbike from the second film. I’d recommend this film as part of a trilogy movie marathon, as it makes very frequent reference to Batman Begins, and if you haven’t seen that yet, then I highly recommend you do so before the oxygen supply under your rock on Mars begins to dip too low.

Upon reflection, this has been quite a negative review, so it may come as a surprise to reiterate that it is really quite good. It’s just not as good as the last one. While The Dark Knight will go down as one of the most adored films of all time, the Empire Strikes Back of this generation, sadly The Dark Knight Rises will just have to do with only being really, really good. The action is great, the script not so much, Batman’s character development is fantastic, while Princess Hathaway can kindly fuck off back to Genovia. Gary Oldman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, underappreciated as they will be, rack up some nice screentime, and I highly recommend you slam one out before you lock eyes on Marion Cotillard; it’ll help you last longer.

All the same, this is just not the Batman of Batman films. It’s the ending we needed, but if I can be just disgustingly fan-servicery for one second, it’s not the one we deserve. Hence it is with a heavy heart that I condemn this film to a comparatively paltry 3 ½ Stiff & Erect Bat-Nipples out of 5, and yet unequivolcally recommend it to any and everyone who saw the first two, which is literally the entire population of Earth. What ho!
_

The Quibble – Unfortunately the frigid climes of Gotham Bay are too unwelcoming to the local selachian species; I was gunning for a little Bat-Shark Repellent action. Sadly this was not to be. On the other hand, if there’s something we really feel we ought to look back on and have a chuckle over, it’s the first time Hathaway is revealed as Catwoman. Oh my sweetest God that is some shocking acting.

Things to Click:

I Want to Believe – Why Faith is not a Choice

Posted by xaviergeorge on
Beliefs Mormonism

She might think she believes, but will she ever really?

I recently watched and reviewed Prometheus. Chuck it a squiz first if you’re of the context-loving persuasion.

There’s a line at the very beginning of the film that ground my gears. In a dream, a young girl asks her father what happens once we die. He says we go to heaven, or paradise, or somewhere nice, and when his daughter asks him how he knows he simply replies “because that’s what I choose to believe.”

He’s wrong. Nobody ever chooses what they believe. It just happens.

The line is repeated a bit later on in the film, when the crew of the titular spaceship ask protagonist Dr. Shaw why exactly she believes that the aliens of the film, the ‘engineers,’ were responsible for the creation of life on earth, as opposed to the forces of evolution or the omnipotent hand of God. Again, she says “because that’s what I choose to believe.”

Belief doesn’t work like that. You believe because you are convinced, not because you consciously will it to be so. You can desperately want something to be so, and given time and a messed-up enough psyche perhaps eventually faith can grow from it, but you cannot ever deliberately believe it.

It reminds me of my imbecile 4th-grade teacher. I went to an international school with children from all over the world, and our class environment was built from many ethnicities and faiths. Naturally we grouped up at some point to do a project on the religions of the world. Inevitably, some 10 year-old intellectual asked of our teacher’s beliefs, and even as a fourth-grader I was completely blown away by the nonsensicality of what she said. “I don’t believe in anything right now,” she answered.

“But I like Buddhism. Maybe I’ll start believing in that.”

Belief isn’t a mineshaft you can suddenly pick up tools and start hammering away on. The human brain is not a vending machine that you can just push ‘I wish’ coins into until belief falls out. Belief is a conviction, and a conviction comes from being convinced.

I am not especially religious, as I am not yet convinced of anything in that domain, but nor am I an atheist, since I’m not 100% convinced of the falsity of everything spiritual. If faith of either kind builds up within me, it will be a natural process, not something I can manually direct in the way I feel most comforting, like a builder creating his dream home from blocks he’s just invented himself.

My 4th-grade teacher might show a genuine interest into Buddhist precepts, and a fascination is certainly a strong jump-off point for faith, but the two are not the same. Maybe she’s been studying the Buddhavacana all this time, and given it some thought, and gradually accepted it into her beliefs. Maybe she’s a Scientologist.

