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Thursday, May 28, 2015
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

ALBUM REVIEW

‘Between’ fails 
with lacking plot

TV REVIEW

By BEN ROSENSTOCK

Daily Arts Writer

“Between,” a new Canadian series 

on City and Netflix, belongs to the 
genre that channels like the CW and 
MTV have been 
milking 
enter-

taining 
shows 

out of for years: 
YA science fic-
tion combining 
supernatural 
and 
dystopian 

elements 
with 

teen drama. Shows like “The Vam-
pire Diaries,” “Teen Wolf” and 
“iZombie” have been doing this with 
lots of success because, for all the 
stigma attached to the “paranor-
mal romance” and “dystopian YA” 
genres, they’re enormously enter-
taining.

“Between” follows an ensemble 

cast of characters living in the small 
town of Pretty Lake, where a strange 
disease suddenly strikes and kills 
everyone over 22 years old. As the 
pilot episode progresses and adults 
quickly die off, the military raises 
a fence around the city, effectively 
quarantining everyone inside.

In the hands of creator Michael 

McGowan (the critically acclaimed 
“Still Mine”), who wrote the pre-
miere, the show doesn’t deliver the 
thrills its genre often suggests. One 
of the problems is that while shows 
like “Teen Wolf” both commit to 
their goofy premises and don’t take 
themselves too seriously, “Between” 
doesn’t show a lot of self-awareness. 
There’s almost no real fun to be 
had here; subplots basically revolve 
around the teen characters’ parents 
dying and there isn’t much variety.

“Between” could be entertain-

ing if the actors hinted at a sense of 
humor that the script itself doesn’t 
suggest, but the cast is almost uni-
formly bland. Jennette McCurdy, 
who showed some sense of comic 
timing in “iCarly,” gives the vibe of 
a poor man’s Juno in her first scene 
as Wiley, walking down the hallway 
at school with her best friend Adam 
(Jesse Carere, “Finding Carter”), but 
the sarcastic charm of Sam Puck-
ett is toned down here in favor of 
Wiley’s uninteresting teen pregnan-
cy subplot. Besides, any chemistry 
Wiley might have with Adam grinds 
to halt whenever Jesse Carere opens 

his mouth. Carere’s acting is surpris-
ingly bad, his line deliveries all read 
in the same emotionless voice and 
his unblinking eyes always staring 
blankly at whatever poor actor he’s 
sharing the screen with.

Those are only two of the char-

acters who round out the ensemble 
cast. There’s also Wiley’s religious 
sister Melissa Day (Brooke Palsson, 
“Less than Kind”), jail inmate Mark 
(Jack Murray, “The Prize Winner of 
Defiance, Ohio”), rich kid Chuck Lott 
(Justin Kelly, “Degrassi”), farmer 
Gord (Ryan Allen, “Get Rich or Die 
Tryin’”), drug dealer Ronnie (Kyle 
Mac, “Carrie”) and Pat (Jim Watson, 
“The Strain”). Notice how I couldn’t 
even pair Pat with an interesting 
character epithet? That shows how 
hard it is to find anything intriguing 
about these characters.

It’s difficult to get remotely 

invested in any of these characters 
because the pilot episode spends 
so little time with only of them, 
sketching them out with extremely 
expository dialogue in brief interac-
tions before moving on to the next 
character. The episode becomes 
marginally more entertaining when 
the unrelated plot lines begin to 
intertwine, just because the episode 
can be more efficient with its time. 
Gord interrupts a conflict between 
Chuck’s cartoonish, rich father and 
Pat and Ronnie, then rushes over to 
help deliver Wiley’s baby. Still, the 
intersection of conflicts is kept to 
a minimum, leaving the audience 
with a number of disparate subplots 
that don’t demand next Thursday’s 
follow-up.

It’s hard to see what future epi-

sodes of “Between” could look like, 
both content-wise and quality-wise. 
With the right cast and crew, later 
episodes could prove more inter-
esting, since there’s potential for 
the idea of an isolated “Lord of the 
Flies”-esque society without adults. 
Perhaps putting Wiley, Ronnie 
and Chuck in a situation in which 
they’re forced into becoming the 
leaders of a new society will bring 
out something new and fascinat-
ing in the conflicts. Still, based on 
the performances and writing of 
the lackluster pilot episode alone, 
“Between” might not be capable of 
something like that. Besides, most 
viewers might not have the patience 
to wait that long.

C

Between

Season Premiere

Netflix

Rocky LP revives Yams

Following ‘To Pimp 
a Butterfly,’ ‘A.L.L.A’ 
gives voice to the dead

By ADAM DEPOLLO

Managing Arts Editor

“We catchin’ spirits. We ain’t 

even really rappin’, we just lettin’ 
our dead homies tell stories for us.”

Those words 

are 
the 
last 

spoken by the 
ghost of Tupac 
Shakur 
on 

“Mortal Man” 
— the closing 
track on Ken-
drick Lamar’s 
To Pimp a But-
terfly— 
and 

they offer what is perhaps the best 
characterization thus far of the 
otherworldly 
aura 
surrounding 

2015’s most ambitious projects in 
hip hop and R&B. Starting with 
Flying Lotus’s October release 
You’re Dead!, continuing through 
D’Angelo’s 
Black 
Messiah 
and 

finally to Kendrick’s masterpiece, 
a new canon of technically and 
lyrically stunning work is rapidly 
being assembled as America’s most 
critically acclaimed Black artists 
open themselves up to conversa-
tions with an ever-expanding host 
of spirits.

