Category: Politics/Metaphysics

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Helping Artists When Money Is Scarce – Thoughts From Isolation

I’ve talked a lot on social media over the last few weeks about the ways in which music fans who have been fortunate enough to maintain some level of financial stability through the beginnings of the pandemic lock-down can help artists out. Primarily through buying music, and using this time to reconsider where our economic relationship with the people who make the music we love has ended up after a decade of the streaming economy dominating the conversation.

However, one thing that’s apparent in all this is that the economic impact of this upheaval is so spectacularly uneven, and not sliced anywhere near the usual economic faultlines. I have some relatively poor friends who have been able to shift their work online who are stable for now, and some others who were doing astonishingly well up til the cancellation of all their work who are facing financial ruin and some incredibly tough decisions.

The financial support that those of you who’ve been able to have already offered to musicians – particularly through the massive uptick in Bandcamp sales, as well as through the many GoFundMes that have been set up – has been SO helpful and so hugely appreciated, but I want to make it extra clear that no-one should feel bad about not being able to help anyone else financially at this time. The uncertainty is real and terrifying for so many, and in many instances it would be deeply unwise to be buying music when your own next paycheck could be months away…

Instead, here are a few simple things you can do if you want to give back to artists who are struggling right now, without spending any money:

  1. Send them a message. I’ve had a number of emails from people saying that specific bits of my music are helping them get through this, and honestly, that shit is worth its weight in gold. It’s an incredible feeling to know that you’re able to help in tangible ways just by doing your art as best you can.
  2. Make it public – reviews on Bandcamp are always an absolute treat to read, and really do help with sales etc. Now, they feel like the universe reaching out and affirming the reason we’ve all done this stuff for so long and allowed ourselves to live such economically precarious lives. Quite a few people I know have taken to Tweeting their quarantine soundtracks, either with or without tagging the artists in. I’ve both been deeply encouraged by the ones listening to me, and have discovered some great new music from the ones who are including links. If you’re able to shift the focus of your Facebook conversations about music away from yet more nostalgic promotion of 70s rock stars and instead give a shout to some struggling current artists, that would be hugely helpful.
  3. If the artists you care about are involved in any online activity to try and rebuild their creative identity without the clarity that gigs brought to that process, help them spread the word. I’ve watched some fabulous live streaming gigs, and have where possible been sharing links to the artists’ other work in the chat. Just give them a nudge – a surprising number of artists are playing catch-up with the potential of the internet to build actual audiences and communities beyond just Facebook event invites and instagram carpet bombing…

In short, encouragement can mean a whole lot to a musician sat at home wondering what the fuck they’re going to do for the next two months and how they’re going to last til this ridiculous government decide to finally give the self employed some help…

Go and declare your gratitude, and thanks again for all the music shopping. It’s been a lifeline for so many. 

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Steve’s Incomplete Guide to NAMM

The NAMM show is on next week – for those who don’t know, NAMM stands for the ‘National Association of Music Merchants’ and the show is the world’s most important music gear trade show (it’s not the biggest, but it is the one where everyone launches their flagship products for the year and flies in their biggest endorsers.) It can be a huge amount of fun, and many of my favourite people in the world are brought together in one place for a weekend, so that’s great. But it’s also incredibly weird, and potentially a shitshow, so here in no particular order is my incomplete guide to how to behave at NAMM:

1) Listen to the person in front of you! It’s so tempting to keep one eye on who may be walking past, looking out for celeb sightings or people you’re trying to do a deal with. Ultimately, it just makes the person you’re talking to feel unwanted. If you genuinely have to be somewhere, just say so, don’t string people along. I’ve often described NAMM as “120,000 people lying to each other for a weekend – and there’s so much in it that is false and meaningless. Avoid that. Give the person you’re talking to your attention, be as real and as kind as you can be, and carry yourself with some dignity… Likewise, wait your turn if someone is already in a conversation. Wait to be invited in (few things are more annoying than having a conversation about something that actually matters and having some numbnuts pile in and start hugging and high fiving you or the person you’re talking to with no awareness of what they’ve just interrupted). This isn’t primary school, behave like a reasonable person…

Steve Lawson with Vernon Paul and Morton

2) Don’t promise to go to everything. Factor in the time it’ll take you to get to places. Everyone at NAMM has unexpected encounters with friends and it messes up their schedule – that’s fine, obviously, but don’t go around promising to go see someone play or to go to an event or launch or whatever if you’re not going to show up. It just means you end up compounding the bullshit later when you see them again and start making up excuses. Put things in your calendar with at least a 10 minute buzzing notification so you can make decisions rather than piling up regrets at all the things you’ve missed…

