anti-theatricality in politics (the theatre kid trope) (the bling king)

Sometimes you get a bonanza - and so it with this Atlantic piece about the the new right-wing insult-trope of "theatre kid"

"The White House assistant press secretary, Davis Ingle, recently dismissed Senator Jon Ossoff as a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid.” The taunt was hardly novel. Theater kid has become a curious little term of abuse on the right. Another Trump White House spokesperson castigated Senator Alex Padilla for pulling an “immature, theater-kid stunt” after he was forcibly removed from a news conference last year for asking then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question. Spencer Pratt recently branded New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani a “theater-kid commie.” Conservative pundits have decried progressives for engineering a “theater-kid-occupied government.”

"The elastic insult is meant to belittle the target as inauthentic, attention-hungry, unserious, and unmanly. In adding feminine, Ingle handily made the subtext text."

But as writer Erik Forrest Jackson shows, the ultimate theatre kid is Trump. 

He draws on an 2004 interview he did for the magazine Show People in which Trump "gushed" about Broadway and in particular musicals. He'd seen Evita six times and was a particular fan of Patti LuPone. Other faves included Chicago, The Phantom of the Opera, My Fair Lady, and Hello, Dolly!

“I have attended Broadway shows for years. It’s one of the great things about New York.”  

Aged 23, he'd been involved as an associate producer of / investor in Paris Is Out!, "a 1970 comedy about a married couple planning a vacation. The show lasted 96 performances at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Clive Barnes in The New York Times called it “almost totally pitiable,” “trivial and silly,” and “a bad play.” "

Trump said: “Making it on Broadway is no easy feat.. I know what a difficult business it is and that the odds of success aren’t great, so I respect anyone who has managed to create a successful career there.... Wall Street may be tough, but the theater business is tougher.” 

He compared it the manly hard-hat endeavour of the construction industry: “a lot of details, a lot of foundation work”.

Returning to the Republican trope-du-jour, Jackson notes that

 "Ingle’s barb about Ossoff is useful for the way it clarifies the sneer’s intent: to turn expressiveness into weakness, enthusiasm into neediness, performance into fraud. The implication is that stage types and progressive politicians are craven, submissive, and insincere. Yet the actual work of being a theater kid demands a toughness Trump plainly prized.

"Then there is Trump himself. If theater kid means somebody with an instinct for showmanship, then he is an odd figure for the prosecution. Trump has a keen understanding of an entrance, a refrain, a music cue, and, perhaps above all, an audience. “You’re fired” was less a management philosophy than a line reading. Show tunes tend to be Trump’s music of choice at his Mar-a-Lago resort. As president, his compliment of choice is to praise people for looking their part, as if they came from “central casting.” Despite leading a movement that sneers at theater kids, Trump loves putting himself center stage.

"Instead of spending the time to seriously consider intelligence briefings warning that Iran would likely seize the Strait of Hormuz in a war, Trump has preferred to concern himself with showbiz. Take the Kennedy Center—as he certainly did. After replacing trustees with allies, Trump inaugurated his first board meeting as chairman last year by reminiscing about the 1982 opening night of Cats and proposing bringing some of his favorites back to the center, including Hello, Dolly!, Phantom of the Opera, Camelot, and Fiddler on the Roof. Here, at last, was his chance to graduate from theater kid to impresario.

"But, as he told me decades earlier, in the dramatic arts “the guarantee of success is not so solid.” Artists canceled their Kennedy Center appearances. Hamilton withdrew a planned engagement. By the fall of 2025, the organization was selling only 57 percent of its available tickets, down from 93 percent a year earlier.

"Worse still, his revered Patti LuPone responded to this state of affairs by calling him a “buffoon.”"

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Tangentially related to anti-theatricality via spectacle / luxury and other things the Puritans didn't approve of 

Reminded me of this pre-Trump book by Peter York

As referenced in this recent piece by Matt Viser

 Let Them Eat Gold: Taxpayers are now financing President Trump’s love of anything gilded.

When you approach the freshly gilded twin statues near the Lincoln Memorial, there is no mistaking that they are gold. Very, very gold. Distractingly gold—or, more precisely, covered in 23.75-karat gold leaf costing $5.1 million. The 19-foot statues, called The Arts of War, were once easy to miss but now look a bit like oversized children’s trophies, especially next to the classical and austere Lincoln Memorial. Seeing them is as if, on the walk between Arlington National Cemetery and the National Mall, you’d suddenly stumbled upon a P. F. Chang’s.

This is how President Trump is approaching his redecoration of Washington: glitzy and gaudy, even if out of place. He has already splashed gold all around the White House, but these statues are the most prominent symbols of Washington’s new gilded age. As the scaffolding around the statues came down this week, marking one of the few completions of a Trump-ordered renovation project, the president giddily posted photos on social media—and tourists, commuters, cyclists, and runners paused to take photos of their own of the capital’s latest can-you-believe-it attraction.

Trump has worn his love of gold like a blinging billboard. Mar-a-Lago’s ballroom is inspired by Versailles, and he has proudly bragged of golden bathrooms, golden airplane-seatbelt buckles, and a gold-infused penthouse suite. The Oval Office now looks like a Middle Eastern bazaar crossed with an opulent Cracker Barrel. Thick, gold frames line the walls; gold vases and ice buckets adorn the fireplace mantle; gold stars form a circle on the ceiling; and gold appliqués fill any gaps. (Trump insists that these are real gold, and not painted flourishes from Home Depot.) Last year, he exempted gold bullion from his reciprocal tariffs, and he named his special visa program for wealthy foreigners the Trump Gold Card. He has taken his personally designed presidential challenge coin (which is golden) and glued it to the center of the Oval Office door, at about eye level. The coasters are gold, the curtains are gold, and guests know to come bearing gifts of gold.

When FIFA President Gianni Infantino awarded Trump the first FIFA Peace Prize, it was a golden orb of a trophy. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook presented the president with a 24-karat-gold base to hold a glass sculpture. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year gave him a golden pager to commemorate an operation in which members of Hezbollah were killed when their pagers detonated. “See,” he said during a meeting with his Cabinet in March while riffing about all of the projects he’d launched in Washington, “I’m a gold person.”

