Written for Culture Wars
Tempest’s mode is one of unprepossessing passion and flair. Her writing has all the casualness of conversation, only to turn a trickshot every so often that lets the rhymes and rhythms of the rest fall perfectly into place. It’s the mode of a swimmer tumble-turning at the end of a length, with a sudden, almost unexpected, burst of speed and agility. Or a pedestrian flicking her heels into a quick burst of tap. The result is two kinds of ease on the ear at once. There’s just enough tongue-twisting to tickle as her words slip down your ear canal.
Partly that’s down to the skill of her storytelling. Brand New Ancients is a graphic novel conjured with words alone. Two half-brothers, Tommy and Clive, unknown to one another, walk on opposite sides of the tracks. They are a latterday Loki and Thor, “a two-man nation.”
Tempest is interested the possibility of a modern and mundane mythology. She invokes X-Men alongside the Greek Gods and upholds the idea that all of us are somehow superhuman or godly, even as we stalk supermarket aisles and tinker on our iphones. Underneath all this is a sense of constancy – something primordial without being primitive. Students permanently talk change, the jukebox playlists unchanging. It’s located in human nature and, crucially, in community; a pub where regulars end their orders with “and one for yourself.”
Tempest also spins, almost freewheels, into asides and footnotes. Simon Cowell comes in for particular criticism in an offshoot slamming fakery and fame. You realise that this, for Tempest, is the opposition: an individualism that would elevate itself above all the other gods, that would float like a giant, helium-filled icon in a Macy’s Parade.
I don’t know how old Tempest is, but she’s certainly sager than her age should allow. What’s more, she’s a thoroughly captivating performer. There’s something of the sportsman to her, the way her feet flicker and twitch with the barely-contained energy of a boxer pre-bout or her habit of stepping back from the mic in lulls as if returning to her corner to recuperate. When she speaks, she turns a trance, overtaken by the sort jerky percussive movements brought on by itching powder, but here dictated by words.
But its those words that really seal it. Tempest’s popping candy phrases and silken soundbites are bliss, but that they never get in the way marks her out as a prodigious talent.
Photograph: Katherine Leedale
0 comments:
Post a Comment