Tag Archives: Noah

No Longer Destiny’s Child

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These reviews first ran on Splice Today here and here.

Beyonce, 4

“I Was Here” off Beyonce’s latest album, 4, is one of those songs that makes you re-evaluate an artist’s entire oeuvre in light of the capacious bucket of liquid feces that has just been upended on your noggin.

Not that Beyonce hasn’t spawned crap before… and crap of similar provenance. She’s always had a weak spot for surly self-vaunting, reaching perhaps its apex in 2001’s “Survivor,” a song devoted largely to taunting the two women she’d forced out of her band. Still, crass as it was, “Survivor” at least had a hook. “I Was Here,” on the other hand, brings all the self-absorption and none of the pop smarts. Beyonce takes a deep breath and belches out barrels of Broadway glop, enthusing over her own career success with unembarrassed egotism and Hallmark card triteness. (“I want to leave my footprints on the sands of time…want to leave something to remember so they won’t forget.”) Moving into her second decade of mega-success, Beyonce is proud to let us know that she’s got absolutely nothing to talk about except how cool it is to be mega-successful. She makes her mirror look deep.

In fairness, this has always been a big part of Beyonce’s appeal. Male rock and rap stars are notorious narcissistic assholes, but female performers, from Madonna on down, tended to seduce their listeners with at least as much vulnerability as swagger. Beyonce, though, was all about the girl power put-down; from “Bills, Bills, Bills” through “Irreplaceable” through “Single Ladies,” Ms. Knowles never pleads when she can sneer instead. Her message isn’t so much “I Will Survive” as it is “Fuck. You.”

As rock and rap have shown, “fuck you” is a pretty popular slogan, and Beyonce has certainly opened the way for women in pop R&B to be bigger jerks. It’s hard to imagine how we would have gotten from Ashanti and early Mariah Carey to Ke$ha and Lady Gaga without Beyonce in the middle.

But while Knowles may have broadened the range of attitudes available for female pop singers, her own emotional reach has always been limited. She can be triumphant, she can be hectoring… or, yeah, she can be triumphant. It’s pretty clear at this point that she’ll never manage a song like her former bandmate Kelly Rowland’s “Still in Love With My Ex,” a rapturously heartbreaking track about betraying yourself and everyone you care about. To sing that song, Rowland had to admit to weakness, and Beyonce isn’t going to do that any more than Robert Plant or Snoop Dogg would. When Knowles talks about being hopelessly in love on “Rather Die Young,” it’s all about burning out before you get old; James Dean and gasoline and leaving a beautiful corpse. Similarly, “Start Over,” about a love she can’t leave behind, ends up as a surging future-hope anthem. Rowland’s adult despair and self-loathing—or, say, Patsy Cline’s—might as well be in another language. Beyonce’s a rock star, and rock stars kick life in the ass; life does not kick them.

Rock stars also look really stupid when they get old enough to know better… and there’s some indication that Beyonce may run into that problem as well. Her longevity has been astonishing in a genre where careers are often measured in months rather than year, but, however belatedly, her shtick is starting to fray.

“Best Thing I Never Had” is Beyonce once again kissing off some dumb dude with a mid-tempo lyricism that is much less engaging than “Irreplaceable”; “Run The World (Girls)” is a percussive girl power jam without the humor or novelty of “Single Ladies.” “Love on Top” tries to re-energize the flailing diva by reaching even further back, all the way to Destiny’s Child‘s first album and the summery, girl-group vibe of “No, No, No.” Beyonce responds with a strident, hog-calling vocal that dutifully beats the song’s would-be flirtatiousness to death and dances on its corpse.

There are a couple of bright spots on the album. “Countdown” is a bizarre, lurching mini-masterpiece; with horns, steel drums, keyboard bleeps, and a bizarrely out of sync Boyz II Men sample all bouncing around each other as Beyonce declaims and soars and even woofs like a dawg. It’s weird and sexy and hip—more like an Amerie or Robyn track than most of Beyonce’s solo work. She’s still got some fire in her, so maybe 4 is just an unfortunate detour, and she’ll figure out a way to make decent albums again. I won’t hold my breath though. Once rock stars start to suck, there’s generally no going back.
 
