Hope You Die Before I Get Old
published in Like No. 5, Melbourne, 1998
In
the early 70s, an over-therapied Alice Cooper picked up
on David Bowie's chi-chi schizophrenia by talking in the
3rd person. Bowie did so to be artsy in a Burroughs kind
of way. Alice Cooper did it as a form of carney promotion.
As Vincent Furnier, he would refer to the 'outrageous' antics
of Alice, like he was an outre Ms. Hyde. Alice Cooper was
never really radical but he was and remains a popular icon
of radicalism across the Burger King heartland of middle
America and the Hungry Jack parkland of suburban Australia.
One of the great charms of Pop music (far more so than popular
culture) is its ability to ridicule radicalism. But to appreciate
that, your being must be cleansed of every 60s counter-culture
bug which so many people still cling to like a viral panacea.
Forty year old plumbers play SCHOOL'S OUT in their vans
on their way to unblock someone's toilet in Greensborough.
With rocky mortgages, hardened arteries and hairy knuckles,
they know exactly the snake oil salesman pitch of Alice
Cooper and his Hanna Barbera shock tactics. While many a
morbid soul weeps deep down for Bob Dylan as a voice of
'their' generation', there are many for whom Pop music was
and will remain a complete and honest sell-out which let's
you be at ease with how fucked up your life will probably
be as you get on with making a buck.
While
Alice bit off chicken heads and guillotined himself on stage,
his real life was more compelling in its lumpen rock star
banality. Cooper was severely alcoholic, did chemical time
in sanatoriums, and basically ran the whole Hollywood Babylon
gamut short of committing suicide. He still produced some
great pop music post-breakdown (FROM THE INSIDE saw him
as the Oprah of Rock & Roll well before tabloid TV had
been defined) and in typically self-destructive mockery,
made much reference to how fucked up he had become. Like
all great Pop stars, he had an innately cynical and ferociously
pragmatic attitude towards the recording industry and stardom.
His last hit album TRASH is everything that people deny
about the Rolling Stones: anaemic yet flabby; dark yet pasty;
wired yet tired. The heads of L.J.Hooker could rock as convincingly
as The Stones circa VOODOO LOUNGE. Perhaps somewhere deep
down in the single saliva bubble at the edge of Charlie
Watt's curled lip, there is honesty in the exploitative
showmanship of The Rolling Stones' 'Voodoo Lounge' pyjamas
which sold well on the tour to all the sexy dads in the
audience. Alice Cooper's TRASH is a beautiful, glossy statement
about how not to grow old with style. The album and its
Hollywood Rock image machinations are embarrassingly old
hat and gorgeously affected. There is a Rock & Roll
Heaven - and in it, no one is dead. They're on tour in your
town. They're doing plastic surgery and MTV. They're dating
super models and selling stuff on late night TV. They're
being prosecuted for child molestation and kiddie porn.
All
Pop stars fuck up. And they eventually do so because you
don't give a fuck about them. You don't care about them
as people - as fellow humans who strive, overcome obstacles,
have dreams, pay bills, use hair shampoo. If you cry watching
THREE COLOURS but ridicule cheap social-issue telemovies
starring Patty Duke, Kate Smith or Jane Seymour, get real.
When your life fucks up it'll be every bit as banal as those
telemovies. And no one will be speaking French to you. You
might proclaim that artful movies must have such humanist
values, but you probably don't extend them to the down slide
of the Pop star. Why should you? You've never met them.
It's only Pop music.
So
when they commit suicide - don't cry to assuage your guilt.
Lou
Reed many years ago made a quip about he could have done
the easy thing and died. That way people would have respected
him like some mythical hero. Reed chose life in all its
rent-paying skin-sagging honesty. When Reed played on LETTERMAN
last year, his studied and controlled performance of a Doc
Pomus tribute tune was focussed, succinct and self-absorbed.
Bent over his guitar and intensely attuned to the texture
of his sound (he is, as he once claimed, better than Hendrix),
he proved yet again that there is nothing more engaging
than being an old rock'n'roller who truly doesn't give a
fuck about what you think. Reed used to do this for nasty
effect in the drugged-out days of Glam, but then got real
passionate about it. In this respect, he has always gone
against the grain of Nick Tosches' 'martyrs' hall of infamy'.
In his books Tosches popularized the ideal of mythologizing
old rockers who never die, but continually degrade themselves
in the process. Reed - like Iggy Pop - got healthy and sharpened
his brains. Which is why many a thirtysomething rock singer,
guitarist or critic finds them uncool, and prefers Tosches
slushes like Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin. Once-glorious
now-gross icons washed up on the martini lounge floors of
nowhere dives, they now invite a strangely warm nihilism
with which many ex-rockers identify. It's a pretty cheap
romance, though. Most of our fathers are dead or are dying
because they are dumb and stubborn, smoking their lungs
away and eating shit while their insides rot with cancer.
Their wives - our mothers - could care less for the pithy
juvenile histrionics of it all. And believe me, not one
of our dads is a rock star.
Many
Rock and Pop stars have died. Some made me sad for inexplicable
reasons. I always pictured Johnny Thunders as your basic
New York New York junkie. He certainly played up to it,
and I have as much time for junkies as I do for Christians
and parents. The New York Dolls were OK, The Heartbreakers
less so, but I still bought all their records. Yet when
I read a brief piece by Johnny Thunders in SOUNDS, the simplicity
and precision of what he had to say conveyed that he knew
he was fucked up and could deal with it in a decidedly unromantic
manner. He died a week later from an overdose. The day I
heard that Billy McKenzie died upset me a lot. I always
liked The Associates - their unevenness in the footlights,
their gleeful slippery Gay-ness, their Byronic sonic quality.
