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In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, players didn’t just play through another story set in Hyrule. The sequel to Breath of the Wild took the previous game’s sandbox elements several steps further, allowing players to use a new set of powers to construct machines, weapons, and tools using items in the world. By introducing this, Tears of the Kingdom encouraged players to be truly creative and push the limits of building in the game.
Fans responded to this new level of freedom by devising awe-inspiring creations and sharing them online. In the time since Nintendo released the game, fans have made nifty items like skateboards to intricate machines like a mechanized kaiju that looks like Godzilla. Given the game’s emphasis on creativity, Polygon asked Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma and game director Hidemaro Fujibayashi about the possibility that fans would ever get a Zelda game that purely focused on building their own creations, like Super Mario Maker. From the sounds of their answers, it seems unlikely Nintendo will release a Zelda game that’s purely about creating levels or dungeons.
“When we’re creating games like Tears of the Kingdom, I think it’s important that we don’t make creativity a requirement. Instead, we put things into the game that encourage people to be creative, and give them the opportunity to be creative, without forcing them to,” Aonuma told Polygon through an interpreter in an in-person interview.
Image: Nintendo/Nintendo EDP
In Super Mario Maker and Super Mario Maker 2, players can design their own Mario levels from scratch using an in-game editor. This has allowed players to create custom levels of all sorts in Mario. Players can make ultra-difficult levels that challenge the most seasoned Mario players or zany creations where a Mario level becomes an homage to Splatoon. No matter the approach, a huge aspect of the Super Mario Maker games is that they rely on player creativity.
Now, it’s no secret that the developers of Tears of the Kingdom were inspired by fan responses to Breath of the Wild. Developers saw players stretch the creative limits of Breath of the Wild, and they later created a game that doubled down on these sandbox elements. Given this, Zelda fans have long wondered if a version of Zelda that works like Mario Maker — where players could create or design dungeons or worlds — could ever come out. But when asked directly about a Mario Maker-style game for Zelda, Aonuma had an interesting answer about the nature of Zelda games and what they offer to players.
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Image: Nintendo
“There are people who want the ability to create from scratch, but that’s not everyone,” Aonuma said. “I think everyone delights in the discovery of finding your own way through a game, and that is something we tried to make sure was included in Tears of the Kingdom; there isn’t one right way to play. If you are a creative person, you have the ability to go down that path. But that’s not what you have to do; you’re also able to proceed to the game in many other different ways. And so I don’t think that it would be a good fit for The Legend of Zelda to necessarily require people to build things from scratch and force them to be creative.”
Given Aonuma’s response, it seems unlikely that Zelda will ever get its Mario Maker equivalent. If we did get more creative elements, it seems they would have to be nestled into a larger game where players could proceed in multiple ways. So those holding out hope for a Zelda builder might be better off finding other games that currently offer similar options — which, luckily for us, already exist.
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Rob Harvilla, Chris Ryan, and our intrepid host Yasi Salek converge onstage at the Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles, California, to do a live draft episode in honor of Rob’s fantastic new book 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s. A heartwarming and funny evening from start to finish that we are so happy to share with all of you.
Follow Rob on Twitter at @Harvilla
Follow Chris on Twitter @ChrisRyan77
Host: Yasi Salek
Guests: Rob Harvilla, Chris Ryan, and Rob’s mom
Producers: Jesse Miller-Gordon, Jonathan Kermah, and Justin Sayles
Audio Editor: Adrian Bridges
Theme Song: Bethany Cosentino
Subscribe: Spotify
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60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for its final stretch run (and a brand-new book!). Join The Ringer’s Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 110 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering Sublime’s “Santeria.” Read an excerpt below.
All the way up to the mega-huge self-titled Sublime record in ’96, the album that comes out two months after Bradley Nowell dies, Sublime are never famous in real time. When you listen to Sublime, the dudes singing and playing for you, those dudes aren’t famous yet. They don’t know that they’re gonna be famous. They don’t know that the ’96 Sublime record is gonna sell 6 million copies in America. It’s a little heartbreaking, listening to Sublime, what you know that they don’t. Sublime’s first official-official album comes out in 1992. It’s called 40oz. to Freedom. We got a super-important Sublime collaborator, Marshall Goodman, a.k.a. Ras M.G., playing drums on a lot of it because Bud Gaugh’s got his own problems. This record’s famous—it sells 2 million copies in America—but it doesn’t blow up right away. Or, really, it doesn’t blow up fast enough to do Bradley Nowell any good.
