So how gay is gangsta rap? I just got Chamillionaire’s The Sound of Revenge and the answer seems to be, pretty darn gay. First of all there’s his name (pronounced Camille, like a girl or, even worse, a Frenchman.) And then there’s the subject matter. In “Picture Perfect” Chamillionaire primps and preens, boasting about his diamonds and good looks and encouraging the male chorus to “take a picture, nigger.” In “No Snitchin’” he discusses the importance of keeping secrets with the ardor of a man who’s spent some time on the down low. “Peepin’ Me” is about the glances which precede a hook-up — with a woman, supposedly, but the surreptitiousness of the set-up and the emphasis on getting off and getting out strongly suggest a male-male context. In “Think I’m Crazy,” Chamillionaire is nervous as a woman seems to be coming on to him; the emotional climax comes when the rapper is shown a picture of his (male, naturally) “ex-best friend”— who died of AIDS. But the clincher is “Grown and Sexy” an ode to ass in which Chamillionaire watches a woman walk away and declares “you look better from behind.” Indeed — and we all know what it means when a man doesn’t go for specifically female sexual characteristics but becomes excited by buttocks, don’t we?

Of course, this isn’t just about Chamillionaire. Gangsta rap in general is, and has always been, subliminally flaming in exact proportion to its desperate surface masculinity. It is, after all, about the denigration and rejection of intimacy with women, the glorification of male-male bonds (“it ain’t no fun if the homeys don’t get none”), and the fetishization of that mother-of-all-penis substitutes, the gun.

As R&B and rap have fused, you might have thought that this inward-turned masculinity would have been diluted. Radio rappers work with female performers on a regular basis, after all. Yet the barrier between male and female remains firmly in place; in fact, if anything, it’s accentuated. On the video for Get Up, Chamillionaire performs beside Ciara. Yet he’s entirely oblivious, spitting out his rhymes in front of his all-male crew as if he hasn’t even noticed that one of the hottest women on the planet is gyrating nearby. The disinterest signals of course, that he’s a manly man who doesn’t need no woman…but, you know, it might also signal that he’s a manly man, who doesn’t need no woman.

Or (to give poor Chamillionaire a break) consider a recent appearance by the big bad father of the genre, Dr. Dre. Dre makes a recent guest appearance on the Timbaland track “Bounce”. It’s an amazing song; Timbaland provides one of his best productions, all squeaky stuttering, tripped-out beats. Unfortunately, the lyrics are just embarrassing for everyone. Timbaland’s monotone is, as always, lame, and Dre isn’t a whole lot better — he sounds old, tired, and bored as he mumbles on about an Asian girl named “Some Young Ho”. Then Justin Timberlake starts babbling cluelessly about a menage a trois, and one is forcibly reminded that what we’ve got here is not two girls with one guy, but several guys and no girl. That is, until the last verse, where Missy Eliot shows up — hitting hard on the “bs” of “big old butt”, punching out syllables behind the beat, mocking Dre’s lame rhymes, and generally making the other guys look like pansies. A track which (like pretty much all gangsta tracks) is supposed to solidify the male bona fides of the participants ends up suggesting that the only one in the room who can swing that thing is a (butch) woman.

In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick points out that heterosexual masculinity is always and everywhere caught in a “double bind.” On the one hand, associating with or being intimate with women feminizes you, and makes you gay. On the other hand, associating with or being intimate with men also makes you gay. The result is a desperate, constant, and unconvincing denial of homosexuality. Black men — who have been relentlessly emasculated in our culture — have responded with a cartoon masculinity which needs constant shoring up, not only because of outside pressure, but because of its internal contradictions. You can never be man enough, because being man enough means not being a man, which means you have to prove your man enough…and on and on, repetitive track after repetitive track.

This is why, I think, R&B has really surpassed rap as a creative force on radio at the moment. Gangsta has (ahem) swallowed rap, and gangsta as a genre is, it seems to me, deeply neurotic. The obsession with masculinity limits the subject-matter, the style, and the ambition of its performers. Female R&B performers are just able to talk about more stuff — they can be tough, but they can also be vulnerable; they can talk about wanting sex, but they can also talk about wanting to save themselves. And without the burden of always being dangerous and manly, their tracks can take more musical risks as well. That Ciara track with is sure as hell trickier than anything on Chamillionaire’s album; it actually has different parts, for example.

All of which helps to explain why OutKast’s last, brilliant fusion of rap and R&B went precisely nowhere. Idlewild is certainly about the relationship between Dre and Big Boi — but that relationship is both acknowledged and loving, not a fraught, sublimated mess. As a result, it leaves room for Dre to dress fastidiously while singing feyly off-key, Big Boi to get chewed out by his woman, and both to rely on a goofy stew of influences which includes such manic, semi-androgynous geniuses as Prince and George Clinton. Billed as their break-up album, Idlewild is actually Dre and Big Boi’s most definitive statement that they care more about each other than they do about being tough — and the rap world’s predictable response was, “Fuck that gay shit.” Then they all went back to contemplating each others’ hardness.

This appeared in the Chicago Reader a month or two back.

Just out of curiosity; is there anybody (except me) who would like to see me post more about music and perhaps slightly less about comics? Leave me a note in the comments if so….

