pg. 1 2

    I recently turned my radio to KEXP 90.3 FM and heard a re-united Gang of Four performing live. This legendary post-punk band mixed social-politico-personal lyrics with jarring yet funky grooves and dub-style space and noise. Sound familiar? Do today's indie darlings The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, Bloc Party, and, the two biggest culprits, Radio 4 and the Rapture ring a bell? Maybe you've even heard descriptions like this for once-alternative-now-mainstream acts like Rage Against the Machine and Red Hot Chili Peppers. In a not-entirely tongue-in-cheek statement from an unidentified Gang of Four member during an interview, one of them said that while their comeback tour had been both a critical and commercial success, they were "still waiting for Franz Ferdinand to call." While GO4's new ventures have only been re-mixes of old songs by new artists, it's good to see them getting their well-past due. I don't think that most of these newer bands are ripping them off entirely, but people, especially the young punks, should know that these new bands didn't re-invent the wheel.

    This is the same feeling I had when I picked up Robert Mayer's Superfolks, the novel that supposedly upped the anti in anti-hero comic books, to pardon the pun. In 1977, Marvel Comics had some human pathos in some of their characters, such as the young-adult angst of Peter Parker, the bitter cynicism of Ben Grimm, and the Jekyll and Hyde curse for Bruce Banner. But most comics still had heroes and heroines with inflatable bodies and a vacuous inner life. Just because DC's Clark Kent couldn't get laid didn't mean he had any cracks in his impenetrable super skin. Then, supposedly, Superfolks came along and changed all that.

    David Brinkley (yes, that's his name, and more ordinary characters with pop-iconic names will appear to both endear and ingratiate) was the most powerful superhero on earth until his early thirties, when he desired a simpler life with a paying career and a wife and kids in the suburbs. Shortly after his retirement, all the other superheroes and super heroines died, went M.I.A., eschewed their powers to assimilate with society, or just went old and senile. Suddenly, NYC is struck by a 50-foot crime wave. As Brinkley tries to shake off the American Dream to save his city, he realizes that he's going to have to conquer his mid-life crisis, as well as a few extra couch-potato pounds, before he can get back into his mothballed uniform.