King Missile – Happy Hour

The other day my wife told me how glad she was to have come of age, culturally speaking, in the early to mid ’90s. We’ve had this discussion several times, because every time it becomes apparent how easy it was to have really terrific music placed right in front of you by the paltry-by-today’s-standards number of outlets geared toward putting music in front of teenagers, by god, it’s worth talking about. A case in point for me is this, the concluding and title track to the album that “Detachable Penis” came from. I still think “Detachable Penis” is very funny (“He wanted twenty bucks, but I talked him down to seventeen”). But what I couldn’t have known when I brought home the CD in its giant cardboard longbox from Tower Records was that the album that surrounded that novelty classic was stuffed with really first-rate alternative-rock musicianship. Some of it was pastiche of genres I really didn’t have any experience with yet (“VulvaVoid” is shoegaze! “Trapped” is mid-period time-to-rock-happily R.E.M.!), some of it was spoken-word weirdness and wordplay draped atop roiling hard rock I had no problem appreciating (“Sink,” “Ed”), and a lot of it is just crushingly morose songs about complete failure. “I’m Sorry” and “Heaven,” the third-to-last and penultimate tracks, contain lots of imagery of crushed birds and breaking things that can’t be repaired, all delivered with John S. Hall’s twerpy speak-singing to undercut the heaviness. No such undercutting takes place in “Happy Hour,” a dirge I put on to this day when I want to feel unremittingly awful. Funereal organ, some kind of electronic reverse-tape effect that sounds like something shuffling into a grave, lyrics that conclude with the lines “While the flesh fell off our bodies and we lost our limbs,” so fuzzy and distorted you can’t make it out without the lyric sheet, and on top of it all a melancholy, briefly beautiful piano chords and, finally, a guitar that sounds like it’s bleeding to death. Back then you could stumble bass-ackwards into shit like this all day long. You had it so easy you weren’t prepared for a time when you’d need a song like this.

Gang Gang Dance – Sacer

Because we absolutely, positively need more art-pop that sounds like T’Pau’s “Heart and Soul.” It took me forever to place what I was hearing in this standout track from Gang Gang Dance’s engrossing, energetic new album Eye Contact but even before I struck upon what I think is the most direct influence, this song’s project of rehabilitating big sky’s-the-limit mostly English alternative pop sounds from the ’80s had my full support. Everything about it makes me feel like I’m sitting in some teenage bedroom I never had, playing it at full volume and sharing some secret delirious joy with myself. That stop-start beat, with its synth stabs and big flat reverbbing drums, is just made to dance to in your mirror, awkward and uncaring, while Lizzi Bougatsos’ vocals run the impenenetrability of Liz Fraser (another icon of rhapsodic interiority) through a strange Bollywood filter. Which works perfectly, because to me the appeal of all the Big ’80s bands was just how far away their world felt from mine, like these were transmissions of heartache and happiness and emotions too intense to filter down to me as anything but pure excitement, in a secret language of adult glamour I was lucky enough to understand for three or four minutes at a time.

Prison for Bitches
Ryan Sands, Hellen Jo, Calivn Wong, Anthony Ha, Makkinoso, Gea, Sophia Foster-Dimino, Chris Kuzma, Johnny Ryan, Sophie Yanow, Chris “Elio” Eliopoulos, Michael Kupperman, Adam Bronson, An Nguyen, Mickey Zacchilli, Lisa Hanawalt, Anthony Wu, Evan Hadyen, Leslie Predy, Monika Uchiyama, y16o, Ryan Germick, Saicoink, Angie Wang, Tony Tulathimutte, Andre Syzmanowicz, Raymond Sohn, Michael DeForge, Mia Shwartz, Patrick Kyle, Derek Yu, Jordyn Bochon, Seibei, Ginette Lapalme, Nick Gazin, Harvey James, Zejian Shen, Robert Dayton, Aaron Mew, writers/artists
Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, editors
self-published, 2010
64 pages
$12
Buy it and see an extensive preview at PrisonForBitches.com

The wonderful thing about recruiting a galaxy of underground comics and illustration stars to make a Lady Gaga fanzine is that no matter what kind of extravagant weirdness they concoct, there’s a better-than-even chance that at any moment the Lady herself could come along and comfortably out-weird them all. Nearly to a piece, the art, comics, photography, interviews, and essays assembled here by the Thickness team of Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge appear to have been created with a healthy appreciation for their own potential obsolescence in mind, and admiration and awe for the relentlessly and exuberantly creative young woman who’d make it happen. How else to explain the number of contributions that portray Gaga as godlike? In the hands of the Prison for Bitches team, Gaga is a queen seated on a giant telephone throwing trinkets to the huddled masses (Foster-Dimino); a vision appearing in dreams to espouse Anarcho-Gagaism to her supplicants (Yanow); a Big Brother-style disembodied head whose kohl-rimmed eyes stare at the viewer with a totalitarian sex-death gaze like something out of Metropolis (Kupperman); a She-Ra/ELA-esque figure riding through space atop a crystalline Battle-cat (Hayden); a Ray-Ban-wearing Baphomet (Predy); a giant sea goddess towering over the bodies of the drowned (Wang); an empress who lives to be 110 years old (DeForge); a severed head whose tongue, hair, and blood vessels are Cthulhoid tentacles (Aaron Mew). She is seen as supernatural, both a Delphic oracle of fabulousness and a Ring-claiming Galadriel proclaiming “All shall love me and despair.”

On the “love me” point, only a handful of the contributors work with the fact that she’s a very attractive person, but they’re among my favorites: André Syzmanowicz lovingly depicts the curves of her stomach, her breasts, her armpits, even as a werewolf creature gropes her from behind; a strip from Robert Dayton sees an ostensible fan complain about her mediocre music and ripped-off style, finally responding to the question “What do you like about her then?” with “Her navel—I want to lick her navel”; and right between the staples in the centerfold spread that anchors the book’s central full-color section, Mickey Zacchilli sticks the singer’s famously fit rear end.