3) If you’re not a buyer or a dealer, don’t expect manufacturers to prioritise conversations with you. This is one for artists – NAMM IS NOT ABOUT US! We are a vital and important part of the ecosystem, a big part of the mythology that fuels the whole shebang, but unless you’re Eddie Van Halen or Vinnie Colaiuta, you don’t take precedence over the dude from Iowa who needs to be convinced to stock your friend’s guitars/amps/pedals etc. Having a booth at NAMM is eye-wateringly expensive, and the companies are there to do business. If you do get some downtime with a friend there, great, they’ll be delighted to see you and talk to someone they know for 5 minutes, but as soon as someone with a buyer badge arrives, make yourself scarce, or if you know the builder well, offer to demo the product (and don’t be offended if they say no).

4) Eat a massive breakfast. Food in the convention centre is, well, convention centre food. It’s bogus. You can get out of the centre and go to Subway on the corner of Harbour and Katella (my food of choice for my first decade of NAMM – so much so that the manager recognised me and said hi every time I was in there for the next decade… 🙂 ) but I’d recommend a decent diner breakfast to get you through the day, and a snack at lunch time. Take it with you, so you don’t end up paying $8 for a slice of reheated pizza.

steve lawson with bryan beller at NAMM 09

5) Drink water! Loads of it. The air con in Anaheim is vicious and will destroy your voice in minutes. So drink water whenever you can. If you’ve got a friend on a booth that has loads of it, make regular stops. Bring a water bottle if you can to save on plastic, or reuse the first one you pick up – refill from a water fountain. NAMM is already a spectacular environmental disaster, try not to make it worse…

6) Be honest with people. This is perhaps the hardest of all of these things. The number of meaningless superlatives that get thrown about at NAMM ends up crushing you. If every person you meet is awesome and their music is the greatest and every guitar you try is perfect, and every amp is the greatest you’ve ever heard, you have literally no way of ever conveying an opinion that has any merit at all. NAMM is overflowing with people who’ve never learned that superlatives are best used in strict moderation, or they become utterly and irredeemably useless. I have a mental list of the people who every year tell me that I’m amazing and an inspiration, and I’m all too well aware that I hear or see nothing from them in the intervening 12 months – no social media comments or anything, and certainly no Bandcamp sales. So, vague rule of thumb: If it’s not something you’d part with cash for, if they aren’t a band you’d drop everything to go see if they come to your town, they aren’t ‘awesome‘. There are other ways to make people feel loved and cared for beyond lying to them about the degree to which you’re invested in their life and work. You can be meaningfully and demonstrably delighted by your friends’ successes without trying to falsely insert yourself into that success. Be present, be honest and be compassionate.

7) Pace yourself. The history of NAMM is littered with people fucking their lives up for a weekend. Regional sales guys who suddenly think they’re in the Guns n Roses biography. It’s quite possible to have fun without getting wrecked and doing stupid shit. Look out for your friends too, especially if they’re new to this – NAMM is quite literally overwhelming. It’s unlike almost any other experience on earth – it’s a weekend in Vegas but with 10,000 hustling musicians trying to show off their musician-y-ness to each other. I have deep enduring friendships that I made at my first NAMM show in ’99, and people I still avoid because two decades ago they tried to drag me into their coke-fuelled hell. No. Don’t be a dick – rule #1 of human existence.

8) Feel free to step away from it all at regular intervals – get outside, go grab a coffee in a remote corner of hall E, go sit on the grass, or take an afternoon off to head over to the beach. It’s an utterly inhuman environment, in which a lot of human wonderfulness thrives despite the context not because of it. Be kind to yourself.

