By David Humphries
Once in a while - on average, every few months - a new sensation, a new phenomenon, a ground-breaker, an envelope pusher, a re-drawer of cultural boundaries descends from Mount Olympus with the fanfare befitting a mythical god.
It was Sydney's turn this week to host the latest of these incarnations, one Stefani Germanotta, aka Lady Gaga, a New York singer whose lyrics, whose fashion excess and whose humdrum thoughts, we're told, speak for a generation of young souls who otherwise would be rudderless in a sea of turpitude.
Illustration: Rocco Fazzari
Perhaps there is something to this. I'm too much of a stale old curmudgeon to know. But surely the rank, as bestowed by a newspaper correspondent this week, of being one of Sydney's two most powerful women means Ms Germanotta is entitled to a serious hearing. (The other woman of influence was Clover Moore, who made Stef an honorary citizen, whatever that means.)
I would have let Gaga week roll over me with barely a blink of recognition, cosy in the assumption that her fame will blow away only to be replaced by a busload of successors, had it not been for the media obsequiousness to her every costume change and half-baked thought bubble.
I've no beef with her. Fortune has shone on her, focused by the contrivances of a small army of myth makers, storyline choreographers and gatekeepers. Good luck to her and her followers. They don't expect me or my kind to join the throng, a conversion that instantly would burst the bubble anyway.
My issue is not that her music and exuberant antics do not interest me. I'm not envious of her wealth or celebrity. When someone tries to ascribe to her or any other famous person a certain wisdom born out of that fame alone, however, my hackles rise.
It's the great cop-out, the triumph of ordinariness, the affirmation that life essentially is a lottery, where anyone can have virtually anything so long as they trust in the game of chance.
Neal Gabler, the author of Life, the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, argues that celebrity culture doesn't result from the meeting of consumer culture and religion but from the hostile takeover of religion by consumer culture. Entertainment, not religion, he says, is the opiate of the masses.
We're encouraged to adopt the shadow of fame as a surrogate windshield to the buffeting of life's turbulence, an easy reference point which allows us to surrender our duty to challenge for ourselves, as if some higher order of mortal being can do our thinking for us, even though they make no claim to superhuman credentials.
We aspire to fame and therefore applaud those, adore those, who achieve it. But our adoration must be justified; hence our attachment to the famous of qualities the rest of us only dream about.
Not everyone, of course, is so easily hoodwinked, so comprehensively self-deluded. Stephen Parnaby, a Herald reader from Revesby, put it as well as anyone in a letter to the editor. "Excuse me while I have a grumpy old man moment. I can't be the only person who isn't overly excited about Lady Gaga," Parnaby wrote.
"You can't open a newspaper, turn on the radio, turn on the television or go online without coming across some guff about Ms Gaga. She's a pop star; she hasn't discovered the cure for all forms of cancer. I'm not saying she's a bad person, or unworthy of some respect as an entertainer, but to paraphrase the late Rex Mossop, I don't think she should be forced down my throat." Quite.
So why am I banging on about it here? Because the mindless and seemingly inexorable rise of celebrity helps displace the individual obligation to think for oneself, to sift through the palaver, the spin, the deceit, the silly, to resist sloganeering masquerading as reason, to understand that glory pursued vicariously through an idol is a poor substitute for sucking the marrow from life.
Images of Bono chewing the fat with successive American presidents, bending the ears of British prime ministers and twisting the arms of our own demeans Western political process. I don't suggest - as Paul Theroux has - that the Irish singer and other prominent entertainers prick our consciences about global injustice because they're "mythomaniacs" wishing "to convince the world of their worth". I give them the benefit of the doubt, but what entitles them to an open-door policy from world leaders when hundreds of people working tirelessly around the clock and without recognition to overcome these injustices are denied the opportunity to enlighten those empowered to make a difference?
Politicians, I guess, rub shoulders with celebrity in the hope some glory will wash onto them. But heaven help those who slip up by not keeping celebrity fascination at the forefront of their otherwise busy minds.
November 17, 2006, was the day Kim Beazley sank the final nail in the coffin of his leadership of the Labor opposition. Belinda Emmett, wife of the TV presenter Rove McManus, had died of cancer and Beazley began his press conference that day extending his condolences. But he stuffed up, confusing McManus with the White House numbers man Karl Rove. Beazley was gone from the leadership 17 days later, replaced by Kevin Rudd.
Attributing to Gaga, a 25-year-old pop singer, the wisdom to pronounce on issues deeply rooted in the mire of social mores is an insult not only to the politicians she's invited to lecture disdainfully but to the rest of us, too.
That didn't stop Channel 9's Tracy Grimshaw lobbing to Gaga a question on whether Julia Gillard was a hypocrite for cohabiting in The Lodge while denying legal recognition to homosexual couples. Hell, Gaga didn't even know the prime minister was heterosexual, assuming from the framing of the question that she must be a lesbian.
Lack of clarity, of course, didn't stop this advocate of gay marriage from bursting into song, admonishing prime ministerial double standards (a different issue from hypocrisy) and not pausing for clarification until the cameras were off. Put straight, so to speak, Gaga adjusted her answer when filming resumed and the gaffe was neatly papered over.
It wasn't her initial answer that was so egregious. Gaga had been asked to opine on an issue she clearly was no more qualified to answer than my grandmother. That she was asked the question was bad enough; it's worse that her second response was faithfully reported by supposedly serious media as if Gillard, poorly advised though she often is, should be guided by someone so ill-equipped, so lacking in temperament as to know nothing of her own limitations.
It's offensive because it invited me to take her opinion seriously, as if I needed her prompting to see the light. Better she had followed the example of Paul McCartney, one of four likely lads whose fame eclipsed hers, and who probably did more than any others to elevate the notion of entertainers as philosophers.
In the 1990s, I attended for a national newspaper a press conference for McCartney and his wife Linda at Perth's Subiaco Oval. It was the only press conference they would give on their band's world tour, which began in Perth, so dozens of media representatives arrived from around the globe. There were the usual fruitcakes, clamouring for McCartney's endorsement of the philosophical directions of their Wheat Germ Weekly or Dope Smokers' Bugle. Others wanted him to open up on the Beatles, and others again wanted his thoughts on issues ranging from world peace to Australian taxation.
McCartney shrugged his shoulders in bemusement. "I'm a singer and writer of pop songs," he said. He had no finer insight of matters political than the next bloke, and he wasn't going to be tempted to make an ass of himself. Hooray.
The Dalai Lama isn't so blessed with a course of easy retreat, but his every utterance is swooned over by some members of the fourth estate, no matter how much it amounts to simplistic statement of the bleeding obvious.
I once was compelled to attend an audience with the holy one. It convinced me that while his fame does not derive directly from being an entertainer, he commands the same sort of celebrity status that adds undeserved gravitas to his pronouncements.
How do we achieve world peace? We need to show more love. Why aren't we happier than we should be? We need to show more love. It's like the words of a pop song.
I don't mean to ridicule the Dalai Lama. But for his every word to be exalted as the revelation of a universal truth is a victory for empty-headedness over examination. To expect prime ministers to meet him at the drop of a hat, just because he's at their doorstep, is to confuse yet another partisan political viewpoint with spiritual wisdom.
What mass media gives is just as easily taken, of course. There's a danger in riding to the top the elevator in which celebrity is mounted. If their pedestals were not so high, the famous wouldn't have so far to fall when their mortality inevitably is exposed. Then again, that's half the media fun.
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