Monday, July 30, 2007

3 Makes a Pattern: Tall, Women Bass Players

If we didn't have blogs to remark on these things, nobody would care.

I am ready to declare a new archetype: tall, skinny, women bass players. Because next to nothing about music, my three examples here are all from movies. Also, two are fictional, but this is an archetype we're talking about, so I don't think that makes a particular difference.

Tina Weymouth of The Talking Heads

The Talking Heads have made two brilliant flicks, True Stories (Texas in a nutshell through a Talking Heads prism) and Stop Making Sense, which is the best concert movie I've ever seen.

Whenever I try to explain why Stop Making Sense gets to me every time I watch it, I just end up as a blubbering sack of a man.

The best explanation I can give is that it is so clearly a perfect representation of the world from one odd and specific perspective that, even if you only understand that perspective marginally, there's no way not to be swallowed up in it.

Tina Weymouth was the Talking Heads bass player. (I think she also did some of the vocals for Noodle of the Gorillaz.)

When I think of Tina Weymouth, I think of her performance of "Genius of Love" in Stop Making Sense. It's a very catchy tune - if you watched any MTv at all at any time in 1995, you would recognize it from as sampled in Mariah Carey's song "Fantasy."

When I first saw Weymouth sing Genius of Love in Stop Making Sense, I thought she looked really nervous. After watching it again, I realized it wasn't that at all.

It's just that Weymouth seems so open, so vulnerable while she sings. It's like Gene Hackman's acting, if Gene Hackman were playing bass and were a beautiful blond woman. I am doing a shitty job of explaining this.

Anyway, yeah. Tina Weymouth is tall.

Stella of The Crescendolls

I talk a little about Interstella 5555 here as part of another 3 makes a pattern post about how rock stars think of themselves as aliens.

Interstella 5555 is a movie by legendary anime director Kazuhisa Takenôchi . The only sound in the movie besides a very few sound effects is the Daft Punk album Discovery. There is no dialogue.

The first part of InterStella 5555 I saw was Something About Us on YouTube. I had no idea it was part of a movie - I thought it was just a really amazing Daft Punk music video.

I thought about writing about Something About Us, maybe saying something about how this combination of an incredibly overwrought, sentimental song and an incredibly overwrought, sentimental anime love story could combine in to something affecting and genuine. Then I watched the rest of the movie on YouTube and realized the whole film was like that.

At that point, I didn't have anything smarmy to say at all. Interstella 5555 is incredible.

Takenôchi's anime tends to have tall, skinny, heroines (according to Wikipedia, anyway). In Interstella, the tall, skinny women heroine is the band's bass player, Stella.

Like Tina Weymouth, Stella seems very vulnerable. In this case, though, Stella seems vulnerable because she's so guarded about her emotion.

If someone's expressionless in a movie, we can attribute whatever emotion we want to them. In film, this is called the Kuleshov Effect.

There's also a component of what Scott McCloud calls "projection" for comics. Anime tends to have very simplified characters in very complex environments so that people project themselves in to the characters and viscerally experience the environments of a comic.

Anyway, Stella is skinny women bass player #2.

Katie of School of Rock

School of Rock is a decent movie that would have sucked if Jack Black didn't work so goddamned hard in it (see: Ace Ventura, Turner and Hooch). Jack Black: respect.

The kids hold up their part in the movie very well. Eponymous band bass player Katie is played by the lovely Rebecca Brown. IMDB lists her as 5' 7" (at 15!), but what's important is that she's relatively taller than the other kids in Jack Black's class.

Tall woman bass player #3, and 3 makes a pattern.

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