The Kids Are Mediocre, Albeit Not Utterly Without Charm

Earlier this week I wrote a post at the Atlantic where I talked about the game Desktop Dungeons and how its creators had discovered that, in order not to be sexist, they had to work really hard at it. The intention to be non-racist/non-sexist isn’t enough, because the default tropes used to imagine fantasy game settings and characters are racist and sexist. It takes imagination and effort to overcome that.

So Kieron Gillen and James McKelvie definitely deserve credit for the extent to which Young Avengers pushes back against decades of accumulated superhero whiteness and sexism. The team includes a gay couple (Wiccan and Hulkling), and a Hispanic child of a lesbian couple (Miss America),along with two other white guys (Marvel Boy and Kid Loki) and a white Hawkeye).

Perhaps more importantly than their numbers, the marginal characters aren’t treated as marginal or other or weird…and the decision not to treat them as marginal or other or weird is nicely linked to the supehero milieu. Hulkling is a green-skinned shapeshifter from another planet; Miss. America is a brown-skinned superhuman from another dimension. Hawkeye is sleeping with the alien Kree Marvel Boy, Wiccan is sleeping with the alien Skrull Hulkling. Amidst all the intricate incoherence of the Marvel multiverse (which Gillen and McKelvie gleefully toss about without much explanation for novices), a non-White superhero as the strongest member of the group or a gay romance as part of the proceedings hardly seems worth mentioning (except, in the later case, as a vehicle for the requisite quotient of intra-team melodrama.)
 

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So Gillen and McKevie set the worthy goal of not being sexist, racist assholes, and they followed through with intelligence and some subtlety. Thus, the comic is good. QED.

Alas, would that it were so. Not being racist and sexist is hard work, but there are other bits of making a worthwhile piece of art too, and as regards them Young Avengers is less successful. In particular, the artist Jamie McKelvie is, even in the context of crappy mainstream super-hero art, not really any good. His figure drawing is clumsy and haphazard; his poses are stiff when they’re not default; his faces are not particularly distinguishable. But where he is really abysmal is in his layouts, which are consistently confusing and cluttered. Especially in his fight sequences, it’s often almost impossible to figure out what’s happening — and there’s no visual panache (as in say Bill Sienkiewitz) to justify the incoherence. A Chris Ware inspired page is almost laughably incompetent, with tiny figures boucning around in an ugly floorplan that manages to be at one and the same time bulbous, blocky, and boring, the whole thing ringed by uninspired mainstream action sequences, the color scheme of which contrasts garishly with the wannabe-Ware floorplan pastels. Descriptions of the action are set off in a kind of map legend and keyed to numbers because diagrams are what the latest hip comics artists are doing and McKelvie would like to be up to date and hip with all his heart. It’s sort of sweet, if you cover your eyes and don’t look.
 

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Gillen is more competent than that; his dialogue is fun and snappy and pop-culture-aware in a way that seems, if not precisely true to teens, at least true to the sorts of things teens might read. When Kid Loki asks Ms. America why her former super-team broke up and she says, “Musical differences,” I snickered. Same when Hawkeye comments that she knew there was some world threatening catastrophe because Wiccan wasn’t answering his texts every 30 seconds. It’s not genius or anything, but it’s cute. If I can appreciate Taylor Swift, there’s no reason I can’t appreciate this too.

There’s some perhaps interesting thematic material as well, if you squint. We first meet Hulking when he’s shape-shifting in imitation of Spider-Man, hunting down bad-guys as Marvel’s most popular superhero. Later, Wiccan summons Hulking’s dead mother from another dimension…only it turns out to be a shape-shifting soul-eating demon. The other Young Avengers’ parents also end up coming back from the dead as evil glop. You could see the comic then, perhaps, as being about children turning themselves into their parents — or about the way that it’s not just parents who make their kids, but kids who make their parents. The evil parents and the clueless parents (adults can’t see the evil demon mommies) could be a version of the hippie “parents just don’t understand/anyone over 30 can’t be trusted” meme. But you could also see the bad/clueless parents as constructs or dreams — as make-believe parent kids want to/need to create in order to make their own lives. That’s underlined by the fact that the evil parents are the reason for the team coming and staying together; the threat is what makes the book diegetically possible.

