RIP Tim Curry

A glam icon obviously for his Frank N Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a movie much darker and more interesting than I had first imagined and great fun to write about in S+A. (Interviewed Richard O'Brien who said the character was his own secret self.) 

But I also love Tim Curry's turn as Stevie Streeter in the TV music biz satire Rock Follies (something else I managed to squeeze into S+A). 

In particular these scenes where Streeter talks about his stage concept for the song "Street Signs" - a backdrop of urban decay: "filthy, violent, and honest" - and then rehearses the song with garbage underfoot and a chorus of sex workers. 

It's interesting for the way it shows the theatricality that inevitably lurks within any attempt to bring "reality" onto a stage.

But I wonder who it's actually meant to be a parody of? 

Springsteen? 

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band with their "Vambo Rules" graffiti aerosoled onto a backdrop of a fake brickwork like a tenement wall? 

The Heavy Metal Kids? 

Also rock-adjacent - and punk-adjacent - is Curry's memorable role in Times Square as a late-night  radio deejay who helps turn the teen punk she-rebel duo into folk-heroes 

Here's what I wrote about it in this Pitchfork piece on the Best and Worst Punk Movies.

Producer Robert Stigwood thought he’d do for New Wave what his Saturday Night Fever did for disco—which is why the Times Square soundtrack was a double album, crammed with tunes by the likes of XTC and the Ramones. The John Travolta counterpart here is Robin Johnson as Nicky Marotta, a raspy-voiced runaway who takes sheltered posh girl Pamela Pearl (13-year-old Trini Alvarado) for a walk on the wild side. The backdrop is sleaze-soaked midtown Manhattan, those same streets that Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle imagined a real rain sweeping clean. Pamela’s urban developer dad plans to do exactly that. But street life, incarnated in Nicky, fights back, stealing his child and revealing that Real Life exists “outside of society,” as Patti Smith sang it.

A busker, Nicky is herself a punk poet in the Patti / Jim Carroll mode. The story of the rebel duo, who call themselves the Sleez Sisters, enchants late-night radio DJ Johnny LaGuardia (Tim Curry). When Pamela sends a letter denying that she’s been kidnapped but rather “Nicky-napped, happy-napped,” the DJ reads it out over the air and turns them into Bonnie and Clyde-style outlaws at war with “banality… boredom… television… doing it for all us stay-at-homes.” Now a band with songs like “Damn Dog” and “Your Daughter Is One,” the duo inspire a copy-cat movement of girls wearing bandit-style eye makeup. Then they become urban guerrillas throwing TV sets off the top of buildings. Although increasingly implausible, Times Square works as a beguiling modern-day fairytale. A bomb at the time, it became a touchstone for latterday punks like Kathleen Hanna and Manic Street Preachers.

 Complete with an unconvincing American accent, Curry appeared in the Armchair Theatre play Vérité,  not as a rocker but as an underground film maker called Mik. It was written by Howard Schuman, who wrote Rock Follies, and  aired on 23rd October, 1973.  

BBC Archive report on the making of the Rocky Horror Picture Show

He had a role in the curious little film The Shout - which has scenes of John Hurt doing musique concrete - but I can't remember anything about Curry's contribution.

Hair today, gone tomorrow... 

"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.” 

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Ah I have posted on this subject before - the Thomson commentary and my aversion to Madonna. A more detailed breakdown on that here. 

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

folk versus glam (1 of ??)

Hubert Parry: "in true folk-songs there is no sham, no got-up glitter, and no vulgarity"

Folk is associated with naturalism - the idea that there is no artifice involved, no element of show. 

Performance, stripped of performativity or exhibitionism. The singer as the ego-less vessel or conduit for the people's consciousness. 

Green Gartside on Anne Briggs: "The beautiful melodies Anne sang unaccompanied were profoundly affecting, her unornamented voice a precursor to the anti-professionalism of DIY."

Folk would be the Quaker option, the nonconformist option (in the religious and Puritan-ical sense).

Everybody equal in this society of friends; the liturgy, barebones, stripped of ceremonial flatus. 

(Whereas opera, or heavy metal - at least in the 70s - is obviously Catholic. Pomp rock).

The Puritans despised and feared the theatre. 

The diagram below relates to anti-theatricality  - and the idea that some sorts of performance (the folk mode and the art approach) can actually be "real". That reality can be brought on to the stage, either through the performer as representative of a community, or the artist expressive of their inner self, their emotional reality.  

