Faux-Redemption
Jun. 25th, 2010 12:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseA more cheerful rant, if such is possible. Inspired by the fact that we're sort of planning another music night, and because Jeff asked, on finding out TSO was sorted under my folder labelled "melodramatic" as "Isn't that a serious understatement?"
I want very hard to like Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
I mean, I quite enjoyed the show last November, and I've collected one of the Christmas albums and both non-Christmas collections. And I do listen to them fairly regularly. I like most of their instrumentals, particularly the classical-based ones (though Tracers, on Night Castle, has a lot less of that, and is darn good) and about 50% of their sung pieces - and the best of the sung pieces can be right up there with the instrumentals.
Then they have the other songs. The ones where they seem to decide that singing the same one-to-five word line fifteen times over is a powerful effect and not a grating one (Bruce Springsteen manages this in Devil's Arcade, but none of the members of TSO have half his strength of expression.)
That they like to sing every single incident as if it were the end of the world, or the height of its saving. When they don't reduce it to snarling vocals, because an evil character like the devil can't possibly sound good. That everything needs to be ornamented or elaborated.
That interrupting an amazing piece of rock opera with a sudden carnival rant doesn't pretty much trash what is otherwise one of the best vocal pieces. (Seriously; I want to get some kind of sound editing software, because I'm pretty sure the rest of the song can be linked together with that bit excised.) (The Carnival effect also compares systematic genocide to the Roman Colosseum. Which is not even on the same SCALE. Nor was it approached with the same intent.)
But the worst are their stories. Every album comes with a story linking the songs. Some of the songs don't make sense without the narration, some would be more universally applicable.
And the stories? Universally suck. They're unsubtle, unrealistic. They want to be hopeful, but they bend reality out of shape to do it, even as they claim to be about being realistic and facing the evils of the world.
Beethoven's Last Night isn't dreadful - Beethoven is being threatened by the devil and reviewing his life. Until it throws in an unnecessary extra bit about a girl (spawninng two of the weakest songs in the whole thing), and a ridiculous extra twist that renders the entire story moot (Done by a character named, to make it even more obvious, Twist). Beethoven gives up his precious Tenth Symphony. It's rescued by a last minute bit of lawyering, and he dies happy and at peace. And the Tenth Symphony is hidden away again the moment his back is turned. And I go, So why did I even bother?
But Night Castle actively offends me. First, you have a man and woman get together and get married and spend literally ONE DAY Together, in which they get married and conceive a child. This grates for a number of reasons. This isn't how real romance works. But I'd let it pass. it's a minor ill.
Then the young man, a Lieutenant, goes to Cambodia, where he dies as a captive of the Khmer Rouge, but not before convincing the Khmer Rouge General, Tran Do, that their slaughter is wrong.
Tran Do, with his new terrible epiphany, realizes he has to make up for what he's done, and for the Killing Fields. So he flees his own camp and his own people, and.
Guess.
Does he:
1) Start helping the people fighting against the Khmer Rouge with inside information?
2) Denounce the Khmer Rouge publicly?
3) Seek to find some other way to save lives?
4) Seek to negotiate a peace?
5) Surrender himself to be tried for his crimes in a world court?
6) Do anything at all useful either to the people dying of war or genocide in Cambodia or to prevent other cases of genocide?
7) Even do something as weirdly random-but-decent like become a doctor and try to save future lives?
NONE OF THE ABOVE.
His entire plan is to free the Lieutenant and send him home. When he finds that the Lieutenant died before he could get back, he goes to America with the Lieutenant's gifts for his child (Which the lieutenant has never seen), seeks out his daughter and asks her forgiveness. Then wanders off to find a possibly mythical castle the lieutenant claimed to have seen, wherein lives a wizard who taught the lieutenant all he knew of goodness, morality, right and wrong, and wisdom in general.
That's it. And he's considered redeemed.
What the fuck kind of epiphany is that?
The songs where Tran Do realises what he's done and become are actually quite powerful. If they went somewhere.
Then. Poof. Nothing. Nada. He seeks redemption by asking a little girl and looking for a wizard. The little girl is of course the perfect clueless innocent of all TSO works, so whatever, but the wizard in the castle, who's supposed to be the pure epitome of wisdom, should have said, "That's the best you can do? Go out there and be useful."
You know, I'd even be okay with him realising he could never be redeemed, but choosing to live a quiet life somewhere, growing plants, not balancing the scales, but at least not making it any worse. It's the fact that they seem to feel that talking to a little girl once actually does redeem him that turns this into an offense.
I'm sorry. It didn't work in Star Wars, where refusing to kill his own son was supposed to redeem the slaughter of children and the extermination of planets. though a fair number of people bought it. It sure as FUCK works less well when you're talking about a real world event. Sorry to invoke Godwin, but it really IS exactly like a story where Hitler is redeemed because he gave one random British girl a flower and said, "Sorry our soldiers killed our dad. Oh, and for that Holocaust thing." And being cheered as having made up for all of it.
You couldn't even look at the daughter of one of the people you executed?
The thing is, all the morals in their Christmas stories have this same over-simple quasi-positive sort of feel. It's fake happiness, created not by actually doing a substantial thing to help the real evils of the world - even when those evils are explicitly brought up - overall, but usually making one gesture to make one individual person feel better.
If they didn't bring up the real scale of the evil in the world -- genocide, warfare, and centuries of hatred -- before they bring up a girl in a bar getting the money she needs to go home, or a man begging forgiveness of a girl for killing her father, the saccharine faux-redemption might pass. But it doesn't, because the scale doesn't match.
