{non-fiction}

In the budding days of spring 2015, following in the footsteps of Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, and the evil blond kid from Game of Thrones before him, Kanye West delivered a lecture to the Oxford Union, the self-described ‘most prestigious debating society’ in the world.

The Oxford Guild Society chairman issued an invitation for West to speak ‘literally any time you want’, and the musician’s staff was gracious enough to give the two-century-old institution half a day’s notice that he would be appearing - provided they meet demands to have raw asparagus, Volvic-brand mineral water bottles with labels removed, and a full-length mirror ready for him before the talk. (They couldn’t buy the mirror on such short notice, so one of the organizing committee members carried her own out of her room.)

He refused to take photos with the faculty, gave a short talk beginning with ‘Okay, everyone please be completely quiet’ and ending with ‘That’s all.’ In between, he said: ‘The Matrix is like the Bible,’ before stopping himself to ask ‘Why is The Matrix like the Bible?’, then trailing off. He also advised that, ‘If you lose your expensive luggage at the airport, you can get that back. You can’t get the time back.’ (He declined to name the brand of the luggage that he would ‘normally say’ because he ‘had a meeting with them soon’.) He reminded his audience that it was illegal not to wear clothes, and ‘also possibly too cold’, and that one should avoid buying $5,000 sweaters. He called his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy the best thing put out in the last twenty-five years, then clarified that he was simply repeating the critical consensus. He said that his goal if he were to do fine art would be to become ‘Picasso or greater’.

Suddenly declaring things at an end, he walked out. They assumed he was going to come back in, but, as the chairman later recounted, ‘I knew when I was looking at his grin that this was classic Kanye.’

Five thousand students were expected to attend the event, convened at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History; around three hundred people were there.
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​Later that month, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago - which quotes the critical estimation that it’s ‘the most influential art college in the United States’ on its About Us page - announced that it would be conferring an honorary doctorate upon West during May convocation. 

In response, students and alumni of the college started a petition to rescind the offer and posted flyers around campus featuring West’s lyrics without comment. Sample: ‘Have you ever had sex with a pharaoh? / I put the pussy in a sarcophagus / Now she claiming I bruise her esophagus.’

The Institute’s President and Dean of Faculty gave an interview dismissing their concerns. ‘They’re still young!’ said the President of a renowned university about his students and alumni. ‘The guy is smart,’ declared a person who is a major scholar of art history about an honoree.

At the ceremony, the introductory speaker’s first words were these: ‘I’d like to begin by quoting from the Chicago Tribune, which I hope many of you saw, just this past week. Our guest has - and I quote: “the most important, influential cultural voice to emerge from Chicago in a generation.” And that’s the Tribune.’

So there.

Baby boomers have been trodding the boards of the theater of life for seventy years now, and they know the script - very well. You might even say they’re approaching the point where they’ve toured too long in the role.

Here’s what happens when an artist captures the attention of society at large: they challenge the status quo of the older generation; they’re mocked and vilified for their effrontery and tastelessness; they’re gradually accepted as messengers of a new day; and they’re ultimately lionized by the generation that comes of age with them. It’s the natural order of things, as inevitable as the changing of the seasons: baroque to classical to romantic, realist to impressionist to expressionist, jazz to rock to hip hop.

The cycles of art are not an invention of the post-war generation, of course, but the difference is that, with the pace of change accelerating more than it ever has over the course of a human lifetime before, they’ve lived through this rodeo enough times to make it rote. And yet it hasn’t ceased to captivate them. They crave the next big thing as much as they expect it. As creatures of a world that’s unfolded before them like one long, piped-in performance, the greatest pleasure principle they can understand is being there for the show - and the greatest fear is missing it.
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There have always been famous people of course, but celebrity is its own particular thing - a by-product of modernity as beguiling and as stifling as the London fog.