9) Watch out for the casual racism/sexism/homophobia/ableism. Politically, the wider context of NAMM is one of the most toxic environments on the planet. The position of women within many, many dudes’ understanding of what’s going on is ‘promotional eye candy’ – a huge number of the women there – regardless of their skills and experience – are essentially handed an ultimatum – look sexy, or stay away. Feel free to celebrate with the women who’ve carved out a space for themselves outside of that, but do not fall into the trap of either objectifying or vilifying those women whose work requires them to engage with that toxic bullshit. From the ‘booth babes’ (pro-tip – never use the term ‘booth babes’ about anyone ever) who hand out flyers and pose for pictures with provincial dudes to the artists who are ‘strongly encouraged’ to get overly glammed up in order to make any kind of headway in a world where male musicians are listened to and female musicians are gawped at. You WILL see a lot of that, and you will likely hear a bunch of hideous bullshit spewing from people with horrible opinions. Work out before you get there how you plan to deal with it – don’t be blindsided but also don’t be complicit. Offer solidarity, but also don’t commiserate with someone doing their job – just don’t reinforce the culture that limits their options. (it goes without saying that there are a lot of women who get glammed up because they LOVE it, and should be and ARE free to do that – that anyone might question their motives is a sign of just how toxic the environment is. If you assume that every woman looking glam is only doing it for ‘attention’ that’s as much a part of the problem as giving her marks out of 10 to your guitar-bro. Just treat all humans with dignity, and all musicians as fellow professionals. It’s not that hard, honest.)

10) Phone home. Stay in touch, stay grounded, talk to your partner and kids, get away from the mayhem to do it. E.T. understood this in the early 80s, and he was a fictional alien. As a real life human, it’s not beyond your abilities.

11) Wear VERY comfortable shoes. I’ve sometimes walked more than 10 miles a day at NAMM. The convention centre is huge and the events are often a few blocks away. Don’t get caught wearing shoes that you couldn’t comfortable do a quick 3 mile walk in, you’ll injure yourself. If your schtick requires showbiz shoes (I say his as someone who wore a fake-fur coat in the sweltering California heat for YEARS at NAMM), take some flats in your bag…

12) Bring earplugs! This was suggested by my lovely friend Sam over on FB – (he’s a many-year NAMM veteran, and can often be found playing crazy-fast jazz on upright on the booths of some of the sax and jazz guitar amp companies..) But yes, the ambient noise level at NAMM is pretty high and gets fatiguing – I’m not sure if the high percentage of that noise that is total bullshit makes it even more draining, but I like to think it does. So bring earplugs. Maybe even wear them all day. You’ll take them out at 6 o’clock and it’ll feel like a new day.

There you go – I may add to this over the weekend, so check back, or add your own tips in the comments… 🙂

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Improvisation For A Better World – Making Sense Of Things With A Bass In My Hands

For years – perhaps decades – I’ve said that ‘instrumental music is what happens when I run out of words’. I love words, I love what language makes possible, and my default position is always ‘talk more, listen more, don’t give up on dialogue’.

But I hit a point on Monday when the barrage of shrill voices on social media (NONE of it targeted at me, I hasten to add) – people with plans, schemes, ways of interpreting what’s going on, insider knowledge, spiteful interpretations, thoughts to counter the spite, arguments with, from and between politicians… it just became a cloud of shouting. Like a montage from a David Lynch movie meant to represent the dreams of an insane person. Or the set up for a Peter Gabriel-era Genesis song. Talking loud, saying nothing. The intentions were mostly good, but were also mostly desperate, reactive, non-reflective, and lacking in care.

At this point, I thank God that I am, at heart, an improviser. That I’ve built a music practice around responding to now with sound, around being able to step into that instinctive, mystical space – not having to sit and painstakingly compose music that reflects how I feel and then play the music I’ve written…(there are people who do that brilliantly, and I’m grateful for their art and the guidance I’ve received from it through the years).

My need is to sort through ideas, emotions, reactions… sadness, anger, confusion, hope, clarity, absurdity, more anger…and music is where I go to do that.

Sharing it is how I throw a line out to anyone else who connects with it. It’s a pretty exposed thing to do, as there’s pretty much no way to counter a response of ‘you’re just playing any old shit and saying it’s about whatever you want…’ – but that’s also a discussion that’s so utterly pointless I wouldn’t enter it anyway…

What is true right now is that I’ve pretty much run out of words, and I’ve exhausted, to a large degree, my need for other people’s words to try and make sense of what’s going on. We’re in a massive downward spiral, and there are many ways of seeing a bright future in a crystal ball, or predicting the collapse of civilization as we know it. I don’t need that kind of guesswork, I need to stay in touch with the emotional/spiritual side of this, and then harness that to actually DO things to help the people whose lives are changed by this. Because, as well as being my refuge and place to ‘heal my hurts’, as Faithless put it, music is a constant challenge to me that music isn’t enough. To take that inspiration, that comfort, and go do something for those who are really messed up by this. Because as a white dude born here, with an accent rooted in the UK, I’m not at risk. Our financial position, in the longer term, is pretty precarious, but that’s not even close to the fear that all the amazing people who have chosen to make the UK their home and are now facing a rapid increase in racist abuse are feeling.

