6A — Monday, January 11, 2016
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

By NOAH COHEN

Daily Arts Writer

J. J. Abrams, Disney whisper-

ing in his ear, calls Star Wars back 
from the brink of irrelevance. “The 
Force 
Awak-

ens” is respect-
ful to the point 
of pandering.

This 
fran-

chise 
took 
a 

lesson 
from 

failure, 
read 

the 
manual, 

and 
followed 

it to a T. We’re 
not frustrated 
with the lack of 
novelty. Rather, 
we’re all breathing a sigh of relief. 
Abrams takes us back to the rak-
ish golden era in terms of plot 
and mood. The Force is with this 
reboot, if tentatively.

The Empire has been struck a 

grave blow, but threatens revival in 
the form of The First Order, knock-
off Nazis with a bigger, badder 
Death Star. The Resistance can’t 
fight back without the last Jedi, but 
Luke Skywalker is nowhere to be 
found. Our only clue to finding him 
is a piece of a map secreted away 
in another adorably booping droid 
who’s been abandoned on a remote 
desert planet to be discovered by a 
plucky, disenfranchised youth bur-
dened with glorious destiny.

The coming years will be a 

trial of our loyalty, but less fright-
ening than the Christenson-era, 
given we have such a personable 
roster of named players. Starting 
with our fresh faces: Daisy Rid-
ley (“Scrawl”), as Rey, unites the 
casual, barely-an-actress vibe of 
Jennifer Lawrence with the self-
possessed screen dominance of 
Anna Kendrick. She’s Luke, except 
with verve. Playing off her straight-
man poise is the comedically out 
of place John Boyega (“Half of a 
Yellow Sun”), playing our traitor-

stormtrooper and beloved knuck-
lehead, Finn. The cherry on top 
is Oscar Isaac (“Ex Machina”), as 
Poe, whose brash charisma lays 
down the framework for Finn and 
Rey’s friendship, if not the opti-
mistic emotional undercurrent of 
the entire flick. We ship Poe with 
everyone.

Ridley is the Disney princess 

of popular demand. Relentlessly 
competent, Rey rides obstinacy 
and coincidence to the apex of 
her galaxy’s needs, sheathed in 
resplendent plot armor and that 
ambiguous weather-hardened late 
youth that screams “violent back-
story.” Her plasticity in the up-
tempo plot is so extraordinary that 
her character arc feels superficial 
at times, as though her life were 
taking the backseat to her heroism. 
But isn’t it always that way, with 
heroes? And if you think Star Wars 
owed you novelty or introspec-
tion, you’re barking up the wrong 
Wookiee.

Ridley has space to grow in the 

next films. “The Force Awakens” 
only sets the pace, and that pace is 
meant to keep us out of breath. We 
come hurtling out of the gate with 
a plot whose velocity defends us 
from our own overthinking. There 
are so many potential throwbacks 
in Star Wars, it would be garish to 
dwell; Abrams, Lord of the Pas-
tiche, picks the right ones. Espe-
cially satisfying Easter eggs include 
the titillating wobble of a light-
saber being summoned, Rey’s cry 
“Stop taking my hand!” (for those 
of us who remember how dopey 
Han looked running with Leia 
in “Empire Strikes Back”), Maz’s 
(Lupita 
Nyong’o, 
“Non-Stop”) 

iconic cantina, ripped from “A 
New Hope”, a dramatic confronta-
tion on a narrow bridge (here there 
be spoilers), and our favorite, Han 
Solo telling us to respect the Force 
and the Jedi while standing in the 
exact same spot on the Millennium 
Falcon that he was standing when 

he told Luke that “hokey religions 
and ancient weapons are no match 
for a good blaster at your side, kid.”

