May 2021 Line Rider Roundup
Featuring guest reviewers Hanuman and DeafTab
It’s been a bit of a slower month for Line Rider, but I’m extremely pleased to have two new guest reviewers on this month! I thought it was really fun to have multiple perspectives on the same track in last month’s roundup so I’m gonna keep doing it!
Our first guest reviewer is Hanuman, who you may remember as the creator of Delirium, #8 in Line Rider Review’s Top 10 Line Rider Tracks of 2019. He’ll be reviewing You Want It? by Ava Hofmann, Summer/Storm by Matthew Buckley, Threnody by Ava Hofmann, Chase the Mountains by vsbl, CircloO 2 by TheMatsValk, Space Mountain by Xavier Lundberg, and Bosh finds his dad by Roaxial. He would like to introduce himself:
Hi I’m Hanuman, you may remember me from such paradigm-shattering discoveries as the Hanual, the Kranuman or even the long lost Unicornual... My monotonous tones have provided an uninflected backdrop to many creator interviews, tutorials and even track voice-acting roles! I’ve been a part of the community since whenever Toivo joined, and made a few interesting tracks along the way. Toivo’s are way better though. I’ve dabbled in many styles of track making and always personally appreciated feedback and criticism of my works. Ironically it was Line Rider Review that critiqued my first few stumbling experiments all those years ago, lighting a fire in me that fuelled my creative juices. So I am honoured by this opportunity to do the same for other creators.
Our second guest reviewer is DeafTab, who you may recall as the creator of The Fall of Mr. Fifths from April’s roundup and We Don’t Wanna Die from March’s roundup, as well as Everybody Asked About You from Line Rider Review’s Elevator Pitch #2: Early 2021 Tracks That SLAP. He will also be reviewing You Want It? by Ava Hofmann, and will also introduce himself:
Hello! I go by DeafTab on the interwebs. I’m interested in several art mediums that aren’t Line Rider, but I found Line Rider as an art form to be one of the most accessible for an online medium. I’ve been creating Line Rider tracks for about seven months, but I’m also interested in other subjects, such as psychology and music production. I also like to write reviews on things I’m interested in, hence, my guest review in this roundup.
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
🙌 = highly recommended
👍 = recommended
🤷 = neutral
👎 = not recommended
You Want It? - Ava Hofmann
Guest review by Hanuman:
Rapidly becoming one of the most interesting Line Rider creators, Hofmann strikes gold again with this absurdist insight into consumerist culture. The extreme dependency on unhealthy and overly processed food and social media is brilliantly highlighted in this stunningly visual piece. I could write a whole essay on this, but I think I will restrain this to a one liner: this is the best track I’ve seen in a real long time, so please keep making more!
Guest review by DeafTab:
Ava Hofmann has proven herself to be one of the most promising Line Rider creators as of this year, and it should come as no surprise, considering that she has an entire avant-poetry scene behind her back. Having first touched Line Rider only four months ago, she has put that creativity to brilliant use in a lot of her tracks, especially one of her latest, You Want It? The track begins with the singer telling us “Why don't you look out the window?”, only to be immediately thrown into an explosive corridor of eyes that seem to look directly at Bosh. My favorite detail is the trademark symbol tacked on to nearly every lyric written out, which perfectly represents the homogenization of industries and corporations copyrighting everything with their name on it. This theme is clearly at its most prominent whenever the track gets a chance to get a laugh out of food industries and commercialism, such as the taglines on the “Quit it while you're ahead!” section, and the use of industrialized machinery to package and sell a box of so-called “Bosh-O's”. It's like a cartoon episode, caricaturizing the food industry as this overly industrialized and greedy corporation that doesn't care for whatever resources they are wasting to sell their products as much as they care for the money, and the money only. Not to mention that the creative direction is off the charts. Having a “Bosh Magnet” help remount the rider, and the X-Ray scene, where preview mode is turned on inside of the X-Ray to make it seem that we are, in fact, seeing Bosh's skeleton. I simply can not talk about this track without mentioning the unique camera work (credit to Bevibel) that perfectly adds to the aesthetic of the track. There is a very heavy edge to it, and the wonky movements