So, make music, then use the inspiration of the music to change the world around you. It’s as simple as that, and as complicated as that.

So how does this play out? A lot less time on social media, for sure. I need to train myself not to get on Twitter of Facebook expecting the sum of the shared ideas to bring clarity. It won’t. I need to spend time every day making music that reflects how I feel about what’s going on. This weekend, I released ‘Referendum’ – 6 tracks directly reflecting on what’s been going on. 4 from before the vote, 2 from after.

The Pre-Order Plan:

I’m currently working on the follow up to last years A Crack Where The Light Gets In and The Way Home, but it felt important to get these works out now. You can listen to that, and buy it if you want. If you want to ‘pre-order’ the new album, please Subscribe via Bandcamp – it’s £20 a year, you’ll get about 23 albums and 4 singles immediately (everything solo I’ve ever released, and a collection of subscriber-only collaborations from the last 2 years), and everything I release in the next year. Which will include a series of subscriber-only video previews of the new music as it happens. The first of those videos went up today.

I’m not doing any other kind of crowd-funding campaign for the new album, there are no ‘tiers’, no attempt to get you to increase your contribution, or sell you stuff you don’t want or need. There’s just music, lots of it, and you can pay £20 or as much over that as you want… It’s entirely your choice. The subscription model fits my music-making so well, and the response from the subscribers so far has been amazing.

I’m so grateful for their support, and the feedback that happens on the Subscriber feed on Bandcamp. Please sign up and join in.

This is the future of sustainability for niche music. Be a part of it.

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Why I Never Talk About Women’s Appearance In Public

[this is long and sweary – grab a cup of coffee, and strap yourselves in]

First up, read this Gawker Mansplainer post – it’s a very eloquent and funny exposition on the problem we’re exploring here.

Which is what? Which is, the way musicians who are women are often treated and talked about in the music industries. While we’ve made a whole load of progress on gender equality, and there are now so many amazing women playing every imaginable instrument at the absolutely highest levels, we STILL have an issue…

The root of the issue seems to me to be that for a large number of men in the industry, the women that work in it too are first divided into one of two categories – fuckable or unfuckable. That’s the line. If you’re not hot, you’re ignored. If you are hot, then the purpose of any interaction, ultimately, is to try and get laid. There seems to be pretty much no acknowledgement of just how insanely toxic a notion that is for both the personal and professional life of the women involved, or indeed any consideration of the social and professional consequences of that, when guys end up trading stories of who they’ve slept with, and those women end up being ‘trouble’ on a session or tour because of past relationships, and get sidelined. And it’s ALWAYS the woman who gets sidelined. Bros before Hos, right? If you’re an amazing guitar player who slept with an OK drummer but it’s the drummer who’s the dude? Sorry, we’re going to get a new guitar player, cos there’ll be weirdness on the tour bus.

So, for the women who choose – for personal or professional reasons – not to have any kind of relationship with the musicians they work with, they become a conquest. And bets are had over who’s going to bed her first. Or rumours start, because hey, who could resist hanging round with a bunch of delusional wannabe rock stars, eh? She’s got to want to fuck one of you!

And what if the woman actually does want to have some fun? If no strings sex sounds like a great way to go? That’s not a choice that’s available. For the aforementioned professional reasons.

Observation: there’s no male equivalent of a slut, and no female equivalent of a playa. Men are rewarded for promiscuity, and women are punished for it, in every way.

But, I get told (and I DO get told), she looks so great! Anyone dressing that fine must be out for the attention. She laughs when I ‘jokingly’ tell her what I want to do to her. She’s one of the guys, it’s all funny…Well, it can be funny – I know some women with a way cruder sense of humour than me, that love crass jokes…But when it’s relentless? When it’s the only thing that’s ever joked about? When joking turns into being groped? It ceases to be funny. But, if she wants to get hired, she’s got to play along. And she HAS to look amazing. Because if you end up back in the unfuckable category, you’re ignored.

