Why I Am Not A Fan…
I was going to post some more Batman/Final Crisis stuff now (I may do later), but looking through Google Reader briefly I came across pillock’s post on ‘the art-comix crowd‘, a response to some inanity that has been posted to the All-New All-Lobotomised Blogorama – now with 5000% more content about ‘geek demographic’ TV!
Apparently someone on there has been saying that (this is from Pillock’s paraphrasing) Kirby, Ditko, Morrison, Moore, and Spiegelman are all much the same sort of thing and all ‘overrated’ compared to giants of the form like, presumably, Ed Benes or Brian Bendis, and that people who say different are ‘art comics’ snobs.
Now, I like superhero comics. A LOT. I buy a lot of superhero comics, and wouldn’t spend the money I do on them were I not getting some enjoyment out of them. But while I can enjoy something like Trinity on some level, I accept that it is not as good a comic as Alice In Sunderland or Fate Of The Artist or Doonesbury or Calvin & Hobbes or Achewood or Ghost World or Jaka’s Story or Lost Girls. Not only do I not get as much enjoyment out of it as I do out of those things, it is just *not as good* by any critical standard I can think of.
And that’s the thing that makes me a ‘non-fan’ – applying critical standards. It doesn’t matter what they are – it’s the fact that they exist at all that seems to bother some people. The fact that someone can have an actual reason for liking what they like. And it’s not just (or even mostly) comics fans that this bothers. I remember someone on rec.music.beach-boys ten years or so ago used to have a .sig that read “there are *NO* bad Beach Boys songs”.
Really? None? Not ‘Loop De Loop Flip Flop Santa’s Got An Airplane’? Not the cover version of The Times They Are A-Changing where the band keep on shouting stupid comments? Those are precisely as good as God Only Knows, are they?
Of course not – because fandom isn’t about quality. It’s about brand names. Which is why we use the same word to describe people who follow sport teams as we do for people who follow bands, or TV shows, or whatever. I’ve had ‘you’re not a true fan!’ hurled at me by people over and over again, always for the same reasons – I’ve said Keepin’ The Summer Alive is not a very good album, or that nuWho is so different from the show I loved that it’s not something I bother to watch (Jennie gives a very good summary of why that is here ) – in other words I’ve used some discrimination. I’ve liked things because they contain qualities I like, rather than because they have the label ‘Beach Boys’ or ‘Doctor Who’ or ‘JLA’ on them.
So fine – I’m not a ‘true fan’. But I would argue that the ‘true fan’ – the person who praises everything, who takes the slightest criticism as a deathly insult, who thinks that the mere existence of some kind of critical standard is a slap in the face – is the reason for things like Star Trek: Enterprise or Mike Love’s solo album or Countdown or Monty Python’s Spamalot. If you can sell people any old shit so long as it has the brand name on, then there’s no incentive to actually try harder.
And if you’re thinking now that there’s a connection here between this post and Jennie’s recent post on Liberal Conspiracy, that there might be a political meaning here… well, you may think so. I couldn’t possibly comment…
A Big Finish A Week 17 – The Genocide Machine
Sorry for the lack of posts this week so far. Not only am I staying with my in-laws, with only dial-up internet access on Windows XP, but a combination of jetlag and a sinus infection has made me basically unable to think for a few days (an unfortunate thing about my wife working at a hospital is that even though I can get rid of most infections the same day I get them, there’s always another one coming along…)
We did, however, get to visit a few friends on Tuesday, and Prince Mu-Chao very kindly lent me several old Target novelisations, so I’ve spent the last few days journeying back to my childhood, counting the number of synonyms for ‘said’ that Ian Marter can use in a single page, and generally engaging in intellectual comfort-eating (as well as physical comfort-eating – I always put on weight in the US…)
More RIP/FC stuff tonight/tomorrow (I’m not entirely sure of what day it is any more…) but for now, I’ll be looking (briefly) at another example of intellectual comfort-eating, Mike Tucker’s The Genocide Machine.
Previously when looking at Big Finish audios I have mostly concentrated on those that contained some actual original ideas – one of the things I like most about Big Finish’s Doctor Who range is that at least a third of them or so have genuinely strong central ideas, and both plot and characterisation are arranged around these ideas – Rob Shearman’s better work, for example, is far better summed up by discussing its themes than by recounting its plot. The Holy Terror isn’t ‘about’ a castle created to torture an old man, but rather is about the obligations of a creator to the creation. Other times the idea is a scientific (or pseudo-scientific) one, or a counterfactual history, or just a neat way of structuring a plot. Even when these ideas aren’t fully integrated (as in The Council Of Nicea, which appears to be written by someone who can’t take the ideas under discussion terribly seriously) they’re there.
