Well, with the All-Star announcements coming out, I took a look at my pre-season predictions, and it turns out that once again, I'm awesome. This is good, because my NBA predictions were a little hit-and-miss this year and I need a rebound.
I made 10 predictions and it looks like I'm at least mostly right on all of them. As always, self-congratulation is the word of the day. Let's take a look:
1. "The Seattle Mariners are wildly overrated and will not win the AL West." Well, right off the bat, I'm doing well. Most sports publications picked them to win the AL West, except for me, who picked both the Angels and the Rangers over them. All the pre-season love for the Mariners was completely misplaced and the team is now 34-47.
2. "Brett Anderson will put up monster numbers in his second season and finish in the top-5 for Cy Young voting." Aaaaaand we're back to the middle. Anderson, who had a 4.06 ERA his freshman year in the league, had really good underlying numbers, and it seemed probably he'd make a big jump this year. And through six starts, he looked great - an ERA of 2.35, a WHIP of 1.07. Very, very strong numbers. And then he got hurt and we haven't seen him since. Oh, well.
3. "The Red Sox will sputter through a solid month this spring and look completely disoriented. Fans will panic, but they'll put on the jets over the course of the summer and finish with 95 wins." It's a little early to call this one, but certainly, the Sox looked awful early, everyone discounted them, and they've had 9 players on the DL this year already. But now they're just a game and a half behind the Yankees and fully in the thick of playoff contention. If the season ended today, they'd win the Wild Card. (Update: they'd now be a half-game out)
4. "The Rays will be the third-best team in the American League and possibly baseball, and will still find themselves out of contention and make at least one "looking to the future" trade, most likely involving Carl Crawford or Rafael Soriano." Too early to call this one, but I think it's safe to say that the Rays are competitive enough they won't be making a major trade. They're just a half-game behind the Sox, and any small streak could push them to the top of the AL EAst. Still, if their slide continues - they've been 12-15 since June 4th - they could slip out of contention and be forced to make a deal. As of right now, though, they're the 3rd-best team in the American League and one game out of being the 3rd-best team in baseball (Update: they now are the 3rd-best team in baseball).
5. "Out of Nick Johnson, Javier Vasquez, Joba Chamberlain, and Chan Ho Park, at least one Yankeespectacular fashion." will flame out in Well, Nick Johnson is hitting .167, Javier Vasquez is 6-7 with an ERA of 5.11, which is still better than Chamberlain's (5.24) or Park (6.41). I picked the right crowd.
6. "Comeback player of the year: C.J. Wilson. Close second: Lance Berkman. Breakout years: Billy Butler, Gordon Beckham, Garrett Jones. Still not having a breakout year: Grady Sizemore, Alex Rios. Not going to have an impact his rookie year, hype or not: Aroldis Chapman. Who will: Jason Heyward, Stephen Strasburg. Severly underrated: Rajai Davis. Not a fluke: Ben Zobrist. Change of scenery would do him good: Corey Hart."
C.J. Wilson, who up until now could best be descibed as a mediocre middle reliever (ERA 4.29, WHIP 1.41), landed the opportunity to start for the Rangers this year and has done a nice job so far (6-4, 3.34 ERA, 1.26 ERA). He's a decent Comeback player candidate, though Vernon Wells would probably be a better one. Berkman, meanwhile, looks ever worse than last year and is batting .243, so that's a pretty big swing and miss.
As for the breakout years, Butler is hitting .320 - 20 points higher than normal - but both Beckham and Jones' numbers have tailed off this year in sophomore slumps. Sizemore was just as bad as I expected, he hit just .211 before injuries finished his season, but Rios has been hitting 20 points over his career average and having a year just as good as his 2007 season, which no one thought would ever happen.
Despite hype, Aroldis Chapman has still not made the big league rotation of the Reds, even though two other, less-heralded rookies have come up and found spots in the same rotation before then. Now, that's just ridiculous. Meanwhile, Strasburg's been near-unhittable and almost made the All-Star team on the basis of six starts, and Jason Heyward did make the All-Star team - in fact, he's starting.
