Random Notes



I received a pair of interesting and very thoughtful comments to Monday's review of Apollo 18 - interesting and thoughtful enough that I thought it was worth the time to repost the conversation and my replies for the benefit of anyone who might not other pay attention to the comment section.

The first comment, from my most loyal reader moose n squirrel (seriously, we should all be so lucky as to have such a close reader!), presented as a rebuttal:

I have to say, your take on TMBG is striking me as more than a little simplistic at this point. What you see as "nerdiness" or "a refusal to grow up" I see as a refreshing ability to work outside the boxes that music critics (and wannabe critics) typically try to cram artists into. There's a tendency on the part of critics - who, I'm sorry, are some of the dumbest fucking people on the planet when it comes to talking about music - to try to only discuss music in terms of what label they can slap on it (the other tendency they have is to talk about music entirely in terms of how well the band's previous album sold, or how trendy their style of music is, without actually talking about what the actual fucking music sounds like). TMBG is a hard band to label precisely because of their ability and tendency to hop from one genre to another,, even within the same song, which has gotten them dismissed as "quirky" or a novelty act. Because their lyrics are smart, they're called "nerds." Because they write fantastic pop tunes, and because they've already been relegated to the "quirk"ghetto, they've been dubbed "childish," because we've decided that music that's fun, but that's too complex for stupid adults to understand, should be relegated to children

You imply that the band doesn't take itself seriously, and I've got to say, are we listening to the same band? Yes, TMBG has a sense of humor. But the jokes they tell are about disease, decay, addiction, depression, war, divorce, paralysis and death. Much of "Fingertips" itself is positively funereal. A while back in your review of Lincoln you dismissed "The Pencil Rain" as a bit of nonsense, which made me scratch my head, because that's as "messagey" as anything the Johns ever wrote - it's an obvious, sledgehammer-subtle antiwar song.

You hold out "Narrow Your Eyes" as one of their best songs, because... why? Because it's a "real" song, and it's a "real" song because... why? Because it's about a traditional subject (love/break-up) written in a traditional style with more-or-less traditional instrumentation? (If only they cut out the accordion - then it'd REALLY be "real"!) That's a pretty strange, blinkered use of that term. Is it that that song is "real," or that you have a nice, grown-up-sounding category you can push it off into? "AHA! Flansburgh is singing a 'break-up' song! CHECK!"

"Ana Ng," "Kiss Me, Son of God," "See the Constellation," "I Palindrome I," "Birdhouse in Your Soul," "The End of the Tour" "Destination Moon" "The End of the Tour" - I guess none of those are "real" songs then. But they are fucking amazing songs, and they are much, much better songs then "Narrow Your Eyes," both because they're better-written and more original and because they're still about real emotions. For whatever otherworldly trappings those songs may have, they're about loneliness, exploitation, obsession, death, delusion and longing, approached in a way that's smart, funny, and sometimes deeply affecting.

And then, on a similar note, from Jebediah-P:

Like some of the others above, I find your take on "authenticity" short-sighted. Why should They Might Be Giants feel the need to be "authentic" if their songs have little relevance to the world outside themselves? There is no reason for a song to be "real" if it's about a personal topic of little social relevance. A great deal of legitimately terrible music has been produced in the name of such “authenticity”. They Might Be Giants' greatest strength is their whimsy, their refusal to make vanilla songs despite having the competence to do so.

Your dismissal of "Fingertips" disregards an important factor of what makes the band unique: their desire to be several bands at the same time. Most They Might Be Giants albums feature songs that vary a great deal in composition and subject matter, sampling the whole pop spectrum. "Fingertips" is the ultimate expression of this. It also strikes me as a much more personal song than "Narrow Your Eyes". "Narrow Your Eyes" is about a breakup. "Fingertips" is about imitating every song on the radio and making fun of them at the same time. It's a song for showing off how you’re smarter than everybody else. It's silly and obnoxious and much more authentic for They Might be Giants than a song without jokes or vocabulary words.

"Real"songs imploy far more odious gimmickry than "Joke" songs. The "gimmick of no gimmicks", so to speak. Reality is not a breakup song. To imply this, to dismiss the goofy as unimportant, is miserablism par excellence.