This song is called “Badfish.” This is a top-tier Sublime hit, actually. This is maybe, probably, presumably a song about Bradley battling heroin addiction. “Badfish” is also the song that makes me think, if only for a split second, of Jimmy Buffett. Bradley and Jimmy. The clown princes of Margaritaville. Two barefoot bards of good-time partying, all libido and id and conspicuous overconsumption, but with a not-so-hidden soulfulness, a grace to them even at their bawdiest. Shrewd songwriters with hidden depths. Bradley and Jimmy—and Jimmy’s still present tense too—they don’t specialize in super-sad songs that deceive you by sounding all happy; they write happy and anthemic songs where the shrewd undercurrent of sadness somehow only amplifies the happiness, the anthemicness. The pain, the struggle driving “Badfish” doesn’t make it sound painful. The struggle just makes it sound better.
Yasi really likes that line: Ain’t got no quarrels with god. The use, the deployment of the word quarrels there. Yes. Great word. But don’t skip over Ain’t got no time to grow old. That’s—OK, that one’s a little painful.
Despite the fact that, again, Sublime are very much not huge or even “successful” yet—they’re not even on a major label yet—even so, 40oz. to Freedom has Greatest Hits energy. It feels monumental if only in retrospect. “Badfish” and “Ball and Chain” (love that one) and “Let’s Go Get Stoned” and “Don’t Push” are all back. Sublime’s covers of “Hope” by the Descendents and the Grateful Dead’s “Scarlet Begonias” are here, and this is the only record I’m aware of that covers both the Descendents and the Grateful Dead. “Smoke Two Joints” is here. “Smoke Two Joints” is a cover, also. “Smoke Two Joints” was written and recorded by the Toyes, a reggae band that started in Hawaii but later moved to Oregon. Tough break. Great song, great cover. When Bradley Nowell sings, “I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints / And then I smoke two more,” you believe him. But then again, you believe him when he sings anything.
This might be my favorite song on 40oz. to Freedom, if you want the truth. Ask him how he knows about hamburgers and Elijah Muhammad and the welfare state. Go ahead, ask him: He wants you to know why he knows. The song is called “KRS-One.” It is probably the best quote, unquote rock song about a rapper, ever. Just the delicacy of this song. The sweetness. The earnestness. Bradley just loves listening to KRS-One and wants to shout out everything he’s learned about by listening to KRS-One. And I love listening to him talk about why he loves listening to KRS-One; I even love when Bradley slips back into reggae patois while he does it.
He knows. He knows you know he just sang the words, We don’t want to pay no money fi hear the same old sound. He sells the fi there, somehow, maybe. Or maybe not. Or maybe you could also ask, Who’s “we,” Bradley? in the line Watch and we’ll take hip-hop to a higher ground. But even here, there’s a difference between wrapping yourself in the flag of KRS-One, so to speak, and simply waving KRS-One’s flag on KRS-One’s behalf. Not that this is the song on this record that unnerves everyone. At first, 40oz. to Freedom isn’t a disaster, exactly, but it doesn’t sell a ton. It doesn’t push Sublime to the next level. It doesn’t work, really, and it especially does not help Bradley Nowell in his very public battle with drugs. The next Sublime record is called Robbin’ the Hood. It’s from 1994, it’s four-track recordings, it’s lo-fi in the extreme, it’s experimental, it has a theoretically visionary sample-heavy beat-tape vibe, it’s got Gwen Stefani for less than two minutes, and it features several interludes from a schizophrenic gentleman named Raleigh that unfortunately last way longer than two minutes. There’s a lot going on, and pretty much all of it is baffling, but it’s all more intriguing than maybe you remember. Here’s a little throwaway tune called “Lincoln Highway Dub.”
Huh. That sounds familiar. I may actually not get around to “Santeria” here today. Is that OK? Are people gonna get pissed at me? They might. Sublime’s biggest songs are so huge, are so ubiquitous, that I never need to hear them again, externally, because they’ve been stuck in my head for 30 years. In a broader sense, I’m never not listening to Sublime. I don’t know if there’s any point to elaborating on that, but—OK. So, look: Robbin’ the Hood is not designed to push Sublime to the next level, to put it mildly. What pushes Sublime to the next level, in August of 1994, is that a famous DJ named Tazy Phyllipz plays “Date Rape” on the famous L.A. rock station KROQ, and the phone lines blow up, and soon “Date Rape” is the biggest song on KROQ, which means that rock radio stations nationwide pick up on it, which is how I hear it in fuckin’ Ohio, and that’s what pushes Sublime to the next level. Yeah, this is a story of a single DJ at a single radio station plucking a random song from obscurity, and that song blows up in a manner so absolute that we even remember the DJ’s name now.
