Manufactured Competition: Don’t Believe the Hype
Our media culture is driven by superlatives. This extremism leads to disappointment and distrust, since the vast majority of communications people receive are exaggerations and false. (A significant consideration is that most advertising’s imperative nature would be considered rude if it occurred in face-to-face contexts.)
Advertising is bathed in radical, all-or-nothing language to ensure maximum provocation and authority. Throughout the ages, this sort of propaganda was largely nonexistent and rarified. Today, it is almost inescapable and consequently has influenced the way people think. This element has altered and harshened our cultural climate. Largely, this is due to marketing’s goal being to provoke anxiety while simultaneously offering a solution to resolve it. Rather than finding a need and filling it, propaganda strives to manufacture needs that then must be filled (to then again be perpetually displaced).
The desire for the “best” can only lead to disappointment. For there rarely exists such a distinction. With a planet of billions and counting, the concept that chosen individuals are so superior that they should be listened to or looked at exclusively, and the majority silenced, is a profit-steered construct.
Managers, agents, promoters, and music companies protect their interests, in the same manner that petroleum giants hire mercenary armies in oil rich, undeveloped outposts. Profits foil the greater good, and artists past their prime are propped up like straw effigies, kept going by artificial life support, so that we can be subjected to the decades of dribble from them. Many a one-shot writer’s, idiot savant’s, or prodigy’s gifts were ephemeral and, in some cases, even killed off by the trappings and/or ramifications of success.
Worse yet, usually very few of those that are trend-riders outlive the novelty phase. They fall into the quick fix of bell-bottom sounds that come forth with a pre-issued, ready-made expiration date, a cultural shelf life.
Instead, classic works free us from time. And these almost always emanate in the absence of ego. Often, so much so, that the contribution was made anonymously.
Not that any of those lottery-lucky performers deserve being begrudged, but in a more holistic and aesthetically minded culture, ailing artists would be issued anti-record contracts and paid to stop making albums. Or even more, paid to unrelease their paler efforts.
“In the name of ‘eminent domain,’ you’ll need to step away and hand over that Les Paul now, sir.”
But, instead, once-visionary groups are allowed to degenerate into tribute bands to their former selves, releasing ever fainter facsimiles of their apex, in an endless string of hollower “comebacks.” This is done, rather than recognizing and admitting that the limits of their own imaginations have already peaked and been duly strip-mined. They, instead, loiter in the collective consciousness. The hero of today is almost predestined to become the despot of tomorrow, should they not self-terminate and bow out gracefully.
Far too often, once an artist has become a cash-cow, they are milked dry and paraded around like Stalin’s corpse. (I had the misfortune of witnessing, by chance, the final performance of a blues giant, weeks before he passed on. He had to be led by the hand to a chair, did not once touch with his hands the instrument set in his lap the entire time, babbled incoherently and sporadically somewhere around the vicinity of his microphone, and it was clear that he had only the foggiest idea he was even on a stage. I expected at any moment for him to start singing, “Get out of my house! How did all these people get into my house? Somebody, call the police!” In such cases, it would seem that more than a paying audience, Elder Protective Services should’ve been on the scene.)
This is not about ageism. Clearly, some artists are delayed-bloomers and their greatest work comes late (Little Jimmy Scott; Norman Maclean’s first novel A River Runs Through It being published when he was seventy-three).
Drugs and other indulgences aside, few things are more deadly than the pride (and the self-consciousness and grandiosity) that the star-system engenders. The instant an artist even dares to conceptualize a “legacy,” the muse has left them for purer portals. This is night and day from an artist at their peak, overflowing with so many ideas, that they are indefatigably outpaced by them and driven to distraction. Inspiration is a restless thing. And, if that person is further insulated by yes-people and the bloated “G”-word gets bandied about too liberally, then the quality of their output will predictably fall in direct disproportion to that wicked word’s use.
The fact is, if remembered at all, even a venerated author’s entire work is often depleted down to a single misquoted or misattributed touristic blurb (Capote for Venezia, Mark Twain for something he never even said about San Francisco).