Well, I've written so much about the Sopranos, I have to write about the ending just to wrap things up. You see, I'm not David Chase. I think that things should have some kind of clear cut closing. So here's my final take on the Sopranos: I'm done with it. I had intended to buy the full series box set. Now I want nothing to do it. Seriously. I'm not watching the show again for a long, long while.

The non-ending ending was absolutely terrible. David Chase insists that he didn't come up with this "ending" to mess with fans. And many a critic are giving Chase heaps of praise because he left it open for fans to interpret or choose their own ending.

First off, no one ever claimed that a Choose Your Own Adventure book was great literature. It may be fun, but it's not great. The Sopranos was supposed to be great television. In some people's minds (including mine for a while) it was the best television show ever made. If you truly want to be respected as a great writer, you have to know how to close out your series. So if the point of the hard cut to black and rolling the credits was to allow all of us to come to our own ending, then you, Mr. David Chase, are not a great writer. You might be a very good one, but you are not a great one. The stories we remember, have endings we remember. They have plot lines that are explained. If George Lucas cut to black right before Darth Vader said, "Luke I am your father" what kind of story would that be? If NBC cut to black after Michael Jordan shook Bryon Russell before we saw the shot go in, what kind of story would we have? David Chase's non-ending, if it was made to give us a means to decide on our own what happened to Tony, it should lead us all to the conclusion that David Chase is not the television god that we all thought for so many years. Critics should stop giving him praise for that.

Now the other option is that the ending is littered with clues and that the diehard, observant viewer can figure out what happened. I'm too angry at the show and go back and look myself. There are supposed clues like a talk between Tony and Bobby earlier in the series where Tony says when you get shot, everything just goes black. Supposedly the cub scouts in the diner in the last scene were also in the train store when Bobby got shot. Sure. That's fine. But an obtuse ending is not how any of major character story lines have wrapped up in this series. And certainly nothing this cryptic.

My thoughts can't even come together really when I think about this ending. It makes me so mad. So I'm going to wrap this uphere and maybe come back to it. But don't hold your breath on that.

There are times...


Sometimes, when you're feeling down, angry, or depressed, all it takes is one good song. To get over the Sopranos fiasco, I found a song that instantly made me happy. This one is a new take on an old classic.

I had always been a fan of Common's "The Light" off of his Like Water for Chocolate album. However, while digging for more records, I discovered that San Fran hip hop MC/producer Kero One had remixed "The Light." It is an absolutely fantastic remix. Kero's usual light jazz/funk instrumentation seems perfectly suited with Common's rhyme patterns. The original version of "The Light" still remains a hip hop classic (and absolutely deadly weapon for mix tapes, especially tapes for the ladies). But Kero's remix seems to go in just enough of a different direction to make you feel like it could be it's own song, without sacrificing the genius of the original. And that's exactly what a good remix should do.

I've ripped the audio from a YouTube video Kero made. Watch the video. Take the low quality mp3 with you. And go buy the 12" from Turntable Lab. The Badu and Outkast remixes are absolute quality as well. I cannot wait for that record to get here.

Common - The Light (Kero One Remix)