A Simple Thought, Expressed Succinctly

When the creative teams for DC's 52 relaunches are announced, we should arrange a mass drinking game for every "TBA" therein. DC will be responsible for any and all hospitalizations for alcohol poisoning.

SIR

Iron Man 2.0 #5

You gotta give them props for being honest with us: whatever semblance of a story Iron Man 2.0 may have been telling in its first four issues is completely unimportant compared to the possibility of scratching at a small corner of this month's giant crossover. War Machine says as much, "wow, I was fighting someone else and doing something completely different, and then a crossover happened, so here I am with some other guys who've never appeared in my comic before doing something completely unrelated." The problem is that, as uninteresting as Fear Itself has proved to be so far, the hook for this particular crossover is still a billion times more interesting than whatever the hell Iron Man 2.0 has been doing for four issues.

(Don't worry, I know what it's been doing, I've read it. So far it all adds up to a strangely deaf attempt to ape the tone of Fraction's regular Iron Man. And since Fraction's regular Iron Man is already kind of a boring book at its very best, Iron Man 2.0 comes out like a faded photocopy of a VCR manual.)

I was one of the few comics bloggers who was strangely unmoved by the recent Iron Fist reboot - I just don't care that much about martial arts in comics under the very best of circumstances. Given that, you have a pretty steep road to climb to get me to want to pay attention to Iron Fist, and what I read seemed oddly static and talky for a martial arts adventure. But this actually was pretty fun. If in hindsight a surprisingly large percentage of pages in The Immortal Iron Fist was expository set-up, this is where we get the pay-off: some nice, fairly original characters and concepts added to the sandbox for later writers and artists to play with. In this case, Nick Spencer decided to check in and see what was going down in the Seven Cities of Heaven during Fear Itself; which involves getting the Immortal Weapons involved in the hunt for one of the Serpent's giant hammers; which involves Titania and the Absorbing Man; which I'm down with as well; which has fuck all to do with War Machine and is basically pressing the "pause" button on a series that's not yet five issues old. But maybe this is a good thing? Because honestly the way it was heading Iron Man 2.0 was really boring and superfluous. The regular storyline might not suck so bad when they take it off anesthesia in a few months. Maybe it actually gets some blood pumping with this definitively gratuitous crossover action.

The Mighty Thor #2

I've written a great deal about how boring Matt Fraction's run on Thor has to date been. There is no doubt: he is leaning heavily on talented artists to fill sketchy plots with "epic" scenery, seemingly oblivious to the damning fact that even in hardcover the story will still take less than 20 minutes to read.

I've been on an old comics kick lately - lots of bronze age stuff, some 80s and 90s books as well, maybe some stuff I'll write about, maybe not - and it never ceases to amaze me how long it takes to read any average issue from 1985 or 1995 compared to almost any example from 2011. The change is easily explained: after Quesada and Jemas took over Marvel in 2000, they did away with thought balloons and third-person narrative captions. Not all at once, but slowly and more-or-less permanently. I still don't know, and really have not seen a single compelling reason, why these changes were pushed through so thoroughly, but the more I think about it the more I am fully convinced that this shift was undeniably deleterious to the long-term quality of the line. It's a question of economy: captions and thought balloons were an extremely efficient way of communicating a large amount of information in a surprisingly concise package. Back in 2000 $2.25 for 15 minutes of reading was a good deal. No amount of inflation will make $3 or $4 for 5 minutes a good deal for anyone.

