A Comment on Modesta

Didn't blog Saturday. First day I've missed in about two months. What can I say? Feeling pretty empty. Pretty down. Sighing a hell of a lot. Tonight just sat staring blankly at the TV. Felt like I wouldn't blog again. Really fed up with putting in the effort for so little result. It's bad when I can't even feel any pleasure in drawing a cartoon. Every tweet I write loses me followers. Wondering about going back into hiding, back to my programming and teaching myself how to write for Windows. Vague ideas of things I'd like to do but can't figure out why I should bother...

In the end, I was only motivated to write this because I wrote something in response to a dumb and deeply irritating article over at The Guardian. Channel 4 are promoting a young singer but on the basis that she's the first amputee pop star. The article was similarly well meaning but in a completely patronising way. I always feel that it's a crass approach to both music and to disability. Anyway, I wrote the following, which I guess will get zero votes and will probably be deleted by the morning. The Guardian seem to hate my comments. At least I can now say I blogged Sunday. Monday I'm going into LIverpool. Might cheer me up. Might not.

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My comment in response to this.

The world would be a far more enlightened place if we could concentrate on the quality of an artist's music rather than judging them on something we're encouraged to overlook.

'Forget what you know about disability'... [The first title in her video.]

Bit of an oxymoron, isn't it? Forget the very thing you're choosing to highlight repeatedly in that long, pretentiously over-produced video. Isn't also somewhat presumptuous? What do you think I know about disability?

Should I forget that disability isn't an issue? Do I listen to Ian Dury because he wrote and sang great lyrics or because of his physical condition? It's the so-called 'imperfect' people in the world who often make the most beautiful music because there's not one of us who isn't broken in some way. Our imperfections are what we call 'individuality', 'character' and 'soul'. It's the very basis of great art. I suppose that's why Channel 4 paid to air this video in the break to X-Factor. Art-without-soul is the very thing the X-Factor has, year upon year, tried to persuade us isn't as important as marketing, celebrity and gimmick.

I'm not interested in vocal or physical perfection. Did Johnny Cash sing anything in his youth as great as the songs he produced when his voice was cracking and carried the scars of a lifetime? Give me Jim Morrison when he was overweight and his voice broken over the one who posed for iconic photos. Are Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder great singer/songwriters or great blind singer/songwriters?

What this article (and video) seem to forget is that in a modern truly liberal society, disability isn't a label we apply to people. We should each be judged on who we've been, who we are and the person we wish to become. When Ms. Modesta’s music begins to reflect her character in a non-facile way, then she might become a good musician with something significant to say. All I can see and hear, here, are over-produced autotuned vocals occasionally punctuating a tediously long video filled with heavy-handed symbolism. It's as indistinct from the videos of a thousand other singers equally devoid of character.

And if you think that sounds harsh, then doesn't it demean Ms. Modesta (and demean other far better artists) not to apply the same critical judgement to this song as we would to any other performance?

Getting into Gaga: An Old Fart’s Guide to Loving the Lady

The Lady Gaga phenomenon sadly passed me by. I don’t know why or when or even what I was doing at the time. I was possibly clipping my toenails or buying new underpants and I just didn’t notice the world go crazy about this supremely gifted young woman and her music.

Now I think about it, I do recall seeing some pictures of her in the nude, though I don’t remember why I was nude. Probably something to do with my needing new underpants… I was, however, struck by her unusual fashion sense. In days of bland talent, Gaga seemed particularly spikey, though that was in no small part due to the enormous spikes she was wearing at the time, along with a bin bag, rubber talons, and fetishist’s rider’s crop with feather tickler.

That was as far as my interest went until now... The imminent release of Gaga’s new album, Popart, means that I finally have chance and reason to catch up with the rest of the world in appreciating this unique talent. I expect I’m not alone. There must be many of you out there in similar positions: intrigued by the enigma, wanting to know more, but unsure where to start. Well, worry no longer, my friends. I’m here to help. Grab my muscular arm (not the withered one!) and let me bring you up to speed on the phenomenon known affectionately to her fans as ‘the velvet aardvark’.

