Lib Dem Bloggers – Wrong On Nutt
As those of you who don’t pay attention to these things won’t know, the Home Secretary, Alan “I used to have a chance of being the next Labour leader, you know” Johnson, recently sacked David Nutt, the government’s scientific advisor on drugs policy, because he was saying things like “Ecstasy isn’t the most dangerous thing in the whole history of ever” and so on.
Johnson said that he didn’t want ‘confusion between scientific evidence and policy’, and the Lib Dem ‘blogosphere’ has been up in arms as a result.
And they’ve all been saying the same thing – ‘we need to base our drugs policy on the best scientific evidence, so of course Nutt shouldn’t have been sacked’.
And they’re wrong.
Of course, Nutt’s assessment was largely correct, but by complaining about his sacking people are falling into a classic trap of letting your opponents define the terms of debate. People are all arguing that “if the scientific advice says something’s harmless, we should use that as the basis of our policy”.
Piffle. Whatever happened to the harm principle? Lib Dems practically worship Mill (and Taylor, who should really be credited as a co-author), yet people don’t seem to have really internalised “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.“
How dangerous drugs are, what any scientific advisor says, should have no bearing on the matter. It should have a bearing on peripheral policy matters – for example taxing drugs for the increased burden they cause to the NHS, or whether drugs should be allowed to be sold in doses large enough to be used as a poison (in much the same way we limit the amount of paracetamol that can be sold), or whether warning labels need to be placed on the packaging to ensure people using them have full information. But on the main question involved – that of whether they should be criminalised – science doesn’t come into it. It’s a matter of principle.
And Johnson’s here actually being more principled than we are. He belongs to a party that believes that it’s OK to ban things just because they’re nasty and unpleasant and they smell and only the wrong sort of people do them. So if he says he doesn’t want scientific advice to confuse matters that’s absolutely fine. By his own lights, he’s actually in the right.
But we’re supposed to belong to a party that believes you should let people do what they want to themselves so long as they don’t hurt other people. Not ‘what they want so long as it has been deemed safe by a scientific adviser’ or ‘what they want so long as a full risk assessment has been carried out’. The scientific evidence clearly shows that having enough vitamins and taking half an hour’s brisk exercise every day is good for you – should we perhaps enforce that as policy as well?
Linkblogging For 29/10/09
Just a few quick links today…
Ubuntu has released its latest version today, Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”. Ubuntu isn’t my GNU/Linux distribution of choice, but it is far and away the best for people who’ve had little previous experience with GNU/Linux, so if you’ve been thinking of shelling out a few hundred quid for WIndows 7, and maybe having to buy a new computer to run it on, why not try downloading a totally free, better new OS instead?
Those of you who don’t read XTC’s MySpace blog really should. This week, Andy Partridge is interviewed about Collideascope, and briefly references Ditko and Kirby.
The Mindless Ones posted some Annocommentations for League: Century, but like the teases they are they took it down again. I have a cached copy, though. Mwahahaha etc. They do still have a pretty spot-on review of the last issue of Planetary though.
An interesting article on ‘doing your good deed for the day‘. Remind me sometime to explain how this ties in to my belief that almost all political blogging is counterproductive (I don’t do my own blogging to be productive – I do it to let off steam. If I want to make an actual difference I’ll go out and do actual campaigning, which I don’t do enough of).
And some Twain and Einstein adventures by Michael Kupperman…
(Tomorrow, if you’re lucky, a defence of libertarianism…)
The Beatles Mono Reviews 5: Beatles For Sale
An edited version of this essay is now included in my book The Beatles In Mono. Hardback paperback
After that temporary hiatus, caused by my stereo breaking, and the CD drive in my computer breaking, and my external CD drive breaking, and my replacement stereo and replacement external CD drive breaking, which lesser men would have taken as a sign not to bother continuing with my inexplicably-mildly-popular series of reviews, I’m continuing with the Beatles’ fourth album (I’ll go and backfill the rest of the A Hard Day’s Night album at some point).