Rajai Davis' other numbers have dropped, but he is on pace to steal over 50 bases, which would be a career high by at least 10 bases. Zobrist has proved he's not a fluke, and he's only 3 stolen bases shy of last year's total, but his home run numbers are way down - he finished last year with 27, this year he's only on pace for 10. And Corey Hart sat on the bench for the beginning of the year while trade rumors swirled and the Brewers talked about how they were unhappy with him. But when they finally put him in the lineup, he hit like crazy, and now he's on pace for nearly 40 homers, 40 doubles, and 120 RBI, with a batting average 10 points higher than his career average.
So, good calls on Wilson, Butler, Sizemore, Chapman, Heyward, Strasburg, and Hart, and bad calls on Berkman, Beckham, Jones, and Rios, while Davis and Zobrist are a bit of a wash. Let's give the category a tenuous thumbs up and give me half a point.
7. "Not dead yet: David Ortiz, Rafael Furcal, Jermaine Dye, Bronson Arroyo, Brad Penny, Orlando Cabrera, Orlando Hudson, Daisuke Matsuzaka." Boy, I look like a prophet with Ortiz, huh? I was essentially the only Red Sox fan who didn't give up on Ortiz during his slump, and I was the only one during his hot streak who said that his average would come back down over the course of the year. I'm right on all counts. Furcal is hitting .338 - about 50 points over his career average - with as many stolen bases as he had all of last year. Arroyo's era is 1/100th of a point off his career average, and he's 8-4, which is significantly better than normal (then again, so are the Reds). Brad Penny's got a 3.23 ERA, and while Cabrera's numbers have declined, he's still stealing bases as good as ever, and the same's true for Hudson. Dice-K looks significantly better than he did last year, and his ERA is down over a run from 2009. Only Dye doesn't count, since he turned down all free agent offers and chose to stay retired. Oh, well.
8. "Dead: Huston Street, Mike Gonzalez, Milton Bradley, Brad Lidge, Melky Cabrera, Pedro Feliz, Matt Lindstrom, Johnny Damon's outfield-playing days."This side is more hit-and-miss. Street spent most of the season on the DL so far, but he returned at the end of June and has the closing gig - for now. Gonzalez is 0-2 with an ERA of 18 and has lost the closing job. Milton Bradley is hitting .211 and has already melted down once in spectacular fashion. Lidge's ERA is 5.25 and his manager has said he is "not entirely comfortable" with Lidge being his closer. Cabrera is hitting .253 with 2 homers, Feliz is hitting .224 with 3 homers. However, it turned out Lindstrom wasn't totally dead yet - he's got 19 saves, which is already a career high. And Damon has played 31 of his 74 games in the outfield.
9. "The NL playoff teams will be Phillies, Cardinals, Rockies, and Braves. None of these races will be particularly exciting, though none of them will be insanely out of reach." Whoops. Currently the playoff teams are Mets, Reds, Padres, and Braves, thought everything is still close: Philly is two back of the Mets, the Cardinals two back of the Reds. San Diego looks surprisingly strong, though, and hold a 4-game lead in the NL West. Who saw that coming?
10. "The AL playoff teams will be the Yankees, Red Sox, White Sox, and... Angels. The Twins will remain in the hunt all season, and Texas will look frisky but deeply flawed. They'll be 2011's 'look out for this team coming on!'" Texas actually turned out to be this year's 'look out for this team coming on!' They're atop the AL West, but everything else seems to be in order, though the NL Central features three teams (Detroit, Minnesota,, and Chicago) all within a half-game of each other.
Well, that was refreshing. I'll check back in at the end of the year to see how I did at the final. In the meanwhile, let me make a second-half prediction: The Padres are not for real.
By the way, if you haven't voted, go cast your ballot in the All-Star run-off. Nick Swisher is ahead of both Kevin Youkilis and Paul Konerko, and Joey Votto, who is leading the NL in OPS, has somehow not made the squad yet, while Yadier Molina has. Get on that.