Sublime get signed to a major label, to the MCA subsidiary Gasoline Alley, but also Bradley goes to rehab. Sublime start recording in Redondo Beach with David Kahne, who’s worked with Fishbone and Tony Bennett (separately), but that flames out, so they also record with Paul Leary, he of the Butthole Surfers, at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studios in Austin. Sublime nail down their biggest, most enduring hits—“Santeria,” “Wrong Way,” “Doin’ Time,” “What I Got”—but they also leave a trail of destruction and consternation. Sublime’s self-titled album comes out in July 1996, and those songs slowly but surely make Sublime super-famous, finally, but Bradley is already gone, and we’ll spend the rest of our lives listening to Bradley singing about himself in the present tense.
To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to order Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.
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Saltburn has the slick intrigue of a Gothic thriller and the icy wit of a comedy of manners. The eponymous estate at which bookish University of Oxford loner Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) works to ingratiate himself is a museum of decadence, its splendor concealing a depravity that only the wealthy can disregard. But the movie’s target isn’t straightforward. Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), the bewitching classmate who invites Oliver home with him for a rambling summer, starts out as a token of desire but becomes a heedless lodestar. Felix inherited his savior complex from his mother, Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), a wannabe do-gooder with a vampy cruel streak. She’s married to a daffy lord (played by Richard E. Grant) whose lack of self-awareness rivals her own. As for Oliver, he spends his days at Saltburn currying favor among the Cattons, only to enact extravagant subterfuge.
Emerald Fennell, the writer and director of Saltburn, calls it a “vampire movie.” Oliver is the ultimate bloodsucker in question, yet his drive remains a sympathetic one. He wants what everyone wants: to belong. When Felix embraces Oliver, who talks of drug-addicted parents and a life without spoils, Oliver quickly leeches on to the most popular guy at school. Can you blame him? Grandeur is an aphrodisiac.
“It’s the same as constructing any love story. I mean, it is a love story,” Fennell tells The Ringer. “Can you completely believe why these two people would come together?”
Part of the seduction scheme that eventually leads Oliver to acquire Saltburn involves sex—the sex he witnesses, the sex he wants, the sex he initiates. If he has something to gain beyond corporeal pleasure, nothing is off-limits. That includes semen-streaked bathwater, menstrual blood, and grave fucking. With the movie hitting theaters, Fennell and Keoghan walked The Ringer through Saltburn’s three outré sex scenes, the ones meant to shock and titillate in near-equal measure.
For the movie’s first kink to land, Fennell had to plant a few crucial seeds. Casting the right Felix was the first. Keoghan is well-known for playing shifty oddballs like Oliver (see: The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Green Knight, The Banshees of Inisherin), but Feilx is all about surface-level élan. Fennell needed an actor with a magnetism that leaps off the screen, someone so striking his mere presence can melt hearts—not unlike Bo Burnham in Promising Young Woman, her 2020 directorial debut. Felix, whom Fennell compares to Brideshead Revisited aristocrat Sebastian Flyte, doesn’t have a whole lot to offer beyond beauty, charm, and money.
Fennell was pleased to discover that Elordi, the Euphoria and Priscilla heartthrob, shared her take on the character. “Felix does something shitty in every scene,” Fennell says. “He’s casually misogynistic, he’s fickle, he’s snobbish. I was always saying to Jacob, ‘He’s not a good kisser. He’s not good in bed. He’s never had to be.’ When Jacob came in to audition, he [played Felix as] kind of a dope. The thing that’s important is that so much of what makes him interesting is Oliver looking at him.”
Oliver certainly can’t stop looking, first through a dormitory window where he watches Felix holding court amid a tribe of admirers. Felix’s poise screams privilege, which immediately beguiles Oliver. When he watches through another window at night while Felix has sex with a young woman, it’s blissfully unclear whether Oliver would rather swap places with Felix or the girl. (For whatever it’s worth, Fennell says Oliver is “absolutely bisexual.”) By the time he enters Saltburn’s imperial gates, he’s completely enthralled, only seldom betraying his underlying desperation. After growing acquainted with the family and their ostentatious house, which Fennell and cinematographer Linus Sandgren (La La Land) sought to shoot “like a fetish object,” he spies Felix masturbating during a bath.