of the camera only help emphasize it. A lot of Ava's tracks have a way of finding enjoyment outside of just being a creative flex that's kind of hard to describe. A great example of this is in her other track, BELLS, where aggressive scribbles of static and unintelligible lyrics are thrown at you to the point where it starts to get genuinely overwhelming. The same thing could be said for You Want It?, in which the way the lyrics are written perfectly reflects the sassy attitude of the singer. All of it is aggressive, unapologetic, and in your face, much like the attitude of BELLS, yet stylistically quite different. The most memorable bits are the ones that make you go “what the fuck just happened?” out of pure hilarity and confusion, such as in the second half of the track when we do, in fact, look out the Window™, only to see a polluted environment full of toxic waste and barren trees, and the “Nutrientizer”, which you might as well see for yourself. After all of this, we go inside the box of Bosh-O’s, only to have an absolutely explosive psychedelic array of shapes and stripes thrown at us, and then carried into a wall of puffy intestine-like structures with an eye ominously staring at us behind the mess, foreshadowing worse to come. The ending itself is something worth seeing yourself, but overall, You Want It? perfectly captures the exaggerated industrialization of the food industry, all in an incredibly explosive and psychedelic fashion, and I’m more than excited to see whatever Ava Hofmann brings to the table in future tracks of hers.
I did the heavily-involved camerawork as well as some editing for this one, so I’m a little too close to this piece to write a comprehensive review. I do want to comment, though, on one aspect of the work that neither review mentioned. While I agree with everything in these reviews, in my opinion the weakest parts of You Want It? are the longer bits of the text written out in a sort of inflated graffiti-style typography. When it’s a single word or a short phrase, like “Ahead!” or the titular “You Want It?”, this style is delightfully punchy, reminiscent of wacky 90s-era Nickelodeon commercials, but when it’s longer and/or less direct stuff like “Deny It Or Pretend” it’s mostly illegible, and unfortunately the texture of these illegible words isn’t nearly as evocative or expressive as those in BELLS, so it feels more like a mistake than an intentional choice. This is a minor gripe though, and on the whole I think this is easily Ava’s best track yet. Actually, I think it’s by far the best-executed blend of art style, worldbuilding, narrative, lyric video, and socio-political message ever created in Line Rider!
🙌
The Four Seasons, Summer/"Storm" (Vivaldi) - Matthew Buckley
Guest review by Hanuman:
I don’t normally enjoy tracks in this style but much like DoodleChaos’ hit track Mountain King, this track is just too good to miss. Unlike many of the tracks of this genre, Buckley has moved a step beyond the now-traditional classical style. Summer/Storm was crafted not only precisely, but creatively and intelligently, making use of a variety of techniques to accomplish synchronisation. A big win for this piece is that Buckley accomplishes this without straying too far from the simple fundamentals that help tracks remain comprehensible to the casual viewer.
This track was an eyeful of delightful choreography from start to finish and I look forward to future efforts.
Summer/Storm is my favorite Matthew Buckley track yet. It may not have the plot-twists of Waltz No. 2 or the breaks from rightward motion of Pizzicato, but Matthew has absolutely taken his characteristic blend of three-rider classical music sync to another level in this piece, keeping the choreography grounded in sledding while reaching incredible new heights of music visualization. I’ll go ahead and say it - despite techniques consistently taking a backseat to choreography in his works, at this point Matthew Buckley has shown he has more nuanced control over Bosh’s movement than the vast majority of technique-focused creators, and it would be downright insulting to call Summer/Storm something as reductionist as “flatsled” or “simple”, or to say that Matthew isn’t a “quirker” himself. As someone with strong audio-motion synesthesia, this is perhaps the only Line Rider track I have ever watched where every individual second of choreographed music sync felt absolutely spot on. This track might not set out to do anything ambitious or earth-shattering, but I cannot find a single flaw in its execution - and that’s typically my specialty! But beyond that, the sheer satisfaction of the viewing experience Summer/Storm provides is virtually unmatched.