Make no mistake, I appreciate this series of posts quite a bit. It turned me on to Join Us and helped me better appreciate some of the material from TMBG’s back catalogue, especially John Henry. It’s just that this post has exposed an unfortunate undercurrent in those previous. An inability to see the forest for the trees.

To both of these comments, I will say first and foremost that I sympathize with your position and, to an extent, cede the point. My problems with They Might Be Giants are my own, the result of living with this band for - what, twenty-three years now since I bought a copy of Flood? - and having committed a large part of their catalog to memory. Make no mistake: whatever my conclusions my be, I still have all of these albums memorized backwards and forwards, at least up through Factory Showroom. After they leave Elektra I have to admit my interest wanes precipitously, for a number of reasons. I don't think, until Join Us, they had produced an LP even half as good as anything from the Restless or Elektra years. The music the produced in the intervening years struck me as vaguely shrill, somewhat wrong-footed in a way that their first albums never were. I am certainly open to the possibility that the only real difference was myself - I changed, my tastes changes, whatever - "it's not you, it's me."

There's an old saw that gets trotted out every now and again (although, much less so now that so much of Western culture has been set on a course of terminal infantilization), actually a verse from the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 13:11:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I hate that quote, and I think it encapsulates a perfectly rancid view of maturity, of maturity as preparation for seriousness and bloody-mindedness to the exclusion of all else. We live in a wonderful world where we can be perfectly functional adults who pay taxes, kiss ladies and prosper while also maintaining comics blogs. It would be the height of hypocrisy to accuse They Might Be Giants of failing to conform to some notion of High Seriousness, when I myself flee from the unpleasant drudgery of day-to-day life by posting pictures of Lea Thompson in skimpy dresses.

And yet . . . there is nonetheless a part of me that long ago became dissatisfied with the band for precisely those reasons. There's a difference between putting away childish things and simply wallowing in them. The last time I saw They Might Be Giants was in 2009 - actually, New Years Eve 2009, just before the calenders switched over to 2010. It had been exactly ten years since I had seen them last - in 1999, at a street fair in downtown Denver of all things - and I had no idea what to expect. They were playing two shows that day: an afternoon matinee for the kids' music, and then an evening rock show. So I was expecting, you know, a rock show.

But that wasn't what they gave us. I had remembered them being a pretty fierce live act, but this time around, not so much. They had a lot of gags, a lot of schtick - hand puppets, toy drum kits, confetti canons. They brought out the extremely annoying John Hodgman to do some really, really unfunny and very much protracted bit about a rich person. And then - even though they had played a kids' matinee earlier that day for the express purpose of playing their kids' music for their kid fans - they played a pile of songs from their kids albums anyway - to a room full of adults, let me stress. And all through it I kept rolling my eyes, hoping that they'd burn through the jokes and the schtick and actually, you know, start the show, get down to the business of playing some of their songs. And they never did - it was just joke after joke, and I got tired of sitting their waiting for them to play two songs in a row without interrupting the show for a bad gag. To say nothing of a bad gag, it left a bad taste in my mouth.

You're not going to find a bigger booster of those first six albums than me. Despite my misgivings - which are completely my own - those albums are a part of me and always will be. If you've been reading along you've seen me discuss just how deep their dark streak runs - all the way back to their self titled debut, although I'd argue that their bleakest and most profoundly unsettling album is still Lincoln (although John Henry, as we'll see when I get around to it in the near future, certainly gives it a run for its money in terms of unvarnished misanthropy). I also see a lot of the more manic, chipper, and unabashedly goofy material from their earliest albums as being unpleasantly shrill and occasionally even sinister. What I get from their more recent albums, however, is the same kind of manic, chipper, and unabashedly goofy material with all the hard edges sanded away.

It was such a pleasant surprise to put Join Us onto the stereo and actually hear Linnell call someone a dick - not because I'm twelve years old and like hearing grown-ups cussing, but simply that it seemed to be a kind of "all clear" sign to those of us who had been left in the cold by their childrens' material. And sure enough, if you look at the liner notes and read the lyrics for Join Us, it's all about death, death, death - including a surprisingly, refreshingly tacky visual pun about the Dakota apartment building in New York. It's not a perfect album but it is a very good album.

