Month: February 2021

There was a moment, for four or five days of my life, when my only goal was to see Die Hard 2. (Which, then, most people I knew referred to the movie as Die Harder, but that version of the title has seemed to have dissipated over the years.) A month before the release of Die Hard 2 I had gotten my driver’s license. But to see Die Hard 2 I had to be 17, which I was not. It’s a weird no man’s land of an age, where a human being is old enough to operate a moving vehicle on an interstate highway, but not old enough to hear the word “fuck” more than once during the course of a motion picture. Seeing Die Hard 2 in a movie theater was proving to be a challenge.

(I do find myself getting irrationally annoyed when people tell stories about how they saw all these “hard R” horror films in theaters with their buddies when they were 12, or whatever. How did everyone live near theaters with such lax rules except for me? I had a terrible time seeing rated R movies before I was 17. My first date ever, we were supposed to see Pretty Woman. Wouldn’t that have been a nice story? Well, they wouldn’t let us in to see Pretty Woman because it was rated R, so we saw Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles instead. To this day I have misplaced hatred towards Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for this very reason.)

At the time, just outside of Kansas City, somewhat near Arrowhead Stadium, there was a somewhat decrepit movie theater at a somewhat decrepit shopping center called the Blue Ridge Mall. (This mall was finally demolished a few years ago.) Now, my parents didn’t live particularly close to the Blue Ridge Mall, but, after a few failed attempts at other theaters, this was the first theater where, by chance, whoever was working that night, didn’t seem to care I wasn’t old enough to see Die Hard 2. (This theater would become my “rated R” theater until I turned 17. I had, probably, around a 50 percent success rate. But this was much better than my rate at other theaters, which was “zero.” But I remember I did, eventually, also get in to see Total Recall and Darkman. I was denied entry to The Two Jakes, a movie I didn’t wind up seeing until 2020.) And, let me tell you, when I finally got to see these movies, it was exhilarating. But not because I was watching something even close to “dirty” or “sinister.” I was watching movies where people kind of acted and talked like they did in real life.

I’ve been thinking about this past incarnation of rated R movies a lot lately. Mostly due to having not much to do socially these days, I’ve been rewatching a lot of rated R movies from that era. And, frankly, they are awesome. A friend of mine, before the pandemic, had a huge blindspot when it came to action movies of the ‘80s and ‘90s. He had just assumed he wouldn’t like them because he doesn’t really like today’s versions of action movies. Well, he’s all caught up. And not only does he like these older rated R action movies starring the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, he loves them. And the reason being is they literally don’t make these movies anymore. Because, while watching, they kind of, sort of feel like PG-13 action movies of today, in that they are intended for a younger audience. Then, out of the blue, there’s a bunch of profanity, or someone gets killed and there’s a lot of blood and a funny punchline. This kind of movie is so rare today, these moments all feel like real shocks to the system.

Today, if an action movie is rated R, that’s basically the selling point. And the movie has to be “dark” and “earn its R.” Back then none of these movies were trying to earn an R. They were just barely R, but that’s what makes them unique now, because no studio is going to let a “barely R” movie see the light of day. Today, it either has to be PG-13 or full-on, all the way, R. There’s no Die Hard 2, middle-of-the-road R-rated action movies anymore. And I didn’t realize how much I missed them until now.

I asked ‘80s and ‘90s film historian Kumail Nanjiani (oh, and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter) – who has also been re-watching a lot of action movies from that era over the last few months – if he’s also noticed this.

“Yes,” agrees Nanjiani. “I think R- rated movies then were more fun and more varied. I think the difference in R-rated movies in the past compared to R-rated movies now seems to be that R-rated could be ‘casually’ R. They could be fun movies. Whereas, now, every R feels like a decision.”

Nanjiani’s use of the word “casually” is interesting here, because that’s a pretty good way to sum it up. Here’s an example: Deadpool and Logan are two famously R-rated superhero movies. And there’s nothing “casual” about either of their R ratings. It almost felt like a studio note was, “If we are going to let you make this rated R, you’d better use the word “fuck” in literally every sentence.” (For the record, I like Logan quite a bit.) We can even see this with The Snyder Cut of Justice League. One of its promotional tools is that its “rated R.” That never used to be a thing: “Come see Commando, it’s rated R!”

Now, compare all this to a movie like Planes, Trains and Automobiles. There is absolutely no way possible this movie would be rated R today. It’s barely even rated R then, save for one scene in which Steve Martin unloads the word “fuck” 18 times. Which is a classic scene we’d, again, never get today. Could you even imagine the conversation in the corporate offices, “So, wait, you’re telling me we are going to make this nice family holiday movie rated R because of one 90-second scene? Forget it! You’re fired! Now find me Spider-Man!” (For some reason I picture J. Jonah Jameson as the head of Paramount Pictures in 1987.)

Honestly, I think what makes these “casual” rated R movies so appealing is our normal lives are “causally R.” No, most of us aren’t dealing with explosions on a regular basis, but we do hear some casual expletives often during our day. But not “let’s make this a rated R movie in 2021” often. There’s something strangely realistic in the way people talk in these action movies of the ‘80s and ‘90s that we don’t get today.

And they are shockingly fun. As I mentioned before, when they do use an expletive, it’s usually at an opportune time that really hits. Nanjiani adds, “Movies for adults are generally R now, or hyper-violent thrillers.” Looking back at a few of the movies that fit in this category I’ve re-watched over the last few months (and that I had a great time re-watching. Like, an actual good time): Die Hard 2, Die Hard with a Vengeance, Passenger 57, Beverly Hills Cop 2, Young Guns, Total Recall, Predator, Commando, The Running Man, Under Siege, Eraser, Tango & Cash, Con Air – or even comedies like Major League and, yes, Planes Trains and Automobiles … all of these movies are rated R and I’d have a difficult time believing any of them would be released with an R rating today. And none of them are really aimed at adults or are hyper-violent thrillers. And even when they do release them as R today, like say 2018’s The Predator, the somewhat fun spirit of the original is long gone and it leans into the fact it’s an “R movie.” These movies all work because they are “casually R.”

People often lament that studios don’t make mid-range budget movies anymore. And that’s true. And some of the movies above would fit into that category. And, boy, this past year sure would have been a good time for some new “casually R” movies. But the “casually R” movie is now extinct as that theater at the Blue Ridge Mall where I got to see them in the first place.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Fox News blowhard Tucker Carlson was a contestant on a 2004 episode of Jeopardy! He narrowly finished in first place over columnist Peggy Noonan (the Final Jeopardy prompt: “If a president is impeached, this official presides over the trial in the Senate,” which is almost too perfect), but it would have been a blowout if the game had been focused on Carlson’s specialty: “vile and vicious” attacks. Monday’s episode of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah had Carlson responding to his oft-racist, sexist, and white nationalist comments over the years with Jeopardy!-style buzz ins. For instance:

“We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer and dirtier” “What is hate speech?”

“All cultures are equal, except they are not all equal” “What is a white supremacist?”

“Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys” “Who’s the racist here?”

“Well, I’m, like, extraordinarily loaded just from, like, money I, you know, inherited… I’ve never needed to work” “What is precisely is privilege?”

And most recently: “There was no physical evidence that George Floyd was murdered by a cop” “What exactly is this disinformation?”

Watch the clip above.

Katee Sackhoff has been working steadily in the industry for well over twenty years, from Battlestar Gallactica to 24 to her Netflix series, Another Life, to Longmire, where getting chewed out by a co-star changed her career. She’s also been featured in a few movies — most notably Riddick — but Sackhoff has never broken out in a huge way.

However, since she was a little kid, Sackhoff has always wanted to be part of the Star Wars universe. “I always joked,” she told Michael Rosenbaum on his Inside of You podcast, “that there’s one thing I will always do. If they call me to be a rock in a Star Wars movie, just say yes. I’ll be a rock just to be in this world.”

That’s exactly what Sackhoff did more than ten years ago when director Dave Filioni asked her to voice the role of Bo-Katan in the animated Star Wars series, The Clone Wars. “I didn’t even have to think twice. A female Mandalorian warrior? Hello! Of course!”

Though it was just an animated character, Sackhoff still often joked with Filoni about being cast as a live-action version of Bo-Katan. “You know, one day, if this happens, you know she could exist in these worlds!” Sackhoff said that she “kept saying tongue in cheek things like that because I was honestly just taking the piss.” She never expected it would actually happen.

“I have had such a beautiful career,” Sackhoff continued, “but I have seen people around me get that huge, massive thing… but it’s never happened to me. This huge thing had never happened, so I always joked with [Filoni] just thinking, ‘Of course, they’ll probably recast her. They’ll probably cast Scarlett Johansson.”

“But when The Mandalorian came out,” Sackhoff said, “I made a joke again to [Filoni]. ‘I’ve been playing characters like this for 15 years, buddy!’ And I never thought it would happen. I was just sort of joking.”

In the end, however, Sackhoff didn’t even have to audition. Jon Favreau — the showrunner on The Mandalorian — thought “outside the box” by hiring the actual person who was voicing the animated character, which “never happens.” In fact, when she sat down for a meeting with Favreau, “it wasn’t until halfway through the meeting before I realized he was talking about me. It was a total out of body experience. I kept thinking while he was walking, ‘Those are pictures of me on the wall. What is happening?!’”

“I’m still pinching myself. My mind is blown that not only did they have the thought to do [hire the person who voiced the character], they believed that I could play the role, and that they ultimately let me.”

Source: Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum

The Haim sisters have been friendly with Taylor Swift for years; They opened for her on the 1989 tour in 2015. Now, it appears the trio is teasing a new collaboration with Swift thanks to what fans have perceived as a subtle clue.

Yesterday, the group took to social media to share a photo of themselves and captioned in, “one gasoline pump.” The photo is of the sisters outside of a gas station, which suggests that they may be releasing the Women In Music Pt. III highlight “Gasoline” as a single (the song previously charted on the Billboard Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart last year despite not being an official single). Fans were quick to point out that the number of the gas pump their car is at in the photo is 13, which has been widely interpreted as a hint that Haim is prepping a remix of the song featuring Taylor Swift.

If a Swift-featuring version of “Gasoline” ends up coming to fruition, it will be the second collaboration between the artists in the past few months, as Haim found their way onto Swift’s December album Evermore by featuring on “No Body, No Crime,” a country murder ballad that earned the approval of The Chicks.

This past Friday, Jimmy Eat World aired the third and final “Phoenix Session” — a series of exquisitely shot and recorded live performances of their most recent LP (2019’s Surviving), their second best-selling album (2004’s Futures) and Clarity, their 1999 masterpiece whose original commercial performance got them dropped by Capitol. I admit I’m a little biased since Clarity is my favorite album of all time, but I’d submit the Phoenix Sessions as damning evidence against the claim of my Indiecast co-host that livestreams are inherently dull. Most are, because they’re attempts to recreate the sounds and sights of a club gig without the social camaraderie; which negates pretty much the entire point.

Conversely, the Phoenix Sessions recast entire albums as a new audio-visual experience, one that was exponentially enhanced by the quality of your television or computer. Having seen the 10-year anniversary performance of Futures in 2014, I can say that there was no added value in watching Jimmy Eat World run through “Drugs Or Me” packed shoulder-to-sweaty shoulder with someone who might be waiting an hour just to hear “The Middle” during the encore. The Phoenix Sessions provided hardcore Jimmy Eat World fans an enhanced version of the way they’ve likely experienced Futures and Clarity for years — headphones on, in isolation, to paraphrase “A Praise Chorus,” feeling like a part of it was yours and yours alone.