Gillen doesn’t ultimately do all that much with this material though. There isn’t, for example, any real anxiety around the evil parents per se — dead moms and dads come back from the dead, but their kids don’t seem much traumatized, or even disturbed. They just trundle on through the by-the-numbers superhero battles, the only real emotional tension being the frustration caused by the fact that, based on McKelvie’s drawings, you can’t actually follow those superhero battles at all.

To some degree that’s fine; it’s a competent empty-headed superhero adventure with crappy art, and it doesn’t make much pretense to being anything else. But, inevitably, the mediocrity of the execution has implications for the treatment of gender/sexuality/race as well. McKelvie, for example, tends to draw the usual slim/hot female characters — he certainly doesn’t feel anything like Desktop Dungeons’ commitment to imagining women who don’t look they walked out of Cosmo. The full-length, blank-faced, hip-cocked, wait-let-me-stuff-this-cleavage-in-somehow Scarlet Witch is an especial low-point.
 

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In a similar vein, Gillen’s insistently shallow writing makes it hard for him to do much with his diverse cast other than have them there. As I said, part of the joy of the comic is that difference is simply treated as normal, so that green skin isn’t much different from brown skin. But while that’s refreshing, it also can feel like a cop out. Is Miss. America really even a Hispanic character, for example, when she’s an advanced human from another dimension who has never experienced prejudice? G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel deliberately explores what it would mean for a Muslim girl to gain superpowers in terms of her perception of herself and others perceptions of her. Such subtlety is utterly beyond Young Avengers.

So, basically, making art that isn’t mired in stereotypes is hard. And making art that’s good is hard. And those two things put together are even harder, not least because, to some not insignificant degree, you can’t do one without the other.

Phonogram 2: The Breakfast Club

The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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A return to the world of Kieron McGillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Phonogram: Rue Britania, which I reviewed previously here.

TO RECAP: When we last met our hero, he was a judgmental dickhead (and indie music snob) – the kind of asshole who thinks he knows more than you, on the one hand, and may be ultimately out to sleep with you, on the other. Perhaps there were glimmers of a kinder, less arrogant jerk buried deep within, but they were overshadowed by the self-involved nature of the narrative: Rue Britania chronicled one man’s odyssey to salvage the worthwhile parts of a youthful passion for music from the cynicism that develops after heartbreak; and to recover personal meaning from an opportunistic media narrative. By the end of the story, we’d learned that 1) bands that present themselves as the “saviours” of British guitar pop are the worst, especially if they believe it themselves; 2) most music “journalism” is hype after the fact and shockingly unconcerned with facts; but then again 3) your personal reality is, at base, probably not more real anyone else’s. This isn’t a “personal taste is subjective therefore all bands are equally worthy of fans’ love” argument, but an “everyone is entitled to feel passionately about the things they feel passionate about and to develop as fans and human beings in their own time” argument.

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Not the narrator of Rue Britannia, but I think we all know a guy like this. Don’t be this guy! He is wrong about the Pipettes, by the way.

Fast forward to the Singles Club, and some of those glimmerings of decency and tolerance have blossomed. This “sequel” to Rue Britannia is less self-involved by design: there are six chapters following six different characters over the course of one night; and not one of those characters is the author. It’s more explicitly feminist than Rue Britania, too, because the first character we are introduced to –- our guide — is a perfectly nice, if somewhat naïve, young girl who loves to dance. And she, too, is a Phonomancer: a passionate fan of music able to magically channel that passion in a way that enhances her personal powers.