Han Solo (Harrison Ford, “Indi-

ana Jones and the Kingdom of the 
Crystal Skull”) and General Leia 
Organa (Carrie Fisher, “Maps to 
the Stars”) are the wind in this 
movie’s sails. There’s a note of self-
aware absurdity in all sci-fi sto-
ries, and the best ones have a voice 
capable of lampshading on the 
right frequency to keep the world 
in check without breaking charac-
ter. That has always been Han Solo 
for Star Wars, with that shrugging 
smile that dresses down an entire 
universe.

Ford is old guard, and his his-

tory shines though his one-liners 
(“Escape now. Hug later!”); his 
wily leadership recalls Indiana 
Jones and reminds us just how 
much baggage this movie inherits. 
When Ford asks Fisher, “Wasn’t 
all bad, was it?” he’s more than 
just Han, he’s the mouthpiece for 
the audience, a living elegy for late 
20th century geek childhoods, 
unpretentious and organic, shep-
herding the new cast into the fold 
of cultural staples.

But the joy of “The Force Awak-

ens” is majority elegiac. It feels like 
celebrating something that was, 
rather than something that is. We 
thrill in our seats when we see 
General Leia, not because it’s Leia, 
but because we’re excited to see 
Fisher reprising Leia, grateful that, 
so many years later, she’s still there 
for us and nothing has been for-
gotten. The promise of “The Force 
Awakens”is strong, but the script is 
often weak. You leave the theater 
lighter than air, but with nothing 
substantial to savor.

This trial of loyalty isn’t over, but 

“The Force Awakens” is so thick 
with the energy that made us fall 
in love with IV, V and VI, a twenty-
something geek can’t help but have 
a little faith. And mercifully, there’s 
no fucking Jar Jar Binks this time. 

‘Force Awakens’ is 
a new hope for fans

B+

Star Wars: 
The Force 
Awakens

20th 
Century Fox

Quality 16

20TH CENTURY FOX

Pew pew pew!

MOVIE REVIEW

“What is this remix of ‘Girls 

Just Want to Have Fun?’ ”

I know. The first time I 

heard 
it 

play, I was 
an 
idiot. 

Bright 
synths 
and drum 
machines 
were 
blasting 
over 
speakers 
in 
the 

Michigan 
League at a school-sanctioned 
East Quad social event, and 
when I tried to figure out this 
unfamiliar song, my friend gave 
me this glare she delights in 
giving me, one that makes me 
question how I’m even smart 
enough to dress myself in the 
morning, before she decided to 
enlighten my world.

“This is Whitney Houston.”
I don’t know how I went so 

far in my life without hearing “I 
Wanna Dance With Somebody 
(Who Loves Me),” but in the 
year since I’ve heard it, I’ve 
been converted. I’m ready to 
say that it’s at least Top 5, if not 
the greatest song of all time.

It may not seem so obvious 

at first. In fact, you might think 
this whole column is a joke. 
I don’t blame you — Whitney 
Houston’s big hit sounds a little 
bit derivative, not just of her 
own work (“How Will I Know”) 
, but of other iconic ’80s artists 
like Cyndi Lauper or even 
Madonna. Its sound, with its 
funky artificial bassline and 
perky keyboard fanfares, is the 
kind of music that defined the 
whole era, and it’s not your fault 
if you think of it as just one of 
many old ’80s hits.

But the genius of “I Wanna 

Dance 
With 
Somebody” 
is 

how perfectly it combines the 
best of both ballads and pop 
hits. Pretty much all of your 
standard “greatest song of all 
time” picks have an enormous 
crescendo — something like 
“Stairway to Heaven,” “All 
My Friends” or “Hey Jude.” “I 
Wanna Dance With Somebody” 
has that huge build-up, but it 

sees no need to start slow. It’s a 
fiery, irresistible pop song from 
start to finish.