This quality has remained in Jimmy Eat World’s music as they’ve held nearly every conceivable status in the 25 years since 1996’s Static Prevails became arguably the first major-label emo album ever released — they’ve been wildly underappreciated and utterly inescapable, critically scorned and later canonized (often with the same album), beset by a slow, steady drift into mid-life crises, lumped onto tours with alt-rock has-beens and then rejuvenated as elder statesmen of an entire genre. Try to think of how many major-label bands have been as consistent and consistently rewarding as Jimmy Eat World over the past three decades — Radiohead and Deftones come to mind and that’s really about it, but I don’t think their public reputation will ever be reduced to a single song, like, “Creep” or “Change (In the House of Flies)” (don’t worry, “The Middle” is on this list). But whether you’re a hardcore fan looking to quibble with the rankings, a “Clarity-through-Futures only” essentialist or someone who really hasn’t heard a Jimmy Eat World song besides “The Middle,” trust that it was hard to limit this list to only 30 songs. You can’t not still feel the butterflies.

30. “Closer” (Stay On My Side Tonight, 2005)

There’s no real shadow history of Jimmy Eat World’s non-album tracks – most of them end up as B-sides or bonus cuts on deluxe reissues. But Stay On My Side Tonight stands as their only official collection of non-album originals (along with a Heatmiser cover and an inessential “Drugs Or Me” remix), a way of honoring the choicest cuts from the Futures writing sessions that couldn’t find a proper place on their first album subject to legitimate commercial expectations. Despite Jimmy Eat World’s intention to present Stay On My Side Tonight as a discrete entity, it can’t help but be seen as kind of a patch to Futures — all but the most diehard listeners can instantly think of at least two tracks they’d swap out to find room for SOMST’s originals. It’s not even that “Closer” is simply better than, say, the monumentally hokey PSA “Drugs Or Me” or misguided horniness on main (“Night Drive”), it challenges the assumption that these wouldn’t have fit on Futures. “Closer” is virtually the exact midpoint between the bittersweet “The World You Love” and the sourball skate-punk of “Pain,” a rare instance of Jimmy Eat World stretching out for groove and texture rather than a preconceived notion of “epic.” You can believe Apple Music — Clarity and Bleed American are their truly essential works for casual listeners, but attach “Closer” to Futures and… well, it’s a lot closer.

29. “Mixtape”
28. “Invented” (Invented, 2010)

Critic Andrew Unterberger recently asked whether The Human League’s Dare was the only example of a classic album that backloaded its three best songs at the very end. There were a couple of common responses — Celebration Rock, Purple Rain, several for Automatic For the People. I’d nominate Invented, even if it has only reached the status of “aged surprisingly well” as opposed to “classic.” As they typically do after their streamlined pop-rock albums, Jimmy Eat World tried a little bit of everything on Invented — a reunion with Mark Trombino, the first Tom Linton lead vocal since Clarity, acoustic strummers with strings, songs written from the perspective of Cindy Sherman photos — and the results were predictably scattered. The one throughline was Adkins’ focus on storytelling and he hits a peak on Invented’s penultimate title track. He’s occupied this kind of space before on “Ten,” “If You Don’t, Don’t,” “Disintegration,” and “Kill,” just to name a few — a drunk who can keep things together just enough to clearly see everything around him fall apart. They’ve also made compelling use of female vocals from the likes of Rachel Haden and Liz Phair, but whereas they mostly provided harmony, the presence of future alt-country darling Courtney Marie Andrews makes “Invented” feel like a conversation — establishing an intimacy that holds even as “Invented” explodes at its Aqua Net-glossed bridge (I mean “explodes” quite literally, to the point where it sounds like a mastering error). It’s the kind of song that would typically require a comedown immediately after and instead, it’s followed by the equally massive “Mixtape,” which fortified Adkins’ heartsick solo version with strings and cranked drums. “Where went all the takers baby/do you still have what they want?” Adkins asks, a poignant question for a band whom critics were judging mostly on commercial performance rather than artistic growth. Ten years later, “Mixtape” and “Invented” can be seen for what they really are, the backbone of Jimmy Eat World’s most underappreciated album.

27. “555” (Surviving, 2019)

Jimmy Eat World have made dozens of pop songs, but all of them would be primarily classified as “rock.” That’s their thing — even if their biggest hits put them in the company of Taylor Swift and Nickelback and the cast of Saturday Night Live, none of it cuts against a humble image of the same four guys from Mesa, Arizona hanging tight for over 25 years. That’s probably why they’ve never been put in a situation where Greg Kurstin or Ryan Tedder is brought in to punch up their hooks or modernize the production — you know, dial up some synth presents, swap out Zach Lind for some trap beats, put some glassy harmonies in the chorus. Funny thing is, that all happened on “555,” the outlier and standout track on 2019’s Surviving, a strong album that nonetheless played things a bit too safe after the reinvigorated Integrity Blues. The sound of “555” itself was as jarring as the sight of Adkins playing an extraterrestrial despot buried in pancake makeup and a white wig in the video, and both worked fantastically — even if Adkins admits he had to stifle laughter throughout the whole shoot. We’re probably fortunate that Jimmy Eat World were never expected to play the same game as Fall Out Boy or Panic! At The Disco, but even if they did, “555” proves they’d survive that, too.

26. “Integrity Blues” (Integrity Blues, 2016)

Spoiler alert: 2013’s Damage was completely shut out on this list, and I don’t foresee this being a controversial outcome. After their weakest-selling and most artistically inert album, Jimmy Eat World took their first extended break in two decades, with Adkins asking himself a question that never seemed to faze peers like Dave Grohl or Rivers Cuomo or Billy Corgan — does the world really need a new Jimmy Eat World album? The crowds who showed up to watch Adkins play solo gigs at bars and small theaters in places like Maquoketa, Iowa and Billings, Montana bore witness to an unusually candid song he wrote about that very thing. “It’s all what you do when no one’s there / it’s all what you do when no one cares,” Adkins sang plaintively over his acoustic guitar, an elaboration on its title: “Integrity Blues.” By the time it became the title track on their best album in over a decade, they couldn’t help layering on the strings and reverb until it could pass for something Justin Meldal-Johnsen smuggled out of his Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming sessions. But Adkins’ voice is unadorned, as if he’s singing “I’ve got work to do” alone in the bathroom mirror. It might not scan as emo, but Adkins has never been more raw and vulnerable than he is on “Integrity Blues.”

25. “Roller Queen” (Jimmy Eat World EP, 1998)

Both of Jimmy Eat World’s releases that were intentionally self-titled are nowhere to be found on streaming and pretty hard to find in general — in the case of 1994’s Jimmy Eat World, likely because they’re sorta embarrassed by it. I imagine 1998’s Jimmy Eat World EP is caught up some legal or publishing rigamarole — released on an imprint then best known for being run by a guy from Less Than Jake, Jimmy Eat World mostly existed to give “Lucky Denver Mint” a trial run and once it got some spins on KROQ, the release did enough numbers to allow Fueled By Ramen a bigger office space in Jacksonville. Nowadays, Jimmy Eat World is worth seeking out solely for “Roller Queen,” a slow-motion space race with no real equivalent in Jimmy Eat World’s catalog. They’d dabbled in lengthier songs on Static Prevails, with “Anderson Mesa” playing the role of “epic closer” and “Digits” more of a prog-like suite. But with “Roller Queen,” there’s no real hook, no real structure aside from a slow, steady crescendo interrupted by bit-crushing production tricks — imagine if they made their Low Level Owl instead of Clarity, or veered off into becoming a digital post-rock act on Morr Music. Nothing in Jimmy Eat World’s catalog conjures as much fascinating alternate history as the least-heard song on this list.

24. “Blister” (Clarity, 1999)

This one could have easily been a B-side. Clarity is already over an hour long without it, the apocalyptic doomsaying isn’t an obvious fit anywhere on the album, let alone immediately after “Just Watch The Fireworks” and “For Me This Is Heaven.” And to top it off, this is a Tom song, which were already having trouble finding their place in Jimmy Eat World’s studio releases. Maybe they felt compelled to have one true Tom song on Clarity, or maybe when you have a song as infectious as “Blister,” you find a place for it. It might not have the most radio-ready chorus they’ve ever done, but it features their most compelling imagery — “the West Coast has been traumatized,” Tom Linton sings as a Cormac McCarthy character, the last man alive walking across the United States all alone. I think we can admit that Clarity is an album that takes its every fleeting emotion very, very seriously and can allow itself some comic relief — after so many times of feeling like your world is caving in, imagine how funny it would be if Earth actually collapsed on itself.

23. “Cautioners” (Bleed American, 2001)

While it lacks the “experimental” reputation of its predecessor, in many ways, Bleed American refined the advancements of Clarity for use in form-fitting pop structure. Isn’t the palm-muted riff of “The Middle” really just a major-thirds take on the palm-muted riff of “Your New Aesthetic,” which itself was a tighter version of the one on “Rockstar”? There was still room for their spacier, more sentimental ideas, which were now shaped into show-stopping ballads, every bit as purposeful as the singles. And I’ve often wondered whether Jimmy Eat World were so enamored with the infinity loops of “Ten” that they just imported them verbatim onto “Cautioners.” This is the “weird one” on Bleed American, sandwiched between their overt homages to Cheap Trick and John Cougar Mellencamp, at once immaculate and 8-bit — regal cymbal washes misting over Lind’s mechanical drums, guitars nicked from The Joshua Tree and a bassline on loan from the underground of Super Mario Bros 2. All the more fitting for a song about trying to stay firm and resolute as your insides turn to mush: “I’m making my peace, I’m making it with distance / Maybe that’s a big mistake, you know I’m thinking of you,” Adkins admits. As the curtain falls on the final chorus, the guitar loop just keeps ringing — it could go on for twice as long as “Goodbye Sky Harbor” and I’d allow it, after all, what is “Cautioners” but endlessly watching the one you love slowly walk away without ever really leaving.

22. “Firefight” (Chase This Light, 2007)

If I had to choose my favorite Jimmy Eat World sequencing trope, I’ll go with the “B-side banger.” See: “nothingwrong,” “Get It Faster,” “Through,” “Clarity,” “Action Needs an Audience,” “Robot Factory,” songs that break up the typically slower, somber second halves and are unafraid to be inessential. Some are absolute keepers anyways, very few would make lists like these, but “Firefight” stands as the one song in this category that fundamentally alters its parent album. On the whole, Chase This Light overcorrected towards genial hooks and cloying sentimentality, an understandable impulse after Futures failed to connect with pop audiences like its predecessor. But did their strengths really lie in “Feeling Lucky” or “Carry You” or a song like “Firefight,” every bit as melodically powerful as the obvious singles and maintaining the jagged edge of Bleed American’s singles that weren’t “The Middle.” While it features some of Adkins’ most impressionistic writing (“they’re spitting spite all through my blood,” “love is quartz and breath the second hand”), “you can be anything, just be anything with me” leaves nothing to interpretation on the bridge — win or lose, he’s going out in a blaze of glory.

