FreakyTrigger https://freakytrigger.co.uk Lollards in the high church of low culture Tue, 19 Mar 2024 11:41:31 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 Aard Labour 9: Reads https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads#comments Mon, 18 Mar 2024 18:06:17 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976 This is the 9th in a series of posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a controversial independent comic. This episode has the controversial bit! And also spoilers, as usual, for the actual story both in this book and as a whole.

Previously: Mothers & Daughters, the climax of the main Cerebus narrative, reached its halfway point as four of the most important characters met physically for the first time. The comic’s extensive text material, meanwhile, had turned its attention more and more to its characters’ ideas about gender…


“”Fuck off, Viktor”, thought the reader” – Viktor Davis in Reads

OH GOD IT’S THIS ONE

With Melmoth, Dave Sim asked the question “what can Cerebus encompass?” and the answer was “anything I like”. But that turns out not to be the whole truth. The monthly experience of reading Cerebus wasn’t just about the comic, it was about the backmatter: the huge, rambling “Aardvark Comment” letter column, the samples and exclusives of whatever comics or creators Sim was keen his readers knew about, and the essays and commentaries Sim offered.

With the boundary between core story and side project thoroughly dissolved, Sim started testing new boundaries – between the story and the backmatter. Between the thoughts of Dave Sim and the action of Cerebus. Between the comic page and the creator. Even if the text sections were Elrod’s Gardening Tips, Reads would be Cerebus’ most radical book to date for how it shatters these barriers and for how it sets out a relationship between comics and prose which is unlike almost any previous comic – demanding we experience huge chunks of text as part of the comics story. And at the same time as Reads insists on the primacy of text for half its material, the other half is dispensing with it altogether, with a bloody, wordless fight scene occupying the comics pages for issue after remorseless issue.

Reads is one of the most formally challenging graphic novels I’ve ever read. But that’s not why it became probably the most famous, or notorious, section of Cerebus. This is also the point in the story where Dave Sim steps into his own creation at the climax of those text sections and spells out his incendiary views on men, women and creativity. How the world is a battle between creative Lights (almost all male) and devouring Voids (almost all women) and how the Voids’ main tactic for devouring the Lights is luring them with the impossible promise of Merged Permanence (a happy relationship of equals).

As I hinted last time, a re-read in 2024 blunts the impact of those views a bit. Not because time has proved Sim right, but because with hindsight it’s obvious how Sim built up to the bombshell issue #186, and it’s also clear that Sim’s misogynist views aren’t particularly novel. In fact they’re exhaustingly familiar. Even the most scrupulously fair summary of the ideas in Reads is likely to have you saying “Wow, sounds like that guy had some issues”

But Reads still does have an impact, not so much because of what Sim says but the way he says it: the visceral, vicious language of “Viktor Davis” rant in #186 is still brutal in ways that summaries can’t really capture. The stuff about women voting being a mistake comes early on, and it just gets further out from there. Meanwhile the cosmic terminology he drapes over his philosophy – all the lights and voids and merged permanence stuff – make the basic concepts seem stranger, and less tawdry, than they are. Plus, let’s face it, there are no comics parallels to what Sim is doing(1). The closest thing I can think of – almost a decade on from this – is Alan Moore’s tour of the Tree Of Life in Promethea, and that had gorgeous JH Williams pictures to soften the density of ideas. Even Gerhard doesn’t get a look-in here(2).

So Dave Sim’s arguments in #186 overshadow not just the story elements of Reads but the questions you might usefully ask about all the rest of it: do its many formal experiments work? How much text can a comic contain and still be one? What is the first text section of Reads doing? And even the rant poses questions beyond its content: Why is it in the comic and not the backmatter? Why does it have to be so hateful? And what did Sim imagine would happen when he published it?

I’m going to offer an answer to most of these questions, but there’s a caveat: this is the point in this series where all the material was new to me (if not by reputation). I originally quit reading Cerebus at the end of Flight, realising the story would read better in the ‘phonebook’ collections. I continued flicking through the comic in the shop each month, so absorbed enough about Reads to update my plans to “I’ll read it when it’s finished I guess”. Which, 20 years after it finished, I did. So any insights I have on these latter books are based on flimsier ground – I’ve read them more recently and thought about them less.

I’d guess most Cerebus readers haven’t rushed back to this one, though. So first, a quick summary of what else is in Reads.

HE READS READS SO YOU WON’T HAVE TO

So far, Mothers & Daughters has been structured around a single story – Cerebus, Cirin and Astoria’s power struggle – told in a complex, chaotic way by the constant interruption of dozens of simultaneous vignettes somehow related to those events. Reads continues that in a much more straightforward way, as the “ripple-effect” stories fall away and we get an uninterrupted story where the three leads and Suenteus Po finally meet in the cathedral of Iest.

The four characters talk – mostly a lecture from the ascetic Po, outlining his philosophy of inaction, as he hopes to persuade the others to basically give up and go home. He leaves, and so does Astoria, who has actually listened, and whose experiences in Women have left her disillusioned about political leadership anyway. Before she goes she drops a bombshell – Cerebus is a hermaphrodite. This leaves Cerebus and Cirin alone – neither have any intention of taking Po’s advice and they begin a fight to the death.

Giving the volume its title is a short story about Victor Reid, a writer of Reads, mass-market fiction a bit like the old penny dreadfuls or pulps. The Reads industry has been bubbling away for a while now in the background of the comic – Weisshaupt puts Cerebus’ name on some in Church And State, and both Oscars wrote them. It’s often meant to represent the comics industry or some aspect of it. That’s definitely the case here, as Reid’s story is a comics roman-a-clef about a talented young creator swept up by a big publishing house (“Vertigo Horse” DO YOU SEE), who break his creativity on their publishing wheel. He ends up a despairing hack, and the architects of his downfall are women: his demanding, baby-ridden wife; his ball-breaking agent; his fickle, bosomy muse(3).

The Victor Reid section is barely linked to Cerebus’ story – Victor’s great artistic leap forward, whose rejection by his publisher breaks him, is a ‘read’ about Cerebus’ ascension and the events of Church And State. It’s followed by a text section which does tie in directly, in a way we’ve never seen before. At the start of the Cerebus and Cirin fight, the point of view pulls back to show a drawing board with a man drawing the fight, the author of Cerebus. He turns around: this is “Viktor Davis”.

Viktor also demonstrates his control over the events of the comic. “BANG, BANG, BANG” he writes, and three huge bangs demolish the cathedral around the fighting aardvarks, leaving the throne ascending into space with Cirin and Cerebus clinging to it as it flies past the moon. Viktor, meanwhile, ends his role in the book with his lengthy thoughts on men and women and creativity, leaving us with a Pink Floyd quote(4) and a hope that he’s instilled some seed of enlightenment in the male reader. And that’s Reads.

The Viktor Davis sections are very oddly written, a third person description of Viktor talking to the reader about Cerebus. Viktor is, essentially, Dave Sim – he recounts real world anecdotes involving Alan Moore, Jeff Smith, and others. During the story ‘Viktor’ pulls ‘the Reader’ into the comic with him, an experience which reads like a kind of hypnotic ritual, and retells in prose the Judge’s story of the Big Bang from Church And State, except flipping the roles: now the male light is smothered and split by the female void. 

Reads kicks off the second half of Mothers & Daughters, but that isn’t its only function in the overall Cerebus construction. It’s also the start of what I think of as the third overlapping Cerebus novel. The first, which Mothers & Daughters ends, is a genre novel – a satirical, political fantasy saga full of dazzling digressions. The second, which Jaka’s Story opens, is a modernist novel, a comic and tragic story about a man and a woman who are unable to be happy with or without each other: it’ll resume as Mothers & Daughters ends. And the third is an experimental novel, a philosophical enquiry into men, women, God and their relationship to one another, in which the character of Dave Sim is as important as the character of Cerebus.

Depending on which of these novels you think you’re reading, the text elements of Reads play different roles. If you’re reading the first novel, they’re an unwelcome and skippable distraction, and even the metafictional elements which turn up here will be better used in Minds. If you’re reading the second novel, then the Victor Reid half of the text section is tangentially relevant but the “Viktor Davis” half is well worth avoiding: it acts as basically a spoiler (in several senses) for the next several books, in that it removes a lot of tension from future narratives by outlining exactly how Sim thinks men and women always behave.

And if you’re reading the third novel, then the Viktor Davis bits are the kickoff, the moment Dave Sim steps out of the shadow of his creation and reveals what the point of Cerebus was all along. Ouch.

YOU DO NOT IN FACT HAVE TO HAND IT TO DAVE SIM

There are several interesting questions about Viktor Davis’ anti-feminist screed, none of which are “is he right?” (He isn’t: for a start all his gender arguments rest on a hard division between ‘reason’ and ’emotion’ which he doesn’t define beyond linguistic pedantry. And that’s the bit even his sympathetic commentators tend to put before the “but…”(5)) One is “why is this in the comic not the backmatter?”. Another: “Is this what Dave Sim actually believes, and if so how long has he believed it?”

A lot of the initial response to Reads, especially from fellow creators and regular readers, leaned heavily on the fact that “Viktor Davis” is a pseudonym, and that his views might not fully reflect Sim’s. A lot of the later response takes for granted that Sim ‘went mad’ or was radicalised somehow and that the screeds of Reads bear no real relation to the humane, even liberal comic Cerebus used to be. 

Both of these responses are anticipated by Reads itself. Reads is painstaking in establishing that yes, Viktor Davis is the writer of Cerebus, Dave Sim. Sim’s own views – explained at infinite length ever since – tally with what he writes here. Viktor Davis writes about how he’s been self-censoring himself for years, and anticipates the horrified reaction to Reads in general and specifically ‘the reader’s’ appalled response to his reversal of the Judge’s monologue. In interviews at the start of Mothers & Daughters he put forward the idea – which he’s stuck to since I think – that the Judge and Viktor Davis represent two extreme points of view and readers can choose for themselves which is right. There’s a worthy liberal tendency to imagine that an author depicting two extreme points of view means they feel the truth must be somewhere in the middle: Dave Sim would not agree(6).

AARDVARK SHRUGGED

Viktor Davis is certainly Sim framing his beliefs in the starkest, harshest terms he can to get his point across, but it’s a point he’s been building to. In the Women post I went through the three strands to Dave Sim’s philosophy – the gender, creative freedom, and religious parts. Viktor Davis is where the first two of those end up: all the wider political elements feel like window dressing for Sim’s real issue, which is the way the “voids” absorb and drain the creative energy of the “lights”, i.e. the way women, in his view, sap and stymie men’s’ creative impulses.

This directly ties back to the Victor Reid parts of the book – Reid is an object lesson in how this happens. But the important part of the two stories isn’t just the women in them, it’s that Reid is also the victim of an industry which has the exact same goal – diverting and draining his creative light. Sim’s libertarian philosophy of self-publishing – that you simply cannot trust publishers not to force you into compromises, and compromise means artistic death – is the backbone of Reads as much as the gender material is.

In fact, you can see Sim’s philosophy of men and women as the next step of his belief in the importance of self-publishing to artistic greatness. Following your artistic path is hard. You will constantly be expected to compromise or weaken your work by the uncreative forces around you (publishers, distributors, other middlemen) so you have to own it for yourself. So far, so Randian. But Sim goes further, with his “Light does not breed” mantra – by expecting to be an equal partner, women (and later children) are automatically diluting and stealing this creative ownership and control. If publishers are parasites, how much worse are wives and families?(7)

Where Sim’s two big concerns – creative freedom and the iniquities of womankind – have ended up is a kind of Objectivism of the Boudoir, Cyril Connolly’s “pram in the hallway” bon mot on libertarian steroids. I don’t think you can disentangle those two elements of Dave Sim’s philosophy, which is one reason Jeff Smith becomes such a bete noire for Sim. Smith has a cameo here as a pal of Viktor, but is a living refutation of Sim’s ideas: his wife gave up her job to support his self-publishing ambitions, and his comic Bone is visibly Cerebus inspired but also considerably more palatable to a wider comics-agnostic public. Bone ends up in libraries and homes across the world(8) – it replaces Cerebus as the success case for self publishing at exactly the time Cerebus becomes a cautionary tale.

BUT IS IT AARDVARK?

So far I’ve looked at what Sim thinks in Reads and why he thinks it. For the reader of Cerebus, looking aghast as they turn the page to find yet another double page spread of small print, there’s a more urgent question: what is this stuff doing in the comic? It’s clear how they link philosophically, but how do the Victor Reid and Viktor Davis sections work as part of the actual story?

It’s initially very hard to see what the point of the Victor Reid parts in particular is. Artistically it’s the weakest element of the book, without the genuine brilliance of the comics sections or the “what the fuck is happening” rubbernecking of the Viktor Davis part. In its own right it’s just not a great story: Sim’s prose is as fussy as it ever was when pretending to be Oscar, and over time the gossipy elements have faded out to leave a set of stereotypes. It seems mainly addressed to Sim’s fellow creators: Reid is an example of artistry denied and defiled by compromise. 

It’s also a more general comment by Sim on the state of the industry. At the end of Women, the Roach has a crisis, and a horde of alternative identities threaten to burst out of him, all based on short-lived comics or publishers from the early 90s boom. Most are now unfamiliar even if you “were there” – yes, I could spot the Warriors Of Plasm reference, but I wish I couldn’t – but it’s the sheer number and relentlessness of them that’s the joke, a market glut given physical form. The material in Reads is more pointed – the boom was turning to bust, and Victor Reid’s story is a barbed commentary on the ‘mainstream alternative’ companies like Dark Horse and DC’s Vertigo imprint, which offered more varied and critically respectable – but still corporate-owned – output.

All the reads industry sections, though – not just this but the equivalent sections in Jaka’s Story and later books – are making a wider point within the story, which is that popular art is not any kind of bulwark against tyranny: the reads industry is subject to market pressures and tacit censorship under the Cirinists just as it was subject to political pressures before them, and creators are ultimately indentured labourers. Genuine artists can and must work only for themselves.

Artists like Viktor Davis, whose Read exists in our world and is a comic called Cerebus. And this is one answer to that question – why is Viktor Davis’ beef with women part of the actual comic? For Sim, only the genuine, self-publishing artist has the freedom to say the unsayable in modern society, but that freedom is meaningless unless it’s exercised. Sim has to push Cerebus to its most extreme point, in terms of form and content, at least partly because no publisher would let him do it.

Sim knows very well that the Viktor Davis stuff is going to shock and upset readers. Davis prefaces his big mask-off disquisition in #186 with a lot of “aint-I-a-stinker” hints about how controversial the last chunk is going to be. He’s already worked hard to rattle readers(9). And it’s written explicitly to be as offensive and horrible as possible. Nothing else would prove Sim’s point to his own satisfaction. There’s a moment in Victor Reid’s story where his evil aspect, the backmasked Rotsieve, comes out and says hateful things to everyone. Is Viktor Davis – David Victor Sim backwards – Sim’s Rotsieve? I think that probably was the point of that concept – but it was there to explain why Davis is so venomous, not what he was actually saying.

And the other reason it has to be in the comic is that each part of Mothers & Daughters is a reprise and revision of an earlier part of Cerebus, and here we’re redoing Church And State. As I mentioned above, Viktor Davis is the devilish reverse of the Judge: an omniscient being talking us through cosmology and inverting the Judge’s origin of the universe. Not an act of cosmic rape; an act of cosmic smothering and emasculation. If the Judge’s monologue has to be part of Cerebus, so does Viktor Davis’.

FORM AND AVOID

So now we’re just left with the question – does it work? This is Sim’s biggest, most notorious, most ambitious and most shocking risk? Does he pull it off?

Reads is obviously the book where a lot of readers noped out. Even if they made it through to the end of Mothers & Daughters in Minds, the decision to quit happens here. Whether or not you respect Sim’s artistic freedom – and despite Sim-as-Davis saying he could be prosecuted for hate speech, nobody has ever tried to ban Cerebus – from this point he’s a guy a lot of people don’t want to give money to.

Some people agreed with Sim, or partially agreed, or thought he had a point but ‘went too far’. Obviously they didn’t stop buying it, though Cerebus has never gained a reputation as a great work of conservative or libertarian art. Others argued for a “separate the art from the artist” principle which seems a little insulting in this case, given how diligently Dave Sim worked to make that impossible.

Many, probably most, readers decided that Dave Sim’s obvious artistic excellence meant putting up with his being an arsehole, and kept reading. The best critical work on Cerebus I’ve read, Andrew Rilstone’s When Did You Stop Reading Cerebus?, roughly takes the line that Cerebus is a big, deliberately complex and difficult book in a similar way to Moby Dick or Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, and that reading it involves reckoning with the parts that are most difficult, Reads included.

I think, though, that you can see Reads as horrible but necessary to Sim’s overall conception, and still see it as an artistic failure.

Bits of it – the bits Sim actually draws – are certainly not a failure. Sim gives us both a philosophical and a physical resolution to the big conflicts of the series. The conversation between the three aardvarks and Po is the kind of thing people now call a “lore dump” but it gives a solid explanation to what an aardvark is and what’s been going on in Mothers & Daughters so far. Aardvarks magnify the traits, people and events around them: the only good course of action, according to Po, is inaction.

As she did in Women, Astoria shines. I’ve seen people say that she gets the best ending in the comic, and in a sense that’s true – her final contributions are a reminder of why we liked her and she leaves on her own terms, the only character with the brains to actually listen to Po. But even if her arc across Mothers & Daughters is complex and complete, her final turn to the domestic here also feels like a shabby ending for the comic’s great intriguer and manipulator(10). Is it growth, or is it just Sim wanting to take her down a peg, show her plans and schemes as futile? Or demonstrating to his women readers the virtuous way to overcome your devouring void-ness? One of the worst things about Reads is that he lets you – encourages you to – read those kind of motives into the action from now on.

The artistic high point of Reads, though, is the Cerebus and Cirin fight – page after page of weighty, savage, thoroughly choreographed and horribly physical combat, the first time in the entire series that Cerebus has fought someone clearly his match as a fighter. Their combat is quick to read, and continually interrupted by the – equally brutal in a different way – Viktor Davis pages, so it feels like it lasts even longer than it actually does.

Fight and action scenes are part of the grammar of American comics, but they are hardly ever this long – sometimes Jack Kirby would draw a big multi-page slugfest in Fantastic Four, which Stan Lee would usually over-dialogue, mistrusting the simple thrill of movement and the pleasure the reader gets from turning images into motion. Sim’s inner Stan Lee – occasionally a presence in the early issues of Cerebus – is silent here.

What the fight sequence feels most like is a manga episode, where higher page counts often allow for more wordless, decompressed storytelling. In Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, a stellar martial-arts manga, entire volumes are spent on fights in which only a handful of blows are exchanged, including pages of interiority as the combatants size each other up or move around one another looking for an opening. Manga is an influence Sim would have absorbed indirectly via Frank Miller, whose action choreography was the basis for his early stardom, but the level of weight and detail in Sim’s rendering – the blood-slicked fur of the combatants – takes this up a level. Sim disliked drawing fights and action – it was a reason the comic turned away from straightforward fantasy so early – so the Cirin fight in Reads, paired with the Viktor Davis text, is a creator deliberately pushing himself, as well as the reader, well out of his comfort zone.

But it’s those text parts that let Reads down, not just in content but in concept and execution. The Victor Reid sections are a mediocre morality play, a struggle to get through when I don’t know (or have forgotten) who all the characters are meant to be. Reid is a cypher – I don’t believe in his talent, so I don’t care when he abandons it.

The Viktor Davis parts are more readable, because they’re so strange, and because they promise some behind-the-scenes insight into the stuff a reader does actually care about (the Cerebus story). But Davis is insufferable even before he starts talking about women – he’s pompous, long-winded, self-satisfied, and presumptuous. He’s constantly assuming how the reader feels, and usually exaggerating it: as he described the reader’s (my?) horror and grief at his pronoun-switching of the Church And State big bang story, I was in fact flicking back pages to see what I’d apparently missed: in all the verbiage, I’d barely noticed him do it.

The Church And State reversal is – even more than the #186 lecture – the big payoff to Reads, the ultimate rugpull after two books of smaller ones, taking a hammer to one of the fan-favourite parts of Cerebus. It should be as shocking as Davis says it is. It really isn’t. All through the Davis part, Sim quotes Alan Moore talking about how stories work, from a conversation the two of them had. Moore tells Sim that “all stories are true” on some level, and they become true because the hearer gives a kind of permission for them to be true. If you want to defeat a story, you have to tell a better story. And if you told a beautiful illustrated story – like the end of Church And State – you aren’t going to beat it with prose. Especially not Dave Sim’s prose.

Absent Gerhard’s gorgeous lunar and cosmic vistas, absent Sim’s note-perfect Feiffer impersonation, the light/void retcon in Reads is torpid, hard to visualise, unengaging. And, yes, petty. Maybe in Sim’s mind, he was presenting two equally extreme versions to make a point, and when readers in their droves preferred the first one it just proved to him how the feminists had won and only he could see it. But they also preferred the first one because he told it better. 

The formal question Sim is asking in Reads – how much text does it take before a comic stops being a comic – is a genuinely interesting one. Maybe there are comics writers who could answer it well, and it obviously fascinates Sim, as every Cerebus phonebook has text-driven elements to a degree. But the more of the comic’s artistic load he asks them to bear, the worse it gets. Sim is just not a good enough prose writer to do the things he needs to do in Reads: I would call it an artistic failure whatever you think of its morality.

FOOTNOTES

(1) There are Reads parallels further back. In his excellent history of the penny dreadfuls and boys’ story magazines, Boys Will Be Boys, E S Turner gives an example of at least one penny dreadful writer who would regularly stop the ripping yarn for an entire episode to offer digressive essays on economics or prison reform, to the presumed frustration of his thrill-hungry readers.

(2) Which may be another reason for doing it this way. Viktor Davis’ thoughts are Sim’s, and the responsibility for them is Sim’s alone: why make Gerhard an accessory? I think it’s the only section of Cerebus with genuinely no illustration.

(3) These women characters are tiresome cliches or poison-pen caricatures, but for fairness’ sake let’s mention that Reid’s biggest believer, Milieu, is also a woman, who sees Reid’s descent into hackery as a betrayal. It’s not women per se Sim hates, you see, but the innate devouring female essence – he even allows that some rare women may qualify as creative Lights. How gracious of him!

(4) Sim is on record as disliking music, which fascinates me. He doesn’t work to it, he doesn’t make it, he doesn’t play it for pleasure, he thinks jazz is a marxist-feminist psyop, etc. Jaka’s dancing is essentially freeform, silent, non-interpretive. The only music references he makes in Cerebus are comically basic boomer ones – two Pink Floyd quotes, a Beatles quote, and members of the Beatles and the Stones turning up as visual icons.

(5) There are two parts of the Viktor Davis rant which people unsympathetic to the gender elements sometimes give credit to. One is the – I think very muddled – stuff about “Life” and “Death”. Sim thinks (roughly) that there’s too much respect given to individual life and preserving it, which is a factor in overpopulation. Leaving aside the question of whether the planet is overpopulated, one of the most generally agreed on ways to bring population growth down is educating women. The other part of the rant that people seem to like is the stuff on how wretched and uninformative the media environment is and how short-termist and manipulative politicians are. Here the issue isn’t that he’s wrong – people who trust the media or politicians are in a tiny minority. But his explanation for it, that feminism has won and reduced public conversation to arguments about feelings, is poor: politicians have always played on the emotions of the masses (and have always done the Sim trick of clothing unpopular positions in the robes of rationalism, for that matter)

(6) Much later on Sim does change his mind about the cosmology here, and we get a third version (now there’s something to look forward to). But that’s a refinement of his basic idea about the masculine and feminine principles of life, not a reversal. He’s not landing somewhere in the middle, more deciding his previous extreme perspective wasn’t quite extreme enough.

(7) Worth remembering at this point that the only person ever listed as publisher on Cerebus was, er, Dave Sim’s ex-wife.

(8) I’ll get back to Smith in the Guys post. I don’t actually enjoy Bone much, though Smith is a fine cartoonist. But that doesn’t shift his status as a counter-example to Sim’s ideas.

(9) I’ve not mentioned the one thing everyone who read Reads at the time speaks of with awe in the Viktor Davis part – the fake-out section where Davis says he’s going to end Cerebus at #200 not #300. It’s immediately reversed, but people coming to it fresh in issue #183 were genuinely floored. Obviously, that doesn’t work when you know going in it’s a lie, but fair enough – ya got ‘em, Vik.

(10) Of course Astoria has a parting gift – the “Cerebus is a hermaphrodite” thing. It’s hard to parse, and I’m going to park it for a later post – Sim thinks it’s a big deal, Cerebus obviously does too, but his subsequent crisis of masculinity plays out across a bunch of subsequent books. But yes, of course it’s significant that this happens in a comic so rooted in gender essentialism, I’m just not confident yet to say why.

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Why, Claudius? – Family Affairs https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2024/03/why-claudius-family-affairs https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2024/03/why-claudius-family-affairs#respond Sun, 17 Mar 2024 14:23:02 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34953 “Family Affairs” begins with disembodied Clavdivs summarising the last nine years of plot: Julia and Marcus Agrippa did get married, but then Livia poisoned Marcus Agrippa and forced Tiberius to divorce his wife Vipsania…somehow? This allowed Tiberius and Julia to get married, thus bringing Livia’s decades-long plot to fruition. While I do understand that this show covers a lot of time and many events, it does seem pretty weak that a third of the dramatis personae introduced in the first episode are now dead, and Octavia doesn’t appear again, so why bother introducing her in the first place?

Clavdivs turns the story to someone beloved by all, his very own pa, Drusus! Even Tiberius loves Drusus! Unfortunately, since Drusus loves the republic, Livia does not. The brothers are having a jolly game of indoor medicine ball catch so we can see Drusus glowing with health and athleticism and Tiberius coated in a Tricky-Dick-debating-Jack-Kennedy-sheen of sweat. It soon turns into chatter about politics, which then descends into cagey sibling rivalry and then all-out wrasslin’. The lack of any incidental music really amplifies all the associated grunting, which in turn isn’t helped by the lads tumbling into some deeply unfortunate positions. The weird, lingering shot on their legs is also somewhat upsetting. After Drusus pins Tiberius (exactly as wrong as it sounds), they reminisce about the good old army days, mainly so Tiberius can whinge about his current sinecure and Drusus can big up the republic.

Cut to Julia and Antonia, Clavdivs’s mum, getting massages and Julia whinging about everything from the slaves’ work ethic to her cold fish husband. She also appears to be snacking throughout her massage? Julia can’t work out why Tiberius doesn’t like her, let alone seek sexy funtimes, which is our first indication that Julia is a slut. Antonia bigs up her man Drusus by saying that he can always make Tiberius laugh, so he can’t be all bad, but Julia insists that he also he hates his stepchildren, Gaius and Lucius, and *everyone* loves them!

Pause here: okay, so she had children with Marcus Agrippa, whose oldness apparently didn’t prevent him from siring children (or did it?). This info was not given in the 9-year plot summary which, come on, dudes, it would have added like half a sentence! Note also the heavy emphasis on these two boys and them alone; pin for later ranting.

Julia then dishes all kinds of stuff to Antonia, starting with Tiberius’s predilection for anal sex, but that she’s fine with that (another indication of sluttiness). This shocks Antonia to her core! This scene is a lovely bit of misdirection for Antonia’s Actual Bad Bitch character and yet another reason why I’d never see this in *my* Catholic high school, where once, as part of an RE lesson we watched Terms of Endearment, for reasons that were unclear even at the time. 

But there’s more! She suspects her stepma may have been responsible for Marcellus’ death because he seemed totally fine before she got involved, although she says it with such a total lack of emotion, maybe it’s this which truly shocks Antonia, even more so than nudity, which by the way she hates.

Cut to now-nude Drusus and Tiberius having a brotherly olive oil back-scraping session and chatting about their ma, which quickly segues into Tiberius’s suicidal ideation. Tiberius claims he’s only ever loved three people and lists them as first their pa, and then gets distracted by his uxorious love of Vipsania for a few beats. Drusus finally asks what we all were thinking: if you loved her so much, why did you get divorced? The answer is Livia made him! Tiberius pours half a litre of weaksauce over this argument by claiming if he didn’t marry her, Augustus would be powerless to stop Rome falling back into a republic, so all their work would be for nothing, nothing! Sweet summer child Drusus points out that well actually, succession-wise, he’s got to step over Gaius and Lucius first (again: just the two of these children!) Tiberius finally gets back to his third real love, Drusus. It could have been a rather moving depiction of fraternal love if they hadn’t also been starkers and chatting about their evil ma

Thankfully, we cut to gramps Augustus playing “Empires” (i.e Risk) and even when saddled with some pretty crap child actors, Brian Blessed’s UNHOLY ACTING TALENT shines through. My Abiding Teenage Memories were so Sejanus (and eventually, Caligula) focussed that I barely took notice of him at the time. But even my partner, who was only quarter-watching, said that he was totally gripped by his scenes. There’s a compliment disguised in a joke about Britannia not being worth conquering because the inhabitants are too savage and not even good slave material, when Drusus drops past to bid adieu before he’s off to “Germany”, taking pregnant Antonia and their kids Germanicus (DO YOU SEE?) and Livilla (SAME). 

Augustus and Drusus stroll about the garden to reverse-Bechdel and natter on about how great Livia is and how Augustus couldn’t have faced these past twenty years of emperor-ing without her. Drusus takes this cue to suggest a wacky thought that’s just occurred now: maybe Augustus steps back to let the Senate take over! This elicits the kind of rumbling laughter which appears genuine but ultimately serves as an instant knock-back; oh Drusus, you’re just like your dear old dead dad, with all this republic gubbins! With Livia-like precision, Augustus pivots to a reminder that said dad was once his enemy you know, not that you ever will be, my son! We’re all a happy blended family here, and no one is afraid to eat the figs! I love my two (as far as you know) grandchildren! The way Augustus vacillates between cold, dead eyes and chummy stepdad friendship gives us a rare glimpse into the kind of skulduggery he must have engaged in order to seize power. 

Then yet another pivot to return to the important topic: Livia, and Augustus admitting he did Drusus’s pa dirty when he stole Livia from him. (It’s rather sweet that he genuinely thinks he made this choice for himself.)

Drusus’s pa does not get name-checked, but since it was Tiberius Claudius Nero, zero of those names could be used without causing even more confusion. But no matter, it’s all for the GOOD OF ROME, which everyone wants, even Tiberius. Druses tries to help his bro out by implying his weirdness may be ameliorated if he leaves Rome (and by extension, Julia), but Augustus disagrees, preferring the ‘sack up and quit moping’ option. 

Livia enters, ostensibly to say goodbye to Drusus even though it’s clear she DGAF but mainly to advise Augustus the Parthians are desperate to worship a Roman god: him. He’s not keen but bats the discussion away to go play with his grandchildren, and the look of unbridled disgust on Livia’s face at the mere mention of these (two) children positively lifts my soul.

Livia hisses that Drusus really needs to lay off the republic BS and quit encouraging Augustus already, in a scene that falls squarely into the ‘masterpiece’ column. It’s evident that this is an argument that’s been played out since childhood and that no love is lost between them.

This is shortly followed by the much-lauded blocking that frames Drusus out of focus as he lobs a truth bomb.

OH GOD, HER FAAAACE! I keep saying it, but the way Siân Phillips deploys a variation on this expression that can be interpreted in multiple ways is nothing short of genius. Here, it’s a tacit agreement, yes, but whether this is a ‘well, that’s astute and true’ or ‘well, that cuts’ or even a ‘yes, I certainly can’t, and that’s given me carte blanche to take the very life I gave you!’ is totally down to individual interpretation.

Next up is not only the worst scene in the episode but in the whole show, and not because of any shonky sets or scenery-chewing but because Tiberius: The Grossening is about to turn the dial up to 11 and keep going. He has been de facto stalking Vipsania despite her begging him to stop because he’s putting her in danger. Also, she’s getting remarried so it’s time to move on. This is hard to watch, friends, this depiction of obsessive love rooted in entitlement and ownership, and I’ve no doubt it was meant to be, but I am so tired of this trope and could happily live out the rest of my days never seeing it again. He goes from desperately sad to violently shaking her while screaming, “I’ll kill you, you’re mine!”, and then back to morose when she cries that she would have never divorced him, no matter what. From there it’s a jump to a proposed ‘solution’ of double suicide. 

Then Vipsania (of course) comforts this sobbing monster which fine, the tedious normalcy of women be managing men’s feels, but then we get some FORESHADOWING that without her sweetness and because of that bitch Julia, he won’t be able to keep his darkness in check. So yeah – not fun. Thankfully there are no disembodied voiceovers, which I’m grateful for, but it’s worth noting that there is a good deal of withheld info here; namely that Vipsania was Marcus Agrippa’s actual daughter, which seems at least relevant if not super-important?

Whatevs – back to schemin’ queen Livia, chirpily arranging Augustus’s deification behind his back and against his will, just so we can bask in all her awful glory, before zipping along to hear Augustus chew out Tiberius for seeing Vipsania, and every golden bellowed word is mesmerising. It’s also remarkable in that it aptly  demonstrates how absolute power comes with near-total detachment from reality: pretty much everyone in Rome has to know a thing before it trickles down to Augustus. And even then it’s not guaranteed.

And this is the crux of the show: it’s a soap, not a history, and the depiction is not of a powerful emperor but of a dude facing the consequences of what seemed like a good career decades ago, but who now just wants to play with his grandkids, eat figs and get drunk. Livia covers for her son by pretending she knew about the visits, and besides, didn’t he, Augustus, also visit his ex after they got together? Augustus orders Tiberius not to sulk with the exact same language and tone he used earlier towards Gaius and Lucius.

The awkwardness is interrupted by a letter from Drusus, which although is noted as being specifically for Tiberius, he feels compelled to read aloud as per narrative convention. Drusus is injured but more importantly, can Tiberius please convince Augustus to retire already? He knows he wants to but can’t because Ma just won’t quit riding his ass! Genius Tiberius stops reading three sentences too late, and there’s some ‘lively debate’, where Augustus confronts self-awareness for a full second before dismissing the letter as injury-induced ravings and nothing more. Livia makes it all about her (to be fair, it kind of is) and they soon dive headlong into the kind of jolly pretending all dysfunctional families engage in when avoiding facts. Livia arranges to send her very own doctor to tend to Drusus.

HER OWN SON. It reminds me of when Livia Soprano was in cahoots with Uncle Junior to get Tony whacked (and then used possibly made-up dementia as an excuse when it went south). 

There’s some whizzing of scenes between “Germany” and Rome. Drusus reads a letter aloud (obviously) while the camera pans back to his festering leg wound, made possible by Urban Decay’s goth palette and what appears to be some string (I’m sure it was great FX on a 1976 CRT television). The letter is calling him back to Rome, which we can see ain’t gonna happen. Then we’re back to Rome, where Augustus can’t fathom how a simple fall could have caused such a great injury? This elicits a blink-and-you-miss-it reaction from Tiberius that is so fucking good I had to rewind it no less than four times. Augustus offers his thoughts (which will take the form of sacrifices) and prayers, which segues into a rant about his recent deification in Palmyra, using his inability to cure gout as a foil for his impotence in curing his ailing stepson.

Who is super-dying now. Antonia decides to fetch the children for some character-building trauma, while Tiberius threatens Livia’s ‘doctor’. He totally would have been able to cure that gangrene, but he got there too late! As Drusus takes his final breaths, Tiberius admits he read the letter to their ma, causing Drusus to predict that Gaius and Lucius are fucked, then subsequently croaks thereupon. Antonia arrives with baby Claudius just after, and the baby’s wailing leads us back to old Clavdivs glowering over his voiceover.

I’m not sure of the point of this scene, other than to show him as a condescending old man who really should be a lot nicer to his food taster. There’s also a weird clunky moment when the wine jug clangs into the chalice as it’s being served, which doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of the things, but just looks careless, and surely wouldn’t have been a huge deal to reshoot? It’s sincerely baffling, this juxtaposition of painstaking attention to detail with an Ed Wood-esque ‘cut it and print!” ethos. The food taster asks about Clavdivs’s current project and delivers an award-winning burn on his writing skills, which is the only halfway decent thing in the entire scene, the whole purpose of which would appear to be so that Clavdivs can say he’s just reached his father’s death in his family history.

Stop telling us things we’ve literally just seen! Every single thing in this steaming pile of horseshit has already been well-established. Yes, we know he’s worried about his food being poisoned. Yes, we know he’s writing a history of his family, that Livia be scheming, that Pa was homicided.  And also I thought the family history was going to be secreted away for 1900 years’ time as per the Sibyl’s prophecy but now he’s broadcasting it freely? 

It does serve as a kind of segue to the next scene: INT: Caesar’s palace, night – one year later. Except that setup isn’t needed since Augustus bellows at Antonia to quit moping over Drusus because – you guessed it – it’s been a year since he died. Everyone is lying down, stuffed to the gills with food and drink, Julia single-handedly slaying the feminine mystique with some very porcine snoring. People stagger their way out, leaving Tiberius to whine about how much he hates Julia, so Livia can issue some threats before taking her leave. God, I love her.

Julia finally snores herself awake, then drunkenly sidles up to Tiberius, and he nearly drops a barf.  His repulsion triggers a “Marriage Story”-esque row where Julia gleefully admits her infidelity and dunks hard on Vipsania, which is the final straw for Tiberius – the argument ends when he smacks her across the face. 

Augustus foghorns the episode out with some grade-A patriarchy-steeped logic: I hate your violent husband and am banishing him from Rome, but also you can’t divorce him! How would it look for ME! You’ve already been through two husbands! Let’s ignore the fact that most of Rome either suspects or just plain knows that his actual wife murdered both those men. Then he goes on about how she’s to got focus on Gaius and Lucius – again those *two* grandchildren of his.

And then the camera pans back so you can see the children watching their ma while their gramps is berating her. As they file this for later nightmares, Livia stops to note what a lovely scene this is, how precious her step-grandchildren are, she could just eat them up. Presumably alive, like gagh.

Because the BBC aired the first two as a double bill, we get the very first END OF PART ONE BUGLE BLAST! Julio-Claudians out!

Next time: Will we get to watch Gaius and Lucius grow into strong, untraumatised young men and help their gramps rule Rome? Who will Livia poison next? All will be revealed next time on ‘Waiting in the Wings’!

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Aard Labour 8: Women https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-8-women https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-8-women#comments Sat, 16 Mar 2024 11:08:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34940 This is the 8th of my posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a controversial and long-running comic. This post includes detailed spoilers for Women, for the series as a whole, and for its writer’s philosophy.

Previously: The 50-issue Mothers & Daughters storyline got underway with Cerebus taking the fight to the matriarchal Cirinists, a fight interrupted when he’s whisked away on a cosmic journey to talk to fellow aardvark Suenteus Po. Dave Sim’s storytelling grows more staccato and experimental as he tries to convey the nature of reality to his readers…

The second book of Mothers & Daughters starts with Cerebus crashing through a skylight and finding himself in a room with two ladies. One is an elderly woman who likes tea. The other is her Cirinist guard and stenographer, assigned to write down anything she says. This is clearly a significant encounter. The old woman seems to know important things. The first episode of Women ends, portentously, with her about to reveal them: “And now here you are. Here you are.”

And next issue she tells Cerebus this: “Women rape men’s minds, just as men rape women’s bodies”

If you know Cerebus by reputation, you know that at a certain point Dave Sim turns the story into a soapbox for his ideas about men and women. That moment is not quite here. But as you’d expect from a book called Women, some ideas turn up here first. For a start, it’s a book in which the story is continuously interrupted by pages from the philosophical writings of Cirin and Astoria, two established characters who are the leaders of opposing matriarchal movements. So already a sizeable bit of the novel is Dave Sim writing prose extracts from female supremacist philosophies he invented.

And then there’s this mysterious third character, a kindly old lady under house arrest, who tells Cerebus and the reader that women read minds, and more, that they absorb and consume men’s minds, and that the ultimate result of the Cirinist takeover will be disaster, as by consuming all the male rational minds they replace strong male leaders with weak, inconsistent women.

Now, Cerebus is a fantasy comic. These are fantasy concepts. We’ve already seen that the Cirinists operate as a telepathic group mind in combat situations. This is a new character speaking, who may be an unreliable one. “Women eat minds” could be a fantasy conceit like Robert Jordan’s “male magic is tainted”.

But if you know what’s coming up, you also know that in roughly 2 years’ publication time, Dave Sim is going to show up, thinly disguised, in his own comic, and say essentially that yes! women are in fact brain-draining leeches. This fantasy stuff is a very thin metaphor for the real world. Which means that before we talk about Women we have to talk about…women. And what Dave Sim thinks about them.

And now here we are.

Dave Sim is not a typical misogynist any more than Cerebus is a typical comic. But Cerebus is a comic, and the unusual things it does are rooted in the grammar and ideas of comics. Similarly, the way in which Sim expresses his ideas about women is certainly odd, but a lot of the ideas themselves seem to me straightforward, if hardline, conservatism in their conception of women as fundamentally unequal and – whatever weasel words he uses to get around the point – lesser. Women were happier as homemakers. Women are too emotional to make decisions. Feminism has wrecked Western society. Conservative speech about these obvious truths is being suppressed.

These are very basic reactionary ideas, the kind you might pick up on many a right-wing talk show or Men’s Rights YouTube channel, expressed by men with a hundredth of Dave Sim’s talent but very similar opinions. There’s a danger that in focusing on Sim’s weirder expressions of his misogyny – the stuff about women’s bums being evolved to spank, or the idea that music promotes the feminist illusion of collective decision-making – we lose sight of the fact that the core of Sim’s thinking on gender is bog-standard saloon bar conservative talking points, jacked up to emphasise the immense threat women pose to male creative or decisive energy.

And yet while Sim’s central philosophy isn’t as ground-breaking as he might think, parts of it are strange, and it gets stranger as he goes on. It’s a braid of three interlacing strands, of which his troubles with women are only part. Even if, like me, you’re trying to write only about the stuff he’s actually putting in the comic, it’s worth having a broad mental model of what Dave Sim believes and how it develops over time. So permit me an unwelcome break to describe the Three Pillars of Dave Sim Thought, as far as I can summarise them:

THE GENDER STUFF: There wasn’t a lot about men vs women in the first parts of Cerebus. The Cirinists appear quite early, but they’re basically nuns. Astoria in High Society is a woman who can’t openly operate as a politician, but is working towards broadly feminist ends. Sim didn’t seem to have many personal issues either: he happily portrayed himself in interviews and editorially as a horndog, and during the initial success of Cerebus Sim and wife Deni were an independent comics power couple. His marriage ended in the mid 80s, and around this time he started either drifting towards conservative positions on gender or feeling more free to express those positions – by the 90s he was happy to describe himself as anti-feminist in the letters pages. 

Sim’s big stated issue with feminism was that men and women are inherently, hugely different, wanting completely different things from life and love, and that feminism has restructured society since the 70s to deny this and to unfairly advantage women, with terrible effects. He explained this position at length through an alter ego in the notorious Cerebus #186, at the climax of Reads. The reaction to that, and his changing religious views entrenched and hardened his ideas, and from 1998 on he was celibate by choice. At some point he started making people who want to work with him sign a statement that he isn’t a misogynist, which raises a lot of questions already answered by the statement (and the 300-issue comic).

THE CREATIVE FREEDOM STUFF: Before his emergence as an anti-feminist, Sim was already a political activist – a firebrand by the timid standards of the comics industry. His position as one of the most consistent and successful self-publishers gave him a lot of authority in the independent comics scene in the 80s, and along with several other creators he thrashed out a “Creative Bill Of Rights” circa 1986 proposing complete artistic freedom for creators. 

This was a hot topic in mid-80s comics, as it became clear that some of the most legendary figures in the mainstream – Jack Kirby, for instance – had signed iniquitous contracts and were being shafted by the companies they made millions for. True creative freedom, for Sim, involved working independent of a publisher and having the maximum possible control over printing and distribution. These stances were more hardline than most independent artists, who might own their work but had contracted with hopefully sympathetic and honest publishers to get it on the market. But whatever the policy differences, Sim’s views won him a lot of industry respect (as did his work, and his personal generosity to other indie cartoonists). Working conditions in comics have changed at least somewhat since the 80s, and Sim is one of the people who deserves credit.

I’m not sure whether Sim ever embraced libertarianism explicitly, but the philosophy with its distrust of government and of rent-seeking middlemen certainly seemed to appeal, and I’m happy to use it as shorthand for this part of his thinking. Sim’s credo of total creative freedom at the individual level dovetails with his gender thinking in Reads. This is the part of Sim’s beliefs that has shifted least over the decades, though in the late 90s he publically backed away from the idea that he was a leader of any movement (he objected to the word “godfather” in particular).

THE GOD STUFF: Sim characterised himself before his conversion as an atheist. I think that doesn’t quite capture it – post-conversion he often calls his earlier self a “pagan”, which fits better. I might use that corny phrase “spiritual but not religious”. Sim certainly was no skeptic: he had a belief in hidden patterns and synchronicity and a dissatisfaction with pure materialism but, before 1998, no need to attribute those patterns to a higher being. While researching Rick’s Story, which involved reading the Bible in order to parody its language, Sim had a religious conversion. 

This wasn’t an overnight change – in a discussion about magic with Alan Moore printed in Cerebus around the beginning of Rick’s Story, Sim is a lot more open-minded about Moore’s beliefs than he would be later, when he described his sometime friend as possessed by demons (he still liked Moore enough to want them cast out). Sim’s religious researches led to some significant lifestyle changes, and ultimately to his developing a personal faith syncretising Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He has no time for the organised versions of any of these religions and his interpretations of their texts are, as we’ll see, unorthodox. Sim’s newly religious sensibilities sharpened both his gender politics and his sense of individual separation from society – his life now is essentially monastic – and figure heavily in the final two books of Cerebus.

All three parts of Dave Sim Thought are important – I don’t think you can get why he does what he does in Cerebus by just isolating one of them. He’s a misogynist. He’s a libertarian. He’s a convert. He’s also an artist, dedicated to improving his craft and telling his story in the best way he can. Sometimes for him that means putting that other stuff on the page. But sometimes that means leaving it out.

I would say the gender and creative freedom elements develop together from early on. The religious element comes more out of left-field. And it has a major impact on trying to actually understand what’s going on in the comic, because after the conversion Sim becomes even crankier, in the sense of derailing and ignoring questions about story points and wanting to talk a whole lot more about his beliefs and the marxist-feminist society that’s cancelled him. It explains some of the peculiar tone of the later books of Cerebus, but also makes any glosses he offers on the earlier books a lot less useful.

This is a problem for Women, as it’s a particularly hallucinatory, oblique part of the Cerebus story. After his chat with the mysterious old lady, Cerebus spends much of it back in the pub. But this time he’s asleep, though continuing to affect the world in the same chaotic way he did in Flight. A lot of other people are asleep, too – much of the action of Women happens in dreams, often shared dreams, but dreams which have a physical impact on reality. And somehow the catalyst for this is the Roach, who has taken on his final major incarnation as Swoon, king of dreams – a parody of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, comics’ critical sensation at the time. (Gaiman loved the parody, which is extremely broad but certainly nails Morpheus’ core identity as a sad horny goth)

Meanwhile the rapid-fire scene-switching of Flight continues, particularly towards the end of the book, with dream-states and waking states shuffling as the three aardvarks and Astoria start to converge for their confrontation in Reads. The tone is constantly, unpredictably shifting, and so is the cast – you turn the page from philosophy extracts to a daytime talk-show parody with Red Sophia and her Mother; Astoria fights for control of her besieged followers and a few pages later the Regency Elf is trying to seduce Cerebus. Like a dream, it feels chaotic and semi-random. On my first read of Women, it was probably the single most difficult Cerebus book to understand – on a “what is happening?” level, not a “why is Dave Sim doing this?” one. 

With hindsight, there’s a clear story throughline in Women – it’s where the extremely long-bubbling “Cirinists v Kevillists” subplot comes into the foreground, which is why it’s studded with those bits from philosophical tracts. And the chaos has more of a purpose, too. This is – though we don’t know it at the time – the last time we’ll see most of these characters. Remember that back in Church And State and High Society, the main way Dave Sim set up stories was by a shuffled series of encounters with comic relief characters – Elrod, The Roach, Sophia et al – which gradually built up to something wider, as those comedy characters subtly advanced the plot. With Jaka’s Story, Sim switched to his other main storytelling mode, a theatrical one following the drama of a small group of characters. After Women, that becomes the dominant way he tells the story: he returns to the “let’s see who shows up this issue” model with Guys, but he’s using it in a very different way, with a mostly new cast.

So a lot of Women is a farewell tour, and a rather bitter one at that – Sim is keen to overturn expectations and knock down characters he’s built up. The debunking of minor adversaries in Flight (like the demon Khem or Death) becomes a set of revelations about more significant figures. Elrod was never real. Nor was any version of the Regency Elf we’ve ever seen on-page. The Judge tearfully apologises for being wrong. At every turn in Women, Dave Sim is the guy in the astronauts meme, pulling a gun behind the shocked reader. “Elrod is a creation of the Chaos Gems?” “Always was.”

But this stuff is happening around the edges of the main story: Cirinism v Kevillism, and the return of Astoria to centre-stage after 70 or so issues in prison. Cirin is freaking out about Cerebus’ reappearance, and turns to the imprisoned Astoria, who she always assumed was running the Cerebus show anyway. Astoria realises the leverage she has and demands an in-person meeting, which will lead either to her death or an alliance. Before it can happen, disaster strikes as part of the mountain above Iest collapses onto the city – Sim handles the chaos of this brilliantly. In the disorder, Cirin is briefly believed dead and Astoria’s Kevillist followers are desperate for her to take action. The two women finally do meet, in a shared dream, but ultimately Cirin rejects any compromise with her former protege.

