A few years ago, I wrote and recorded an album of songs (Stellar) concerning my time in the New York alternarock scene circa 1990 and some of the people, or the types they would come to embody upon broader application, from my own perspective as a musician and social creature. Some of the songs describe what it's like to watch friends get famous, though most of them are about my own experience as I'd tried to stay afloat amidst the increasingly-turbulent waters of the proverbial "sea change" (a term that I can't stand, except as the title of a great Beck album). What I had failed to represent in the songs is something which I had been unable to fully recognize during the period in question: the effects of burgeoning fame upon third-party bystanders and mutual friends.
Simply put: though I had been in denial of it and its ramifications at the time, it had deeply troubled me to see how the attitudes of friends of certain musicians getting famous then were changing. Moreover, it perturbed me that mutual friends were growing competitive about being "better friends with" the famous ones than I; particularly if they had met them through me. This amounted to a slow-burning betrayal, an insiduous usurpation and underhanded alienation of affection. Being, at the time, too weak-willed to recognize and treat it for what it really was, it got the better of me, as it resonated through other aspects of my life, undermining my confidence and efficacy – and eventually leading to a succession of events which I prefer not to recount, except to let the song written about it for Stellar tell of it with succinct brutality.
It's weird enough when people find out that you're "friends with" someone famous, which is why I normally avoid letting anything of the sort be known. Most people don't know anyone famous, and when they know that you know someone famous, a "lite" version of the neurotic complex regarding famous people is leveled at you. There are three types of people who know famous people: other famous people; those who try or aspire to know famous people; and those who know famous people circumstantially (having worked on their cars, having known them pre-fame, and such). It's the people given to climbing up your back to get to the famous people you know who are the worst, followed by those who are nicer to you for knowing that you know someone famous. After that are the people who bad-mouth famous people whom they know that you know, and then look at you in smug defiance, anticipating your reaction, either wanting you to concur with them for gossip's sake or hoping you'll convey, or just absorb, their disdain. (My gossip-blocking response is, "What have you done?")
I recall the final time that I'd gone to hang-out in the studio where the aforementioned alternarock icon's band was recording their major-label début. The studio's lounge area was filled with scenester pals of the band, each seeming to try to call attention to and edify themselves as part of this "moment," or of the momentum behind the band's rise to major-league status. Meanwhile, the bass player sat quietly on the periphery of the room, watching the band's star-power light up the room on the band's behalf. Bassplayer and I shared a glance that concurred the ridiculousness of this scene, though she seemed to realize that this were to come with the territory and eventually be managed as yet more wind in the band's sails, despite her apparent discomfort with it. After all, it were she, not they, who would be on the magazine covers, the talk shows, and so forth, a few months later.
It was at that moment when the polar shift occurred, at least in my own mind. All the cards in the game were laid face-up on the table. It was then that the band were as good as yet more people whose phone numbers I'd used to have, I suppose. It was certainly at that point when, in my mind, I had to say to my mutual "friends" of the band, "Okay – you win; they're yours." The psychological complexity of the overall situation, with that moment in the studio's lounge being but a morsel of it, was too much for me; self-deprecatingly, I internalized it as terrible personal confusion. Fame brings out the worst in people, but most often in those ancillary to the fame.
So much time has passed since then that it seems to have happened in another world, a distant universe. It doesn't even occur to me whether I still know any famous people; I suppose that I do, but I just don't care. It doesn't matter to me, just as I had tried not to let it matter "back in the day." I had not been raised to be class-conscious nor status-driven, and the only thing I'd learned in high school was, you know, like, how to talk correct – not to kiss ass to get to where people would kiss my ass. I'm now far too advanced in age to compare myself against anyone who's well-known for their music, and I'm far too accomplished in my own right (in artistic terms) to care how it might compare with "what sells." Per a conventional view of things, it would appear that I'd been "left behind" by old pals who'd gotten famous, but one can't be left behind if one is taking a different route.
