Pop CultureAugust 9, 2017

Election playlist: Songs from inside NZ’s political campaign HQs

Guest writer

After weeks of working sources deep inside New Zealand’s political parties, Henry Oliver reveals the songs dominating the office stereos at campaign headquarters.*

* Not really. We freely admit this entire playlist is a work of speculative fiction.

National

Eminem – ‘Lose Yourself’

A source tells the Spinoff that, despite the trouble caused by the party (allegedly) ripping off this Eminem motivational classic last election, Bill English is still frequently playing ‘Lose Yourself’ on repeat over the campaign office’s UE Boom. Multiple sources confirm John Key told English that the song was an integral part of his preparation for campaign events. And after months of struggling to come out from his predecessor’s shadow, we’re told English is going “full Key”, even delighting in telling his staff that, after the rise of Jacindamania, he’s now more “keyed in” to the election than ever. “You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow,” he told staffers in a stand-up morning meeting earlier this week. When Judith Collins told him he had in fact missed his first shot to blow in 2002, English said he wouldn’t deny the accusations he’d previously lost a general election, but cannot recall ever running for prime minister and certainly no longer retains any evidence relating to that incident.

Ashford & Simpson – ‘Solid’

Contrary to snarky leftist Twitter, we’re told Bill English was already privately known amongst his party’s inner circle as The Rock and that Ashford & Simpson’s classic ‘Solid’ is often the last song played when Friday drinks get out of hand.

Labour

Fulantino – ‘Let’s Do This’

A Labour party intern tells us of the search for a new campaign song for the Jacinda Adern era: “The other day, before our hangovers had subsided, me and a few other interns had to sit and listen to every song on Spotify called ‘Let’s Do This’. And guess what? None of them are good. None of them! The Hannah Montana one is probably the best – definitely better than the Todd Rundgren one – but it’s probably too expensive to license and no-one wants a repeat of that whole Eminem thing. I ran a banging trance track up the ladder to leadership but was told it was ‘too relentless’. I think we settled on this group Fulanito, who I’d never heard before, but I think it represents our re-energised party.”

Cyndi Lauper – ‘Time After Time’

We’re told that spirits are understandably high inside Labour’s campaign office. “Get it?” a campaign insider says. “Jacindi Lauper? Jacinda, Cyndi. Jacindi? We were lost and we found Jacinda. And when we fell, who was there, waiting to catch us?”

Greens

Tame Impala – ‘Feels Like We Only Go Backwards’

“Tame Impala used to be a big hit on the office stereo,” a campaign volunteer tells the Spinoff. “The vague stonerisms, the lush production, upbeat but not too upbeat. Everyone loved it! It bridged a gap between me and my younger volunteers and the older lot who just wanted to play Bob Marley and that one Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young record all the time. So, after a rough week this week, I put this on ‘cos it’s a fucking jam and it did not go down well. Like, at all. James walked over and turned the stereo off without saying a word. It took me a minute but then it clicked. My bad. My bad.”

Tracy Chapman – ‘Fast Car’

“A few weeks ago, we were the one with the fast car and Labour were the ones wanting to get away from their problems,” says a source with close connections to the party leadership, who, unprompted sung the first few lines of Tracy Chapman’s incredible ‘Fast Car’: You got a fast car / I want a ticket to anywhere / Maybe we make a deal / Maybe together we’ll get somewhere / Any place is better / Starting from zero got nothing to lose / Maybe we’ll make something / Me, myself, I got nothing to prove. “Now, I fear that Jacinda is the fast car, and we need her more than she needs us.”

NZ First

Rihanna – ‘Needed Me’

“We all know who we’re here to appeal to,” says a list member of NZ First who asked not to be named in case they actually get elected. “Better than anything else, Winston knows what his supporters like, and knows what they like in him. So if there are any outsiders around when we’re having a few drinks, he’ll put on some oldies – Tem Morrison, Sinatra, that sort of thing – but what might surprise you is that Winston actually keeps up with pop music. I think it’s from spending time with his grandkids. Anyway, the funniest time we had recently was when he put on Rihanna’s ‘Needed Me’ and danced around pretending to sing the chorus to pictures of Bill English and Jacinda Ardern. Classic Winston!”