Like Flight paralleled Volume 1 of Cerebus, Women parallels High Society, in the sense that Astoria is very much its star turn. Astoria is one of those characters Dave Sim can’t quite bring himself to ruin, even when he obviously detests what she stands for. He’ll trash-talk her endlessly in interviews but keeps writing scenes where she absolutely steals the show, like her explanation of why, in the midst of catastrophe, she’s going back to sleep. Her character journey in Women – towards the realisation that the political movement she’s led sees her mostly as an alternative leader to Cirin, not an inspiration to set and achieve one’s own goals – is one of the most nuanced in the comics, perhaps because it parallels Sim’s own eventual disenchantment with his status as a self-publishing guru.

Astoria remains fascinating. The ideological battle she’s caught in is a lot less digestible. Cirinism vs Kevillism has been a background element of Cerebus for ages, the secret conflict behind much of the series’ intrigue, and both Astoria and Cirin tend to see the world in its terms. The Cirinists are absolutely vexed by their failure to understand why Cerebus is clutching the rag doll Missy, for instance – is he secretly making a pro-Mothers gesture?

(The observation here is shrewd – dogmatic thinkers tend to interpret all information in the light of their chosen beliefs, however little it actually fits. Dave Sim himself will become a case in point.) 

It’s true that as of Mothers & Daughters we haven’t had a full explanation of what Cirinism and Kevillism actually are, but it’s unlikely any readers would feel shortchanged. By their works shall ye know them, and we’ve seen enough to get a solid grounding in the two ideologies. Any reader will have picked up that Cirinism is an expansionist military matriarchy in which only mothers have full citizenship, men have almost no rights, and infertile women form an inferior caste. They should also have figured out that Kevillism is an offshoot started by Astoria that extends rights to “daughters”, i.e. all women, and believes in working within the system to achieve their ultimate goals, which include women’s suffrage, abortion on demand and “ownership of men”.

If readers have worked this stuff out already, why does Sim keep interrupting Women to give us more detail on the two philosophies? It’s not to entertain us: when the text blocks show up in Women it’s like a bad RPG sourcebook gatecrashing the comic. Strangely though, it’s not because the battle between Cirinism and Kevillism is vital to the plot either – in fact it’s something of a red herring. The whole of Women is setting up a conflict between Cirin and Astoria which barely happens – Cirin meets Astoria in a dream, has the chance to change things, and doesn’t. None of the philosophical disagreement ends up actually mattering very much.

So what’s going on? For me the answer comes back – not surprisingly – to the beliefs of Dave Sim, and his wholesale rejection of feminism.

One of the themes of Mothers & Daughters is how political movements go wrong. In Flight, the Cirinists are rife with internal rivalry and disobedience, and in Women, the Kevillists are revealed to have learned almost none of the lessons Astoria wanted to impart. The Cirinist mother cult is also hypocritical – their leadership barely see their own children – and the great schism between Cirin and Astoria turns out to be based on Cirin’s petty spite as much as any action Astoria took. For all the words we see spilt by the two women, it’s clear there aren’t many fundamental differences, and the main ones are rooted in age or personal enmity. (The Cirinist and Kevillist symbols are the same on those text pages – an ankh – it’s just the amount of ivy growing on it that differs).  

And when we see the Cirinists in future books, they’ve absorbed some minor elements of Kevillism (women are allowed in pubs!) but Astoria is gone and the disagreement is barely relevant any more. In other words, the great divide operating behind the scenes of Cerebus was largely an illusion – the differences between Cirinism and Kevillism, between Mothers and Daughters, were just not that important.

Dave Sim has made them seem important because he’s presented the Cirinists in a violently negative light and the only major Kevillist we’ve seen – Astoria – in a mostly positive one. And Astoria’s political wishlist is mostly a broad mix of real past and present feminist demands, whereas Cirin’s matriarchy feels alien and brutal, a totalitarian state in burlap habits. But this is another Mothers & Daughters expectation reversal: to Sim, the differences are cosmetic, which is presumably why he chucks the “ownership of men” grenade into Astoria’s list. 

To someone who’s issues away from telling us that the most basic of Astoria’s demands – women’s suffrage – was a bad idea, the vaguely-recognisable-as-feminism Kevillism and the full fascist matriarchy of Cirinism are two sides of a female supremacist coin. He’s ultimately no more interested in the differences between them than he is in the differences between first, second and third wave feminism. So the main plot of Women is a blind alley, which partly accounts for why, even by Cerebus standards, it’s an awkward, elusive book.

If Cirinism v Kevillism is a false trail, where is Sim really heading? The most telling text page in Women isn’t any of the extracts from The New Matriarchy. It’s the testimony, near the end, of an old woman facing a Cirinist tribunal, talking about how life was better before the revolution, when women stayed at home and men worked. It’s unadorned conservative anti-feminist talking points. The page concludes by noting her execution, as the Cirinists can’t handle the truth. This, not the shadow conflict between Cirin and Astoria, is the fight Dave Sim is about to pick.

Flight ended in a strange, rapid-fire muddle. Women ends with a sense of real momentum – Astoria, Cerberus and a robed figure who turns out to be Po, making their way to the cathedral where Cirin is waiting. The storytelling accelerates even more – cutting panel by panel between the four protagonists. Sim knows how to pace a climax. The first time fans read it, whatever they’d thought of the novel so far, whatever suspicions about Sim’s purposes they might have had, they must have felt excited. Reading it knowing what’s coming, what once was thrilling is now ominous. Here we are.

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Aard Labour 7: Flight https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-7-flight https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-7-flight#comments Wed, 13 Mar 2024 11:51:01 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34935 This is the seventh in a series of posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a comic I used to read. Spoilers, as ever, abound.

Previously: Dave Sim ended the first half of his 300-issue Cerebus comic with a meditation on death, specifically the death of Oscar Wilde. In the epilogue to that, Cerebus is galvanised into action and starts fighting the matriarchal theocrat Cirinists.

Flight is the first part of Mothers & Daughters, and Mothers & Daughters is a lot of things: the conclusion of the ‘main’ Cerebus storyline; a speedrun remix and retcon of the first 150 issues of that storyline; a gigantic rugpull for the faithful readers of those 150 issues; a 50-chapter postmodern metatextual graphic novel about feminism and its discontents; the point where Dave Sim irrevocably announces himself as one of said discontents; the point where a lot of readers (me included) quit; a smorgasbord of astonishing cartooning; a right fucking mess.

Mothers & Daughters is divided into four books, which Dave Sim issued as separate collections, partly for economic reasons I’m sure, but also partly so the Cerebus Fan’s bookshelf would forever bear Sim’s dread warning: WOMEN READS MINDS. I’ll be talking about the books separately, but first let’s have a quick overview of the structure of Mothers & Daughters and what each of the books do.

Mothers & Daughters is a shattered mirror of all previous Cerebus books, but in particular Church And State. Like that novel, it’s a story of political upheaval which culminates in an Ascension, which resets Cerebus’ understanding of his life for the next phase of the comic. In Flight, matriarchal tyrant Cirin is planning her own Ascension, while fellow aardvark Cerebus sparks a revolt in Iest against her rule and is then swept on a journey of cosmic self-discovery where he meets Suenteus Po, the third aardvark. In Women, Cerebus returns, disaster strikes Iest, and the conflict between Cirin and Astoria’s Kevillists comes to a head. In Reads, Po, Cerebus, Cirin and Astoria converge and converse, and ultimately Cirin and Cerebus fight. And in Minds, Cirin and Cerebus both ascend, talk separately to their maker, and Cerebus gets a tour of the solar system and of several possible futures before spending a couple of years abandoned on a moon of Pluto.

Put like that this is a somewhat baroque but legible fantasy story: it’s no more difficult to follow than, say, the average Avengers or X-Men event, and probably about as hermetic. But it doesn’t read that way at all. For a start I’ve left out the fact that in Reads the narrative bifurcates to include two long text stories, one of which is a memoir/manifesto by “Viktor Davis”, a Dave Sim analogue. This is where the controversy over Sim’s political views exploded. But even if you leave that to one side – and god knows many readers did – the storytelling in the first two books of Mothers & Daughters is deliberately fractured, a kaleidoscope of dimly connected events in which cause and effect is radically unclear. The moment at which Cerebus, after three years of slow, beautifully-crafted comics, finally starts moving its wider story forward is the moment Sim chooses to unleash his most chaotic, formally difficult storytelling mode.

And that’s the point. If there’s a theme to Mothers & Daughters – and in fact there are dozens – it’s escaping the tyranny of expectation. You expect certain things – from life, from a story, from a marriage, from the world, from a £1.25 a month comic – and your expectations, from a particular point of view, are themselves a compromise, a set of unexamined assumptions that are also traps. Mothers & Daughters is, among all the things mentioned above, an attempt to overturn those expectations and assumptions. So on the most basic level: you expected the story of Cerebus The Aardvark to continue along certain lines; you expected its creator to think and behave in certain ways; you expected that all the bits you liked already will continue to mean largely what you thought they meant. And this is the point in the Cerebus experience where Dave leans down and whispers “no”.

(OK, let’s be accurate, that’s two books after Flight.)

I don’t think thumbing your nose at expectations is a bad thing to do. I don’t think writing things that shift the meaning of what has happened before is a bad thing to do either. In fact if you’re undertaking a project as monumental and long-term as Dave Sim’s, you’re likely to end up doing that whether you want to or not. Cerebus itself has already worked like this: Church And State becomes more comprehensible when you know a) what an Ascension is and b) that almost every character in the story is interpreting Cerebus’ actions as trying to achieve one. In the third and fourth books of Mothers & Daughters, information on Cerebus’ nature is revealed which potentially shifts everything about the previous books – whether it does that well or not is a question for later. But this is all stuff Sim is consistently playing with – he wants you to always keep in mind the relativist, unreliable nature of almost every written or verbal account you get in Cerebus.

On the formal level and on the story level, the kaleidoscopic chaos of Flight’s storytelling is part of this rewriting of expectations. You thought you were going to get straightforward explanations: you aren’t. What you actually get, at first, is a linear set of action sequences – Cerebus killing Cirinists; the Cirinists trying desperately to get Cirin to take it seriously – surrounded by a whole handful of other mini-stories, switching in and out of the main narrative like subplots on speed, and most of them are wholly cryptic. Menaces from the earliest days of Cerebus are logicked out of existence by the Judge. The mountain of Iest grows a dick, horrifying Mrs Thatcher. A nude model posing for the artist from Church And State sees a tiny Cerebus hovering in front of her. The Pigts are on the march.

For the first few issues of Flight, this all feels terribly confusing but also terribly exciting. Stuff is happening! And at an astonishing pace! Also, you can intuit a basic idea of why – Cerebus’ actions are somehow having ripple effects all through the world of the comic, but the throughline of the story is in what he’s doing, not what’s happening around him. And then suddenly, Cerebus vanishes, and what he’s doing becomes another part of the chaos.

In one way, it’s a brilliant move: everything in the comic since the end of Jaka’s Story has been deferring gratification for the moment Cerebus springs into action and takes on the Cirinists. Flight is where it happens, and it’s very quickly apparent that Cerebus’ direct approach is absolutely no match for the situation he’s put himself into and is going to get a lot of people killed. The thing readers have been wanting for at least 12 months – and for over 3 years, in some cases – goes spinning off in a different direction. You thought Cerebus was going to get stuff done: he isn’t.

The rest of Flight isn’t trying to match the adrenaline rush of that opening, and it doesn’t. The helter-skelter scene-switching and staccato storytelling continues, though. So does the tour of moments from the first half of Cerebus, revisiting concepts and characters from as far back as the late 70s: Sim’s juvenilia. K’Cor and the Pigts get a lot of page time. The Roach and Elrod are a meaningful part of the action for the first time in 60 issues. And the main story becomes a cosmic chess game between Cerebus and Suenteus Po, in which the stakes are utterly obscure. 

Sim returns to older art and lettering styles, too – Cerebus’ journey to Po’s Eighth Sphere is told with the familar “omniscient narrator” font and with plenty of visual references to the original Mind Game story from Issue #20. The Pigts material reaches even further back to the Windsor-Smith Conan pastiche of the very first issues. It’s impressive – of course it is – that Sim can slip into those old styles like a vest. But…

On reading this stuff at the time a little voice spoke up – OK, what’s actually the point of all this? Those old stories weren’t exactly the greatest: they were a young cartoonist working through some heavy influences and discovering more of what he wanted to do and be. Returning to them smacked of an attempt to force-fit significance: Cerebus is a complete 300 issue work, ergo what happened in those first dozen comics must be made relevant to the wider conception. Cerebus had been self-indulgent before – as a reader, you knew to expect that. But it hadn’t ever seemed pedantic.

We know a lot about what Sim is aiming for in Flight, because he took more pains than usual to tell people in interviews, and (unusually for later Sim) his explanations are directly about the story, not about its underlying gender philosophies. A rough but hopefully honest paraphrase: Flight is an attempt to demonstrate the structure of Reality as Dave Sim understands it. However, there is no visible pattern, because it’s not possible to step back enough and discern the visible pattern in real events (the disorientation of Flight is akin to making sense of the ‘big picture’ of world affairs by reading a newspaper). In general, what’s happening is that Cerebus’ inaction has caused his peculiar ability to influence events to seep out into the world around him, so that now he’s doing something the environment is responding chaotically. Po’s chess game is meant to demonstrate to Cerebus that action in itself is a bad idea for someone with this unconscious ability.

This is all interesting stuff and some of it can even be deduced from reading the comic. Some parts you can work out after reading the rest of Mothers & Daughters – Po’s belief that staying out of events is the only moral thing for an aardvark to do, for instance, because he flat-out states it later. (Though it doesn’t make a re-read of the chess sequence feel any less arbitrary) But even if you did manage to entirely grok what Dave Sim is up to, “there’s a pattern to events but we can never get far enough away to see it” is such a shrug of an idea. It may well be how Sim honestly saw reality at the time he was creating Flight, but as a creative choice on the page, it’s hardly satisfying.

And that’s fine – satisfying his readers has never been Sim’s goal; most of what is good about Cerebus (and much of what is awful) wouldn’t exist if it was. In general, though, there’s been a balance of trust up to now – Sim has a reason for presenting the story how he does, and the payoff tends to be worth it. Flight – even when you know the thinking behind it – is for me the first real time that Sim’s ambitions and his abilities don’t match. There may simply be no way to represent ideas this abstract in an action comic. But it surely doesn’t help that he chooses to demonstrate the workings of Reality by returning to dead-and-buried story elements only the Cerebus hardcore will even remember.

Thinking about it in terms of the full conception of Mothers & Daughters – as the beginning of an acceleration to a conclusion, and a way to serve notice that much in those earlier issues is unreliable, and a last look at What Cerebus Used To Be Like before the inflection point we now know was coming – yes, all the nostalgic sequences make more sense. Individual pages and sequences are, as you might take for granted by now, brilliantly done. But they still add up to a comic which suddenly feels like it’s fussily going over old ground. Flight is the least essential part of Mothers & Daughters.

Which also makes it the least obnoxious. That says something about what’s coming up, given that Flight is also showing us something we’ve never really seen before – Cerebus as a genuinely violent comic. There’s a brutality in Flight that we’ve only seen in the Cirinist raid on the Tavern in Jaka’s Story, and that was a terrifying eruption of violence from nowhere. In Flight, the savagery is immediate and sustained. Cerebus’ fights with the Cirinists are horrifically bloody; later, a minor comic character from the earlier books gets whipped and burned to death. The Cirinists execute hundreds just because they saw Cerebus, and the Pigts slaughter each other: the violence isn’t always on-panel, but the book is soaked through with it. One of Sim’s most effective artistic touches here is pages of Beckettian mouths and eyes against blackness, as the citizens of Iest whisper together and try to imagine how they might survive the chaos of the storyline and the Cirinist’s fascist government.

Even the comic elements are pitch-black and raw-edged. The Roach turns into Punisherroach, gunning down Cirinists by the dozen. Shortly before, in one of the best sequences in the book, a mob of fired-up citizens attack the Cirinists and are slaughtered: Sim renders the “fight” as simply a full page of lavishly violent sound effects, including trailing intestines from the word “GUT!”. It’s inventive, repulsive, and horribly funny.

In the schema of Mothers & Daughters, each of the four parts is a response to one of the earlier novels. Flight is violent partly because Cerebus began as a pastiche of the sword-and-sorcery mainstream comics of the 70s, in which combat and implied brutality played a major part. That was 1977. By 1991, the mainstream had changed. Cerebus #151 – the opening chapter of Flight – came out in October, the same month as the best-selling comic of all time, Claremont & Lee’s X-Men #1, ending a run which predated Cerebus itself. While not an especially violent comic itself, it surfed to its 7 million sales on a new wave of slick, militarised, action-oriented, superhero stories. The sequence in which normalroach becomes the Punisherroach has a strange real-world echo: normalman’s creator, Jim Valentino, published at one point by Dave and Deni Sim, resurfaced at Image in 1992 with the antihero Shadowhawk, whose gimmick was breaking criminals’ spines. Such were the times, and the violence in Flight exists in that context.

From a story perspective, though, the most obviously important thing Flight does is give readers their first proper look at the patroness of Cirinist violence, Cirin herself. She’s been the explicit antagonist of the comic for 40 issues, and a source of reader fascination since her appearance in #100 as the second of the ‘three aardvarks’. It would be wrong to say she’s a particularly well-developed character, but in some ways nor is Cerebus. Cirin is ruthless, utterly focused, spiteful, impatient and overconfident – again, not unlike the protagonist. And visually, she dominates almost any page she’s on, a cross between a walking elephant and Frank Miller’s Kingpin. 

Cirin rarely comes up in conversations about Sim’s women characters, because the books she’s actually in get so notoriously derailed, and because she’s a fascist leader who’s turned herself into a symbol of her movement, and most characters react to her as such. But even though she’s not as strong or interesting a character as Astoria, Cirin is one of the great comics villains, in the one Cerebus novel that’s grand and operatic enough to require one.

One of the things that makes Cerebus fascinating to me as a comic is that the ways in which it’s bad, when it is bad, are so unusual. It has, obviously, several potential failure modes. A reader can find a book’s underlying philosophy repugnant. They can find its formal experimentation pointless or self-indulgent. They can judge that it hits all its intended artistic and philosophical goals and is simply a bust at the simple level of being entertaining and interesting. But then there’s one of the most common reactions I have to a comic – I can see what the idea was, but the execution falls short. (Comics are difficult to do well!) 

I’ve rarely had this response to Cerebus so far – even when I have, it’s confined to overwrought text sections or a failed attempt to catch an accent. Dave Sim is generally so technically good at what he does that he finds a way to pull off almost everything he attempts. So Flight is the first time I’ve thought “this doesn’t quite work” at the book scale. That doesn’t make it bad – as its name suggests, it’s a propulsive, exciting comic even when nothing much about it makes sense (another way in which it chimed with the early 90s times). But it’s the least satisfying to me of any of the Cerebus books so far.  

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Aard Labour 6: Melmoth https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-6-melmoth https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-6-melmoth#comments Mon, 11 Mar 2024 16:57:18 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34930 This is the sixth of my posts about Cerebus, the alternative comic that ran from 1978-2004. As usual, it’s full of spoilers for the book in question, the whole run of Cerebus and in this particular case, the life story of Oscar Wilde.

Previously: Dave Sim switched focus from his large-scale fantasy plot to tell a more intimate, theatrical story about Cerebus’ lost love Jaka, against the backdrop of rule by a fascist matriarchy, the Cirinists. One of the supporting cast was a fictionalised version of Oscar Wilde at the height of his literary powers.

Melmoth is the first of the really ‘difficult’ books of Cerebus, a dual narrative in which Cerebus sits outside a bar, almost catatonic (at one point a character literally dusts him) while Oscar Wilde dies. The Wilde scenes are drawn from – and narrated with – the real letters of Wilde’s friends, written as he lay dying in Paris. Dave Sim doesn’t alter the names but he changes geographical and religious details to fit Cerebus’ world. In some parts of the story, Cerebus is prominent – we even see a few old characters from Church And State, like Princes Mick and Keef or Bishop Posey. In others, the comic is entirely given over to the Wilde material, which is told mostly in the style Sim was coming to use more and more – text laid alongside beautifully composed illustrations.

I put ‘difficult’ in scare quotes because Melmoth’s reputation as a tough read mostly dates from when it was coming out monthly, across an entire year of the Cerebus comic. As a 240-page graphic novel (novella, purist Sim might protest) it’s a bizarre, unique work but an entirely digestible one. In fact, both the ‘comics’ and ‘illustrated text’ halves are less daunting than their Jaka’s Story equivalents. The Cerebus portions are a return to the way Sim was working during the first half of Church And State – a series of short comic or tragicomic vignettes which patchwork together into a story. The Oscar segments use considerably larger text and less flowery language than the extracts from “Daughter Of Palnu” we just sat through. Of all the sixteen Cerebus phonebooks, Melmoth might be the fastest to read.

Even so there’s rarely if ever been a ‘graphic novel’ more unsuited to monthly serialisation, and this was at a point where Cerebus’ overall reputation was glowing. Sim’s personal profile in the comics industry, as godfather of a creator’s rights movement and as hard-partying convention regular, was also sky-high. And he was putting out a comic in which, month to month, almost nothing happened.

The sheer inertia of reading Melmoth monthly is impossible to recapture, which is in some ways a shame for a book about the horror of helpless waiting for something to happen, even when it’s not something you want. There are definite thematic links between the Cerebus and the Oscar material but, as is often the case with Sim, the ties are also on the level of pacing and the reading experience. The characters in the Oscar half are in agony, a familiar one to anyone who’s been up close to a nasty death. They’re reliant on confused and contradictory diagnoses of a patient whose worsening condition includes moments of heartbreaking lucidity. Robbie and Reggie, Oscar’s companions, clutch at occasional straws but ultimately must resign themselves to the barely endurable wait for their friend to die.

Sim knows most monthly readers won’t be empathising with Wilde’s friends, but they can experience those feelings themselves as what they most want to happen (Cerebus to get up and do something) is similarly withheld. They get the catharsis they want in the Epilogue to Melmoth, but only after Oscar’s story has run its course.

For most of this post I’ll be exploring that story, and its place in Sim’s wider conception of Cerebus. But if the Oscar story is the heart of Melmoth, the Cerebus material has its own joys. Melmoth is, in essence, a filler arc – in an interview Sim candidly admitted he didn’t know exactly what it would be or even be about until the idea fell into place when reading about Wilde’s death. His original concept seems to have been an arc in which the dead-inside Cerebus acts as a kind of foil or sounding board for other passing characters – an idea which had the advantage that it would take as long or short as needed for Sim to get to #150 and the halfway point in the comic.

You can see traces of this in Melmoth as it exists – the scene with Prince Mick, for instance, probably the funniest in a book that’s not as short on laughs as you might imagine going in. There are visions and dreams which let Sim stretch out a bit from the straitjacket he’s put himself in with the rest of the story and nudge readers into recalling characters like Astoria, who will be important again soon enough. But most of the Cerebus part is the story of Cerebus’ stay at Dino’s Cafe, based on Sim’s own experiences as a regular at a Canadian bar in between relationships.

This phase of Sim’s life is also what he’ll draw on later for Guys, and the easy-going vibe of Dino himself feels like a dry run for some of the characters in that book. (In the chronology of the whole, Mothers & Daughters covers a few days in 48 issues, bookended by months and years Cerebus spends largely in the pub.) Dino is also the anti-Pud: no more intelligent, perhaps, but free of demons, more focused on his business, and bolder. Pud is terrified of Cerebus’ gold coin; Dino sees it as his chance to turn the Cafe into the absurdly fancy Dino’s Bistro Continentale. There’s very little movement or variation in the Oscar parts of Melmoth, so – even though Cerebus spends the book largely immobile – the Dino parts are a chance for Sim to enjoy himself with scenes that are often full of light and motion, like the sequence where workmen demolish the old front of Dino’s with rhythmic hammer blows.

Sim’s concept of alternating between the Oscar and Cerebus sections, and of letting some of the connecting tissue be Gerhard’s wonderful visualisation of a single Iestan street, is one of his best creative decisions. Without the Cerebus sections, the Oscar Wilde material would be a formal exercise in solemnity: sad and well-crafted, but unrelenting. But as it is, Sim generally knows exactly when to spin away from them and return to Dino’s. Equally, several issues of only Dino’s would have been too frothy to convey the depth of Cerebus’ collapse at this point, and might have made his recovery too swift. 

The counterpoint between the two is the storytelling answer to the very reasonable question: what on earth is a retelling of the death of Oscar Wilde doing in the middle – the exact middle – of a fantasy comic about a talking aardvark? But there are other answers too.

Oscar isn’t the first time we’ve seen a real world character lightly fictionalised in Cerebus. It’s not even the first time we’ve seen this real world character. In the next book, Flight, Dave Sim will make clear that there are two Oscars, but this is left tantalisingly ambiguous in Melmoth itself – Jaka-Oscar received the real world Wilde’s two years’ hard labour sentence, and Melmoth-Oscar’s stout defense of the literary merit of ‘Daughter Of Palnu’ could read as poignant self-justification. (It could also read as Dave Sim telling off those readers who disliked the prose elements of Jaka’s Story) At the very least, some of Sim’s beloved synchronicity is at work.

But Oscar in Melmoth – from now on I’ll just say “Oscar”, and specify if I mean the first one – is qualitatively unlike any previous real world borrowing in Cerebus. Most of the others – even the previous Oscar – are an opportunity for Sim to do a bit. They’re a comic foil (or a villainous foil in the case of Mrs Thatcher) for other characters to bounce off and a chance for Sim to show off his gift for pastiche. Oscar marks a significant advance in Sim’s technique, a further weakening of the boundaries between character and real-life model, in two major ways. 

First, Oscar is the first major borrowed character whose biographical details match his model’s: Lord Julius is not a comedian and film star; Prince Mick is not a singer. But Oscar – both of them – is a writer, and the circles he moves in are identifiable as the real ones he was part of. This is the model Sim will come to use for a series of writer and creator analogues later – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Woody Allen, and others, overlaying literary and artistic biography directly onto the narrative of Cerebus.

The vehicle for doing this is the concept of “Reads” – the pamphlet-length serialised works of fiction which stand in for books in Cerebus’ world. Writers of fiction, in Cerebus, break the skin of the wider fiction they’re a part of. There is a whole metafictional sub-story beneath the surface of the longer work in which these writers are reading, commenting on, and reacting to one another’s work – Oscar in Jaka’s Story mentions meeting “the author of Church And State”, a droll in-joke which reads rather differently after Mothers & Daughters. The intrusion of real writers into the narrative of Cerebus anticipates what’s going to happen in that novel.

Which makes the conversation between Oscar and Robbie Ross in the first episode of Melmoth one of the most important in the whole of Cerebus. The two men are talking about “Daughter Of Palnu”, with Robbie expressing disbelief that its author (the Jaka’s Story Oscar) got away with so many implied criticisms of the Cirinists – mostly, we know as readers, via the character of Nurse, who turns out to be upsettingly different from the ogress Oscar writes her as. Au contraire, says Melmoth’s Oscar, the Cirinists have in fact allowed almost complete artistic freedom, because they understand that most dissent is simply fashionable contrarianism, admired for its daring but powerless to effect change. No licensed writer – nobody within the existing editorial system – will challenge the genuine power structures operating above and behind the factions of politics.

Oscar’s view of the Cirinists isn’t the gospel truth – the fact that Mothers & Daughters opens with Cirin selecting books to be burned implies that she, at least, cares what’s in them. But Oscar’s argument is important, because the things it suggests about what Dave Sim thinks about art and dissent are major flags as to what’s coming up in Cerebus itself.  

Oscar’s argument does not make a lot of sense as applied to the Cirinists, or indeed to any real-world authoritatians you could mention. Censorship of literature is, in general, pretty high on the agenda of tyrannical regimes, or of people who are hoping to lay the ground and rally the troops for future tyranny. But the argument is still a familiar one. It’s very much the line of reasoning used by people who think that Canada, or the USA, or Britain or France or any other Western ‘liberal democracy’, is in fact a tyranny, one so invisible and entrenched its citizens don’t realise they are doing its bidding. This is the position Dave Sim will indeed end up at, even if he isn’t there already at this point – in his view the “marxist-feminist-homosexualist” axis that governs Western culture is so powerful it won’t be shifted for tens, if not hundreds of years.

The idea that there is some genuine dissent which is culturally forbidden is a very attractive and very deep-rooted one, partly attractive because it’s obviously true. There are a lot of opinions in any society which sit outside, or uneasily on the borders of, an existing political consensus, and people aligned with that consensus will reject them if they can. Step outside it and you may well feel embattled, because very often you will be embattled.

The problem, though, is that stepping outside that consensus may or may not be right, but it’s very likely to feel right. That applies even if you haven’t actually transgressed anything. Casting yourself as the heroic figure who stands up and says “this is wrong”, the one who Just Asks Questions, is an incredibly strong temptation, and it’s no surprise a lot of people put on that rhetorical armour to defend positions which are actually deeply mainstream, or interest groups who are, in fact, doing just fine. (Very often they know exactly what they’re doing – casting yourself as the underdog is basic PR)

One consequence of feeling in the right – especially once you’ve convinced yourself you’re at war with an inescapable cultural tyranny – is that attacks on your position can become a kind of proof you are in the right. In the run-up to Reads and Dave Sim’s grand presentation of the “male Light / female Void” theory – and I think we’ve been in the run-up to Reads since the end of Jaka’s Story at least – he is continually dropping coy little hints that he’s about to be a Very Naughty Boy and get in a lot of trouble. This turns out to be true, and he’s laying the groundwork for his application of this circular logic when people do, not surprisingly, object to being told they or their loved ones are brain leeches. “Sounds like the kind of thing a marxist-feminist-homosexualist would say” becomes an infallible counter-argument. If dissent is tolerated, but people want to cancel Dave Sim, why, he must have stumbled upon the truth.

What does all this have to do with Melmoth? People might point to this book and say, look, why would a bigot like Dave Sim write this tender, haunting, deeply humane portrait of a gay man’s final days? I think the answer may be the same as the answer to “Why does Dave Sim write an “I Am Not A Feminist” editorial in Cerebus #140, running next to the excerpt from the trial judge’s verdict on Oscar Wilde?” Sim is preparing the ground for his own social ostracism, his self-fulfilling martyrdom and exile.

So that’s one, very cynical, answer to what the death of Oscar Wilde is doing here. But it’s an answer that also recognises something important: Melmoth really is a tender, haunting, deeply humane story, a graphic novel which mixes like no other comic a requiem – the pale, slow processional of the Oscar material – and a wake – Cerebus’ gradual emergence from his own mental collapse. This culminates in his active rejection of his own death, albeit standing over several fresh corpses. And this is where the second big difference between Oscar and previous real-world imports comes into play.

Most of the other import characters exist for Cerebus to react to. But not Oscar. In fact, neither Oscar ever actually meets Cerebus: the aardvark has not taken up residence at Dino’s when Oscar walks up the street on his final night out, and when the two stories do cross, Oscar has died. Oscar in Melmoth partly replaces Cerebus as the protagonist, like Jaka did in Jaka’s Story. But that was a story about Jaka in which Cerebus was a supporting character. In Melmoth, the Cerebus story and the Oscar one exist in parallel. They are, in a way, the same story.

We know that Cerebus will last until issue 300. We know the comic is about his life. We know how that life ends – “alone, unmourned and unloved”. So Sim is in the unusual position where he can tell a story at this point in Cerebus which foreshadows something later – in the way the end of Church And State foreshadows the end of Mothers & Daughters – but this time all the readers know what it’s foreshadowing and why. Oscar is a version of what Cerebus will become. The end of the first half of Cerebus is a pre-echo of the end of its second. 

So what Melmoth has to say about death is important in that wider storytelling scheme. In one way, you can see Oscar’s death – shabby and premature as it is – as a ‘good death’ compared to Cerebus’ prophesied passing. Oscar, surely, is not alone, unmourned and unloved.

I’m not sure this is what Dave Sim is driving at, though. Oscar is certainly loved and mourned – the main story of the book ends with his funeral, and it’s largely told via verbatim extracts from the letters of his lover, friend and literary executor Robbie Ross. But just as the Cerebus part of Melmoth is a slow return from spiritual death – at first he’s only able to say “aye” and “nay” – the Oscar part is a story of gradual but inexorable separation from friends, from consciousness, and finally from life. Oscar’s last recorded words are nonsense, his last sound a terrible, drawn out death-rattle. For the mourners, Ross and Turner, Oscar does not die alone. But for Oscar?

In a Bluesky comment on the Jaka’s Story post, the critic Andrew Hickey summed up a theme of the story beautifully. I hope he won’t mind me quoting him: “Jaka’s Story is, for me, a book about the lies we tell ourselves about who we really are, and about the lies we tell to and about other important people in our lives, and how it’s never truly possible to know anyone.” This is very much a wider idea of Sim’s – people and events are unknowable, there can be no ‘definitive’ account of anyone or anything.

And I think Sim carries this from Jaka’s Story into the still more pessimistic – though often very beautiful – Melmoth. What Melmoth is telling us about death is that subjectively we all die alone, unmourned, and unloved, cut off from the people around us physically, unable to see, hear or no them. There will be no ferryman on our voyage into the dark.

Read as a 240-page whole Melmoth is one of the more accessible parts of Cerebus, even if a new reader wouldn’t exactly know where everything fits. The pacing of the Cerebus sections is beautifully done, with almost nothing changing month by month but a slow arc towards awareness and awakening showing through the whole. The Oscar material works too as a formal experiment, a sombre high point in Sim’s realist mode, and it helps enormously that the language feels (and is) genuine, rather than clever Sim pastiches.

There’s one more reason to do a literary biography of the death of Oscar Wilde in the middle of your aardvark comic, though, and it’s the simplest of all. Because you can.

Sim was preaching self-publishing as the only way to ensure complete creative freedom for artists – that’s what Oscar’s digs about editors are getting at, and the whole idea that the established publishing system produces “good sheep”. (Another way in which this all prefigures Reads) All around him, meanwhile, cartoonists and writers were tackling their passion projects, helping cement the sense that Sim was part of a wave of outrageously talented alternative creators with no obvious limits to the ideas they might try and realise. 

Alan Moore, for instance, was starting up From Hell. Peter Bagge, a cartoonist Sim greatly admired, had chosen precisely the right moment to do a comic about dead-end kids in Seattle. And most relevant for Sim’s future directions, his friend Chester Brown had turned half his comic Yummy Fur over to a played-straight adaptation of the Gospel of Mark. Meanwhile, Dave Sim was committed to his 300 issue comic about a talking aardvark. 

Melmoth is the moment where Sim sets out to demonstrate – to his own liking, if not the market’s – that “a 300 issue comic about a talking aardvark” really can include absolutely anything he wants it to. He proved the point: Melmoth is one of the high watermarks of Cerebus. Even if nobody in 1992 understood what “Cerebus can include anything Dave Sim wants” might really entail.

If they’d read the Prologue and Epilogue, they might have had more of a clue. If you’re reading Cerebus for the “plot”, you can actually skip the whole Cerebus at Dino’s and Oscar Wilde sections – the main ten parts of Melmoth – and just read these. In the prologue, the Roach sits outside the cafe in a ghastly suit – he’s parodying Jim Valentino’s already-a-parody normalman – and mutters under his breath about “fucking cunts” while turning into a cringing heap every time a Cirinist looks at him. 

In the epilogue, Cerebus overhears a Cirinist patrol talking about torturing Jaka. He snaps out of his trance, slaughters the women, remembers his friend Bear telling him that Cirinists are a telepathic hivemind and begins to flee. Covered in flecks of blood, the panels shrinking to slivers, he starts his desperate run into metaphor, madness and Mothers & Daughters. It’s one of the most exciting cliffhangers in the series. If you wanted to stop there, and make it a Butch And Sundance style finish, nobody could blame you.

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Why, Claudius? – A Touch of Murder https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2024/03/why-claudius-a-touch-of-murder https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2024/03/why-claudius-a-touch-of-murder#comments Sat, 09 Mar 2024 11:57:46 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34916 The opening credits for I, Claudius (or Clavdivs, if you will and you probably should, so let’s) have long since passed into National Treasure status. No doubt the most aggressive bugle you’ll ever hear outside military boot camps that bookends each episode heavily influenced Eastenders’s famous beat, in addition to inspiring Blackadder II’s own gentle parody. In fact, I would strongly advise you keep your remote control handy so you can adjust the volume when necessary, and it will be very necessary, since a good deal of the dialogue is either bellowed or shrieked, notwithstanding the straight-up screaming.

Our first vision is that of Sir Derek Jacobi (old edition) acting through a few kilograms of pancake-slathered prosthetics. He’s pottering about his study, occasionally mumbling to himself but mostly addressing the audience via voiceover. To be honest, a direct fourth-wall break would have felt more natural and in keeping with the ‘this is a play broadcast on TV’ vibe going on. It would also remove the need for all that hokey nodding and overwrought puzzlement as Clavdivs mugs along to the voiceover. This device, as well as the total lack of soundbed and only occasional diegetic music, is really alien and took some getting used to.

Clavdivs has but one thing left on his bucket list while he idles away in his winter years: to write the definitive history of his family. Writing is self-care, and memoir in particular can be very cathartic, so he’s well ahead of his time. But of course his family is the powerful Julio-Claudian gang, and he’s writing to set the record straight and also for long-term revenge.

Like Dave Rudman, he’s going to bury his history, because he totally just remembered that when he was but a slip of a lad, he was plucked out of the queue, Studio 54-style, for a personal fortune-telling from the Sibyl. This scene is a weird cutaway to a small child barely in shot and then what appears to be a still image, with the prophecy delivered by voiceover. Which is just weird, and I have no idea what the thinking could be behind this direction. According to my extensive research (i.e., reading the Wikipedia page) the BBC shot on videotape in the studios at BBC Television Centre, for artistic rather than budgetary reasons, but it’s kind of hard to swallow that, given how janky it looks. Sibyl gasses on for a bit, but the crux is that while no one will listen to or care about what he has to say when he’s alive, they will in 1900 years’ time. Child Clavdivs files this away and presumably lives his life for several decades only for the penny to finally drop now that he’s putting stylus to scroll.

Flashback to Rome AD 54, and to begin a colossal, generations-spanning tea-spillage. And what better way to launch into a tale of people being nasty in the past-y than to cut away to TITTIES! Unsurprisingly, for a mid-70s depiction of Ancient Rome, there are very few Black people in this show, and so the depiction of ‘tribal’ topless dancers, for a few seconds of exploitation before the camera pans away beginning the story proper, is sadly predictable. There’s a big ol’ party going on right here, a celebration to last throughout the year, or until the poisoning starts. Celebrating the Battle of Actium serves as the MacGuffin for assembling the gang in order to honour Marcus Agrippa.

He would be pleased, except the boss’s shitwit son-in-law Marcellus keeps dunking on his age and insinuating the battle was all a bit of a doddle. But because Augustus continually brushes off the insults, there’s nothing Agrippa can do except sit there stewing. By which I mean lie there: this show leans hard into the “Romans ate lying down” trope, which translates into lounging about on the chaise longue all day long. To distract grumpy Father Ted, Augustus calls for the cake and ents: the cake being some inedible ship-shaped papier-mache and the ents being some prose poetry from a real-life Greek. We’re spared this performance in favour of voiceover Clavdivs providing a visual dramatis personae:

  • Marcus Agrippa – general and formerly the favourite and presumed heir to
  • Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus – beloved emperor
  • Livia Drusilla – his second wife, beloved scheming sociopath
  • Octavia – Augustus’s beloved sister and mother to
  • Marcellus –  beloved smarmy young shitwit, husband to
  • Julia – Augustus’s only beloved, slutty daughter

And it is helpful to have the visual alongside the character introduction, because much like the British royal family, the Julio-Claudian massive tend to recycle the same ten names over and over again. I kind of want someone to take this scene and do a hokey-ass AI trailer in the style of Guy Ritchie – I’d take that over ersatz Wes Anderson trailers for a month of Sundays. It’s also worth noting that Marcellus is Julia’s whole cousin, which never gets any less gross, whether you’re ancient imperials or this human nightmare. I kind of feel like the entire episode, not just this particular scene, should have started with this introduction, but this is just one of the many, many questions I have.

Marcus Agrippa can only take so much bad-natured ribbing and storms away, so we can fade back to old Clavdivs gazing into the middle distance and voice-overing to inform us that by the way, he’s not even born yet but will be eventually and that Livia was scheming away even then.

This show is chock filled with ACTING – brilliant, awful and very little in between; but LOOK AT HER FAAAACE! Siân Phillips as Livia owns every damn scene she’s in – rooting for a murderous sociopath has never been more fun, even when it’s rudely interrupted with a scene-shifting voiceover.

Back to the past, where Livia’s with her odious son Tiberius, skilfully blocked in the background looking bored; another point-score in the ‘brilliant’ ledger (I strongly recommend this video’s analysis of blocking in the show). Luckily for him, ma’s been summoned by the imperial stepdad, but unluckily, she orders him to tag along and then wait outside until she calls for him, because he apparently has nothing better to do. And of course he grudgingly obeys, as all despised, inept eldest sons desperate for crumbs of parental love are oft wont to do.

Livia’s come to bear witness to Augustus and Marcus Agrippa palling around. They’re men! They’re men’s men! They’re men’s men’s MEN! Manly men, doing masculine things in a dudely fashion. Marcellus is manfully prancing off to Syria as it’s become apparent his former bestie has picked a younger, smarmier version of himself, and Augustus will continue to pretend said new bestie isn’t a shitwit he only tolerates due to being his nephew-in-law. After they embrace in a not-at-all gay way and Marcus Agrippa takes his leave, Augustus immediately stuffs a metaphorical effigy of said former bestie in a dunking booth to cringe at his old ass and pathetic attempts to secure succession.

But also sashaying away is Tiberius, who is off to, ahem, “Germany”. Turns out the BBC didn’t think their mid-1970s viewers would understand where or what “Germania” is. It’s the briefest of interactions, since Augustus has important emperor shit to do, like wandering aimlessly through his gardens bellowing at figs, leaving Livia alone to berate her son via exposition.

She coldly advises him to commence sucking up much harder and longer, because someone has to take over from Augustus, and it can’t be his brother Drusus because he’s pro-republic and therefore unsuitable, and it obviously shouldn’t be Marcellus who is dead to her and soon to all.

We get a tidy summary of how she herself has been biding her time, painstakingly shitcanning husband 1 (i.e., her children’s pa) to advance herself (and by extension her sons) with Augustus – and now look at her! Wearing the equivalent of Balenciaga togas and everything! (I would wear the shit out of the women’s fashion here – it’s like the flowing kaftans of Blanche Devereaux in soft, breathable cotton; the touch, the feel, the fabric of our lives.) Also a dead chicken told her Tiberius would be emperor one day. So that’s us told.

She’s technically correct – famously, the best kind of correct – but what I find vexing is that we’re never shown WHY she wants the power. And here we have the main issue with both the source material and the era, which infers that her motives are incidental, because they are too obvious to explore. If this were aired today (and lord knows it’s ripe for a reboot like everything else), it would be allocated at least twice as many episodes, or at least enough to provide a decent backstory and some frigging context. In fact – scrap the reboot: let’s just have I, Livia Drusilla! The story of how she was passed over for an idiot older brother or cousin on the basis of being a girl. Sadly, we don’t get this for her, or any other female character. I’m by no means mad at all her delicious, sly looks, and I certainly don’t need to be signposted to everyone’s ulterior motives; it’s just tedious that all the women are given exactly one dimension (Bitches Be Crazy).

Anyway, she drops a backhanded compliment and orders him to kiss her and skedaddle, and then the disembodied voiceover of Clavdivs cuts in to tell us Livia be scheming on how to get rid of Marcellus.

Yes, despite the fact that we have literally just seen this happen before our human, viewing eyes! These stupid voiceovers are so pointless, and I hate them for that.

This clunky segue takes us to the fam munching fruit in the garden and chatting about immigrants: Marcellus: pro, because so far he has demonstrated 0 charisma, and this is our very last chance to see any good qualities in him; everyone else: con. Augustus and Marcellus exit to plan the victory games commissioned to celebrate the aforementioned Battle of Actium, leaving Julia and Livia to fail to pass the Bechdel test, so they can prattle on about Marcellus while trading barbed comments about the lack of issue in both their marriages.

We’re repeatedly assured that Marcellus is very popular, a difficult task given his inherent shitwittishness. Livia notes that Tiberius’s wife Vipsania seems fine and all, but doesn’t Julia remember how much she adored Tiberius when she were a lass? Because Livia thought they were just adorbs and that she always hoped they’d get married. HINT HINT. Julia ignores her in favour of shoving more figs in her gob.

We then jump to the victory games, and this time we’re allowed to deduce for ourselves that time has passed without a ‘helpful’ voiceover. I say we jump to the games, but what I mean is we jump backstage, guided with the BBC sound effects track ‘large crowd in marquee, indistinct busy speech’. Livia is disengaged, instead focussing on her correspondence. When called on the optics, she looks at Augustus like she would sooner rip off her own face and eat it than spend even thirty seconds of her life watching competitive murder, and can you blame her? No, you cannot.

Marcellus is gleefully greeted by the sound effects crowd (remember: he is POPULAR, and NOT a self-important gasbag), which enrages Livia so much that she has to feign a headache and duck backstage to fume. Augustus, ever the dutiful husband, checks in, presuming she’s upset because he’s about to schlepp off to the Eastern provinces because Reasons. His ‘comfort’ to Livia is that Rome will be in great hands with Marcellus, once again failing to understand her in any way.

So we skip ahead again to find Livia’s apparently constant flow of unspecified admin interrupted by the news that Marcellus is a bit peaky, plus Julia and Octavia are away. Cashback! Despite his protestations that it’s just a summer cold, she offers to ‘take care’ of him. And that goes as well as you’d predict: the doctor becomes baffled because he’s never before seen a summer cold produce green slime. Tiberius returns from “Germany” so Livia can order him to comfort the about-to-be-widowed Julia; isn’t she fetching? Tiberius can hardly begin repping for his actual wife when Julia’s off-camera scream confirms that Marcellus is finally dead, which is frankly a relief.

Everything about this scene confirms the awful brilliance of Livia, whether she’s comforting a grieving widow by slapping her, to the flash on her FAAAACE when the doctor suggests it might be something he ate, to the palpable relief when she realises he means FOOD poisoning, not food POISONING. Octavia’s reaction is also as priceless as it is useless.

In the Eastern provinces, Augustus reads the news of his successor’s demise. Much is written (understandably so) about Brian Blessed’s stentorian boom, but the grief he shows via body language in this scene is incredible. Unfortunately, disembodied Clavdivs voiceover cuts in to inform us that ROME IS PISSED OFF at their favourite son’s passing. The BBC stumped up for a handful of extras to support the ‘large crowd of men rioting, with boos and shouts’ sound effect to help us picture the off-camera mob, furious about Marcellus’s dodgy death. Livia genuinely believes she can lecture the crowd into sodding off with some weaksauce demagoguery but is driven away with rotten veg and the realisation that Marcus Agrippa’s old ass needs some serious kissing so he can take the flak while she figures out how to install Tiberius.

So once again, our bros enjoy a manful chuckle over their definitely still-intact pride. Marcus Agrippa is NOT gloating over Marcellus’s death, even though he was a prick, and yes, of course he’ll come back because he loves Rome almost as much as he loves his emperor; not just him but his whole family! Including newly single Julia! Augustus is visibly disgusted for a full fifteen seconds before concluding that needs must, and what’s the point of having female issue if you can’t barter with them?

Livia’s livid, and the ensuing row is chock full of convincing bouts of sniping, cajoling and guilt-tripping. This final scene honestly makes the episode for me, with both actors totally sucking me into the autumn years of a marriage based entirely on wishful thinking for both parties. She (somewhat half-assedly) tries to convince Augustus she’s all for girl power and that’s totally the reason why she’s cheesed, and he knows she’s probably lying, but it’s all pointless. Because as disembodied Clavdivs intones, she got her way in the end!

NEXT TIME: Will Augustus finally secure his sucessor? Will Will Clavdivs stop butting in with voiceovers? All will be revealed next time on “Family Affairs”!

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Why, Claudius? https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2024/03/why-claudius https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2024/03/why-claudius#respond Fri, 08 Mar 2024 15:56:44 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34882

Puritanical belief in predestination has fallen somewhat out of fashion in modern times, although some might argue that true free will is an illusion, even without an asshole God casting people into the fiery pits of hell without regard to their actual behaviour. Social media’s algorithms serve an infinite scroll of content trailing content into more content, sponsored by tailored ads that advise us that beautiful, intelligent, successful people who liked this shit also bought this crap; further you’re ugly and broken, and buying said crap will make you whole again. Even Government nudge units joined the act, encouraging dudes to pee on decals of flies and loftily sneering that everyone else had set up a direct debit for their Council Tax apart from you, so maybe you ought to sort it out.

And so with these inescapable influences that suggest, cajole and outright push us, there persists a school of thought that none of our choices are made independently. And if this is true, did I really choose I, Claudius from the iPlayer on a pure whim, or did the universe plan for me to return to this beloved teenage favourite by seeding piecemeal background hints for some years or even decades? 

I first heard about the show from a friend, who had watched a few episodes as part of a high school Roman Civ module. My interest was piqued when I discovered it featured one of my objets d’crush; namely, Patrick “Captain Picard” Stewart. And because I attended a Catholic high school where there was absolutely zero chance of watching anything that included nudity, even if they were historical knockers, I had to check out the video cassettes from the library. It undoubtedly made an impact on me back in the day, cementing a number of abiding teenage memories. It also fostered in me a great envy towards anyone with easy access to BBC dramas, since based on the star-studded cast, I assumed they mostly featured Royal Shakespeare Company stalwarts (I also wanted to believe that, although it was unlikely they all lived in the same house like the Beatles in Help!, it was possible they were all good friends).