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“Etc”

This happens to be the comics and music roundtable at HU: not just the music roundtable, and not just the comics roundtable. So I can proudly report that Phonomancer isn’t a story that happens to be about music and happens to be in the form of a comic, but is a series that draws from the energies of both. In the first volume, we spent a lot of time with a character whose “type” we recognize from both music and comics: the music snob type, always willing to tell you (or just privately think) why and how you are wrong; and the semi-autobiographical indie-comic-narrator type, out to involve the reader in his personal internal journey. The art, in black and white, with cleanly-drawn and laid-out panels ala Chris Ware or Harvey Pekar, and lots of space given over to text detailing the author’s thoughts on everything from Manic Street Preachers to NME, fits in with the style of semi-autobiographical indie comics, too.

At the same time, Kieron McGillen is now writing, and Jamie McKelvie is now illustrating, for superhero comics. And some of the more action-oriented aesthetics of superhero comics have been present from the beginning, too: from the centrality of (not well defined) superpowers to the narrative; to the narrator’s final not-so-climatic final showdown with the zombie ghost of Britannia, Avatar of British Guitar Pop; to the paneling, which breaks out of the equally-sized-boxes mold of indie comics to hew closer to the dynamic style of manga, with frequent splash pages, pages laid out with an eye toward the overall balance of blacks and whites, and flow designed to draw the eye onward from panel to panel.

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Cinematic pacing also very manga-like

The Singles Club moves further toward superhero comics with the addition of VIVID! FULL! COLOR! And also by going into more detail on Phonomancers powers, which were underexplored in the previous volume.

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This splash page is, like, totally superhero-ish

Like superpowers, Phonomancer powers are presumably unique to individuals. However, since we mostly only dealt with the author and his powers in the first volume, it wasn’t too clear what the range these music-related superpowers might be. The narrator’s power was very intellectual: he dissected pop songs in arcane rituals in order understand their totemic powers. Although there were other Phonomancers in the picture – like his friend Emily, who also appears in this volume – they were off to the side, sidelined to the narrator’s quest.

Here, too, the powers are off to the side: the comic follows an “off” day, or what Phonomancers do for fun when they’re not actively practicing magic (naturally, music is still involved). Even with that, though, there’s still more about magic powers than before. There’s the girl we met already, who uses her love of music to enhance her charisma when she dances; and her friend, who uses psychological insight gleaned from well-written songs to cloak her own personality and tear others down. And there’s the weird guy who channels obsessive creativity into a homebrew music zine:

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“Mr. Logos” is, definitely, a super-villain name (not a super-hero name)

Are these characters music fan archetypes – like a music fan version of The Breakfast Club? Maybe, but those archetypes exist because they’re (often) true. In any case, what was true of the The Breakfast Club is also true of this comic: the pleasure comes from seeing all of these different types of music fan gathered together in one place and interacting with each other, rather than cordoned off into their own separate spheres of music appreciation. In this case, they haven’t been forced together by chance (assigned detention, trapped in a cabin during a snowstorm): instead, they mostly know each other, and have willingly come together at an indie dance club night.

Last time I promised a sociological explanation of music board ILX (ilxor.com). I don’t think I can really do that, but I can say that “different types of music fans bond over shared love of music, overlooking differences in style and opinion” is a basic premise of the site. Loving music as a whole more than you love any single band is a sort of defining feature of ILX, and it’s also a defining feature of this comic. At the club, everyone has different sensibilities and baggage – some relate to music in a more intellectual way and others in a more intuitive way – but they are all united by their passionate love of music, which, the comic implies, makes them more similar than different.

Another defining feature of ILX, meanwhile, is that even frequently maligned genres like chart pop and chart RnB (beloved by “nonserious” music fans like women and gay men) also have their share of supporters. It’s a male-dominated space, like most online bulletin boards – or actually most online spaces where contributors exchange strongly worded opinions on topics not solely of interest to women – but it’s a male space well-schooled in the politics of marginalization and oppression, and trained away from knee-jerk put downs. And that political focus shows up in The Singles Club too, coded into the rules of the club night:

1. No Boy Singers, 2. You Must Dance, 3. ??? ?????? ("No Magic")
The first rule of Fight Club, etc. Hover for alt-text if text is too small to read.