The good news is that, as of this issue, Fraction seems to be getting ever so slightly more comfortable with the character and the format. This issue took more than 5 minutes to read - and there's a fair amount of content in here. We are left with the promise of a truly awesome Thor / Silver Surfer clash, which is something we haven't seen in decades. I already like this new relaunch better than I did the entirety of Fraction's previous storyline. It's fairly obvious that before he was padding for time before Fear Itself hit, laying the groundwork for that crossover with what was essentially an extended prelude. It's nothing short of scandalous that they expect to get off charging so much for so little, but maybe one of these days they'll figure out that people might just be inclined to buy more comics if they thought they were actually getting a reading experience commensurate with the exorbitant price, and not just ten or twelve Roger Dean album covers with some sparse lettering across them. Letting writers write more may have resulted in some talky, ponderous and boring comics back in the day, but it also offered an opportunity for more characters to shine by allowing an insight into every character's thoughts and feelings. Some of what has been lost might conceivably be dismissed as "cheap melodrama" by readers more accustomed to contemporary storytelling, but dramatic irony and purple prose were the grease in the gears of mainstream comics for at least fifty years. Throwing out many of the tools that allow the comic book reading experience to be distinct from any other entertainment medium is extremely short sighted, unless your only goal is to transform your properties into adaptation-friendly forms that can be easily transported into other mediums. Any contemporary issue of Avengers should illustrate this point well, with the writer actually resorting to reality TV debriefing scenes in order to convey exposition and character beats that could have been much more succinctly delivered through captioning.

A book like Fraction's Thor could definitely benefit from increased density. Thor is usually an ensemble book, and its cast can be very large - basically, the entire realm of Asgard, plus anyone else from Earth who happens to be near the action at any given moment (such as, for the moment, the town of Broxton, Oklahoma). There's only so much plot that Fraction can display in any given issue because the widescreen format he's chosen (literally widescreen, filled with long double-page spreads). There's only so much character development he can provide in the context of relentlessly epic action spreads. This issue was a bit more talky than usual, and I take that as a good sign: it actually took a few more minutes to read. Maybe with a bit more density the book might actually live up to some of its perpetually frustrated potential.

Secret Avengers #13

Marvel botched this title really badly, and what we're seeing here is some pretty aggressive water-treading in the form of an action-packed crossover tie-in. This was also written by the above-mentioned Nick Spencer, and appears to fit in either directly before or directly after the action in iron Man 2.0. As with that issue, this is a surprisingly good (not "great," but solidly good) and surprisingly focused tie-in story, even if it (again) has fuck-all to do with the stories that immediately preceded it.

(The problem with Fear Itself seems to be that the story itself really is nowhere near as involved as people were led to believe, hence a lot of people continually complaining that they don't "get" what it's really "about." For months we were "treated" to teaser images of all our heroes being faced with images of their greatest, most profound fears. It is reasonable that most people expected that the story would involve many of these heroes being brought face to face with their greatest, most profound fears in some fashion. But no, really, it's just about a bunch of bad shit happening all at once that the heroes are too busy to clean up in an organized fashion. A bunch of really strong people get giant magic hammers that make them even strongerer. So yeah. That's it: they're afraid because shit just got real. Which, eh, isn't really the story they advertised, but whatevs. How this is any real-er than Secret Invasion or Secret Wars II or Maximum fucking Security is not really clear. Giant hammers and Nazi robot? Oh my, the pulse, it throbs with suspense.)

Secret Avengers hasn't worked because the stories being told were nothing like the stories people wanted to read in an Avengers book with this cast of characters. As written, Brubaker's Secret Avengers was essentially a Steve Rogers book, with a loose cast of affiliated Avengers as tertiary characters being called as the mission required. The first arc, with the whole of the team on Mars, was something of a red herring: every subsequent story has gone out of its way to provide as little actual Avengers action as possible. So finally we get to see Avengers Avenging, and while it's better than what preceded it, that's not saying a lot. There's a bit of a ham-fisted conversation between the Beast and someone who is obviously supposed to be a stand in for John Lewis, a former Freedom Rider-turned-Congressman who is also an omega class mutant with the power to turn the Lincoln Memorial into a giant Nazi-killin kaiju. All well and good, and there was some good action bits in there, but obviously "fill in." Kind of sad that the fill-in actually works better than the regular series has up to now. Maybe the Warren Ellis run will be better, but I still don't think it will be anything like what people had in their minds' eyes when the book was announced over a year ago.