Kelly Rowland, Here I Am
The cover of Destiny’s Child’s 1999 mega-smash Writing’s on the Wall shows three blindingly hot women swathed in clingy white diaphanous nothings—and, Kelly Rowland. Beyonce, LaTavia, and LeToya look like they’re ready, waiting, and eager for superstardom; like they’ve spent their whole lives preparing for the moment when they could bare their shoulders and be showered with adulation and cash. Rowland, on the other hand, has a deer-in-the-headlights stare. You can almost see the cartoon thought bubble above her head, “Are we done yet? Can I put on some clothes now?”

It’s not that Rowland is particularly unattractive for a civilian. But standing next to Beyoncé Knowles, one of the more heart-stoppingly beautiful women on the planet, she does end up looking a little horse-faced—like the sit-com best-friend, carefully chosen not to upstage the star. Rowland, who lived with the Knowles’ from the time she was 14, solidified her stand-by-your-BFF cred when she remained with Beyoncé during LeToya and LaTavia’s acrimonious split from the band. On subsequent albums, Rowland did her usual thing, flanking Beyoncé and new bandmate Michelle Williams, looking hot but not too hot. A notable exception is DC’s 2001 Christian album, where the trio all wear something approaching street clothes and Rowland actually seems… comfortable.

Destiny’s Child is long gone, and Rowland has invested in breast implants—but whether she’s an A or a B-cup, in a band or out, she’s still a second stringer. Her only big hit without Beyoncé, 2002’s “Dilemma,” wasn’t a solo success, but a collaboration with Nelly. Her post-DC solo album, Ms. Kelly, didn’t do squat in terms of sales, though it was surprisingly strong musically. Its first track, “Like This,” featured Rowland’s thick Houston accent wrapping itself around a sparse head-nodding hook. The song had character and made you remember why you always liked that best friend on the sitcom better than the boring lead.

The same cannot be said for Rowland’s latest album. In some ways, this is the logical culmination of her career—a work devoid of ambition or vision, designed to underwhelm on every level. The title, Here I Am, seems to have been chosen specifically for purposes of self-refutation. The opening song, “I’m Dat Chick,” is resolutely anonymous. Rowland’s accent is obliterated in an onslaught of autotune, and Tricky Stewart provides a bland anthemic backing.

That’s how it goes throughout. Ke$ha uses autotune to give her castrating party girl persona a snotty adenoidal edge; Britney uses autotune to turn herself into a robot. Rowland, though, just uses it to rub off the edges of her personality, like she’s afraid you’ll notice that she’s singing without a real frontwoman. The obligatory guest appearances by various rappers just drive the point home more painfully. Rowland’s pro forma cooing on “Motivation” sounds lame on its own… but when you put it next to Lil Wayne’s languidly, goofily lascivious rap (“I put her on the plate/and then I do the dishes”), the putative star’s lack of star power becomes actively embarrassing.

It’s a well-known truth that pop success is far more about marketing than musical talent or genius. Lady Gaga isn’t an especially gifted musician, and she doesn’t even look like the typical pop star sex bomb—but despite all that she has charisma out the meat dress. Rowland, on the other hand, has neither sex appeal nor marketing smarts. She poses topless on Vibe, and the media reacts as if a bra fell in the forest and there was no one around to hear.

The sad thing about this is that with Destiny’s Child and even on her own, Rowland has been involved in making a fair amount of great music. Ms. Kelly is arguably better than any of Beyonce’s solo albums, and the harmonies of Beyonce and Kelly together with their bandmates are some of the most heavenly musical sounds of the early 2000s. On Here I Am, though, Rowland is swallowed by her own lack of wattage, trying so hard to be a diva with charisma that she sounds like any random diva, minus the charisma. It’s a reminder, maybe, of the many ways in which pop stars find themselves constrained. Everyone knows that you only get an audience if you make a certain kind of music and have a certain kind of image. But Rowland’s career suggests, too, that failing to sell your image can in certain circumstances, not only reduce your audience, but can also end up gutting your music.