It starts with a mere 10 

seconds of warm-up. Someone 
turns on the drum machines, the 
bass enters and Houston tests 
out her voice with a few breathy 
yeahs. Then, already satisfied, 
Houston opens the door of 
our old farmhouse world and 
reveals her own personal Oz, 
colored attractively with the 
best production that money can 
buy. While every other artist is 
shooting off Roman candles, “I 
Wanna Dance With Somebody” 
is a big city fireworks display. 
Like the work of idolized 
queens like Beyoncé or Rihanna 
today, 
Houston 
is 
entirely 

unattainable on this song. We 
can’t sing like her; we can’t get 
our hands on her producers or 
songwriters. We have no access 
whatsoever to the talent she’s 
working with, but she deigns to 
let us in by singing about what 
we’re all feeling.

Then 
Houston 
takes 
us 

down, just for a moment, in 
the first verse. Not enough that 
anybody stops dancing, but 
she pulls it back just for a little 
bit. Importantly, there’s never 
a dull moment in this song, 
but it still needs an ounce of 
ebb and flow, lest its listeners 
burn to a crisp right on the 
dancefloor. But she quickly 
lights it up again, giving voice 
to all our passions as she sings 
the chorus, overwhelming our 
bodies and our brains with her 
search for someone special 
— “I Wanna Dance With 
Somebody.” And every time she 
goes back to the chorus it just 
gets more and more powerful, 
like Houston finds renewed 
energy and focus whenever she 
reminds herself of her goal — 
“Somebody Who Loves Me.”

The key, though, is right 

after the bridge — that moment 
of confusion and uncertainty 
when the roller coaster slows 
to a crawl as it tips over its 
highest point. The final chorus 
hits and it’s one of the most 
ecstatic highs in the history 
of pop music. Her voice gets 
even 
higher, 
more 
frantic, 

like Houston’s going to break 
herself down and collapse on 
this dance floor as she pushes 
herself to the finale or else she’s 
not going to finish the song at 
all. The music starts to wind 
down, but the singer’s not done 
yet. You hear Houston’s gospel 
roots as she hysterically shouts 
“Don’t you wanna dance!? Say 
you wanna dance! Don’t you 
wanna dance!?” because she 
sees the truth in her mind and 
knows it to be undeniably true: 
all that matters as she performs 
on this night is finding someone 
to connect with, someone who 
truly understands her.

“I 
Wanna 
Dance 
With 

Somebody” is a universal epic 
that somehow runs under five 
minutes. It’s a world-shaking, 
breathtaking display of force, 
both vocally and emotionally. 
This 
song 
is 
the 
greatest 

because it gives everybody 
everything 
that 
we 
need, 

focusing on nothing more than 
human connections and the 
love we find through music. If 
the biggest songs ever peak at 
a 10 out of 10, “I Wanna Dance” 
starts at 11 and somehow finds 
a way to turn it up to 99.

Look, I know that from 

“How Will I Know” to “Girls 
Just Want to Have Fun” to 
“Vogue” to “Drunk in Love,” 
you can draw all sorts of 
comparisons to this song. It’s 
not groundbreaking. It doesn’t 
have 
the 
mind-expanding 

poetry of Dylan or the constant 
striving for something greater 
that you hear in Springsteen 
or 
the 
political 
awareness 

of Kendrick Lamar, but nine 
nights 
out 
of 
10 
Whitney 

Houston still reigns supreme 
with this single. I’m not trying 
to diss any of those other artists 
— they’ve all made complex, 
world-changing 
music 
and 

frankly, their work as a whole 
is much more impressive than 
Houston’s. But “I Wanna Dance 
With Somebody” so simply 
cuts to the core of everything 
that we need as music fans. It’s 
not the social commentary of 
political protest, but Houston 
can see into the hearts of all its 
listeners, and she uses her voice 
to immortalize our collective 
burning passion — we all wanna 
dance with someone who loves 
us.

Theisen just realized “Ice Ice 

Baby” and “Under Pressure” are 

two different songs. To confirm 

this, email ajtheis@umich.edu. 

