Reykjavík Grapevine - 25.08.2006, Page 8

At 8 o’clock Pacific Time, Kurt
Cobain’s corpse sprang from its
grave, sprinted to a local Wal Mart,
purchased a shot gun, and blew the
last piece of decaying grey matter
out of the inch of the skull that still
remained on its neck.
An Icelander was responsible for
this poor corpse’s misery.

In the months that we have covered
the reality television show Rockstar:
Supernova we’ve had some laughs.
The dorky trio of Supernova are
consistently naïve and go-lucky, and
as they lead a gaggle of hapless wan-
nabes, they are sometimes funny. In
fact, living in Iceland, this is proba-
bly the only place in the world where
one could watch and enjoy Rockstar.
We have the advantage over the rest
of the world in that we have the only
likable contestant not suffering from
constant sexual harassment. Up
until the recent episode, we also had
a contestant who had some degree of
integrity.
So we watched as Tommy Lee,
who built his rocker reputation by
punching out women’s teeth and
video-taping his wife while he
infecting her with Hep C, made
word play and pretended to know
the value of the domestic life. We
watched Gilby Clark, of Heart
fame, say casually nice things with
the defeated eyes of a man who
has been cuckolded many, many
times. We even took pleasure in
seeing Frankenstein look-alike
Jason Newsted, a man with so little
character that after playing with
Metallica for 20 years he was known
as the new guy, grunted out advice
on vocal technique. We began to
appreciate the show in the way
kids might appreciate a local blind,
foul-smelling, bad-tempered dog
that licks itself while sitting in a
prominent front yard.
The bad-tempered mutt licking
itself appeal faded this week, when
an iconic piece of music was de-
stroyed by Iceland’s own Magni—
and then the whole genre of rock
was obliterated by Supernova. Of all
songs, Magni chose to sing Smells
Like Teen Spirit, the hypercritical
examination of nitwit culture at
the beginning of the 1990s. Cobain
said, about writing the song, that
when he was growing up, kids in
Aberdeen Washington were “like
Beavis and Butthead, only not as
smart.” Cobain’s songs chronicled
the torture of living in a brain dead,
butthead age.
Our own Magni got up on
international television, and sang
Teen Spirit like he was channelling
Creed, that is, he took an intelligent
and critical song, and performed it
as thought it was a vague utter-
ance meant to allow the singer to
strain the throat and get that muscle
showing, just above the collar, that
women might check out.
To then see the cast of Super-
nova critique it, and ask, brainless as
the day they sniffed their first bottle
of glue, why Magni hadn’t thought
to smash a guitar. The whole band
really thought Magni did well, but
should have smashed something.
Magni was followed by the
contestant Ryan Star, who, along
with Tommy Lee himself, was
likely the subject of another Nirvana
song, Rape Me. Ryan Star may be
brain dead, without charisma, and
completely out of fashion, but at
least he follows instructions. As he
sang an original song that sounded
like a Live tune without the pesky
grammar, he posed his way through
throwing a guitar, to show how
rowdy he could be.
It was a sad evening for those of
us at the Grapevine. We had wanted
to like Rockstar, and Magni. We
have dedicated large portions of our
magazine to the genre of rock mu-
sic, and we wanted to keep on liking
that genre. That has been taken
from us. To hear Nirvana would be
to remember the day a neighbour
demonstrated that “he likes all our
pretty songs but he don’t know what
it means,” as the corpse of Kurt
Cobain screamed while waiting for
the underpaid Wal Mart checkout
girl to okay his ID. To hear rock
would be to remember the brain-
dead gaze of Ryan Star throwing his
guitar.
We are all now dead inside.
Cobain’s Corpse Awakens,
Shoots Self Again
Magni and Supernova kick culture in the teeth
by bart cameron
superstar
/// And to think that we didn’t get
any complaints. I’m alarmed that a
newspaper’s website censored you.
After one complaint. Is that the
way things work around here?
– I’m not sure about that. Maybe the
priest had some friends at Morgun-
blaðið. That’s how things work here,
people know each other.
/// Yeah, but they don’t have to
apply reason or logic to their com-
plaint, they just have to…
– Not always, no. But I think usu-
ally priests are very smart people
who have a big sense of sarcasm.
/// I would have assumed that as
you cover everything from rape,
incest, faecal matter nonsense,
that there would really be more
reactions.
– Well, you know, reactions so far
are to blasphemy and almost noth-
ing at all about these incest jokes. At
that convention I mentioned, there
was this American couple looking
through my book and they said,
“You have a lot of incest jokes in this
book.” I just said I was from Iceland.
They just said, “Of course.”
/// They can just pretty much do
that for every problem that comes
up though. “I’m from Iceland.”