In previous entries to the roundtable, several authors brought up questions about how music can be visually depicted in comics. Well, for one, you can show the effects of music on bodies, as in the splash page above. And, for two, you can make sure enough of your references are to well-known songs by well-known artists. Compared to the indie namedropping of Rue Britania, the music in The Singles Club is a lot more mainstream… and even if there are a few artists you’ve never heard of, the authors helpfully publish a playlist at the back of the volume so you go can follow along. Some amount of accessibility is a virtue at club night, after all, as demonstrated by this scene:

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Always have a secret weapon

While the previous comic explored the music snob/intelligent person’s sense of exclusion even from supposed “mass events” like summer music festivals, the ideological drive of The Singles Club is toward inclusiveness. Otherwise “normal” women who just happen to really really love music are included, but also other marginalized groups like the psychologically damaged and the just plain weird. Even pop music – music for the masses – can be a place for the excluded to find each other, the comic says: it’s the depth of their commitment to music that identifies them to each other, not their tribal affiliation to a particular band or genre. In fact, music is so much the domain of the weird that it’s the more “normal” people who find themselves left out:

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Lloyd should be proud of himself for delivering that zinger at such an appropriate moment

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Another guy I haven’t talked about much: more “chewed up” than “left out”

Speaking of tribal affiliation, though – and here I go with the sociopolitical examination of ILX, after all – in a capitalist landscape where the relationship between an artist capable of inspiring deep passion and his/her fans is, not just monetized, but aggressively monetized – thanks to a combination of declining disposable income and increased competition for the limited pool of obsessive-fan-types who will actually spend money on music – does it make sense to replace a deep love of one group with a kind of grazing behavior appreciative of many? When you learn to value songs for what you can get out of them, without allowing yourself to be too deeply drawn into a single artistic vision – if you can even find an artist with an encompassing vision, in these days of quick media exposure – you learn to fulfill your role as a consumer and, thereby, enter the capitalist landscape of music groups as commodities. Once there, you are in accordance with the realities of your environment, and friction between yourself and your environment disappears… no?

Perhaps this is a logical move for fans of music who have to live with the logic of capitalism, in other words? In an artist-fan relationship based around idolization, the artist holds the power (but only as long as they continue to play the role allowed to them by their fans: leadership is a two-way street). In an object-consumer relationship, on the other hand, the consumer occupies a position of power over the object of consumption. From a song, we can take certain ritualistic elements – a baseline, an attitude, a well-written line – while discarding the parts we don’t care for… and in that way, avoid being hurt by them. Perhaps?

On the one hand, pop music isn’t immerse yourself in your bedroom music, or even immerse yourself with fans of the same group at intimate club shows music. It is immerse yourself in beats in a collective setting music. Wide knowledge is better than deep knowledge for this purpose. But on the other hand, you could argue that deep knowledge is a prerequisite to understanding the power music can have at its most potent. Perhaps you have to be a passionate dedicated fan before you can be a passionate casual fan? Anyway, I’m just talking out loud, here.

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Wide-ranging consumption is the path forward out of obsession, as demonstrated by the narrator of the previous volume of Phonogram

Passion isn’t just about knowledge, either. Half the characters are still the intellectualizing sort, but who gets the last laugh at the end?

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The non-Phonomancer, that’s who

It’s okay to think these things through, but we shouldn’t forget the functions they serve, the comic suggests. The purpose of a dance night is to drink, dance, and maybe end up in bed with a stranger by the end of the night. And that’s true, even when the dance night is as explicitly intellectual and political as the one in this comic. Pop music can be smart as well as catchy; intellectual types have emotional needs too. But just because the pleasures are simple doesn’t mean they can’t also be deep; and vice versa. See also Poptimism, a London club night.

In summary: if you recognize the character archetypes, that’s good. If you like the songs, that’s good. If you enjoy the characters as people, without recognizing them as archetypes, that’s good. If you enjoy interlocking narratives, that’s good. If you agree with the politics of the author… well, you probably didn’t need to read this comic, but probably did and enjoyed it anyway.

