I usually keep the Legion-of-Super-Heroes-related stuff on Legion Abstract, but I thought I’d mention that this week’s episode of the Long Live the Legion podcast features me as a guest. If you’ve ever wanted to hear my voice, now’s your chance! It’s a good time and I recommend the podcast highly. Thanks to Jim and Jay for having me on!
Category: Uncategorized
I Still Have Faith in You (ABBA, 2021)
I Still Have Faith in You – ABBA (2021) written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. Nominated for Record of the Year; #9 on the Canadian digital music sales chart, #2 on the Swedish charts. Platinum in Sweden.
This was the lead song from ABBA’s big comeback album, Voyage. It’s not the best ABBA, but it’s pretty good ABBA. It showed that, after forty years, they can still make it work like they used to. If you missed them, they’re really back.
“I Still Have Faith In You” seems to be about the singer of ABBA wondering if she can still make music with the band like she used to. She thinks so, there’s definitely some of the old magic around, but she isn’t sure of her own ability to rise up to the necessary level. Whether she can or not, though, she’s taking heart that she knows the rest of the group can.
But it doesn’t have to be about that. It could be sung from the point of view of a woman unsure about restarting an old relationship. That’s possible. Look at the lyrics and tell me it isn’t possible. Why aren’t we interpreting it like that?
This is what these music types do, sometimes, with their charisma and their razzmatazz. They get us to like them, to identify with them. To invest in their story. ABBA are four Swedish people who sang several dozen catchy songs forty to fifty years ago. No reason why they shouldn’t try to make a comeback, but how can they presume that a song about whether they can manage that comeback, whether they’ve got the internal resources to live up to how special the group used to be, would be something that would engage our empathy?
Except, of course, that they’re right. We do care about all that; we are glad that they’re back, and that they still have faith in each other, and in us, and we in them, and that the group was and is special. Parasocial relationships gonna parasocial. It’s a great trick. All the more so because the joke isn’t on us: it’s on all the people that it didn’t work on.
News: Patreon
I have started a Patreon. It’s for, I explain uselessly, all the writing I do that doesn’t appear here or at Legion Abstract. No, really though; most things I do will still show up where you’d expect them to show up, including *Palace Guard*, which I will be getting back to, but sometimes there will be things on Patreon and sometimes they’ll be behind a subscription wall.
One such is the short story “How Silently”, which is available to subscribers now. So okay! Let’s get this going! Tomorrow the world!
Here’s a link to my new Patreon page. All are welcome!
Update
Sorry for the lack of activity on here lately. No excuse, really. I’ll try not to let it happen again. (I will probably let it happen again.)
Update
My writing life is somewhat in disarray at the moment, for undisclosed reasons. I will get back to it, but I don’t know when I’ll next be on a regular schedule for writing, or if I will want to reorganize how, how often, and when I do things. But you’ll hear from me.
Update
New entry soon! I’ll be trying to resume a more frequent posting schedule for Palace Guard. Thanks for your attention and your patience!
Spring 81: help
Most beloved Zann,
Ran’s father and I finally talked. His name’s Jornay. He didn’t really understand, at the start, what I wanted. Or I suppose he didn’t understand that I didn’t want anything for myself. And then when he did understand he didn’t like it any better.
“So you’re some kind of do-gooder,” Jornay said.
I grimaced and twisted to avoid the word. “I don’t know. I just… I don’t want to not solve the problem. If Ran is throwing rocks at people, something’s not right. Well, maybe I could walk home a different way. That would be easy. Everything would be fine for me. But it wouldn’t mean everything’s all right. He’s just going to throw rocks at someone else. And maybe the someone else will get rough with him. Or worse. That’s no good either. So somebody has to fix it.”
“You think I can’t?”
“I hope you can. I’m not his father and he doesn’t like me. For all of that, I don’t like him. But maybe I can make it easier for you to fix it.”
“How? You going to give me money?”
“I might if I thought it would help.”
Jornay stared at me. “What did you think you were going to do, show up here every day and play longball with him?”
“Um. I don’t know. Maybe?”
“He wouldn’t. He’d, I don’t know, run off, or drop a brick on you, or something. Anyway the real problem is money. I had a good job in Cas Crid before the Nap. And my wife, Ran’s ma, was a wallpainter. But now Cas Crid isn’t there and I guess it took my wife with her, and I’m making do. If I could put fifteen silver cups together I could get Ran into the apprenticeship cooperative and that would… well, it wouldn’t fix everything, but it would fix the biggest thing.”
“Oh.” Fifteen silver cups? That was a lot of money, but we could probably do it…
“You don’t think I ever thought about this?”
“Uh…”
“The apprenticeship co-op is a lot better use of the kid’s time than longball or border-bridge or whatever the piss you had in mind.”
“Sure. Right.”
“Plus it wouldn’t leave him sitting around wondering what was next. If there even was a next.”
“Ay.” And then, “Fifteen silver cups? That’s a lot of money for apprenticeship…”
“Usually it’s eight. But you know Ran. He’s going to need… special attention. So the fellow there said, fifteen.”
I nodded slightly.
“So.” He stood up. “That’s the way it is, and I don’t care what street you use to walk home. Are we finished here?”
“Not quite,” I said, standing up and heading for the door. “I said I wanted to help and I meant it. I’ll be back with your fifteen silver cups. And it’s not charity. You can pay it back if you want to. I just won’t come around looking for it.”
Couple of hours later, when I handed it to him, he was surprised. I don’t think he should have been that surprised.
Love,
Ybel
Spring 78: rocks
Dear Zann,
One of our new recruits decided not to be a guard anymore so I had a double shift today. When I got off the longcoach at Blackfloors I was as weary as you please. I suppose I was a draggy sight as I slogged home through the crowds.