🙌
Threnody - Ava Hofmann
Guest review by Hanuman:
Ava Hofmann is a relatively new track maker on the Line Rider scene, and her work is refreshingly new, imaginative and intensely thematic.
I have a severe weak spot for conceptual tracks, and initially that’s exactly what I thought this track would be, a high concept multi-line experimental. The first 30 seconds of the track certainly enhance that feeling with brilliantly creative use of multiple elegantly crafted lines matching the eerie tone of music. However, Bosh moves to a seemingly “mundane” line after this point pulling me out of the trance-like experience of the first 30 seconds. This is repeated through the track, with mesmerising and creative use of multiple lines clashing with several unappealing transitions. Perhaps I was expecting the designs to blend from one to the next seamlessly, or perhaps the author’s intent was to make the track deliberately jarring, but it left me longing for a cohesive final version.
While I also struggle to see a cohesive structure in Threnody, I must admit I really dig some of the ideas in this track, and I’m a sucker for art that tries weird experimental shit, even if it doesn’t all hold together in a neat package. As long as the ideas are all in the same general wheelhouse I’m usually on board, and this is definitely true of Threnody. There might not be one or even two or three central concepts, but there’s absolutely a consistent vibe. Ray-like line structures reminiscent of Ribs and Bug Thief, large areas filled in with black, cryptic text written with a non-Latin alphabet, a contemporary capital-G Gothic song, and moments spent lingering on vaguely threatening imagery all combine to form a tense, brooding mood. The weakest parts of Threnody, in my opinion, are the ever-changing attempts to sync to the drums. There are times when these attempts match the vibe perfectly, such as a section with large vertical columns of black with lines writhing in between, but more often these drum syncs feel unnecessary and distracting, such as small bits of repeated text going past Bosh on each beat. With a bit more thought put into the central concept(s), some refinement of transitions, and more of a focus on syncing to the macro structure of the song - a sync to the vibe, if you will - instead of micro-syncing to each individual drum beat, Threnody could have been something remarkable and moving. In the end, it’s not particularly affecting, but to me it’s still absolutely unique and compelling.
👍
Chase the Mountains - vsbl
Guest review by Hanuman:
Sometimes it was quite hard to distinguish who was speaking, but here is my interpretation:
A meditative piece on how the young rationalise the world and the nature of existence. The young protagonists swap their versions of God whilst travelling through the mountains, wondering if they will find him there. Later on they become more mature, and no longer believing God is on Earth they decide that they don’t need to chase for God in the mountains, they don’t need to search for higher meaning, they can just chase the mountains for their own sake.
This piece is quite nostalgic, as it immediately reminded me of childhood and the process whereby innocence becomes experience. What is lovely in this piece is that Charlie and Bosh don’t throw away their childish fancies. Instead, they accept them for what they are, choosing to revel in the experience rather than rationalise their way out of happiness. God may not be in the mountains or even on earth, but the mountains are, and they are worth attention for their own sake.
This track vaguely reminded me of a quote from Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy:
“We have to build the republic of heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.”
Or to deconstruct this in the crudest possible way: YOLO. You only live once, so make the most of it, don’t search for a higher meaning in the mountains, just enjoy them.