So yeah, the best answer I can provide is that my prejudices are my own, and I acknowledge the shortcomings of my own perspective. I've been frustrated by the band for a long time - it's not that I wanted them to "grow up," so much that from my perspective it seemed as if their state of permanent arrested development had begun to sap their vitality. It's that edge, the razor-thin dividing line between cynical misanthropy and cheery fortitude, that defines their best music. Their more straight-forward songs - "Narrow Your Eyes," "End of the Tour," even "You Don't Like Me" off Join Us - all take advantage of our expectations regarding what They Might Be Giants songs should sound like, and are that much more effective for confounding our expectations of glib cleverness. They're the codices that make all the rest of their strange, contradictory, frustrating, wonderful music legible.

And though I once preferred a human being's company



Apollo 18

I would argue that Apollo 18 is pound-for-pound a much stronger album than Flood - more focused, more precise, with better hooks and the first stirrings of a real, muscular rock sound. It's definitely a confident album. If Flood was tentative, defined as much by its missteps as by its successes, Apollo 18 represents a band far more comfortable with their larger canvas afforded by dint of being signed to a subsidiary of one of the world's largest media conglomerates. All things being equal, this is one of the very strongest records in their catalog.

Perhaps you can sense a "But . . ." coming.



If you know They Might Be Giants, you can probably guess exactly where this is going. There's one giant pink elephant in the room for any discussion of Apollo 18 - a moment where the album takes a step away from being a stone-cold five-star classic and instead becomes something far weirder and less immediately palatable. That moment is, of course, "Fingertips," a 4:35 long collage of 21 song fragments - that is, fragments of hooks, verses, or sound effects from hypothetical songs. Conceptually, it's a nod to the Residents' 1980 release Commercial Album, albeit even more manically demented. It's something that only a hardcore fan could truly love - but since most They Might Be Giants are fairly hardcore, this hasn't usually been a problem. Really, TMBG aren't Pearl Jam: they're not a band you can sort-of like in a vague way. You either like them a lot or not at all, and if you like them a lot there are good chances you really like them a lot, and therefore will find even their most pointedly unpleasant experiments interesting and even lovable. The problem begins at the moment when their reliance on the good-will of their hardcore fanbase becomes a commitment to schtick for the sake of schtick. You can see the first stirrings of subsequent dissatisfactions on "Fingertips."

But with all of that said, I'm still one of those guys who knows all of "Fingertips" backwards and forwards, from "Everything is Catching on Fire" all the way through the incredibly grating "I Walk Along Darkened Corridors" (one of the all time best shower singing songs, simply by dint of the fact that it can in theory loop forever on that same repeated phrase). The fact that they didn't end the album with "Fingertips," that they appended another song, "Space Suit," to the end, and the fact that "Space Suit" is one of the band's all-time best compositions - all of these are reasons why They Might Be Giants remain one of the most simultaneously rewarding and frustrating bands in town. They're gifted songwriters and incredibly capable musicians who remain wedded to juvenilia as a way of life. It never quite reaches the level of regrettable sophomoric humor, because they don't have it in them to go blue and their music is never less than resolutely good-humored. But that lack of edge certainly creates as many problems as it solves - even when being nasty might be funnier than being snarky, they can only very rarely pierce the veil of Maya that separates their songwriting from sincerity. (Of course, those moments when they do manage to pierce the veil are always worth noting.)

From the very beginning of the album, there is a noticeable emphasis on rock - they had always been a rock band, obviously, but they had only rarely ever rocked before, if you can see the difference. It's worth noting that the Apollo 18 tour was their first with a real live drummer, and it's fairly obvious that many of the drum tracks on this album were written with a live percussionist in mind (or, at least, were written to approximate the effect of a live percussionist, which isn't an effect for which they had ever particularly strove until then). This trend would come to fruition on their next album, John Henry.

