A Comic About Marina and the Diamonds

What no exposure to the outside world does to a mf—teetering on the brink of insanity, scraping the inside of my brain for comic inspiration, when the bastard queen MARINA releases a new single so bad that it inspires me to write a whole comic lamenting the fact.

Originally, this was going to be a simple 2-pager “X vs Y” style comic— but I couldn’t think of enough jokes. Instead, I couldn’t help but dwell on the internal narrative that the albums spun in my mind, and this was the result. Am I giving too much credit to Marina with my interpretation of her work— of maybe giving myself too much credit? Yeah, probably. But art is a two-way street, and this is my overelaborated interpretation of what her former work meant to me, versus what the modern incarnations appear to me as.

The first two Marina and The Diamonds albums— though bafflingly garnering worse reviews than her modern work— are some of the only albums of pop music to ever really emotionally affect me in some way. I love Charli XCX, Sia, Tegan and Sara etc. as much as the next het guy, but there’s a pleasant simplicity and superficiality to all of it that never made me put too much emotional stock into them, save for maybe 1 or 2 singles.

Both of Marina’s first two albums, in my view, are clouded by this ominous sense of misery and dissatisfaction, which persists across multiple songs, giving it a much more potent sense of realism and rawness. To put it crudely— there’s almost a vague “female” nature to some of it— a distinctly feminine sort of yearning, concerning one’s romantic life, sense of self-esteem, and purpose— in a way that seems to allow me to get in touch with an alternate reality, feminine version of myself, in a visceral way that no other female-centric media has allowed. Does that make sense? Am I coming off as a crazy person?

I’ll take it a step further; these first two Marina albums (Family Jewels and Electra Heart) appear in my mind as a sort of feminine counter to the masculine rage and despair of Jay Reatard’s first two albums (Blood Visions and Watch Me Fall) in terms of tone and theme, in a way that, I think, must be experienced to be understood.

I didn’t really touch on this, but Marina’s later works (part of Froot, Love+Fear, that shitty new single Purge The Poison) all kind of smack of this pop-feminism “we are the disease” liberal nihilism-- which isn’t so bad when taken alongside the quiet misery of her earlier work— but when sandwiched in between dime-a-dozen love songs just comes off like she’s coming up to you and saying “Hey, have you heard about this pollution stuff? Crazy? And uh… the wage gap? That’s so messed up!”

In any case, I won’t waste your time by continuing to write on the topic. If you want to fully experience the comic as intended, you must obviously listen to Marina’s discography first! Family Jewels then Electra Heart, and then if you want to save yourself some misery, just jump right into Purge The Poison and allow the disappointing whiplash to overcome you— or don’t, and then just come back and tell me I have bad taste in music. (To 100% the Beany music canon, of course, you would also need to listen to Jay Reatard’s first two albums as well— which should instantly lose me any clout I might have gained amongst “The Gays” that my Marina recommendation garnered me— there are few albums more violently heterosexual than Blood Visions)