Beatles For Sale is an album that causes me much the same problems as a reviewer as did The Five Doctors, as both are things I fell in love with before developing any kind of higher critical faculties, and both are also things which are part of a body of work I love very much, but which don’t actually stand up very well on their own merits.
Beatles For Sale was the first album I ever grew to love as an album – my memories of my very young childhood are hazy, but I believe the only albums I owned before this one were Dannny Kaye Sings Tubby The Tuba and songs from Hans Christian Andersen, a collection of novelty hits, two Shakin’ Stevens albums, Elvis’ Greatest Hits, the best of Buddy Holly and the Beatles ‘blue’ album. But somehow around the age of six I acquired this one, the first proper album by a proper band I ever owned, and certainly the first one I ever obsessively listened to, over and over.
Rather embarrassingly, the song I listened to most, Mister Moonlight, is regarded by most as a terrible blot on the Beatles’ discography, and I can see why now – with twenty-four more years’ experience listening to music, I know all the cultural associations that Hammond organs have, and now the solo does rather make me think of Armando Iannucci as Peter Fenn on Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World, but… damnit, if you throw out that baggage, it sounds so strange and eerie, and Lennon’s vocal is just extraordinary.
This album is also the one that confirmed in me a preference for the mono versions of the Beatles’ albums over the stereo ones. After several years of being played to death by a very small Andrew, my second-hand mono copy became almost unplayable (though I think I still have it somewhere) and I got – in a batch with half-a-dozen other Beatles albums and a load of solo McCartney ones one Christmas when I was about ten – the stereo mix.
And in comparison to the original, it sounded appaling. Both mixes are slathered with reverb, but on the stereo mix the reverb on the vocal is panned to one channel, with the vocal itself panned to the other – and they’re (at least on my stereo vinyl copy) out of phase enough that the reverb comes in fractionally before the vocal. Just an incredibly shoddy mix.
But while it’s an important album to me, it was rather less important in the Beatles’ career, being the last of their ‘moptop’ phase albums, before the huge leap in songwriting quality that came with Help!, and it’s the last one to be full of filler cover versions.
But those cover versions are interesting in themselves. While all the previous cover versions (apart from Paul’s moment of cuteness per album) had been of soul or R&B tracks, this time we have, along with the Chuck Berry and Little Richard, rockabilly – two Carl Perkins songs and one Buddy Holly one.
And that points to one of the distinctive things about this album – even more than A Hard Day’s Night, this is the Beatles’ folk-rock album. Almost every song has acoustic rhythm guitar, many have bluegrass-tinged harmonies, and overall the feeling is that they’ve heard Bob Dylan and he’s reminded them of a strand of influence they’d previously neglected.
Which is not to say, though, that they are going for ‘authenticity’ – this is also the point where the Beatles first start really pushing the boat out in terms of outrageous sounds. Although Derek Taylor’s rather sweet liner notes try to reassure people that it could be reproduced on stage, almost every song has a little note by it saying who was double-tracked, or what else was done to make it sound odd.
And the final thing of note in the album as a whole is that McCartney is, for the first time, the writer of as many songs as Lennon. Lennon still feels like the dominant member, thanks to him taking the opening three tracks of the album and also taking lead on two of McCartney’s songs (Eight Days A Week and Every Little Thing), but the balance of power is shifting.
As this is a lesser album, I’m not going to talk about every track, just those that show some point of interest.
No Reply, the opening track, is quite a creepy track – listen to the cold way Lennon sings “they said that you weren’t home/that’s a lie”, or the rage bursting out in “I saw the light!” – but the interesting thing about this is that the way Lennon merges both the more laid-back Dylan influence with a melody that shows more of Smokey Robinson’s influence – again, listen to the melisma on ‘that’s a lie’, coming after the flat Dylanesque line right before it. or the Vandella handclaps on the middle eight. If you’d ever wondered what Dylan would have sounded like as a Motown artist, this is the answer.