The camera, mirroring Oliver’s eyes, lingers on Felix’s long torso and aroused face. But it’s what follows this voyeurism that’s most erotic. When Felix leaves the bathroom, Oliver slinks into the tub and guzzles the last of the ejaculate water as it drains, as if he’s harvesting Felix’s fluids and social status at once.
“The moment where he rubs his face along the plughole and wants to be in it, it’s sort of like, ‘I want to feel it, I want it to be part of me, I want it to change me,’” Keoghan says. “It’s a total obsession. He’s confused and lost. I don’t think he knows what he’s actually chasing.”
Keoghan says he channeled some combination of fox and snake while descending into the tub, and the sound team blended his slurp with the effects of raw octopus sliding against oil. Oliver’s animalistic excess was one of the first images Fennell thought of while brainstorming Saltburn. “It’s the impulse,” she says. “The moment he does that, it imbues him with this kind of wicked power. It also just felt, to me, so profoundly true of vulnerability, desire, and class envy: All of us can only ever really hope to lick the bottom of a bathtub. So there’s something pathetic, funny, incredibly sexy, and incredibly real.”
As the summer continues and his stature among the Cattons swells, Oliver starts to see everyone as a potential dupe. If he can embed himself in the fabric of Saltburn, maybe he’ll never have to leave. He gives Felix’s catty American cousin (Archie Madekwe) a hand job as a sort of vengeful come-on after the cousin embarrasses Oliver at a dinner party. He even flirts with Elspeth, attempting to appeal to her affinity for waifs. She sees him as a sapling to protect, so Oliver then directs his persuasions to Felix’s troubled sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), seizing on her fragility. As a self-conscious idler with an eating disorder, she’s anxious to find esteem within a family where Felix is the star.
Aware that she’s uncomfortable in her own body, Oliver uses lusting after Venetia as his ace card. Late one night, when he spots her stalking the garden, Oliver pounces. He treats her like a delicious talisman, fingering her on the fog-soaked lawn and smearing her menstrual blood across both of their faces. This act of demented flattery confirms Oliver’s mounting sense of power. Look at how far I’ll go for you.
“So much of the dom-sub thing is about taking care of the person,” Fennell says. “We see him giving people what they want, and that’s just being a good acolyte. What turns him on … is having control of the situation.”
Keoghan takes that sentiment a step further. “He’s abusing her, and he’s a master manipulator,” he says. “He wants to see how far he can take it: ‘I own you. You’re going to do what I say.’ He knows he wouldn’t get away with that with Felix.”
Oliver’s quest to become an honorary Catton falls apart when Felix arranges to take him home to visit his parents on his birthday. Discovering that Oliver is nowhere near as Dickensian as he’s led on, Felix sours on his summer guest, sending Oliver into a spiral. If he can’t worm his way into Saltburn by feigning victimhood, he’ll go for the second-best option: killing the Cattons one by one and taking the whole thing for himself. Anything to avoid feeling once again like an outcast.
After poisoning Felix’s champagne during a blowout party, Oliver enacts a final act of longing: He leaves the funeral to return to the cemetery, pulls down his pants, and fucks the dude’s gravesite. For Fennell, the gesture is more about grief than sex—a visceral version of Heathcliff digging up Catherine’s body at the end of Wuthering Heights. It’s his last chance to touch Felix. Oliver can never have him back, and although he tells himself he wasn’t in love, the intensity of his sobs suggests otherwise.
Initially, Fennell imagined Keoghan rubbing his face in the grave and fondling the dirt, blending the bathtub scene and the garden scene into one showstopping desecration. But upon discussing it with the actor, they decided to be less coy. “I wanted to see what the next step was,” Keoghan says of Oliver’s farewell to Felix. “It wasn’t to get a wow factor. It was quite sad, because he’s lost at that moment.” Keoghan requested a closed set, meaning only essential people like Fennell and Sandgren were present. Shot from behind, he did the deed in one take, hoping to avoid the “sheer embarrassment” of needing to repeat it.
With the Catton clan eventually gone, Oliver is alone at Saltburn, having convinced Elspeth to will the property to him. He can dance naked through the house’s halls all he wants, but Oliver’s victory is hollow. After the movie fades to black, he’ll be left without companionship or a clear purpose. What was it all for? “I’ve always believed that what he wanted was very simple, which was just to be there with [the Cattons],” Fennell says. “The framing narrative makes it seem like he was always in pursuit of this specific end goal, but what he’s most interested in, even if he doesn’t know it himself, is the game of power. That’s why he’s interested in Felix from the beginning. It’s not just that he’s beautiful. It’s that he’s in the middle … That’s what Oliver’s preoccupation is: with being special. And aren’t we all preoccupied with being special?”
