What does the title mean? That, I can’t tell you. It’s an excellent power metal album, however. Time of the Oath was 25% better than Master of the Rings; Better than Raw is 25% greater again. Everything locks into place here. Music, tone, style, production, performance. It’s distinct from anything Helloween made before, yet feels like a summation and endpoint of their 90s style: great songs, performed with panache and energy. Helloween wasn’t just out of “comeback hell” in 1998, they producing melodic power metal that compared decently against their classic 80s run (Walls of Jericho plus Keeper of the Seven Keys I and II).
All of the musicians more than pull their weight, but one of them steals the show. Uli Kusch’s drumming is so damned good here—flashy and technical, yet in-the-pocket and lively. Listen to the way he anchors the start of “Push”—tight triplets on the kicks, with sharp, precise hats punching Markus Grosskopf’s bubbling bass into place like steel tentpegs—or the unyielding chaos of “Midnight Sun”—where flurries of wild snare and tom fills swoop and overtake each other like crazed birds. He adds such interesting skeletons to fairly average midpaced fair like “Hey Lord!” that they seem absolutely compelling.
This might be the most balanced Helloween album from a songwriting perspective. Four songs by Uli, four by Weikath, four by Deris. This is the only 90s Helloween album to have absolutely no songs credited to lead guitarist Roland Grapow, but I happen to know he “ghosted” a fair bit on Uli’s songs. The staccato guitar riff in “Revelation” was written by him, for example.
“Push” is fast. “Falling Higher” is even faster. Tommy Hansen’s production is dated, archaic and rough, with bits of dust seeming to cling to the cracks in every note. I think this was the last time they ever worked with Hansen, and represents another breaking point with their classic power metal style. Subsequent albums had a more modern (sometimes too modern) sound.
There are some recondite progressive rock touches in the album’s second half, which, unlike Chameleon, are well done and don’t seem too distinct from the band’s core style. “Time” and “A Handful of Pain”.
The worst song is probably Weikath’s “Lavdate Dominum”, which listens like a goofy punk rock song, or a heavy metal cover of some Christmas carol. I don’t know what the idea was here. He also gets the album closer, “Midnight Sun”, which is really good; extremely lengthy and technical while also fraught with emotional agitation. One of Deris’s great vocal tracks is on this song.
There are two great songs, that are pretty much in the top 10 greatest Helloween tracks every time I make a list. The first is Uli Kusch’s “Revelation”, an amazing, warp-speed epic that seems to be a jaded postmodern take on the Bible. Astonishing shifts in feel and tempo, solo after solo, weird digressions into funk rock and thrash, the album’s greatest chorus…Worlds form, collide, and break apart inside this song.
The second is a complete surprise. “I Can” is one of the hardest sellouts Helloween ever sold, literally being an alternative rock song that sounds like New Order’s Get Ready more than anything, But it’s extremely well-written, compact, and catchy. I’m glad they didn’t go further into the territory explored here, but man, I’m glad they planted a flag at least this far.
1998-2000 was the era where power metal became incredibly competitive: bands like Gamma Ray and Stratovarius were in the middle of career-defining hot streaks, newcomers like Freedom Call even America was finally becoming relevant again thanks to Virgin Steele and Kamelot. Better than Raw ranks alongside the best of that period.
In 1969, Jim Henson locked a man in a box and let him die. Don’t worry, it was just for a movie. A movie that now gathers dust in the LAPD’s evidence room inside a locked crate marked “Too horrifying to watch”. How does it gather dust inside a locked crate? Good question.
Let’s talk about The Cube, a Henson-directed telefilm from the same year.
A man is trapped in a white room. He doesn’t know how he got there, and can’t leave. People enter the room through mysterious doors (which only they can see and use), and do things to the man that might be pranks, might be torture, or might be attempts to enlighten him. They rave, threaten, lie, confabulate, explain, offer hallucinatory narratives about what’s happening, then leave. The man is still in the cube.
Henson made films about puppets. The Cube depicts a man (played by Richard Schaal) who’s metaphysically a puppet: he lacks free will, and is at the mercy of his unreliable senses. That’s the simplest reading of The Cube: we are locked inside our own minds: trapped in a skull-box, grasping at threads and slivers of light and sound spilling through pinholes and cracks and fissures, seeking meaning in the pale, languid eidolons, trying to infer the world buzzing outside the cube—a world we can never actually visit, because it would mean stepping outside the boundaries of our own awareness. We are prisoners of the sensorium. And it’s lying to us.