Still Alive

Blogging will resume imminently. Been a busy couple of weeks, but I do have a couple things on the hopper.

In the meantime, this is what I've been up to:

Epic!



(This is part one of a two part discussion of Game of Thrones, the second part of which will is featured here at The Factual Opinion.)

It should surprise no one at this late date that I have read my fair share of fantasy novels. However, I have not read George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series. Perhaps an explanation in is order.

When I was just a little shaver coming up in the world I split my reading time pretty evenly between sci-fi and fantasy. (I'm going to type sci-fi and if you've got a problem with you can just suck it.) My tastes in sci-fi were, even at the time, hopelessly retrograde. I had a teacher in high school - we all had this teacher in high school - who was really, seriously into sci-fi and used to tease me for being stuck in the mud with my Heinlein and Asimov while he was jazzing out to Lucius Shepard and Bruce Sterling. He actually gave me a couple books when I graduated - Shepard's Kalimantan and The Difference Engine by Sterling and William Gibson. I finally got around to reading the former a few years back and it was pretty tepid, and the one time I tried to read The Difference Engine I just about had a stroke because it was so damned dry. It's still there on my shelf, unread, next to my autographed (and similarly unread) copy of Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon's The Chrome Borne. (True story: Lackey & Dixon are the nicest people you could ever want to meet, and if you're ever in northeast Oklahoma you should stop in and say hi. I have no idea if they remember me fondly at all.)

Fantasy is an easy genre for a kid to like, but all the same more problematic than sci-fi. Sci-fi can always fall back on (at least the appearance of) a patina of sophistication and rationality. It's the Literature of Ideas! I loved fantasy but at the same time I was always deeply skeptical of the genre. Even as a kid it was pretty easy to tell that some of that shit was just not right. Fantasy, after all, is the Literature of LARPing! I will say for clarification that while I have read books (plural) by Piers Anthony, I have never read a Xanth novel. I have never read read Terry Goodkind, L.E. Modesitt, or R. A. Salvatore, but I have to my eternal shame read a Dungeons & Dragons novel. (In my defense it was actually pretty good.) However, with the exception of rereading some Tolkien in the middle of the decade, I haven't read any "high" fantasy in over a decade. There is one very simple reason for this, and if you know fantasy at all you'll understand exactly why I walked away from the genre: The Wheel of Time.

Epic fantasy is a strange beast, but even in the world of epic fantasy The Wheel of Time is a remarkable and sui generis specimen. The genre is notable for its extreme depth of field: every epic fantasy series (and all epic fantasy comes in series) walks in Tolkien's footprints, and Tolkien's primary virtues as an author were his extreme attention to detail and unparalleled sincerity of affect. That is why his books endure even after decades of awful fandom and mediocre movie adaptations. I'll stand by The Lord of the Rings even after all the shit that has been perpetrated in its name - damn fine books, and the ending of The Return of the King still chokes me up every damn time. (Don't talk to me about those fucking movies!) So every epic fantasy series is long and long and long, composed of multiple thick door-stops of cheap newsprint, published every couple of years like periodical drugs, and dissected with the ferocious loyalty of Thomas de Quincey rushing the doors of his favorite opium den. There's money to be made ad infinitum from nerds forever chasing that dragon, trying to somehow reclaim that first high, pretending as if their arms weren't already covered in the scabby purple track marks of narrowed expectations.

