The Wall of Sound

With the upcoming ending of Glee (which, as yesterday’s NY Magazine article noted, will have a hard time competing with the show’s half a dozen other natural stopping points), I got to thinking about what I miss about performing. And there are lots of things: I like being the center of attention, I like the chance to show off, I like the escapism, all that sort of thing.

There is a specific thing that I miss about a cappella, though; a phenomenon that I think of as the “wall of sound”. It’s when you’re in the middle of a big group of singers who are filling every note of a power chord with their voices and it just drives right through you. A lot of raw excitement and enthusiasm comes right through, and everything fits together, and for the length of that sound, you can tell everyone is just having the time of their lives.

(Jethrien doesn’t really get why I like the song “Pompeii”, but there are several a cappella covers that are clearly very good examples of this phenomenon.)

At some point, I need to get that experience in my life again.

The TPBs I Bought at Big Apple Con

The Prisoner: Shattered Visage - This hits a major issue with anything having to do with The Prisoner: You can’t add much to the canon without explaining something that the series left open, and you can’t explain anything without nuking someone’s fan theory, because it’s just that kind of a show. As a sequel set 20 years after the show, it needs to declare that the events of “Fall Out” were a drug-induced hallucination and that The Village was run by the side Number Six WASN’T on. It also tries to keep the mystery of who is actually running the show with cryptic references to “archangels”, but has to admit that British intelligence is the next level up from the Village superiors. The story was okay, but I didn’t find that it really added anything to Prisoner canon that was worth what you needed to accept in order to buy into it. (It occurs to me that if I were doing a 6-issue miniseries of Prisoner stories, I’d have six entirely separate stories, each based on a completely different interpretation of the events of the series. That would be fun.)


Supreme Power (collected issues #1 - #18) - JMS came up with a Justice League elseworlds story, but had better luck selling it to Marvel with the serial numbers filed off. (Okay, yes, the Squadron Supreme and Squadron Sinister existed before this, but they were JLA-expies from the start, just like the Justifiers of Angor were DC’s answer to the Avengers; or the great Freedom Fighters/The Invaders pseudo-crossover. Man, Roy Thomas just loved doing that.) It’s his take on a “realistic” JLA story, creating a meta-origin for all the superhumans and giving everyone a what-if twist: Superman was raised by the US government, Wonder Woman is insane, Green Lantern is periodically possessed by his sentient power ring, Batman is black and obsessed with racism, the Flash is famous, and Aquaman is a mute and telepathic blue girl. Unpleasantness ensues and the body count is very high. It was fun to read given that I paid $4 for each trade, but I feel like most of what it does has been done elsewhere; JMS isn’t quite as smart as he thinks he is (particularly regarding racism and sexism); and it’s unnecessarily gratuitous with the nudity and violence. Not everything can be Watchmen…and this wasn’t.