It took me a few months to complete the series, because I was only allowed to borrow two video cassettes at a time and was dependent on parental lifts to the library. Years later, when devouring as much of Arrested Development as possible via the LoveFilm DVD rental system, I looked back smugly at the Stone Age of 1990s library media rental; truly these are the halcyon days, I thought, impressed by The Future’s convenience, particularly the ability to pause my groaning off-brand laptop to take in all the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it background jokes. 

Renting discs is positively quaint now that I have instant access to several subscription streaming services, as well as the iPlayer and terrestrial TV’s offerings. It’s convenient but not without its own problems – a plethora of content spread over various platforms and behind various paywalls, which can vanish overnight. Even though I am satisfied being a dilettante fan who doesn’t get every reference or deep-cut character (maybe it’s the geeky foundation Mystery Science Theatre 3000 instilled in me) and as such don’t even attempt to keep up with e.g. Star Wars or the MCU, I am having everything fatigue. When faced with this enormous selection, I will often pivot away from the new and have taken a lot of comfort in revisiting the known but hazily remembered quantity. I’ve always reread favourite books and make sure to spend some time every year in the Discworld to catch up with beloved characters and rediscover vaguely remembered plots, but lately I feel even more inclined to return to old material rather than try to pick something new. 

So why Claudius; why now? What influences signposted me to selecting it instead of an old Doctor Who story or Interior Design Masters with Alan Carr? Was it because during the first lockdown, I made the somewhat ill-advised decision to rewatch all 6 seasons of The Sopranos in a fairly short time frame (which I highly don’t recommend)? With hindsight (and Wikipedia), it’s obvious that Livia Soprano’s character was clearly influenced by, if not modelled on, Livia Drusilla, despite David Chase maintaining he created the character based on his actual mother, with some of her dialogue being allegedly verbatim quotes.

Was I further influenced by my somewhat reluctant obsession with Succession, a show that initially brought me in for the comedy, but by the final season I was actively dreading (and yet still watched)? The skullduggery inherent in bequeathing a corporate empire proved no less of a ballache than Julio-Claudian succession politics. Did it, in fact, go all the way back to watching the Roy’s exact same storyline played out by the hapless Bluth family over a decade ago? Or was it just as simple as the last Sleaford Mods album featuring a track called – you guessed it – “I Claudius”? (sample lyric: looks trustworthy / but when the guard’s down / it will sing / what’s fucking wrong with loving ya country / everything!)

But more importantly, would I, Claudius continue to enthral as it did during my initial teenage slow-burn binge, and were my Abiding Teenage Memories correct? Or would I misremember crucial scenes, like the wholly invented final scene of The Sopranos I apparently concocted? (No, the last scene is not Meadow sitting down and saying, “So what did I miss?” but this false memory was incredibly stubborn right up to the end, and I somewhat deludedly still kind of think that I saw a different episode and am therefore right). Further, would it stand the test of time? I, Claudius first aired four months after my own entrance into the world and in some ways has actually aged better than I, namely my tell-tale hands, which already qualify for the Basic State pension.

The answer is, somewhat predictably, both yes and no. Here we have a rare example of something being exactly as lousy as it is brilliant, for a host of reasons. 

It’s not entirely fair to judge a 1970s production on today’s technology or the values embedded in it from a text written in the 1930s. But I will. And because I badly need distraction from the planned political hellscape of 2024, I invite you to join me on this hokey-ass rediscovery of a classic TV series. I’ll be dissecting, over-analysing and making tenuous connections with all 13 episodes, starting with A Touch of Murder (nice).  Ab antiquis ad absurdum!

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Aard Labour 5: Jaka’s Story https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-5-jakas-story https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-5-jakas-story#comments Wed, 06 Mar 2024 11:01:39 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34875 This is the fifth in a series of posts on Cerebus The Aardvark, an often technically brilliant comic. As usual, it contains spoilers for both this novel and the series as a whole. In fact, this is a particularly spoiler-heavy post.

Front cover of Jaka's Story by Dave Sim and GerhardPreviously: Dave Sim ended the epic Church And State with the downbeat revelation that his aardvark protagonist had lost everything and would die “alone, unmourned and unloved”. The comic, meanwhile, had reached its circulation peak amid the 1980s black and white boom, making Sim a public champion of self-publishing and creative freedom in comics.

I.

There used to be a T-Shirt with the slogan, “I Survived Jaka’s Story“, a tongue in cheek reference to the idea that this Cerebus novel was particularly slow, or boring, or difficult to read. Knowing what’s still ahead of us, you might stifle a hollow laugh at the idea. But Jaka’s Story is boring. Intentionally, radically boring. It’s a 23 chapter novel in which almost nothing happens for 16 of them. Here’s the story: Cerebus arrives at Jaka’s house and becomes her guest. He meets her jobless husband Rick and their landlord, Pud Withers. Jaka and Rick quarrel sometimes and have sex sometimes. Cerebus does nothing. Withers fantasises about Jaka, who dances in his tavern to no customers, and these fantasies start to become violent. Rick idolises Withers’ other tenant, a writer named Oscar, who is painting the stone head outside the tavern. Cerebus goes to find some more paint. Pud finally gets another customer. Congratulations, you’re now two-thirds of the way through the book and almost a year and a half in. 

It’s quite a contrast from the last novel. As a feat of cartooning, Church And State was all about creating a sense of unstoppable momentum, Dave Sim taking advantage of his new partnership with Gerhard to produce some of his most fluid, gorgeously readable work yet, and integrating all his techniques – from caricature to wordless dream sequences to comic relief – in the service of a baroque fantasy epic that accelerates across 1100 pages before coming to a dead stop with an audacious five-issue monologue set on the moon.

Jaka’s Story flips the script. It, and its companion-stroke-epilogue Melmoth, swap acceleration for stasis, showcasing two more of Sim’s favoured techniques: the ‘decompressed’ telling of small actions (applying makeup, doing housework, playing games) across extended sequences, and the use of blocks of text alongside illustrations. Once these two storytelling modes are introduced in the first chapter, they barely vary. Jaka’s Story is the most consistent Cerebus has ever been; one of the most restless and unpredictable comics on the market has been tamed. One of the people who survives Jaka’s Story is Dave Sim himself, testing whether he can manage an extended period of suppressing monthly variety in favour of story discipline.

(He can, though you could argue he never really does it again – even the most extreme stretches of monthly invariance after this only last 6-12 issues, though some of them feel a lot longer.)

Whatever the longueurs endured by monthly readers, Jaka’s Story as a whole is seen as a peak of the series. For a lot of people it’s the peak, the one moment between the early fantasy stories and the later, more didactic ones that Sim achieved his potential. Few Cerebus novels can truly work as a standalone, satisfying experience. Jaka’s Story comes closer than anything else, partly because Cerebus’ own presence is so minimal in it. So it’s worth asking why Sim wanted to do it.

From a structural perspective that’s easy enough. Cerebus is the story of a life. Jaka is one of the most important people in that life, Cerebus’ great love interest. “Could Cerebus and Jaka be happy together?” is one of the questions the series keeps cycling back to. It’s important that readers get to know her better, and with Cerebus himself a wreck after Church And State and his lunar judgement, now is the right time.

But there’s another, rather interesting, external reason Sim wanted to try this kind of smaller-scale, human-stakes storytelling: it’s one of the few times Sim admitted to being influenced by a peer, in this case Love And Rockets’ Jaime Hernandez. The influence wasn’t entirely friendly – Los Bros Hernandez had made no secret of being uninterested in Cerebus, even though the two comics were constantly packaged together in the late 80s as brilliant independent alternatives. Sim in turn hinted that he didn’t much like the brothers’ comics, finding Jaime’s work artistically repetitive. But while Cerebus had been locked into a baroque fantasy epic, the acclaim for Love & Rockets grew and grew. In a later interview Sim copped to at least feeling some need to prove he could do the things Jaime did in his Locas strips – which he saw as realistic, domestic dramas.

Hence Jaka’s Story, which, to everyone’s credit, reads absolutely nothing like a Locas story, and isn’t obviously trying to. Jaime Hernandez’ comics take place in a version of the real world, and their realism springs from how we see the characters behaving in that world; Cerebus does not, and Sim’s built his world to be full of incongruity and absurdity, so ‘realism’ in Cerebus means stripping out a lot of the extraneous detail, zooming in on characters and their relationships, which is why Jaka’s Story is so tightly focused. 

This suits Sim’s developing storytelling style, too. Both Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez were developing dramatically as storytellers around this time, focusing not so much on panel-to-panel storytelling but on manipulating the transition between panels to shift scenes in place and time and communicate story by what’s not shown as much as what is. (Beto’s difficult, non-linear masterpiece Poison River is a contemporary of Jaka’s Story, for instance). Sim wasn’t at this point interested in that kind of experimentation, and pushed his storytelling in the other direction – close observation of movement and action, slow development of scenes, and teaching the reader to pay attention to small shifts in expression or detail. 

In a way it’s an evolution of his earlier technique – characters moving through panels across a static background – and like that it’s helped immeasurably by the solidity of the environments Gerhard builds (literally – he was making models for recurring locations like Jaka’s house). Except here often the characters are almost static too, and tiny shifts of posture or expression are where the storytelling happens.

This remorseless, slow attention to detail is also a feature of the text portions of Jaka’s Story, with long, descriptive passages about riding a wooden horse, or opening a door. But of the two overlapping modes of storytelling in Jaka’s Story, the text-and-illustration one is far less successful. 

II.

Jaka’s Story is a split narrative: the two modes tell two stories. Alongside the ‘present day’ story of a shellshocked Cerebus taking refuge with Jaka and her husband, we get excerpts from a book – which turns out to be written by Oscar based on his conversations with Rick – about Jaka’s girlhood as a child of privilege, the niece of regular character Lord Julius, ending with her leaving his city-state Palnu after her Uncle uses her to humiliate his wife, Astoria. Mixing text and illustration like this was a fascination of Sim’s as far back as the “Silverspoon” Prince Valiant pastiches in Vol.1, but it becomes an increasingly important part of his practice as a creator from this volume on. 

Compared to some of Sim’s later forays into illustrated (and increasingly non-illustrated) text, the “Daughter Of Palnu” sections of Jaka’s Story are uncontroversial. But they’re still by a distance the weakest parts of the book, even though Gerhard in particular does a tremendous job on detailing the palace interiors of Jaka’s girlhood (his work on the covers of Cerebus in this phase is exquisite, too). Like many comics writers who switch to prose, the writing is prolix and overdone, a chore to wade through especially when the comics pages are paced with such care and precision. If you’re feeling generous to Sim, you can of course blame the overwriting on Oscar, but Sim’s later prose is often just as meandering and pompous.

(Oscar, of course, is Oscar Wilde, in the same way Lord Julius is Groucho Marx, but I’ll hold wider discussion of that over till next time, when Sim tries his hand at literary biography)

After the first couple of chapters, where they synchronise well with the rhythm of the story, I came to resent the labour of working through the prose sections – especially as the comic scenes became more tautly horrifying in the final third of the book. They do add something to our understanding of Jaka – we know why she fled her life in Palnu; we see how she gets her greatest joy from physical motion; we get a sense of her taste for luxury, which will be a rather sour plot point much later. But we get far more sense of her, far more efficiently, from the comics sections. Jaka’s Story is an unintentional showcase of how much better good comics can be than mediocre prose at characterisation.

Jaka has up to this point been one of the weaker aspects of Cerebus – the lead character’s love interest, who shows up at important moments in the plot to engage in an issue or two of shameless melodrama, much beloved of the early Cerebus fandom. As the one serious recurring character, she played a useful role as a kind of yardstick for how low Cerebus had sunk (or how high he’d risen), but the lip-trembling mawkishness of the Jaka issues was an early alarm bell that writing relationships between men and women would not be a Dave Sim strong point. You might think an entire two-year sequence devoted to her wouldn’t work. But the comics section of Jaka’s story is a tour de force, where the novel earns its reputation as one of the indie comics greats. 

Sim is betting at this point that he’s a good enough cartoonist that he can use a page on almost any mundane action and make it sing. In Jaka’s Story he wins that bet. For instance, there’s a lot of dressing and undressing in this book, and it’s mostly presented as the entirely everyday thing it is, but Sim’s cartooning is so good that Jaka getting out of bed and stretching, and Rick pulling on his shirt over his lanky body, feel fluid and vivid, well worth spending pages at a time on. Later on, when Jaka is dressing to dance, Sim’s storytelling captures her more considered, careful movements. The detail in the cartooning, and the low-intensity, steady, six-panel-per-page pace of the comic is telling us something important: these are real people, not the caricature figures of Church And State, and we should get used to them, because we’ll be spending a lot of time together.

There’s always been a lot of talk about how comics are cinematic, but cinema is hardly the only way of combining words and images. Jaka’s Story is a rare example of a comic which is theatrical. It mostly limits itself to a small cast – Cerebus, Jaka, Rick, Pud Withers, and Oscar – and a handful of locations: Withers’ tavern, Jaka and Rick’s house, and the roadside between them. It even has an explicit three-act structure, though the third act introduces two new characters and locations.

Doing comics as theatre lets Sim concentrate on the cadences and rhythms of his dialogue – which he excels at – and the relationships between the characters, all of which are based to some extent on thwarted desire. Rick and Jaka are together, but Cerebus and Withers both want Jaka and Oscar wants Rick: Jaka’s Story is a farce which takes a sharp right turn into tragedy. For all the similarities to a stage production, though, Sim is able to use techniques unique to comics to create drama of a kind you can’t easily get in the theatre – Cerebus’ overhearing Rick and Jaka having sex, for instance, expressed as a duet of converging speech bubbles and licquescent lettering. Or the increasingly chilling scenes where Withers rehearses conversations he intends to have with Jaka.

(I say “unique to comics”, but the fact is they’re unique to this comic: nobody else is using alternating bold and italic dialogue in a text block alongside a single character image to show that character imagining a conversation. On the page, though, it feels entirely natural as a technique – you immediately get what Sim’s depicting and quickly learn what to pay attention to: the minor variations and additions in the dialogue as Withers’ obsession darkens.)

Jaka’s Story is built around a series of misdirections – the story you’re expecting is never quite the story you get. In the first act, the conflict you imagine is coming – between Cerebus and Rick for Jaka’s affections – largely doesn’t happen: Cerebus issues ultimatums to both and is quickly defused. In the second, all the tension in the comic is around Pud’s increasing obsession with Jaka and his premeditated plan to rape her, a storyline which comes to a head with a sudden switch back into farce as Pud (and the threat he poses) is rendered suddenly ridiculous. And in the third act, after another sudden and shocking reversal, we might be hoping Cerebus will return to the storyline to confront the Cirinists: he doesn’t. The novel’s title never lied: this was Jaka’s story all along.

In fact, after 113 issues with Cerebus at the centre, he’s barely involved in Jaka’s Story. He puts nothing in motion, he’s offstage well before the denouement, and reappears too late to make any difference. His only real role is as a distraction – readers, used to focusing on him, may be tempted to relegate or glaze over scenes without him, like Rick’s crucial conversations with Oscar about wanting a son, or Oscar’s stories about the Guffin. But these, more than anything Cerebus does or says, are what make the closing stages of the book make sense. 

Even though they turn out to be important to the plot, these scenes also feel like filler, because almost everything in the first sixteen episodes of Jaka’s Story feels like filler. It’s a comic which revels in its intimate, repetitive, domesticity, gradually cranking the tension underneath the daily events, but also letting it dissipate sometimes too. It all has one important effect – the reader is meant to forget the Cirinists exist until the moment they come crashing through the tavern door. And it works: the scenes in which everything falls apart are genuinely shocking and painful even when you know they’re coming: the remaining issues, of imprisonment and interrogation for members of the cast, are brutally powerful.

They also bring into focus a major element of the middle chunk of Cerebus – life under a fascist system. The Cirinist occupation of Iest is totalitarian and has impoverished much of the population, but Jaka’s Story keeps the occupiers offstage until the final act. Until that point it’s a story about everyday life in a time of shortages, state controls, and offstage gestapo justice. Jaka’s Story is uneventful not just because Cerebus himself is at the mother of all loose ends at this point, but because the Cromwellian social orders imposed by Cirin have leeched opportunity and joy from the comic’s world. Nothing is happening because nothing can happen. For the next books to work, we as readers have to hate the Cirinists at least somewhat, and Jaka’s Story certainly accomplishes that.

III.

For most of the book, the actual nature of the Cirinists isn’t as important as the recognisably oppressive ways their presence distorts the story. Dave Sim will have increasingly strong and strange ideas about what a fascist matriarchy would entail, but in Jaka’s Story they don’t really affect the comic until very near the end, where Jaka finds herself imprisoned by the Cirinists, then interrogated by one, Mrs Thatcher.

Yes, that Mrs Thatcher, though Sim’s version of her is more based on the Gerald Scarfe caricature than on real life, and as a British reader I’ve never found her speech patterns that recognisable – the character’s cadences read better to me if you drop any memory you might have of the actual politician. Still, she’s in there for a reason – she’s the first post-occupation Cirinist we see in a major role, and Sim looked around for a real life equivalent to trigger the responses he wanted in the reader. 

(Which is odd, as Thatcher’s actual politics don’t map onto Cirinism, as seen so far, very well: her legacy rests not on her social conservatism but her economic radicalism. It’s not that she wasn’t censorious, or closed-minded, and she was never afraid to pay lip service to the family as the fount of morality, but those are the shibboleths of most conservative politicians. It doesn’t matter for her role in the plot, but it’s an early example of how Cirinism is a slippery element in Cerebus – sometimes it’s an invented but fairly coherent politics of radical motherhood, sometimes it’s a catch-all for bossy women Sim doesn’t think are hot (the hot ones get to be Kevilists)) 

One thing the comics Thatcher does share with her real-world inspiration is a callous dogmatism. Thatcher’s role in the story is a dark mirror of The Judge in Church And State – the higher authority who gets to have the last word on what’s been happening in the novel. Both characters end up having their in-story authority brutally undermined later on, but in the moment their verdict is final. Of course, there’s a difference: the sheer strangeness of the Judge’s appearance on the moon gives him a kind of cosmic authority, whereas Mrs Thatcher is introduced as a villain, the tormentor of the woman whose story this is. The Judge’s verdict is a tragedy because we can look at the novel and see how he’s right. Thatcher’s is a tragedy because we can do the same and see how she isn’t.

Or can we? Sim in interviews has revisited the closing issues of Jaka’s Story in the light of his later religious and personal convictions and said, basically, he thinks Mrs Thatcher is in fact right. Dancing, he now agrees, is fundamentally wrong; it does unavoidably arouse men and lead them off the righteous path; and abortion is murder. I don’t think it’s controversial to say this really isn’t how the novel actually reads, even knowing what Sim thought later. For all I suspect Sim is more sympathetic to Rick at the end than Jaka, Thatcher is not just introduced as a villain, she’s played as a manipulative monster, using Jaka’s horror at the execution of Pud and her terror of prison to guilt her into accepting responsibility for his death. Her treatment of Jaka is another brutal removal of agency from a character defined by her lack of it and desperation to have it.

Or that’s how I see it. But some of the possible greatness of Jaka’s Story lies in how open the book is to letting the reader decide for themselves on the morality of the characters and their choices. Thatcher is a devil, but her reading of events is still the final word. In fact, I’d guess that’s the point of the novel – I’ve said throughout this post that Jaka’s Story reads as a theatrical work, a play, but the kind of play Sim is writing isn’t really apparent until this last act. Jaka’s Story is in the tradition of plays about social and ethical questions – ones designed to provoke precisely because their characters’ choices and actions are morally debatable.

(I very vaguely associate this tradition with Ibsen, but the near-contemporary theatrical artefact closest to Jaka’s Story might be 1992’s Oleanna, by David Mamet, a play about college sexual harassment which supposedly led to screaming arguments between men and women in theatre foyers. Jaka’s Story predates that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Sim envied the impact it had)

Here’s a reading of Jaka’s Story which puts her choices in a wholly sympathetic light: Dancing is what she loves, it’s her means of self-expression and Rick wants her to do it. He is a lazy daydreamer who can’t find work, so having a baby would cut off their only source of income, and she ends her pregnancy. With dancing illegal after the Cirinist takeover, she’s forced to leave the Lower City and dance at Pud’s tavern, understanding that this is risky, but also realising that Pud is a black marketeer. She hates her upbringing, but when the Cirinists bust the Tavern she’s forced to claim diplomatic immunity to protect herself and Rick in the face of women who’ve just murdered two people in front of her.

And here’s the Thatcher interpretation: Jaka is fundamentally selfish, concerned only about her dancing, which is in any case pornography under the figleaf of art. She aborts their baby without telling Rick, lures Pud into letting her dance at the risk of his life and livelihood, and ultimately knows that if the shit does hit the fan she has a get out of jail free card in the form of her Uncle.

Cerebus meant a lot to a lot of people – me included – who now vehemently disagree with Dave Sim’s stated positions on almost everything, and there’s an understandable desire to stress the liberal, or feminist readings of his earlier work, to salvage the ‘good bits’ from the spectacular heel turn that’s now only a few years away. In some ways stressing those readings is easy, because they’re in the book. But other readings are in there too. 

Sim in 1990, writing the end of Jaka’s story, may not have agreed Thatcher was right at the time. But he’s writing a highly theatrical “issue” novel to be a litmus test for readers’ views: he definitely wants us to try and figure out whether and why she’s wrong, and whether Jaka or Rick are, and why. And honestly, the choice of abortion as the ultimate ethical pivot of an issue novel by a male creator is a telling one – there’s an air of “just asking questions” around it which makes it still harder to straightforwardly claim Jaka’s Story as a work written from a ‘liberal’ point of view.

And it doesn’t have to be. For a start, the craft in the comics sections is so remarkable that you can marvel at half the pages without the slightest thought to context. But beyond that, it’s a truism on the left that conservatives can’t make good art, but I’d say it’s a facile one. The reality is rather trickier. Political art made by someone whose politics you don’t share is often a hard sell, partly because you might disagree with its conclusions, but partly because the ways in which authors move their pieces around to reach those conclusions feel more visible, less natural. 

And yes, I do experience this as a flaw in Jaka’s Story – on re-reading it feels like 16-20 issues of beautifully observed, wonderfully crafted, slow paced human drama engineered to set up a cruel little thought experiment. But despite this the characters are rich enough, flawed and sympathetic and vivid enough, and the experiment open enough, that even I can’t wholly resent Dave Sim for pushing me into it.

Sim describes Jaka’s Story as his book about love. It feels more like a book about that most conservative of bugbears, responsibility. All the five lead characters in Jaka’s Story are in some way irresponsible, foolhardy, led by vanity, unable to resist doing things which threaten themselves or others. Sometimes – as with Pud – this leads them to the brink of doing something atrocious. More often the irresponsibility is imposed from without, by the arbitrary rules of tyranny, which considers any self-expression a danger, and whose monstrosity makes self-expression more virtuous by default. Thatcher dismisses Jaka’s claim that Pud letting her dance was an act of “civil disobedience”, but his swinish motives don’t actually change that her dancing is exactly that.

And how these characters are punished for it! One dies, the others are broken by the experience. Cerebus most immediately, as we see next volume, but Jaka most sadly. The next time we get an extended look at her, she’s a character much closer to the privileged, naive girl in Oscar’s book than the free-spirited, complex dancer we’ve been reading about. Whether that change feels real or cruel or both is a question for a much later post. But that T-Shirt told a lie. Nobody survives Jaka’s Story.

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Aard Labour 4: Church And State II https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-4-church-and-state-ii https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-4-church-and-state-ii#comments Mon, 26 Feb 2024 13:21:31 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34868 This is the fourth in a series of posts on Cerebus The Aardvark, a comic I suggest you approach with caution if at all. As usual I’m including spoilers for the whole series, and not including much if any art. Church And State is one story published in two halves for size reasons, an arrangement my post mirrors.

Previously: In the first half of this 2-part post, Dave Sim started the longest Cerebus novel, Church And State. He recruited background artist Gerhard, who had an immediate effect on the look and quality of the comic. He also got divorced.

SIXTY THOUGHTS ABOUT CHURCH AND STATE, II

31 STONES

There are no great jumping on points for new readers in Cerebus (and a lot of great jumping off points for old ones), but every issue might be someone’s first and my first was the episode, a little over halfway through Church And State, where Cerebus meets Prince Mick and Prince Keef. It was not love at first read. I was 13, I only dimly understood who the Rolling Stones were, I had no idea why Cerebus was talking to them, and Dave Sim’s attempt at a British accent was indecipherable. Sheer bad luck – if my friend who bought it had been an issue earlier we’d have got the Secret Wars/Dark Knight parody, and that would have hooked us.

32 TARGETS

This read of Church And State might be the first time I’ve enjoyed the Mick n Keef stuff. It’s ultra-broad drug humour but the rhythms of Mick’s speech are a delight and the elegance of how Sim draws him, a languid swan of a creature like a Jules Feiffer dancer, is beautiful. It’s Sim having fun, and not really at anyone else’s expense, which is relaxing in a story in which mothers in law, fat women, skinny men, feminists, babies, peasants, artists and anyone else Sim likes are the butt of the broad, vengeful and (yes) often funny jokes, adding to the long established targets of politicians, bureaucrats, snobs, girlfriends, ex girlfriends, comics creators, characters and fans.

33 RIFFS

We aren’t yet at the stage at which Sim starts to grab the reader by the collar and yell that some of his basic jokes and barroom observations are actually a philosophy of life (and one of Sim’s recurring ideas, effectively used in Church And State, is that offhand comments turn into philosophies and accidents into traditions an awful lot). Church And State is a collection of comic or psychedelic or action riffs, like the Mick and Keef sequence, from a few pages to a few issues long, interspersed by moments of sudden seriousness. The seriousness of these moments in the rush of riffs makes them extremely effective – “Go to hell”; “Boom”; “It is”; Something fell”; “Alone unmourned and unloved” – as does the way the frequency of these beats increases until the final sequence (mostly a four issue monologue) gets an uncanny narrative weight from the rising momentum that’s led up to it.

34 PISS

Liberated from handling backgrounds, Sim’s art becomes more fluid, and his willingness to take up pages with wordless or decompressed action grows. He’s still calling the most formally adventurous issues “Mind Game” but the techniques he’s developing there start to bleed out into the rest of the story. Towards the end of Church And State I, there’s a sequence where the aardvark wakes from a particularly ominous dream and spends a few pages taking a piss, an early example of the deliberately mundane storytelling he’d return to again and again.

35 FASTER

For the most part, Sim’s interest in decompressed action works to speed the comic up, not slow it down. Church And State is a story in which events outpace everyone who thinks they have a handle on what’s happening – first Weisshaupt, then Bishop Powers, then Astoria, and ultimately Cerebus himself. The storytelling is constantly accelerating, too – there are longeurs and dialogue-heavy issues but you can binge-read Church And State in a way that wasn’t so easy for High Society. Back then issues would often end with a punchline, a satisfying way to say “here’s a month’s break”, and Sim’s storytelling often used that to its advantage, using the gap between issues to shift the story dramatically – the jump before the final episode being the ultimate example. But in Church And State Sim exploits cliffhangers as ruthlessly as a Netflix series. From roughly when Cerebus becomes Pope, the story seems to hurtle forward, faster and faster, daring you to try and put it down. 

36 CLIFFHANGER

Sim’s cliffhanger game is excellent through most of Church And State. It’s the last time he’s revelling in the episodic nature of what he’s doing. “What’s going to happen next?” is the oldest hook in comics, and this is the point where Sim is using it better than he ever would again. It means he can gladden an old school comic geek’s heart by making sure his 100th issue has a major turning point, a genuine game-changing revelation on the final page. But Sim’s skill with cliffhangers creates an illusion that Church And State is a coherent story in the conventional, three-act way High Society was. And it’s not, or at least it doesn’t work that way for me. The serious moments aren’t the spine of plot, they’re just a different kind of riff in the ever crescendoing tumble of events.

37 MILLER

A lot of the important bits and pieces around the Ascension storyline are given to minor characters and comic relief – the same technique Sim used in High Society: you get to be funny and advance the story at the same time by simply having the funny characters advance the story. Take the Roach: his ‘Secret Sacred Wars’ routines and the pursuit of Cerebus up the tower are solid parodies of mid-80s superhero melodrama in general and Frank Miller in particular. He’s probably never funnier. But Sim plays the pursuit simultaneously for laughs and not for laughs – it’s where he slips in the critical information that the Tower is growing, and we’re cued up by the desperate reaction of Astoria (one of the reliably serious characters) that what’s going on is properly important.

38 ROACH

The Roach is a more interesting character than he looks. He’s a series of parodies, some good, some less good, but more than that he’s a character that’s always in dialogue with the story and mood of the comic: from High Society on he’s usually an exaggerated answer to the question “how would a normal (read: mainstream) comics character react to this stuff?”. He’s a piece of another comic transported into this one and forced to adapt, and his adaptations reveal the story as well as reflect it. That gets even clearer later, but the Secret Wars Roach, it seems to me, is a response to the fact that the action of the wider Cerebus plot really is approaching a moment of crisis – even beyond the fact there’s a 50 foot golem stomping around.

39 LIMIT

So is Church And State any good? For all the exhilaration of Dave Sim finding his mature style once Gerhard is there to complete the ‘look’ of Cerebus, for all the sprawl and scale of the story, for all the moment-to-moment, issue-to-issue brilliance, I’m not actually sure there’s much to it. High Society is deeply cynical about politics, but politics is a topic which feeds on cynicism and Sim ends up finding something interesting and true to say about it. But religion? Sim goes straight for the limit case, the fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist preaching the end of the world while lining his own pockets. In the 80s, this was almost a stock character, and while the sheer gall of Pope Cerebus pushes the satire into a zone of black farce, there’s something lazy about it too: you never get the impression Sim has thought about religion in the way he obviously had about politics.

40 UNCANNY

Is it more interesting to read Church And State knowing where Dave Sim’s own religious journey ended up? Knowing about Sim’s politics doesn’t help a read of High Society – it probably clouds it. But Church And State is shallower on the surface about its intended topic, so reading it for clues that Sim was of God’s party without knowing it might help. Now, I’m writing this as an atheist myself, and I hope I stay one, but I think Church And State is rather good on the “moving in mysterious ways” side of the divine experience. The Ascension has rules (that nobody properly understands) but it doesn’t have an explanation for those rules, and scenes like the coins tearing out of the bags and Cerebus’ visions in the throne room retain a sense of the uncanny. Sim refuses to flatten the supernatural into a system, and leaves room for mystery – this is actually something he gets a lot worse at post-conversion.

41 WOLFE

It’s said of science fiction writer Gene Wolfe that his novels are built for the re-read: he tends to conceal or withhold information in ways that mean the second reading is where the book actually makes sense. This is overstating the case a little – the books are generally very rewarding on a first read too – but it’s certainly true that Wolfe is happy to leave a lot of work to the readers. Church And State is Dave Sim’s most Wolfeian novel: important pieces of plotwork and information are revealed in asides or comic scenes, and the motivation of almost everyone who isn’t Cerebus is only really clear quite late in the book, which changes your understanding of what’s been happening.

42 ASCENSION

Understanding what’s going on in Church And State becomes a lot easier when you know that the story is heading towards the Ascension, because this is what every character in the book already knows – except the one who actually gets to Ascend. When you first read the conversation between Cerebus and the soon-to-be-previous Pope, it’s obviously freighted with meaning, but it seems mostly metaphorical – Weisshaupt is aiming for power, he’s arranging forces to achieve this, he’s dangerous, etc, and the Pope is using the card game Diamondback as a way to make Cerebus understand this. On a reread what the Pope is probably thinking is “Weisshaupt is trying to ascend into heaven and the attempt will most likely destroy the city”, and we realise Diamondback itself may be a metaphor for what people think happens in an Ascension.

43 GOLD

The storyline of Church And State is based on a misunderstanding that comes true. Cerebus starts collecting all the gold and declares that the world is going to end. Every other main character – from Astoria to Thrunk – sees this as an attempt at an Ascension, this once-in-a-generation magical quest to go meet God, and reacts accordingly. But Cerebus doesn’t know that, and just wants the gold because he’s Cerebus and that’s what he does. In a story obeying the logic of politics, this would be a bit of ironic misdirection, like the Hsiffies turning out to be Conniptins in High Society. But Church And State obeys the logic of religion, so everyone who isn’t Cerebus is in fact right: doing the things which let you go up to heaven and meet God will, in fact, lead to you going up to heaven and meeting God.

44 WHAT?

“The Black Tower begins to rotate” – and after 40-plus issues of ratcheting momentum, the story reaches escape velocity and just… floats, into a climax that’s a four issue monologue by a character we’ve never seen before. What the hell, you might well ask, is going on? There are weirder things in Cerebus than the end of Church And State, but they’re almost all strange because they’re Dave Sim derailing his own comic. They aren’t what a whole novel has been leading up to. The only comparably audacious thing in Cerebus is the lurch into metafiction in Mothers & Daughters, and honestly, the finale of Church And State beats it. 

45 MOON

“Walking On The Moon” and the Judge’s monologue aren’t the last time Sim will collapse a story with something entirely unexpected, but it’s probably the last time he’ll carry a big part of his readers with him. Sim later on walked back most of what the Judge says, and took the negative reaction of readers as evidence they preferred the COMFORTING LIES of feminism to the HARD TRUTHS he was offering. But it’s hard to imagine many readers took the Judge’s cosmology seriously as a creation myth or even were wedded to it because it echoed their beliefs. It worked because it’s magnificently illustrated by Gerhard, beautifully paced by Sim, and puts a final, harsh capstone on Cerebus’ arc in the story. Making the big bang an act of cosmic violation makes the semi-divine judgement on Cerebus’ fate land harder, reminding us just who we’ve been reading about and what he’s recently done. People responded to it, I’d guess, as a literary success not a philosophical one.

46 JUDGE

Did Dave Sim intend the Judge to be wrong when he wrote the moon monologue? Like most “Did Dave Sim intend…?” questions it’s of limited use – the work is the work. But after Mothers & Daughters undoes a lot of the ending here, it’s a question many readers would ask. I’ve read a theory which claims Sim wrote Astoria’s rape, was shocked by the backlash he got, and came up with the Judge’s scenes a year later as a clumsy correction to persuade angry readers he (Sim) wasn’t the bad guy. I don’t believe this for a second – it seems so out of whack with the way Sim generally operated vis a vis reader feedback. But it’s also the case that Sim genuinely did persuade some readers into thinking Cerebus was a feminist comic. (My own guesses – and they are only guesses – on what Sim believed when can wait until Reads.)

47 TROPE

Cerebus is not the only rapist-protagonist in 80s fantasy fiction. Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant is a rapist: it’s almost the first action he takes. Gene Wolfe’s Severian, from The Book Of The New Sun, is one too. Sexual violence had become a nasty trope, a way to differentiate a new breed of lead characters from the noble heroes of post-Tolkien quest fantasy, to signal to readers that even as they followed these men through the story, they should not expect to like their actions. But like and dislike, approval and disapproval, identification and non-identification aren’t switches to be flicked on and off at the gift of the author. In Watchmen, Alan Moore ran into the problem that there was no degradation he could visit on Rorshach that would not make him seem a badass. (Rape is crucial to that story, too, though The Comedian is never a protagonist. But he is the guy whose badge you can buy.) To give Sim some credit, he had no intention of using sexual violence as part of a hero’s redemption arc, a la Donaldson. To withdraw that credit right away, where he ended up with Astoria’s rape was even worse.

48 CONSENT

Only Dave Sim knows whether response to the rape scene surprised him, but the event itself is obviously a pivotal one in Cerebus, and he returned to it three times. Once in the Judge’s monologue, and once in Astoria’s own recollections of it in Reads, where she claims she manipulated Cerebus into doing it. And then finally in Latter Days, where Cerebus does the “instant marriage” gambit again, this time consensually, and it works out dreadfully for him again. This final revisiting underlines textually what Sim had said in interviews all along – that for him the important element was the misuse of papal power, not the issue of sexual consent. (So maybe he was wrong-footed by the uproar)

49 BABY

Cerebus raping Astoria is the end – you would think (or perhaps hope) of Cerebus as hero – or, as I hedged in the High Society piece, of Cerebus as character-in-the-place-a-hero-goes. But this is the same character who, 25 or so issues earlier, threw a baby off a roof, an incident Astoria actually reminds us of in her conversation with Cerebus. How was he still a hero-shaped-character after that? This is an example of where the tonal shifts between comedy and drama in Church And State are treacherous – the terrible things Cerebus does that you laugh at are, to the other characters, still very terrible. But Sim can’t actually evade those shifts completely – tone does still matter, and Astoria’s rape is part of a sequence which plays out mostly as drama, which is why it’s not hypocritical for an imagined reader to read it as horrific and the baby scene as jet-black satire.

50 CRISIS

The most powerful sequence of covers in Church And State is the run from #94-#98, Astoria’s interrogation and the opening part of her trial, which includes the scene where Cerebus rapes her. This is the most claustrophobic, emotional, and dramatically intense part of the entire novel, and the covers reflect that, but in an unusual way: snapshots of moments of action (Cerebus pulling at Astoria’s chains; Cerebus unfurling a scroll), so zoomed-in you see every cross-hatched line, like beads of sweat in a movie close-up. This is a moment of crisis in these characters’ lives and in the wider plot: every action is appallingly consequential. While time seems to stop on the covers, inside Sim is slicing it up, using thin vertical panels to carve the page and the characters’ dialogue into staccato beats, showing slivers of scenes in a way that completely upends any usual panel-to-panel flow but keeps driving the action inexorably forward, however much we might prefer to look away from it.

51 JUDGEMENT

Wherever in the book you think it happens, by the closing act of Church And State Cerebus is a more monstrous figure than he’s ever been. He’s still the protagonist though, the narrative is still about his un-knotting his problems – and while those problems are the ridiculous Fred and Ethel monster, or the anonymous power of the Sepran Empire, the narrative pushes the reader onto his side. But in an important sense by the time he meets the Judge readers are ready for that Judgement not to go his way.

52 SPOILER

“You will die alone, unmourned and unloved” is a prophecy that hangs over the remaining 189 issues of Cerebus like a curse. If as readers we’ve been primed to feel that Cerebus has earned retribution, as comic readers we understand how powerful this particular retribution is. The character we’ve followed for over a hundred issues, and whose life we’re ready to follow for almost 200 more, has had the possibilities of that life brutally cut down. The Judge has issued the ultimate sanction, and for a fictional character the ultimate sanction is also the ultimate spoiler.

53 WOMEN

I said that Sim persuaded some readers Cerebus was a feminist comic; on reflection I’m not sure he actually did. What it had a reputation as, and not just among men, was a comic with good, rounded, interesting women characters. Astoria in High Society, Michelle in Church & State, Jaka throughout. Set against this there are the caricatures – Sophia and her Mother, the fat chambermaid in the Regency, and so on. But there are a host of male stereotypes and caricatures as well, though the situations Boobah or Posey find themselves in aren’t as stock as the mother-in-law joke. Sim was not – or not until much later – the kind of misogynist who was uninterested in women or ignorant of them. Like most great caricaturists he was a keen observer of speech and behaviour, even if his understanding of women grew increasingly bizarre, so later on there’s often a mask of observation over a core of misogynist ideology. But it’s only once the Cirinists make their presence fully felt that he can start writing them as creatures of undifferentiated malice.

54 HACKWORK

So I don’t think Cerebus’ rep for good women characters was unjust – Astoria and Michelle are interesting to read about and given depth by the script in ways none of the men in Church And State are bar Weisshaupt and Cerebus himself (inasmuch as he’s ever given depth). But there are caveats. One is that in 70s and early 80s comics we are very much grading on a curve. With most of Cerebus’ finer qualities you have to put Sim’s work in the context of a mainstream that was mostly hackwork and an nascent indie scene struggling to make headway after the decline of the undergrounds in the 70s. Put Sim’s writing of Astoria up against a random supporting character from a well-regarded mainstream writer from ‘82-’83 – an Englehart or Moench, say – and it’ll stand out. But it wouldn’t necessarily come off as anything special to a new reader now. And next to a contemporary like, say, Lynda Barry – an observer of people who actually likes them – his women characters seem jejune.

55 INTERIORS

The two sections of Church And State featuring the Countess, Michelle – found at the beginning of Volumes I and II of the story – are another opportunity to see how Sim’s synergy with Gerhard took the comic up a level. Both chunks of story are very similar: Cerebus is licking his wounds after a catastrophic defeat, and links up with the Countess, a mysterious but knowledgeable woman. The Countess comes with an entourage of dimwits – including the Roach – and both times the basic action of the story involves her trying to explain something important to Cerebus while a Roach-driven farce happens in the background. In her first appearance Michelle lives in a mansion, but what we see of it is suggestion – a staircase here, an entrance there, a few couches or chairs. In her second, she’s keeping house for her idiot sidekicks in a small urban cottage, and with Gerhard drawing interiors it feels like a real place, with the physical comedy using the layout of the house – stairs and cellars – to great effect.

56 MICHELLE

The Countess is a cryptic character, one of two women Cerebus lands (literally) in the house of who seem considerably more clued-up than almost anyone else in the comic. Like Serna later, I’m drawn to her as a reader, I want to know and see more. Both turn out to have a similar back story – formerly major political players who are now, by choice or by force, removed from the action, no longer intervening or manipulating things. (Or at least, until their chance encounter with Cerebus). Both busy themselves with things which are stereotypically the preserve of women – cooking, cleaning, knitting, making tea, reading romance novels, looking after dumbass men. These are good characters, but knowing what we later know about Dave Sim’s idea of women, it’s hard for me not to see them as his ideal of a woman – one who gives up her vampiric powers and retires to the quiet life.

57 INTOLERABLE

With most artists who fall from grace because of their views, you can see a number of critical lines develop, most defensible on some level but all, I think, ultimately springing from the same, highly sympathetic impulse: I would rather not be reading stuff by a person who thinks these things. The two extremes of opinion – “they were never any good in the first place” and “their towering genius leaves me no choice” – in fact share this basic urge. The cry of the moderate – “separate the art from the artist” – is impossible in Sim’s case; more honest to say, as many do, that Sim’s views make his art intolerable even if it’s brilliant and refuse to read it entirely. The question of Sim’s politics and life and their effect on how we see his work is really one for the final post in this series. But Church And State is where the gravity of that question first starts to drag on the reader, especially if they’re trying to ask a more pertinent one: is Church And State any good?

58 PYNCHON

Is Church And State any good? What I’ve been trying to obliquely argue in these posts is that to get the most out of this novel you have to come at it in a frame of mind that accepts the comic on its own terms – chaotic, fractured, storytelling; constant digressions; marrow-deep cynicism; and a quickening pace that ultimately asks you to simply have faith that what’s happening makes sense on some wider level. Literary comparisons to comics were in vogue in the 1980s, so here’s one – I get something of the same dizziness and acceleration from Church And State as I did when I read Gravity’s Rainbow; it’s the most Pynchonian part of comics’ most Pynchonian work. Which makes it the best part? I guess so.

59 CULMINATION

Was Church And State any good? When it finished it must have felt like a masterpiece – a strange, cultish one, to be sure, already drifting out from the centre of the comics conversation, following its own weird elliptical. But in its ambition, scope, variety, and Sim’s technical development, it was an extraordinary achievement. And it still is, but – even if you can sidestep the shadow of later Cerebus – time has done funny things to it. It’s not a question of feeling dated. The comics industry in-jokes have, god help us, aged well: events are still events, Wolverine is still Wolverine. But the whole style of cartooning Sim drew on has slipped further into the past. He was always an old soul – the Exile-era Stones about the most recent reference point he uses outside whatever the Roach is parodying – and his cartooning blends 30s, 40s and 50s newspaper strips and comics with the mainstream realism of the early 70s. A genuine pioneer in a business sense, artistically Sim feels more and more like a culmination, not a trailblazer.

60 ALONE, UNMOURNED AND UNLOVED

“Alone, unmourned and unloved” is also a promise and a warning to the reader. We have read Cerebus at his peak. The good times have rolled. Cerebus The Aardvark is not going to be anything like it used to be from now on. The issue after Church And State – not in the collections, which I think was a mistake – is called “Square One”. A devastated Cerebus returns to a devastated, conquered Iest and the ruins of his base. He has lost almost everything. There is a very good punchline which I won’t spoil. “Square One”, though, is a lie of a title. It implies Cerebus has gone back to his beginning, that he can start up again. This, you might think, is a breathing space before the next adventure begins. It isn’t. The tone of “Square One” – Cerebus as a passive wreck of a creature – sustains itself for the next three years.

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Aard Labour 3: Church And State I https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-3-church-and-state-i https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-3-church-and-state-i#comments Sun, 25 Feb 2024 20:51:07 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34864 (This is the third part of a series about Dave Sim’s Cerebus The Aardvark. As before, I’m not trying to get you to read this comic, just scratching a discursive itch, so it’s spoiler-heavy and artwork-light. Church And State, the third Cerebus “novel”, is one story published for size reasons in two parts. My write-up mirrors this arrangement.)

Previously: With a planned 300 issues to run, Dave Sim shifts the storytelling in Cerebus from one-offs to longer “novels”. The first of these, High Society, details the aardvark hero’s career as Prime Minister of the fantasy city-state of Iest. It is commercially and creatively a great success…

SIXTY THOUGHTS ABOUT CHURCH AND STATE, I

1 RELIGION

When I first read Church And State I thought it was “the one about religion” in the way High Society is “the one about politics”. And it kind of is, but not in the way I would have meant then. Cerebus’ antics as Pope are a satire of religion in the way Princes Mick and Keef are a satire of rock stars, a comic bit based on already existing stereotypes the readers have about “fundamentalists” and “rock stars” so Sim can turn that stuff up to 11. That’s already a difference from High Society, which for much of its story turns politics into other things – like Marx Brothers routines or comics conventions – in order to capture the vibe of the political without getting into the detail. So even though it bears little relation to ‘real’ politics it provides quite a subtle portrait of what it’s like to get caught up in it.

2 RULES

A better way of comparing High Society and Church And State is that beyond just being “about” politics and religion, the two novels obey the logic of politics and the logic of religion. So in High Society the drama and plot partly comes from the fact that politics has rules. We as readers can intuit at least some of those rules (and get some more explained to us), and we get to understand the extent to which Cerebus can and can’t break them. In Church And State, the supernatural or divine also has rules, but Cerebus doesn’t know what they are, and we don’t either, and the characters who think they do (like Weisshaupt or Fred/Ethel) tend to be proved fatally wrong. We have no way of telling which set of characters, caricatures, weird happenings, strange encounters, dreams, and so on is important, and nobody in the comic has a reliably better handle on that stuff.

3 PATTERNS

Cerebus may have been written by (at the time) an atheist, but it’s a comic and a world in which supernatural agency clearly exists but is not necessarily comprehensible. As readers we’re forced to read the story from a position of faith (that this stuff will make sense). We’re like a soothsayer with a set of entrails, looking for patterns among the chaos. The most obvious pattern we latch onto is tone – the serious stuff must matter more and be truer because it’s serious. Which turns out, as in High Society, to be somewhat treacherous.

4 REPRISE

Church And State doesn’t really begin in the conventional sense. It’s unusual in this. High Society opens with an episode called “High Society”. Jaka’s Story gets a title page. Mothers & Daughters even has an epigraph! There is no story called “Church And State”, no title page; people even disagree on its first issue. For our purposes it starts with Cerebus in a pub, writing his memoirs, and getting into a fight. Right after that, the comic seems to be spinning its wheels, doing a reprise of the original Astoria-and-the-Roach issue with a new character, Michelle. A few issues after that, Cerebus is Prime Minister again. A few issues after that, he’s the Pope, and all Heaven breaks loose.

5 MIRRORS

The first year or so of Church And State must have been odd to follow as a monthly reader. It’s good, it’s funny, but it’s also a conscious mirror to the story that’s just finished. Seven months after his dreams of power ended, Cerebus is back in office. This is our first look at one of Sim’s big structural techniques: he likes to repeat and reconsider situations and story set-ups. Mothers & Daughters starts by remixing the barbarian stories of Volume 1; the F Stop Kennedy section of Going Home is a refinement of the Jaka’s Story set-up; and so on. So before the main action of Church And State can start, we have to speedrun High Society again. Which recasts High Society – plotwise – as a sort of failed Church And State, which in turn mirrors how the action of Church And State is a failed version of what ends up happening successfully in Mothers & Daughters. Important events ripple and echo (“Something fell!”); nothing is coincidental. Before Dave Sim believed in anything else, he believed in that. 

6 EPIC

Is Church And State any good, though? It’s the heart of the Cerebus narrative. Ascensions, Cirinism v Kevillism, Tarim and Terim, Cerebus’ grab for power and its long fallout, Jaka’s marriage – this is what the rest of the comic is ‘about’ from a plot perspective, even if it’s rarely this direct again. As such it doesn’t really stand alone in the way the first two volumes did: it reads, ironically more so than Vol 1, as an episode in a wider fantasy series. It’s the first Cerebus volume where the details of the – forgive the jargon – world-building feel like they really matter. You can pinpoint the moment the comic enters the realm of the Fantasy Epic, too – Weisshaupt’s dying croak of “There are THREE aardvarks”, a development that is only interesting or significant if you buy into the tropes of high fantasy storytelling. But readers who enjoy Church And State as part of such an epic should also be aware that the rest of the story takes great pains not to be one.