I was riding along in a friend's car the other day when Citizen King's 1999 hit "Better Days (And The Bottom Drops Out)" came on his Sirius. There was a general outcry of "hey, I'd forgotten about this song!" and "how long has it been since you heard this?" Listening to the song, I suddenly realized "this is a strange song." During the bridge, there's a female voice that comes on and asks "Do you like my new Gucci bag?" and a raspy male voice answers "that's beautiful, beautiful." Why is there a spoken word section in the middle? Who knows? You could get away with stuff like that back then. 11 years later, pop radio is a whole different world.
It made me go back and take a look at music during that era (strange to think of the turn of the millenia as an "era," I know). But 11 years ago, I was 15 and a freshman in high school, and that was a stretch when I listened to the radio voraciously. Back then, having songs like "Better Days" on the radio seemed normal to me. But a quick glance at the Billboard charts revealed that started listening to pop music at a very strange time in Top 40 history.
Consider what the playlists looked like back then: boy and girl bands like 'NSync, Backstreet Boys, etc., were an unstoppable force in pop music, so much so that bands formed on television shows to cash in on the trend became hitmakers by default (O-Town, S Club 7), and even the fictional boy band MTV formed for their boy band satire film, 2ge+her - featuring Chris Farley's bald, chubby younger brother, Kevin Farley - accidentally landed a hit single called "U + Me = Us (Calculus)." Despite the supergroup domination, radio maintained a strong acoustic vibe (Alanis Morissette, Dave Matthews Band, Jewel, Sarah McLachlan). Pop-rock groups were also holding strong - Matchbox Twenty, Third Eye Blind, and the Goo Goo Dolls all had multi-platinum records during this stretch, while straight-ahead alternative rockers like Creed, Fuel, Lit, and Nickelback broke into pop radio. Rap-rock made its first appearance - Limp Bizkit and Korn dominated MTV, and P.O.D. and Linkin Park managed to break into the Top 40.
That's not even mentioning a burgeoning R&B market - TLC, Brian McKnight, Brandy, Monica, Jennifer Lopez - or the emergence of pop-punk bands like Blink-182, Good Charlotte, and Sum 41. The first pop country acts made their appearance - Shania Twain broke down the barrier between the two worlds, followed shortly after by Faith Hill and Lonestar. Jay-Z and Eminem hit pop radio for the first time. Tally all those up in your head, and then throw in the various crazes the swept through radio during this time: Latin Pop (Ricky Martin, Marc Antony, Enrique Inglesias), techno DJs (Moby, Fatboy Slim), swing (we'll get to that later), and emo (Dashboard Confessional, Jimmy Eat World). It seems almost impossibly diverse.
But even with all these various genres fighting for radio dominance, every few months, a band would come out of nowhere with a bizarre one-hit wonder of a tune. This was the era of Fastball, of Harvey Danger, Marcy Playground, Smashmouth, Crazytown, Len, and The New Radicals. Billie Myers encouraged us to kiss the rain, Next warned us of the dangers of slow-dancing, Eve 6 burn-burned like a wicker cabinet and had a very strange relationship with their teacher, and Cher came back and invented autotune for us (really!).
With a little hunting, I came up with the 15 strangest, most out-of-left-field one-hit wonders of my early radio listening years, from the point I started listening to pop music at the tail end of 7th grade in '97 until I graduated high school in '02. Even after this long and very specific intro, I think you'll be a surprised at how very odd a time this was for pop radio.
Fun fact: while all these songs received varying degrees of success in the U.S., every single one of them went to #1 in the U.K. Which I think says something very unfortunate about the United Kingdom, frankly.
15. "I Try" - Macy Gray Year: 1999 Billboard Peak: #5 Sample Lyric: "I try to say goodbye and I choke, try to walk away and I stumble."
The song stands out not for its lyrical content or musical strangeness, but the odd and appealing harshness of Gray's voice. A raspy, frog-like croak, there was nothing commercial about Gray's song, yet it was an international sensation, was nominated for several Grammys (including both Record and Song of the Year), and landed her a cameo in Spiderman. She disappeared from U.S. pop radio as soon as this song did, and this track, unlike most of the other songs on this list, hasn't had any staying power whatsoever.