(More on the Diagram below)

Peter Sellers’s  spoof on Lonnie Donegan: Benny Goonagain (starts at 4.30 minutes into this satire of a current affairs show): 

Goonagain: 

Rock'n'roll? -  No! I'm a folk singer, man -  I sing blues, work songs - songs of the people and the peasant, you understand, cos they're ah workin on a railroad...

Rock'n'roll as something to diss-associate from - on count of it being commercial, amplified, gimmicky, substance-less. 

Reminded that Guthrie-remodel minstrel Billy Bragg went on to write a whole book about skiffle. 

"Roots, Radicals and Rockers" - you couldn't get a better articulation of the Folk axis of my triangle!

It's notable, though, that Donegan and his band wore suits and bow ties when they played live (at least on TV shows). Donegan sang Leadbelly songs but he didn't wear denim dungarees like Leadbelly (which was, if I recall right, an idea of his handlers, to pitch him at the folk revival scene - working men's clothes. 

Barefoot too! The full story behind this image is shocking.

When left to his own druthers, Leadbelly - like most blues performers - preferred to wear a sharp suit. and a bow tie. Singing - even about gritty subjects - was still showtime. (So in that sense, Donegan's fancy get-up was actually - inadvertently? - authentic).

White gloves!

Even jamming, he's done up to the nines

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I created this diagram as a teaching aid. It depicts the discursive space of pop music - it's about talk and rhetoric, rather than praxis and genre per se.

- how fans and critics imagine and understand the music…

- how artists explain what they do, to others and to themselves. 

(But could there be a fourth side, making it a square? See if you are as clever as some of my students)

Some artists are firmly established on one side or other of this triangle, and stay there.

But the most interesting careers either involve an artist located somewhere between one axis and another (Roxy Music exist between Art and Showbiz but are nowhere near Folk).

Either that or they are equidistant between all three sides (can't think of a good example here).

Or even more interesting, when the artist goes on a trajectory within this triangular space, starting in one place and moving to another (Dylan is archetypal, moving from Folk to Art, and then creeping back a bit, at times). Some veer all over the place, doubling back, and contradicting / erasing the previous location: consider the literally careering careers of John Lennon and David Bowie.

anti-theatricality in rock (slight return)

 

New Musical Express, 

December 18 1976 

The title of Paul Stump's excellent book on prog rock captures this idea - we're all about the music, we don't put on a show, we leave that to commercial bands - but then again, one of the things that prog bands, or some prog bands, explored was, well, showmanship: theatrics, costumes....   Jethro Tull and Gabriel-era Genesis being only two of the most blatant examples 

There is a good bit in Philip Auslander's excellent, unusually-angled study of glam rock, Performing Glam Rock, where he contrasts the Underground's gestural language onstage with glam artists.  He talks about your prog or blues-heavy or acid-jam type band would project inwardness - as if totally absorbed in making music. No eye contact with the audience, no banter....  almost acting as if the audience wasn't there. Eyes closed often. No strutting or guitar poses or moving about.  A fairly static, perpendicular, concentrating-hard sort of stage presence. 

Interestingly Wendy Fonarow in her excellent study of British indie rock Empire of Dirt talks about "gaze strategies" - how bands, particularly shoegazey bands, similarly project inwardness, "lost in music", an obliviousness to the audience's existence.  This suggests that as much as it comes from shyness and from the need to look down at all those foot peals, the gazing at shoes is an instinctive re-irruption of an Underground era mode of anti-performance.

Slowdive did talk about they were more influenced by Pink Floyd than Sex Pistols. 

New Puritans

Continuing the Trump-related posts, here's part of a talk I delivered early in 2016 at a conference in Lyon. The talk was titled TOMORROW NEVER KNOWN : LE FUTUR IMPRÉVISIBLE DE LA POP CULTURE and as is my frequent wont, the text was way too long to deliver in the allotted time. So I never actually got to read out this final section - perhaps just as well, given its speculative nature. 

NEW PURITANISM

Recently I interviewed the author Chuck Klosterman about his forthcoming  book But What If We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past  - a series of thought experiments trying to imagine what aspects of knowledge today – things we are certain about, in terms of science or what we think is important in culture or the arts – which of these could be completely rejected or thought about in a radically different way, at some point in the near future – 50 years, 100 years, 200 years from now.  He looks at music, literature, sports as well as scientific knowledge like our understanding of gravity.

