On Pop Songs, Gaga, Comic Books, Magic Words, Concept Albums
Why did I write a bunch of songs about superheroes? Prince and Gaga did it, so.
PLOT TWIST, for the plot to be described in the next paragraph: Lady Gaga just announced she’ll be releasing a concept album to accompany her performance as Harley Quinn in the upcoming sequel Joker: Folie à Deux. The album is titled Harlequin and comes out this Friday, September 27.
This year I started a pop music group called 12 Valentines. We’re putting out our debut EP next month. It’s not really a band, more a loose collective of karaoke colleagues and friends who are much more musically talented than I. None of these pop songs are popular yet, I just wanted to compose them and get them out there. Most of them are based on stuff that happens in superhero comics.
I didn’t choose comic book tropes as the concept for the concept album solely for the pure exercise of being a nerd. I need prove nothing in that area, smiley face. Here’s my thing: When coming up with lyrics for a song, one wants to choose words with some magical poetic potency in them, that convey feeling and/or story with economy and resonances and, ideally, rhyme.
A thing that ends up happening, in my view, is that many of the most magic words can be found lying around in comic books, also in space opera and fantasy narratives.
An example of what I mean: Marvel and DC Universe characters were SEO before SEO existed. That is, Search Engine Optimized, the essential Internet concept related to branding — basically, how easy or hard is it to find the exact thing that you are in the morass of the Web. For example, the band name “Skunk Anasie" has a good level of SEO. The band names “The The” and “The National” do not, because they easily overlap with a lot of other things. This is partly why we have weird Internet branding moves like “Lyft” instead of the literal “Lift,” and the Sci-Fi Channel rebranding itself as “Syfy.” You have to spell your brand a little weird so that it is as unique as possible and can be distinguished from a general category of things. Duh, que no?
So, what’s cool about the Marvel characters (and partially explains their massive ascendance in recent years) is that most of them originated with perfect SEO, because they were made up in Kirby and Lee’s imagination, and weren’t specifically anything else. Whether you like or dislike Spider-Man, the X-Men, Thanos, you are not going to confuse them with anything else, and neither will the search engine.
Think about it. “The Avengers” has always been kind of a goofy name. What are they avenging, actually? No one knows. But if they were called something more precisely descriptive and still heroic-sounding, like, I dunno, The Crusaders, The Hero Squad, they’d be slightly more blah and their brand would not work. The fact that “Avenger” is a slightly wrong not-real word, yet still conveys the basic idea, makes it a very powerful brand. The Avengers aren’t anything else but the Avengers of Marvel Comics.
Framing it in terms of marketing and branding may seem a little crass, but it’s the same operational principle when one is trying to write a poem or a song lyric. One wants to use words that evoke specific images and feelings, ideally using as few words as possible.
That’s why I think of the Marvel and DC vocabulary as being a repository of magic words. Magic in the sense of, to say “Spider-Man” incants exactly one thing — an imaginary world where Spider-Man exists. Batman, Green Lantern, Firestar. You can think they’re silly or whatever, but they do a magic thing by triggering your mind to picture Firestar, a fictional person who is absolutely nothing else. If she were named “Firehose,” it wouldn’t work at all.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
So if you’re writing a song lyric, choosing words with built-in magic evocative powers is the whole point. Otherwise you have bland lyrics, and three or 300 songs titled “Somebody To Love,” which there are. I mean, Queen’s “Somebody To Love” is a great song, and lyrically on-point. (And there is a track on our upcoming EP that is just titled “Someone,” which is not the most exciting or searchable title in the world, but it’s a favorite tune in other respects.)
But for most of the songs, I used the cheat code of referencing a comic book thing, often obliquely, because those are the words that take you places quickly and in very few syllables. E.g., “Catlady.” Mr. Vance is too much a twit to be conscious of what a lovely and evocative term that is. When both “Catlady” and “Bratgirl” became buzzwords associated with Summer 2024, I knew that our disco tune which stared quite normally as an ode to the video game Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League needed to come together. FYI, Bratgirl, besides being a Charli XCX-associated term, is the unaffectionate nickname Harley Quinn uses for Batgirl. Catlady, obviously, is the Batman associate/foe with the whip and the claws who steals high-end jewelry and art, and likes cats.
You may recall that Prince did the soundtrack album for the 1989 Batman movie. It’s a pretty cool Prince thing and an incredibly cool comic book thing. Our superhero~popsong ekphrastics aspire, spiritually, to the level of fandom blenderism that Prince achieves here through his raw nerdy power. (“Ekphrastic” is a useful word which in modern usage means “an artwork inspired by another artwork.” E.g., a song about a painting, a dance about a novel.)
(Also, I happened to see Lady Gaga do her Jazz & Piano set in Las Vegas a few months back, where she performs mainly American songbook standards and some piano-with-big-band versions of her own pop hits — great show! I imagine the musical numbers in Joker 2 embrace her enthusiasm for that vibe, to some degree.)
Anyhoo, here’s the mobile/lyric video for our song Birds & Catlady, composed by me and mzmo, with vocals by Vic Ess, Nyaradzo K, and Mariah G, keys by Gaby Alter, drums by DJ Dave Wittman.
Please add 12 Valentines on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, etc., because those metrics sure do count toward eking out indie musical artist longevity. Buy our songs for cheap or preorder our concept album at Bandcamp, if you find you like this kind of stuff. At some point, there will be karaoke versions.
“Hear that? That’s the empowering feminist anthem of my internal soundtrack starting.”
- Harley Quinn, as voiced by Tara Strong, in Rocksteady Studios’ Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League.
…Also, might as well mention that we have this Kamala Harris-themed song we’re trying to get out there, which doesn’t especially have to do with comic books except in the bankshot Kamala Khan sort of way.
Can't wait to hear the songs on 12 Valentines!