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.  

Trump and Glam

Continuing the short series of pieces about Trump, glam, and fascism written back when he was first seeking election (as opposed to seeking reelection, in 2020). 

This is the director's cut of a Guardian piece from October 14 2016 - eight years ago. 

Glamour, noun – 1. (archaic) visual illusion, a magical haze in the air causing things to appear different from how they really are (as in “cast the glamour”). Etymology: Scottish, variant of Scottish gramayre,  “magic, enchantment, spell”.

 

Trumpery, noun -  1.  worthless nonsense  2/ practices that are superficially or visually appealing but have little real value. 3. (archaic) tawdry finery.  Etymology: Middle English (Scots), trumpery -  deceit or fraud;  from Middle French, tromper – to trick, as in trompe l’oeil.

When I was writing my new glam rock history Shock and Awe, I kept running into things that seemed like strange premonitions – eerie previews of the scary and dangerous man running for the American presidency right now.

 In mid-Seventies interviews, David Bowie kept talking - in an unnervingly fixated way -about “a strong leader” destined to “sweep through” the Western World: a charismatic superhero who might possibly emerge not from conventional politics but the entertainment field. Sometimes Bowie’s tone was ominous and fatalistic, as if this scenario was inevitable. At other times, he’d make it seem like a necessary corrective to a Weimar-style state of decadence, talking with seemingly approving anticipation of “a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny” that would clean up the mess made by the permissive society.

 At his most extreme, unguarded and cocaine-addled, Bowie proposed himself as a candidate for the job, whether as British PM, as the “first English president of the United States,” or maybe even as ruler of the world. 

  And Tony Defries, who simultaneously masterminded Bowie’s rise to stardom and promoted his own mogul-in-the-making image. Defries left many of his contemporaries convinced that his ultimate ambitions – and destiny – lay in politics.  One boss of a rival management company confessed that “the only thing that’s worried me about Tony is that one day he might be representing a country in which I happen to live. And I might find myself at war, with no control whatsoever!”

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On the surface, Donald Trump and the glam era’s stars and star-makers couldn’t be further apart. What does Trump have in common with Ziggy Stardust, apart from orange hair?  The Donald is a bigot, a macho bully, a philistine, a proud ignoramus.  Bowie and the brightest of his peers were androgynous aesthetes, intellectually hungry and sexually experimental.

 And yet... there are some unlikely affinities. As signaled by his gilded tower on 5th Avenue, Trump surrounds himself with glitz. Trump and glam likewise share an obsession with fame and a ruthless drive to conquer and devour the world’s attention. Trump actually plays “We Are the Champions” by Queen (a band aligned with glam in its early days) at his rallies, because its refrain “no time for losers” crystallises his Social Darwinist worldview.

 A mirror of oligopoly capitalism, pop is a ferociously competitive game that sorts the contestants into a handful of winners and a greater number of losers.  Propelled by a stardom-at-all-costs drive, most of the principal characters in Shock and Awe - Bowie, Marc Bolan Alice Cooper, Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel, Bryan Ferry –nimbly reinvented themselves and sometimes trampled people on their way up.  They willed their fantasy-self into existence.  This same imperative of “don’t dream it, be it” (as articulated by Rocky Horror Show’s Frank N. Furter) could be seen in the type of fandom that glam inspired: it had an imitative quality that had never really been seen before in pop, with audiences dressing up like the star. Responding to the sophistication of Roxy Music’s image and artwork, and to sly winking lyrics like “sure to make the cognoscenti think”, the group’s following costumed themselves as members of a make-believe aristocracy. Ferry recalled how some of their North of England followers would turn up to the shows in full black tie as if attending the Academy Awards ceremony. 

Trump’s appeal is generally seen in terms of his doom-laden imagery of a weakened, rudderless America. But there is clearly something else going on: an aspirational and admiring projection towards a swaggering figure who revels in his wealth and entitlement, who’s free to do and say whatever he wants. Trump is a fantasy figure as much as he’s a mouthpiece for resentment and rancor.

“I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump wrote in The Art of The Deal, explaining the role of bravado in his business dealings. “People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” Describing this “very effective form of promotion”, he and co-writer Tony Schwarz coined the concept “truthful hyperbole.” That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it cuts to the essence of how hype works: making people believe in something that doesn’t exist yet, it magically turns a lie into a reality. This was a technique that Tony Defries used to break Bowie in America: travelling everywhere in a limo, surrounded with bodyguards he didn’t need, Bowie looked like the star he wasn’t yet, until the world started to take the illusion for reality.

Early in his career, Trump grasped that – like a pop star – he was selling an image, a brand. As commentators have noticed, banks see him as a promoter not a CEO: the Trump name gets affixed to buildings and businesses that he doesn’t even own as such, let alone run. He’s an extreme version of what people on Wall Street call a “glamour stock”:  an investment that outperform the market based on an inflated belief in its future growth potential or on even more intangible qualities of cool. Twitter (Trump’s natural habitat) has been described as the ultimate glamour stock, its attractive image vastly out of whack with its ability to make money.  Glamour stocks are self-fulfilling prophecies initially:  magic tricks of confidence, they win because everyone believes they’re going to win. They keep on winning right up until they lose, when the gulf between their perceived value and actual wealth-generative potential gets too huge. 