It’s one thing for Trump to have a personal fascination with one of the world’s most expensive metals. It’s another for the president to flaunt it at a time when many Americans are struggling to pay rent, losing their health insurance, and seeing high prices at the gas pump. It may not quite be a “Let them eat cake” moment, but it is one where he seems to be saying: Let them see that I just spent  $5 million in taxpayer funds on golden statues.

Trump for decades has loved gold and marble, liberally sprinkling them about his development projects and his personal spaces. Ivana Trump, his first wife, who was the Trump Organization’s vice president of interior design, encouraged Trump’s gold obsession, according to Regime Change, the recent book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that has a golden cover. (Ivana’s love of the color proved lasting: She was buried in a gold casket.) In the 1980s, Trump bought Mar-a-Lago in South Florida and went on to put $7 million worth of gold leaf on the walls, plus gold-plated sinks near the ballroom. He hired the designer Henry Conversano, known for infusing golden flourishes in the Golden Nugget casinos, to remodel his Trump Tower penthouse apartment and work at his Atlantic City casino. In 1988, he purchased from the sultan of Brunei a yacht that was bathed in gold—couches, sinks, ceilings—and named it the Trump Princess.

“It was so gaudy. Almost shockingly gaudy. And he loved it. He thought it was the most beautiful thing out there,” Jack O’Donnell, one of Trump’s former casino executives who helped him host parties on the boat, told me. He speculated that Trump may have been inspired by the yacht when he remade the Lincoln Bathroom almost entirely in gold and marble.

Years later, in 2008, when Trump built a hotel in Las Vegas, the 406,000-square-foot facade was coated in a layer of gold-infused glass. More recently, when a group of Trump supporters erected a 22-foot statue of him at his golf course in Doral, Florida, they opted for a gold finish.

“To him gold was the essence of richness and class,” Barbara Res, who oversaw construction for the Trump Organization and was placed in charge of building Trump Tower, told me. “To him it meant, This is gold. This is mine. It’s the best you can get, and I’m the best. That’s how his mind works. I’m going to show you the best by buying the best.” Sometimes, she said, it wasn’t the best. It was a cheaper alternative that looked like gold but actually wasn’t (although she found that he was willing to spend his money for something that was his idea). He liked the design concept trompe l’oeil, a French word that means “deceive the eye,” where painters could make a column that looked like marble.

“It was tricking the eye of the consumer. He loved it,” Res said. “And he took an interest in the gold finishes. It reflects his taste and his ability to spend endless money on something beautiful. That’s what he wants people to believe.”

Whether it’s in his long, red ties; his swooshed-over hairstyle; or his “Thank you for your attention to this matter” social-media posts, Trump is all about branding. Perhaps nothing is more on-brand for him than his affection for gold. “I love the gold, but if you don’t use 24 karat gold, it doesn’t look good,” he told reporters last August. “It just beams,” he marveled in September. “It’s all real stuff,” he said in March. “You can’t imitate it. Someday they’ll discover a paint that will look like gold, and the guy’s going to be the richest man in the world.”

Peter York, a design and culture columnist, wrote in Politico Magazine in 2017 that Trump’s design style is “aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of.” Although it’s often associated with Italian Renaissance or French Baroque, York says a better  comparison is more recent. “The best aesthetic descriptor of Trump’s look, I’d argue, is dictator style,” he wrote.

Gold has often been used to represent imperial power, whether in 18th-century France or 19th-century Russia. When Trump went to the Middle East for his first foreign trip of his second term, I watched as he marveled at the gold and marble in the palaces of Doha and Abu Dhabi. “Versailles is not a gold leaf,” he said in June ahead of a trip to the palace. “Versailles is the real deal.”

The two Arts of War statues, called Valor and Sacrifice, were sculpted by Leo Friedlander and cast in Italy. They were dedicated in 1951, offered to the United States as a gift from the Italians for helping rebuild their country after World War II. Each statue shows a nude man and a seminude woman. Two other statues, collectively called The Arts of Peace, are nearby but still undergoing their golden glam-ups.

Each of the statues sits on a granite pedestal ringed with 36 stars, representing the states in the Union at the end of the Civil War. The statues, cast in bronze, were last regilded in 1971 and had since faded. Trump added them to the list of eyesores he wanted fixed before the nation’s 250th birthday, on July 4, and federal officials scrambled to meet his demands.

When I reached out to the White House to ask about the project, the president’s role in it, and his choice of gold, the spokesperson Davis Ingle responded with a statement that made no mention of gold and said, in part: “No other president has done more to beautify our Nation’s interior than President Trump.” He said that the president’s “bold vision” was ensuring that the 250th birthday was filled with “glory and pride.” He referred other questions to the Department of Interior, which did not address any of my questions about the project, its delays, the choice to heavily apply gold, or Trump’s involvement. “Residents and visitors are excited to see the city revitalized to the grand destination it was meant to be,” the department offered in a statement.

Federal officials did not seek competitive bids for the work on the statues, bypassing the typical process and awarding a contract in April for $5.1 million. The project was treated as a high priority by the National Park Service, according to The New York Times, which cited internal documents that referred to it as “a visible, high-impact example of how the N.P.S. is responding to presidential directives.” Extensive market research was not done to determine whether $5 million was a fair price, according to documents obtained by NOTUS, and the agency determined that only one company could meet the requirements of the work and the timeline: the Gilders’ Studio in Maryland.

The company, which did not respond to my message, has done a large number of regilding projects around the country, including the dome of the Georgia State House, the cupola of Faneuil Hall in Boston, and—perhaps most similar to the statues in Washington—the Sherman Monument in Central Park. A description of the project had a mandatory competition date of July 1. But for the past few weeks, as it had for the months before, the scaffolding remained up, and tarps read: We are making DC safe and beautiful.

Only now is the project coming into view, and although Trump is clearly pleased, others are less so. “Fit for an oligarch’s ballroom,” a review in ARTNews reads.

