"Absolute Beginners" is one of my favorite Bowie songs, and probably one of my favorite songs, period. It is consistently overlooked, which is not to say entirely forgotten - but still, it's a classic and deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as similarly-themed ballads such as "Heroes" and "Time".
If you need to be convinced at this late date about the depth and breadth of Bowie's catalog, remember that this track dropped in the middle of what is generally considered his nadir - 1986, right between the twin supernovas of suck Tonight and Never Let Me Down, and right before the ill-considered Tin Machine period. (Of course, there are still things on both of his mid 80s albums which I quite like, and Tin Machine certainly has its share of admirers.) Regardless: it wasn't even an album cut, but a one-off recorded for the soundtrack to a forgotten adaptation of Colin MacInnes's novel of the same name. Bowie did quite a number of these soundtrack bits in the period, and it's easy to dismiss them en masse because of their abstruse relation to his "proper" discography*. But a track like "Absolute Beginners" is proof that even at his very worst, he was still capable of sloughing off a true gem when the mood struck him.
Like most of his 80s work, there's no "persona" in play here, no conceptual baggage (aside from the film connection) as in his peak 70s or 90s resurgence material. Just a simple love song, almost a silly thing, with a slight doo-wop vamp and some orchestral flourishes. For any other artist this would be a career-defining hit, the type of thing that gets played at high school proms from here to eternity (cf. Seal's "Kiss From A Rose"), but for Bowie, because of his critical reputation as a "serious" songwriter, a track like this is seen as a fluke. I'm hardly a fan of contemporary pop balladry but Bowie pulls it off because, you know, this is the guy who sang one of the greatest doomed love songs ever written, this is the guy who had a huge chart hit with a song called "Modern Love" which wasn't actually about love but about anxiety and social conformity (set to a great New Wave beat so you could still dance to it, 'natch).
So yeah, if he wants to sing an actual, honest-to-God love song, complete with a sweeping chorus and saxophone solo? Well, hell, let's give it a go.
As long as you're still smiling, There's nothing more I need. I absolutely love you, But we're absolute beginners; But if my love is your love, We're certain to succeed.
Simple words, simple sentiment, but never simplistic: it's just a simple, beautiful song, consistently forgotten and underrated. One of these days someone is going to latch onto this song and make it a huge hit - could be some up-and-coming indie chanteuse, a jittery British punk band, or even an American Idol finalist. It's a good enough song that you can easily see it surviving the transposition into any number of other idioms. It's underperformed even by Bowie, never covered, highly obscure: ripe for rediscovery.
* For the life of me I'll never understand the affection for "This Is Not America", which commits the twin cardinal sins of pop music by being both boring and pretentious.
So, I've been thinking a bit about the X-Men lately. This is perhaps my favorite new blog, and is I think of some interest even to folks who have little actual interest in the X-Men themselves. Recapping every mainline X-Men title from the 90s, and many of the spin-offs and associated books, highlights two things primarily: 1) the books were by and large incredibly repetitive and 2) they were also overwhelmingly bad.
Now, let's think about that for a minute. The X-Men were the #1 franchise in comics for two decades, only falling off in recent years due to the unexpected resurgence of the Avengers line. The X-Men as individual characters and as a general concept is popular enough that it was able to survive not just the loss of its founding father, Chris Claremont, in 1991; not just the loss in 1992 of some of the most popular artists in mainstream comics history - creators whose popularity had enabled them to reorient the entire line to suit their whims in the early 90s, a reorientation that included getting rid of Claremont in a Soviet-style putsch; but the books were able to thrive as the #1 franchise even though the books themselves floundered through a seemingly endless succession of meaningless, ill-received events and useless spin-offs. Sure, people have fond memories of the Age of Apocalypse - and it was pretty good, as these things go. But, you know, that's one storyline, and when weighed against, say, Onslaught, The Phalanx Covenant, Operation: Zero Tolerance, The Twelve . . . well, you see, it starts to add up after a while.
