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There's something about Peter Parker which is forever sort of difficult second albumish. He's the guy whose songs are all about how difficult his life is being a teenager and dealing with fighting crime and everything, except then he's a superhero, worldwide celebrity and married to a hot model. Pretty difficult to produce a second album full of the angst that made him famous.
Basically in real life, if that isn't the most ridiculous thing I've ever said ever, Peter Parker would now be unrecognisable to his friends from school. He'd be a worldwide celebrity on press junkets and trying to maintain his third major tv series, or he'd have gone totally underground and be either living in Ecuador or gone totally feral soldier of fortune. Or he'd have shacked up on super-hero science facilities with Reed Richards trying to invent the next sun-collider while all the major technology companies and governments of the world tried to have him killed. The narrative arc that ends up with him teaching in a school is pretty much farcical except in as much as it allows the familiar Spider-Man narratives to continue in some cod, hacked-together, zombie sort of way.
I'm a great believer in stories having a beginning, middle and an end, and Peter's story can't ever end, and remains perpetually middle - super tantric storytelling - and as such can't help but jar increasingly against his origins. He either stays the same perpetually (boring) or changes and evolves from the original premise (diluting, unconvincing). I mean, they do a good job of sustaining these narratives through perpetual retelling of the same stories to different markets, and by the abandonment of evolution that has occurred in the past (continual variations on a theme, each previous theme having reverted), but there's something relentlessly unsatisfying about it. Reminds me of playing World of Warcraft in some ways. |
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