Spider-Man: Rock Reflections of a Superhero

Long, long ago, when my friend Kristin still lived in North Carolina (actually, two years ago), I went out to visit, and one day we went to the Ava Gardner Museum, but didn't actually go inside because it was closed. We did go inside some antique stores, though, where I bought a little bit of Pyrex and this record:



It looked interesting, but also maybe a little bit cheesy, especially when I looked at the back:



and saw all the pictures of how the singing and music were all allegedly performed by Marvel Comics characters like the Hulk and the Falcon:



Conan (On strings? Really? Violins weren't even invented yet) and Captain America:



and even the Fantastic Four:



Too late, Reed. You're on the cover art:



The song titles were intriguing, as they hinted at stories but, by themselves, didn't actually tell one: "No One's Got a Crush on Peter" was probably about Peter Parker's awkward high school years, as was "Square Boy". "Peter Stays and Spider-Man Goes" might be a reference to Amazing Spider-Man 50, a well known issue from the 1960's when Peter decides that he's done being Spider-Man, but other songs could mean anything: "High Wire"? "Count On Me"? Others were fairly obvious. There's no mistaking what "Dr. Octopus" or "Green Goblin" are about, since those are some of Spider-Man's best known foes.

And "Gwendolyn" is clearly about Gwen Stacy, Peter's first girlfriend, a character who should have been in all of the Spider-Man movies but only ended up being in some of them because Peter was married to Mary Jane Watson during the 90s (before he sold his marriage to Satan) and the movies had to match the comics and cartoon. Although she's been a little mishandled by writers since her death (looking at you, Straczynski) and readers today generally only see her as a sweet, smiling girlfriend in flashback scenes, Gwen Stacy in the 1960's was an independent woman who fought for women's rights and functioned as more than just a love interest.



She was, but I'm digressing. I just got really irritated that the Tobey Maguire movies didn't even have Gwen until the third (and worst) one, and then she was pretty undeveloped as a character. I wasn't a big fan of the Andrew Garfield movies, on the whole, but at least they had the right love interest, and she was well written.

Back to the album, all I could do was guess at what was inside, because I don't have a record player.

This Christmas, though, my parents changed all that, not by giving me a record player, but by getting me this CD:



It's all I've listened to in the car since Christmas, and it's very entertaining. There's not really any new art:





other than this weirdly creepy photo of someone in a Spider-Man costume holding the original record:



but it does have a story from Mike Ragogna, a songwriter from the original album who was 17 at the time, about how the record came to be:



which basically boils down to "Marvel was making a ton of money licensing Spider-Man out for pretty much anything, so they asked Lifesong Records to make a Spider-Man rock album."

While that story is interesting, the album itself is, too. It's like listening to a Broadway show that didn't actually exist, with the songs telling a story that's linked together by narration between each song, spoken by none other than Stan Lee himself. Shockingly, he doesn't overact it, and there's something about listening to a story of Spider-Man, a hero whose identity is grounded in being from New York City, told in Stan Lee's unpolished New York accent that makes it all even better. The general plot is that Peter is doubting himself, and looks back on his beginnings as Spider-Man, his self-doubt, and finally his resolve to be a better hero. Sadly, it also touches on the death of Gwen at the hands of the Green Goblin, an event that shaped Spider-Man's character for decades to come and which was kind of terrible to relive while driving to the grocery store.

The songs themselves are kind of a mixed bag of styles and impact, and the album is a little reminiscent of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in the way that every song is a different musical style. Some of them sound very 60's and 70's, with "Dr. Octopus" and "A Soldier Starts to Bleed" reminding me a lot of the ensemble songs in Hair, but some of the songs probably sounded pretty dated already when this came out in 1975. That's not surprising, coming from a company that rolled out (no pun intended, given her roller skates) Disco Dazzler in 1981, when disco was already pretty much dead.



Sorry, Dazzler. I love you, but it's true.