It seems as if every 12-18 months back in the mid-to-late 90s you'd have a big new relaunch with new creators who'd do a gushing Q&A in Wizard bragging about how they were going to "shake things up" and get fans excited again. Mark Waid, Joe Kelly & Steven T. Seagle, Alan Davis . . . all of them started big but soon fell down the rabbit hole of forgotten or truncated storylines, lost plot threads, obvious editorial interference, and increasing irrelevance. And yet one thing remained constant: it always sold. Always. Even when the rest of the comics industry was struggling to survive, the X-Men always sold - even when competition was fierce in the height of the early 90s crossover & Image armageddon, the X-Men always sold. People bought the comics no matter what.
Although the X-Axis website is no more, Paul O'Brien continues to read just about every new X-Men book as it is released and review it for his current website. O'Brien is one of the best writers on mainstream comics currently active, and that is primarily due to the fact that he manages to be both a canny industry observer and an unrepentant fanboy - a neat trick considering that the two goals are not usually complementary. In recent months O'Brien has focused increasingly on the fact that the books are violently floundering. The flagship books are still popular, but the franchise isn't #1, it hasn't been #1 for long enough that the tumble can't be perceived as a temporary fluke, and despite the fact that Marvel still thinks the franchise is capable of supporting many more books than seem healthy in the current retail climate, no one is interested in secondary and tertiary X-books anymore. When sales were up and it didn't matter what they put in the books so long as they shipped, they could keep the illusion of momentum going strictly on the strength of sheer popularity. With that automatic popularity having dwindled, it's hard to hide the lack of momentum and the chronic wheel-spinning that characterizes even the most well-received modern X-books.
So, I'd like to talk some about why this is, because as one of the most popular franchises in the history of comics I think there is some significance to be found in their current dire straits. So I'll throw this one out there: based on the above preliminary thoughts, what is your perception of the current state of the X-Men? That's a pretty wide question, so let's see where that takes us.
Friday, June 26, 2009
News You Can Use
I haven't done a lot of music writing for other venues recently - truth be told, after four or five years of writing music reviews and doing music journalism, it started to get really repetitive and I burnt out. Plus, with everything else that's been going on, I haven't had a lot of time to devote to non-academic writing - to which this blog's spotty publication history will attest. However, I have been easing my way back into it lately, and I contrited a handful of entries to Popmatters' big 10th Anniversary feature, spotlighting the most memorable and important (which does not necessarily mean "good") discs from 1999. I love the music of the 90s - not to sound like a grumpy old fart, but dammit, in many respects this current decade was a big come-down from the last one. If you're under 25 maybe you'll have reason to disagree, but it's been kind of a bleh decade for music.
Anyway, I wrote some of these you might be interested in. Scroll down the page for the appropriate bits:
A couple of them are rush jobs and I had no idea how they'd end up reading, but none of them are terribly embarrassing. (OK, maybe the Leftfield one.)
Thursday, June 25, 2009
You Have To Watch Them In Order To Get The Full Effect
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Although at the time it seemed like an unaccountable tragedy, in hindsight it makes a grim kind of sense that The Woods was Sleater-Kinney's final album. (Although they've been careful to specify that they went on "indefinite hiatus" instead of merely just splitting - purposefully leaving open future possibilities - for all intents and purposes they're broken up.) It sounds like a final album: it's got that air of finality to it that you associate with albums like Terror Twilight, Abbey Road and Strangeways Here We Come. These people knew, even if maybe they hadn't articulated it in as many words, that this was probably the last time they were going to be able to pull this off. Last chance to put it all together, last opportunity to say what they needed to say, what could only be said with the folks in that room. There aren't going to be any encores so you might as well blow the P.A.
The album debuted to uniformly good if occasionally baffled reviews: great album, they seemed to say, even if it doesn't really sound that much like Sleater-Kinney. But that was part of the problem. Sleater-Kinney 2.0 (i.e., the version everybody knows, with Janet Weiss on drums to replace original drummer Laura Macfarlane) had released four universally acclaimed, universally beloved albums of tight power-pop-punk, getting regular write-ups in unlikely venues like TIME magazine and generally receiving acknowledgment from all corners that they were one of, if not the best, rock combos in the world. But these albums, if all great, were at the same time slightly frustrating. And here's where I take some shit from S-K's hardcore fans: if you're honest, you'll admit that by 2002's One Beat they had fallen into a rut, dare I say, a formula. There's one thing to be said for consistency, another entirely for repetition, and the slight changes to the formula with every new album had started to seem cosmetic. They were just so good at what they did that it was easy to lose sight of the fact that they were beginning to spin their wheels. You can demur if you choose, point out that One Beat was a harder, more melancholy album; that All Hands on the Bad One was frothier, more "classic" pop; that The Hot Rock was more "indie" less "riot grrrl", etc. But these arguments are academic.