I'd be lying if I didn't say that the type of people who read these books was, at a certain point, a major factor in my having become seriously disinclined to read more of them. Besides Tolkien, the only series to which I ever gave my heart fully was Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books. I loved those books partially because of the way they gleefully dismantled so many of the genre's hoariest cliches. (The protagonist was a physically deformed rapist, for crying out loud.) A lot of hardcore fantasy fans seriously dislike Donaldson for just those reasons. But then against my better judgment I got sucked into The Wheel of Time. It it not without good reason that I say "against my better judgment": I had a number of friends who kept pushing the damn things on me over the space of about a year. I resisted and resisted, made a couple false starts but then finally got sucked in. The problem was that the books themselves were awful things in which to get sucked, totally aside from any discussion of quality, simply because they never ended. The first book in the series, The Eye of the World, was published in 1990. The series' author, Robert Jordan, died before the books could be properly completed, but the series will finally be completed in 2012 with the help of an assistant hired by the estate to flesh out Jordan's final notes and outlines. The last volume of the series will be the fourteenth volume. The story when completed will be larger than Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle, and that's the second biggest non-genre fiction series that comes to mind. (The longest is most likely Balzac's Comédie humaine, which stretched over 95 finished and proposed novels and short-stories.) You could fit two and a half Prousts inside the Wheel. (Maybe you could actually find Marcel somewhere in the Wheel if you looked hard enough, nibbling on a madeleine and swinging a sword against rampaging trollocs.) Check this out: when all is said and done, the whole thing will top out over four million words. Nerds are masochists, not to mention slaves to habit.

I freely admit I loved the books in the beginning. They are great fun, and even if the characters are about as transparent as saran wrap the stories themselves can be quite novel. So over the course of many months I kept reading and kept enjoying myself, until around book five a torpid kind of lethargy set in . . . book six was a dutiful obligation . . . and finally in the middle of book seven, after reading literally six chapters in a row of different characters I couldn't remember all arriving in some vaguely defined spot in the woods whose location I couldn't remember without an atlas, I gave up. I don't know if I literally threw the book against the wall but I wanted to, real bad. I was done. No more! No more epic fantasy! Because that shit . . . never . . . fucking . . . ENDS. Life is too short: in the years since I gave up on reading fantasy, I actually read War & Peace, which really isn't all that difficult if you've hacked your way through The Shadow Rising.

It was around that time that Martin's Game of Thrones first came onto my radar. The first book was actually hand-sold by a very enthusiastic bookstore clerk at The Other Change of Hobbit in Berkeley, California. This was back in 1999. That book, the titular volume of A Game of Thrones, has been sitting on my shelf, unread, for 12 years. In that time i have encountered many, many people who have urged me to give the books a try. Give it a shot, they said. Read to page 80, they said. (Everyone says that, "read to page 80"!) Die-hard fantasy fans love it. Even a few friends of mine who have no real interest in contemporary fantasy have found themselves surprisingly devoted. But I had been burnt so badly by the Wheel that the thought of ever diving into another fantasy series just made me want to die a little on the inside. I am not feeling the whole "fantasy" thing so much these days, for whatever reason . . . maybe there's a statue of limitation regarding how long one man should be expected to care about elves and kobolds?

And now HBO has saved me the trouble of deciding whether or not I eventually wanted to commit to Martin's series (not as voluminous as The Wheel of TIme but still quite large, and still frustratingly unfinished). If a slavish adaptation on TV's premiere network for prestige serial drama can't sell the books, then the books aren't worth being sold, right?

I am not unconvinced but still somewhat nonplussed. I didn't absolutely hate these first two episodes, and I am firmly on board for the rest of the season (it's pretty to watch and well made, if nothing else, and I'd rather watch fantasy on TV than a crime procedural or a singing competition) . . . but based on the story I see, I can't for the life of me imagine why these characters and these situations have resonated so strongly with so many readers over the last fifteen years. Either the charm of the stories themselves is becoming obscured by the difficulties of adaptation, or the stories are less compelling than the manner in which they are told on television - I don't know the answer, and unless and until I read the books myself I will be in no position to judge one way or another.

There is also the fact that, frankly, I am sick to death of the default medieval setting for epic fantasy. Anyone who writes this type of fiction is still essentially playing in Tolkien's toolbox, and even the most clever inversion (such as Donaldson's books) is still just a clever inversion of an instantly recognizable and intimately familiar archetype. So we see the castle, the swords, the furs and the rusty armor, and we already know going in what the stakes are and what the general shape of the story is going to be. Genre is a phenomenon that trades on familiarity: people love The Lord of the Rings so they want more books like that but different, preferably for the rest of their lives.