7 READERS

Sim talked later in interviews about how a large chunk – even most – of his readership saw the barbarian stories as “the real Cerebus” and everything else as increasingly baroque deviations. Any reader coming to it now, knowing what Cerebus is as a whole, will have an almost opposite view. Inasmuch as Cerebus himself has a point of view on his own stories, you suspect he’d agree with the old school readers. And the comic continually flirts with giving those readers what they want, all the way up to the cliffhanger of issue #299. But the beginning of Church And State is the last time the comic actually could have gone in that direction – Cerebus on the road again, sword in hand. With hindsight I think Sim protested too much, and many Cerebus readers were staggeringly tolerant. Still, from now on every volume will find new ways to drive some away.

8 MEANING

Even though Church And State is the centre of the Cerebus story, if you had to sit down and describe what happens you’d rapidly have to admit that it doesn’t make a lot of linear sense – actions and outcomes are evident but causal mechanisms aren’t: that’s religion for ya! What you’re left with is an experience – a sense that something meaningful has occurred.

9 COVERS

One area the chaos of Church And State is reflected is its issue covers. Later Cerebus novels mostly take a far more controlled approach to cover design – they announce the title on the cover, for a start, but they also tend to impose a unified scheme on each novel’s individual issues, reflecting the reality that the monthly issues were simply becoming less important than the ‘phonebooks’. But during Church And State the issues were still king, which partly explains why the storyline is so freewheeling. Cerebus 100 is Cerebus 100, not also “Church And State: 49”, and its cover is a montage of previous Cerebus art. Elsewhere the cover styles flip around continually – three Miller Wolverine pastiches in a row (which Marvel rapped Sim’s knuckles for); a run of the panel-on-wallpaper effect he’d use more consistently in Reads; a trio of what are apparently Bill Sienkiewicz imitations; and finally the group of photorealistic images of the moon and lunar landscapes. 

10 TITLES

When I first read Church And State, I thought the issue titles were particularly badass – another accoutrement of mainstream comics Sim soon dropped. For much of Church And State they’re draped on the covers too, oblique little phrases which feel like Rush or Pink Floyd album tracks as often as they mark points in the story itself. For every “Talking To Tarim” there’s a “Hovering Above The Fray” or “Varying Reasons Of Assorted Depths”. (“Anything Done For The First Time Unleashes A Demon”: oh yeah, that’s on the Nick Wright side of Ummagumma right?) Fair dos – Church And State is the prog rock triple LP of 80s comics: heavy themes, technical virtuosity, and life-alteringly cool or irredeemably embarrassing according to where in the culture you find yourself. No wonder punk rockers like Los Bros Hernandez didn’t like Cerebus.

11 DIVORCE

Behind the scenes Church And State is marked by a departure and an arrival. The arrival is of Gerhard, who draws backgrounds from issue #65 and makes an instant impact on the comic. The departure, a little before, is of publisher Deni Loubert, formerly Deni Sim, whose divorce from Dave Sim is often cited as the reason Sim – and Cerebus – took the anti-feminist turns they did. Even now when Sim is mentioned casually it’s often in terms of his being “one of the most divorced men of all time”, up there with Elon Musk and Scott Adams. Loubert herself, though, in an interview given after Sim published his anti-feminist manifesto in Cerebus #186 at the end of Reads, said its views reflected what her ex had always been like, painting a picture – which Reads honestly does nothing to dispel – of a man terrified of his emotions and of the loss of control over them that women represent.

12 DAVE

Cerebus the character is not Dave Sim, but the story of Cerebus the comic is also the story of Dave Sim, and real people from Sim’s own personal and professional life show up in it, only sometimes disguised. If you’re to take Cerebus seriously, you have to take the hard biographical interpretation of Dave Sim seriously – the idea that his divorce and other failed relationships pushed him into the positions (some might say corners) he ended up in. You also have to take seriously the possibility that mental illness – the “borderline schizophrenia” he writes about, or something else – is behind some of his obsessions. But it seems to me that both are true but also limited. Every creator is shaped by their personal experiences – their upbringing, health, love, background, identity. To assume that some of those experiences are a kind of skeleton key to their work feels reductive, even when the ideas in the work are as extreme as Dave Sim’s became.

13 BUSINESS

One reason the biographical read of Cerebus is limiting is that it disguises a two way process. Very obviously, just as Dave Sim’s life changed Cerebus, the act of doing Cerebus changed Dave Sim’s life. Sim’s religious conversion while researching Rick’s Story is the most clear-cut example, but his divorce gives us another. Assuming Deni Loubert is right, and Sim’s bubbling gynophobia was the cause, not a symptom, of his divorce, the biggest change to come about because of it is that Sim suddenly becomes the sole publisher as well as sole creator of Cerebus, which raises his profile as a businessman as well as an artist. During the time publishing Church And State he’s also having public fights with distributors and refining his hardline view of the rights, duties and supremacy of the creative artist in comics.

14 READS

Sim’s main vehicle in Cerebus for commenting on the publishing business and commercial art is his concept of “reads”. Once we’re past the comic’s barbarian phase, where everything looks like a D&D module, the level of technology and culture in Estarcion (Cerebus’ home continent) draws on anything from the early modern to the Victorian eras, and reads are the Cerebus version of 18th century pamphlets or 19th century penny dreadfuls – cheap entertainment for the growing literate population. Later on, the reads industry more explicitly becomes the comics industry, but in Church And State it’s a propaganda tool ruthlessly exploited by Weisshaupt, the ally-manipulator-antagonist for the first half of the novel.

15 ENLIGHTENMENT

Weisshaupt is a great idea for a character. His basic deal is that he’s an Enlightenment man – his clothes are a dead giveaway – in a pre-Enlightenment world, and to get what he wants he uses the tools of the Enlightenment: statecraft, rationality, propaganda and gunpowder. A ruthless, rapacious Thomas Jefferson or George Washington let loose in a fantasy kingdom – naturally he’s terribly successful. Most of the characters in Church And State, and none more so than him, are on the “political logic” side of the story, assuming they’re in a narrative about deals and plots and self-interest. This is why they end up losing. Weisshaupt’s realisation of the kind of story he’s actually in, in the moments before his death, is one of the most terrifying and effective in the Cerebus run.

16 PARTNERS

Cerebus’ 300 issues is – or was at the time – the record stretch of comic book issues by a single creator. For 236 of those, from Gerhard’s arrival with #65, it was also one of the longest collaborations in comics history, a 15-year stretch which started magnificently and ended with Gerhard apparently counting the months until he could be free of the work. If Gerhard’s work on those later books isn’t up to the standards of his run from Church And State through Guys – and some of it is still extraordinary – it’s partly because Sim simply stopped caring about giving his artistic partner interesting things to draw. But in Church And State, that’s not an issue, and his arrival is a creative levelling-up that it’s hard to find comics parallels for. Looking at the issues just before Gerhard, Sim doing the rest of the run as a solo joint is almost inconceivable: for all the hard work before, #65 is the moment completing the 300-issue project became possible.

17 SPACE

Read those issues immediately before Gerhard joins the title and you see immediately why he was needed. In several sequences Sim has essentially given up on backgrounds – like his great influence Jules Feiffer, his characters are often interacting in blank space. We can imagine the Regency Hotel or the gardens of Iest – we’ve seen them recently enough – but Sim is barely drawing any of it. And while parts of the comic are as good as ever, it’s starting to affect the storytelling. When Lord Julius and Duke Leonardi show up to bamboozle Weisshaupt, Julius glides into the scene as he did in High Society, but without a background it’s not nearly as visually effective.

18 ARCHITECTURE

If you want to see what Gerhard brought to Cerebus, the cover of Church And State I shows the two artists at their best. A wraparound picture, it shows a two storey brick hotel with a long extension and a mansard roof on the main building. The hotel faces onto a square with more houses in the same style – which look less elaborate and elegantly built, with more wood against the brick. Behind them rears up a black mountain, oddly arranged in curtain-like folds – at the point nearest to us we see that the rock is made up of monstrous, gargoyle-like faces. All this is drawn by Gerhard, with his exquisite eye for providing detail and weight to architecture without having it overwhelm the composition or distract from the action.

19 GROTESQUES

Gerhard draws the scenery on the cover of Church And State I; Sim draws the characters. That’s the division of labour throughout their run together. And on that cover, Sim goes wild. The square is full of a crowd, hollering, cheering, begging as they raise their skinny arms and gawp at a tiny figure standing pontificating on the hotel chimney stack: Cerebus. The crowd are all different, rapturous grotesques – men, women, the young and the old, many infirm or injured, jammed into the picture to get a glimpse of their Pope. Sim’s face- and figure-work is way ahead of anything he was doing even during the High Society era – cartoon people as expressive and vivid as the Gerhard-drawn world they inhabit is tangible and detailed.

20 BACKGROUNDS

Gerhard is a background artist, a rarity in western comics where the comic-making process tends to separate artistic duties between penciller, inker, colourists and letterers. But it’s not a rarity in animation, as I understand it, and it’s certainly a technique used in manga production. In many Naoki Urasawa comics, for instance, there’s a similar division of labour – Urasawa, like Sim fascinated by the face and its expressions, is free to draw his motley cast while a number of assistants place them in the evocative surroundings of 90s East Germany or early 70s Japan. But these comparisons do no justice to Gerhard: he’s not an anonymous assistant learning his trade, but a master craftsman in his own right, a man who’s refined one particular aspect of comics-making to a near-perfect level. Sim’s luck in finding Gerhard can’t be overstated, and he knew it – he gave his new partner free rein, and a share in ownership of the comic. 

21 LETTERS

The pre-Gerhard issues are Sim visibly straining himself to carry the burden of creating and publishing a monthly comic. But they also have a couple of absolutely wonderful uses of lettering – the skill that really comes to define the middle stretch of Cerebus. There’s the scene where the recently enpontiffed Cerebus bullies the timorous Bishop Posey, his blocky, rectangular, thick-bordered word balloons coming in from off-panel and literally pinning Posey against the panel borders. There’s also the scene where Weisshaupt takes Cerebus up to the roof in a rainstorm, and the word balloons themselves, slanted and full of big grey letters, feel battered by the storm – they convey exactly what shouting to someone through a storm is like.

22 MOVEMENT

Recruiting Gerhard was a masterstroke because it liberated Sim to do the things he was already experimenting with better. He could work out his slight weakness in faces and figures, and continue to try out ways of making conversation – the basic unit of a Cerebus story – feel dynamic on the page. In High Society he’d developed the technique of moving figures across a static background and found it could work brilliantly – Gerhard let him concentrate on that animation-style feel to his paneling. But Gerhard’s painstaking creation of the houses and rooms Cerebus moved through opened up other options too – allowing Sim to start concentrating on the dynamics of groups of people in small, clearly-defined spaces.

23 SALES

The high point of Sim as a monthly storyteller was also – not by coincidence – his high point as a seller of monthly comics. At some point during Church And State Cerebus’ sales peaked at somewhere above 30,000 per month. In today’s market this would make a creator-owned book a major hit, able to run as long as its authors wanted. In an interview with The Comics Journal Sim waved aside allegations of success, pointing out how tiny his sales were compared to market leader X-Men, which shifted 400k a month for Marvel, and mentioning Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as an indie comic which far outsold his. Still, if he wasn’t quite as high selling as Elfquest or quite as acclaimed as Love And Rockets, 30,000 sales as a self-published title was remarkable. Sim found himself as de facto leader of a creator’s rights movement in indie comics, a position he took very seriously.

24 ’86

While Dave Sim was clearly ahead of most of his peers in acceleration and development, the gap was narrowing: Church And State coincides with 1986, the annus mirabilis of ‘mature comics’ as a mainstream force, the year of Maus and The Dark Knight Returns’ breakout successes in bookstores, of the first issues of Watchmen, of the emergence of the golden generation of early 90s alternative cartoonists (Peter Bagge, Dan Clowes, Chester Brown, et al). Oh, and the rise of Love And Rockets, whose creators had little time for Cerebus – and Sim made sure to mention he felt their work was lacking too, though it was strong enough to get Sim thinking about his next novel. Meanwhile, in comic shops, the black and white boom (and bust) in self-published or small-publisher indie comics turned Sim into a figurehead for a wave of self-publishers. Cerebus showed up as an honoured guest of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the book which launched this armada. 

25 HAMSTERS

The 1986 perfect storm of media attention and indie product glut should have been a triumphant moment for Cerebus – by almost any standards one of the best regular comics on the market. But for Sim it was a double-edged sword. He was lashed to the mast of a thick-continuity, monthly series sold only in comic shops, in the middle of a 60 part storyline about an Aardvark who becomes Pope. Sure, it was brilliant, but a very different sort of brilliant to the comics grabbing media attention. The cognoscenti knew that Cerebus The Aardvark was doing things closer in ambition to Maus than to Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters. This would not have been obvious to the press. Or, for that matter, to kids walking into comic shops looking for Turtles books.

26 CARROT

Dave Sim’s sense of allegiance to the indie comics scene is most obvious in Church And State near the end, when Bob Burden’s surreal post-superhero Flaming Carrot shows up for an issue, as a chance encounter inside the ascending Black Tower. It’s a jarring sequence, shattering the epic pretensions of the Ascension storyline and setting up a set of issues massively removed in tone from anything you might have expected. The sudden intrusion of an entirely different art style to Sim’s makes the issue doubly strange – a genuine irruption of the uncanny even in the anything-goes universe of Cerebus

27 FUNNY

Is, I say, is Church And State any good? It’s the end of the ‘early funny ones’. There’s a pretty definitive moment they end, too, in Astoria’s prison cell, after which the polarity of Cerebus switches. After Church And State we see a lot less of Sim’s old favourite trick, of the comic relief advancing the plot, and a lot more cosmology, philosophising, and slow-paced domestic drama. The jokes never quite leave Cerebus (there’s a whole book where Sim is at least trying to be funny) but Church And State is their peak. Nothing dulls funny moments more than repeating them, but when I think of the things that make me laugh most in Cerebus – Scorz, Most Holy getting robed, what Prince Keef would do with his gold – they’re generally from Church And State. It’s not the last time Cerebus is innovative or impressive or moving. But it’s the last time it’s fun.

28 GRANDMA

One of the funniest things in Church And State isn’t Dave Sim’s invention at all. A reviewer in The Comics Journal praised Mrs Henrot-Gutch, Cerebus’ mother-in-law, as a great comic creation. And she is! Just not Dave Sim’s. My own Gran used to love Giles’ cartoons for the Daily Express, and had piles of his collections around her house, so I immediately recognised his most famous character “Grandma”, who Sim had basically sampled. Grandma’s unlicensed cameo is a snapshot of the good and bad in Sim’s sense of humour. In Giles she’s a force of immobile but unstoppable malignancy, a creature no busybody or do-gooder could withstand. For Sim she’s a mother-in-law joke, but Sim gets his best laughs from cracking the mask of immobility, making her sudden motion into the punchline. The best jokes in Cerebus may be remembered by one-liners, but the laughter is always from the cartooning too.

29 STRUCTURE

Church And State is structurally looser than Cerebus ever would be again. Sim talked about how valuable High Society had been in letting him realise what he could actually do in 500 pages (less than he imagined, was the gist). Jumping to 1200 didn’t, it seems to me, greatly increase the thematic complexity or depth of the novel. Instead it offered a different way of resolving the “wider story vs chasing-an-urge” dilemma I outlined in the High Society piece – build a structure big enough to do both at liberty. Church And State is a patchwork of styles, shifting focuses, tonalities; a shaggy god story in which what an issue contributes in terms of vibe is as important as what it contributes in terms of plot.

30 OVERLOAD

So it’s fitting that this is the only Cerebus storyline to be split into two volumes of the same title. Church And State is too much – in the hippie-descriptive, not judgemental, sense. An overload, a story that refuses a shape, a whole that is not more than the sum of its parts because it breaks down into those parts as soon as you try and contemplate it.

NEXT: In the second half of this post, I look more at the actual story of Church And State – the Ascension, the Judge’s monologue, and the Astoria scenes, with thoughts on Sim’s pacing, Sim’s women characters, and how the whole story holds up today.

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Aard Labour 2: High Society https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-2-high-society https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-2-high-society#comments Wed, 14 Feb 2024 23:01:25 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34857 (The second part of a series reconsidering Dave Sim’s Cerebus The Aardvark on the occasion of me actually finishing it. As before, I’m not worrying too much about spoilers or trying to draw attention to particular moments or bits of art: this is just me writing about it.)

Previously: Dave Sim’s Cerebus, a planned 300-issue comics series, launches with a series of Conan The Barbarian pastiches, which rapidly spin out into a comic fantasy series taking in parodies of comics characters and wider pop culture. The most successful of these, a take on Groucho Marx, points the way to Sim’s first lengthy “novel”…

Re-reading Cerebus as an adult makes me focus on the question – “what was Dave Sim good at?”. It feels like an important question because the answer puts the wider project – actually finishing Cerebus – in a different light. If I’m enjoying Cerebus for its ideas about society, or for the way Sim writes sympathetic relationships, that’s likely to make what’s coming considerably tougher than if I’m enjoying it because Sim draws a cool aardvark.

When I first read High Society, at age 14 or so, I probably did like it for the ideas and the relationships and all the awesome characters, but I mainly liked it because it blew open any ideas I might have had about the scope of what comics could do. It wasn’t my first encounter with Cerebus – more on that next entry – but High Society made me a Cerebus fan. 

I was at boarding school at the time, living in resentment and dread of the older boys who were, at a day to day level, in charge of me. My part of the school was subdivided into little common-room style fiefdoms of a dozen or so boys, run by individual prefects. One, an older boy called Nick, liked comics, and he let – or tolerated – me hang out in his common-room area reading them while he played his Blue Oyster Cult and Hawkwind records. Nick’s comics were almost the first indies I ever saw: he owned the Swords Of Cerebus collections, he owned a set of Sim-inspired British comic Redfox, and he owned High Society.

Nick was affable and kind, but within the narrow bounds of schoolboy taste there was something exotic and risky about the things he liked. Spiritually, if not materially, he was a stoner, and by 1988 his hippyish tendencies felt intuitively like a remnant of some vanished era, even if I couldn’t have articulated that. But the stuff he liked – the indie comics, the space rock, the Moorcock – blended with what I already knew, like D&D and Doctor Who and 70s Bowie, into a nerdish milieu that made up my cultural world.

Cerebus and High Society fitted right in. Like everything else I liked, they were little subcreations you could hide in, freighted with lore and oddity, full of doorways to other esoteric discoveries. Probably something which appealed to me about Cerebus was the sense of looking into someone else’s wunderkammer full of bits and bobs which had caught Dave Sim’s eye or ear: Conan, sure, but also Foghorn Leghorn, Moon Knight, Yosemite Sam, The Marx Brothers, Swamp Thing, Clint Eastwood. You didn’t have to share the exact reference points to catch in Cerebus’ use of them hints of a kindred spirit, or so it then seemed.

But even within my own range of teenage interests there was nothing like High Society, a comic that was constantly shifting its own terms of engagement, wriggling with discontent at the very idea of genre. The topline summary of High Society is “Cerebus does politics” or “Cerebus becomes Prime Minister”, but that doesn’t really capture the wild fractality of reading it. High Society is a comic about tavern fights and interest rates and old hotels and gambling and elections and romance and military strategy and comics conventions and economic terrorism. And on the meta level, it’s a comic about Dave Sim learning how to tell a 25-issue, 500-page story, and you watching him do it on the page. 

From this point there are occasional standalone stories between the larger Cerebus sagas, but Sim’s conception of a comics novel becomes the core structure the series is built on. High Society is the first of nine such, and at 25 issues it’s around the median in terms of length. Later on, the novels will feel a lot more tightly planned and individual issues much more diffuse – written for the trade to use a later phrase. Through most of High Society, though, the individual issue is still king, even as the overall narrative asserts itself more and more strongly.

So though High Society doesn’t overtly show any of Sim’s later obsessions it would be wrong to say there’s no connection in craft terms. Once he settles on the ‘novel’ as his way of writing, Cerebus is always a balance between Sim’s higher-level plan for this stretch of comic and what he wants to do with these specific twenty pages this specific month. How enjoyable (or bearable) it is comes down to both how much you’re down with his wider aim and how inspired he is to do great on-page work. 

There are stretches where the wider purpose crushes monthly spontaneity and bits where the opposite happens and everything stops for Dave to chase an urge. High Society is a rare sweet spot where the wider aim is one readers can get behind – tell a satirical story of Cerebus’ rise and fall as a political leader – but Sim’s given himself enough month by month room to chase those ideas and improvise the details, especially early on.

The result on the page is that this is Cerebus’ most playful volume, full of unexpected caricatures, one- or two-page joke sequences and storytelling riffs. Not all of these work – it’s where Sim’s love of text really starts ticking, and there are plenty of bits (like an army officer based on John Cleese) where Sim’s delight at capturing a vocal rhythm wasn’t shared by me. But nothing lasts for more than a few pages – there’s always a new idea on the way. Even at the end, as the overall plot plays itself out, whole issues are structured largely like a newspaper strip’s Sunday pages, a full-page mini-story with a punchline at the end.

The opening issues of High Society aren’t a huge shift from the stories in Cerebus Vol.1. The setting is new: the city-state of Iest, where most of the next 160-ish issues are going to happen, though the extensive city-building here barely matters later on. But the rhythm of the story is familiar – Cerebus finds himself in a situation, resolves it, only for a new twist in his fortunes to surface at issue’s end. Sim at this stage is working with full issues as his basic units of story rather than single pages, but the overall vibe isn’t dissimilar to early Tintin. Herge is another cartoonist who you can watch learning on the page how to structure a longer story, and in the early ones like Tintin In America, the plot is simply a sequence of dramatic cliffhangers whose purpose is to shunt the hero into the next episode’s situation. 

As High Society continues, though, this patchwork of encounters settles into a more clearly stable plot, and as with Tintin the marker of this stability is that Cerebus has acquired, for the first time, a supporting cast.

Most comics with a sole protagonist have regular supporting casts – Conan was an exception, which is probably why Cerebus didn’t acquire one until he started to leave the Conan model firmly behind. Supporting casts are useful because they generate stories outside whatever the standard M.O. for your character is – fight a villain, solve a mystery, etc – and because they complicate the character’s life in productive ways. (Aunt May getting ill makes Spider-Man feel bad about his lifestyle; Captain Haddock being a drunken idiot makes Tintin’s life harder, etc.) 

In most cases the character has a basic objective and the supporting cast either help or hinder them. But Sim does something unusual – in Cerebus, the supporting cast work to subvert the character’s basic objective. Cerebus’ basic motivation is greed and, when he’s in a position to get it, power (but power is usually a means to the end of greed). All through High Society, this fairly simple motive is being exploited by various parties, who ally themselves with Cerebus for their own ends (Astoria wants to advance her political cause; Bran Mak Muffin wants to encourage Cerebus to fulfil assorted prophecies). Cerebus himself has no particular desire for political office or reason to seek it, and Sim brings back Jaka, a love interest from one early issue, to act as a kind of conscience – pointing out that Cerebus isn’t happy and should just walk out of the story.

But the story has other ideas. Something Sim is very good at doing in High Society is getting the reader invested in a succession of tense situations – can Cerebus stay in his diplomatic position? Can he get enough votes to become Prime Minister? Can his military plans possibly succeed? – while disguising the fact that Cerebus might in each case be better off if the answer is “no”. He subtly encourages us to want Cerebus to ‘win’ even though the rules of engagement are being set by other characters and Cerebus’ own aims are, as usual, entirely selfish. And the upshot of this is that High Society is a comic where it feels like Cerebus has a goal and is surrounded by allies, even though that isn’t what’s happening in the book at all.

Building the supporting cast takes up High Society’s first act, Sim complicating Cerebus’ changed circumstances by bouncing old characters off him while introducing new ones. One of Sim’s great discoveries as a plotter is that there’s no difference between comic relief and moving the dramatic story forward – the same characters can do both jobs. This is something else Herge understood, and became very good at – his late masterpiece, The Castafiore Emerald, is a dazzling construction of a comic in which large numbers of his regular cast are smoothly rotated to create the illusion of a story. But even before that, characters like Professor Calculus regularly perform double duty as farcical stock character and serious plot motor.

In High Society and its sequel, Church And State, Sim uses this trick all the time. The Moon Roach, for instance, is a pisstake of Marvel’s multiple-personality character Moon Knight, and of mainstream comics’ then-growing love of melodramatic internal narration. But he’s also an assassin whose predations on the business class of Iest help Astoria move Cerebus into place for the second act, the aardvark’s rise to power in the city-state.

By this point the issue-by-issue pacing of the early parts of High Society has been subtly replaced by something often just as episodic (Sim enjoys, and is good at, cliffhangers) but more clearly plotted. The antagonist of the book comes into view, and appropriately it’s Sim’s most emblematic comic/dramatic character, Lord Julius, who runs Palnu, the country holding most of Iest’s debt. Lord Julius embodies the “comic relief is deadly serious” approach – it’s the modus operandi of his character, a ruler who uses obfuscation and confusion to achieve his aims. Or make people think whatever just happened were his aims in the first place, which works just as well. He does this by, obviously, being Groucho Marx, and his appearances are giddy tributes to classic gag comedy, especially when Chico Marx shows up as his fellow ruler Duke Leonardi.

When Lord Julius shows up on page, it’s a moment to take stock of how rapidly Dave Sim is developing as a cartoonist. While Sim gets a full page cliffhanger out of many returning characters, Julius glides discreetly into a scene in the lower background of multiple panels, an effect like the villain walking across the back of the set during a pantomime, and triggering similar delight in the audience. Sim’s panel transitions, his caricatures, and his sense of pacing are all getting better by the issue at this stage, and Lord Julius is a perfect showcase for all those skills.

Sim’s style, also, is fully shaking free of the early Windsor-Smith and Neal Adams influence – while those detail-rich artists are inspirations he’ll return to when he needs, across High Society he adopts what becomes his mature style. It’s a cleaner, simpler line which owes more to Will Eisner’s beautiful, flowing cartooning and Jules Feiffer’s looser, highly expressive caricatures. Both men were superb at capturing bodies in expressive motion, and Sim’s storytelling starts to centre more on movement across a fixed background.

At this stage not all the influences are fully integrated – some characters, like comedy hicks the McGrews, feel more purely Eisner to me; some, like Lord Stormsend and Filgate, could have walked out of a Feiffer strip. Others, like Astoria, have looks that don’t quite settle – Sim isn’t great yet at drawing womens’ faces, though the manipulative Astoria is one of the most compelling characters from almost her first appearance, so it didn’t put many readers off.

The second and especially the third act – Cerebus once he’s achieved power – create an impressive momentum: it’s the first part of Cerebus I wanted to binge-read, even if the internal politics of Iest are presented just earnestly enough to be boring and just frivolously enough to not feel important. (Sim, a deep cynic, is fascinated by politics, which appears to be full of people just as cynical). Those who are following along with the plotting and manoeuvring may still be wrong-footed, as Sim hides critical bits of plot (like what the Exodus Inward is) in chunks of text or side conversations, a way of hiding information in plain sight that he’ll use relentlessly in Church And State. It doesn’t work quite as well here as it will later, and Sim’s favourite technique of using comedy to move the actual drama along can help obscure important plot transitions.

But he pulls it all off in the end. The last 9-10 issues of High Society are dazzlingly paced, a chaotic mess of dread, triumph, hubris, disaster, plans and counter-plans, the desperation of seeing a situation slip away from you and a final bathos-soaked denouement (in an issue called “Denouement”). It genuinely feels like a payoff to the whole 600 page saga, one of the graphic novels that “sticks the landing” most gloriously.

So to go back to the original question – what was Dave Sim good at? Ultimately, pacing. Pacing at the level of a page, an issue, a storyline – all requiring very different skills. The individual moments that stick with me are little triumphs of one or two page storytelling, like the sequence with Lord Stormsend and the beacons. Those moments are all over High Society, threaded into a larger story which earns its payoff.

In some ways it’s a payoff to the whole of the comic so far. Cerebus gets the money and power he wants, he pursues his own agenda, and being Cerebus he fucks it up. One of the things I think late Sim and early Sim are quite consistent on is that Cerebus is not at all effective. He’s a success in the very short term arena of capers, fights and thinking on his feet. He’s smart enough to spot when someone’s trying to put one over on him (which is often) and good at thwarting them. But he is horrifically unsuited to any of the power he actually gets. The sections in the wider Cerebus story where he is acting decisively with a plan are often the sections where things end up going worst for him. They also tend to be the most compulsively readable parts. 

One tricky question this starts to raise is whether Cerebus the aardvark is the ‘hero’ of Cerebus the comic. I think one of the reasons High Society is so fondly thought of within the Cerebus corpus is that it’s one of the rare novels where, if you squint, he sort of is. For most of the series after High Society Cerebus is either active, or sympathetic, but not both at once – the big exception is the start of Mothers & Daughters, and Mothers & Daughters has its own issues far removed from anything the “little gray guy” is doing. 

Cerebus is – mostly – our protagonist, and Sim makes it clear early on he isn’t a conventionally heroic figure: he’s greedy, often ignorant and sometimes cruel. But while he’s not a hero, he is in the place a hero goes in the narrative – the sympathy character for the audience. (The main exception in High Society is the Jaka issue) He’s venal and selfish, but the forces he’s working with and against are all also venal and selfish. And besides, that’s his name on the comic.

This is where the bigger story of High Society, and Dave Sim’s broader insight about politics, come into play. The humour and drama of High Society both come from Sim playing on the trope of the outsider crashing the political system. But rather than our hero as a well meaning idealist manipulated by powerful forces, here our hero is a greedy and self-interested pragmatist who’s *still* manipulated by them. “Everybody’s on the make” is a cynical view of politics, and often a lazy one, but there’s also enough truth in it that it leaves me feeling High Society is genuinely ‘about’ politics rather than using it as a setting.

One of the things it’s been proven shrewd about is the role of outsiders in a political system. Cerebus is elected Prime Minister as, essentially, a populist. But he governs as a Napoleonic dictator – ignoring his promises, purging the system and using his power to launch a military war of conquest. The people and groups that elevated Cerebus prove utterly incapable of actually controlling him, despite his apparent uncouthness and ignorance. To unleash a populist outsider on politics is to risk politics itself. What it means to have such a figure in the hero’s place in a narrative would soon become more fully clear.

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Omargeddon #41: Omar Rodríguez-López & John Frusciante https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2024/02/omargeddon-41-omar-rodriguez-lopez-john-frusciante https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2024/02/omargeddon-41-omar-rodriguez-lopez-john-frusciante#respond Sun, 11 Feb 2024 08:17:38 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34850

I bought the Omar Rodríguez-López & John Frusciante CD upon its re-release in 2012 through his partnership with the Sargent House label, eagerly anticipating a thick-cut shredfest capable of clearing the earwax of everyone within a 2-kilometre radius. I was surprised (and, in all honesty, a bit disappointed) because although it is a guitar-driven album, it’s not the frenetic axe-battle I was expecting. 

Sadly, I never really gave it the chance it deserved in the end, because I sold it to MVE during a time of extreme penury, not because I disliked it, but because I had to pick something to sell, and at the time, all of ORL’s music was freely available to stream via his now-defunct website. Then his partnership with that label went bust, and I lost access. Even looking at the cover makes me a bit sad for the person who slunk down to the shop with a backpack half-full of treasures to be appraised, criticised and sold for a handful of coins just so I could top up my electric metre and buy some yellow-stickered Tesco scran. 

That feels like a lifetime ago; since then I have secured a digital copy and downloaded the files to a few cloud storage locations, so it’s definitely not going missing again. Access is also ensured now that the Sargent House back catalogue is available on Spotify. But I will always feel a little bit sad about all my lost media, and I’m not sure why. I could probably find it via eBay or Discogs, if willing to pay over the odds, but I don’t want a copy of the CD/book/whatever, I want mine back

Realistically, even if I still had the CD, I would probably still continue to access music via my phone, much in the way that even most of the books I read are on an e-reader. Although I don’t miss a tonne of stuff taking up my limited space, I must admit it is a shame that digital media reduces cover artwork to thumbnail images that can never compare with a proper, full-sized cover. The photo featured on Omar Rodríguez-López & John Frusciante is a pretty basic Polaroid, taken by Omar of John playing his 1962 Fender Jaguar, but the intimacy of holding something tangible, of a made thing, of art begetting art, distilled into a single image of his friend’s hand holding an object both practical and venerated, in a world where guitars are a surrogate for the sacred, is lost when squinting at a 640x1000px image.*

It’s still a cromulent image for a collaboration where guitars are a lodestar for a soundscape texturised with wibbly effects and underpinned by occasional drum machine. At times the beat is best described as more of a pulse, as on opening track “4:17am”, where it sounds as though the recording began a few moments after the music started and lends an immediate dreamlike quality where the mise-en-scène is familiar but distorted. The music doesn’t flow directly from one song to another, but the seam is very faint, and there is a clear emotional progression. 

Contemporaneous reviews I have seen are mixed, with some finding the album underwhelming, as I originally did. I do wonder if time and context have altered those opinions. I couldn’t find anything to indicate the reasoning behind the titling convention, but Epignosis posited via the Prog Archives forum I wonder if this duo began recording at 4:17am and finished at 5:45am – a short, almost ninety-minute session of just whatever they came up with. That would explain a lot. I like the story that’s been created here, especially as someone who treats music like a kind of magic that I don’t have the grimoire to learn and even if I had, wouldn’t understand the language.

As noted above, although there are clear breaks between tracks, I found it hard to select featured tracks since they influence one another, and the album is one I do think is best experienced as a whole. However, “LOE” is an obvious choice for the simple fact that, after a gradual buildup, it’s closest to what I’d been expecting all those years ago. It also best exemplifies the playful nature of this collaboration. The intro winds through tunnels of reverb, only to exit into a different topography, where it drives in concentric circles for the kind of extended outro I never tire of.

As “0” featured on a compilation many years before the album was on Spotify, it’s ORL’s second most streamed song, only bested by his cover of Ellie Goulding’s song “Lights”. But it also merits this much attention simply by being fantastic. Occasional stabs of acoustic guitar break through the ebb and flow of fuzzy sound. It’s exactly the kind of gradual progression through repetition that captures my full attention every time, and that I find very comforting. I could have done with another five or even ten minutes easily; in the past I could have been listening to this song for the best part of half an hour before realising that, in fact, the record was damaged and stuck on a loop.  

The record ends much in the way it began: with an initial stirring, intensifying towards a quickening as a summit is approached, followed by a desolate plunge into a blasted quarry and a resultant escape, concluding with a confusion of effects like binaural beats guiding lucid dreams. This album would be perfect for a series of visualisations, as filmed for Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon; I imagine an opening shot of a giant four-poster bed encased with wispy chiffon curtains as a cold, distant mother figure abandons all attempts at soothing. 

I’m still mostly listening to instrumental music during working hours, but I’ve found that Omar Rodríguez-López & John Frusciante isn’t suitable for the kind of aural wallpaper I need to concentrate. Even the simplest layers demand attention, and I find myself idly staring into space focused on the music, instead of idly staring into space while process mapping and cursing Visio’s fiddliness. This is also partially because of its relative novelty; it takes a wee while for me to grow with an album (and the reason why Is It The Clouds?, the first ORL release since The Clouds Hill Tapes Parts I,II & III, will be reviewed no earlier than winter 2025). Records like Old Money are practically part of my DNA by now, music that I sometimes feel over hearing, so having it in the background is as natural as the pulse of my heartbeat and isn’t a distraction. 

In Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Mark Twain wrote “We are so strangely made; the memories that could make us happy pass away; it is the memories that break our hearts that abide.” I’ve been actively working on making new, positive memories in locations that I had been associating with unhappier times, but music is much harder. Maybe it was for the best that my CD is gone; I wonder if I still owned a copy, I would associate it with one of the shittiest times in my life. As it stands, I like to think a fellow fan found it in the MVE some time later and punched the air with delight at snagging a rare bargain and that person still treasures it to this day.

* Unfortunately, the nature of renting music means that not only can files disappear, but the record covers can be changed! I’m mildly cheesed that a recent vinyl release of the ORL Ipecac catalogue altered most, and possibly all, of the previous artwork, but I was truly baffled when I realised that his earlier albums are also getting a do-over. Spotify now gives Cryptomnesia some very tasteful text-and-muted-gradient colours instead of the iridescent portrait of the original cover. The back image wouldn’t have featured on Spotify anyway (another tick against the streaming model), but that too was a splendid homage to the “Bohemian Rhapsody” video – but I still have this CD, thankfully.

Track listing
4:17 am
0=2
LOE
ZIM
VTA
0
5:45 am

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Aard Labour 1: Cerebus https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-1-cerebus https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-1-cerebus#comments Sat, 03 Feb 2024 22:26:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34834 As I said in the intro post, I’ll be posting expanded – in this case vastly expanded – versions of my Cerebus reviews on here. These aren’t really meant to advertise the comic, so I’m keeping actual images to a minimum, and they will readily spoil elements of it.

Back in those long-ago days when a liking for Cerebus didn’t come with a side order of clarifications about Dave Sim, there was one caveat most people still made: the comic doesn’t get good until Volume 2. Critical consensus had it that the first 25 issues of Cerebus – the early funny stuff, if you like – introduced a lot of recurring characters but were a chore to read, Sim working through his Barry Windsor Smith debt while writing a not very good fantasy parody. They had their moments but were, in the eyes of Cerebus fans wanting to make more Cerebus fans, a regrettable stumbling block to Cerebus being recognised as the Great Work it was.

It’s a testament to how well Sim set his own terms and how weird comics culture is that nobody back then and few since have said, wait, why is it all the same work? In most narrative fields – and frankly in comics too – the idea that someone’s mature work should be intimately part of the same story as their juvenilia would be really bizarre. The fact of Cerebus being a single 300-issue novel which is also its creator’s first work is held up as extremely impressive, and on some levels it is, but it’s also very weird.

In comics, I can think of two comparable creators, and the way they differ from Dave Sim illuminates why people read Cerebus, and why people stop. The first is his contemporary Jaime Hernandez, who’s spent a lot, probably most, of his career drawing the life of one character, Maggie Chascarillo, and her friends and family. Locas – the broad collective title for his Maggie stories – is like Cerebus in that its original opening story, almost his first published work, is very much the early work of a creator learning as he goes: “Mechanics” is a sci-fi piece with a lot of clumsy techniques Hernandez wouldn’t use again and characters he’d rapidly de-emphasise within his wider conception. It doesn’t fit, but he moved on from it, and the result is you can read Locas without ever reading the “Mechanics” stuff: Hernandez has neatly avoided the problem Sim created for himself by insisting on his early stuff being part of his bigger plan.

The other is Eiichiro Oda, creator of the most successful manga of all time, One Piece. Oda had published one manga before he started on the adventures of Monkey D Luffy in 1997, and he’s been writing and drawing them now for as long as Sim did Cerebus – a continuous narrative at least 3 times as long, thanks to the Stakhanovite practices of the manga industry (Oda’s health is the source of constant worry among his fans). One Piece has made him staggeringly rich. One Piece is also nothing like Cerebus. But if you had asked a Cerebus fan in 1979, when Dave Sim was still writing Conan-esque fantasy and first declared that his aardvark comic would run to 300 issues, what they expected that 300 issue novel would be like, their best reasonable prediction might have been something like One Piece. 300 issues of richer worldbuilding, more intricate plotting, and a steady stream of funny characters, but never straying too far outside the genre template those early issues laid down.

Sim didn’t do that, obviously. He didn’t opt to tell the story without changing its style and content, like Oda did later. He didn’t opt to change genre and content and characters and discreetly refit the story around it, like Hernandez has done. He wanted to have his 300-issue cake and change it into steak or salad or raw liver. 

Having announced he would write a 300 issue story, he started breaking down the genre and stylistic boxes he’d put himself in, working out on the fly how to bring politics, religion, literary pastiche, domestic drama, and more into his comic and how to plot longer stories. Much – most – of Cerebus is unrecognisable from these early issues, but still part of the same story.

The insistence that Cerebus is one complete novel of which this is the first chapter puts a burden on these early comics which they can’t sustain after the comic starts radically changing its form and content. And yet as late as the #190s, mere issues after Sim has declared the comic to be explicitly a frame for his ideas about gender politics, you’re still getting attempts to tie the story back to its original material, to make the stuff from Vol 1 about the Pigts and Cerebus’ Helmet matter. It’s just a really, really unusual way to approach creative work.

It’s as if Steve Ditko – another man with opinions as unyielding (if more comprehensible) than Sim’s – had made every comic he created about Spider-Man: 35 issues of fighting Doc Ock, then 100 more of preaching objectivism, Mr A style. It would radically change how we saw the character, just as Sim’s philosophical journey to his personal extremes changes how we see Cerebus.

But in that comparison is why, I think, Sim did it this way. Steve Ditko couldn’t have done that because Ditko didn’t own Spider-Man. Someone would have stopped him. Cerebus isn’t just a novel, it’s a proof of the idea that self-publishing means total creative freedom. Even back in these very early issues, buying into Cerebus means buying into the ideal of self-publishing and individual, unfettered creativity. Sim’s unwritten promise to the reader is that Cerebus will always be about exactly what Dave Sim wants it to be about. It’s a promise he keeps.

That implies something else, though. It implies that right from the beginning Cerebus is about Dave Sim. Not in the explicit way it’s eventually going to be. But to produce his 300 issues, Sim is going to push himself, and learn new styles and new ways of approaching comics. He starts on it right away, in this first book. Volume 1 of Cerebus matters not just in a plot sense – because it introduces Elrod and Jaka and the Moon Roach – but because it’s teaching you how to read Cerebus. You read Cerebus to see the development of Dave Sim. A plot development is interesting, but Sim learning a new way to pace a page, or to use blacks and greys, is also interesting.

(But doesn’t this involvement with Sim’s progress make it even more difficult when he, you know…? Yes, it does.)

Something that is helpful to reading Cerebus Vol 1 is that Sim starts off pretty good. He’s trying to do Barry Windsor-Smith Conan comics, and those are a good model for an artist in 1977, when the high tide of relative mainstream quality Smith represented had definitely gone out. He’s also inspired by the long tradition of “funny animal” comics, with Steve Gerber’s Howard The Duck the most obvious model. There’s a lot of rough edges in the art but Sim became a great visual storyteller remarkably quickly – there are strong examples on Issue 1, Page 1 and he keeps getting enjoyably better. It’s not true to say that each early issue of Cerebus is better than the last, but there’s no long dips, and a detectable upward curve which makes this volume less of a slog than it might be.

He didn’t become a great non-visual storyteller quite so fast, and even when he learned how to plot and pace a story beyond the page-by-page, issue-by-issue level it was knowledge he’d happily let go of to follow an urge. The comics collected here which hold up best now as narrative are exactly those early Windsor-Smith Conan pastiches, because Conan stories have a really solid structure that can withstand plenty of messing around and playing with tropes. The basic story here is repetitive but robust – Cerebus wants gold or loot, Cerebus gets involved with some scheme to get it, but loses it in such a way to seed the next instalment and move him to another location on his fantasy world map. Sim fills out the episodes with action, jokes, and increasingly parodies.

Longer-term readers will cheer when a soon-to-be-familiar face like Elrod shows up, but for me Cerebus Vol 1 gets significantly weaker once the focus of Sim’s satirical intent stops being structure and starts being character, especially as a lot of the characters referenced are pop or comics culture flotsam whose presence in the culture has waned over time, and the effect is a bit like a stoner trying to insist that a bunch of MAD Magazine parodies are really a coherent storyline. Sim’s drawing is improving fast – the positive effect of the parodies is that they push him away from Smith and towards Will Eisner and Jules Feiffer as influences, a cartooning style Sim turns out to be fantastic at. 

So Cerebus looks better and better but the jokes and observations are typical of the kind of cynical 20-something Sim surely was, and much of this book is a painful read now. The final storyline in the book is typical of its virtues and vices – a multi-part riff on Clint Eastwood’s The Beguiled with Cerebus stuck in a girls’ finishing school and gags based on Swamp Thing, Man-Thing and the X-Men. The references are confusing or era-bound, the jokes weak, but the atmosphere, Sim’s page-by-page pacing, and his ability to draw people are massively far ahead of where he started.

Cerebus Vol 1 is a turgid read for the most part, but there are three big exceptions in the second half. Two are formal – the side-story “Silverspoon” is a joyful step into Prince Valiant style storytelling, Sim having immense fun with Hal Foster’s rich but stiff strip about rich stiffs. He takes to prose-and-illustration with gusto, prefiguring his intense use of it later on, most of it far less charming. Also mixing prose – in this case dialogue – and illustration is the “Mind Games” experiment with ink, greyscale, and lettering styles, which still feels like a remarkable creative leap. 

Third and most important is the three part story introducing Lord Julius, Sim’s first and best recreation of a real historical or cultural figure. The story, about a secret society plotting the overthrow of a city’s ruler, is the usual nothing, but making the ruler into Groucho Marx, and then thinking through how the Groucho Marx persona might operate in a fantasy setting, is the first of Sim’s truly inspired ideas, and the one that unlocks the next hundred issues of the comic. Lord Julius – “Groucho as fantasy bureaucrat” – is a better idea than the rest of this hefty volume combined has, and it’s no wonder that his invention was the springboard for better things.

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Aard Labour 0: There Are Three Aardvarks https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/there-are-three-aardvarks https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/there-are-three-aardvarks#comments Wed, 31 Jan 2024 23:35:14 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34829 So. I’ve finished Cerebus The Aardvark. Twenty years after it ended, as promised, with its 300th issue, thirty years (roughly) after I gave up reading it, thirty-seven years (I think) since I saw my first issue of it.

At the time I stopped reading it I imagined I would pick it up again – my plan was to switch from monthly issues to the collected “phone books”. Whatever my personal beef with the comic and with Dave Sim, its writer and half of its art team, it seemed obvious that it was a major work which people would be reading for years to come.

About a year after I quit*, the comic became extremely controversial, and now, in 2024, it’s hardly read at all. The reason for this is Dave Sim (according to almost everybody who isn’t Dave Sim), and the marxist-feminist-homosexualist axis which controls modern culture (according to Dave Sim). That should also give you a flavour of why I never quite got round to finishing it.

The right has, to some extent, caught up with Dave Sim on this stuff. It’s no longer shocking to see phrases like that, in fact it’s exhaustingly familiar. Not that Sim is held up as a conservative prophet – he would probably have been a hero to the alt-right, but for the fact none of them want to wade through a 300 issue comic about a talking aardvark.

So why did I wade through it? Good question. Hopefully I’ll get around to answering it. Some of it’s nostalgia for a moment – brief as it feels now – when Cerebus was important to me. Some of it’s the fact that Dave Sim was a technically dazzling cartoonist and comics maker, restless in his pursuit of new things that could be done with the comics page. Until quite near the end he’s doing extraordinary things with layouts and lettering, and even at the end when the innovation has largely dried up he has bags of tricks that serve him extremely well. You can never entirely separate form and content (and Sim would be disgusted at the attempt, if resigned – he knows perfectly well the marxist-feminist-et-cetera has its claws in almost everyone) – but in comics maybe you can get closer than many things.

I’ve been reviewing the 16 individual volumes of Cerebus over on Goodreads. I’ll be posting those reviews here – tweaked in some cases now I’ve read the whole thing (EDIT: by “tweaked” I apparently mean “massively expanded”). This introductory post is a way of answering a very basic question: if you WERE going to read Cerebus The Aardvark, where should you start?

“In the beginning” is one answer, and probably the one if you are committed from the outset to tackling the entire 300-issue, 16-graphic-novel work. But Cerebus as a unitary work is problematic, even leaving out the later parts after Sim’s coming-out-party as an ‘anti-feminist’. For instance, the first volume is Sim learning on the job via a series of pastiches of Marvel’s Conan comic. These issues are pretty good Conan pastiches and get more interesting fairly quickly, but they aren’t Sim at his best. And in general, the stylistic and thematic variance in Cerebus is so great you’re probably better off being a bit more targeted.

So here’s a way of thinking about the comic aside from as a 300-issue story. It’s not really one overarching narrative, it’s three overlapping long narratives, which share some of the same material. Pick the one which holds most interest for you.

The first Cerebus is an epic satirical fantasy, which runs from Vol.1: Cerebus to Vol.10: Minds, though you can leave out the text material in Vol.9: Reads (and optionally in Vol.6: Melmoth). This version includes all the stuff people still say is good, like Church & State and Jaka’s Story. The best way of reading this is to start with Vol. 2: High Society, read a few issues, and if you like the way the story’s being told and are interested in the plot, put it down and then go back to Vol.1 to find out who everyone is. Read like this, Cerebus is a fairly coherent story with lots of excitement, great storytelling, good jokes, a couple of major digressions and a strange, probably unsatisfying but complete ending.

The second Cerebus is a domestic drama about a man and a woman who are unable to be happy apart or together (well, the man is an aardvark, but that’s less relevant in this version – you can think of it like Inio Asano’s Goodnight Punpun, with a non-human hero who is in any meaningful sense human). This one is the trickiest in terms of reading. The core parts are Vols 5-6 (Jaka’s Story and Melmoth) and Vols 11-14 (Guys to Form And Void), but it’s worth reading the handful of “Jaka” issues before that and the “what if?” sequence in Vol.10: Minds. Reading it this way gets you a complete if tragic story, Sim’s most mature writing and experimental designs, and also the best of his series-long love of characters based on real-world actors and authors. If you want to read this you should start with Vol 5: Jaka’s Story.

The third Cerebus is a highly experimental philosophical novel about the political, moral and theological journey of a writer, Dave Sim, and his creation, Cerebus, as they first explore relationships between men and women and later come to comprehend the divine implications of this initial understanding. It starts with the text sections of Vol.9: Reads and continues until Vol 16: The Last Day. The novel consists of a series of didactic dramas designed to illustrate the futility of marriage and romantic love, a set of utopian and dystopian outlines sketching possible societies arranged around this understanding, and climaxes with a close reading of the Torah and the revelation of a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, both centred on the natural incapacity of women to reason or create anything important. This is the stuff most people who read Cerebus got mad at, and they’re right, but if you do want to read this start with the “Viktor Davis” parts in Vol.9: Reads, and if you can stomach that good luck to you.