21. “Futures” (Futures, 2004)

I spent most of 2004 buried under Criminal Procedure readings, crumbled Arby’s wrappers, and empty cans of Sparks Ultra, so I’m probably not the most reliable historian of that era. Still, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that there wasn’t the same “all hands on deck” call to action from musicians the last time one of the bad guys was up for reelection. Maybe people were resigned to seeing no realistic path towards victory for John Kerry or maybe there was an equal amount of urgency as 2020, just without social media to serve as amplification. But compared to a time where we are intimately aware of nearly every celebrity’s political leanings, I was legitimately startled when Jimmy Eat World kicked off their highly-anticipated follow-up to Bleed American with a call to rock the vote. How many other political rock songs from popular bands do you remember from that time, keeping in mind that even Conor Oberst thinks “When the President Talks To God” is kind of lame and “Mr. November” came out in 2005 (also, The National weren’t popular yet). “I always believed in futures / I hope for better in November,” Adkins shouts, November 2 about two weeks away — by that point, it was pretty clear that better would not happen, but “Futures” was retained enough of Bleed American’s broad uplift to make it retroactively applicable to a promising first date or the Red Sox finally winning the World Series.

20. “You With Me”
19. “Sure And Certain” (Integrity Blues, 2016)

Jimmy Eat World is my favorite band and I also kinda dreaded hitting play on my promo copy of Integrity Blues — your therapist would probably call that a dialectic. Their previous three albums had inspired moments, but mostly sounded like Jimmy Eat World trying too hard to be themselves. Or maybe I was just hitting an age where Jimmy Eat World’s music is supposed to hit different, or not hit at all. And while I’ve come to appreciate it as Integrity Blues’ thesis statement, “Get Right” was a terribly uninspiring lead single, plodding and lacking any real strong hook. It provided no indication of Justin Meldal-Johnsen’s involvement or why Jimmy Eat World wanted to work with the guy in the first place. But the actual introduction of Integrity Blues… the first guitar strums sound like a triple-tracked harp. There is no way any actual human beings could have been involved in the recording of those choral harmonies. Rick Burch’s bass is alchemized into an electrical current. The drums are treated with the same man/machine textures that defined “Lucky Denver Mint” and “Cautioners.” Judging from just the first minute of “You With Me,” Jimmy Eat World heard Meldal-Johnsen’s work with M83 and said, “yeah, give us all of that.” For an album intended as a bold reinvention of Jimmy Eat World’s sound, “You With Me” shows a remarkable amount of patience and stamina throughout its five minutes, surging through its subtly witty chorus and allowing themselves as much time as they need to luxuriate in the production. Jimmy Eat World sounded fantastic on “You With Me,” and on the next song, they were truly back. You just knew when the sweeping chorus of “Sure And Certain” hit for the first time; I remember someone saying that it sounded like it belonged on a bank commercial and I just take that to mean that it’s the first Jimmy Eat World single in ages that sounded like it could be everywhere, its steady tom-drum beat and glistening synths sounding in dialog with avowed fans like Paramore and CHVRCHES without sounding like they’re trying to hop on the bandwagon. I distinctly remember emailing lapsed Jimmy Eat World fans about ten minutes into my first listen of Integrity Blues — “this is real good.” Not the “actual good” that comes as a sigh of relief when your favorite band doesn’t embarrass themselves. But the kind where you can say they’ve now made essential albums in three consecutive decades.

18. “Big Casino” (Chase This Light, 2007)

Britty Drake of the dearly departed Pity Sex recently tweeted that “Futures is the In Reverie of Jimmy Eat World,” and for everyone not versed in “30-something emo Twitter Bat-signals,” I’ll try to explain: there isn’t much superficial similarity between Futures, a logically darker and denser follow-up to a platinum blockbuster and Saves The Day’s sole major label album, a foray into florid, day-glow psych-pop. Likewise, Futures was generally well-received by Jimmy Eat World fans and had a respectable showing on the charts (it sits at about 600k sold), whereas In Reverie was mostly despised by Saves The Day fans. And, unlike Jimmy Eat World, Saves The Day were drummed out of the major label system once DreamWorks was sold to Universal. Nonetheless, Drake’s point sorta stands: both followed two certified scene classics to a relatively muted response and spooked each band into an immediate course correction. Lind admits that Jimmy Eat World intended for 2007’s Chase This Light to have a similar impact to Bleed American and they called on megaproducer Butch Vig to gloss up a batch of songs that tried very, very hard to match “The Middle.” Jimmy Eat World gloriously overshot the mark on “Big Casino,” which drew equally on Bleed American as it did Sam’s Town, proudly ostentatious Boss fanfic that steamrolls over any criticism one might have about Arizona guys playacting as a “New Jersey success story.”

17. “Episode IV” (Static Prevails, 1996)

After taking the lead for most of Jimmy Eat World’s rudimentary skate-punk, Tom Linton gradually, graciously and, by Bleed American, all but entirely ceded the frontman role to Jim Adkins. He never ended up playing the typical “hypeman” role you see in emo bands with alternating vocalists — the scream-y guy, the more nasal guy, the guy allotted one hardcore throwback or two per album. But most of his leads from Static Prevails going forward were bangers, all of which makes “Episode IV” the most emphatic argument against his marginalization — his sole ballad proves how well-suited his lower register was for Jimmy Eat World’s dreamier material. If not in sound, “Episode IV” is Static Prevails most overt lyrically emo song — dancing awkwardly, singing off-key, projecting spiritual salvation onto someone — the sort of things that make introverts feel seen the first time they hear them and would eventually become cliche thanks to bands that soon walked through a door that Bleed American kicked off the hinges. But Linton’s steady, solemn voice sells all of it, largely by not trying to sell it — “and you know I almost lost my will to live” should sound like exhausted relief, not a celebration for having narrowly escaped. Jimmy Eat World could keep going for 30 more years and still not include “Episode IV” in their setlists a single time, but it’s just as well — something this underplayed and restrained deserves to remain one of the band’s best kept secrets.

16. “Kill” (Futures, 2004)

By a quite comfortable margin, Futures stands as Jimmy Eat World’s angriest album — its sharp edges owing as much to Gil Norton’s diamond-cut production as its terse song titles, where both ellipsis (“Just Tonight…”) and compaction (“nothingwrong”) manage to uphold the lurking, unknown menace. “Kill” is where Adkins’ internal seething finally finds a release valve, a hotel bar lament by turns accusatory, embarrassed, emasculated, enraged and, in one perfect line, completely in earnest — he who has not used “SORRY BUT I JUST CAN’T TURN OFF HOW I FEEL” as a LiveJournal status, cast the first stone (cause of death: pelted with stones). “Kill” serves its subject by mirroring the way drunken emails or texts to the one who got away typically go — painstakingly rehearsed before it all comes spilling out, a rare Jimmy Eat World song where there’s still a verse-chorus-bridge structure, but none of the lyrics repeat. Except for one — “I know what I should do but I just can’t walk away,” Adkins sighs as “Kill” fades out, resigned to the inevitability of being in the crosshairs once again.

15. “If You Don’t, Don’t” (Bleed American, 2001)

“Bleed American” immediately blew my shit back when I first heard it at the alt-rock station in Charlottesville and when I finally got a hold of the promo CD, I played it in my car and got pulled over for speeding by “Your House.” And yet, it wasn’t the untouchable side-A run of future singles or even the show-stopping Track Six BalladTM where Bleed American really clicked for me. While it initially appeared that Jimmy Eat World had set aside the attentive soundscaping of Clarity for radio-ready hooks, there’s a point on “If You Don’t, Don’t” where Adkins and Linton seemingly hit six different tremolo pedals in case you somehow missed the point of a prior lyric — “we once walked out on the beach and once I almost touched your hand.” That almost is doing all the work in that sentence, a reminder of every time you got so close to acting on the thing you wanted more than anything else in the world but were left with feeling like your organs were suspended in seafoam. “I’m sorry that I’m such a mess, I drank all my money could get,” Adkins admits towards the end and yeah… we’ve been there. The dominant emotion here isn’t love or even lust, but fear — a fear that this won’t happen or even worse, it will and mean everything to you and nothing to the other person.

14. “Ten” (Clarity, 1999)

Albums as revered as Clarity shouldn’t really have songs that are called “underappreciated” after 22 years — even obvious curveballs like “12.23.95” and “Goodbye Sky Harbor” have factions who will preemptively shoot down any suggestion of skipping through Jimmy Eat World’s IDM curiosities. And yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if the general reputation of “Ten” remains “the one before ‘Just Watch the Fireworks’ and ‘For Me This Is Heaven,’” the two-song run that really makes Clarity, y’know, Clarity. And that makes sense, since the latter are some of the most impossibly lucid emo teen dreams ever written while “Ten” is bathed in fake yellow light, rooted in reality and resigned to fleeting and illicit thrills. “Our weakness is the same, we need poison sometimes,” Adkins mutters to his accomplice, while Lind’s pounding, stutter-step beat and the endlessly chiming guitar loops combining to replicate that physically burdened and mentally weightless feeling of a drunk pushing himself to the next bar, a buzz that’s about to spiral out of control. “Nowhere and then nowhere, trapped in the chase,” as Adkins aptly puts it, trying to get that mixture just right until you believe songs like “For Me This Is Heaven” can actually come true.

13. “Polaris” (Futures, 2004)

In a just world, the title track of Def Leppard’s Hysteria exists on the same plane as “I’m On Fire” — a relatively subdued, amorous, and not inescapable single reincarnated as an indie favorite with dozens upon dozens of covers from cred-conscious bands who want to claim the hidden gem in an otherwise overplayed-to-death 1980s rock radio institution. But that is not the world we inhabit, so let’s just appreciate “Polaris” for honoring one of Jimmy Eat World’s latent, formative influences. Adkins once claimed “Photograph” inspired him to pick up a guitar for the first time and while that song’s imprint is all over Bleed American’s pop-rock of ages, the incandescent center of Futures takes after Def Leppard’s most emo power ballad. “You say that love goes anywhere / in your darkest time it’s just enough to know it’s there,” Adkins yelps, and as the bard once said, when you get that feeling, better start believing. In this instance, the magical mysteria is all in the crystalline guitars, trying in vain to sprinkle stardust on a relationship slowly fading to black.

12. “Claire” (Static Prevails, 1996)

Long before Jimmy Eat World defined the sound of major-label emo, they were simply the first emo band on a major label. And “Claire” does indeed sound like a more polished version of what was happening throughout Texas and the Midwest at the time, a sweeter, slighter take on Sunny Day Real Estate — well-thought out twinkles commingling with distorted octave chords, unabashedly plaintive vocals straining to sell lyrics about faith and girls and faith in girls into poetic abstractions. “One way trip can work both ways / loose ends kept untied make better friends,” Adkins sings before the priceless coda — I don’t know exactly what he means by “CAN YOU SAY FULL RIDE,” but it was probably about long-distance relationships in college, at least that’s what I assumed while I was in a long-distance (like, an hour away) relationship in college. Coming after a song literally titled “Rockstar,” “Claire” confirms not just where Jimmy Eat World were at in 1996, but where they’d go soon after — it’s Jimmy Eat World’s first arena-rock moment and the last time they sounded even remotely hesitant about embracing such things.