Once you move past the de rigeur observation of "Fingertips," it's really hard to pinpoint anything resembling a lapse throughout the whole album. "Dig My Grave" and "I Palindrome I" provide a suitably energetic and even - heavens! - aggressive introduction to the leaner, meaner They Might Be Giants. The vaguely glam rock feel of "Dig My Grave" is echoed later in the album on "See the Constellation." The core of the album is a remarkable run that begins after the strangely heartfelt "Mammal" (about, you guessed it, mammals), with "The Statue Got Me High," continues through "The Guitar" on through fan-favorite "Dinner Bell" (about, you probably didn't guess, Pavlov's experiments in conditioned reflex behavior), and finally climaxes with the remarkable "Narrow Your Eyes." The reason why "Narrow Your Eyes" is perhaps the highlight of the entire album is that this song represents one of their first attempts at writing a "real" song, a song without any kind of cutesy gimmicks or narrative conceits or schlocky jokes. It's just a song about a guy who can't get off the bus because the bus stop reminds him of his ex-girlfriend. It's got a strong melody and one of Flansburgh's most affecting vocal performances. It is one of their best songs, full stop.



If you've been reading these reviews as I've been posting them, you've probably already picked up on the main theme of my assessment of the band's catalog: the tension between cloying juvenilia and grown-up songs. This might strike many of you as unnecessarily pedantic, not to mention besides the point: after all, isn't the point of They Might Be Giants precisely in the fact that they steadfastly refuse to grow up, that they insist on writing songs about science and puns long past the point when they should by all rights have graduated to writing about love and politics and all that jazz? There is certainly a part of me that is sympathetic to that criticism. After all, one of the benefits of listening to their albums after all these years is their uncanny ability to recreate the emotions and sensations of being younger, of growing up. Even if you weren't a kid when you heard these albums for the first time, they retain the ability to put you into a kid's mindset - with all that entails both good and bad.

For me, I can't hear Apollo 18 without thinking about both the 1992 LA Riots and Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld books. I bought the album on April 29th, 1992 - it had been released in March but since I lived in the sticks it was a while before I heard there was a new album and was able to get into town to buy it. (The now-defunct Wherehouse Music store in Reno, Nevada, in case you were wondering.) That was the day of the LA Riots, so when we got back to town from Reno the TV was full of images of Southern California in flames. This was also the spring I first read To Your Scattered Bodies Go, and I specifically remember many long hours spent reading To Your Scattered Bodies Go with Apollo 18 on the headphones. Good times.

They Might Be Giants have proudly worn the badge of the Worlds' Biggest Nerds for decades now, and it's part of who they are as musicians - hyper-literal, ready to make bad jokes at the expense of good songs, unable to pass up the opportunity to mug for the camera. The problem is that there are a handful of moments scattered throughout their history where they show that they are capable of doing more than that. They're not "Weird" Al: they don't just do parodies, they aren't just immaculately turned-out jokesters. They can write real songs about real people, emotions and experiences. That they choose not to do so very often forces their audience to make a choice: either you accept their "serious" songs as inessential stylistic outliers next to the main business of being bratty and precocious fiftysomethings, or you listen to songs like "Narrow Your Eyes" and "The End of the Tour" and "Pet Name" and realize that - for whatever reason - they're consciously holding themselves back. And that's the point where their jokes become just a little bit less funny, when you realize that the conscious decision to remain in a state of arrested development has done as much to limit their development as it has to advance their career.

Next: Man vs. Machine


(out of five)

SIR

Red Lanterns #6



It must be great to be a space crook in the DC Universe. The Green Lanterns haven't done anything but fight other people with colored rings for, seriously, half a decade. There are all sorts of other groups of colored ring teams out there who, likewise, do little more than fight other people with rings - or, you know, straight-up murder people by the truckload. (I still don't understand what exactly Sinestro was trying to do - if he's such a fan of law and order - when he gave magic wishing rings to thousands of serial killers.) So if you're trying to knock over a bank on Neptune, chances are good you can get away with it as long as the Green Lanterns are too busy fighting the Chartreuse Lanterns that week.