Still other contributors take advantage of Gaga’s graphic potential for maximum maximalist imagemaking — artist after artist (Jo, Wang, Gazin, Yu, Bochon, Foster-Dimino) have a ton of fun with her hair, culminating in a spectacular caricature of her Coke-can curlers from the “Telephone” video by Harvey James. An Nguyen and the team of Hellen Jo & Calvin Wong provide concert reportage, the former with photos of her cosplaying fans, the latter with comics about the on- and off-stage spectacle of the concert experience.

A trio of prose pieces appear in what seems like ascending order of skepticism; in descending order, Adam Bronson has a funny piece that uses Deleuze and Hegel to analyze the relative potential of Gaga’s “Let’s Dance” and Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” to provoke violence in Filipino karaoke bars; Anthony Ha interviews Vanessa Grigoriadis, author of New York magazine’s seminal profile of Gaga’s origins and rise to fame, that’s best summed up by its title – “I’m a Total Fan of Hers, I Just Am Not a Huge Fan of Her Music”; editor Sands kicks the whole thing off with an utterly sincere and descriptively, persuasively argued “UNDISPUTED TOP 5 LADY GAGA SONGS,” featuring genuine gems like “[‘Alejandro’] sounds like ABBA’s ‘Fernando’ rubbing lotion all over Ace of Base’s ‘Don’t Turn Around’ while bathing nude on ‘La Isla Bonita'” and “[‘So Happy I Could Die’ is] really just a simple song about being convinced you are the hottest and most desirable person on the earth, and that this can be the best of all possible worlds if we allow ourselves the pleasure.” Taken in tandem, they’re like a debate between different modes of Gaga fandom, from arch irony to measured respect for a pop-culture needle-mover to downright love for someone who makes awesome songs to dance to.

The whole zine works like this, basically. Whatever it is you get out of Gaga — a pop-art deity, a gorgeous girl, an eye-inspiring spectacle, a thinkpiece generator, a hitmaker — by all means share that fun with a world that doesn’t have enough of it. This book is a snapshot of the Gaga conversation, post-“Telephone” video 2010; it’s a testament to the contributors and their subject alike that even now that the specifics of that conversation have now been rendered moot by an album full of pinball music and Clarence Clemons sax solos with a cover that reads “BORN THIS WAY” over a picture of the artist as a motorcycle with a human head, I’d love to hear them have it all over again. Prison for Bitches is a Little Monster must-have for any Gaga fan.

King Crimson- Lark's Tongues in Aspic Part !!

I’m a sucker for supervillain team-ups, but I’m particular about them as well. Conventional wisdom holds that supervillains’ villainy will always undermine their collaboration in the end: Megalomaniacal master-planner types will spend as much time maneuvering against one another as against their mutual enemies, the more dignified types will clash with the real wild ones, and before long the team-up’s either in pieces or at each other’s throats. Fie, I say. Reality is little more than a constant stream of examples of horrible people working together quite effectively to advance their agendas, and I see no reason to believe that evil men and women of sufficient means and motivation couldn’t pool their resources and crush the resistance of their do-gooding rivals, scattering broken Avengers across the Eastern seaboard and erecting enormous matching statues of Doctor Doom in New York Harbor and Magneto in the San Francisco Bay.

This is the feeling I get when I listen to this live version of a ’70s King Crimson instrumental, performed by the band’s “double trio” incarnation twenty-odd years later. Robert Fripp’s the mad scientist in this model, bespectacled and seated quietly on a stool as he makes his guitar sound like it’s actually capable of biting your head off with those first few notes. His fellow avant-guitar legend and collaborator-with-everyone-interesting Adrian Belew is a jaunty Joker-like presence by comparison, bouncing around as he draws out soaring, piercing sounds from his instrument. Two drummers pound away, laying down a suppressing fire of time-signature changes, percussive miscellany, and ear-smacking loudness; they include math-rock monster Bill Bruford (late of Yes) and session guy Pat Mastelotto (late of everyone from Mr. Mister to …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead – he’s kind of like the jobber who gets tapped by one of the big boys and surpasses everyone’s expectations) . Every good supervillain team needs a bald guy, so there’s Tony Levin, supplying the low end for one of the band’s bass-heaviest compositions, and teaming up with Trey Gunn, who compliments Fripp’s already science-fictional-sounding Frippertronics by playing instruments with names like the Warr Guitar and the Chapman Stick. The song itself is like an assault — impossibly loud from the start, like many King Crimson tracks it relies on repetition, crescendo, and melodic lines that rise ever higher in pitch to create the impression that it’s somehow getting louder and more urgent still. The constant rhythmical shifts, nearly impossible to predict unless you’ve heard the song a million times, make the riffs feel like they’re jumping out of the grooves to try to get to you as fast as they can. It’s just a sinister, angry-sounding song, and it ends with the band basically burning it to the ground, the sonic ashes a monument to their triumph. Everyone worked together to make something awful and awe-ful.

