Magneto and Titanium Man

While there’s a rather obvious connection between comics (“sequential narratives”) and motion pictures, the connection between comics and popular music is less obvious. Although it’s unusual to see a reference to comics invoked in the context of popular music, this article, on Esoteric’s new SERVE OR SUFFER hip hop album, reveals some interesting connections between the two media. One of the earliest explicit connections I remember between comics and music, revealing that the two could come into confluence, was Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Magneto and Titanium Man,” from VENUS AND MARS (1975), a sort of ekphrastic attempt at a comic book. The music on Esoteric’s new album may not appeal to everyone, but it is interesting to see a concept album focused on the idea nonetheless.

In the 1960s, there was perhaps a closer connection to rock culture and the so-called “underground“ comics of the time--the cover of Big Brother & the Holding Company’s CHEAP THRILLS, for instance, was drawn by R. Crumb. Some years later, John Byrne would create the Silver Surfer illustration used on the cover of Joe Satriani’s album SURFING WITH THE ALIEN; a webpage of album covers drawn by comic book artists can be found here. So far as I’ve been able to discover, the first rock band inspired to take its name from a comic book was Suicide. According to Simon Reynolds (Rip It Up and Start Again, p. 143) the band took its name from the title of a Ghost Rider comic titled “Satan Suicide,“ “an issue of [Alan] Vega’s favorite comic book.” In 1979, Marvel Comics released a comic book (pictured) based on the characters in Alice Cooper’s FROM THE INSIDE (1978). The typographic design for The Cramps’ name was inspired by EC Comics’ Tales From the Crypt (EC Comics’ influence can also be seen in the cover of the Alice Cooper comic).

I’ve assembled below a playlist with references to comic characters. I’ve listed The Jam’s version of Neil Hefti’s “Batman Theme,” which has been covered many times over the years; it’s interesting that all the rock songs that I could find with comics references appeared after the Batman TV series premiered in January 1966.

A Rock Comic Con:
Donovan – “Sunshine Superman,” Sunshine Superman (1966)
The Kinks – “Johnny Thunder,” The Village Green Preservation Society (1968)
The Beatles – “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” (“So Captain Marvel zapped him right between the eyes”), The Beatles (1968)
T. Rex – “Mambo Sun,” (“I’m Dr. Strange for you”), Electric Warrior (1971)
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band – “Sergeant Fury,” The Impossible Dream (1974)
Paul McCartney and Wings – “Magneto and Titanium Man,” Venus and Mars (1975)
The Jam – “Batman Theme,” In The City (1977)
Suicide – “Ghost Rider,” Suicide (1977)
XTC – “Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me),” Black Sea (1980)
Joe Satriani – Surfing With the Alien (album of instrumentals), 1987
Prince – “Batdance,” Batman (1989)
Crash Test Dummies – “Superman’s Song,” The Ghosts That Haunt Me (1991)
Spin Doctors – “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues,” Pocket Full of Kryptonite (1991)
Esoteric vs. Gary Numan – “General Zod,” Pterodactyl Tubeway (2007)

Soft Rock

Perusing the used record bins in the local Goodwill Store the other day, I came across the worn, tattered cover (no LP inside) of a K-Tel compilation album consisting of “Soft Rock” hits, issued in 1975 or thereabouts. I don’t remember all the songs listed on the back cover, but I do recall the album including, for instance, Jim Croce’s “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song,” Three Dog Night’s “Old-Fashioned Love Song,” Neil Sedaka’s “Laughter in the Rain,” Dave Loggins’ “Please Come to Boston,” Frankie Valli’s “My Eyes Adored You,” and America’s “Tin Man.” Since coming across that old album cover, I’ve been thinking about what constitutes “Soft Rock,” its features and characteristics.

