Panic, etc.
There’s something about the British riots that is very… fake, I want to say, if that makes sense. It’s not, of course; it’s all too real, and horrible in a way that’s genuinely difficult to think about for too long without my head spinning. Sitting here in Portland, reading about cities in the country I came from burning and being destroyed in ways that seem like something out of a bad science fiction film, is a truly surreal experience. It doesn’t seem real, reading about police stations being set alight or people being pulled from motorbikes and rescued by gangs in vans looking to settle scores with the people who were trying to steal the bike. There’s something about reading the tweets and blog updates and the real-time updates like this that brings it closer to reality – the slowness of it, and the detail, perhaps, the fact that it’s not just cutting from major disaster to major diaster non-stop, but that there are moments of quiet and fear and confusion that remind you that there’s no greater plot to be serviced, that this is real life and real life is random in ways that you can’t comfort yourself by counting the moments until the next ad break or whatever.
I think of friends in London, and of places I recognize when they get named as being sites of fights or fires or whatever, and it doesn’t quite settle into my head properly. I’m glad about that, I think; I think if it did, if I really understood what was happening, I’d be terrified and depressed and would fully understand my powerlessness. Reading the news, everything feels as if it’s lighter and easier to fix than it actually is, and there’s something comforting about that misunderstanding.
Comics Random Media: Gerard Jones Jack Kirby Men of Tomorrow
by Graeme
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Some Histories Are Written By The Losers
From Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones:
History is written by the winners – sometimes. But some histories are written by the losers. The history of the comic book has been told by those who got rooked and by those who sympathize with those who got rooked. The men who got rich from them kept their mouths shut. The men who founded the companies, bought the characters, and created the multimedia marketing empires kept their stories to themselves and let the writers and cartoonists write the history.
I’ve been thinking about that quote a lot, recently – Mostly in relation to the news that Disney/Marvel was awarded a summary judgment in the lawsuit filed by the estate of Jack Kirby over the termination of Marvel’s ownership of the characters Kirby created for them. There’s been a groundswell of support for Marvel making some level of reparation to the Kirby family on moral grounds, if not legal ones, following the decision, but what I keep thinking about is the fact that Disney and Marvel, on a corporate level, really don’t care about this matter at all. They get to keep their IP, and couldn’t care less about what the world thinks of them beyond that. History means nothing when compared with today and tomorrow, and the profits available therein.
Stop Making Those Eyes At Me, I’ll Stop Making Those Eyes At You
So much of my musical taste today is shaped by nostalgia of some form or another – Songs that remind me of experiences, people, places, or just what it was like to be a particular age when that song was playing on the radio. My love for the first Arctic Monkeys album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not isn’t any different, in a sense, because it’s almost entirely based on nostalgia, but it’s a fake nostalgia, if that makes sense.
I was too old, too married and too living-in-America to be living the life the songs on the album so vividly describe when it came out, back in… 2006, I think? But it’s a life I can remember, a life that feels like the one I used to live when I was in art school and every Monday and Thursday (and, sometimes, Friday and Saturday) would be spent out with friends at clubs and dancing and trying to pull and the whole thing turning into a blur of mundanity and optimism and hormones and music. What I love about songs like “Red Lights Indicate Doors Are Secured” and “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” isn’t just the spectacular spiky pop music – Seriously, these are songs that make you want to get up and dance with their singalongable melodies and bouncing basslines, even if that just means jumping up and down, pogo-style – but the lyrics, their focus on all the small details of those nights that you remember once someone mentions with a sense of “Of course, that’s what it was like, how could I have forgotten…?”
Whatever People Say I Am is a pretty perfect pop album, short and honest and filled with songs to stick in your head. I didn’t really pay that much attention to the follow-ups, and sometimes regret that, but that feeling is always countered in my head with the idea that what made me fall in love so deeply with the record is something that couldn’t really follow through on any follow-ups: The idea that this was reportage from the front lines, the way life really was. As the band became more and more successful, their lives changed, and any attempt to do the same thing over and over again would’ve seemed forced and fake, and defeated the very thing that I loved so much in the first place.
