Saturday, June 27, 2009

My Leg Measurements And The Size Of My Cock

I know celebrity is odd, and I also know that lots of other people know that. Still, I hope it isn't only me that thinks that it's pretty bizarre if there's a real need for an eight-page supplement on the life of an only just cold musician who had made no new music of any note for well over a decade or that satisfying that alleged need is anything but a bafflingly vicarious exercise in sanctimonious intrusion. I suppose I can make sense of a regret that there'll be no more music, but the thought that there's anything more than a passive consumption of product, however wonderful that product was, to the relationship is quite alien to me. What otherwise unsatisfied need is being met by projecting the features of a real, mutual, in some way intimate, relationship on to the surely long-mad one-time purveyor of pop music whose genius after all lay in the way it was polished out of all reality? And if anyone mentions Diana, Obergruppenfurher of our hearts, I'll claw my own eyes out, or at least theirs.

3 comments:

Phil said...

All very weird. I don't often link to Nick Cohen these days, but his image of the front page of the Times reporting the death of Elvis is... interesting. Obviously there's been a generation or two grown to adulthood listening to pop music rather than Schubert in that time, but I don't think that's quite the whole of it.

Rob Jubb said...

I really don't think it is the whole of it: it's not just who matters, but the way in which they matter, as if celebrity of itself is the foundation of some deep personal relationship. Maybe I'm being hypocritical about this - I'm not sure I'd find the assumption of the sort of relationship that can ground grief so odd in the case of a sportsperson or even a more confessional musician - but it just seems so profoundly wrong, in all kinds of ways; the implied emotional structure of people's lives, turning the properly private into the tawdrily public, the whole of it.

El said...

There was also the obit twice, and six pages each on Fri and Sat (and the 6:30 headline on the Today programme). It's a bit much