​Historically speaking, celebrity is a very recent phenomenon - just another one of the many cracks splintering through the cultural ice sheet under the weight of the industrial revolution. There have always been famous people of course, but celebrity is its own particular thing - a by-product of modernity as beguiling and as stifling as the London fog. It’s not so easy to give a place, name and date for the first famous person, but nailing down the first celebrity is a cinch.
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‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous,’ Lord Byron said, itself famously, following the publication of his epic coming-of-age poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812. People identified with - or wished they could identify with - his stand-in, a don’t-give-a-fuck type now referred to in the critical literature as the ‘Byronic hero’. We’ve never shaken that character loose from our collective psyche; he’s everybody from Han Solo to Tony Stark to the cop on CSI. Shortcut: badboy.

Needless to say, Byron entered into a whole new world that’s now hopelessly familiar to our fantasy-addled brains. Women desired him on some mysterious hypersexual plane that split the difference between erotic dream and icon veneration. He threw money around like he’d never stop making it. He went to all the best parties. He took glamorous trips with the boys. He conducted a wildly promiscuous and experimental sex life. His behavior made him the subject of scandalized-cum-delighted gossip mongers everywhere he went. His books sold like hotcakes based on his name alone. 

This was something new under the sun. It wasn’t fame or renown. People didn’t respect or admire him. He wasn’t worshipped as a saint or adored as a god. It was intimate. People thought they knew him, and that he knew them. He had minions of strangers who considered themselves friends, a state of oxymoronic kookiness we named by abridging the word ‘fanatic’.

It’s a condition that has a pronounced and splintering psychological effect on both subject and object. The one senses its own inadequateness and tries to compensate, the other does the same. It’s a kind of madness we share, a pinprick in the soul that always needs filling, the insatiable sweet tooth of the modern man. It’s celebrity culture - and you need both those words to make sense of it.

​My dad explained The Beatles to me by saying that he couldn’t explain The Beatles.

It was just a different time, he said. It’s impossible to get across, he said. They weren’t just big; they were pretty much everything. The Venn diagrams overlapped completely. They were, to use the only words there are, bigger than Jesus.

This was celebrity like there had never been before - and tellingly, like there would never be again. And there was a moment to this one too, a cultural moment even more specific than London 1812: February 9th, 1964, at 8 pm. Let’s face it: they were a hell of a band, and they put on a hell of an Ed Sullivan Show, but nothing an artist has ever achieved rivals the feat of having 73,700,000 people experience something at the same time. When over a third of every man, woman, and child in a superpower nation is watching a concert in concert - the largest communal event in history up to that point - what the nice smiling boys did or did not steal from Chuck Berry isn’t really the point.

When we’re moved by something in an intimate way - the defining feature of pop art - we tend to downplay the circumstances that gave rise to the moment. ‘The first time I heard The Beatles’ is a ubiquitous cultural signifier that speaks to how transcendent it was for so many people. But it’s precisely those kinds of moments that are the most weighted with all the messy undercarriage of history - both public and personal. It’s a cliché that we find the appeal of current pop culture more and more unfathomable as we get older, and that’s it exactly. Nothing simply matters; everything matters to somebody at some place in some time. The things that define us, as bodies and as bodies politic, are always suspended in the jello of the moment. And the jello of February 9th, 1964 had 74 million grapes in it.

A perfect storm if there ever was one. TV as a medium had only just asserted itself as the most powerful and ubiquitous instrument in the history of mass culture, with set ownership hitting almost 90% of homes by 1960. Maybe there were that many bibles in the country, but it seems safe to say they weren’t being gathered around every night. The potential of this new weapon of mass instruction had yet to be unlocked; in fact, with just three channels, all they were really doing was knocking on the door. Three channels meant that everybody was basically watching the same thing - perhaps the single most important factor relative to our age of exploding media shrapnel. 

Demographically speaking, the largest generation in history was still living with their parents, and most had never heard anything but Perry Como. The Beatles were a few years older, but just a few - young enough to be considered one of them, but old enough to wield influence. This is ubiquitously the case among boomer icons: Paul McCartney, born four years before the boom; Bob Dylan, five years before; John Lennon, six years before; Mick Jagger, three years before; Joni Mitchell, three years before; Jimi Hendrix, four years before; Janis Joplin, three years before; and on and on. Call it the Baby Boomer Big Brother effect. And call the moment that all of these factors came together on one winter’s night in 1964 Peak Celebrity.