As I rode my bike past the new gilded statues Friday morning, I couldn’t help but wonder what would next succumb to Trump’s Midas touch. If a triumphal arch is constructed across the bridge, will it be just as glaringly golden? Will Trump cast the John F. Kennedy statue outside the Kennedy Center in gold? Is Abraham Lincoln, sitting nearby, at risk? Or the pensive Thomas Jefferson standing in the dome across the way? How far will Trump’s new golden age extend?

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Instead of funding universal healthcare or investing in solutions to the climate crisis that's burning up  natural beauty and choking the world this superhot summer....  all the resources of the American state are going to "beauty" and cruelty   

And senseless wars, a foreign policy that is like a Viking fantasy, looting the treasures of other counties... 

anti-theatricality in politics (the drama king) (enter: the love interest)

"The scriptwriters obviously decided to introduce Natalie Harp to spice things up in season three of 'Trump.' Viewers were getting bored by Vance, Miller, Hegseth, Blanche et al. The question: Is this mini-plot just a temporary diversion in the story? Or a major inflection point?" 

- Bill Kristol

"Mr. Trump seems to have a real fear of boredom. Even at his age he is restless; when there’s peace and quiet he seems to become anxious, as if he can’t tolerate normality. He shows little faith in quiet progress, as in: Set good policy in place and hope it succeeds inch by inch. Instead he creates drama or a crisis, arouses a counterforce, attacks this new enemy, experiences fear—will my luck hold?—defeats the new enemy, feels relief, relaxes. Then, restless again and on the prowl, he creates new drama . . .

That is a real weakness in life, needing drama. It will find you on its own. When you need it you’re always generating new stakes, and in a presidency they’re often high, and when you fail that is some big failure."

- Wall Street Journal

"Trump is willing to undermine and destroy any institution, law, norm or ideal cherished by Americans in a bonfire of his vanities"

- Maureen Dowd (the anti-theatricalism quite buried there, via the reference - probably mediated through Tom Wolfe - to the proto-Puritan Savoranola and his bonfire of the vanities). I haven't read the whole piece though

Ah she's used the pun before.

"Donald Trump refused to leave the World Cup stage. He clung to the trophy as though it belonged to him. The players celebrated around him while the cameras searched in vain for an adult willing — or able — to explain to the president of the United States that the ceremony wasn’t about him.

It happened in plain sight. It was real — yet it remains almost impossible to believe.

The psychological fragility on display was breathtaking. It was narcissism stripped of disguise, vanity without inhibition, neediness elevated to statecraft. Historians will study the footage because it captures, in a handful of seconds, something speeches and books can’t: a man so consumed by the hunger for adulation that he can’t surrender the spotlight, even when the world’s greatest athletes have earned it.

There are images that explain an era better than any speech. This was one of them.

Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico and Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, looked less like honored guests than reluctant hostages, unwilling participants in a spectacle they neither chose nor could escape. They trailed as far behind Donald Trump as protocol and dignity would allow, instinctively placing distance between themselves and the strange gravity of the moment, as though proximity itself carried risk.

Trump shuffled ahead, slightly stooped, moving with the slow, inexorable certainty of a lava flow — impossible to hurry, impossible to redirect, consuming every ounce of attention in its path. It was a procession of malice wrapped in vanity, instability wrapped in power, all bundled into a slovenly suit and Florsheim shoes straining around the swollen ankles of the American Nero.

There was something almost Shakespearean in the grotesquery of it. The leader of the world’s most powerful democracy behaved not as a statesman, but as an aging monarch who no longer distinguishes between the state and himself. Every trophy is his trophy. Every triumph is his triumph. Every stage is his stage.

Roald Dahl gave the world Veruca Salt, the spoiled child who believed every prize belonged in her hands. Lewis Carroll imagined the Mad Hatter, imprisoned inside his own absurdity. Donald Trump has accomplished something neither author attempted. He has fused both characters into a single living performance while occupying the presidency of the United States.

Then came the boos.

The stadium rejected him. It mocked him. It reviled him.

It no longer mattered.

There was a time when applause and condemnation occupied different chambers of the human heart. There was a time when shame retained the power to restrain conduct and public humiliation could provoke reflection. Donald Trump crossed that frontier years ago. He no longer distinguishes between admiration and contempt because each satisfies the same craving. To be cheered or jeered is irrelevant so long as the lights remain fixed upon him. The crowd’s hatred has become merely another form of attention, and attention is the only currency he has ever truly valued.

President Norma Desmond has reached his final cruising altitude.

There’s no longer a Donald Trump who performs for an audience. There’s only Trump performing for Trump. The man has been consumed by the character. The character has been devoured by the caricature.

The cartoon has swallowed the man.

He now exists as self-parody made flesh — a photographic joke requiring no caption, a punchline that no longer needs a setup because his mere appearance completes it. Satire has become obsolete. Exaggeration has become impossible. Reality has outrun parody.

This is the final destination of narcissism. It isn’t merely vanity. It’s the obliteration of the self beneath an invented persona until nothing authentic remains. The individual disappears inside the performance. The mask fuses to the face. Every moment becomes an audition. Every stage becomes compulsory. Every camera becomes indispensable.

The tragedy isn’t simply personal. It’s national.

The presidency was created to embody constitutional restraint, republican virtue, and public service. Donald Trump has transformed it into an instrument of perpetual self-validation. He mistakes visibility for leadership, celebrity for greatness, dominance for strength, and spectacle for achievement. The office no longer elevates the man. The man diminishes the office.

History has a merciless eye for such moments.

Long after today’s arguments have dissolved into the fog of forgotten headlines, this image will remain. A lonely, grasping figure refusing to release a trophy he didn’t win. World champions celebrating around him while he inserts himself into their triumph. Foreign leaders hanging back as though they had wandered unwillingly into someone else’s fever dream. A president incapable of understanding that the greatest office in the world confers responsibility, not ownership.

The footage will endure because it distilled an entire political age into a handful of unforgettable minutes. It required no commentary. It needed no narration. The picture explained itself.

