Phthursday Musings: Super Job, Guys. Super.

Over the past week, news broke about the formation of something called the Super League, a European soccer league which would be only the elite of the elite. The 12 founding members include names that you’ve heard of even if, well, you don’t give a shit: Manchester United! Barcelona! Real Madrid!

For those of you who don’t follow this at all, it was sort of the equivalent of Alabama and Notre Dame and Ohio State saying they were just going to play each other in football, but worse, because there’s even more money involved.

Within a couple of days the whole thing collapsed under a combination of its own hubris and the ire of almost the entire universe. Seriously, get a load of this: the players, the coaches, the fans, the federations in each country, politicians of every party in every country: They all condemned the Super League. The world is more united against the Super League than it is against COVID-19.

The whole thing is super infuriating, and super hilarious.

I tried to think of a non-sports analogy and this is what I came up with, apologies to Gen Z: Remember the rollout of New Coke and the return of Coca-Cola Classic? Now imagine if it all happened in a span of three days.

I don’t want to dwell on the specifics because a lot of META-SPIEL readers truly do not give a shit! You’re not here for the footie!

I think though that this all should be understood as something more than an abstraction of sportsball or whatever. This whole debacle is a manifestation of strange international politics, including the flexing of muscle by certain small countries like United Arab Emirates. It gets at the heart of things like whether the European Union will hold it together. Even if you think it should be, it’s not just a game.

One thing I got to thinking about was the choice of the word “Super”. Now, they couldn’t use words like “Premier” or “Champions”, because those are the existing names of leagues. So they needed a superlative adjective. And what adjective could be more superlative than super? It is literally part of the word!

There’s no bowl bigger than the Super Bowl, right? And there’s no bon bon bigger than a Super Bon Bon, right?

Ah, crap, I just lost Gen Z again.

Anyway.

The thing about Super is this. America being America - and containing Texas - there’s always a need for greater superlatives. Remember how there used to be a Silver Visa and a Gold Visa and then they needed to add a platinum Visa and then a Diamond Visa and at that point they ran out so they just started issuing things like Horse Tooth Rewards Visa cards because nothing was more valuable than diamonds?

I think video games might be largely to blame here. Mario Bros. begat Super Mario Bros. begat Super Mario Bros. 2 begat Super Mario Bros. 3. NES begat SNES. But what were you going to call what came after Super Nintendo Entertainment System?

I remember a video game for the original NES called Base Wars where you had a team of robots playing baseball. I don’t remember this as being an especially good game, though maybe it was? I suspect only my cousin and I even remember this thing.

Well, in Base Wars, my recollection goes that Super was at a particular level, and then there was another level up and that was Hyper, and then the actual highest level was Ultra. Before the ‘90s, I’m not sure anybody used the word “ultra” for anything at all. By the mid-aughts, I think there were “Ultra Lounges” all over the country, where the word “ultra”, I think, meant that you wouldn’t hear Bob Seger songs. Today, I think, “ultra” probably has something to do with vaping, doesn’t it?

There’s a tipping point there, right? We blew past the most super of superlatives and just stopped describing things coherently at all.

There’s a very excellent book called Advertising the American Dream, written by Roland Marchand. Marchand focuses on how advertising became more than just a method of selling products and turned into something of a broader cultural force, focusing especially on the 1920s. It’s a long book, and it’s sort of academic, and it’s now decades only, but I highly recommend it. It’s eye-opening without trying to be all “gotcha!” like so many things seem to be today.

There’s something about the idea of entering The Ultra Age and how it arguably coincided with the beginning of the demise of the Empire that makes me think of Marchand’s work. You may have heard reference to “The Gilded Age”, roughly the last three decades of the 1800s, the name a reference to how society was gilded in gold but underneath there was still rampant poverty, inequality, etc. I think in some ways we’re in the flipside of that, but where the ubiquity of wealth is very different, and where we’ve seen decades of crumbling infrastructure as opposed to infrastructure not keeping pace with economic growth. But instead of it all being papered over by flashes of gold, we’re papering things over with language. Superlatives have gotten to the point where we can’t adequately describe things anymore. You’re poor as hell, but you can still go hang at the Ultra Lounge, etc.

Those soccer executives couldn’t well have called their baby Ultra League without it sounding even more absurd, but that’s really what they were getting at, and Super was still available for them so they just went with that. The best just isn’t good enough anymore. It’s got to be Super, Hyper, Ultra, Mega, Giga, Terra, maybe at some point we’ll stop using Greek prefixes and switch to Chinese ones, who knows. What’s the Bantu word for utmost? What’s the Hindi word for greatest? Let’s appropriate everything! Super appropriation! Ultra appropriation!

There was this silly time, I think spring-summer 1997, when every other band had the word Super in their name.

Some had been around a while: Superchunk, Supergrass. Super Furry Animals?

Some had not. At this point I forget a lot of the names, but many of them were silly.

The one which sticks out in my mind though is a band named Super 5 Thor, because they managed to pull off both the “Super” thing and the “Add a random number!” thing at the same time. I mean, Super 5 Thor was probably a once-fancy model of Swedish toaster or something, but still.

If a band came through with “Super” in their names you could guess at a certain kind of sound, something guitar heavy or something vaguely ironic.

But if you saw “Ultra” it was a tipoff to something electronic. I’m specifically thinking here of Ultraviolence but I’m thinking there was a lot more than that. “Ultra” was pulsating techno, flashing lights, ecstacy, an epileptic’s worst nightmare.

I don’t know where I thought I was going with this so here’s the video for Superchunk’s “Hyper Enough”:

“Hyper Enough”, speaking of which, is in turn responsible for the most super 40+ minutes of college radio ever. Three guys were on the air at WXYC in Chapel Hill and spent an insane amount of time analyzing this one song. At some point someone started recording, and the recording wound up being a bonus track on Superchunk’s Laughter Guns EP. If this paragraph sounds remotely interesting to you, yet you somehow don’t know what I’m talking about, go find this EP immediately.

I am pretty sure I first heard about Superchunk one random day after I got home from high school. Two guys I went to grade school with, who I hadn’t seen in maybe four years, showed up out front of my house, hopped out of the car, and, to the best of my recollection, just kept talking about Superchunk.

Superchunk is of course a fine thing to talk about! But I think that I’m hyper enough as it is. I think that I’m hyper enough.

Alright, friends, Roman Reigns, country ladies, I’ll level with you here. I came into this week with three ideas about what to write about. One was the Super League. One was Super 5 Thor.

The third was leveraging the Super League discussion to sidetrack into ridiculing Tottenham Hotspur, which I will condense to:

LOL Spurs

So, um, this is not a super set of ideas. It is superbly terrible.

Somehow along the way I managed to share a couple of videos from the golden age of indie rock, though, and what the hey, I’ll share a couple more that fit the theme.

First, this one, Sonic Youth’s cover of the Carpenters’ “Superstar”, which has always been wonderful and it’s so nice to have an excuse to hear it again:

And, well, this isn’t really a video, but fine, you asked for it, here’s Super 5 Thor, with all of 41 total views, doing what I suppose is their best Jesus and Mary Chain impression, playing music which could only have been made in the 1990s. Let’s boost it up to 50 views, shall we? 50 Super 5 Thor fans can’t be wrong!

Hope everyone had a super Earth Day!