One gets the impression that the favourite Doctor Who era of the Big Finish producers was probably Christopher Bidmead’s short tenure as script editor – while Bidmead’s stories didn’t always make as much sense as they should (there is a gaping hole in Logopolis for example – why use the Earth technology?) they’re about ideas – recursion, entropy and so on – and when they work (they didn’t always) they’re remarkably successful at getting those ideas across.
However, it took time for Big Finish to really find a unique voice, which probably didn’t happen for the first year, and in those first dozen or so stories, while some new things were done (the introduction of Evelyn being the most important), they were essentially pastiching the old show, either in terms of genre (a historical, a multi-Doctor story and so on) or by bringing back old villains like the Ice Warriors and the Daleks.
The Genocide Machine is one of the latter, a straightforward ‘old-school’ Doctor Who story, with even a title that you can imagine the announcer in Toby Hadoke’s Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf reading out – “And now, The Genocide Machine. In which there is a machine. And some genocide.” – the only surprising thing is that, given that it features the Daleks, it’s not called Resolution Of The Daleks or something.
But even here, in one of the most generic Doctor Who stories Big Finish have ever done (The Daleks attack a gigantic repository of all knowledge, which hides a deadly secret… that’s it) you can still see the audios starting to diverge from the TV programme.
The Big Finish audios are unique in my experience of spin-off media in that they manage to straddle a number of lines. They retain the feel of the original show for the most part ( odd exceptions like Master and Flip Flop aside – and note here that I’m not talking about the McGann audios, which are a slightly different beast) but still have their own unique identity. They also are generally of a far higher quality than the TV series itself was during the time of the Big Finish Doctors (my opinion of the Nathan-Turner era is higher than many people’s, but even I would argue that there was never a Davison story as good as The Kingmaker or Spare Parts, and the Sixth Doctor was never as good on TV as in Jubilee or Davros). Here we see the very first stirrings of this, in the decision to do the first Dalek story without Davros in it for 25 years.
I remember as a kid being quite surprised when reading novelisations of old Doctor Who stories to find that Davros didn’t always appear with the Daleks – I thought the whole point of a Dalek story was for the bit where the Doctor confronts Davros – and so Big Finish’s decision to go back to the stories of the first three Doctors, and tell most of their Dalek stories without Davros, was quite a brave one. It’s both a strength and a weakness in this case – without their distinctive appearance the Daleks could be Anymonster, and they could easily be replaced in this story with, say, the Cybermen, without any major plot changes. But on the other hand, they don’t look anything like as clunky in the imagination as they did in some of the TV adventures…
Everything’s done competently enough here – the story is a fun romp, with nothing more to it than that – but it’s nowhere near as good as Big Finish later became capable of, and still shows a conservatism that is perhaps understandable in a company that was just starting out and had to persuade the fanbase of its legitimacy.
Off to the US for Xmas
To visit the in-laws with only dial-up net access. I plan to have a post or two up most days from Wednesday (US) onward, but that will depend on Events.
Linkblogging for 14/12/2008
Liberal Conspiracy has been a bit more of a Labour mouthpiece than I like recently, but today there have been two very good posts, one by Laurie Penny on work and benefits, and one by my friend MatGB on Brian Coleman.
Mark Waid has a good post on the difference between writing for comics and for film.
Charlie Brooker writes about the sad death of Oliver Postgate.
Mark Dominus’ book Higher Order Perl, which apparently teaches you to write Perl as if it was Lisp, is now available for free download. I’m no fan of either Perl or Lisp, but the book still looks very interesting…
And Kevin Church has some great redesigns for graphic novels/trade collections of comics, which really show up the lack of imagination of most publishers in that market…
Albums You Should Own : The Naked Dutch Painter
Mark ‘Stew’ Stewart has become a Broadway sensation over the last year – the musical Passing Strange, for which he wrote the book and lyrics, and the music for which he co-wrote with longtime collaborator Heidi Rodewald, has won him a Tony award for best book, and it’s going to be filmed soon by Spike Lee. He’s famous among other constituencies, as well – my eleven-year-old niece loves Gary Come Home, the song he wrote for SpongeBob Squarepants.