It's an interesting album for comics fans, but I'm not sure how much non-fans will get out of it. I think the best song on the album turned out to be "Peter Stays and Spider-Man Goes", but your mileage may vary.

My Dark Descent Into Taylor Swift Fandom

It's been warm in Knoxville this week, warm enough that when it wasn't raining I was driving around with my windows down. That means that anyone close enough to the car can hear what I've been playing, and all this week it's been Taylor Swift's 1989. (Last week it was Steve Grand's All American Boy, which you should buy both because it is a decent debut album and also because you can hear a man singing pop songs about loving another man's sexy body.) I didn't stop to think about how weird this might seem until tonight when I ran into a friend in the Kroger parking lot on my way home.

"Joel, is that... are you listening to Taylor Swift?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I like her."

"You like Taylor Swift now? You?"

I do.

I like Taylor Swift.

Let me take a minute to explain how this happened. I mentioned it once before, when I wrote about how much I didn't like Beck's Album of the Year. I buy CD's, rather than just downloading the album on iTunes or Amazon, because I don't want to download every song on any album until I know if I like them or not. Sure, I could still do that with digital music files, but if I have a physical CD and don't like it I can take it to McKay's and trade it in for store credit, like I did with that crappy Beck CD. I can't do that on Amazon or iTunes. Granted, it's not what I paid for it, but it's better than nothing. With that idea in mind, I purchased Taylor Swift's CD thinking that I wouldn't like it, but also thinking that I should at least listen to it before pre-judging.

On my first listen, I was immediately scornful. After hearing "Welcome to New York", the first song on the album, my immediate response was, "This sounds exactly the way someone who wasn't alive in the '80's thinks 80's music sounded like." It gave me the same feeling that photos of sorority "80's Nights" parties does. It was very synthesizer heavy, sounded a little processed, and even though it didn't have any beats or chords in common with it the song sounded to me like a knockoff of Nu Shooz's "I Can't Wait". It was later pointed out to me that Taylor Swift actually was alive in the 1980's. She was born in 1989. By the time I finished a first listen of the entire album, I believed that my preconceived notion of Taylor was still correct: She was the kind of girl that I would advise a straight guy friend to immediately break up with, because there was a seething undercurrent of "clinging nutbag" to all her songs.

I'm slow to react, though, so Taylor Swift kept playing in the car for the rest of the week.

By Wednesday, I realized that I liked the third song on the album, "Style". It was catchy, moody, and I might have gotten hooked a little by the reference to James Dean, but also it's a song about how you should really stop dating this guy but you keep dating him anyway because you're both a little obsessed with each other and when you're good together it's great but really you should just break it off for real this time because you keep crashing and burning and that's happened to me before when I was younger and Oh my God, I have something in common with a Taylor Swift song.

Taylor Swift and I connected.

It was like a door opened, and I suddenly began to hear all of the songs on the CD in a different way. I understood that yes, Taylor and I can be a little mental sometimes, but we've both dated a lot of guys who are jerks. And we kept dating them. We remain hopeful, but Jesus, we sure can pick them, can't we? By Friday of that week, five days into my Taylor Swift listening experience, I realized that even though Kelly Clarkson is my go-to for music when I'm mad about a man (because every time I hear a song by Kelly Clarkson I want to go find a man who wronged me and kick him right in the junk), there was room in my heart for my girl Taylor.

So yes, I like Taylor Swift now, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

I don't particularly care for the new Beck album

We were released early from work yesterday, due to an ice storm currently rolling across East Tennessee. The roads were just starting to freeze when they left us out, an improvement over the last time this happened, when they let us out well into what the weathermen here charmingly refer to as "wintry mix", as if it's a bag of special snack food that you can only get around the holidays. For the most part, my ride home was fine, if a little slow, except for one turn from Volunteer onto Joe Johnson. I took it a tiny bit too fast, and as I completed the turn my back end slid for just a second on some slush, and I thought:

Shit. I'm going to fly off the bridge and die a fiery death in the Publix parking lot, and the last thing I'm going to hear is this crappy Beck CD.