This happens pretty much every time I’m talking to a woman at a music event:

We’ll be sat talking about music, life, family, touring, stupid shit, whatever…

And some dude will come up and say ‘excuse me, I have to tell you that you’re so beautiful.’ blah fucking blah…

And my friend will smile and say thank you…

And dude will push it, and go on…

And eventually – hopefully – realise this is not their conversation and fuck off…

And nothing will be said about the person’s music or art, no attempt to engage with them as a fellow professional will be made. Just some bullshit attempt to ‘reward’ them with attention for how they look. Like somehow having creepy dudes going on about how hot you are and staring at your boobs was part of your career plan when you spent 8 hours a day learning your instrument, or 70 grand of your own money to get through 4 years of university to become the best musician you could be.

But then, it gets worse. And the playing bit of the event is also built around a peculiarly male obsession – that ridiculously competitive, chops-heavy, zero-sound-design, melody-free world of the fusion bass jam. where a bunch of guys trade ever more elaborate reharms over an E minor vamp. And someone quotes Coltrane, and someone does a bunch of clever arpeggios. And if you’re not the kind of player who wants to spend years and years of your life training for the bass olympics, you’re out.

I’m obviously way outside of that world for another reason – my gear takes way to long to set up! This is the world of plug and play, a line of generic amps that give just enough midrange for everyone to battle it out… But it’s cool. I get a million other outlets and while I’m listening to this rutting ritual take place, no-one is stood next to me trying to feel my arse without getting caught.

And there are SO few women who can be bothered with this doleful charade. There are a few who can hang in that world, some who love it. But for the most part, the women I know in music are song players, writers, arrangers, producers – people who tell stories and put together the whole deal. Who care about sound design and things sounding good not just being metrically observable as faster or more complex than everyone else while 4 instruments battle or the same single octave span in the sound spectrum.

Why does this matter? Because it’s all about boxing in people’s options. It’s a social structure that has women watching men battle. It’s as old as dinosaurs puffing up their crests to see who has the biggest one and can pull the lady dinosaurs.

And it’s bullshit. This doesn’t mean you can’t dig bass jams. This is not a value judgement about being a part of that. It’s about acknowledging that narrowness of the social situation and how it impacts on the visibility of the talents of women vs the ‘value’ of their presence as eye-candy.

And let’s face it, everyone likes to look good. That’s not about wanting it to be the only thing that gets talked about. We want to look our best, because we’re on show. We’re entertainers, FFS!

Observation: I get to see a teeny-tiny-miniscule bit of what women put up with whenever a YouTube thread is taken over by some messed up angry-dude discussion about my nail varnish.

But the difference? The massive difference: I have options. I can choose to not wear nail varnish and pink shoes, to leave the wizard coat at home. I don’t suddenly become invisible. I like to look my best but when I’m too tired, it’s all cool. I have agency over my choices and they won’t negatively impact my career. For women? That’s very very often not the case. At all.

So, here’s why I never talk about the way my friends look – because I wouldn’t do that for a dude.

If you talk about the way men sound and the way women look, you’re an asshole.

If you compliment men on their choice of notes and women on their choice of neckline, you’re an asshole.

If you choose the guys you jam with because of their groove, but the women because you think you might be in with a chance, you’re a predatory shithead.

As human beings, we rely on music to tell the story of who we are. Music has done that for millennia. It’s part of our documentation. If we shut down the role of women within that, if we silence them and just make them part of the visual landscape, or fit their story-telling into the whims of the male gaze, the stories we’re telling are a lie. They aren’t us, they aren’t who we are.

For a lot of women, telling the real story of who they are would lose them work. They’d be unable to pay the bills if they took that risk. This is real shit that impacts people’s livelihoods. This isn’t just some theoretical feminist rant, or some moralising BS – women have neither the option to opt out of looking their best (while I can show up looking like a homeless dude and still get the gig) or to fuck all the dudes they like and do it without professional and social consequence (whereas I would be rewarded with high-fives and status if I managed to coerce my beleaguered female colleagues into sleeping with me).

So, have a think about how you talk about women, how you describe musicians who are women vs men. Next time you’re in a group of dudes talking about music, start talking about the women who inspire you and see how long it is before someone starts talking about how they look or whether they’d fuck them:

How easy would it be to dissent?

What would the impact be if you said you were uncomfortable with that?

Now think about BEING the object of it, dealing with that, in the context of your desire to be a professional musician, and the impact that would have on your career. And then think again about the ‘well, I’ve never heard a woman complain about it’ argument that’s used to justify the fucked up behaviour of the creepy dudes who obsessively pursue the women they work with.