“THERE IS A FREEDOM IN VIOLENCE THAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND! AND LIKE I’VE NEVER FELT BEFOOOOOOORRRRRRRREE!!!!!” And with that top-of-her-lungs chant from singer/songwriter Merrill Garbus…it’s samba time! For all of about twenty seconds, that is, before “Riotriot” resumes the twitchy, nervous-sounding, quiet minor key groove it occupies for the bulk of its duration. I don’t want to give the impression that the song isn’t interesting up until that dramatic point — not at all. Something about its timid swing and Garbus’s hushed vocals suggests that it’s being delivered on tiptoes, looking over her shoulder to see if anyone’s listening. And that’s fitting given that Garbus is singing about seeing a riot cop in action from her window and having a sexual fantasy about him. But deep into the song things start getting a little buzzier, a little crackier and more urgent, and Garbus’s vocals start crescendoing, and then BLAM! this huge, huge moment hidden like an Easter egg at the 2:47 mark. Garbus does this sort of thing on all three of the highlight tracks from Tune-Yards’ excellent second album Whokill: there’s also the ecstatic horn section that comes from out of nowhere in “Bizness,” and the sections that involves shouting “MY MAN LIKES ME FROM BEHIND!” (every word delivered like a punch) and gorgeous woo-ooh-ooh high notes respectively in “Powa,” I feel rewarded by songs like that — it feels like their creators did something extra to make each part interesting and unpredictable, and gave me a payoff for sticking around that a traditional verse-chorus-repeat structure just wouldn’t deliver. I suppose it’s the same sort of thing I like about “Liar”‘s genuinely dangerous-sounding transitions between rest and aggression, “End Come Too Soon”‘s magnificently miserable ending, “Long Distance Runaround”‘s flipped switch between jaunty piano piece and forward-leaning math-funk. And though I hate to be the guy who takes something he likes and then says “unlike all that other shit,” fuck it: Surely Garbus’s attention to things like dynamics and song structure are what help put Tune-Yards head and shoulders above so much of indie rock’s unimaginative, amorphously strummed same-iness, where within fifteen seconds you’ve heard every trick up a given song’s sleeve, while her ability to take a sentiment as disturbing as finding freedom in violence and slam convincingly it into a “Fool in the Rain”-style party interlude is roughly twelve bajillion times more interesting, entertaining, insightful, and listenable a treatment of violence in art than some trollish shithead putting out two albums’ worth of rape jokes and daring you not to get them.

Wonderful though the trimmed-down video version may be, I’m posting the full-length album version of this song instead. It’s in this version, with its leisurely intro and extra lines and lacerating instrumental section before the third verse, that you get the full effect. It’s a different feeling than the usual “quite verse/LOUD CHORUS/quiet verse” altrock model, mind you; it’s not so binary, so on/off. Each time the loping groove nears the end of a verse, it kind of shakes out and tightens up and only then turns up the volume — it grows into the loud chorus, and you feel that potential contained within the rest of the song. Overall it radiates a sense of lazy coiled menace, like a big dangerous animal dozing in warm weather that suddenly opens its eye when you get too close. I like a song that can surprise you like that, a song that does its thing for a while but eventually says “alright, fuck it” and rears up and punches you right in the face.

Wild Beasts – “End Come Too Soon”

The lyrics to this song really couldn’t be simpler. With haiku-like precision, Hayden Thorpe’s falsetto sketches a succession of rapturous nights with a lover, all of which head inexorably to the same conclusion: the end, come too soon. That premature end — the ends of things we wish would never end are always premature — ends up overshadowing all that came before, so that where Thorpe started by singing of “blessed” and “divine” nights, he ends by saying “your skin looked waxen in the fading light.” Loss, whether through death or separation, colors everything in the same dreary gray. Once that point is reached, the music’s gently pulsing beat and cooing backing vocals take a break, as do the high plucked guitar notes and endlessly cycling piano, giving way to ambiguous electronic tones. It’s as if the band collectively pauses, draws a breath, and then lets it all out in an enormous wave of grief embodied by Thorpe’s wordless, repetitive cry, the highest and loudest notes he hits in the whole song, sung over and over again. He ends by repeating the title phrase over and over and over as well, eventually just shortening it to “too soon, too soon, too soon,” like it’s all he can think to say. As the finale of the band’s astonishingly cerebral, subtle, sensual, and controlled new album Smother, it’s an overwhelming moment of anti-catharsis, and it gets my vote for song of the year so far.

* The rumors (which weren’t so much rumors as they were lots of people knowing exactly what was going to happen and talking about it privately but not being able to say so publicly just yet) are true: DC is scrapping, re-numbering, and relaunching its entire superhero line, launching fully 50 different #1 issues in September. What’s more, the entire line will go day-and-date digital, with digital versions of the books going on sale the same day as their print counterparts. Much more on this anon.

* The two Hobbit movies, subtitled An Unexpected Journey and There and Back Again, will be released in December 14, 2012 and December 13, 2013 respectively. See you there opening night.

* Ed Brubaker on superheroes, violence, and closure — one of the most interesting things I’ve read about superhero comics in a long time, from Tom Spurgeon’s very interesting interview with the writer.

* Bruce Baugh on John Carpenter’s The Thing:

Third, there’s a useful lesson in plotting in this story. You absolutely don’t have to nail down everything for it to feel like a tight, connected whole if you give the audience—or players—enough solid points for them to stand on while speculating about the rest. In the case of the Thing’s subversion of the various station members, we can tell with great confidence when some happened, and even get to see some right on screen. Others we can only wonder about. And that’s fine. Players often like to chew over the unresolved questions, if it doesn’t all just feel like an exercise in futility.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this sort of thing, about questions left unanswered by various genre fictions, and how sometimes those un-answers remain a huge part of the work’s appeal years later while other times they’re the reason we rarely return to it, all in the context of how Twin Peaks seems to be a case of the former while it’s still unknown what side Lost will eventually fall on. I think it has to do with…I guess I’d call it a matter of “full absences” versus “empty absences”? You want a given absence of information to feel like it’s full of information that for whatever reason you can’t see, rather than just a gaping hole where information should be, but I’m not sure if I can nail down what the difference would be other than “I know it when I (don’t) see it.” I need to hash that out some more.

* This is exactly why I keep Corey Blake in my RSS reader: Here he’s collected links to all of my Robot 6 colleague Chris Mautner’s “Comics College” columns, which offer advice to newcomers on where to begin with the work of the great cartoonists.

* I wish there were an apostrophe after the author’s last name–that would make the title of Michael Kupperman’s next book even funnier.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates was in fine form today. First he coined the phrase “the fiscally fantastic” to describe fiction about the extravagantly carefree wealthy. My wife and I were talking about this just this past weekend, in reference to how Frasier, despite being more consistent over the course of its however-many seasons than its predecessor Cheers and the similarly ubiquitous-in-syndication sitcom Roseanne, really doesn’t hold a candle to either one. In the end, stories about Roseanne‘s nuclear family of working poor and Cheers‘ adopted family of three-time losers feel more inherently…I dunno, worth telling than the travails of the Brothers Crane as they try to balance failed romances with getting time on the squash court, drinking aged scotch and fine wines, and snagging season tickets for Seattle’s most expensive cultural attractions. I know I’ve also gotten kind of tired of movies about billionaire vigilantes and rich young beautiful urban professionals who learn something about life and laughs and love.

