Year / 2006

by Edward Champion

Failing to Muse Me

I’ve had my disagreements with Mr. Ewins about Elbow in the past. But now I must dissent with the man on Muse’s Black Holes and Revelations. The album’s okay, I guess. “Starlight,” with a piano riff that seems less a integral component to the song and more of a nod to mellowing alt-rock listeners (“Yes,” the band seems to assure us, “it’s okay to listen to pop music after thirty.”), shouldn’t get stuck in your head, but it does.

But if an album can be judged on the basis of whether it serves as good road trip music, then Black Holes doesn’t fit the bill. As I was speeding 85 mph in Wisconsin listening to “Map of the Problematique,” contemplating the pretentious song title and its percussive insistence that, dammit, Muse is about something, I felt as if I was being conned. I enjoyed Muse’s melodic aggressiveness on its previous three albums, but at least, back then, the band understood then that vocalist Matthew Bellamy had his limitations. Instead, they’ve thrown this doofus at the forefront of the mix, encouraging his angsty sham. Bad enough that Thom Yorke lost his whiny panache with the solo album, but what can one say when one is greeted by a Thom Yorke imitator whining, “Loneliness be over / When will this loneliness be over?” Meet me on a street corner, Matt, so I can show you a homeless woman who’s truly suffering.

It doesn’t help that Muse possesses the attention span of an infant wired up on Rockstars. They can’t settle on any musical style for more than thirty seconds. On “Invincible,” the most insufferable track on the album, it’s space rock one moment, arpeggio-based ballad the next, 70s prog rock the next, inflated 1977 hard rock solo the next, all with Bellamy whining into your ears like a constipated teenager who needs to be told where the laxative is, and then needs a comprehensive explanation on what a medicine cabinet is and how to open it. The band is so without nuance or feeling that they have the effrontery to subject you to what seems to me, on the whole, to be a transparent music geek trap. And the hell of it is that they’ve succeeded.

But not with me.

Of course, it’s quite possible that Muse is sending up the bloat that the music industry relies upon like crude oil and oxygen. Certainly the final track “Knights of Cydonia,” which emerges after ten tracks of shitty bloat, suggests this.

But real bands give a damn about something outside of themselves. Only David Bowie or Sweet could get away with this kind of masturbatory glam nonsense. (I’ll see your “Soldier’s Poem” and replace it with “Seven Line Poem,” thank you very much.) And while my ears perked up a bit during the first few listens, I don’t see how any decent music lover can respect herself by clinging to such willing bombast.

by Edward Champion

A Special Column from Michael “Sore” Loser

After twenty-two years of hard labor, my 1,468-page experimental novel, Dan Buys a Sofa on the Installment Plan, has received a total of one review — a 300 word blurb written by Cletus Garfield in the Penny Saver, who declared “quite possibly the worst book to take a crap to.” I have since learned that a San Francisco writer may have ghosted this review, but thankfully another San Francisco writer — someone referred to as a “blogger,” who I presume is some kind of German dancer — has permitted me the space to express my grief, with the proviso that my byline includes the nickname “Sore,” which he tells me is Hungarian for “sublime.”

It’s petty and unreasonable for authors to dispute this kind of reception. But since Michael Laser has demonstrated that there is a market for sour grapes, I, Michael Loser, must also join the chorus. Besides, expending energies to whine is better than paying some quack three hundred dollars an hour and, if I play my cards right, I might just get Salon to buy this piece too.

I had high hopes that readers would see my clear homage to Celine, beginning with the way I used “installment plan” in the title and consistently referred to “installment plan” in my work. Consider this excerpt from Page 432:

Dan installed himself on the installed sofa and picked up his guitar, which he had also purchased on the installment plan. He strummed D minor and, five minutes later, he had penned a ballad: “Installment plan / I’m living on the installment plan / I’m breathing on the installment plan / Have you got an installment plan too?” Tunes came easily for Dan. He had a five-subject notebook filled with fresh ballads and had often bartered his ballads away for other home furnishings. A few burly furniture store owners had agreed to an installment plan deal, in which Dan would offer his ballads piecemeal for tables, armoires and chiffoniers — a grandstanding installment plan that would include installation. Could they not see his latent talent? Would he ever compose a masterpiece? Or was he leading up to it with these songs, all of them written on the installment plan?

If Mr. Garfield could not see the clear metaphors and imagery here about how we are all, in some sense, living on the “installment plan,” if he can’t supplicate upon my genius and if readers, in turn, cannot see the true valor of my words, then I may just have to slice my wrists.

Then again, if Salon accepts this piece (and given its history, I am certain they will), then I may just find life worth living after all. I might even be a Great American Writer. After all, writing is all about the roses they throw you at the dais.

I am now working on a second novel called The End of Dan’s Sofa, which was inspired by the great A.M. Homes book and deals with a sofa cruelly ejected from Dan’s apartment, taking up residence in a jail cell, where the sofa strikes up a correspondence with an abandoned Windsor chair.

If the reading public cannot understand the human condition through Installment Plan, then perhaps exploring the consciousness of furniture is the next best thing.

For the moment, I just want an intelligent review. I just want a sale. I just want a hug.

Love me. I’m fragile.