It Might Go Pop, But It Won’t Blow Up

Rihanna’s “Good Girl Gone Bad” has all the ingredients for pop R&B success. Comely, limber, light-skinned singer/dancer to put on the album cover? Check. Cameo by hit rapper on the single? Check. Two or three tracks produced by Timbaland? Yep. Songs about booty-shaking, sex, loving your good man, and dissing your no-good man? There you are . Now just spend an obscene amount on promotion and prepare to rake in even more obscene amounts of cash.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Whether its roots rock, bop, 60s soul, or metal, genres are formulaic — otherwise they wouldn’t be genres, after all. Rihanna’s album has great songs, superb production, and has been spending happily spinning away in my CD player. She’s simply a traditionalist rather than an innovator — Otis Redding rather than Sly Stone; High on Fire rather than Khanate.

Contemporary R&B has its innovators, too, of course. But — in comparison to other genres — the recognition they get for their efforts is small, and their careers circumscribed. Kelis, for one, had to trade in her Afrocentric pose and some of her rock stylings to achieve even partial success. And Houston native Brooke Valentine’s story has been even more painful.

If you just asked “Brooke who?”…well, yeah, that’s the thing. Valentine’s debut album, “Chain Letter” came out in 2005. She appeared on the cover sporting a half-shirt emblazoned with a big-winged bat and holding a pen topped with a plastic eyeball. By the fashion-shoot standards of pop R&B, such a display of quirky humor qualifies as willfully eccentric — and one of the interior photos, which shows Valentine standing in front of a gigantic wall of records, is just as odd. We all know divas spend their money on shoes and bling —we’re supposed to believe she collects vinyl?

The answer is, yes indeed. “Chain Letter” is one of those albums — like The Beatles “Rubber Soul” or OutKast’s “Stankonia” — that turns a genre inside out. R&B becomes the world, and the world gets swallowed by R&B. Valentine’s producer and co-writer Deja the Great is a hyperfertile genius; every song has unexpected twists, layered bridges, and gimmicks on its gimmicks so, for example, you can listen to the album fifty times before you fully catch the delicate music-box fade on “Tell Me Why (You Don’t Love Me).” On “Cover Girl” the pair channel folk-rock through Stax; on “American Girl”, they bash Prince-inflected funk into riot grrrl while suggesting that two are bound together by a patriotic adoration of pop-culture detritus (“This Disney World’s your underworld/ Try to escape it/ Just face it you’re an American Girl.”)

As a singer, Valentine doesn’t have the firepower of, say, Beyoncé, but what she’s got she uses with enthusiasm and imagination, breathily harmonizing with herself on “Laugh Til I Cry,” yodelling over the loping Texas groove on “Pass Me By,” Rasta ranting on “Million Bucks”, rapping like it’s 1979 on the discofied “Taste of Dis,” and wailing like a gospel air-raid siren on “I Want You Dead.” The latter, which starts, from the same man-hating stance as Rihanna’s “Breaking Dishes,” quickly vaults into gleeful, Danzig-worthy horror pastiche — “I’d rather see you in the cemetery, gagging, boxed up, full of maggots…some hopeful thinking never hurt anyone.” Even when Valentine’s just extolling the virtues of the boogie, her brain stays in touch with her butt. “The junk in this trunk’ll put a bump in your pants;” “I move my body left to right/their checkin’ me out like I’m a website.” “Even the girls are lookin,” she boasts — and you can stay in the damn closet, if you want, R. Kelly. Oh, yeah… and did I mention the entirely gratuitous, seemingly endless, spoken-word dis aimed at dumb Valley Girls and their sleazy bimbo ambitions? And a demented duet with Ol’ Dirty Bastard, complete with burping organ accompaniment? Musical eclecticism in R&B has some precedent…but goofy and snide is the prerogative of male rappers. No wonder Valentine declares “They think it’s a dude, but it’s me, they see” — she knows that R&B girls don’t get away with this shit.

And, indeed, she hasn’t. Valentine’s first single, “Girlfight” was a moderate success on the strength of a Lil Jon guest spot, but since then her career has gone precisely nowhere. “D-Girl”, released in 2006, was a tough, stoned, gothic head-nodder, with ominously surging keyboards and a sample from N.W.A.’s “Dopeman” that patters over the Sturm and Drang like a whispered, half-forgotten threat. It stiffed, as did a follow-up, “Pimped Out.” Her second album, “Physical Education,” was supposed to come out more than a year ago. On her myspace blog, Valentine blamed the delayed release on the merger between Virgin and Capitol. Perhaps. But, clearly, if someone there thought it would sell, it would be on the shelves by now. No one has officially pulled the plug, but it seems possible at this point that the album will never be released.

Valentine certainly has a fan base. Her debut sold 250,000 copies — small potatoes by pop standards, but still an awful lot of records. Nor am I the only reviewer whose gushed: writers at both Stylus and Popmatters argued that “Chain Letter” was one of the best albums not just in R&B, or of the year, but ever.

The problem is that, for pop R&B performers, there isn’t any way to translate critical cachét and decent sales into career momentum. If Valentine were a white rock performer, or a male rapper, the fact that her material is smart, distinctive, and self-penned — her integrity— could be, if not money in the bank, at least a possible means to connect with an audience. She could be a perfectly respectable indie artist — a minor influential, eccentric legend selling 100,000 units an album for 15 years. It seems like a natural enough move, since Valentine was first signed by what’s essentially an indie — Deja the Great owns Subliminal Records, a Houston label that distributed Valentine through Virgin. But if you compare Valentine’s success to Rihanna’s, it’s clear that it’s a lot better to be signed directly by the major without the intermediary. And if you don’t have any major-label connection at all? Well, another Subliminal artist is having his album released direct to ringtone. Good luck with that.