The ceremony belonged to the champions.

Only one man believed it belonged to him.

- Steve Schmidt

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Yet another reminder of the impotence of eloquence

Even as the argument of the piece (images are the language of today) is expressed using the very linear, sustained-thought mode that has been rendered irrelevant and ineffectual

As if finely wrought tropes and subtle thinking could defeat the pathological vulgarity of Trump

It's just comfort food for the educated, isn't it?

Shocking how a single monster ego could cancel and collapse everything

And that the pushback - if it does come finally - is more to do with gas prices and the cost of living, than principles values standards and all those norms one unwittingly depended on and probably felt free to scoff at or disregard...

Still, surely those who mocked the liberals's "over-reactions" and dire warnings, who talked of Trump Derangement Disorder, are having some second thoughts now... 

Bubblegum Revolution

 

As powerful - and as political - as Spacemen 3's "Revolution"

(Don't be too quick to understand that sentence)

The Monkees perplex -  when the results are as a pleasing and potent as the "real thing", does intent / content / context matter? 

And how "real" is the real thing anyway? 

"Street Fighting Man" had completely different words up until almost the last minute, you know. 

The Fame Monsters

Strangely no mention of the Blondely Ambitious one in this piece about ambition in pop and "a certain monstrousness" of the popstar personality. Published in the winter 2009 edition of GQ Style, it's a Madonna-free zone,

Also absent is her inheritor Lady Gaga. With the long lead times with a quarterly magazine, I must have written it the late summer.  I hadn't heard The Fame, was barely aware of singles like "Paparazzi" and I doubt I would have known a revamped version of the album titled The Fame Monster was coming out in November . But clearly there was something in the air. 

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AMBITION

GQ Style, winter 2009

by Simon Reynolds

Just a few months before Michael Jackson died, I felt the urge to write about him for the first time ever. I was in a café and "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough" came on and even though I must have heard it hundreds of times since first seeing the video on Top of the Pops in 1979, for some reason the song hit me like a lightning bolt. For all its falsetto-funk silkiness , the sheer aggression of the sound--the coiled rhythmic tension, the stiletto penetration of Jackson's voice--seemed to attack with the force of The Stooges or Sex Pistols . But what I really came away with was a vague idea, just a phrase really: "total music", the idea of a category of pop set apart from the merely excellent. Listening, rapt, I imagined the electricity of the Off the Wall sessions: Quincy Jones assembling the highest-calibre session players available, no expense spared, and pursuing perfection with an almost militaristic focusing of energy. The achievement: flawlessness so absolute that it didn't so much transcend commercialism as blast right through it, such that domination of the radio and the discotheques was merely a by-product, a secondary benefit, of the quest.

"Total music" occurs through the synergy of talent, limitless funding, a really good idea… and something else: a superhuman drive, the "right stuff" that Tom Wolfe wrote about in connection with NASA's moon missions. I imagine this intangible elan infused the making of Abba's music, or the classic recordings of the Beatles, Phil Spector, Brian Wilson. There's loads of music that I love and that probably means more to me than "total pop", records made by artists both more unassuming yet in some ways more narcissistically self-absorbed and idiosyncratic. But there's no denying the special charge that imbues music when it's made by people who know they're making history, who can be confident they're taking it out onto the largest stage available.

In the Sixties there was a long moment where the best pop (in terms of constantly pushing forward and sheer musical quality) was also the best-selling: Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Byrds, Dylan, Beach Boys, Doors. (There's really only a few exceptions: Love, Velvet Underground). Aesthetic ambition and commercial ambition were indivisible. This folk-memory of this ideal persisted long after it ceased to apply, inspiring everyone from Bowie and Roxy to the major punk bands to the likes of U2, Bjork, Radiohead. But over the last couple of decades the two kinds of ambition have come to seem more and more tenuously connected, to the point where a phenomenon like the Beatles seems almost implausible, a fluke.

My dad had this maxim, something like: aim for the top, because if you fall short, you'll at least reach higher than if you'd aimed for the middle and fallen short of that. It's not completely true: o'er vaulting ambition can result in "EPIC FAIL", whereas a shrewd strategy of modest aspiration might lead to steady sustained successes. Still, remembering this motto led me to this thought: if you want to do great work in music or any art form, just as important as talent or imagination is the desire to be great. You might have the most refined melodic gift, the subtlest musical mind, but if you don't have that will-to-power, the balls and the gall…

Certain bands only make sense at the top of the pop world: Springsteen and U2 were made to work in widescreen, to issue the most sweeping, speaking-for-Everyman statements. "Overbearing", "bombastic": the insults are merely the measure of their achievement, and nobody can take away those moments when they mattered (Born To Run, then again Born in the U.S.A., for Bruce; the majestic sequence from "Pride" to "Streets Have No Name", for Bono and Co). Of course, there are artists who have the temperament of the world-historical genius but who don't actually have anything worth saying. Jim Steinman, the fevered brain behind Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell, Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", and Celine Dion's "It's All Coming Back To Me Now", exemplifies this syndrome. Steinman is far from deficient in the will-to-greatness: he's got an unbridled flair for the grandiose, plus the requisite perfectionist streak (he's been known to spend huge amounts of his own private money on projects when the original budget's run out). Unfortunately his ambition is not accompanied by the filter of taste, to put it mildly.

Talking of finances, the rise over the last decade or two of home studios and digital audio workstations, has meant that it's possible for artists to make massive-sounding and expensive-seeming albums for a fraction of what it once cost. It's much cheaper and easier to create the illusion of luxuriant orchestration or to pull off ear-boggling sonic trickery of the kind that would have taken days of intricate labour by George Martin and Abbey Road's white-coated technicians. Artistic ambition, in the old days, had to go hand in hand with commercial ambition, just to pay off the bills. Nowadays the two kinds of aspiration have become severed. The Colossal Sounding, Colossally Ambitious Album is today a sort of specialist subgenre of rock, purveyed by groups like Flaming Lips. And not just rock: take Erykah Badu, who renovates the tradition of politically engaged, autobiographically personal "progressive soul" masterpieces by the likes of Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, and Marvin Gaye. Her vastly ambitious New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) sold pretty well but it could never hope to achieve the mass cultural impact of Songs In the Key of Life or What's Goin' On. These are different times and Badu, like her buddies The Roots and Common, is catering for a niche market of historically-informed cognoscenti who still listen out for that kind of takes-the-measure-of-the-zeitgeist Epic.

