Savannah Lee

One of the neat things about studying art history is doing comparisons. Very often, in an exam, an instructor will throw up two slides by different artists which have some major differences and some less-obvious, but significant, similarities. (There are *always* less-obvious but significant similarities. The instructor would not make the comparison otherwise.)

Your job is to dig into all this as hard as you can in the time you've got. You learn a particular way of thinking pretty quickly--it's important to get at the similarities first, because those are going to be more elusive but more telling. Make a quick nod to the most glaring and undeniable differences, but then get right going on the similarities, which will actually bring the differences back around into relief as you analyze them.

Once you've learned to think that way, you can carry it over to pretty much any area you're interested in. (E. Annie Proulx and Stephen King!)

In fact, once you've learned to think that way, it's hard to *stop* thinking that way. Your mind starts automatically searching for bizarre yet potentially fruitful comparisons. Odilon Redon's "Cyclops," for example, and Courbet's "Man with a Pipe." They are, after all, both portraits, albeit one is of a mystical giant looking over the figure of a reclining nude from a distance, while the other one is of the real Courbet himself and is close and immediate. But the Cyclops has the same sensitive bearing, the same sense of deep psychology and personal resonance, as the more realistic Courbet. And the more realistic Courbet still indulges in a self-mythologization which brings us back to the legitimately mythical Cyclops.

(You'd never use that particular comparison for an exam, of course--it's too out-there. But just for your own thinking, it's a good exercize.)

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Around 5am today, my mind got going on "Rocket Queen," the schizophrenic final track from Guns N' Roses' 1987 barnstormer "Appetite for Destruction," versus "Moment With You," the obscure revenge song which haunted the forcibly-outed George Michael's 1998 collection "Ladies and Gentlemen."

And see, that's exactly the kind of thing you want for a good comparison. It's nice to have a little bit of asymmetry in there...a minor work from Matisse, for example, versus a famous but not cliched one by Picasso.

Let us dutifully present the context: "Rocket Queen" is a dubious tribute to a female friend of GNR singer Axl Rose, while "Moment With You" is an even more dubious tribute to the police officer Michael accused of having entrapped him into sexual behavior in a Los Angeles bathroom.

Differences: duh, one is a screaming nail-gun of hard rock, while the other is a distant, mournful slow-disco pop track.

Similarities: Both songs negotiate sexual encounters. Both songs function as self-portraits of the singers, giving a snapshot of their world, or at least their sexual world. In Broadway-musical terms, these are the "third songs," the "I want" songs. "Here I am, and you're a rocket queen," blares Rose. "Hey, this won't take much time," murmurs Michael. "We won't touch, we'll just wait for signs."

Right there in the similarities, you can start to see the deeper differences. Rose in this song inhabits a fantasy world which he happened to have been making every effort to live out (the legend with this song being that he actually screwed someone in the studio to get the female-orgasm track). But Michael's stripped-down, resigned narrative is the antithesis of fantasy. Nobody has Rose's kind of aggressive, self-glorifying, public-persona fantasies about cruising men in toilets.

Rose self-consciously emphasizes his decadence ("I've seen everything imaginable...I've had everything that's tangible"), whereas Michael doesn't have to. The circumstances pretty much speak for themselves. What *he* does, impossibly, is bring the sweetness of his early work to this bleak place. It's there in his sad voice. It's there in his plaintive words, "I wanted that moment with you."

Which brings us to another interesting difference. Rose, for most of "Rocket Queen," is lit up with fury. Michael isn't. Which is odd. Michael's got a reason to be; he's writing a poison valentine to the man who he believes deliberately entrapped him. Yet what comes through in the song is not anger. Instead, there's regret, sweet sadness, sly backhanded compliments ("what a way with your hands you had"). Loneliness. ("We don't touch, do we, baby.")

But Rose, as furious and badass as he is throughout his own song, eventually comes around to a poignant sense of loneliness as well. He stops showing off and starts thinking. ("I hate to see you walking out there, out in the rain.")

And so he resolves on a note of reconciliation and redemption....whereas "Moment With You" doesn't really resolve at all. It fades. It takes all of its hurt, regret and unfulfilled desire and slips away.

They were both outlaws in their time, Rose and Michael, though Rose looked the part and Michael didn't. The culture winked at Rose's kind of bad boy, though he'd racked up numerous accusations and rumors that he was capable of hurting people. It gave no quarter to Michael's, no matter if their only weapons were words. Rose felt like he had something to brag about. Michael felt like he had something to hide.

Rose envisioned contact.

Michael, the opposite ("We won't touch").

Yet we read what they're talking about as the same experience.

That's the most interesting conundrum of all.