A Second Hand Conjecture

Songs and Celebrities

When I decided to start writing about rock lyrics, I promised myself I wasn’t going to talk about the Beatles or Bob Dylan, because forests have already been harvested to provide the paper for musings on their lyrics, and I don’t really have anything further to add. At least not without breaking out some Marxist/feminist/Lacanian theory, and nobody wants that. (”Everybody run! I’ve got a Derrida and I’m not afraid to use it.”) But I’m going to break my rule, just a little, because a Beatles lyric that is both petite and grand (and that likes to think it’s full of great wisdom and import, and maybe it is after all) provides a nice jumping-off point for some sort-of related topics.

The lyric, “And in the end / The love you take / Is equal to the love you make” is from “The End,” which fittingly completes the Beatles’ final album Abbey Road. If you imagine the entirety of The Beatles’ work as one great piece of art, a giant gift to the world, then “The End” is a big red bow on that present. As endings to works of high modernist pop go, it hardly rises to the level of a Gatsby-esque “boats against the current” finale, and perhaps bears a whiff of Hallmark sentimentality, but as a simple evocation of a moral truth, it works.

Whether or not that claim is actually true seems less important than actually wanting it to be true, which has the happy real-world effect of making its truth-value more real. If everybody lives as if McCartney’s claim is true, then it is. (Game theorists, chime in with “prisoner’s dilemma” commentary now.) And maybe it is anyway; after all, we are talking about love here, not power. The Beatles were on this case early in their career, observing that money can’t buy it (love, that is; apparently money can buy other things, which must be why they were not reluctant to accumulate it). In any case, I find it amusing that decades passed before someone asked Sir Paul if the lyric from “The End” was true, and even more amusing that the questioner was Chris Farley, in his clumsiest and most innocent persona.

Of course, the point of the famous SNL sketch was not to determine the truth of a Beatles lyric, but to explore the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance we experience when faced with celebrities in person. Chris Farley’s nervous, self-flagellating ordinary-guy-as-talk-show-host is so funny because it is a performance of the odd relationship ordinary people have to celebrities. Based on years, sometimes decades of exposure to them, we come to feel as if we know them (especially true for singers, confessional poets, and the like, for whom it pays to maintain the little white lie that their words are windows into the soul, a true portrait of the artist him/herself), but we do not know them at all. Instead, we know their work, which is a performance, manifestly NOT real in the case of actors, and highly mediated at least in the case of musicians, newsreaders, and athletes. When a fan says, “I love Paul McCartney,” what he really means is, “I love Paul McCartney’s work.”

The double consciousness in which a celebrity is both known and unknown (both friend and stranger) creates most of the discomfort we feel when meeting a famous person, especially if it is a person we “know,” perhaps even like, but do not have a particularly burning case of fandom for. What does one say to this person? I suppose a simple, “I liked you in Ghostbusters” would suffice, but that lacks something, and feels awkward anyway. As a conversational gambit, it has little chance of leading to an actual conversation, to a large degree because you (Average Joe) know more about Jane Famous than she knows about you. In other words, the inequality in the encounter favors you, Average Joe, which is the opposite of the way it is commonly perceived. Even then, what Average Joe knows, what he OWNSâ€“the very personal relationship he has to Jane Famous’s workâ€“is an uncomfortable case of knowing a lot at the same time as knowing a little.

I spent the bulk of my 20’s waiting tables and bar tending at Louie’s Bookstore CafÃ©, a hip restaurant in Baltimore (sadly, Louie’s no longer exists) that attracted musicians and actors when they were in town playing a show or filming a movie. At Louie’s, I had plenty of chances to observe and participate in the uncomfortable reverse power differential described above. “Andre Braugher, your Detective Pembleton redefines the TV cop! And, uh, what kind of dressing would you like?” So, yeah. Mostly (well, all the time) I just did the second part of that, even with the table that featured the oddest collection of well-known people ever to gather there: during the production of Cry-Baby, John Waters brought in a group that included Johnny Depp, Patty Hearst, and Traci Lords. The only time I was ever really starstruck was with Iggy Pop, sitting at the bar nursing a club soda. Here is a guy whose work I truly admire, whose influence on many other things I like was immense, and I don’t have a word to say to himâ€“or rather, I have too much to say to him and he has nothing to say to me, beyond what he already said in “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”

Now, remember that time, a few paragraphs ago? When I was talking about The Beatles? That was cool. But it also has some bearing on this discussion of celebrities.

If celebrities (as people, the ones creating the work) were songs, we would know them only as cover versions or samples of that song. As consumers of popular culture, we don’t have an original, a referent, a Platonic ideal to refer to when enjoying the stuff that celebrities produce. Hence, to us, the stuff that they produce (the music and films and talk show appearances and the things they do that get splashed on the covers of gossip magazines) is the original and the person producing it is the copy. How strange is that! It’s as if we only knew The Beatles song “The End” via its appropriation in the Beastie Boys song “The Sounds of Science,” which bites a big tasty slice of “The End’s” main guitar riff. If that were trueâ€“if we only knew The Beatles by what we could understand from The Beastie Boys stealing/finding and re-contextualizing some Beatles noises, and various covers of Beatles songs by Ray Charles and The Breeders and The Damnedâ€“could we really say we know The Beatles?

That’s why “celebrity news” is so much bright and calorie-free chatter. It might be “true” in a limited sense, but being true does not necessarily also mean that it is relevant. What is relevant to us, the consumers of popular culture and art, should not be WHO produces it, but WHAT is produced. The work itself is our original, our referent, and that’s what’s important.

Understanding that premise leads inescapably to one conclusion: if it is not that important what kind of people celebrities and artists are, it unshackles our taste from the prison of personality. You can enjoy the work of Tim Robbins and Barbara Streisand even if they seem to be complete tools. You can delight in Mel Gibson movies even if he thinks of Jews as subhuman. You can dance to James Brown even if he hits his wife, rock to Jerry Lee Lewis even if he married his 13-year old cousin. None of that stuff matters, because if it does we get trapped into focusing on things that are at best marginal to the real value of the artistic work.

Anyway, that’s how I plan on rationalizing going to see Apocalypto. Until then, I will continue not caring that Michael Stipe is a blockhead.

Technorati Tags: Chris Farley, Music, Rock and Roll, The Stooges, Beastie Boys, The Beatles, Saturday Night Live, Apocalypto, Ghostbusters, Johnny Depp, Cry Baby, Homicide, Andre Braugher, Detective Pembleton, Bill Murray, John Waters