He committed suicide only a week or so after his mother
died, a new album freshly mixed. In the end, Billy McKenzie
was neither cool, hip nor avant garde. He was weird and
Pop, but unlike Scott Walker, he didn't survive.
Nor
did Andy Gibb. Brian Connolly. Sid Vicious. Karen Carpenter.
Rick James. All of whom you probably made jokes about. Jokes
based on the Stevie Wonder and Azaria Chamberlain templates,
passed down by cardigan-wearing public servants whose monumental
sense of inadequacy is just short of being traumatic enough
for them to take their own lives. Laugh while you can, guys.
I
was not sad hearing about Michael Hutchence. Unlike most
people who forgot that they outwardly dismissed INXS for
the past decade as frothy over-foamed stadium Pop stars,
but now have some hang up about having lost a great legend
of Rock'n'Roll. Please. INXS never made good Pop music,
let alone a decent Rock track. Despite Hutchence being groomed
via COUNTDOWN as New Wave's answer to Mick Jagger (sic),
INXS's music has consistently been undynamic, unperverse
and uncharacteristic. (Try singing a chorus.) There are
heaps of even more 'embarrassing' Australian Pop stars who
- if you embrace the conundrum that Pop music grows sincerity
like a fungus in its artifice - made better Pop tunes: Spectrum,
The La De Das, Edith Bliss, The Models, The Swingers. Along
with INXS, their buckled vinyl albums can be bought for
a $1 a pop at Coburg and Maribyrnong markets every Sunday.
INXS were a pseudo-internationalist band who tried to be
funky (courtesy Nile Rodgers) and groovy (courtesy of whoever
styled their video clips) and -like Jean Paul Young - sold
well in the infamous Pop barn industries in Sweden, South
America and throughout South East Asia. Not one of their
songs will live on to be regarded as quintessential Pop
as have those by other MTV-pouting New Romantics like Howard
Jones, Eurythmics, Human League, Toni Basil or Adam &
The Ants.
I
don't know who came up with this Tall Poppie syndrome. Probably
some literary dude who didn't sell many books. Contrary
to that mythical syndrome, Australian culture is clearly
insecure and gutless when it bags YOUNG TALENT TIME for
decades then crowns someone like Tina Arena as a mature
woman on par with Celine Dion. Though I like the idea that
YOUNG TALENT TIME - "sponsored by McDonalds family restaurants"
- was so popular with sexually confused middle-aged men
in their drunken stupor after watching Saturday football,
today I find no perverse enjoyment in even bothering to
ridicule Tina Arena. But good luck to her: invest that money,
honey, and beware of all levels of entertainment management.
I once saw another ex-YTT member 'star' in a hard rock band
at Preston Drive-in (when they used to have bands at interval
- like, way cool). She waited in a station wagon until her
big entrance, then entered the automatic doors wearing a
white fringed leather jacket and rocked like a K-Mart Pat
Benetar. The moccasined audience of thirty was more interested
in getting hot dogs and jam donuts. Somewhere right now,
she could be contemplating suicide. Somewhere right now,
every ex-star you've ever bagged could be on the verge of
a breakdown.
So
when they commit suicide - spare them your false lamentations.
As
much as I never cared about INXS (and still don't), I cared
even less for Hush. Man, were they a lame band, part of
a uniquely tacky version of Oz Glam wit bands like Skyhooks,
U-Turn, Kush and The Ted Mulury Gang. Yet I really felt
for Keith Lamb when he was profiled on AUSTRALIAN STORIES
on Channel 2. Young, naive, immature and egotistical, he
was prime meat for Pop stardom, but couldn't reach that
Use-By sticker stuck between his shoulder blades. Interned,
homeless, psychotically dispossessed, he's now healthy and
running a handy crafts store in the bush. I still think
Hush suck, and I'd never buy the stuff he sells in his store
- but I'm glad he survived being spat out by an industry
that is currently preparing Silverchair for a similar future.
I switch channels and see Les Gock - one of the guitarists
from Hush - doing an ad for American Express, going on about
how in his 'industry' (which now means running a successful
recording studio & doing jingles) you gotta survive.
Youth
is never wasted on the young. The minute you know what youth
means is the minute you grow old. And the more you talk
about it, the older you grow. I just aged thirty days. Michael
Hutchence - like most Pop stars whose nubile fans could
be their own children - died an old death. An awkward, messy,
badly directed one Kenneth Anger would find apt. And like
all Pop stars, his choice of life-style trappings could
have been taken from a sitcom episode - right down to him
at one point professing an interest in filming J.G.Ballard's
CRASH. The star of Cronenberg's CRASH was not Michael Hutchence,
but James Spader. If you regard yourself as an 80s sophisticate
and still wear black, you probably know him from art house
crud like SEX LIES & VIDEO TAPE. I know him from teen
movies like TUFF TURF and exploitation flicks like JACK'S
BACK. Teen movie stars - like child TV stars and Pop stars
- come up real good if they can survive. Because they know
the heartless hyped-up vacuum at the centre of the entertainment
industry. Because they know that they are there to be exploited.
Because they know that in the end, you don't give a solitary
fuck about them, their lives, their concerns or their feelings.
