#they make it extremely clear its satire even for people barely paying attention

[wrenfea]

The Simpsons have always been great but the last season (34-35) they were not holding back at all. Amazing satire, all other adult animation should be taking notes.

[arecomicsevengood]

I’ve been trying to slow down the pace of my anxious brain, to move it away from the obsessive unsatisfying masturbatory procrastinating of clicking refresh. I want the presence of mind that comes from focused reading, I want to heal the destroyed reward mechanism of my brain. Absent the structure to days that comes with leaving the house, quarantine conditions have exacerbated these problems. I sought out older newspaper strips, because they have a leisurely pace. While no one would actually read a book-length collection a day at a time, in recreation of how they were originally read, the guiding principle that they be taken in as a diversion while doing other things is worth keeping in mind, as it runs opposite to current directives to binge-watch TV shows. Theoretically, having these narratives exist in parallel to the procession of days would be a nice respite from quarantine’s time-warp effect. However, when reading older newspaper strips, especially if you’re paying attention to the news at all, one is frequently jarred by the presence of racial caricatures.

I really try to avoid being someone offended by work that comes from a completely different cultural context. I’m a white dude, and while I don’t want to be quick to forgive anyone’s racism, I also don’t want to be one of those people that rush to condemn things as a way to posit myself as some sort of enlightened authority. Trying to “cancel” someone who’s long dead really only makes you into someone dismissive of history, which only works to one’s detriment.

Still, when the protests against police violence turned to easily-communicated gestures of symbolic speech, and iconoclastic energy was directed against statues of historical colonialists rather than the more immediate threats presented by police cruisers, conservatives defended such statues arguing their historical importance. This argument is extremely disingenuous. We can choose the historical narrative we want to present to ourselves. While the majority of opinions enshrined in law throughout the course of American political history were those slave-owners and genocide-justifiers, there’s nonetheless a vast cultural history it would serve as well to look to and posit as who we are. Every decision made was the result of argument, the losers of the arguments unaccountably brave. Ever since reading Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, I’ve been convinced that if any woman should be preserved on our money, it’s Jeanette Rankin, if only so her story would then be taught in schools. The work of a historian is to make an argument by collecting threads of a narrative out of the collective chaos of ongoing time before it’s all lost to entropy and rot.

Much credit is due to comics historian Bill Blackbeard, who edited the Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics, for what it is now clear is the considerable effort he must’ve made to avoid including too many depictions of racial stereotypes in his survey. He did so because he was arguing for comic strips being an art form, and avoiding the laziness of racial caricature helps that argument be made. He doesn’t bypass them completely: They’re in a Herriman strip, Baron Bean, albeit only for a few panels. They’re also on prominent display in the McKay Little Nemo strips. Maybe they’re somewhere else I didn’t look at too closely, it’s a large book.

But imagine my surprise and mortification when I bought a big collection of Polly And Her Pals Sunday strips and encountered these “mammy” caricatures in the depiction of servants. And then, when I bought a collection of Walt And Skeezix dailies, there it was again. These strips are well-regarded, considered the best of their day, and the comic strip as a whole was regarded as intellectually superior to the comic books that followed. When Gary Groth wrote his introduction to the first issue of Love And Rockets, these strips were the works he cited as the historical apex of the form.

(Apologies may be in order for my not wanting to actually include the relevant imagery of racial caricature here, and this post being all text. I would definitely need to apologize if I did include them though.)

The thing about the racial caricatures is they demonstrate the limitations of their artist’s ambition. The most charitable reading I can afford to give is that the caricatures exist within a larger context where all of the characterizations are burlesques, intended strictly for laughs, and somewhat thin. Gasoline Alley, currently being reprinted as Walt And Skeezix, is meant to evoke some sense of feeling, and while there are some melodramatic plotlines, the bulk of the work it does to accomplish that end is by being low-key and gentle. If you view the strip not as a light comedy historical piece, and admit you are meant to project your feelings onto the white main characters, you kind of have to concede that maybe Frank King didn’t really see black people as human. You know black people read these strips! It ran in a Chicago newspaper. If you lived in Chicago at this time, you would see black people living their lives, which would surely include the buying and reading of newspapers. It seems really weird to then depict black people as dumb and superstitious, even if the depiction of them as working as servants was primarily how the cartoonist would have encountered them in the middle-class milieu he lived in and depicted.