vsbl’s newest work is the only Line Rider work I can think of where the meat of the piece is virtually entirely in dialogue between characters, in this case two sledders, conveyed via text added to the video in post-production. Dialogue in Line Rider works conveyed via text isn’t unheard of, but the narratives have often left much to be desired. Since the track itself in Chase the Mountains is barely more than a contextual setting for the story, it all leans on the strength of the writing. So it’s a good thing that the writing in Chase the Mountains, while nothing approaching exceptional, is… actually decent! At least, compared to just about any other Line Rider track where writing takes a central role. The dialogue between Bosh and Charlie is nostalgic, evocative, and reasonably convincing as dialogue you can imagine two people actually having. The message itself, however, is… a bit unclear to me. The ages of the characters between the two scenes is unclear - I think they’re supposed to be kids in the first scene and then adults in the second but the way they speak to each other doesn’t seem to change at all. And then there’s the notion proposed by Charlie that God will reward you with a trophy for climbing a mountain to meet him, which I find to be a bit baffling - if it’s a metaphor it’s unclear what of, and if it’s literal it seems to be using oddly overt Christian imagery as an aesthetic choice, which I personally find a bit off-putting. These things considerably muddle the message that Hanuman wrote about above in my view. The work is also a little rough around the edges - there are frequent typos in the text, the titular “mountains” are obviously just a pencil squiggle drawn in a zig-zag, Bosh and Charlie start out with their sprites overlapping which makes the opening confusing, it’s often unclear who is speaking (as Hanuman mentioned), and it’s unclear what positions Bosh and Charlie are supposed to be in during the second scene. When I first watched it, I thought Charlie was supposed to be dead and Bosh was talking to his grave before I realized he was simply meant to be seen as sitting down next to his sled, looking… directly at the camera? while Bosh stares… off into the distance, facing away from his friend, sitting on his sled? The scene could have done with some better thematic framing and positioning, I think, given that it’s a static shot that we linger on for a solid 30 seconds, and there could have been some more effort put into the setting to make it more interesting to look at. Despite all these issues, I honestly enjoyed this piece and found it to be an unusual attempt make a type of art you almost never see in Line Rider, and I think you’ll probably get something out of it too.
👍
Space Mountain - Xavier Lundberg
Guest review by Hanuman:
Honestly I was rather blown away by this track. The first half is probably the best representation of Bosh in space that I’ve ever seen. You really feel like Bosh is moving through some kind of appropriately “Line Rider-like” space environment. It’s rather beautiful. The transition to full-on track, could perhaps have been better signified and is a little jarring, but once Bosh settles in to his new high-octane adventure it won me over too. The use of high-end techniques in this case is well suited by the music choice, an alien spacey theme. Ultimately I think the second half could have been slightly more polished, but this track is undeniably great, and easily the best piece Xavier has ever produced.
I thought the version of this track made for the 350 Line Contest back in September 2020 was really fun and made excellent use of the zero-gravity mod, so I was excited to see it had been expanded into a full release. Low-gravity mods have been around for a long time, but that initial partial-release of Space Mountain was the first time I’d ever seen one used for a thematic reason - namely, Bosh in space - and that alone put Space Mountain head and shoulders above every prior Line Rider work utilizing a low-gravity mod, as well as most Line Rider works utilizing experimental mods in general. I was positively delighted to see that Xavier had added scenery to this section of previously-released track, featuring asteroids, stars, and constellations. Would it have been better if the scenery had been designed as the track was created? Almost certainly. But from the combination of Michael Giacchino’s soundtrack composed for (and synced to!) the Space Mountain roller coaster in Disneyland, minimalist track lines boosting Bosh to slowly spiral through the empty space, the scenery creating a celestial space (pun intended) for Bosh to travel through, and even some fantastically cheesy motion lines evoking old sci-fi films, it all comes together to create something remarkably fun and creative. The first 75 seconds do a fantastic job of setting the stage and building hype, especially when we see a temporary stall perfectly synced to a countdown to a rocket launch in the music. What a shame it is, then, that the remainder of Space Mountain is monumentally disappointing. Featuring frequent uncomfortably-close zooms, the second half of the track is relentlessly over-synced to every beat of the music with horribly jarring movement, in part due to a ludicrous number of wildly unnecessary cannons. All sense of place, of space, of adventure, that made the first half so fun has been lost, replaced with the laziest possible technique-based creative choices at every turn. I was getting ready for Bosh to ride a kickass roller coaster in space, and all I got was a bunch of exhaustingly dull quirk. It’s almost like Xavier completely ran out of ideas and just gave up and filled the rest of the piece in with off-brand Arglin instead of granting the viewer any kind of payoff after all that fantastic buildup. In my opinion, sync is actually far less necessary in this latter part of the song - it’s made for a roller coaster after all, and this part is just meant to be a rockin’ beat that helps you have a great time while you’re being whipped through the darkness in a giant artificial mountain with stars everywhere while screaming your head off! In the end, I’m quite torn about this track. The opening half is absolute flames, but in the end it’s a buildup to an incredibly disappointing second half so it’s hard to enjoy it. Ultimately though, the first half of Space Mountain is so unique and fun that I’d say it’s worth checking out for its own sake - just know that it’s not going anywhere near as exciting as it feels like it is.
