Comic Book Songs
In this post I have decided to take two songs that share the name of (or a similar name with) two comic book characters, both Marvel properties, and see how they stack up next to the characters with the same or similar moniker. We’ve got one heavy metal song and one hip-hop song; two genres of music that I think go well with superhero comics. Let’s take a look.
The Song: Iron Man
The Artist: Black Sabbath
(For an even better Iron Man picture I suggest you head over to David Welsh’s blog Precocious Curmudgeon)
The Sound: Could it be the greatest heavy metal song ever? That will be debated for years to come but Sabbath’s song of a rejected superhero certainly has what it takes. A menacing feel, somewhat silly lyrics delivered with utter conviction and most importantly, a brilliant riff. The monster that emerges from Tony Iommi’s Gibson SG is not only manically sinister it is also catchy and creates a great groove that the rhythm section of drummer Bill Ward and bassist Geezer Butler push forward very powerfully. The sound of it coming out from the horror movie intro of the song is surely one of rock’s finest moments.
Ward’s lyrics tell us of a man “turned to steel in the great magnetic field.” He was once a savior of the human race but since he didn’t get enough respect he now “kills the people he once saves.” It feels almost like a sci-fi version of a song Johnny Cash might have song, just not as smart or authentic. Not that it hurts the song much. Ozzy Osbourne’s high pitched vocals wail the story to the same tune as the aforementioned riff, creating the sense that there’s this tightly run army of heavy metal musicians behind the vengeful Iron Man. The song continues into a fury of multiple guitars soloing and a rhythm section almost flying out of control as the listener is left to imagine the carnage in his/her mind.
The Stack-Up: As Iron Man has always been one of my favorite metal songs I figured it would be worth checking out the comic book hero of the same name. While Sabbath’s song created this great adolescent male sci-fi epic (the type that has appeared in so many metal songs since) the character has never done it for me.
I found out that Tony Stark doesn’t kill the people he once saved but I got over it. I still had to deal with the fact that Iron Man doesn’t have one of those great neuroses that other Marvel comic characters have that makes them so relatable and interesting. Granted he is an alcoholic but that’s just seemed like a plot device grafted onto the character too late in the game to seem real enough for me. Spider-Man was a mess of guilt from the start and the X-Men were always a (usually ham-fisted) parable for minority oppression. These speak to kids who are just finding their favorite superheroes.
Iron Man has lots of different armor but he’s still just a rich guy in a suit. He’s not an icon that is attractive to a young person’s stunted sense of rebellion like Black Sabbath or Spider-Man. Tony Stark just feels too much like The Man and after all, The Man wants to shut rock ‘n’ roll down.
The Song: Dr. Octagon
The Artist: Dr. Octagon
The Sound: Yeah, I know it's not exactly Dr. Octopus, but I like this song so much that I decided it's close enough to be incldude here.
Kool Keith, going by the alias Dr. Octagon here, is known to be as talented as he is strange and make no mistake about it, he is strange. The rhymes of many of the songs on Dr. Octagonecologyst sound like Chuck D if D spewed out word salad inspired by Marvel Comics and porno mags. An excerpt:
It's costing androids leaving humans with hemorrhoids
Thinking more of what they can't explore, like
the cartoon Donald Duck is giving fellatio on the floor
with Reed Richards, looking at The Thing's naked pictures
Taking Ex-Lax to relax with the needle and thread
sewing up all the other buttcracks
That’s either really deep or completely nonsensical, either one’s fine with me. Keith delivers these words as if they were as normal as a shopping list which is what makes them sound so good. Keith’s low-end tone and easy flow has been proving irresistible since the early 90’s when he was in Ultramagnetic MC’s. Sir Menelik takes the first and third verses of the song and sounds to me like a less gifted Kool Keith. I would prefer if the song was just Keith but I don’t mind Menelik’s rhymes that much.
Dr. Octagonecologyst helped to introduce the world to the production talents of Dan the Automator. The beat to Dr. Octagon is mellow as well as gloriously psychedelic. Sounds echo and synths hold long chords while the drums keep a slow and simple groove. It’s not one of the standout tracks like Earth People or Blue Flowers, but it’s not without its charm.
The Stack-up: Dr. Octopus is one of those many Spider-Man villains that is based on another animal himself. It’s basically a mad scientist, nothing new there, but one that has a great visual with those four mechanical arms going after Spidey. He’s just one of the many odd characters that pop up in superhero comic books. It’s that sense of the fantastic, not too far off from the sense of the absurd, which fires up the lyrics of Kool Keith.
That absurdness isn’t really the main point to the Spider-Man stories. With most of the original Spider-Man comics it seemed fighting the villain was never as important as the “tormented nerd” part of the Peter Parker/Spider-Man mythos. Most stories had Spidey losing the villain in the beginning only to beat him near the end of the book with all the soap opera elements going on in between.
It’s when you read issue after issue of this stuff do you start to get off on not just the sort of weird characters like Dr. Octopus or The Thing but real oddballs like Ego the Living Planet or Armin Zola (his brother Emile did better). It’s that off-kilter fun that isn’t too far off from what’s entertaining about the music off of Dr. Octagonecologyst or Deltron 3030. The character Dr. Octopus might not be as crazy as the song that he inspired but he lives in a world that certainly helped to create that manic joy which Keith and Automator create.
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