– Yeah. “I’m from Iceland. It’s cold
up there.” I think Penguin are
putting some information about
Iceland on the back of the book, like
Iceland has this many sunny days a
year and people like putrefied shark,
so that explains the book. So that’s
what I do, I sit in the darkness and
eat putrefied shark and then I make
comics. It’s almost correct. I eat and
I sit.
/// If you and I are going to do an
interview, then we have to talk
about the AIDS comic, whether I
should have apologised for print-
ing it.
– You don’t have to apologise to me.
/// That’s not my intention. I just
wonder if you think it was justi-
fied?
– Well, I think it’s the only time
ever when there’s been an apology
by you guys, by the Grapevine. Is it
the only time? Really?
/// Yes.
– Well, that’s kind of an honour,
in a way. I didn’t make an issue
out of it, but I was very curious as
to where the guy who complained
was coming from because he got
really offended because the fact
that I mentioned AIDS in a joke
context. So AIDS is something you
shouldn’t joke about
/// I think he was referring to
the 80s pop culture in the U.S.
There, derogatory jokes about
AIDS got mentioned all the time
in pop culture, the most infamous
example being Sebastian Bach’s
Aids: Kills Fags Dead t-shirt. As
I am an American, and I present
a mix of American and Icelandic
culture, I shouldn’t have presented
something that only works in an
Icelandic context.
– Yeah, you have seen, living in
America, a huge wave of AIDS
jokes. Living in America and know-
ing lots of people dying of AIDS,
you’re going to find it offensive. So,
I get it.
/// But the joke is more acceptable
in an Icelandic context, because
you guys have never had that
negative stigma. You had a pretty
responsible government when
AIDS came in to Iceland, and
they educated right away, that was
the time the gay rights movement
started getting going here.
– And besides, this is a story about a
man who had AIDS and hid it from
his girlfriend until they were mar-
ried and told it to her going away
from the church, so it’s a story about
a very irresponsible human being
who had AIDS. And it’s what most
of the stories are about, like human
behaviour gone wrong.
/// And this is why priests like your
work so much? Because you focus
on the fallibility of man?
– Yes. I think so. Also, I have God
there (in my comics), but I don’t
really draw God so it’s not really
blasphemous. I just make his word
balloons come out from the air.
/// What’s the most embarrassing
comic you did? One you would be
embarrassed to look at while some-
one else was in the room?
– One joke in Save Us has these
three guys, typical stick figures like
I draw them, and one of them says
“So I’m an albino, so what. Stop
looking at me like that!” And I
thought it was really funny when I
wrote it because I wrote it because
in stick figures everyone’s an albino.
That was the joke, making fun of
the stick figures. But then later on I
read it and published it, I thought it
was crap.
/// Are there any that stick in your
head as the ones that make you
laugh as you look at them?
– No, well, I don’t laugh out loud at
my jokes when I think of them, not
anymore. I do it sometimes when
I’m drawing them. Sure there is a
lot of stuff I am pleased with, stuff
I’ve done at the Grapevine, like the
elephant, dolphin and the Christ-
mas story.
/// I’ve got one favourite that is
lodged in my brain. A couple on a
blind date, and the women says “So
that’s the worst thing I ever did.
What about you?” And the guy
says “I once participated in a gang
rape.”
– (Laughing.) That’s one I had in my
head for a really long time. I had it
in my head before I started doing
this. Because I was reading, I saw it
in the newspaper a piece about how
many people in ten had participated
in a gang rape, something like that.
A staggering amount of people had
participated in rape, and I was kind
of blown away that I could walk
out of this coffeehouse right now
and pass a rapist at one point. I was
thinking that and also OK, what
kind of lives do these guys live, do
they wake up in the morning and
go, “Shit, I can’t believe I raped a
girl last night, I was soooo drunk.”
Are they like that? I mean, how
do they think? So I thought of this
situation, of a rapist on a date and
he would just tell her the truth, you
know, it’s like truth or dare, like
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever
done?” “Well, I once participated in
gang rape. I guess that’s the worst
thing I’ve done.” I mean, how do
people that do all those horrible
things, how do they get through the
day? That’s a huge mystery to me
and a lot of my stories are a way for
me to deal with that.
/// I’m sure that not many people
consider it though, until they come
across that panel. It’s a perfect and
brutal joke.
– Thank you. Do you mean like
because people consider the people
on the date as soul-less monsters?
/// No, I think they have to think
of them as people for just a second.
Otherwise, the tendency is just
to avoid thinking of bad people. I
think it’s something in the Icelan-
dic mentality because it’s a small
isolated island and because of the
history of legal persecution under
Danish rule, that there’s an inter-
est in trying to understand people
who commit crimes.
– It really is a weird thing. Because
it’s not really possible to understand
it. Yeah. That’s what I have to say
about that.
There was this American couple looking
through my book and they said, “You have
a lot of incest jokes in this book.” I just
said I was from Iceland. They just said, “Of
course.”
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