👍
Disinterest - Malizma
[cw: suicide]
Well this piece is certainly edgy. Watch sledders crash unceremoniously into a flat line as Bosh slowly sleds past them while white noise hisses in the background, until Bosh finally goes offsled themself and the white noise stops. It’s tempting for me to read Disinterest as some kind of deep metaphor - a suicide analogy is certainly plausible - but my honest guess, given the title, is this is a piece made about the feeling of losing creative motivation in Line Rider. However, paradoxically, making art while you are feeling a strong emotion does not necessarily result in effectively conveying that emotion to the viewer - for this reason the best art about mental health is often created after someone is through the worst of it, but it’s recent enough that it’s still fresh in their mind. This is to say that, possibly unfortunately, the main reaction Disinterest elicited from me was some brief laughter, particularly when riders zoomed upward past Bosh and then crashed down to earth in slapstick fashion. It’s definitely unique, and I’m intrigued by the concept, but my overall impression of the piece is muddled.
🤷
CircloO 2, but I made a Line Rider track to it. - TheMatsValk
Guest review by Hanuman:
A meditative mix of chilled out flats and quirky moments, this track showcases technical flare mixed with relevant pacing. It kind of gives the idea of someone doodling on a page on a nice relaxing afternoon, just listening to the music and playing with what happens next. The result is an aesthetically pleasing track that keeps engagement despite its length.
CircloO 2’s concept is at least somewhat unique - advanced quirk techniques used in more subtle ways to sync to a remarkably calm, meditative piece of music - and it’s undeniably TheMatsValk’s most chill release to date. I promised last month that I would give tracks that focus on music-synced choreography with advanced quirk techniques more of the benefit of the doubt, so I’m going to try, but to be honest, I struggled to sit through this one. I appreciate the understated approach and the restraint from using a lot of gigastacks, but the music itself is incredibly relaxing, while the movement in TheMatsValk’s style of quirk is inescapably jarring and glitchy. It seems to me that at no point did TheMatsValk ask himself, “Is quirk the best way to accomplish what I’m going for here?” - instead taking it as a given that precisely-synced quirk was the one and only creative tool at his disposal. Perhaps the thought process started with the assumption that music-synced quirk would be the one and only thing in this piece, followed by a desire to make a Line Rider track to the song Growth by Stijn Cappetijn from the CircloO 2 soundtrack, followed by an attempt to use quirk to precisely sync a track to that piece of music. But I would ask, why do you want to make a Line Rider track to Growth? What are you trying to convey to me, the viewer? And is quirk the best way to convey whatever that is? Only TheMatsValk can answer the first two questions, but what I can say is that what the track did convey to me was, essentially, boredom, and, assuming that wasn’t the goal, I must conclude that quirk was a poor way to convey whatever was being attempted.
👎
Angel - MrBlueSky
Beginning with some post-production text that to me basically amounts to “Keep on truckin’”, Angel is… well, it’s pretty much like every other MrBlueSky track - dense quirk tightly synced to a rap song - but with a mod that makes the lines invisible until Bosh touches them. I assume this choice and the opening text have something to do with each other, maybe something about how life is unpredictable and how you often have to take things one day at a time? But it seems like more of an aesthetic surface-level choice than one at the core of the work, to the point that it would be totally unsurprising to me if it was all conceived after the entire track was already done. There’s nothing in the Line Rider track itself that relates to these ideas, and so it comes off as an attempt to retroactively assign meaning. The lines-invisible-until-touched idea is certainly promising, but Angel is far from the first to use it, and I have yet to see it used in a way that’s more than a cool but meaningless effect. Maybe someday!