To summarize the summary: it’s all good.

Phonogram: Journey to the Past

This is an excellent comic. Let’s get that out of the way first.

Next: Kieron Gillen, author of highly-regarded Thor reboot, Brit, music nerd, all-around good guy. He’s friends with Tom Ewing, of Freaky Trigger and Poptimist fame. And since I spend a lot of time lurking ILM, the message board that started out as a discussion page for Freaky Trigger – and is now a hotbed of professional music writers – and since I was once an obsessive Libertines fan – dubbed “the saviors of British guitar pop” by a certain segment of the British music press – I feel as qualified as (mostly) anyone to discuss the intricacies of his and Jamie McKelvie’s two-volume comic Phonogram, which is, basically, a passionate and detailed criticism of British music criticism. And there’s a third volume due out soon, so this is even kind of timely!

By the time the first volume of this series, Rue Britania, concludes, the music critic whose POV we inhabit – who might or might not be closely modeled after the author – has confronted his post-teenage disillusionment and bitterness and become a stronger, less douchebaggy person.

As heartwarming as this is, it doesn’t quite erase the sting of many pages that first establish the character as an asshole – or the fact that this asshole character’s pronouncements on music are, for the most part, the final word within the comic on tons of indie bands you’ve probably never heard of (although the sting is somewhat lessened by the inclusion, at the end of the book, of a much less self-important glossary of terms and bands).

That, and the fact that Rue Britania is well-written, well-paneled and well-drawn, more than justifies its sequel, which not only sees the return of the narrator as an older, wiser, and more feminist person, but also foregrounds the series premise that there are many different ways to be a passionate fan of pop music. Plus, half the viewpoint characters are women! And it’s in color! No wonder The Singles Club sold way better than Rue Britannia (see comments for author correction).

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What we can look forward to

In order to fully appreciate the narrator’s personal growth by the time of The Singles Club, it’s necessary to first start with the egotistical dick of Rue Britania. So that’s what I will be doing in this post. My next post will focus on The Singles Club, and when Volume 3 comes out, I’ll review that one too. Without further ado:

PHONOGRAM: RUE BRITAINIA

Is a comic about the damage music critics do to young impressionable teenagers when they overhype acts as “the saviors of British guitar rock.” Alternately, it’s about the damage specific rock acts do to impressionable young fans when they overhype themselves as the saviors of British guitar rock, even if – especially if – they believe it.

At this point I should probably explain this whole “saviors of British guitar rock” thing. It’s a long story, going back to Beatles and the Stones. Since then there have been many mutations – the Kinks and Small Faces and the rest back home in England in the 60s; Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello and their Stiff Records cohort in the 70s; the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays and other Madchester acts in the 80s; and then Britpop bands like Blur and Oasis, who saved England from the twin evils of Americanization and grunge in the 90s. Of course this is a gross simplification, but that’s kind of the point.

The aughts version of this cyclical narrative is tied up with the Libertines, according to some, or is a shameless and transparent attempt on the part of the music weeklies to pretend that they are still relevant, according to others – including, more than likely, the narrator of Rue Britania. Anyway, suffice to say that there is a long lineage of (mostly) two-songwriter bands in England that are somehow uniquely homegrown; and there’s also a British music press hungry to find the next group it can slot into this lineage (for ease of hype).

Our Hero can’t get over the narrative that has coalesced around a scene he was intimately involved in – he’s incensed that the bands he remembers as being actually central to Britpop – especially the female-fronted indie band Kenicke – have been forgotten in favor of a more convenient media narrative that it was really all about Blur, the snotty middle class art school savants, vs. Oasis, the rags-to-riches working class dreamers. His pain is twofold: one, that the press is trampling all over what actually happened; and two, that he can’t seem to shrug off his massive personal investment in what is – more and more obviously – a dead scene, and move on.