The idea had been with us long before that, and it would of course stay with us as a dominant cultural force up to the present. Celebrity continues to shape us in fundamental ways. At every moment of modernity circumstances contrive to make a few of us objects of idolatry and the statistical equivalent of literally everyone idolaters. There are always many variously unique reasons why this is so, but the linchpin in the whole grenade of an arrangement is technology - and at the pace it’s going now, it might finally be outrunning its own echo.

​New technologies are a shock to the system deep enough to make us see a little fuzzy. We think something’s novel simply because it’s so radically intensified. Movies made the progress of celebrity speed up sharply, and the dawn of mainlined mass culture that came with television reordered the magnitude, but it started before anyone had ever taken a picture of anything. Although the principle is the same, it’s easier to look down the barrel of a water gun than a fire hose. So back to our model organism: Byron, and his fainting couch of a fan base.

Since ‘every journal consists of 50 or 60 publications’ wrote man-about-town Isaac D’Israeli in 1795, ‘when I take the pen and attempt to calculate the number of volumes which the next century must infallibly produce, I lose myself among billions, trillions, and quartillions.’ The information genie, once a monkish novelty or dandy’s amusement, was out of the bottle and granting wishes wholesale. Reading books used to be a more or less intimate social pursuit, something to be shared with friends over brandy and wooden dentures. When distribution was piecemeal, books were something like a heightened form of conversation. You were basically reading what your brother-in-law wrote.

When mass market publishing began in earnest, it was a two-sided coin: people got to read more and better books, but they also became hopelessly alienated from each other. (Not for lack of trying, but you just can’t get through an essay on the history of modernity without using the word ‘alienated’.) That’s the trade-off with mass culture: a heightened sense of communion, but at arm’s length. Byron was funnier than your brother-in-law, but you didn’t know him. And the people who make you laugh, who move you, are people you expect to know. When someone’s made you laugh and cry, at some basic level it simply doesn’t compute that you don’t actually know them.

Byron became famous because he could make you feel something intimate and beautiful, but he became a celebrity because you didn’t know him - and you thought you did.

​For the boomer generation, initiated into the world at the very moment of peak celebrity, culture became a nearly perfect reflection of that idea. They had little patience for what they deemed either elitist or stodgy ideas about what kind of art matters. Bolstered by the democratic undertones of mass culture - artifacts everyone could enjoy - boomers shunned the theater of life in favor of the screen. Good theater was too inaccessible, and community theater was too lame. ‘Good’ and ‘community’ were old ideas anyway. To hell with Ibsen and Our Town both - they had Altman and Jaws. Art became pop art, and the soup in that can of worms was celebrity.

It’s impossible to overstate the influence that celebrity culture had on shaping the consciousness of this most definitive of generations - impossible, and unnecessary. Today, it’s a sauce covering the whole enchilada of culture. We understand the world through that lens. In the political arena, we don’t support issues; we support candidates. We don’t gather together, formulate a policy agenda, and seek out a representative who will enact that agenda. We wait for a candidate to come to us, usually through our many screens, and evaluate their stances on the issues as though they made up a static image. From a bird’s eye perspective on human political life, that is exactly ass backwards. But it’s what we’re conditioned to expect from a mass cultural outlook.

The mainly playwright David Mamet has a film called State and Main in which a local community theatre production competes in vain for the attention of a small town with a giant movie production that’s filming there. ‘You’re doing a play,’ says the movie’s screenwriter to the play’s director in a surprised tone. ‘Small town, I suppose. You have to make your own fun.’ ‘Everybody makes their own fun,’ she replies. ‘If you don’t make it yourself, it ain’t fun. It’s entertainment.’

And it’s not fun. It’s weird. Forcing your own spirit through the grate of another person is an unnatural condition - but, like the artificial pleasure of drugs, it has its benefits. For one thing, its highs are a whole lot higher. Young women attending Beatles concerts in the first wave of the British invasion were said to experience more orgasms than they would statistically have over the next several years of their lives. Bob Dylan songs inspired a whole generation to rise up and then sit back down again. Woodstock was the defining cultural event of the generation, and whatever else it was, it was a show. Stoned or sober, you were just watching it. This wasn’t the Great Pullman Railroad Strike. And yet it was powerful enough to go down in history as the great sensation of its time.