Matthew Jacobs is an Austin-based entertainment journalist who covers film and television. His work can be found at Vulture, Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, HuffPost, and beyond. Follow him on X @majacobs.
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60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for its final stretch run. (And a brand-new book!) Join The Ringer’s Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 108 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering Portishead’s “Glory Box.” Read an excerpt below. And if you’re in Los Angeles on November 16, check out the 60 Songs and Bandsplain crossover event celebrating Rob’s new book.
What is this voice? What is the deal with Beth Gibbons? How would you describe Beth’s diction here? Playful? Caustic? Bright? Malicious? Theatrical? All of ’em? None of ’em? Who do you hear? You hear Billie Holiday? You hear Dusty Springfield? You hear a Disney villain? You hear a Bond girl? You hear a Bond villain? No, Mr. Cupid, I expect you to die!
What does Beth Gibbons think about Beth Gibbons? “I’m not technically a very good singer. If anyone says I am, I know they don’t know what they’re talking about. If I wanted to be, I’d have to give up smoking and have lessons.” That’s Beth in a 1998 book called Seven Years of Plenty: A Handbook of Irrefutable Pop Greatness 1991-1998, by Ben Thompson. 1991 to 1998 is eight years, but OK. Portishead consists primarily of three people. You got Beth. You got Geoff Barrow, on lots of stuff but primarily on turntables. And you got Adrian Utley, primarily on guitar. Beth and Geoff meet while participating in an Enterprise Allowance Scheme. I’m going to be honest with you and say that I got really excited by the word Scheme. I pictured Beth and Geoff meeting while devising, y’know, an Ocean’s Eleven–style audacious crime spree. Right? I pictured a stylish caper. I pictured Beth and Geoff hanging upside down and stealing the Pink Panther diamond or whatever. Right? How appropriate, given this band’s flagrant old spy movie vibe, the Mission: Impossible of it all.
But, no. No. The Enterprise Allowance Scheme was an ’80s Margaret Thatcher–era British political thing that gave young people extra government money if they set up a small business. That’s boring. That’s so boring. But Beth and Geoff meet, and they do set up, in a manner of speaking, a small business called Portishead, a band named after the town near Bristol where Geoff grew up. A town that Geoff once described to SPIN magazine by saying, “I really don’t like the place. It’s a place you can go to and die.” And then Beth says, “That’s why we named ourselves after it.” That’s funny. C’mon. She’s a little playful. The first song they work on together is called “It Could Be Sweet.” Dig the feature-length, majestic, tragic arc of the word nothing here.
Perhaps you’re like me, and you can close your eyes and clearly picture the cover of Portishead’s 1994 debut album, Dummy: It’s a quite striking, almost nauseating blue, with a blurry photo of Beth sitting in a chair in a fancy dress with blood on her face and hooked up to an IV, looking disconcertingly dazed. Perhaps you’re like me and you were not previously aware that this cover photo of Beth is a still from a short film Portishead devised and, perhaps to their chagrin, starred in called To Kill a Dead Man. Adrian plays an oily businessman type, Geoff plays a dirtbag assassin type, Beth plays a femme fatale type. They’re all not great actors, necessarily—Beth, maybe, though, if she took lessons and smoked more—but they’re all extremely well cast. Let’s leave it at that, actually.
The drums on “It Could Be Sweet,” though. The precise and bone-dry psh psh psh psh of the cymbals, the dollhouse-tea-set delicacy of it all. It’s a minor technical marvel; it’s a marvelous major triumph of vibe. Looking back on this song while talking to BBC 6 in 2010, Geoff says, “It wasn’t soul, but then, it kind of was. And it wasn’t overtly jazzy. And it wasn’t folk. But she brought this adultness to the track. And all of a sudden it was—this is actually real. And she’s singing about things that she obviously cares about.” You can find that quote in a cool Trash Theory video about “Glory Box” as well.
