I can’t pee in my bathroom
I can’t pee in my yard
Can’t get in my house
Can’t get past the guard
Can’t have an affair
Can’t color my hair
’Cause there’s always somebody watchin’
—“There’s Always Somebody Watchin’”
(Thornton/Andrew)
NOWADAYS YOU CAN BE FAMOUS BECAUSE YOU ATE THE MOST WORMS, or get a record deal because you lost two hundred pounds on television. So what is fame anymore? When we were growing up, we would be ashamed if the way we got famous was by winning a talent contest. Nobody ever became the biggest fucking rock star on earth from being on Ted Mack’s The Original Amateur Hour. Those were people who had a poodle and a kazoo or something. I didn’t make it by skateboarding down a banister and landing in a pile of watermelons on YouTube in a minute-and-a-half video. It took well over half my life to get to where I am today.
The fact of the matter is, the audience is now the star.
Reality television shows and TMZ are on major networks now, and the point of these shows is so America can look at stars being ridiculed and made fun of and have cynical things said about them. But it didn’t just come along with the computer, it was already happening. What I’m talking about is cynicism. I’m cynical about cynicism. Cynicism has become popular, funny, and entertaining, so in order to combat it, I then have to become cynical about the perpetrators.
This goes back to my thoughts on the loss of heroes. Our children are never going to enter a record store and flip through every record and go, “Oh wow, Dickey Betts, Gregg Allman, Billie Holiday!” or whoever it is, read the liner notes, and get so excited to save up their three dollars and eighty-five cents—yes, ladies and gentlemen, it was three dollars and eighty-five cents for a fucking record album—so they can take it home and play it. You wanted to like it. You wanted to like it so fucking bad.
Today I feel like audiences go to movies and buy records to be, like, “Okay, let’s see what this motherfucker’s done this time.” It’s like, “Fuck these motherfuckers, I’m going to buy this record and rip it to shreds.” As a result, today every cartoon you see on TV, every TV show practically, is mean-spirited and designed to cut somebody to pieces. And it’s funny to people.
When people go to a movie today, some random person with a blog will point something out about it, and then the next thing you know that becomes the thing every article is about. “Did you notice how the continuity was horrible in that movie?” When I was growing up, we didn’t care. We went and saw a movie, and if we liked it we liked it, and if we didn’t like it we didn’t like it. Now we live in a society that drives artists inward, and so the real artists do not have the inclination to keep doing their art. They’re afraid of getting their hearts broken. That’s what happened to me anyway.
The point is, when the audience is so critical of the people who are still making the movies or making the records or writing the books or painting the pictures, they’re hurting entertainment, they’re hurting art, and they’re hurting themselves, mainly because they’re never going to feel that magical thing we felt when we were growing up.
I challenged this girl one time who was arguing with me saying I was some kind of dinosaur. I said, “Here’s an experiment for you. Take a sheet of paper and, starting with about 1980, write down all the songwriters, singers, and bands who, one hundred years from now, will be in the books as being incredible legendary performers or songwriters. Write them down.” She started throwing out names like Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen, and I said, “No, you can’t count them because they started out in the late sixties. I’ll give you REM and U2, because I’m trying to give you something. I’ll just say, if you take a sheet of paper and, starting at about 1975 and going back to the turn of the century, write down names, you don’t have enough paper in your house to write them all down.” There’s something to that.
I ain’t no dinosaur and I ain’t acting like my daddy. My daddy didn’t like the Beatles because my daddy came from a long line of Irish sawmill workers who were, you know, rednecks and shit, but they were all fairly well educated and came from a time when there wasn’t any child abuse—that didn’t exist as we know it. You messed something up, you got your ass beat with a razor strap, period. I had mine beat many times. If I made too much noise when he was on the graveyard shift when he worked in a factory, he’d fly through the room in the middle of the day and just beat the living dog shit out of me. That’s where I come from, and he came from something even worse than that, and his daddy came from something even worse than that.