What the phrase “Soft Rock” refers to, musically speaking, is very elusive. I don’t recall hearing the term prior to the mid-70s, when compilations of the K-Tel kind (pictured) began to be heavily marketed and sold through television advertisements. Obviously “Soft Rock” is feminine-coded as opposed to the masculine-coded “Hard Rock,” thus linking “Soft Rock” to the “Singer/Songwriter” tradition, also feminine-coded (Carole King, James Taylor). “Soft Rock” suggests that there’s something about the contents of the K-Tel album that fundamentally distinguishes it from other forms of rock, rather like “light” sour cream is different in some basic way from “regular” sour cream, or “fat free” Half and Half from regular Half and Half. If, by analogy, “Soft Rock” is different from “normal” rock in the same way fat free Half and Half is different from “normal” Half and Half, then presumably it refers to rock music purged of some feature of “normal” rock that is perceived as pernicious or “unhealthy.” Of course it is much more complicated than this (based on list of songs I remember being on the album, I would say that Soft Rock is characterized by traditional romantic themes, for instance), but as a rhetorical gesture, perhaps it is enough to understand what it, at least in part, refers: as a phrase peculiar to the 1970s, “Soft Rock” means, this music ain’t that 60s “free love” and “got to revolution” crap. As opposed to being “raw,” Soft Rock is “cooked”—that is, it has so-called “high” production values, medium tempos, orchestrations (“strings”), pop-like melodic hooks, and lyrics focusing on traditional romance (and heartbreak): “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song,” “Old-Fashioned Love Song,” “My Eyes Adored You,” “Laughter in the Rain.” And while the designation is rife with problems (as Simon Frith and others have pointed out), the general consensus at the time, as I remember, was that Soft Rock was commercialized rock—an accusation bolstered by the aggressive marketing of K-Tel albums, among other sorts of compilations, on TV. The K-Tel compilation albums of the 1970s are the antecedent of the “Now That’s What I Call Music” series of CDs currently found in stores and on-line.

In fact, the phrase “Soft Rock,” rather like that of “Garage Rock,” represents the reinterpretation of the past by a later generation. “Garage Rock,” as a term, didn’t exist until 1972, thanks to Jac Holzman and Lenny Kaye’s NUGGETS anthology, in which the value and significance of aspiring rock musicians rehearsing in their parents’ garage was reinterpreted as “authentic,” that is, non-commercialized, rock. The same principle applies to the history of “Punk Rock.” “Punk,” as a term used to describe the culture gathered around a particular type of rock music, had no musical application until around 1975. Immediately afterward, the word “punk” gained currency, people identified themselves and their culture with the term and they started stitiching together a history, memorializing certain figures that came before them and ascribing to those figures their own desires--which those illustrious predecessors could not have fully known. Thus, some historiographers memorialize the MC5 and The Stooges as punk precursors, while others memorialize the Velvet Underground. The narratives that grew up around punk are, in effect, reinterpretations of the past, establishing predecessors on the analogy of the pilgrims who settled America, who sacrificed for a future they could not have fully known or understood. To refer to, say, The Byrds or The Beau Brummels as “Soft Rock” would have made no sense in the mid-60s; the term can only make sense in retrospect, as a consequence of the reinterpretation of the past by a later generation.

“This Record Was Made To Be Played Loud”

Trivia question: What was the first album in the history of rock to include the disclaimer, “This Record Was Made To Be Played Loud”? I cannot provide a definitive answer to that question, but in my (limited) experience, it was an album by Mountain, titled Climbing!, released in March 1970 (which includes the band’s biggest and perhaps best known hit, “Mississippi Queen”). Of course, loudness is not noisiness, but at the time that album was released, the terms were often used interchangeably, and the injunction to play the record loud was meant to suggest that if the listener would play the record at a high volume, it would sonically recreate, as closely as possible, the live concert experience.

Loudness has to do with volume level; noise typically refers to disagreeable sounds (which may be loud) rather than to music. Early on, “noise” (and “noisy”) was a pejorative term applied to rock, which meant that [fill in the blank] was not music at all. Hence the word “noise,” as Jacques Attali has pointed out (Noise: The Political Economy of Music, 1985), is really a category of taste. I remember hearing the word “noise” quite a bit in 1964, the year the Beatles were introduced to America. For those Americans born before the war who grew up listening to jazz and swing, what the Beatles played was not music but noise, which, translated, meant that the music challenged what were presumed to be clearly defined notions of good and bad taste.

Hence, while there is such a thing as noise, noise-as-noise, in rock music, because it is a product of culture and technology, noise is never noise, but rather noise-as-code. Even so-called “feedback,” which might be considered as an accident or a form of error, can be considered noise-as-code: because of the theatrics of the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix and The Who, by the late 1960s rock concerts often concluded with guitarists leaving their instruments on the stage in order to generate self-sustaining feedback while the audience left. At the very least, this practice challenged conventional notions of taste. Yet because “change is inscribed in noise” according to Attali, it also, obviously, represented rebellion, but perhaps more importantly a new, perhaps “revolutionary,” order outside the hegemonic norm (the “mainstream”). Feedback, in other words, was not noise; it was ideology.

Noise-as-code pre-dated Elvis, but he was certainly aware of its existence. By the late 1960s, noise-as-code could be deployed both as an individual statement as well as a critique of cultural violence and chaos, and there is perhaps no better illustration of noise-as-code in the history of rock than Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock in August 1969. That the performance was understood to be an ideological statement was revealed by the cultural debate that occurred almost immediately after the release of the film WOODSTOCK in March 1970 (coincidentally, at about the same time as Mountain’s Climbing!). As is typical of much public discourse, the issue quickly became polarized: was his rendition of the national anthem an anti-war statement, or a statement on the divisiveness that characterized America in 1969? Idealism or disillusionment? In retrospect, the moment was so significant that subsequent developments of noise-as-code, as exemplified by movements such as “industrial music,” “electro-industrial,” and “industrial rock,” can be understood as mere gloss on this historic moment.