👎
Outro - Roaxial
[edit: privated by creator shortly after this review went up, can be viewed here]
Before I get into this review, I need to talk about my bias here. Hurry Up We’re Dreaming by M83 has been my all-time favorite album for years. A sweepingly epic work of audio clocking in at nearly 75 minutes, Hurry Up We’re Dreaming is unapologetically celestial in scope, shockingly emotionally vulnerable, fiercely romantic, and relentlessly optimistic, even as it touches on some of the most overwhelming and terrifying aspects of being a human in the 21st century. This album is a journey through massive chorales; toe-tapping 80s-inspired jams; meditative, otherworldly sonic textures; earnest, yearning ballads; and seemingly endless riffs, fills, and solos that are all absolutely lit. And, at the end of this utterly transformative work is the the grand finale - the impossibly epic Outro, that somehow brings the whole gargantuan thing to a fitting close. Naturally, after the album came out this piece became ubiquitous in movie trailers and the like, so virtually everyone has heard it out of context by now, but I guarantee you that the experience of listening to the 73-minute album straight through to contextualize Outro is one you will not regret. Naturally, when I saw Roaxial had made a Line Rider track to this piece I was simultaneously excited and anxious. Unfortunately, as I watched, my feelings quickly moved from concerned, to disappointed, to exhausted, to frustrated, to actively upset. Here. Think of your favorite piece of music ever made. Now, imagine that you could snap your fingers and instantly create the best Line Rider track you can imagine to it. Now, take that masterpiece in your head, and imagine the most rushed, stripped down, uninspired, bland version of it you can, and then imagine how you would feel watching that video, and you can imagine roughly how I felt watching Outro for the first time. I commented in last month’s review of Overture that sometimes it felt like Interstellar_1 was playing it safe. Well, if Overture felt like that at times, Outro absolutely epitomizes it. Right from the start of the track, Bosh is sledding back and forth across the screen in ways superficially synced to the chord changes while utterly failing to convey the serene yet anticipatory tone of the opening. There’s a section in the middle where the music drops to nothing but a low rumble for a surprising length of time, and Roaxial represents this with Bosh falling through white space while being held back by invisible lines, presumably so they don’t gain too much speed, and the result is Bosh looks awkwardly, stiffly, held in place. When the music begins to creep back in, Bosh abruptly resumes sledding back and forth across the screen while hastily-drawn Xs, Vs, wavy lines, and zig-zags visualize the drums and vocals, again in the most superficial way possible, as we build up to - remember - the grand finale of not just this piece, but the entire album that came before it, when the synths and drums and vocals and strings all roar to a glorious climax that will be sustained for the following full minute. Roaxial represents this by having Bosh fall through the air in a straight path, while larger versions of the same Xs, Vs, and zig-zags continue to visualize the drums and synths, but this time with more pencil scribbles alongside and on top of them, until finally Bosh is unceremoniously and instantaneously stopped with a cannon that violently slams them offsled on the last drum hit, and they ragdoll off lines synced to the delicate, deeply emotional, final piano chords in the most superficial possible way until an abrupt suspension in space on the last note. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t also heartbreakingly dissonant with the music it’s depicting. While this will never be as bad as the endless DoodleChaos knockoffs, it’s quite distressing to me that some of the music visualization ideas I first explored in Formula, which were then further popularized by Andrew Hess’s work such as Formation, have become a go-to visual language when someone wants to make a track to visualize a cool song, and doesn’t want it to be technique-focused, but doesn’t have any actual ideas for what they do want to make. They’re easy to make and they usually turn out pretty cool-looking, but to me it feels heavily reminiscent of back in the day when people would say (and genuinely think!) they were going to make an emotionally moving Line Rider track, while in practice they would just make a manuquirk set to an emotional song, letting the song do all the heavy lifting of evoking emotions instead of trying to build on the music and make something new. Or in other words, slapping some generic track on a song and letting the song do all the work instead of… actually using Line Rider as a means of expression. Now, I should mention that there are a few moments at the height of Outro’s climax with animated zig-zags drawn with squiggly lines that I found to be at least conceptually interesting, but on the whole it feels like I’m watching the rebirth of the era of someone setting a generic Line Rider art style to a moving piece of music and then thinking they made some powerful and important art, but this time, instead of copying Z_N-Freak people are copying me, and instead of using generic rock music they’re doing violence to music that I love, and to be perfectly honest, it feels gross and I hate it.