Drugs have cheap effects, but they also have exalted ones. A great drug experience can rejuvenate and inspire you - make you believe anything is possible. It can be perilously difficult to keep that feeling with you, but we’re creatures of time and flesh, and very few of us who’ve had moments like that would choose to take them back if we could. In a sense, the problem is that it was worth it. We chase the dragon for a reason. But sooner or later it takes its toll, and the treasure stays lost.

​Well, we all know what happens after a peak, don’t we? Celebrity could never be what it was again - to the boomers or to their technologically diversified issue. But the people holding the levers still understood the world this way, and they sought out that ineffable first high as both consumers and suppliers. Celebrity became the fulcrum of any major cultural endeavor and a vital (and volatile) component of every major institution. Politics we’ve been over. The military’s summed up nicely by that USO show sequence in Apocalypse Now set to Susie Q. This ain’t Begin the Beguine anymore. As for the correlating antiwar movement, Jane Fonda on an antiaircraft gun pretty much says it all. Environmental activism in its genesis: save the seals because Brigitte Bardot told you to. And as for the great jewel in the crown of baby boomer culture - the new and improved consumerism - celebrity endorsements went so far they reached into the great hereafter. People used to like Fred Astaire - a lot, even - but it took the madness of the age to make him sell vacuum cleaners ten years after he was dead.

There’s truth to all this, of course: celebrities help things along. The Beatles could make you dance; George Clooney could get people talking about Darfur; Barack Obama could energize a stagnant political culture. But there are devastating limitations to this worldview built right into the foundation, and the more you pile on top of it, the less steady the edifice becomes. Ultimately, apart from being a failure in its own right, a leaning tower leaves a lot of people out in the cold.

But addicts are addicts, and one of the things that makes them so is refusing to let go of their illusions. Deep down they really believe that their drug will make them happy, that it does make them happy, that it will make them win in the end. No matter what frustrations and contradictions amass in their wake, they simply can’t let go of an idea that’s been so fundamental to their own pursuit of happiness.

As the decades have worn on, there’s been an increasingly desperate attempt by cultural arbiters to squeeze every last bit of juice out of the idea of celebrity, and the long-diminishing returns appear only to embolden them further. This is ironic, because in point of fact, with the fabric of culture being fundamentally rewoven over the course of the digital age, celebrities have been mattering less and less all the time. People follow their friends on Twitter as much as they follow famous people - and in this more immediate of mediums, famous people tend to seem a lot more like their friends than like network-anointed, image-crafted, bepedestaled icons. More and more, you can actually know the people who move you - at least as much as you know anyone. Even more importantly, they’re not all the same people. There are far too many channels coursing through the body politic to allow for anything like the hegemony of those halcyon days of the celebrity-deity. 

Perhaps it’s this dilution in the product that accounts for the manic intensity of the rhetoric, which has been amped up so high you can’t hear the music anymore. And so we come to hype, the tenor of the age, egged on by consumerist frenzy and snowballing like an aging coke head’s line. Books are no longer sold without pages of blurbs so overheated it’s a wonder they don’t reach 451. (‘If I could eat this book, I would.’ Dude.) Limp Bizkit was the sound of the revolution; Dave Chapelle was the voice of a generation; Lost was supposed to go somewhere. The Beach Boys were to be held in the same esteem as Beethoven; Dr. Kanye West appeared on the cover of the nation’s oldest magazine under the headline ‘American Mozart’. Mozart. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Who wrote the Jupiter symphony. At this point, we’ve traveled the full distance from ‘criticism’ to ‘panic attack’ - the natural endpoint of a culture that can no longer make sense of joy.