To the extent that there is a viable, R&B indie scene, it’s devoted to neo-soul — a subgenre with a lot more cred. When pop artists like Nivea, or Kelis have trouble making it in the majors, they move, not to smaller labels, but overseas, where any black American music automatically has the authenticity needed to pull an underground audience . On these shores, though rockists — that is, music fans who salivate over words like “integrity” and “authenticity” — mostly aren’t interested in chart-chasing, slickly-produced dance divas who dress like sluttier Cosmo models. Meanwhile popists — that is, music fans who love Madonna and Brittney — are busy celebrating, in critic Kelefa Sanneh’s words “a fluid musical world where it’s impossible to separate classics from guilty pleasures.” More power to them — but if you’re chasing the fluid jouissance of the next one-hit wonder, there’s not much motivation to go back and unearth a forgotten classic like Valentine. Even if — or especially if — she rocks. The U.S. loves its pop stars and its indie troubadours. But when you’re not clearly one or the other, no one knows how to market you. And that means that you, and your fans, are screwed.

A version of this article appeared in the Chicago Reader a couple of years back.

Good News and Bad Marketing

In the wake of Ken Burns, Martin Scorcese, and the Coen Brothers it’s hard to believe that there’s any roots music left unfetishized. And yet, despite the attention lavished on jazz, blues, and country, classic African-American gospel continues to be largely ignored, both critically and commercially. Hank Penny, a minor western swing performer, has multiple well-annotated recordings in his catalogue; on the other hand, the Ward Singers — perhaps the single most important gospel group of their day — have still not been the subject of a single definitive, or even decent, anthology on CD. It defies reason: I mean, here’s a moving American art form created by and for the oppressed masses: why hasn’t it been mercilessly over-packaged for bourgeois consumption?

It’s not a new question. Robert Christgau, the self-styled Dean of American Rock Critics, asked the same thing 14 years ago, and trotted out most of the usual answers. Gospel (according to Christgau) hasn’t found its niche because it’s mostly vocal and the public prefers instruments; because “the rhythm parts are rudimentary” (i.e., it doesn’t have a good beat to which the kids can dance); and because “personal quirks and oddities are subsumed in communal values of rare solidarity” (i.e., it all sounds the same.) There’s some truth in each of these charges, and they certainly make it clear why classic gospel reissues haven’t knocked Britney off the charts. But they don’t explain why Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie are bywords among long-haired volk-fanciers, while Roberta Martin, Claude Jeter, and Norsalus McKissik are not.

A recently released Shanachie compilation titled “When Gospel Was Gospel” does nothing to clear up the mystery. The disk — a stellar anthology of tracks from Gospel’s “Golden Age,” roughly 1945-1960 — features a huge variety of styles, from the hillbilly-tinged recitation of Edna Galmon Cooke to the almost operatic baritone of J. Robert Bradley. Moreover, if you listen to roots music with any regularity, the disk is thoroughly accessible. Rosetta Tharpe’s jazzy acoustic guitar on “Little Boy, How Old Are You” would do Lonnie Johnson proud, while R. H. Harris’ yearning vocals, effortlessly detached from the beat, recall Louis Armstrong’s trumpet solo on “West End Blues.” Marion Williams’ crazed, piercing “OOOOOOOOO” on “Traveling Shoes” shows why Little Richard idolized her — though even in his most flamboyant dreams, Richard has never held that note for twelve seconds. Ruth Davis burns through “Too Close to Heaven” with all the aching passion of Etta James, while The Gospel Harmonettes’ “You Better Run,” is syncopated enough to bust your pacemaker. Plus, I’ve been humming the Sensational Nightingales’ incredibly catchy “Sinner Man” to myself for over a week now, “the world’s gonna be on fire….nightmare!” And punks think they’re whimsically dangerous when they sing cheery ditties about beating on the brat….

Of course, there are some veterans of the culture wars who, scarred by childhood trauma or recent election results, would sooner cancel their subscription to Harper’s than subject themselves to pre-recorded proselytizing. Gospel music is about Jesus, which limited its appeal back in the day, and still loses it some listeners. And yet, bluegrass continues to attract an enthusiastic following, even though its message is far more confrontational and judgmental than is black gospel’s. Even when they sing about Judgment Day, the Nightingales seem joyful; white gospel performers, on the other hand, tend to sound genuinely vindictive. Take the song “O Death.” Sung in a trembling, emotionless quaver by Lloyd Chandler or Ralph Stanley, it’s a frigid orgy of sin, death, and hellfire. When you hear Chandler intone, “I’m death I come to take the soul/Leave the body and leave it cold/To draw up the flesh off of the frame/Dirt and worm both have a claim,” you know he’s heir to the same culture that produced Faust and Stephen King.

