Why We Like Monsters: A Halloween Meditation

Get a link to my newest post on why our popular culture is so fascinated with the dark and the demonic here.

Did David Bowie have a soul?

I remember years ago, when the Queen Mary ocean liner was finally retired in Long Beach, California, the owners of the celebrity ship (now just a public spectacle) decided to have it refurbished. This involved repainting the ship's three magnificent smokestacks which were part of the visual allure of this, one of the greatest of boats. But in the process of repainting them, they fell apart. As it turned out, the metal inside had long ago rusted out. The smokestacks, in fact, were all paint.

I always felt sorry for David Bowie. You could tell that he thrived on public attention. In fact, that seemed to be his whole purpose in life, and he was very good at it. He was good at other things too: He was a great songwriter, and a dynamic performer. But it was all in the service of his public image.

Sometimes you wondered if there really was anything underneath the image he had so carefully crafted. Was there anyone really there under all the makeup? Or was he all paint?

The ego is a strange thing: It seeks to gather everything to itself, but it is never filled. It paints itself over again and again into what it wants to be to the point where you begin to wonder if there is still any self left there. I imagine this is why so many celebrities are miserable in their private lives. I always wondered if Bowie suffered from this malady so typical of the pop star. Was there unhappiness under the glitter? If there was, he was too good at cultivating his image to ever let us see it.

It seems almost irrelevant to ask of Bowie what we should ask of anyone who takes the trouble to live a life: the question of whether the life he lived was a good life. We don't like to ask this question of pop culture figures because the question seems irrelevant.

You judge something on the basis of whether it achieves its purpose. But the purpose of a celebrity is not to be good; The purpose of a celebrity is to be interesting. That, at least, is what we seem to assume.

While we are fascinated by the gap between how celebrities appear and what they are in their private lives (this is the whole allure of People magazine, E! Television, and the National Enquirer), we do not expect the twain to meet. This is why we are so forgiving when they die: Not because we are so gracious, but because to be morally good people was never what we expected of them. That was not their role. Their role was to play roles: We never expected them to be the way they portrayed themselves to be. 

Bowie certainly benefited from this tendency to look the other way when it came to his personal life. He was, by the account of his first wife, narcissistic and sexually indiscriminate.

His ability to transform himself—to take off one mask and put on another—made David Bowie seem the quintessential postmodernist celebrity. Postmodernist writers have always been fascinated with people who seem to reinvent themselves. It underscores their belief that we are not created in any particular way, with any particular nature; instead, we create ourselves—we determine our own nature.

This is why postmodernists have always been fascinated with Madonna. If you read postmodernist literature (I'm not advising it, I'm only saying, if you do), her name pops up again and again. Why? Because she is constantly recreating her public self. Once she gets tired of one persona, she just goes into her personality closet and chooses another one. 

Of course, the ability to create necessarily requires a good imagination, and most of us don't have the requisite imagination to create much of anything, let alone ourselves. Maybe that's why so many of us seem dull: We don't have the requisite imagination we need to create a very interesting self.

But Bowie had an imagination. 

This was at the root of his androgynous pose. In the same way he became Ziggy Stardust, Alladin Sane, the Thin White Duke, he became female, male, male/female, neither. In fact, it is astounding to think back on how he managed to make androgyny cool—even among people who would have reviled homosexuality if you had asked them openly about it. Today you are given bonus points for sexual unconventiality—and extra bonus points the farther out your gender orbit is from your natural heterosexuality. But how could someone who was openly androgynous in a time when the culture still widely adhered to traditional gender ideas have become so popular? 

Only the protean Bowie could have pulled it off. He was the human chameleon.

But there is something about the gender mirror show he put on that tells us something about Bowie that it is easy to miss, and it is this: As much as he appeared the examplar of the postmodern self— fluid, ever-changing, impermanent—and despite the fact that much of what he did actually promoted this idea, Bowie was, in fact, a counter-example.

How do we know this? Because he said so himself. Although his androgynous poses certainly gave the appearance of promoting the idea of gender fluidity, Bowie himself knew it was all just an act. He knew the difference between being able to actually transform yourself and simply putting on another mask. This is why he denied being gay and said that his one-time announcement that he was bisexual was "the biggest mistake" he ever made. The androgyny was no revelation of who Bowie really was, it was just one more role he had decided to play—for whatever reason: shock value, fame, whatever. To him, it was a beautiful lie, a lie he openly admitted.