Belief is a funny old thing. Growing up, certain things are impressed on us – the Earth is round, swearing is bad, etc etc. Often spiritual belief is just another core concept – surely there are many, many children growing up in religious households for whom faith is just the default, children who have never asked the Big Questions, but never really accepted and understood what they think is their ‘belief’ either. Real belief – religious or otherwise – either comes later, more gradually, or is consciously rejected, at least in our faith-obsessed culture.

Perhaps Dr. Shaw’s fictitious father hadn’t reached that point for himself. Maybe he’d never given it enough thought to call it out, or to personally reaffirm his convictions.

Either way, I hope my old teacher is happy.

Related articles

Dubious Reviews – Ridley Scott – Prometheus

Posted by xaviergeorge on

Me while I watched this film, except less overtly distressed, and also a man.

Oh, fuck you, Ridley Scott. I see what you’re up to. Two can play your little game.

Prometheus is a great piece of sci-fi, and it’s ending especially will have fans of the original Alien leaping out of their seat to Dimmeys, fistful of cash in hand and defiled underpants in the other. It tackles really heavy stuff; existentialist questions, God versus science, the origin of life, and all the while distils the formula with the same heavily disconcerting sexual imagery that has pervaded the series since its inception, if you’ll pardon the awkward pun.

It’s built for nerds from the ground up – cool and graphically sexy enough to keep Johnny Average Punter hooked, but also seemingly deliberately vague enough to get all that Blood-Type Nutella nerd blood worked up into a frenzied froth, arguing over the who and the where and the why in the hell. There’ll be a sequel, to be sure.

It’s entertaining, has really great special effects, and above-average characterisation for a thriller of its type. On the other hand, while I hate the classic reviewer cliché of ‘raises more questions than it answers,’ that is really the best I can do here to sum up the main problems of the film without completely fingering the plot for those who haven’t seen it.

It’s probably the best mistake a writer-director can make, really. It’s the biggest snag of the film, but I’m not allowed to talk about it. Fuck you, Ridley Scott.

Cinematically, it’s an entirely recommendable film. Everything that I can write about it that isn’t a Pandora’s Box of plot spoilers is perfectly fine and appreciable. The drawbacks of the movie are the sorts of things that can’t readily be outlined without some sort of example to give – for instance, there’s a certain ‘twist’ about two-thirds of the way through that would have been fascinating if it didn’t concern a character we’d only heard from once before in the entire movie, and even then they managed to give the game away. So the characters go ooh and ahh and the audience heaves a collective ‘meh, saw it coming.’

The problem is this: there’s no point in a big revelation if it only happens to the characters. That’s simply not good enough; it needs to happen to us too, otherwise who cares? It’s not like we’ve grown attached to the characters over the length of many years’ worth of episodes and plotlines; we only have two hours to get to know the protagonist, and that puts a very definite cap on the amount of empathy we can spare. The rest of the emotion needs to be supplied to us, not just by us.

Continuing the theme, the main character, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, is consistently meh-ish. Ripley of the Alien series proper has always been portrayed as a strong woman who don’t need no man, but unfortunately all Dr. Shaw really ever amounts to (a shade ironically, given the imagery of the franchise) is basically a pussy. Perhaps it’s because so many terrible things happen to her during the course of the film that she turns completely inward, but that shouldn’t be an excuse for shortcomings in the script. The other characters are just fine – the ensemble is basically the same as in every pseudo-horror film – the sassy black dude, the asshole, the token Asian, etc etc. Idris Elba does a great job of his relatively minor role as the ship’s captain; the most important thing I took from this is that, as an actor, he’s capable of playing more than one character – Stringer Bell the captain ain’t. Charlize Theron is sadly crap, yet Michael Fassbender is frankly brilliant as the morose android David, and in fact winds up being probably the best character in the whole movie.

The first half of the film is great. Good setup, good characters, great visual design. Something more subtle that will probably fly over the heads of many viewers is the stylistic restriction on the colour palette – the world of Prometheus is black and grey, and the little hints of green and blue work really well visually. The opening panoramas of the alien planet are just like a David Attenborough doco. Hollywood still doesn’t quite know how to get old-people makeup to look right – Guy Pearce’ wrinkly maquillage looks, quite frankly, just as alien as any of the series’ famous monsters. The rest of the characters are well-cast, not just in terms of acting ability but visually – the tattooed and mohawked Sean Harris stands out as Fifield, as do the hoodies and jumpers apparently in intergalactic fashion in the year 2089. It’s the type of film that, upon catching a roommate playing it on his laptop, you could happily stand and watch for a minute or two, oblivious to the plot. It’s all very pretty, but flawed where it matters most, not unlike Avatar, or Russel Brand, according to rumour (zing!).