But even as recently as three years ago he was unknown enough that he would every so often write songs on commission – he’d put an offer up on his website and then write and record custom songs for anyone who wanted them, as birthday or Christmas presents or whatever. I had one written for my wife for our wedding, and I can honestly say it’s one of the best things he’s ever written.
And while Stew is now fairly well-known, his earlier work is still unknown. The three albums he did with his band The Negro Problem (Joys And Concerns, Welcome Black and Post-Minstrel Syndrome) are all out of print and command prices of £50+ on Amazon – a shame as TNP are a *great* band, also featuring Probyn Gregory of the Wondermints and Lisa Jenio of Candypants. Their material ranged from Ken (a song about the problems of being a gay Ken doll (“the people at Mattel/the home that I call hell/are somewhat baffled by my queer proclivities”) ) to beautiful ballads like Come Down Now, to a note-perfect cover of MacArthur Park, but one in which the crack rather than the cake has been left out in the rain.
However, it was as a solo artist I first became aware of him – as the support act to Arthur Lee and Love (at the time Lee’s touring ‘Love’ were Baby Lemonade, another band from the same LA powerpop scene as the Wondermints and TNP). At what would have already been an astonishing gig (the first time I saw Lee live, and he was simply superb – I also saw Brian Wilson that same week, doing a fifty song set, and got a backstage pass to that one. Best week for gigs of my life), for possibly the only time an unknown-to-me support act overshadowed the headline. Stew and Heidi performed songs from TNP and Stew’s first two solo albums, and were just extraordinary.
Thankfully, Stew’s three solo albums (Guest Host, The Naked Dutch Painter and Something Deeper Than These Changes) are all still in print (and available from eMusic – a site which I will keep plugging until every reader of this blog is a member, because it’s fantastic), and with luck those albums will get increased exposure now that Passing Strange is a hit – several of the highlights of the musical are reworked versions of older songs. There’s not a bad song on any of them, but probably the best album – both as an album and as an introduction to Stew’s music – is The Naked Dutch Painter.
I feel rather anxious about writing a review of Stew’s music, partly because I know there’s a lot going on in his lyrics that I’m not getting (a lot of his lyrics are very culturally-specific, and he can also be quite an oblique writer), and also because he’s both more articulate than I am and very caustic about reviewers – even positive ones – who don’t get it. I just hope that either he never sees this or I *do* get it.
The Naked Dutch Painter is a more-or-less live album, including some of Stew’s great between-song chatter (“I’ve been wondering… why is there only one photo of Che Guevara? Why isn’t there a photo of him, like at some kid’s birthday party, snorting milk out of his nose?”). The live-ish nature means that it has neither the college-rock production of the other two Stew solo albums, nor the baroque pop complexities of the Negro Problem music, but rather a loose-but-sophisticated sound that makes me think of piano bars (there’s a lot of piano on the album) or people like Stephen Sondheim.
Every song is good, but to my mind the two highlights are The Drug Suite and the title track.
The Drug Suite, as the name might suggest, is actually three songs linked by the common theme of drugs. The first song, I Must Have Been High is a gorgeous ballad with minimal instrumentation – mostly just piano and what sounds like a melodica:
Wasn’t that me in the electric chair?
And isn’t it true I spent two days there?
See my friend’s folks they were out of town,
So we bought a sheet and we all got down
And every song sounded like an angel’s choir
My edges were rounded, I had wings of fire
Soaring through the sky, I must have been high
Sitting on the balcony watching the rail rust
Slipping through my fingers like angel dust
The lyrics are both hilarious (“Didn’t we vow to live in a tree while staring at static on the TV?/And when she said ‘I am a bird’ I hung on tight and drank every word”) and at times beautiful – the line about angel dust is one of those “I wish *I’d* thought of that” lines.
I’m Not On A Drug, the second song in the suite, is one of my very favourite of Stew’s songs, as it describes a situation I’ve been in all too often – being the only person at a party who is completely sober and straight. “I know this is a happening party and I don’t want to make you yawn my darling, but I’m not on a drug.I didn’t want to tell ‘cos you might tease me – I really wish I was right now believe me”. With its staccato piano chords and skittering violin, this sounds like something Noel Coward might have performed were he feeling rather daring.