The reason these series become so big is that the fans want extreme immersion. It's undoubtedly a byproduct of publishing evolution: series became bigger and more elaborate over the last few decades since the original publication of The Sword of Shannara. Shannara in 1977, moreso even than Tolkien, was the spark that lit the epic fantasy boom. Writers and publishers were rewarded for providing "more but different" all down the line, until the emphasis on "more" ran straight into the creation of electronic word processors. Looking at the history of genre fiction especially it's easy to see how the invention of word processors made the act of physically producing reams of regrettable prose far, far easier than it had ever been in the age of pen or typewriter. (Remember manual correcting fluid?) Perhaps there has been something of a backlash in the wake of The Wheel of TIme. Everything I have seen on the matter indicates that Martin is very much adamant about not wanting to needlessly inflate his series too far past the point of absurdity. With his hand firmly in the back pockets of a generation of fantasy readers this is an admirable show of restraint.

So here we are once again in a society that vaguely resembles medieval Europe, complete with struggle over hereditary kingships. Oh boy. You know you're in fantasyland (in more ways than one) when the audience is immediately invited into ethical complicity with royalty. Again, this is Tolkien talking: Tolkien was a professor of medieval history and language. He was a philologist of the old school. We are not. I do not automatically respond to hereditary authority with deference and respect, and I am actually resentful of any author (or director or screenwriter) writing in the year 2011 who takes it as a given that my sympathies will automatically lie with the king without giving me a damn good reason. Shakespeare was a man of his time writing historical propaganda, alive in an era when absolute monarchy was all the rage - he gets a pass. But don't forget: not 46 years after the peaceful death of Good Queen Bess, Charles I was executed for treason by a rebellious parliament.

This is especially important to remember now, of all times, when so many eyes are focused on another "spontaneous" outpouring of naive enthusiasm for a royal wedding. We are perpetually attached to our fairy tales of noblesse oblige. We want to believe that the marriage of William and Kate is a grand romance and not the wedding of two social parasites propitiously timed to distract a weary body politic from a series of regressive, crippling cuts into the social welfare state on the part of David Cameron's penurious austerity measures. These medieval fantasies appeal to us in moments of societal upheaval and uncertainty. Who wouldn't rather be a serf under stolid, wise Eddard Stark than a contemporary citizen in our current burnt-out shell of a democratic republic?

There is a profound lack of imagination at the heart of the popular fantasist's persistent refusal to reiterate any vision of society besides the most reactionary kind of feudalism. I like Geoffrey of Monmouth as much as the next guy, but the reason he wrote the stories he wrote was because he was a propagandist for the house of Normandy in the years immediately following the conquest of 1066. Tolkien's masterwork was an incredible synthesis of a thousand years of English (and Welsh, Irish, Germanic and French) heroic tradition. But the fact that we're still writing and reading all these stories that are content to begin with Tolkien's presets intact is deeply distressing. (And yes, I know that there's a lot more kinds of fantasy out there than can be dismissed on these grounds - but those aren't the kind of fantasy stories that Hollywood pays hundreds of millions of dollars to realize.) I like fantasy, and I've even got a big old soft spot for epic fantasy, but I'm not twelve anymore and I would like to believe that there is something in the genre of popular fantasy fiction that will not insult my intelligence.