14. "Mummer's Dance" - Loreena McKennitt Year: 1997 Billboard Peak: #3 Sample Lyric:"We bring a garland gay, we've been rambling all the night."
Once again, not all of these songs are of the 'so awful you can't believe they're a hit' variety. Instead, some of them of good, interesting songs that just came out of nowhere. "Mummer's Dance" was a single from a Celtic New Age singer of mostly background ethereal choir and keyboard that sounds completely unlike a radio single. Sure, these songs appear on radio every now and then, but "Mummer's Dance" somehow went to #3 on the charts. That could never, ever happen now.
13. "Jump, Jive, and Wail" - Brian Setzer Orchestra Year: 1998 Billboard Peak: #14 Sample Lyric: "A woman is a woman and a man ain't nothing but a male."
Certain songs are harbingers of a changing of the tides, an announcement of new things arriving. This song was one of those - it appeared on the radio out of nowhere and suddenly everyone was saying "swing is back!" Really? Why? Who decided this? But swing dancing became an unstoppable craze for the next five years, and a bevy of zoot-suited 9-piece bands with unlikely names (Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Cherry Poppin' Daddies, Squirrel Nut Zippers) were getting radio airplay. How big was it? People reference the ska craze as a major musical phenomenon, but in terms of radio prevalence and cultural impact, swing dwarfed it. Swing was everywhere - every wedding, ever dance party, every girl's night out. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy played the Super Bowl halftime show. And then, as quickly as it arrived, it disappeared again from the public eye. That's the way these things crazes go.
12. "We Like To Party" - Vengaboys Year: 1999 Billboard Peak: #5 Sample Lyric: "The Vengabus is coming, and everybody's jumping."
Vengaboys are a dance group - excuse me, a Eurodance group (I don't know what the difference is, either) from Amsterdam who had two #1 U.K. singles ("Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!" and "We're Going To Ibiza") and then their big U.S. hit, "We Like to Party." Words cannot describe the banality of this song. It's one verse, a bridge, and a chorus, repeated ad nauseum, and the words to the verse are simply "we like to party" repeated over and over and over. Its most noticeable feature is the blaring bus horn worked into the beat and its almost tone-less singing throughout. In 2004, just as it was disappearing from pop culture, Six Flags chose it as its new theme song and introduced a bald old man in a tuxedo who danced wildly to its beat. Years later, the song remains inescapable.
11. "Aaron's Party (Come Get It)" - Aaron Carter Year: 2000 Billboard Peak: #4 Sample Lyric: "I said Mom, Dad, yo why ya sittin home? It's a Friday night, have you seen Aunt Joan?"
Aaron Carter is memorable mostly because this was the heart of the boy band craze, and the Backstreet Boys were so popular that Nick Carter was able to launch the career of his younger brother despite it being readily apparent that Aaron had significantly less talent than the already hard-up Nick. Aaron flamed out (no pun intended, honestly) immediately after this single, which is a shame, because his follow-up release was a track called "That's How I Beat Shaq," in which he takes on the then-Lakers star and defeats him by "psyching" him with tricks, until he wakes up to discover it was all only a dream. Incredibly, this song failed to chart on the Hot 100.
10. "Thong Song" - Sisqó Year: 2000 Billboard Peak: #3 Sample Lyric: "Baby make your booty go da na da na."
Right in the middle of R&B group Dru Hill's heyday, platinum-haired lead singer Sisqó released a solo record called "Unleash The Dragon." It failed to make any sort of impression until the strange novelty track "Thong Song" was released the next year. Somehow, radio went wild for the singer waxing poetically about "that thong th-thong thong thong." He immediately recorded an alternate version called "Thong Song Uncensored," which ironically had no explicit language in it, though both version do feature the lyric "she had dumps like a truck truck truck," which is either the strangest or grossest lyric to ever hit pop radio, depending what Sisqó meant by "dumps". The music video is credited - and criticized - for launching a new wave of "booty" videos, to which its director, Joseph Kahn responded: "You can go and try to make "Thong Song" all pretentious; about some f**king communist upheaval or something. But let's just relax and make a booty video, and let's make a really good one." (That one quote earned Kahn my undying adoration). Sisqó released a second solo record, which went nowhere, then reunited with Dru Hill, went nowhere again and the band was released from their label. "Thong Song," though, is still going strong, and was featured on "Glee" this last year.
