Celebrating 25 Years of the Game Boy with Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters

© Nintendo

Last week was the Nintendo Game Boy's 25th anniversary. It's a weird experience, realizing that the hunk of plastic and silicon I used to play with in the back seat of my parents' car is now a quarter of a century old. If the Nintendo Game Boy were a person and not a handheld video game system, it would be old enough to buy booze and maybe not get carded. Old enough to settle down and start a family of its own. I'll spare you the ubiquitous "Game Man" jokes--okay, I'll admit it, I'm just jealous that I didn't think of it first--but the whole thing is so weird that I'm almost in denial about it. 25th anniversaries are things that happen to stuff from my parents' generation, like Abbey Road or, I dunno, Star Wars. Could it really have been 25 years ago that I first played Tetris and Super Mario Land? (Well, no...I'm pretty sure I didn't get mine until a few years after launch. But you know what I mean.) Am I really this goddamn old?

The answer is yes. Yes, I am. Old enough, in fact, that upon hearing the announcement last week, I felt the irresistible nostalgic pull to return to some original Game Boy games. My first thought was to dust off the aforementioned Mario Land, but that game is so short and breezy--a half hour to beat at best, if you're a 2D Mario vet--that it really shouldn't require a special occasion to revisit. Instead, I decided to try a Game Boy game I've never played before, 1991's Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters.

Throwback Thursday Bonus: Double Indemnity

© Paramount Pictures Corporation

Editor's Note: Yeah, I already posted a Throwback Thursday piece today, but then I was reminded that Billy Wilder's classic film noir, Double Indemnity, is 70 years old today. As an occasional film scholar and an avid fan of all things noir, I felt I would be remiss if I were to let that milestone pass without acknowledging it in some way. So here's a piece I wrote in 2006 as a review for the film's then-most recent reissue on DVD. Keep in mind that this piece is itself almost a decade old now, written while I was still an undergraduate (and it shows). But it's a decent little piece of juvenilia all the same. I've cut it down a bit to remove all references to the specific DVD edition, which means there also won't be any discussion of the miserable 1973 made-for-TV remake. And that's just as well; I wouldn't want to make Mr. Wilder spin in his grave on today of all days. So anyway, happy birthday, Double Indemnity... you cold, bleak son of a bitch. - Z.H.

No discussion of film noir is complete without Billy Wilder's 1944 masterpiece Double Indemnity. Not because it was the first; the beginnings of the genre go back to John Huston's The Maltese Falcon in 1941, if not even earlier, to a brief mini-tradition of American B-films stemming roughly from the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s. But what does make Double Indemnity so historically significant is its placement as one of the first truly influential films noir, and certainly the most pronounced execution of that style's essential narrative and visual elements to date. Double Indemnity's release in 1944 puts it ahead of the crop of 1945 films that caused French critics to originally coin the phrase "film noir"; its success, netting seven Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, paved the way for a new period of credibility in the genre, allowing for a brilliant, if short-lived run of similarly-themed films in the post-war era.

Throwback Thursday: Prince's "Black Sweat"

© NPG Records

Editor's Note: I have been writing about music off and on (mostly off) for almost ten years now. A lot of the stuff I've written has been lost because I was dumb about preserving my work offline. A lot of it is scattered around now-defunct blogs that I'd just as soon not draw any attention to, because they're terrible. But some of it I still think is worth reading, so every once in a while I will throw it onto Dystopian Dance Party with minor revisions. I will do this on Thursdays, because the Internet has officially deemed Thursday the day to share old stuff nobody else cares about. This week, to tie in to all the Prince coverage we've been doing, I'm sharing a review of another Prince single from way back in 2006. - Z.H.

In the summer of 2004, I saw Prince on two of his stops at the Palace of Auburn Hills (now DTE Energy Music Theatre) in metro Detroit. He was touring in support of his much-vaunted "comeback" album, Musicology, and the setlist was tooled to match that record's mood: heavy on hits, often in medley form, with few idiosyncrasies and a "family-friendly" veneer on even the notorious '80s material. Hence when performing "I Feel For You," Prince changed the words "it's mainly a physical thing" to "it's mainly a spiritual thing," while "D.M.S.R."'s 1982 instruction to "work your body like a whore" was replaced with the more modest "work it like you want some more." And it was good, for what it was; the man is pushing 50, after all, and after all those rumors about door-to-door Witnessing, it’s a wonder we got to hear nuggets like "Automatic" and "Let’s Work" in the first place. I mean, what were you expecting? Assless pants?

But on the second night, something strange happened. Prince was midway through a fiery blues guitar solo in "The Question of U" when he threw his axe to the ground. Then, suddenly, he was on the ground too, crawling slowly toward the fallen guitar like he'd just stepped out of the video for "When Doves Cry." Time seemed to stop. Would he stand up? Or would he start humping things? In short, were we about to witness the return of the "old" Prince, the sexy Prince, the Prince all of us in the audience really wished was in Auburn Hills that evening? I had a mental image of the Kid's impish grin as he grinded the hell out of "Darling Nikki" in Purple Rain, stripped to the waist and dripping with sweat. For a moment I saw Jehovah himself, the lips beneath his gray beard curled with shock, his eyes covered piously against the sacrilege to come. It was a surreal, intense, thrilling moment…and then, it was over. Prince stood back up. He finished his show with consummately performed, if safe, renditions of hits like "Kiss" and oldies like Sam & Dave's "Soul Man." He came back with an encore of Musicology's sweet, gorgeous--but hardly Dirty Mind-ed--"Call My Name." And he left, his last show in the Detroit area concluded and not another flash of the Prince we once loved. It was good…for what it was.