The 60s were a decade made for such questions. Marijuana. LSD. MKULTRA. Postmodernism. The edges of reality and perception were being tested and rewritten and overturned. Science accelerated cultural derealization: we could actually examine an eyeball, and see all the kludges and hacks holding our vision together: see the bloody lattice of veins and arteries spread across the retina, see the optical nerve which interrupts our vision (a blind spot that the brain edits out with a patchwork of surrounding data), see how the sensory sausage is made.
In 1967—one year after Henson and Muppets co-writer Jerry Juhl wrote The Cube‘s screenplay—Doreen Kimura conducted her famous dichronic experiments, revealing the mangled patchwork of the human auditory system. Simply put, aural pathways from our ears to our brain “cross over” inside our heads—what the left ear hears goes to the right side of the brain, and vice versa. But the left hemisphere is dominant for language tasks: so when human speech (for example) enters the left ear, the signal must make an additional trip from the right side to the left via the corpus callosum for processing, adding a few-millisecond delay to the sound. To compensate for this, the brain does the same thing a laggy online videogame does: by artificially delaying the signal from the right ear, so that both left and right stereo signals match. Essentially, your ears hear things happening later than they actually did. The brain coheres all this into a singular experience, a singular sound, but it’s an illusion.
The Cube could be viewed as a metaphor about scientific derealization. It also has religious readings. A Christian Scientist turned hippie, Henson likely had at least a remedial understanding of Buddhism, and The Cube kind of works as a dramatization of three “marks of existence”: Impermanence, suffering, and selflessness.
Anicca: all is impermanent. Reality inside the cube is unsettled and ill-defined. A mud that swirls into new shapes every time The Man tries to touch it Objects and people suddenly appear that weren’t there before. The words of his visitors are no more reliable: often they’re palpable lies, or contradictions. He meets a prisoner called Watson, who claims to have spent a very long time in another cube—how long, he cannot say, because when he tried to mark the passage of days on his thumbnail, they tore it out. (This itself is rugpulled: the man is later described as an actor, playing a role…which is true, of course. None of these events are happening. The Cube is a 1969 TV movie directed by Jim Henson.) There’s a layer of metafiction, as the man sees himself on a TV screen, and must process the implications.
Dukkha: all is suffering. The Man is sent reeling through psychological states. Hope, horror, amusement, confusion, sexual desire, anger. All are useless in the cube. His actions aren’t totally meaningless—people react to him, such as two clowns (the first is apparently a parody of Eddie Cantor) who become savagely angry when The Man fails to laugh at them—but he can’t escape the cube. He’s like a ball in a pinball arcade cabinet: it whips around at dizzying speed, racking up points on bumper after bumper, but will fundamentally never escape the cabinet. The cube is a hell twisted into the shape of a Kline bottle. There’s nowhere to escape, except straight back into it.
Anattā: lack of self. The Man (for he is indeed all men), is the most Hensonian of objects: a puppet. Kermit might have form and shape, but he is hollow cloth with sawed-in-half eyes. His behaviors are supplied by the ghostly demonic hand twisting inside him. Likewise, the Man has no name, and no memories. The torments he is subjected to are nonsense…but in a sense, they’re all that’s real in The Cube. A coquettish seductress walks into the cube, seems to be trying to seduce him…and then reveals it was all an act. This is cruel…but was it really fake? The lust the man felt was real. So is the anger he feels after the prank is revealed. In a sense, she has provided him with what he lacks: an identity as a lustful, angry man. Without the external world torturing him, he would just be nothing. Nothing whatsoever.
Maybe The Cube is simply a freeform Rorschach blot onto which the audience imprints their own meaning. It certainly has a hippie-esque “it’s so deep, man” vibe. And what’s the hippie term for a prisoner of the system? A square. And what’s a cube made of…?
The problem with a film about meaninglessness is that it can quickly shade into the film itself lacking meaning. The Cube does not quite reach that point, but if it had gone on longer than 60 minutes, it probably would have. The Cube is strange, challenging, but perhaps ultimately a bit shallow. Eventually, you get the idea. It’s all a weird, dark game that he’s better off not playing. Instead, even at the end he’s still basically falling for the idea that there’s some “deep reality” that he can reach beyond these shifting stands. Most of the film consists of arbitrary events, that could probably be rearranged in nearly any order with no loss of meaning.