His pain is the pain of any very serious music fan who cares a great deal about the ways in which words and music construct reality, only to wake up to the laziness and willful misrepresentation of most music journalism. It’s also, although this has not quite formulated itself in the mind of the asshole protagonist, a kind of proto-feminist rage. Why are so many of the female-fronted groups being written out of the narrative?

In The XY Factor, Rhian Jones discusses the gender gap in professional music criticism. And in the comments, I drag my friend Sabina into an argument that the Rock Critic Establishment’s love of making lists and ranking things so as to determine their absolute universal worth tends to work against female-fronted bands, as the female fans who might have pressed for their inclusion in the “canon” tend not to relate to music in the same list-making way. It’s worth reading the original comment thread for Sabina’s take, which is much more nuanced than mine.

In any case, I bring this up not to fire another shot in the endless war of men and women, but to show that Gillen’s arguments, as ridiculously over-invested as they might seem, do have real-world consequences. Maybe Britania, the spirit of English Guitar Music, won’t actually fall down dead if culture warriors like the narrator cease to defend her. But these narratives do have power.

Going back to Kieron Gillen’s proto-feminism, though, here is the opening sequence of Rue Britania:

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The narrator introduces himself as a toxic, noxious, assholish… man! With a bonus nod toward comics, the medium being used to tell his story.

As you guys know, it’s very important when attending a show to dress right for the occasion. You wouldn’t haul out the indie regalia for a Kings of Leon concert, but probably just show up in jeans and a t-shirt. By the same token, if you went to see Patrick Wolfe without glitter eyeshadow, you’d probably be underdressed. Our Protagonist, in this case, is very aware of this, and is putting a lot of thought and effort into his outfit: but towards precisely the wrong ends. He wants everyone at “Ladyfest” to know exactly how much he does not belong.

In other words, this guy is a huge dick! And not only is he a dick, he’s a self-constructed dick – which is even worse!

It’s not only that, though. His costume marks him out as a recognizable “type” – not just within hardcore music fandom, but as the protagonist of countless indie comics. His role in the comic, in other words, is not just to be there, but to explicitly display and acknowledge his obnoxiousness – and in the process, maybe, to reveal to the reader his own obnoxiousness.

That’s if the reader catches on. This is a fairly subtle comic – unlike, say, Scott Pilgrim, where Bryan Lee O’Malley starts out subtle but later aims with increasing unsubtlety to show the reader exactly how much damage well-meaning but willfully “clueless” guys can do to the girls they don’t care enough to work on their relationships with – so there is a chance that the reader won’t get it. Bryan Lee O’Malley has a whole series to make his points in, though, while Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvin have only this one volume of a trade publication they don’t expect to make money from, and they want to actually talk about the music, too. So perhaps this comparison is unfair.

Also, though, this guy is just such an asshole!! He’s way more of a jerk than Scott Pilgrim ever was. He understands pain, loneliness, and the female-fronted rock outfit Kenicke; but instead of using that knowledge for good, he uses it to sleep with vulnerable scene girls. Meanwhile, the girls he is friends with are those kind of ‘cool’ girls who will put girl-groups down with him and interrupt sex with their girlfriends for him.

It is somewhat satisfying and fitting, then, that for the sin of being a huge dick, the narrator is cursed in a very feminine way:

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Of course, this guy isn’t a Standard Edition Asshole Dick. He knows better, that’s the whole point. He might be using his love of Kenicke to pick up girls, but he also genuinely loves Kenicke. Summing up this contradiction, the essence of his fandom – the passion that defines him as a person and grants him music-related superpowers (more on this later) – is Britannia, a female avatar of British guitar rock. Not only that, but in a key scene we find out that in a contest between his girlfriend and Kenicke – sleep with the girlfriend, or get up to reset the needle on a Kenicke record? – Kenicke wins every time.

