I have conflicted feelings about Miranda Lambert, but I do like this song quite a bit. There’s something about that high-gloss production and her twang that gets me, I’ll admit it.
And…let’s see if this works…I believe you should be able to download the file here:Me and Your Cigarettes
So what have you all been listening to this week?
This seemed like a nice, non-confrontational way to finish off our Eddie Campbell inspired roundtable on comics and literariness. Below is a comment Steven Grant left on one of his own posts.
I would suggest the approach I describe is the unromantic one. The romantic notion is there are a million hidden geniuses out there who would’ve outflowered Shakespeare if only someone had given them a kind word. I’m not suggesting needless cruelty, & I am possibly romanticizing by assuming the critic in question knows the difference between bad writing & a radical but fruitful shift in approach, but there really is a difference between people who want to write & people who want to be writers. The latter are the ones who stop. It’s not that hard to tell bad writing, & even good writers are more than capable of it. Everyone gets feedback, & the only feedback that’s any good for you is honest feedback, positive or negative. You’re not under any obligation to accept any of it, but a writer doing something really wrong (by which I don’t mean wrong in a “mainstream writing” sense, but wrong in that it undercuts their purpose) will not be helped by someone being “nice” about the work. Being negative & being cruel are not the same thing, but if you can’t take being negative you’re probably better off doing something else anyway, because negative is largely what the world at large rains down on writers. Unless they happen to be at the rarefied heights where the slightest criticism unleashes a torrent of virulent defenders. And y’know what? That’s often not that good for one’s writing either.
It’s a strange, strange business.
Frankly, no matter how good your writing is, approbation is usually so hard to come by that anyone who writes for approbation is an idiot.
As for Hanks, Noah, we began this discussion on email. Leaving aside reservations about “outsider art” (having watched its inception/invention contemporaneously, it always struck me as more politically than artistically motivation, since it played on many political themes of the day) I question whether Hanks fits the category. Just because he was largely unknown to our generations doesn’t make him an outsider. A guy who worked steadily for several years (I’ve no idea of the circumstances of his departure from the field) at a circulation considerably larger than any I’ve ever enjoyed, in framework (artistically his style isn’t even all that different, though I’m more than happy to accept his art is better – prettier, certainly – than many of his contemporaries) essentially identical to what surrounded him. But it’s never been his art I quibbled with. It’s his writing that’s the house of cards. Yes, I understand the auteurial approach to Hanks’ work, & that’s fine, but imagine Hanks’ stories if they were drawn by, say, Paul Reinman. How fascinating would you find the writing then?
This first appeared on Splice Today.
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“If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel I could make a billion dollars.” Elvis’ discoverer Sam Phillips denies ever having said it, but the quote keeps getting repeated because, apocryphal or not, it resonates like truth. Folks like Jackie Wilson and Junior Parker and Mama Thornton were performing in Elvis’ style before Elvis was. But they weren’t white, and so they didn’t have access to the same kind of mainstream success that Elvis did. The quote underlines the extent to which Elvis was a product not just of his own individual genius (which was considerable), but also of America’s conflicted history of segregation and racism.
You could argue that Elvis’ success is built on cultural theft — and many people have. But you could also argue that it’s built on a particular kind of performance. That is, the excitement, the sexiness, and the thrill of Elvis isn’t just that he’s performing in a black idiom, but specifically that he was a white man performing in a black idiom. The charge wasn’t just the styles being appropriated, but the appropriation itself.
The soul of rock, then, is not its authenticity, precisely, but its fakeness. Elvis is edgy because he’s adopting a persona that isn’t his. His success/failure in passing for black is what makes him rock n’roll, and the failure is every bit as important to the mystique as the success. Similarly, middle-class Jewish Zimmerman is rock because he is pretending/failing-to-pretend to be an earthy Okie hillbilly. Mick Jagger’s charisma is a function of the fact that he is pretending/failing-to-pretend to be a working class American (of vacillating races), rather than the art school snob he is.
Elvis and Dylan and Mick Jagger are all performing differences of race or class…but those performances are all also about gender. When Elvis wiggles his hips, or when John Lennon declares “you better run for your life if you can, little girl,” they’re not just pretending to be (respectively) sexy black performers or sexy American performers. They’re also pretending to be men. The pretense of authenticity is also a pretense of manliness — of greater sexiness, swagger, violence, and danger. And, again, the fact that the pretense isn’t perfect, that the façade is an aspiration and in part a failure, is an aspect of the excitement, not a negation of it. Rock gives you the chance to be someone you’re not; to feel the giddy rush of swapping up for a better race, class, nationality and/or phallus. If the mask was too perfect, you’d think it was real, which would make it not sexy but stodgy, like parents who can’t be bothered to put on a costume for Halloween. Thus, David Bowie’s flirtations with androgyny (not to mention Elvis’ flirtations with mascara) were a logical fulfillment of rock rather than a queer twist on it. The music was in part about the sexiness of mimicking a man; but it was also about the sexiness of micking a man.