As the audience faded into that vanishing point inevitable to slavish icon veneration, it flailed wildly for its fix - by now basically equivalent to its identity, if not its very life. Celebrities may have been getting less powerful, but to compensate, celebrity was deified more than ever. Increasingly, all that mattered about something was what someone famous said about it. That’s the news cycle: not the issue itself, but the kerfuffle among public figures surrounding the issue. It’s how we make sense of the world, how we talk about it. We talk about what a few people entirely distinct from the stakeholders said about it. What Michael Douglas thinks about cancer. What Jim Carrey thinks about vaccination. What Seth Rogen thinks about propaganda. What the President or Presidential candidate has to say about whatever happens to be going on that day. That matters to us. We talk about it. And then we stop talking about it. The facts established by experts, the suffering engendered by these social problems, the people affected by them - all these are footnotes to the lead story, which is inevitably a short quote from a famous person. That’s our peephole on the big bright world surrounding us, the straw through which we breathe. Little wonder that we feel light-headed.

It all started innocently enough, as most addictions do. But folks, something’s gotta give. A generation’s passed, and our celebrity habit has gone from Hard Day’s Night goofy to hard core porn scary. As for art, our mirrored bellwether, a feint at greatness has become indistinguishable from greatness, smothering art’s value - along, sometimes, with the artist.
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​As a small child holding my father’s hand at the fair, I shared the near-ubiquitous experience of losing my grip on the helium balloon I was carrying and watching it shrink into the sky. Like most kids that age I was not acquainted with loss. It was shockingly tragic to me. Even at the time I was surprised by how sad it was. This colorful thing, lighter than air, hanging above me and brightening my day - but only so long as I held it. Then it receded into the clear blue sky, gone but still visible. It was never coming back, but every time I looked up it was there. It seemed so lonely.

But here’s the thing: it was a goddamn balloon, and I was a fucking child.
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​It’s comforting to look up to people, but it also makes us small. Giving up ownership over life’s beautiful things has a destabilizing, infantilizing effect on us, turning over the vital spark of our creative agency to someone else. It makes us the children of our own souls, behoven to grown-ups who know better. Necessary evil though it may be, it’s fundamentally demeaning that we don’t make our own music, or tell our own jokes, or make our own movies. A self-actuated individual in a vital community should be able to do all these things. By farming out our soul’s work to a rarefied class, we create a massive inequilibrium, with nearly everyone on the bottom. And we react to our diminishment by intensifying our scrutiny of the chosen ones, relentlessly honing our identities to the shape of our gawking. 

This is a kind of madness, and like all madness, it gets worse with time; the grooves get deeper and deeper, the weight heavier and heavier as we fruitlessly seek to make sense of nonsense. And all that weight is invariably brought to bear, not on icons, not on stars, but on human beings. We watch with anonymous fascination as it bends them into the strangest shapes, and in not-so-good time, we go into extravagant mourning when they break. By this time, their art is beside the point. The magazines in grocery store checkout lines don’t publish reviews.
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​There’s something in pop music called the ‘27 club’. The price of entry to this swinging joint is death, to be paid in full sometime over the course of your 27th year on earth, contingent on your having produced spectacularly affecting, mass-distributed art by the time most of us are starting to get the hang of cooking for ourselves.

As it happens, it’s an evil idea: a weird one, a wrong one, a crazy one. In a word, it’s fanatical.

As peak celebrity coasted on its plateau, the baby boomers lost three big brothers and one big sister in the space of three years: Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin all died between 1968 and 1971, aged 27. That’s the founder of the most popular band in the world, the greatest rock guitarist of all time, the brassy knob on the doors of perception, and the queen of rock and roll. It was tragic. It was fucked up. People said so. But people only started talking about a club when the next generation lost its big brother (b. 1967), two and a half decades later. By then, hyperbole may have become the native tongue of the land, but it really does sound right to call Kurt Cobain the last real rock star.

Cobain was a complicated man, and a disturbed man, and a complicatedly disturbed man. There were many reasons for his suicide, none of which I’m privy to, and all of which are beyond the scope of legitimate cultural inquiry. But dipping my toe in the tar nonetheless, it seems safe to say that his outsized success, the commercialization of his music, and the infernal machine of hype that sprang up around him at least turned up the heat in his own private hell. The fact that his memory came to be included in a swirling media frenzy - that a troubled, unique, talented young man was spiritually exhumed by a horde of conspiracy theorists and celebrity fabulists - meant finally that there could be no rock stars anymore. The air had become inhospitable to them.

