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This originally appeared in The Declaration on 9 February 2006.

Maybe it’s the nostalgia. Maybe the primary colors fried our brains. Maybe we’re hiding from a geopolitical order in which everyone acts like they’re six-year-olds by remembering our six-years-old selves. Or maybe it’s the realization that we can’t play these new-fangled games with their four shoulder buttons and their analog sticks and their three-dimensional gameplay. For whatever reason, the original NES has been experiencing a cultural revival these past few years. Sure, the scope of that revival has ranged from the dorky (Nintendo controller belt buckles) to the kitschy (an emo band named after the Konami code). But the best part is all the attention being paid to those 8-bit soundtracks of our youth.

Because let’s face it: those songs were good. Limited to such a small range of options to make the background music—a handful of Midi tracks, and that’s it—the composers of the 8-bit era managed to make songs that the geekier among us still hum from time to time. Take the Mario theme, or the opening track from the Legend of Zelda. Awesome, right? Those short melodic hooks work so well that they’re still influencing game music today, even with the 32-bit sound that the Playstation and Xbox can throw out.

So what the Advantage do is take those songs and cover them with a live band. They’re not the only guys that do this; the Minibosses, from Phoenix, do essentially the same thing, have been doing it longer, and cover Ninja Gaiden. The difference is that The Advantage cover everything from Mario to Contra to Metroid to Double Dragon III, and they’ve got the guitarist from Hella (though he plays the drums). The Minibosses are a wee bit looser in their songs, giving their tracks a bit of a punk rock, let?s-crowd-surf-with-our-power-pad vibe; the Advantage replicate the songs more faithfully, with a couple of weird time signatures and a math rock accuracy ’cause, hey, it’s the dude from Hella.

Given that math rock is essentially making Nintendo songs with stranger time signatures, it’s amazing it took until last year for The Advantage to release their first, self-titled album. That one focused on the games that everyone played: the Mario themes, the Zelda dungeon (they had the decency to leave the overworld theme—quite possibly the best video game song of all time—well enough alone). The new album, Elf-Titled, takes quite a few of its tracks from obscure games you might not have played. But that’s fine, since the songs are still awesome. “Batman—Stage One” doesn’t sound like any of the Batman movies, but the bassline is so rocking that you won?t care. You probably never played The Guardian Legend (but you should), but “Corridor 1″ hurtles you through space just like it should. And I swear that “Duck Tales —Moon” was ripped off by Slash for “Sweet Child O? Mine,” but that’s probably all in my head.

Sure, the element of nostalgia counts for a lot—it’s great to suddenly hear the Kraid boss music from Metroid, for example, or level five of Double Dragon II. But that alone wouldn’t make this a good album. The performances are amazing, but good musicianship doesn’t make an album, either. It’s the songwriting that makes it rock, regardless of how much time you spent in front of the TV with a controller in hand.

The one problem with the album is that, depending on the mood you’re in, the songs might get a little repetitive. But it’s a testament to the quality of The Advantage that that rarely happens, even when the theme they’re drawing from is just ten or fifteen seconds long. And much more often, it creates the trancelike state that you used to hit with these games. It’s good for paper writing. Or for dancing like an idiot. Or for playing old-school video games with the TV on mute. Nostalgia for 8-bit music only goes so far.

This originally appeared in The Declaration on 2 February 2006.

Some animals are more equal than others: At first blush, one might think George Saunders’ new novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, is just a political allegory for early twenty-first century America. There’s the vaguely fascistic despot, Phil, who (a) speaks best when his brain is removed from his head, (b) responds to violence with greater violence, (c) takes the presidency of his country by undemocratic means, (d) enforces loyalty oaths on his constituents and (e) steals every last resource of a bordering nation. There’s the populace who follow his every decree enthusiastically, eating up the drivel he spouts about their great nation. And there’s the “media”—three guys with bullhorns—who try desperately to report on all these actions, but instead have a case of ADHD and like to talk out their anuses. Sound like any country you know?

