Time is both the best friend and worst enemy of art. Culture shifts and morphs daily into new language and new modes of expression, and the voice of the past either becomes timeless or unintelligible in tandem. Author David Lindsay was no one in the 1920s while he was still publishing. He was thirty years dead by the time his hallucinatory novel A Voyage to Arcturus was celebrated by academia. Alternatively, Our American Cousin was considered great comedy and great theater a century and a half back. Today, you’d be hard pressed to understand what the damn script even means. Enduring works persist for a number of reasons. They speak to an unchanging facet of human experience (love, loss, etc.) or they stay durable through sheer architectural integrity, perfect examples of their medium (I can find no other reason why people continue to read Melville.) Sometimes, though, art survives as a time capsule, something that takes a place and a time, no matter how insignificant, and preserves it.
Crazy Taxi, in its American Dreamcast release, is the millennial turn preserved in digital amber. More than even the early editions of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Crazy Taxi’s character models, its Offspring-laden mall-punk soundtrack, the growling “extreme” announcer and its pigeon-LA and San Francisco are a pitch-perfect distillation of pop-consumer culture in 2000. Its presentation is complimented by manic arcade-style driving, a kinetic representation of pre-war American tastes at the end of the ‘90s. It holds up too, fun despite comparing poorly to more dynamic contemporaries like Burnout Paradise; if you drive into a wall, you bounce off of it instead of watching a complex physics engine realistically crumple your taxicab. Burnout is a fitting counterpoint; while Crazy Taxi is concerned only with driving at top speed and bright colors, Burnout’s most visceral moments are during crashes, when everything is slowed to a stop, color becomes washed out, and the game halts to focus on destruction.
Of course, that’s just one argument. What do you say, reader?
More Yeah, But Is It Art?:
It Will Never Be the Same
Oh, wait, it’s already art.
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