The Groove That Ended

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This first appeared in The Chicago Reader.
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Today fabulous divas and thuggy rappers use the same producers. They sing about the same things—mainly clubbin’ and sex. They date each other. And they appear not just on the same radio stations but on the same tracks. For all practical purposes, hip-hop and R&B have merged into a single commercial juggernaut.

Ashanti, who’s been out of circulation for four years, has already proven herself a diva, but her big comeback, The Declaration, is also her attempt to fully and finally embrace radio reality. It’s the album where she shakes off the influence of label owner Irv Gotti and hooks up with a bunch of megaproducers to prove she can rock the dance floors of the late aughts even harder than she rocked the bedrooms of 12-year-old girls in 2002.

That was the plan, anyway. But The Declaration is completely anonymous. It feels like it could’ve been put together by any second- or third-rate R&B diva—Christina Milian, say, or Lumidee. It’s not terrible, and there are some nice moments—the piano loop on the lead single, “The Way That I Love You,” works well, and “In These Streets” gets lodged in your head in that pleasurable/painful way certain pop songs do—but the moments of inspiration are fleeting. Even Rodney Jerkins, who’s been on fire these past couple of years, seems to be sleepwalking; his production job on “So Over You” sounds like he unearthed a duff Brandy track from ten years ago and remixed it while doing his taxes. “Girlfriend” is a dreary knock-off of Ciara’s “Promises.” And Akon’s contribution to “Body on Me” is just like every other one of his wack misogynist whines—the man is a one-trick blight.

Even more distressing, though, is the slide in Ashanti’s singing. She’s largely abandoned the slightly nasal burr that put a poignant catch in everything she did. Gone too are the smarts, which made her one of the most underrated pop singers in the business despite her thin voice. Nothing here matches the aching pause in “I’m so… happy, baby” (from “Happy,” on her self-titled debut), the clipped, funky stutter in “Focus,” or the jazzy phrasing that swings her sublimely off the beat in “Don’t Let Them” (both from 2004’s Concrete Rose).

On The Declaration Ashanti runs through a smorgasbord of vocal styles. On “You Gonna Miss” she vacillates between a hard-edged pseudo-Beyonce and a processed pseudo-Ciara. On “Things You Make Me Do” she seems to be imitating the sensual purr of her old rival Tweet. It’s like she desperately wants to be somebody else, or anybody other than herself. On the execrable faux show tune “Shine,” Ashanti insists that “They can’t shut out your light/ No matter how hard they try.” But this record is proof that, if you give them just a little help, they can in fact smother your inner beauty under a big, fat bushel of blandness.

Of course, negative reviews of Ashanti albums are par for the course. Except for the millions of tween girls who bought her CDs in the early aughts, pretty much everyone despises Ashanti’s music. Even contrarians who laud the virtues of disposable plastic pop tend to prefer Beyonce or Kelis or Mariah Carey. Ashanti, who was briefly as big as any of them, rarely merits a mention.

Ashanti’s problems—now and then—mostly stem from being on the wrong side of the zeitgeist. Specifically, she has a very uncomfortable relationship with hip-hop. Her 2002 debut included some of the most embarrassing faux-street skits ever committed to disc, with the pitiful Gotti incongruously bellowing profanities like some sort of Tourette’s-afflicted ungulate (“I’m feeling the shit out of you, you’re feeling the shit out of me”). A remix of her big single “Foolish” featured a sexually explicit rap by the deceased Biggie Smalls, with Ashanti cooing encouragement. Instead of buying her some cred, it just made her seem cluelessly ghoulish.