Arlington Hill, the last part of the drug suite, is apparently a description of Stew’s first acid trip, and it sounds musically very like a gentler version of Strawberry Fields (in fact, what it sounds *exactly* like is Darian Sahanaja’s reworking of Wonderful in the style of Strawberry Fields for the soundtrack of David Leaf’s documentary about Smile, Beautiful Dreamer). This points to another thing about Stew – while I’ve been talking mostly about his lyrics (and they are some of the wittiest, cleverest lyrics I’ve heard from any songwriter active in my lifetime), he apparently writes music-first, which I personally find astonishing. His music is always both interesting and catchy (while firmly rooted in traditional song structures – Stew very much regards himself as a craftsman rather than some tortured artist racked by the muse) and perfectly fitted to the lyrics – given the relative complexity of his lyrics and the simplicity of the music (not a criticism in any way of it – as three-minute pop songs go Stew’s are among the best) I would have thought that writing the lyrics first would be much easier.
The album finishes (apart from two hidden tracks) with the title track, which combines one of the best melodies of the album (accompanied by Stew’s own guitar, prominent for almost the first time on the album) with a great story that deserves to be posted in full:
The naked Dutch painter in the kitchen does not want to fuck you
She’s got seventeen boyfriends and an eight o’clock class to get to
She’s smoking hash all night with some coffee amaretto
She’s asking stupid questions ’bout my groovy black ghetto
And the naked Dutch painter in the kitchen does not want to fuck youThe naked Dutch painter in your bed does not want to sleep with you
She just feels like being naked you don’t think that you can take with her next to you
She says “Gandhi used to sleep between two naked women”
But you’re not the Mahatma that’s a whole ‘nother religion
And the naked Dutch painter in the bed does not want to sleep with youThe naked Dutch painter in the morning does not want to need you
She missed her eight o’clock class ’cause she couldn’t get her ass up off of you
So you walk along the Rhine and jump back in the sack
If this is how they do it then you’re never going back
And the naked Dutch painter in the morning does not want to need youThe naked Dutch painter in the gallery does not want to love you
She’s throwing fluoresecent paint accompanied by a Mingus tape that she stole from you
It’s performance art porno under trippy black light
She left with her professor, he can stretch her canvas tight
And the naked Dutch painter in the gallery does not want to love youThe naked Dutch painter in his arms does not want to see you
You are drunk and you are sore, you busted down professor’s door yet he feels for you
So a wicked joint is rolled and it mellows out your head
But you’re not feeling too bold when he invites you into bed
While the naked dutch painter in his arms does not want to see youSo now you’re on your own in a freezing pay phone around daybreak
You’re feeling so shitty that you’re calling Culver City just to bellyache
But there’s nobody home except your answering machine
So you write a stupid poem about the freaky shit you’ve seen
Like the naked Dutch painter in the morning sky who hovers above youThe naked Dutch painter at your door says she finally loves you
But she said “I’ll see you later” when she saw another naked painter sitting in the kitchen with you
Well she seemed a little shattered then she got a little pissed
When she saw that you were flattered by the fact that you’d be missed
While the naked Dutch painter at your door says…
(ha ha)
All Stew’s albums deserve a much wider audience, and after The Naked Dutch Painter I recommend Joys & Concerns, the second (and to my mind best) Negro Problem album. Unfortunately, on Amazon a ‘new’ copy goes for $299 , but you can probably pick up a second hand copy significantly cheaper (or torrent it, given that it’s been out of print for many years – but if you do, make sure you buy it if it goes back into print. This is music worth paying for…)
He’s Known As Bruce Wayne By Day, Wealthy Socialite…
So, I’ve been promising to write about Grant Morrison’s Batman run for quite a while, and the things I have to say have just been getting longer and longer. And then the first of the Last Rites issues comes out and it becomes apparent that the whole story has just been leading to Batman’s part in Final Crisis and everything becomes even longer. So consider this the first of a series of posts that may well continue at least until Final Crisis has finished, looking both at the Bat-books post Infinite Crisis and at Final Crisis – as well as looking at some other comics that have relevance to these.
Before we start, I just want to echo amypoodle’s post on Final Crisis. I think these comics are *great*, some of the best superhero comics ever written, and if you don’t agree you are, objectively, wrong. I can prove it. I have graphs.