All of which helps, perhaps, to explain rock’s decline, if not entirely as a commercial force, then at least as a libidinal, barbaric yawp. As Jonathan Bogart says,
Rock has been undergoing something of an identity crisis in the past several decades. Its position as the dominant sound of youth culture has been usurped by hip-hop and dance music. Its reputation as the voice of rebellion has been co-opted by three generations of advertising and corporate culture. Its claims to righteous authenticity and working-class grittiness have been undermined by a multimillionaire celebrity culture and the rise of of a blue-collar generation that’s a lot less white and male than previous ones. It has only managed to retain any cultural capital in the world of indie rock, where its original vulgar aggression and sexual drive has been replaced by the kind of patient sensitivity, faithfulness to tradition, and self-conscious artistry that rock was once a reaction against.
Rock’s edge is gone. And the edge that’s gone is, I’d argue, not its truth, but its falseness. Rock hasn’t lost itself; its found itself, which is worse. A performer like Jack White isn’t pretending to be Howlin’ Wolf or Woody Guthrie. He’s pretending to be Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith. That can be entertaining to listen to, but it’s not enough of a lie to be either dangerous or shocking or sexy. Instead, it ends up looking more like nostalgia. Decades of history mean that, as a rock star, White can only claim to be more or less the man he actually is — and where’s the fun in that?
Which is why, as Bogart says, Ke$ha, despite her dance-pop roots, is able to pull off the rock-star pretense in a way Jack White can only dream of. That is, she’s able to pull it off precisely because it is a pretense. Ke$ha — because she’s dance-pop, and even more because she’s a woman — has a distance from the (mostly) male history of rock. And that, makes her appropriation of that style — like Elvis’ appropriation of black styles —sexy, daring, irritating, and charged. When on “Dirty Love” she shouts at Iggy Pop, “You’re not my daddy/baby I’m full grown,” the gleeful lasciviousness is in the brazenness of the disavowal. Iggy Pop is her daddy; she’s lifting his attitude, his moves, and his mojo.
And yet, as the insanely catchy bubble-gum chorus charges ahead, she nasally insists that she’s not imitating the man, but is instead inside his very pants. The flirtatious byplay isn’t just skeevily intergenerational; it’s incestuous and cross-dressed, inasmuch as Ke$ha is adopting Iggy’s masculinity in the interest of getting it on with herself, or himself, or whichever self it may be. It’s not convincing; Ke$ha is a far cry from the Stooges, just as Iggy was a far cry from the blues. But the distance is the point — which is why, these days, it takes a woman to rock like a real (i.e. fake; i.e. real) man.
On HU
Featured Archive Post: Jason Michelitch on Eddie Campbell’s After the Snooter.
Me on how Peter Jackson is too twitchy and so made Frodo paranoid and stupid.
Alex Buchet with a survey of the cartoons of G.K. Chesterton.
Ng Suat Tong on how the EC Comics are still not very good despite Eddie Campbell’s protests.
I compare Billie Holiday and Jack Kirby since Eddie Campbell asked me to.
Christopher Gavaler on the original Iron Man and other war machines.
Eddie Campbell on plot summaries and Nicki Greenberg’s graphic Hamlet.
Robert Stanley Martin explains why he prefers Eddie Campbell as a cartoonist to Eddie Campbell as a critic.
Jones, One of the Jones Boys pisses on Eddie Campbell from the heights of Mt. Parnassus.
Our weekly music sharing post features Uriah Heep’s Bird of Prey.
Utilitarians Everywhere
Bunch of articles at the Atlantic this week:
I confess that I’m a lazy parent.
I stage a cage match between Betty Friedan and Anne Bronte.
I ask why no one calls Beyonce is a genius.
I review Hitler’s Children, a documentary about the descendents of notorious Nazis.
At Splice Today I compare the shaming of Minami Minegishi of AKB48 to the shaming of Ann Wilson of Heart.
Also at Splice I review the soundtrack to Berberien Sound Studio.
Other Links
Apparently Wertham fudged his data.