I’m A Loser is a much more straightforward track, with Lennon again going for a Dylan feel, with harmonica chords (huffed on a folkie diatonic harmonica, rather than the single-note chromatic harmonica passages of the early hits), and a lyric and vocal so seeped in irony it’s almost possible to miss the very real self-pity that’s in there. Harrison does a sterling Carl Perkins impersonation on lead guitar, but unfortunately the clear sound of the reissue highlights a rather weak performance by the rhythm section. McCartney is just busking a walking bass part, not really quite right for the track, while Starr is stiff, heavy handed, and seems to be keeping time less than perfectly – very rare for him.
I’ll Follow The Sun is one of McCartney’s strongest early songs, if very callous. After listening to this track since I was tiny though, I still can’t make out for certain which bits of the harmony are double-tracked Paul (as it says in the liner) and which are John (some definitely are, but not all – the two could sound amazingly alike at this point).
Mister Moonlight is dead good, and I’ll deck anyone who says otherwise.
John’s I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party is the most obvious genre-pastiche the Beatles ever did, being a straight country song (and a precursor to Paul’s I’ve Just Seen A Face from the next album – listen to Paul’s harmony on the middle eight and compare to ‘falling, yes I’m falling…’) with a Chet Atkinsesque guitar solo from Harrison. This could easily have been a hit for the Everly Brothers (other than maybe the line about ‘a drink or two’, this inhabits very much the same lyrical world as most of the Everlys’ mid-period hits combining humour and pathos more or less equally, like Wake Up Little Suzy or Bird Dog). It’s a sign of the attention that was being paid to even throwaway tracks on a throwaway album, though, that the song has a seperately-composed instrumental intro/outro (which is in itself slightly reminiscent melodically of the Everlys’ Cathy’s Clown).
And Paul’s Every Little Thing and What You’re Doing are the two real pointers to where the band is going production wise. The use of piano on Every Little Thing is extraordinary – you have the tiny single-note bits leading into ‘yes I know I’m a lucky guy’, but in the chorus it’s used to double the percussion! – piano and timpani playing the same note, while the lead guitar is stabbing at the word ‘thing’ – that’s Jack Nitzsche level arranging. The whole production is full of little touches like that, and these remastered CDs let you hear every tiny detail (even the fluffed guitar part *right* at the end of the fade, which I’d never heard on any previous copy of this album, mono or stereo).
And What You’re Doing, as well as being the inspiration for the Byrds’ entire career (though probably in its turn inspired by The Searchers’ recent hits), sees the first appearance of The Paul McCartney Drum Part. This broken fill (played by Ringo but under Paul’s instruction), can be traced as it evolves through the next few Beatles albums, most noticeably in Ticket To Ride, before ending up being the basis of Tomorrow Never Knows. Here it’s just one element in the drum part rather than the whole thing, but it’s a pointer to the future.
Beatles For Sale is a deeply strange album, with songs about depression, betrayal and loss, but all delivered with a distanced affect and with swathes of black humour. It’s obviously an album put together in a hurry, as a quick filler for the Christmas market, no matter how much the liner notes try to deny it, but the mere fact that it was knocked off so quickly makes it probably a better representation of the band’s mental state than the more polished albums on either side of it, and while it’s never going to make any ‘best albums’ lists, it’s invaluable to anyone who wants to see how Lennon & McCartney’s songwriting and production ideas came together.
I realise that for these first few albums I’ve not had that much to say about the sound quality of the remastered CDs – that’s because it’s simply less important on these early albums, which were primitively and quickly recorded. They sound clearer and sharper than any previous issues of the albums, but there are no great revelations as there are with the albums from 65 onwards. In the case of Beatles For Sale the remaster is hugely clearer than any previous version I’ve heard (I’ve heard the original mono vinyl, an 80s stereo vinyl pressing and MP3 rips of the original CD release) but this album doesn’t benefit from that clarity as much as the others – it’s a murky, muddy, confused album, and should be heard that way. Possibly the best way to listen to it *is* on an old scratched vinyl copy you’ve had since you were seven, where you drew glasses on John Lennon’s face on the gatefold so he’d look more like he did in Yellow Submarine.
Next week – Help!, in mono and stereo…
New Spotify Playlist – Pure Pop For Never People!