Did you know that Beck has a new album out? I didn't, but he does. Morning Phase is his first new album in six or seven years, and I had no idea that Beck was still around and releasing albums until it won Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards last weekend. I posted this to Facebook the night of the awards and my friends immediately commenced shaming me, their responses ranging from random expressions of disgust ("Ugh, Joel.") to indictments of the general state of our culture and the fact that I know everything about every single Real Housewife but nothing about Beck's current status as an artist.

That's a lie, by the way.

I don't know anything about the Housewives of Miami.

Mostly because it's the only one of the franchises that I don't watch.

I have standards, you know.

What I did not have, on the other hand, was a copy of Beck's new album, so Monday, when I left work early due to my terrible cold, I realized on the way home that I needed more diet ginger ale and diet orange juice and decided that I would go to Target, since they also have a music department. I assumed I could kill two birds with one stone, and when I had my basket loaded with juice and soda I headed over to the music area, where I found a display of Grammy winners.

Minus Beck.

I checked the B section of the "Pop/Rock" area, because it won "Best Rock Album", but they had nothing from Beck there. Mildly annoyed, I flagged down the nearest employee, who explained that the CD was not actually out yet, but that I could buy it on iTunes. Some of my friends also suggested this, but I like to buy the CD and listen to it in the car for a few days so that I know if I like the songs or not. That's how I came to understand, after a week of listening to nothing else but 1989 in my car, that Taylor Swift is not a slightly unbalanced man-stalking nutbag, but is instead my spirit animal. We've both dated a bunch of jerks, and then picked ourselves up and moved on.

Back to Beck, though, I made a second attempt at purchasing the new CD on Tuesday after work, when I was going to Barnes and Noble to pick up this Superman hardcover. They don't carry a lot of music at Barnes and Noble (it isn't Borders), but there is a little rack up near the registers and bargain books, so I figured since I was already there I might as well look. Nope, no Beck CD although, just like Target, the rack had a large sign advertising the Grammy Awards. I didn't actually watch the Grammies, but I heard from credible sources that the album won Album of the Year. What the hell?

Now determined to track down and purchase this thing, I went from Barnes and Noble straight to the mall, even though it was Tuesday night and it was almost time for my stories. I went straight to FYE, which claims to be For Your Entertainment, and where they have a large selection of CDs. As predicted, they had a huge Grammy display at the front of the store, and I immediately scanned it, looking for the Album of the Year.

Which wasn't there.

"Can I help you find something, sir?"

I live in the south, so I get "sir"-ed a lot. I turned to Nick, an FYE employee who appeared to have been born right around the last time I purchased any of Beck's music, and said, "Yes, please. I'm looking for the new Beck CD. It won a Grammy?"

Nick frowned thoughtfully and stared at the Grammy display rack.

"I don't see it," he said, still frowning. "Are you sure it won a Grammy? Because they sent us a list to tell us what to put on the shelf."

"It won Album of the Year," I said. Clearly, Nick doesn't watch awards shows, either.

"Let me go look it up for you, sir."

"Sure, thanks."

Eventually Nick located the CD, over in the B section of "Rock/Pop".

"Maybe you should put some on the Grammy shelf over there?" I suggested.

"Oh, no, we only put stuff on those from the list they send us."

I thought about pointing out that the list was obviously incomplete, but I didn't have it in me to lecture an 18 year old on fighting his corporate overlords and showing a spark of independent thought. He probably just wanted to get through the rest of his minimum wage shift without having to help clueless old guys locate CD's by obscure artists he's never heard of when they should have just bought it from iTunes and not come to the mall in the first place. Mildly disgruntled but ultimately satisfied at completing my To Do list in time to get home and watch my stories, I hiked back to the car, drove home, and spent the next six days listening to Beck's "Morning Phase".