Herriman is a fascinating complicating factor. Because he’s black, and he’s arguably one of the best strip cartoonists of this era, and was respected by his peers. But he was also white-passing, in all likelihood because he knew his racial background would create problems, including with his peers. I think there’s a strong case to be made for the case Ishmael Reed basically implicitly makes with his Mumbo Jumbo dedication: That Herriman is one of the great artists of the twentieth century, and his art is informed by his blackness in the same way that blackness informs the great American art form of jazz. That his identity was denied to his peers doesn’t make his own art any less great, it simply complicates the ways that art works. But if you think of Cliff Sterrett being one of the guys who called Herriman “the Greek” and then drew this comic strip that features these horrible stereotypes, it just hurts your soul.

Sterrett is even I think someone whose work gets called “jazzy,” because there’s a certain modernist verve to it, a visual inventiveness. While the limit to King’s work is in how well-written you can really view it as being when you’re considering the racism, the limit to Sterrett’s is in how well-drawn and actually wild it is, considering that every strip  has the same gridded layout, when contrasted against the more inventive architectures of a Feininger page, or Charles Forbell’s Naughty Pete, or a Garrett Price White Boy strip. (I haven’t actually read the White Boy collection. The people who have read it and like it cite how it’s beautifully drawn, and how not-racist it is in the depiction of Native Americans, as being the things that credit it.)

Here’s something: I’m not even reading the strips drawn by conservatives! I’m not reading Chester Gould, or Harold Gray, or Al Capp. Each of these cartoonist is their own weird thing, with effectively different forms of conservatism, who I don’t wish to dismiss. I can get down with some Dick Tracy strips, whatever. To a certain extent, being an adult in dealing with history means seeing the virtues in people you probably disagree with in many ways. But it’s seeing the weird unconscious attitudes of people you would like to genuinely admire that makes you want to throw the whole project in the trash and start anew, because it displays evidence of such a deep taint.

Racism is basically America’s original sin. Comic strips are, along with jazz, the great American art form. It basically follows that you can’t talk about comics in any sort of accurate historic light without talking about racism. (There’s also racial caricature in Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo strips, obviously.) Reading the supplemental essays in these books of reprints, or critical reviews of them, you realize the desire to distance oneself from talking about the racism in the work is similar to how the conservative view of “American exceptionalism” goes hand-in-hand with a refusal to acknowledge the racist premises at the heart of its founding: People arguing for the exceptional quality of these strips are not addressing the elephant in the room, or only address it in the most cursory and hand-waving way imaginable. They are trying to paint a portrait without blemishes, without flaws, and in so doing depict a platonic ideal that does not actually exist.

These strips are not the work of Robert Crumb, where the racist imagery being employed has ostensibly an satirical end. It’s not Huckleberry Finn either, where the use of racial slurs is commonplace to set up a default mindset that then becomes undercut as a common humanity is realized. I’m actually unclear on if you could print such racial slurs in the newspaper at this time, or if it would be avoided as strenuously as any other profanity that couldn’t run in a “family newspaper.” What you see in these strips is the soft racism of paternalistic attitudes in the twentieth century American North laid bare for what it is. The volume I have of Walt And Skeezix collects the strips from 1923 and 1294, the Polly And Her Pals collection collects work from 1928 to 1930. This was an an era where black people could be reliably counted on as Republican voters, in the era before the realignment in politics that came with the Great Depression and the New Deal.

The current ahistorical posturing of Trump’s Republican party has them occasionally downplaying their overt anti-black racism to claim the “party of Lincoln” banner. So these strips are relevant, essentially, for depicting the sort of status quo the Republican party seek a return to, prior to FDR-instituted social programs, where black people exist primarily as servants and their concerns or agency, beyond how they exist in service to liberal white people, who address them from a place of charity, while conservatives would theoretically exist in all-white enclaves, are dismissed. The racism in the world depicted in these strips is inarguable, but the hope exists, in the eyes of conservatives, that liberals will see the way it flatters them, and wave it away as basically acceptable.

