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“Usually, People Get Paid for Endorsements, Right?”

I sure as hell won’t miss getting requests to participate in articles where you list all of the Marvel NOW! books you’re looking forward to and why. Oh, not a rundown of all of the titles and what you think of each. No, just what books you’re looking forward to! Because it’s a fun article! And it’s only fun when it’s positive and pretty flowers and free advertising for the largest comic publisher in North America! I don’t know if I’d like it more or less if money had been offered. I guess getting paid to participate in an article like that would be more honest. I mean, it’s a fucking ad for a bunch of comics — an endorsement! And, usually, people get paid for endorsements, right? Then again, it’s not like this is Marvel asking that this article happen, it’s just something that someone came up with, because it’s a ‘fun idea.’ How sad is that… ‘Fun’ equals ‘free promotion.’ Not actual balanced content — not even the illusion of it. Hey, if you genuinely love something, then shout it from the roof. I’ve never shied away from that. But, this… this is shilling pure and simple. Sucking Marvel’s cock and pretending it’s journalism.

From here, where Chad Nevett writes about his decision to step back from writing for The Comics Internet and explains why. He’s not wrong, but I’m still surprised that this saw print on ComicBookResources itself, simply because it’s… I don’t know, pulling back the curtain a little bit too much for comfort, maybe? I can’t imagine that there aren’t as many CBR writers who’d see this and think “I am a sell out” as there will be people reading it and thinking “I KNEW IT!” (This isn’t just something that is restricted to CBR, by the way; Newsarama and iFanboy and other comic sites do it just as much, too. And, yes, I write for many of these comic sites, and I sometimes contribute to this type of thing, for the purposes of full disclosure). Nonetheless, I’m really glad he wrote it; I think it’s smart and passionate and needed to be said by someone who actually has experience in this field. I just wonder what the reaction will be, both privately and publicly, is all.

…Somewhere in my head are thoughts about “fun articles” and positivity and the way in which they do serve a purpose beyond shilling or cowering to publishers/creators/whatever, but they’re nowhere near well-formed enough to actually write into anything coherent yet. One day. I still have to write about being on television last week, too.

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366 Songs 304: The Imperial March

What can I say? It seemed appropriate for a day when people lose their shit over Lucasfilm being bought by Disney and a new Star Wars movie was announced, instead of, you know, continuing to lose their shit about a hurricane – Sorry, “super storm” – decimating the East Coast. But, putting aside the timeliness and the “Really, Internet? Really?” nature of things, there’s no getting away from the fact that John Williams’ “Imperial March” is kind of a spectacular piece of music. Even if it wasn’t amazingly evocative and nostalgic for anyone who’s seen the original Star Wars trilogy, there’s such a narrative power in this music: You listen to it, and you can hear an epic grandeur, a militaristic element and a growing intensity – The bit at 2:49! – throughout, and you can imagine a story, even if it’s not necessarily the story of Star Wars. Williams is famous for his well-known themes to Star Wars, Superman and Indiana Jones amongst many others, but it’s this piece of music that will always make me love his work without any doubt.

Poh, hee. Poh, hee.

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What Are Our Tote Bag Rewards?

Actually raising money is only part of the challenge with Kickstarter, which has to approve a project in the first place. The Amicos’ first Kickstarter campaign pitch last winter was rejected because the rewards they proposed — the special add-on that donors gets based on the amount they donate — weren’t good enough. (Update: Kickstarter’s Justin Kazmark emailed me after this article went up to say that the first proposal wasn’t rejected per se. “Someone from our team suggested they just give more thought to their rewards before launching,” he said.) This time around, awards varied from donors names being published in a “thank you” post ($10 or more) to getting the Homicide Watch team to guest-teach a class or lecture ($5,000 or more).

“Kickstarter is an odd fit for journalism in many ways,” Laura said. “The symptom of that to me is that rewards are so problematic. Public media does tote bags. Tote bags even have nothing to do with what you’re actually producing, which is the point of Kickstarter. It doesn’t have anything to do with the product we’re offering, necessarily.”

From here.

I have a weird fascination with crowdfunding, and especially the idea of crowdfunding what I do, which is journalism, I guess. Discovering that people have successfully done it already is oddly comforting, to be honest.

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366 Songs 303: Dolphins

Terry Callier died this weekend. I never really knew his work, but this duet with Beth Orton, covering Fred Neil’s “Dolphins,” remains one of my favorite recordings ever made; there’s something about his vocals in here, how comforting, how rich and warm they sound. Orton’s own vocals dance around Callier’s; he grounds the performance, and provides the world for her to return to.

I love “Dolphins,” as a song, but often find the performances from various artists to be disappointing. Even Neil’s original doesn’t sound quite “right,” somehow. There’s something about the interplay of Callier and Orton’s voices, about the folk/jazz accompaniment (Those vibes!) that backs them up, that fulfills the song’s potential as nothing else I’ve heard actually managed. Maybe I should hunt down Callier’s earlier catalog and see what other favorites he worked his magic on, as well.

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366 Songs 302: Sharp Darts

Mike Skinner is, let’s be honest, a kind of terrible rapper. He stumbles and mumbles over his delivery, and he sounds as embarrassed by what he’s saying as confident, more often than not. Despite that – because of that? – “Sharp Darts” is kind of wonderful. It’s an ugly, ungainly track, with the beat as stumbling as Skinner’s vocals, a musical bull in a china shop that’s not in the slightest bit worried about crashing into things or being polite. It’s also funny: “This one’s fat like your mother/Contains enough calories” is such a juvenile moment, it’s ridiculous, but I love that it’s in there nonetheless.

