Monday, November 26, 2007

Paper Sun

Earlier this year, I worked up a book proposal premised, in part, on a whimsical speculation that the members of Traffic were big comic-book nerds, and that the lyrics of John Barleycorn Must Die and other records were packed with coded references to Marvel characters and storylines. I was only half-joking, which means I was only half-serious.

Now—via SeeBelow—you can hear what it would have sounded like if Traffic had actually been huge Marvel Comics nerds (and if the lead singer had been, say, Burton Cummings, rather than Steve Winwood—more red-rimmed blooze than blue-eyed soul).

Ladies and gentlemen, scholars of pop, enter The Marvel Comics World of...Icarus.

(MP3s compressed in the .RAR format; this freeware utility unzips RARs.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I came here from your comment at CT, and, seeing this post, have a better idea to offer. This week an email from a young friend (American) living in France with an English flatmate ended as follows

"PS my flatmate told me that when she used to think The Who was a band made up of actors who used to play Dr. Who".

There must be a novel in that, surely.

Grant said...

Man, those Icarus guys are *funky*.

Weeeird.

Jack Feerick said...

It was 1972, man. Mainstream "rock" was still pretty well connected to its identity as a subset of R & B. The ethnic cleansing that Sasha Frere-Jones decries in such deliberately-provocative terms didn't really start happening bigtime until the explosion of punk, by my admittedly idiosyncratic rendering.