Or read the whole thing from Vol.1 (I warned you, though). Or ignore it entirely, like I didn’t.

*So incendiary was the issue where Sim published his ‘masculinist’ tract that I’d completely retconned my own quitting the book – I was off it well before.

If you simply want to jump to see what I have to say about a Cerebus book you particularly love or hate, here’s the list.

  1. Cerebus
  2. High Society
  3. Church And State I
  4. Church And State II
  5. Jaka’s Story
  6. Melmoth
  7. Flight
  8. Women
  9. Reads
  10. Minds
  11. Guys
  12. Rick’s Story
  13. Going Home
  14. Form And Void
  15. Latter Days
  16. The Last Day
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22nd Freaky Trigger Annual Between Christmas And New Year Pub Crawl (#FTABCANYPC22): The Shepherd (Market) Crook https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/12/22nd-freaky-trigger-annual-between-christmas-and-new-year-pub-crawl-ftabcanypc22-the-shepherd-market-crook https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/12/22nd-freaky-trigger-annual-between-christmas-and-new-year-pub-crawl-ftabcanypc22-the-shepherd-market-crook#respond Thu, 28 Dec 2023 14:11:07 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34651 As revealed last Sunday, we are finally realising an ambition of mine, to go all upper class and hoity-toity and do the Pub Crawl in Mayfair. In particular, I have always wanted to do Shepherd Market, though it is not actually that close to other pubs, so this one starts with a little bit of a walk.

Map of the Shepherd's Crook Pub Crawl

The order is:

3pm The Guinea – Bruton Place
4pm The Coach And Horses – Hill St*
4.45pm The Footman – Charles St
5.45pm Ye Grapes – Shepherd Market
6.30pm The Chesterfield Arms – Shepherd Market
7.15pm The Market Tavern – Shepherd Market
8pm The Kings Arms – Shepherd Market

Completists might want to do The Coach And Horse Bruton St which exists to confuse us. Regulars will know that a spare pub is often useful.

As usual please feel free to join when you want and leave where you want, though timings above are advisory at best. And note this year, in an attempt to reunify the old tradition, this crawl is on Saturday 30th December rather than the 29th (which I will mostly be spending in an airport).

Any questions, or spotted the obvious mistake – let me know.

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Omargeddon #40: Ciencia De Los Inútiles https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/12/omargeddon-40-ciencia-de-los-inutiles https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/12/omargeddon-40-ciencia-de-los-inutiles#respond Tue, 19 Dec 2023 17:16:46 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34631

By now, it should be abundantly clear that owing to my total lack of even the most rudimentary understanding of music theory or technique, Omargeddon reviews are emotionally driven. As such, I’m forever trailed by a weird sense of, if not outright shame, profound embarrassment that I should feel so deeply to gas on at length despite possessing no real expertise. Being embarrassed by my often intense reactions to music has semi-plagued me since childhood; once, while bisected by a lap seatbelt in my ma’s Toyota Corolla, I faked a coughing fit to mask the tears evoked by the dulcet sounds of “Africa” by Toto broadcasting from 105.7 WAPL (The Rockin’ Apple). Even as a proven crybaby, I knew I couldn’t explain why the pulsing cry ‘there’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do’ made me want to curl up and cry my little girl’s heart out. And even though since then I’ve had a certified whale of a time belting this song at karaoke, hearing it still triggers some vestiges of 1980’s beige-vinyl-upholstery-coloured melancholy, which I will remain forever embarrassed about.

Ciencia De Los Inútiles has been translated by the Mars Volta wiki as Science of the Useless, although a fluent Spanish-speaking friend advised me that in this context, ‘inútiles’ is an insult more akin to ‘loser’. This interpretation has strongly influenced my feelings about this mostly acoustic, percussion-free folk album, the only one credited to El Trío de Omar Rodriguez Lopez. Being low on cash, I opted to stream through my off-brand laptop’s tinny speakers via the now defunct ORL website and positively cried my eyes out. The left-field direction and folky vibes divided fans in most contemporaneous reviews I’ve seen, though at worst it received a lukewarm rather than vitriolic reception, and as this was the golden age of ORL solo and side projects, less keen fans simply waited a few months for the next record to drop.

The creative process for this album represents the ultimate deviation from ORL’s famously complex and often dictatorial process. Instead of assembling a varied cast of musicians and then providing them with their parts to record separately, as he did for years with the Mars Volta, album liner notes confirm that the record was completed in just three days, inclusive of composition and recording. In addition, there was a strict three-take limit for each song, although it was noted that the first take was often chosen anyway. Trying to preserve ephemeral moments doesn’t always succeed; like trapping fireflies in a jar, there’s a time-and-space limit, but in this case, a severely stripped down version of the Omar Rodríguez-López Group captures an intensity that carries as much heft with its three players as a full band could. 

The result is a study in sparsity, of the space between notes, the squeak of guitar strings duetting with the steady thud of the double bass, and above all, the quiet power of Ximena Sariñana. At times she’s pushing her vocal range to its upper limits, but for the most part, she’s simply allowing her vulnerability to expand within the space afforded. The songs translate into a very personal depiction of heartache, in particular on “Lunes”, like a dreary afternoon alone with the fear, and the lonely instrumental “Sábado”, which down another pant leg of the trousers of time might have waded into the salty waters of the sea-shanty. But there’s also unexpected joy present, as when “Viernes” confronts the trials of accepting forgiveness.

The ORL-directed “Miércoles” video adds an effective visual narrative to the process; the decision to film in black and white encourages a hyper-focus on the simplicity in the magic of three. Although it was Ximena’s pure belting on Solar Gambling that made me a fan, she’s also an expert in conveying strong emotions with increasingly reduced volume. The lyrics of “Miércoles” are full of hearts and silence, of goodbyes and past-tense love; her direct gaze to the camera in the video is often quasi-accusatory, while the softly strummed guitar and persistent metronome of the double bass steers the Trío towards the (considerably non-acoustic) bridge, where things get a bit fuzzy and neopsychedelic for a while before returning the spotlight to the vocals. 

The listless count-in to “Martes” subverts expectations as a very misleading intro to what is the most playful song on the album. Bass and vocals serve as key instrumentation, with Omar continuing to treat his acoustic guitar as though its primary function is a background squeak device; he’s clearly made a technical choice to either ignore or possibly even encourage this across the whole piece. The seesawing chorus is almost like a solo call-and-response, although this lighthearted whimsy continues a mild deception with its lyrical content, is a much welcome moment of joy.

“Jueves” continues the trend for deceptively low-key intros and introspective lyrics singing of and from the heart. Even without a translation, the tone is apparent, though I’m particularly struck by Ximena’s poetry: mi corazón es un panal / residuos del ayer / no es facil recordar promesas (machine translation gives me: my heart is a honeycomb / residue of yesterday / it’s not easy to remember promises). It’s worth noting that a good deal of the lyrics she wrote for ORL address mistrust in romantic relationships, which must have smarted while the two were actively partnered up, and now seems especially poignant years after their split. The double bass tends towards a softer texture, overwhelming the ever-present guitar squeaking through, but always allowing lyrical introspection to lead. This is my favourite of the featured tracks due to the abrupt shift to the bridge, an electric guitar solo that surges like cortisol in fight-or-flight mode.

Domingo” completes the affair on an understated note, with Ximena pushing herself to the very limit of her high register and mostly hitting the mark. The simple repetition does provide a perfectly cromulent outro, but once again, I find myself quibbling with the track listing. “Noche Dia”, a spoken word piece, utilises minimal instrumental intervention and instead supports the vocals with a soundbed of katydids and tinkly effects splashing in the background like a spray of fairy lights. As all the other song titles are days of the week, albeit non-consecutive, “Noche Dia” could round off the album as night flows into day. In fact, the Mars Volta wiki notes that the original Bandcamp digital release had indeed been ordered consecutively by days of the week, finishing with this song, but at some point the order was reshuffled and this final, shuffled track listing is also featured on the vinyl release.

I’m firmly of the belief that it’s not only possible but desirable to soundtrack your day according to your current emotional weather. The golden thread of heartbreak woven across Ciencia De Los Inútiles is sometimes thinly veiled but always pervasive. It’s an ideal soundtrack for days that are enveloped in a greyness that is neither warm nor cold, gripped by an inchoate sense of, if not outright dread, than a bone-deep unease; the sort of days when, quite frankly, I’m lost, and listening to Frances the Mute or Qué Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazón would be akin to emotional defenestration. 

On days like these, I need an aural analgesic for endemic pain caused by the unknown and as yet unquantifiable, beneath the warmth of an overcast day nurturing hope that that blue sky is only temporarily hidden underneath, just waiting for the clouds to part.

Track listing:
Lunes
Viernes
Miércoles
Noche Día
Martes
Jueves
Sábado
Domingo

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Four Candles https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/12/four-candles https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/12/four-candles#comments Tue, 05 Dec 2023 12:34:32 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34592 One thing about the streaming revolution in pop is that it gives us a pretty accurate tracker of the UK’s changing tastes in Christmas songs. Now, by “tastes in Christmas songs” it’s probably fairer to say “what goes on Christmas playlists”: this is the one time of year where you are likely to encounter very specific songs “in the wild”, and it’s hard to say how many of the plays of Christmas songs are people sitting and listening to them. It’s also hard to say how many Christmas playlists are hand-built rather than ‘off-the-shelf’.

But! Whether we choose to hear Bobby Helms and Sia or have them thrust upon us, hear them we do. And what we hear at Christmas is shifting. While trying to get my head around how it’s shifted I came up with this rough model: there are four distinct phases of Christmas music which wax and wane in strength in the UK Christmas charts. Something old, something new, something glam and something Wham.

What are these four Christmases and how is the picture shifting?

OLD CHRISTMAS: This might also be called “American Christmas” – the US christmas canon, spearheaded by Brenda Lee and Bobby Helms, has made huge inroads into the UK Christmas charts. This is purely a cultural import: as Paul O’Brien points out in his excellent chart posts, “Jingle Bell Rock” was never a UK hit at all before 2019. American Christmas movies are probably a driver here – the Home Alone effect.

It’s not that American Christmas hits were unknown in the UK pre-streaming, of course – you’d find Bing, Brenda, Andy Williams and a few Spector tracks (or knock-offs) on most 2CD BEST CHRISTMAS EVER compilations 30 years ago, bulking out Disc 2 alongside some forlorn carols. But they weren’t top billing. The US Christmas canon is very much still on the rise here – I was surprised (and happy!) to hear “Feliz Navidad” in a petrol station the other day, unthinkable even a decade ago.

GLAM CHRISTMAS: The American Christmas classics are pushing the Christmas music of my childhood out of the way. It used to be that Britain and America had two quite different Christmas traditions, and ours involved the men of rock larging it up on TOTP or gurning at frightened schoolkids. This phase of Christmas music broadly runs from John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” up to roughly Jona Lewie’s “Stop The Cavalry” and includes Wizzard, Slade, Elton John, Mud, Greg Lake (Greg Lake!!) and “Wonderful Christmastime”.

If you were a British kid in a certain era this stuff IS Christmas music. But its stock has very much fallen – it’s now the least salient of the four Christmases I’m talking about. Proper Binman Christmas Music no longer makes much of a chart dent – “Wonderful Christmastime” held on for a bit and will feature in the charts as we get closer to X-Day, so might a couple of the others, but at the moment of writing nothing from the 1970s is in the Top 40.

WHAM CHRISTMAS: Compare the fortunes of the Slade era Christmas music to their 80s and 90s successors. This actually was what prompted this post – Andrew Hickey on Bluesky wrapped up the 70s and 80s stuff into a bundle, and when he and I were younger they very much were packaged together. But in terms of public fortune there’s a dramatic disjunction between two eras of Christmas – the glam era is dying, the Wham era rules supreme.

This phase runs roughly from Wham!’s “Last Christmas” to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You”, two Christmas songs which have nothing in common barring the fact they went to No.1 last year and will probably do so again. Also up there is “Fairytale Of New York”, the late Shane MacGowan the holy spirit in the Christmas Trinity. But “Stay Another Day” and Shakey are both performing a lot better than anything from the earlier phase of Christmas songs. (The big loser is Sir Cliff).

Will the era of Wham! and Mariah end like that of Noddy and Roy Wood? Unlikely, or not for a long time – both these tracks were huge US hits too which probably inoculates them against changing fortune. The Pogues’ song may well be a perennial too; Shakey is probably doomed in the longer term.

NEW CHRISTMAS: And finally the most intriguing Christmas – the modern stuff. The signal with modern Christmas songs is confused by things like Amazon exclusives which turn up for a year because they’re front-loaded on Amazon playlists (this got “River” to No.1 a while back). But even so the shape of a modern playlist era canon is becoming clear – the recent songs are performing strongly in the charts so far this Christmas.

You can count Buble in with the oldies if you want, but Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me”, Kelly Clarkson’s “Underneath The Tree”, and potentially Sia look to be here for the long haul. (I am a bit surprised Taylor Swift’s “Christmas Tree Farm” hasn’t caught on more, considering, but give it time). All these are 2010s numbers – there’s a need for fresher material on playlists which didn’t seem to be there in the sales era, and so there does seem to be a real void in Christmas pop between Mariah and the last 10-15 years. Maybe it will be backfilled.

So what’s the broad picture? An Americanisation of Christmas, certainly – there’s an Ed Sheeran song doing OK this year but all the modern big guns are US singers, and the gradual retconning of Christmas Past shows no signs of stopping. And hand in hand with that a decline of the specific UK Christmas canon. Like a lot of peculiar-to-Britain popular culture of my childhood – British home computers, British comics, British TV and films – the British Christmas hits are fading from view, squeezed out of a global market. 

I’m in two minds about that – on the one hand I think making strange and silly little bits of sometimes-commercial art was something we, as a country, did well for a long time, even if they pleased nobody but ourselves. And there’s a genuine sadness when something that people did well, and enjoyed doing well goes away. On the other hand I feel that nostalgia is our national curse, that the present holds a world of joys (British or otherwise), and that the same people who are most nostalgic keep electing governments for whom the idea of leisure, or hobbies, or unprofitable art are anathema. Like the big man says, the Christmas we get we deserve.

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3. Priceless Junk https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/11/3-priceless-junk https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/11/3-priceless-junk#comments Sun, 19 Nov 2023 23:58:49 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34579 (The third part of the 3-part piece about the 1000th Number 1, the charts, and 20 years of writing about them. Part 1. Part 2. See also the pieces on #999 and #1000 on Popular.)

Here’s the thing, though. I still really like pop music.

When I started Popular, I said something stupid. Not “I’m going to write about every No.1”, a normal statement by a sensible individual. But I said something along the lines of, I’m writing this because pop gets better every decade, and my subtext was as this blog will show! Let me remind you that No.1 at the time I said this was “Where Is The Love?” by the Black Eyed Peas, a record I do actually enjoy but not anybody’s pick for a tune on which a Whig Interpretation Of Pop could rest.

But it was the early 00s, and the world of pop and rap and R&B were on multiple highs, full of fresh poses and new ideas, just as exciting as any of the 20th Century ones. The charts felt stuffed with good ideas, jostling along with terrible ones, like the notion the proper form of pop was a gameshow run by a man who didn’t know how trousers worked.

It was a time to be, how might you put it, optimistic about pop. So a project like Popular was a bet that you could tell an interesting version of the story of pop through the story of Number 1s, and in September 2003 that bet felt safe. And like everyone else who ever thought “No more boom and bust!” I said as much out loud, and along came the bust.

A quick digression. The most embarrassing of my inspirations for Popular – in the very general sense of a guy who started a weird personal project and saw it through – was a cartoonist called Dave Sim, who drew a comic about an aardvark for well over 20 years. His version of seeing it through involved revealing political and religious views so batshit that even today’s right wing haven’t embraced him. (This is why he’s embarrassing. I was wearing a T-Shirt with his aardvark guy on my first date with my wife, a year or two before that became the reddest of red flags. Fortunately I had other T-Shirts available which made me look less like a freak, for example The Smiths.)

Anyway, Dave Sim told everyone his aardvark comic was going to last for 300 issues, and astonishingly it became clear that yes, it probably would. But then, approaching issue 200, he revealed that he’d lied – the story would end at 200, in fact was always going to end then. Dave Sim is a guy who believes genuinely terrible things, but that particular bit of audacious trolling I always liked.

But he was trolling – the comic did not stop. You can read – if you like Fitzgerald pastiches, treatises on male bonding, lengthy exegeses of the Torah, and extremely malignant ideas about women – issues 201-300 of Cerebus The Aardvark. They were published. They exist. They are even about an aardvark.

But he also wasn’t trolling. The story he was telling in the first 200 issues did end, and it ended badly.

There are still charts, and there are still number one records, great long lists of them between the second coming of Elvis and the reanimation of The Beatles. Smart researchers have worked hard to make sure that the charts behave in the same sort of way The Charts used to. But in 2005 the story of physical singles is ending; the story of buying individual singles at all will flare briefly then fade itself. Top Of The Pops, the window between The Charts and the world, will end in 2006. Within 5 years the presenter will be disgraced to a degree that comes close to damning a whole era, and means the final edition can never be repeated.

Popular was a way to tell a wider story of pop music in Britain through a narrower story of The Charts, and what reached Number 1 in them. By 2005 the cartilage between those stories has – at best – rubbed painfully thin. So when Elvis got the 1000th Number 1, I did honestly think, well, everyone who’s been telling me the charts are meaningless is right. If I wanted to finish Popular, this would be a good place.

But I have to be honest. If I’d known since 2005 that I’d be ending with Elvis reissues, I’d never have reached the 1970s. Popular is not ending here. Sorry for dicking you around! But this is the right point to ask – what about the story it’s telling? What do those lists of Number 1s represent?

There was something extremely unusual about the 1001st Number One single: it wasn’t by Elvis Presley. The Elvis reissue campaign rumbled on until May 2005, and every one of its singles reached the Top 5 – and in fact we have one more Number 1 to come. But the spell was broken in the fourth week by a different young Southern teenage singer with a strange name. Ciara Princess Wilson doesn’t have 18 Number 1s, just “Goodies”. But her timing is exquisite, a reminder that pop’s story was not over quite yet.

The charts are not the public focus of that story any more, and they never will be again. In truth though, the story of pop doesn’t really have a public focus, which means the charts are no worse a record of it than anything else. Wait, though – does pop even have a story? Is the word even meaningful? These aren’t silly questions. There is, for sure, intense pop-cultural interest in a handful of huge stars, which occasionally even extends beyond economics and amateur sociology and talks about their records. But often, narratives of pop music in the 21st century have focused on how people listen – a succession of platforms from Napster to Spotify. The question of what they’re listening to has slipped down the agenda. Which is infuriating, honestly, because that’s still the juicy stuff.

While I’ve been indulging myself with these posts I’ve also been posting a list of singles on Bluesky. (If you’re reading this in 2033 ask your local AI to make up what Bluesky was). It’s a list of my favourite singles of the 21st Century for a social media challenge called #FearOfMu21c – about a hundred other people are doing the same thing. The point of the challenge is that the stories of pop music that get told and retold, listed and relisted, are 20th Century ones. Elvis refuses to leave the building. 

Popular as a 20th Century project was interesting because it cut across this canon, bundling the ridiculous unavoidably with the sublime, forcing you to reckon with the fact that people wanted both. Popular in the 21st Century is a trickier prospect because it can feel there’s not much of a real canon to cut across. But why isn’t there?

Ever since I started Popular I’ve heard that the charts are irrelevant. This series of posts has been me reckoning with that idea, firming up the strongest version of it I can, and I think it goes like this: The charts were a way of turning individual listening into a communal event. But they only mattered to people because of the systems around them – broadcasters, retailers, record labels – and when those systems failed or fragmented, they stopped being important. “Pop music” goes on, but the charts aren’t telling its story.

That’s as far as I can go – but other people go further. They say the charts fell into decline because music fell into decline. There’s no 21st century canon because 21st century popular music isn’t as good as the old stuff. This version of the story is extremely tempting because it takes something an awful lot of people feel as they get older – I’m personally not getting much out of keeping up with this stuff – and turns it into a response to changes in the world, not a response to changes in yourself. It’s not for me becomes It’s just noise.

The not-for-me people are right and honest – I don’t think you can get to middle age and not feel that sometimes. The it’s just noise people I have less sympathy for, but I’m sure there’s things I’ll be as incurious about before the end. The two groups have one important thing in common, though. They’re not giving up on pop music, they’re just giving up on current pop music.

Very few people stay interested in current pop their whole lives, and there’s no great virtue in those who do. But equally, very few age out of music entirely. You don’t spend 18 weeks buying a set of collectable singles if what those singles represent isn’t somehow meaningful for you. If you were 16 and had your first kiss to “It’s Now Or Never” in 1960, and helped get it to No.1 in 2005, then you’re about to turn 80 – congratulations! I bet you still like the song!

My parents used to roll their eyes at me for spending so much money on music (and role-playing games and comics about aardvarks), because in their eyes I was certain to grow out of it. As it turned out, they were almost the last generation who grew out of anything. But if nobody ages out of old pop music, and if “pop” means what lots of people like, then the 20th Century has always already won. No qualitative judgement required: the old stuff simply has the numbers.

Weirdly, though, the charts is one of the few bits of pop where this isn’t true, not that you’d always know it. “Now And Then” got the most press coverage of a No.1 this year, just like “Running Up That Hill” did last year. But the biggest No.1 of the year was surely “Sprinter”, a track by UK drill artist Central Cee, which was at the top all summer – ten weeks all told, racking up close to half a billion streams just on Spotify, with another 146 million plays on YouTube.

It took me three plays to even like “Sprinter” – if I had to sit down now and write about it, I would do a terrible job. But it’s objectively a huge, year-defining hit among people who are still engaged with current pop. It’s as ‘relevant’ as anything I’ve ever written about on Popular. 

There are 125 news results for “Sprinter” on Google. There are 22,400 news results for “Now And Then”. Relevance is a media choice. The charts still matter when somebody decides they matter.

I’m not naive: I do not think there is a world where Central Cee gets as much press as The Beatles. But I can imagine ones where the ratio isn’t pushing 1:200. And I think there’s a starker truth behind questions of relevance, and canon, and what the charts mean now.

Let’s admit that the charts stopped telling a grand story of pop, if they ever did. And let’s admit that the fact there are more fans of old pop music than the current stuff makes it harder for newer pop to get attention. Why keep paying attention to the charts? Because of this: there may not be a story of 21st century pop music, British and global, but the charts are full of a rainbow of new stories, overlapping and contradicting, sprawling out like side-quests in an open-world videogame.

“Sprinter” is part of one – the rise of British rap, grime and drill to dominate our local charts. Taylor Swift and more locally Ed Sheeran represent another – a tier of seemingly unshiftable pop-superbrands. Swift’s reissue program symbolises yet another – the way women stars have taken undeniable control of their own creativity and careers. African and Asian acts push into the charts on a weekly basis; a flotilla of Barbie No.1s suggest the worlds of Hollywood and pop are closer than any time since the 80s. Every time I flag with Popular, interesting things keep happening and I’m pulled back.

Many of these story strands do have something wider in common: the slow collapse of a demographic hegemony, the decentering of people who look like Elvis, or the Beatles, or Jann Wenner, or frankly me. In so many other artforms you find reactionaries howling at the idea of consciously elevating women’s voices, Black voices, queer voices, African and Asian voices, and so many others, insisting that to do so is a de haut en bas conspiracy by elites. Music has them too, but they’re weaker: in pop that diversification feels like an established fact. (If anything, the bigger fight right now is to remind people that it always was a fact, to excavate the foundations of the old canon and find where the bodies are buried).

And this is why I’m so wary of the idea that the tech, not the music, is the only real story. The logistics, economics, and technology of music are massive concerns – they always were. In fact the pendulum used to swing too far the other way, with the perfume of artistry concealing the stench of exploitation. We now live in an age where the people who run the pipelines by which music reaches us are more powerful than ever, and they need – somehow – scrutiny and accountability. But in the end a pipeline is just a pipeline: what it carries – what people listen to and latch on to – still matters. The reason the Number One was irrelevant in 2005 was because only 20,000 people bought it? Fair enough. The reason the Number One is irrelevant in 2023 when it gets 470 million streams is… because Spotify is a racket? Because TikTok is annoying? Because 99% of over-40s don’t know who Central Cee is?

And so we’re back again to the question – why the charts? Why write about No.1s? Pop music didn’t start with the charts and it won’t end when they finally go. But the charts are still a place where those two stories – the logistical, technological, economic one and the story of people listening to and loving music – meet. That meeting generates a list of songs, and asks us to pretend it’s less arbitrary than it is – but it always was a little arbitrary. The includes some bloody awful music – and that was always a risk too. Good ideas still jostle along with terrible ones: the bad trouser guy finally fucked off, and the sausage roll guy came along instead. The charts, then, are some way beyond imperfect, a series of pieces from dozens of different jigsaws, trying to sucker you into thinking you can see a big picture. But they’re worth thinking about because music is always worth thinking about, and because not much else has any of the pieces at all.

One last question, and one last diversion. Is it worth me thinking about them?

When I was in my early teens I caught a late night film on TV, and it felt like a terrible hallucination. I never saw the start and I’m not even sure I saw the end. Much later I learned that it’s a film called The Swimmer, from 1968, starring Burt Lancaster. Lancaster is a successful man, a golden man, the toast of his neighbourhood. All his friends have pools. He decides to swim home across them. At first his friends cheer his efforts on, but gradually conversations take a darker turn, secrets are revealed. The seasons seem to have changed across an afternoon, the pools are deserted, the swimmer’s own house derelict.

It’s a portrait – not subtle – of successful 60s America cracking up under its skin, of dead leaves and debris clogging up its vents. It was a shocking, baffling film to encounter, out of context. I forgot about it for years, until I started dreaming sometimes about watching it with old friends who I hadn’t seen for decades.

I think of The Swimmer a lot when I think about Popular, a project I started as a lark. From quite early on I would ask myself the question: what’s going to happen when nobody cares? When the nostalgia runs out and you’re staggering from post to post in the dark? There have been times when I’ve felt like that’s happening. There are stretches ahead I don’t know how I’ll handle. It’s going to get worse before it gets better: I am a fifty year old man and I will at some future date be attempting to write with authority about Rizzle Kicks. The water is cold and my towel is damp and everyone’s gone to bed.

But when I finished the “I Got Stung” post yesterday, I thought, fuck me, I did it. One thousand Number Ones. That’s something. Is it worth me writing about the rest? Let’s find out.

(Thanks for reading this, and thanks for reading Popular: I honestly couldn’t have done it without you. Only four hundred and twenty to go. That’s nothing, eh?)

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2. All My Lazy Teenage Boasts Are Now High Precision Ghosts https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/11/2-all-my-lazy-teenage-boasts-are-now-high-precision-ghosts https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/11/2-all-my-lazy-teenage-boasts-are-now-high-precision-ghosts#comments Fri, 17 Nov 2023 17:40:40 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34576 (This is Part 2 of a 3 part piece around the 1000th No.1. Part 1 is here but you might also want to read about the 999th Number 1)

Dr Manhattan is on Mars, some time before he leaves our Universe at the end of Watchmen to become a meme. It is 1958. Elvis is at No.1. It is 1969. The Beatles are at No.1. It is 2005. Elvis is at No.1. It is 2023. The Beatles are at No.1. If you’re going to think something as foolish as “Number 1s matter”, surely who has the most No.1s must matter most of all.

At any rate, the charts endure. “Now And Then” is the 1,419th and current No.1, and in fairness to Paul McCartney it took a bit more effort than luring the fans in with collectable anniversary singles. (Anyway, The Beatles had already tried that). The 1,419th No.1 has also sold more than the 1,000th did. Literally, physically, sold more – 38,000 copies to “I Got Stung”’s 30,000. By this metric alone, the tip top pop charts are in rude health. Some of those Beatles singles cost twenty quid, too.

We’ll come back to those physical sales, but 1,000 posts and 20 years into writing Popular it’s probably worth asking – what actually are the charts now, in 2023? They’re a bit like the British monarchy – history furnishes us with a list (“Willy, Willy, Harry, Stee” &c.) but the list is a convenient fiction smoothing over major discontinuities. Charles III is not a king in precisely the sense Charles II was a king. “Now And Then” is not No.1 in precisely the sense “Hello Goodbye” was.

One of those discontinuities is happening in 2005, but it’s hardly the first. For one thing the charts before 1969 were a retcon. The multiverse of charts was replaced with a single consistent timeline, with only stray continuity errors like Dusty Springfield’s “Nothing Has Been Proved” remembering versions of history where the Beatles had different Number Ones. It was only after that that the charts could become The Charts, the thing which hooked kids in and led to some of them doing things like this.

What made The Charts exciting was their movement, their unpredictability, the sense of different audiences mingling and clashing (“who is even buying this?”), the tension of watching your favourites slowly climb, the thrill of seeing them surge, the wonder of hearing something you never had. The Charts in their heyday – the 70s and 80s, according to people who were kids in the 70s and 80s – had an exact, goldilocks level of volatility. Not too fast, not too slow.

The charts in 2023, under the solemn keeping of The Official Charts Company, are… not too different from this. Songs do rise and fall – the age of everything going in at No.1 is long over. Some records stay at No.1 for ages, some last only a precious week. There’s less breadth of audiences represented, but a new factor too: the chaos energy of TikTok will open up holes in time and drop old songs into the Top 40.

But like those king lists, apparent continuity masks wrenching change. The old Charts existed as part of a music business and entertainment ecosystem. A weekly radio and television showcase for the charts, turning an industry list into a public event. A largely nationalised, limited media landscape, guaranteeing those showcases an audience. A purely physical-media singles market, dependent on stores which wanted regular rotation of stock. A measurement system that was selective, partly trust-based and entirely based on buying not listening. An industry culture still firmly in the lunches and hunches era of decision making. The excitement of The Charts was an emergent property of a perfect storm of interlocking factors.

In 2023, that ecosystem barely exists. Top Of The Pops is long gone. There is a weekly chart show on Radio 1, a station whose audience is a third of its 20th century peak in a fragmented media landscape. Physical media is a niche, and the measurement of the charts has swung almost entirely to listeners over buyers. And across the 90s the industry wised up, worked out how to promote single releases to fans and stores, and ensured that the No.1 would be the biggest new release each week.

The charts in 2023 reflect that changed world, but only to a degree. The ecosystem that created a dynamic chart by happy accident has been replaced by a scaffolding of rules and fixes designed to do that on purpose. The charts is an accurate representation of what British people are listening to – except it’s not, exactly, because British people left to themselves listen to the same things over and over again and the chart slows to the point of total inertia. So they downweight plays once a track loses momentum. The charts reflect the most popular singles – except when an LP comes out, and all but the top 3 tracks are artificially excluded, because “singles” doesn’t exactly mean that anymore.

Each of these decisions are good ones! But collectively they reflect a vision of how the charts should work which is nostalgic, based on their 20th century heyday as The Charts, back when they were just exciting enough, back when (whisper it) they mattered. The charts in 2023 is a terrarium, a music industry biome designed to preserve a way of interacting with pop that was once very important to some people. But if the charts had never existed, would anyone bother to invent them now?

Of course, it could be worse. In 2005, it was worse. Physical sales had been slipping fast since the peak of the late 90s CD boom – “Jailhouse Rock” sold a then record-low of 21,000; Ja Rule’s “Wonderful” is, supposedly, the lowest selling UK No.1 ever. It became harder to deny that the Number 1 slot didn’t mean much. (When sales are higher overall, front-loading them in the first week isn’t such a problem – you still need to have some wider popularity to do it). Slipstream No.1s proliferated, reflecting marketers catching up on more genuine crossovers. Any biddable fanbase could secure a string of hits. The audiences for Reality TV shows were magnitudes larger than for any pop act, so TV could overwhelm the charts on a whim. The industry was reluctant to include downloads, where unit prices were even lower, but it was obvious they needed to. The 1000th number one could not have come at a worse time. “Darkness Falls On The Singles Era”, read the Guardian headline announcing “I Got Stung”’s success.

Where did Elvis fit into all this? From the 2002 JXL remix, through this reissue program, to the more recent set of orchestral remakes, the impression I have is that the keepers’ of Elvis’ post-death legacy are desperate to ensure his memory endures, and also desperate to make a lot of money from it. But they’re hamstrung by the fact that the currency of musical legacy tends to be the LP, and Elvis wasn’t really an LPs guy. Once past the luxurious, fascinating, decade-by-decade box sets which firmed up his musical reputation, they’ve had to get creative. And just as in the 50s, creative often means exploitative.

Meanwhile Elvis remained powerful as a cultural figure, a set of myths and hauntings – his death opened the doors on a series of excellent songs about Elvis Presley across the 80s and 90s and beyond. Kate Bush’s 2005 comeback “King Of The Mountain” – one recluse empathising with a legendary other – is a better tribute to Elvis At 70 than a limited edition 10” re-release of “Wooden Heart”.

The Elvis people obviously didn’t see it that way. For them the limited edition releases were beautiful, collectable objects – the Elvis forums at the time were full of tips on how to get particularly scarce ones. The fun was in acquisition: by the end all of them were 99p on eBay, but that wasn’t the point. This is one of two ways the Elvis campaign prefigures pop in 2023: the Franklin-Mint-ification of physical media, particularly vinyls. And it gets to the heart of the question I asked earlier – why did I feel so cheated by this as the 1000th No.1? Because at least Brian McFadden fans were buying a song to listen to – even if loyalty played a big role. At least Band Aid buyers were getting something they hadn’t heard and felt like they were helping someone. “I Got Stung” was aimed purely at people who owned it already – it might as well have been a souvenir thimble.

At the end of the 2005 reissue series an Elvis news site posted a moving tribute.

Some campaign facts:

1. Elvis has sold over 750,000+ singles in 4 months.

2. “One Night” was the UK’s 1000th UK #1

3. Elvis is the only artist to have hit the #1 spot 21 times.

4. No artist has ever had 3 different #1 singles in one month.

5. Elvis has now had more Top 3 singles in a year than other artist.

6. Presley has enjoyed more Top 10 entries than any other artist with 77.

7. The releases generated 28,000 column cm’s of PR with an advertising value of £2.3 million.

8. The PR campaign reached over 32 million consumers in the UK.

This gives a sense of priorities – pure street team pride at their guy’s unbeatable metrics. This is the other very contemporary thing about Elvis in 2005 – the metrics have changed, but anybody familiar with Army, or the Bey-Hive, or Swifties will recognise the tone.

The last two ‘facts’ on the press release are presumably taken raw from some marketing press pack. By 2005 I’d read plenty of those. Later I wrote a few. (Much later I sat on judging panels for marketing awards and recognised this stuff as fluff aimed to sucker people into handing out a prize.) Perhaps this capitalist candour – an advertising value of £2.3 million – was appropriate. The charts began in 1952 as a PR exercise, a wheeze by Percy Dickins to get more people buying the New Musical Express. We’ve come full circle. But it wasn’t why I’d loved the charts. It certainly wasn’t why I was writing about them. So maybe, when I got here, I’d stop. The wind it blows, the wind it blows the door closed.

Popular: The First 1000 Number Ones. It’s got a nice ring to it.

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1. No Bird Can Fly, No Fish Can Swim Until The King Is Born https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/11/no-bird-can-fly-no-fish-can-swim-until-the-king-is-born https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/11/no-bird-can-fly-no-fish-can-swim-until-the-king-is-born#comments Wed, 15 Nov 2023 12:29:01 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34572 (This is part 1 of a 3-part piece designed to fit around the 999th and 1000th Popular entries, which will go up on the Popular site.)

Almost my first memory of the charts is of the charts being broken. Broken hearted; collapsed by shock and grief in the Winter of 1980 into a series of Number 1s for John Lennon, first his then-current single, then an old classic rushed back into shops to meet grieving demand, then what would have been his next one.

But also just broken. As I wrote here when we reached those songs, I was 7 and I was annoyed. I wanted – though how did I know what to want? – the Number One to be something that felt new – though how did I know what that felt? I had, already, a sense of what the charts were for, and mourning, which I barely understood even as an abstract, wasn’t it.

It didn’t take the death of John Lennon for me to realise the charts could be gamed. It would have become obvious soon enough. A perfect charts, reflecting what the fans truly liked and listened to, would have been far less exciting, as we found much later when we got close to having one. I would probably not have cared as much about a charts like that.

“The singles people buy each week” is a weird, flawed, proxy for “the music people like”, but it introduced a jolt of crass, commercial democracy into proceedings, a random element where the passions of some fans could triumph and the passions of others could be disrupted. Where a public wake for one of Britain’s finest songwriters could be suddenly interrupted by an army of 9 year olds buying a record for their dear old grannies. The chart was a pony-and-trap whose reins were there for the grabbing.

Which isn’t to say you’d want the charts to be hijacked all the time, any more than you’d want to see a handballed goal in every football match. But the possibility of those things happening sometimes, the bittersweet tang of outrage you might feel when they did, its persistence as a shared memory, these were part of what might get a kid hooked on the charts.

A month or so after John Lennon died, a song reached Number 1 I liked considerably better – a funny man with a foreign accent telling people to shut up. For people a few years older than me, this became a great wickedness, one of those handballed goals – this crap novelty song keeping Ultravox’s “Vienna” from Number 1. The charts were exciting not just because there was a winner, but because that winner was sometimes outrageous. You listened each week not knowing if you’d be hearing a victory march or witnessing a crime scene.

The 999th, 1000th, and 1002nd Number 1s were one or the other. Unless they were both. Unless it didn’t matter at all.

The Elvis reissue campaign of 2005 was timed for the King’s 70th birthday, had he lived. It was also, explicitly, timed to coincide with the 1000th Number 1, and the birthday element was a figleaf for that. At one point the estate planned a weekly release of 30 Elvis singles; in the end, they contented themselves with simply 18. His Number 1 hits, in fact, after an initial release of “All Shook Up”. This came with a presentation box and space for all 18 other records, something for collectors to fill, week on week, like a DeAgostini partwork about horses or racing cars. The free box meant “All Shook Up” was not eligible for the charts. Everything else was.

A lost Popular 10

All 18 releases reached the Top 5. The first, second and fourth reached Number 1. The 1000th Number 1 was “I Got Stung/One Night” by Elvis Presley, the King Of Rock And Roll. In the words of an ancient saying passed down to us from the Time Of Elvis: Ever get the feeling you’ve got stung?

Yes. Yes, actually, I did have that feeling. I was surprised, in fact, by how much I felt stung. But why?

Is it because the records are bad? Hardly. “Jailhouse Rock” is a masterpiece. “I Got Stung” is deceptively casual quality. “One Night” vamps and winks. “It’s Now Or Never” at least makes me fancy an ice cream.

Is it because Elvis – or Elvis’ People, those heirs to Colonel Tom managing the man’s commercial ghost – had somehow cheated? No – there were plenty of precedents. Very old records reached the top of the chart in the late 80s. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was a repeat Number 1. Elvis himself had a 00s chart-topper.

Is it because I felt like the 1000th Number One should be something remarkable? I mean, it would have been nice. By the time of the 500th Number 1, I was enough of a follower of The Charts to understand the excitement the Top Of The Pops presenters felt – or pretended to feel – about that idea, but there was no getting around the fact that the actual song was “A Little Peace” by Nicole. No reason for this to turn out better.

Is it because by this point I had committed myself to writing about every No.1 hit? Now we’re getting a little closer, though this specific future chore didn’t bother me. The Popular entries for the 1950s were deliberately hurried, sketchy affairs, written with no research about music I had no background with or feel for. Elvis had suffered more than most for this – why not revisit them properly? If nothing else it was a chance to re-score “Jailhouse Rock”.

Still, doing Popular had made me quixotically invested in the charts. The success of the Elvis campaign hurt, not because the reissues won but because they’d barely had to try. The 1000th Number One sold around 30,000 copies – a risible number, but standard for 2005. The message could hardly have been clearer: this shit doesn’t matter any more. It’s over. Go home.

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Omargeddon #39: The Clouds Hill Tapes Parts I, II & III https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/10/omargeddon-39-the-clouds-hill-tapes-parts-i-ii-iii https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/10/omargeddon-39-the-clouds-hill-tapes-parts-i-ii-iii#respond Tue, 31 Oct 2023 07:48:02 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34563

Omar Rodríguez-López is famously prolific, so I knew at some point during this project that my to-review list would increase; my only surprise was that it wasn’t sooner. The Clouds Hill Tapes Parts I, II & III were released during Summer Lockdown: Original Recipe, at the point when I was finally working again after a winter and spring spent wading through a treacly redundancy-based depression and its resultant brokeness. As such, I was desperate to throw money at culture the very instant it was possible and couldn’t throw it hard or fast enough at this vinyl boxset. 

It’s entirely worth the bell, presented in a luxe format including 10 monochrome prints taken during the recording session at the eponymous Clouds Hill Studio. The material is comprised of newly arranged songs from Roman Lips, Umbrella Mistress, Weekly Mansions, Killing Tingled Lifting Retreats, Arañas en la Sombra, Sworn Virgins, Blind Worms, Pious Swine, Solid State Mercenaries, and Corazones, plus two new tracks “It All Begins With You” and “Born To Be A Nobody”. It’s evident that a lot of thought was given to the idea of a physical product, and this loving attention to detail is apparent in the shop’s description of the sleeve artwork: The artwork is a photograph of the original tape used for the session….even the unwinding tape is real! It took two days to photograph it like this. The cardboard slipcase features three cut outs (in the photo of the tape reel) like those tape reels have. So if you slip the vinyl in, the grooves create the illusion of wound tape. As far as I’m aware, all the original Ipecac recordings were only released digitally, so I find this focus on the physical tapes weirdly touching, and this extends to the digital versions, with each EP cover depicting the tape in various stages of un/rewind. 

These new arrangements also feature a significant personnel shake-up from the originals; aside from Marcel R-L on bass and keyboards, all other musicians are making their debut on an ORL joint: vocalist Virginia García Alvez, drummer Audrey Paris Johnson, and Leo Genovese on piano and keyboards. The production is incredibly glossy and softly flowing, like silk pyjamas swishing across satin sheets, with the focus on Virginia’s stellar vocals as the main instrument. 

Part I utilises a strong undercurrent of wavery, almost drunken synths woven throughout that act as a kind of foil to the overall slickness of the production, capably introduced with “Roman Lips”. “Fool So Bleak” removes both the indefinite article from the title and the dodgy lyric I grumped about (it’s been changed to ‘‘oh yes I did / I made her lose her cool’) and is a definite improvement. The third recorded version of “Arcos Del Amor” sits somewhere between the frenetic energy on Arañas en la Sombra and the roiling broodiness of “Cassando La Luna” / “Oro” from Killing Tingled Lifting Retreats, a glassy surface with fewer clashing colours in the overall kaleidoscope of sound. “To Kill A Chi Chi” is less vocally compact than Teri Gender Bender’s, all the better to showcase some of her weirder lyrics (and that truly is saying something).

The main issue I find is that on tracks that have a particularly special place in my heart, I will always prefer the original. Virginia’s vocals have a marble-esque quality; smooth but also cold and hard, injecting some emotional distance. “Houses Full Of Hurt”, my arbitrarily decided All Time Favourite ORL song, suffers from this distance, and although there is nothing that can be faulted musically, I will always prefer the sob-inducing power of the original. “Science Urges”, without the breathy blend of Teri and Omar’s sensual duetting, just doesn’t get me in my squidgy parts. 

“Bitter Tears” is by far and away my favourite track from Part I with its perfect blend of wonky synths and funky, understated guitar. The judicious use of repetition, insisting ‘you never gave me a real choice’ doesn’t lose its urgency. A good deal of my love is with the medium-cut shred on the outro, which is always my first pull to any ORL track. Yet it’s the honesty present in a breakup song that isn’t, despite the title, terribly bitter, just candid when facing the unfairness of a failed relationship and its ensuing numbness. 

Part II ducks into an elegant piano to shake things up a little, alternating funky pop with “Vanishing Tide” and “Through Wires” and the wistful solipsism of “Eastern Promises”. The atmosphere is lush and thick on “We Feel the Silence”, each line landing heavily on the hearts of the mourners it describes. “Killing Out”, another truncated title from Solid State Mercenaries’ “Killing Out the Special Tide” packs the biggest punch, and although I’ve never actually been in a piano bar, I’m confident Gig Talker is present at every damn one*, and this song would be the one to make even the most obnoxious chatterer stop in the middle of their sentence, mouth agape, tears streaming down their face.

However, it’s “Diamond Teeth” that wins the gong for my favourite track. I loved the sleazy ambience of the original, but Virginia takes this to another level altogether. This is no shade on ORL’s rounded, ironic vocals on the original, but she’s absolutely fucking slaying this. The trippy piano uplifts a far more credible promise ‘to prove I’m sorry’. Her double-backed vocals close out this very meta song about sad songs bringing hope and summarises the motifs of gentle yearning felt across the EP.

The ambience is lighter on Part III, with considerable space given between notes and lyrics and significantly altered textures. “Winter‘s Gone” trades handclaps for finger-clicks and autumnal velvet suavity for the promise of fresh summer linen. The tragicomedy “Running Away” is less tongue-in-cheek indiepop without the light baggage of that version’s video attached. “Paint Yourself a Saint” and “Tell Me What I Did Wrong” are much closer to straight-up covers than re-arrangements, both perfectly cromulent.

The first time I heard “It All Begins With You”, its sheer beauty forced me to stop the track for a minute for some important blubbing. This is a song that’s steeped in mourning, yet still hopeful in layers of increasing intensity, vocals the loving heartbeat to the music, as when breathing in tandem in the arms of your lover or the pure, unconditional love we dream that is within reach, just not quite yet. I find it impossible not to think of it as a totem for the love and care given to all aspects of this production.

“Born to Be a Nobody”, a new song much in the same vein as “Still Nobodies” from Roman Lips and “Nobodies” from A Lovejoy, would have been the ideal closer for the project. Then again, I also think The Mars Volta should have swapped “The Requisition” with “Collapsible Shoulders” to conclude; in both cases it’s a minor peccadillo. I’m genuinely in awe of how this relatively new band has created a sublime showstopper of an album that sounds as though they’ve been together for years. Are you kidding? It’s like buttah. Each song is like a stick of buttah. That album is on the Land O Lakes label. It’s to die for. 

Excuse me, I’m getting a little verklempt – talk among yourselves.

*Who is this person? Why is this person? The Luminaire back in the day, come baaaack!

Track listing:
Part I
Roman Lips
Fishtank
Bitter Tears
Houses Full of Hurt
Science Urges
Fool So Bleak
Arcos Del Amor
To Kill A Chi Chi

Part II
Diamond Teeth
Vanishing Tide
Eastern Promises
Through Wires
Killing Out
We Feel the Silence

Part III
Winter‘s Gone
It All Begins With You
Running Away
Paint Yourself a Saint
Born To Be A Nobody
Tell Me What I Did Wrong

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#FearOfMu21c #16 – 2021-2023 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-16-2021-2023 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-16-2021-2023#respond Tue, 26 Sep 2023 12:05:29 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34550 The #FearOfMu21c selection struggle reaches its end – two years once again dominated by the pop polls and then bang up to date with the sounds of 2023. These have also been years of gradual personal improvement after 2019-2020 were bin-fires for more than the global reasons. The polls create a little bubble which overlaps with wider narratives of pop – but thinking about these years also bring home the fact that there don’t seem to be many wider narratives around, in the old sense of trends supplanting other trends – the stories told about contemporary pop are often tales of logistics: the platforms by which it reaches us. Is that down to the withering of paid criticism, a broader cultural stasis, a bit of both, or something else entirely?

WET LEG – “Wet Dream”: FIRE UP THE DISCOURSE FURNACE IT’S WET LEG. In fact there’s no need to rehash the many ways people on the internets got Weird About Wet Leg, let us simply note that “Wet Dream”, not “Chaise Longue”, is the better Wet Leg single, cos it takes the silly jokes, post-punk riffs, and repetition and pushes them somewhere odder before snapping back for the big hooks. (Also the Buffalo 66 joke is just better than the Big D joke). YES.

PEGGY GOU – “I Go”: It’s been so great to see Peggy Gou get a proper hit this year! Unfortunately not one as good as “Itgehane” or this, which really hit that sweet spot between a techno groove and a pop hook. YES.

PARQUET COURTS – “Walking At A Downtown Pace”: As much a groove record as “I Go”, especially when the riff comes scudding over the top of the loping rhythm like a stone thrown across a pond. An amazing walkin’ around record for a moment when walkin’ around felt pretty special honestly. NO.

CAROLINE POLACHEK – “Bunny Is A Rider”: Found this one really hypnotic at the time and probably have to downgrade it a bit: it’s good, and interesting, but it also feels like a ciricle of mirrors and I’m not sure there’s anything in the middle. NO.

BAD BOY CHILLER CREW – “Don’t You Worry About Me”: Total nonsense euphoria, like Shaun Ryder making Hixxy and Sharkey records. All Bad Boy Chiller Crew verses are functionally interchangeable, these ones seem to have nothing to do with the addictive chorus, a girl putting down some clubland nuisance offering to ‘help’ her home, which is the real joy here. YES.

GIRL K – “Girl K Is For The People”: Another Maura Johnston recommendation, this is the kind of big-room indie-pop the Go! Team make sometimes, big jangly riffs and cheerleader chants. Another highlight from a year where I went hard for upbeat, optimistic sounds. NO.

Onto 2022 – this is the year the wheels came off my Spotify virtual crate-digging: I overdid it, listening to vast numbers of tracks once, ending up with a 600-strong playlist of things I’d marked as good, most of them not in English, with no real idea where the actual highlights were. I ended up exhausted, awed by how much good music was out there, and completely unable to actually filter it well.