But this one album? It’s “Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones, but better, for an entire album.
I Seem To Spend My Whole Life Running From People Who Will Be
I know, of course, that Oasis were never the most critically-acceptable band, and that the fall-out of the divorce between the Gallagher brothers so far has been the almost-comically rough Beady Eye album (I really liked the first single, “Bring The Light,” and then the album was horrifically bad), but… I kind of love the debut single from Noel Gallagher’s new project, the hilariously named “Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds” (The song itself is called “The Death of You and Me,” a title you have to wonder whether or not was created to bait the journalists and fans looking for secret messages about the end of Oasis). I don’t know if it’s the pretty melody in the chorus, the brass band, or just the fact that I liked “The Importance Of Being Idle,” an Oasis song that bears a close resemblance to this. But, no matter what the reason, this feels like a nice way to come back: Gentle, melancholy, longing.
For You, I Was A Flame
It feels weird to say that there was something surprisingly upsetting about the news that Amy Winehouse was discovered dead in her apartment this weekend; the word “surprising” suggests that I should’ve have been upset, or that there’s some other kind of reaction I would have hoped to have, neither of which are true. But, nonetheless, it felt like more of a shock that I would’ve thought, perhaps, and I found myself feeling more upset than I normally do, reading about deaths of celebrities, as if it was the death of someone I’d actually met, if that makes sense.
I hadn’t met Amy Winehouse, of course. It’s not like we moved in the same social circles, or even liked on the same continent, so I have no idea why I read the news with such a sense of sadness and the dull ache in my head that felt like I was shutting down some bigger reaction pre-emptively. I was a fan, I’ll happily admit that, but I wasn’t such a fan that I’d done more than enjoy Back to Black and her rare cameo-appearances on songs since then (I love her covers of “Cupid” and “It’s My Party” that appeared on compilations over the last few years). I’d never seen her live, and I found her first album, Frank, pretty disappointing when I searched it out.
But there was something about her, and about her music. She was a mess, yes, but she was so fucking talented – Not just her singing (Although, God, that voice), but her songwriting, too. There was a humor and a sadness there that really stood out, something that demanded you pay attention. I hadn’t noticed them at first, hearing “You Know I’m No Good” for the first time and noticing Mark Ronson’s production and the Dap-Kings’ horns more than Amy herself, but the more I listened to Back to Black, the more obvious it became that these were really, really well-written songs, ones that had more depth than you might’ve suspected, and were the product of a smart writer who’d been around and lived this stuff, and who also knew pop music on some level that can’t be taught.
Even though I love the retro-60s-soul sound of Mark Ronson, my favorite Amy Winehouse song isn’t something that he’s behind; it’s not even a finished version of a song. The original demo of Back to Black‘s “Love Is A Losing Game” lacks the swagger and the sound of the version on the album, but it makes up for it with simplicity and a heartbreaking performance, vocally. Winehouse was only, what, 21, 22 when this was recorded? Imagine what she could’ve been capable of in the future.
But Where Does She Go
Since buying the reissued version of Suede’s 1994 album Dog Man Star last week – and then getting over the realization that said album is almost twenty years old and oh God I am so old – I’ve become weirdly obsessed with the question of why the album wasn’t more influential amongst the musicianati of the world. Don’t get me wrong; I know that the vocals (and the lyrics, most definitely) are things to be left to the drug-fueled ambition of the ’90s, but the music of that version of Suede – the mix of 1970s prog and glam, with pretentious classical steals and guitars permanently turned to “epic” – had a hunger and depth that was never really followed up on in the wash of Britpop that soon overtook the world after DMS came out. Even bands like Rialto and Gene and all those Britfop bands, they wanted to be the Smiths, not Suede, and it took Bernard Butler himself to follow up on some of the threads on the Sound of McAlmont and Butler album, and some of his solo work.
It’s sad; I listen to the music – again, not so much the vocals – of something like “The Asphalt World” and there’s something there that I wish there was more of, even if I can’t properly explain what it is. An echo of some Earth-3 version of the 1970s, played through a scuzzy speaker, trying to escape to happier places.