One clue we get about this is the lyrics to his songs. Notice that Bowie almost never talked about personal feelings in his songs. Bowie writes about "Panic in Detroit, and "1984," and "Spiders from Mars." His lyrics chart the universe, but they never delve the soul.

Compare this to another great pop songwriter, Tom Petty, who always stays close to earth, writing about how he doesn't want anyone "Draggin' my Heart Around." "Don't Do Me Like That," "You Wreck Me," "The Waiting," "Refugee"—these songs have the same personal sensibility you find in country music, which is where, rather than purely popular music, Petty finds his roots. They are about personal relationships, anger, love, loss, resentment—all the things each one of us experiences every day. In fact, notice how many of Petty's songs are addressed personally to someone else. They are every bit as morally relaxed as Bowie's songs, but at least they have a beating heart.

You never see this in Bowie. To talk this way would allow us to see behind the mask.

This is why, in the end, Bowie should be anathema to the postmodern gender theorists, who mistake the masks for reality. They, unlike Bowie himself, can't tell the act from the real thing. To them being gay or bisexual, or whatever other invented gender category they give a name to, is "who you are." Bowie didn't go in for this. Bowie's problem was just the opposite: He considered his actions to be completely disconnected from who he was.

Bowie knew he was playing a role. All the same, there a those who are so good in playing somebody else that they have a hard time returning to reality. Sometimes there's so much paint that if there is something there, it's hard, even for the person himself, to figure out what or who it is.

So now Bowie has undergone the final transformation, only this one doesn't involve another role. The mask is off. I would love to know, when they took off all the paint, what they found underneath.

Music for Cultural Zombies: A meditation on the new U2 album

The following article has been released and is available free of charge from Vital Remnants

I was the guy at my high school who knew all the hot bands--and the ones who would be hot even though nobody knew it yet.

I remember when I had Queen's first three albums before anyone had ever heard of them and found out they were coming to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, a mid-size venue for Los Angeles County. I convinced a few of my friends (who I don't think had ever heard of them) to go with me. "Killer Queen" had been a moderate hit the previous year, but that was all anyone other than me know about them. Then, about two weeks before the concert, "Bohemian Rhapsody" hit the airwaves. There we were, the only ones around with tickets.

At a reunion not too long after graduating from college, an old college roommate came up to me and said, "You know, you used to play music from all these bands that no one had ever heard of. And, a few months later, they would be really popular. "So tell me, what's going be popular next?" I don't remember what I said, but I hope it was something like, "Polka. Trust me."

Then there was the friend at my fraternity, who, upon discovering I was a wealth of knowledge of the pop music world, would grill me every time he saw me about some band or another. I was walking through the lobby of the University of California Library one day and he stopped me. "Okay, I think I've got you now." And he proceeded to formulate some question having to do with a band from Canada which was the only band that had gotten so far on the charts in America--or some such thing. "You can't possibly know that!"

I looked at him calmly, and said, "April Wine," as I turned and walked out the automatic doors, leaving him standing there dumbfounded (This is what passed for important knowledge at that time).

I'm trying to figure out how I knew all this, since, at the time, there was no Internet and very little information available on what is now the object of a whole industry. There was Circus magazine, which you could obtain at one of the few record stores around, Melody Maker, a British magazine―if you tolerate all the coverage of British bands that didn't even have American releases. And then, of course, Robert Hilburn's articles in the "Calendar" section of the Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles was a great place to live if you liked rock music, since it was always on everyone's tour schedule. I saw a lot of bands live growing up there. Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, Queen, Kiss, Yes, Peter Frampton, Bob Seger, Cheap Trick, Jackson Browne, Al Stewart, The Dictators, Rush, UFO, Talking Heads, the B-52s, the Kinks, Kenny Loggins, Journey, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Gentle Giant, Thin Lizzy, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Sparks, and Be Bop Deluxe. There were others. I saw some of them more than once.