Tom Spurgeon with a nice brief review of a T.Rex gag book.
Alan Jacobs on why he doesn’t like Watchmen.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy on rich girls and unpaid internships.
Laura Hudson on the (lack of) women in Star Wars.
This Week’s Reading
Kind of a crazy week; I didn’t manage to read much. Read this mediocre book about US involvement in Afghanistan that I’m supposed to be reviewing. And just started a collection of Anna Akhmatova’s poetry.
One of the most spectacularly goofy prog songs ever; awesome down to every ooh! aah!
So tell us what you’ve been listening to this week.
In his recent piece decrying the comparison of comics to literature, Eddie Campbell, somewhat surprisingly, argues that it might be better to compare comics to jazz.
By way of a comparison, think of the great Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit”. It is a fine literary poem, set to music, and its author could have found no better singer to put it across. But a die-hard fan of Billie Holiday, the kind who has most of her recordings, is more likely to put on something from her earlier Columbia series of recordings, like “You’re a Lucky Guy” or “Billie’s Blues” (“I ain’t good looking, and my hair ain’t curled.”). A good number of the songs she had to sing during that period weren’t particularly good songs by high critical standards, and she didn’t have much choice in the matter, but the important thing is the musical alchemy by which she turned them into something precious. That and the happy accident of the first rate jazz musicians she found herself playing with, such as Teddy Wilson and Lester Young. Every time she sang she told her own story, whatever the material she was working with. I’m not talking here about technique, a set of applications that can be learned, or about an aesthetic aspect of the work that can be separated from the work’s primary purpose. The performer’s story is the essence of jazz music. The question should not be whether the ostensible ‘story,’ the plot and all its detail, is worth our time; stories tend to all go one way or another. The question should be whether the person or persons performing the story, whether in pictures or speech or dance or song, or all of the above, have made it their own and have made it worthy.
The truth is that this analysis is a little garbled. “Strange Fruit” is a mediocre song in no small part because the lyrics are lugubrious — the song’s lurid imagery and emotion sink into a clogged and ponderous earnestness. On the other hand, while it’s true that some of Holiday’s early sides weren’t especially great lyrically, many of them were. She sang “Summertime,”by Gershwin, arguably one of the greatest lyrics in the American songbook. She sang “A Fine Romance,” which means you get to hear Billie Holiday declaim, with great relish, “You’re calmer than the seals/In the arctic ocean/ At least they flap their fins/To express emotion.” She sang “St. Louis Blues” and “Nice Work If You Can Get It”. And, again, even a piece of fluff like the song “Who Wants Love?” is, in its simple unpretension, a good bit better lyrically than the overwrought “Strange Fruit.”
In other words, Campbell takes one of Holiday’s worst written song, declares it one of the best written, and then says that other tracks were better despite the writing rather than because of it.
But be that as it may. Let’s take Campbell’s contention at face value. We can look at “Who Wants Love?” which, as I said, doesn’t have especially great lyrics. “Love is a dream of weaving moonbeams in patterns rare/Love is a child believing/Stories of castles in the air” — that could be worse, but anytime you’re comparing love to moonbeams and having children build castles in the air, you’re not exactly in the realm of great poetry. So I think it’s fair to see this as an instance of a great artist trying to make mediocre material her own.
Campbell in his discussion seems to be suggesting that the content of Holiday’s songs is entirely beside the point; that the story, or lyrics, can be put aside, and the song can become purely about the artist’s achievement. But the achievement isn’t separate from the content…and Holiday doesn’t ignore the lyrics, or their slightness. Rather, her performance is in no small part about acknowledging and using the nothing she’s given. In her first words, she draws out that title, “Who wants love?”, putting more weight on it than the offhand phrase can bear — and so suggesting an intensity that can’t be contained in the song. That’s continued throughout; her exquisite sense of timing — swinging phrases so they stretch out against the beat — doesn’t ignore the song so much as emphasize her distance from it. She doesn’t mean what she’s saying, because what she’s saying doesn’t have enough meaning — not enough joy,not enough sorrow, not enough life.
The slightness of the song, then — its weak writing — becomes, for Holiday, a resource. And, as such, the weak writing is no longer weak. Holiday makes the writing mean more than the writer meant; it is not, as Campbell says, that she is telling her own story whatever the words say, but rather that her interpretation of the words is a great story. Campbell suggests that the song is not literary, but that Holiday makes it great anyway. What I’m saying, on the contrary, is that part of how Holiday makes the song great is that she transforms the words into great literature. And again, she does that not by ignoring what the words tell her — not by eschewing the literary — but by paying closer attention to what the words are saying and doing than the writer did, or than almost anyone can. Holiday’s triumph as a singer is in no small part her triumph as a reader — and as a writer. To deprive her of her literariness is I think in no small part to denigrate her art.
