There is a song by The Stone Roses called “I Wanna Be Adored.” I’ve always loved the title. The song, not so much. It came out well before my time. To my ears it always felt a little watered down musically, like it was borne of some valley or lull between more progressive and lyrically profound peaks. I don’t know if that’s true. It’s generally regarded as the proto-Britpop anthem, a touchstone that gave us Oasis, Blur, etc in the 90s. Maybe its relationship to the origins of a pretty strong wave of cool makes up for its fairly anodyne arrangement.
It think it speaks to a particular strain of striving in the arts where the goal is to be just plain cool. The goal is also to be an object of fascination. A sexual idol. Rock music has always relied on the perception of cool to sell itself. The recipe is equal parts mysteriousness, edginess, rebelliousness, and sexiness. The most popular groups ride the zeitgeist for a few years then fade into a nostalgia act. Some are lucky to be endowed with pure talent and live on in history and on the back of evolving creativity. But to be sure, rock music is a young person’s game and nobody old is cool.
Looking back the idea of adoration and cool seems a little short-sighted, anachronistic even. Why aim to be a sex god when you could reach for something much bigger? Instead of making oneself the object of desire you can alter the public perception about a range of questions, issues, and even facts.
What I mean to say is you can now, in our present media and art environment, create a lie out of whole cloth (just make up some random nonsense if you want), convince people it’s true, then cite the perception you’ve created as evidence of some base validity that the thing you made up is in fact “possibly” true.
Let me give you an example. Just this week I read an op-ed where a GOP lackey said there was growing concern among the right-leaning electorate that the Justice Department had politicized the indictment process, even citing poll numbers that supported the argument. Now, how have most people arrived at that perception? Has someone told them that very thing ad nauseam over many weeks and months until it’s become almost an empirical reality or have they arrived at that opinion on their own after carefully considering a wide swath of federal indictments over many years? The question is purposely absurd because we all know the answer. And there are countless others swirling around cultural conversations that are nothing more than perceptions built on ignorance.
I’m surprised the artist community hasn’t stepped into this void of unreality. We have plenty of politicians there, and social influencers too. Their roles in public life have always been a form of kabuki theater and sleight of hand; a performance of stereotypes built on mountains of half-truths we’ve either agreed to ignore or echo with every breath. It’s true that many pop stars have crossed over into social influencers and back, and they are selling that notion of cool manifested in where I started this piece. I just think our pure artists should join in the fun because this march into the irrelevance of empirical truth isn’t going to end anytime soon. Better to find a chair before the music stops and you’re sitting on the floor or out of the game for good.
Which reminds me: did you know this blog has been nominated for a MacArthur Genius grant on multiple occasions. Or that every printed copy is redeemable at your local Wawa for a frozen beverage of your choice. Or that a real person has never authored any of these pieces. Or that a couple of people write most of these pieces in their spare time. Or that the idea for this blog came from a character in a story nobody outside of the author has ever read. Or that all the pieces for this archive are part of an archive found at a yard sale and we’re coming to the end of the stock.
One or all of these statements may be true or not. It doesn’t matter which.