Although a singer, Badu regards herself part of hip hop. Surprisingly, given its sketchy record with the Album, rap has been one of the main places this decade where commercial ambition and artistic ambition have remained tightly entwined, with performers like Outkast, Jay-Z and Kanye West putting out sonically adventurous, alternately self-glorifying and socially-conscious albums that sold in huge numbers. It stands to reason that rap is richly endowed with "the will to be great" because the genre is all about self-aggrandisement. What LL Cool J called "talking on myself" still defines the art's core: MCs exalt their own ability to dominate and defeat the competition, finding the most vivid, witty, unique and creatively brutal ways of describing their prowess.

Rap expresses and exposes the ugly side of pop's ambition: its profoundly inegalitarian streak, a drive towards status, glory, preeminence. The aspiration to greatness often comes with a certain monstrousness of personality *. Look at Morrissey. Pop stardom was always, he frankly admitted, a form of revenge exacted on the world for his outcast adolescence. But when society's "mis-shapes" (to use Jarvis Cocker's term) become stars, the result can be unsightly. The retaliatory narcissism of early Smiths lyrics ("the sun shines out of our behinds", "England owes me a living") is one thing when the singer is a skinny wisp only a few years out of obscurity. But from a fifty year old pop institution with the build of a bouncer, striding across arena stages and tossing the microphone cord with lordly disdain, it starts to look like any old showbiz prima donna. Rap has its own Morrissey in Kanye West. I never used to understand hip hop fans complaining about his monster ego (this is rap, what did you expect guys?). But after the bloated self-pity of much of 808s & Heartbreak and his disruption of the MTV Video Awards, I'm starting to see their point.

The supreme case of the will-to-be-great turning rancid is Michael Jackson, of course. Around the point he started calling himself (and insisting on being called) the King of Pop, Jackson 's output shifted from "total pop" to "totalitarian kitsch": the nine gigantic statues of MJ as a Dictator built at his requirement by Sony and installed in European cities to promote 1995's HIStory: Past, Present & Future, Book 1, the fascistic promo film for that record with Jackson in full Khadaffi-style regalia amid hundreds of soldiers. Think too of the Versailles-like indulgence and corruption of Neverland, and that peculiar quasi-dynastic marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of the King. When pop stars try to externalize the grandeur inside their music, to make reality match up to its utopian absoluteness, the results can be grotesque, a tragic-comical catastrophe of nouveau-riche kitsch.


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"photography poisons the world" (All the World's A Screen addendum)

Here's an entry from The Biographical Dictionary of Film in which David Thomson rehearses some of the concerns about "movie" addressed in the new book A Sudden Flicker of Light:

Fortuitously - but purely accidentally - timed for the tenacious Madonna's return to visibility with an alleged return-to-form album.

But what if the form being returned to is of no concern or interest to you? Or even actively repulsive, as with Thomson? 

I can't say I have never liked a Madonna record. The early club tracks, when she was almost a nobody,  on a par with the great Vicky D - had a husky exuberance.  "Into the Groove" conveys a timeless sentiment and really does sound carefree. "Vogue," as record and video, had a certain military ruthlessness that earned one's submission. "Justify My Love" has a good stolen beat and some heavy-breathing soft-porno appeal. "Ray Of Light" - if you could stifle your guffaw at the idea of Madonna taking a spiritual turn, getting into Kabbalah and all that - is pleasant pop trance. 

But you know how there are people who are born to sing? Madonna isn't one of them, which is why there is such a sinewy texture to her vocals. Nor is she nice to look at - not because of her looks but because the personality radiates through the face.

I always remember the unsentimental compliment paid by her freshly married husband Guy Ritchie, when you'd think they'd have been in the honeymoon phase: something like "she's a great girl. Such a hard worker".  

Can't find the exact quote but searching turned up a post-divorce compliment of sorts:

"She's a manifester, if there ever was one. First-rate manifester. Madonna makes things happen. Put Madonna up against any twenty-three-year-old, she'll outwork them, outdance them, outperform them."

Apparently her four-hour daily exercise sessions were a bone of marital contention. 

Still I suppose that stardom-at-all-costs drive does makes her glam, which is why she makes a brief appearance in the Aftershocks section of S+A, with five lines on "Vogue":

1990

March -- Madonna’s B&W retro-glamour video for “Vogue” either pays tribute to  or coopts New York’s gay subculture of balls and costumed competition, to create an anthem of escape-through-fantasy and magical masquerade. Learn from the screen gods and goddesses who “gave good face”, advises Madge;   “strike a pose, there’s nothing to it.” 

All the World’s a Screen (anti-theatricality’s eternal returns) (cutting up reality)

David Thomson has a new book out, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, in which he convinces himself that the artform to which he has dedicated his entire life is actually corrupting civilisation and profoundly responsible for the current political hellscape. 

In a New York Times profile titled "Did Movies Ruin Everything?," A.O. Scott, himself a distinguished film critic, gives the nutshell: 

"According to Thomson, movies — especially American movies — have whitewashed history, glorified violence and made role models out of thugs, narcissists and murderers. The consequences shape our public life. Donald Trump “is our movie man,” Thomson writes, meaning that Trump’s presidency, which Thomson sees as a catastrophe, was foretold and to some extent made possible by Hollywood....Turning our humanity upside down and our values inside out is what good movies do. It’s what movies do best. A Sudden Flicker of Light trains its gaze... on certain indelible characters — Charles Foster Kane, Michael Corleone, Hannibal Lecter — who have become icons of charismatic degeneracy. Their ambiguous collective legacy is summed up in the book’s verdict on “The Godfather”: “So much that is grand — and too much that is a disgrace.”