I remember a friend of mine and I going to see Devo at the Whiskey A Go Go before they hit it big in the early 80s with "Whip It." It was also before they began performing as their own opening act at their concerts without anyone knowing about it. Before the show, my friend Wes and I had a couple hours to kill and we were walking down the Sunset Strip, seeing the sights. Wes had a T-shirt with a picture of the Tubes on it. The Tubes were a moderately popular band in the early 80s. As we were talking, a fairly tall guy walked up to Wes and said, "I like your T-shirt." It was Fee Waybill, lead singer of the Tubes. They were playing at a club down the street.

I'm thinking about all this now that I've listened to the new U2 album that is partly famous because iTunes has released it for free.

U2 is one of the few classic rock bands that is still together and writing new music. Like the Heartbreakers, who also have a new release, U2 is one of the many classic rock bands that believed in meta-narratives. They couldn't actually provide any, but they at least believed they existed. Aside from disco and other subgenres in pop music at that time that were about little other than having fun (through various means, including sex and drugs), many of the classic rock bands at least attempted to say something they thought might be significant. Most of the time they ended up trying to say too much, in which case they ended up just being pretentious (I'm thinking of Rush here).

Among the most pretentious musical events ever was, of course, the movie "Tommy," a so-called "rock opera," with music and performances by the Who. Because it was produced by a popular rock band, everyone was expected to suspend critic judgment and talk about how profound it was, a critical assessment commonly voiced by such expressions as "Oh wow" or "That was so radical" (expressions that were considered high praise among us knuckle-headed teenagers of the time).

Of course, there was nothing profound about "Tommy" at all. It wasn't really about anything--or at least anything important. But everyone was expected to think highly of it because it was the Who and the Who were cool.

The only rock act of the time that made any real sense was Alice Cooper, and that was only because his act was a Vaudevillian stage play wherein the character he played was shown going to Hell (where, incidentally, he belonged). All of it, of course, was a tongue-in-cheek. No one took Alice Cooper seriously, especially Alice Cooper: He spent half of his stage act making fun of himself, dispensing with the need for the rest of us to do it. I still consider it a favor.

And there's not much good you can say about Kiss, but at least there was no pretense to their unadulterated hedonism.

When it comes to popular culture you have to be thankful for small things. Bands like Pink Floyd, Yes, and Genesis, although they never pretended to say much that was very compelling (well, maybe Pink Floyd did), their attempt to say something could at least be taken as a bow to the idea that there were things about life worth saying that had some importance in this life and, sometimes, beyond it.

They at least tried to say something big, and if they couldn't find anything particularly big to say, they said it big. In fact, the lack of any substantive message was more than made up for by the size of the show. Pink Floyd's "The Wall" tour, and virtually all the concerts of groups like Yes and Genesis (when they were led by Peter Gabriel), were huge spectacles. They were big, bold, and gaudy.

Nostalgia for metanarratives

I wonder what it says about us now that bands no longer make much of an effort to actually put on a show? Today's rock bands don't even attempt to say anything big. They have small things to say and they expend little effort in saying them.

No one writes a song like John Lennon's "Imagine" anymore, a song which evokes a wholly different world. In one sense that's good, since I can't imagine any world in which I would less like to live. I don't want to live in a world in which there is "nothing to kill or die for," or where there is "above us, only sky."

But what's worse than living in a world in which songwriters write songs about worlds that are not very good worlds is a world in which no one writes songs about other worlds at all.

We don't live in a world in which songwriters can't write such songs; we live in a world in which they won't. It's not that they can't say anything big because they don't know how; rather, it is because they don't believe there is anything big to say.

Many of the rock bands of the 70s and 80s were pretentious because what had to say was less important than they seem to think it was. Now it is considered pretentious to say anything important in the first place.

In Jean Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, he defines postmodernism as "incredulity toward metanarratives." Our culture now doesn't believe there is any one narrative in which we can all participate, but only smaller, subnarratives under which we gather only briefly and for some small comfort, before having to disperse back to our atomistic individuality. "The narrative function," says Lyotard, "is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, is great goal."

We got the world John Lennon hoped for. Unfortunately it is a world in which a song expressing hope for such a world could not be written.