I bring up the race of these musi-

cians in part because their music 
expresses a hyper-awareness of 
their own identity as Black men, 
but mostly because the spirit realm 
their songs belong to hangs over a 
physical world increasingly cov-
ered with Black bodies. The shoot-
ing and death of unarmed teenager 
Trayvon Martin in 2012 served as 
an introduction to what now seems 
like an unending litany of Black 
victims gunned down by white 
authority figures. The sheer weight 
of this reality should be inescapable 
for any American, but it is particu-
larly so for African-Americans, who 
make up a disproportionate per-
centage of the casualties of police 
violence in this country. “Trayvon 
Martin could have been me,” Presi-
dent Obama famously said. 

These artists find themselves in a 

landscape covered in bodies, but it’s 
unclear whether they’re standing 
in a cemetery or in front of a mass 
grave. The difference between the 
two scenes hinges largely on the 

cyclical debate over whether people 
like Mike Brown, for example, were 
criminals who received their just 
desserts or innocent victims of a 
society that unjustly singles them 
out for destruction. While the offi-
cial report invariably describes 
the former scenario, often the only 
witness who might contradict the 
powers that be is the dead man with 
a policeman’s bullet in his chest 
— and, as the old adage goes, dead 
men tell no tales. 

But it would seem that dead men 

can in fact rap, and nowhere is that 
fact more apparent than on the lat-
est release from Harlem-bred MC 
A$AP Rocky, At.Long.Last.A$AP, 
which features posthumous vocals 
from Texas rapper Pimp C and 
A$AP Mob founder A$AP Yams, 
both of whom died young of a pro-
methazine overdose complicated by 
sleep apnea. While Tupac’s benevo-
lent ghost offers guidance to a 
troubled young rapper on To Pimp a 
Butterfly, A.L.L.A.’s cover artwork, 
which features the upper half of 
Yams’s face eerily superimposed 
onto Rocky’s forehead, suggests a 
much more ambiguous relationship 
between the artist and the ghosts 
trying to speak through him. 

The source of that ambiguity is 

left somewhat unclear by the end 
of the album, but the emotional and 
philosophical fluctuation between 
A.L.L.A.’s first nine pot- and LSD-
laden tracks, to the homage-heavy 
quartet running from “Jukebox 
Joints” to “Wavybone” and finally 
to the frenetic rumination on the 
overlaps between love, drugs and 
money on the LP’s final six tracks 
makes it clear that this album is 
something of a musical disembow-
elment for A$AP Rocky. He’s put-
ting himself out there with a type of 
frankness and self-confidence that 
simply wasn’t present in his metic-
ulously crafted Long.Live.A$AP 
and Live.Love.A$AP personae, and 
this frankness occasionally leads 
him to blurt out things that really 
should have stayed inside his head, 
like the “Type of hate that make 
you feel worse than a rape victim” 
line off of “Back Home.” Yet other 
quotable lines — like “Left ‘em Har-
lem shaking on the pavement” from 
“Pharsyde” or “This year I turned 
racist, all I wanna see is green 
faces” from “Electric Body” — 
reveal a beautifully macabre sense 
of humor that lends Rocky’s crudity 
and goofiness a significant political 
and philosophical weight. The guts 

he leaves on the table are perhaps 
hard to look at, but they’re there in 
all their gory detail. While mean-
ing is there to be found, grabbing 
onto it means getting your hands 
dirty.

And I think the best way to think 

of A.L.L.A. is as A$AP Rocky run-
ning his hands through his own 
entrails, painfully searching for a 
way to define himself among that 
pile of skin, blood and intestines. 
Part of that process involves exor-
cising the ghosts he finds inside 
himself, which leads, of course, 
to the voice of A$AP Yams filling 
the same role on “Back Home” 
that Tupac played for Kendrick on 
“Mortal Man.” He closes out the 
album with a Dame Dash-esque 
invocation accompanied by haunt-
ing, reverb-heavy piano melodies, 
concluding Rocky’s self-vivisec-
tion on a definitely unsettling 
note. His speech evokes Harlem, 
fashion, cultural influence and the 
A$AP Mob, and it might have been 
a spot-on description of Rocky’s 
pre-A.L.L.A. ethos. But Yams is 
dead, and while talking to his ghost 
might explain everything leading 
up to his death, it doesn’t explain 
what comes after.

And what does come after? For 

now, Rocky’s answer is an image 
he provides at the end of “Dreams”: 
“Police brutality was on my TV 
screen / Harmony, love, drugs and 
peace is all we need.” But some-
how that doesn’t satisfy either, in 
part because it doesn’t do enough 
to bridge the gap between the two 
lines. What it has done, however, is 
demonstrate that Rocky is tapping 
into the same issues facing the best 
artists in hip hop right now, issues 
that have already produced some of 
the best and most socially engaged 
albums of the last 20 years. This 
album is not one of those mas-
terpieces — though if it came out 
in any year other than 2015, I 
would be writing a much differ-
ent conclusion to this piece — but 
it suggests to me that we’re look-
ing at the prelude to an explosion 
of depth and maturity in Rocky’s 
sound, and I wouldn’t be surprised 
if we’ll be looking at A.L.L.A. in the 
afterglow of Rocky’s next album 
in much the same way that we’re 
looking at good kid, m.A.A.d. city 
now. 

In the meantime, the dead don’t 

rest easy — but they just found 
another rapper who can make 
them speak.

A-

AT.LONG.
LAST.A$AP

A$AP Rocky

RCA

