A little context: Steve is a frat-boy lawyer, a Republican, not straight-laced but not someone you think of as a dancer. This strip exactly carries the power of Michael Jackson to cross cultural barriers. It also gets at some of the sadness of white culture: that you can only dance and express yourself in secret, and if you get caught, it’s cause for shame. A lot of my musician friends and other creatives need to bludgeon their shame reflexes into submission with drugs and alcohol. We’d be happier and healthier if we could feel free to get our Billie Jean on without inhibition.

What’s interesting to me is how the movie is simultaneously so fresh and so derivative. Avatar’s freshness is in its breathtaking visuals, all the technogeekery of its making. It’s derivative in its plot, setting, characters, and all other non-technical content. It’s practically a mashup in movie form. In the spirit of my blog post parsing out all the sources of Halo, I figured I’d do the same for this movie. Here are some of the most obvious sources, similarities and resonances (There are some spoilers within, but the plot of this movie is totally predictable and the least interesting thing about it, so feel free to read if you’re planning to go see it.)

Dances With Wolves

The plots are extremely similar. Both are racially problematic, as thoughtfully outlined by io9.

Pocahantas

Not the historical Pocahantas, the Disney version. From Ponyponyshow’s Tumblr, click for full-sized.

Both Dances With Wolves and Avatar descend from the Pocahantas myth. I haven’t seen the Disney version, but Terrence Malick did a lovely job of it in The New World. That movie, Dances With Wolves and Avatar all share a cast member, Wes Studi.

Roger Dean’s paintings

Like the album covers he did for Yes.

Avatar is especially influenced by Roger Dean’s thing for floating islands.

The ever-helpful io9 has many more examples.

The Matrix

The whole virtual body thing naturally didn’t start with the Matrix, but that’s what I kept thinking of. The “avatar” disambiguation page on wikipedia lists a zillion things with that name, the two most culturally significant being the original word from Hinduism and the ubiquitous computing concept. Unlike in the Matrix, in Avatar, the virtual bodies are real. Except that they really aren’t, they only exist as ones and zeros. Layers within layers! Who says Hollywood action movies are dumb?

The Abyss

James Cameron has a fetishistic thing with asphyxiation, relating to his love of near-death diving experiences – see the New Yorker profile for some gruesome details.

Aliens

Sigourney Weaver! Robotic exoskeletons!

Sexy blue women

See this article on io9 about the phenomenon.

Unobtainium

Praise be to wikipedia. How else would I know that “unobtainium” is a fifty-year-old word?

Every Vietnam movie

All that helicopter-based combat in a jungle setting. A rich high-tech civilization being defeated by a less rich, lower-tech one with home field advantage.

Entire planet as organism

Pandora’s planetwide nervous system descends from the Gaia hypothesis. There’s an Asimov novel called Nemesis where a planet’s bacterial life all turn out to be a single networked superorganism that communicates telepathically with human visitors. The best “planet as organism” is the South Park episode “Lice Capades” where the sentient world is Clyde’s scalp.

The Dragonriders of Pern

Outing myself as a real dork here, but so Anne McCaffrey wrote a whole series of books about riding giant flying reptiles. As I recall, the riders communicated telepathically with them.

Fern Gully

Haven’t seen it myself, but one of my Twitter buddies pointed it out. Tone Loc is in it!

My point here is not that James Cameron is a bad artist for being so derivative. His work has its problems, what with the racial stereotyping and clunky dialog and broadness of stroke. But he’s still a good artist. His referencing, borrowing and outright quotation makes his work stronger. Any quotes or sources I missed? As usual, kindly hit the comments.

Lil Wayne and I have some differences of style and taste: about facial tattoos, about drinking cough syrup recreationally, about jewelry on one’s teeth. But we agree about music. He brags constantly that he’s the best rapper alive. I think he makes a pretty good case.

It wasn’t even Lil Wayne’s rhymes that caught my ear in the first place, it was his tracks. His music sounds fine on regular headphones or speakers, but it reveals its true power in the club or in a car with a good system. The tempos are slow, the beats are minimalist, and there’s plenty of space around every sonic event. On the big hits, like “A Milli” and “Lollipop”, an 8o8 kick drum is the only sound in the low register. There’s usually no bass guitar or even bass synth – the tuned 808 kick carries the bassline. The vocals, snares, hi-hats and synths are all up in the high frequencies. The midrange is totally empty.

Emptying the midrange adapts Wayne’s music perfectly to its natural habitat: cars, parties, clubs, subway trains and other noisy, less-than-ideal listening environments. In a club or a party, the midrange is full of people talking. In a car or train, the midrange is full of engine and wind noise. Keeping the music’s midrange empty means that it doesn’t have to compete with the ambient sound. The songs can sound huge and full and totally present without blowing your eardrums or your speakers out. Another benefit of the empty midrange is that it leaves room for you to enjoy the upper overtones of the kickdrum. Even severely compressed and played through computer speakers, Lil Wayne’s music sounds pretty damn hot:

The weird vocal sample the song is named for comes from “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo (Vampire Mix),” a remix of the Tribe Called Quest song by Fatboy Slim. The original Tribe song has a sample in it of “Funky” by The Chambers Brothers. That makes “A Milli” a remix of a remix of a remix. Recursive!

I’ve been drawn to the musicality of hip-hop since I was a kid, but at times I’ve been scared off by all the angry and confrontational language. As a kid, I could mostly enjoy with Run-DMC. Sometimes I found them a little bit scary, but mostly they made sense to me. My friend Elbert played me some Public Enemy in ninth grade, and I felt like it wasn’t meant for me, but I liked it. When we got into the nineties, that’s when I lost touch with hip-hop. I wanted to like the Wu-Tang Clan and the west coast gangsta rappers, but I got scared away.