It’s time to speak up.

And it’s time to LISTEN – to the stories of women, to the opinions and experiences of women, to the truth that may make us uncomfortable about our complicity in this screwed up behaviour. We need to listen without using our hurt feelings as a threat to the professional status of women. If they can’t tell you when your behaviour is out of line without it damaging their career, you’re not an ally. You’re the problem.

Be part of the solution. 

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For International Women’s Day…

It’s International Womens Day! A day to celebrate brilliant women, to acknowledge the massive debt our culture owes to the many millions of women who battled uphill to get past massive sexism and inequality to shape the world we live in. To give thanks for the mothers and sisters and wives and girlfriends, friends and colleagues who teach us and with whom we partner in building lives, culture, society, friendships, homes, communities…

But it’s also a day of reflection, a day of lament, a day to acknowledge that pretty much none of us dudes do enough to correct the imbalance, that we are want to fall back on tropes about slow progress or even to use clever blogposts and Facebook statuses to hide our inactivity behind. It’s WAY, WAY easier to write this than it is to call out some dickhead at work telling sexist jokes, to make a fuss about those situations where women are constantly overlooked, to check our language for times when we put appearance first in the list of things we compliment a woman for, as though they need to earn the right to be complimented on their work by looking the part first.

It’s always easier to sound like a feminist than to act like one. To write inspirational bullshit on the Internet than to get off my arse and do my fair share of the housework, to daily resensitise myself to the systems that enable my male privilege… So don’t take this as a statement of success, but an admission that I’m not where I should be. And neither are you, dudes. No sackcloth and ashes, just take some time to fix some things, OK?

And here, to celebrate the day, is some incredible music by women I’m inspired by and aspire to be like. Geniuses all:

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We’re Not Thatcher’s Children, we’re Mandela’s.

Long Walk to FreedomThere were two events in my 20s that helped me understand the scale of the age we live in. one was visiting the Berlin Wall. The other was reading Long Walk To Freedom.

All of a sudden, the scale of the importance of what was going on in my lifetime was brought home. It wasn’t just seeing it on the TV, it was reading about world changing events and people and REMEMBERING them happening. Seeing the broken wall, walking from West to East Berlin, and remembering watching it live, being taken apart. Continue reading “We’re Not Thatcher’s Children, we’re Mandela’s.”

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My letter to the Musicians Union About the Digital Economy Bill

Well, the Digital Economy Bill passed. One of the stupidest yet most potentially catastrophic bits of legislation ever forced through in the Wash-Up (the last couple of days of a Parliament before an election.

I opposed it, I still oppose it and I will continue to oppose any legislation about the internet written by people who don’t understand the internet or, in this case, the music industries and the role that music plays in our culture.

I’m particularly ashamed that the Musicians Union – a Union of which I am a member, was a proud member, and have supported by paying double what I should’ve been paying for the last two years – supported this insane bill, to the detriment of musicians everywhere.

I made this public, and got an email of their ‘official position’ this morning, which is: Continue reading “My letter to the Musicians Union About the Digital Economy Bill”

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U2 And The Feast Of Enoughness

In response to This article about the scale of U2’s current tour, I posted this on twitter and facebook:

U2, knocking years of the length of time earth can sustain human life, one gig at a time

The discussion on Facebook then got as far as one friend suggesting that people who objected to the planet-trashing excesses of U2’s tour wanted us to “email [all the gig-goers] to stay home and make organic muffins…..” – the kind of Richard Littlejohn-esque reductionist, lazy thinking that leads someone to say such things, often stems from the feeling that something they value highly has been questioned – in this case, it was a friend who was deeply moved by the U2 gig he went to, so any attempt to frame them as irresponsible needs refuting and debunking. Continue reading “U2 And The Feast Of Enoughness”

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Fame, Fame, Fatal Fame – Michael Jackson And The Death of Global Super-Stardom

The death of Michael Jackson – like so many celebrity deaths – has brought with it a swathe of responses, both from the public and in the media.

Anyone who ever met him gets dragged out to talk about ‘their relationship’, and anyone remotely famous who might have a connection (be it sharing the pop-charts with him in the 80s, that they at some point in the past expressed a liking for his music, or just happen to be famous and black) is door-stepped for their comment.

