I don’t tend to be wild about the online pronouncements of Warren Ellis. Take this column about pop music, for example: There’s something about a grown man working himself into a rage-filled later over Britney Spears and Pop Idol that smacks of adolescent desperation. The piece is also laden with the kind of passages that sound like they’re saying something about the music being discussed but are really not that much more than distracting pyrotechnics–like the make-up and explosions at a Kiss show, used to cover up the fact that there isn’t a thing Kiss does that Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, the New York Dolls, AC/DC, Van Halen, and even Alice Cooper didn’t do better. For example:
And, God, look at the “alternative” choices the machine offers up. Travis and Coldplay. Stubbly weaklings who wear socks as hats and would die of fright if someone played them something as rude and vulgar as a melody. Formless, sensitive strumming, riff-free and invisible to memory, and a belief that their vaunted “songwriting” requires nought but muttering lots and lots of words without actually saying anything at all. These people would vaporise if subjected to an honest thought. When did we stop wanting our music and our bands to be vivid?
I think what he’s saying is that he doesn’t like Travis and Coldplay. Fine; I don’t like Travis either, and though I do like Coldplay quite a bit, I think it’s worth re-electing George W. Bush simply to irritate Chris Martin. But what did Ellis actually say about their music? That it doesn’t have melody? Think what you will of Coldplay, but I will bet you twenty American dollars you’ve had the piano line from “Clocks” stuck in your head more than once this year. And all this business about “muttering” and “vaporizing” and “honest thoughts” and “vividness” makes me feel like we’ve wandered into a review column written by Tom Bombadil during a Sunday-morning come-down after a bad trip with Goldberry. You’re welcome to deduce how any of the above passage applies to any of the actual work either band has done, but it’s new comics day today and I don’t have the time to try it myself. It’s stylish nonsense, and to be honest, it’s not even all that stylish.
But something Ellis in his recent column about how lame pop music is brought to mind a similar issue in comics. He quotes writer Kieron Gillen, who says:
“Some poor kid is going to buy into the Vines and end up laying down eighth-rate memories of how good pop music can be, and thus ending up dismissing it as inconsequential. By wasting their first rush on the Vines, they’re going to be the ageing house-wife who doesn’t think sex is a big deal because they’ve only ever experienced a premature gimp trying to reach their cervix with desperate, spasming thrusts.
“If the Vines are your first favourite band, you’re fucked from the start. You’re the pop-equivalent of a thalidomide baby.”
More of the same purple prose you find in The Face, okay, sure; and I truly do feel that this kind of hyperbollically vicious attack on something as personal as music preference is best left behind with acne and algebra. But isn’t this basically the same argument Alan David Doane made, probably correctly, about the work of what I (and Barton Fink) would call The “Merely Adequate” Comics Writers’ Club? Transparently lousy, stupid art, like Britney’s latest album, is too obviously silly to do any lasting harm. It’s the quasi-acceptable, almost kinda good that ends up hurting, if it convinces us as readers to blur our boundaries and weaken our standards and spend our money on something that doesn’t deserve it. And unlike with pop music, there’s only about 250,000 of us consuming comics in this country. The business can’t afford for us to have lousy taste.