So let’s turn now to the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby page that Campbell presents as an example of counter-literariness and “improvisation” — a word that, coming as it does shortly after the discussion of Billie Holiday, can’t help but suggest jazz.
Campbell argues that this page is shaped importantly by the fact that it used the Marvel method. The art came first, and then the writing was done afterwards. Thus, Campbell argues, the Lee/Kirby collaboration “tends to elude conventional literary analysis.” For Campbell, the anti-literariness of the page is a result of process, and so the most important aesthetic content of the sequence, its most essential comicness, is dictated not by the creators, but by what are basically commercial logistics.
As I said,Campbell’s fear of, and misunderstanding of, conventional literary analysis reduced Holiday’s achievement. By the same token, his eagerness to place comics formally beyond the bounds of the literary denigrates the conscious artistry of Lee and Kirby. That’s in no small part because the conscious artistry in this page is precisely about addressing the literary.
Like the Billie Holiday song, the page’s narrative is pretty much empty genre default. Holiday used nuance and subtlety to explore the distance between her and her tropes. Kirby, on the other hand, employs stentorian volume to belligerently bash down the distinction between speech and noise altogether. The fight scene occurs nowhere in no space; the actors throwing themselves together in a series of almost contextless poses against a background of expressionist, blaring lines.Towards the end, Batroc starts to disappear altogether into the sturm und drung; his hands floating in an explosion of purple, his body returning to the white space that bore it.
Lee’s captions here, are, then, not mere filligree — they actually show a remarkable attentiveness to what Kirby is doing. As Campbell says, the captions establish additional characters — not just Cap and Batroc, but Jack and Stan, as well as the reader as audience. Moreover, Lee’s winking text boxes present the page not as a narrative about the battle between Cap and Batroc, but as a performance by Kirby (and, indeed, by Lee himself.) Thus, the heroic narrative is not about Captain America’s victory, but about Kirby’s Ab-Ex dramatic self-assertion — not about the triumphant outcome of battle, but about the triumphant rush of forms across the page.
Campbell, then, is right that Lee and Kirby are sidelining the superhero narrative. He’s wrong, however, to see that sidelining as formal or default. It isn’t that the comics form naturally or automatically eschews literariness. It’s that Lee and Kirby on this particular page are, very consciously, eschewing the literary. Campbell is in effect taking the particular achievement of Lee and Kirby, and ascribing it to comics as a whole. It’s like reading Moby Dick and concluding that literature is awesome because it has whales in it.
Moreover, while I think it is right in some sense to say (as I do above) that Lee and Kirby are turning away from the literary, it’s pretty important to realize that that turning away presupposes and requires a quite thorough investment in, and understanding of, the literary and how it functions in their art. In fact, I think that you get a better sense of what they’re doing if you see it, not as pushing aside the literary entirely, but rather as substituting one story for another.
Specifically, Lee and Kirby substitute for the story of Cap the story of Jack. The page is not about Cap’s feats, but — deliberately, insistently — about Kirby’s. Thus, the story Campbell tells about this page — that it is about Kirby and comicness rather than about Cap and his story — is itself a story. And it’s a story that Lee and Kirby are quite aware of, and which they deliberately chose to tell.
Which, since Campbell has raised the issue, brings up the question — how does the story Lee and Kirby are telling compare to the story Billie Holiday is telling?
For me, at least, the answer is clear enough. While the Lee/Kirby page has its virtues, the Holiday song is a much greater work of art. This is again, in large part, because Holiday and her band accept, understand, and then work with, the inconsequentiality of the song. Listen, for example, to the Bunny Berigan solo — all bright, brassy good spirits, until that final, wavering, hesitant dropping note reveals the cheer as a bittersweet facade. Berigan isn’t using words, but he’s absolutely telling a story — and that story is about how what the pop song can’t say is a song in itself. Tied up in the vapid tune, Berigan slips free by acknowledging that he can’t get free — his capitulation, his vulnerability, is his triumph.