MUSIC COLUMN

An argument for the 
greatest song ever

ADAM 

THEISEN

The legacy of an icon

By DAYTON HARE

Daily Arts Writer

Pierre Boulez died last week. I 

wrote this.

Last 
Tuesday, 
the 
French 

composer and conductor, Pierre 
Boulez, passed away at the age of 
90. In the days since, I have been 
struggling to figure out what to say 
about the man — what could I pos-
sibly contribute to the conversation 
among the outpouring of emotion 
and collective grief expressed by 
the musical community? What 
could I, a young and inexperienced 
composer, have to say about one of 
the greatest musical minds of the 
20th century? Over the past few 
days obituaries have been printed 
in most major news outlets across 
the globe, YouTube comment sec-
tions have been filled with sym-
pathetic R.I.P.s and the world’s 
leading orchestras have resolved to 
dedicate concerts to Boulez’s mem-
ory. Compared to what has already 
been said by those who knew and 
loved him, I fear that whatever I 
can contribute about Boulez will 
be inadequate — and yet I also feel 
that I must do my best to express 
what Boulez meant for me and my 
respect for the memory of such a 
legendary figure.

I did not grow up listening to 

Boulez — not even close — but I 
distinctly recall the first I heard 
of him. It was during the summer 
of 2013, and I was reading a book 
called “The Rest is Noise” (a title 
delightfully derived from Prince 
Hamlet’s dying words) by Alex 
Ross, The New Yorker’s music crit-
ic. The book was recommended to 
me by my first composition teacher, 
and I devoured it with an eager 
enthusiasm that continued to grow 
the further I read. Ross’s book was 
a history of 20th century classical 
music which was both entertain-
ing and filled with well construct-
ed prose — and about three fifths 
of the way through, in a chapter 
aptly entitled “Brave New World,” 
a young and dashing Boulez burst 
onto the scene.

I can’t say that my first impres-

sion of Boulez was altogether 
favorable. I found the take-no-pris-
oners attitude of the young radical 
who showed up at Olivier Mes-
siaen’s door in 1944 to be some-
what disconcerting, his extreme 
aesthetic 
pronouncements 
and 

condemnations of all music he 
deemed regressive to be off-put-
ting. Given infamous statements 
such as “[A]ny musician who has 
not experienced — I do not say 
understood, but truly experienced 
— the necessity of dodecaphonic 
music is USELESS,” I came to con-

sider Boulez to be a bully (a view 
aided by the misconception that 
his name was properly pronounced 
“Bou-lay”), and his sonic creations 
seemed to me to be abrasive and 
cacophonous. And yet, I could not 
help but admire his passion, his 
single-mindedness of purpose and 
the purity of his artistic motives. 
Boulez was an extremely purpose-
ful person, rushing forward into 
the no-man’s-land of unexplored 
sonic possibilities and daring oth-
ers to follow him. And they did — 
Boulez soon became the leader of 
the avant-garde, his confidence in 
the veracity of his aesthetic ideas 
a comforting beacon of light in the 
post-war age of anxiety that was 
born in the looming shadow of the 
atomic bomb.

Boulez’s complex compositions 

and pointed polemics served him 
well in his youth, but as he grew as 
a musician, the tone of his philip-
pics began to soften, and he began 
to contribute in different ways 
to the musical discourse. Gradu-
ally he began to conduct, becoming 
known as a director of great skill, 
notable for his eschewing the use 
of a baton. Before too long he was 
in demand as a conductor on both 
sides of the Atlantic, eventually 
equally as famous for his conduct-
ing as for his compositions. In the 
70s he served as music director 

of the New York Philharmonic, 
an appointment which musical 
progressives hoped might drag 
the conservative orchestra into 
20th century repertoire. Further-
more, Boulez founded numerous 
institutions of musical education 
and research, the most famous of 
which was the Institut de Recher-
che et Coordination Acoustique/
Musique, founded to study the sci-
ence of music and sound, as well as 
to facilitate the composition of elec-
troacoustic music.