I wrote above that Prometheus tackles big issues. I was wrong: it doesn’t actually address them, it never reaches any sort of conclusions regarding them, it just kind of… brings them up. In the introduction to the film, we see a young Dr. Shaw ask her father about what happens after death. She wears a cross around her neck for much of the film, and the ideas of belief and faith get tossed around like a baby in a windsock (???), but none of these themes are ever properly explored. It feels like Scott realised just how much death was going on in the movie, and so chucked a couple of lines about God into the script to try and wring an Oscar or two out of the dark. It’s not going to happen: give us some credit, we need more than wordplay on “going to meet your maker.” The only truly interesting avenue is the identity crisis of the android David: he frequently makes reference to life and death, and his nature as an emotionless robot really nails a sense of there being something deeply wrong with the universe of the film, and humanity in general. It’s riveting stuff.

Prometheus is classic Sci-Fi, in the same vein as the original Alien. It mixes genuinely unsettling elements of horror with ingenious visual design and generally interesting characters. It feels a little impotent in the deep-and-meaningful department, and honestly I would have relished even five or so minutes given solely to a little bit of proper closure on the Ridley Scott’s Meaning of Life front, but given the experience of watching the film itself is just so damned enjoyable, it certainly ensures another Ridley hit. I give it 3 ½ Screaming Vaginas out of 5, and my personal recommendation, especially to all of the Alien fanboys.

_

The Quibble – Mr. Scott drops a lil’ bit of Chopin’s 15th Prelude in the movie’s introduction, as well as the credits. You might know it from the classic Halo 3 ‘believe’ ad spot. I ask this: why’d he only include the happy-sounding first two minutes, when the tone of the piece so famously turns sinister halfway through? Now there’s an Oscar-winning metaphor for you.

Related articles

Ten Things I’ve Learned from Editing Community Cookbooks

Posted by xaviergeorge on

The presumed author of many a recipe I’ve had the bad luck to be subjected to. His grammar is poor and his life story tedious, he puts a can in a bowl and calls it Cordon Bleu.

My mother, in what spare time she can conjure, runs a fledgling cookbook empire, right from her very own kitchen. Along with her business partner, she produces cookbooks for the purpose of corporate fundraising, built from the much-loved, time-tested, and surely oft-piss-stained recipes submitted to her by those pertaining to whichever community she is putting the book together for, whether that be a private school, a charity committee, etc etc.

Basically, the idea is that people give her the recipes, along with a little story on the family history that goes with it, and she’ll whip it up and put it in the book. Unfortunately, this requires a lot of sifting through the rivers of literary muck to find the occasional gleaming turd worthy of immortalisation within the annals of cookbook history – and this is where I come in to play. Rather unfortunately, I have been placed in charge of editing the recipes – for grammar, typos, etc. – and believe me, I ain’t having that.

Here are ten things I’ve learned from editing my mother’s cookbooks:

1) Everybody in the world who can cook is apparently also completely dyslexic.

2) Having read a bit of Hemingway does not automatically make you a great writer.

3) ‘Beans’ is not a proper noun, nor is ‘oysters’

4) Almonds that have been finely cut are called ‘slivered’ almonds, not ‘slithered’. They are not a snake. They do not slither.

5) Italian mothers: we don’t, on the whole, give much of a shit about where exactly in Tuscany your bisnonno used to source his goat’s milk cheese. This sort of information is kind of how what I would imagine a father’s day gift from an uncaring teenage son must be like: you make it, we take it, we chuck it, and we both forget about it for the rest of our lives.

6) There is no E in yummy.

6.5) There is one T in feta.

7) If you can’t spell ‘Worcestershire’, for Ganesh’s sake, don’t just guess it. Google is your mate. You wrote this on a Microsoft Word document, so presumably you have fingers to hit up spellcheck – and even in lieu of fingers, surely it can’t be THAT hard to get your stumps around a dictionary. Have a heart for the boy that got roped into this inescapable sarlacc of a job.