The trouble is that Ashanti came on the scene just as R&B and hip-hop were fusing. In the 90s hip-hop was certainly an important influence on R&B, but there was still some distance between them. When Aaliyah sings “One in a Million,” for example, it’s emphatically R&B—the music is groove based, and the lyrics are a straightforward tribute to perfect love. Timbaland’s beats function as an insistent but separate voice, so that the track becomes almost a duet, a love song from R&B to hip-hop with Aaliyah and the breakbeats trading endearments and vows.

The two genres consummated their relationship at the end of the decade. Acts like Destiny’s Child (with producer Kevin Briggs) and Kelis (with the Neptunes) moved away from grooves and toward more complex song structures, integrating beats and multilayered vocals. Lyrics also began to adopt a much more in-your-face hip-hop attitude—instead of agonizing over the men who done them wrong, Beyonce and Kelis come across as tough and angry, chewing out stalkers, cheaters, and parasites with gleeful disdain. On songs like “Bootylicious,” Destiny’s Child even slipped seamlessly from singing to quasi-rapping while boasting about their sexual charms.

Ashanti is a different story. The music on her debut was the last, gorgeous gasp of 90s R&B. Taking his cue from Butterfly-era Mariah Carey, producer 7aurelius didn’t so much write songs as pour glittery, translucent glop over beats and vocals. The result was a syrupy, trudging, pulsing drone—doom metal by Care Bears. Ashanti and her infinitely multitracked doubles often sound buried alive, desperately emoting from inside an echoey pink plastic prison, repeating and repeating R&B signifiers (“Baby baby baby baby baby”) until all meaning is squeezed out of them and they start to register as pure sound. It’s overwhelmingly, swooningly, gooily romantic, miles away from the invulnerable iron-bitch strut of Beyonce or the true-pain confessions of neosoul artists like Keyshia Cole. In other words, it’s neither tough nor real. There’s nothing hip-hop about it.

Ashanti’s next two albums kept the same format—lousy skits, ravishingly ethereal music—but fell off progressively from the massive commercial success of the first. Gotti’s legal troubles certainly helped sabotage 2004’s Concrete Rose, but in any case the space in R&B for artists with so little real affinity for hip-hop was shrinking. On 2005’s The Emancipation of Mimi, Mariah Carey proved she was flexible enough to adapt and still make good music, but Ashanti… well, not so much. On The Declaration, in order to fit in with the current state of R&B, she’s systematically erased all traces of her musical personality.

I’m not trying to say that everything was better back in the day. Though 90s R&B had its moments, overall I think the genre has benefited enormously from hip-hop’s influence. Still, there’s a price; pop is a zero-sum game, and when one style wins, another loses. That’s why today Ashanti’s early albums sound like a transmission from another world, a place where R&B never took that left turn but instead went straight on, stuck in one endless, shimmering groove.

It’s Nobody, Bitch

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Of all the pre-processed, artificial, talentless pop blow-up dolls, Britney Spears is quite possibly the most processed, the most artificial, and the most talentless. Beyoncé can actually sing. Lady Gaga has performance art attitude. K$sha has rock and roll attitude. Rihanna has an accent. Even the relatively anonymous Ciara can dance.

In comparison, Britney is a cipher. Over the years, she’s mimicked a range of pop styles, from the faux-Beatles psychedelia of 1999’s “The Beat Goes On,” to the 2001 faux-Prince funk of “Boys.” But you never get the sense that those styles exactly influenced her, or that she even knows who Prince or the Beatles are. Without Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake’s whole performance schtick would dissolve. Without Prince or the Beatles or even Madonna, Britney’s producers would just feed her something else. This is ludicrously illustrated in 2007’s Blackout, where whoever’s in charge decides to turn Britney into a confessional artist. On “Piece of Me” she coos and growls about her public meltdown and her kid and how unfair everyone is to her, and she sounds as engaged as if she’s reading someone else’s tax forms. When Christina Aguilera whines about her critics, she seems sincerely self-obsessed. For Britney, though, talking about her life is just another pose she can fail to carry off convincingly.