So this is real. Geoff is somewhat of a studio veteran by the time Portishead kicks off; in fact he was a tape operator at Coach House Studio in Bristol when Massive Attack was making Blue Lines. Geoff has said that he was a lousy tape op, but he made great tea. That’s gonna about do it for Geoff and self-deprecation. Geoff once told Melody Maker, “Ambient music has never particularly appealed to me. Push ‘Go’ on a synthesizer. Make some noise. Put some delay on it, and put a couple sheep noises on it. I’m not into it.” Rude! I believe Geoff’s got some specific targets in mind, there. The KLF would like a word, Geoff. But let’s leave that at that, as well, actually. Sheep noises will not suffice, then, in terms of a hook.
And this is how Dummy, this is how Portishead first reaches me in 1994, an alt-rockin’ midwestern teenager with no ambient sheep music experience, only a little Massive Attack experience, and for that matter very little cool old spy movie experience. Portishead first reaches me via the single “Sour Times,” which has a recognizable retro-futuristic cool old junk drawer feel that makes a lot of sense if you’ve spent 1994 getting heavy into Beck, or Stereolab, or, like, “A Girl Like You” by Edwyn Collins. You remember that shit? Is that a sacrilegious comparison from Portishead’s perspective? Too bad.
[Rob hums guitar solo.] That’s right. That’s exactly how that guitar solo sounds. Too many poor-ass singers! Not enough poor-ass songs! That’s what he says there, right? Listen. There was a subset of 1994 alternative rock popular enough to sneak on the radio and MTV and yet ultra-cool and wily enough that I’d hear it and go, I don’t know how old this is. This is not the most sophisticated initial framework through which to receive Portishead, but, well, the statute of limitations expired on that, too. What elevates Dummy, what enshrines Dummy, is that you get all these warped old samples, you get that disorienting sense of timelessness, you get all these wonderful dusty old machines, but you get all the ghosts in those machines, too. All the ghosts are played by Beth Gibbons.
I dig the beat here, right? The alarm clock boom bap of it all. Adrian Utley’s less-is-more fuzzed-out guitar: bwwwwooowwww. But you also get Beth singing, wailing, moaning, declaiming whatever it is she’s saying there, on the song “Strangers.” I can’t think of another album that delivers quite the same sort of delightful whiplash pivot between cool detached post-human sounds and bone-chillingly extreme human frailty. This song is called “Numb.” You ever heard a cooler snare drum sound in your life? No, you have not.
However. Does the coolest snare drum sound she’s ever heard in her life make Beth Gibbons feel less lonely? No, it does not.
In my California years, my Bay Area years, one time I went to this super-cool San Francisco apartment open-mic night sorta living room concert deal, and this dude had just a microphone and a loop pedal—he was a beatboxer, right—and he did a full looped beatboxed version of Portishead’s “Wandering Star.” It is difficult, perhaps, to convey the exquisite desolation of Beth Gibbons’s vocal approach while beatboxing; I don’t know if I would recommend getting romantically involved with a Portishead-covering beatboxer. You’re living on the edge there, emotionally. You’re gonna end up living a Portishead song. I’m generalizing, but come on. But on the other hand, this dude did a great job this time, and thereafter, every time I go back to Dummy, “Wandering Star” sounds ever so slightly more human to me.
“Wandering Star” sounds more human to me now, but it also remains, like, wildly depressing, right? “The blackness / The darkness / Forever.” I have always heard Portishead primarily as primo moping music. Moping, whining, sulking, pouting. Being a grumpus. Not calling ladies on the phone. Feeling extravagantly sorry for oneself. Over-romanticizing one’s solitude, et cetera. This does not appear to be the way most people heard Dummy. The moping approach does not appear to be either of the top two approaches most people took to Dummy. Generally, you hear two things about this record. One: It is apparently stupendous background music. You’d hear it in restaurants, you’d hear it in both high- and not-as-high-end clothing boutiques, you’d hear it at the parties where all the girls were so they wouldn’t have been home even if I had tried to call them, which I didn’t. Dummy became not ambient music, exactly—not Lo-Fi Beats to Study To—but this record did prove compatible with a wide variety of activities and social situations. Put it that way.
Or! Or, put it the other way. People thought it was makeout music. Music for … smooching. Amorousness. Et cetera. On YouTube you can find footage of Geoff and Beth, on camera, in a church, being asked by a cheerful Canadian interviewer how they feel about Dummy being described as “the greatest shagging record of 1994.” That’s another way to put the other way to put it. That’s apparently the Canadian way to put it. They don’t shag in Canada. Do they? Don’t answer that. Do you find this music appropriate for, uh, smooching? Don’t answer that, either. I just have a very hard time imagining some suave Canadian dude being like, Hold on, baby, we need some music, yeah, let me put on some, yeah, all right, check this out, baby.