Sorry I’ve been a bit crap at updating recently. Between computer problems at home, pressure at work, and the general blandness of most of the comics recently, I’ve not really had any momentum for posting. Hopefully that’ll be back again soon and I’ll be back to the level of productivity from last month within a few days.
Anyway, the nights are drawing in, so we all need some cheerful pop music to pick us all up, and here is a playlist of just that.
Come On In by The Association is as good an opener for anything as you could hope for. The one time I DJ’d I started this up as soon as the doors opened (unfortunately, of course, no-one heard it as they hadn’t arrived yet. This is the kind of thing you don’t think of if you’ve never DJ’d before).
Mayor Of Simpleton by XTC is one of those list songs like What A Wonderful World, to which it bears a huge lyrical resemblance – “Never been near a university/Never took a paper or a learned degree… And I may be the mayor of Simpleton, but I know one thing and that’s I love you”. The music is insanely catchy, though, and I’m amazed this was never a hit. Everything here’s perfect and thought through – listen to that bassline from Colin Moulding, going all over the place, commenting on the main melody – but at the same time it’s *immediate* in a way much of XTC’s stuff isn’t… I actually considered just doing an XTC playlist today, they’re so great.
Broadway by Stew is one of his few cover versions, a radical reworking of the Clash song, turning it into a disco track backed by drum machine, analogue synth sounds and fast-picked banjo (presumably played by Probyn Gregory?), this gives some idea of what the Negro Problem’s side project The Covers Problem sounded like (at some point I must post an MP3 of their live cover of the full Thriller album).
I’ve posted Nerdy Boys by Candypants in more than one playlist before, but who cares? It’s the best pop single of the last decade.
7 And 7 Is by Love is the song that invented punk, back in 1966 when the rest of California was busy inventing hippysim, and it’s still one of the most ferocious records ever (fantastic song to play live, too, especially since the rhythm section has to do all the work while the guitarists just have to slash out chords). Drumming by the great Alban “Snoopy” Pfisterer (I’ve told Holly that if we ever have a kid I’m going to name it Alban “Snoopy” Pfisterer in tribute, which has ensured we shall remain child-free).
September Gurls by Big Star is the track that invented powerpop. Unfortunately, Spotify removed the three proper Big Star albums recently, so this is what sounds like a full-band demo – every element of the track is there, but not *quite* as tight as the finished version. For those who don’t know the original, though, it’ll more than suffice.
More Important Things by The Mockers is another catchy-as-hell harmony-based spiky jangly guitar song. Sometimes I like those.
Baby It’s Real by The Millennium is a track I’ve adored for ten years even though it breaks the cardinal rule of lyric-writing , Harry Nilsson’s “Never use the word baby unless you’re talking about a little person”.
Friends Of Mine by The Zombies is almost unique in that it’s a song about being happy about other people being in love, although rather sadly almost all the (real) people named in the backing vocals have either split up or died (Jean and Jim are still together forty-one years later though, if that’s any consolation).
This Whole World by The Beach Boys is an astonishing tour de force. Stupid lyrics, but in one minute fifty-seven this manages to cycle through something like five different keys, never settling on one for more than a couple of bars, in a completely unusual structure.
Thankful/It’s Over Now by Linus Of Hollywood is another example of LoH’s rather odd attitude to women (which I can only hope is a Randy Newman-esque ‘writing in character’ thing) – “If you would just leave and take all of your things I’d be grateful… don’t forget to take your mood swings/don’t forget to take your nasty attitude” over one of the most upbeat, bouncy pop tunes I’ve ever heard. Again, a cleverly-structured, complex piece.
And Jaded by The National Pep is my attempt at doing a pop song as clever and complex as the last couple, or even more so. And if you listen to it through spotify, I’ll get a whole shiny penny to share with my collaborators…
I Aten’t Dead
Computer problems have caused a huge delay for me in getting any new posts done. I’d just like to say that no-one should ever buy anything from Clas Ohlson, at least if they want something functional… ESPECIALLY don’t buy their record players (the ones on half-price sale with built in CD player and USB MP3 port) as their tone-arms are so light that they just skid every time you play anything recorded at any kind of volume. But also don’t buy one of their cheap Samsung external DVD drives, unless you want something with a European plug rather than a British one, and which will pack up just when you need it to reinstall an OS on your malfunctioning computer.