They were smart enough to know that they needed to change or die. But there was also something else in the mix besides the understandable desire to mix things up - a desire that, by itself, could have easily been satisfied with the facile introduction of, say, a synthesizer player or perhaps an acoustic tour. Listening to The Woods it's immediately obvious what that extra element is: they're pissed. But "pissed" is too small a word. They'd been pissed before - One Beat is a pissed album. The mood isn't just angry, it's dark, it's depressed. The light touch that had maintained the group's overriding tuneful alacrity despite the occasionally mordant or political subject matter was gone. In its place was a single-minded, terrible purposefulness that verged on monomania. All the little pieces of quirky cuteness that defined their earlier albums had been obliterated: no "Rock and Roll Fun", no "Little Babies", no "Milkshake and Honey". This isn't a fun album by any stretch of the imagination. The emotional palette has been constrained, and in light of this it's easy to see why the album was received with some ambivalence by their fanbase: again, it's not a fun album. It's an album that consists of ten songs on the general theme of failure, and all the emotions that accompany it on the Kübler-Ross spectrum - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Fuck Korn's Saturday-morning banality, or Slipknot's cartoonish buffoonery: this is hard rock distilled from real, honest-to-God anguish, the sound of three women collectively raging against the dying of the light. I can't go on, I will go on.
So it's a hard album to get one's head around. It's not an album to put on for tooling around the house. Otherwise, you might have trouble seeing past what most critics fixated on as a Led Zepplin pastiche, and might generally think the album was an uncharacteristic, one-note downer, respectfully filing it on the shelf but rarely taking it down in favor of hearing All Hands on the Bad One again. Given my history, it might seem odd that such a resolutely old-fashioned slab of hard-rock might rate so highly on my personal list. This isn't some genre-defining milestone or an example of any kind of post-millennial avant garde, or even, heh, pseudo avant garde. Sonically, this is the simplest album represented. But moreso than any other album on this list, and I'd wager, more than any other album of the last decade, The Woods is simply harrowing.
It feels sorrowful in such a clear, unambiguous and true fashion that it leaves the listener feeling as if he or she has been well and truly gutted. It's a rare feeling, such genuine anguish. There's a little bit of it on Nirvana's In Utero - especially some of the acoustic demos released on the box set (I'm not a big Nirvana fan but I generally regard Cobain's solo, unaccompanied demos to be superior to the studio versions of his songs). The Manic Street Preachers' Holy Bible comes close, particularly on tracks like "Die in the Summertime" and "4st 7lb". (Tellingly, these albums were both recorded right before the songwriters' suicides.) But it's hard to find ready comparison because, unlike most examples of dark pop music, there's nothing theatrical or histrionic on display here. It's real, it's earned, it's heartbreaking.
I booked my ticked Packed my bags Flight is leaving Our time has passed. I'm tired of knocking on a door that just won't budge, Locked out of the engine, It's a wheel that you have spun But who's to say I don't have wings?
The problem is that the "wings" which present the only glimpse of hope at the end of "Steep Air" fly for the briefest of durations - that is, the four seconds it takes to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge in "Jumpers".
More to come.
Best Music of the "Aughts"
10.The Field - From Here We Go Sublime 9.Spoon - Gimme Fiction 8.The New Young Pony Club - Fantastic Playroom 7.Girl Talk - Night Ripper 6.The Roots - Phrenology 5.LCD Soundsystem - Sounds of Silver 4.The Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Show Your Bones 3.Radiohead - Kid A 2.Sleater-Kinney - The Woods 1.Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot 1, 2 Introduction