Let me just preface the following by saying that before I did my extensive research, I knew almost nothing about Lady Gaga. Thankfully, the internet came to my rescue. I now consider myself an expert in all things Gaga based on that impeccable source of information.

So, let’s begin our story at the beginning. It was March 28, 1986, one month before Chernobyl let off its radioactive poison cloud, when Lady Gaga was born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta in the back of a high class New York taxi cab. Her initials SJAG, honour the S-type Jag in which she took her first lungful of air and let out a caterwaul. Like Chernobyl, little is known about her life for the next eighteen years but she did attend Catholic school which inevitably led to her career as a barroom stripper. Working in burlesque, the young Gaga was exposed to many musical influences. Her precise dance moves she often attributes to the years she spent learning to kick her knickers across a crowded room without taking out somebody's eye. It was in the strip joint that she was first taught to play the harmonica by a one-eyed table dancer call Chloe. It was there that she wrote her first song ‘Poker Face’ about an old tassel hoofer whose facial nerves had withered after losing a bet in an illicit lemon sucking den in Harlem. Yet the event that changed her life and the course of human history happened one night in 2007. During a particularly nimble strip, her right suspender got stuck. Filling the time as she tried to unhook the clasp, she started to sing and that’s when famed record producer, Herb Spanish, heard her powerful baritone for the very first time. ‘It was like a visit to my proctologist,’ he later said. ‘That voice was both familiar and yet so very strange. I couldn’t sit down for a week after hearing it.’

A record contract soon followed and the Lady Gaga phenomenon quickly spread further than she could kick off her underwear, which is to say, a pretty long way.

But that was nearly seven long years ago. We are now about to embark on the next phase of her musical journey and her newest song provides some hints as to what we can expect. It’s called ‘Applause’ and the cover of the single is a certain giveaway as to this new direction.

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The cover depicts Lady Gaga dressed as a clown whose makeup has run after what looks like a professional egging. However this modern take on the traditional commedia dell'Arte figure of Pierrot is Gaga’s way paying her debts to other musicians. Here she is clearly imitating the not-disturbing-in-the-slightest-way cover of the classic album, ‘Circus in Town’, by Merle Evans and his Circus Band. The direct gaze is reminiscent of Charlie Mingus’s clown album, whilst, perhaps the greatest debt of all is to Pavarotti’s Greatest Hits in which the great man appears on the cover striking a gong that has been cunningly disguised as a big bass drum.

In this sense, ‘Applause’ may be Gaga’s most intensely personal songs. Her debt to Pavarotti is obvious from the first line which strikes a powerful note.

‘I stand here waiting for you to bang the gong’.

What gong, you ask? The gong of public opinion, I reply. Like Pavarotti before her, Ms Gaga is using the gong-banging metaphor as a clarion call to modern youth, among whom gongs are apparently very popular since the worldwide Korean hit, Gongem Style in 2012. Go into any park on a weekend and you’ll see the youth standing around their newest gongs, made by fashionable gong companies such as Beats, Bangs, and Bongs. Yet to Gaga, the gongs are symbolic of talent shows where artists are cruelly judged on their musical ability.

‘To crash the critic saying, "is it right or is it wrong?"’

There’s no beating about the bush or, indeed, about the gong! We’re straight into the moral relativism that’s so clearly close to the Gaga heart. It reminds me of Nietzsche who first asked what is beyond good and evil? Well, Gaga is here to tell you…

‘If only fame had an IV, baby could I bear
Being away from you, I found the vein, put it in here’

What lies beyond good evil? Now you know. It’s contorted syntax and half-rhymes. But let’s try to unwrap this wayward beast of a line and see what Gaga is really saying because she certainly doesn’t mean that fame itself would take its nutrients through a vein. Rather, she’s saying that she wishes that fame could be applied intravenously, because, if it could, she would plunge it into her arm so she wouldn’t need to go to the effort of entertaining people to make them laud her.

It is, I admit, a chilling confession, brought into sharp focus by the lyrics of the chorus.

‘I live for the applause, applause, applause […]
Live for the way that you cheer and scream for me’.