In contrast, the version of the song on the Marion Williams compilation “Remember Me,” also released this year on Shanachie, seems to comes from a different planet. Though Williams, like Stanley and Chandler, sings a cappella, her vocals drip with emotion and even sensuality, a far cry, literally, from the hillbillies’ paralyzed, sexless keening. Dispensing with most of the lyrics, Williams overemphasizes her breathing like a country preacher (or a rapper) to create a beat, around which she moans and growls, repeating “O Death,” over and over, until the sound becomes more important than the meaning. When death does finally get in the room, she swings his “poor ice hands” so knowingly that their touch becomes a caress. At the end of the song, the listener is left contemplating, not mortality or sin, but Williams’ artistry. Take that, Mr. Grim Reaper.

The triumph of life over death is part of the Christian message that, making a few allowances, even a secular humanist can love. Yet, while black gospel’s music and lyrics were welcoming, the social structure in which the music existed was narrow to the point of xenophobia. Most musical genres in America accept, reluctantly or otherwise, that performers are in the entertainment business. Blues purists may loath Muddy Waters’ psychedelic period, but they don’t therefore hate the man himself; you don’t have to throw out your copy of Evol just because Sonic Youth later signed to a major label. Gospel, though, is a different story. In her recent book, “Singing in My Soul,” Jerma A. Jackson explains that gospel was seen by its audience and its performers as a continuation of the tradition of the slave spiritual. Thus, gospel’s mission was, first, to transmit the holy spirit and, second, to preserve a uniquely African-American cultural tradition of dignity, suffering, and liberation.

That’s a lot of cultural baggage, and, under the double burden, gospel developed a cult of authenticity which was brutal even by the unforgiving standards of American pop music. Thus, Thomas A. Dorsey, the Father of Gospel Music, won that title only after he had entirely abandoned his career as a secular hokum pianist, and furthermore, made public statements attacking “worldly musicians” — that is, jazz bands — who “desecrated” — that is, performed — his songs. Even so, he was criticized because his religious music was influenced by the blues.

Dorsey, a shrewd businessman, at least managed to make a decent living for himself. Many other performers were simply chewed to pieces by gospels’ demands. R. H. Harris, unable to reconcile his faith with life on the road, quit and ended up working for a florist. Rosetta Tharpe was abandoned by the gospel audience after she booked a series of night-club dates in the late ‘50s — even though her night-club performances consisted of religious music. Forty years later, Jerma Jackson found church people in Chicago still embittered by Tharpe’s betrayal. Similarly, after going pop, Sam Cooke and the Staple Singers both received cold receptions when they performed before gospel audiences. Mahalia Jackson — who was, according to John Hammond, “only interested in money” — did manage to keep one foot in the church while crossing over, but only by performing completely inoffensive dreck like “Trees” and “Rusty Old Halo”. Even so, according to Hammond, she lost the majority of her black audience. Meanwhile, the Country Gentlemen were courting the college crowd by mixing murder ballads with their hymns.

These days, the firewall between black religious and secular music has largely been dismantled, so that, for instance, Al Green — who felt he had to choose one or the other even in the 70s — now performs both. But back in the golden age, the options for gospel singers were very limited indeed, as is clear from the subtitle of Anthony Heilbut’s classic 1971 account, “The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times.” Heilbut also produced and annotated the two recent albums on Shanachie and, indeed has been responsible, it sometimes seems, for every decent classic gospel reissue of the last thirty years. But though he’s a fine and incredibly knowledgeable writer, Heilbut’s enthusiasm for the genre leads him to gloss over its flaws. Sometimes this is charming, as when he insists that Marion Williams’ “Drunkards Down There” would “set any dance club afire” — and a riot might indeed result, if a DJ dared to spin such a trundling, ham-fisted groove.

At other moments, though, Heilbut’s cluelessness takes on a more sinister cast. Like many of the folk-revival anthromusicologists, Heilbut is a long way removed in social class and belief system from the people whose work he has embraced. A German Jew by background, Heilbut is an atheist and a Harvard Ph.D. whose academic interests include gay studies. Yet, his book is blithely dedicated to “the older singers, ‘the ones who didn’t sell out’ but stuck with their music despite the encroachments and temptations of the world.” All right — but if you don’t believe in God, what exactly does “selling-out” mean in this context?

One thing it might conceivably mean is allowing your religious beliefs and cultural identity to be consumed as an aesthetic experience by any collector with a credit card. Gospel has never been as popular as jazz or blues or country in large part because it didn’t want to be — because it’s fans and its artists felt, as a group if not as individuals, that to sell your soul to wealthy, faithless ofays was anathema. Whether they were right or not, they suffered for it, and to ignore the implications is disrespectful. Heilbut was friends with many gospel musicians, including Marion Williams, and all of them clearly appreciated his efforts on their behalf and his sincere appreciation of their work. But at the end of the day (which is where gospel looks, after all) Heilbut’s artistic judgments are as much a part of the world as a record executives’ bank-roll. You choose God or you don’t, and people like Heilbut — and like me, for that matter — are not on the side of the angels.