Hitler Moustache
Richard Herring
So I was looking forward to Herring’s new show, but at the same time apprehensive. The conceit of the show is simply that Herring decided he wanted to ‘reclaim’ the Hitler moustache for comedy, giving it back to Charlie Chaplin, because for it to be associated with Hitler meant that Hitler had won a tiny victory. So he was going to grow a toothbrush moustache and see what the reaction would be.
To my mind, this was a regressive idea – Herring was one of the first of the many comedians who have recently done shows or written books about themselves trying to do impossible feats, and this seemed similar to the kind of thing he did in his earlier show The Twelve Tasks Of Hercules Terrace, except that this time he was not being driven by the total breakdown of his life that had precipitated the earlier show. I thought that at best he would be just ‘satirising racism like some kind of Rory Bremners’ (as Herring himself would put it) and at worst it would be a Danny Wallace-esque ‘look at me being wacky’ show.
And to be honest, I suspect that Herring originally saw the show that way himself – possibly as something light after the emotionally draining show he did last year. He references Hercules Terrace in the first half of the show, and the (free) programme for the show – created before he wrote the script, when he only had the concept – doesn’t touch on much of the subject matter of the show, being a mixture of old blog posts and bits about his podcast with Andrew Collins.
The first half of the show, in fact, seems to fit that kind of show rather well. It’s loosely themed around Hitler and racism, and has some great lines on the subject (saying that if only everyone saw themselves as racists did, there’d be no more wars – India and Pakistan would say “Why are we fighting? I’m a Paki, you’re a Paki!”) it goes off on tangents about subjects like Madeline McCann, Michael Jackson, and just funny lines – “I don’t know the meaning of the word hubris. Which is unfortunate, as I’m entering a ‘define the meaning of the word hubris’ contest, straight after the show. I think I’ll win anyway, though.”
It was funny, and contained a lot of strong material, but was seemingly unfocused and more about getting individual laughs than having a strong through-line. That’s often the case with Herring’s shows though – his first halves often seem flabby, but often the less-impressive stuff from the first half is setting things up for very delayed punchlines later on, and his second halves are usually phenomenal.
In the case of this show, there was a natural break, as Herring had planned to wear the moustache for two periods – a short trial one, after which he shaved for some family commitments, followed by a longer one for the show’s run at Edinburgh and subsequent tour.
The day he shaved down to the moustache the second time was the day the results of the European elections were announced, and this triggers a total change of tone in the second half, which starts with him almost screaming at the audience “This was all your fault. Statistically, at least half of you didn’t vote, because oh dear boo hoo the politicians bought duck moats so they’re all the same. Really? They’re all exactly the same? There are TWENTY FUCKING NAMES ON THAT PAPER and there’s not ONE of them you’d prefer to the Nazis? You don’t think ‘maybe we should give the Greens a chance’? It’s YOUR fault the BNP got in YOU UTTER FUCKING CUNTS! And no, I’m not joking.” Before going on to talk about those who fought in the Spanish CIvil War for democracy and freedom, and comparing them to those who can’t even be bothered to walk to their local primary school.
As you can imagine, I was very much in agreement with this routine, given that this was almost word for word what I wrote on the day the results were announced, and I clapped, very loudly, for what felt like minutes (but was probably just seconds) on my own before a handful of others joined in. Herring went on to demolish people who spoil their ballot paper, as well as the idea of no-platforming these absurd, disgusting individuals.
And from this (rather preachy, but by God *SOMEONE* needs to be saying this stuff, without any caveats about ‘well, you can understand them…’) the second half of the show was hilariously funny (at times I laughed so much my vision went blurry through choking) and managed to take some of the formally clever stuff he’d done in earlier shows and make it about something more than just being itself. One routine, where he argues with himself, is very similar to the end of Menage A Un (and has a punchline from Someone Likes Yoghurt), but it takes on added resonance as he’s comparing his own use of the word ‘Paki’ (quoted earlier) to Carol Thatcher referring to a black man as a ‘golliwog’, and trying to work out how one can be justified and the other can’t, deconstructing the show and the argument itself.