Let’s back up for a minute and talk about magic. In this metaphorical book, being a passionate fan of music gives you superpowers. So what’s the main character’s superpower? Well, he does “intricate vivisection rituals on pop songs to understand their totemic powers” (and then uses his powers for evil to seduce young girls, because he is a dick!!!) Beyond that, he can use Jedi mind tricks to get into shows for free

Let’s be real here – this is a much more useful and practical magic power than “flying” or “X-ray vision”, right?

In this book, we spend most of our time with Mr. Charming, so we never really see the other ways that “Phonomancers” channel pop music to enhance their personal power. That will be left until the next, more accessible book (in full color!), which I have already promised to discuss in the next article.

I’m not trying to say I have a unique insight on this comic, by the way. Any good ILM-er or diligent reader of British weekly music ‘zines would tell you the same, and the author does make many of these points for you. The feeling that I have unique insight is actually exactly what I share with the noxious asshole narrator. It’s this feeling of superiority and specialness, among other things, that he will have to kill to progress as a person.

To show the seriousness of the situation, as the music press rewrites the past, the narrator’s memories actually start to shift. (The first clue that he is in an alternate, unacceptable universe? He is in the habit of listening to Echobelly records.) Besides the narrator’s personal hangups, we’re introduced to another character who was, at one point, heavily invested in a particular group, the Manic Street Preachers. While the narrator struggles to hold on to his sense of self, this Manics fan has actually split herself into two selves: a self that waits, wraithlike, for disappeared guitarist and lyricist Richey Edwards to return and reclaim his position as pop-music prophet. And another self, a “real” self, who no longer cares about music.

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If you don’t know the specific groups under discussion, the scenes lose some of their power. There’s something universal about the idea that someone else is rewriting your past, though, and about investing so much of yourself in one thing, and being so badly hurt as a result, that you are never willing to invest so much or to care so much about any other thing again. And maybe Britpop club scene –> massive arena and festival tours is something any former indie kid – like for instance Hipster Runnoff‘s Carles – can relate to. Specific references, universal themes, in other words.

The rest of the volume is similarly metaphoric. The narrator goes on a spirit quest to save “the universe” (probably only his own universe) from the debasement of the discourse around Britpop. Some of these metaphors are clever:

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Retromancers as gollums, Gollum as junkie scum.

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Throwing a vinyl record on the fire, and a discussion of “memory kingdoms” you can only enter if you’re not personally invested in them.

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Knebworth Park in 1996, the huge festival headlined by Oasis, where – according to the press – countless individual fans lose all their distinguishing features and are transformed into just a mass, a crowd, a sales figure.

Sometimes, though, the pursuit of symbols and metaphors leads the author to strange places. An easy way to see this is to consider what happens when the “symbols” in his book are – not just real people – but still alive and working.

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I don’t know that much about Blur, but I know enough to know that the automaton in these panels is not even close to being anything like the real Damon Albarn – either the person or the performer. How can you write about real people and not even care that you are completely misrepresenting them?

Kieron Gillen sidesteps this issue, somewhat, by setting all these scenes in a dream landscape. In his own mental cartography, which has been weirdly influenced by the media narrative around Britpop, Damon Albarn and Oasis are figureheads who are notable mainly for the roles they play in the media narrative. It’s the roles he’s interested in exploring, not the actual or perceived personalities of the performers.

Still, the author’s choice to focus only on roles is an odd one: if he cut his teeth as a music fan at small club shows, he must have met some of these people at some point, right? Is it because he’s a pop fan – in other words a fan of a genre in which the main relationship between fan and performer is necessarily mediated – that he thinks this way? Or is it just that Kieron Gillen has no interest in personalities outside of music (putting him in the minority of Britpop fans)?

But also, you know, the creator is dead, and all that.

And if you think about it, this privileging of the fan/critic perspective over the author/artist perspective is clear even in the premise (and title!) of the series: that being a passionate fan of music endows you with special powers. It was Sabina (once again) who pointed out that while you do see, by the end of The Singles Club, many different ways of being a listener-Phonomancer, what you don’t see are any musicians who are also Phonomancers. Can an artist be a Phonomancer in Kieron Gillon’s universe? Perhaps this question will be addressed in the forthcoming third volume of the series.

