I’ve lived in St. Louis, MO for 23 silly years, and if there’s one thing I know about this town, it’s not a lot of famous people come here voluntarily. Sure, we have our meager share of born and bred celebs (Costas and Goodman, shout out from the 314!), but they don’t live in St. Louis as much as they do in Olympics coverage and Roseanne reruns. All of our famous people only got to where they are because they left this city for some place better, whether it was the coasts or somewhere as painfully close as Chicago. St. Louis is basically a big city version of all those small towns in East Asshole Montana or South Central Wyoming or whatever, where people like Gloria Steinem or Peewee Herman pined for the day when they would leave and make their fortune in New York or LA or fucking Portland. For years, the only high internationally acknowledged venture we had in St. Louis was Anheuser-Busch, and now that’s left, too. Heavy sigh.
So why in the hell would Eddie Argos, frontman of British snob-punk band Art Brut, pick up a gig as a comics columnist for PLAYBACK:stl, a little read website from a rarely regarded city? Could it be that Argos understands the true spirit of St. Louis, our defeated but still sort of plucky attitude towards life, our humble but still sort of remarkable music scene, perhaps our marvelous riverside binge-drinking destinations, unrivaled in their filthiness? Did any of these things play a hand in enticing Argos to our fair city’s website?
No, they certainly did not. “I started writing this column because I was promised free comics,” says Argos in his second column. Fair enough, rock star, but I’m still chalking this up as a victory for STL. Updating twice weekly from across the Atlantic, Argos’ comics topics range from reviews of mainstreamers like Captain America (wait, I thought he was dead???) to independents like Too Cool To Be Forgotten. If you enjoy Argos’ ramblings about his little brother and his shitty weekend in Art Brut and really like comics, then you’ll get a kick out of his column. And hey, if you’re into totally free and badass zoos, maybe you should check out St. Louis. We’ve got a hippo hideaway and a warthog wallow and everything!