The show turns into one of the all too few truly robust defences of liberal democracy (lower-case – Herring supports the Greens rather than us, but nobody’s perfect) I’ve heard recently that don’t come with either mealy-mouthed caveats or with threats to bomb anyone who isn’t as tolerant as us. One would *hope* that in 2009 basic ideas like democracy being better than fascism and racism being bad wouldn’t *need* defending, but unfortunately they do, and Herring does as good a job as could be hoped for.
And at the end he gives Chaplin the credit he’s due, for sticking his neck out and making The Great DIctator (and in the process ties in the Michael Jackson material by saying of Chaplin “Yes, he was a bit of a paedophile, but he was talented and he’s dead, so it doesn’t matter, as we’ve recently learned”) by reading out a chunk of Chaplin’s big speech from that film. I’ve never been a huge fan of Chaplin (rating him far below the Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy and Buster Keaton – I regard him as the Woody Allen of pre-war cinema, in many ways), but that speech still resonates today.
This may not be Herring’s funniest show (I think that’s still Menage A Un) but it’s probably his best, and certainly his most necessary. Go and see it if you can, and if not buy the DVD when it comes out next year (Herring’s shows get released by Go Faster Stripe usually just after he starts touring the next show – his last one, The Headmaster’s Son, should be out soon). It’s well worth it.
Heil Herring!
Darkseid!! (Authority Post 1)
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
Darkseid! from Ambush Bug 2
Duncan, in the comments there, mentioned my earlier piece, Darkseid Is (and we could also add my post from last month on the Fourth World characters) but that doesn’t quite fit Pillock’s brief – he wanted us to talk specifically about Jack Kirby’s Darkseid.
(This was partly in response to someone on Geoff Klock’s blog making the claim that the TV cartoon version of Darkseid is better than Kirby’s, and Klock reacting to this as if it were a defensible position in some way. I suspect the reason I was chosen to write this is that this made me start posting on Twitter with a #geoffklocksays hashtag, rather cruelly saying things like “Oasis are better than the Beatles” and “Steve Martin is the definitive Inspector Clouseau”)
And both those posts were about my idea of Darkseid, which actually comes from two sources – Kirby and Grant Morrison. And trying to do the Kirby-only post has led to what looks like being a second series of interlinked posts like the Hyperposts from a month or so ago…
Because the problem for me is that even though I love Kirby’s Darkseid, I came to the character in the late 1980s, This is post-Star Wars.
Star Wars was, of course, hugely influenced by Kirby – in fact everything in it that isn’t from Flash Gordon, Dune or the Lensmen books is from a Kirby comic. In particular, Darth Vader is a bad Darkseid rip-off dressed up as Doctor Doom.
Which meant that when Star Wars became The Biggest Thing In History and singlehandedly destroyed both the medium of cinema and the genre of science fiction forever, and DC Comics decided they wanted some of that – well, they had their very own Darth Vader, didn’t they?
Actually, they had two, because Jim Starlin created Mongul for that very purpose – even giving him his own Death Star, Warworld – but everyone knew that Starlin really wanted to be doing the real Darkseid, not his own copy of a copy.
So very soon we had a ton of bad space opera, by second-rate talents like Starlin or John Byrne, fitting Kirby’s characters – which had been conceived as a self-contained thing, with little connection to the DC Universe (other than the Superman tie-ins forced on Kirby by editorial), and were part of a personal artistic vision – into a massive ‘continuity’ (and we all know what I think about those).
These ‘respectful’ travesties – created by people who thought that it was actually paying tribute to possibly the greatest imaginative artist of all time to create weak, watered-down copies of his most personal work, rather than ever having a single original idea themselves – were, of course, hugely popular, for much the same reasons that the Rolling Stones were more popular than Howlin’ Wolf. Darkseid became absolutely ubiquitous for a time, to the point where his ‘surprise’ appearances were parodied by Keith Giffen, having the splash panel at the end of every issue of the first Ambush Bug miniseries being a ‘surprise reveal’ of Darkseid.