People have always used the police metaphor to describe the Green Lantern concept. If ever there was a time when the metaphor fit, it hasn't been for a very long time. All the Green Lanterns do now is A) fight each other, B) fight people who used to be Green Lanterns but who aren't any more, C) fight other people with differently-colored magic rings, and finally D) fight people who are pissed at their bosses, because their bosses are dicks who've been fucking with people for billions of years. So if you're a crook who isn't A) a Green Lantern, B) a former Green Lantern, C) a differently-colored Lantern, or D) someone who already got screwed over by the Guardians, you can pretty much assume you're in the clear. Because while the Green Lanterns pretty much have a lockdown on magic-ring related crimes, they don't seem interested in too much else. (And, really, they don't even have a great track record when it comes to magic-ring crimes, either.) The police metaphor doesn't work unless you want to believe in a cop show where the cops only chase other cops, former cops, cops in other precincts, and then have to spend the rest of the time trying to get rid of people who have a grudge against the Police Commissioner. Basically, it sucks to be a Green Lantern.

What I like about Red Lanterns is that the book does a great job of getting to the heart of why the current Green Lantern status quo is so gosh-darned silly. This is a book ostensibly about a group of aliens who have magic wishing rings empowered by anger and hatred, a group of badass monsters who want to deliver bloody justice to murderers and tyrants across the universe. In reality, the book is really about a dozen people sitting around this barren planet and yelling at each other about how angry they are, in between taking deep swims in an ocean of magic blood (not a metaphor for puberty, there is a literal ocean of magic blood) to clear their heads. This is pretty much the same formula that worked like a charm for Rob Liefeld, only at least his books actually featured some of the characters occasionally doing something. Here, there's this alien guy, Atrocitus, and he's angry because someone stole the body of this dead midget he'd been carting around so he could yell at (again, this is literally what is happening: Atrocitus is pissed because someone stole Krona's corpse from where he had it stashed before he was done yelling at it). And the problem is because Atrocitus pretty much has a case of 24/7 roid rage he is just incredibly paranoid and keeps yelling at everyone because he thinks they're trying to get him. And all his cronies hate him because he robbed them of their free will when he made them into magic-ring wielding rage-aholics.

So if we're going to keep up with the cop-show analogy: Red Lanterns is what happens when a bunch of rogue cops who really hate the guys in charge of the precinct want to bust out on their own and bring some raw justice to the streets, vigilante style, but they hold their meetings in the precinct rec room and can't really move past just yelling at each other about HOW MUCH THEY HATE CRIME, and BOY DO I HATE CRIME and they're lifting weights on the machines and pumping iron and sweating and talking about HOW MUCH ASS THEY'RE GOING TO KICK but really they never actually get around to leaving the rec room, let alone swinging through the neighborhood as vigilante badasses. They do a lot of meth and just get more and more addled. Then six months pass and you realize they're still just yelling at each other, and it's awesome, because it's terrible.

Winter Soldier #2



This is a terrible comic book that somehow managed to convince the world that it wasn't just an unoriginal pastiche of Robert Ludlum, John LeCarre, Ian Fleming, and Tom Clancy cliches pasted together from a hobby-shop kit. It's that last one that burns, right? Those who pride themselves on their taste in spy fiction probably suck the wind through their teeth like they got hit in the balls by a football at the mention of Clancy, but given the degraded state of contemporary fiction you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between good espionage fiction and crap. It's all just hard men who have to make hard choices to fight the bad guys in a world of endless grey. Except it's not a world of endless grey, it's still just the same superhero shit wrapped up in black leather - the bad guys are just the same Cold War leftovers with machine-toting gorillas in tow, and they even call America "the Great Satan" - which, you know, unless the Red Ghost is secretly Persian, that's not exactly something a Soviet would have said since, you know, the Soviet's weren't really big on religious language. (Seriously, that is just some sloppy, fixed-by-Wikipedia-in-30-seconds shit: Iran has called the United States, and sometimes Great Britain, the "Great Satan" in official government communications for a long time now. It's their thing. Are you telling me you can't tell Russians from Iranians?)