In the intervening time between 

my reading of “The Rest is Noise” 
and now, my view of Boulez has 
gradually become far less harsh. 
While I still feel that many of his 
criticisms of other composers and 
particular aesthetics were unnec-
essarily scathing, I have come to 
value his unique contribution to 
the great debate of ideas in a way 
that I did not in the past. And while 
I am still not as well acquainted 
with his music as I think I should 
be, I have begun to listen to it much 
more — what I once found strident 
and strange I now hear as beauti-
ful, nuanced and interesting (a shift 
in aesthetic preference which is 
mirrored by a gradual modernist 
encroachment into my own music).

Part of the reason that my view 

of Boulez has shifted so much is 
because I have observed his fin-
gerprints everywhere. I recently 
became interested in the composer 
Kaija Saariaho; as a young woman 
she studied at IRCAM. Two months 
ago, for this publication, I inter-
viewed the composer Tod Macho-

ver about his “Symphony in D”; 
Machover served as the first direc-
tor of musical research at IRCAM, 
and thus worked intimately with 
Boulez. The two were close enough 
that Machover published an obitu-
ary for Boulez in The Washington 
Post. I have heard from some of 
my instrumentalist friends that 
on Tuesday Kenneth Kiesler, the 
conductor of the University Sym-
phony Orchestra, briefly stopped 
rehearsal, saying “I’m sorry, today 
has been a hard day for me — my 
teacher died.”

This past summer, I studied 

composition at the Tanglewood 
Institute in Massachusetts. Three 
of my fellow student composers 
there idolized Boulez with a rever-
ence that stopped just short of con-
structing an altar, a fact which was 
easily recognizable in their music. 
All of us hoped that we might one 
day have the opportunity to meet 
the master. But we realized this 
would have to happen quickly, tell-
ing each other — only half in jest 
— that “he is likely to die any day 
now.”

This expectation didn’t do much 

to stifle the surprise, however, 
when the prophecy was fulfilled. 
It was an odd feeling to know that 
a figure like Boulez was a part of 
the same world which I inhabit — 
however distant from me that he 
was — and that then he wasn’t. A 
few weeks ago I was reading about 
Boulez in “A Concise History of 
Modern Music” by Paul Griffiths 
— and then a few mornings past I 
was reading Paul Griffiths’s Boulez 

obituary in The New York Times. 
Scrolling through the list of other 
articles of his — which bear titles 
like 
“Karlheinz 
Stockhausen, 

Influential Composer, Dies at 79” 
and “Gyorgy Ligeti, Central-Euro-
pean Composer of Bleakness and 
Humor, Dies at 83” — I think I have 
discovered what is most affecting 
about Boulez’s death for me.

Boulez was a remnant of an age 

of stunning musical innovation, a 
member of a rapidly diminishing 
group of 20th century greats who 
still walk the Earth. To Griffiths’s 
list of deceased composers I could 
add Gunther Schuller, Robert 
Ward, Elliott Carter, Lukas Foss, 
Luciano Berio, Lou Harrison and 
William Albright — all of whom 
died within my lifetime — and such 
giants as Aaron Copland, Leonard 
Bernstein, Olivier Messiaen and 
John Cage just a few years before 
I was born. I have no doubt that 
this age too will produce its share 
of greats, but my reverence for the 
accomplishments of past is such 
that I feel melancholy when the 
living links to them begin to wear 
away.

When figures from the past 

begin their eternal residency in 
the past, succumbing to the inexo-
rable march of time and age, I can’t 
help but reflect upon the transitory 
nature of all that we are and do, that 
our acts that will live on only in the 
memories of others — and so with 
reverence we consign Boulez, like 
so many others, to memory and to 
the all encompassing arms of his-
tory.

She sees the 
truth in her 
mind and 
knows it.

Every time she 
goes back to the 

chorus it gets 
more powerful.

COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK

