Atlanta season 1's sweetest move was an old 30 Rock move: it never tried to sell Paper Boi as God's gift to the trap scene

This is the first of 12 or 13 blog posts that will be posted on a monthly basis from now until this blog's final post in December 2017.

I was skeptical about Donald Glover's Atlanta when FX first announced in 2014 that it picked up Glover's creation, his first TV series since his departure from Community, the offbeat cult favorite where he continually killed it each week as Troy Barnes, a high-school football star trying (and failing) to suppress his nerdy side (like that time when Troy, in what has to be my favorite acting moment from Glover on Community, was so excited to be in the presence of his childhood hero LeVar Burton that he turned catatonic). A half-hour comedy about a trap rapper and his manager cousin trying to get by in the rap game? Disquieting visions of "Entourage for the Atlanta trap scene" danced in my head when FX first hyped Atlanta. The world doesn't need another half-hour piece of boring lifestyle porn where the lead characters constantly bang anything that breathes in the most opulent of settings and the storyline with the biggest stakes would be "Is Vince Paper Boi doing or not doing the movie A3C?"

Another disquieting vision I had was that Atlanta was going to be a weekly half-hour ad for Glover's musical career as Childish Gambino. Glover is a good example of an actor/rapper whose beats, frequently provided by Community and Creed score composer Ludwig Göransson, are solid, but his bars leave a lot to be desired. I was never a fan of Gambino's corny verses about his Asian fetish.

Gotta have fetishized at least 3 asian chicks before u can really appreciate Childish Gambino's music

— Desus Nice (@desusnice) October 31, 2013

I caught up on Atlanta season 1 on FX on demand, about a few weeks after the season concluded, during a couple of breaks between chapters for a manuscript I've been working on since August (chapters that I, by the way, ended up having to delete from the manuscript because I found myself thinking, "This material isn't gonna work as a YA novel anymore. A Jim Rockford-type Pinoy should be the audience surrogate, not a precocious Richie Brockelman-type Pinoy," so I got rid of all the teenage characters). Atlanta, which took home the Best Comedy Series and Best Actor in a Comedy trophies at the Golden Globes earlier this month, exceeded my expectations. As a half-hour single-camera comedy about the rap game, thankfully, it's more Taxi than Entourage.

Sure, Atlanta is frequently funny (three words: secret revolving wall), but Glover and his writing staff's brand of humor is tinged with Taxi-style melancholy, particularly about how working-class adult life often feels like you're running in circles. That melancholy reflects Glover's belief, as he once said during a 2016 Television Critics Association press tour panel, that "you watch Master of None and it's a very optimistic look at millennialism, [but] I'm pessimistic about it. I feel like we kind of fucked up."

There's nothing lifestyle-porny about Atlanta. Neither are there any moments of blatant product placement for Awaken, My Love!, the surprise Gambino album Glover dropped one month after the Atlanta season finale, save for a cameo by the Awaken, My Love! cover artwork on a bookshelf in the "Juneteenth" episode. The non-rap Awaken, My Love! is also the first-ever Gambino release I've genuinely liked from start to finish, aside from whatever the fuck Bino was doing with his voice during "California."

The show is an exploration of, as Joshua Rivera put it in GQ, "the stress and pain of being broke," particularly when that broke-ass person is both a creative and a POC, like Earn Marks, Glover's Ivy League dropout character, and, to a lesser extent, his cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), a.k.a. the trap rapper known as Paper Boi (not to be confused with Paperboy, who recorded the 1992 one-hit wonder "Ditty"), who's more economically stable than Earn, thanks to income from drug dealing, but he's not exactly on the level of Future/Gucci Mane-type wealth yet. "Ballin," singer/songwriter Bibi Bourelly's current ode to finding ways to "treat yo'self" when your savings account is empty, could be an unofficial theme song for the daily hustle of either Earn, who becomes Alfred's manager, or teaching assistant Van (Zazie Beetz), Earn's ex and the mother of his baby daughter (I wouldn't be surprised if Bourelly's extremely relatable song surfaces on Atlanta during its second season, which is currently scheduled to air in 2018, partly due to Glover's upcoming gig as young Lando Calrissian).

What happens when you mix DJ Snake & Lil Jon with motion-stabilized Star Trek? (You win the Internet.)

One reason why I used to like glimpsing behind-the-scenes footage of Star Trek: The Next Generation on entertainment news shows in the '90s was because I got to see--from the news cameraman's point of view--what the actors looked like when they shook themselves around on the Enterprise-D bridge or shuttlecraft sets for scenes where the ship was under attack. Without the dramatic camera tilts, the actors looked goofier than Justin Bieber in an oversized baseball cap he stole from Pharrell's hat shop. All that flailing around (without the aid of those massive hydraulic gimbals that the crews of The Hunt for Red October and Crimson Tide were able to afford in order to believably simulate submarine motion) is a huge part of Star Trek acting, which Brent Spiner once described during one of those entertainment news shows as "a cross between Shakespeare and flying around the house with a towel around your neck."

Nowadays, there's motion stabilization software that can take the final versions of Star Trek battle scenes, remove the camera tilts and make those scenes look just like those old behind-the-scenes EPK clips of Star Trek actors shimmying around like crazy-looking white people in a B-52's video. The results of Star Trek getting motion-stabilized are being posted on a subreddit called Star Trek Stabilized. Somebody on YouTube must have noticed that the Star Trek actors' movements without the camera-shaking closely resemble the slo-mo'd thrashing around and twerking during the insane video for the DJ Snake/Lil Jon trap hit "Turn Down for What," which was directed by the Daniels (a.k.a. directors Daniel Kwan, the dancer whose crotch has a life of its own in the video, and Daniel Scheinert).



Now that anonymous somebody has taken Star Trek Stabilized .gifs and mashed them up with "Turn Down for What." The shit is perfect.



All that's missing from "Turn Down for Spock" is the sight of Data yelling "Yeaaah!" and "What!" Lil Jon is the black Jerry Lewis (I keep expecting to hear him yell out "Flavin!" in the middle of a track), and Holodeck Joe Piscopo once taught Data how to do a Jerry Lewis impression, so Data would be Lil Jon/Jerry Lewis in this situation. (Of course, like a lot of soundtrack album collectors, a lot of Star Trek heads are musically narrow-minded, "get off my Salam grass lawn" types who don't understand either trap or the "Turn Down for Spock" video's references to the Daniels' video, so they leave annoying YouTube comments under the "Turn Down for Spock" video like "Music ruined it for me" and "Great compilation, but the soundtrack is crap.")

One of the .gifs in "Turn Down for Spock" is a clip from a Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan battle scene. The title of the classic James Horner score cue during that particular battle scene is "Surprise Attack."



"Surprise Attack" isn't currently in rotation on "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H" on AFOS. But a bunch of other Star Trek II score cues are part of those AFOS blocks, including an alternate version of the Star Trek II epilogue cue that contains neither music Horner had to add at the last minute because of reshoots nor audio of Leonard Nimoy's voiceover (of what is now stupidly known as the Captain's Oath), and that alternate version is worthy of Spock's favorite adjective of "fascinating."