What we have here is old school narcissism and it’s admirable that her Ladyship should share this with the world. It’s rare that people are honest enough to reveal their darker sides, even at the risk of their appearing utterly dislikeable. However, Gaga is apparently confessing the grubby truth that her art is less important than the fame. The music is merely the means to an end and she will do anything to get the affirmation of her adoring crowd.

Let’s skip a few lines which repeat the same things and look at the second verse. What psychological horrors honesty might that reveal?

‘I've overheard your theory / "Nostalgia's for geeks"’

I’ll be honest and admit that this takes the ring round around my comprehension. Why might nostalgia be for geeks? Aren’t geeks forward looking and excited by the future? Unless Gaga is hereby offering a new geekdom! Ah, perhaps that’s what it is… We’re not just looking beyond good and evil. We’re looking beyond geekdom too! She has become the Übergeek! The geek of all geeks!

‘I guess sir, if you say so / Some of us just like to read’.

It’s admirable that she’s promoting literacy give her evident difficulties with the written word…

‘One second I'm a kunst’

A ‘kunst’?

‘Then suddenly the kunst is me’

Like some staggering bilious drunk emerging suddenly from the gloom, the meaning now becomes clear! She does indeed love to read and having read the German word for ‘art’, she has also spotted an elaborate pun too filthy to explain. However, this is taking us straight into the meat of this ugly business…

‘Pop culture was in art
Now, art's in pop culture in me’.

It’s a magnificent observation, contracting all the themes of the song into one memorably image. Where previously pop culture had made inroads into the world of art, art is now a subset of pop culture. Yet Gaga also realises that the entirety of pop culture is represented by Lady Gaga herself. She might as well cry, ‘my name is Legion: for we are many’! Lady Gaga is pop culture but, moreover, all art is raised in her image and to glorify her being.

Is there no clearer meaning behind this song? In her pursuit of fame and applause, Lady Gaga no longer cares about the music. The arrangement of programmed beats and autotuned vocal meddling are a brilliant way of conveying the attitude of a singer completely indifferent to the business of making meaningful art. What we have, then, is merely an audio jingle for the cloth eared. It is music made by an already jaundiced system where expensive promotion can still indoctrinate shallow youth with a message that takes sexuality and turns it into a form of camp theatre, art into faux outrage, and fame into gaudy bubble, expensive to view but ultimately a shell encompassing the sheer banality of nothing.

Here, then, you have understanding. You have now graduated with honours in Gaga. Look forward to the album with this new knowledge. If you can, send her money without even buying the album. It’s what she’d prefer. Then laud her but don’t make her have to do anything.

Laud her loudly and long because, don’t you know, she lives for your applause.

Last night I sat down and listened to an entire Jonathan Coulton album

This whole complicated business began with the cricket. I’d logged onto The Guardian’s website to see if we’d won The Ashes. We hadn’t. Not yet, at least. In my disappointment, I suppose I lingered and… Well, I swear I don’t know how it happened. It must have jumped out when I wasn’t looking. One minute I was reading about Prince Charles’ political meddling, the next I was listening to Lady Gaga’s new single. In fact, I listened to it twice just in case I’d missed something like my sanity medication. Then I wrote the following comment.

Not made for me, not aimed at me, and won’t make a difference what I say. Therefore: polished, predictable, and completely lacking heart. An old sock hanging from iron railings has more artistic depth that this vacuous jingle for the drone army in control of this corporately controlled dehumanised world.

The last bit was probably laying it on a bit thick but I didn’t have time to make it pithy. Not that I really needed to. As is always the case: some people liked the comment and others hated it. One even put their grievance into words:

I think that's just the standard Guardian-reader response to something they can't be bothered to understand just because it's 'popular'. And i'd love to hear the music aimed at you, since you clearly know what music should sound like. Yawn.

The comment stirred some thoughts, not all of them to my credit, but I did wonder if I listen to too much of the same kind of music. I’d intended to spend the evening in comfort, drawing cartoons, and, as is my usual way, I was planning to plug in my iPad and listen to music as I worked.