This isn’t a track that wants to make you dance, or admire the lyrical prowess; it’s a track of selfishness and brutishness, of a particular mindset that really doesn’t give a fuck, and at 1:34, it’s short enough that you find yourself wanting to listen again when it’s over, to double-check that it actually happened like you remember. “Shut up, I’m the driver/You’re the passenger.”

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What Does The Troll Want?

Is the troll engaging in bigoted speech in order to call out, and therefore subvert, genuine expressions of bigotry? Is the troll attempting to make a larger claim about sensationalist corporate media? Is the troll merely a racist or misogynist who hides behind trollings. Is the troll engaging in bigoted speech in order to call out, and therefore subvert, genuine expressions of bigotry? Is the troll attempting to make a larger claim about sensationalist corporate media? Is the troll merely a racist or misogynist who hides behind trolling as a way to distance him or herself from his or her own beliefs? Some combination of the three? Something else entirely? Regardless of the insights these sorts of questions might yield, it is critical to acknowledge that the troll’s reasoning — what they really think about a given subject — is ultimately less important than the effects his or her behaviors have. Put simply, whether or not the troll “really” hates women, for example, doesn’t matter if the targeted women feel hated as a way to distance him or herself from his or her own beliefs? Some combination of the three? Something else entirely? Regardless of the insights these sorts of questions might yield, it is critical to acknowledge that the troll’s reasoning — what they really think about a given subject — is ultimately less important than the effects his or her behaviors have. Put simply, whether or not the troll “really” hates women, for example, doesn’t matter if the targeted women feel hated.

From here. I have such an odd relationship with trolls, and the purposes of trolling; I can’t help but feel that there really is some value to trolling, sometimes, as weird as that sounds.

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366 Songs 301: Ain’t That Love

I was reading something, somewhere, recently about the way that gospel audiences were appalled by what they saw as the sexual nature of Ray Charles’ vocals in early releases; it was a strange moment for me, because I came to Charles at the end of his career where the innuendo one grunt could have was nothing compared with the tales the man had built up around himself, but listening to this early single, it make a bit more sense. “Ain’t That Love,” after all, has a very gospel structure with the call-and-response to it, something really emphasized by the tambourine, oddly enough. You listen to this and you can imagine a younger Charles singing songs of devotion amongst the faithful and raising spirits as well as temperatures with each note.

(I love the chasteness of this song, too; “Oh, when you walk/I wanna walk with you” Charles says, asking “Ain’t that love?” and it is, albeit a particularly innocent, amusingly desexual idea of it.)

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366 Songs 300: Stacked Actors

“Stacked Actors” shouldn’t work as a song, I think everytime I listen to it; it’s a car-crash of rock cliches, from the feedback that starts it to the scream before the guitar solo, and including the faux-lounge rock of the verses that sounds as much as anything like UK act Terrorvision’s appalling “Tequila” from the 1990s:

And yet, it does. Is it the intensity of Dave Grohl’s vocals (For some reason, when his voice cracks on “truth” in the “All I want is the truth” at 3:39, that always gets me), or the lyrics that go from sly (“God bless/What a sensitive mess/But things aren’t always what they seem”) to outright bitter (“Stack dead actors/Stacked to the rafters/Line up the bastards/All I want is the truth”) and back to sly again (“We cry when they all dye blonde”)? Is it that the stomp of the chorus, heralded by that burst of feedback, is irresistible in a way that was later harnessed by “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes?

The answer may be all of the above, together with the fact that we want to like this song; there’s something weirdly underdoggish about it, and about the Foo Fighters in general. For triumphant rock, it’s particularly untriumphant and submissive, and there’s something appealing about that. It’s music that rages against a celebrity machine that it’s complicit in, and yet the contradiction oddly works in its favor. I’ve never quite worked out how they managed to pull that trick off, but it’s definitely a good one.

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366 Songs 299: 3030

A true story: Years and years and decades ago, when rap first started appearing on British radio and the pop charts, I remember my dad being weirdly excited about the potential of the genre; he talked about it being a way to make poetry more accessible to young people, and the ways in which it was really just spoken word performance coming alive again. That lasted… ehh, months, at best? And then he defaulted to the old man position of it being noise, not people singing just talking, and the like, for the rest of his life. He was won over by the conservative position and the fear of a culture alien to him, depressingly.

I always think about that when listening to “3030,” or any track from the Deltron 3030 album. Del tha Funkee Homosapien’s performance on these tracks feels like something that may have convinced my dad to default to his earlier position. There is poetry here, smart and funny and wonderfully strong in the way it introduces and evolves narrative while still working as individual tracks for the casual listener. It’s wonderfully complex and evocative, helped along by the grandiose production of Dan the Automator, who provides wonderfully grandiose music to act as backdrop, pushing memories of epic science fiction space operas and classic classical music to the forefront with the orchestral and choral sweep of the whole thing.

I never got to play Deltron 3030 for my dad; I have no idea whether he would have gotten it or not. But I like to pretend that he would, even so.

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366 Songs 298: Doing The Do

“It’s me again/Yes, how did you guess?”

There is little as weirdly comedic, with hindsight, as late 1980s/early 1990s crossover rap music. Today, “Doing the Do” sounds ridiculous, like some amateur idea of what dance music should sound like with all the vocal “Ooh Ooh” samples and particularly synthetic instumentation. Back when this was released, though, this song was awesome. I remember the fifteen year old me fancying Betty Boo herself, and thinking that this was a great little pop song (I still love the “I’m sorry/If I upset ya” bit, I have to admit) that was wonderfully contemporary, a feeling brought on, I’m sure, by said crush. I was wrong, but to my credit, Betty eventually got to pop nirvana with later releases: