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366 Songs 187/188: I Was Wrong/You Were Right

These are, officially, two songs despite the fact that they’re obviously meant to be listened to together (Note that the first line of “You Were Right” starts “And you…” as the continuation of the last sentence from “I Was Wrong”). Damon Gough’s musical career has been filled with more than enough missteps and wrong turns than most, and the album that these songs come from (Have You Fed The Fish?) feels like it was the start of that tendency; even in these two songs – specifically “You Were Right,” which is the more substantial of the two – there’s a meandering quality and aimlessness to everything here, underneath the lush strings and excitement of the performance. The song is the musical equivalent of someone telling a story, adding “And then!” after every event, giving the thing a breathlessness and monotony that it doesn’t really deserve. Despite that, though, there’s a nice goodwill to this song, as with most Badly Drawn Boy songs. You want to like it, because it’s nice and you get the idea that Gough is a good guy, under everything.

(Worth pointing out: Gough lifted lines from this song and spun them out into a completely different song on the same album, which is either genius or a sign of creative exhaustion. That other song, “Tickets to What You Need” is also a lot of fun, another of the good songs from Have You Fed The Fish?:

How genuine, I wonder, were the repeated “What’s wrong with me?”s in this song, at the time…?)

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“Unnoticed – or at least Unheeded”

He saw quickly that the indifferent gaze of the Street View camera randomly recorded what he called (in one of the series resulting from this discovery) Unfortunate Events: altercations and accidents, pissings and pukings, fights and fatalities. The Street View cars usually go about their business unnoticed – or at least unheeded – but occasionally people respond to their all-seeing presence by giving them the finger (hence the title of another of Wolf’s series, FY). And so Wolf combed through mile after uneventful mile of boring footage in search of moments that might or might not prove decisive

– Geoff Dyer, writing about the Google Street View-excerpting work of artist Michael Wolf.

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366 Songs 186: I Guess The Lord Must Be In New York City

If you’re thinking “This song sounds really familiar…” then that’s no accident; Harry Nilsson wrote and recorded it as something close to a rip-off of his cover version of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin'”, pretty much. There was a particular reason why, of course: In the early ’70s, the makers of the movie Midnight Cowboy had, apparently, issued something resembling an open call for submissions for its theme song during its post-production phase to replace Nilsson’s version of “Everybody’s Talkin'” – used as musical stand-in during editing – for Academy Award purposes before final release. Hoping to land a lucrative deal with a song he’d actually written, Nilsson created this song to be an as-close-as-dammit contender. For whatever reason, it didn’t take – Also created for this reason, and also discarded, was Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” fact fans – and the moviemakers stuck with “Everybody’s Talkin'” for the final release. From my point of view, it was the wrong choice: I’ve always had this odd relationship with the song “Everybody’s Talkin'” – I’ve kind of liked it, but there’s always been something about it that never quite sat right with me. Thankfully, there’s this song to swoop in and save the day, providing everything I like about the Nilsson version but adding a melody and lyric that I appreciate more. I think it’s the wonderful fall during “Well, here I am Lord, knocking at your back door…” (I can’t hear that part without mentally singing along “bum bum bum BUM”).

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366 Songs 185: Your Reverie

I suspect that the phrase “lo fi” would/should be used in connection with Kelley Stoltz’ music; there’s something charmingly simple and shambolic about it, retro – that riff, for some reason, feels like it could be something from a Beatles song before the days of Rubber Soul – but there’s also a touch of early Elvis Costello in there, especially with the organ in the mix. Originality isn’t the buzzword here; that seems to be “earworm,” like so many of Stoltz’ songs. He’s more of a magpie than a creator, but his thievery is done in such a way that it feels disarming and worthy, in some way.

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Unfinished Writing #23

Here’s something unusual; an unfinished review that was intended for the Savage Critics; it’s been sitting on my laptop for the last few weeks, untouched because I couldn’t find enough time to complete it – I don’t know why I didn’t finish it, it stops midthought, suggesting that something distracted me as I was writing – and, now that the subsequent issue is also a few weeks old, it seemed so untimely that I decided to leave it alone. Instead of just dumping it altogether, though, I thought I’d throw it up here.

It feels as if there’s now some sort of belief, or suspicion, perhaps, amongst comic professionals that in order to get readers and retailers on board with your new series, you essentially have to tell them enough of what the story is that you spoil whatever plot twists may be in the first issue. That’s certainly true of SPIDER-MEN #1, which – in terms of plot – doesn’t get any farther in its first 20 pages that getting Peter Parker and Miles Morales face to face. And yet… that that climactic moment doesn’t have any punch can’t be blamed on spoilers or PR or anything else; the title of the comic, after all, is Spider-Men, the cover features both Peter and Miles swinging together with their masks off (which would happen further on in the story than what’s actually in this first issue), and the recap page at the start introduces both Peter and Miles. The comic itself spoils that final page without breaking a sweat.

And that last page feels like a fudge even beyond that; it’s a full-page splash of Peter and Miles coming face to face, with both figures in the air, Miles quietly saying “No way.” On the one hand, that’s a nice moment – Miles is literally verbalizing what Peter’s inner-monologue had just said twice (But I’ll get back to the problems with repetition later), making the Miles-echoing-Peter-in-choice-of-superhero-identity more explicit – but on the other… Outside of the fact that we as readers and writers have the meta-textual knowledge that this is one Spider-Man meeting another Spider-Man, this shouldn’t actually be a big moment for Peter. After all, he’s met clones before, he’s met fake Spider-Men before… Why would running into someone who’s not even wearing the same costume as he does, who is shorter and has a different body type be anything more than a “Kid, why’re you biting my style?” moment, exactly…? The only way that final page works as a dramatic moment is with the added knowledge of this is the moment you’ve all been waiting for… but that same added knowledge also robs the moment of any power, because this is the moment you’ve all been waiting for, if that makes sense.

Because there’s no “Who’re you?” “I’m Spider-Man!” “No, I’m Spider-Man!” exchange, it means that #2 is forced to carry that scene, which… I don’t know; I find myself feeling as if that we don’t need two issues of a five issue story to get to the “We’re both Spider-Man, oh, I get it” point, you know? If you consider that, thanks to the page count of comics these days, this is going to be a 100 page story (5 issues of 20 pages), then the “first act” of the classic three act structure should be totally done with by page 34 – yet, by page 20, we’ve only really been introduced to Peter Parker and had hints of the two other core characters in the story. That leaves 13 pages or so to (a) introduce Miles Morales, (b) explain that Peter is now in an alternate universe – Something, that, again, shouldn’t phase him that much considering everything else he’s even done, but I suspect will because otherwise how will the readers know that this story is supposed to be important? – and (c ) presumably allow both heroes to put together that Mysterio has something to do with all of this. Somehow, I don’t really see all of that happening, do you…?

The feeling that this first issue is poorly paced isn’t helped by the fact that Bendis’ Peter Parker is so frustrating, offering schtick instead of characterization. Bendis’ monologue for Parker is horrifically written; unsubtle (It’s full of things like “I am including the part where my life seems to be in constant danger by elaborately themed costumed crazies. And the part where, no matter what I do, I’m hated by just about everybody this side of the Verrazano Bridge,” because, I guess, telling is much faster than showing when you only have 20 pages), almost entirely expositionary, and just plain clumsily constructed. Here’s the opening to the issue:

I love this city.

Love it!!

And, really, the best part about being Spider-Man is getting to swing around up here and just… take it all in.

The best part!

Why the dual repetition? You got me; emphasis, I guess? A sneaky shout-out to the “two Spider-Men” concept? I have no idea, but as inner monologue – or, even, narration, which’d make more sense, unless we’re supposed to believe that Peter Parker spends his evenings reintroducing himself to himself and justifying his life choices – it’s extremely awkward and takes Peter from “quippy” to something akin to “over-caffinated preteen with limited attention span trying to explain why they love Justin Beiber so much.” Maybe I’m way too old-fashioned with my Spider-Man, but for me, his inner monologue would be slightly more ordered and less “OMG!!!” than this; it’s not that it just reads poorly, it also “sounds” wrong for the character.

(Also: Am I wrong in my read on the character that Spider-Man’s quips aren’t necessarily the way he thinks, as such, but an attempt to hide nervousness/anxiety/guilt behind what he considers bravado? Bendis’ narration reads as an excitable version of Spider-Man’s personality, whereas the set-up of the character suggests it should be the opposite.)

Oddly enough, there was a really easy fix to so many of these problems: Use the other Spider-Man. Not only would Bendis have a better handle on Miles’ narration – Being the sole writer of Miles to date, there was almost no way that he could get that voice “wrong” – but Miles, being the newer and less explored character, not only needs the space of the lengthy introduction more (Despite the high sales of Ultimate Fallout #4 and Ultimate Spider-Man #1, there’s no way that the character is as well-known as Peter Parker) but works better as a point-of-view character for the series: He hasn’t dealt with Spider-impostors before, he has an emotional connection with (a version of) Peter Parker that Peter doesn’t have with him, and he’s new to all of the super-science that’s necessary to get through a story about parallel universes and crossing over and the like, allowing him to need the exposition that the audience also needs.

More importantly, using Miles as the main character for the first issue would have validated him as Spider-Man. As it is, this first issue does the one thing the character didn’t need: it underscores his position as the “alternative” Spider-Man, the other one. As far as this first issue is concerned, Miles’ character is so unimportant that his part could be filled by Spider-Man 2099, Spider-Man India or even Ben Reilly; he’s literally a non-character who plays more part on the cover (where at least

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366 Songs 184: Full Of It

This one turned out to be a grower; it’s from Netherfriends’ free EP of songs built around Harry Nilsson samples, which meant that I was almost guaranteed to dig it, but for some reason this one left me flat until the other night, when that riff just got stuck in my head, looped around and sounding wonderful. I love that it sounds simultaneously like a Nilsson song from the ’70s and something from this year, as if the distance between the two wasn’t over three decades.

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Random, (Mostly) Unfiltered Thoughts on Hits, Quality and Online Writing

I’ve been thinking recently about online entertainment journalism, and pageviews, and the responsibilities and realities and everything involved. To explain what started this train of thought it something that’d get me more hassle than it’s worth – Suffice to say, it was the discovery that a site I used to work for wasn’t covering a particularly important news story because it was presumed it wouldn’t get hits – but, thinking about the subject over and over again, I find myself depressingly out of step with the way that the Internet works, it feels like.

I mean, I get that it’s all about the hits. I worked for Gawker Media for two years, and that really gets drummed into you there, or at least it did for me: The eyeballs are what matter, the clicks and the important clicks, not just any clicks. It’s a number that constantly gets whittled down: At first, it was hits, then it was “unique visitors,” then it was “new unique visitors” (Eventually, it’ll be “People who’ve never even been online before, but bought a laptop just to read your piece,” and then people will get fired for not inspiring at least one MacBook purchase every week). That’s not just the case at Gawker sites, though; elsewhere, I’ve had series killed because the hits weren’t good enough, pitches approved based solely on how much traffic they would likely bring even if they were weaker ideas than other ones vying for attention, the whole thing. The internet exists to get your attention, after all.

And yet, that all seems curiously, unhealthily, short-term thinking to me. “Content is King” was the mantra of the Internet for awhile, the idea of “If you build it, they will come” made into something resembling a business plan. It was… optimistic, naive, maybe? There was a sense of good work will find an audience because it’s the Internet – which, come to think of it, feels like part of the thinking behind Kickstarter and other crowdsourcing ideas nowadays. Hmm – that was ultimately replaced by “Content is Content,” which translated into something along the lines of “Fuck it, we can get people to write for us for free and who cares whether or not it’s good as long as it drives traffic, right?” The quality of the work became secondary – if even that – to the fact that the work existed. Curation became more along the lines of “Will this get hits?” than “Is this any good?” because everyone had to earn their keep, and so sites became less about an editorial voice or vision, and more interchangeable as a result with everyone chasing after the same exclusives, the same images and videos and interviews and with the same formula to write it all up.

Surely, if you’re looking to make your site stand out, it makes more sense to decide to actually have its own voice and viewpoint? Have a sense of. Okay, this doesn’t get good traffic but it’s something we should be covering, so we’re going to take the hit on it? Comics Alliance feels like a good example of this; consider the way that the site followed Laura’s passions to the point where it became known for doing so, and for having smart, nuanced writing on gender and webcomics and other subjects that weren’t being covered by other comic sites. It’s a return to “If you build it, they will come,” definitely, but – and this is where I find myself out of step with the Internet – what’s so wrong with that? If you wait long enough, they will come.

Weirdly, surprisingly, Gawker may have the best solution to this issue (That’s Gawker.com, not all of Gawker Media); the idea of traffic-whoring to offset more important, more individual and quieter pieces felt like the closest to an elegant solution to the problem that we could get, short of someone having the guts to say “Screw it, let’s just do good work we believe in and hope for the best.” It feels like it’s a way for sites to fulfill hit/financial responsibilities to their owners, while also the responsibility to readers of something worth reading. I wonder how that experiment worked out…?

Ramble ramble ramble. I should come back to this when I know what it’s clearer in my head.

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366 Songs 183: Ode To The Big Sea

Normally, I am not a fan of jazz noodling and music that goes nowhere fast, but there’s something about the Cinematic Orchestra’s “Ode to The Big Sea” that wins me over, every single time. It’s the loneliness and searching of the central riff, which comes and goes throughout the song, I think. It’s something that’s classically “jazzy,” but when happening over that particular perpetually shuffling drumbeat, becomes something weirdly contemporized in my head. The original recorded version might explain what I mean, more, with the obviousness of the samples underscoring the “acid jazz”-ness of the whole thing, with the atonal riff feeling as if they’re as Sun-Ra inspired as anything else; it suddenly seems less trad fusion jazz, and more something that you could imagine coming from Mocean Worker.

It’s that tension between timeframes that fascinates me, I think.

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366 Songs 182: My Mind’s Eye

One of my favorite things about this song is that it was apparently released despite the Small Faces’ wishes; the version that everyone knows was a demo that management put out as a single because they wanted a follow-up to the band’s previous single sooner than the band could come up with. That might explain why it’s really only half a song, with the other half being what’s essentially a rip off of “Ding Dong Merrily On High” with “In my mind’s eye” replacing “Hosannah in excelsis” (This was the band’s 1966 Christmas single, amusingly enough; clearly, someone had a sense of humor) And yet… This is a great little psych pop song, even in unfinished two-minute form, as much because of the energy in the performance and the spectacular organ that the Faces had going on back then. It makes you wonder what other greatness we’ve missed from the band because it never went past the demo stage, doesn’t it?

Strange but true, I first heard the song as a (far inferior) cover from Britpop wannabes, Northern Uproar:

They totally butcher it with their sub-Oasis clodstepping, don’t they? So much so that, when I first heard the Small Faces version later that year, I didn’t even make the connection that they were in fact the same song. Just imagine how much musical greatness we have lost because Oasis were so popular back in the 1990s…

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366 Songs 181: Accelerator

I still love this song from Primal Scream’s “seminal” XTMNTR album from 2000, which does all the MC5 posturing that you’d want but doesn’t forget to try to be awesome in the process.

The guitar solo alone is worth the mental price of admission, but really: the whole thing is pretty spectacular, no matter where or when you slice it. It’s entirely retro, but feels contemporary even twelve years later, purely through force of will and some wonderfully intense performances (There’s something enjoyable about the fact there are actually harmony vocals on the “Come on! Come on!” parts, as if shouty agit-rock needed a Supremes influence in there). The production is suitably grimy – Can you imagine a version of this with a grunge-esque mix or without the feedback, which is a large part of the architecture of the song? – and, really, the only slip-up anywhere is the fade at the end. If ever a song needed to go until it just… broke down, then this is that song. “Into the future! Into the future!” indeed.