9. "Because I Got High" - Afroman Year: 2001 Billboard Peak: #11 Sample lyric:"I was gonna pay my child support, but then I got high."
For all the artists who complained that Napster robbed them of royalties, there's always a flip side - for Afroman, Napster was his big break. After smoking an excessive amount of dope one day and finding himself unable to clean his room, Afroman wrote a track about the perils of marijuana. An unsigned artist, his song quickly circulated and gathered buzz, and ended up being played for a while on the Howard Stern show. Shortly after, it caught fire, and the rapper's laid-back lesson in how pot smoking ruined his life somehow became a stoner anthem. Soon, he was signed to Universal Records, and Kevin Smith (Clerks) was directing the music video. Later that year, a court ordered a Connecticut teenager to write a paper on the song after he was found smoking a marijuana pipe while driving. Inexplicably, that year "Because I Got High" was nominated for a Grammy award for best solo rap performance.
8. "Your Woman" - White Town Year: 1997 Billboard Peak: #5 Sample Lyric: "I could never be the right kind of girl for you."
White Town was a British one-man band created by Jyoti Mishra, who created the song after listening to 30's jazz singer Al Bowlly's "My Woman" and deciding to sample the trumpet line (the same trumpet line, incidentally, that supposedly inspired the "Imperial March" from Star Wars). Oddly, he wrote the song from a female's perspective - or did he? Interviewed about the song later, Mishra said the lyrics could mean "Being a member of an orthodox Trotskyist / Marxist movement (as I was for three years in the 80s). Being a straight guy in love with a lesbian (ditto). Being a gay guy in love with a straight man (not tried this one yet). Being a straight girl in love with a lying, two-timing, fake-ass Marxist. The hypocrisy that results when love and lust get mixed up with highbrow ideals." I have no idea what any of that means. Frankly, neither does Mishra, probably. Things don't get any clearer the more you dig. The song's music video was produced in a black-and-white silent film style, and contains an homage to Salvador Dali's 1928 surrealist film Un chien andalou. Meanwhile, Mishra proved so difficult to work with that EMI dropped him from their label in 1997 - that's right, the very same year his song topped the charts.
7. "Tubthumping" - Chumbawamba Year: 1997 Billboard Peak: #6 Sample lyric:"He drinks a whisky drink, he drinks a vodka drink, he drinks a lager drink, he drinks a cider drink."
Chumbawamba was a British anarcho-punk band who wrote horn-driven pop singles about working-class British political issues, and somehow managed to climb to the top of the charts in almost every country on the planet. The song quotes a UK anti-road protester, Paris 1968 graffiti, details about the McDonald's vs. Morris & Steel case, and the short story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner." The opening of the song starts with a soundbyte from the British film Brassed Off by the entertainingly named Pete Postlethwaite. The band's previous single, two years prior, was called "Ugh! Your Ugly Houses!" This is simply not the makings of your normal Top 40 hit. Yet the hook of the song is so catchy, and the chorus so fist-pumpingly exciting ("I get knocked down! But I get up again! You're never gonna keep me down!") that it's still being used in movies to this day. The band was so excited about the prospect of releasing the music to a larger market that they signed a music deal with EMI, despite having written a song condemning the label years early (the song was called, naturally, "F**k EMI"). It wouldn't be the last time the band changed their tune: they later sold their anti-social-networking song, "Pass It Along," to be used in an irony-ignorant Windows ad.
6. "All The Things She Said" - t.a.T.u Year: 2002 Billboard Peak: #8 Sample Lyric:"When they stop and stare - don't worry me, 'cause I'm feeling for her what she's feeling for me."