Which is absolutely not a bad thing. On the contrary, Britney’s utter lack of emotional investment in her own music has served her well throughout her career. The contrast with Xtina is instructive. Aguilera has 10 times the voice Britney does. But she also has at least that much more ambition, without any more discernible intelligence. Her increasingly desperate efforts to turn herself into something more respectable than a dumb pop singer—a classic diva! Lady Gaga! Anything! Help!—have resulted in one of the most embarrassing public careers in recent memory. For Xtina followers, her mangling of the national anthem wasn’t so much a horrible misstep as a logical culmination of her evolution as a singer. And I’m speaking as someone who liked Aguilera’s last album!

Britney’s had her own public disasters, of course. But they never seemed to touch her actual music, in large part because nothing touches her music. A Britney song has the perfect purity of an unwrapped Twinkie; it exists outside authenticity and time and art in an inviolable envelope of plastic. This has only become truer as her career as advanced. Way back on Baby, One More Time, Britney sounded almost human—on the first moans of that album she even came within a mortar shot of soul. No fear of that on the recently released Femme Fatale. Autotune was made for Britney and Britney for autotune. Her non-personality is systematically erased; she’s more herself than ever, which is to say she’s more no one.

Just because Femme Fatale is arguably Britney’s most characteristic album doesn’t necessarily mean it’s her best. The song selection overall certainly isn’t as strong as In the Zone, and I think Femme Fatale is a step down from her last effort, 2008’s Circus, as well. Still, there’s plenty to like. From the insanely catchy whistled hook of “I Wanna Go,” to the catchy and burpy low end on “Big Fat Bass,” producers Dr. Luke, Martin, Billboard and others pack the disc with enough gimmicks for an ABBA album or three. The sing-song girl-meets-bloop “How I Roll” does Robyn better than Robyn does. “I wanna go downtown where my posse’s at / got nine lives like a kitty cat,” turns streetwise posturing into music-box girl-group nonsense, an apotheosis of rapturously treacly yearning. But the highlight of studio fuckery may come on “(Drop Dead) Beautiful.” In the middle of casually objectifying some hot guy, Britney lets out a lascivious laugh which is almost instantly processed into a computerized squeal. It’s like the producers heard a flicker of sincere emotion and panicked. Drown it out! Drown it out! Where’s the confounded FX knob?

The totality of the self-effacement on Britney’s albums is definitely funny, arguably disturbing—and also, I think, kind of moving. For instance, at the beginning of “Inside Out,” Britney sings “gotta look my best if we’re gonna breakup.” It’s a wry, rather sad line, and it seems true as well—you want to impress the boyfriend more when he’s on the way out, though logically you should want to less. The lyric touches on a sense of being out of control, of trying to remake yourself to no good purpose.

I don’t think this is a glimpse of the real Britney. Someone else wrote it, and her delivery certainly doesn’t suggest she thought about it too hard. Rather, the lyric resonates with the fact that there is no real Britney. And that in turn points to a sometimes-neglected truth. Pop and love and life—they’re not just about swagger and personality. They’re also about disappearing into everyone and no one; about ominous, bitter, and sometimes sweet nothings. Britney is not the pop star as genius. But there is a kind of genius in the way she incarnates the pop star as nonentity.

Utilitarian Review 3/3/12

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On HU

In our Featured Archive point this week, I talked about the sublime incoherence of Moto Hagio’s story, “A Drunken Dream.”

I discussed the bonus sexism of incompetent comics cheesecake.

I talked about war and masochism in Wonder Woman Chronicles volume 1.

Robert Stanley Martin discussed Anais Nin’s fiction of the 30s and 40s.

Kinukitty reviewed the manly assassin yaoi of This Night’s Everything.

I looked at Patrick Conlon and Michael Manning’s sci-fi fetish porn comic Tranceptor.

James Romberger looked at comics by Adrian Tomine, Steranko, Toth, Chester Brown, and more.

Joy DeLyria with a short history of long (and continuing) fiction.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Chicago Reader I review the magazine Midwestern Gothic. Neither Midwestern nor Gothic; discuss.