I do think, though, that Morrison’s Batman has been less successful than Final Crisis – partly because of the artists (who, with the exception of the always-wonderful J.H. Williams III, have ranged from the competent to the incompetent, never touching ‘good’), and partly because, as my friend Tilt put it a while back “It’s like if the Beatles made Sgt Pepper, but only after ten years of everyone making Their Satanic Majesties Request“. The Batman-facing-the-worst-foe-ever-and-getting-broken-by-it storyline is one we’ve seen so many times before that even though Morrison’s doing it better than anyone else, the story still sagged a little in the middle just because of its similarity to other stories (roughly the couple of issues before the appearance of Bat-Mite, when everything went all Morrison). Having said that, it’s still the best run on Batman I’ve ever read, by a very long way.
I want to look at every aspect of these stories, and also as far as possible at what the creative process was and to what extent these works have been shaped by editorial diktat rather than the ideas of the writer. I think that any honest assessment of these comics has to take those factors into account, bearing in mind the widespread rumours of disagreement between Morrison and the editorial teams he has been working with, and the extraordinarily non-committal statements those editors have made (along with Morrison’s virtual absence from any publicity for his recent work – odd, given that he is one of the most publicly visible comic creators).
One of the standard phrases that comes into pretty much every internet critique of Morrison’s run on Batman is ‘except for the editorially-mandated Resurrection of Ra’s Al-Ghul crossover’. I must have read that phrase at least twenty times, and yet nobody writing it has explained why Resurrection should be left out of consideration when considering Morrison’s run. I think that the phrase is actually code for “You got other writers to mix with the sacred Morrison! Blasphemy!” – even when the people writing this then go on to damn the rest of Morrison’s run with a variety of types of faint praise.
Now, if you’re going to think of writers to collaborate with Morrison, I would suggest that Dini, Nicieza and Milligan are at least as reasonable a set of choices as Waid, Johns and Rucka – Milligan is a genuinely great comic writer for whom Morrison has expressed admiration in the past, and Dini and Nicieza are both very competent journeymen (much as it pains me to say that about Dini, who I still hold responsible for the execrable Countdown), so I don’t think that this, on its own, removes Resurrection from consideration. But is it ‘editorially mandated’? Was it imposed on Morrison from above?
Now, the main way to tell is just to see if it fits into the larger picture of his run – which I will do when I get to it – but for now I shall stipulate that I can make a good case that it fits with both the larger narrative and themes of Morrison’s run. What does an ‘editorially mandated’ crossover involving Morrison and Dini usually look like?
Well, as we’ve seen recently, what it actually involves is Morrison and Dini writing totally different, mutually incompatible stories, and Dini throwing in one or two lines referencing something that almost-but-not-quite happens in Morrison’s story, and then everyone complaining vociferously about this afterwards. That is clearly not what Resurrection looks like. Some people have complained about aspects of the storytelling, but the fact is, it reads as one story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
It also follows from Morrison’s work in a way that it doesn’t from the others – Dini obviously hated doing the story, having Ra’s effectively destroyed again in the very next issue after the crossover finished. Nicieza and Milligan were brought in just for this story. So if the story came from any of the writers, as opposed to editorial mandate, it must have come from Morrison.
This also fits in with what was said about the storyline in advance of its publication (more than a year ago now – scary how time passes so quickly) – that the original idea of Ra’s coming back was suggested by DiDio to Morrison (presumably to tie in with the character’s increased popularity post-Batman Begins), that Morrison liked the idea and plotted the story, and that only later was it decided to make it a crossover between all the Bat-books.
So to my mind, while that may count as an ‘editorially mandated crossover’ in the sense that it was the editorial team that decided for the story to *be* a crossover rather than a story taking place in only Morrison’s title, it certainly doesn’t seem to me like the storyline, or the effects on the rest of Morrison’s run, were in any way imposed on him. Other things later on may have been (and we’ll know more about that in the inevitable angry interview about how Morrison’s work was fucked around with by editorial after it’s all over – Morrison’s work is *always* fucked around with by editorial in one way or another, and he’s always angry about it) but to my mind, Resurrection is part of Morrison’s Bat-run, and will be discussed as such.
Tomorrow – the Joker.
I’ll be posting about music tonight, but in the meantime, you should go and read pillock on scale…
Some good news and a question
So today I received confirmation that I’ve got a place studying for a Master’s Degree in Bioinformatics at Exeter University (one of the better universities in the country). I’ll be doing it online, so I’ll still be working full-time.
But that starts in September, and I’d originally planned to do a Master’s in January. So that gives me nine months with more spare time than I thought I had. Some of that will be spent on stuff like teaching myself Perl (both for work and for the course) and being more politically active, but I’m going to *try* two other things, if I can.