That song’s called “Biscuit.” I just googled “Do they shag in Canada,” and I got what I deserved. That’s all I have to say about that. “Biscuit” is the second-to-last song on Dummy. The last song is “Glory Box.”
Dig that slow-motion gnarly guitar, man. Phenomenal. Adrian Utley on guitar. The chopped-and-screwed Jimi Hendrix, they call him. Nobody calls him that. That is also dumb. That is Cheeto chamber–caliber dumb. Now, that line’s got makeout music overtones for some of you, perhaps, not unreasonably, but Beth’s focus, not surprisingly, is elsewhere.
Talking to The Independent on Sunday in 1994, Beth says, “The key line in the song really is Move over and give us some room, because I do think women are very much taken for granted. I’m more an easygoing than a rabid feminist, but women in general are very supportive to me. History has made them like that. And this is not something that is always reciprocated.” She elaborates on this theme after Adrian’s extra-rad guitar solo.
In 1995 Dummy won the prestigious Mercury Prize, awarded to the best album of the year from the United Kingdom or Ireland, beating out Oasis’s Definitely Maybe, Tricky’s Maxinquaye, PJ Harvey’s To Bring You My Love, and many other fine records, including a Van Morrison album I was unfamiliar with. I wouldn’t say Portishead recoiled from the spotlight, precisely, but Portishead put out a second album, self-titled, in 1997, in a vein similar to Dummy’s but just a little harsher, sharper, less … what’s the word? Warm. It’s not as warm. It’s still pretty great, though. What it doesn’t have is a “Glory Box.”
To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to preorder Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.
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Rob Harvilla
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How effectively can you explain yourself to others? Learn to embrace the healthy challenge of describing your beliefs to sharpen your thinking and worldview.
The post Explain Yourself: The Healthy Challenge of Describing Your Beliefs appeared first on The Emotion Machine.
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Steven Handel
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60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for its final stretch run. (And a brand-new book!) Join The Ringer’s Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 107 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering the Cardigans’ “Lovefool.” Read an excerpt below. And if you’re in Los Angeles on November 16, check out the 60 Songs and Bandsplain crossover event celebrating Rob’s new book.
The Cardigans form in Jönköping, Sweden, in 1992. The Cardigans consist of guitarist Peter Svensson, bassist Magnus Sveningsson, drummer Bengt Lagerberg, keyboardist Lars-Olof Johansson, and lead singer Nina Persson. Nina had never sung before, but Peter and Magnus were like, Trust us on this. Peter and Magnus both started out as metal dudes. They played in heavy metal bands—as did Max Martin, come to think of it—but they got sick of metal, and now they’d like to play in the poppiest pop band ever born. And the Cardigans will devote their lives to proving that pop and metal are quite tonally similar, at least the way they do it. They do that in a song called “Rise and Shine,” and this one’s called “Black Letter Day.”
And here’s the whole ball game, really, with Nina Persson, lead singer of the Cardigans: She sings beautifully and exquisitely and elegantly and delicately even when she’s singing what could totally be Metallica lyrics. James Hetfield totally would’ve written and barked out a song called “Black Letter Day” if he’d thought of that title first. James Hetfield got so mad when he heard this song. The first Cardigans album, called Emmerdale, comes out in 1994; the album cover is a blurry photo of a dog. It’s an extremely 1994 album cover, I have to say. A blurry photo of a dog perfectly sums up the dominant vibe of alternative rock in 1994. Time for a piano ballad.
This song is called “After All,” and it sounds like Nina is singing directly into your ear, which means that the t in the word insanity is really going to pop when she sings the word insanity. Is she singing, “I’m scaring close to insanity”? Because if she is, James Hetfield is so pissed he didn’t think of that first. James Hetfield is pissed regardless, obviously. You want the chorus? Do you think you can handle the chorus? Well, let’s find out!
And this, too, is an extremely 1994-type vibe, yes? Tremendous darkness in a tremendously bright package. This bait-and-switch approach is not exclusive to the Cardigans, or exclusive to Sweden for that matter, but it feels exclusive, it feels fresh and freshly unsettling when the Cardigans do it. Talking in early 2023 with a newspaper called The New European, Nina says, “Isn’t it a universal thing, really? If you made stats, there are few pop or rock songs that are only bright—that’s very rare. The rest of them are dark! I’ve always had a hard time talking about the Scandinavian mentality, but I think it’s art in general. I think what we are drawn to—which might be a Scandinavian thing—is to sort of ‘Trojan Horse’ your product; put it in a costume of something that’s light and upbeat.” All right, so time for something light and upbeat. Name that tune!