One thing Klosterman suggests is that whatever we can imagine, is precisely the thing that won’t happen -  because it’s those assumptions, those limits to what we can conceive or that are thinkable for us, all of that is precisely what will disappear. And it’s true that there are plenty of examples of discredited knowledge in history, not just of discredited values or ideology, but actually discredited quasi-scientific belief – the late 18th Century belief that masturbation was the cause of physical and emotional debility – the concept of hysteria – phrenology. 

So right now, we think of the culture heroes of the present as the sexually adventurous, the gender experimenters -- that’s the story of rock - Prince for instance is celebrated in those terms, playing games with gender, inciting us all to free our bodies – and I as a vulture, someone descending on the corpse to write athinkpiece about his career, that’s what I argued – the genius of Prince’s androgyny – but in the back of my mind, even as I wrote it, I was thinking: hmmm. Maybe one day – sooner than we think - all these figures – Mick Jagger, Prince, Madonna or Lady Gaga – they will seem mystifying - That could be because we’ll all live in some kind of trans utopia where the battles of gender will have been won and we’ll be whatever we define ourselves as – man-woman will be a spectrum not a binary.

However it could also be because the whole investment in sexual liberation and sexual expression that is the dominant ideology of our time, that maybe will just be left behind.

Michel Foucault speculated about this in the History of Sexuality, a book I read at the age of 19 and which rearranged my mind, I’ve never covered from the perspectival turnaround -  he wonders whether in the future people will look back on the 20the Century and wonder why we regard sex as the truth of our being, rather than anything else – our minds, our hobbies, our citizenship, our public participation in democracy or whatever.

So I can easily imagine a time when the cultural heroes of the late 20^th and early 21^st Century will the few public figures who are militantly vegetarian or vegan – Morrissey and Prince would be among them, remembered not for Morrissey’s sexual ambiguity and being celibate, or Prince for his polymorphous perversity – but both remembered only as pop stars who were vegan and publicly stood up for that cause. 

Imagine in two hundred years time, there’s a world government, the eating of meat is banned – I know we’re in Lyon, you like to eat animals, every bit of the animal –but a lot can change in two hundred years – so there’s a world government and meat eating is abolished for reasons of ecology, personal health, and for ethical-humanitarian reasons -  only a few hundred thousand livestock still exist on the planet in agricultural museums – there is a black market underground of carnivores, who are prosecuted as perverts – and meanwhile the grand project of the human race is repairing and restoring the biosphere.

Just as we look back to the abolitionists of the 19^th Century as cultural heroes – resisting the obvious evil of slavery – one day our descendants may look back to Morrissey, Prince, Ariana Grande, Natalie Portman, Jared Leto, Ellie Goulding, not for their music or their acting but for being public vegans – abolitionists of the slave trade in animal flesh.  

Paul McCartney will be remembered only as the musician spouse of Linda McCartney. 

But in a larger sense, it could be that the entire rock era with its incitement to self indulgence and excess and living for the now, that will seem not only decadent but  inexplicable -  the cultural values of this future world-society would be equilibrium, continence, restraint, dedication to communal values and duty for the future.  Our era’s popular culture would be seen as antagonistic to those values. Perhaps even criminal, in the biospheric sense.

So if you ask me about the future of popular culture – then what I’m arguing, or at least what I’m playing with as an idea – is that popular culture as we understand it – which is the riotous rebellion of the id against the super-ego – a dark carnival of sexuality, violence, narcissism, vanity, self aggrandizement, poor impulse control, the cult of adolescence as a supreme states of being   - there may be not much of a future for this -  humanity might just grow out of it, it might have to mature out of it.

That’s a thought experiment to play with, have fun with.

But is there any evidence that humanity is suddenly going to get virtuous and self-sacrificing and self-denying?

I don’t necessarily humans will, but I do think there’s evidence for the coming of a new puritanism – my new book Shock and Awe is about glam rock in the 70s and the idea of decadence, and one thing I’ve learned is that pop history goes through cycles of glam and anti-glam – anti-glam phases would be the counterculture, where the values were those of Rousseau – nature, primitivism, childhood, purity, authenticity – then the next anti-glam phase would be punk and postpunk: hedonism distrusted and despised, an emphasis on the didactic, on content over form -  the Eighties are very glam, very narcissistic, image-oriented – and then you have another wave of anti-glam – grunge and to an extent gangsta rap, the values are underground, they’re not to do with looking fabulous or glamorous or being famous.