When the Beatles came along, do you think my dad was going to like the Beatles? He didn’t care if they were good or bad, he wouldn’t have known it. My dad didn’t even like music. My dad was the only person I ever knew who actually didn’t like music. It’s not that he didn’t like rock and roll—he didn’t like music. Actually, no, he liked two songs: “Easter Parade” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” Those are the only two songs my dad liked. I’ll never know why. One’s from a musical, and the other one was supposedly about smoking reefer sung by a folk trio. My dad didn’t give a fuck about Peter, Paul, and Mary. If my dad ever ran into them, he’d beat their ass right in the street.
My dad didn’t like the Beatles because they were threatening to him, because they were young, nice-looking boys who were playing this strange outer-space music he didn’t know anything about, and it didn’t have anything to do with working or football or anything like that. He didn’t like them, but not because he thought, Oh, look at those simple lyrics, “If I fell in love with you would you promise to be true.” He just didn’t like them and went about his business liking other stuff.
Armchair critics have always been there, tearing apart lyrics like they know something though they’ve never written a song, and tearing apart a movie though they’ve never made a movie. Generally these guys are envious or jealous of the motherfucker who made it. But why did we not know about these guys before about ten years ago? Because of that fucking thing—that fucking computer right there. It’s like, “We’re gonna let everybody in the world have one of these machines here, and we’re gonna let every one of you call yourself whatever you want to call yourself. You are an Internet critic, you are a blogger, you have a title, you’re somebody.”
So, I’m just going to say I’m a research scientist. I’m going to tell everyone I’m a theoretical physicist. If some drooling idiot sitting in his basement writing reviews can call himself a legitimate movie critic, I’m going to start calling myself a theoretical physicist, and I’m going to say, “It’s my theory if I go outside to my swimming pool right now, stare at it long enough, and throw a softball in it, the United States Senate will appear on my lawn.” That makes me a theoretical physicist. We’ve let anyone call themselves whatever they want to call themselves, and the scary thing is that people listen to them and they’re missing all the goddamn magic in life because of it.
Having said all that, I want to point out a cat like Harry Knowles. I know him, he’s a good dude. He was a kid in Texas who started his little Ain’t It Cool News, and he used to sneak into screenings, then go put the word out on great movies before they came out. He’s a critic on the Internet, but Harry is a great guy who loves movies and wanted to spread the word about movies that maybe not everybody would see. Unwittingly, he was like Sam Peckinpah, the first guy to show blood squirting out of people in slow motion. That spawned a lot of bad blood-squirting movies, but Peckinpah did great ones. The problem is, every motherfucker with drool running out of his mouth is a critic. They’re not all Harry Knowleses, but they think they are. That’s how that shit happened.
I’ve always wished that critics were people who just talked about what they liked so they could present it to the people; it’s like, “Hey, you may not have heard this, and I think you should check it out,” as opposed to writing about stuff they don’t like so they can sound clever and cynical. I don’t even know why you would waste your time. If you don’t like it, don’t worry about it. It’s just like a “punish honk” in traffic. People want to punish now. We grew up just wanting to love everything, and if you didn’t, you simply didn’t pay much attention to it. To these so-called critics on the Internet, it’s not your sole responsibility in life to warn the public about this dreadful thing that’s going to make your ears bleed or your eyes burst. Is that what you really think? That you have a responsibility to the public to protect them from this horror? It just seems weird to me, and it’s a slap in the face to real critics.
I’m not saying that good critics don’t exist anymore. There are some terrific critics out there, and there are even some good ones that do it on the Internet. People who know what they’re talking about, so it’s kind of a slap in their faces because they’ve been doing this for a long time. They were there back in the day, and their profession is being watered down because of jealous hacks.
Bob Geldolf came on some TV show, I think it was Craig Ferguson, who I happen to really love—he kind of takes the piss out of people and society in general—and right in the middle of J.D. and I writing this rock opera about this very subject, Bob said, “Does nobody understand that this is an emergency? Why is nobody saying we’re turning into a bunch of morons?” He actually said it. And Craig Ferguson said, “Yeah,” and the audience cheered. If you bring people together and say this stuff, they cheer you too, and yet they keep doing the very thing they seemed to agree in the moment they’re not supposed to be doing. Nobody with any power is saying this. I don’t have any power, but maybe someone who does will put an end to this shit someday.