And I don't like it.

There's nothing in particular that I don't like about it, but after repeated listening there's also nothing in particular that I like about it. None of the songs stand out or catch my thoughts, and in fact they all kind of sound the same and blur together into one song that takes up the whole album. Every time I start to think, "Jesus, how long is this song?" I look at the CD player and realize that it's three songs later than the last time I looked. I just didn't notice the songs changing because they all sound exactly the same and, worse, it's not a particularly entertaining sound.

To me.

But it won a Grammy, so there must be something there that I'm missing.

"Whatever Happened to Day 30?"

I already explained what happened to Day 27 of my 30 Days of Blogging project for the month of April, but yesterday Jeannie pointed out to me that Day 30 was also strangely absent. I did actually have an entry for Day 30 mentally sketched out in my head, but on the evening of Day 30 I came home to write it and Comcast no longer felt like providing internet service. This has been happening fairly often lately, with Comcast's only explanation being, "Oh... unplug your modem for ten seconds so that it resets, and that should solve the problem." When I have to do that four times in an hour, because the modem comes back on and then immediately goes back out again, I just give up and do something else.

Anyway, the topic for Day 30 of 30 Days of Blogging was:

"American Idiot": The Musical

Green Day released the album American Idiot in 2004, and I consider it to be one of the best pieces of musical art to come out of the "W" Bush presidency. Whether or not you agree with it, the album is still emotionally resonant almost ten years later, with the anger, disillusionment, powerlessness, and outrage of liberal Americans still palpable when you listen to it. It certainly holds up better than Toby Keith's Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue, which seems to sum up the worst parts of American ignorance, bullying, and jingoistic enthnocentrism, or the open, shamelessly grasping artificial sentimentality that drips from every word of Alan Jackson's Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning). The feelings in "American Idiot" have at least been validated over the intervening almost-decade: the American people were lied to, repeatedly, and railroaded into a senseless war over imaginary weapons of mass destruction to bring democracy to a people that don't want the kind we have to offer, and they have a right to be angry about it.

These are the themes of the musical, too, which uses the music of the album and the weaker (but still good) followup album, 21st Century Breakdown to tell the story of three friends in post-9/11 America and the roads that life takes them down. My parents bought me a ticket for Christmas to see the touring version of the show downtown at the Tennessee Theatre:



and it was fantastic.

At the end, when the main character sings "Whatsername" about the woman he loved and lost through drug addiction and domestic abuse, I cried a little bit. I've always liked that song, but it touched me in a whole new way when I had a story to go with it, and it's not just some mythic story or a Hollywood movie: it's the story of us. Sure, I never moved to the big city and got hooked on drugs, but we all have friends that we drifted away from, and some of us are the friend who was left behind in the hometown while everyone else went out into the world. I have friends who joined the army and went away to the war, and friends who came back damaged and lost because of it. I enjoyed the show so much that I wished I had a ticket for the second night, too, just to see what I missed after being overwhelmed by it the first time.

On top of how good that part of the night was, I also took a short stroll down the alley on the back of Market Square between Wall Avenue and Union Avenue, and was delighted to see that almost all of the graffiti has been painted over since the last time I was there, and that artists have added new things:







(that one was a little unexpected, as I rarely see graffiti depicting non-Christian religions around Knoxville besides the ones for the Church of the Sub Genious:



but, you know, hey there Baphomet, I guess someone likes you)



















It was like my own little quiet art gallery tour, if the gallery smelled vaguely like sewage. I especially liked this painting:



or is it a metapainting, since it's a graffiti painting of a wall with graffiti on it?

Either way, walking through the alley on my way to the show made the evening that much better.

Until I got home and the internet was dead.