8) Please, please, please press the spacebar just once after each full stop. In the same vein, there is a direct proportionality between the amount of exclamation marks tacked onto the end of a sentence, and the apparent decline in mental well-being of the man or woman who wrote it.

9) Don’t try to pass off a recipe as original when the very first ingredient is “Bird’s Eye Crispy Chunky Chicken Dippers.” I’ve spent too many a night hunched like the Pixar lamp over the grotesque remains of what might once have been a meal at my Nanna’s; I know a recipe from a serving suggestion when I see one.

10) Fuck italics.

That is all.

Related articles

Dubious Reviews – Hilltop Hoods – Drinking From the Sun

Posted by xaviergeorge on

Pictured: probably not anyone to do with Hilltop Hoods

 

Just as the crooners of the 20’s turned the crutch of the microphone into an instrument in its own right, Hilltop Hoods have attempted to take our admittedly bizarre accent and make rap work for it. But good taste transcends the brogue barrier, and with their latest, Drinking from the Sun, Hilltop Hoods have proven that they have earned the recognition they’ve acquired as among the very best of Australia’s fledgling hip hop movement.

The Australian accent is often viewed (understandably) as incompatible with rap – it is sadly true that for many, having grown accustomed to the traditional American sound, the sub-genre is simply too hard to break in to. However, just as Drapht turned his western adenoidal drone into his biggest draw, the two Hilltop Hoods emcees – Suffa and Pressure – have successfully turned their accents into musical elements in their own right.

MC Pressure is definitely the more listenable of the two – his diaphragmatic/nasal tone compliments his accent perfectly. I might even go so far as to call him the most aurally pleasing rapper currently in the Australian scene.

MC Suffa isn’t bad by any means – but he just sounds so normal, so annoyingly standard that I feel a lyricist with his skill ought to perhaps put a little more focus into how he sounds once the snare drums and high-pitched violins have overtaken his own voice as the more audible element of a track.

That doesn’t happen often, by the way – but unless you look up the lyrics online, you’re certainly never going to glean every nugget of lyrical gold from this album.

And it most certainly is lyrical gold: where the American mainstream hip hop scene is beginning to suffocate from a lack of genuine talent and originality, Australia is coming to the rescue. Regard the opening lines from the Album’s first single, I Love It, featuring Sia.

I’m wondering where the day went,
The clouds have me shrouded in grey, but,
I’m still out pounding the pavement, word,
Drowning the hurt by pounding rounds in brown paper,
Founded a label now I’m drowning in paperwork,
But now the crew I’m down with found an escape from work,
And I love it ‘cause that what your hard work gets you,
My heart bursts through my chest I’m rescued,
So forget what the rest do,
I’m blessed to do it with two of who are the best to do it,
Do I love it?

Hilltop Hoods are truly modern-day poets – this sort of artful honestly is tragically missing from so many contemporary hip hop albums. Going back to the actual delivery of these lines – I feel like the two emcees could benefit from the sort of half-sung fluctuations in tonality that makes artists like Method Man and Krayzie Bone so listenable.

The musicality of rap can definitely make a difference as to how easy it is to pay attention to – basically, if I’m not so attuned to fast-paced rapping, I should still be able to enjoy the lyrics. We see a tiny glimpse of this done right in the chorus to Keys to the Kingdom, where the rapping gives way to a simple 6-note arpeggio over the words “’til the day that I die.” It highlights the poignancy of the lyric, as well as being simple fun to listen to.

The production work by Suffa and Trials nails exactly what it ought to – it is perfectly, easily identifiable as a uniquely Australian rap sound. If somebody had told me that The Cat Empire had been responsible for mixing the album’s blend of classical instruments, trumpets, piano riffs and booming guitars, I would have believed them.

Where other Australian hip hop successes like Bliss n Eso have found success clinging to – even in spite of – reliance of traditional DJ’d beats, Hilltop Hoods have continued what they began on State of the Art with the construction of a sonic fingerprint that could never possibly be confused with any other world genre.

Their style unites the entire album – no song from this collection could ever sound quite as in place on its own as it does when played within the album as a whole. If I might raise a solitary criticism in this regard, it’s that sometimes the complex rhythms in the beat drown out the actual rapping, obscuring the occasional word.