At Splice I argue that using children to make progressive points about schooling is not progressive.

At Splice Today I talk about how Sinead O’Connor hasn’t moved on.

 
Other Links

Virginia legislators stop being idiots.

Bad review bingo.

Tucker Stone has some almost nice things to say about Red Hood (plus other reviews.

Kelly Thompson explains that superhero women are not drawn equally.

Andrew Sullivan on the movie Bully and the MPA rating system. Linda Holmes on the same thing.

Alyssa Rosenberg expands on my thoughts on superhero cheesecake.

Depressing piece about sexism in the video game community.
 

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman Chronicles volume 1

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I just finished DC’s Wonder Woman Chronicles volume 1, which collects Wonder Woman’s appearances in chronological order. This first volume collects Wonder Woman’s first appearance in All-Star Comics 8 (December 1941-January 1942) through Sensation Comics no. 9 in September 1942, and also includes Wonder Woman number 1.

I’ve already talked about several of these comics in the Bound to Blog series (for example, I talk about Wonder Woman #1 here, and Sensation Comics #1 here.) But there are a couple of things that struck me while reading the collection as a whole.

No Intro

There’s absolutely no introductory material at all, unless you count a small note in the table of contents that says, “The comics reprinted in this volume were produced in a time when racism played a larger role in society and popular culture, both consciously and unconsciously.” That is undeniably true

but still, it seems like there might be more to say. Who wrote these comics? Who drew them? How popular were they? What did people think of them? Why are we reprinting them?

Of course, the answer to the last question is basically, “because they are there,” and also, “Wonder Woman still has a fanbase, so if you stick her face on a cover, you can sell some copies, even if no one really thinks this material is particularly worthwhile — or, for that matter, thinks anything about it at all.”

Not that this is just about Wonder Woman. I’m sure DC’s other chronicles editions don’t have intros…the point is to make them as cheap as possible, I’m sure, in the hopes of selling to a not-especially-well-defined audience of WW fans, kids, and the curious or confused. But even the DC Wonder Woman Archive Edition (hard backed, more expensive, slightly more material) has an intro (by folk singer Judy Collins) that is more along the lines of an extended blurb than an actual effort to provide some context.

I’m sure some might say this is for the best — why have some professor get between the kids and their pop culture ephemera? The problem is that pop cultural ephemera is ephemera; if that’s what it is, why reprint it? And, indeed, DC’s various archival projects have tended to founder from lack of interest, being released at glacial speeds before instantly going out of print. Those boring professors, it turns out, are part of minimal cultural validation — and without that minimal validation, old pop cultural ephemera is largely irrelevant.

Steve Trevor, He-Man Convalescent

Steve Trevor appears on the very first page of Wonder Woman’s first story in All Star comics. In that debut appearance, he’s unconscious.

He then stays unconsious throughout the entire tale. He gets some moments of lucidity in flashback, but by the end of the story, he’s still conked out. It’s only in the 2nd WW tale (in Sensation Comics #1) that he comes to his senses. After that he’s in the hospital convalescing. He sneaks out when he learns of deadly danger to the country…but by the end of the comic, he’s back in bed again, with WW as Diana Prince (who changed places with his nurse…don’t ask) caring for him. Next issue he’s up and around, but by the end:

It’s only in Sensation Comics 3, the fourth WW story, that Steve Trevor escapes from the hospital, forcing Diana Prince to get a job not as his secretary, but as his boss’ secretary.

In other words, the ur-Steve Trevor, as Marston conceived of him, is not a fighter nor a love, but a hospital patient. The true Steve Trevor is the wounded — or, perhaps more accurately, infantilized — Steve Trevor.

In Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power, and Reistance, Gill Plain argues that:

War creates a situation in which the gender debate is subsumed by a meta-narrative of power. It represents a conflict that divorces and prioritises the division between activity and passivity from the founding binary opposition masculine/feminine. War almost represents itself as a constructive reinscription, or even a rejection of the age-old formulations of gender…. In the course of purusing the division between a non-gender-specific activity and passivity, woman is ‘decentered’… The woman has once again become invisible.