The alternative, as ever, would be in Herriman’s Krazy Kat, “the future liberals want,” where race and gender are forever up for debate in an shifting desert landscape. The issue there, of course, is the basically true argument that the strip doesn’t make any sense, and the more-up-for-debate point that the unique language of the strip is the result of repression of identity and internalized self-loathing. It’s also notable that the strip lacked popular appeal but was allowed to continue existing because it won the support of a wealthy benefactor. Maybe one day we’ll all learn to vibe with it, but I don’t really see that happening.

[fmdtaeyongarchive]

↬ even if we love each other, we don’t talk together.

date: roughly late september 2019 to january 2020?

location: ash’s studio

word count: 1,624 words, not counting lyrics.

summary: n/a.

notes: creative claims verification for “we don’t talk together” by deity and jaewon.

his album is coming out soon, but a successfully confirmed tracklist doesn’t mean rest for ash, not when discontent still nags him in the back of his mind. the sound for fatalism is one he likes, but putting it out in a form he isn’t embarrassed to stand behind and put his face on has been an uphill battle that’s sucked some of the joy out of it for him. the first few ideas he plays around with following the completion of his album are very clearly aiming for something different than the sound he’s been keeping himself within for the past year.

“we don’t talk together” isn’t the first song ash begins creating in the aftermath of all of his work on fatalism, but it is one of the firsts. he isn’t sure what number, even at the time, because guitar lines and one line melodies buried in his phone barely count as songs, but he has a sound and concept for the song before his third album comes out.

when he first starts working on the song, it’s tentatively for something he’ll prep for release with his voice over it. most of the songs he writes are still for himself and conceptually it makes sense for him — a tale of two lovers unable to properly communicate fits easily into his relationship troubles and heartbreak niche—, but he isn’t too deep into the process before he realizes it would fit someone else better than it would fit him. his voice over it doesn’t seem as natural as it should. it should go to someone with a more rhythmical voice is what he decides and before the melody is even completed, he adjusts the key to fit a prominent female voice better. he doesn’t have one particular voice in mind, but after the song is finished and he finds out some time later that it’s been given to yoona, he hypothesizes he spent so much time performing, practicing, and recording with her for the year that she may have been an inadvertent influence on him. that could very well be looking for serendipity where it doesn’t exist, though.

musically, it’s an understated throwback. he brings in elements of 90s hip hop he remembers from his childhood like the use of 808s in the bassline, but he doesn’t want it to feel too dated, so he brings a melodic side to the line instead of leaving it plodding out one note over and over again. he doesn’t want it to be classed as an attempt to cash on the return of 90s sounds as a trend. blame it on his stubborn artist’s pride, but he doesn’t want to fall in his climb to be taken seriously as a songwriter and producer already. relying on tried trends for no reason other than lack of inspiration would be the first step to his downfall. instead, he finds it more important to have a hint of nostalgia in every element of the song. he’s used minor keys and regretful vocals to elicit the feeling of nostalgia many times before, and he wants to try something new. arguably, he needs to if he doesn’t want to stagnate. he’s done that plenty emotionally as of late; he can do better in his professional life.

the last time he’d written a retro-tinged track, it’d been “free somebody”, a powerhouse vocal showcase, but this one is more about delivery than it is about showing off, or at least, that’s what he envisions as he’s composing it. the range of the melody doesn’t reach either extreme of the scale and if anyone ever sings it, they won’t be belting out high notes with a high energy dance routine, but that’s more comfortable for ash to write anyway. he doesn’t have anyone in particular in mind while writing it, so he figures he’ll try to sell it off if the final product is any good, but he hopes it ends up with someone who can keep the soul of it in tact.