I just saw Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr. It is, of course, a classic film, and its director is to be complimented for establishing many of the tenets of the horror genre even before the invention of pacing, plot, or night. Luckily, movie-star good looks had been discovered just a year or two previously, and so we are treated to scenes of an extremely attractive young actor wandering about on a brightly lit set, interrupted by the occasional ominous, overwritten title board. In no particular order, he imagines himself dead in a coffin with a window conveniently cut in it for easy viewing; encounters an equally attractive actress who engages him in a battle to see who can open their eyes more widely; and passes out at various critical junctures, allowing an old man with a funny hat to kill the vampire and generally do most of the heavy lifting. Other high points are when the actress mews like a cat (as the result of sound limitations, apparently, not supernatural forces, and a close up of the mouth of a girl turning into a vampire so that we can see that fangs had not yet been invented either. Anyway, eventually the leads take a boat onto a lake, in the fog. The end.

There are good bits — the use of sentient shadows is creepy, and the coffin sequence is effective. But, jeez, the thing is just interminable. I’ve seen some episodes of the TV show “Dark Shadows”, which is paced in a similarly paralytic fashion, but at least there the melodramatic tropes are vaguely coherent — just slow as sludge, which actually comes off as funny. Vampyr is more fractured and pretentious than that, and really kind of intolerable…just watching the DVD counter as the minutes ticked down to the conclusion. Oh well…I guess the tedium is the way I can tell its culture.

Sean Collins wrote about an SPX panel on the state of comics criticism here The panel included Dan Nadel, Tim Hodler, Gary Groth, and Douglas Wolk.

Anyway, Collins said some things I thought I’d comment on, since that’s what comics critics do. Also, I just figured out how to use blockquotes, and I’m kind of excited about it.

he point that Doug enabled me to make is that most comics and graphic-novel coverage in mainstream-media publications, as well as most alternative/indie-comics coverage in Wizard and other superhero-centric print and web publications, is written from an advocacy position…. When you have an editor who is usually fighting to carve out a spot for these things because she feels that comics is an art form worth talking about, and you as a writer tend to feel the same way, they’re not going to use that space to have you explain why Will Eisner’s later work is overrated.

I certainly understand the desire to use your space to talk about things you want to promote. This is, incidentally, hardly a mindset restricted to comics; I write music reviews for Bitch, and while it’s nothing like an absolute policy, they clearly, in general, prefer to run positive critiques. Still, for myself, I think that its often worthwhile to talk about things that aren’t so great. Its helpful to the reader in that it gives a better idea of where the publication comes from, and can also warn them off something that isn’t very good. Besides, aesthetic discussions are boring if everybody’s blowing sunshine up each others ass. Which brings me to the last point; mainly, a good negative review, like a good positive review, can be entertaining and enlightening. It seems to me like it might be really worthwhile to point out that Will Eisner’s latest work is overrated — and a lot more respectful to comics as an art form than to engage in relentless boosterism.

I obviously wasn’t alive during the ’50s-’60s-’70s era Gary champions, but I’m not 100% convinced that this Golden Age of Criticism really existed. I mean, it existed in the sense that there were great critics writing about various art forms, sure (though not comics, not really). But Gary seemed to be arguing that the likes of Pauline Kael were the Gene Shalits of their day. I think it’s a safe bet that if the average reader of this blog asked her mom and dad who Pauline Kael was, they’d have no idea. As an audience member pointed out, criticism isn’t consumed by large numbers of people because most art isn’t consumed by large numbers of people in ways that would make them receptive to criticism. As she said, this is doubly true of comics, where large numbers of people aren’t consuming that art form at all, so yearning for a more vibrant critical milieu for comics is in some ways a fool’s errand. But while I could be wrong, I think it’s unlikely that this mass audience for criticism ever existed even for more popular art forms.

The best movie criticism I’ve ever read is James Baldwin’s long, amazing essay “The Devil Finds Work.” The best literary criticism is probably Henry Fielding’s “Joseph Andrews”. The best comics criticism was probably Johnny Ryan’s team-up of Art Spiegleman and the Red Skull, or else a short piece by Charles Schulz in an anthology listing all the foodstuffs that caused Little Nemo bad dreams. The Pauline Kael I’ve looked at seems all right, but certainly not up to that standard. Not sure that I exactly have a point,except that the phrase “vibrant critical milieu” inevitably makes me pray for a massive, universal plague of laryngitis and/or keyboard failure.

Doug advocated for the value of “bomb-throwing” — divisive pieces intended to provoke debate. I’m not crazy about this at all. For every act of bomb-throwing into which went a considerable amount of thought, like the Journal’s Top 100 Comics of the 20th Century list or Understanding Comics, there are probably three times as many straw-men massacres. Chris Ware sucks, most alternative comics are autobiographical and therefore boring, the only comics worth a damn are “New Mainstream” genre titles, no one tells stories anymore, the Internet is the future of comics, superhero stories are inherently worthless and no one in the real world likes them, manga is all the same, super-popular webcomics > pretentious art comics that nobody reads, etc. Yes, they frequently provoke intelligent responses, but more accurately way they necessitate intelligent responses lest the white noise they generate drown out actual argument and criticism.

I think this is deeply confused. Collins is arguing that the problem with bomb throwing is that it drowns out “actual argument and criticism.” But I think you’d be just as right saying that mealy-mouthed space-filler is in danger of drowning out people with actual opinions. Collins more or less says this himself in the bit above where he talks about the fact that many publications only want to run positive (and presumably safely positive) reviews. I don’t know; personally, I like to read critics who shake me up a little. In any case, I don’t see why trimming moderates like Hillary Clinton should be ipso facto presumed to be more thoughtful and/or right than nutters like Ron Paul.