One is to record a solo album, entirely by myself. I know absolutely no readers of this blog are remotely interested in my musical activities, but I would be very grateful if any of you know where I could find some MIDI patches containing *GOOD QUALITY* orchestral instrumental samples. I wouldn’t mind paying a reasonable amount, but they’d have to be freely re-usable.
The other thing is to write a book. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while – and in fact I’ve got a half-written draft of a book on the Codex Alimentarius (a multi-national food regulating organisation) that I may finish up – but I’m interested if people reading this would actually buy a book if I wrote it (I figure that if people who are already interested enough in my writing to read this wouldn’t buy it, no-one would) and if so, what kind of book you’d be most interested in from me? Fiction? Non-fiction? And on what subject(s) ?
(Oh, and the Batman posts *are* coming – since the last issue and the most recent FC, they’ve turned into a hugemegamassive RIP/FC thing that’s taking some sorting out…)
Linkblogging for 07/12/08
Those of you who use GNU/Linux might be interested in instalinux.com, a site that lets you roll your own distro using just point-and-click, based on several popular distros. Looks like it’ll be very handy for creating ISO images of custom Debian (or whatever) installs that only include the software you want.
Millennium Dome, Elephant has a superb post about liberty including the liberty *not* to go to work.
Jennie is quite rightly furious that her ISP, like mine, has been censoring access (to material which I have no especial desire to view) and lying about it (giving 404 errors instead of actually letting people know what’s been blocked and why). Pledgebank have a pledge up about this…
The Independent has a story headed “Landlords Demand Relief on Buy-To-Let Mortgages: The Homeowner Mortgage Support Scheme should be extended to cover those who are behind on buy-to-let repayments, say groups representing landlords.” To which I’d like to reply:
“Renters demand landlords fuck off. Residences belonging to landlords who can’t even do the one thing landlords are meant to do – take money from tenants, pay the mortgage and keep the change – should be taken from the landlords and given free of charge to the people living there who have, after all, been actually paying the mortgages even when the landlords haven’t, say groups representing tenants”
I’m not a fan of landlords…
And via Eddie Campbell, a rare coherent essay from Roger ‘Pop-Eye’ Scruton, Kitsch and the modern predicament . Unsurprisingly, I don’t agree with the implicit cultural politics here (that the Enlightenment was a bad thing) but I agree with the aesthetics of it…
Albums You Should Own – “&” by Kristian Hoffman
Sorry for the lack of posts recently – I’ve had a touch of post-viral depression. I *will* spend all next week posting about Batman along with my usual posts though. (The couple of weeks after will be light again though as I’ll be visiting the in-laws in the land of dial-up). So expect two posts tomorrow – Batman and Big Finish.
& by Kristian Hoffman is one of those albums that everyone who hears it loves, but which flies under the radar. On the very few occasions I’ve spoken about it to anyone who’s heard it, they’ve always said “Wow, I love that album, but I don’t know anyone else who’s heard it!”
Hoffman is someone who’s been on the fringes of success for decades – he was in the obscure art-punk band the Mumps in the 70s, and since then has worked with everyone from Rufus Wainwright to Carolyn Edwards – and &, his third ‘solo’ album, is actually an album of duets that pulls collaborators from throughout the world of interesting music. Hoffman’s style is closest to the glam-punk of 70s Sparks, but he also has elements of powerpop, prog-pop of the ELO/Wings variety and a healthy helping of pre-rock pop. Possibly the easiest way to describe his music is to imagine Sondheim or Cole Porter as produced by Jeff Lynne, and while & is his third album it feels in many ways like a first album – it’s a collection of songs written over several decades, Anyone But You, for one, dating back to the 1970s.
The list of collaborators on the album could easily double as a list of the most interesting still-working musicians alive in 2002 (when the album was released) – Stew, Darian Sahanaja of the Wondermints, Russel Mael of Sparks, Van Dyke Parks, Rufus Wainwright – combined with some choices that one could see as being chosen for camp value ( Maria McKee, El Vez (“The Mexican Elvis”), Paul ‘Pee Wee Herman’ Rubens) but who actually all turn in performances every bit as good as the more critically acclaimed performers.