I didn’t take Procession, which is the biggest street going anywhere near our roost. Too crowded. Council Street is quieter, narrower, prettier, and runs parallel to it. And sometimes I stop in at the fountainroom that has the frostmint flavouring. I might not go that way anymore, though.
Because today I passed a roost-tower on Council and there was a kid sitting on the stairs in front. Hadn’t quite started to grow hair on his face. I noticed him but didn’t really look at him. Anyway, he threw a rock at me.
It bounced off my shoulder. Only hurt a little. I stopped, turned, amazed.
“What?” he said, grinning.
“What did you do that for?” I said.
“I didn’t do anything. Anyway, you smell bad.” He threw another rock. I dodged it. I probably didn’t smell bad, and even if I did, he was too far away to tell.
I wasn’t sure what to do next. Could I catch him? Maybe? And then what? Forget it.
So I kept walking. He slipped off the stairs and followed. He bounced a rock off my back.
“Stop doing that,” I said.
“Or what? Are you going to thrash me? A young boy? You’d be a big man then! Is that what you’re going to do?”
“What are you going to do? Keep throwing rocks at a stranger?”
“I’m not throwing rocks,” he said, and threw a rock. Smirking. There weren’t any crowds around, but there were some other passersby, and they were watching us out of the corners of their eyes.
I wasn’t sure what my options were. I’d run away if I wasn’t so tired. I certainly wasn’t going to thrash him.
In the end I just kept walking home. He followed the whole way, throwing rocks and asking questions. “Why do you smell like that? What’s your name? Why don’t you like me? Why don’t you say anything? Did you know your chin is bleeding? Are you angry? Do you live here? Can I come in?”
In case you’ve forgotten details from previous letters, I’m a professional guardsman and soldier. I never expected to feel this helpless.
Love,
Ybel
Some renovations underway!
Announcements soon.
On Billy Joel
It’s time to talk about Billy Joel.
I have a hard time with Billy Joel. On the one hand, he’s had a long career of writing and singing a lot of catchy songs that I find pleasant to listen to. And, for a lot of those songs, I can enjoy them unambivalently: “Downeaster Alexa”, “For the Longest Time”, “Storm Front”, and especially “River of Dreams”… nice job. No notes.
And it’s true that a lot of his songs are very Boomer. This is not a quality that I look for in a song, but I can’t deny that he comes by it honestly. We all belong to one generation or another, and if it shows up in our art, then it does, and there’s no point complaining about it. So when he gives us “We Didn’t Start the Fire” or “I Go to Extremes” or “My Life” or “Goodnight Saigon”, that’s all right, I can take it as it comes.
My big problem with Billy Joel is the misogyny that often shows up in his lyrics. His songs, in aggregate, suggest to me a specific kind of whore-madonna dichotomy in his portrayals of women, where women can be callous, man-eating bad girls who it’s dangerous to get involved with, as in the songs “She’s Always a Woman” or “Big Shot”. Or they can be innocent good girls who need to be kept on a pedestal until they’re ready for the dangerous love of notorious streetwise tough guy Billy Joel, as in “Only the Good Die Young”, “That’s Not Her Style”, “You May Be Right”, and “Uptown Girl”. Even “Tell Her About It”, which isn’t actually all that bad, participates in this to some extent: “A nice girl wouldn’t tell you what you should do”.
But even those aren’t the worst of it. I didn’t mention “An Innocent Man”, the #notallmen of rock songs. And I didn’t mention “Just the Way You Are”, in which the singer says *the most horrible things* to a woman whom he claims to love and we’re supposed to hear it as romantic. It’s just gross.
So that’s where I was with Billy Joel for a long time. But recently I figured out something else about him: Billy Joel is no damn nostalgist.
My time as a Legion of Super-Heroes fan has taught me to distrust and disdain nostalgism. It’s not a positive force. It eats creativity and blocks necessary progress. (Note that when I talk about nostalgia, I don’t mean appreciating things about the past, or having affection for the cultural artifacts of the past. I mean thinking things were better Back Then and that we should go back to that.)
One of Billy Joel’s biggest hits was “It’s Still Rock’n’Roll to Me”, a song which takes the position, so far as I can parse it, that, while the current music scene may be shallow and crass, it isn’t actually any different from what it used to be. “Next phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways / It’s still rock’n’roll to me.” This is around the same time that Bob Seger’s reaction to the same conditions was, “Don’t try to take me to a disco / You’ll never even get me out on the floor / In ten minutes I’d be late for the door / I like that old time rock’n’ roll.” Of the two attitudes, I’ll take Joel’s.
Or look at “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, which is obviously an easily mockable song, and certainly one in which Joel indulges in a lot of old memories. It’s easy to look at what gets listed and what doesn’t and conclude that Joel thinks that about seven times as many things happened from ’46-’69 as happened in the ’70s and ’80s. But let’s not forget the basic point of the song: yeah, there are problems now, but there were problems Back Then too, and it sure looks like there are going to continue being problems, so we’d better deal with it. Again: that’s not nostalgia.
And, finally, we have “Keeping the Faith”, which ties it all together. First, it’s an *extremely* Boomer song, one that describes teenage experience in the ’50s/’60s in detail, and gives them religious significance. Second, it manages to *not* participate in the misogyny mentioned above: the lyric “I thought I was the Duke of Earl / When I made it with a red-haired girl / In a Chevrolet / Oh yeah / We were keeping the faith” may have a rite-of-passage element to it that isn’t great, but it does cast the girl as an equal participant in the enterprise at least. And, most of all, Joel gives us the concluding thought that, no matter how good a time he had Back Then and how much he likes to think about it, “the good old days weren’t always good / And tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.”
In short, Billy Joel is a land of contrasts. Thank you very much.