Kirby’s insistent triumph, on the other hand, is his capitulation. There is no space in the Batroc battle for vulnerability or vacillation. Instead, the art booms out the greatness of Kirby without qualification — which is a problem inasmuch as the greatness is thoroughly and painfully qualified. The story Kirby is telling may be about his own mastery of form, but that mastery can’t escape from the stale genre conventions — and, worse, seems oblivious to its own hidebound inevitability. If Kirby is truly such a heroic individual, why does the individuality seem to resort to such half-measures? The art seems to boast of its thoroughgoing idiosyncrasy and extremity — but when it comes down to it, it won’t and can’t abandon the by-the-numbers battle for full on abstraction. Why can’t we just have bursts of colored lines in every panel? Why not turn the forms actually into forms, rather than leaving them as recognizable combatants? In this context, Lee’s captions almost seem like taunts, praising “Jolly Jack’s great actions scenes” as beyond words, when they are, in fact, perfectly congruent with the hoariest narrative clichés. The hyperbolic indescribable fight scene is, after all, just a fight scene. Holiday knows and uses the fact that her pop song is just a pop song, but Kirby the uncontainable doesn’t even seem to realize how thoroughly he has been contained.
You could certainly argue that the Batroc battle is more successful than I think it is. You might insist, for example, that Kirby’s struggle with the stupid superhero milieu is a kind of tragedy, and that the interest is in seeing him pull something worthwhile from the dreck. Again, that’s not exactly what I get out of it, but if you wanted to do a reading that told that story, I’d be willing to listen.
Whatever one’s evaluation of Kirby, there does in fact have to be an evaluation. If the point of art is to reveal whether the artist performing a story has made it their own and has made it worthy, then there has to be some possibility that the artist in question has not done either. But Campbell’s refusal to countenance comparison, his insistence that (following R. Fiore) comics are comics and that that is there main virtue, comes perilously close to making the comicness of comics their sole virtue. Comicness becomes the all in all — so that the production method of the corporate behemoth in whose bowels Kirby toiled becomes more important than whatever Kirby was doing within those bowels. In an effort to put Kirby beyond criticism by bashing literariness, Campbell paradoxically ends up elevating the genre narrative, with no way to praise Kirby’s efforts (successful or otherwise) to leave those narratives behind. If literature has nothing to do with comics, then Kirby’s efforts to blow up genre narrative into abstraction and form become meaningless. If Kirby can’t fail, then he can’t succeed, either.
The truth, of course, is that art simply isn’t segregated the way Campbell wants it to be. There is literariness in comics, just as there is rhythm in prose and imagery in music. Artists — even comics artists — don’t fit themselves into boxes. Why shouldn’t a singer or an artist tell stories and think about narrative? What favor do you do them by pretending that they can’t or won’t react to and use the words and the narratives that are part and parcel of their chosen mediums? I like Kirby less than I like Billie Holiday, but both of them are greater artists than Eddie Campbell will allow.
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You can read the entire roundtable on Eddie Campbell and the literaries here.
On HU
Featured Archive Post: Monika Bartyzel on Bella, Buffy, and Katniss.
Me on Jack Hill’s Switchblade Sisters and the feminist revolution.
Voices from the Archive: I express some skepticism about the excellence of Eddie Campbell’s prose.
Jacob Canfield reviews a bunch of student-run college comics publications.
Brian Cremins on the end of the Comics Buyer’s Guide and Matt Levin’s Walking Man comics.
I talk about gender in comics by Lilli Carré and Derik Badman.
Jog on why he writes the comics criticism he writes.
Bert Stabler asked folks to help him out with recommendations of comics for his high school art class.
Vom Marlowe reviews Lunch Lady and the League of Librarians.
Our weekly shared music post features Wax Audio’s amazing mashup “Stayin’ Alive in the Wall.”
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic I wrote about Azzarello’s violent, man-pandering Wonder Woman.
Also at the Atlantic I talk about noir and misogyny and Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects.
At Splice Today I explain that Matthew Houk is not as cool as Johnny Cash, and that he should really shut up.
Also at Splice I write about the ambience of pop and the pop of ambience.
Other Links
Alyssa Rosenberg talks about video games and the violent fantasies of the gun lobby.
Carly Lewis suggests that men stop writing celebrity profiles of women.
Helen Rittelmeyer on less sex and more God at Yale.
Russ Smith speculates on personnel changes at TNR.
A short piece on the state of video games.
Jadehawk on whether there will be sex work in the feminist utopia.
C.T. May sneers at House of Cards.
This Week’s Reading
Finished Carol Ann Harris’ Fleetwood Mac tell-all memoir; read Franklin Einspruch’s Comics as Poetry anthology; read the Azzarello/Chiang second volume of Wonder Woman; just started Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey.
