Over on her blog, Kelley Eskridge has a video of a “Bono Moment” in which you see two distinct types of fans interacting with U2’s lead singer. Check it out and come back here.
Okay, the guy in the t-shirt obviously is carrying on a conversation. he may be being a fan, but he hasn’t lost his mind. The female is being…a groupie, I guess. Though the groupies I’ve met in my time have been a bit more specific about what they wanted and had a better plan on how to get it. In any event, the questions Kelley raises are interesting and relate on so many levels to so many different things. The fan reaction—mindless adulation bordering on deification—looks to me, has always looked to me, like exactly the same kind of nonsense people put into religion. Mindless, utterly uncritical adoration of an image and the set of emotions with which that image is connected in the mind of the adulant. You can see the same thing in politics. To a lesser degree with less public personalities—writers, painters, photographers (I never knew anyone who elevated a photographer to the level of sex god, but I have known people who got off on sleeping with painters, and of course there’s a kind of Nabokovian/Bellow/DeLillo-esque subculture of writer groupies…) and other creative types—but actors and musicians seem to get all the dedicated obsessives.
I’ve never had this happen to me. I’m not sure if I’m grateful or resentful—having somebody want to associate themselves with you in a mindless swoon because your work has made them, I don’t know, climax maybe is on a certain level appealing. But it’s appealing the same way porn is—something most people, if they’re at all sane and grounded, kind of grow out of and get over. I know I would not find it very attractive now. When I was twenty-five? You betcha. Bring ’em on.
But if I’d had that then I think I’m fairly sure I would have wearied of it very quickly. I long ago realized that sex, to me, involved the other person—emphasis on Person—and the best sex I ever had included the good conversations before and, especially, after. (There is a point, of course, where you realize that sex is a conversation, of a very particular sort, and takes on a whole new dimension, which one-night-stands, no matter how good they might be, just can’t provide.)
But the real problem with all this is that art is more than just any one thing and the artist is not the art. The two are inextricably linked. Here is a video discussing the question of artist-in-relation-to-muse which I find illuminating. The notion that the talent “arrives” and you act as conduit through which creativity happens is not, as the speaker suggests, a new one, and it’s not one I’m particularly in sympathy with—it all happens in my brain, it’s definitely mine—but I certainly find her analysis of the psychology of following through intriguing and true. Once the muse is finished with you on a given project, you do not continue to exist as though in the grip of the work. There is a person there that pre-figures the work and who will be there after it’s done that has all the needs and wants and sensibilities of a normal human being. To be treated as some kind of transcendence generating machine by people is in some ways disenfranchising. For a writer, if the well from which inspiration and material are drawn is the honesty of human interaction, then the gushing idiot fan robs the writer, for a few minutes at least, of exactly that.
But it also sets the artist up to become a prisoner. A prisoner of other people’s expectations. Those expectations always play a part in anyone’s life, but certain aspects—the most artificial ones—get exaggerated in the instance of fan adoration.
Watch Bono shift from one stance to another when he finally acknowledges the female. No, he doesn’t stop being Bono, but it’s almost as if he says “Oh, it’s time to do this sort of thing now” as he first recognizes her presence and then automatically poses for the camera, with this not-quite-disingenuous smirk. Because he also recognizes that, however silly this person is being, what she’s feeling right then is her’s and to claim it is artificial is wrong. Maybe an artificial set of expectations led her to this point, but now that she’s In The Moment, the emotions are real. If he’d ignored her or told her something snarky in an attempt to snap her out of it, all that would have resulted would have been an ugly moment, a bit of cruelty, and a lot of confusion on the fan’s part.
Some—perhaps most—of us grow up to a point where, although our respect and admiration for certain artists is immense to the point of feeling like we have nothing meaningful to say to these people (and after all beyond “I really enjoyed your work” what do we have to say to someone we just don’t know?) we realize that they are human beings doing a job of work. To idolize them is really a selfish act and blinds us to the possibilities in people who do not happen to occupy that slot in our pantheon of significance.
I was fortunate. Way back when I was possibly susceptible to becoming a kind of mindless acolyte, I had an opportunity to meet a couple of musical superstars under circumstances that allowed for the human element to dominate.
The first was a chance encounter with Martin Barre, guitarist of Jethro Tull. I worked at a camera shop and he came in when the band was in town. He’d heard that the owner of the shop had a big camera collection, museum quality, and he was interested in buying all or part of it. I had some of my own photographs hanging in the shop at the time and we ended up talking about photography. Barre was a collector. We had a ground upon which we could meet as rough equals and had a good conversation about it. It lanced the boil of idolization for me (and resulted a couple years later in my being able to go backstage and talk to Ian Anderson and a couple of others, and because of the basis of my albeit small relationship with Barre, the interaction was satisfyingly ordinary in many ways). Here was just a bloke who liked cameras and was a hobbyist and his talent, while I respected it enormously, didn’t get in the way of actually talking to him.
The other was with Rick Wakeman and was amusing in the extreme and I’ll save that story for later. But in both instances, I was able to just talk to these men in a way that standing in an autograph line would never have permitted, and consequently gave me—I suppose I could say “inoculated” me against the mindlessness of fan adulation.
Make no mistake, I treasure both those encounters as peak experiences. But I’ve never forgot that such people are gifted but ordinary.
Ordinary in the way that we all are and few of us are without special qualities and talents. The circumstances that lead to “stardom” are just that—circumstances. (Stephen King, for all his gifts as a narrative writer, benefited immensely from a publishing environment that simply does not exist anymore. Not that he wouldn’t have been significant anyway, but his stature would have taken much longer to achieve and might not have become what it is today without that initial synchrony.)
(In an argument several years ago involving the president, my opponent kept pushing the position that criticizing the president was the same as insulting the country, to which I finally said “Damnit, the president is not the country—he’s an employee! Well-paid, highly-placed, enormously powerful, but the son-of-a-bitch works for me!” It was not a view my opponent had ever seemed to consider before. It was for him a humanizing moment.)
I’m not sure what, if anything, to do about fan adulation. As I said, you can see in this exactly what happens in religious conversion. The mindlessness, the abandonment of intellect, the handing-over, as it were, of the Self to the momentary care of someone who is seen as Other Than Ordinary. I think anything that robs people of their self-possession is a bad thing, which is why I generally dislike being in large crowds—there is something about that many people being synced emotionally by a single event that disturbs me deeply. But it seems to be a human characteristic.
Which may be why I’m so very bad at determining the demographics of my own potential audience. I can’t say who will want to read my books, not as a definable group to which marketing might be targeted. I don’t buy books as part of a group, and if I did and I found out, I’d seriously re-examine my habits. I’m not a commodity. Either as an artist or as a fan. And yet, to make a living at art, there’s a degree of having to cater to that kind of thinking.
Another paradox, I suppose.