Murray Street and The Sopranos: One Underrated and One Overrated (Take A Guess Where I Fall On This One)

On the night before I go to hospital for the long hospitalization, I thought I'd put forth a brief question. You can take your time with this, but I think the answer is pretty obvious and easy to ascertain.

The Sopranos reminds me of "The Buried Life" in terms of its "emperor's new clothes" status. I mean, Matthew Arnold in general and "Dover Beach" specifically are passable, but "The Buried Life" is just conflated and bombastic. In the same way, The Sopranos sucked for most of the last season. Then, all of a sudden, with its open ending, ambiguous resolution, contentious stance it forced its audience to take, and altogether annoying lack of answers or crazy interpretation, it comes back and generates a huge amount of buzz.

Umm, I'm not saying I don't enjoy The Sopranos, but it is really is just a show about the mob...with a hackneyed twist. I once had an ex-girlfriend tell me this, and I knew those days were numbered. Her exultation of the show lay with its inclusion of psychoanalysis and therapy as its big groundbreaking innovation. I hate to tell the world, but this is not exactly new material. John Lennon went through that "Primal Scream" therapy with Yoko and came out with some truly squeamish shit. Then, he made a phenomenal record, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, that was imbued with a combination of anger, resignation, some of which still degenerates into that old, exhausting ""John" or "Paul"?" hypothetical. At the time, I think McCartney was in Wings or something. Must I elaborate?

Murray Street, on the other hand, made me say to myself, "Holy shit, this is fucking good..." as I drooled in awe. The hypnotic swirl of the songs and the shoegazer quality of some of the sound injected with the barbed wire of the guitars entrance you but keep nudging you to pay attention.

In the HBO equivalent, around then, (remember John From Cincinnati? I hope not.), Tony's teeth fall out or he hallucinates when he does and doesn't take peyote with one of his dead nephew's reliable hook-ups whenever he was in Vegas or he dreams under general anesthetic after he gets shot by his senile and demented uncle, who used to be Tony's boss but then was a symbolic head of the family and, ultimately, an afterthought. Got that?

Reward yourself after pondering this dizzying synopsis of The Sopranos and put on Murray Street and get swept away by its majesty.

R