What we are left with in a world without metanarratives is a world in which there is nostalgia about a world with metanarratives. Has anyone noticed the recent blizzard of shows about "the 60s"? Why are we engaged in this frenzy of nostalgia for the 60s?

I'll tell you why.

We look back longingly on the 60s because it was when John F. Kennedy announced his vision for putting a man on the Moon. It was when Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Civil Rights Crusade and the March on Washington, D.C. It was when Lyndon Johnson launched the Great Society programs. there were grand causes and

What do we do now? The big, bold imaginative quest, like the Apollo program of the 60s and 70s, is too expensive, or too troublesome, or simply not realistic. It doesn't address any of our current priorities, the chief of which is what benefits me personally. The safe, comfortable little individualistic world in which we live militates against it. We got what we wanted: a bottomless pit of information and goods from anywhere on earth. We've got air conditioning microwave ovens, and wide screen TV.

Was there something else we needed? Comfort kills culture.

Our contracted imaginations are simply incapable of even formulating any kind of grand vision. And we try to find causes big enough for crusades, but they're getting harder and harder to find. All the cultural walls have been scaled. All the barriers have been broken. All the cultural landmarks have been removed.

And besides, isn't The Walking Dead coming on in a few minutes?

The best we can do is something like gay rights. But that's a poor excuse for a crusade. Despite the comparisons with Blacks, gays were never enslaved, they never had to live in separate neighborhoods or go to inferior schools or had to drink at separate drinking fountains.

Never happened.

Discrimination against gays is largely a myth. In fact, they're wealthier than everybody else on average and have political clout way out of proportion to their numbers and are celebrated at every cultural juncture by the media and entertainment industry. The only danger they are in is suffocation due to over-adulation.

The gay rights movement is nothing more than the muscle twitch of a tired, dying culture.

And then, of course, there is Woodstock. How many television specials have we had now celebrating what was, essentially, a big, over-haired, drug-induced orgy? The attempts to exalt an event in which a whole bunch of spoiled, overgrown adolescents show up and behave, well, like spoiled, overgrown adolescents are nothing short of comic. But at least if you take away the pretense of "freedom," you can see what kind of society modern liberals really want.

And if you want to see something other than old reruns of it, just go to a college coed dorm hall.

But what about space, the final frontier? It's too expensive to explore, and besides we need the money to prop up Medicare.

We can't do culture big anymore. All we can do is admire the past era in which we could. Which brings me back to the new U2 album.

What is U2's "Songs of Innocence" about? It's about nostalgia for meta-narratives. U2 is a classic rock band that has lived past its era, "chasing down the dream before it disappears," as Bono sings on the first track. To speak to the current culture it can no longer evoke the great; it must instead evoke the era in which the great could be evoked. "The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)" is not about greatness, it is about the memory of thinking things could be great.

Of course, I remember the first Ramones album. I had it before anyone else. One listen to "Blitzkrieg Bop" on the radio and I was on my way to the record store. But I grew out of it: I not only grew out of liking it, I grew out of the idea that it was worth liking.

But we live in a culture that refuses to grow up.

"The Miracle (of Joey Ramone) is Bono's nostalgic reminiscence of hearing the punk band the Ramones for the first time. It begins with an anthemic chant, much like the Ramones' cartoonish "Hey, ho, let's go" from "Blitzkrieg Bop." Then the crunching electric guitar chords, and then the oversimplistic drum beat―Ramonish fixtures all.

The Ramones were the quintessential nihilist band. They may have invented torn jeans and T-shirts of the kind that you can now buy in high-end stores for some ridiculous price, I'm not sure. From the way they visually presented themselves to how they played their instruments bespoke the philosophy of nothingness. Joey Ramone sang in a mock monotone, Dee Dee Ramone played an intentionally unremarkable bass, Tommy Ramone played pretty much the same no-frills drum beat in every song. Then there was Johnny Ramone, the guitarist of the band who bragged that his guitar playing style (such as it was) was entirely without blues influence, which was just another way of saying it was devoid of human subtlety. It was a styleless style.

And by the way, the blues thanks Johnny for disassociating himself from it.