11. “The World You Love” (Futures, 2004)

For a quintessential band in a genre synonymous with bombastic oversharing, Jimmy Eat World are granted an unusual amount of authorial distance; credit their modest public profile or his tendency to write in broad strokes, but unlike with, say, Bright Eyes or Taking Back Sunday or Say Anything, the enjoyment of Jimmy Eat World’s music is not at all contingent upon believing that Adkins is actually the main character in his songs. “We’re only just as happy as everyone else seems to think we are,” Adkins sings on “The World You Love,” and judging from the Futures cuts that immediately surround it — “Work,” “Kill,” “Pain” — it stands to reason that people don’t know the half. It’s easy enough to hear “The World We Love” as strictly about a relationship trying to survive physical and emotional distance, albeit more satisfying to interpret “I’m just looking for a nice way to say ‘I’m out’ / I WANT OUT” as bringing the subtext of Futures to the surface — that the darker follow-up to their blockbuster breakthrough is darker because of everything that comes with making a blockbuster breakthrough.

10. “You Are Free” (Integrity Blues, 2016)

I don’t know if Jim Adkins ever gets tired of singing “The Middle” at every single show they have played since 2001. But by 2016’s Integrity Blues, he had to ask — who is he to say that everything’s gonna be alright? Everything might not be alright, just look at what happened a few weeks after Integrity Blues’ October 21st release date. Or maybe everything will be alright, maybe not terrible, not great, just… kinda life on life’s terms. This was also the message of “Get Right,” but its attempt at real talk wasn’t anywhere near as convincing as “You Are Free” — those harmonies on the chorus, that’s why you get in the studio with Justin Meldal-Johnsen. The affirmations of Bleed American had evolved into a more resonant tough love on Integrity Blues, which makes “You Are Free” kind of a spiritual sequel to “The Middle” — an anthem for the simultaneously thrilling and frightening realization that if everything is gonna be alright, it’s completely up to you.

9. “The Middle” (Bleed American, 2001)

There are likely people who absolutely despise “The Middle” and never want to hear it again. There are likely people who enjoy “The Middle” but feel like they never need to hear it again — that chorus really does commit itself to memory after five seconds, after all. And then there are Jimmy Eat World diehards who appreciate or at least tolerate its existence; it’s kind of a bummer that one of the greatest American bands of the past 30 years has been reduced to “I used to listen to this in middle school!” but countless people (myself included) wouldn’t have discovered Clarity or Futures without it. It’s also why they’ll be given the freedom to make an album like Integrity Blues on a major label’s dime.

By the time “The Middle” officially dropped as a single in November 2001, Bleed American had already been renamed Jimmy Eat World and there was a seemingly insatiable demand for the reaffirmation of rock music, whether it came from U2 or The Strokes. And here was a song about keeping the faith in yourself, from a band that had been written off and looked down on. And even if they looked a bit square in comparison to the New Rock Revolution, the video brilliantly turned Jimmy Eat World’s modest, everyguy anti-image into an asset (although surely many teens watched it on mute). Sometimes, the magic of pop music is simply an artist being prepared for their moment, but let’s not get it f*cked up — “The Middle” is one of the most brilliantly crafted pieces of pop-rock of the 21st century and any list of Jimmy Eat World’s best songs that doesn’t include “The Middle” is trying way too hard.

8. “Just Watch The Fireworks” (Clarity, 1999)

Jimmy Eat World’s best records can be treated like seasonal flavors — Bleed American, released in July, full of shout-out-loud hooks and bang-on-your-steering wheel drums, definitely a summer record. Justin Medal-Johnsen’s production wrapped Integrity Blues in icicle lights, Futures begins on Election Day and is permeated by a late autumn chill. I’ve had debates about where Clarity fits into this — “12.23.95” makes an obvious case for “winter,” as do the frosty bells and glacial pace of “Table For Glasses” and “Goodbye Sky Harbor.” So… what about “Just Watch The Fireworks”? Ah, but here’s the thing about Jimmy Eat World’s most googly-eyed, unabashedly romantic song — there’s not a single mention of actual fireworks in the lyrics, a rare if not unprecedented example in the deep, deep canon of fireworks songs. And who stays up as late as they can to watch 4th of July fireworks, those begin at like 8 PM. As “Just Watch the Fireworks” hits its final, “I can’t go on… I must go on” surge, its message becomes clear: the most breathtaking, awe-inspiring moments of your life are bound to happen if you can get out of your own way and just let them happen (this might explain why the song actually titled “Let It Happen” doesn’t hit quite as hard). Doesn’t matter if it’s Christmas Eve, prom, graduation, a first date going curiously too well, or just a desire to remember what it felt like to stay up as late as possible because you didn’t want the night to end — “Just Watch the Fireworks” is for all seasons.

7. “Bleed American” (Bleed American, 2001)

Bleed American’s origin story is a classic tale of short-sighted label execs, DIY pluck and redemption by the will of the people. But here’s the thing that often gets overlooked: yes, Jimmy Eat World may have recorded Bleed American on their own dime and Mark Trombino offered his services on spec, but once the album was finished, this was no underdog. Lind claimed that it was the subject of a bidding war that involved just about every major label except for Interscope, who eventually oversaw Futures after DreamWorks was absorbed by Universal. This probably explains why they could hold back on obvious singles like “The Middle” and “Sweetness” and reintroduce themselves with “Bleed American,” the hardest, meanest thing they’ve ever done; listen to the way the rhythm section locks in during the final minute, it’s essentially a Helmet song. I don’t think anyone was questioning Jimmy Eat World’s punk credentials after Clarity — it’s hard to be called a sell-out for making an album that got you dropped and their aggression never felt entirely convincing even on “Your New Aesthetic” — but “Bleed American” is a multilayered statement of intent, a band no longer content to be coal for someone else’s machinery, a celebration and a protest suitable for a picket line or a parade. Bleed American’s swift name change after 9/11 left it as the band’s third self-titled release, and it strangely feels appropriate. Whether you call it “Bleed American” or “Salt Sweat Sugar,” from the first seconds, the point could not be more clear — Jimmy Eat World have truly arrived.

6. “Disintegration” (Stay On My Side Tonight, 2005)

Jimmy Eat World have never felt the need to mask their influences and when it came time for them to make a 7-minute dirge of turbid guitars and synthesized strings, they paid direct homage to the great, grim grandfathers of Gothic grandeur. A holdover from the Futures sessions, I’ll let the Wiki entry for “Disintegration” explain why it didn’t make the cut — “the song features uncharacteristically negative lyrics,” and true enough, “do what you want, but I’m drinking” applies a poison pen to what is otherwise one of Adkins’ most familiar writing tropes. “Disintegration” also uncharacteristically intensified just about everything else about Futures, and the result was so compelling that it alone warranted the release of 2005’s Stay On My Side Tonight. Lind’s drums were freed from basic timekeeping and cranked louder than the guitars, the band’s usually angelic harmonies were lent to a demonic cheerleading cadence and Trombino’s electronic production touches surrounded everything like the crackle of a high-voltage fence — title aside, Jimmy Eat World weren’t drowning in their sorrows on “Disintegration,” they were thrashing for their lives.

5. “A Praise Chorus” (Bleed American, 2001)

Did anyone besides Clear Channel really think “Bleed American” was condoning domestic terrorism? Bleed American was clearly intended as a pledge of cultural allegiance, an album that paid tribute to the life-altering power of heartland rock radio by adding to it. I mean, the cover is a damn jukebox and there’s a John Mellencamp homage that isn’t even the most referential song. That would be “A Praise Chorus,” wherein the power of pop music isn’t framed in spiritual terms, but something closer to a narcotic — something that can create a fleeting, but very real sense of belonging, a piece of the world that truly feels like your own. It’s powerful shit, something that can inspire ordinary people to do extraordinary things, to dedicate their entire lives to chasing that high either as a fan or as a musician themselves. But even as Adkins and Davey Von Bohlen sound irrepressibly joyful in aligning They Might Be Giants, Poison, Tommy James, and The Promise Ring like the bowling trophies on Bleed American’s cover, there’s a warning encoded in “A Praise Chorus” about the insidious downside of your formative years. “Stick around, nostalgia won’t let you down,” Adkins sings, but it won’t lift you up. As much as it tells, “A Praise Chorus” shows — how can you hear Lind’s pounding drum intro and not be on your feet, on the floor, good to go and ready to fall in love tonight. It might not happen, and it probably won’t, but “A Praise Chorus” wants to be that song you hear that makes anything feel possible.

4. “Lucky Denver Mint” (Clarity, 1999)

A lot was riding on the first single from Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity — “Lucky Denver Mint” was given a soft launch on a teaser EP released by an unheralded Florida label called Fueled By Ramen and later, a plum spot on the Never Been Kissed soundtrack. Whereas they were dilettantes in both electronics and pop melody on Static Prevails, their new sound was bold and bionic, outfitted with state-of-the-art drum loops and a hook that was insistent rather than suggestive. Capitol also financed a clip that probably seemed in line with the self-deprecating, loudly ironic Jack Black-ish physical comedy that defined alt-rock videomaking at the time, but I refuse to link out of respect for the band. This song was supposed to accomplish everything “The Middle” did two years later and perhaps its failure to launch was encoded in its downbeat chorus — “you’re not bigger than this, not better, why can’t you learn?” You know, maybe you should write yourself off. Inspired by a terrible night gambling in Vegas, “Lucky Denver Mint” doesn’t explode like the Bleed American singles, it just surges forward like a racing dog after a mechanized rabbit it won’t ever catch or an addict impulsively acting on the belief that it’ll hit different this time. “Lucky Denver Mint” was self-fulfilling prophecy in that way — Jimmy Eat World were a major-label band on borrowed time, at the mercy of disinterested Capitol execs, short-sighted radio DJs and the fickle tastes of music consumers in a time of teen-pop and nu-metal. But contrary to what Adkins claims on “Lucky Denver Mint,” they did learn from the experience and we wouldn’t have gotten Bleed American without it — the next time, they bet on themselves and hit the jackpot.

3. “For Me This Is Heaven” (Clarity, 1999)

Do you really expect me to justify this song’s placement by talking about… I dunno, how that piano part perfectly weaves its way into that dual-guitar lattice that sorta kinda predicted American Football’s “The Summer Ends”? Or that final harmony? Or how the off-kilter drums keep everything from floating too far into the clouds? Come on, y’all — if four grown-ass men can make a song titled “For Me This Is Heaven” with a chorus of “can you still feel the butterflies” without totally embarrassing themselves, that would be enough. That it serves as the lyrical centerpiece of one of the greatest emo albums ever made justifies every bit of success they achieved in perpetuity.

2. “Sweetness” (Bleed American, 2001)

I don’t want to give Capitol too much credit here, but… if they were the ones who decided “Sweetness” wasn’t a good fit for Clarity, they made the right call. At least that’s the case with the version that’s been retroactively appended to its deluxe reissue, a scrappier take more in line with the “Sweetness” that was appearing in their live sets alongside “Lucky Denver Mint” and “Crush.” There’s an argument that it’s thematically aligned with, say, “Believe In What You Want,” “Blister” or anything else on an album rife with unrequited affection, especially given Jimmy Eat World’s relationship with a label that was mostly fixated on reissuing Beatles and Frank Sinatra records at the time (“Capitol didn’t give a shit about us,” Adkins later joked). But the demo version of “Sweetness” sits in a liminal state between the formative pop-punk of their earliest days and the Jimmy Eat World striving to make “disgustingly catchy and straight ahead” radio hits on Bleed American. The first part is certainly true — Adkins’ a cappella “are you listening? WHOA-OH-OH-OH-OH-OH” is one of the greatest opening lines of the 21st century and now that I think about it, the demo version of “Sweetness” is basically a Post-Nothing track. But “straight ahead,” not so much here. Sure, the ubiquity of “The Middle” has likely driven many to ride on the behalf of “Sweetness,” but to these ears, it’s also a better representation of what it meant for emo to go mainstream. The post-hardcore and second-wave influences are plainly obvious, Lind’s churning drums and the stop-start dynamics as vicious as anything Trombino’s old band put to tape, a historical fiction where Yank Crime justifies its existence to Interscope accountants. Even if its lyrics are pretty much the exact opposite of those on “The Middle,” the existence and success of “Sweetness” is just as life-affirming — if you’re gonna ask “are you listening,” say it with your whole chest.