For Plain, then, war destabilizes gender by divorcing activity/passivity from gender — but in so doing, it erases women’s difference, and so erases women.

I think, though, Marston, radical feminist and dirty old coot, has found a way around this dilemma. He uses the destabilizing effect of war to create an emasculated hero — the wounded soldier, whose incapacity is the sign of his boldness and strength. But for Marston, the fact that passivity is disconnected from women does not result in ungendering. On the contrary, it becomes a masochistic fetish. Steve regresses, authority is upended…and patriarchy becomes matriarchy. Woman isn’t erased; she’s explicitly elevated as caregiver and (maternal) hero. Which is (in Marston) what men want:

That’s an awesomely, fluidly flaccid twisted leg Peter has drawn there — and Steve is, of course, explicitly getting off on his own castration. War for Marston isn’t a disaster so much as an opportunity for men to embrace their weakness…and let women take over.

Myself for a Rival

A number of the stories in this volume end with a panel like this

What’s interesting about this is that…that’s it. The trope is stated…and then dropped, over and over again. The love triangle is pointed at, but never really becomes central to the plot (the way it is with the Clark/Lois/Superman triangle, even in the early years to some extent.)

It seems like, for Marston, there’s a pleasure in the masquerade of changing identities, and a frisson in the unrequited melodrama…but very little interest in actually presenting either Diana or Wonder Woman as angst-ridden or, for that matter, weak. There’s almost a condescension about it, like she’s pretending she’s worried to make Stevie feel important, the little darling. As I’ve mentioned before, double identities in Wonder Woman feel more like play than agonized bifurcation, a polymorphous feminine role-play rather than an agonized Oedipal bifurcation. After Marston died, of course, Diana’s love vicissitudes move from marginal tease to major plot points. With Marston’s feminism removed, everybody seemed more comfortable with a passive object of desire, rather than with the all-powerful Mommy, stooping to love.

Adding Incompetence to Insult

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This originally appeared on Comixology.
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I’ve been following the When Fangirls Attack linkblog (Update: sadly largely defunct now.) recently. Among other things, it’s a good way to find out what moronic cheesecake schlock the big two have served up this week. I think there have been at least three prime slices of said cheesecake since I’ve been following the blog with some regularity, namely:


Cover of Blackest Night.

 


Cover of Marvel Divas

 


JLA: Cry for Justice

And, what the hell, here’s a blast from the past or two as well.

 

 

The thing is, I have no problem with cheesecake. I even like cheesecake. Anita the Swedish Nymphet? Japanese Vogue? Michael Manning’s fetish porn? Sure; I vote for all of those. Or for the classic pin-up art of Dan DeCarlo:

 
Or Jack Cole:
 

 
Or even Larry Elmore’s trashy fantasy illustration:
 

 
Yet, despite my general appreciation for the form (in various senses), I find super-heroine cheesecake irritating and often borderline offensive. Why is that?

I think there are a couple of reasons. In the first place, super-heroines are, you know, heroes. They’re supposed to have stuff to do, crime to fight, justice to uphold, and so forth. For Dan DeCarlo and Jack Cole, the woman are just there to stare at; they’re hot, hot hot. That’s the whole raison d’etre; there’s no effort to pretend that you care what these women think, or how they act, or whether they defeat the villain without falling out of their tops and being exposed to the vastness of space.

I guess there’s a school of thought which would argue that turning women into objects like this is bad. And (despite the strong demurral of a couple of my lesbian friends) I do think there’s something to that. But, on the other hand, if you’re going to have pictures of sexy women, and the pictures of sexy women are why you’re there, maybe it makes more sense to just admit that, and not disingenuously pretend that you’re interested in what’s going on in their heads. If you make it simply about visual stimulation, it’s simply about visual stimulation, and doesn’t have to have anything to do (or at least, not much to do) with real women. Once you start pretending that you’re talking about a smart, motivated, principled adventurer, on the other hand, you end up implying that said smart, motivated, principled, adventurer has an uncontrollable compulsion to dress like a space-tart on crack. Which is, it seems to me, insulting.