That might suck a little, but it happens on near-as every single other rap album, so fans of the genre aren’t going to care a bit. It’s still one of the group’s best albums, and the best Australian hip-hop album of the last few years

_

The Quibble – Mos Def would have been purrrfect on this album.

Related articles

The Danger of Making Hate Popular

Posted by xaviergeorge on
Christopher Hitchens

Unquestionably a brilliant mind, but is his legacy something he would be proud of?

There is a very good reason our grandparents all agreed to never speak on politics or religion: because no speaker in the world has the capacity to convince somebody of their spiritual wrongness within the space of a single conversation. Online, however, there is nothing to stop any ten year-old who’s watched a few Hitchslaps from dropping an obscene hate-bomb onto any jungle corner of the internet before clicking away, never to be heard from again. But, as Mark Zuckerberg’s ex-girlfriend in The Social Network puts it: “the internet is written in ink” – and any influence it has upon its usership, which is to say, a lot, is for better or worse, here to stay.

Since the rise of such prominent atheist spokespeople as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, as well as the popularity of such like-minded entertainers as Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr and Seth McFarlane, it has become almost somewhat popular in itself to take a public stance against the religions of the world. The problem is that when the average Joe who professes strong beliefs of any kind meets the near-unanimous litany of hate from the users of almost any public internet forum, the result can be tremendously ugly.

This, in turn, leaks out into the real world: I once found myself compelled to quash a God vs. Science ‘debate’ in a taxi on the way to a club – which didn’t exactly provide the foundation for a carefree romp at Cheers.

I adore Christopher Hitchens. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest public speakers of our time, a passionate, brilliant mind, the likes of which the vast majority of his fans can only ever aspire to.  I admire the hypnotic sway his rhetoric held over his audiences, and I’ve giggled along with the infamous ‘Hitchslaps’, online videos of Hitchens ingeniously deconstructing the arguments of his opponents in debates of all kinds. Christopher Hitchens was then; there can be no doubt, an extraordinary human being.

His lagacy, however, is something he would surely be disgusted by; that is, the distinct and unfortunate blurring of the lines between atheist and anti-theist. An atheist is, of course, one who rejects the notion of the existence of any kind of god.  An anti-theist is a radical atheist, in my own opinion taken a step too far, who believes that all religions of all kinds are harmful towards society, and that the world would be better off without them. Hitchens was an anti-theist. However, he was also somewhat of a celebrity spokesman for atheism, and this is where the two worlds collide.

Simply put, there exists (both online and off) an air of expectation that most atheists are also antireligious. Likewise, many atheists also feel almost obliged to wear an air of disdain towards organised religion, above and beyond the call of duty, as it were, that is necessarily mandated by mere non-belief in a god. With the death of Hitchens and the subsequent explosion of internet activity regarding religion, to many atheism and anti-theism are regarded as one and the same.

The irony of this is twofold: firstly, one of the very pillars of secular philosophy is the championing of individual thought, and this blind mass-agenda against people of religion very plainly defies this. Secondly, a major argument against religion is directed at its capacity to spread irrational hatred towards people of a certain mind – surely in this debate, there is no greater irony.

When asked of my religious views, I like to reply with a curt “non-religious.” It’s a nice, inoffensive term, without the baggage of the word ‘atheist’, and also without the explicit certainty it implies. One’s beliefs should never be something to be ashamed of, nor something that ought to be continually defended, and yet too often this is sadly necessary on both sides of the belief fence.

Too often radical causes fly under the banner of ‘teaching’ – but truthful learning must be factual, never emotional, and this is where strong wills and incomplete educations collide. No opinion is worth listening to unless it is absolutely erudite – take a look at the #Occupy saga, for example, which was a genuine and heartfelt protest against a biased system that became utterly bogged down and reduced to a joke by unfortunate loudmouths who felt the hate, but didn’t know the facts.

The bottom line, then, is that while the internet is a treasure trove of knowledge and the bastion of modern communication, we must always look at opinion with a cynical eye. Promoting hatred – of any kind, with any intent – is a social strangler vine, and it simply cannot ever be the genesis for any sort of good.