So Bucky's alive and that's great because he gets to spend all his time fucking the Black Widow which, uh, OK. I guess that's something you can hang a plot around? I think this book needs to go at that premise full-tilt - basically, the superhero comic for Henry Miller fans, Bucky travels around the world fucking women in skintight leather and then being emotionally callous to them.

I guess if you really like spy books - or, excuse me, not spy books, basically just Mack Bolan novels with a little bit of dirt over the camera lens - this is what you've been waiting for. Butch Guice is really hitting far above his weight class here - you can tell he's going for Steranko but he doesn't have 1/10th the design skill that Steranko did on his worst day. Basically what we get is a bunch of randomly jagged panels, a la late period Byrne, with human bodies splayed randomly across the panel gutters. And then put in a few close up shots of people that look like they were traced from Jim Holdaway - seriously, can we not talk about the debt Guice owes to Modesty Blaise, or does that go in the same box as "Michael Jackson magically turned white," shit we're not allowed to talk about in polite company even though everyone knows it's true?

It's an - at best - mediocre book with delusions of grandeur, as if being grim and quiet and having muted colors was somehow enough to dodge the fact that this is one of the most derivative books I've ever read in my life. (The colors are the best thing about the book, hands down.) I thought Brubaker had reached his Nadir of derivativeness with his Daredevil run, but I guess I was wrong: now he's playing his own greatest hits back at us, daring us not to notice that the cloth has grown so threadbare that we can't even pretend not to see the scaffolding anymore.

The Descent of Man



(Longtime readers and Twitter followers might recall that this is a post i've been promising - threatening? - to write for at least a few years. There's not a lot of new material here but it might be new to folks with a less-than-encyclopedic recall for late Bronze age continuity.)

Evolution is the process of gradual biological change in large populations over multiple generations through incremental changes enabled by natural selection. Evolution is not, as is often supposed, random - but it is blind, without any set goal other than the perpetual survival of species. There is no "purpose" to evolution, no ultimate teleological endpoint to which the improvement of species tends - in fact, the very idea of "improvement" is a qualitative judgment wholly alien to the process of selection.

Except that this isn't how evolution works in the Marvel Universe.

Oh, don't get me wrong: natural selection works just fine, and the large majority of natural history on Earth 616 occurred almost identically to our Earth. (There are some differences, many of which can be explained by recourse to the mystical manipulation of the Elder Gods on the primordial Earth, but that's mostly a separate story involving Set and Gaia and the destruction of the dinosaurs.) But for the most part, natural history on 616 proceeded very similar to our own, until sometime around the point where - in our own fossil record - the ancestors of Homo sapiens first split off to form the primate branch that would culminate in our own species. Somewhere along the line of Nakalipithecus or Ouranopithecus, Earth was visited by the first host of the Celestials.

The Celestials tampered with these distant human ancestors and planted the seeds of later development. The Celestials had identified man's ancestors as the most advanced creatures on the planet, with the most potential for the kinds of improvement which would lead to the eventual development of civilization. So they tampered with proto-man, and inserted into his genetic code the source of a three-way divergence in human evolution, a split which culminated in the creation of three distinct branches of Homo sapiens - the godlike Eternals, the savage and genetically unstable Deviants, and the mainline of "normal" humanity. In addition to these three main branches, the Celestials also planted the seeds of a fourth, later development - the creation of Homo superior, mutants.



It is important to remember that in our world evolution is not and cannot be teleological. This is just one reason why eugenics in the "real world" has always been a bad idea. Putting aside every other consideration, it's just terrible science, an idea invented to justify racial distinctions that have no basis in physiology, and which if pursued to its logical extreme would tend towards achieving the opposite of the desired goal - that is, the weakening and attenuation of the organism through the gradual pruning of hybrid diversity. But in the Marvel Universe, human evolution is and has always been teleological: humans on Earth 616 have a roadmap in their genes implanted by 500-foot tall space gods for mysterious purposes. For whatever reason, the Celestials decided that humanity needed to exist and needed to exist for very specific reasons. (It's worth noting that Earth isn't the only planet they altered in this manner - the Skrulls and Kree are also the products of ancient tampering.)