Scott zooms in on key quotes from the book: “attention has become infernal, hopeless, yet unstoppable”...  “we let the lifelike distract us from life” ... "We are no longer the selves we hoped to be. We are not exactly alive any longer.”  And he also highlights a distinction between film / cinema / the movies (with the definite article) and Thomson's use of the word "movie" as an open-ended noun for a blurring of reality and unreality, a sort of indeterminate and borderless state that enfolds the entire social fabric, as opposed to a discrete unit of entertainment: 

"Movie”... refers not to an individual film but to the mode of cognition, the way of seeing and imagining the world, that the medium has imposed on us. Whether or not we go to the movies, most of us live in what he sometimes calls “the condition of movie,” a state of perpetual fantasy and denial."

Thomson is a learned man (not just about his chosen special subject,....which anyway touches on almost everything in the world, the other artforms, human history etc... to write about film with his level of penetration is to write about all things). So is A.O. Scott. So I'm surprised that either of them think these ideas - this reflex of distrust and disquiet - are new. 

"Movie," as Thomson uses it, serves the same function as the Spectacle, as theorized and denounced by Guy Debord and the Situationists. The angle of Situationist concern, though, was less about corruption of the moral core in the audience and more about an alleged passivity and isolation induced by spectactorship (of film, TV, sports, etc) (a questionable idea for many reasons, this passivity and isolation). 

In his later Comments on the Society of Spectacle,   though, Debord's emphasis did shift to the idea of contemporary life as saturated with lies, fictions, propaganda, multiple simultaneous “competing conspiracies in favor of the status quo”.

"Movie" is also similar in tone and tenor to the perspective of Daniel J. Boorstin's The Image, widely read on its 1961 publication and partly inspired by the election campaign of John F. Kennedy. 

Boorstin railed against “the menace of unreality” creeping into every area of American national life and mass culture.  He diagnosed a social-cultural malaise of “nothingness,” in which “the vacuum of our experience is actually made emptier by our anxious straining with mechanical devices to fill it artificially.”  Television, advertising and political theater is more the focus of The Image than Hollywood but to the extent that it is about the world seen through screens, the critique is close to Thomson's "movie" and is still absurdly applicable to our present. Indeed deep fakes and AI bring a dystopian supercharge to Boorstin's warnings about “a new elusiveness, iridescence, and ambiguity” contaminating everyday life.  

But these kinds of anxieties go even further back: there's a current of anti-mimesis running through Western Civilisation all the way back to Plato.  

A particularly vivid eruption came with the Puritan vilification of the theatre. Puritan tracts denouncing the play houses rehearse many of the fears  and doubts that afflict Thomson in A Sudden Flicker of Light. The way stage plays make audiences identify with the strongest characters on the stage, who are usually the most evil.  The way that theatre stirs up violent emotions and irrational passions - and alluringly depict sins and vices of all kinds.  The simple unreality of it all.  During Cromwell's rule, the playhouses were actually closed down and theatre went into the underground, with covert performances in private houses. 

Still I should probably hold off a bit until I've actually read A Sudden Flicker!

For if anyone could squeeze out some interesting new thoughts out of these age-old reflexes, it's Thomson. 

I've had moments like this myself where I've decided that rock music (and its inheritor rap) is the  exaltation of selfishness, recklessness, egomania, impulse, short-term gratification, waste, destruction and risky behaviours etc. And speculated that some future world society organized around egalitarian and conservationist principles, zero growth, duty now for the future, custodianship of the Earth, etc etc will look back on the entire era of youth culture / pop music as a fever of decadence - a disease of late-stage capitalism.  I too have had moments of falling out of love with the genre - or at least there's been the onset of deeply conflicted shame, an inability to reconcile my love of the Stooges, punk, trap, etc with the fully grown-up, responsible, parental, civic-minded person I am now.

Andrew Keen has an interview with David Thomson at Keen On

 

Right from the start, Thomson uses the word "spectators" repeatedly.  

And Andrew Keen says at one point "David, we could have been having this conversation in the Sixties."

Thomson's comments about the violence of the cut in cinema seems again like a belated misgiving to have about a medium that is entirely constituted in editing, composed out of discontinuity, non-linear jumps... 

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Related to this theme is the new book Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves Into a State of Emergency by Megan Garber.  Which I do have in front of me and will be reading soon.

In a book promoting piece via her main outlet The Atlantic, Garber claims that "with the rise of screen culture, all the world has stage fright".

The beta-blocker propranolol has been a mainstay of American medicine since the 1960s, when it was regularly prescribed as a first-line defense against hypertension, arrhythmia, and other cardiovascular problems. Recent years, though, have seen a boom in the medication’s prescription rates—in part because as the drug regulates the heart, it also settles the nerves. Off-label, propranolol is used to calm the assorted storms of stage fright: the sweaty palms, the belly churn, the racing heart. Even professional performers have publicly alluded to using it. Robert Downey Jr., accepting an award at the 2024 Golden Globes, said casually, “I took a beta-blocker, so this is going to be a breeze.” Last fall, a People magazine headline asked, “Why Is Everyone Suddenly Taking the Decades-Old Chill Pill Propranolol?". 

One answer is that stage fright, in the world shaped by the internet, is no longer limited to the stage. Smartphones and the social-media platforms installed on them—portable movie studios in miniature—have transformed their users into life’s cinematographers, directors, producers, and distributors. Those capabilities are at this point familiar. But in ways that are steadily becoming more clear, they are also transforming relationships—adding new uncertainty to what were once mundane interactions, tweaking people’s nervous systems, unsteadying their very sense of self.

"They have brought new vulnerabilities and, for many people, new apprehension to the simple act of existing in public, where anyone is at risk of being ensnared in another person’s lens. You might be taken out of context. You might be cast as the star—or as an extra, or as scenery—in someone else’s show. You might be edited, turned into a hero or a villain or a joke. No medication can cure the broader societal ailment: Mass self-consciousness is ascendant. Performance anxiety is becoming a way of life.