Māori Party

Wellington Ukulele Orchestra – ‘Wake Up’

According to multiple sources inside the party, Te Ururoa Flavell and Marama Fox are actively looking for a campaign-related follow-up to last year’s viral sensation – the pair’s ukulele version of ‘Santa Baby’. While our reporting remains inconclusive, we are told that the current front-runner is Aaradhna’s ‘Wake Up’, modelled after a version recorded by the Wellington Ukulele Orchestra which has been dominating the office stereo. We can’t wait to hear it.

TOP

Beyonce – ‘Love on TOP’

Evidence shows that Beyonce is amazing, so it’s no surprise that a deep cut on her now-overlooked album 4 is getting played a lot in one of Gareth Morgan’s empty houses/campaign headquarters according to a “well-connected” supporter with a Bernie Sanders avi and an ‘Uber but for craft beer’ start-up. “Love is a metaphor for evidence-based policy @top_nz @garethmorgan #nzpol,” the supporter tweeted at the Spinoff.

ACT

The Beatles – ‘Taxman’

A Young ACT member, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of jeopardising a possible number two list placing in the 2020 election, tells the Spinoff that when David Seymour gets excited he likes to put on the Beatles’ ‘Taxman’ and sing along enthusiastically with his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up. “’See – even hippies hate paying tax!’ he tells us during Paul McCartney’s scorching guitar solo.”

Bob Dylan – ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’

“A week or so ago, the night the 1 News Colmar Brunton poll came out and ACT was on 0.3%, I left for the day and got to my Porsche Cayenne before realising I’d left my car swipe thingy in the office,” the same Young ACT member says. “So I walked in and there was no-one there except David [Seymour] and Beth [Houlbrooke]. They were just sitting there, staring at the floor, listening to the Bob Dylan song my dad used to play when my mum left him for a bit a few years ago.”

United Future

John Cage – 4,33

We tried to find someone in the United Future campaign who would talk to us off the record, but with no success. We couldn’t actually find a campaign per se. After Bill English all but guaranteed Peter Dunne’s return to parliament by pulling out of the Ōhāriu electorate, it appears that the election is effectively over for Dunne and his United Future party which, at 0.1-0.2% in the polls, appears not to have much of a future beyond Peter Dunne at all. Failing to find someone to talk to us about Dunne’s listening habits, we drove out to United Future’s campaign headquarters and, peering through the window, found nothing there but an unattended desktop computer from the early-’00s.

This is the second annotated Election Playlist in an occasional series: Read the first, Jacinda Ardern’s complete set list from her legendary Laneway Festival DJ gig, here.

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Pop CultureAugust 9, 2017

Review: Tacoma is soft sci-fi, in the best way

Sam Brooks

Contributing writer

Sam Brooks reviews the latest from Gone Home hitmaker Fullbright: a meander through an abandoned space station called Tacoma.

If you hated Gone Home, stop reading this now. You’re not good enough for these words and you should go and learn how to get feelings from your videogames like a good honest nerd who also gets feelings from their tabletop games and their comic books. Then come back and read this review, you dead inside corpse-man.

If you loved Gone Home, also stop reading this. You should go play Tacoma right now. Go and live in that game for the two-to-three hours it immerses you in a world and a group of characters that feel real.

If you don’t fall into either of these groups, keep on reading.

The new game from Fullbright, the company who brought you Gone Home, takes that game’s notorious slow-and-deep focus on an empty house and the troubled family unit that lives there, and applies it to a space station in the far-enough future in Tacoma. You play a character who has to investigate what went down at a now-abandoned space station, interfacing with the AI, investigating the quarters and replaying events from the days leading up to it being abandoned.

