Blue Lines Revisited

Anonymous asked: Among FutureSex/LoveSounds, Blackout, and Robyn (the self-titled album), which one do you think is the best?

Blackout is probably my best-loved and most-played pop album of the last decade, so that’s your answer. As for the other two, FS/LS I remember enjoying but very quickly filleting - I pulled out the standout tracks and rarely played the rest. Which is your classic hits+filler pop album behaviour pattern, despite Timberlake’s obvious intention to make something more “substantial”. So while “What Goes Around… Comes Around” and “SexyBack” are terrific I never play the parent record - it would be a good one to re-investigate.

As for Robyn I only really started enjoying her stuff with Body Talk (EDIT: No, “With Every Heartbeat” was before then, so it must have been with that). Clearly her approach hadn’t exactly changed, but I could never get used to her voice before. Maybe the production felt a bit rinky-dink to me, too - my favourite Robyn record is “With Every Heartbeat” which sounds much fuller than almost any of her solo stuff to me.

(A lot of my friends ADORED and still adore Robyn, and find her very quotable and write brilliant analyses of her songs. Even though I quite like her now I definitely feel I’m missing something, probably because I’m not THAT much of a lyrics guy any more.)

Anonymous asked: judge dredd mt rushmore! hard to believe you've not done this one before, though.

This is pretty hard, because I tend to think of Dredd more in terms of phases rather than individual stories, but also because most of the stories I HAVE read since about 2000 have been the big individual (graphic-novelised) sagas. BUT I haven’t read eg Day of Chaos yet, so I’m not up to date.

But I’ll have a go. BTW I’m going to exclude the stuff written by my brother from consideration here, so my judgement is unsullied by family ties ;)

THE JUDGE CHILD QUEST: As a kid we had the Titan Books editions of the main Dredd sagas - Cursed Earth, Apocalypse War, Judge Child - we didn’t have The Day The Law Died but a friend did. I had to pick one, it was almost the Apocalypse War, which is a proper story (unlike the disconnected travelogue of Judge Child) but for wonder and pleasure Judge Child wins. As a demonstration of the scope of the Dredd Universe, it’s unbeatable, and it starts and ends very well - the grotesquerie of Faro The Garbage God at one end, the inexorable Western-style executions of the doomed Angels at the other. In between, so much to enjoy: “That damned moustache!”; “Shake hands with the Thing From The Pit”; McMahon’s drawing of the exploded planet-thing; “Two aliens have entered the battlefield!”, and even one of Wagner/Grant’s verse stories that’s actually bearable. Add on the epilogue with Dredd on the streets while his fate is decided by the Council of Five, just to tie a bow on it.

UNCLE UMP’S UMPTY CANDY: One of the classic early years one-parters, the one with the absurdly addictive sweets. To be honest, this is a stand in for about fifty stories published in the early 80s, especially in that relatively happy (for Mega City One) time between Cal and the Apocalypse War. What I like about these short stories isn’t just their craft - satire, action and a good gag or two in six pages, week-in week-out - but the overall sense of Dredd in what he might consider his prime, before the losses started mounting up and the doubts set in. Portrait of the Judge as a Young Man - one who enjoys his job, banters with his colleagues, rolls his eyes at the citizens… it’s as close to a stable, sympathetic environment as a comic with a fascist protagonist ever really gets. The Complete Case Files 3-6-ish are probably where you want to look for these, I don’t know exactly which stories are in what.

THE DEAD MAN: The actual story of the Dead Man is slow but fine, this is only really in here for having THE great Dredd Universe revise-everything-you-know-RIGHT-NOW-EARTHLET cliffhanger. I bought it when it came out. I probably squeaked. And, er, I’ve sort of spoiled it just by its inclusion in a Dredd Mt Rushmore.

BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY: I simply haven’t read enough of what you might call Late Dredd to make a call on the best one, so instead here’s a highlight of what you might call Middle Dredd, or Dredd: The Procedural Years - it was this or The Pit, which is fantastic (Dredd takes over an underperforming Sector House - hijinks ensure), but this one has the gloriously creepy and awful Judge Roffman in it, one of those foils who, once he’s appeared, you can’t believe a series ever managed without.