My tastes are fairly varied but I am the kind of person who’ll listen to the same album a hundred times before I change it. Lately, it’s been Sparks on constant loop but tonight the comment put in the mind to try something else. My usual listening can be anything from Tom Waits, PJ Harvey, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, through folky territory with Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Suzanne Vega, Neil Young walking me into grunge and punk, so there’s also The Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Talking Heads… That’s off the top of my head but there’s also Ry Cooder, Serge Gainsbourg, The White Stipes/Jack White, The XX, Frank Zappa, The Doors (especially ‘LA Woman’ which is my favourite album and song), David Bowie, Philip Glass, Jean Michel Jarre, Bach, The B52s… Okay, I’m now cheating. I’m just scrolling through my iTunes library but I could carry on like this for hours and no real pattern would emerge except you might notice that I don't like jazz and I’ve never bought into packaged pop. Whatever that ‘popular’ thing is, I’ve never been into it.

Not that I wanted to get into it last night. Lady Gaga: not now, not ever. I did, however, want to listen to something new and there was one obvious choice…

I’ve been meaning to listen to Jonthan Coulton for a very long time. He’s been lingering in the corner of musical periphery for years but something has always got in the way of my trying out the live album I’d been given a while ago. Sometimes being smart can work against a person and Coulton, I think, suffers more than most due to his association with a certain fan base.

Like many people, the first time I head his music was in the context of a computer game. Some years ago, I was hooked on a game called Half Life 2 on the PC. The end of the game involved a fight with a artificial intelligence which had achieved sentience. The masterful finale, now remembered as one of the high points of gaming, involved the defeated computer singing a song about cake. The song was called ‘Still Alive’ and remains much loved among geeks. This Youtube recording of the game’s closing credits has been watched over 18 million times. That’s eighteen million voices squeaking along to ‘aperture science…’



Even outside the context of the game, the song deserved to be a hit and still deserves to be better known. I remember researching the song at the time and discovering that it was written by a very well established musician called Jonathan Coulton. Yet something stopped me from going on and listening to more of his work. I like to think it was a lack of availability here in the UK but I think what really dissuaded me was that his songs were loved by a certain kind of American hipster, a rare and noble breed of geek that lacks the social awkwardness of their British counterparts. These American geeks had embraced their difference, formed themselves into huge communities in places like San Francisco, where they ran the entire internet whilst listening to Coulton. Actually, forget I said San Francisco. Coulton fans remind me of this great opening to the comedy series, Portlandia…



Coulton seems to write, exist, and find his audience within that very specific subculture. Even the live album’s title (‘Best. Concert. Ever’) conveys Coulton’s spiritual debt to his audience and their idiom. Songs like ‘Code Monkey’ and ‘Mandelbrot Set’ aren’t something you’d find on even the most highbrow band’s album but Coulton is of that geek world and you sense that he really understands it. ‘Code Monkey’ may enjoy playing with the clichés of the programmer but he captures the nuances too.

Code Monkey get up get coffee
Code Monkey go to job
Code Monkey have boring meeting
With boring manager Rob
Rob say Code Monkey very diligent
But his output stink
His code not "functional" or "elegant"
What do Code Monkey think?
Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write god damned login page himself
Code Monkey not say it out loud
Code Monkey not crazy, just proud

Confession time. I was once a code monkey and my manager in my second job was called ‘Rob’. The only difference is that I enjoyed writing login pages. It was where I could stick all my silly easter eggs. The boring part was coding the functions that printed out reports... But I digress…

Even given my geekish background, it doesn’t make me an obvious Coulton fan. I loathe ‘funny songs’ after growing up in an era when the TV was filled with men who discovered that a failing comedy act could be rescued if they held a guitar and sang. Or they were failed singers who rescued their musical career by telling jokes badly. They were a strange hybrid capable of both sucking and blowing, perhaps years before their time, and yet to find a new life after Sir James Dyson has fitted them with plastic balls and the ability to vacuum the stairs. And Coulton might be viewed in the same light as those comic-singers except for two problems: his music is too good and his comedy is too beautifully observed.

I’m not going to review every song or quote too many long blocks of lyrics but this example from ‘Tom Cruise Crazy’ is typical.