As you would assume, because this is a video game and a piece of fiction, things are not all they seem on the space station. What the game actually ends up being about is figuring out what everyone on the space station is up to, diving into troubled pasts and even more troubled presents, and slowly piecing together how these particular personalities vacated the station.

More often than not, the gameplay consists of walking around the station, which has a gorgeous design that splits the difference between System Shock’s obvious horror and Mass Effect’s 80s sci-fi homage. You come across scenes and events played out not by actual people but by hazily rendered shapes and full voice-acting, and piece together more information. Sometimes the game throws an easily surpassable roadblock in your way, like a literal locked door. It’s usually as easy as rewinding a scene to find out what code a character put into that door, but it’s enough gameplay to make you feel like there’s a genuine investigation going on and like you’re not just pressing play on a bunch of scenes.

The meat of the game is actually teasing out little details, like medical officer Serah’s anxiety when she’s by herself and her complete brave face for the crew, and the semi-covert relationship between network engineer Nat and mechanical engineer Berta. Calling it character-driven implies there’s sense of momentum behind the game; this is more character-dwelling. Every now and then you get a chance to see what the crew’s personal quarters are like, and these little scenelets end up being the most humanising parts of the entire game, whether it’s the commanding officer EV playing ‘Is That All There Is’ by herself in her room or the upsettingly poetic Andrew trying to get better at video games in his room.

Tacoma isn’t telling a big story, and it’s not trying to. Like much science fiction, it ends up touching on the relationships between humans and AI, and our continued reliance on technology. More interesting, it spends some time on how technology and business intersect, and the humanity that’s lost when that happens.The crew members stuck on the Tacoma are flailing as much against the bureaucracy that kept them there as workers as they are now the shit is going down.

Where the game is most impressive is the details it gives to its characters. In this way it takes a lot of inspiration from its spiritual predecessor, Gone Home. But where Gone Home relied almost entirely on found documents like letters and other little documents, Tacoma gets a lot out of hazy re-enactments of events. A big part of the gameplay is coming upon scenes that slowly advance the plot, like the crew members figuring out what to do in their pretty dire situation

It’s not a perfect game – the pacing of the game is a little bit off and the plot resolves itself in a jarringly similar way that Gone Home did, removing the stakes we’ve been given and tying everything up in a neat bow. But as with Gone Home, the great strength of Tacoma is the way it gives us a cast of characters and a tense situation, and then diving into how these characters respond to that situation.

That seems like damning a game with faint praise, but in a games industry where well-observed characters increasingly feel like they’re far and few between – and believable, engaging plots even rarer – a game like Tacoma is a welcome treat. We’re invested in these characters in the short time we get to spend with them, and they feel enough like real people (or at least approximations of the same) to feel compelling. These are just six people trying to get by at work; they throw parties, they forget their PINs, they hate their corporate bosses.

E.V St James plays a bad rendition of Is That All There Is.

This relatability is helped along by some of the best voice-acting I’ve heard in a video game in a long time. The way these people talk and interact feels like a group of people who have spent way too long together and knows the ins and outs of each others rhythms. Again, it seems like I’m damning with faint praise, but it’s amazing how many triple-A video games can’t even get this right.

This all speaks well for Fullbright’s future, and it makes me want to see them do a bigger game with this same attention to detail and Real Human Problems™, one with a wider scope and the thematic material that they’ve clearly got the chops to deal with. These two games tap into something unique that video games let us do – allowing us to dig around in somebody’s life and psyche to figure out how they tick. In real life this is reserved for conversations or maybe Facebook stalking, but there’s something gratifying (and maybe also problematic) about turning an investigation into a person’s life – their damage, what makes them tick – into gameplay, even gameplay that is as loosely ‘gamey’ as this one is. It’s what Fullbright does best, and is doing better than anybody else on the market. I have a feeling the Fullbright style will eventually have a profound impact on gaming, helping to change how we engage with video games and the people who inhabit them.

But for now, Tacoma’s a perfectly pleasant and even alarmingly affecting meander through the lives of some relatably complicated people stuck on a damn spaceship, and that’s a beautiful thing.

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