First Crush

On Day 17 of 30 Days of Blogging, I continue splicing Leo's topic into three topics. Having covered my first memory (possibly) yesterday, today we move on to:

First crush

But we again run into a problem: I have no idea who the first one was. I don't remember ever really having a crush, like a giggly swooning writing their name on the insides of my notebooks crush, but over the years I've had some low key crushes that I'm willing to share.

Literary Crush: F. Scott Fitzgerald. We would hang out in nightclubs, and listen to jazz, and smoke, and drink, and dance, and be friends with a lot of flappers, and he'd call me Joel and I'd call him F. Scott, and there would be no Zelda in sight to screw things up.

TV Crush: I have two, and have had both for years and years. There may be others who come and go, your Chace Crawfords and your Yigit Puras, but these two have endured the test of time. One is a character, and the other an actual person.

First, Dr. Crusher. Yes, I'm aware that she's female. I don't want to date her, but ever since I was a teenager I felt like Dr. Crusher and I would be best friends. She was the smartest woman on the Enterprise, and for about a year I prayed every night that I would get a brain tumor so that I could contact the Make a Wish Foundation and my wish would be a guest starring role on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and then Dr. Crusher and I would meet and become BFF's.

Yes, I'm aware that this plan was both deeply flawed and psychologically disturbed.

However, knowing that Gates McFadden tweets photos of herself playing with her Dr. Crusher figures just confirms that we are meant to be friends.

The second TV crush is Tom Welling. I watched "Smallville" way past the date when it was physically and mentally painful to do so (looking at you, Season 8) because Tom Welling was still on it every week, although that was about the time when he wanted to be a "serious actor" and stopped taking his shirt off onscreen so much.

Music Crush: For quite a while there, JC Chasez had the crown. I even had a shrine:



which I decided to (mostly) get rid of when I moved here. It was just as well, because by then I had moved on to Billie Joe Armstrong, the lead singer of "Green Day". I don't want to actually date Billie Joe. He could totally just lay on the couch with his guitar and plaintively wail about how we're out of a cheese and the remote fell on the floor and is too far away to reach, and I would make him a sandwich and be happy.

I would date the hell of out Brandon Flowers from "The Killers".

That's all I can say about that without getting the vapors.

Sorry, Billie Joe.

My-pod

"What are you listening to?"

My friend Stan asked this when we were discussing an excellent blog post he wrote about music with graphs and analysis and scientific testing. When I say we were discussing it, I mean that we were posting comments back and forth to each other. I'm pretty sure it has been over ten years since Stan and I were actually in each other's physical presence and could discuss anything in person, but I'm still using the word "discussion" because the language of social interaction hasn't quite caught up with the technology of it.

In any case, Stan asked what I listen to, and a simple question has a simple answer: I listen to my iPod.



(My iPod is modeled here by Ferro Lad, who hopefully did not punch out Superboy to get it.)

My iPod is the only place where I listen to music. I've had my car since 2006 and it doesn't have a single radio station programmed in because I only listen to the iPod. The radio has commercials, or songs that I don't like come on. Either is unacceptable. Before I had an iPod, I had a car with a six disc CD changer, and before that I had mixed tapes.

I've had the iPod even longer than the car, so long that Apple doesn't list it on their website anymore and will not service it if anything ever happens to it. Compared to the iPods of today, my iPod is a Neanderthal, the Cro-Magnon rung on Apple's ladder of technological evolution. When I got it, I spent over a week carefully copying every song I liked on every CD I owned onto it, generating a playlist that's somewhat heavy on the 1990s and early 2000s since that's the era when I had the most interest in music. I was even a radio station DJ in my undergrad for two years, with a two hour show in the "alternative" programming block. It's never really been clear to me how I progressed from that to my current sweater vest and khakis state, but I was never really that alternative to begin with, I think. I sure did like their music, though.