That Was It

Speaking of the Strokes, New York's finest continued their comeback at Coachella (after recently releasing their first album in five years), although the tracks from their breakthrough debut Is This It drew the most elated audience response. "Hard To Explain," "Last Nite," "The Modern Age," "Someday," "New York City Cops," and "Take It Or Leave It" all sounded so fresh, so relevant, so freakin' cool, it was mind-boggling to realize that these songs were recorded (prepare to feel old) TEN YEARS AGO. The Strokes truly set the blueprint for the indie-rock revolution of the 2000s; many baby bands playing Coachella '11 owe them a huge debt, and a huge amount of respect. And their Coachella concert, with sunglassed-at-night, trucker-hatted singer Julian Casablancas in fine surly form and Albert Hammond Jr.'s distinctive guitar as tinny and angular and, well, Strokes-y as ever, was a welcome reminder of their influence and impact. 04/18/11

I saw the Strokes at Coachella in, I want to say, 2002? They were playing in the middle of the day on the main stage, a very short set composed of the entirety of Is This It with, I want to say, two new songs. One of those songs was "Meet Me In The Bathroom," which later appeared on Room On Fire. I remember standing there in the crowd at a fair distance and enjoying the set in a mild enough fashion - they played their songs with an admirable degree of precision, but they seemed a bit lost on a giant festival stage. It must be said, however, that no one really looks good in the midday slot at a festival.

Listening now to Is This It, I am struck as much by the simplicity of the music as anything else. I'm not a musician, I want to stress: it's been a decade since I held a guitar for an extended amount of time, and even longer since I beat a drum. (I was a moderate duffer.) But listening to their earliest songs, the purposefully sparse style is nevertheless impressive. There aren't very many guitar parts on the album that you couldn't play with a basic knowledge of power chords and some simple scales. Give me some tablature and I could probably figure out the rhythm guitar for "Last Night" in ten minutes. But it sounds pretty damn nice all the same.

The production is crisp and naked in a way that positively screams New York: no lush Los Angeles atmosphere, no British warmth, everything is bright and even tinny, very trebly with not a lot in the way of bottom end. If the album sounds like anything, it sounds like Television's Marquee Moon. To my ears that album has one of the most fascinating sounds of any rock album ever recorded. Television maybe weren't the best songwriters (I'll get pilloried for that in the comments) but they got by on a hypnotic degree of atmosphere and some truly stunning arrangements. At a certain point I don't think it even matters whether or not the members of the Strokes are or were as well-versed in rock history as a lot of critics (including myself) always gave them credit for being. Either the Strokes knew Television and the New York Dolls or they heard all the bands who were influenced by them - the result is a wash. Anyone with half an ear for music history can identify where the disparate parts of the sound came from, either first-, second-, or third-hand. Milo (in the comments to the last post) was right to point out the Cars as an influence - I had never made that connection before, and I quite like the Cars. But I suspect that someone, somewhere along the line - perhaps producer Gordon Raphael - had to have heard Marquee Moon. All the details, right down to Julian Casablancas' omnipresent fuzzy vocal filter standing in for Tom Verlaine's croon, are just so dead on that it would stand as an amazing coincidence of convergent evolution if the Strokes had arrived at the same sound without any prompting.

The Strokes have been around as a cultural force for ten years now. Their new album really isn't much to write home about but they've been met by rapturous crowds everywhere on their current tour. People like the Strokes an awful lot. This is funny, for anyone with a good memory of the last ten years. Is This It was hot for a while but their second album - the aforementioned Room On Fire - was a disappointment, commercially if not critically. Their third album, First Impressions of Earth, received negative reviews and was met with wide indifference. by 2006 people were writing the band's obituary - maybe they had influenced a great deal of the music that followed, but they seemed trapped in amber themselves, of their moment but unable to move beyond a certain image suspended in time.

Personally, I quite liked Room On Fire. For all the complaints of it being a retread of their first LP, I thought their sophomore effort was an improvement in every way. For one thing, the songs were better. There were a number of standout tracks on their first album, but it feels overlong at 30 minutes. Room On Fire, however, is strong throughout and ends with the one-two punch of "The Way It Is" and "The End Has No End," two of the best rock songs of the last decade. "The End Has No End" also gets credit for the fact that the video is an unannounced and completely sincere sequel to 2001:



Nice!

