June 2013
14 posts
Aamer Rahman: GAME OF TROPES: Racefail (spoilers) →
aamerrahman.tumblr.com
I’m late to Game of Thrones - but I caught up. And I couldn’t help photoshopping this picture of Khal Drogo as a Klingon. Anyone sad enough to be familiar with both GOT and Star Trek knows exactly what I’m talking about.
The Klingons are the Dothraki of Star Trek - the scary,…
i don’t like the white savior plot device, but i do love Daenerys’ character, a strong woman who is freeing slaves and wants to conquer a the neighboring continent with them. i could get with character like that whether black, white, red, blue, or striped like a zebra. as for sci fi writers fulfilling their fetish desires. i see it more as romanticism. growing up in the western world, these writers are fulfilling their romantic desires, which revolves around the belief that they live in the more “civilized” part of the world, thus them wanting to emphasize the most barbaric and “noble savage” themes of the eastern and oriental world, when depicting fictional barbarian cultures. i don’t think the show, writers, viewers, or author is racist. the show does however, reflect how many perceive race and the world today.
POZ Decade: Brand New - Deja Entendu
Today PropertyOfZack is launching our next Decade feature in honor of an album you might know called Deja Entendu by Brand New, which is celebrating its ten year anniversary next week. To state the importance of the album in anyway would be nearly impossible, so we’re going to celebrate it in the best way we can. We have commentary on the album from PropertyOfZack team members Adrienne Fisher, Alyssa McKinley, Erik van Rheenen, and Zack Zarrillo. Enjoy and reblog to let us know your thoughts on Deja Entendu ten years later!
How Deja Entendu holds up
Ten years after the release of Deja Entendu, its tracks remain some of the most prominent of the Brand New discography, a discography that is just as relevant now as ever. Brand New shows still sell out in twenty minutes flat. While fans remaining not only interested but overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the bands current affairs might be largely due to the constant ambiguity of its future combined with a lack of tour dates, without a past as incredibly solid as the one Brand New has had, nobody would care. There is no denying that the majority of people who wait for the minute tickets for a Brand New show go on sale are waiting in hopes that they’ll get to hear tracks like “Okay, Believe You But My Tommy Gun Don’t” and “Play Crack The Sky” live, and those weren’t even the singles.
While Your Favorite Weapon will always be great for the nostalgia factor, and Deja’s follow-ups also have their own strands of incredibly astonishing musicality and lyricism, this album will probably always be the most iconic of the bands career. Deja Entendu fortified Brand New’s status as a complete powerhouse of a band and made way for their future successes. It’s timeless within our scene and it’s as significant now as it will be in another ten years. – Adrienne Ray Fisher
Was the band successful in following it up?
There is no saying that Brand New ever progresses or digresses, but they always follow up in a momentous way, taking an entirely different path with each release. Where Deja Entendu is stark and brazen, The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me is illustrative and perplexing. If these two albums belonged to two different bands, it is likely that they would be the best albums in the catalog of each. While diehard fans of Deja Entendu may have been entirely disappointed in what Brand New delivered after it, that disappointment could be attributed only to the drastic change in style, not to any lack of a caliber of excellence. If the order were reversed, the situation would have been exactly the same. For as long as Brand New exists, they will keep their fans guessing what they will do both in and out of the studio. It’s all a part of their charm.
Just give one listen to Deja Entendu and you’ll realize that saying the band exudes confidence is a kind understatement. Being a fan of Brand New is like being in a relationship with an arrogant partner who is too brilliant to let go. They’ll always do whatever they want, but we will always love it. – Alyssa McKinley
How Deja Entendu changed Brand New’s future:
To say that Deja Entendu changed Brand New’s future is a gross understatement. While Your Favorite Weapon sits pretty in history along with the other stalwart records that shaped the era of really, really emotional and really, really catchy pop-punk, the release of Deja marks for the band a launch into mainstream rotation and the beginning of a rabid cult following. At first, the record felt like Brand New had turned on us; for a generation of kids who hadn’t been music fans long enough to realize the artistic merit in bands pushing their songwriting in new directions, Deja, at first, fell upon confused and skeptical ears. But it didn’t take long at all for what felt like literally everyone to not reject, but devour the album with fervent obsession. Loving this record became a person’s hallmark of participation in underground music, and the lyrics are all but Holy Scripture at this point after years and years of immortalization in away messages, tattoos, usernames, car sing-a-longs, covers, and the live shows themselves.