She harps on about a term that I also have noticed as indicative of the times: "main character" or "main character energy" (versus non player character).

"Words once reserved for describing dramas on the stage or screen have been repurposed to describe consumers’ ordinary realities....  People now narrate their personal “character arcs” and bemoan those who have “lost the plot” or been “canceled'...  Main-character energy is, in that sense, a turn of phrase that hints at a widespread condition: the ever-more-inescapable demands of performance.

"... Consider the ubiquity of the word performative—which, in its modern use, has come to serve as a description and an all-purpose insult....

" Invoking performativity, people now blithely reject other people’s actions—and, by extension, other people’s claims about their own lives—as fakery made in the service of the show....

"The main character, after all, has one job: to put on a good show. But when the show never ends, the need to stage-manage doesn’t either. And that can be exhausting."

My kids just told me a couple of young people expressions that fit this context:

“Last night was a movie” (to describe a memorably epic night out)

“Screenager” (although that is probably more a journalistic or concerned parental term than one used by actual kids)

Going back to the Thomson critique and its perennial nature, Megan Garber herself invokes Erving Goffman's classic book  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life - which was published in 1956 - and she could easily have also mentioned Daniel J. Boorstin and The Image. (And may well do in the book itself - irritatingly it doesn't have an index so I can't tell)

Warhol - another figure from 60 years ago! - is also mentioned: "Celebrities, consequently, are what Andy Warhol once called “half people”: flesh-and-blood humans who function, for their admirers and detractors, not as facts but as fictions. They also function as images to be read, analyzed, and judged."

Crikey, an even earlier figure is cited: "the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley, writing around the turn of the 20th century, described the rise of the “looking-glass self,” the tendency to perceive one’s self through other people’s reactions. Phone-based life has made Cooley’s concept literal—and immediate. Never before have we seen ourselves so incessantly. Never has self-consciousness about the way we present been so intense."

Garber talks about how expensive this performance oriented way of living is: cosmetic surgery, the return of sunbed tanning, grooming products, supplements, gyms, looksmaxxing…

Most striking to me is the return of false eyelashes (I went to the doctor recently and every single young woman working at reception had false lashes). 

But then again that too was a mid-Century thing. It was also a time when it was quite common for women to have a wardrobe of wigs. 

In truth, fakery and image-projection, costuming and extreme cosmetics - it's been around forever.  Keeping up appearances, what Goffman calls "impression management" is hardly a recent invention.

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A different kind of "violence of the cut"- Jia Tolentino at the New Yorker on the sinister miracles performed by "aesthetic surgeons" today

"The subtle results of the new facelifts conceal serious invasion—hours of slicing and manipulating fascia, muscle, and fat. A writer for New York magazine observed a deep-plane facelift and described the surgeon’s fingers sliding under his patient’s cheek: “Once all the necessary ligaments have been cut, the features on top move freely and in one piece, like a Halloween mask.

"This violence produces an outcome that is almost supernatural. Lindsay Lohan, a totemic millennial celebrity, reappeared in 2025 out of relative obscurity with the skin of a toddler, the brow of a person who had never felt worried—a face just like her old one, if it had been assembled by blushing angels at sunrise that very day."

Tolentino contrasts that with the much-discussed Mar-a-Lago face aka MAGlamA - where the point of the work is to be visible and unsubtle, flaunting the expense and drawing attention to the extremity of the modification. 

"Once, plastic surgery seemed garish, its own obvious signs a kind of cost that people paid for refusing to appear old. This blunt artificiality has not vanished completely; it is present, for instance, in Mar-a-Lago Face, a hyper-exaggerated look common among the women of the second Trump Administration, accompanied by a makeup style that signals a lack of interest in the natural. (Like the Administration, Mar-a-Lago Face locates power in the spectacle of dismissing reality altogether.) 

"But the most expensive plastic surgery today is seamless, vaguely Gnostic, suggestive of complex secret knowledge."

Talking of "practical magic", saw this trailer at the movie theater the other night (we were there to see The Invite, recommended until it craps towards the end) and I thought that it resembled a convocation of plastic surgery survivors

Another interesting bit in the Tolentino piece also shows how perennial these practices and the anxiety / contempt they stir: 

"The current media environment is so grim that critique of anything has become radically attenuated. About two decades ago, the feminist website Jezebel, in one of its first posts, offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who could provide the original, unaltered version of a recent glossy-magazine cover photo. The images of women in magazines were “essentially female forgeries,” Jezebel argued, “what with all the computer-artistry involving airbrushing, contouring, and, sometimes, outright body-part swapping.” A few months later, Jezebel published unretouched photographs of the country singer Faith Hill, contrasting them with the image that ran on the cover of Redbook, in which Hill’s body had been thinned, her eyes tweaked, her ordinary lines and wrinkles erased....

The following years have entailed chauvinistic backlash and the disappearance of women’s media. The feminist sites have largely shut down, and physical media is vanishing; many of the magazines that Jezebel targeted—Redbook, InStyle, Marie Claire, Glamour, Self—have ceased printing or gone entirely defunct. (The thought of a website criticizing a magazine for Photoshop is almost unbearably quaint.) These were flawed but robust publications, staffed by professionals in dialogue with their audience about the state of women’s lives. They have given way to Instagram and TikTok, where the P.R. operations of celebrities and influencers can propagate the same aspirational imagery without dialogue or substance or investment in anything, really, other than algorithmic success.

The Jezebel critique reminded me of something from a couple of decades before that - the Miss America protest of 1968 staged by the women's liberation group New York Radical Women, in which cosmetics and other feminine accoutrements were thrown in the Freedom Trash Can outside the venue, and later the ceremony itself was disrupted

 It will get worse:

"Kids are growing up at a time when the beauty ideal is upheld, more and more, by completely artificial women—flawless physical specimens generated by A.I., placed in real-world scenarios, in images and video clips, to fool the horny and gullible and torment the insecure. (Recently, a bunch of such videos, purporting to capture spontaneous footage of insanely hot girls in the stands at baseball games, went viral.) Instagram demanded a certain sort of woman and then produced her, deranging broad swaths of the population in the process. A.I., which delivers an experience of absolute plasticity, and which builds on the premise that what is specifically human is inferior, for being imperfect, will do worse."