* Then there’s this piece on why male readers should read women writers. Basically, Rooney Ruling yourself to account for gender opens you up to the output of over half of the human population, which can only redound to your benefit compared to sticking just to the Y-chromosome set:

This is not a favor to feminists. This is not about how to pick up chicks. This is about hunger, greed and acquisition. Do not read books by women to murder your inner sexist pig. Do it because Edith Wharton can fucking write. It’s that simple.

I think it’s worth murdering your inner sexist pig, but yes. One thing that the “eat your vegetables” metaphor for doing less-than-immediately-easy things undervalues is that when you eat your vegetables it’s not that the only benefit is that you’ve satisfied your mom and dad, you’re also getting vital nutrients necessary to stay alive. Plus, broccoli is delicious. You know?

* It’s been great to see Brian Hibbs, Graeme McMillan, and Jeff Lester — the Big Three of the fractured Justice League that is The Savage Critic(s) — return to regular capsule-review writing. You should go and browse through the past several weeks of entries, but for now let me direct you to Jeff’s most recent contribution, which contains this beautiful bit of writing on Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy:

By [the ’50s], it feels like every character has turned grotesque, and every object requires an arrowed caption to label it, a paranoid’s world where nothing can be dismissed.

Ooftah, that last bit is good.

* Though I think Nitsuh Abebe is being too hard on Lady Gaga, who’s a better pop star than we deserve, and that he ultimately stops short of where he could have gone with his argument that provocation and “being yourself” are value-neutral concepts — that’s as may be, but surely we could look at the actual form these things have taken with, say, Odd Future and Lady Gaga and evaluate their respective value, no? — the rest of his column on the message of Born This Way is so stuffed with great ideas, expertly delivered, that I hardly know where to begin excerpting it. But here’s a start: “Aren’t ‘be yourself’ and ‘be what you want to be’ totally different instructions?” That’s an underexplored aspect of Gaga’s persona. “Born This Way” — what if you weren’t? Her embrace of artifice is so complete that it’s odd to think of how she’s simultaneously arguing for the primacy of personal authenticity.

* Some sweet, He-Man-cartoon-reffing fanart for Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit by Marc Palm.

* This looks like sketches for a new Uno Moralez comic.

* Always good to see a new Ben Katchor strip.

* Is Green Lantern the psychedelic superhero movie we’ve been waiting for?

* Dave McKean’s new sex comic Celluloid looks lovely,

* I thought this was kind of neat: There are so many Marvel writers located in Portland that for the company’s latest creative summit, the New York-based editorial staff flew there instead of the other way around.

* Here’s an excellent critique of Chester Brown’s Paying For It by Douglas Wolk that echoes many of the thoughts and complaints I had about it. Douglas is harder than I am on Brown’s cartooning here, though, which is as beautiful as ever.

* Buy some Zach Hazard Vaupen originals and prints and comics and help him pay his rent!

* TJ Dietsch on Grant Morrison’s JLA and its lessons for superhero team books:

Morrison didn’t put the team together by having our heroes looking at pictures and weighing their options or all meeting up by happenstance and deciding to join forces, THEY WERE JUST THERE! I’d like those potential super hero team writers to take note of this too. We don’t need to see how the team is put together. It’s boring. Just put them together and if questions arise (or better yet, if mysteries abound) answer them as you go. I don’t want to see how next season’s Steelers come together, I want to see them play football!

* Trent Reznor and Karen O. covering Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”? Oh, indeed. Actually, who cares about Karen O., it’s Trent Reznor covering Led Zeppelin, a prospect that would thrill me equally at any time between now and about 1992.

* Missed it somehow, but Dan Nadel catches that Fantagraphics is publishing some Guy Peellaert graphic novels. Peellaert is best known (to me anyway) as the guy who painted the cover for David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs.

* Ben Morse and Kiel Phegley dig into the series finale of Smallville. I watched the last 20 minutes or so, making that the first 20 minutes of Smallville I ever watched; Darkseid possessed John Glover and was killed by a montage, and the part of 10 years of audience expectations vis a vis Tom Welling in a Superman suit was played by a tiny CGI man in the sky.

* Real Life Horror: Jared Loughner, the man who killed six and injured 12 during an attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was found legally insane. I wanted to point that out since the day it happened I jumped to the conclusion that the shooting was politically motivated, and I was wrong.

* Bruce Baugh on Victor Frankenstein and genius youth.

Friendly Fires
“Hawaiian Air”
from Pala
XL, May 2011
Download it from Amazon.com

I’m not a lyrics person, not up front anyway — my initial experiences with a song are almost always going to be solely music-based, perhaps with an assist from the song title. So when I arrived at this standout track off the second album from the shiny-sounding English dance/rock group Friendly Fires, saw the title, heard the galloping beat and the soaring synth wash during the chorus and that little birdlike noise that keeps repeating, I figured “Okay, cool, it’s a song about being in Hawaii and being awed and amazed by the beauty of it all.” Everyone loves a good “transformed by the beauty of my vacation destination” song (what’s up, “Tahitian Moon”?) especially one with as openly hedonistic a beat as this one, so hey, no problems here. Then I finally listened to the record enough to pay attention to those lyrics, and lo and behold, singer Ed McFarlane never gets off the plane. He’s not singing about the water and the volcanos and the trees and the hula and such, he’s singing about feeling someone’s knees in his back and getting stuck in his seat due to turbulence and “watching a film with at talking dog.” The “Hawaiian Air” of the title isn’t the oxygen, it’s the airline. The realization made me chuckle, but beyond the lulz, what a warm, humble, relatable thing to write a big, soaring, epic-sounding dance track about. McFarlane’s voice already manages to pull off the trick of being simultaneously ultra-(R/r)omantic and also really intimate and friendly-sounding; this song doubles down on his preexisting appeal. A real treat.