All you need to know about this band is that they were formed by a music producer named Ivan Shapalov to fill a void in the underage Eastern-European lesbian market, and that they are now the biggest Russian band in history. The two girls who make up the group were cast at 14 and made a Russian album that was so successful that they were forced to re-record it in English and release it worldwide. The girls both signed contracts not realizing that they would be forced to pretend to be lesbians while in the group, yet whenever they played a live show anywhere - including live American television - they were contractually obligated to make out with each other during the performance. Their success led them to be selected to represent Russia in the Eurovision Song Contest, but the Russian goverment understandably felt they didn't represent the motherland well. In response, Shapalov arranged a video shoot in Red Square with 200 girls behind the band, cavorting and kissing each other. The shoot eventually got so out of control that Shapalov was arrested for disturbing the piece. And that wasn't even the official music video, which feature the two girls making out in the rain while in prison, before the camera panned out at the end of the video to reveal that the girls were free and it was us, the viewers, who were in prison - by our preconceptions. Mind-blowing.
5. "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" - Eiffel 65. Year: 2000 Billboard Peak: #6 Sample lyric:"Everything is blue for him and hisself and everybody around."
Here's how you know a band will be a one-hit wonder - while listening to the first single, your immediate thought is 'how the hell did this become a hit?' "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" falls emphatically into that category, as it's a song so banal and monotonous it's already stuck in your head and grating on your nerves before it hits the chorus. The song is from an Italian dance group who - this is true - came up with the piano hook, picked the color blue at random as the subject, and told their lead singer to write nonsense lyrics to fill in the rest of the song. They're the band on this list least likely to have a follow-up single, and yet their next release, "Move Your Body," was a near-hit - brushed the Top 40 for a week, went platinum in some European countries.
4. "Who Let The Dogs Out" - Baha Men Year: 2000 Billboard Peak: #40 Sample Lyric: "Woof, woof, woof, woof."
This song counts on the list despite barely charting in the U.S. because despite its lack of radio airplay, seemed completely inescapable. It was played at baseball stadiums, on late-night show, on kids shows, in every new comedy released that summer. Alex Rodriguez threw a fit when he wasn't allowed to use it as his walk-up music because it was already being used by another of his Seattle teammates (the Mariners eventually caved and let A-Rod use it). It was even played live by the band on SportsCenter one night. This despite being originally recorded by the unfortunately named hip-hop group Fatt Jack and his Pack of Pets, or being a single released from the Rugrats In Paris: The Movie soundtrack, or, most oddly, having a chorus of nothing but its members barking. Even stranger, the song even has a weird Milli Vanilli-vibe: younger, more video-ready members were brought in to front the band after it was clear the song was a hit. And in what's becoming a strange theme here, the band won a Grammy for this song (Best Dance Recording).
3. "Mambo No. 5" - Lou Bega Year: 1999 Billboard Peak: #3 Sample Lyric:"A little bit of Sandra in the sun, a little bit of Mary all night long, a little bit of Jessica, here I am, a little bit of you makes me your man."
Bega's out-of-left-field hit, a cover of Pérez Prado's 1949 mambo single (whenever Prado couldn't come up with a title, he'd merely number the song), was a strangely successful attempt to bring mambo back to Top 40 radio. Bega - a German pop artist - struts through the song with the confidence of a New York MC, listing the names of the women lining up to be with him with cocky bravado. Stranger than the song itself is its lasting impression on pop radio - Radio Disney had Bega do a version where he changed the name of the ladies in the songs to Disney characters like Mickey Mouse and Huey, Dewey, and Louie (It also featured some entertaining lyric changes, such as his boys wanting "ice cream" instead of "gin and juice"). More incredibly, Bob the Builder (!) covered the song, and that single went #1 in the UK and #2 in Australia. It was selected as the theme for Channel 4's cricket coverage, and, briefly, the 2000 Democratic Convention, before someone recognized that having a song about a man having several women on the side might strike the wrong tone for the party at that particular point in time, especially since the first line of the chorus goes "a little bit of Monica in my life" (how did this happen? Who okayed that decision?). Just last year, it was used in a car commercial for the Corolla. This is a song that simply will not die.