1. “23” (Futures, 2004)

Teenagers are mythical beings in pop music, living, loving, and losing with a raw vulnerability that makes them both invincible and ultimately blameless. It’s much harder to romanticize someone’s early 20’s — Jimmy Eat World’s most famous advocate described being 22 as “miserable and magical” and their second-most famous advocates wrote a song called “What’s My Age Again?” that concluded “nobody likes you when you’re 23.” Because at that age, you’re supposed to discover that “ADD” really meant “being bored in school” now that the world has more to offer than television and prank phone calls, and the obligations of adulthood are now coming into focus: your parents might have been married and actual parents at 23, or at least college graduates or at least no longer living with their parents. It appeared that the culture at large was beginning to soften their expectations towards people in this demographic as the long tail of the Great Recession segued into the 2020 pandemic, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually any easier to experience being 23.

I firmly believe that Jimmy Eat World is at their best writing about this specific age range — there isn’t exactly a desire to relive one’s teens, but to reassess those formative experiences now that you have the lived experience to fully appreciate them. It’s easy enough to say “I wanna fall in love tonight” in high school when kids fall in love three times a week; it means something different when you’re ready to fall in love for the last time. And so it’s only right that a song called “23” is their magnum opus. It’s obvious that Jimmy Eat World were heavy into The Cure during the making of Futures — another band who has spent decades successfully speaking to listener’s teenage conception of themselves — and when it comes to giving the majestic sprawl of “Pictures Of You” a hi-def, emo-pop reshoot, “23” out-Disintegration’s Jimmy Eat World’s own “Disintegration” (imagine if they switched out “Night Drive” and had those two back-to-back on Futures).

During the second verse, Adkins’ perspective switches to someone who’s about to turn 23 and sees it as a final emotional destination; “I won’t always want what I’ll never have / I won’t always live in my regrets.” It’s the kind of thing a teenager sometimes has to believe to survive high school, and I wouldn’t want that experience to be lost on anyone. But those feelings don’t end when you turn 23; they probably get worse. And this is how the chorus of “23” really generates its power — it’s Adkins in the mode where he works best, an older brother figure, someone who can alternately provide comfort, support, and tough love, who’s been there maybe just a few years earlier. 95% of the time, he’ll tell you to learn from his mistakes — make a move or you’ll miss out; disguised as patience, time gets wasted; you are free, as much as you can stand to be; you’ll sit alone forever if you wait for the right time, what are you hoping for? “23” isn’t really about being 23 years old, or wanting to be 23, or looking back at turning 23 — just the point when people decide they’re here, they’re now, they’re ready to truly live.

Jon Stewart is new to Twitter, and yes, it’s 2021. One might guess that Hell has frozen over, but that might not be the best hyperbolic statement go make, given the U.S. is currenly covered in snow and ice and resembles a Roland Emmerich movie. Stewart recently joined the platform to express fury over the GameStop/Robinhood stock fiasco, and he’s subsequently tweeted a handful of times, mostly jokes.

Now, the former The Daily Show host appears to be doing slightly more than having fun with his latest offering. “Has anyone seen my me packet?” Stewart tweeted.

The first thing on a lot of people’s minds was to wonder what the heck was happening.

Well, this probably has plenty to do with Stewart’s recently announced Apple TV+ show, for which he’ll do the current-affairs thing again for multiple seasons beginning sometime in 2021. The gifted satirist will likely not be able to resist amusing his viewers, even though the show (according to the Apple TV+ synopsis) “won’t have a nightly or even weekly cadence.”

As for the whole “packet” thing, he’s apparently asking Twitter users to offer up original jokes, which is standard practice for the late-night TV realm (writers who want to work for the show submit packets of sketches and/or provide impressions). People quickly picked up on what Jon was (likely) asking for, and they had a field day while alternately attempting and not attempting to impress him into throwing out some gigs. And yes, of course there was a John Mulaney joke in here. Also, “FULL METAL PACKET”!

People got a little carried away. Good for them! I hope someone here gets the gig.

Jon Stewart’s still-untitled Apple TV+ show should arrive in 2021.

Entering a new decade is a great time to look back at the old one, either to laugh at trends that quickly disintegrated or pick out artists and albums that helped redefine genres. For pop music, the shift over the last ten years has been enormous, and those shifts have been brought about by one-off records just as much as they have by the long career arcs of certain artists. For instance, Adele’s 21 was named the No. 1 album of the year in 2011 by Rolling Stone, shifting the notoriously rock-centric publication toward pop in a way that nobody could’ve predicted, and dragging a lot of other music criticism along with it. And when she went on to win multiple Grammys for Album Of The Year — both for 21 and beyond — she helped establish a pattern of critical acclaim for pop music that Taylor Swift had laid the groundwork for the year before. Young women could make serious music now, too — even if they weren’t rockers.

Other random records that barely ever enter the conversation anymore proved more prescient than they seemed. Katy B’s debut record On A Mission set her up as an artist to watch, and though she hasn’t become a mainstream icon, the sounds on that album are certainly concurrent with today’s pop aesthetic, ten years later. Miranda Lambert’s massive country-pop album Four The Record opened doors for the likes of Kacey Musgraves (who co-wrote that record’s biggest hit) and Maren Morris. And, Lights turned Ellie Goulding into a genre star who could make it on the strength of her voice alone, mostly existing without the help of tabloid storylines. That model has been harder and harder for younger stars to follow, but early releases from The Weeknd and Frank Ocean proved that pop audiences were intrigued by a mystery, and that the genre would open its borders to elements of R&B and hip-hop production, as long as the artists stepped out of the shadows eventually.

As poptimism — or the idea that pop music should be taken as seriously by critics as other more esoteric, cerebral forms of music — began to take hold over the course off the decade, some of these records prove the point more clearly with every passing year. Others fell through the cracks as they should, but still had their place in the sun, at least for the year. Check out our picks for the twenty most influential records of 2011, whether they defined that year or kept pushing forward into the future.

Lady Gaga – Born This Way

Addressing what amounts to the best and most important pop album of the year first, Lady Gaga’s second proper record was the one that transformed her from rising star into global sensation who could hold the world’s attention in the palm of her hand. This was the Gaga era that solidified her glam-rock shtick with enormous balladry gone electric like “Marry The Night” and the unstoppable hooks found on songs like “Edge Of Glory” and “Judas.” Rarely has a straight pop star gotten a gay rights anthem so right in the way that “Born This Way,” did, and after so many years of queer fans devoting themselves to women in music, it was something of a miracle for a star to openly give that love right back. Gaga laid out the blueprint for how pop stars should support marginalized communities, and has continued doing so all the way into the next decade by speaking up about Black Lives Matter and all of the continued advocacy she does with her Born This Way Foundation. A pop star as a political force seemed far-fetched ten years ago, but in 2021, it’s the reality for anyone that matters.

Britney Spears – Femme Fatale

Though she had already been through some of the worst years of her life and placed under a conservatorship, Britney Spears was still making hits in 2011. Femme Fatale, the follow-up to 2008’s incredibly influential Circus, actually kicked off an era of even more successful singles for Spears. “Hold It Against Me” debuted at No. 1 and put her in rare company, as only the second female artist after Mariah Carey to debut more than two singles at the top of the chart. Even if it wasn’t as big a radio hit, “Till The World Ends” went all the way up to No. 3, and “I Wanna Go” also reached No. 7. While Femme Fatale didn’t necessarily set the table for a late-career surge, it proved that Britney was still in control enough to release two great albums back-to-back, and also earned her the Vegas residency that has been a core element of her recent arc. As The New York Times and others focus on the #FreeBritney movement, interest in the singer has reached a peak once again, and a potential change in her legal situation might be coming soon. Britney influenced the way we treat our pop stars, as the ramifications of her tabloid craze days become more clear — and more damning.

Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes

Ten years ago it wasn’t a given that Lykke Li would be the one laying down the blueprint for languid, beat-inflected songs that turned their sadness into the hook. But take a look at the pop landscape in 2021 and consider how much Lykke’s early ear for combining the melody of pop and the percussion of trap beats has come to dominate modern songwriting. She’s still employing the same formula with as much success on her latest record, 2018’s so sad so sexy, but it’s the next crop of teenage stars who took it and ran with it that should really be sending their thanks. The fact that Wounded Rhymes sounds current ten years later points to just how far ahead of her time Li has always been.

Beyonce – 4

Back before Beyonce was the kind of unimpeachable icon who can make the entire world stop with a social media post — let alone a surprise album drop — 4 was still one of the best pop albums in recent memory. If the classic devotion of “1+1,” irreplaceable good-time jams of “Party” and “Love On Top,” and eternal declarations like “Dance For You” and “End Of Time” weren’t enough, then throw in the feminist anthem “Run The World (Girls)” and remarkably complicated emotional rollercoasters like “Best Thing I Never Had” and “Rather Die Young.” Oh, then there’s the top-tier layered Beyonce song, “Countdown,” which would probably be a weak mess if another vocalist attempted it. No, we didn’t yet know that Beyonce was going to run the whole entire world and then some, but there’s enough clues on 4 that this was a pop star in a league all her own. 4 is a great enough album that, even after of a few of the flashier records, some fans still love to claim this one as their favorite project in her expansive discography. Click play above, and by the time you get to that third key change in “Love On Top,” who can argue with them?

Adele – 21

Though her debut album, 19, instantly transformed her into a massive presence in the pop world, it was the follow-up that cemented Adele as the next great Voice in the modern music industry. Recognizable after a single syllable, and beloved by young and old alike, her tales of heartbreak and renewal were somehow timeless and decidedly born of the 2000s in the same breath. Though some critics felt her next album, 2015’s 25, wasn’t as strong as her first two records, the Grammys didn’t agree, once again awarding her the coveted Album Of The Year trophy. The British singer’s ability to transcend age, gender, and genre is certainly part of her global appeal, and none of it would possible without that Voice. Proving that even with all the productions tricks and AutoTune plug-ins available now, there’s still something about raw vocal talent that will sell records. She seems to have switched things up quite a bit over the last five years, and is preparing to release a new record very soon, so this year we’ll see where she takes her legacy next. No matter where she goes next, “Rolling In The Deep” will always be gospel.

Selena Gomez & The Scene – When The Sun Goes Down

If you were already an adult by 2011, odds are one of Selena’s earliest records — one of three with her band, Selena Gomez & The Scene — didn’t really make its way onto your radar. But as unobtrusive as it might have been, this record quietly set Selena up to make her transition from Disney child star to adult musician. The leadoff track “Love You Like A Love Song” predicates the unusual, disco-y beats she’d be drawn to later on, and highlights her penchant for musical metaphor. The album’s next best offering is the title track, channeling early Kesha glitchy, hedonistic freedom, but without all the adult references. Selena was already pushing at the boundaries of a Kids Bop take on pop music, and the album’s closer, a Spanish remix of one of the album’s toothless, teeny bopper hits “Who Says,” translated to “Dices,” indicates that even years ago, Gomez was thinking about how far-reaching her fanbase was. As she embarks on her first-ever Spanish-language EP next month, the strides she’s taken couldn’t be more obvious, even if the groundwork was there all along.