Everything about the band evoked a senseless and sterile world in which human feeling had no context and human aspiration no place. A broken relationship was reduced to "I don't want to walk around with you," anger to "Beat on the brat (with a baseball bat)," and all the while they just wanted to be sedated. I don't want to attribute too much intelligence to the band, but knew exactly what they were doing.

And boy did it play. In modern culture the demand for nihilism is bottomless.

Rolling Stone Magazine famously designated the Ramones one of "The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time." Yes. You heard that correctly. Then again, that probably says as much about Rolling Stone as about the Ramones.

So why would Bono so admire Joey Ramone? At first you're tempted to think that the high tone of a song about something as mundane as the lead singer for a punk band is slightly comic, but when Bono sings that he "woke up at the moment when the miracle occurred/To a song that made some sense out of the world," you begin to realize that there comes a point in the lives of many people in my generation when you either grow out of the attraction for the shallow appeal of the music you listened to when you were young, or you have to take it seriously and come to terms with what much of it really is.

If the song you liked asked you to Rock and Roll All Night and Party Every Day, it's a little easier to shrug it off. You realize it is just silly and debased and you try not to think too much about it so you don't end up unconsciously whistling it all day.

But in what way did the Ramones "make sense out of the world"? You could only say that if you just accepted their nihilism outright, something Bono seems explicitly to professes when he says, "I was young, not dumb/Just wishing to be blinded/By you..."

Make no mistake, Bono knows how to fashion a lyric:

We use language so we can communicate
Religion so I can love and hate
Music so I can exaggerate my fame
And give it a name

But the irony is that the worldview championed by the likes of the Ramones is the very thing that has ended up making groups like U2 obsolete and irrelevant. U2's concerts were never quite the big productions of many other classic rock bands, but they at least wanted to be about something. They and musicians like them are less and less able to communicate to a culture that rejects the grand narratives they were once able to voice. But, hand it to them, they're smart enough to know what they are still capable of doing, which is to reminisce about the time when this could still be done.

Lou Reed and the art of being bad

Whenever a popular culture icon dies, we're all supposed to stop and take notice. Even if the popular culture icon was not very popular.

Lou Reed died last Sunday, and so now the people who we have given the job of telling us who is popular are telling us that Lou Reed was popular even though he demonstrably wasn't.

Lou Reed was never popular, however much the idea of Lou Reed was.

Lou Reed, in case you didn't know, was a rock 'n roll star. His most famous song was "Take a Walk on the Wild Side." It was also his best song, as measured in relative terms by all his other songs, most of which were much worse.

He started out his musical career with the band the Velvet Underground, a cult band whose popularity defied, ... well, their popularity. The people who have heard of the Velvet Underground far exceeds the people who have actually heard the Velvet Underground, which for these latter people is (probably unbeknownst to them) a good thing. Its members wore black leather, played long interminable songs about sex and drugs, and generally made a cultural nuisance of themselves.

Reed himself played guitar only passably, and sang mostly off key. He said he learned to play the guitar from listening to the radio. I think we can safely assume the the radio from which her learned to sing and play didn't have very good reception.

Since he was not very good, his mourners have had to resort to saying things like, "He was prophetic," although exactly why he was prophetic or what he was prophetic of remains a mystery.

Reed's publicist Bill Bentley claims that the reason no major label would sign the Velvet Underground was because their songs were seven minutes long, rather than three. Maybe. On the other hand, maybe they couldn't get signed because they stunk--not that I would have complained if we could have subtracted four minutes of bad music from the world.

Lou Reed was a musician we were all supposed to like. Which accounts for all of the Twitter eulogies coming from celebrities, most of whom probably never heard more than a song or two from him, if that, but know that it's just one of the things you're expected to say to be thought fashionable in the world they inhabit--a world that, unfortunately inhabits many of us.

I mean, Miley Cyrus (who tweeted, on Reed's death, "noooooooooo notttttttttt LOU REED")? Really? She probably thinks her music is good too.

Reed once said of his album Metal Machine Music, which even his admirers admitted was really bad, "No one is supposed to be able to do a thing like that and survive." But he underestimated the bad taste of his admirers and the depths to which they would descend in order to retain their avante garde cultural status.