From the opening “Gimme Some Lovin’” riff of Devil May Care, with Hoffman affecting an almost Dylanesque nasal voice (very different from the rest of the album) doubled by Russel Mael’s vibrato falsetto and backed by crunchy Big Star guitars, it’s obvious that this is going to be a musically interesting album, but it’s when that song gets to the middle eight that Hofmann’s real songwriting strengths start to show, with the line “Some postulate reward if you should mortify the flesh”.
Hoffman is one of the most articulate lyricists I’ve heard in years, with a huge working vocabulary and a wicked sense of humour. The album is just full of quotable lines – “Devil may care but I am disinclined to lend belief/to any square who spends his time bemoaning just how brief it is”, “It’s like a hideous chorus by the post-Mary Wilson Supremes”, “We sensed by scent that this brief sentiment was overripe”, “No sex in heaven – where do I sign?”, “This passion play was engineered, but when the mutant sheep appeared,”.
I’m more of a music person than a lyric person, so when even *I* am quoting huge chunks of the lyrics you know they’re special, but the music more than matches them. Get It RIght This Time, for example, has a first verse that could come from one of Noel Coward’s better musicals, all sparse strings and elegance, before going into a big musical-theatre chorus. The second verse then duplicates the arrangement of the first, but with Abba-esque piano, before we have two instrumental variations of the melody, one a perfect baroque pastiche, all piccolo trumpet and harpsichord, the other shredding 80s hair-metal guitar, before a return to the chorus and a final “Little Help From My Friends” tag. But none of this is in quotes, it just feels like the natural place for the music to go.
The album’s full of things like that, and even the less musically ambitious material is still well worth a listen. Anyone But You, with Stew and Heidi of the Negro Problem, for example, is one of only four or five guitar-based pop songs recorded in the last decade to be worth a damn.
And while the album is nothing so gauche as a ‘concept album’ (except in the sense that every song is a collaboration) there are themes that recur over and over again. Religion comes up in almost every song – obviously in song titles like God If Any Only Knows, No Sex In Heaven and Devil May Care, but also in lines like “Scarecrow, those who seek metaphor compare/Scarecrow, that other man left hanging there/But it seems to me/That comes too easily” and the whole of Anyone But You. There’s also a carnality to the lyrics, and an examination of sexuality and what sexuality means in modern life, and especially what it means to be gay – Scarecrow, the song just quoted, is about the murder of Mathew Shephard, a gay man murdered in Wyoming by homophobic fuckwits ten years ago, and is a haunting counterbalance to the more upbeat lines like “gonna put the ‘oo’ in the human condition” that predominate.
The best song by far is the ballad Sex In Heaven, one of the best ballads I’ve heard in years, whose lyrics deserve quoting in full:
It’s heaven sent, this miracle soprano you employ
That makes an angel of a boy, earthbound.
My soul took wing upon the sound.
I guess I still can’t face the implications of this gift.
There’s something pagan in the lift — airborne.
And why should soul from flesh be torn?That’s what it costs to buy a note so pure and high
and so divine: no sex in heaven.
The bottom line: no sex in heaven. Where do I sign?Then came the man whose eyes professed the love that we had sought;
a love that’s never to be caught or held.
Some ancient pact can’t be dispelled. What’s the surprise?
The storied sacrifice is often told: that this perfection must be cold,
and hard — where once we joined by scalpel scarred.What gimpy God aflame with jealous rage decreed that you
Like him must be unwhole; allowed to yearn?
But if the need that you profess is once returned,
You slap it down! (If I should ask, and I always ask.)I guess I still can’t help the sickened impulse to admire
the score that this castrati choir translates
that soothes as it emasculates.
What amazes me about this album is that it’s one of the *very* few albums I’ve heard in recent years where *everything* is well-crafted. The songs are absolutely superb – they remind me of Elvis Costello at his best or a less grating Randy Newman, oblique and intelligent with lines echoing and commenting on each other (for example in Revert To Type there’s a line about “the island of Dr Morose”, which is quite a good pun in itself, but is also an echo of the ‘mutant sheep’ earlier in the song), the arrangements are imaginative, ranging over almost every form of popular music from Sparks to Cole Porter to the Beach Boys, and the performances are stunning (my favourite is Stew’s full-throated roar on Anyone But You, but there’s not a bad performance on there).
& can be bought on CD and MP3 from CDBaby, or downloaded from eMusic. His first two solo albums, and a compilation of the Mumps’ 70s recordings, are also available from the same sources and well worth getting, but this is his masterpiece. He’s apparently also working on an album produced by Nick Walusko from the Wondermints, which I can’t wait to hear…
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