It’s a fairly unpleasant media feeding frenzy, but it’s definitely serving a voracious need amongst a large section of the populus to be handed a secular liturgy for mourning the death of someone that, while insanely significant in the history of popular music, hadn’t made a notable artistic contribution in 20 years, and was written off a few years ago as a freaky paedo that many people (without any real evidence or experience of the case) thought escaped jail on a technicality…

For all those of us who hadn’t seen him live in over a decade, only listened to his older records (or not at all), and whose main month to month awareness of his was the reports of his spectacular and mind-boggling financial collapse, the emotional outpouring seems to be more an expression of 3 things:

  • a desire for some kind of connection with *the thing that’s going on* – get our opinion in, be part of the public conversation, tell everyone you always thought he was a genius/freak/whatever.
  • a sadness – close to grief – for our youth (a deeper expression of the same thing that drives people to watch I Love The 80s)
  • a largely unarticulated – but it appears, deeply felt – sense of loss for the age when musical and media megastars could MEAN something. (Andrew Dubber mused on this on Twitter)

Michael Jackson in his day combined musical genius, innovation and fame-beyond-measure. He was a truly global phenomenon. Massive far beyond the reaches of late 70s Ameri-centric radio and the English-speaking world. Larger than life, weirder that weird, but astoundingly gifted. Ever since Off The Wall came out, generation after generation of kids have connected with his music (there’s something about his music that definitely – and in light of the court case from a few years back, disturbingly – connects with pre-teen kids more than almost any other soul/funk-based music).

His creative partnership with Quincy Jones, producer of Off The Wall, Thriller and Bad, produced some of the most iconic moments in the pop canon, but since Bad, he’s produced little that’s considered musically significant (I saw him live in the late 90s, when I interviewed his bassist, Freddie Washington for Bassist Magazine – outstanding show, but definitely all about the decade-plus old hits).

So what do we get out of grieving?
What are the questions we need to ask about the impression we had of him, the false feeling of connection we had with him as a person through his music and the press, and our complicity as part of a media-hungry world that fueled his madness (largely, it seems attributed to a seriously screwed up relationship with his dad, but made worse by his fame-neccesitated isolation).

Neverland, bubbles, oxygen-tanks, Liz Taylor, plastic surgery, llamas, friendships with kids, that documentary… A life documented like a dystopic flip-side to the Truman Show, but one that destroyed him.

At the recent UnConvention conference in Salford, I was asked at the end of our panel on being ‘outside the box’ what my one piece of advice was for musicians looking at their place in the world of music. My comment was

‘it’s more important to be nice than it is to be talented’

if becoming a ‘great musician’, and more pertinently, a ‘famous musician’ turns you into a reclusive lunatic, your priorities are screwed. Quit music, get a job in a bookshop, and leave fame to those whose narcissism is so overpowering they’ll pursue it to their own death.

Michael was rightly celebrated for his musical contribution, but his fame and its destructive influence on his life was out of all proportion to that (how could any music possibly live up to that??) – his public persona was a media-created 2-headed chimera: musical deity and social demon, invented to seed the front pages with stories between the album releases. If the next album’s a turkey, who cares, we’ve got pics of him in an oxygen tent, kissing a monkey dressed in tiny human clothes! Win!

Fame is the downside to success, and the way it removes the consequences from ones actions means that people like MJ who desperately needed help to recover from his screwed up childhood-in-the-spotlight never got it. If you’re heading towards it, in the words of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, “Run away! Run away!”

Or, indeed, put another way:

“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

Nothing is worth that.


So, commenters – fame, celebrity, talent… where does it all go from here? What does a tale like this mean for those of us working in music, and using social media to break down the myths around our lives? Is ‘accessibility’ just another myth, once you get beyond a certain as-yet-undefined number of pseudo-personal connections? Have at it!

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How To Respond To A Crisis. A Lesson From Sungard.

I have a friend who works in Marketing for Sungard – they’re a huge, multi-national, multi-billion dollar IT Services/financial information/Software company. Massive. Bigger than big.

What interesting for us musical types is their response to the financial crisis. A situation which, naturally, they took very seriously indeed, partly because they were deeply affected, but also because it was a time when all the big finance companies were being shaken up, and previously held notions of who were the ‘big players’ could be re-jigged. It was a chance for companies to rebrand, reposition, and use the recession as a chance to do some fairly risky thinking, and ask some massive questions. Continue reading “How To Respond To A Crisis. A Lesson From Sungard.”

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