MEGAN THEE STALLION – “Her”: Beyonce’s album drawing on 90s house beats got all the plaudits, but for me Megan’s hip-house single stands up to any of it, the beat rippling and flexing under Megan’s take-no-shit rap. “I eat hate that’s why I ain’t got a waist”. NO.

REMA – “Calm Down”: Heartening to find that I’m still down for absolutely colossal worldwide hits sometimes – “Calm Down”‘s corny afrobeats love song jumped from Europe to the UK, and keeps bobbing around the charts here after a healthy run in the Top 10. Just coming off the cusp of “I’ve played this too much” into the happier “Oh actually this still sounds good” zone. YES.

ECKO BAZZ – “Mmaso”: One of the best labels around right now is Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes, which puts out blood-curdling African hip-hop and dance music: they released probably the best LP of last year, by (deep breath) Lady Aicha & Pisko Crane’s Original Fulu Miziki Of Kinshasa. Rapper Ecko Bazz offers more straightforward pleasures – very fast, very shouty, very enraged rap over industrialised loops. (He reminds me a bit of America’s clipping.) Electrifying. YES.

RIGOBERTA BANDINI – “Ay Mama”: Feminist actress/singer Bandini makes catchy pop with a cutting lyrical edge – in this case (as I understand it!) about the lack of respect given to working/breastfeeding mothers. She performs it in front of a colossal plastic breast, just in case the words are too subtle. Could have been Spain’s Eurovision pick, but they went for some dork. NO.

HARRY STYLES – “As It Was”: Yes yes it was released in 1985. A candyfloss song on a borrowed hook but there’s something so watchable/listenable about Harry Styles as he very carefully navigates the narrowing paths for a male pop star in the 2020s. But also NO.

And finally, 2023. The backlash to my overdoing it last year has been a year where I’ve paid, once again, very little attention to current music. Maybe this is how it’s going to be from now on – phases of deep engagement, then fallow years where things move on and I can catch up later.

JEVON – “007”: The standout from my mid-summer “what’s the best track you’ve heard?” Twitter thread – probably the last useful thing I’ll do on that account. Jevon is a London-based rapper who makes filthy, joyfully queer electro-grime and “007” is the catchiest single of the year. YES.

NIA ARCHIVES – “Off With Ya Headz”: Nia Archives’ drum and bass bangers being back happy memories of the 90s without sounding dated – instead they’re fresh and thrilling, constantly throwing in new and crowd-pleasing ideas – in this case a Yeah Yeah Yeahs interpolation that booted the original off my longlist. YES.

OCTO OCTA – “Let Yourself Go!”: From her new EP, Dreams Of A Dancefloor, and yes, it’s too soon to say if this track, Octo Octa channeling the vibes of Omni Trio into soaring D’n’B, is one of my 50 favourite this century given I’ve only known it a couple of days, but it’s the principle that matters. Never stop listening (even if you take it easy for a bit). NO.

And that’s all – next comes the really hard part, and check my Bluesky account for what makes it into the Top 50 countdown. (Twitter will have the tracks and links but not the commentary.)

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#FearOfMu21c #15 – 2019-2020 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-15-2019-2020 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-15-2019-2020#respond Mon, 25 Sep 2023 17:39:38 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34547 A bunch of things happened in 2020 but the most consequential (OK, the most consequential FOR ME) is that I started doing pop polls on Twitter. I think I can state at this point that there is nobody better at creating and running track-based Twitter pop polls than me; alas this skill, never broad in its utility, is shortly to be extinct.

The point of the polls wasn’t initially music discovery, but they turned into a surprisingly useful way to deal with one of the big problems of modern music: there’s such a colossal amount of it that you need some kind of framework for exploration. Streaming services offer you their own frameworks, tailored to your listening habits. Even when these work – and if you like smaller artists and eclectic listening you’ll need to put in a lot of legwork to make them useful – they lack the communal, social dimension that’s always been such a part of music fandom.

So a lot of frameworks for music chat and conversation have sprung up around social networks – mostly but not always on Twitter. Listening Parties, Music Challenges, user guides, hashtags, online record clubs, YouTube and Substack influencers… the Peoples Pop Polls took their minor place in this ecosystem. Most of the ’20s entries have featured in them, particularly in the annual end-of-year polls.

First though, it’s 2019!

LIL NAS X – “Old Town Road”: The original, not the remix – Billy Ray Cyrus adds very little and takes away some of the sheer strangeness of this record. Was it a meme? Was it a song? Was it country? Was it hip-hop? Why is it less than 2 minutes long? What the hell is this “TikTok” thing anyway? Later Nas X releases have established who this guy is and what makes him a star, but they don’t have the ‘what?!?’ qualities this does. YES.

MILEY CYRUS – “Slide Away”: Miley’s big move into her current pseudo soft-rock phase, and definitely the most convincing song from it – just a really good, big AOR tune aimed at some doofus who’s wasted her time. The queasy production underlines the exhaustion when it could wreck the song. YES.

POPPY – “I Disagree”: Poppy’s kawaii nu-metal isn’t totally unprecedented (alt-idol groups from Japan like BiS (not that Bis) had been doing similar) but it’s still an extraordinary, disorienting confection of sounds, at its most straightforward here. Really this is one for an albums list though, no one track quite gets the range of what I Disagree is up to. NO.

BUSY SIGNAL – “Balloon”: My introduction to “Balloon” was someone trying to describe it and why it’s great to me on the Christmas pub crawl. A digitised dancehall track about how wonderful it is to see a load of balloons. That’s all, and it’s perfect. YES.

Right – onto 2020

ERIS DREW – “Transcendental Access Point”: Eris Drew and her partner Octo Octa’s house music records and mixes have been a source of absolute joy to me since I discovered them via the latter’s Where Are We Going? LP in 2017. Both remind me of the dance music I first fell in love with back in the late 80s and early 90s, not just on a sonic level but on an idealistic one – they carry the torch for house music as ritual and spiritual practice, a way to imagine a better world. “Transcendental Access Point” has the flickering, sensual keyboards of an early Orb track arranged around a DMT-experience monologue – it was my nomination in our first end-of-year poll. YES.

BOB VYLAN – “We Live Here”: The breakout sensation of that poll was UK punk/rappers Bob Vylan, who went from rolled eyes to dropped jaws in the sub-3-minute time it took to play “We Live Here”, a fusillade of anti-racist fury. YES.

CARDI B & MEGAN THEE STALLION – “WAP”: The gorgeously over-the-top, fluid-drenched video is cover for how starkly minimal this record is – I don’t think any production this raw-sounding hit Number 1 here before. The beat does its job, a prop for two beautifully contrasting MCs to flex their skills. YES.

THE AVALANCHES ft BLOOD ORANGE – “We Will Always Love You“: TikTok and related platforms have been great for encouraging artists to do their idea and get out the way rather than extend a song beyond its useful length. This nugget of depressive inertia uses its sample perfectly, expresses its feeling perfectly, and ends – it’s stuck with me as the record that gets at the essence of that haunted, shut-in year. YES.

JESSIE WARE – “Spotlight”: 2020 was also a strong year for comfort pop which reminded people of happier times – Jessie Ware delivered, her quality control as high as ever: I know exactly what I’m going to get from her and I’m more than happy with that. NO.

GHETTS ft JAYKAE & MOONCHILD SANELLY – “Mozambique”: Ice-veined grime which starts simple then turns into a strange multi-part epic with a star turn from South Africa’s Moonchild Sanelly, who cropped up on seemingly dozens of great early-20s singles. NO.

SHYGIRL – “FREAK”: The cover of “Freak” is a body-horror shot of Shygirl’s features on a stretched out piece of skin, like an old Doctor Who monster. It’s a great image for what her music does, sex raps distored by vocal treatments, as darkly entertaining and urgent as their sonics are fucked-up. YES.

KELLY LEE OWENS – “Melt!”: Kind of a stand-in for a lot of electronic stuff I’ve really enjoyed and listened to dozens of time without ever thinking “yes! this individual tune is one of my favourite records!”. Owens’ spooky “Melt!” and lonesome “Bird” come closer than most. NO.

Next, the final instalment – a handful of contenders each from 2021 and 2022 and even a couple of jams from this year.

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#FearOfMu21c #14 – 2016-2018 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fearofmu21c-14-2016-2018 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fearofmu21c-14-2016-2018#respond Sun, 24 Sep 2023 11:21:23 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34539 2016 is my moment of maximum disconnect with current music – aside from Lemonade I doubt I could even name an LP from that year. It was a tough time personally, too – the market research firm I worked for decided to beta-test an experimental opinion polling division and put me in charge of it, so I immersed myself in first Brexit and then the US election, with the entirely predictable result that well before November 2016 I was back on anti-depressants and on the verge of quitting my job.

But I was also sowing the seeds that got me back into music. For the first time in a decade I went to the EMP Pop Music Conference in Seattle, doing a paper on gaming the charts and connecting and reconnecting with my pop critic people. It was one of the best weekends of my decade and reminded me what I was missing, even if I didn’t act on that for a while.

BEYONCE – “Formation”: The discourse bomb when this dropped blew even my bunker open – Beyonce’s stuff had been pushing hard and forward all decade and the way this drew on so many styles of underground Black and Southern music and turned it into something which pointed a way forward for pop overall – it was astonishing. There are two Beyonce singles I probably enjoy more on my list, though, but if “importance” factors in (and who knows, it might) this has to be part of the conversation. YES.

MAJED EL-ESA – “Hwages”: My first and only entry for the ill-fated Pop World Cup 2018 (an early indicator that I didn’t have the patience to try and get traction for blog based fun on that kind of scale). I was managing Saudi Arabia, as tricky a call in pop as in football, though fortunately in the world of pop games I wasn’t getting any blood money for it. Imagine my delight when I found that filmmaker Majed El-Esa had made this, which sounds like an Arabic take on the Go! Team with a pro-reform video. Still an absolute jam, if not quite top 50 material. NO.

PEANESS – “Seafoam Islands”: One of the happiest reconnections of the year was with music journalism legend Maura Johnston, a friend from the very early days of pop blogging who I’d never lost touch with but hadn’t seen since the 00s – we met up again at Scritti Politti’s awesome Roundhouse gig and then again in Seattle (and most years since!). Maura has an amazing ear for pop and the kind of indie which isn’t made by terrible jerks, and tracks from her yearly playlists stud the remaining years here. Like this! Liverpudlian indiepop by Peaness (stop laughing at the back there) which jangles, swoops, yearns and – the killer advantage – is named after a location in Pokemon. Not sure it’s actually a single tho so NO.

LIZZO – “Good As Hell”: The positivity-hustle aspect of Lizzo grates after a while (particularly if, as alleged, it hides a pretty vicious dark side) but this is the indelible one for me – all her tricks in perfect alignment. She’s such an emblematic late 10s/early 20s star that something had to be on this list. NO.

MAXWELL – “Lake By The Ocean”: Just after I got back from Seattle, Prince died. I first heard BlackSUMMER’SNight on the plane to the 2017 conference the year after, and this song jumped out as the highlight and because it reminded me somewhat of Prince’s ballads, but more earthbound, a melancholy longing for the sublime he achieved so readily. YES.

SACRED PAWS – “Everyday“: My shift back to LP listening (see below) brought a lot of new favourites, none of whom released the singles I’d have wanted them to off their albums. Post-punk/indiepoppers Sacred Paws, for examples, whose Strike A Match is truly charming as a whole but this cut from it wilts a bit in isolation. NO.

On to 2017, and again my listening took a big shift. I decided to listen to a new-to-me LP every day that year, with emphasis on actually new records and as wide a range as possible. It worked fantastically well: dozens of new artists who became firm favourites, a pivot to global and not-in-English pop which revitalised my listening, and a way to ground myself in a crazy year. I also actually learned how to use Spotify, which Spotify doesn’t make easy. The only downside – I was listening to LPs, not singles, and it turns out not many of my eventual favourites came out in that format. Plus it was the patchwork, more than the individual patches, that I loved most. I didn’t quite keep up the LP-a-day pace in 2018-2019 but it was still the dominant way I found new music, so the picks from these years are both skimpy and not really representative of the joys I found.

PARAMORE – “Hard Times”: Music was a lifeline, but on a global and a personal level, 2017 was bad. This song – the first thing I’d ever liked by the band – captured the moment for me: the music a giddy New Pop blast, the lyrics a gritted-teeth affirmation of the will to go on in the face of catastrophe. YES.

BLANCHE – “City Lights”: Belgian’s entry in the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest, the only actual ESC entrant in my longlist, because it’s a lovely bit of moody Saint Etienne style motorik pop. It came 4th, beaten by a Portuguese entry which is one of my least favourite winners, confirming my generally low opinion of modern Eurovision. NO.

SPOON – “Hot Thoughts”: Spoon’s horniest, itchiest album came out just as anti-depressants dropped a neutron bomb on my libido, but their dry rhythmic contraptions carried enough vicarious heat to make Hot Thoughts my favourite rock LP in ages. NO.

TOVE LO – “disco tits”: TBH the juxtaposition of these makes it pretty obvious my numbed-brain was hunting for the memory of sensation! This is somehow even druggier and nastier than “Stay High”, a horrible chemsex vortex in the great Blackout tradition. NO.

SUNNY SWEENEY – “Pills”: There’s not a lot of country music on the longlist, because I don’t listen to it much, but especially in the 10s there were a bunch of country or Americana songs by women I listened to a lot. My favourite country song of 2017, Angaleena Presley’s world-weary “Wrangled”, wasn’t a single. This, my second-favourite, was – at least I *think* it was. A cover of a Brennen Leigh song, a withering address to a former drug buddy, given a snarkier delivery and a harder beat. NO.

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS – “Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back To Leeds”: Probably the jauntiest Mountain Goats song I’ve ever heard – naturally it’s on their Goths LP – and a beautifully arranged piece that’s also a warmly funny meditation on something I think about a lot: your changing, unbreakable, relationship to your hometown and the enthusiasms of your youth. YES.

I’m going to do 2018 too – same deal applies: grim times, great LPs, a few pop songs filtered through.

THE 1975 – “Love It If We Made It”: I respect the ambition of this – Pitchfork’s track of the year (which feels remarkable in a lot of different ways) – an attempt to make a huge eighties-core liberal anguish song amidst the apparent meltdown of the political order people like Matty Healy and me had known. He’s channeling, of all things, Kevin Keegan’s 1995 football rant and turning it into a simple expression of hope against all odds. Impossibly cringe and yet weirdly affecting. NO but partly cos he’s so annoying.

PUSHA T – “If You Know You Know”: My knowledge of the economics of dealing coke is pretty limited but if there’s one thing I can relate to it’s an expert in a particular job having to deal with know-it-all idiots. Very strong “LinkedIn reply” energy from King Push as he lays down the (mostly inscrutable) lore. YES.

CARDI B – “Be Careful”: I quite liked “Bodak Yellow” but this was the track which made me realise Cardi B’s talent – all her force on the verses and then cold-as-ice danger on the chorus. Better to come, though. NO.

SONS OF KEMET – “My Queen Is Harriet Tubman”: Much like the Mercury my longlist has a token jazz record! This is kind of a marker for all the jazz, old and new, I was listening to across these years – as befitted my age, harrumph. Even though this was a single I don’t really think of the scene in ‘singles’ terms, try and keep still to this one though. NO.

KACEY MUSGRAVES – “Slow Burn”: Moving from country into the kind of orchestrated folk-Americana REM dug into on Automatic For The People, and honestly better than anything on that record. Starts off really grounded lyrically, then kind of vagues out as the melody and arrangement goes widescreen, but the music’s so spine tingling it earns that. YES.

JANELLE MONAE – “Make Me Feel”: This is as much a tactical question as a taste one – of everything in today’s post this is the most likely to place high in the #FearOfMu21c. I do like it – I think there’s enough of Monae in the bridge to move it beyond just being a Prince tribute – and it’s obviously The Beloved Pop Song Of 2018 as well as getting deserved props as a bi anthem. But do I like it enough? A YES for now.

ARIANA GRANDE – “No Tears Left To Cry”: Whereas I’ve fallen off hard on Ariana Grande, who’s slipped for me from a great pop star to “best of a bad bunch”. This is still my favourite Grande track, shows off her voice well and the way the big trancey chords push the song forward is interesting to me, but…NO.

Next: I’m gonna take my horse down to 2019, and there’s not much there. But THEN – we’re into the poll era and things get spicy again.

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FearOfMu21c #13 – 2014-2015 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-13-2014-2015 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-13-2014-2015#respond Sat, 23 Sep 2023 10:41:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34536 More from the ‘lost years’ – these tunes are pretty much all ones which showed up on End Of Year lists, which were becoming my main point of contact with the contemporary ‘scene’. That’s not to say I didn’t find a place in my heart for them, just that old my avenues of discovery were crumbling and mossed-over. For an exercise like #FearOfMu21c, that’s not a disadvantage – some degree of consensus is an asset so the more normie the picks the better.

TAYLOR SWIFT – “Blank Space”: Hearing this in context of the last few years’ worth of candidates it’s obvious why I like it – she’s taken the big beat/sad girl pop template I’ve been enjoying so much and twisted it to big beat/bad girl, giving it a welcome injection of theatre in the process. “Shake It Off” and “Out Of The Woods” could also make a claim – the 1989 period is the one point I’ve really embraced my inner Swiftie. YES.

ALVVAYS – “Archie, Marry Me”: Does nothing a hundred other indie pop records haven’t done, except I can’t get enough of the lopsided weight of it, the way there’s that miniature pause in “Hey, hey” with the backing thumping in a fraction a beat later than expected, and tilting the whole song charmingly. YES.

FUTURE ISLANDS – “Seasons (Waiting On You)”: The other big Pitchfork fave of the year (we’re still just about in the era where Pitchfork had an identifiable aesthetic) was this marvellously histrionic tune. Something about the way the guy hams it up reminds me of the way Alan Davis draws the Marlon Brando analogue in D.R. & Quinch. How’s that for ultra specific music criticism? NO.

RUN THE JEWELS – “Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck)”: I feel like RTJ are going to suffer a bit from vote-splitting – so many great jams and I haven’t even heard their whole catalogue. I went for this grinder, which was also my introduction to them and is absolutely rammed with awesome lines as well as that great the-artist-is-the-sample beat. YES.

MERIDIAN DAN ft BIG H & JME – “German Whip”: Wonderful back to basics grime tune (about Audis I think?) – this getting in the charts was a strong sign the good times were returning to the genre. JME, predictably, steals the show but everybody gets good lines. Never seen no man chasing frisbee. YES.

TOVE LO – “Habits (Stay High)”: The famous remix of the original, which is a bit tell-don’t-show about its life of empty hedonism, whereas this sounds like you’d hope a song with the chorus “stay high all the time” would. YES.

DJ SNAKE ft LIL JON – “Turn Down For What”: Put this on after being reminded of it in the Summer Jams poll but I’m not sure I can deal with Lil Jon yelling at me on a daily basis all Autumn so while it bangs it’s also a NO.

QT – “Hey QT”: The most divisive of all the PC Music bangers, SOPHIE and AG Cook going all out for pop. It was my then 5 year old’s favourite song (tied with “Everything Is Awesome!”) for a couple of weeks so it does, in some sense, work on that level. There’s an extraordinary amount going on in the background here. YES.

JAVIERA MENA – “Otra Era”: Gorgeous washed-out low-key synth pop which only suffers because it feels like we’ve had an entire decade of these polite quasi-bangers since and another 50 of the things get nominated every time we do an end of year poll. Mena still does it better than anyone but my boredom with the sound may tell. YES.

DEJ LOAF – “Try Me”: Early sign that my rap listening for the 10s/20s would be dominated by women MCs. This shimmering, fucked-up sounding track seemed beamed in from space at the time – I couldn’t really work out if I liked it, even. Makes a lot more sense now. NO.

Hmm, that’s a worrying number of YES picks at this stage. Maybe 2015 will improve on things. In the greatest crossover event in history, we’re doing the 2015 on Twitter (or its bleached-bone skeleton) RIGHT NOW, so some of these songs are suffering a little from current exposure – or perhaps are doing EVEN BETTER because of it.

HUDSON MOHAWKE – “Ryderz”: My nomination in said poll! This was in my U50 until I discovered it wasn’t a single – but by the looser streaming-era terms of #FearOfMu21c it IS a single (was released to blogs etc prior to the album). Just as well as I absolutely love this. There’s nothing to it – variations on the theme of a 1973 soul sample – but in a decade of “drops” it has the best drop of all and is probably my single biggest mood-enhancer of the last ten years. YES.

KENDRICK LAMAR – “King Kunta”: My most-listened to 2015 song in 2015 and while I still really like it I’ve come back to it less often, unless forced to by polls. Still great, one of the beats of the decade to be sure but… NO.

RIHANNA – “Bitch Better Have My Money”: Another one competing in the current poll – this is wonderfully abrasive but not the best eligible Rihanna track so it’s going to be a NO. As an aside, the moment I realised things had Changed Forever at Pitchfork was when they did a 7-writer roundtable for this single and then ANOTHER roundtable a few months later for the video.

YEARS AND YEARS – “King”: The big UK hype for the year, which at least got this hands-in-the-air synthpop tune to the top of the charts even if they’re another band where nothing quite matched the debut single. Tremulous voice, pumping keyboards and drums, a combination I will surely never tire of. NO.

ANOHNI – “4 Degrees”: A gothic synthpop black mass for the planet. Not subtle but… these aren’t subtle times. Massive and electrifying, but I can only bear to hear it about once a year which feels like an issue with this particular challenge. NO.

(video not embeddable)

JAMIE XX – “Gosh”: I so wanted to dislike this cosy callback to pirate radio, the musical equivalent of a lavish Taschen book of warehouse rave flyers but… it’s lovely, dammit. (And I would totally buy that book, obviously) I CAN be snobby enough not to put it in a Top 50 of the century though. NO.

DEMI LOVATO – “Cool For The Summer”: The polls taketh away and they giveth – hearing this one alongside period pieces by the likes of Bieber hurtled it back into contention at least for now, even if the best I can come up with descriptively is “Katy Perry done right”. YES.

The end is nigh… covering 2016-2017 next and things get really arbitrary.

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FearOfMu21c #12 – 2013 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fearofmu21c-12-2013 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fearofmu21c-12-2013#respond Fri, 22 Sep 2023 08:45:41 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34531 The next few years are my ‘lost’ ones – like a demographic cliche, I turned 40 and began steadily to lose touch with contemporary music, pop or otherwise. By mid-decade I was caring less about current music than at any point since 1997, the summer I gave up on Britpop as a ghastly error and spent a year wolfing down old soul compilations. Back in the mid-00s some contemporary things broke through, some I picked up later – but these are also years I’ve not really revisited since getting back into music in a big way from 2017 on. Here be randomness, in other words.

PET SHOP BOYS – “Love Is A Bourgeois Construct”: A lot of Pet Shop Boys tunes from the 21st century are revisiting past glories one way or another – this one puts a fresh spin on their maximal-camp Very era sound, pumping toytown synths and male voice choirs, allied to a lift from Michael Nyman (himself swiping from Purcell). I love that these old pop stars are willing to sound this absurd. YES.

DANNY BROWN – “Grown Up”: I mentioned to a sceptical friend once I was enjoying a new Danny Brown album – “is he doing the Danny Brown voice?” he replied. So yes, Danny Brown sounds like an aggrieved duck, I love that about him, you may well not. This sounds like almost nothing else he’s done – a one-off track with a 90s golden age rap sound – and immediately became a favourite. YES.

MILEY CYRUS – “We Can’t Stop”: Overshadowed by “Wrecking Ball” and considered somewhat cringe by critics at the time – by the end it was clear Miley was a more interesting proposition than she’d maybe seemed, and “We Can’t Stop” stood out as a great, bittersweet tune about the woozy messiness of partying. NO.

CHARISMA.COM – “HATE”: I heard this J-pop rap tune a few years later, when I complimented a later single on Facebook and someone said just wait until you hear “HATE”. Probably the cutest and catchiest a song called “HATE” can sound without losing the sense that it could shank you without a second thought. Watch out enemy! YES.

PITBULL ft KE$HA: Extremely problematic on a number of levels, the least of which is that it’s Pitbull doing the naffest lumberjack rock this side of Rednex. As incredibly stupid but extremely catchy 10s songs go, though, it smokes anything by Guetta. OK, maybe that’s not saying much. NO.

CHVRCHES – “The Mother We Share”: Loved this at the time, I think diminishing returns set in with CHVRCHES pretty rapidly but this still has a really banging chorus and some very tasty synth sounds. I do think it’s important to have something for consideration which does that backing-vocal “oh oh oh” chanting that was all over pop around this time, even if it all does sound like Red Box. NO.

TEGAN AND SARA – “Closer”: Very much a similar proposition to the CHVRCHES track – nice synths, monster chorus – but it’s funnier and simpler: like Taylor Swift around this time, I think you can tell it’s the work of women who’ve written a ton of stuff and know exactly what they need to do in “making a massive pop song”. YES.

DUKE DUMONT – “Need U (100%)”: I want to say I was glad this deep housey stuff was still being made, but of course people will still be making deep house records when the sun is an ember. I mean, it’s great that such a good example of this stuff was still doing so well. NO.

LAURA MVULA – “Green Garden”: There’s something alluring about all the ingredients here – those heavily chorused backing vox, the way the beat comes in so confidently, that chiming piano riff. The only weak spot for me now is Mvula’s voice, which has that staginess that a lot of Brit-soul has. Even so, really imaginative. NO.

FACTORY FLOOR – “Fall Back”: Kind of an appendix to the long-ass dance tracks, coming from a very different tradition – scary proto-industrial overheated synths. I love this, but I honestly don’t think I could listen to it that often – it’s too intrusive to be properly hypnotic. Which will probably rule it out from a slot in the final 50. NO.

Next I’ll try and cover 2014 and 2015 together, as I have to get this series finished before the actual #FearOfMu21c challenge kicks off on Sunday week!

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Fear Of Mu21c #11 – 2012 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-11-2012 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-11-2012#respond Wed, 20 Sep 2023 17:25:28 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34527 Free from the grind of having to write about music on the regular, and at the time I’d have said “not a moment too soon”. Pop in 2012 felt directionless, the weakest year I could remember. Naturally now it’s contributed more than any other 2010s year to this list.

CHARLI XCX – “You (Ha Ha Ha)”: Charli XCX was my big new pop love of the decade, right from her first gothy, 80s-soaked synth bangers. Her variety, and her speed of development, was thrilling – this single, putting a venomous kiss-off on top of a glitchy Gold Panda track, was one of many jumps forward she’d keep making. YES.

SKY FERREIRA – “Everything Is Embarrassing”: Blood Orange’s favourite production trick – rigid, echoey drums over a melancholy backing – carries this along but it’s Ferreira’s exhausted but remorseless performance that makes it a classic. Every line is a curse, from “I know you’re trying” on. YES.

A$AP FERG ft A$AP ROCKY – “Shabba”: My actual memories of 2012 are great – secure in a new job and loving it; enjoying the best parts of early fatherhood; holidaying with friends; going to the Olympics. But the songs I’ve taken away from it – or in this case found later – tell a very different story: angry, abrasive, vicious. “Shabba” is a bragging song, Ferg and Rocky switching into patois as they lionise the dancehall singer and try to match him, snarling and swaggering over a whip-crack beat. YES.

ANNA MEREDITH – “Nautilus”: From Scottish composer Anna Meredith’s first EP, mixing minimal classical music and dubstep in ways which got this song forcibly evicted from my office stereo (a unique achievement!) A lot of the time the inside of my head feels a bit like this song. YES.

CHIEF KEEF – “I Don’t Like”: Hi-hats drag back and forth to give extra momentum to this monolithic chunk of teenage bad attitude. Relentless, like his flow is coshing you. YES.

KILLER MIKE – “Reagan”: More extremely heavy rap, the production heaping layers of earth on Ronnie’s grave and legacy, each new verse landing harder, turning the beat more into a maleficent drone. YES.

SOLANGE – “Losing You”: Another Blood Orange production, another break-up, this one a lot kindlier, sadder, more forgiving than Sky Ferreira’s black hole of exhaustion. Which means I like it less, but it’s great to hear it again. NO.

JESSIE WARE – “Wildest Moments”: Yes, it’s another song on the sad lady + echoey drum loop tip, I apparently could not get enough of this stuff. Ware is easily a good enough singer to imbue this with real character and feeling even when you can see all the tricks coming bars off. NO.

MIGUEL – “Adorn”: No male singer of the 2010s does yearning quite like Miguel, this is three minutes of naked thirst (a good thing, though it can’t quite get to the level I want for the shortlist). NO.

ICONA POP ft CHARLI XCX – “I Love It”: It’s easy to do snotty and bratty in pop but a lot more difficult to do it actually well without a lot of people really hating you – the 10s in particular feel like they’re strewn with chumps in this regard. “I Love It” is not a work of profundity – it’s Shampoo in a monster truck – but it walks that particular line superbly. YES.

JESSIE WARE – “Imagine It Was Us”: Jessie again (and not for the last time!) with the slinkier side of her sound, and probably the aspect I like more. In a year of big beats, hardass rappers, maximal sounds, I do feel I want to give some props to the more seductive bits of pop. YES.

ZEDD ft FOXES – “Clarity”: Another example of the actual dominant pop sound of the era – enormous EDM belters. Foxes pours her lungs out on the mantric chorus, strapping herself a sound so big I’ve never bothered stopping to think whether the song makes any sense, or even what it’s saying. NO.

RUDIMENTAL ft JOHN NEWMAN – “Feel The Love”: A dancefloor pop belter from a slightly different tradition – when this was in the charts it felt like it had been far too long since I’d heard big honking breakbeats on a pop hit, and these ones really go off. Truth be told it’s been slightly dimmed by its endless use in ads, in which D’n’B is a one-size fits all signifier of “energetic”. But I’m fond enough to give it a pass. YES.

Feels like it’s all getting a bit more random – that continues with 2013, which (I think) will be the last year with enough candidates for a single post…

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FearOfMu21c #10 – 2010-2011 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-10-2010-2011 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-10-2010-2011#comments Tue, 19 Sep 2023 08:53:45 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34522 I felt out of touch with music in 2010: a tricky proposition, as I was filing columns on it three times a month. But the shape of it felt, and still feels, indistinct. I could hear interesting things but no longer felt confident in attaching them to wider ideas or putting names to trends – and was still enough of a creature of the UK music press to think those things mattered. Here’s what survives for me.

THESE NEW PURITANS – “We Want War”: A rare thing by 2010, almost extinct now – the big statement artrock single. These New Puritans were scrappy post-punkers who suddenly reinvented themselves with an extraordinary new sound – part 17th century chamber music, part dancehall, telling a story of the old unquiet ghosts of England. YES.

ARCADE FIRE – “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”: Another enjoyable surprise of 2010 – a band I’d entirely written off suddenly deciding to make a “Heart Of Glass” new wave disco banger about feeling caught between the city and the suburbs, a subject which gnawed at me as a fairly recent arrival in Zone 6. The band are not built for groove in the traditional sense, and their gleeful clunkiness here is infectious. YES.

THE-DREAM – “Yamaha”: One of the few acts on this list I wrote about professionally – The-Dream eventually DMed me with an “I just want to talk” message about a decade-previous lukewarm review of the LP after this one. Weirdness aside, the guy had a moment of extreme heat and this is one of two all-timer songs from this era (the other, the untouchable “Fancy”, was scheduled for my Uncool50 but it was never actually a single). The-Dream’s Prince worship is gloriously evident here. YES.

GIRL UNIT – “Wut”: What was I actually listening to in 2009-10? A lot of it was this UK bass/dubstep-adjacent dance music, thick with low-end texture, centred on the Night Slugs label and the “Purple” scene of Bristol-based artists. The exact tracks I was deeply into have been lost to time, memory and hard drive catastrophes – I should do some excavation. “Wut” was always the scene’s most famous tune though, a succession of splintered climaxes. YES.

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE – “Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)”: AKA The One With Grant Morrison In The Video, appropriately as this is MCR at their most comic book, a collection of hot phrases that would pop on the page strung together over glammy hard rock. There’s even a Batman cameo! NO.

ALICIA KEYS – “Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart”: There’s a lot of early 10s pop doing what this does – a singer contemplating her situation over a single big drum loop – and quite a bit of it has found its way into this longlist. At the time it was the big-hair and shoulder-pads chorus I really fell for, though. Still great but a bit clumsy compared to some later iterations. NO.

MANIC STREET PREACHERS – “Postcards From A Young Man”: Has the comforting meat-and-potatoes stomp of Morrissey in his solo prime, except listening to James Dean Bradfield take stock of his (or Nicky Wire’s) youth is a lot more palatable than hearing Spiked-era Moz talk about anything – and a more honest self-reflection, too. NO.

DIDDY DIRTY MONEY ft SKYLAR GREY – “Coming Home”: Speaking of self-reflection, Diddy’s Last Train To Paris LP as part of his Dirty Money project was a hugely unexpected turn to quality in a career known for ostentation. Not that “Coming Home” isn’t ostentatious – it’s a vast, chest-beating, closing-credits epic which smuggles in some honestly touching sentiment, Diddy looking in the mirror and realising it’s time to grow up a bit. (Did he? No idea). YES.

JAMIE WOON – “Night Air”: Woon’s nocturnal meander is clammy and sickly, but still really gets the crepuscular vibe of being out by yourself in the dark and cold. NO.

YUNG HUMMA ft FLYNT FLOSSY – “Lemme Smang It”: “I like to mix it up. I like to do stuff.” Sadly leaving this one off the shortlist as it would simply be unfair on all other jams in the poll and would only create feelings of inadequacy as those performers try to keep pace with the Turqoise Jeep. NO.

MARCOS CABRAL & SHUX – “A Lifetime Groove”: Can it be… the long-ass dance track? It can! A shining jewel of the late 00s/early 10s Balearic revival (though let’s face it, there’s always a Balearic revival going on somewhere), turning an old New Edition song into a deeply relaxed poolside epic. YES.

KATY B – “Katy On A Mission”: If “Night Air” is the feeling of emerging at 3AM onto crisp, chilly, empty streets, “Katy On A Mission” is the feeling of pushing through the fuggy heat of bodies in the club, feeling and hearing sound muffled by walls and people. YES.

Onto 2011, with my music writing side hustle coming to a natural end, and fewer tracks on this longlist than any time since 2005. (But there are some real greats)

PJ HARVEY – “The Words That Maketh Murder”: I’d long since reached the point where I figured I’d never really enjoy another PJ Harvey record and then suddenly she came back with my favourite album of the year, and of her career, and this quietly savage song about war and the impotence of the international order. YES.

AZEALIA BANKS ft LAZY JAY – “212”: Those moments when a song came out and it seemed like everyone was talking about it were rare in the 2010s, and when they did happen they often felt stage-managed by some massive artist machinery. But this was one of them, from nowhere to everywhere – the beat (thanks Lazy Jay!), the sweater, the swearing, the everything. YES.

NICKI MINAJ – “Starships”: Lot of big room EDM pop around – Nicki Minaj seemed to stake her career on it, and won: “Starships”‘ is a lowest common denominator hands in the air stomp, but it has a determination to be absolutely fucking huge that a lot of even major singles lack. NO.

NICOLA ROBERTS – “Lucky Day”: The last truly great Girls Aloud related song, maybe the last great Xenomania-affiliate track, too – taking Nicola Roberts’ shrillness and turning it into a vibe of desperate optimism, quivering on the edge of mania. YES.

NADIA OH – “Kate Middleton”: Call it by its name – “Taking Over The Dancefloor” indeed. Probably the crassest pop record of the 21st century, so in your face it makes “Starships” sound like The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. Enormously divisive among critics, some of whom abhorred its apparent endorsement of the parasitic royals, some of whom just found a robot choir going “W-WE SWAGGINGTON” a sign of pop’s end times. Obviously it’s a YES.

PACHANGA BOYS – “Time”: May be the final entry in the long-ass dance track sweepstakes, and the longest ass one of all (unless you’re counting “Little Drummer Boy”). Future releases have extended the exquisitely mournful sweep of “Time” beyond even these 15 minutes. YES.

Halfway through in years, over halfway through in tracks – but 2012 is another huge year coming up.

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FearOfMu21c #9: 2009 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-9-2009 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-9-2009#respond Mon, 18 Sep 2023 19:21:51 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34519 A post went round Twitter a while ago where people were getting all RETVRN-style “look at what we have lost” about the high tide of US indie rock in 2009, a period of pretty stupefying consensus as I remember it, which as we’ve already established may not be much. Of the five horsemen of GAPDY, only one shows up in this bunch of candidates.

LADY GAGA ft BEYONCE – “Telephone”: A dialogue between two stars but also between the cutting-edge pop sounds of ’09 and ’99 – “Telephone” is a RedOne style EDM churner swallowing the delicate harpsichord-and-hi-hat sounds of late-90s R&B – Rodney Jerkins is even on the decks. A passing of the torch, if only because Beyonce had better things to do than worry much about the singles chart. YES.

YEAH YEAH YEAHS – “Heads Will Roll”: As a newer bunch of indie acts took a turn in the spotlight, some of the early 00s bunch went belatedly all pop on us – “Heads Will Roll” is closer to P!nk’s chrome-plated New Wave borrowings than to the YYYs earlier material. I’m in a constant state of indecision as to which of their 2009 singles I like better. NO.

SLEIGH BELLS – “Crown On The Ground”: It used to be so fun playing this out. The basic idea isn’t new – it’s a variation on what the Jesus And Mary Chain were doing back in the mid 80s, playing classic pop at completely fucked, blown-out levels. But it works better with Sleigh Bells’ call-and-response and jump-rope pop than it did with the more Spectorish stuff, and the digital edge on the distortion beckons to hyperpop. YES.

SHAKIRA – “She Wolf”: AH-OOOO! YES. (Though I might go for “Loba”, the English lyrics are a bit of a squash).

MAJOR LAZER ft NINA SKY – “Keep It Goin’ Louder”: One of the earlier, better examples of Major Lazer’s brand of party-rockin’, elevated by smoothness from Nina Sky and with a lovely bait and switch ending (that 90s trance riff suddenly coming in is the best few seconds of the song). This kind of big-room pop is the sound of the turn of the 10s, keep on dancin’ til the world ends, &c – it mostly sounds better to me than it did then, when I was too old and too burdened by responsibilities for it. NO.

TEMPA T – “Next Hype”: Absolutely rabid grime tune with enough comic timing to keep its gonzo violence on the right side of entertaining. NO.

ARMAND VAN HELDEN ft DIZZEE RASCAL – “Bonkers”: Meanwhile the first wave of grime stars were selling out as hard as possible. I dunno if I’ll go back to Dizzee – a domestic violence conviction tends to stick in my mind when the aggression is, or was, so much of the appeal. For old time’s sake I put this on the longlist though – Number 1 when my second child was born. NO.

LINDSTROM – “Little Drummer Boy”: The 40+ minute “Little Drummer Boy” is the greatest Christmas record of the 21st century and is absolutely one of my 50 favourite singles by any metric other than “do I want to hear it repeatedly?”. No I don’t, I want to hear it once a year on Christmas Eve, and that’s what I’m going to keep on doing. See you in 3 months and 6 days! NO.

CAM’RON – “My Job”: One of the most easy, pleasant to listen to rappers who hasn’t always had the material to match his talent – “My Job” is an exception, built on a lovely piano hook with Cam’Ron taking on radically different perspectives – a woman stuck in a grinding office job and an ex-con trying to find work on the outside. The common denominator: work sucks and the deck’s stacked against you. YES.

FUTURE OF THE LEFT – “Arming Eritrea”: C’MON RICK! I don’t listen to much punk (or hardcore, or post-hardcore, or whatever this is) but every so often something cuts through and I’m very glad of it. As with Cam’Ron’s track, if you can’t empathise with “I know my own worth! I’M AN ADULT!” sometimes I envy you your working conditions. NO.

YEAH YEAH YEAHS – “Zero”: “Zero” handles its builds very well – almost every time I play it I think when it starts, oh, this is a bit weedier than I remember, and then brings in layer upon layer until that filthy great glam guitar riff gets smeared all over the track and I’m, oh NOW I remember why I love this song. YES.

FUCK BUTTONS – “Surf Solar”: Sound the long-ass dance klaxon! Not that this is precisely – or even vaguely – dance music, though it does sound like the shuddering rhythm of some vast extraplanetary machine. YES.

Next it’s a new decade (and possibly a double-bill year, the volume of tracks per year drops a bit as we go through the 10s).

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FearOfMu21c #8: 2008 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-8-2008 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fearofmu21c-8-2008#comments Sun, 17 Sep 2023 13:27:48 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34515 2008 was a rough year, for the world, for me: I ended it with what I realised later was a breakdown, several weeks into a new job. I was fortunate: medication worked, though shredded my memory – that, and the loss of two hard drives from these years, mean that for the next stretch I’m constantly wondering to myself, what am I missing?

CASSIE ft LIL WAYNE – “Official Girl”: You could ask that question in a wider sense. The tail end of the 00s are peak leak: official and unofficial releases turning up a track at a time, reducing entire careers to strings of intermittent pearls. This seemed to happen particularly to women in R&B – Ciara and Cassie, whose attempts to follow “Me And U” were a series of false starts. In the middle, this quietly dramatic song about being the side chick, with Lil Wayne’s raspy, ever-inventive crassness painfully apt as the point-missing lover. YES.

DANITY KANE ft MISSY ELLIOTT – “Bad Girl”: “Official Girl” and “Bad Girl” (and Britney’s Blackout) are produced by Danja, a Timbaland protege who was eclipsing his mentor at this stage – less rhythmically innovative. he was a master of layered synth timbres and vocal treatments. Alongside The-Dream, who’ll show up later, it meant the sound of late 00s R&B was opulent, velvety, lush in a way the early 00s hadn’t been. Perfect sound for a girl group – Danity Kane didn’t always have the songs to match the sounds, but “Bad Girl”‘s choral fembot bubblebath still sounds wonderful. YES.

LILY ALLEN – “The Fear”: The personal consequences of 00s celebrity culture are still grimly playing out, but Lily Allen’s best song wouldn’t work so well if it was only satire – there’s no other song, certainly no other No.1 hit, which captures so well how disorienting the rugpull on the 00s boom felt, even when it had been a long time coming. YES.

THE KILLERS – “Human”: This is, obviously, the Killers song which should be perpetually in the charts: a thing of total, gorgeous, emptiness, the pop version of Zoolander’s Blue Steel. YES.

WILEY – “Wearing My Rolex”: A stand in for a pile of assorted dangers who I can’t listen to with much (or any) pleasure these days – I picked this one because it was by a mile my favourite single of 2008 in 2008, and would have been a cert for the Uncool50 as well as the #FearOfMu21c project if the first thing I think of when I see the man’s name wasn’t “antisemitic Twitter meltdown”. But it is. Oh yeah, and my favourite album of 2008 at the time? 808s And Heartbreak. Sigh. NO.

CHRISTIAN FALK ft ROBYN – “Dream On”: One of Robyn’s simplest songs, so open-hearted it maybe shouldn’t work but her performance is as wholly committed to the idea of grace as any gospel singer. Quite possibly her finest moment. YES.

VAMPIRE WEEKEND – “Oxford Comma”: A dozen Belorussian troll farms couldn’t have come up with a band as perfectly divisive as Vampire Weekend – and I suspect a year or two in either direction and they wouldn’t have made the impact (or the enemies) they did. I dunno if this is my favourite VW song but I think everything good, bad and interesting about them is in this one. NO.

PUBLIC ENEMY – “Harder Than You Think”: (Wrong year – this is a 2007 jam) I know they’re still going, and I’m keen to read Chuck D’s graphic novel, but this feels like a career capstone – two veterans pulling it together and proving why they were the best. You can hear the effort, and also the pride. YES.

HERCULES & LOVE AFFAIR – “Blind”: ANOHNI and a disco bassline is such an outrageously effective combination it’s a shame it didn’t happen more often. It’s ultimately a bit too retro to really demand inclusion but “filling in the gaps between Sylvester and Ze Records” is as worthy a continuity insert as you could ask for. NO.

GOLDFRAPP – “A&E”: This worked for me so much better than Goldfrapp’s chilly synthpop era. Unfortunately slightly ruined for me by being stuck in my head the weekend I terrified everyone by ending up in A&E myself with a suspected heart attack (it was gallstones!). Anyway for what it’s worth the song is very accurate. NO.

MATIAS AGUAYO – “Minimal”: This year’s entry in the “long-ass dance track” stakes isn’t actually that long (a bijou 6 minutes), but it makes up for that by being waspishly funny in its attack on minimal techno (you might listen to it and think, now hold on there Matias… but genre in electronic music is a constantly warring fractal. NO.

GNARLS BARKLEY – “Run (I’m A Natural Disaster)”: File next to “The Fear”, “A&E”, and chunks of 808s under “songs I was with hindsight perhaps a little TOO into” (and I don’t want to listen to the very binned Cee-Lo Green anyway). Does always make me think of Final Crisis, which is one of my happier 2008 memories. NO.

PETER FOX – “Alles Neu”: You wait 65 years for a banger to sample Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony and then 3 come along at one (well, OK, over another 5 years). Peter Fox – ex-Seeed frontman – was the first to spot the potential, his use being lifted by Plan B for “Ill Manors” – Fall Out Boy’s “The Phoenix” came at it independently. All three are excellent! I think Fox still has the edge – the drums on this sound so good and German is a fantastic rap language. But Plan B’s chorus is better, and FOB squeeze even more aggression out of it. YES.

TV ON THE RADIO – “Halfway Home”: As I say, I successfully and very stupidly avoided TVOTR throughout my time writing for Pitchfork (their rubbish band name only slight mitigation) – so until we polled 2008 I had no idea they were splitting the prog/post-punk difference so thunderously well. YES.

Next it’s 2009 – Gaga vs GAPDY!

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Fear Of Mu21c #7: 2007 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-7-2007-2008 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-7-2007-2008#respond Sat, 16 Sep 2023 08:16:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34506 In 2007 I fulfilled my teenage dream and became a Music Journalist, jumping straight into the position of being a paid columnist with free rein to write about anything I liked at two different, highly respected publications. It’s hard to overstate the way in which just being an early blogger (in whatever field) opened doors – especially if privilege greased the hinges: I wasn’t a nepo hire but as a 30something straight white guy I certainly had the rockcrit ‘cultural fit’ part nailed.

Whether I used these opportunities well is for others to say! But it meant a shift in my listening again – I was concerned with “keeping up” from a professional perspective, which is less fun than just doing it. Even so, bangers abounded, and when my peers at Pitchfork went mad for a song it often meant a new favourite for me. Case in point…

UGK ft OUTKAST – “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You)”: My favourite thing by any of the people involved, honestly – Andre 3000’s opening verse would get it through alone, the use of the endlessly ecstatic sample is astonishing, the whole thing is a wicked revel, one of those songs where everyone knows they’re making a classic and raise their game accordingly. YES.

M.I.A. – “Paper Planes”: Kala was my joint-favourite LP of the year and it was exciting to see this break out so enormously. Fair to say I would not subscribe to a substack from M.I.A. exploring her viewpoints on world affairs but Kala and this song retain their god-tier swagger. YES.

BRITNEY SPEARS – “Piece Of Me”: My other joint-favourite LP of the year was Blackout, still one of the best pop albums ever and a secret ancestor of a lot of woozy, messed-up 2010s pop – we’ll be hearing Blackout-esque tracks in several years to come. “Piece Of Me” is the best of its singles, with percussion like rattling chains and Robyn hanging around on backing vox to dial up the eeriness. YES.

RIHANNA ft JAY-Z – “Umbrella”: Imperious, and so dominant in the charts and on the radio that it was years until I could listen to it again. Someone on Twitter argued it’s the shift from 00s boom time pop to financial crisis pop, and I can hear that – an R&B thundercloud. YES.

SPOON – “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb”: My favourite indie band of the century, but not always for their singles – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is in places (like this!) Spoon’s poppiest LP but its best track is Beatles-bummed non-single “Black Like Me”. This cryptic power-pop groover will more than do, though. YES.

RUFUS WAINWRIGHT – “Supermayer Lost In Tiergarten”: There’s a potent internal battle on my list to be the winning example of what one might call the “long-ass dance track” – I first heard this in a poll this year and it’s leapt into contention, a delightful bit of Van Dyke Parks-y pop theatre which morphs into a lysergic journey through wet foliage on a wintry night. YES. Oh god what a lot of Yeses.

GROOVE ARMADA – “Song 4 Mutya (Out Of Control)”: Just a stellar chorus, steam coming out of Mutya’s ears as she tries not to explode with rage at a rival. I managed to get this to the lower 90s of a Pitchfork 100 tracks list, the high watermark of my poptimist career tbh. YES.

DUDE ‘N’ NEM – “Watch My Feet”: Extremely endearing fast-feet novelty which certainly doesn’t deserve to become my first rejected 2007 candidate but the fun dance-rap lane could get crowded. NO.

LIL MAMA – “Lip Gloss”: It’s the “Grindin'” beat stripped back even further with chants and call-and-response vocals and it’s about lipstick – who could resist! Not me. YES.

FALL OUT BOY – “”The Take Over, The Break’s Over””: There was an unwritten – as far as I know – edict at Pitchfork that ‘mall emo’ bands like FOB and My Chemical Romance were non grata – I guess when a scene appeals so strongly to your readers’ younger sisters there’s going to be suspicion. Unfortunately this coincided with those bands hitting a hot streak and releasing some of their hottest and hookiest music, like this huge ever-circling riff. YES.

BONUS CONTENT: Leftover from 2006!