👎
Bosh finds his dad - Roaxial
[cw: parent death, positive portrayal of suicide]
[edit: privated by creator shortly after this review went up, can be viewed here]
Guest review by Hanuman:
An unexpectedly lighthearted track considering the subject matter. Bosh decides to leave his depressing life behind, launching out of the physical and into the metaphysical, going for ‘one last ride’. Eventually he reaches heaven, where his dad is waiting to greet him at the pearly gates. For me this track sort of loses meaning in the track segment, even though the initial world is well-crafted. I wasn’t sure if riding the lines is Bosh’s job in this tangible world or if he was just going in for his last day in the ‘Line Rider office’ so to speak. Perhaps this take was meant to showcase a more rose-tinted view of someone ‘going to a better place’, but it ends up feeling rather confused. I think the main problem with this track is that it seems to almost encourage suicide. If not that and we flip the track around, it just seems like Roaxial uses suicide as a convenient framing device for his track, which also rankles.
Bosh finds his dad certainly starts out promisingly, with an opening that reminds me of Branches’ utterly devastating work You Are the Sunset. Bosh leaves what looks like a hotel room and sleds outside into the pouring rain to visit a grave in a church graveyard. We then see that the church is being torn down and follow Bosh into a park next to a cliff. There’s a clearly intentional moment where Bosh sleds up to the edges of the cliff, pauses, and then suddenly jumps off in sync with the music. What follows is… well it’s a bunch of unscened music-syncing to bizarrely upbeat music. That’s troubling enough, but the real kicker is the end of the track, where Bosh arrives at heaven and his dad is there, and we realize that not only was the grave in the graveyard the grave of Bosh’s dad, and not only did Bosh just commit suicide, but Bosh just committed suicide in order to go to heaven to see his dad again, and it worked. Like Hanuman said above, either it’s using a topic as serious as suicide as a thoughtless framing device, or it’s straight-up intentionally glorifying suicide by implying that if you kill yourself you can see your dead loved ones again. Either of these is utterly appalling, and I find myself in the rare position of being glad that the message of this track is muddled by the large unscened section that confuses and distracts from the narrative, because if it was better at conveying the emotional beats of the story that it’s trying to tell I would have no choice but to consider it actively dangerous and potentially harmful, especially for anyone struggling with suicidal thoughts. I strongly believe that art should never be censored, but Bosh finds his dad - intentionally or not - glorifies suicide, while treating the topic with casual, lighthearted flippancy, and I struggle to find any redeeming qualities in that, which unfortunately leads me to the conclusion that the fewer people who watch it, the better. I do think there’s a place for art that doesn’t actively condemn or criticize horrible things, since it can be incredibly important for people to process thoughts and feelings around the possibility of doing horrible things as a way to work through various fears and traumas, but at the very least there needs to be a strong content warning that, for example, a work portrays suicide in a positive light. A subject as serious as suicide must be treated responsibly, and not casually tossed into something without warning, but that’s exactly what Roaxial has done in Bosh finds his dad. See, that’s the thing about creative work. If you’re trying to make work that affects people, when you succeed, it’s going to affect people, and it’s important to consider what effect you want your work to have. Sometimes we get so carried away with trying to have an impact on our audience, of any kind, that we lose sight of what we’re actually trying to say, and in some unfortunate cases, we wind up unintentionally saying awful things and making something that will do more harm than good. It’s not my place to police someone else’s choices around what kind of art they want to make, but it is the responsibility of all artists to be mindful of these complicated issues, and strive to make the world a better place, as opposed to merely striving for attention of any sort. Thankfully, Bosh finds his dad is unlikely to do any real harm, thanks more to incompetent storytelling than anything else, but I think it’s incredibly important to view it as a cautionary tale. Please, please, please don’t make art that lightheartedly glorifies suicide. We want to make the world a better place, not a worse one.
👎
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