I wish it were pointed out more often that there’s really no such thing as “the Journal.” There’s Gary, and there’s whoever’s the editor, and then there’s a bunch of writers who submit reviews and essays with no editorial guidelines and no back-end content editing either. (At least in my experience.) I know what “the Journal” is supposed to mean, but in reality it means the opinions of R.C. Harvey, Noah Berlatsky, Joe McCulloch, Tim O’Neil, me, Chris Mautner, Michael Dean, Kristy Valenti, and a couple dozen more all at once.

It’s certainly true that Gary doesn’t have anything like the monolithic control that, say, Dave Sim seems to think. (Except for one very brief message board exchange, I’ve never actually even spoken to Gary myself.) On the other hand, I think the Journal does have a pretty strong editorial identity. It’s highbrow and combative because that’s what Gary’s like, and it is still very much his magazine. At the same time, the Journal is very committed to letting its writers say whatever they want — which is a pretty rare thing in publishing. The point is that the variations in opinion at the Journal aren’t a sign that “The Journal” doesn’t exist in some coherent form; rather it’s in many ways the most identifiable thing about the magazine.

I wish the phrase “the dumbing down of American culture” were removed from this discussion.

Amen.

A version of this review of the Catwoman movie ran several years back in the Chicago Reader.

Bad As It Wants To Be

Some of the earliest sexual fantasies I can remember involve Catwoman. Specifically, they center around a Batman audio recording I listened to when I was eight or younger. I can’t remember where I was at the time, and I’m pretty sure I heard the tape only once. Nonetheless, I remember the plot clearly; Catwoman had developed a kind of super-catnip, and she used it to control Bruce Wayne’s mind and force him to help her steal jewels. I could go on in detail; the story’s extremely muted eroticism was seared into my pre-adolescent brain, even though — or perhaps because — I didn’t know exactly what catnip was. From context, I vaguely assumed it involved needles, a misunderstanding that it took me at least another ten years to clear up.

The specific details of my, um, relationship with Catwoman are idiosyncratic, of course, but the fact that I have a relationship isn’t. She may not be Mickey Mouse, but it’s safe to say that a large number of people have thought about Catwoman in the 60-plus years since she was first invented by Bob Kane. She’s a firmly established part of what comic-book writer Alan Moore calls the “fictional planet — the place we have with us ever since we started listening to stories.”

Moore adds that “We spend a lot of time in these imaginary worlds, and we get to know them better than the real locations we pass on the street every day.” This is why making a movie about Catwoman — or Spider-Man, or King Arthur, for that matter — is such good business; the audience already knows and loves the people in the film. It’s almost like watching a friends’ home movies. Critics forced to sit through uninspired sequel after uninspired sequel often start moaning about late capitalism, or marketing machinery, or Hollywood’s general lack of daring. But the truth is that the public has always liked to hear about the same damn people doing the same damn things over and over and over. Today, we call these pulp stories; they used to be called myths.

The argument that super-heroes are somehow the latest incarnation of a universal, Joseph-Campbell-approved Bildungsroman is frankly preposterous, no matter how often it’s wheeled out by desperate comic-book fans. Superman is not Zeus, and the Elongated Man is not the holy lingam. But while the content of pulp and myth may be different, the way they are produced has some similarities. Myths had no single creator; they were group productions; lots of poets and singers and just ordinary folks told each other stories about the gods, adding to them as they went. But nobody owned them — they belonged to everyone. In pulp stories, of course, we generally do know the actual originator; we can point to Edgar Rice Burroughs and say, there’s the guy who made up Tarzan. Nonetheless, the creation often looms so much larger than the creator that it eclipses him or her altogether. Today Tarzan is as much a creature of Johnny Weissmuller as of Burroughs, and perhaps even more a product of the people who worked on that animated cartoon, whoever they were. He’s a composite creation, cut off from Burroughs in a way that Hamlet, for instance, will never be cut off from Shakespeare.

Super-heroes may be our cultures’ most communal possessions for the paradoxical reason that comic-books are so little read. For most people, if a movie or television character originated in a comic-book, he might as well just have sprung full-formed out of nowhere. This gives super-heroes a certain fluidity, which is, again, similar to mythological figures. Just as Argus had anywhere from four to a hundred eyes, so a single super-hero may change radically from story to story, depending on who’s doing the telling. In the first Superman comics, for example, our hero could only jump, not fly; in the Christopher Reeve movie, he can make time run backwards by reversing the direction of the earth’s rotation, a preposterous idea that I’ve never seen utilized in a comic-book. Sometimes Superman is married to Lois Lane, sometimes he isn’t. And what about the “alternate-universe” story where the infant child rocketed from Krypton is found, not by the Kents, but by an Amish family, and so becomes a pacifist, with tragic consequences for all?