The reason why the Marvel Universe has such a strange origin story at its center is actually quite simple. In the mid-1970s Jack Kirby returned to Marvel from DC and proceeded to create a number of new series for the company, many of them in the same vein as his increasingly weird and highly eclectic output for DC. One of these series was The Eternals, an epic sci-fi story in the mold of The New Gods, predicated on an ancient war between the Eternals and Deviants reaching back to the very dawn of human life on Earth. The series, like much of Kirby's output, was influenced by then-current cultural trends, specifically, the popularity of Erich von Däniken's Chariot of the Gods and the "ancient alien" theory. The series was not considered a success in its time, and a series of creative compromises between Kirby and Marvel editorial ensured that the series' 20-issue run ground to a stop in the throes rapidly diminishing returns.

Perhaps the most significant element in the series failure was Kirby's inability and / or disinclination to properly place the series within the context of the larger Marvel Universe. In the series' early run, there's very little indication - other than throwaway mention of SHIELD and the Thing (of the type which could easily have been inserted at the behest of editorial) - that the series actually takes place in the Marvel Universe. There's little in it that explicitly contradicts continuity, but the very premise of the series was such that, if the series was to be considered "canon," it would change the complexion of the entire line.

Perhaps it might seem like something of an obscure point, but consider the fact that once The Eternals was officially part of continuity, everything in the Marvel Universe had an origin. Every human character - from Spider-Man and the X-Men all the way down to the Punisher - was part of a massive genetic experiment on the part of ancient space gods that literally spanned the whole of human history. The question of whether or not The Eternals could be considered canon was the subject of heated debate during the early months of the series' run. The series' editors were initially hesitant to confirm or deny. Kirby himself was, to all appearances, extremely nonplussed by this reaction. While it is certainly true that he was one of the architects of the system that eventually became known as the "Marvel Universe," he had never shown himself to be spectacularly invested in the propagation of the Universe concept for its own purposes. He was perfectly happy to have a shared universe as long as it allowed him to draw Thor fighting Galactus, but he wasn't invested in the concept in the way that those fans who later became the second generation of Marvel creators were.

The idea of the Universe being a higher goal and purpose in and of itself separate from the considerations of individual creators and their series was probably very unsettling for him. His 70s run on Captain America was very much set in the context of the Marvel Universe, but that was a long-running series with an established history and supporting cast. He didn't invent the Falcon, for instance, but he was perhaps the best writer the Falcon ever had. But the idea of making every idea fit into this singular context was alien to his catholic creative tendencies. Certainly, there could have been no expectation that his 2001 adaptation would ever be folded into the Marvel Universe - and yet, it eventually was, to the extent that Marvel still makes occasional use of the rectangular Monolith from Kubrick's film (something that, according to Tom Brevoort, they've never even bothered to run past MGM). Even Devil Dinosaur was eventually made to fit into the Marvel Universe.

If there was any lingering doubt in the late 1970s that The Eternals was destined to remain a part of the Marvel Universe regardless of its creator's wishes, this doubt was annihilated by Roy Thomas. Thomas devoted a full year and a half of his run on Thor to folding the The Eternals into Marvel history, a series of stories that culminated in Thor #300, wherein the united pantheons of Earth confronted the Fourth Host of the Celestials by animating the Destroyer armor in an attempt to save humanity from the judgment of Arishem. (There's some other interesting stuff in there as well - Thomas wasn't just invested in incorporating Kirby's work into continuity during this run, but also the Niebelungenlied and its various permutations, along with establishing pantheons of god to correspond to all major Earth mythological systems. It is thanks to Thomas, for instance, that the Marvel Universe has an underutilized version of Vishnu who gets together and has lunch with Odin and Zeus. Thomas' influence on Grant Morrison has yet to be widely acknowledged.) From that moment forward, the Eternals, the Celestials, and all their baggage, have been an integral - if oft-ignored - cornerstone of Marvel's cosmology.

Next: Mutatis mutandis

Why is the world in love again?