I like the music. But I find myself rebelling against the ideas underlying the music. This isn't morality. It's like they don't even understand what good really is.
I want very hard to like Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
I mean, I quite enjoyed the show last November, and I've collected one of the Christmas albums and both non-Christmas collections. And I do listen to them fairly regularly. I like most of their instrumentals, particularly the classical-based ones (though Tracers, on Night Castle, has a lot less of that, and is darn good) and about 50% of their sung pieces - and the best of the sung pieces can be right up there with the instrumentals.
Then they have the other songs. The ones where they seem to decide that singing the same one-to-five word line fifteen times over is a powerful effect and not a grating one (Bruce Springsteen manages this in Devil's Arcade, but none of the members of TSO have half his strength of expression.)
That they like to sing every single incident as if it were the end of the world, or the height of its saving. When they don't reduce it to snarling vocals, because an evil character like the devil can't possibly sound good. That everything needs to be ornamented or elaborated.
That interrupting an amazing piece of rock opera with a sudden carnival rant doesn't pretty much trash what is otherwise one of the best vocal pieces. (Seriously; I want to get some kind of sound editing software, because I'm pretty sure the rest of the song can be linked together with that bit excised.) (The Carnival effect also compares systematic genocide to the Roman Colosseum. Which is not even on the same SCALE. Nor was it approached with the same intent.)
But the worst are their stories. Every album comes with a story linking the songs. Some of the songs don't make sense without the narration, some would be more universally applicable.
And the stories? Universally suck. They're unsubtle, unrealistic. They want to be hopeful, but they bend reality out of shape to do it, even as they claim to be about being realistic and facing the evils of the world.
Beethoven's Last Night isn't dreadful - Beethoven is being threatened by the devil and reviewing his life. Until it throws in an unnecessary extra bit about a girl (spawninng two of the weakest songs in the whole thing), and a ridiculous extra twist that renders the entire story moot (Done by a character named, to make it even more obvious, Twist). Beethoven gives up his precious Tenth Symphony. It's rescued by a last minute bit of lawyering, and he dies happy and at peace. And the Tenth Symphony is hidden away again the moment his back is turned. And I go, So why did I even bother?
But Night Castle actively offends me. First, you have a man and woman get together and get married and spend literally ONE DAY Together, in which they get married and conceive a child. This grates for a number of reasons. This isn't how real romance works. But I'd let it pass. it's a minor ill.
Then the young man, a Lieutenant, goes to Cambodia, where he dies as a captive of the Khmer Rouge, but not before convincing the Khmer Rouge General, Tran Do, that their slaughter is wrong.
Tran Do, with his new terrible epiphany, realizes he has to make up for what he's done, and for the Killing Fields. So he flees his own camp and his own people, and.
Guess.
Does he:
1) Start helping the people fighting against the Khmer Rouge with inside information?
2) Denounce the Khmer Rouge publicly?
3) Seek to find some other way to save lives?
4) Seek to negotiate a peace?
5) Surrender himself to be tried for his crimes in a world court?
6) Do anything at all useful either to the people dying of war or genocide in Cambodia or to prevent other cases of genocide?
7) Even do something as weirdly random-but-decent like become a doctor and try to save future lives?
NONE OF THE ABOVE.
His entire plan is to free the Lieutenant and send him home. When he finds that the Lieutenant died before he could get back, he goes to America with the Lieutenant's gifts for his child (Which the lieutenant has never seen), seeks out his daughter and asks her forgiveness. Then wanders off to find a possibly mythical castle the lieutenant claimed to have seen, wherein lives a wizard who taught the lieutenant all he knew of goodness, morality, right and wrong, and wisdom in general.
That's it. And he's considered redeemed.
What the fuck kind of epiphany is that?
The songs where Tran Do realises what he's done and become are actually quite powerful. If they went somewhere.
Then. Poof. Nothing. Nada. He seeks redemption by asking a little girl and looking for a wizard. The little girl is of course the perfect clueless innocent of all TSO works, so whatever, but the wizard in the castle, who's supposed to be the pure epitome of wisdom, should have said, "That's the best you can do? Go out there and be useful."
You know, I'd even be okay with him realising he could never be redeemed, but choosing to live a quiet life somewhere, growing plants, not balancing the scales, but at least not making it any worse. It's the fact that they seem to feel that talking to a little girl once actually does redeem him that turns this into an offense.
I'm sorry. It didn't work in Star Wars, where refusing to kill his own son was supposed to redeem the slaughter of children and the extermination of planets. though a fair number of people bought it. It sure as FUCK works less well when you're talking about a real world event. Sorry to invoke Godwin, but it really IS exactly like a story where Hitler is redeemed because he gave one random British girl a flower and said, "Sorry our soldiers killed our dad. Oh, and for that Holocaust thing." And being cheered as having made up for all of it.
You couldn't even look at the daughter of one of the people you executed?
The thing is, all the morals in their Christmas stories have this same over-simple quasi-positive sort of feel. It's fake happiness, created not by actually doing a substantial thing to help the real evils of the world - even when those evils are explicitly brought up - overall, but usually making one gesture to make one individual person feel better.
If they didn't bring up the real scale of the evil in the world -- genocide, warfare, and centuries of hatred -- before they bring up a girl in a bar getting the money she needs to go home, or a man begging forgiveness of a girl for killing her father, the saccharine faux-redemption might pass. But it doesn't, because the scale doesn't match.
I like the music. But I find myself rebelling against the ideas underlying the music. This isn't morality. It's like they don't even understand what good really is.
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Date: 2010-06-26 02:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-30 05:53 pm (UTC)