If a major figure like Superman is treated with such freedom, a minor one like Catwoman must count herself lucky if she’s even vaguely consistent from appearance to appearance. In fact, as the excellent fan-produced Feline Fatale website amply documents, most aspects of the Catwoman character have been up for grabs over the years. Her origin has varied widely; at first she was an amnesiac stewardess (yes, that’s right, a stewardess), then an abused housewife, and now, thanks to writer Frank Miller, she’s a hard-boiled ex-S&M hooker who snaps out lines like “You know why I hate men?….Never met one.” Her powers, too, have come and gone; sometimes she has a whip, sometimes she has cats trained to do her bidding, sometimes she knows martial arts, and sometimes, of course, she has super-catnip. Even her costume has been reworked; early on she wore a full, furry cat-head replica; later she changed to a more manageable eye-mask and a purple knee-length dress with a green cape. Her most recognizable outfit — the catsuit — didn’t become de rigeur until Julie Newmar’s shiny, form-fitting debut on TV’s Batman series. In Batman Returns, Michelle Pfeiffer moved the franchise more firmly towards fetish gear, with a notoriously uncomfortable latex get-up; Pfeiffer had to use powder to slide it on. More recently, the comic-book Catwoman has been wearing goggles, of all things.

But though one has a lot of leeway when telling a Catwoman story, the character still has to be recognizable. That’s the challenge of writing about pulp icons; you have to come up with a way to make the story your own while making sure it remains everyone else’s too. A current success is the WB’s popular Smallville. The show is about Superman as a teenager, before he got his costume and all his powers. The series works as decent melodrama, and it gains much of the weight it has from the audience’s familiarity with the details of the Superman narrative — heat vision, Lex Luthor, Lana Lang, Krypton. In other words, its creators reference a shared body of knowledge, and by doing so, demonstrate their respect for both their material and their audience.

The same cannot be said of the people responsible for the new Catwoman movie. As an experience, the film is familiar enough, but it’s the familiarity of cliché, not archetype. One-named director Pitof’s visuals are relentlessly, anonymously stylish — one sequence on a basketball court could be mistaken for an exceptionally long and pointless soft-drink commercial, while another where cubicle workers speed up to show the passage of time looks like an ad for telecommunications software. The actors appear to be as non-plussed by the visuals as the audience; Sharon Stone is especially peevish, but everybody looks as if they wished they were someplace else. The plot, such as it is, involves toxic beauty cream and many, many shots of Halle Berry’s rear end. Among men, the financial success of the enterprise will clearly rest on the second of these; for straight women, the only possible attraction is the kitty cats. Be warned, however: there are many fewer cute feline reactions shots in the movie than you would have a right to expect from the previews.

Obviously, no one involved in this disaster cares anything at all about Catwoman. Even so, the script ignores the character’s legacy in a manner that can only be described as gratuitous For example, in all her previous incarnations, Catwoman’s alter-ego was named Selina Kyle. Now some secret identities — Dick Grayson, for example, or Oliver Queen — have aged poorly. But what on earth is wrong with Selina Kyle? Nonetheless, it’s gone; in the movie, Catwoman’s alter ego is…Patience Phillips. If that sounds a bit too much like Peter Parker, it’s no accident; Berry’s Catwoman has a lot more in common with Spider-Man than she does with the Batman villain. Just as Parker gains the proportionate strength and speed of a spider, Patience’s mystical cat benefactor grants her “fierce independence, total confidence, and inhuman reflexes.” With her super-self-esteem, Patience becomes Oprah Winfrey in a Mexican wrestling outfit, telling off all those who need telling off and boldly owning her consumer preferences. As an extra bonus, she gains many of the attributes of cats, such as fear of rain and — in a scene reminiscent of Splash — an unseemly appetite for raw fish. On the subject of litterboxes, however, the film is mercifully silent.

The one aspect of the traditional Catwoman character that the movie *does* seem interested in retaining is her moral ambiguity. In the comics, Catwoman began her costumed career as a burglar, and though she’s been reformed at various times and in various incarnations, she’s usually been kept at least a little villainous. Patience Phillips does, in fact, have a first-rate motive for turning to crime: she has just lost her job. Luckily, though, she is not the sort of girl who thinks like that or, indeed, who thinks much at all. When Catwoman does rather dutifully steal some jewels, it’s only because, you know, cats like bright, shiny things. In any case, Patience’s heart doesn’t seem to be in it — she almost instantly returns most of them in a bag marked “Sorry.”

Berry’s Catwoman, then, isn’t selfish or greedy or even especially angry. She just has poor impulse control. This neatly inverts the whole raison d’etre of the character. The old Catwoman was sexy because she was dangerous, skillful, and unattainable; Batman was attracted to her at least in part because she was a worthy foe. Berry’s version, on the other hand, is supposed to be appealing because she’s animalistic — i.e., sexually aggressive, spontaneous, and fun to be around. Most of all, she’s available: when a bartender leers at her, she doesn’t hand him his head, but instead almost purrs with appreciation. Berry’s up there to be eye-candy, and her desperate desire to be ingratiating makes all the tight leather and exposed collar-bones seem more than a bit pitiful. When Catwoman dumps Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt) because she’s just gotta ramble, baby, it’s hard not to think that he’s well out of it.

At the film’s close, Berry’s Catwoman mews that she’s “bad as I want to be,” which is a little misleading In truth, Catwoman is as bad as *Warner Brothers* wants it to be; they’re the ones who made the movie and, moreover, the ones who own the rights to the character. That’s because even though Catwoman’s been around for more than half a century, and even though her creator is dead, she’s still under copyright. So are most super-heroes, which is a shame. At one time, tales involving communally created characters were told by whoever remembered and could best repeat them; nowadays they’re told by whoever happens to have the ear of a media oligarch. This produces some lame art, and it also keeps a lot of good art off the shelves; the excellent live-action Batman TV-show, featuring Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt as Catwoman, has still not been released on DVD because of licensing disputes. More importantly, though, granting corporations the rights to ideas that have for all intents and purposes entered the public domain turns people into passive observers of their own culture, and of the insides of their own skulls. I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want Time Warner claiming ownership of any part of my psychic space. It makes me feel a bit like Patience Phillips/Catwoman: torn between two identities, each one stupider than the other.