Self-reinvention was the strategy used by glam stars like Bowie and Bolan. You can see the same chameleonic flexibility at work in Trump’s career. Once upon a time he was a Democrat, on genial terms with the Clintons.  Years ago he used Birtherism as the launch pad for a political career; now he’s dropped it as a political liability. Same with his recent rabble-rousing rhetoric about building a Wall. Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer  analyses the agility with which Trump evades attacks by discarding ideas: “He merely creates new Trumps,” just like Bowie conjured up new personas to stay one step ahead of pop’s fickle fluctuations. With no fixed political principles, Trump’s only consistency is salesmanship and  showmanship: the ability to stage his public life as a drama. And it’s the drama that holds the public’s attention – the edgy promise of a less boring politics.  The New York Times recently quoted a voter who confessed to flirting with a vote for Trump because “a dark side of me wants to see what happens if Trump is in. There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change, people are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen.”

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Emerging after the earnest, authenticity-obsessed late Sixties, glam was a period in which rock rediscovered a sense of showbiz and spectacle. Pop history has repeatedly cycled through such phases of glam and anti-glam: the Bowie/Roxy era was supplanted by pub rock and punk, which in turn was eclipsed by the glammy New Romantics, while in America hair metal was displaced by grunge. 

Strangely, you can see similar dynamics at play in contemporary politics.  Hilary Clinton sits squarely in the unglam corner: a worthy but dull public servant, supremely accomplished at everything required of a politician and leader except what the public perversely craves: being an entertainer.  Hilary is the American political equivalent of a value stock – those dowdy companies that over time doggedly outperform the glamour stocks, but simply don’t inspire spasms of irrational exuberance in the markets.

The real anti-glam leader of our age, though, is Jeremy Corbyn.  Bearded and low-key, he’s the UK politics equivalent of Whispering Bob Harris: the presenter of the Old Grey Whistle Test, who couldn’t hide his distaste for visually flashy, image-over-substance bands like Roxy Music, Sparks, and New York Dolls. 

Corbyn is viscerally opposed to – and fundamentally incapable of – political theater, the very thing that has carried Trump so close to the White House.  Corbyn even tried to change the format and feel of Prime Minister’s Questions, saying that he wished to “remove the theatre from politics”. In one particular PMQ, Corbyn responded to Cameron’s slick pre-scripted gags with the schoolmasterly reprimand “I invite the prime minister to leave the theatre and return to reality.”  

Oratory is not his strong suit: he seems instinctively averse to all those elements of spoken language - cadence, musicality of utterance, metaphor – that sway the listener by bypassing the faculty of reasoned judgement. But as Gary Younge argued recently, Corbyn’s plain-spoken delivery is taken as a token of sincerity by his following, who “have not come to be entertained; they have come.... to have a basic sense of decency reflected back to them through their politics.”

This is how a personality cult has built up around Corbyn, despite his honest and accurate admission that "I'm not a personality.”  It’s very indie, very alt-rock, the way that the absence of charisma has become the source of a curious magnetism. And of course it’s also Corbyn’s principled consistency over the long haul that seals the deal: an unyielding integrity that makes him closer to a Neil Young than a Bowie.  

While the classically elegant Bryan Ferry fraternizes with the nobility and admits to having conservative views, Brian Eno – who abandoned the glam image soon after leaving Roxy for casual, artist-in-the-studio wear – can now be found penning columns arguing “Jeremy Corbyn for Prime Minister? Why not?”. But as with a taste for indie’s lack of showy drama, it takes a refined sensibility to see past the surface appearance. The general public want a leader to look like a leader. The performance of a public image is considered as important as the actual job performance.

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Once in a blue moon, a politician comes along who combines pop star allure and all the less glamorous qualifications like knowledge and temperament. Obama has both kinds of cool going for him: perfect comic timing at the White House Correspondents Dinner, calmness and clarity during moments of Oval Office crisis. Politics without charisma is certainly a dry affair. But the cult of personality can be dangerous outside the realm of showbiz. 

“I could see how easy it was to get a whole rally thing going,” Bowie said in 1974, recalling the height of Ziggy mania in Britain a few years earlier. “There were times when I could have told the audience to do anything.” In another interview of that era, Bowie spoke with seeming admiration for the way Hitler “staged a country”, combining “politics and theatrics” to create the ultimate spectacle. “Boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience...  [Hitler] created this thing that governed and controlled the show for those 12 years. The world will never see his like.” 

Fingers crossed, the Trump show gets cancelled next month.

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If you consult your copies of K-Punk, the posthumous Mark Fisher anthology, and turn to page 617, you will find "Mannequin Challenge" - the last piece Mark ever wrote, an unfinished essay from October 2016  - it just stops short mid sentence. It's about the Trump campaign versus the Clinton campaign, the libidinal deficit of the latter compared to the former, and in part the essay picks up from this piece I did for my The Guardian. To the end me and Mark were passing the baton back and forth - albeit more sporadically than the blog heyday.