Prog rock is lambasted for its bombast and excess, but at its best restraint is its true hallmark, along with an ability to lock into a groove and do it to death as much as any of the funk bands that were the monsters of prog’s contemporaries during their mutual heyday. One of my all-time favorite classic-rock radio jams — it counts as one, since like “Sgt. Pepper’s (Reprise)/A Day in the Life” or “Time/Breathe (Reprise)” or what have you its two halves segue together and are never played separately — the combo better known simply as “Long Distance Runaround” puts both qualities on ample display. The first half is all about holding back: After faking us out with a squiggly guitar filigree and rhythm-section churn, the song settles down into a main section characterized by a softly jaunty keyboard part, complemented by the broken-up phrases and clipped delivery of Jon Anderson’s vocals and a joint guitar/bass line from Steve Howe and Chris Squire that drops in a few notes every so often and then cuts off almost as soon as it begins. It’s a restrained approach well suited to Anderson’s lyrics, which sing of the frustration of opportunities squandered and expectations never met, and it creates a refreshing amount of space around each instrument, if that makes sense — you feel present in a room with various musicians contributing every so often, then holding back, content to let things linger in the air. Lyrically, the second half of the song may consist only of nonsense — the taxonomic name of a fish chanted as though it contained the secrets of the universe — but the instrumentation seems to house all the angst lurking beneath the pinched and placid surface of the first half. Essentially a drum and bass duet with Squire overdubbing a rather extraordinary range of approaches to his instrument and future King Crimson behemoth Bill Bruford providing a tight percussion backdrop, it seizes a 7/4 rhythm and exploits it, introducing new and increasingly menacing bass elements every few turns of the screw. It’s difficult for me to hear it and not nod my head along, leaning into the music as it barrels forward.

I’ve probably listened to this song more often after catching it by chance while flipping around my car radio presets than on my iPod, and in that context it shines even brighter, I’d say. Music on the radio often comes through as a wall of noise, filling every available sonic space, sounding emitted rather than performed and recorded. “Long Distance Runaround”‘s dynamics give my ears empty spaces to dart into, and I can “see” the rest of the music from that vantage point as it plays, instead of merely sitting there and letting it blast over me.

* Saving this for when I can really sink my teeth into it: Ken Parille compares the creation stories of Jack Kirby and Chris Ware, the two best cartoonists, for the Comics Journal.

* Speaking of the King and the Journal, TCJ.com has posted the infamous Gary Groth/Jack Kirby interview in which Kirby claims sole credit for most of the great Marvel comics; as I say over at Robot 6, the claims are dubious, the emotion behind them understandable.

* Also at Robot 6, a few brief thoughts on the importance of Kramers Ergot.

* Winter Is Coming rounds up the latest batch of Game of Thrones reviews and recaps. This feature is great one-stop shopping for GoT crit, if you’re looking for such.

* Curt Purcell returns to the topic of religion’s role in Battlestar Galactica. He’s harder on the show than I am, certainly, but he wields his criticism with far more precision than “OMG NO JEEBUS IN MY SF!!!”, which was as far as many reviewers got.

* Great Renee French drawing, or greatest Renee French drawing?

* Hans Rickheit gets his Mutter Museum on and draws medical deformities.

* Is this a new Kevin Huizenga strip, or is it an old one I missed someplace? Either way it expresses a sentiment I’m sure anyone who’s ever freelanced has felt.

* The Rapture reunites with DFA? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* A 33 1/3 book about prog? Sure, I’ll eat that too.

* I was really sad to hear of the death of Macho Man Randy Savage. The man was like an entertainment elemental: Everything about how he looked, sounded, and acted was a delight. Ben Morse reflects on his unique gifts as a pro wrestler, a gig in which he combined mic skills, stage presence, and technical prowess in a way few have before or since.

* Stop your grinnin’ and drop your linen: Kramers Ergot 8! Now from PictureBox, the latest issue of Sammy Harkham’s seminal artcomix anthology will be a tighter, smaller affair, with comics of 16-24 pages each by about a dozen creators: Gary Panter, Gabrielle Bell, C.F., Kevin Huizenga, Ben Jones, Jason T. Miles, Sammy Harkham, Leon Sadler, Johnny Ryan, Frank Santoro & Dash Shaw, Anya Davidson, Ron Rege Jr., Ron Embleton & Frederic Mullally. Watch the video for more.

Kramers Ergot #8: The Trailer from Dan Nadel on Vimeo.

* Speaking of Harkham, he recently sounded off on Chester Brown’s Paying For It in a fashion that was equal parts colorful and insightful. I agree with him about the ending.

* So this is kinda neat: Over at The Cool Kids Table, my friend Megan Morse and I will be talking about Game of Thrones every week — her from the perspective of a newcomer to the material via the show, me from the perspective of a grizzled veteran with a tedious obsession. This week’s opening installment may betray its roots as an informal email exchange, but now that we know what we’re doing, I think it’ll be a real pip.

* Speaking of GoT, George R.R. Martin talks about the development and completion of A Dance with Dragons in fascinating and exhaustive detail. He gives you ample warning if you wanna bail out halfway through the post, just so you know, but he does reveal three of the viewpoint characters and all but reveals a fourth. Very much worth a read if you’d like some behind-the-scenes information about the making of the most infamously delayed SFF book since The Last Dangerous Visions.

* Nick Gazin talks to Dan Nadel about Yuichi Yokoyama and Garden. Nick’s questions get Nadel to flesh out Yokoyama’s personal history and personality a bit, which is welcome.

* Geoff Grogan serves up a process post on his excellent comic Fandancer.

* Michael DeForge joins the crew at What Things Do with a new strip.

* True American Dog is a treasure.