Still reading Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and thinking about how it relates to comics. Of course, speculating on Cerebus’ sexuality is fun because it’s at least a bit counterintuitive. Applying the same analysis to super-hero comics is maybe a little too obvious (secret, closeted, hypermasculine identities decked out in colorful tights. With boy sidekicks.) And, in any case, these implications have been pointed out by everyone from Frederick Wertham to Grant Morrison (in his Beard-Slayer issue of Doom Patrol, among other places.)

Sedgwick has a couple of other insights in this area that are interesting and applicable though, I think. One of the things she talks about is the idea of the sentimental. Sedgwick points out that the sentimental is typically defined in terms of insincerity and femininity. But, she argues, in fact in our culture the sentimental is often used as a male mode; especially in the sense of male efforts to escape it, and/or ultimately succumb to it. Thus, at the end of High Society, the emotional pay-off is the moment when the normally stoic, masculine Cerebus breaks down in tears in the arms of the ultra-feminine elf. Sedgwick links this cultural fact to “an extraordinarily high level of self-pity in non-gay men” in the U.S., and argues that such “straight male self-pity is…associated with, or appealed to in justification of , acts of violence, especially against women.” As an example, one of my high-school friends was shot and killed by her ex shortly after she broke up with him — a narrative which is, obviously, quite common in both real life and fiction.

Sedgwick also notes that “this vast national wash of masculine self-pity” is “compulsively illustrated for public consumption” in , for instance, “the New York Times’s “About Men”…or for that matter any newspaper’s sports pages, or western novels, male country music, the dying-father-and-his-son stories in The New Yorker, or any other form of genre writing aimed at men…” Comics in this country have, of course, traditionally, and still largely, a form of genre writing aimed at men. So how well does this cathexis of sentimentality and maleness apply to them?

Quite well, thank you. The super-hero genre is sodden with self-pity; it’s arguably the main tool of identification, of plot, and of character development. Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man, the three most iconic examples of the genre, are orphans, and it is there status as such which impels, justifies, and lubricates their masculine physiques, skin-tight attire, and repetitive violence. Other characters of the Marvel stable (the Hulk, the Thing, X-Men) have their bifurcated difference as the cause of their sentimental histrionics; their status as closeted or outed other is their tragedy, and, again, their excuse. Women in those old marvel comics tended to be opportunities for soul-searching rather than for actual romance; why on earth was Matt Murdock — a grown, successful man — so tormented about his relationship with his secretary? Ask her out, man! But wait, perhaps I don’t really want to…why don’t I want to? Oh woe! The turmoil! (Now, of course, as Stephen Grant has pointed out, it’s the death of female characters which is the engine of sentiment and violence — as in Sue Dibny’s murder providing a plot arc for her husband, the Elongated Man. (Interesting name, that.))

What’s really revealing here, though, is the extent to which the nexus of sentiment/self-pity/troubled maleness transfers so seamlessly from super-hero to art comics. Like Batman and Superman and Spider-Man, Jimmy Corrigan has no father, and, like them, that fact seems to be the defining emotional fact of his life, both in terms of the character and in terms of the reader. Surely it’s his wounding and his loss which makes the utterly repulsive (racist, emotionally inaccessible) Corrigan at all palatable, just as Bruce Wayne’s nocturnal nuttiness is made coherent by his tragedy. I don’t remember David Boring having such a clearly traumatic backstory, but he nevertheless seems cut from a similar cloth of wounded maleness — indeed, our sympathy with him as a character (to the extent there is any) seems predicated on our acceptance and interest in other male prototypes who have a more explicit excuse for their various unpleasant habits (Boring’s unaccountable appeal to women — an attraction linked counter-intuitively to his semi-secret fetishes — seems worth mentioning in this context as well.) Of course, autobio accounts of SNAG sexual conquest/tragedy like those of Jeff Brown and David Heatley are merely a different wrinkle on the same formula. So too are Anders Nilsen’s account of his girlfriend’s death and, in exactly the same way, comics critic Dan Raeburn’s New Yorker article about his wife’s stillbirth.

Sedgwick takes some pains to argue that sentiment isn’t in itself an evil or bad thing. And indeed, of the comics discussed above, I like many of them not despite, but because of the way they work with and on emotions. I love the hoky sadness and frustration of Stan Lee’s Spider-Man comics; I found Jimmy Corrigan affecting; Dan Raeburn’s essay was a little formulaic, but it was certainly also harrowing and moving (and I haven’t read the Nilsen comic, though I plan to.) So the point isn’t that all these things are lousy or self-serving but, rather, that they all plug into a particular image of masculinity, and that that image seems endemic in American comics. Jimmy Corrigan isn’t, in this sense, a transcendence of the four-color genre past: he’s a fulfillment of it.

Incidentally, the title of this post was inspired by a poem I wrote years and years ago. For those with any stomach for contemporary poetry (and God help you), I’ve posted it here.