Coldplay – Mylo Xyloto

Ah, remember when pop music had bands in it? While Coldplay continue to walk the line between mainstream rock and mainstream pop – as do fellow chameleon acts like 21 Pilots, Imagine Dragons, and Walk The Moon — back in 2011 this album marked a shift toward pop for Chris Martin and co. Between the electropop inclinations define “Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall” and a full-blown Rihanna feature, this still-guitar-heavy album was a huge step toward radio-friendly material that has now come to define the British rock group who once seemed intent on swinging for the classic rock fences. Between the AutoTune and ecstatic noodling on “Hurts Like Heaven” and the tearjerker-y ballad, “Us Against The World,” this record practically screams I want to work with Beyonce. Though “Hymn For The Weekend” was another album, a whole “conscious uncoupling” and another four years away, Mylo Xyloto alerted the world to the fact that Chris Martin wasn’t going to turn up his nose at pop. And by the time they were collaborating with The Chainsmokers in 2017, the fit was perfect.

Demi Lovato – Unbroken

Plenty of child stars need a couple albums to really get their sea legs as adult pop stars, and though Unbroken was Demi Lovato’s third record, it was the first time she really began to connect on a singles level. Her second album, Here We Go Again debuted at No. 1 but failed to get a single into the top ten. Unbroken, on the other hand, put “Skyscraper” solidly at No. 10. The rest of the record featured contributions for Missy Elliott and Timbaland, leaning into an R&B sound instead of the power balladry of Again or the Jonas Brothers, who co-wrote and produced her debut. A female pop star turning away from pop-rock and belting and toward the likes of Jason DeRulo seems like a given these days, but back in 2011 it was still pretty unusual. Demi and Ariana Grande — who would release a rap-influenced debut two years later — were teen stars who quickly learned that R&B and hip-hop could help them sound grown up fast. Though the last decade Demi dealt with mental health and addiction issues along the way, she also leaned into rap far less — and Ariana soon eclipsed her as a result.

Kelly Clarkson – Stronger

Kelly Clarkson has now settled comfortably into the world of talk show host, but ten years ago she was on top of the world as one of the only American Idol contestants to actually crossover as a tried and true pop star. Stronger actually won the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album. Still, Stronger was the beginning of the end for Clarkson in some ways, who went on to release a Christmas album, Wrapped In Red and a final record on RCA, the fairly weak Piece By Piece, before releasing her a soul/R&B-inspired record Meaning Of Life on Atlantic Records in 2017. Though she’s teased plans for a new album this year, it’s her recent Emmy that proves a point, Clarkson has become much more of a force in the world of television than music this side of 2020. But what pivot could be stronger?

Florence & The Machine – Ceremonials

I remember seeing Florence Welch play her own harp on the tiny stage of The Troubadour back in 2009, so as the years passed and it became clear she would soon begin headlining stadiums, it was hard to reconcile her “indie” origins with the mounting fame. The bridge between those early, desperately lonely Lungs tracks and their eventual breakout in 2015, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, was 2011’s Ceremonials. While this album lacked the gigantic star power of a towering single like “Cosmic Love,” it more than made up for it with the much more palatable, radio-friendly hit “Shake It Out.” A few years later, Rihanna would also employ a snippet of the leadoff track, “Only If For The Night,” in promotional materials for her own stone cold classic record, Anti—, in some ways reviving interest in Ceremonials. But Florence is the rare “indie” pop star who never lost her songwriting credit even as the stages got bigger and bigger, and, ironically, her latest album High As Hope is closer to her debut than anything else she’s done. She might be playing the Hollywood Bowl now, and someone else takes most of the harp parts, but Florence is just as influential now, as a massive star, as she was when she was a rising one.

One Direction – Up All Night

Ah, we were so young, back before the band broke up and everything was beautiful. One Direction fans knew early on that the eventual split was coming, that driven by desires for solo careers, the pressures of fame, and simply growing up this teen boy band sensation would fall apart someday. But back in 2011? They were going stronger than ever, fresh off a synthesis concocted by Simon Cowell on the British singing show The X Factor and releasing their debut album, Up All Night in the UK and Ireland. Even four albums and a breakup later, “What Makes You Beautiful” is still up there as one of the all-time 1D hits, and fun fact related to an early entry on this list, the song “Tell Me A Lie” was originally intended for Kelly Clarkson’s Stronger. After the album got a full global release in early 2012 — one that even had to be moved up due to fan demand — the group quickly followed it up with their second album, Take Me Home. And the rest, they say, is history. Though Harry Styles has become the de facto 1D member still carrying the torch, his last album Fine Line came out in late 2019 and was still resonating in a big way in 2020. With all this time on his hands in lockdown, will Harry release a third album this year? Or will all the demand for a return to live music once the pandemic is finally settled convince the band to kick off a reunion tour in 2022? Either way, One Direction made sure everyone released the power of a teen girl fanbase, and never again will a young, female expert on pop music written off as a “groupie.” At least not on Harry’s watch.

Rihanna – Talk That Talk

In 2021 the desire for a new Rihanna album is so strong that it’s hard to believe she used to release one new project a year, like clockwork, for almost a decade. Talk That Talk was the sixth album in what would be a seven year streak — save 2008 when no new album came — that defined RiRi as one of the most influential pop stars of the 2000s. Over fifteen years after her debut record hit America in 2005, Robyn Fenty has transitioned into a mogul of makeup and skincare, lingerie, and even luxury couture design, but arguably, none of that would’ve happened without “We Found Love.” Sure, there are other massive Rihanna hits, and yes, she probably would’ve made her way to mogul someday, either way, but this all-encompassing, dancefloor-packing, completely unexpected depression EDM jam might as well have defined the entire experience of the 2010s. It put Calvin Harris on the map, and definitely helped bring EDM more directly into mainstream pop in America — I think it was the first song I ever heard that had a “drop” in it. Basic, I know. Anyway, other bangers off Talk included “Where Have You Been,” an ill-advised attempt at reconciling with Chris Brown on “Birthday Cake,” and a return to Jay-Z collaborations on “Talk That Talk.” Throw in “Cockiness (Love It)” and it quickly becomes clear this is one of Rihanna’s best albums ever. What’s most astonishing about listening to her material from ten years ago, though, is how little it would have to tell us about where she went next — Anti— is still a left-field curveball that nobody could’ve predicted. And despite the Internet’s constant thirstiness, I’m pretty positive whatever she gives us next will be, too. For now, put some lip gloss in your cart and be happy. This might be a hopeless place, but we still have Rihanna here with us.

M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

Some melodies are so strong that even without lyrics, it’s so easy to sing them out. That’s the case with M83’s “Midnight City,” an instrumental song with such an undeniable hook that most music fans can probably identify it by humming it to each other. M83 — a French electronic band “named after the galaxy of the same name” — anchored by composer Anthony Gonzalez, along with Nicolas Fromageau and Morgan Kibby. Their 2011 record Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming defied all odds when it became a seminal album despite the fact that it was mostly instrumental and not what most successful pop albums of the era looked like. After three decades spent living in France, Gonzalez moved to California and began writing the album as an outlet for the emotions he was feeling while visiting places like Joshua Tree for the first time. Aside from the spectacular, dreamy, nearly cosmic feel of the record, marketing campaign from Urban Outfitters and huge co-signs from music critics, topping year-end lists and picking up a Grammy nom for Best Alternative Album. Sadly, this is one case where lightning couldn’t strike twice, and band hasn’t released anything on par since. Still, catching lightning in a bottle, even once, is a thing of beauty. This record will sound just as alarming, beautiful, and nostalgic in any era.

Miranda Lambert – Four The Record

If you love Kacey Musgraves, then you’ve got Miranda Lambert to thank. Lambert helped put Musgraves on the map in a big way by cutting a song she co-wrote, “Mama’s Broken Heart,” and turning it into a rambunctious hit that blew up the country charts, hit No. 20 on the Billboard Hot 100, and quickly went platinum — which may or may not have inspired the title for Lambert’s next (and best) album. But the success of this single didn’t just help Kacey, though you might get lucky and hear her play it herself someday on tour, if she’s in the mood — it also helped make Four The Record the highest-charting album of Miranda’s career, debuting at No. 3 on the Billboard charts, and proved that women in country could be modern and go mainstream, skirting the line between genre diehards and pop fans. If you’re grateful for Kacey, Maren Morris, Kelsea Ballerini, Carly Pearce — hell even the success of rougher and folksier types like Ashley McBryde and Brandi Carlile — thank Miranda for paving the way, and give the album a spin. You just might hear something you like, including a Gillian Welch cover, a Blake Shelton duet (RIP that relationship), and a song written by then-undiscovered Chris Stapleton, “Nobody’s Fool.”

Frank Ocean – Nostalgia Ultra

It would be easy to simply call this mixtape the blueprint for the next ten years of pop music and stop there. Because if other musicians weren’t blatantly copying Frank, then they were hoping what they made sounded like him. Though he’d infamously had a hard time getting noticed on his label, and would later execute some pretty clever tricks in order to get out of a binding contract, when Nostalgia Ultra hit all most people could do was notice how he synthesized every other sound or song or chorus and made it his own. Even when he’s rapping or singing over some of the most well-known melodies in the musical canon, Frank stood out above the source material. Here was a once-in-a-lifetime artist letting us hear his sketches before he’d paint his masterpiece. It was a moment of complete hope and unbridled anticipation for an industry that had managed to produce plenty of “hit” artists, but so rarely nurtured a true genius in the recent past. And to give credit to Frank, he succeeded despite this industry, not because of it. Nostalgia Ultra was an emblem of its time, a digital tape full of uncleared samples and the kind of freedom that comes from not giving a f*ck about arbitrary rules. Ocean has given us two perfect records since (sorry, I don’t count Endless), and if the next decade even gives us two more, we should be happy.

Jennifer Lopez – Love?

It would take almost the full decade for mainstream pop music to catch up with the Latin stars who were blazing their own trail in American music anyway, so Jennifer Lopez is in a much different place right now than she was back in 2011. Though at the height of her fame back then, she was still pushing against a whiter, less diverse industry, and Love? got her dropped from her label, Epic Records, when the lead single “Louboutins” failed to achieve commercial success. Undeterred, the triple threat signed a new deal with Island Records and released the record after all, anchored by songs written with the likes of Tricky Stewart and The-Dream and a massive Pitbull collaboration called “On The Floor.” That song became a No. 3 hit and despite mixed reviews, the album itself had a No. 5 debut on the Billboard chart. Though Lopez released one more album after this, A.K.A in 2014, it’s only been over the last five years that Latin music has become such a powerful force in the pop mainstream. Between the massive success of stars like Bad Bunny and J. Balvin, and the groundswell of support that surged after her latest movie Hustlers was a smash hit, the timing might be perfect for J. Lo to dip her toes back in. After all, she was doing it way before Selena Gomez, why not carpe diem?