* Matthew Perpetua is right: This footage of Tune-Yards performing “Powa” in April 2010 is absolutely remarkable and riveting. The album this song was on wouldn’t come out for another year, and Tune-Yards was an opening act at a show whose audience had largely never even heard of them…yet watch Merrill Garbus perform with such confidence that you can slowly feel her pinning down the audience, where by the end they’re screaming their approval. Now I understand what all the critical fuss was about last year.

Let me pick up where I left off with Jeremih and Adele the other day. This is why I find myself reaching for the pop radio stations even more frequently than my iPod when I’m in the car these days: It’s a cavalcade of “Holy shit, did you hear this?” moments. There are absolutely any number of awful boring songs on there, from Bruno Mars’s novelty turd about sleeping late to the mercenary house tracks delivered by Enrique Iglesias and Jennifer Lopez. But in between you have these oddball amusement-park rides/sideshow attractions, like Katy Perry and Kanye West dueting about alien anal probes as a metaphor for strange love; or Britney Spears mounting back-to-back comeback hits with choruses that are a gag from Monty Python’s “Hungarian Phrasebook” sketch and simply the word “oh” repeated respectively; or pop’s slattern-in-chief Ke$ha having the sheer cajones to call a song “Blow,” packing not one not two but three entendres into a single syllable. Yes, I even enjoy Ke$ha now, at least as far as the material from her follow-up EP Cannibal goes: When one of her songs comes on I can listen till the end and know that for better or worse I will never get bored, which is a lot more than I can say for Usher.

If you’re detecting a degree of cultural condescension here…well, you’re probably right. I do not listen to this music exclusively, nor in chunks larger than a single at a time more often than not, and as such I’m going to react to this stuff differently than would someone for whom it’s their entire musical environment. When I get tired of the bombast and spectacle I can retreat to the new Wild Beasts record. Radio pop is certainly not a genre I turn to for subtletly: After all, Lady Gaga’s “Judas” is straightforward enough to be passed off as an outtake from Jesus Christ Superstar, yet compared “Hey Baby (Drop It to the Floor)” it’s goddamn Finnegan’s Wake.

I think that’s the problem it’s faced on the charts, more than Gaga fatigue or faux-controversy backlash or annoyance with that herky-jerky beat or the feeling we’ve been here before but better with “Bad Romance”: It’s not 100% clear, in completely idiot-proof fashion, what she’s singing about. Most songs on pop radio today are about wanting to dance or wanting to fuck, and they come right out and say it. “C’mon get me on the floor, DJ what’cha waitin’ for?” “Sex in the air, I don’t care, I love the smell of it.” The booming subgenre of affirmation pop is just as blunt: we are who we are, the show goes on, I’m on the right track, etc. To the extent that pop has employed metaphor at all over the past several years, it’s usually done so with all the complexity of a Madlib: people are fireworks or extraterrestrials, they wear halos, their love is an umbrella. Gaga’s not really doing much more than that in “Judas”‘s love triangle — she’s just using proper nouns instead of regular nouns. But because she casts Jesus, Judas, and Mary Magdalene in the leading roles, suddenly it seems like you’ve got some kind of Da Vinci Code to crack. Does she mean the real Judas? Hand to God, I heard a DJ ponder this aloud. And thus she breaks radio pop’s current custom: In a dance song, you sing about dancing. In a love song, you sing about love. In a sexy song, you sing about sex. In an empowering song, you sing about empowerment. In a break-up song, you sing about breaking up. This leaves very little room for kings with no crowns or “in the conjugal sense, I am beyond repentance.”

I first heard Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” on the local alt-rock station. This is a testament to the radio station (101.9 FM in New York — listen to it for half an hour and chances are you’ll hear something rad, like “Down in It” or the full album version of “Personal Jesus” or Luka Bloom’s cover of “I Need Love” or the by-god lead single from King of Limbs) as much as it is to the song, but it’s the song I’m focusing on here. And despite its being a reasonably big hit on the pop-dance stations, where I’ve also heard it played, you can see how it fits in with the rock narrative: A woman sings her guts out about heartache over live minor-key instrumentation, with a reasonably cryptic metaphor (“rolling in the deep” isn’t as one-to-one the standard “our love is like” formulation) and a sharp edge or two (those chanted high-pitched backing vocals during the chorus, to me the weirdest and therefore best part of the song). The first time I heard it on pop powerhouse Z100 I felt like I should mark the date down in my diary, so unlike everything else on Top 40 stations it was, even the nominally rock- or country-influenced stuff, most of which could conceivably be covered in a “Disney Princesses Live!” stage show. “You gotta hear that Adele song!” I gushed to my wife. “It’s the real deal.”

So I thought until I gave it a second or third front-to-back listen. Then I realized that it was something else besides dark and unique in the landscape and impeccably sung: kinda boring. Verse, bridge, and chorus all basically take a single melodic line and repeat it, revealing nothing new about those notes with each new iteration, and leaving nothing to discover in repeat listens. Adele’s got a terrific blue-eyed soul voice, but in much the same way the Walkmen’s world-weary last-call schtick gets old when that’s all they do, singing every line with voice-cracking intensity leaves the listener with nowhere to go, no emotional arc to follow either upward or downward. You’re just stuck in that same old familiar spot, and you know what familiarity breeds.