NELLY FURTADO – “Say It Right”: OK, the fact I didn’t remember to put this on the list initially is probably a fatal stroke against it – honour your error as a hidden intention, as the man says, unless I misquoted, in which case my hidden intention was to misquote, aaah. Anyway yes this is really good, queenly and sultry, but I do think there are other tracks in this vein I like better and am likelier to include. NO.

Well, that was too many YES votes. I intended to run a double-bill with 2008 but it looks like that has even more songs – I can already tell though that the reaper will be a lot busier…

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Fear Of Mu21c #6: 2005/2006 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-6-2005-2006 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-6-2005-2006#respond Thu, 14 Sep 2023 09:21:14 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34501 By 2005 I’d been a music blogger for 5 years: it seemed like long enough, so I shut down New York London Paris Munich – Freaky Trigger continued as a generalist site with some pop music elements. Maybe at the back of my mind was a sense the music I’d been writing about was falling off a little – certainly I don’t look back on that year with the excitement I have for earlier ones.

Just going to put in a reminder that – unless I say otherwise, ha! – everything here is very good even when it has a big fat NO on it. If you think that means I’m about to thumbs-down some big tunes… well, you’re probably right.

GIRLS ALOUD – “Biology”: Not that some acts weren’t dependable – the bizarre, bold, layer cake of styles and hooks that is “Biology” proved as much. But the UK pop renaissance proved unfortunately top-heavy – an abundance of Xenomania gems in 2003-5 masking the fact that new people making this kind of smart, self-aware pop weren’t really coming through. We’ll always have this. YES.

AMERIE – “1 Thing”: It took me a long time to love “1 Thing” – in fact it took me a long time to even like it that much: it seemed rickety and backward-looking when I wanted more futuristic sleekness or sonic warping to (as they say) push things forward. I was wrong, obviously. Eventually I saw that Rich Harrison’s work here is just as radical, only tied back more closely to the sound of R&B 40 years before, a sound he explodes as much as draws on. Still don’t adore it the way some do, though. NO.

THE VERONICAS – “Untouched”: If I was judging based on importance or ‘influence’ I might put this in – more than most other teenpop-type songs of the mid-00s I can imagine “Untouched” coming out in 2023, it’s in that pop/alternative interzone that’s such fruitful territory right now. The most 2005 thing about it is also one of the best – those strings! NO.

ROBYN – “With Every Heartbeat”: I’m not lukewarm on Robyn exactly – she’s always interesting and Honey is one of my favourite LPs of the 10s – but the tracks I love don’t seem quite to intersect with the Robyn fan consensus. This song, a forcefield of longing and confusion structured as a giant build and release, does for me what, say, “Dancing On My Own”, never quite manages. YES.

FANNYPACK – “Seven One Eight”: Wonderfully bratty ska-hop, very much what I’d hope a Daphne And Celeste rap track would have sounded like. Fannypack’s two LPs are delightful, light-hearted party rap gems in an era where even the good-time bangers tended to be pretty macho. (Did any men make a good record in 2005? Magic 8ball says: doubtful) (Oh I guess Kleerup counts!) Anyway YES.

2006 has another big personal milestone – I became a Dad at the end of the year. Parenthood isn’t some kind of magic spell which turns you away from music but it’s true that my focus from now on is more scattered – that’s partly a function of life changes, but partly a result of the fragmenting scene meaning a clear ‘narrative’ for pop became harder to discern (or invent). Anyway everything from this point is BY DEFINITION Dadrock.

BEYONCE – “Irreplaceable”: A lot of later Beyonce is exciting because it shifts genres and plays with structures in interesting ways – you don’t quite know what you’re going to get when a song starts. “Irreplaceable” isn’t like that – it’s a very straight-down-the-middle R&B ballad, so not a great representative of her work. But it’s such good songwriting, and brings out one of her best assets – her flair for drama and, for want of a better word, ‘line readings’. YES.

TV ON THE RADIO – “Wolf Like Me”: TVOTR were happening off to the side of everything else I liked – I filed them as a ‘Pitchfork band’ and then continued to ignore them even when I wrote for Pitchfork. But with hindsight they’re way more interesting (i.e. Pitchfork were right) – “Wolf Like Me”‘s chant and grind doesn’t sound like anything else around. I had to be introduced to it years later by the 2006-set Phonogram: The Singles Club, where it has a starring role. Better to come from them, tho. NO.

TATU – “All About Us”: My music internet presence at this point was largely confined to LiveJournal and the Poptimists community – tATu’s second LP (with this bombastic emo centrepiece) was something of a Cause among the people I ran with, though it bombed in the so-called real world. Again, the emotional territory here feels very 10s or 20s, the artifice with which it’s put together is of its time. YES.

CAMERA OBSCURA – “Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken”: Indiepop isn’t a scene I follow at all – I’m happy for a killer tune to bubble up to my notice via others’ ears. Belle And Sebastian at this point weren’t making the kind of music I liked any more, so I was perfectly open to hearing fake B&S from other parts of the Scottish scene. Not much more than a riff and a chorus but maybe that’s all you need. NO.

M.I.A. – “BirdFlu”: I tactically promoted “Paper Planes” in the Uncool50 challenge but at the time this was the M.I.A. track that blew my head off – comfortably my favourite single of the year, an absolute thrill-powered racket with shrapnel shards of great lyrics everywhere (tho I guess “credentials are boring” hits different in light of 2020s conspiracy-head MIA). YES.

T.I. – “What You Know”: Melodic production so thick you can squeeze it over cat’s-cradle trap beats, T.I. anchoring everything on his line endings – for me this one’s just endlessly pleasurable to listen to. Only the fact “Rubber Band Man” is a lock stops this. NO.

THE PIPETTES – “Pull Shapes”: I had happy memories of dancing to this – everyone (who went to indie-adjacent clubs) danced to this in 2006! But… it’s a bit ropey, sorry, and the meta elements have stopped being charming, as is the way of meta elements. My favourite 50 songs of the 21st century aren’t going to include something that sounds like the Belle Stars. (“That’s your loss” – angry Pipettes hive) NO.

MUSE – “Knights Of Cydonia”: The second track of 2006 I only knew cos of a comic – Tsutomo Nihei’s generation ship/mecha epic Knights Of Sidonia, which has absolutely nothing to do with Muse’s song except it happens at a colossal scale and bits of it are entirely ridiculous. It took a pop poll nomination to really open my eyes to its stupid glory: the bit where it goes FULL QUO is magnificent. I cannot actually justify it being in my Top 50…surely. NO.

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE – “Teenagers”: “Black Parade” has a claim, too (and neither are getting in) but this is quite something – I love how the swaggering, glammed-up music and the lyrics push against each other, leaving the whole song in a state of wild ambiguity. NO.

LETHAL BIZZLE – “Police On My Back”: ‘Grindie’ (Grime and indie) was written off as a terrible idea roughly 10 seconds after the NME invented it, but this is great – it’s just Bizzle telling a story, trying out a more conversational flow, over a Clash sample, and given how open the Clash were to hip-hop back in their day that feels pretty appropriate. It’s no “Pow (Forward)” but it was well worth doing, and hearing. NO.

SALLY SHAPIRO – “Anorak Christmas”: One of two ‘Christmas songs’ on my longlist – this one melts like a snowflake on a mitten. I think there was a more celebrated/famous Sally Shapiro song but this one was my smol jam. NO.

COLDPLAY – “Talk (Thin White Duke Mix)”: Very much the usual Jacques Lu Cont trick of turning a rock song into an electropop banger by adding breakdowns and drops. But if it works, it works – “Talk” is the one that nicks big chunks of “Computer Love” so adding lots more electro bells and whistles feels only right, and ironically it holds up better than “Brightside” because the original song’s so meh, it’s not fighting against its cyborg makeover. YES.

BELLE LAWRENCE – “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor”: I was listening to a lot of dance remakes of rock songs at this point, as if you couldn’t tell from all the remixes. A lot of the best ones were put out by Almighty Records, which did hands-in-the-air cover versions for gay clubs. Belle Lawrence (who may have been several people) was one of their stars, applying a brassy, belting voice to the hits du jour. This is her best, because making a song about dancing like a robot from 1984 into a huge club banger is a sensible thing to do, and because it brings out the energy in the Monkeys’ chorus (a good one, I reluctantly concede). NO.

THE SOUNDS – “Tony The Beat (Rex The Dog Remix)”: To this day I don’t think I’ve heard the non-canine “Tony The Beat” (the Jaques Lu Cont equivalent of this is “Avalon” by Juliet) – and there’s no clue the song has that title, it’s just THIS song with THAT enormous chorus. As pure a distillation of the mid-00s rock/dance remix sound as you’d want, then. NO.

CANSEI DE SER SEXY – “Let’s Make Love And Listen To Death From Above”: A bonus addition – this was the first new favourite I heard via some POP MUSIC ORGANISED FUN that I was running, so it’s the secret origin of the pop polls in a way. Stevie T was managing Brazil in the first Pop World Cup we did on LiveJournal, and put forward CSS, which none of us had heard and which swept the round (he was very early on the hype train for this one, so we all got to share a bit in the thrill when it became A Thing). Stands up well. NO.

A brutal culling today – 2007 has a lot fewer songs but also more big favourites. No wonder there’s panic in the industry.

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Fear Of Mu21c #5: 2004 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-5-2004 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-5-2004#respond Wed, 13 Sep 2023 10:48:20 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34496 Alongside 2000, this is the year with the most longlist picks – a real bruiser. In the wider world of music discourse, 2004 is the year Kelefa Sanneh publishes “The Rap Against Rockism”, corralling some of the sprawled-out conversation around ‘rockism’ (and ‘poptimism’, though from memory it’ll take a while for that word to become a fixture) that’s been floating around message boards for a few years. Coincidentally – or not – 2004 is a high watermark for the catchy, knowing Anglo-European strain of pop I particularly dig. Onto the tunes.

JOHNNY BOY – “You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve”: 2004 is also marked by resurgent British indie, not yet hit with the “landfill” tag. Most of it is reheated junk: Johnny Boy approach their Lego-Wall-Of-Sound rebuke as if it’s their only shot at a hearing (it is) and make my favourite indie single of the era. YES.

ALCAZAR – “This Is The World We Live In”: An era of clever pop is also an era of astonishingly stupid pop, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, and at the very least you can’t work out which is the Trojan horse and which its payload of warriors. Alcazar take one of the most overproduced, empty hits of the 80s (which is saying something) and drop it into the middle of a disco party. YES.

RACHEL STEVENS – “Some Girls”: Digitised glam rock concealing an all the way down streak of nastiness; the catchiest and most iconic song from the UK’s smart pop wave – a dizzying metatext that gets a whole chapter to itself in Michael Cragg’s oral history of the era. YES.

THE KNIFE – “Heartbeats (Rex The Dog Remix)”: Alongside Stuart “Jacques Lu Cont” Price, Rex The Dog was the most delightful remixer of this pop moment – here he’s taking the Knife’s fabulously chunky early single, already probably their single catchiest moment, and turning it into a machine that keeps all the hooks while building inexorably to a truly ecstatic drop. Accept no cover versions. YES.

LETHAL BIZZLE – “Pow (Forward)”: A grime track so incendiary and hard it was banned from multiple clubs because fights kicked off whenever it was played. You can hear why: absolutely bug-eyed, hulked-out stuff. YES.

THE WALKMEN – “The Rat”: More bulging-vein intensity on top of a jangle blurring into a thrash, as if The Wedding Present had dropped the nice-guy passive aggression and just got… aggressive aggressive. A difficult NO cos there’s only so many times I can listen to it.

AMADOU ET MARIAM – “La Realite” & “Senegal Fast Food”: Two singles from their breakthrough Dimanche A Bamako – the former is more a good-time groove, the latter is jittery and intoxicating, an odder and fresher fusion. LR: NO. SFF: YES.

BIG AND RICH – “Save A Horse (Ride A Cowboy)”: Rich – or Big, or both for all I know – is a MAGA dickhead now, and “Save A Horse” plays these days as a kind of inverse of that rotten “Small Town” record this year – here the cowboy hits the city and all the city girls love him. The music, though, is as open-minded, infectious, inclusive and goofy as the singer’s philosophy isn’t (well, goofy in a good way). If the final list was purely a historical record of my loves, this would be a shoo-in. As it is, a cautious YES.

V – “Hip To Hip”: I admit it, this never had a chance of progressing but I just enjoy hearing it. A snapshot from an alternate world where One True Voice (or A.N.Other boyband) ended up working with Xenomania instead of Girls Aloud. A minor pop gem. NO.

KILLER MIKE ft BIG BOI – “A.D.I.D.A.S.”: After a few years of listening to loads of rap I seem to have been more tuned out in the mid-00s. I liked crunk but it didn’t do it for me the way the previous wave of Southern hip-hop did. But that wave had crested, too: this is two Dungeon Family alumni goofing around doing sex raps – ultimately not as good as I remembered, with a few red-card lyrics, tho very catchy and the instant pleasure of hearing these guys rap is there. NO.

ARCADE FIRE – “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)”: I never got properly into the AF – by the time their second album came out I was heartily sick of them – but I had a soft spot for the first track I heard by them, thought they used crescendoes and heart-on-sleeve yelping really well. But the seeds of my later exhaustion are definitely here. NO.

CIARA ft LUDACRIS – “Oh”: Ciara made a ton of reliably very good singles without ever quite making an all-time favourite jam of mine. Felt like this might be the one and it’s close – oddly what lets it down is an atypically washed-sounding Ludacris. NO.

NINA SKY – “Move Ya Body”: A late entry in the R&B/dancehall crossover stakes – like Lumidee a wonderful, hypnotic near one-off, in this case on the “Coolie Dance” riddim. Being realistic there’s probably not room for both on the final list but I don’t WANT to be realistic. YES.

GIRLS ALOUD – “The Show”: Like a lot of these songs (and “Memories” by Elaine Paige) this ended up on my Glastonbury 2004 tape, frankly one of the core texts of Poptimism. They had our attention before but this really kicked off the period where every new GA single was a “what are they going to do next?” moment. In this case, 80s-style electropop with that Xenomania jigsaw structure that made their tunes so thrilling. YES.

TEDDYBEARS STHLM ft MAD COBRA – “Cobrastyle”: Last of the Club FT floorfillers this year, a novelty mash up of a great Mad Cobra verse (from “Press Trigger”) over an accordion-rock instrumental, with a somewhat rubbish Bomfunk MCs type chorus. With hindsight it’s the chorus that’s the problem – the badass dancehall toasting actually does work better here than on “Press Trigger”‘s own slightly emaciated beat. Later used on some football highlights show, which was slightly annoying. NO.

That ends 2004. The next update will be the first double-year one – 2005 has only a handful of tracks, though 2006 has loads (a surprise, I’d have guessed the other way around).

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Fear Of Mu21c #4: 2003 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-4-2003 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-4-2003#comments Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:25:27 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34482 2003 was a big year personally – I got married! – and in terms of writing – I started Popular! – and at least at this point the new focus on pop’s past didn’t push me too far off the present. As ever, I’m working out which tracks from the longlist I want to include on my shortlist.

T.I. – “Rubber Band Man”: T.I.’s public pronouncements give the impression he’s a bit of a dickhead, but the music on “Rubber Band Man” is irresistible to me, Escher stairs of fanfares giving the impression of a song that’s perpetually peaking, T.I.’s casual, drawled flow stretching languidly over them. YES.

JAMMER ft D DOUBLE E – “Birds In The Sky”: Only ever on a white label, this is the early grime tune that’s really stuck in my head all these years, D Double E’s “mwui mwui” sound and the chiling faux-oriental melody combining to make the song feel strange and heartless. YES.

BEYONCE ft JAY-Z – “Crazy In Love”: My Beyonce pick is probably sealed but there’s at least a chance I’ll switch it and pick her early landmark – Rich Harrison’s production still a diamond even in a very expensive sample/production era. YES.

WIR SIND HELDEN – “Guten Tag”: Sentimentally added to the longlist this bouncy early-DJ-set staple by Neue Deutsche Welle revivalists WSH. Those of a harsher disposition might suggest “Guten Tag” bears some similarities to what you might call Mülldeponie-indiemuzik but I think Judith Holofernes’ hoarsely cool voice and the language barrier help head that one off. NO.

BELLE AND SEBASTIAN – “Stay Loose”: I mentioned I got married – well, we went to Poland on honeymoon (in November, in some ways not the wisest of options) and we had a long, cramped bus journey where we had to perch in separate bits of the bus. I had a CD-R of recent MP3 grabs, including this, and played it a few times as we crawled through the Polish countryside. Happy memories, then, which elevate this – apparently either forgotten or despised – Joe Jackson esque throwback into one of my favourite B&S tracks. Though that can only get it so far. NO. (I do wish they’d done more like this, though).

DAVID BANNER – “Like A Pimp”: I think I meant the screwed & chopped version of this! But now I listen to that it doesn’t sound as slow or woozily fucked-up as I remember it. So this shouldn’t really be on the list – on the other hand it is a good track, and representative of a strand of heavy, hooky Southern rap I spent a good bit of time listening to in 03-04. So it’s nice to be reminded of it anyway. NO.

LUMIDEE – “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)”: Hurrah, it’s the Diwali riddim at last! Hypnotic for the beat, obviously, but also for Lumidee’s low-key performance, like we’re eavesdropping on something she’s singing to herself. After the maximal R&B of the first few years of the 00s there was something of an interior turn going on, with tracks like this and Tweet’s awesome “Oops (Oh My)”. YES.

A.R.E. WEAPONS – “Hey World”: A.R.E. Weapons were mostly treated as a joke and this was not in general unfair (their pub designation: “Arse Weapons”) but there’s something alchemically great about this anthem to/for fucked-up kids, partly that it sounds like Suicide (well, Suicide wannabes) trying to write a Bruce Springsteen song, partly that on the second verse the cool why-hello-there posturing drops away into a relatable anguish at how screwed his protagonist is. NO.

N.A.S.T.Y. CREW – “Cock Back”: Annoyingly the only version of this on Spotify is a later (2006?) remix with new verses from a new incarnation of the NASTY Crew. It keeps the none-more-aggro chorus, though, which is the second best thing about it, and D Double E’s verse, which is the best: “Think you’re a big man cos you got a beard? Bullets will make your face get weird”. That said, I’ve already got a better D Double tune and the all-time king track of shouty grime is up in 2004 so NO.

THE KILLERS – “Mr Brightside (Jacques Lu Cont’s Thin White Duke Mix)”: Jacques Lu Cont remixes were a mainstay of my listening and DJing – this and Coldplay’s “Talk” were the big tunes, turning tedious originals into drawn-out synthpop playgrounds. Listening now it’s a tricky one – “Mr Brightside” has become the longest-lived hit of the 21st century and while the remix vaulted cheekily out from under its shadow in 2003, that shadow has drastically lengthened. I’ll bin it, but add “Talk” for consideration in 2006. NO.

Look at that, only 4 YES picks – this might get more manageable. 2004 is an absolute beast of a year, though, so perhaps not.

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Fear Of Mu21c #3: 2002 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-3-2002 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-3-2002#comments Mon, 11 Sep 2023 17:51:27 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34475 My #FearOfMu21c challenge selection posts continue with 2002! This was a feverish high point of my engagement with current music, the first year in which I had internet speeds fast enough to make large-scale MP3 acquisition a reality AND had an office job in London one block away from Select-A-Disc, Reckless Records, and other meccas. So it’s weird in a way that I’ve ended up with half the candidates I had in 2000. The first three were all in my #Uncool50 list last year, which pretty much guarantees them passage from longlist to shortlist.

SUGABABES – “Freak Like Me”: The apotheosis of the bootleg ‘era’. a cover of Girls On Top’s “We Don’t Give A Damn About Our Friends” mash-up. Also a UK No.1 and Popular 10 out of 10. Also the last great pop record of my 20s? Maybe. Feels like a watershed personally and musically. YES.

STUSH – “Dollar Sign”: AKA Sticky ft Stush, which was how my MP3 was credited. Sticky had done Ms Dynamite’s breakthrough “Booo”, but I liked this even more, a UK garage beat with London dancehall vocals by Stush, who flickers from voice to voice, containing multitudes in the way Nicki Minaj will later. YES.

MISSY ELLIOT ft LUDACRIS – “Gossip Folks”: A controversial pick last year – “Work It” made the greater impact (and was one of the great records to experience collectively online – what was she singing exactly?) but I still think this might be Missy’s boast – her calling back to the funk era, Timbaland’s proto-crunk beat, and some of her most wonderfully southern rapping. YES.

THE WILDBUNCH/ELECTRIC SIX – “Danger! High Voltage”: I think this was a re-recording, or at least a remix, rather than a straight re-release. I also think the E6 version is probably better – a little bit faster and tighter. I’ll need to cross-compare. Like “Hard To Explain” and “Party Hard”, a version of indie rock that was cool because it was also ridiculous, a trait that soon got lost. YES.

MASSIVE ATTACK ft MOS DEF – “I Against I”: Stranded on the Blade II soundtrack if I remember – all the oppressive cyber-skanking of the Mezzanine era Massive Attack, with a hard as hell Mos Def performance too, maybe my favourite thing I’ve heard him do. Can’t see myself finding room for it, but it’s very strong. NO.

CLIPSE – “Grindin'”: Not the last time we’ll see the “Grindin'” beat (or a close relative). Not the last time we’ll hear Pusha T either, from the off one of the most downright evil sounding guys to ever pick up a mic. This has aged monstrously well and was notoriously brutal even at the time – the most hardcore Neptunes production. I think I’m going to go with different options but might swap this landmark back in if want to get tactical. NO.

THE STREETS – “Let’s Push Things Forward”: This has not aged monstrously well, but Mike Skinner’s geek/goofball word association and cut-up phrasal soup was at least one-third defiantly cringe even in 2002, and frankly that’s part of why I loved it. This has a glorious hook and riff, reminding me of the Sabres Of Paradise. Would be a huge reach to say it’s still one of my absolute faves though, so NO.

SEAN PAUL – “Like Glue”: Around this time, if you typed “riddim” and the year into Soulseek, Kazaa or whatever, you’d be rewarded pretty quickly by a dozen of the weirdest and most exciting sounds you’d ever heard. The breakout 2002 riddim is the Diwali Riddim, which Sean Paul rode to the top on “Get Busy”… but it’s not the best Diwali song OR the best Sean Paul song. This perpetual motion machine, on the “Buy Out” riddim, is. NO.

SCOOTER – “Ramp! (The Logical Song)”: Hardcore will never die, and certainly has never died. Germany’s eternal keepers of the rave flame hit biggest here with this pilled-up version of Supertramp, which introduced my social circle to the legendary Sheffield Dave (not from Sheffield, not called Dave). Chipmunk vocals and all, this is a brilliant record. Can I justify its inclusion? Probably not but I can’t bear to do away with it yet. YES.

CLIPSE – “Young Boy”: Hard to lose this one as it’s just so viciously good, a gutbucket Neptunes productio and Clipse’s extremely nasty take on the sentimental growing-up rap trope. But if you learn one thing from Clipse records it’s that there’s no room for sentiment. NO.

TOGETHER – “So Much Love To Give”: A record seen by some as a piss-take, or at least the moment where French filter house Went Too Far, eleven minutes of ecstatic repetition of a single phrase like a mantra (or a car alarm) while the background minutely shifts and buckles behind it. “HOUSE MUSIC IS REPETITIVE ON PURPOSE” tetchily explains the top YouTube comment. YES (HA HA HA YES)

That’s all – next up 2003: grime properly arrives! (As does the Bey-funk era).

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Omargeddon #38: Killing Tingled Lifting Retreats https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/omargeddon-38-killing-tingled-lifting-retreats https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/09/omargeddon-38-killing-tingled-lifting-retreats#respond Mon, 11 Sep 2023 16:41:21 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34470

Every review I write is a quivering pile of jelly, and
with every ill-informed take, I sling another batch on an ooze mountain
which is certain to eventually collapse, trapping me in its slimy prison,
deafening in a crashing cacophony of colour.
I can’t blame Omar Rodriguez-Lopez for my stinking brain problem, it’s probably  London life.
Now that I’m halfway finished with this project, the goalposts favour me.
(and now I have ‘Moving the Goalposts’ by Billy Bragg in my head)
but best get back to the fannydangle,
because if I am constantly distracted, I’ll never understand what I’m trying to say.
Though if I had mah druthers, y’all would be fixin’ to listen!
This record is a solid plank of chaos,
a whirling dervish providing a sturdy foundation;
while I listen, I belt my favourites in the honeyed style of Marlene Dietrich
(Bec, sometimes I do wonder for your sanity).
When this project is over, I’ll be both sad and relieved,
like a short-ass giant who finally reached the top shelf
Ultimately, this record is metaphysical
il a remis le couvert,
said the fork to the knife.
And without further ado, time to sling Killing Tingled Lifting Retreats onto the ooze mountain!

Day 8’s prompt for this year’s Na/GloPoWriMo was “Twenty Little Poetry Projects”, originally developed by Jim Simmerman; the challenge is to use all the prompts in one piece. This exercise immediately brought Killing Tingled Lifting Retreats to mind, because of all the word salad album titles ORL has gifted the world, this is the one I’m most convinced was lifted directly from a spam email. Therefore, opening with the above ‘poetic’ drivel directly aligns spiritually with how much sense that doesn’t make. In all honesty, I’m kind of bummed that Cosmic Jesus Hearst, the title given when 2017’s tranche of albums was announced, ultimately wasn’t chosen, but just knowing it was on the table does lift my spirits. 

Because the lyrics sure don’t; the cover appears to be presenting the proverbial lamb to the slaughter, ready for dressing with bitter herbs and served as resentment stew. It’s hard to imagine the material is anything other than deeply personal, not just because of the acerbic lyrics and frequently snotty cadence, but because of the quiet intensity of emotion, radiating break-up energy.

At times, this energy is just annoying, the kind I classify in the ‘whiny boy music’ genre (quite possibly my least favourite kind of this, when not discounting nasally country music with reactionary themes). “A Fool So Bleak” opens with an ominous beat, and the repetitive lyrics and music act as a harbinger for the rest of the album. Although I do appreciate it both textually and thematically and how it effectively increases in hostility, I’m not in love with the deliberate pause dragging out oh yes I did / I had to cut her / …loose to the point where I just want to skip it. Similarly, the self-pity boiling across “Paint Yourself a Saint” makes me roll my eyes so hard I get a tension headache, regrettably overwhelming Deantoni’s clicky beat and some admittedly clever wordplay. “Love Light” only gets interesting at the outro and struggles to hold my attention, the way you subconsciously tune out an irritating background phone call on public transport.

The landscape isn’t entirely bleak; “Tickle Tumor” is a perfectly cromulent amuse-bouche, injecting a bit of much-needed silliness. It’s deceptively gentle at times, and the vocals constructed of softly rounded vowels that throw a glancing blow at indie pop proffer more exasperation than violence. Thankfully this brief pivot from persecution to absurdity downgrades the overall threat to ‘minor implied’ from the ‘potential femicide’ of the previous track. In addition, the absence of vocal effects adds a humanising vulnerability and is a welcome progression from the previous mixing choices that often masked emotion with fuzziness on ORL’s neo-confessional lyrics.

KTLR’S raison d’être is the split track “Cassando La Luna” / “Oro”, a glorious re-arrangement of “Arcos del Amor” from Arañas en la Sombra. This version is significantly stripped and slowed down from its previous frenetic desperation. The first half measures out the plodding of a dying heart confessing its most selfish misdeeds in an almost detached tone, which paradoxically only intensifies the sorrow. The pace increases in the second half’s coda and gradually thickens the texture, with keyboards gradually developing like invisible ink to take us out with a reprise of the chorus.

“Bow Down Again” / “Or Make War” works in a similar way with two short tracks set in contrast with one another, but I wish there was more space for the guitar. “Don’t Let Us Breathe” is another peppy number centred on vocal and musical repetition that eschews traditional rhyme and assonance, concluding with some dadaist chanting of equations, and is a brilliant cipher for arguments that have become meaningless with time and distance, but still as passionate. “Wonder Kindly”, the smoothest and softest track, can’t end this album on anything but a downer given the circumstances, advising ‘I was always yours / could it be that you were always mine? / let us lay down tonight / to say a long goodbye’ and I can’t think of a better way to summarise everything preceding.

Like many breakup records, the songs here often feel like a protracted, one-sided argument. Lyrics that I might have either glossed over, made excuses for, or just not even noticed ten years ago now stand out in bright yellow highlighter; White Blood Cells got me through my divorce, but when I listen to it now, these same issues of toeing-the-line and outright misogyny are hard to ignore. I’m not dunking on self-pity, blame, venom, and projected guilt (the load-bearing walls of any break-up record), I just side-eye the content in a way I previously found easier to overlook, which makes it all more difficult to rep for this album. 

But in all honesty, my main beef is that KTLR just doesn’t rock hard enough, and I resent how shred-baited I feel. While I can’t praise “Cassando La Luna” / “Oro” enough, and appreciate how the lyrical and textual repetition accurately depicts the same fucking argument you have to have fifty times before you break up for real (this time we mean it), KTLR is not an album high on my rotation, in no small part because of the old ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ cliche. 

Track listing:
A Fool So Bleak
Tickle Tumor
Bow Down Again
Or Make War
Love Light
Paint Yourself a Saint
Cassando La Luna
Oro
Don’t Let Us Breathe
Wonder Kindly

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Fear Of Mu21c #2: 2001 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-2-2001 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-2-2001#respond Sun, 10 Sep 2023 11:40:59 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34468 Continuing an attempt to work out my favourite 50 21st Century singles for a music challenge. As before, what I’m doing is trying to reduce my longlist (>200 tracks) to a more manageable shortlist. It’s proving a challenge.

JAY-Z – “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)”: At this point Jay-Z was probably my favourite MC, just on the level of “how much do I enjoy the sound of this guy rapping”, and “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” is still an almost perfect example for me of how hard you can own a beat without even sounding like you’re trying. Kanye’s beat, of course – Ye himself is one of several artists whose terrible behaviour ruled them out, but I can still listen to this production with real pleasure. YES.

DAFT PUNK – “One More Time”: I once would have confidently called this my favourite single of the 00s, and the most audacious part – that yawning, yearning breakdown – is still a beautiful, remarkable thing to have pulled off. The rest… I love it, but its power to thrill and move me has worn off a little. A victim of the one song per artist rule (entirely self inflicted). NO.

MISSY ELLIOTT – “Get Ur Freak On”: An instant classic and its rep has never really wavered. Its all the little ad libs and asides around the riff that keep it fresh for me. Is it my favourite Missy Elliott single, though? Last year I said no – this time… well, it really is sounding VERY good. YES.

MARY J BLIGE – “Family Affair”: One of those records where I look at it on a list and think “eh, I’m a bit bored with this” until roughly 0.5 seconds after the beat actually starts. I’d be interested to know if and how the records from this (what seems to me) unbelievable golden age of R&B sound dated now – what about them says “20 years ago”. I’ve lost all perspective. YES.

ANDREW WK – “Party Hard”: I’m not doing a great job of winnowing these down! There are more rock records than you might think on this shortlist, but most of them are doing what this does – a straightforward, heads-down attack in service of a big hook. I don’t think any of them do it quite like “Party Hard” does though, like a happy hardcore take on hard rock. YES.

BEENIE MAN ft MYA – “Girls Dem Sugar”: These few years are the prime of the Neptunes but they rarely had vocal hooks this great to work with. I want to get a Jamaican dancehall artist into my 50 if I can. Beenie Man’s sweet lovers’ track has a decent shot. YES.

RADIOHEAD – “Pyramid Song”: Amnesiac is my favourite Radiohead LP and this is my favourite Radiohead single – Thom Yorke as vocalist does my nut in so credit to the band for finding a musical backdrop he really suits, an attempt in the wake of apocalypse to reconstruct what “ballads” might have sounded like. One of the great drum entrances in 00s rock too. Even so, NO.

BASEMENT JAXX – “Romeo”: Another one I played to death, and alongside “Get Ur Freak On” an absolute mainstay of the club night Carsmile Steve and I did in Oxford. Basement Drain Smell more like, etc. Love how staccato the keyboards are, real jab-you-in-the-ribs stuff. But like most Jaxx stuff, it’s faded for me a little. NO.

AALIYAH – “More Than A Woman”: The groove here – which is gorgeous, opulent, expensive sounding – is really dwarfed by Aaliyah’s vocals, shining out in a dozen different ways while never grandstanding. YES.

SOPHIE ELLIS-BEXTOR – “Murder On The Dancefloor”: Even more than her meeting with Spiller (never considered), Ellis-Bextor’s encounter with Gregg Alexander really brought out the best in her – her arched-eyebrow voice the perfect match for Alexander’s “is he really going to be this corny? oh shit he IS” songwriting. YES.

JUSTUS KOHNKE – “So Weit Nie Noch Nie”: I want something from the cool European zones of 00s dance music – the schaffel, the Kompakt, the microhouse, the minimal – but not sure this is it. All about the way the vocal sounds summoned onto the track as if at a seance. NO.

DAFT PUNK – “Digital Love”: One of the funny things that’s happened with Discovery is that the yacht-y, soft-rock-y elements that seemed almost scandalous in 2001 – surely they’re putting us on! – have now been entirely recuperated into hipster taste. There’s no other way to take this lush keytar jam in 2023 except at face value, and that suits “Digital Love” just fine. YES.

LEXXUS – “Monkeys Out”: Spectral dancehall folding Max Martin’s Britney chords into (I believe) a Lenky riddim, Lexxus toasting on top. I could (should?) have two dozen early 00s dancehall tracks in this list, all of which would have no chance of making a Top 50 but every chance of making a Top 250. That’s constraints for ya. NO.

FREELANCE HELLRAISER – “A Stroke Of Genius”: One of the crown jewels of the bootleg scene, a moment I still have extremely happy memories of. Are those memories enough to put this ancient remix, whose joins are more audible than ever, through? The best bits are where Freelance Hellraiser coaxes a new climax from the original structure, very much the way Richard X did on “We Don’t Give A Damn About Our Friends”. Which is a better single, and not going in, so nor can this. Should have had its own remake. NO.

THE STROKES – “Hard To Explain”: OK, so what about the original, the Strokes’ closest approach to the dancefloor and – for me – the only record you need from the entire NYC return-of-rock scene? Listening to it reminds me both how much the Hellraiser did but also how much he didn’t NEED to do – the music here judders and twitches in all the right places. A surprise YES.

OSYMYSO – “Intro-Inspection”: The best version of “Intro-Inspection”‘s delirious pick-and-mix overload is – I still maintain – the non-expanded 7-minute version – but even if there’s too much (of the too muchness) the extended 12 minute version is still a tremendous achievement, pushing the boundaries of listenability with its blend of radio pop quiz and plunderphonics, every comforting moment of recognition immediately snatched away. YES.

Hmm, 10 out of 16 YESes – not ideal. Join me next for 2002 – Sugababes (again!) Missy (again!) and we get faster – harder – SCOOTER.

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Fear Of Mu21c #1: 2000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-1-2000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/09/fear-of-mu21c-1-2000#respond Sat, 09 Sep 2023 16:01:31 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34464 This Autumn I’m taking part in Arron Wright’s #FearOfMu21c challenge – a bunch of people selecting and listing their 50 favourite singles of the 21st Century, one a day.

It’s the sequel to last year’s #Uncool50 challenge (see below), which involved listing 50 favourite singles since 1976 (the same tracks can appear in both, in fact we’ve been sternly warned that they should – at least mostly). As the # sign suggests, the challenge is happening mainly on Twitter, though some players will be posting their choices on Bluesky instead, or as well.

My Uncool50 (and a bunch of near misses) from last year

So what is this blog post – series of blog posts, even – for? Well, I started making a shortlist for the challenge. And it grew. And grew. It’s currently over 200 songs long, and let me remind you I need fifty.

As I listened to it I felt like I had things to say about the tracks. Profound things? No. Bloggable things? Probably.

So these posts are a document of my sorting process. I’m not going to be spoiling my final list – in fact, I can’t, cos I’m nowhere near even starting to make it. But I want to get down to about 100 tracks and crunch it from there – so at the end of each mention here is a YES or NO: is this track getting through to the second, real shortlist? A YES doesn’t mean it will be in the list. A NO does mean it probably won’t.

The songs range from indelible favourites to “gosh, I remember that! Wonder if I still like it?” one-offs. If you’re shocked at an absence, tell me!

First up, tracks for consideration from the year 2000.

OUTKAST – “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad): The first 21st Century song in last year’s list – a last-minute inclusion, as Outkast fatigue had set in a bit. But irresistible as a marker of “yes, we’re in a new century now” shock-of-the-new, as well as one of the great pop duos when they were still aiming in the same direction. YES.

BROADCAST – “Come On Let’s Go”: A near-miss last year, which would also work very well at the head of a list, as a beckoning-in. It’s a very kind record and good advice too. However I plan to waste plenty of time on people that I’ll never know, and COLG doesn’t quite have the, dammit, hauntological vibe of something like 1999’s “Echo’s Answer”. NO.

AALIYAH – “Try Again”: Oh the happy times spent on message boards geeking out over Timbaland productions. His furthest out beat, or so it seemed to me – that acid squelch buzzing around everything like a big sexy wasp. I wonder if it gets in the way of Aaliyah a bit too much? I feel like as the years go by it’s her I want to focus on, more than the (brilliant) productions surround her. Still, a YES.

SUGABABES – “Overload”: I haven’t 100% decided whether to limit myself to 1 track per artist or not, if I decide not to then this might come back into contention, and I couldn’t bear to leave it off the longlist. “Overload” is still a dream, doing nothing you’d have expected a girl group track to do – it’s closest to All Saints in sound, but it doesn’t sound like a committee put it together: so diffident, so unresolved, what the hell is that guitar solo doing? But I’m guessing I’ll pick a different Sugababes track in the end. NO.

LAMBCHOP – “Up With People”: Like “Overload” it choogles, but it’s as comfortable as “Overload” is awkward and moody. A track I only remembered to include when I saw other people mention it – I knew it best from parent LP Nixon but damned if it doesn’t work wonderfully well as a build-it-up jam. Points off for obliquity, maybe? I want this to stick around so I can judge properly, so YES.

WU-TANG CLAN – “Gravel Pit”: Part of the fun of FearOfMu21c is trying to work out what other people might pick (“not hip-hop” is all too often the answer, though). I think “Gravel Pit” is the most likely Wu to draw support, so I thought I’d give it a go to see if I could find it in my heart to pick it. I can’t really – I mean. it’s great, it’s the most FUN Wu-Tang tune, Ghostface sounds great on it, but it’s just not my favourite eligible single by them. NO.

ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION – “Real Great Britain”: Obviously fiery lyrics but I think what I love most about this is how it did the “Sound Of The Underground”/”Addicted To Bass” surf-DNB before any of those. All about that chorus. YES.

LUDACRIS ft PHARRELL WILLIAMS – “Southern Hospitality”: A huge favourite from the NYLPM days, one of the first Neptunes productions I recognised and loved as such. Still sounds exceptionally cool but there’ll be better examples of Luda and the Neptunes to come. NO.

ALL SAINTS – “Pure Shores”: The first of a regrettable phenomenon – songs I really like but got a bit sick of when they were in a pop poll. It’s not your fault, All Saints! Sorry, William Orbit! I’ll come back to it. NO.

BRITNEY SPEARS – “Oops.. I Did It Again”: Peak TRL-era teenpop, peak Max, but is it peak Britney? That’s for later instalments of this to decide. For now I stand by my Popular verdict: a classic. YES.

THE ARK – “It Takes A Fool To Remain Sane”: Glam rock inclusivity anthem from the band Maneskin wishes they were, one of the great pop-rock vocal belters. Really glad I remembered this dark horse. YES.

SAINT ETIENNE – “Heart Failed (In The Back Of A Taxi)”: I had this with the Pet Shop Boys’ “Love Is A Bourgeois Construct” last year, that weird feeling when you realise that some minor single (second off a little-discussed LP, here) is not just one of the best by a band but might be the best. Could find a slot depending on how political I’m feeling – it’s the Blair-era “S.H.O.P.P.I.N.G.” YES.

THE BETA BAND – “To You Alone”: The bass on this sounds so good! This was a very exciting single at the time, partly because the BB had fucked it with their first LP, partly because there were tantalising hints of a band listening to current UK dance sounds. Now it sounds like a pointer to Hot Shots II and probably works better as that than as a standalone. Great tune though. NO.

SWEET FEMALE ATTITUDE – “Flowers (Sunship Edit)”: One of the big issues with this shortlist has been which UK garage tunes to include, tricky in that I can never remember which came out when. Fortunately “Flowers”, perhaps the greatest UKG-pop track of them all, is April 2000. The drum programming on 2-step records is so beautiful and tactile I could honestly weep. YES.

JESSICA SIMPSON – “I Think I’m In Love With You”: Another big old school NYLPM tune, only helped by the fact I’d never actually heard “Jack And Diane” at this point (it’s better than “Jack And Diane”). Should be remembered alongside “Candy”, “Genie In A Bottle” as a high point of the post-Britney wave, but there are tracks doing this sort of 80s-tinged ecstatic pop better later, so NO.

3LW – “No More (Baby Imma Do Right)”: Thanks owed to Kieran Hebden interpolating this last year into “Looking At My Pager” and reminding me what a wonderful little teen-R&B track it is. (Except it isn’t little, like a lot of 2000s era tracks it gets an extra couple of minutes it doesn’t need at all, which is enough to put it out of contention). NO.

WU-TANG CLAN – “I Can’t Go To Sleep”: I didn’t realise this extraordinary track was a single – Ghostface Killah and RZA absolutely melting down and sobbing over a bleeding chunk of “Walk On By” before Isaac Hayes comes in like a cosmic Dad. YES.

That’s it for 2000! (Not every year has so many candidates). Next: 2001 – Missy! Basement Jaxx! Bootlegs! Radiohead?!?!

If you want to join in #FearOfMu21c – running from October 1 – then work out your own top 50 21st century singles and let Arron (@nonoxcol on Twitter and Bluesky) know.

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Messing About On The River https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/08/messing-about-on-the-river https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/08/messing-about-on-the-river#respond Sun, 06 Aug 2023 15:10:08 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34445 Boat Life, Tsuge Tadao (tr. Ryan Holmberg), Floating World Press

Tsuda Kenta is a fiftysomething novelist who splits his time between thwarted attempts to write and equally ineffectual assistance with his family’s clothes shop. One day, on a whim, he buys a small boat and rigs it out with a canvas cabin, intending to use it as a writer’s retreat. Instead, he’s drawn into the extended quasi-community who use the river as a way to break out of their prescribed lives in post-boom Japan. Drifters, lecherous monks, off-grid wanderers, cagey amateur artists and stray cats cross Kenta’s path. He’s as effective at river living as he is at anything else – he catches few fish and spends a lot of time getting ill – but he’s at least occasionally content.

This is the first half of Tsuge’s Boat Life, in a beautifully presented English translation by Ryan Holmberg, who is doing a heroic job at the moment getting alternative manga out into the English-speaking world. Holmberg also provides some backmatter: an essay, alongside two of Tsuge’s own prose pieces, on the 80s and 90s “fishing boom” in Japan. This sudden uptick of interest in angling created an audience for not one but two manga anthology series entirely devoted to fishing, and it was in the shorter lived of these that Boat Life originally ran.

Fishing is as much a part of the Boat Life series as Kenta’s quasi-bohemian lifestyle – in one episode, Kenta’s editor at ‘Fisher Bum’ magazine commissions an urban fishing feature and he and two pals head off to Tokyo to catch some carp. (They fail to do so) Like most of Boat Life, it’s drawn from Tsuge’s own experiences – as well as his art, he had a fishing journalism side hustle.

While the setting of the urban fishing episode is unusual the tone isn’t – nothing much happens, Kenta gets little done, but it’s charming, philosophical and gently funny, and captures the rhythms and waning energies of middle-aged friendship beautifully. Tsuge’s art seems basic at first when really it does what it needs to – get across the earnest, likeable but slightly feckless nature of Kenta’s life and relationships. And his minimal approach is perfect for the landscapes of the series – the seas of reeds and wide river plains, flat and lonesome, welcoming only to the already partly-lost.

Tsuda Kenta has something in common with that other boat-addled patriarch, Tove Jansson’s Moominpappa, who drags his family off to islands and yearns to follow the Hattifatteners on their wicked, eternal voyagings. Both have extraordinarily tolerant partners, but the resemblance only goes so far – Moominpappa is a bourgeois Dad having a mid-life crisis; Kenta is a working class man who comes to recognise in the precarious world of the river an existence on the margins which he nudged up against and opted out of in his own youth. It’s a world Tsuge apparently explored – in its vivid and violent aspects – in his other manga (some collected as Trash Market, which I haven’t yet read): in Boat Life we see its older, more rural parallel, as Kenta meets people who have settled into their choices and embraced itinerant lives in a way he couldn’t. Even if he knows enough to visit.

Tsuge’s protagonist is certainly having a quiet kind of crisis, but by not focusing wholly on it and making the comic as much about the people he meets and the family who tolerate his whims, Tsuge makes Boat Life a richer and more sympathetic comic. The comic doesn’t flinch from the fact that its protagonist is a bit selfish and a bit foolish, but that’s also where the gentle comedy often comes in. Kenta thinks of himself as an experienced man of the world, but he’s still shocked by a pair of lovers wanting to rent his boat as an impromptu love shack, or by the bawdiness of the local monk. It helps Boat Life walk its particular tightrope – a relaxing slice-of-life comic about river living which is still clear-eyed about the lifestyle Kenta is flirting with and his ultimate lack of fit for it. One of the best things I’ve read all year.

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Omargeddon #37: El Bien y Mal Nos Une https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/07/omargeddon-37-el-bien-y-mal-nos-une https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/07/omargeddon-37-el-bien-y-mal-nos-une#comments Mon, 17 Jul 2023 16:43:37 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34436

I am making a concerted effort to both seek and recognise joy, in whatever form it takes, as often as possible. As such, I am recognising the shit out of the sheer unmitigated joy experienced at the Mars Volta’s Troxy show and the ripples of yay that still emanate. Friends, it was everything I’d been hoping for and delivered a metric tonne-sized consignment of rock. Prior to the event, I had been positive I’d become overwhelmed with weepiness but that proved impossible, because I was too busy grinning from ear to ear in a sea of equally ecstatic fans. As with the North American tour, half the setlist consisted of tracks from De-loused in the Comatorium, with three from Frances the Mute. “Cygnus…Vismund Cygnus”* featured the kind of gloriously extended / taffy-stretched middle-considerably-more-than-eight, I’d been dreaming to hear, which managed to be both soothingly familiar and totally fresh; totally worth the wait.

Since then, I’ve been looking to replicate that shivery joy via my favourite ORL solo records and gas on accordingly. El Bien y Mal Nos Une consists of tracks reworked from Un Escorpión Perfumado, apart from “Agua Dulce de Pulpo” (presumably because that song has already been revisited numerous times), along with a few new songs. Like Escorpión, ORL is supported by Marcel Rodríguez-López on synths and with him as always often, Deantoni Parks on drums, but with the extra added bonus of Teri Gender Bender providing backing vocals and 100% RDA of the stated shivery joy I seek. 

El Bien y Mal Nos Une is a severe tonal shift away from the claustrophobic angst of  Escorpión and its heavily manipulated vocals and dense synthy rhythms. “Va Voz” perhaps best exemplifies this difference with the addition of TGB’s Arnold-esque sweetness and light behind breathless lyrics and joyful carnival-esque notes. The rebooted tracks do keep the original dark and haunted lyrics, but their energy has shifted towards the ethereal.

The Quietus agrees this record is dope, but in terms I do not recognise at all, calling it variously “sinister…altogether darker [than Escorpion]…ruthless…arrives like a nuclear strike…abetting a restlessness and dread that abounds throughout the record…punishes with implied violence.” Reading this review was like someone describing a dress constructed with a velvet bodice and tulle skirts using adjectives for tweed and leather. 

Still, we all contain multitudes, and what I perceive as blue may actually be orange to everyone else, yadda yadda. Musically, El Bien is flawless, and my only notes relate to my post-Covid reaction to the cover. When this was released in 2016, I was vaguely aware that it was common to wear masks on public transport in southeast Asia, but now all I can think when I look at the cover is ‘pull it up over your face, dude, you may as well be wearing a chin diaper!’ Though a bit unsettling, it’s fairly benign compared to many other ORL album covers. 

As much as I disagree with the textual description, I can’t entirely dismiss the Quietus’s review. As with the songs from Escorpión, lyrics on the new songs are drenched in spiteful bitterness. “Violencia Cotidiana” juxtaposes layers of scratchy percussion and airy vocals with hopeful backup vocals that belie their cruelty: eres un talento mediocre que está envejeciendo (you’re a mediocre talent that’s getting old) and sigues pretendiendo que tienes valor / pero en el fondo sabes que no eres nada (you keep pretending you have value / but deep down you know you’re nothing). To whom the “Everyday Violence” is being deployed could be the you being slandered or the accusatory I. I’m not sure if this would hit me with English lyrics the way the Spanish does, but it’s just so damn sparkly I can’t help but love it.

I will grant that “Un Acto De Fe” opens with a slightly menacing half-gasp, half-growl, but it segues neatly into strong vocals and indie-style guitar rolling in harmony with some unusual poetic images. The almost insect-like hissy interlude of “Humor Sufi” (previously “Estrangular el Extranjero”) can be viewed as sinister when taken outside the context, but overall, there’s much more space and light present on the album, such as “Va Voz”, a short track giving a real focus on Teri so that it’s probably better described as a duet. “Amor Frio” (“Incesto O Pasión?”) is another example where Teri’s influence adds a whole new weird angle.