Anyway, I liked their second album, but I loved their third album. First Impressions of Earth was the type of album I didn't think the Strokes had it in them to make. It was different - longer, with many types of songs, denser arrangements and heavier riffs. I listened to it a lot when it first came out and I still go back to it. I thought, this was a fantastic album, this is change, this is the kind of stylistic evolution that people like to hear. And then no one else liked it. It got some polite notices from the usual suspects but a savage 5.9 from Pitchfork. The air went out of the balloon, the band drifted apart. Albert Hammond. Jr. went off to do his awful solo stuff. (I saw him open up for Bloc Party when Bloc Party was touring behind A Weekend In The City. Completely innocuous but instantly forgettable.) Casablancas released a solo album too.

What i didn't understand at the time was that, regardless of my reasons for liking their third album, the band was in a torturous bind. Normal rock bands are expected to change, to evolve and to grow. We all know what's supposed to happen because we all know the critical shorthand: Pablo Honey becomes The Bends becomes OK Computer; Please Please Me to Revolver to The Beatles. We expect our great bands to be smart bands, filled with smart people who want to stretch and who chafe at any self-imposed limits. Even when they don't quite make it we applaud the effort anyway (see: Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys). But the Strokes couldn't play that game. They had not rose to popularity solely by virtue of an acclaimed debut album. They were popular because of what they represented at a certain point in pop music history: they were rock stars, they had that swag. The moment they had to try, the moment they needed to either put up or shut up, they lost a bit of their glamour. The difficult second album? The arduous third album? These were not the kinds of narratives that you could stick on a band like the Strokes, because their whole appeal was anti-narrative. They were cool. They didn't sweat. The moment we caught them working at it, the spell was lifted.

It is an inescapable fact that the Strokes are wealthy children of privilege. This makes them, by any stretch of the imagination, fairly despicable creatures. It's hard not to hate them just a little bit when you learn that Casablancas met Nikolai Frature at the Lycée Français de New York, for instance. There is a class element to their appeal: their image is composed entirely of signifiers pointing to their class status. Urban petit bourgeoisie could see in the group something to which to aspire, an image of cool made of smoke rings, Pabst Blue Ribbon and po-faced Members Only jackets. The Strokes didn't invent hipsters, but the existence of the Strokes crystallized the category of "hipster" as a concrete object, either for aspiration or derision.

Look around record stores and takes a glance at the people buying contemporary rock records - not Nickleback or Coldplay, but the good stuff: Spoon, TV On The Radio, the National, Neko Case, Fleet Foxes. Who's buying the good critically acclaimed and interesting rock records? Middle class white people. College students. NPR listeners. Intellectuals. Contemporary rock has dropped out of the mainstream and into a solidly upper-middle-class socioeconomic niche. Listening to rock now isn't as simple as plugging in your FM radio, it's a lifestyle choice. It's fashion. It's contingent. It's identity politics. The idea of a rock star coming up now and making a bald-faced populist appeal without sacrificing their credibility is simply laughable. Credibility matters, but credibility these days isn't tied to integrity, it's tied to the consistency of your brand.

I can't lay all these sins at the Strokes' feet. There's a ton of good rock music being made right now that doesn't fit neatly on any kind of hipster fashion axis. But rock doesn't occupy anywhere near the central position in our culture that it once did. (Hip-hop doesn't either, anymore - good hip-hop has become just as much of a niche as good rock. It's all balladry, dance pop and R&B. That's the cultural center, because that is the kind of music most easily marketed towards children.) Perhaps that was inevitable - nothing lasts for ever. Established forms always grow in complexity and increased self-referentiality as they approach obsolescence. I hear the Strokes and I can't help but think that the supposed "renaissance" of rock in the last decade was also a definite restriction. The bands can say: now we know who the audience is. It's not kids, it's not casual listeners who don't get the allusions and post-ironic genre signifiers and the post-post-ironic-but-not-emo-new-sincerity. It's people who can dress like us. Find a band that dresses like you and follow them. Dress in casual blue jeans and deceptively expensive cardigan sweaters. That's it.