And then the Trojan horse opens up and oh, shit, it’s the Cardigans’ cover of “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” by Black Sabbath. Told ya pop and metal were quite tonally similar! Take it, Ozzy!
I feel as though Ozzy and Nina would really get along. I don’t think Nina Persson would bite the head off a bat or snort a line of ants or befoul the Alamo, but she sings as though she’s considering doing all of those things. All right, we got ourselves an intriguing and sweetly confrontational Swedish alt-rock band with sophisticated pop overtones; time for the second Cardigans album. You know the greatest feeling in the world? You wanna know my favorite thing? I’ve said this before, but I’m saying it again: It’s when you love a song, but you totally forget about that song, and then you hear that song again years and years later, and you fall in love with it for the first time but also simultaneously realize that you’d already fallen in love with it.
The second Cardigans album is called Life, it comes out in 1995, and we have leveled up in terms of brightness, cheeriness, catchiness, and also, possibly, subversion. There’s an exclamation point in this song title.
That song’s called “Hey! Get Out of My Way.” There’s Nina, on the cover of the Life album, smiling extra brightly, lying on her stomach in a powder-blue dress with furry sleeves, propped up on her elbows with a little sunflower pinkie ring, her feet crossed and dangling in the air, and she’s wearing ice skates, and it occurs to you, pretty immediately, that ice skates are just blades for your feet. Hey! Hey! Get out of her way. This song’s called “Tomorrow,” and it’s as close as Jönköping, Sweden, has ever gotten to Motown.
Is morning a sugar kiss, though, really? The Cardigans are not setting the world or the pop charts on fire at this point. But they are building toward something, and this precise three-year span, 1994 to 1996—post-grunge, pre–nü metal, post–alternative explosion, pre-Napster—this is a great time to be building toward something, pop subversion–wise. The third Cardigans record, released in 1996, is called First Band on the Moon. Nina, in a 2014 interview, says, “Every record we have made with the Cardigans has been a counter-reaction to the previous one. And by then we were really tired of everybody calling us cute, after having done sort of cute and ethereal—we felt like we weren’t easy listening. We weren’t taken serious. So we wanted to be taken seriously. We wanted to be sort of more gritty and rocking.”
As an added bonus, this song has the most Black Sabbath–esque guitar riff on this whole record. Get a load of how rad this guitar riff is:
Y’know how Black Sabbath–esque that guitar riff is? It’s the most Black Sabbath–esque guitar riff on an album where, just for emphasis, the Cardigans cover Black Sabbath again.
Yes, the Cardigans do “Iron Man,” and I used to play the Cardigans cover of “Iron Man” all the time on college radio, and I’d be just tremendously pleased with myself. As an added bonus, this record, First Band on the Moon, has another track that went semi-arbitrarily viral on TikTok in the spring of 2023, and I love it when semi-arbitrary ’90s songs go viral on TikTok; that doesn’t make me feel weird or old at all. It’s called “Step on Me,” and Nina means it literally.
That’s the sped-up TikTok version of “Step on Me.” I feel great. This phenomenon of speeding up songs for TikTok, I understand that perfectly. I don’t feel like my bones are grinding themselves to dust and blowing away in the wind at all. That quote of Nina’s, about wanting to be taken seriously and be more respected and gritty and rocking on this record, there’s one last part to that quote, actually. She says, “So we wanted to be taken seriously. We wanted to be sort of more gritty and rocking. But then we made ‘Lovefool’ on that record, so we like totally dug our grave.”
And maybe there is nothing that I could do. The mass appeal of “Lovefool” was immediately, painfully obvious to everyone, and that includes the band—this song’s mass appeal was painfully obvious while they were still writing it, before they sped it up. Talking to Billboard in 2016, Nina says, “We definitely were aware that it was a single and a catchy song when we wrote it, but the direction it took is not something we could have predicted. It wasn’t necessarily our character; it felt like a bit of a freak on the record—which, objectively, it still is. Before we recorded it, it was slower and more of a bossa nova. It’s quite a sad love song; the meaning of it is quite pathetic, really. But then when we were recording, by chance, our drummer started to play that kind of disco beat, and there was no way to get away from it after that.”
To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to preorder Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.
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Rob Harvilla
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