Tom Cruise is so in love with Katie
At least all his people tell him so
And while he thinks that she's a very special lady
It's probably not the way he'd choose to go
But a lifetime of longing looks would cause too much distraction
Good thing that he's not gay anymore

The lyrics sound better on the ear than they do on the page. Coulton takes utterly bland things of everyday observations and pulls them sideways. The line ‘good thing that he’s not gay anymore’ is perfect example of his twisted wit. The common assumption is that Cruise is or was gay (not a viewpoint I share). However, Coulton is phrasing it ironically, knowing that we probably think the opposite, that Cruise is gay. However, the archness of the song comes from the delivery. This is a singer playing a role, that of the reader of tabloid gossip. It then becomes a geek’s response to banality, overlaid with wit and a kind of far seeing clarity.

And that is the cleverness of his writing that can be a problem. Is it too pleased with its intelligence or is he merely providing a recognisable voice for a generation that have removed themselves from that world? Before last night, I might have said the former. Now, I’m converted. The solo acoustic performance threw the emphasis on the lyrics. The entire album is filled with strong songs, best when they’re commentating on the banalities of life. These are outsider songs, reminding his faithful why they chose to be different. Highlights include the song ‘Ikea’, a hymn to perkily named furniture, and Coulton’s reinventing the Sir Mix-a-Lot song ‘Baby Got Back’, the lyrics given an additional twist coming from the mouth of singer who more likely to sing about the Madelbrot set than his love for the juicier rear.

It’s when he is singing about computers, though, that I begin to feel so oddly at home that I wonder why I never listened to him sooner. As a teenager, I tried to write code that could draw the Madelbrot set. I never managed it. I was lousy at maths and, even if I’d figured it out, the computers were far too slow. Or perhaps I didn’t have somebody to provide a better role model. Music was obsessed with singing about that simple thing called love. Perhaps I needed Coulton back then to explain things to me. Perhaps if I had, I’d have been a better programmer, living in Portland, and washing my yogurt maker whilst singing this algorithm from memory…

Take a point called Z in the complex plane
Let Z1 be Z squared plus C
And Z2 is Z1 squared plus C
And Z3 is Z2 squared plus C and so on
If the series of Z's should always stay
Close to Z and never trend away
That point is in the Mandelbrot Set

 

It's A Sparks Show

Coming soon... It's A Sparks Show: Part 2...

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This was a comic strip idea that had been rattling around in my head for a long time so I’m glad to have finally sat down and drawn it out. I think drawing this was some kind of penance for once writing to Ron Mael as Stan Madeley (movie frogman) offering to teach him how to scuba dive. He never replied but I can hardly blame him.

I’ve been a big fan of Sparks, possibly from early childhood but, on a conscious level, since I discovered the 'Gratuitous Sax' album yet I consider myself to be far too sane to be one of those 'super fans'. I stood next to a few of them outside Manchester’s Ritz last October when I saw Sparks play live. It was a birthday present otherwise I would have probably missed the tour and missed standing in line with one scary woman who was ready to throw body parts onto the stage if Russell Mael had only looked in her direction. Rather than stand at the front, I crept up to the balcony and, as fate would have it, got one of the few seats in the house (video here). I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Sparks will come back to Manchester around October when they do another live tour later in the year. The evening was sublime.

Next to seeing the Ralph Steadman exhibition or going to the Fringe to see Stuart Lee and Baconface, a Sparks concert could be another highlight of that fantasy year when I actually earn money for my cartoons/books and can actually afford to see all the things I want to see.

Looking back at this strip, there are things I could have done much better. I mainly read underground comics so I love roughly framing, though, doing this again, I perhaps  wouldn’t make it quite as rough. Some of the crosshatching was also rushed. Yet there are parts of this I really like. Learning to draw cartoons is all about constant practice. I didn’t want to spend too long on this, though I’ve not drawn two A4 sheets for quite a while. Anyway, success or failure, this is one of those things I draw for myself. The monkey at the end amuses me enormously and I've not stopped smiling all day.

Bob Dylan Plays China

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