By contrast, Jeremih is working with a dramatically inferior instrument. But in his goofball “please grind against me and/or give me oral sex” anthem “Down On Me,” he and his producers work that much harder to keep things interesting. Establishing the basic template for the vocals, a follow-the-bouncing-ball monotone of staccato eighth notes, they quickly work against expectations: Jeremih stops short, letting the final syllable of several lines drop from his mouth like that cigarette that got stuck to Ackroyd’s lip in Ghostbusters. Then they distort his vocals, pitchshifting him way downwards for a repetitive nonsense non sequitur: “BANG BANG BANG BANG.” Then he marvels at his would-be conquest’s body with a weirdly specific comparison (“What, you work at Bally’s? Look at your physique”) delivered in a sleepy mushmouth. Then he heads upward in both energy and register for the autotuned chorus, affecting a weird pseudo-South Asian accent of all things, as anonymous hip-hop “HEY!”s echo in the background. Then 50 Cent returns after a brief cameo in the intro for a verse that returns to the earlier ratatat vocal rhythm before dipping into distortion a couple times to hide cusswords or emphasize how he’s not going to put shit on blast. Then he does exactly that, slowing way down to deliver a few lines about how he’s going to stuff his oversized penis into her potentially too-tight vagina (I am not kidding) as an overdubbed choir of Jeremihs sings “Daaaaaamn….oh-oh-oh aw daaaaaaamn.” Then it’s back to the chorus, only this time it ends with the title phrase done in a chipmunk voice. Then there’s a third verse that sounds more like a middle eight, one that repeats an oddly respectful characterization of the girl’s personality: “Say you independent / get it from your mama.” All the while the music bubbles and tinkles and whizzes along, the beat dropping in and out like someone you momentarily lose sight of at a club only to lock onto again. It is a thoroughly, thoroughly weird song, and as cheesy and gross as its message and mien are, it’s not just an earworm but something I can listen to over and over again and find new things to geek out over. It makes Adele’s respectable pleasure feel shallow indeed.

Surely any Rocky Horror-experienced person can recognize and applaud in Lady Gaga the realized desire of many young people to be publicly weird in their underwear.

* I saw it first via George R.R. Martin himself: Game of Thrones has been renewed for a second season. EW’s James Hibberd talks to some HBO suits about the renewal, ratings, viewership, the length of the second season, the DVD release, and so on.

* I enjoyed the measured reviews of the pilot episode from Sean P. Belcher and Jason Adams. Room for improvement, reasonable confidence that it will.

* Wow: Tokyopop folded. I like Becky Cloonan’s take on it as much as any. A smooth operator with no real interest in publishing got lucky, basically. The film is a saddening bore ’cause we’ve seen it ten times or more.

* Chris Mautner’s interview with Gilbert Hernandez is an absolute monster. Beto publicly walks away from his career-making work. Gutsy and admirable.

* Make sure to check out Alex Dueben’s interview with Daniel Clowes as well.

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force is going on hiatus, so now’s a great time to read the whole thing.

* 30% off everything PictureBox sells until April 30th. Buy that Mat Brinkman print for me, will ya?

* Clive Barker reports that Abarat III draws closer and closer.

* This year’s excellent roster of Stumptown award winners includes Emily Carroll, Zack Soto, Michael DeForge, Johnny Ryan, Bryan Lee O’Malley, and Lisa Hanawalt.

* Matt Maxwell talks Benjamin Marra, Tom Neely, Brandon Graham, Nate Simpson and more in his epic Stumptown con report. He also got Marra to draw goddamn Pinhead.

* Michael DeForge, still great.

* Jonny Negron sighting!

* Ganges #4 appears to be on the way.

* Chris Mautner salutes Mome with a list of his six favorite stories from the anthology.

* I think these two MoCCA con reports from Darryl Ayo and Alex Dueben indicate that despite it being a small, focused show, people’s experiences are very different depending on what they’re there for.

* New Ben Katchor strip!

* I liked this “The Strokes vs. the ’90s” piece by Tim O’Neil very much, maybe the most of any of his music posts.

* Finally:

The pursuit of an Awesome Job is not something I think of as particularly worthwhile endeavor. I say this as a person who likes his job a lot. The idea that there’s a Really Awesome Job that will be totally fulfilling and provide all kinds of meaning and value to your life is not helpful. People deserve jobs where they can use their brains, feel respected as a human beings, and not hate themselves or feel like they are settling. That is a Good Job. Once you have that, you can focus on finding value in the other parts of your life. That’s the shit that matters.

—Kevin Fanning

One of the vocal styles in question comes from band member Noah Lennox, a.k.a. Panda Bear, who sings in starry-eyed, raise-your-voice harmonies that can resemble, at various moments: earnest children baying around a campfire; lonely goatherds calling from hill to hill; some sort of monkish or liturgical concern dedicated to solemnly singing the Beach Boys’ “In My Room” in the apses of Gothic cathedrals; or possibly the way two people might try to sing in harmony on clear quiet nights if they were stranded on South Pacific islands about 200 yards away from each other. Which is to say: Lennox’s vocals are distinctive and hard to hear without dreaming up slightly fantastic settings for them to belong in.

—Nitsuh Abebe, “Panda Bear’s Tomboy is Animal Collective’s Latest Magic Trick”

Friends have been recommending Martin’s books to me for a while, but I chose not to read them (for now, at least), wanting to see if the series could stand on its own and be both comprehensible and interesting to a newcomer. And it is. I probably struggled with identifying the members of the Barksdale crew in the early episodes of “The Wire” as much as I did trying to sort out the members of the House of Stark.

—Alan Sepinwall, “HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ an epic, mature, well-crafted fantasy series”

–Richard Hawley, “The Ocean” live in Holmfirth, October 1, 2009. Unexpected and breathtaking guitar solo at the end.

* Career highlight: I interviewed Daniel Clowes about his new book/old New York Times strip Mister Wonderful for The Comics Journal.

I immediately thought, “I should try to think of who would be the ultimate, quintessential New York Times Magazine reader—a schlubby, middle-aged guy, the kind of guy I would see reading the New York Times on Sunday morning at a café in Oakland—and make him the hero of this romance.”

* I was quite excited to see that my friend and collaborator Matt Wiegle put up a post on his coloring process for Destructor today. Look at this thing, man.

* Mome, Fantagraphics’ long-running anthology and page for page the heftiest alternative/art comics anthology in American history, is calling it quits with this summer’s volume 22. Obviously, I’ll miss it quite a bit. Tom Spurgeon broke the news and revealed the reason why: Editor Eric Reynolds wants to spend his energies elsewhere. The Comics Journal’s Rob Clough interviewed Eric at greater length about his decision. At Robot 6 I chimed in with some thoughts on the series’ evolution, high points, and possible successor institutions, one of which is likely your RSS reader. And Fanta’s Mike Baehr has preview pages from the final volume.