Regularly, I pass by a majestic old theatre on the windows of which are posted announcements of musicians and comedians scheduled to perform there, their names accompanying their portraits in a collage of coming attractions. It once occurred to me that the thought of a picture of myself along with my name in that context seemed absolutely ridiculous. I may be a musical artist (an artist whose medium is music, not the music-industrial sense of the term), but I cannot be, and moreover, would not want to be, one of those people on the posters of coming attractions. Some people aspire to that, and that's the course they actively pursue, but to me it would feel like donning an evening gown, jewelry, a wig and makeup for going out to play football.
Ironically, it's by doing something so ridiculous that one is taken "seriously" for one's artistic endeavors. Of course, entertainers have to publicize themselves as personages for the public to feel it has a relationship with them, a sense of pre-digested familiarity that one has toward someone in one's social circle – which is why people talk about celebrities as though they know them personally. Life has been too real to me for too long to stomach seeing people posed for pictures, listening to talk-show banter, hearing the very sound of television, and watching musicians and filmmakers go through their careerist motions. The whole mindet of fame/fandom seems psychotic to me now. It's a mass-scale mental illness, experienced both societally and personally. My resentment of it is manifold: it had consumed a great portion of my life (before I awake from its trance), it inevitably influences everyday reality, and it poses a cognitive impairment to my own work's being taken seriously.
Why, since the advent of social media and other internetric venues of self-promotion, do so many aspiring musicians focus on their "image" (a/k/a "building a brand") despite that they should have developed their talent instead? Because sheeple actually do respond to "image" more strongly than to "content" (another deplorable techie-millennial term, but aptly vacuous). When someone perceives you as somehow famous, they act deferentially toward you and autonomically assign you status-points. The psychological mechanism at work is so complex, despite its being so simple; I'm bound to trip over my own words in trying to describe it.
The bedazzling effects of publicity are enduring. When I now hear some of the indie/alternarock of a quarter century (or longer) ago, I cringe because it's so bad. I also have the sense of outrage that one feels when one discovers that innocent children had been given vaccines containing substances known to be harmful. It almost seems as though that crap-music had been propagated among young white people in order to lower their cultural standards and their intelligence, with sloppy musicianship and proudly-tuneless singing. By virtue of that music's being peddled on the strength of "hipness" alone, and as part of this network of hipness-inveighing stuff to know about, that music was considered, and is still remembered, as being a lot better than it really was.
This perception-management continues today in form of the nostalgic comebacks, reunions, and vicennial celebrations (discussed in my previous post) of this band and that album, and of fawning interviews with the alternarock stars of yesteryear. A few months ago, I happened upon one interview with some such dewd, frontman for a college-radio band whose reputation vastly outshone their musicianship, in which, at 50, he acted even cockier than he had in interviews back in his heyday, as though he were trying to be as cocky as he wanted to remember his having been at 25. In reality, now, he's a boring dad living in an affluent suburb.
But most of those people really had been, all along, country-club brats, frat boys, sub-aristocratic delinquents, Ivy League dropouts, and other upper-middle-class progeny who knew how to identify, relate to, and hang with one another. (The musicians who'd ascended from the Underground were rarely products of the Underclass.) They had been socialized toward meeting the "right" people, knowing when to socialize "up" when necessary, and to use their patina of hipness as currency to gain the favor of wealthy people who wanted it to rub-off on them. Those among them who had arisen from poverty were usually those with the outstanding talent and intensity among this lot, but the music biz is, at its core, as bourgeois as the film industry is to the naked eye; it appeals to the consumerist gratification of the proletariat while maintaining the abiding values and acceptable parameters of the elite.
To someone such as I who hadn't been raised to be class conscious nor status-driven, nor socialized to affluence, all that stuff back-then had been confusing and over my head. Now, half my life or so later, I see everything a lot more clearly, and am able to put what had confounded me into blunt perspective. Thus, the idea that something such as what had seemed hip and cool a long time ago might remain so is not even risible, to me. The final song on Stellar has these lines. sung to myself: "Life dragged you across the continent / and boiled you down, everywhere you went / you don't care what's cool anywhere you've been to."