The second thing is that, if you must make your adventurer into a fetish object, it seems like the least you could do is make her tough. That outfit that Larry Elmore’s fantasy warrior is wearing above is clearly ridiculous, and not a whole lot more practical than Star Sapphire’s get-up. But, at the same time, Elmore’s warrior looks badass. She’s got a giant sword and she looks thoroughly pissed off. She’d cheerfully castrate you without a second thought. And that’s the way to go: if you’re going to do action-hero cheesecake, then bring on the masochism: get off both on how hot the action hero is, and on how thoroughly she can beat you black and blue. It’s feministsploitation; not feminism exactly, but a fetishization of feminism, and it makes some sense at least to the degree that the fetish clothing and the putative power of the character are coherently working together, both in that the power makes the character more sexy and in that that the clothing adds (not necessarily logically, but still) to the sense of the character’s potency.

This sometimes works for super-heroine cheesecake too (Frank Miller’s Catwoman is an example). But more often, you get images like those above, where Star Sapphire’s costume makes her look vulnerable, not tough…or the Marvel Divas cover, where everybody but Hellcat is making with the bedroom eyes, and the only threat is that Black Cat’s costume may pinch so tightly that she actually pops apart at the waist, causing everything from the torso up to go swooshing about like a deflating balloon.

Which brings us to the last and perhaps most important point. Super-heroine cheesecake is often offensive just because it’s so thoroughly incompetent. Star Sapphire’s costume, for example, goes right past sexy and on into ludicrous. For the Marvel Divas cover, the artist couldn’t even come up with more than one body type – and he can’t even draw the one he’s got. As I already intimated, Black Cat’s top and bottom look horribly mismatched; similarly, Hellcat seems to have borrowed her breasts from Giant Girl. All of them look like toys, not people. And that Justice League cover starring Supergirl’s chest…why would you even do that? How is it sexy to have a disembodied bosom flapping about your foreground? And as if that’s not bad enough, as Katie Moody says in comments on the Beat; the artist seems to have accidentally left out our heroine’s ribcage. Or maybe it’s deliberate; did Supergirl lose her skeletal structure during one of the post-Crisis reboots? I must admit I haven’t been following the continuity that closely….

In any case, the point is, you look at drawings by DeCarlo or Jack Cole or yes, even Larry Elmore and they get the proportions minimally right (Elmore’s barbarian’s breasts are big, but not that big); they select flattering clothes (DeCarlo’s dress with its va-va-voom horizontal stripes); they take the time to figure out fluid poses (Cole’s sophisticated lady arranged in classic curves upon the couch.) In short, the artists seem to care about women enough to have looked at one or two of them at some point.

Not that I’d argue that good art can’t be sexist; craft and talent aren’t everything, or even necessarily all that much, in these matters. But they are something. Even if you’re pandering, doing a professional job of it implies a certain minimal level of respect not only towards your audience, but towards your subject as well. You look at super-heroine cheesecake, and you get a sense of a boys’ locker-room cluelessness so intense that it is indistinguishable from disdain. Honest sensuality in these circumstances would be a relief. Sexism may be bad, but incompetent sexism is just intolerable.

Utilitarian Review 2/25/12

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On HU

In our Featured Archive post this week, Erica Friedman explains what’s the big deal about Sailor Moon.

I talk about rape, love, and Sally Jupiter from Watchmen.

Jones, One of the Jones Boys on the reactionary sexual morality of Garth Ennis’ Preacher.

Nadim Damluji on new Indian comics opposing the caste system.

Richard Cook looks at horror television and why The River is so bad.

Vom Marlowe on the cozy absurdity of Midsomer Murders.
 
Other Links

Kathryn Van Arendonk on whether television is still episodic.

Kristy Valenti on dick lit: Paying for It and Habibi.

A trailer for a new Wonder Woman documentary.