Perhaps though there will be a Puritan backlash to the natural look. Indeed I can feel my own aesthetic attractions shifting - in reaction to the age of lip plumping, bronzing, eyebrow sculpting etc-  towards thinner lips, pallor, the fainter eyebrow...  

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A New York magazine piece claims that MAGA will lose interest as Trump's knack for Spectacle falters: 

Hours before Donald Trump addressed the nation on its 250th anniversary, the National Mall was in chaos. A storm was on the way, and law enforcement had ordered the MAGA faithful to evacuate — a process that did not go smoothly. People had waited in the extreme heat for hours to celebrate Trump and America; now they argued with the Secret Service and chanted “USA, USA” out of fury.

By now the mess is familiar. The Great American State Fair attracted small crowds; some states even declined to participate. Bret Michaels backed out, and so did Martina McBride. A mock-up of Trump’s triumphal arch oozed a puslike substance, and a robot dog danced alone in the mud. Nearby, the reflecting pool sat green and full of algae, lethal to ducklings and irresistible to protesters, who demonstrated next to it in costume. Two days before the storm, a portion of the stage broke off and nearly struck dancers who were in the middle of a rehearsal.

Trump’s tastes have always been entertaining, if garish, writes Sarah Jones. Lately, though, the seams are fraying. “If Trump can’t throw a good party or make everything golden, what’s left? Loyalists have leaned on MAGA for glitz and a little excitement. Without spectacle, the future of the movement is in jeopardy.”

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Lindsey Graham was a simple man to understand and a tragic one. He lacked a moral core and any sense of right and wrong. The great empty spaces of his life were filled with an insatiable need for “relevance.” He found it as a cast member in the most malignant reality show ever made. - Steve Schmidt

Goth goes Glam

 

What tarts!

Gene Loves Jezebel must have seen Love and Rockets enjoying Stateside sucksess with the T. Rexy "So Alive" and they thought "we'll ave summathat, eh boyo?"

 

That said, I do really enjoy "Motion of Love" as sound + vision in all its effrontery and fakery

The phasing on the backing vocals...

It's less "going glam" in the '70s T. Rexy sense and more glam as in glam metal, hair metal... 

I suppose this is prime Bad Music Era, but the ShitBrit is definitely improved by the attempt to conquer Billboard rather than just scale the summit of the UK independent chart. 

The missus is quite fond of Gene Love Jezebel's early stuff when they have a sort of neo-psych / Cult circa "She Sells Sanctuary" vibe....  but I prefer this would-be sell-out phase. 

Tragic story, though - the Aston brothers fell out terribly, and there are now two versions of Gene Loves Jezebel touring different sectors of the world. I forget which brother has North America. 

Checking Wikipedia, it says they fell out twice: 

"The brothers reconciled in the mid-1990s, wrote some new songs together, and shared a house in Los Angeles"

But that detente didn't last, resulting in a permanent ruction and the ongoing rival Gene Loves Jezebels. 

 And then this happened

"In September 2018, Jay Aston, James Stevenson, and Peter Rizzo were named as defendants in a lawsuit brought by Michael Aston for infringement of his trademark at the end of Jay Aston's Gene Loves Jezebel's first US tour in ten years. Jay Aston's band argued that they had complied with the agreement with Michael Aston to the best of their ability. At the hearing on 7 January 2019 in Santa Ana, California, before the judge The Hon James Selna, the judge found in favour of the defendants on all of the five counts that Michael Aston had brought and ordered him to pay the defendants' legal fees."

So many of these Goths ended up living in Los Angeles... Peter Murphy for instance. 

Lol Tolhurst also (met him at the Hay Festival in Mexico last year, at a lunch organized by the British Ambassador for all the U.K. authors...  educated fellow, we had a good chat)

I suppose many British pop stars and cult stars end up here... and why not... it's where the Biz is... the weather is better

There's also a big Goth scene (industrial too) in LA, a kind of spiritual dissidence against sun and outdoors-iness and tans and health. The commitment it takes to wear all black heavy clothing head to foot all year round in Southern California...

If they didn't literally move to LA,  Brit Goth groups often tried to move there sonically /career-orientation-ly

Tempting to say Flesh For Lulu are the dreggiest dregs of the Bad Music Era, but then there's Balaam and the Angel, there's The Bolshoi, there's Sex Gang Children

Thing I never knew - Julianne Regan was the bassist in Gene Loves Jezebel at one point, prior to forming All About Eve.

Oh my God, there is Wiki Fear and Wiki Fizzle, but sometimes there is Wiki Manna - just a pure gift of brightness and joy irradiating one's life

So... I learn that The Mountain Goats, as in John Darnielle, did a whole album called Goths, and one of the songs tells the saga of Gene Love Jezebel (it sounds a bit like Jackson Browne's "The Pretender")

Robert Smith is secure at his villa in France

Any child knows how to do the spiderweb dance

Siouxsie has enough hits to keep the bills paid

Every New Year's in Los Angeles, you can still see Richard Blade

But the world forgot about Gene Loves Jezebel

Yeah, the world forgot about Gene Loves Jezebel

They charted once or twice

They were on a major label

When the singer went solo

He left money on the table

The two main guys are related

They're at war with each other

Now there's two Genes loving Jezebel

One for each brother

But the world came to agree

What you see is what you get

And what you get is what you see

Whether you're The March Violets or The Bolshoi

Bands who had to leave the darkness for the sun

Red Lorry Yellow Lorry were on Cherry Red, I think

They've been playing clubs since 1981

To be fair to Gene Loves Jezebel

Billy Corgan brought them on stage

It was in 2011

It's on their Wikipedia page

But for the most part

However big that chorused bass may throb

You and me and all of us

Are gonna have to find a job

Because the world will never know or understand

The suffocated splendor

Of the once and future goth band

This is all rather like those Luke Haines records