Right now we have een in the longest glam cycle I can think of - from late 90s rap with its bling aesthetic through the last 15 years of Beyonce, Lady Gaga, it's been nonstop glitz and glamour,  obsession with fame....

I think we are long overdue a switch back to anti-glam, to underground values and a rejection of the idea of music as simply showbiz, simply entertainment.

What evidence do I have for this new puritanism, this suspicion of pleasure and spectacle and glamorous appearance?

I would point not to music or even entertainment but to the huge cult following among young people for Bernie Sanders in the USA and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.

First thing that is striking about this development is that these are old men – they’re not young and hip like Obama, or young and slick like Tony Blair and David Cameron when they first came to power  - these are old men who look old – they aren’t telegenic or handsome, they don’t put any effort into appearance or image.

They are wholly lacking charisma as we’ve come to understand as a political necessity

They don’t go in for political theater – statesmanship as stagecraft (pseudo-events, photo ops) -  Sanders and Corbyn are not even that good at oratory or uplifting rhetoric or slogans

Corbyn and Sanders are the opposite of politicians like Cameron or Mitt Romney or Trump, who is an entertainer, a salesman, a huckster.

What Corbyn and Sanders offer isn’t image but pure substance – policy policy policy. Technical solutions.

There is a taste out there, a demand, for politics without theatre, without spin, without optics or any of the bullshit of public relations.

And these candidates’ very ineptness and lack of polish signifies authenticity, their being in touch with the common people, with reality.

I use the term Puritan in reference to the historical phenomenon – the Protestants who disdained theatricality – the paganism and irrationalism of Catholic ceremony – along with worldly, earthly pleasure.

Corbyn is actually a modern day Puritan – he’s famous for his drab clothing, his frugality (he had the lowest expenses claim of any member of parliament, just 13 Euros in one year for a printer ribbon), he has described himself as a parsimonious MP -  he rides a bicycle, grows vegetables, he’s a vegetarian and he doesn’t drink.

Like the original Puritans of the 17^th Century he is anti-royalist, a republican who refuses to  kneel to the Queen..

Corbyn is an anti-dandy, a Roundhead who despises the Cavaliers for their frivolous ways, their vanity. He said this about the House of Commons: "It's not a fashion parade, it's not a gentleman's club, it's not a bankers institute. It's a place where the people are represented."

Like many on the Left he has an unconscious sympathy for radical Islamic critiques of the West as decadent, sexually permissive, narcissistic – the contempt for a culture that produced pornography, cosmetic surgery, reality TV, and so forth.

Now let’s say global warming gets worse, various other ecological crises get worse – I could imagine in the near future a confluence between Sanders and Corbyn style politics – which is anti-capitalist, anti-plutocratic -  I could imagine this populist anticapitalism merging with Green politics into a potent cultural wave. Probably it’s already happening  – but what if it wasn’t just a revolt against the corporations who are destroying the Earth, causing climate change – what if it was a revolt against the culture of that kind of capitalism? Hyper-competitive, disruptive, oriented around winners – around fame, around glamour, around advertising and PR -  this is the definition of popular culture today.

A new resurgent populism that would define pop culture as the culture of uncontrollable greed, irrationality, world-destruction.

It’s not hard to imagine because things like the folk revival in the 50s were based around the same set of ideas. So was anarcho-punk and the more straight-edge, ascetic forms of hardcore punk in the USA.

Adding Green politics to this mix makes it all the more consistent – Green is about zero-growth, which mean consuming less, it means a restraint on hedonism, the cultivation of a balanced and quiet lifestyle,  a stilling of the ego – all these things feed into a new puritanism. You could factor the ideal of purity in here too - organic food sources, locally produced foods – these are all based around the idea of authenticity and a rejection of artifice, the synthetic.

So the cult of health and fitness – young people increasingly giving up drinking for staying fit – could factor into this. In a culture that incites you to impulsive expression of your appetites, constantly tempting you to indulge, what’s needed is discipline and imposition of restrictions on the self - for the survival of the individual self as much as the biosphere.

Another factor that could feed into this new puritanism would be political correctness – the kind of close scrutiny of conduct and speech for infractions of offensiveness, insufficient respect and soundness of value –  a new piety in which conduct and speech held up to very exacting principles.