This is not to say that my iPod is without music made after 2005 or so. Despite not listening to the radio, new music finds its way onto my radar, most often through television but also through the kindly intervention of friends. Last Christmas, which I spent with my friend Sean, Sean was kind of horrified when I explained that I was still sort of unclear on who this "Lady Ga Ga" was and why she seemed to be famous. I was pretty sure that she was a singer, maybe in a band but possibly also a soloist, and I was unable to name or sing along to a single one of her songs. After three or four days of listening to Sean's radio while we drove around I was better informed, and he burned me three CDs to take home in the hopes that I would listen to them and become aware of pop-culturally relevant music again.

At roughly the same time, my friend Mike (who I call Larry) made a "Best of the Year" set of 4 CDs with an extensive seven page bibliography, explaning who each group was, what the song was, why he liked it, and including other bits of trivia that he felt may or may not be important. I listened to all of his CDs and the CDs that Sean made me for about three weeks on the way to and from work, then I listed all of the songs on them that I liked and downloaded them from iTunes and onto the iPod. The sad part of this story is that friends send me CDs like this on a fairly regular basis, because the only place where I hear new music otherwise is the television. If you've ever wondered who the people who google a band because they heard it on a commercial are, or who the intended audience for the "music from tonight's episode" sequences at the end of "Gossip Girl" is, then the answer to both of those questions is "me". I also buy a lot of soundtracks for movies.

Given all of that, what am I listening to?

1) A lot of cover songs. I love cover songs. I used to have mixed tapes of just cover songs for singing along to in the car. There are five versions of "Baby, One More Time" on my iPod, and only one of them is by Britney Spears. I have two versions of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", neither of which is by Nirvana, and in at least one case ("Land of Confusion") I thought I was downloading the original, accidentally got the cover song by mistake, and never went back for the version I intended to buy. A large part of the reason why I download so much music from "Glee" is my love for cover songs, but it's not confined just to that. I think the best song I heard last year was the Scala and Kolacny Brothers' version of "Creep", which I heard on the trailer for "The Social Network". It gives me shivers when I hear it, and I liked it so much that I listened to samples of all of their songs and downloaded three more.

2) Showtunes. I like musicals. Shut up.

3) The artist with the most songs on my iPod came as a surprise since it wasn't either of the two that I guessed. I assumed it would be the cast of "Glee" or it would be Greenday, but it turned out to be Fountains of Wayne. They have 38 songs out of the 923 on the iPod. "Glee" and Greenday are both in the mid-twenties, and I can list Blink 182, Blue October, the Killers, Cake, and Weezer as honorable mentions.

4) My playcounts are off, since my computer is only a few years old, but the song with the highest playcount is "Poker Face" by Lady GaGa. When that one comes up on shuffle I usually replay it a couple of times. There's a three way tie for second between "The Ballad of Michael Valentine" by the Killers, "Super Trouper" from the "Mamma Mia!" soundtrack, and "Now We Can See" by the Thermals. If the playcounts were tracked over the life of the iPod a lot of other songs would be much higher, and songs like Kim Zolciak's "Tardy for the Party" might not be quite so high. The song in dead last, with zero complete plays (the playcount only registers if you let the song go all the way to the end and let the iPod move to the next song itself) is the "Glee" cast version of "Baby, One More Time", mostly because mine has a few seconds of silence at the end and I always skip the iPod ahead to the next song rather than wait it out.

5) The genre listed most often on the iPod, over half of the 923 song playlist, is "Alternative", followed by "Soundtrack", then "Rock", then "Pop", and then a bunch of little ones. I'm not sure how Apple picks what genre a song or group goes in, since I don't really consider Natalie Merchant or Michelle Branch to be "Rock". Tori Amos doesn't seem like "Pop" to me, and I don't understand why "My Apology", by the Get Up Kids, is the only song on the whole iPod listed as "Punk" while their other songs fell under "Alternative". More than anything, though, I cannot imagine why Harvey Fierstein singing "I Am What I Am" is classified as "Rock". Was someone at iTunes smoking something that day?

What does all of this tell us about my taste in music? I dunno, but it does answer the question of what I'm listening to.