My Reaction to 'Spider-Woman's Big Ass is a Big Deal'

I finally got around to reading The Best Page in The Universe's appraisal of the Spider-Woman cover controversy, which had been recommended and derided to me in equal measure over the last few weeks. On reading it, I got exactly what I expected. To catch up, if you haven't already, you can read a rather more measured appraisal of the Spider-Woman butt controversy on The Guardian.

Parts of it I actually agree with. I definitely concur that once the internet furore among the feminist blogs got blazing, a lot of the criticism of the cover lacked the anchor of the image's context within the rest of comic art. But I consolidated that with the fact that sometimes an issue just needs a 'straw that breaks the camel's back' like this particular cover to bring it to wider attention. At the time, I certainly wasn't ready to take sides and, as with anything on the internet, tried to enjoy and learn from the intelligent debate around the issue, and ignore the ignorance.

But after reading the Maddox blog, I was left in the odd position of agreeing with him but utterly troubled by his means of making his argument - the shaming, blanket generalisations and attacks against people who object to 'this kind of thing' that I've seen time and again. If anyone vocalising unease with certain aspects of entertainment being too misogynistic, homophobic, racially provocative or whatever is going to be lumped into a group of grey, borderline-fascist do-gooders then I've got a few generalisations of my own about the way that a certain type of men on the internet tend to react to reasonable criticism. I've seen many of these arguments on my own Facebook wall recently when I voiced concern about a misjudged joke on a cartoon or bemoaned the commissioning of a TV show by a comedy actor who uses aggressive, sexualised insults on complete strangers. Frothing-at-the-mouth, PC bastard I am.

Knock knock. Who's There? Moist.

 First is that argument about 'don't like it, don't watch it', that simultaneously skirts - and misses - the issue. Just as an American who uses the expression 'Freedom of Speech' to justify deplorable views will quickly be reminded that with that freedom of speech comes our freedom of a suitable response, you don't have to subscribe to a comic or own the DVD box-set to participate in a critical analysis of its content and influence. We have the freedom to watch what we want, just as we have the freedom to respond to it. The irony of the 'don't like it, don't watch it' brigade is that people who use that defence are so often the same ones to argue about how much influence the media - read, too much - has on the West in terms of our outlook, attitudes and lives in general. So why is it so hard to join those dots? If something misogynistic, racist, or homophobic is within our mainstream media, people object to the issue of its influence and effect of 'normalising' certain behaviour. You can minimise it by calling it 'taking offence' or 'being PC' if you must, but it can't be dismissed with 'don't watch it then' because, just like blaming drunk women for their own rapes, the culture it creates affects us all whether we like it or not.

Secondly, I think the straw man 'initiative' of drawing every image of Spiderman as Spider-Woman is the typical internet hardcore-gamer mentality; dodge the issue, move the goalposts, jump on the attack and use a technicality to belligerently, but entertainingly, shame the argument of the opposite party. Instead of listening to their opponent's points and creating a coherent retort, they frame a nuanced argument as a 'game' in which they can use their Photoshop prowess to 'win' rather than a debate where you can learn from each other. Changing Spiderman into Spider-Woman uses a lot of smoke and mirrors but ultimately proves nothing - whether I agree that the Spider-Woman cover crosses a line or not, I can clearly see the difference between that and Spiderman in terms of the sexualisation of that image. I can't believe I'm having to explain it, because we all know it's there. There's a kinetic dynamism in the Spiderman images. There's a sexual slither in the Spider-Woman image. It's the work of a great artist that can bring that out. And I'm not saying I ultimately object to a sexy female comic character in context... but spare me the bullshit that it's all the same thing. I've read super hero comics since the age of four. While you might be able to draw Spider-Woman in a pose that looks the same as Spiderman, that doesn't make women any more equal or make you 'right'. Engaging and sharing your views about the issue, standing by your point while conceding ground, compromising and teaching... that's what makes you 'right'.

The 'image game' can work both ways.

I don't want to tell people how to think. And I don't always agree with the leftist, liberal 'voices' he wildly generalises about in this article - but I'm really fucking glad they're there. And while you're going to get people like Maddox that dig their heels in, if the 'Social Police's influence is a drip-drip-drip of producers thinking twice before going with the lazy over-sexualisation of women in comics, or hiring people like Sam Pepper for TV shows, then I for one applaud them for their vigilance and pressure. Ultimately, the entertainment aspect of mainstream media is more interesting and enjoyable for all of us if women aren't lazily characterised as sex objects or damsels in distress. Paradoxically, Marvel's progressive use of female characters in many of their lines is one of the main reasons why their comics have been consistently kicking DC's arse critically for the past decade. Whether, depending on your perspective, it's a scandal or a non-issue that they chose to run this particular cover, what it has demonstrated, once again, is that a certain section of males are still shamefully unable to deal with valid accusations in a reasonable way.