If this new puritanism became anything like a prominent force in popular culture, a lot of what we think popular culture is about today – freedom, wildness, un-repression – would start to seem like it was regressive. The entire rock era would be suddenly seen as very much on the same side as capitalism – promoting self-ishness, hedonism, impulsiveness, excess, waste, living for the moment, irrationalism and emotionalism. The libertinism of rock and the libertarian capitalist view of the world actually have a far better fit than rock and socialism, or rock and ecology – capitalism wants us to spend, to enjoy, to indulge ourselves.

You could even imagine a revulsion against mediation itself.

-     Again I think of the communitarian aspect to the Sanders and Corbyn phenomenon  - the  huge throngs that Sanders convened in America, the large hall events Corbyn organized, with people unable to get into the hall it’s so crowded, such that he had to have a second speech given for the benefit of the people outside – and this is not someone who is great orator, not a very inspiring speaker really – but that plain spoken, dour list of policies and ideals is what people want to hear, rather than empty uplifting rhetoric.

A A hunger for communitas, for fellowship and collective purpose. 

At At the extreme you could imagine that the pseudo-community and the pseudo-politics of social media would be rejected in  favour of an insistence of physical togetherness in a collective space, face to face politics – the agora of Greek democracy. Politics as a Quaker-style society of friends, meetings without hierarchy. 

Now the final thing in this speculative fantasy of a new Puritanism – which is not something I predict with any great enthusiasm, being a creature of the rock era – but the final aspect is I think that we are overdue a wave of revulsion against the culture of fame – the ideal of worldly glory  as publicity

The original Puritans were virulently opposed to theatre, for a whole bunch of reasons ranging from the very idea of mimesis and actors pretending to be something they were not, to the association of theatre with vice and with the stirring up of emotions, violent passions, 

During Oliver Cromwell’s rule in the mid-17^th Century they actually closed down the theatres. Theatre went underground. There were troupes of actors who perform secretly in the manors and large country houses of the upper class. 

You can hear an echo of this when Corbyn talks about removing the theatre from politics, making it about substance and policy – in a recent Parliamentary debate at which Cameron was making scripted jokes at his expense, Corbyn said “I invite the prime minister to leave the theatre and return to reality” – Cameron who formerly worked in public relations for Carlton TV company in the UK

So that’s a call to leave the seductively irrational elements of politics – image, rhetoric, projection of authority or power using image and gesture - the stuff that Donald Trump excels at, what in old English was called Trumpery – which I believe comes from your French word tromper, to deceive – in English trumpery means empty show, bluster, “practices that are superficially or visually appealing but have little real value or worth” 

It’s a call to leave behind illusion and delusion

The Puritans were anti theatre; today they'd be opposed to the entire landscape of modern entertainment --  TV movies pop music – anything involving escape, fantasy, spectacle, and intoxicating depictions of sex and violence. 

It’s not inconceivable to imagine a virulent reaction against the trumpery of pop culture in its totality, what Guy Debord called the Spectacle.

So imagine - perhaps 30 years from now – as various crises deepen, converge, aggravate each other – imagine  the emergence of a modern Savonarola  - Savonarola, the 15^th Century priest who led a movement to renew the Church and purge society of its indulgences – a new Savanorola who possesses a compelling anti-charisma, a contagious and persuasive sense of the corruption of the contemporary world

Imagine the rejected and excluded who follow him rising up and igniting 21^st Century equivalents of Savonarola’s bonfires of the vanities

Into the flames go not just mirrors and cosmetics, but selfie sticks and smartphones and unimaginable communication devices yet to be developed, into the flames go breast implants and lip-filler and fake eyelashes and bronzer and every kind of name brand fashion item you can think of

In its place a new modesty, self-restraint, reticence, a dour renunciation of beauty, style and all forms of seeking attention for oneself.

Now this new puritanism won’t be a majority of population – but it doesn’t need to be – history shows that a forceful minority convinced of the righteousness of its own historical project can have a disproportionate influence  on events – look at the Nazis, look at the counterculture, look at the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini who brought down the Shah of Iran despite the relative prosperity and peace of the country at that time.

A new theocracy in which the ‘theo’ element, the god part,  might not be God but might be Gaia or some kind of principle of natural balance or homeostasis – not a new world order but a new ordered world.

For security and stability, the cult of freedom and self-expression itself might be relinquished. 

Rock itself would be an absurd relic, inexplicable, denounced, or just forgotten in embarrassment - a childish thing put away as humanity reaches maturity.