Like that other political allegory against totalitarianism that you might have read back in high school, Saunders uses simple language and distinctly inhuman characters to get his point across. Where Orwell used animals to obvious effect (the animals most in favor of the socialization of the farm are, ahem, the sheep), Saunders characters don’t even seem alive. One Inner Hornerite consists of a tuna can, a belt buckle, a blue dot and some connecting parts; another resembles a bald letter C with antlers and side vents to breathe. The Outer Hornerites are as odd, with a presidential advisor who is just a mirror with shady eyes.

The plot is just as insistently abstract. Inner Horner is completely surrounded by the nation of Outer Horner, and it’s only big enough to hold one of it’s citizens at a time. The other citizens wait outside, in an area termed the “Short Term Residency Zone.” When Inner Horner shrinks, stranding the occupying citizen in Outer Horner, all hell breaks loose. The Outer Hornerites tax the Inner Hornerites within an inch of their lives, there’s a coup, and everything the Inner Hornerites do is suddenly interpreted as an attack.

Considering how weird all of this is, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is probably Saunders’ most immediately accessible work. The language is simple and the characters seem to have a fairly one-to-one relationship to reality. There are no ghosts, no children with memory implants that speak in a denatured English—just what appears to be a simplistic allegory about the state of democracy in America today. There’s nothing as seriously challenging as the stories in Pastoralia or CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. The entire book can be read in about forty-five minutes, and re-read faster if you’re on deadline.

But as the story continues, it starts to resist these easy comparisons. Saunders writes conclusions to his stories that do more than simply resolve the plot, happy ending or not. He often includes a twist at the end—not a “Finally I can sit and read all of these books oh no my glasses broke!” type of twist, but a more subtle one that forces the reader to reconsider his or her assumptions about what has come before. Slowly, the one-to-one correspondence between Phil and that guy about ninety miles from here falls apart. Another nation, Greater Keller, is introduced: Greater Keller launches an attack to force regime change in Outer Horner; they measure their national wealth through a statistic called the National Life Enjoyment Index Score. Sound like any country you know?

Unfortunately, if you’re reading for the politics, this will probably be a case of too little, too late. By this point, we’re already two-thirds of the way through the book. Saunders’ blurring of the lines doesn’t really add anything to a reader?s understanding of the characters, who remain mostly interchangeable. It doesn’t affect the plot at all, since an even bigger deus ex machina is soon in coming. What it does do is change the point of the allegory considerably: The book’s not against totalitarianism (well, yeah, okay, it is), it’s not against communism or capitalism or anything so crass. It’s an argument against partisan violence that?s as true in this country as any other. Every satirist is an idealist at heart, after all.

There’s a problem with all of this, however. It’s that reading The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil as allegory is so reductive that it erases everything someone should be reading fiction for. The allegory’s just there to enhance the humor, really: when one realizes that the media folk have a mouth by their ass, it’s so over-the-top that one can’t help but laugh. When Phil wins over the Outer Hornerites by a “stentorian” speech after his brain falls out, the chuckle that follows is just as involuntary. The novella contains a comic universe that’s only funnier because of its odd intersections with reality. (Which is really the definition of satire, after all.)

It helps that Saunders is able to free his prose from the constraints of reality, too; there’s nothing to keep the words on the page, and it flows from laughter to anger to just pretty in a matter of a few sentences. On an uninhabited part of Outer Horner, he writes that it was “a lush verdant zone where cows’ heads grew out of the earth shouting sarcastic things at anyone who passed, which, though lush and verdant, was unpopulated because the cows’ sarcasm was so withering.” There are illustrations, too—always a little odd in an “adult” work of fiction—by Benjamin Gibson, but they suit the story quite well. They help the reader imagine the very odd characters that Saunders envisions, and at the same time have an odd beauty all to themselves.

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is a sharp little book—a quick read that won’t change your mind on any of those pressing political issues that divide the nation, but it will keep you chuckling as you go along. It’s not Animal Farm (and thank God for that). It’s a satire that keeps stretching at the boundaries of what satire can do, far more than a condemnation of Bush or Hitler or totalitarianism. Because even if all allegories were equal, some would still be more equal than others.