Alright then!

Understatement time. I thought it was about time I got back on here and started blogging again. To be fair, this spark of activity is coinciding with a general call to action in our lives as a band that's been going on over the last few weeks. Crucially, this has centered around formal discussions about writing new material and the whole host of intangibles, ideas and questions that throws up. To a certain extent, you put a record out and then go into a sense of creative stasis as you observe and absorb how that lovingly crafted slice of Rock n Roll has been received by the world. Now we're moving onto our last single from the album, it's about time to stop resting on the 'Sonic Boom Six' laurels and all the changes and developments that has entailed and creatively start to look forward.

That's not to say that the last few months haven't been welcome. We've played the odd festival, had some fun times and it's been cool to be at home to have a stable life and be able to eat right and exercise (the first things that fall by the wayside as soon as you jump into the Pirate Ship). But the last few weeks have been exciting with meetings, plans and talk of diversifying within, and beyond, the remit of the band. Specifically for me, that's gonna involve getting a proper start on DJing, (something I've really just played about with in the past) and making more of a go of things with my writing, a side-effect of which paying more attention to this blog is theoretically the start of.



We've also had some recent opportunities to use the band for a few more altruistic ventures. We played a great charity show in Leicester for Oxjam this weekend and spent last Wednesday lending ourselves to make a video with the people at OMG Cameras Everywhere, who provide kids with free resources, training and opportunity to direct, produce, shoot and edit music videos. A couple of weeks back we visited the Teenage Cancer Trust Unit in Birmingham to play a few acoustic songs and meet some of the guys in the unit. We've got some footage and interviews from that coming up for those interested. These experiences have been fulfilling and put us back in touch with why we started the band in the first place and provided us with a chance to keep those flames of idealism burning, albeit in a different time and context. This idea of reflecting and looking back on why we do this on the practical level has a direct synchronicity with our recent discussions on why we do what we do on a musical level. And so, to the main point of this blog... thinking about the future.

We've been for a few meetings to consider and discuss where our heads are at and figure out where to go from here musically. One of these meetings was with a very talented producer and song-writer with a proven track record who is interested in working with us and gave us the benefit of a very frank appraisal of where he thinks we are and where he thinks we could be. We don't want to sit there and have smoke blown up our arses, but this was pretty frank stuff, with some very robust, but valued, opinions being thrown about. Discussion centralised on the concept of truly getting in touch with who and what our band, or any band, is all about and writing songs that convey that. And the idea that writing music for a perceived audience, be they a room full of punks or listeners to daytime radio, is ultimately self-defeating. A band should write the music they want to make, and hear and strive to write the best songs possible from that base. It all sounds so simple. The difficult bit is then going out and doing it. The good news is that we're all a little more inspired and motivated to write. We're currently discussing hiring a cottage or holiday home for a week and spending some time together and having fun writing again. Writing music together, for fun, for us. The way it is when you start a band. Not thinking about audience one way or the other but creating an honest expression of what we want to play and want to hear. Maybe there's a way of getting that sense of adventure and fun, that mixtape vibe, that underpins our early stuff and have it exist in the present day with bigger songs and better performances. To hell with conventions and genres and the radio and all those considerations. That shouldn't matter at the writing stage. The art that rings the truest is that which is the honest expression. And if some of the rough corners we've been compelled to file off in the past sound good to us, then we should keep them. As I say, it's where to go from here that's the difficult question and all this pontificating about the macro doesn't actually create the micro. But it's all good dinner for the duchess as no one has said, ever.



All that's not to say that 'Sonic Boom Six' isn't still alive and kicking. We're currently sorting through lots of awesome treatments for the 'High Cost' video, some of which are great. I'm leaning towards the concept of making the video more velvet glove in terms of getting the message of the song across. The lyrics are explicit as it is, so we don't need to hammer the point home. I'm thinking a visual companion and counterpoint to the song will be better than something that goes to far in making a political statement. There's lots more on these subjects where that came from but I think I'd better save it for another day if I'm gonna be blogging once a week.

Last night we spent the evening doing the first, and only Suicide Bid rehearsal in preparation for our BoomTown Fair set. If the shows without rehearsal have set a precedent for being great, I can only imagine what the reaction's going to be now we've got our shit together, especially at a venue as up-for-it as Boomtown is.



Alright then, I'll let you get on. Remember PLEASE to keep sending me questions, it really helps with the motivation to keep this blog happening.

Listening this week: Kanye West, Yeezus

First couple of listens left me marveling at the boldness of production but balking at the lyrics. By the third listen, I realised that only lyrics that insanely egotistical and cheeky could measure up to what's going on musically. Tremendous.