* Searching through my bookmarks for MoCCA reports I recall that I’ve seen a lot of people say that minicomics sales were for shit this year, yet the only in-depth report I’ve got saved is from L. Nichols, who said she had her best year yet (not good enough to come back next year, fwiw, but still). Peggy Burns from Drawn & Quarterly has the best photos. Dan Nadel’s pix are pretty good too. So are Nick Gazin’s.

* Adrian Tomine, Optic Nerve #12, August. Woo! Apparently it contains “Amber Sweet,” which was his very good piece for Kramers Ergot 7, or at least a story that shares that title.

* Tom Brevoort takes the high road in talking about the need for diversity in superhero comics. That takes patience.

* Whoa, wait, Conor Stechschulte is doing an erotic comics anthology called Sock that Zach Hazard Vaupen’s contributing a strip called “Anal Sex” to? People, you need to tell me this kind of thing.

* My favorite part of this Topless Robot interview with Jeffrey Brown about his Transformers parody Incredible Change-Bots Two is the part where he says he liked the Insecticons so much that he’d make them the good guys when he’d play with them even though they were “really” evil. That was such a part of playing with action figures when I was a kid — the way your favorites and fascinations warped the established storylines and continuity established by the TV shows or what have you. I made the Rat King a huge huge antagonist for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; I think they teamed up with Shredder against him. For me, the “main” G.I. Joes weren’t Duke or Hawk or Flint, but Mainframe and Roadblock.

* I’m not even close to having finished this interview with Anders Nilsen, which means it’s quite long, which is a good thing where interviews with Anders Nilsen are concerned.

* Comixology’s Karen Green on comics about animal rights. I love Sheep of Fools; I think I’d die if I saw Sue Coe’s book about the vivisection of dogs. (Via Graphic Ladies.)

* Matt Seneca is posting pages from his graphic novel in progress Affected at its own site.

* The lineup for Floating World’s house anthology Diamond Comics is rock-solid.

* Here’s an exquisitely nerdy post from Tim O’Neil on various points of superhero interest and disinterest.

* All bound for Mu-Mu land: Tom Ewing spent the week blogging about the KLF. The fact that there was a huge dance hit in the ’90s featuring Tammy Wynette singing Illuminatus! references is quite possibly my single favorite crazy thing in the history of pop music.

* Now here’s something you don’t see every day: a lengthy interview with John Carpenter’s musical collaborator Alan Howarth.

* Finally, fucking Axe Cop is astounding.

* Tom Neely thinks the curator of the 100 Euros art show, Antonio de Luca, may have stolen his artwork. Beware.

* Ed Brubaker is relaunching his excellent Captain America series as a period piece called Captain America and Bucky, focusing mainly on the latter, co-written by Marc Andreyko, illustrated by Chris Samnee. I’ll be there like I’ve been there for everything Brubaker has done with these characters and their milieu.

* Dan Nadel sings the praises of Ben Jones and his new Cartoon Network show Problem Solverz. Did anyone do better than me and remember to set their DVRs for it last night?

* Zach Hazard Vaupen started a webcomic called Rusted Skin Collection! It’s smutty and funny!

* My movie-going days are dunzo, but I must say that this comment by Jon Hastings (aka the Forager) and this review by Oscar Moralde have me reconsidering my ambivalence toward seeking out Sucker Punch. Sayeth Moralde: “This critical paroxysm against Sucker Punch is quite possibly the most colossal collective misreading of satire since Paul Verhoeven was accused of being a fascist for Starship Troopers.” Now that’s the kind of statement that’ll make me sit up and take notice. Equal time: Curt Purcell.

* Speaking of “Hmm, I guess I better check that out” pieces, Eve Tushnet loved Lake Mungo.

* And speaking of Curt Purcell, he continues to write eloquently about any number of things; here he is on one of the key aspects of Lost‘s final season.

* Another day, another terrific Comics Grid piece, this time Jacques Samson on anonymity, facelessness, and the “perfect progressive tense” of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #18. You really ought to be following this site.

* Tim O’Shea talks to Jess Fink about (mostly) her fun porn comic Chester 5000 XYV.

* Tom Spurgeon visited the Center for Cartoon Studies, and all you got was this in-depth report.

* Matt Seneca has launched a dedicated site for his comics. Check ’em out.

* Dustin Nguyen draws Spider-Man and his amazing rogues gallery. I love drawings like this, where an artist with a certain aesthetic basically creates a “set” of characters from a particular property. If I could draw, I’d draw shit like this all the time. (Via Agent M.)

* Uno Moralez is drawing things just for me at this point, I’m pretty sure.

* This is what the new version of Rob Liefeld’s Avengelyne looks like. Wow. The artist is Owen Gieni.

* It’s cool to see Gary Panter incorporating the influence of people he influenced.

* Check out lots of Strange Tales II process art at ComicsAlliance.

* This slow, vocoded George Michael cover version of “True Faith” by New Order is one of the stranger things I’ve heard in a long time. That is not to say I don’t like it, though. Certainly the combination of lyric and artist is enormously apt in this case. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Music critics really, really need to stop treating unusual versions of a certain genre as rebuttals to that genre. That goes for critics on both the pro and con side of any given debate, by the way. First of all, genres are built to be broad, or else you’re not talking about genre, you’re talking about formula. Second, when you definitionally remove unusual instances of genre from genre, you’re hamstringing that genre; rock, for example, would be Chuck Berry and Elvis to this day. Third, I just think it makes no more sense to hold up (say) James Blake as someone out to do (say) R&B or soul or dubstep “right,” whether you’re for such an attempt or against, than it would to say Scott Pilgrim was Bryan Lee O’Malley trying to do shojo manga or videogames “right.” Influences may be incorporated without becoming a commentary, positive or negative, on those influences.