So my first exposure to the character of Darkseid came through London Editions’ UK newsstand Superman title (which reprinted the US comics, starting with Byrne’s run, at magazine size, and usually had either JLI or Green Lantern as backups). But Darkseid, even when being beaten by Byrne’s superyuppie, or being ridiculed in the Giffen/DeMatteis League, still had some of the power of the original creation – to the point where, years before I ever saw any of Jack Kirby’s actual work, I knew he was a comic creator I admired because he’d created Darkseid and Etrigan and Kamandi and a handful of other characters who still had power in inferior creators’ hands.
(The JLI creators weren’t ‘inferior’ in a pejorative sense – they’re better than 95% of mainstream comic people – but everyone’s inferior to Kirby when it comes to superhero comics).
So my view of Kirby’s work is – pretty much necessarily – through the lens of these later creators. I can’t judge HIS Darkseid – the only REAL Darkseid – except in the light of later bastardisations. I think that Morrison’s take on Darkseid is the only one since Kirby himself to actually bear any relation to the character Kirby created – that everything Morrison makes explicit was already implicitly there, and that he’s the only comic creator (with the possible exception of Rick Veitch) who really GETS Kirby’s work, but to go back to an earlier analogy, if Kirby is Howlin’ Wolf, and Byrne is the Rolling Stones, then Morrison is Captain Beefheart. I can see a clear line between Wolf and Beefheart – the roots of the latter clearly visible in the former – but does that make Beefheart covering ‘Evil’ any more ‘authentic’ than the Rolling Stones doing Little Red Rooster?
I’d argue yes, but I’d have great difficulty expressing why that should be.
More on Wednesday.
Linkblogging for 19/10/09
I’m actually in the middle of writing my Kirby & Darkseid piece, but a few things which I thought deserved linking:
Jennie writes more about where all the female bloggers are… good discussion in the comments, too.
Millennium writes about the Dalek War box set.
How to get a Windows refund if you’re buying a new (not second-hand) computer.
Tim at The Hurting writes about the presumption of changelessness in the business plans of the Big Two comics companies.
And Terence Eden bought a newspaper for the first time in a decade
I Know A Song That’ll Get On Your Nerves…
For a while now, I’ve been complaining vociferously on Twitter about the lack of a vocalist for the National Pep, my band (such as it is) – my friend and songwriting partner Tilt Araiza has agreed to continue writing songs with me, but for some reason seems to think “I don’t want to, and anyway I’m moving thousands of miles away very soon, and am not going to travel from California to Manchester to play in a bar in front of five people” is an adequate excuse to stop singing with me.
I’ve tried working with other people to no avail, so have finally bitten the bullet and considered the possibility of singing my own stuff. This does, of course, have the slight downside that people have told me for decades that my voice sounds like a donkey being tortured to death, but I thought I’d give it a try anyway.
So I’ve decided to record myself performing one of my old songs (from my old band, Stealth Munchkin) and upload an MP3 to see what people think of my vocal ‘abilities’. Please have a listen to this and tell me – truthfully – what you think of the vocals. I want to know if it’s actually worthwhile me continuing to make music without a lead vocalist.
The MP3 is very noisy – this is the first thing I’ve ever recorded by myself with this computer, and I only managed to get everything set up an hour ago, so recorded this without setting levels properly or anything like that – and the song itself is a bad one. I wrote the music when I was seventeen, and my old singer wrote the words when she was 19, and it shows (and before anyone says anything, I had heard neither Five String Serenade by Arthur Lee or My Beloved Monster by The Eels when writing this – I was actually ripping off Tell Me What You See by the Beatles). I chose it not because it’s a good song (it isn’t – it’s almost literally sixth-form poetry) but because the main vocal part is in my range but it also allows me to try different ranges in the backing vocals, and because it’s all major chords so it’s easy on the banjo (with the exception of the last chord – Ddim7 – which I fluff horribly).
Listen and let me know what you think. Proper posts resume tomorrow (my writer’s block seems to have cleared…)
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