Watched this week: The Killer Inside Me (2010)

Micheal Winterbottom's stab at the classic crime novel eschews much of the novel's filthy visit into the mind of a psycho and boils the story down into a solidly-acted murder yarn. The male on female violence is for a strong stomach, but serves to underline the despicably psychotic character of the Casey Affleck character. I feel that the critic who infamously printed "I was so queasy, I had to go and stand outside. I thought I might actually faint" about the experience really needs to get her sense of perspective straight. Worth a watch.

Reading this week: Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens.

Being a huge Neil Gaiman fan but never anything remotely approaching fandom towards the work of Terry Pratchett, I've always been turned off by the smug Radio 4 tone of this book and have never made it past chapter 3. Like a mountain, this is there to be conquered, but I think I'll have to binge on some very violent, brainless comics afterwards to wash the twee out of my hair. We shall see.

Until The Sunlight Comes... Barney x

Tumblr Question Reblog: do you like horror films?! IF SO, which ones :3

Oooh good question!

I don’t just like them, I LOVE THEM. My favourite film of all time is the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But I can watch a rubbish horror much easier than I can any other film and even a crappy one (like Freddy vs Jason) I will thoroughly enjoy. I watch a couple of horror films a week at least when I’m at home.

My favourites are the usual suspects really, looking up on the shelf there I can see The Wicker Man, Halloween, The Exorcist, Hellraiser, Nightmare On Elm Street, Evil Dead 2, Suspiria, Night Of The Living Dead which we all know are classics so there’s no point in going on about them.
A couple of films people may not have seen then… a favourite of mine is ‘Witchfinder General’ which stars Vincent Price (the best to ever do it!) as a demented witch hunter in Cromwell’s Britain. It has a weird, tense atmosphere (lots of stories about the goings-on behind camera abound) and is wickedly dark.

Another film from that era (60s & early 70s British folk horror) that is a favourite is a film called ‘Blood On Satan’s Claw’ where a group of kids get seduced into devil worship. It’s actually on YouTube HERE so maybe that’s one to watch tonight if you haven’t already!!!

There are lots of decent horrors in the public domain speaking of watching online, including the awesome ‘Dementia 13’ and ‘The House On Haunted Hill’. There is a great List of them on Listverse HERE and a more exhaustive list HERE.
The best site for watching Public Domain horror is Horrorteque.com hands-down! Bookmark that shit!
Another film that is one of my favourites is Werner Herzog’s 1978 version of ‘Nosferatu The Vampire’, starring Klaus Kinski. It was filmed (in English & German!) in 9 days and is a beautiful film. Kinski’s Dracula is a thing to behold. I actually prefer the version where they talk in English because having everyone in their second language gives it an even stranger air than it already has. My girlfriend once hired out a little cinema and me and all my mates watched it projected! It was a great birthday and everyone loved the film.

And finally, a guilty pleasure of mine has to be ‘Deranged’, a completely batshit crazy exploitation version of the Ed Gein story (which inspired Psycho, Texas Chainsaw and… Ed Gein!) starring the wonderfully-named Roberts Blossom as Ezra Cobb. It’s directed by horror make-up great Tom Savini (who also did the interesting Night Of The Living Dead remake). Here’s a wonderful trailer for it, if you like it, it’s actually on YouTube in several parts which are linked off the trailer.

Right then, hope that answers that! That was fun, I like talking about films, so ask away everbody!

Ta!

Barney x

I'm well aware that I'm never going to be on the 'Cool List'.

Well, well, well!

Sorry it's been so long. Life rolls along whether you're rolling with it or not... Salut to those that came over to the UK shows recently, we’ve really enjoyed pulling a lot of the old tunes out of the box and giving them a play with. We've been recording our version of 'Totally Addicted To Bass' with our old pal Christophe this weekend which has been great fun and the first time that we've actually recorded with James. I can't wait to hear it mixed actually. There are tons of dates coming up including France, India(!) and a European tour with Less Than Jake so we're certainly keeping ourselves busy. Anyway, enough of my yackin, let's get into those questions...

Tim Johnson asks…

Aite man! so, what was the story with Grimace?

The story of Grimace! OK, Grimace was a ska-punk band that lived from 1997 – 2001 and involved Laila, Neil and I and had our good friend Dave Kelly on guitar and a parade of different brass sections (Ben C ended up on sax in the final line-up) We started out when we were in our teens and friends at school and were playing funk-rock, ska, pop-punk stuff influenced by Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone, No Doubt etc. We were playing general band nights rather than punk nights but we started to get a few gigs at ska nights and with bands like Vodoo Glow Skulls and Spunge which introduced us to the ska and punk scene and really turned our heads. As we got into more US ska-punk like Dance Hall Crashers, Less Than Jake and Save Ferris we went more into a US sounding ska-punk thing. We had a couple of songs on some compilations like Know Your Skalphabet and Compunktion, from which the tune ‘Push You Back’ is probably our best tune. Laila actually sung a duet with Alex from [Spunge] on their second album after playing with those guys. Cos we’d just been rock kids who kind of fell into the ska and punk thing by mistake, we didn’t really come from a punk place so we had difficulty fitting in with the scene at the start and by the time we’d figured it out, we had become a bit burnt by it and felt very disillusioned (which is what ‘Play Inna Day’ was about). Musically, we’d discovered hardcore punk, reggae and drum n bass and I got really into hip-hop so Grimace quietly died a death. We were adding these elements into Grimace once Ben had joined and some of the stuff on the final Grimace demo ‘Demonstrate’ is re-recorded on the first SB6 EP. I think we needed to go out and figure out what we were then come back to the punk scene and do something different.