Update: 31 March 2009 9:02 a.m. CDT: Ian W. Hill wrote in (see comments) and indicated that the first rock album to carry the disclaimer was Let It Bleed, by The Rolling Stones, released November 1969, which contained the injunction to “play it loud” on the inner sleeve (as well as a note to play side one first). Thank you very much, Ian, for writing in and supplying the information. I forgot that the Stones album contained the injunction; for some reason I remembered the Mountain album instead. Given that the albums were released just a few months apart, I suspect we now know not only the first album to contain the disclaimer, but the second as well.

Angels In Red

In her book, Women and Popular Music (Routledge, 2000), Sheila Whiteley is interested in identifying and examining female archetypes in popular music. She has observed that there are benign female fantasy figures (“inscribed within a dreamlike and unreal world”), but fantasy women can sometimes become supernatural (as an example, think of The Eagles’ “Witchy Woman”), and therefore dangerous and unpredictable. But there is also the highly idealized woman, the object of the (male) singer’s devotion and desire. The flipside of these highly idealized women are highly sexualized, fallen women, and in songs about them they are defined exclusively by their sexual availability. This morning I sketched out these categories, along with some songs that typify each. Whiteley’s primary interest is in images of women in Sixties rock songs, but in the following list I haven’t confined myself exclusively to songs from that era. Obviously many other examples could be cited; I restricted my list to ten songs in each category. While this is nothing more than a sort of parlor game, it is revealing nonetheless.

Benign Fantasy Women:
(The ideal woman, the “dream lover,” often appears only in dreams; while these songs are about fantasy women, they are also about male fantasy)
The Beatles – “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds“
Johnny Burnette – “You’re Sixteen”
David Allan Coe – “Angels In Red”
Bobby Darin – “Dream Lover”
Electric Light Orchestra – “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head”
John Mayer – “Love Song For No One”
Roy Orbison – “Dream Baby”
Roy Orbison – “In Dreams”
Sugarloaf – “Green-Eyed Lady”
Neil Young – “Cinnamon Girl”

Dangerous Women/Malignant Fantasy Women:
(In which the female becomes predatory and is often unmanageable; they are often given names, but names such that only a writer like Poe would use)
The Beatles – “Girl”
Derek and the Dominos – “Layla”
Fleetwood Mac – “Rhiannon”
The Four Tops – “Bernadette”
Hall & Oates – “Maneater”
The Hollies – “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress”
John Fred and His Playboy Band – “Lucy in Disguise (With Glasses)”
Chris Rea – “Stainsby Girls”
Rod Stewart – “Maggie May”
Neil Young – “Like A Hurricane”

The Earth Mother (and Itinerant Men):
(In which women are nurturing, patient, long-suffering, metonymically associated with the “comforts of home.” In contrast to the Earth Mother, however, the male singer is itinerant, shiftless, financially irresponsible, and unable to “settle down”)
The Rolling Stones – “Angie”
Glen Campbell – “Gentle on My Mind”
David Allan Coe – “Under Rachel’s Wings”
Hall & Oates – “Sara Smile”
Waylon Jennings – “Amanda”
Kiss – “Beth”
Looking Glass – “Brandy”
Chris Rea – “Standing in Your Doorway”
Marty Robbins – “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife”
Conway Twitty – “I’d Love to Lay You Down”

The Sexually Available Kind:
(These contain rather obvious sexual innuendo in which the women are defined by their sexual availability, preferably to be dominated as well)
Aerosmith – “Walk This Way”
Cher – “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves”
Confederate Railroad – “Trashy Women”
Def Leppard – “Pour Some Sugar on Me”
Kiss – “Lick It Up”
Billy Paul – “Me And Mrs. Jones”
The Rolling Stones – “Honky Tonk Women”
Shocking Blue – “Venus”
Conway Twitty – “Tight Fittin’ Jeans”
Neil Young – “Saddle Up The Palomino”

Women figure in songs featuring the carpe diem (“sieze the day”) theme, such as Billy Joel’s “Only The Good Die Young,” in which the male singer pleads with the female (“Virginia”) to give up her virginity. Such songs would also include Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night,” but I would argue that because the erotic scene of such songs is so highly theatricalized, or “staged,” it strongly suggests their subject is male fantasy and not women at all.