2. "Lost In You" - Garth Brooks (as Chris Gaines) Year: 1999 Billboard Peak: #2 Sample Lyric:"Heaven knows I'm head over heels and it shows."
There's nothing unusual or even memorable about this song, musically, what's memorable here is Brooks. In perhaps the strangest move by a music star since Jerry Lee Lewis took out that full-page newspaper ad after he married his 13-year-old cousin, Brooks decided he needed an alter ego. Why? He was planning on making a movie as the character and wanted to release an album as a "pre-soundtrack" (a term that unsurprisingly failed to catch on). But his new persona, "Chris Gaines," a straight-ahead alternative rocker with a soul patch (which was photoshopped into the album photos), spiraled into bizarro world quickly. Brooks wrote a minutely detailed backstory for Gaines which was printed in the album notes of the record, ...The Life of Chris Gaines. VH1 made a "Behind The Music" on Gaines, where Brooks stayed in character as Gaines the entire time. Then, Brooks hosted SNL - as himself - while making his alter ego Gaines the musical act. Unsurprisingly, the endeavor failed. Brook's fans were baffled, and to show their displeasure, refused to buy the album (the fact it managed to move 2 million copies anyway show just what kind of pull Brooks had). Brooks - at that point only behind the Beatles as the most successful artist of all time - saw his career disappear in an instant. He never recovered, and is now playing shows in Vegas full time.
"Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) - Baz Luhrman Year: 1999 Billboard Peak: #10 Sample Lyric:"Know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum."
This is one of, if not the, strangest singles in the history of radio. Famed director Baz Luhrmann (Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge) decided to make an album of ambient version of the songs in his movies. While reworking a song called "Everybody's Free (To Feel Good)," one of his producers stumbled across a commencement speech by Mary Schmich (it is often misattributed to Kurt Vonnegut) called "Wear Sunscreen." Two days before their deadline to hand in the album, they emailed Schmich for permission to use the speech, got it, and an Australian actor recorded a recitation of the speech the next day. The song, which is simply the speech read aloud over a backing track, gives out bon mots like "remember, the race is long, and in the end it's only with yourself," "don't be reckless with other people's hearts, and don't put up with people who are reckless with yours," and "floss." The song, and the album it came from, languished in obscurity for a few months, then suddenly exploded nationwide, being played on The Tonight Show, The Today Show, The View, and both MTV and VH1. Chris Rock made a parody called "No Sex (In The Champagne Room)." The song was re-recorded in German, Portuguese, and Swedish, and was a international hit in all three languages. However, you'd be hard-pressed to find somone who remembers it clearly - it disappeared completely and utterly from radio shortly after it's release, and hasn't reappeared since.
One of my closest friends here, Brian McCormack, will be packing up and moving to Seattle next week. And while I'm terribly sad to see him go, I'm still thrilled to know that the opportunity he's going to is a good one, and that it's exactly where God's led him.
He and I made loads of videos together while he was here - if you go to myWorks page, you'll find him in at least ten of those videos, not to mention twice in the demo reel - and for his last Sunday, we put together one last video, about what it's like to leave a legacy behind.
I noticed recently that two nearly identical movies - Armored and Takers - are being released this year. This is no surprise, because this seems to be the case every year (remember how there were two mall cop movies in two months last spring?). Both of these movies are about a group of thieves involved in one big armored truck heist, but their plans go awry as they get in way over their heads. It's a pretty common plot, so I didn't bother to make a big fuss about it until I noticed that Matt Dillon was starring in both movies. This seemed strange.
It's one thing to have two movies about the same thing come out - movies are in development for years, so studios don't realize they'll be in competition until too late - it's another to have both movies star the same actor. It seemed impossible to me that Dillon would field a call from his agent saying "hey, when you finish up this armored truck heist movie, would you like to do another armored truck heist movie?" And then I looked at Dillon's body of work again.