It took me several more years to realize that I wasn’t supposed to be taking all the imagery literally. I didn’t understand that rappers, like rock singers, are often playing characters or doing standup comedy. It makes sense that Ice Cube has made such a smooth transition from gangsta rap to family comedies. Hip-hop has a lot of theatricality and irony to it, and even a liberal, open-minded white guy like me can lose sight of that. I fell into the bad habit of underestimating the intelligence of hip-hop artists and didn’t allow for the possibility of multiple or opposite meanings to what I was hearing. Imagine if you were plunked down in America without any cultural context and someone showed you an episode of South Park or Family Guy. If you didn’t realize they were kidding, you’d probably be horrified. That’s pretty much what my first reaction was to the dirtier hip-hop styles.

I’m glad I let go of my moral objections to Lil Wayne. He’s crude a lot of the time, but he’s never dumb, and he’s capable of dazzling verbal virtuosity. There’s the famous line in “Lollipop” that everybody quotes, it’s like what Cole Porter would be writing if he were a young guy right now:

Safe sex is great sex. Better use a latex,
’cause you don’t want that late text, that “I think I’m late” text.

Lil Wayne’s high opinion of himself extends to his choice of samples. He samples several of his own tracks for his song “I’m Me.” Again: recursive.

Like his frequent collaborators T-Pain and Kanye West, Lil Wayne likes singing with Auto-tune.

If you haven’t been listening to a lot of hip-hop lately, “Lollipop” represents the state of the art well. The synths are gridded out exactly in a sequencer so as to sound totally posthuman. Wayne plays a little electric guitar with a sloppiness that balances the synths’ unearthly perfection. There are big yawning digital silences in the rhythm that are as powerful as the beats themselves.

The Auto-tuned robo-vocal style inspired me to sing more on my own tracks, which is a minor miracle, because I am not a singer. The sign of a real master musician is when they fill me with an intense, competitive desire to go apply their tricks to some new music of my own.

I think Lil Wayne’s music is healthy for nerdy white people like me. Having a sense of humor about the human body and its functions is the right attitude. Natalie Portman kind of says it best, when she’s asked what song reflects her current state by Interview Magazine:

PORTMAN: Really, really obscene hip-hop. I love it so much. It makes me laugh and then it makes me want to dance. Those are like my two favorite things, so combined . . . I’ve been listening a lot lately to “Wait (The Whisper Song)” by the Ying Yang Twins, where the lyrics are like, “Wait ’til you see my dick” – which is just amazing because it’s whispered. [whispers] “Wait ’til you see my dick . . . ” [laughs] Crazy. So I just listen to it like I’m a five-year-old, like, “Oh my god! I can’t believe he just said that!”

When she rapped on Saturday Night Live, she was kind of kidding, kind of not.

In some ways this could be a Jewish thing. Like Natalie, my mom and the majority of my relatives are in the tribe. I went to a mostly Jewish elementary and high school. My Jewish side finds America’s puritanism weird and lame. I also have a midwestern protestant side I inherited from my dad. This side of me thinks prudishness is lame, but also Not Optional. So there’s some internal conflict. It can be like Jon Stewart vs Hank Hill in my head. Lil Wayne is a good ally in my struggle to keep Hank under control.

But then, Lil Wayne may have more in common with Hank Hill than we realize. He carefully cultivates the image of a stoned slacker, but that performance masks an intense work ethic. It’s significant that the “A Milli” video shows Lil Wayne doing his job. He records new material almost every night. I can’t think of any recording artist who’s been more prolific than he has. Almost everything he records, he makes public. Some of it gets sold commercially, the rest he gives away on mixtapes and the web. He puts out so many tracks that Vibe could write an article called “The 77 best Lil Wayne songs of 2007.” He talks about his process a little in Rolling Stone:

You never write down your rhymes. Do you ever forget good stuff?

I do that a lot and it sucks. That’s why I keep the studio with me everywhere I go. I can just hook up the studio straight to my laptop and start recording. I don’t memorize lyrics like a speech. I just go to the studio and think of it right there. I just let the beat play a trillion times and I go in there and record four bars or whatever I thought of so I can get it off my mind and start thinking about something else. That’s why I do my songs so quick.

I think any creative person could learn a lot from the Lil Wayne strategy. Computer recording encourages improvisation. Improvising is a bottomless source of new ideas. Creativity is evolutionary, you need to have a lot of failures to naturally select out the hits. The wider the diversity of your failures, the more hits you’ll produce. That’s why Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones recorded hundreds of demos so they could narrow them down into the songs on Thriller. Lil Wayne takes the idea up a notch by releasing everything for public consumption and letting the fans decide what works and what doesn’t. I’d guess this demanding routine keeps him from ever getting hung up, from getting too precious. He probably gets things right in a very few tries. Keeping your ideas under so much evolutionary pressure makes them definite. As Lil Wayne says in “Shoot Me Down”:

My picture should be in the dictionary next to the definition of definition.

He’s definite enough to have sampled the Beatles and gotten the copyright smackdown for it. (Thanks to Sasha Frere-Jones for pointing me to this.)

The comments on this video are hostile. I can understand not liking the music, but the anger is way more intense than that. I can’t imagine having so many people that angry at me. If Lil Wayne can keep his confidence up in the face of so much scrutiny and resistance, I don’t see how any creative person has any excuse not to step up their game.

Here’s my mashup of Lil Wayne and Björk.

Lil Wayne Is Oh So Quiet

To download, right-click or option-click the link and save the file to your desktop.