Oh, and, by the way, in case you did't notice, he didn't survive after all. That's why we're talking about him right now.

Or maybe it wasn't just bad taste. No. He was one of those cultural heroes who gets more popular the worse he is. Badness is a quality greatly valued by those who those who don't have any real aesthetic standards think have them. They can't do it themselves quite as well and admire anyone who can. If you can sing badly, write bad songs, flaunt your homosexuality (at a time when it is not celebrated like it is now), take drugs and write songs about how good it is and get away with it all, then you can take the final step to pop cultural apotheosis and insult the people who admire you for doing it.

That's what really throws them into an ecstatic frenzy. Just look at the life of J. D. Salinger.

Terry Gross, host of NPR's "Fresh Air" did an adulatory show on Reed earlier this week. She admitted that she had no past recordings of Reed on her show because the one time he was scheduled to be her guest, he walked off after several minutes because he didn't like her questions. Gross said the incident did not detract from her admiration for his music, but you've got to know it probably only increased it (something other than the music itself just has to account for anyone's admiration of it). Such is the masochistic tendency of those R. Emmett Tyrrell once termed the "chi chi intelligentsia."

Ah, yes. Masochism. Did I mention that the title of Lou Reed's biography was Please Kill Me?

Lou Reed wasn't nice to people and said and did a bunch of bad things, including being rude and selfish, walking out of interviews, and once held a gun to his military superior's head (for which he got kicked out of ROTC at Syracuse University).

But, said one of his cultural entourage, that was "just Lou."

Here is an excerpt from Terry Gross' interview with Mary Woronov, who did the "whip dance" in the "Exploding Plastic Inevitable," a series of multimedia musical performances thought up by Andy Warhol, featuring the Velvet Underground in the late 1960s (And, by the way, were the 1960s really necessary?):

There was tremendous antagonism between New York and L.A. L. A. was, you know, um, full of color, full of acid, full of hippies, and we were not like that.

No way. They (Mary Woronov and her friends) had, you know, standards. They were, um ...

... dressed in black and white, uh, we did not like free love, we liked, uh, S&M, real, uh, restraint, uh, perversion too, um, we took amphetamines. We took LSD, They were, you know, sort of loving and happy, and, uh, we weren't, uh, really evil, we were more intellectual, more about art.

Mmhmm. Intellectual. About art. I think I see the problem now.

In his interview with Terry Gross, Bentley says that Reed was "tortured." She could have pointed out that, if you want to talk about being tortured, you should try to listen to Reed's music. But it apparently didn't occur to her.

But being tortured is also a good thing to be if you aspire to occupy a spot in the pop cultural pantheon. They said this about Johnny Cash too--who, if he hadn't been a "tortured soul," would have been way too Christian to have gotten any attention from those who tell us who we should give attention to. Of course Cash was, by his own account, tortured by the Devil. Reed didn't need the Devil to torture him: He had himself.

I hope he found some kind of peace in the end. Death isn't the kind of place you want to be walking on the wild side of.

Reflections on American Idol possibly going off the air

Well, according to some reports, the show "American Idol" may be coming to an end. This is unfortunate, since I have never seen the show that so many people talk about, and I was looking forward to continuing to be a non-viewer for years to come. So it comes as a hard blow to know that I now will be unable to continue to refrain from watching this great pop cultural spectacle.

But at least I can continue to be a non-viewer of other television shows of similar importance, such as "Dancing with the Stars," "CSI," and (probably my favorite show not to watch) "Desperate Housewives."

In fact, it is probably a good thing that "American Idol" may be going off the air, since it reduces the number of shows I don't watch, giving me more time not to watch others.

So many programs not worth watching, so little time not to watch them ...

Esolen on television (sort of)

Anthony Esolen (is he on our list of Modern Wise Men yet, I'll have to check) discusses the "Top Eleven Christian Television Shows." It's a peculiar list in places, but his comments on each show are well worth reading.

No State of the Union to be found on LOST night

Just in case anyone was in doubt as to what this nation's priorities are:

Fans of the TV series LOST are rejoicing tonight because the White House confirmed it would not schedule President Obama’s first State of the Union address on February 2, the night LOST’s last season debuts on ABC.

Read the rest here.