Katy B – On A Mission

For lots of solo British pop stars, crossing over into America can be a tricky thing. Unless it happens in a big way like it did for Adele or One Direction, occasionally translating across the pond is a difficult game. For Katy B, her debut album did just that, bringing dancier sounds like dubstep and house with her, and making On A Mission one of the most, in a very literal sense, futuristic-sounding records of the year. Still, there was no real narrative to tie Katy to, and as celebrity relationships and love life happenings became a bigger and bigger part of a pop star’s appeal, Katy B never quite ascended, even if this album did. She followed the record up with a few more releases, Little Red in 2014 featuring fellow critical darlings like Jessie Ware and Sampha, and Honey in 2016 (Not to be confused with the 2018 Robyn album of the same name), but neither achieved the same acclaim in America that her debut received. Given how popular electronic music has become in the intervening five years, it just might be time for her to think about a new record.

The Weeknd – House Of Balloons

After taking the biggest stage in the industry a couple weekends (heh) past at the Super Bowl halftime show, Abel Tesfaye has more than officially broken into the top tier of modern pop stars. He’s in elite company with that under his belt, joining the likes of Beyonce, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga, and his subject matter drastically strays from what those three divas cover, too. Back when he was a faceless music blog lothario, The Weeknd put out a series of steamy mixtapes kicked off with House Of Balloons. Most listeners downloaded it for free, or received the zip file from a friend in the know, making him the kind of artist who spread like gossip among friends. Listening to the earliest project Tesfaye created, all the dark, sardonic brilliance is right there, even if he’s polished it until it shines over the last ten years. Where does he go next? Who knows, but the After Hours era will easily continue in 2022 when touring is feasible again, and if he plays “Wicked Games” or “High For This” on that tour, tracks off his earliest album, the crowd will still know every word.

Jessie J – Who You Are

See the Katy B blurb above for a primer on how British pop stars sometimes struggle to connect in America. Jessie J definitely deals with that drawback too, and even if her debut did well enough commercially, it wasn’t a hit with critics. With a debut that hit No. 2 on the UK charts and six singles in the top ten, Jessie actually broke records by being the only solo female artist with a single album with that many songs charting so high. Her third album, 2014’s Sweet Talker was preceded by the massive group single, “Bang Bang,” featuring Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj, but that already-explosive pair easily outshone her, and the record didn’t have much crossover in the US, though it once again fared better in the UK. Still, in the context of 2011, a brand new pop star from the UK who was pissing off critics and breaking chart records was still an exciting thing. And even if she’s yet to release a truly fantastic album, there’s still plenty of time for a late-career resurgence.

Ellie Goulding – Lights

Strangely, Ellie Goulding is one of the few stars in recent memory to make it big without a host of celebrity drama or controversies following her around. Oh, well there was that Ed Sheeran/Niall Horan rumor, but aside from that she’s squeaky clean! Maybe it’s feathery, pitch-perfect vocals, maybe it’s the icy electropop chill, either way, Lights became an instant-classic, and led Goulding to collaborate with some of the biggest names in electronic music, from Skrillex, to Zedd, to Calvin Harris. These days she’s still doing just that even if the producers have changed, releasing a new track with Diplo and Mark Ronson just a few weeks ago. Goulding became a perfect guest feature for EDM-heavy tracks, balancing the sometimes jarring music with her calming, sweet vocals. Last year’s Brightest Blue might’ve flown under the radar a bit, but she still knows how to pick the right collaborator, enlisting fallen rapper Juice WRLD to feature on the track “Hate Me” before his untimely death.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Last week, we published what I believed at the time to be the definitive account of the greatest movie trailer lines in history. Trailer lines, of course, are subjective, and how indelibly they imprint on your brain can depend on many things, including whether you lived in the region where that movie was being most heavily advertised and how much television you were watching at that stage of your life.

All of this is an unnecessarily long-winded way of saying that there were lots of amazing trailer lines we left out of the original list. Why not do a part two? Trailer lines are the movie equivalent of that obnoxious tune you can’t get out of your head: the only way to feel better is to spread it to someone else.

Trailer Line: “I’m trying to solve a murder here!” (line at 1:18)

Movie: Striking Distance (1993)

A consistent theme of interviews I’ve done with eighties and nineties filmmakers is what a pain in the ass Bruce Willis apparently was. According to Striking Distance director Rowdy Herrington, Robert De Niro was attached first, then Mel Gibson, and then Michael Douglas, before Bruce Willis got involved. Pain in the ass though he may be, it’s hard to imagine De Niro, Gibson, or Douglas being able to strike that exact note of fed-up cop petulance that Willis hits in “I’m trying to solve a murder here!” (Is this the 90s cop version of “I’m walkin’ here!”?) The way his voice gets a bit brittle when he’s really pushing it — it’s almost like his voicebox has a “gain” setting. He’s truly a man in command of his instrument.

I had also memory-holed the part where Bruce Willis’s character’s name in Striking Distance was “Tom Hardy.” Can we get Tom Hardy to play Tom Hardy in a remake of Striking Distance? I would watch the hell out of that movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udKQrFKcsTQ
Trailer Line: “I’ve found a cure for the plague of the 20th century and now I’ve lost it!”

Movie: Medicine Man (1992)

In his follow-up to Predator (1987), Die Hard (1988), and The Hunt For Red October (1990) John McTiernan chose… this absolute head-scratcher about a doctor in the Amazon played by Sean Connery (sidenote: has any director ever had as good a three-movie run as Predator, Die Hard, Red October?). Connery’s protege was played by Lorraine Bracco from Goodfellas and The Sopranos. If the movie was a relative disappointment at the box office and a complete flop with critics, the attempt to boil down its convoluted plot into a single trailer line did give us this magnificently clunky yet unforgettable trailer line. “I’ve found a cure for the plague of the 20th century and now I’ve lost it!”

Sean Connery damn near makes that sound like something a person might say, God bless him. But… you had the cure for cancer, and you… lost it? In the long version of the trailer, he even attempts to justify it. “Haven’t you ever lost anything? Your car keys?? Well, it’s rather like that!”

Is it, though? In retrospect, you could probably tell the movie wasn’t going to work based on the fact that the more they attempt to explain the central plot conceit, the less believable it gets.

Trailer Line: “Welcome to Earth!”

Movie: Independence Day (1996)

I can’t believe I left Will Smith, one of the all-time great trailer line deliverers, off the original list. Independence Day is also one of the greatest trailers of all time. I vividly remember seeing it and thinking “this is going to be the greatest movie ever made.” I ended up disappointed by the actual movie, even though I was barely old enough to have developed taste at that point, which probably explains how I eventually grew up to become a film critic.

Anyway, if you remember one thing from Independence Day, it should be this one incredible moment. I love the idea that this alien traveled millions of miles through space, blew up the White House with a laser beam, and the first that happened after it opened the hatch was getting punched in the face. It’s like if Michael Jordan showed up to a pick-up basketball game and the moment he stepped on the court someone ran by and yelled “prison rules!” and kicked him in the nuts.

Trailer Line: “This! Is! Sparta!”

Movie: 300 (2006)

Speaking of movies that never quite lived up to the trailer, let’s travel back in time to revisit 300, when speed ramping was new, and Zack Snyder bravely asked “what if we just did animation in every frame?”

I can admit it, this trailer blew my mind when it came out. That being said, I think the movie would’ve been much better if it hadn’t elided how gay the real Spartans were, to the point that it was tradition for the bride to dress up as a man on the wedding night. Though I suppose it was still pretty homoerotic. In my mind, 300 is indispensable if only because it gave us this gif:

If I’m not mistaken, I think I first saw this on YTMND.com — which is of course named for the trailer line “You’re the man now, dog.” A Russian nesting doll of trailer lines!

Trailer Line: “I’m an old broken down piece of meat.”

Movie: The Wrestler (2008)

The Wrestler was so damned good, and the trailer is still one of the all-time greats. It’s rare to see a movie as good as The Wrestler that could also be completely summed up in its own trailer line. “I’m an old broken down piece of meat” — that’s the entire movie right there. But it was unspoilable. I probably could’ve watched four hours of Mickey Rourke being an old broken down piece of meat. God I love Mickey Rourke. He’s a man who loves tiny dogs, looks like Steven Tyler on steroids, and hangs out exclusively with anthropomorphic glam rock ferrets. Is Mickey Rourke is the best celebrity this country has ever produced? I say yes.

Trailer Line: “Welcome… to The Rock.”

Movie: The Rock (1996)

The Rock was arguably the high-water mark of both Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer and “welcome to The Rock” its most iconic line. It’s a testament to how good a trailer line it is that people could remember that and not Nic Cage weaselishly snorting “Heh, chemical superfreak, actually,” a few seconds earlier. In any other trailer, that would’ve been the trailer line.

Is there anything Sean Connery says that doesn’t sound like an amazing trailer line? I believe there’s a direct correlation between how big a box office star someone is and their ability to deliver the iconic trailer line.

Trailer Line: “YES they deserve to die and I hope they burn in hell!”

Movie: A Time To Kill (1996)

A Few Good Men (1992) was a movie that consisted entirely of waiting for Jack Nicholson to growl “You can’t handle the truth.” So when A Time To Kill (a Joel Schumacher adaptation of a John Grisham novel) did essentially the same thing with Samuel L. Jackson and “YES they deserve to die…” four years later, it’s a testament to Jackson that the ripoff manages to eclipse the original.

Truly, no one can deliver a trailer line like Samuel L. Jackson. The only reason “tired of these motherf*ckin snakes etc” didn’t make this list is because it was obvious that the filmmakers had simply discovered that having Samuel Jackson shout just about anything automatically makes it sound like a movie. It should be noted that Dave Chappelle identified this phenomenon early on:

How’s it taste, motherf*cker?!

Trailer Line: “Tell the truth!”

Movie: Concussion (2015)

In having Will Smith shout “Tell the truth!” in a Nigerian accent, Concussion inadvertently combined A Few Good Men and “In Afrika, it’s bling-bang.” It works beautifully. He even says it twice in a row, like he was practicing different line reads. I don’t think I ever actually saw this movie. And after all, why would I? Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free and whatnot.

Trailer Line: “It’s snakes out there this big?”

Movie: Anaconda (1997)

Jon Voight, Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, Eric Stoltz, and Ice Cube? Talk about a cast! I actually can’t believe that Anaconda is 24 years old. Gun to my head, before looking it up I would’ve told you that this movie came out in 2006. That’s a testament to the timelessness of “It’s snakes out there this big??”

There should be an entire docu-series of Ice Cube reacting to nature. Netflix, please throw some money at this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHASWXlET04
Trailer Line: “I’ll never te-eell.”

Movie: Don’t Say A Word (2001)

Half the reason I even wrote this list was because I was so embarrassed for leaving “I’ll never te-ell” off of the first version. This trailer-line was so good that I didn’t even remember the movie it came from, which is even more impressive considering Sean Bean says the title right in the trailer. Don’t Say A Word came out two weeks after 9/11, and some speculate that the earworm quality of its trailer line was enhanced by a dearth of other movie options around that time.

Certainly, there were few releases in those two weeks (Hardball and The Glass House, anyone?), but Don’t Say A Word came out the same weekend as Zoolander and a week before Training Day, and I’ll be damned if I can remember any lines from those trailers (though the movies are great). The same weekend the following year had about the same number of new movies, so who knows.

“I’ll never tell” was the perfect movie line because the sense memory of hearing is indelible even when pretty much everything else about the movie was not. RIP, Brittany Murphy.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can read more retrospectives here.