At last count, Matt Dillon has been in 40 different movies. He has played a down-on-his-luck ne'er-do-well who becomes embroiled in a get-rich-quick scheme in fourteen of them (My Bodyguard, The Outsiders, The Big Town, Kansas, Drugstore Cowboy, A Kiss Before Dying, Mr. Wonderful, Albino Alligator, Wild Things, One Night at McCool's, City Of Ghosts, Employee of the Month, Factotum, and Armored) . That's incredible. It would be like Harrison Ford being in 14 separate, unrelated movies where he plays a treasure-hunting archeology teacher. In fact, whenever he's not playing that character, he's often in a movie where another actor plays that character and he's part of the storyline (To Die For, Takers, Bloodhounds of Broadway), evidently because he just couldn't be left out of that sort of story.
Even more mesmerizing is that when I tallied those numbers up, with only a few exception, every movie he was in that didn't meet that description almost did. On five occasions, Dillon played a ne'er-do-well who becomes involved in gang warfare (Over The Edge, Rumble Fish, The Saint of Fort Washington, Deuces Wild, To Die For), or a sleazy, self-centered protagonist/antagonist willing to do whatever it takes to get what he wants, whether it be sex (Little Darlings), the affections of married club singer (Rebel), fame (Singles), the love of Cameron Diaz (There's Something About Mary), or to defeat Herbie in a race (Herbie: Fully Loaded). The rest of his roles are a collection of drifters (Frankie Starlight), down-on-his-luck poor kids desperate for cash (Tex, Liar's Moon), and occasionally, morally bankrupt members of the law who become embroiled in the crimes that they're investigating (Golden Gate, Crash, Nothing But The Truth, Takers). He often plays characters who spend the whole movie trying to sleep with married women (Beautiful Girls, The Big Town, Rebel) or high school students (Wild Things), or the twin sister of the woman he murdered (A Kiss Before Dying). He has played a character named "Rebel" (Rebel) and another named "Regret" (Bloodhounds of Broadway). This is a man who only knows one role - desperate sleazeball.
What's strange about this is that Matt Dillon is, empirically speaking, quite clearly an excellent actor. He's Oscar-nominated, and was once the best part of an Best Picture winner (Crash). On the occasional roles he does try to show some range -usually, as a sleazeball who has some heart left in him (Drugstore Cowboy, Crash, Factotum, Singles), he's always excellent. But then his next role is the exact same as the last one he played.
Some people are typecast into certain roles and can't escape from them, and you'll see them complain about how they're always doing broad comedies or indie dramas or whatever they're stuck in, but Matt Dillon is a man typecast into a certain role who seems to have no desire to do anything else. This is the man who, twenty-four years into his career, wrote and directed a film (City of Ghosts) and cast himself as the star. In it, he played a con artist who travelled to Cambodia on a get-rich-quick scheme. I imagine it was a break for him from filming Employee of the Month, which was released the same year, about a fired bank employee who returns to the bank he worked at to hold it up.
So when I think about it, it wasn't remotely ridiculous for Dillon to agree to do both Takers and Armored. What would be strange is if either of those movies thought about going forward without him.
Haven't posted anything I've done for a little bit, so here's some of the more fun stuff I've worked on.
This is this year's Golf Tournament promo, which we shot really quickly. We didn't get permission to shoot on the course, so we just hung out there and waited for foursomes to go by, then jumped in and shot a take before the next group came through. We didn't get a chance to do any prep work or anything, so I came back afterwards and tried to see what I could do with a bunch of guys hanging out on a golf course and waving clubs around. This project was a lot of frame-by-frame editing and calculation of how the physics of these graphics would work.
If you're looking for easter eggs, take another look at the beginning part of the "donate items" shot.
This video is from our big student ministry project this year, Reach, which had the motto "what if one weekend could change a city?" We arrived on Friday night for an evening of nothing but worship, spent the day Saturday doing service projects, and finished the night with a gigantic party. But they needed a wrap-up video - on Sunday morning, so I stayed up all night to get this done. I love this:
And finally, here's a song from our Good Friday service, of Zach doing "How He Loves." I directed the service, so that's why this is in here. Also, because it's incredibly powerful. That service was my all-time favorite since I've been at this church.
*update* All three videos have also been added to the Works page.