Flood

Chances are very good that the first time you ever heard They Might Be Giants, it was something off this album. Chances are even better that if you own only one They Might Be Giants album, it's this one. There's even a good chance if you're roughly my age that your first exposure to They Might Be Giants may even have been on Tiny Toons Adventures, where two songs off Flood were featured as music videos - "Particle Man" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)."

If you need any more proof that the 1990s was a strange decade, reflect for a minute on the fact for a brief moment during the administration of George H. W. Bush the full weight of Warner Brothers' corporate promotion machine was bent towards ensuring that They Might Be Giants sold a lot of records. They took six minutes of airtime on a nationally broadcast children's cartoon and gave it over to free advertisement for a weird New York post-New Wave synth-rock duo.



I have conflicted emotions about Flood. I was one of those folks for whom Flood was their first exposure to the Johns. Although it didn't take me long to track down the rest of their extant discography (which was, at the time, all of three albums - although Miscellaneous T was actually released a few months after Flood, if I recall correctly), this holds pride of place as their first, for me and many others. The problem is that although it isn't hard in hindsight to recognize why exactly this album hit the way it did, it's also easy to discern that one of the reasons it did so was by sawing off many of the sharp edges that had defined their early albums. It is worth noting that Flood has significantly fewer tracks about divorce and despair than Lincoln.

In exchange for the anguish of their second album, we have instead perhaps the apogee of their pop songwriting skills. Excepting "Istanbul" (a cover of the Four Lads' song of the same name), the album presents a series of endlessly catchy pop ditties written in a variety of genres and presenting an incredible stylistic range. Their eclecticism and ability to sell even the most bizarre premise through enthusiasm and panache. Listen to "Letterbox," "Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love," "Twisting" - you'd be hard pressed to find three more different songs, and yet each of them work exceptionally well. I would argue that the variety of sounds on Flood make it at times a difficult listen - it's so disparate, so diverse, that it can be exhausting.

And it doesn't all work. "Your Racist Friend" is still a cringeworthy attempt at - what? sincerity? an "issues" song? Not even a salsa breakdown can save it. I've never been able to get a handle on album closer "Road Movie to Berlin," either. They usually have really strong instincts when it comes to the final song on their albums - "Rhythm Section Want Ad," "Kiss Me, Son of God," Spacesuit," "End of the Tour" - but "Road Movie to Berlin" has always felt flat to me, like a sketch that was never fully developed.

The core of the album, to me, has always been what I've informally regarded as the "working" trilogy - "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair," Hearing Aid," and "Minimum Wage" - three songs dedicated to how much it sucks to work in an office. The personal anxiety of the first two albums has mutated into a more generalized anxiety about wage slavery and the small daily humiliations of working in forced intimacy with people you don't like and with whom you exist in a state of mutual contempt:

More coffee for me boss /
'Cause I'm not as messed up as I want to be /
I've turned off my hearing aid /
Don't say the electric chair's not good enough /
For king-lazy-bones like myself.

One of the band's strong suits has always been their ability to immortalize the most petty and seemingly inconsequential moments of a person's life in musical amber. They have a great deal of empathy for losers and perpetual runners-up - and there is no doubt that their attention to the overlooked ignominies of everyday existence helped cement their relationship to a fanbase seemingly self-defined by their obsession with embarrassment and an inaptitude for daily life.



When you break the album down on a song-by-song basis, it remains enduringly, almost preternaturally strong. It's much easier to pinpoint the tracks that don't work or somehow fall short than to list the songs that remain stone classics - "Whistling in the Dark," "Women & Men," "We Want A Rock." If you've ever heard the album you've probably got one or all of those songs in your head right now. If the album seems slightly patchy in hindsight, a tad scattershot, less focused and more manic than necessary, it's entirely possible that these defects may be entirely of my own imagining.

I suppose my hesitancy regarding the album comes more from familiarity than anything else. I've heard Flood so many times that I could almost certainly recite the entire thing by heart. It's not an album I pull down for pleasure much anymore. Maybe there are only so many times you can hear an album before you can't hear it anymore. Maybe I need to wait a few years before I can ever listen to it again.

Next: Mission to Mars


(out of five)