Last Updated: February 16th
Netflix hosts an embarrassment of riches in almost every genre imaginable, and anime is no exception. If you’ve never watched any before, or if you’re just worried you might have missed some of the best of what the service has to offer, we’ve got you covered. Romance, action, sci-fi, history, or even all of the above — there’s something for everyone on this list of best anime on Netflix right now.

Related: The 15 Best Animated Movies On Netflix Right Now

Death Note

1 season, 37 episodes | IMDb: 9/10

Death Note, the anime series, not the Netflix horror film that borrows inspiration from it, is one of the most inventive shows on this list. It’s also one of the darkest. Ryuk, a god of death, can kill anyone by simply writing their name in a notebook (hence the title of the series). He gets bored one day and tosses his supernatural journal down to Earth. There, it falls into the hands of high school student and prodigy Light Yagami, who’s a bit disenfranchised by humanity and starts using the book to take out criminals. Of course, that makes him a target of the bad guys but also the cops. You never really know who to root for on this show, which makes it all the more interesting.

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Your Lie In April

1 season, 22 episodes | IMDb: 8.6/10

Another really cool take on the anime world, this music-infused series leans heavy on the drama to give us a truly moving love story. Kousei Arima is a piano prodigy who loses his hearing and desire to play after the death of his mother. It’s only when he meets a talented violin player named Kaori that he finds a passion for life and for his art, again.

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The Promised Neverland

1 season, 13 episodes | IMDb: 8.7/10

A group of intellectually gifted orphans discovers a dark secret about their origins in this inventive anime series. There are some dark-fantasy vibes at play here as the 38 siblings living in a seemingly idyllic abode break their Mother’s one rule, opening up a world of secrets and betrayal in the process. We’re suckers for a good mystery, and this has the added benefit of a truly suspect parental figure to heighten the tension.

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Erased

1 season, 12 episodes | IMDb: 8.5/10

This time-travel drama offers an inventive twist on your normal anime fare, turning the story of a young man trying to prevent his mother’s death into a winding mystery filled with fantasy tropes and colorful characters. Satoru Fujinuma experiences something called “Revivals,” tiny jumps back in time that let him help others and prevent tragedies. But when he’s sent 18 years into the past to solve a string of kidnappings somehow related to his mother’s future death, things get complicated.

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Castlevania (2017)

3 seasons, 23 episodes | IMDb: 8.1/10

Even those unfamiliar with anime are likely to have heard of Castlevania (as the franchise is one of the jewels in Konami’s crown). The anime series is produced by Netflix, and boasts a voice cast including Graham McTavish as Count Dracula, who vows revenge against Wallachia after the death of his wife, and Richard Armitage as Trevor Belmont, the last of a clan of monster hunters, who leads the fight against him. (Matt Frewer also features in the cast, which should be a treat for any fellow Max Headroom enthusiasts.) There’s blood a-plenty, and a nice balance between monster and man as per most gothic horror stories — as well as a somewhat romantic aspect, as Dracula is portrayed as a sympathetic villain. The series is also just gorgeously animated, and with a first season of only four episodes, well worth your time.

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Parasyte: The Maxim

1 season, 24 episodes | IMDb: 8.3/10

Parasyte is basically the plot of Venom but in anime form and without that stomach-churning lobster scene. No really, this series is a hell of a lot more fun than expected. A teenage kid named Shinichi Izumi is partially infected by a Parasyte: monsters that butcher and consume humans. He’s got to figure out how to feed the beast without killing people and eventually coexist with his evil counterpart.

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Blood of Zeus

1 season, 8 episodes | IMDb: 7.9/10

This new anime series from Netflix represents the platform’s initiative to churn out more of the genre. That’s a good thing if Blood of Zeus is anything to go by. An anime series about Greek mythology is pretty rare, and this one, which follows a commoner who discovers he’s a descendent of Zeus with a destiny to prevent a world-ending war, is an exciting, addictive watch.

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Beastars

1 season, 13 episodes | IMDb: 7.9/10

BoJack Horseman fans might like this anime series, which also follows a handful of anthropomorphic animals and dives into mental health issues. Of course, this show is set in a school, not Hollywood, and it follows an anxiety-ridden wolf, who finds himself investigating the murder of a classmate. It’s got a mystery/thriller element to it, but that’s not the only selling point.

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Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)

1 season, 51 episodes | IMDb: 8.6/10

Fullmetal fans and newbies alike are somewhat spoiled for choice when it comes to Netflix’s offerings: Fullmetal Alchemist and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood are both available on the streaming service, alongside the recent live-action film. But we’re here for anime, so we’ll just discuss the first two. For the purposes of this list, we’re counting both series as one entity, as Fullmetal Alchemist is a seminal property, but not to fear, I’m not about to leave you in the dark. Both Fullmetal Alchemist and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood are adaptations of the original manga, which tells the story of two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric, as they search for the Philosopher’s Stone. In an attempt to bring their mother back to life through alchemy, they’ve been transformed. Edward has lost his leg, and sacrifices his arm as well in order to save Alphonse’s soul, binding it to a suit of armor. The Stone is their ticket to restoration. The more recent Brotherhood hews much more closely to the manga, whereas Fullmetal Alchemist essentially turns into an original series about halfway through. In the end, they complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses, but if you have to pick just one, I’d go for Brotherhood as the “canon” experience.

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Inuyasha (2000)

2 seasons, 167 episodes | IMDb: 7.9/10

Inuyasha is the rare franchise that manages to strike a balance between cute and horrifying. To liken it to a current pop culture phenomenon, it’s similar to Outlander, in that its basic plot sounds like something out of a romance novel: a young woman, Kagome, is sent back in time, and must then contend with forces beyond her reckoning, all while getting to know a rambunctious man (well, in this case, half dog-demon), Inuyasha, to whom she seems to be mysteriously bound. There’s plenty of time-travel fluff to go around, but in Inuyasha’s case, it’s augmented by nightmare fuel in the form of a host of demons searching for the magic jewel in Kagome’s possession. The centipede monster in the first episode sets the bar for how unsettling these monsters look, as well as the show’s overall structure as a sort of monster-of-the-week affair. To that end, the show can get a little repetitive, but the cast is uniformly great (including Inuyasha’s antihero brother Sesshomaru, who I think I can confidently say is “the hot one”), and the balance between fun and horror is a rare find.

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Aggretsuko

3 seasons, 30 episodes | IMDb: 8.1/10

If an anthropomorphic horse navigating Hollywood just seems too far-fetched, even by cartoon comedy standards, maybe this show about an anthropomorphic red panda working in the accounting department of a Japanese trading firm feels a bit more down to earth. Retsuko is 25 years old, single, and completely fed up with her place of work. Her boss is a pig (literally), her coworkers are manipulative and selfish, and her love-life is nonexistent. Her only escape: The karaoke bar she goes to every night to vent her frustrations with life by dubbing death metal tracks. If cute Japanese anime, hard rock, and shows about self-discovery are your thing, check this one out.

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One Punch Man

1 season, 12 episodes | IMDb: 8.8/10

This fan-favorite anime series has two things going for it: a killer heavy-metal theme song and more action than a Marvel flick. That feels appropriate since the show follows an invincible superhero, who can take out his enemies with just one punch. What’s truly brilliant about this series, though, is how it ranks and classifies lower-tiered vigilantes and how it subverts stereotypes by making Saitama, the hero, apathetic about his own abilities. It’s darkly comedic as some of the best anime typically are.

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Ouran High School Host Club (2006)

1 season, 24 episodes | IMDb: 8.3/10

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, “host club” refers to an establishment where female patrons can pay to drink and chat with the male hosts. Ouran High School Host Club, adapted from the manga of the same name, centers on — you guessed it — a host club operating out of Ouran High School, and serves as equal parts a parody of the stereotypes rampant in shōjo manga (manga specifically aimed at young women) and a sort of bizarro Twelfth Night, as much of the series revolves around the fact that its female protagonist is initially mistaken for a boy. She becomes one of the club’s hosts when she turns out to be a hit with the school’s female student body, though, as is always the case with shenanigans like these, trouble quickly ensues. It’s a fun series, especially as it becomes obvious that the show is poking fun at the very tropes it seems to embody.

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Bleach (2004)

3 seasons, 366 episodes | IMDb: 8.2/10

Bleach has it all. It’s stylish as hell, it’s incredibly well-acted, it’s genre-fluid, and on top of that, it’s well-written. Though it starts out fairly simply, it builds and builds, transforming into an epic that more than earns its place in the pantheon of great anime. The story begins when Ichigo Kurasaki, a high schooler capable of seeing ghosts, takes on the duties of a Soul Reaper in order to protect his family. As he battles evil spirits and ferries departed souls to the afterlife, he begins to discover that some of his classmates have supernatural abilities as well, and to make matters even more complicated, just when it seems like he’s getting the hang of things, he’s brought into the spirit world to answer to the Soul Society. It’s a transition that the show handles beautifully, and does again and again as it progresses. The world of Bleach (and the mythology involved) just keeps getting bigger, without ever falling short, or falling flat. The series is also impossible to peg as one genre or another, as there are elements of almost everything baked in. It’s an epic, and unmissable as such. Creator Tite Kubo’s style is just the cherry on top of the cake.

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Naruto: Shippuden (1996)

9 seasons, 502 episodes | IMDb: 8.6/10

For a lot of anime fans, this Manga-based series was a kind of gateway into the animated world. This show is the second part of a larger story about Naruto Uzumaki, a loud-mouth orphan who hopes to become a famed ninja, so while you’ll probably need to watch his origin story first, it’s this installment that’s the most action-packed. Naruto’s an adolescent now, still chasing glory with his group of badass friends. There are tons of filler episodes in this one, but if you can stick it out, you’ll be treated to a thoroughly good time.

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On Monday, word emerged that the Cavaliers and Pistons were both sidelining two of their most prominent players, as Andre Drummond and Blake Griffin were going to not play again until the teams could work out trades to send each to new teams — or the deadline came and went and buyouts would likely be negotiated.

As many pointed out, it seemed strange that the league would allow for that when teams have been told their best players have to play in games unless there’s a medical reason or else be fined, and players who have requested a trade publicly have been fined as well. The Warriors met the Cavs on Monday and Drummond was there in street clothes courtside to watch Golden State run away with a 129-98 win. After the game, Draymond Green took his time in the postgame interview to blast the NBA for the “bullsh*t” double standard that exists when teams want to trade a player compared to when a player wants to be traded.

Green notes that James Harden was lambasted for how he “dogged it” while looking for a trade out of Houston and that Anthony Davis got fined $100,000 for his trade request two years ago, but the Pistons and Cavaliers will be allowed to sit Griffin and Drummond with no penalty. His issue isn’t just with the lack of equal punishment or treatment, but with how those players are asked to continue being professionals in such a situation and show up to games to watch, noting the toll that can take emotionally and mentally on a player.

It’s a more than fair point from Green, and it’s clearly something he’s thought about coming into Monday’s game, where seeing Drummond seated in street clothes obviously brought these thoughts to the surface. Each situation is different and, particularly with the Pistons-Griffin situation, it seemed to be a mutual decision at the least, but it’s a fair question to be raised as to why it seems the rules are different when a team wants to do this and, at the very least, why the public perception is so warped to see this as understandable from a team while a player seeking a way out is so routinely called unprofessional and unacceptable.