When, ten years later, a swaggering young singer made a respectable debut as an avatar of classic sixties music, then hit it big with a heavily produced follow-up, she expressed the fear that she might end up in the 27 club too. She did. Amy Winehouse enjoyed years of apoplectic success as a live singer in support of her blockbuster record, with sold-out concerts and parties and awards in all the glittering capitals of the world, but she would never record another studio album.

Being a child is hard: powerless, scary, small. In a world full of children, being a parent is impossible. Being a grown-up only works if we all grow up.
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​So what does this have to do with Kanye? 

I’m glad you asked, Kanye. I’m comforted by the fact that you always do.

Maybe in the end we do need our prophets. Not everyone can sing, and not everyone should, and maybe sometimes another human being can speak for us in a way that we ourselves can’t. We humans are social animals, and mysterious fish. But when we seek too hard for that burning bush, we erode the land. We outpace the prophecy, and we don’t get to hear it.

When the younger generation’s prophet is anointed by the old, you have a contradiction in terms. You have a culture choking itself into irrelevance. Instead of championing their own prophet, millennials have had Kanye West foisted upon them by well-entrenched tastemakers. The Grammys and the Atlantics and the Oxfords may lionize him; to young people, to the voiceless, he’s an obnoxious, hype-bloated absurdity - exactly the reverse of the generational cycle of art. The old are electrified and energized, defiant in the celebration of their champion; the young are left scratching their heads and wondering how and when the zeitgeist passed them by.

As for poor Yeezy, he’s left with a hysterically created public persona that’s hopelessly confused with his art. Some may be swallowed up by the hype machine; West, ever the survivor, has instead swallowed it. And so, for our sins, we get to watch the tragicomic opera of a man puffed up like a veritable hot air balloon: his constant insistence on his genius, his ludicrously performed umbrage at not winning the occasional award, his toddler-like anger at anyone who cares to disagree with him. This is not confidence in one’s voice, anymore than cosplay is art appreciation. It’s the inevitable counterbalance of that cultural fanaticism we call celebrity. And perhaps most heartbreaking of all, his art, so moving to so many, has been subsumed by it.

In his speech at the Oxford Union, West did not stop at quoting the cultural arbiters who had deemed his last album the greatest of the past twenty-five years - a record about (what else?) celebrity. Even more tellingly - if an artist with songs named things like ‘I Am A God’ really needs his bread crumbs tracked - he mused that if he were to be a maker of fine art, he would want to be ‘Picasso or greater’. There it all is right there. Grandiose, check, flabbergasting, check, bizarre, check. But it’s all simpler than that, and sadder. He didn’t say he wanted to make art as good as Picasso, or in the style of Picasso; he wanted to be him. He wanted to be the most famous one. For Kanye, a kind of last man of fame, the ideas of celebrity and art have merged into one. What everyone thinks is what he thinks. He’s disappeared completely.

To quote the Bible of the information age: ‘So you’re here to save the world. What do you say to something like that?’
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​But for once, something in this world is not about Kanye, savior or sap though he may be. What his story really proves is that celebrity as an idea is long past relevance - a waning cultural artifact of fast-diminishing returns. The dam has burst, and the great river has splintered into streams well on their way to the sea. The new generation doesn’t need icons the way their parents did, despite being steeped in the residual trappings of iconography. It was never a fulsome idea to begin with, but its hollowness is easier to feel now. 

A recent poll of the very youngest among us, born after the turn of the millennium, posed the question of what their generation should be called. The answer came back ‘Founders’. These new souls will not be diminished. They want to light the way. And they’ll come to know better than any of us that when stars are the light we see by, all our fires go out.

Maybe fame was a zeppelin once, carrying with it a spectacular promise of the future, but it’s long since been reduced to a helium balloon shrinking into the sky. It may have delighted us for a while, but it’s floating away, and it’s never coming back. Let it go. Daddy will get you an ice cream cone.

2/10/2016