Speaking of dead authors, though – and those of you who would rather not know how the volume ends, please look away – it turns out that – shocker! – Britania has been dead the whole time. The retromancers feeding off manufactured nostalgia, the fans who arrived too late to be a part of the original scene (and probably wouldn’t have been cool enough to be there, anyway) – all of her later-day worshippers – are worshipping a corpse.

Was she dead all along – during Britpop as well? I honestly hope so. Otherwise, this whole narrative stinks a bit too much of pulling-the-ladder-up-after-you’ve-had-your-own-fun.

And this is where where I come in. Just before the narrator heads off on his final, quixotic quest to defeat the zombie ghost of Britpop and save the sanctity of his youthful soul from the cruel realities of crass commercialism, he meets a Libertines fan on a hill:

phono15

Click through for dialog if the text is too small too read.

Just like when he met the young Kenicke fan, he’s pretty sure that he understands The Libertines better than the Libs fan does. Unlike when he met the young Kenicke fan, though, he is now old, wise, and mature enough not to clutch this knowledge to his chest, as if his experience is the only valid one, and sneer down at the young fan. Instead he decides to fight for the fan’s right to keep his delusions.

I’m just kidding. This is more about the narrator, an Old, making a conscious decision to relinquish his generation’s claim on the cultural cutting edge. The pop music zeitgeist belongs to the young, passionate, and idealistic.

It’s not a bad story to want to try to tell. After all, it’s not every day that you see this kind of “old must step aside to make space for the young” selflessness being valorized when it comes to pop culture. I think the last place I saw it was Les Mis, based on a story from the 1860s. At least in the US, the Baby Boomers seem to be too large, rich, and powerful of a marketing demographic for the culture industries to suggest that they should step out of the limelight.

While it’s awful nice of the narrator to make this gesture, it is weird that he doesn’t seem to consider that maybe the Libertines and their ilk – Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons, Kooks, Razorlight – do deserve to be considered Avatars of Britania’s Nth Coming. The Libertines, including Pete Doherty and Carl Barat (that co-frontman thing again), certainly thought of themselves that way.

But then you think: maybe Dude does have a point that each iteration of this meme will be more desperate and sadder than the last – as Sabina says, at least in Britpop Version 1.0 there were actual girls on stage, stepping out from their traditional roles as girlfriends and mothers and photographers and forum mods.

For the record, though, the Libertines were aware of the futility of reviving the past. “Queen Bodacea is long dead and gone/yet still the spirit of her children’s children children lives on” goes one of their most famous lyrics, about an ancient Celtic queen who lead a resistance against Roman invaders. (This line is second in notoriety only to their save-England-from-creeping-Americanization refrain, “No sadder sight than that/of an Englishman in a baseball cap”.) It’s a total fan cliché for me to quote lyrics, by the way, but I do it not to share a moto I ever adopted as my own – I’m American! How could I! – but as a way of demonstrating that Pete Doherty totally read the British weekly music ‘zines as a teenager, too.

The idea of taking up a spot in a lineage that is already gone is baked right into the premise of the band, in other words. So who’s to say that they are not an actual, authentic entry in that lineage – if you want to see it that way? And not just because the kids are passionate and naïve – as we all were once – and it therefore behooves the older, more jaded generation to step aside and to allow them to explore their romantic notions in peace. Rather, the reason they belong is that there’s no particular reason that dead-and-we-already-know-it-Britania can’t be every bit as real to the people who worship her as dead-and-we-have-yet-to-realize-it-Britania.

In fact, by assuming that the kids believe essentially the same thing he did – that they are participating in a vibrant underground scene not-yet-tainted by media narratives – the narrator proves, essentially, his own myopia. Even in the end.

This concludes Part 1 of my essay on Phonogram. Part 2 – featuring a sociological examination of pan-music-fandom message board ILM – to follow. I promise to talk more about Jamie McKelvie’s awesome art in the next post, too.