Many of the tricks played on The Man are also tricks on the viewer. A strange monklike figure gives him a mystic artifact called a Ramadar, which might be key to his salvation. But all the Ramadar seems to do is make an annoying buzzing sound, and he smashes it in frustration. Is this a metaphor for the impossibility of enlightenment, or just another red herring? You decide.
The mind is a dark place where all of us live, yet none of us live. And certainly, it is not a place we can escape. My dad had a running joke (likely stolen from some comedian), that old TVs had dust traps down the bottom, and after you watched an old western, you had to empty out all the dead Indians from the bottom of your TV, before they started to smell. They were probably happy to go. They escaped the cube.
Scott Alexander created a Turing Test for AI generated artwork. Begin quote:
Here are fifty pictures. Some of them (not necessarily exactly half) were made by humans; the rest are AI-generated. Please guess which are which. Please don’t download them onto your computer, zoom in, or use tools besides the naked eye. Some hints:
I’ve tried to balance type of picture / theme , so it won’t be as easy as “everything that looks like digital art is AI”.
I’ve tried to crop some pictures of both types into unusual shapes, so it won’t be as easy as “everything that’s in DALL-E’s default aspect ratio is AI”.
At the end, it will ask you which picture you’re most confident is human, which picture you’re most confident is AI, and which picture was your favorite – so try to keep track of that throughout the exercise.
All the human pictures are by specific artists who deserve credit (and all the AI pictures are by specific prompters/AI art hobbyists who also deserve credit) but I obviously can’t do that here. I’ll include full attributions on the results post later.
I got 88% correct (44/50). Here’s my attempt (or rather my imperfect memory of my attempt), and my justification for the answers I gave.
Human. Stuff like the cherubs holding her skirts (one blindfolded, one a cyborg) read like the kind of deliberative creative choice that AI never makes. The birds and feathers and hair (typical pain points for AI) are all sharp and coherent. Human. I haven’t seen an AI-generated image like this before. Tree branches overlap believably (instead of disappearing/multiplying/changing when they occlude each other, as in AI images). Human. Has an AI feel, but the hair strands look correct, and the frills hang believably across her shoulders. Image is loaded with intricate, distinct-yet-similar details (waves/foam/fabric/clouds/birds) that never blend into mush.AI. Blobby oven-mitt hands. Deformed foot. Nobody in the 18th/19th century would allow their daughter to be painted wearing such a scandalous dress.Human. Coherent and symmetrical to the smallest detail. Note the dividers on the window. Hard call. I went with AI because of the way the blackness of the woman’s hair abruptly changes intensity when the curving line bisects it. A random, unmotivated choice that a human wouldn’t make, but a machine might.AI. Right hand has two thumbs.Human. Haven’t seen any AI images like this before. The sleeping disciples are sprawled in complex but believable ways.Human. I went back and forth, but decided the red crosshatching pattern was too coherent to be AI.AI. I recognize the model that created this: Dall-E 3, which has a grainy, harsh, oversaturated look. Other clues are the nonsensical steps to nowhere, the symmetry errors, and the kitsch colors of the gate, which detract from the sense of ancient grandeur. Nobody would spend so much time on the details of the stonework, only to make it look like it was built out of Lego blocks.A hard one. I guessed AI because of the way the windows/chimneys of the houses appear to be slanted. No reason a human artist would do that. (I didn’t see the nonsensical “signature” in the bottom length corner; if I had, I would have guessed Human.)Guessed AI, got it wrong. Very hard.Not hard. At least 10 separate details would make me guess “AI” at 90% confidence. The hairstrands are a melty incoherent mess. The hands have froglike webbing on them. Her skirt is excessively detailed and its metallic designs lack symmetry. Her earring floats in space. It contains confused stylistic choices. The girl’s face is a simplified anime design: does that agree with the ultra-detailed skirt and the near-photorealistic water? Also, where is the light source coming from?AI. Not sure what made me think a human hadn’t made it. Maybe the lack of doors: how do you get in and out?Human. Many specific choices, plus the text on the temple.heavy AI slop feel. Many occlusion errors. Deformed hands. Probably Dall-E 3 