the creation is mostly a smooth process, but once he chooses to go with a lower bpm, the hi-hats quickly feel tacky and derivative, almost satirical, which isn’t what he‘s going for, so he decides to increase the bpm. nostalgia in sound is what will help make it a sorrowful song despite the faster tempo than he’d initially had in mind.

the lyrics come to ash as he composes and arranges it instead of as a separate entity. what ends up serving as the title is also the first line that comes to him: we don’t talk together. the wording is deliberate, not we don’t talk or we don’t talk to each other, it’s we don’t talk together. it’s possible to talk to someone all the time and feel as though different conversations are happening on each end every time, and it’s a feeling ash has never really tried to put into words until now. it’s a phase his past relationships have fallen into more often than not, and as easy as it would be to blame it on the limitations such a fast and busy life put on the time available to talk to a significant other at all, it’s happened enough by now that ash should have learned how to handle it better if that’s the case.

communication isn’t something ash is good at, not face to face with another human being who could have a new hatred awaken for him with one wrong word from his lips. music is the way he expresses himself, but a heartfelt song can’t save his bond with someone he won’t be honest with.

My footsteps grow heavier And I can’t walk I can’t just let you go like this But I can’t open my mouth

would he be single now if he was better at opening his mouth and saying how he felt when his emotions strayed outside of the box of anything other than fairy book adoration and overwhelming, perfect love? he’d ended his last relationship so recently, but when he’d brought it to an end, it’d felt as though he’d seen it coming for a while, so why hadn’t he opened his mouth and said something earlier?

I know We love each other We don’t talk together I’m always yours Why don’t you? I don’t want to admit it Why don’t you? I can’t send you away

the first rendition of the chorus is written in one draft without revisions. the end product is a bit awkward with the way the korean and english fit together, but ash doesn’t mind. it’s disjointed, like the thoughts of someone who can’t sync their own feelings with their lover’s because they haven’t had the courage to ask how they’re feeling.

the third chorus changes some of the lyrics, and the altered version doesn’t take ash much time to write either. the song can’t go on and on without a journey taking place, and after he nails down the bridge and its short but insistent plea that love needs to be found again, the change in tone is a natural evolution of the song. the final chorus becomes an extension of that plea. there was no chance the song was ever going to end happily. ash wouldn’t know the first place to start if he wanted to tell a story about two people in love learning to reignite a lost spark instead of letting it fizzle out into a dark pile of soot.

it’s as hard to hold on as it is to let go.

as the lyrics build, the direction of the arrangement itself becomes more clear to ash. nostalgia isn’t the only element to take into consideration — he has to pay attention to making it a good song in addition to a relatablable one (for him, at the very least). most of the synths, in their bold but crackling state, aren’t added into the mix until the bulk of the lyrics have been written, and they pull the song out of its dreariness. if he wanted the song to be a dragging emotional ballad, he could have kept it for himself, so he throws in the drum machine and the build-up to the chorus to stay true to the 90s funk and hip hop roots that had first sprung to mind when he’d started on the song.

as the song draws on, monotony begins to set in, and while ash likes the metaphor, he draws back for the bridge to grab the ear that may have drifted away in the previous consistency.

he grows attached to (or perhaps, emotionally invested in) the song and its story, and if it hadn’t been so outside of the sound he sees for himself, ash may have kept it, but when he has a finished demo performed by two of bc’s producers he knows to be good demo singers, he sells it off.

he hears back about the song much sooner than he’d expected and when he gets the news that the song is being given to yoona and jaewon, ash cracks a smile in the dim light of his studio. he’s not sure he could have chosen better performers for the song himself, and though he hadn’t written the song for them, he’s pleased when he has the final vocal files in front of him to make one final version of the song with before it goes off for mixing.

he reserves most of the more intense vocal layering for yoona, while most of the layering on jaewon’s rap verse is only for vocal accents on his lines so that the switch up in flow and delivery on his verse stands out more as the piano track follows the drum line into the second chorus.

when ash hears the official version of the song, he picks up his phone to text yoona and jaewon that he has a good feeling about the song, but stops short of sending it.

he goes back to his work instead.