But for the most part, El Bien is the yang to Escorpión’s yin. “Yo Soy La Destrucción” has combined “Mensaje Imputente” and “El Diablo y la Tierra”, the epic centrepiece of Escorpión and transformed it from the opaque paranoia of a thickly carpeted confessional room into a grand, high-ceilinged chamber. That it manages to do so at half the time typifies the soul of this reimagining.   

The energy of “Acuérdate” has refocused from the heartbroken angst of “Que Dice Pessoa?” to something more introspective. It’s several minutes shorter and yet allows time for decompression; it helps that the squelch-o-matic 2000 has been turned down just a scooch without compromising the very evident influence of Eureka the Butcher. There are some minor tweaks to the original lyrics, and although the pathos is broadly the same, it’s more hopeful than the panicked anguish of the earlier version. As is often the convention with reworked tracks, the new title (“Remember”) is present across the lyrics, and the final line tratar hoy de acordarse de mi is expressed without the desperation conveyed previously. I suspect my perception is influenced in no small part by Teri Gender Bender bringing her sweet vocal game to the chorus, injecting some air into the density of the original.

The colour blue frequently features in Teri’s lyrics, such as its use as a metaphor for sickness on the Bosnian Rainbows self-titled album. On El Bien, “Perdido” references dientes azulados y molidos – a theme also seen on Azul, Mis Dientes (an album featuring her as lead vocalist and presumably lyricist). This is another track I’d argue is more of a duet, trading sulky sultriness across stretched syllables. The playfulness extends into an unexpected piano interlude that’s like a spot of dappled sunlight filtering through a leafy copse.

In many ways, El Bien y Mal Nos Une is an album charged as much by its pauses and reflections than the slick production and glossy twist on a fuzzy favourite. This is evident on “Planetas Sin Sol”, the spacy and distant coda to “Yo Soy La Destrucción” that flows thematically into “Estrella Caida”, my favourite kind of outro, which serves as a microcosm of the whole album in less than two minutes. 

And in all honesty, I think I enjoy the album even more knowing my perception differs so greatly from another viewpoint; diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks, etc. I maintain this album is joyous and summery, and I’ll die on a hill for that semi-spicy take.

* I maintain that all I am is contained within the lyrics of “Cygnus…Vismund Cygnus”, and even though I can totally appreciate how deluded and pretentious that sounds, I’m standing by it because it’s also 100% true. Further, the closest I ever will get to believing in any kind of deity is when I hear that song live. Some hyperbole is also true!

Track listing:
Violencia Cotidiana
Acuérdate
Un Acto De Fe
Amor Frio
Perdido
Humor Sufi
Va Voz
Yo Soy La Destrucción
Planetas Sin Sol
Estrella Caida

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Why Won’t You HELP!? https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/06/why-wont-you-help https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/06/why-wont-you-help#respond Sun, 25 Jun 2023 15:56:07 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34417 Marvel Masterworks: The Uncanny X-Men Vol 2

Adapted from my Goodreads review. Collects X-Men 101-110 (July 1976-January 1978)

One of the weird things about the initial Claremont/Cockrum run on the X-Men comic is that the X-Men – still considered a tricky customer, sales-wise – was coming out bi-monthly. These ten issues take a couple of hours to read now, but span almost two years of publication time, which has a noticeable impact on how they’re written. Claremont has time to craft his issues and make every sequence count, but also needs that time to make sure a comic full of still-new characters sticks in readers’ minds every two months. 

It’s one reason – as well as his natural preference – that character interaction is so much at the forefront here compared to battles. The first issue in this collection – 101 – is radical not because it’s The First Appearance Of Phoenix but because it’s the first time Claremont’s risked writing a story with no antagonists. Jean Grey is assumed dead, reappears, collapses, and the bulk of the story is around the characters’ response to that.

So by the time the team throw down with Juggernaut in 102, it’s been 120 days without an on-panel fight. That’s a whole new set of assumptions about what readers want (and will tolerate) in a serial comic.

OK, that’s just one issue, and for most of this stretch there are plenty of fights, though the energy in the story always comes from the team interaction around them and generally the fights work or don’t as extensions of that. In the Juggernaut fight for instance the line of conflict isn’t between the team and the villains so much as between Storm (paralysed by claustrophobia), her own internal struggles, and the ability of the team to understand what’s going on with her.

It would be wrong to say this is entirely new – the great received wisdom on Silver Age Marvel is that it innovated by allowing its heroes to express their anxieties and problems. I do think there’s a shift in tone, though. In the Stan Lee era conflict is often cathartic – it’s how the heroes resolve a lot of their issues: via clobbering (and realising his usefulness), Ben Grimm deals with his self-loathing around being The Thing (until next month, anyhow). In the early 70s it’s more common for the fights and the character work to happen side by side, with the fights unlocking new plot developments or reveals or status quo shifts which the characters can react to afterwards.

What Claremont is doing is slightly different. Here the pressure of danger and conflict is a catalyst for characterisation – a necessary efficiency when you only have 20 pages every 60 days and a core cast pushing double-figures. It has the happy result of making the comic feel more serious, stakes-heavy and exciting – the X-Men aren’t characters who can stop and joke or philosophise in battle, because there’s literally no space for it, but it gives the fights a very different vibe from other mid-70s Marvels, even ones with more sophisticated ideas.

By the end of this volume, though, the conflict-shows-character approach – so exciting in Claremont’s first issues – is starting to show its limits. There are only so many times you can see Cyclops or Wolverine yelling “BACK OFF, Mister!” at each other before you start hoping for some actual developments. The switch of artist from Dave Cockrum to John Byrne will help with this – Byrne’s tastes in storytelling are a little more traditional – but this volume is still very much the Cockrum era, a wild ride of great characterisation and chaotic visual flair.

Cockrum’s final story is the heart of this volume, and the first real touchstone episode of the Claremont era. The team are whisked across space and engage in a battle around the cosmic M’Kraan Crystal, a battle that allows Cockrum to go hog wild with his costume design skills introducing dozens of characters at once, and allows Claremont to literalise the points he’s been making about friendship and teamwork (with a big dollop of Jewish mysticism in there too – as with the “Leprechauns Of Cassidy Keep”, this comic is weirder than I and maybe you remembered).

The handful of issues this space story and its build-up occupy are another reminder of that extended publication time. The first time we see the Shi’Ar, our space-faring antagonists, they’re a crew designed as a Star Trek riff, officers gathered earnestly around a bridge. After the team’s trip to space, Nightcrawler and friends relax by going to see Star Wars, which had come out – and changed geek culture forever – while the X-Men’s space saga was happening. A coincidence which surely didn’t hurt sales, since Claremont’s ideas of mad Emperors and space swashbucklers scratched the Lucas itch in ways most actual imitations didn’t.

Not everything in this volume is great. Even with 60 days between issues, we have two non-Cockrum art fill-ins, one of which is a story fill-in too. These are weak, and so are some of the Claremont stories – after the team’s visit to Ireland there’s a perfunctory Magneto fight which reads very much like someone at Marvel said “What’s this Leprechaun shit Chris? Do a Magneto story.” The man who’ll turn Magneto into his signature character has no real idea what to do with him at this stage, at least not on the page. But mostly this run remains hugely readable – and while it got tighter, it’s still obvious why everyone spent decades ripping it off.

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Around The World In An Hour https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/06/around-the-world-in-an-hour https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/06/around-the-world-in-an-hour#respond Wed, 14 Jun 2023 12:46:12 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34382 Just a bit of CROSS PROMOTION with the Peoples Pop part of the site, where we’ve launched a new! feature – The LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY TRACKS!

It’s a music discovery game. You listen to a themed 12-song playlist each week and pick your four favourite new-to-you tracks from it, then vote for them in the poll. The first week’s theme is Placenames, with songs ranging from 1960s country soul to 2020s gothic synth fighting for your approval. We’re halfway through the 6-day voting period so give it a try!

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Game Of Groans https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/05/game-of-groans https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/05/game-of-groans#comments Fri, 26 May 2023 10:32:57 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34345 The Wrestling, Simon Garfield (2nd edition)

With hindsight this book had a massive impact on me when I read it back in 1996. Not that it rekindled any childhood desire to take up the grapple game – I may be a big lad but I wince at combing out a knot in my hair, so I’m happy to leave these stories of dislocated shoulders, crushed spines and huge buttock abscesses on the page. It didn’t awake a love of wrestling in me either – the sport existed in a vague twilight off to one side of my interests as a kid, and the more theatrical American version never even had the dubious appeal of Big Daddy or Giant Haystacks. Nothing Simon Garfield wrote changed that.

What the book did was open my eyes to oral history as a way of telling a story. Even this turned into a dead end of sorts – I was crap at interviews when I worked as a music writer, so the format was never for me. And of the dozens I’ve read, the only one near to The Wrestling in quality is Garfield’s own superb retelling of the Banister era at Radio 1, The Nation’s Favourite.

Even so, what Garfield does here is fantastic – it has the same combination of theatre and spontaneity, braggadocio and blood, as the great matches he describes. Voices weave in and out, sometimes given space to tell stories their way, sometimes left to undercut or contradict each other. Digressions, figures of speech, grudges, industry myths – all left in with minimal commentary, giving the impression of immense pride taken in grinding, dangerous, skilful work but also a sport in which almost everyone is working an angle, in-ring or out of it.

The amity of the opening chapter, at a wrestlers’ reunion, hides a web of tensions which Garfield teases out – at the time he wrote it, British wrestling was in steep decline after its TV-driven heyday of the 60s, 70s and early 80s. Everyone knows that the sudden loss of TV exposure killed the sport, but there are plenty of fingers to point around what caused ITV to pull the plug on a one-time cash cow. Is Jackie Pallo to blame, for writing a bestseller exposing some of the open secrets around the theatre of wrestling? Is Big Daddy’s outsize success the tipping point, shredding the final sporting elements? Is the problem a lack of charismatic performers to follow the generation of Mick McManus and Kendo Nagasaki? Is it a bit of everything?

Throughout the book there’s a sense of a business that bumped along never having a real plan: lots of svengalis but no visionaries. Near the end one promoter’s big plan for the revival of UK wrestling is a tag team inspired by the Power Rangers, and inspired by here means ‘flagrantly copying’: it never seems to occur to him what the inevitable legal end of this wheeze is going to be.

In some ways the book is just another chapter in British wrestling’s endless cycle of exploitation. Garfield’s interviewees are using him to settle scores; he’s using them to tell a garish story. A sad endnote reveals that the writer was blacklisted by the men he’d idolised, who didn’t like how the book portrayed them. And I feel like a lot of The Wrestling wouldn’t be written in the same way today. There’s little probing – as there surely would be now – of the prejudices in the business. There’s enough on the treatment of Black and women wrestlers, and on the industry’s queasy relationship with homosexuality, to make you realise there’s a whole lot more to tell, but Garfield mostly sidesteps those areas.

Similarly, the book’s seamy enough to cover the fact that Garfield isn’t digging deeply into the sleazier elements – bribery, corruption, exploitation, groupies. At the end there are interviews with a 15-year-old rising star who breezily tells us his Mum is a bit worried. No shit!

And there’s at least one genuine monster lurking in the line-up of pantomime villains. The first photo you see in The Wrestling is of Jimmy Savile, with the caption “I was very bad”. Too right. The double-take a reader does at this is hardly Garfield’s fault – even this revised edition came out a few years before Savile was exposed as Britain’s most ferocious celebrity child abuser. It’s a reminder that – as another interviewee says – all wrestlers are liars. Some lies are worse than others, but Garfield creates an overall impression of dishonesty and tall tales which means he never has to tug too hard at any single thread.

Even so, I loved the book – and still love it, even now I’m more aware of the works behind it and the places it doesn’t venture. There’s enough truth, enough charisma, enough enthusiasm among these people, given the chance to tell their stories in their own words, that it’s hard not to agree with Garfield that this stuff mattered: it’s a story worth the telling. And it’s wonderfully told.

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Crisis On Infinite Polls https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/05/crisis-on-infinite-polls https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/05/crisis-on-infinite-polls#comments Tue, 23 May 2023 16:50:17 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34306 What’s next for the Pop Polls?

So, we’re almost at the end of the Modern Qualifiers on the new People’s Pop site. It felt like a good time to take stock of what’s working well and what isn’t in my efforts to move the PPPolls off Twitter and onto something else.

I’m going to get into the good points and the problems in separate bits, but there are two overriding things that kind of inform everything else and will ultimately dictate what happens to the polls next.

The first is that I really enjoy doing the polls. I love the community and the way it’s been an engine for discovery and fun. Ultimately that’s more important to me than how or where they happen.

The second is that it’s taking me vastly longer to do them.

It’s slightly hard to measure this, because I spent a fair bit of time on the polls before when I wasn’t strictly working on them but was refreshing, enjoying the chat, checking in, fretting, etc. And there’s stuff that I’m doing upfront now before a poll goes up – sourcing sleeves etc – which I was already doing as part of an “origins” post. Doing it as part of prep feels more laborious – cos I’m not getting the dopamine hits of responses/comments, I guess – but actually it’s not taking any more time.

But even taking those things into account, a much more significant chunk of my day is being taken up by poll work. I’m not 100% sure WHY it’s so much more work, especially given the raw number of matches is lower each day, but it is. And if I’m honest, it’s an unsustainable level of work, especially given that Life Developments elsewhere means I might have less time anyway.

So those are the basic issues. I don’t want to stop doing the polls. I need to stop spending this much time on them.

Now onto the move itself, and what’s working well. Some things are working both well AND badly, or at least very differently.

WHAT’S WORKING

First up, the site itself. I love it! I love how good the posts are looking, how well integrated the sleeves and playlists are in the posts. Alan and Steve have done an absolutely fantastic job of building a polling site that works and integrating it with the other things I do. It gives us all a great resource for doing music based polling and building a community around it.

The increased use of Curated Groups has been fantastic and something which should continue well beyond the Charity poll IMO.

I like the flexibility the plug-in gives me to extend matches until they get a certain number of votes, or to keep tied matches open to get a definite result.

I really like the possibilities the plug-in offers to do things which break away from the standard issue group-of-four format, even though I’ve not done that yet.

I think it’s great that the comments allow longer-form commentary and that I can keep substantial posts sticky.

On a personal level, I’m spending less time on my own Twitter, which is good, as Twitter isn’t that healthy for me.

We’ve got a solid core of participants and I hugely appreciate their efforts to make this strange new version of the People’s Pop Poll work.

The issue of hives, bots, etc is no longer a problem.

And finally, I wanted to at least find out how the polls work away from Twitter. Whatever I decide happens next, I’m deciding it from a base of actual evidence. It’s always good to try stuff! 

WHAT’S NOT WORKING

Obviously the big issue here for me personally is the time and work one, outlined above. But assume that magically I was able to spend half the time I do on the polls. Are they working away from Twitter?

The short answer is: not brilliantly, in the format we’ve been used to. There are things Twitter enables which turn out to be extremely difficult to replace.

As I’ve always said there are two points to the polls – discovery and fun. Discovery – people get to find new songs. Fun – we get to see together which songs win and argue about it.

Both of these rely on engagement, and so the level of engagement matters.

Discovery is holding up OK – we have a terrific crop of songs and there are a lot of new favourites to find. I haven’t worked out how best to run Golden Beats in the new format but it’s a solvable problem. 

Obviously the more people who take part the more likely it is your special song will find someone who loves it, but I think most (say 80%) of the people who were using the polls for discovery are still on board, if you take “average voting level in a Golden Beat match” as a yardstick.

(That aside, the level of overall participation is way less than it was on Twitter, obviously, and I was expecting that. I’ll be honest, it’s lower than I’d hoped by about ?, but also this is a 21st century poll with a lot of obscurities, so I should probably have calibrated a little lower! This is a platform popularity issue – it would be similar on eg Mastodon I think even if there wouldn’t be the format shock.)

Discovery is only one half of the polls, though – the fun half is a lot trickier. I’m not using “fun” just in the sense of “is this an enjoyable thing to be doing”, I’m specifically talking about the game part.

I think the biggest casualty of the move, personally, is tension. Close matches don’t feel close. Twitter brought a lot of people, but the real benefit it had is that it brought them together at the same time. There’s no urgency to the new site, no real attempts to shift close matches, and no discussion about the actual OUTCOMES of the matches, just some conversation about the music itself.

Now, conversation about the music itself is the heart of what I want to do! Without it you end up like Music Twitter in general, just endlessly listing the same LPs like you’re rearranging the shelves of your garden shed. 

But the tension is what makes the polls feel like a game, or an event, and what encourages people to bring new participants in. The game is a skeleton to hang music discovery on, but t’s a very necessary skeleton. And the move has taught me how much that mattered in terms of my own motivation and keeping the community going.

The other big issue – which is tied up with this – is a format one.

The format of the polls is based on the limitations of Twitter polls – four options at a time, one choice only, a set duration. We refined that into a structure that worked very well.

The Charity Crusher is locked into that structure because of the Curated Groups, but it’s very ill suited to the blog format, which continually pushes content down and makes it harder to recover and boost. Twitter gives you a lot more control of the “now” of the poll – you can shift focus easily onto close matches, admin, etc. Which is where a lot of the tension and community engagement comes in.

A lot of the issues come from trying to recreate that format on the blog instead of trying to do something new.

Finally, the move away from Twitter is a bit of a fake so far. I have to promote new polls on there to get any traction – 70% of visits are via Twitter. (This promotional work adds to the sense of extra labour). On some level what we’ve been doing is only really possible using Twitter (directly or indirectly), and we wouldn’t be the only fun activity to find that this is the case. I hope it’s still possible to build a community off Twitter, but it always took a long time even in the web 1.0 era.

SO WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

I have several problems to solve.

  1. My poll workload needs to be lower
  2. The polls and discussion aren’t as fun (in a game sense)
  3. We’re trying to run a Twitter formatted poll away from Twitter.
  4. The polls are dependent on Twitter for the near to medium future.

But we also have the considerations that led us here in the first place, and some new opportunities.

  1. Twitter may work well for music polling (assuming polling isn’t deliberately broken at some point) but it’s a bad place owned by a guy with terrible intentions. Even if moving away permanently is much harder than I hoped, I don’t want to be tied to it.
  2. We have a sleek website designed for music conversation and polling to use as a foundation which can do a lot more than just groups of 4 Twitter polls (but which isn’t good for synchronous conversation).

We’re about ? of the way through the Modern poll, with the Ancient poll to come and two excellent topics (2015 and Late Work) on the slate.

Here’s what I think are the options. The first is more or less the status quo. Not keen on this.

  1. KEEP GOING: Run the Modern and Ancient polls on the new site, then work out how best to do the 2015 and Late Work ones. Solve the workload problem by simply doing it all slower (2-3 polls daily, not 5). Accept the shift in discussion away from “game+music” to just “music”.

The next two are ‘nuclear options’ – basically saying, the move was a mistake, scrap it, and either carrying on or finishing the polls. Even less keen on these.

  1. PERMANENT TWITTER RETURN: Basically go back to where we were earlier this year and if Twitter dies we call it a day.
  2. LET IT GO: Call it a day anyway but in a controlled way. Run the Ancient and Modern poll then move into the all-Pollhalla final tournament.

The next one is basically back to where we were in January. Not keen on this either but any solution which acknowledges a need for Twitter probably involves at least looking at Mastodon or Bluesky too.

  1. SECRET THIRD THING: Look for an alternative platform (Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit) for Twitter-style polling once the A&M polls are done.

And finally the ‘retrenchment’ options. Run the current polls on Twitter, and in the meantime work out what format takes advantage of the new site, and either switch the polls to it or run them in parallel with it.

  1. TEMPORARY TWITTER RETURN: Run the Ancient poll (and potentially finish the Modern one) on Twitter, where the format works. Meanwhile work out a more blog-friendly format which would suit future themed nominations-based events and move back to the new site to implement it for the 2015 poll.
  2. HYBRID/BEST OF BOTH WORLDS: Return to Twitter for tournament-style polling at a smaller scale and simultaneously use the PP website to do discovery and fun games more suited to it (eg “league” rather than “tournament” games, LP-based polls, slower all-discovery polls, etc.)

All the options which involve Twitter would mean less polling than we did before – probably a permanent shift down from 6-8 daily polls to 4-5.

What do I think? My gut instinct says 6 – the hybrid approach, keeping the old spirit intact while building something new with the new architecture. But I’m also aware this feels like having my cake and eating it. I don’t want to be really hasty about it, and I’d love to know what other people think too and what options I might not have considered!

Finally, thanks again to Alan and Steve for building something awesome which gives us these possibilities, and to the people who’ve come over (or returned from exile) and valiantly helped the Pop Polls survive outside their natural habitat!

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Omargeddon #36: Calibration (Is Pushing Luck And Key Too Far) https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/05/omargeddon-36-calibration-is-pushing-luck-and-key-too-far https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/05/omargeddon-36-calibration-is-pushing-luck-and-key-too-far#respond Sat, 20 May 2023 11:32:01 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34160 I waited ten years for a new Mars Volta record, and when it finally arrived, I began anticipating a follow-up ORL solo release. But wait – there’s more Volta! Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazón is a total reworking of the self-titled album as acoustic Puerto Rican folk music. Their label and recording studio Clouds Hill describes it as Much more than a simple “unplugged” reading of The Mars Volta’s 14 songs, this acoustic rendition furthers the mission of the source music, which drew into sharper focus the traditional Latin influences that have always inspired their music. This is, says Rodríguez-López, The Mars Volta’s version of a “folk record”, tracing the melodies and rhythms of the parent album back to their traditional Caribbean roots and challenging listeners to hear the group in an entirely new light.

Two lead singles were released in advance, “Blank Condolences” and “Palm Full of Crux”. I first heard the latter on a morning where I had woken up particularly early and was inhabiting a gluey-brained liminal space where I was still processing batshit dreams. The aching vulnerability in Cedric’s soft falsetto reduced me to a proper boo-hoo cry, and I was still sniffling a wee bit in the background of my 10am stand-up (thank various infant deities our Teams meetings are sans camera). 

But even his more aggressive vocals get straight to my soft, marshmallowy, piglety parts, and have done so from the first time I heard them. I recall stanking my bedroom out with Richmond fags while guzzling 2-for-£5 plonk and blaring De-loused in the Comatorium, a CD burned for me and posted all the way from Los Angeles by my new LiveJournal friend Glynnis*. Naturally, I was floored by the guitar solo on “Roulette Dares (The Haunt of)” but just as equally moved by the belted chorus ‘exoskeletal junction at the railroad delayed’. I still don’t know what that means, and I’m entirely okay with that; I know what it feels, how the syllables sashay in parlance with that blistering solo (which still has the power to make me stop whatever I’m doing so I can let it wash over me). Ever since, I’ve loved every iteration of CBZ vocal styles – husky drawls, earsplitting shrieks, staccato stutters, and sweet lullabies. As I gear up to experience them in person for the 6th time, I’m returning to the Mars Volta and MV-aligned music from The Bedlam in Goliath era when I first became a fan. 

Calibration (Is Pushing Luck And Key Too Far) is a quintessentially Volta album for that period, perhaps best demonstrated by the classification of random items like TVs and tea kettles as musical instruments. In fact, if Cedric were lead vocalist on all songs, I’d consider Calibration to be an unofficial yet canon Mars Volta record for the same reasons that Cryptomnesia qualifies, mainly its Mars Volta-with-a-few-literal-musical-chairs-swaps personnel.

Having said that, it does have all the hallmarks of a classic ORL side project, and one that contemporaneous fan reviews were divided on. All Music thought Calibration [wa]s Omar’s most adventurous yet most realized moment as a solo artist thus far, and given his other work, and especially the Mars Volta’s Bedlam in Goliath, that’s saying plenty. A few fan reviews on Prog Archives call it ‘chaotic’ (presumably chaotic bad-to-neutral), ‘a bunch of half-finished ideas’ and ‘uninspired’. 

I don’t entirely disagree, but I do agree that while Calibration is a mixed bag, it firmly falls into the chaotic-good category. Some of the instrumental pieces appeal to my love of Pixies’ well-renowned quiet-thrash-quiet combo as on “Mexico”’s deceptively light intro and volte-face towards a bass-heavy crashfest. “Una Ced Lacerante” is exactly the kind of funky guitar-led interlude I’m never mad at, and the violin on “Grey (Cancion Para El)” and “Cortar El Cuello” juxtapose a starkness that gradually segues into spacerocky dreamspaces and back again in ways reminiscent of the taffy-stretched between-songs jamming during live shows. I do love those moments, even when they border on tedious, because it’s a sign that something brilliant is about to explode, and even if not, it’s always a pure delight to watch ORL & co simply playing, in the childlike fun sense of playing as opposed to performing.

Though I initially turned to this album for a Mars Volta circa 2008 experience, I do think it’s rather telling that I’m picking an ORL vocal track as lead favourite. “El Monte T’aï” really does feel like a Universe B version of the band, with Marcel Rodríguez-López drumming and with Money Mark instead of Ikey Owens on keyboards. The vocal effects blend a pleasingly snowy texture into bursts of synthy weirdness without being grating or obfuscating the lyrics. Violin cuts in throughout to soften the edges of the weirdness. It almost hurts me that there are no comments on this video and a mere 22 likes (including mine), and I’m almost tempted to leave a series of heart-based emojis to rep for it. 

Both “Calibration” and its extended coda “…Is Pushing Luck” give strong Bedlam in Goliath b-side vibes as seen through the rose-tinted glasses of my early fandom. The controlled chaos structured around Marcel’s intense dub-adjacent drumming (itself a different pant leg of the De Facto Trousers of Time or possibly a lost track from Universe B’s Old Money), a ribbon of delicate woodwinds and ORL’s shred slay me every damn time. While “Calibration” is anachronistically short for this time period, “…Is Pushing Luck” concludes the joyful mayhem via CBZ’s always impressive falsetto and cryptic lyrics. I freely admit the sheer density of these layers are overwrought and the quixotic outro lingers just a touch too long. But they work like an aural weighted blanket custom-knit for my creature comforts, containing all the elements that inspire my love. When I highlighted these songs to Glynnis, she also understood this deep well of comfort, noting ‘I keep coming back to the question of WHY I love the Mars Volta possibly best of all bands, and at least part of the answer does have to do with comfort, even when they’re singing about maggots falling from sties’. 

Around the halfway mark, a few incongruous tracks stand out somewhat awkwardly. The semi-squally “Glosa Picaresca Wou Mên” aligns thematically with the rest of the album, but the combination of John Frusicante’s vocals and the abrupt cut-off ending make it feel randomly shoved in without much thought, like receipts in Bernard Black’s pocket-based ‘filing’ system. “Sidewalk Fins” tends towards the uncomfortably discordant; the vocal effects are too much, and the track could easily be half the length and still drag. “Lick the Tilting Poppies” is the good version of this – not too long, actual detectable emotion present in the vocals through luscious fudgy layers of bass and synth.

The extended outro of “Las Lagrimas De Arakuine” is a touch too repetitive and rather overstays its welcome, but it does tug at my Thomas Pridgen-loving heartstrings. It’s an apt conclusion to what I’ll freely admit is a glorious self-indulgence. If Calibration had been released as a Mars Volta album, it definitely would have felt a bit lacking within the context of their discography due to the absence of a cohesive theme. It is also borderline grandstanding of the ‘every scrap of my precious recordings shall be gifted upon the masses’ ilk. But if there ever was a target audience for Calibration, it’s me, because I do want to hear (nearly) every scrap of ORL’s precious recordings. Besides, surely the point of having a side solo career is so these kinds of projects can sit alongside the (for want of a better word) Mars Volta brand (sorry sorry sorry). This album’s strengths equalise the weaker parts, and while I count the days to the Troxy show, I’ll continue to crank up the volume on my favourite tracks.

*I still have this, and although it is, in a very real sense, a bit of plastic crap, to me it’s precious plastic crap that I will always treasure.

Track listing:
Mexico
El Monte T’aï
Una Ced Lacerante
Calibration
Grey (Cancion Para El)
Glosa Picaresca Wou Mên
Sidewalk Fins
Lick the Tilting Poppies
Cortar El Cuello
…Is Pushing Luck
Las Lagrimas De Arakuine

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Guten Tag, Herr Frosch! https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/05/guten-tag-herr-frosch https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/05/guten-tag-herr-frosch#respond Tue, 16 May 2023 22:18:30 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34177 Uncanny X-Men Masterworks Vol 1

When I clicked on Giant Size X-Men 1 in Marvel Unlimited it definitely wasn’t with the intention of starting a large-scale re-read of the 70s and 80s X-Men. I had a vague urge to find out exactly how different and ludicrous the first appearance of Krakoa (THE ISLAND THAT WALKS LIKE A MAN) was. (It was very ludicrous). But I found myself reading on, and then reviewing the Marvel Masterworks volumes on Goodreads.

Marvel Masterworks aren’t the best or most intuitive way to read this stuff. You’re better off just slogging through on Unlimited. But for Goodreads purposes each of them were the right size for a chunky review.

For their Freaky Trigger serialisation I’ve edited them a bit and made explicit some of the references and spoilers. I have made a basic assumption that readers know a) who the X-Men are and b) that they’ve heard of Chris Claremont, the man who wrote them during their 70s and 80s rise to becoming Marvel’s most popular comic characters.

MARVEL MASTERWORKS: THE UNCANNY X-MEN Vol 1 contains Giant-Size X-Men 1 and Uncanny X-Men 94-100.

Reading a bunch of 70s Marvel makes the strengths of Chris Claremont’s opening stretch of X-Men stories clearer. With characters who’ve become such fixtures it’s easy to assume success was predestined – that there’s something inherently special about this cast rather than what the creators did with them. It’s also tempting to look out  for the things that would become Claremont’s best-known tricks – his long-term plotting, his particular narrative voice  – but in this stretch of issues those aren’t really in place.

Yes, Claremont’s writing is histrionic and caption-heavy, but so is everyone’s at Marvel in the mid-70s. The house style at the point Claremont took over the X-Men was just a flared, crushed-velvet version of the Roy Thomas style, where you paper over the lack of actual incident by pumping up the volume. Except of course there really IS plenty of incident in these issues too – a whole new cast, half of whom immediately quit or die. The captions freaking out feels legit for once, because there’s a lot to freak out about.

Still, while the overdriven style has more justification it’s not what makes the book distinctive (as you can see from Len Wein’s very similar narration in Giant-Size 1). Nor is the plotting – yes, there’s a big subplot involving Xavier’s bizarre space dreams, but it’s notorious for introducing nonsensical complexities into what’s already a fairly baffling story. The space dreams work because artist Dave Cockrum draws the shit out of them, not because of any long-term ideas Claremont has.

Who’s zooming who

As for the characters, if X-Men had any holdover identity in 1975 from its previous incarnation as the strangest teens of all the emphasis was firmly on the “strangest” part. In these issues a bunch of new, freaky-looking heroes collide with a set of weirdo characters and concepts from the earlier run plus a few new oddballs: Krakoa The Living Island, Count Nefaria And The Ani-Men, the N’Garai (one of a horde of Lovecraftian ripoffs plaguing the Marvel U at this point), and poster boy for subplot confusion Eric The Red. None of these are worth much on their own but it’s the patchwork of them that sets the tone for this very early phase of the book – none of these discontinuous pests needs any development or real motivation, which gives Claremont more time to get to work on the relationships between the characters.

Which is the actual work he’s doing better than almost anyone else in superhero comics here. For most of this volume, clashes with villains are the backdrop needed to build relationships (friendly and otherwise) between the heroes. Far more so than the FF and Avengers, these relationships are the story. Piotr’s naivety, Kurt’s determination to make a found family work, Cyclops’ perfectionism, Wolverine as an agent of chaos.. these are already what’s creating the stories’ momentum.

Claremont is quickly mastering character-clarifying moments and scenes (Nightcrawler taunting “Herr Frosch”; Wolverine slashing away Jean’s dress to help her fight) which stick in the mind more than any of the supposed stakes or resolutions. He’s also always carving out space in the story where he can quickly check in across the whole cast to contrast their responses to a situation. The two big crises in this run – Thunderbird’s death-wish stupidity and Jean Grey’s self-sacrifice – both happen after the corny central threat of their story has been dealt with, so they can work better as pure character moments.

Jean’s imminent death on a radiation-raddled shuttle is the final scene of the book, and even 45 years on it still works as tremendous pulp comics – the momentum of the scene pushing the decades of story that rest on it out of your mind. Instead it has the power it earned from the year of story leading up to it – the sense of ruthlessness created by Claremont’s initial deck-clearing and the work done quickly and deftly since then to convince you that these characters matter.

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Pop As Ghost https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/05/pop-as-ghost https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/05/pop-as-ghost#comments Tue, 09 May 2023 13:14:26 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34096 ABBA Voyage, The ABBA Arena

In Jim Steinmeyer’s fine history of stage magic, Hiding The Elephant, he goes into detail on the history of Pepper’s Ghost, the illusion that captivated Victorian London and revolutionised the tricknology of magic performance. The ghost’s inventor, engineer Henry Dircks, wasn’t the first to conceptualise the technique, which is simple enough – the arrangement of mirrors so that action under the stage (a performer playing the “ghost”) is projected onto an area of it, meaning performers appear and disappear at spectral will. The problem Dircks solved for the magician John Henry Pepper was one of scale. Previous designs for the ghost, or a ghost-like effect, would have worked, but would also have required the construction of an entire bespoke auditorium to perform it in.

If Pepper and Dircks’ actual ghosts are still hanging around London, they will surely appreciate the ABBA Arena, a fulfilment of the original mad illusionist’s dream of building an entire theatre to perform a Pepper’s Ghost trick. The gimmick by which the digitised “ABBAtars” appear on stage was revealed before ABBA Voyage even opened. You are watching a concoction of lights and video screens around a superflat reflective surface, on which the recordings of the ABBAtars are projected to give the illusion of a stage and depth. 

In the band’s 70s heyday, episodes of Doctor Who would often use reflective sheets like this to give the impression that some hi-tech base was vaster than the studio confines allowed. ABBA Voyage is brilliantly done, with a precision to match any of the group’s perfectonist studio work. But there is something wonderfully ABBA-ish about the fact that this very 21st century concert may center on what is basically a colossal piece of tinfoil.

The instruction you’re given before the curtain rises – do not give away the secrets of Voyage – also conjures a stage magic vibe. All the details of Voyage are available – costumes, setlists, mechanisms. If you choose to look, that is, and I didn’t. Illusion is about the management of expectations – treat an experience as magical and it becomes more so. And in fact, the best moments of Voyage are often the ones least spoil-able, the transitions or momentary effects. Yes, you’ve seen the ABBAtars in their TRON lightsuits, but it’s the way those costumes are introduced that makes you gasp or cheer.

ABBA never quite cracked America; they are unlikely ever to get a Vegas show. So Voyage is a proof of concept both for that lost ABBA residency and for the idea of a bespoke, long-running Vegas-style spectacular in London. With its stars captured in fully digitised youth, the show is wonderfully future-proofed – all you need are technicians and a decent live band and it could run indefinitely. There are enough certifiable bangers left off the set that it could also refresh itself after a while, should a need arise to lure former visitors back.

Still, the idea of ABBA Voyage may be – and has proved to be – an obvious banker, but that shouldn’t cover up the fact that tricky creative choices went into making it. ABBA are a band of two halves: a group firmly rooted in a particular decade and pop moment, the perfect 70s blend of kitsch and earnestness, artifice and melody, glamour and soap opera. And then a phenomenon who found a second life as the kings and queens of the jukebox musical, a band whose songs lend themselves to narrative and who won a whole new fanbase because of that.

ABBA Voyage combines the two – for chunks of the show they’re being as honest as a digitised band can be, offering a perfected version of what seeing an ABBA performance in their heyday might have been like. The music choices reflect that – this is, ironically, a version of ABBA with a strong emphasis on the idea of them as a working, gigging band. If your favourite version of the group is the chugging, glam rocking ABBA of “Summer Night City” and “Does Your Mother Know” you will like Voyage even more.

But there are also bits of something more fantastical, with narratives invented entirely for this show*, plus new songs which seemed metatextual enough on record and now absolutely scream at you that they’re about The ABBA Story (“Don’t Shut Me Down” demands a very literal reading indeed). There’s also enough tender touches between our recreated stars to keep the fan service detectors busy.

For a lot of acts, it wouldn’t work – the illusion of performance and the trickeries of immersive theatre would clash, a sweet-and-savoury collision of authenticity and artifice. With ABBA, who’ve been careful curators of their work for 30 years, and embracers of the theatrical for, oh, 50, it’s fine. It helps too that they’re a band with a stack of songs about lost youth and the compromises of adulthood. Sometimes I thought “this is amazing, this will be the future of legacy pop entertainment”. Other times I thought “this is amazing, only ABBA could pull this off”.

Voyage has been hyped as a revolutionary, innovative show. But its relationship to the future of pop is a thornier question than “is it any good?”. It arrived before the current furore around generative AI and music, which seems to offer a different answer to the question “can we and should we recreate old and lost stars, and what can we have them do?”. It also arrived in the middle of a second trend – the rise in song catalogue purchases and investments, and the beginnings of more aggressive efforts to monetise older songs, which is leaving some observers feeling queasy. (Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene has a good overview of the state of retro play here.)

Voyage is an intervention and an example – witting or not – in both these arguments. And in both cases what makes it stand out is its craft – the care and attention to detail. ABBA Voyage is strictly speaking on the wrong side of the industry-wide division between exploiting old tracks and promoting new artists, but it’s also an elegant move by an artist to set and control their own legacy. Beautifully executed, too. It’s perhaps an odd thing to say about a big, gaudy experiential show with its own bespoke arena – including an uncanny virtual recreation of Swedish drink prices – but Voyage could have been a whole lot crasser. It does the obvious stuff very well but it does a lot more too: it’s not just a nostalgia trip, and wouldn’t work so well if it was.

The question of Voyage’s relationship to AI is more vexed. Voyage is at once a glorious technological feat and a defiantly analog one. Four pensioners, wired up to motion capture sensors for weeks to capture and recreate the gestures and expressions they made when younger, before computer modelling turns them into animated recreations. It’s the kind of thing the mouthier promoters of AI would both respect and lust to replace – all that (shudder) human labour and cost when vocal and image and video models will come up with something almost as magical, if you give it time. There’s a gap in that “almost” as large as the market will bear. ABBA’s curatorial care stands in contrast, at least currently, to the kind of banal stylistic mix-and-match we’re seeing touted as AI music’s unique selling points. In a future of true pop eidolons maybe ABBA will sing anything we want. Why do we want it?

The word most often used for the ABBA Voyage recreations isn’t the mildly cringe “ABBAtars” but “holograms”. They aren’t holograms, any more than Pepper’s Ghost is. But holograms works as a word because, like the Tron imagery, it speaks not to the present but to an older future, the future of ABBA’s past. The first true hologram I saw was on National Geographic magazine in 1984, a picture of an Eagle that was slightly less impressive than the lenticular Daley Thompson badges you got in cereal packets. Holograms in the sense ABBA want to invoke date from 1977, a princess on loop in a droid’s memory: these living hololograms were science-fiction, and still are. ABBA Voyage is futuristic, but part of what makes it moving is that it’s the future that existed when ABBA broke up, the holographic future of 1982, full of lights and wonder, forever being overtaken by a shabbier reality.

*this was the only part that didn’t really work for me, though people I went with loved it. It’s either a fabulous animated video for two classic songs, or excerpts from an abandoned 90s ABBA LaserDisc game. Of course, this being ABBA, it can be both.

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Pointillism And Laugh https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/05/pointillism-and-laugh https://freakytrigger.co.uk/nylpm/2023/05/pointillism-and-laugh#respond Thu, 04 May 2023 09:44:23 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34016 TALK TALK – Laughing Stock (1991)

Written as a “Designated Champion” essay for the Best Album Of The 90s tournament on Twitter.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s 1991 and there’s this band, minor in their genre but well-liked, with a publicity-shy but visionary leader who’s gradually reinvented their sound until it’s something wholly fresh. They go into the studio to make a new album, but the process is creatively arduous and financially atrocious. Innovation and perfectionism combine to take the band to their limits and the label to the brink of bankruptcy. The LP, when released, is a masterpiece, massively influential but also unrepeatable. The band implodes and nothing more is heard from their leader for years.

This is the story of Loveless, the record which has been seeded as favourite to win the Best Album of the 90s tournament. But it’s also the story of Laughing Stock, a record which I pulled out of a list of contenders to have another doomed tilt at glory. While MBV eventually returned, and Shields, thank goodness, survived to see his and Loveless’ reputation grow and grow, Talk Talk and Mark Hollis have a sadder story. 

The band fell apart, commercial pariahs and broken by the vagaries of Laughing Stock’s creative process. Hollis dropped out of sight, returned to release one fine, enigmatic record of hushed sketches then retired for good, sadly and suddenly dying a few years back, firmly out of the public eye. Talk Talk are still best known for the mid-point of their evolution, the churning synth-prog grandeur of “Life’s What You Make It”. While you can hear traces of Laughing Stock in post-rock ever since, the album, their last and best, remains a strictly cult favourite.

Which is how its devotees like it, frankly. You hear from old heads sometimes about how Trout Mask Replica forced them to learn a new way of listening to music, unpicking their expectations of song stitch by absurd stitch. Something similar happened to me with Laughing Stock, when I first heard it sometime in 1992. It happened, I’ve since learned, to a lot of other people. 

This is music where long, near-silent passages of scattered notes or half-phrases suddenly erupt briefly into structure; where mumbled invocations sit next to lucid, touching snatches of lyric; where aching orchestral beauty struggles to get a foothold, is replaced by ugly blocks of guitar, only for those too to fall away into abstraction.

“Ascension Day” is just about a song. “Taphead” threatens to become one, before its fragile acoustic picking drifts into a sea of woodwind reeds and is lost in marshy cries and electronic undertow. (When Hollis keens his way back into the track in his higher register, one sound in the background is surely Thom Yorke taking frantic notes: come back to this in 10 years). “Myrhhman” is a featureless moorland punctuated by blurts of guitar like unsheltering trees and rocks: it ends with the record’s manifesto – “Step right up – something’s happening here”. “New Grass” is motorik pastoral, uncomplicatedly pretty, complicatedly sad, Hollis rocking himself to comfort in the middle. Not sure I’m hearing a single here, lads.

One of the remarkable things about Laughing Stock is that it sounds, in places, like humans jamming in a room together, maybe vibing off each other, perhaps having a “good time”. Little could be further from the truth. By the accounts of those involved, making the record was agonised, studio madness of a kind perhaps only Brian Wilson would fully recognise. Like many perfectionist artists, Hollis demanded take upon take upon take. But unlike them, what his band and hired hands were playing weren’t songs, but fragments, jams, snatches of disconnected music, like actors being made to record every word in a scene on different days. 

Laughing Stock is a pointillist record, assembled from this endless, useless studio labour by Hollis and producer Tim Friese-Greene. A mosaic of music, precisely arranged to give the impression of musicians responding to each other’s creative choices in real time, when they’re all moving parts in Hollis’ shadow theatre. But what a performance we’re given.

Come at it another way, bring to bear the full critical armoury of comparison. There are lots of things Laughing Stock is a bit like.

It’s a bit like Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way – early 70s Miles Davis also involves a lot of tape splicing and collage, and the comparison was actually what got me into Miles (“at last! Another record that sounds like Laughing Stock!”)

It’s a bit like The Rite Of Spring – an attempt to wrestle an orchestra and unlock its wildness, its connection to the earth.

It’s a bit like (in its more rhythmic moments) Can, Faust, Popol Vuh – rhythm as the accomplice in a derangement of song.

It’s a bit like wind and wet earth, a walk alone through wild places.

It’s a bit like Talk Talk’s earlier Spirit Of Eden, which sounds to me like a too-polite dress rehearsal for this, and sounds to some other people like Hollis got these ideas right the first time, thanks.

It’s a bit like Tim Buckley’s Lorca and Starsailor LPs – Hollis doesn’t have Buckley’s cosmic pipes but the approach to folk/rock vocalising isn’t too far off in its far outness.

It’s a bit like playing an open world game and finding that over time terrifying surprises become familiar, even comforting landmarks.

It’s a bit like a host of artists that came soon or later after – Bark Psychosis, These New Puritans, bits of Jim O’Rourke, 90s Scott Walker. It’s still echoing today. I love some of those people but I like Laughing Stock more than any of them.

Mostly though it’s only like itself. If you love it already, enjoy hearing it again. If not, I hope you find a way into it this time.

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Normal Men, Innocent Men https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/05/normal-men-innocent-men https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/05/normal-men-innocent-men#respond Wed, 03 May 2023 18:25:11 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34008

The Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps, Kai Ahsante Wilson (2015)

A fantasy novella that gestures at vaster conceptions than its slim length can contain, Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps is at once a rich broth of engagingly florid prose, a pointed lesson in the uses of dialect in fantasy writing, a tight, violent slice of hard-scrabble life, and a queer science-fantasy love story. It’s not totally surprising that Kai Ahsante Wilson doesn’t hit every twist in this quadruple-somersault with equal aplomb, but it’s exhilarating (and a little exhausting) watching someone try.

The part of Sorcerer which didn’t quite work for me was the cryptic science-fantasy elements – it’s not magic, it’s genetic enhancements; those aren’t gods ascending, they’re superluminal spacecraft; etc. It adds a layer of riddle-making to the story which is certainly there to be puzzled out if you like that kind of thing (and usually I do!) but which doesn’t quite get beyond the feeling, common in modern fantasy, that there’s one hell of a campaign sourcebook lurking just out of sight.

That’s probably the only common thing about the book, though, and even then the worldbuilding does have a wider resonance – it’s a reminder of the traditions Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps is engaging in beyond high fantasy like Delany-esque afrofuturism or Wolfeian literary game-playing. And if the prose and the ideas are an awkward, self-conscious fit for a fantasy book, so too is the protagonist.

Demane, the protagonist, is trained (and to some extent genetically engineered) as a medic, but his superhuman physique and strength puts him in high demand for baser trades, and the book details his stint as a caravan guard, the second in command of a band of polyglot guards-for-hire he knows as “brothers”. They have a contemptuous employer, the caravan’s lead merchant, and a leader, another genetically unusual superhuman – Captain – who is also, secretly, Demane’s lover. The caravan has stopped at a waystation, in advance of its arduous trek across the area of shifting reality called the Wildeeps. But rumour reaches them of something much nastier than usual lurking on the road through…

Given this setup, Wilson makes the important choice to spend 2/3 of the novella’s 200 pages at the waystation, not in the titular Wildeeps. The focus isn’t on the area, or the threat, it’s on the relationship between Demane and Captain, and also the rabble of brothers Demane feels a responsibility to protect, from themselves as much as anything. Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps is a story about a romantic love between men, but it’s also a story about collective love between men – the frustrating, idiotic, bullshit-ridden, fierce bonds that exist between workers doing a dangerous job.

Why does it have to only be men? The bonds of work and danger cross gender. But Wilson has a good ear for men en masse: boastful, horny, sometimes deceptively tender, and the fact the caravan’s brothers are all men puts into sharper relief the way the book is about code-switching and passing – Demane, who is in reality transcendentally above both his middle-class employer and working-class fellow employees, struggles with both of their languages, at the same time as enjoying the other brothers’ regard and respect as their miracle-working ‘sorcerer’. The book’s dialogue is a thrill and a shock set against most fantasy writing – many of the brothers use AAVE, others speak in creoles, and there are fine distinctions of age and seniority in the characters’ dialects too. It’s one of the most successful parts of the book.

All this linguistic play holds up a mirror, of course, to the ways Demane finds communicating with his lover difficult too, and the assumptions and projections a lover makes about the person they love. Demane is not engineered for violence but can perform it with aplomb, and he believes – or presumes – that Captain has some similar ‘true’ role: a belief that drives the central incident of the ‘way station’ part of the novel, and carries forward into the book’s climax in the Wildeeps themselves.

This climax is unflinchingly brutal, Wilson and his cast wading in viscera as the caravan hits its moment of maximum peril (a character is gruesomely disemboweled, for instance: then a few pages later just to rub it in we get the action again from the disembowelee’s perspective). Violence has been a constant companion through the book, and Wilson’s prose is good enough to make it feel physical, repulsive and adrenalised rather than numbing. The ending will linger, but so will the heat, stink, ugliness and linguistic pyrotechnics of the book’s central chapters.

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With This Great News You Are Really Spoiling All Our Readers https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/05/with-this-great-news-you-are-really-spoiling-all-our-readers https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/05/with-this-great-news-you-are-really-spoiling-all-our-readers#comments Wed, 03 May 2023 18:20:56 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34011 Welcome to the new look Freaky Trigger, which is now 3 sites in a server-shaped trenchcoat.

Popular – my ongoing reviews of UK Number 1 hits, which now has its own dedicated site.

The People’s Pop Polls – arriving from the flaming wreck that is Elon Musk’s Twitter on its own, poll-friendly “vertical”

And Freaky Trigger itself, which remains a place where I (and my friends without blogs to call their own) can write about anything else I want.

On this bit of the site, at least, you probably won’t notice much changing. You should now be able to log in via Twitter and other social media sites. Comments might work a bit differently.

The increased activity on Popular you saw in January and February this year will be back – there’s a new entry up today and you can expect weekly updates there. Once I’m back into the rhythm of entries I have a couple of other Popular-related projects I’m hoping to get into as well.

We have a new poll starting – the open-nomination “Charity Crusher” which will run on through May and June. 

And while this part of the site is currently mostly an archive, I’d anticipate seeing some Patreon exclusive material showing up and also some of the more substantial Goodreads reviews I’ve been doing, mostly of comics.

While the changes in some places LOOK cosmetic, in reality there’s been a huge amount of work done by designer Steve M and site admin Alan to haul Freaky Trigger and Popular into the modern wordpress era and build from scratch a new home for the Pop Poll community. None of this would have even begun to be possible without them – huge, enormous thanks to them both.

THE BLOG ERA IS BACK! Who wants to be in my web ring?

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