The rest of the story can be followed just by going and checking out the discography on the Sonic Boom Six site HERE! If enough people ask for it I'd be happy to upload the Grimace discography at some point.

Aaron Lohan asks (well, challenges!)

I've loved a lot of the support bands you've toured with but I
challenge you to take a hardcore band on tour, and if you do, which
hardcore band would you like to take on tour?

Hmmm, sorry to be ‘genre-dude’ but it depends on whether you mean hardcore-punk or hardcore hardcore. We did a tour with Chief in support in 2008 who are my favourite hardcore-punk band around. I think that hardcore-punk bands work really well alongside us and it’s great to play festivals with bands like Strike Anywhere and Paint It Black. We asked The Steal to come on tour a long time back and they couldn’t but one band I’ve really got my eye on at the moment is Our Time Down Here. Those guys supported us in Southampton and we leant our gang vocals to their album and we’d love to take them out one day if we could. You can hear them HERE.

If you mean more in the realms of ‘proper’ tough hardcore like Madball and Judge and stuff, I don’t know if that kind of band would be right for our crowd, much as I love it personally!

And finally, a couple off Kev H

Managing your own label between you guys, being all self-reliant, and constantly touring and merching, doing all that full time, if it's not in bad taste mentioning money, you guys must crunch alot of numbers?
 

Hell yeah. At the moment Neil actually does the accounting but the whole thing is very much run by us. The operation is divided into a division of labour. In theory, we divide like Voltron and we all do different things within the unit that divides the work into manageable chunks and makes sure that we’re all playing to our strengths towards a common goal. And all that. For instance, I'm shit at business and can't drive so I don't go near the money or the steering wheel but I write all the lyrics and lots of the music and Neil does the opposite so, in theory, we all meet in the middle somewhere... in theory. :)

                            
Double Header! It seems this band you're in, more than any other I've ever seen, are totally open to talking to fans & wasting time listening to drunk people tell you they loved the first album. You've got all this vault stuff on your website and are the 2nd most prolific poster on your own forum, and are merch standing it at every gig... Why and how do you put up with it?

Well, I can only speak personally here but I think it’s basically to do with the whole idea of Sonic Boom Six, which was to be a punk band that embodies a lot of different ideas without trying to draw too much attention to that fact. I personally just think the ‘rock star’ mythos is out-dated, corny and narcissistic. I don't dig on that whole Motley Cru thing in terms of that kind of hokey rock-star image, even when people do it ironically. I remember being totally bummed out meeting Red Hot Chili Peppers outside their gig back in 1995 and I’d made a birthday card for Flea and he basically just pushed past and knocked it on the ground. And this is someone who always likes to go on about how punk he is. I tried to give it to his security but they all just shoved past. Who knows whether he got it. Whereas, not long before that year, at the same venue Pantera had come out and hung with the kids and Dimebag was a proper nice bloke and that meant a lot to us.
I don’t see that remaining aloof brings any mystique or air of mystery to a band in this day and age. I like to interact with our fans because being pragmatic and down-to-earth was definitely always an aspect of what SB6 was about. Pricking the bubble of ‘the cool’, which is generally just something that reminds me of 6^th Form common rooms. Like the ‘cool list’. Something journalists write about for kids to read that need to re-affirm their coolness by liking something that a magazine that they sell in Asda tells them is cool. I’m not losing any sleep over it but it’s total bobbins isn’t it? Fuck it. Act like a nice bloke that you’d like to hang out with, not ‘cool’.

As Babar Luck so consistently points out, it's nice to be nice.

Rightio, I'm aware there are another few questions on another specific subject but they'll have to wait until we've got all our ducks in a row to be able to speak about the thing they're asking about! As ever, keep those questions coming in to barney@sonicboomsix.co.uk

I'm off to see Inception in a bit. I like Leo DiCaprio but Christopher Nolan's Batman films - apart from the odd flash of brilliance - haven't been for me. It remains to be seen what I think about a film that he isn't making about a character that I'm irrationally demanding about. I'm ready to be pleasantly surprised!

Barney x