Prince: "The Breakdown" and the Problem of Expectations

© Warner Bros. Entertainment

The problem with being an artist like Prince--an artist who built his career on a body of work that was epochal, genre-shattering, indeed genre-defining--is that it's impossible to simply grow old gracefully. For the last three decades (this year of course marking the thirtieth anniversary of his most beloved album, 1984's Purple Rain), Prince has strained increasingly under the weight of expectation created by his own genius. Back in 1994, when disputes with parent label Warner Bros. over the release of The Gold Experience infamously prompted him to brand himself a "slave" and wage war on his own public image, the artist then "Formerly Known as" Prince tried to manage expectations by defying them. By 2004, with the release of "comeback" album Musicology and a massive stadium tour with a setlist slanted toward his past hits, his strategy had reversed entirely: he would meet those expectations head-on, exceeding them in the process. The story of the last ten years has ultimately been the story of the impossibility of that task. Sure, Prince in the 21st century has risen on the strength of Gen-X nostalgia and a series of spectacular live engagements to the highest cultural profile he's had since the beginning of the '90s; but during the exact same period, his new music has sunk further and further into irrelevancy. The wave of excitement that greeted Musicology had, by 2009's obnoxiously-titled LOtUSFLOW3R/MPLSoUND, diminished to a mildly enthusiastic and mostly obligatory trickle. His next and most recent album, 20Ten, didn't even see an official release in the United States.

The latest chapter of this story, I am sorry to say, doesn't do much to alter the narrative arc. Last week, Prince announced a global licensing partnership with old label Warner Bros. that will include both a series of reissues of his classic albums and a brand new, Warner-distributed Prince record. Then, within hours of the announcement, Prince--no doubt aware by this point in his career that the reissue project would be greeted with more enthusiasm than the prospect of new material--dropped the first single from the still-untitled album, "The Breakdown." And it's...definitely a 21st-century Prince song.

4 His Royal Badness's Consideration: 14 Rarities That Need to Be on the 30th Anniversary Purple Rain Reissue

© Warner Bros. Entertainment

Let me begin by doing away with any pretense of critical distance or objectivity. I am an unapologetic, frothing-at-the-mouth, dyed-in-the-pink-cashmere Prince fan. My little two-bedroom apartment has no fewer than four pieces of framed Prince-related art--including the fold-out shower poster from the original 1981 Controversy LP, which I have hanging in the bathroom across from my actual shower. So when I heard late last week that Prince was burying the hatchet with Warner Bros., the label under which he released all of his best work, and planning a series of expanded reissues beginning with 1984's Purple Rain, I reacted pretty much the way you might expect: with sheer, unbridled, childlike glee.

But I'm also a realist. There's a reason why I am this damn excited about a reissue project: a record-industry practice that has become so habitual for virtually every other catalogue artist of note that it's now officially tedious. Because Prince isn't a normal catalogue artist. This, after all, is the guy who stuffed his long-promised 1998 outtakes collection Crystal Ball with a bunch of patently inessential remixes of '90s-era album cuts like "The Continental." This is the guy who, as recently as 2006, made Warner revise the track list of the hits/rarities collection Ultimate Prince to remove the 12" version of "Erotic City" because, presumably, it had naughty words. So as thrilled as I am to see his catalogue maybe finally getting the, ahem, royal treatment it deserves, I still feel the need to accompany my initial reaction of fist-pumping ecstasy with that second of totally natural fan responses: a list of demands.

Thoughts on Recent Mashups

© The Melker Project

I love mashups--really, any kind of aural collage or remix--more than a reasonable person probably should. During my preteen years, I wasted hours on my Pioneer double cassette deck, mixing everything from Badfinger songs to The Hobbit on audio book into bastard combinations of Frank Zappa's Lumpy Gravy and YouTube Poop. To this day, there are mashups I prefer to any of their constituent parts: a 2005 version of LCD Soundsystem's "Daft Punk is Playing at My House," mixed with Janet Jackson's "Miss You Much" and ingeniously titled "Janet Jackson is Playing at My House," has been stuck in my head for almost a decade now, despite the song itself having seemingly succumbed to the twin Internet plagues of time and DMCA notices. And yeah, I'm one of those assholes who gets legitimately excited whenever a new Girl Talk album is announced.

So it should probably come as no surprise that I instantly fell in love when I heard New York DJ Scott Melker's series of mashup EPs combining recent mainstream hip-hop hits with '70s-'90s pop. My younger sister, who I don't even think would be embarrassed to be publicly described as a Hall and Oates fan, introduced me to last year's Ballin' Oates, the collection that finally gave us the combination of the blue-eyed soul duo's "Rich Girl" and Rich Boy's "Throw Some D's" we never knew we needed. There's also the wonderfully-titled Trill Collins, which left me surprised and frankly dismayed by the amount of latent affection I have for the solo music of Phil Collins, and the even-more-wonderfully-titled Skeetwood Mac, which mixes 2 Chainz' "Yuck!" with the Rumours cut "The Chain"...'nuff said. Most recently at the time of this writing, Melker released Red Hot Trilli Peppers: my least favorite of the bunch, but only because the Chili Peppers have a less interesting body of work than any of the other artists; whatever your feelings on the original songs, pairing B.o.B.'s "Headband" with "Give It Away" is still an inspired move.