again.I actually can’t remember how I guessed here but it’s pretty clearly AI. The face’s left eye is deformed in a random, unmotivated way. Occlusion errors. Filled with ugly, harsh artifacts. Seems like it was trying to write letters in the middle of the image and gave up.Human. Mild slop aesthetic (pretty girl + shiny plastic skin + random sparkles/nonsense) plus heterochromia should point to AI, but the hairstrands are too coherent.Human. Don’t know why I gave this answer. Was probably a guess.AI. What’s the middle black rectangle in the house? It can’t be a door, because it doesn’t reach the ground. If it’s a window, why doesn’t it match the other two?lol, get this cancer off my screen.what makes this look human? I don’t know. Maybe it’s the stark, understated tree? AI would probably put dramatic explosion-esque leaves or flowers on it to match the sky.A good example of the Midjourney slop aesthetic. It superficially invokes liturgic religious iconography, yet Mary wears a full face of Instathot makeup and has detailed veins on her hands. Very weird, inhuman choices. What’s the little nub of flesh poking between her right thumb and index finger?Midjourney slop. Occlusion errors on the hairstrands. It tried to give her an earring but didn’t finish the job, leaving a strange malformed icicle hanging off her ear.Human. This was a bit of a cheat because I’d seen the image before: it’s a render by Michael Stuart and was my desktop background for a while. If I hadn’t seen it, I would still have said “human” based on the complex, coherent rigging and ratlines.AI. Mangled hands. Man wears two or three belts at once, and the holes don’t make sense. His loincloth tore in a weird way, giving him a Lara Croft-esque thigh holster strap. An interesting example of stylistic blend: it’s going for a Caravaggio-esque painting, but mistakenly puts all sorts of painterly details into the setting itself: notice how the man’s left hand appears to be holding a pen or a brush, and how the windowsill is a gilded painting frame.AI. Looks like a Midjourney image from 2 years ago.Blindly guessed “Human” and got lucky.Human. The windows look coherent.AI. Got it wrong. I thought “what are the odds that two such similar looking pictures back to back would both be by humans.AI. The cafe has seemingly hundreds of chairs and tables, some of which are overlapping or inside one another. Why are plants growing inside the window frames?Guessed AI because of the numerous mistakes in the reflections. It wasn’t. Come on, man.So sloppy that Oliver Twist is holding up a bowl and asking for more.Human. I was rushing, and becoming careless. Seems obvious it’s AI in hindsight, when you see how messy the fruit is.Human. The musculature of the man’s torso is consistent with how human bodies were portrayed by late-medieval artists (not all of them could pilfer corpses), but inconsistent with AI, which is mode-collapsed into anatomical accuracy (see the painting of the Blessed Virgin Mother above).Human. It’s unlike AI attempts I’ve seen at this style. The signature looks real.Looks like a 4 year old GAN image.I think this is by Dall-E 3. It loves excessive pillars.Human, but I don’t know what makes it human. I haven’t seen AI images like it.If AI slop was a videogame, this picture would be the final boss.Messy, but packed with deliberate human choices and intent. Characters interact with each other in complex ways. Branches and trees look correct.Human. I’d seen this before.AI. A very old image.Guessed human. Whoops. It was AI.AI. Reflection errors in the water. The tree roots on the left look wrong.More slop. Surface of the landing craft is just random shit (and its feet are asymmetrical). Right astronaut has a weird proboscis sprouting from his helmet.Human. Complex interactions between positive and negative space. The cutouts are chaotic yet have a congruent internal logic. I’ve never seen an AI image like it. Some of the cutouts have torn white edges—a human error.Human. Difficult to say. I think AI images generally either have a clear subject or a clear focal point.AI. Another hard one. What swayed me was the second door on the left-side building. It seems to exist off the edge of the land.We have such slop to show you. Cute big-eyed robot + staring directly at viewer + meaningless graffiti sprays + meaningless planets and circles to take up space = Midjourney.
Concluding Thoughts
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
Human. Stuff like the cherubs holding her skirts (one blindfolded, one a cyborg) read like the kind of deliberative creative choice that AI never makes. The birds and feathers and hair (typical pain points for AI) are all sharp and coherent.
Guessed AI, got it wrong. Very hard.
