The death of Jani Lane has prompted quite a bit of thinking and talking between mrs tsuken and me, fuelled in part by an excellent, articulate and insightful post by Sebastian Bach.
Fame, it seems, is a harsh mistress. There is a striking – and superficially surprising – dichotomy evident in the world of the popular musician. The rest of the world sees glamour, riches, obnoxious self-indulgence, glitz, parties and excess .. Oh, and quite a few early deaths. Yeah… There is that… Kind of a bummer, really.
But we then hear about how the dead star was lonely and unhappy, and feel kind of puzzled, because the image presented to us is of success and hedonism. We certainly don’t see them as alone, because they always appear to be surrounded by others. And if we see them unhappy we often regard it as spoiled petulance. I mean, how can they have anything to really be unhappy about? Look at their glamourous life and all the stuff and fabulous friends they have.
Right?
I guess Jani Lane might disagree were he here to do so….
The life these idols lead, it seems to me, is self-sustaining, but also self-defeating. As Sebastian Bach describes in the post I linked earlier, once the gig is done, and the after-party is finished, and everyone goes home, the star goes to their hotel room. Silent and alone. But all the rest of their existence is the total opposite, so how do they deal with that?
A common theme in rock star’s descriptions of their lives is that they basically exist on stage, and in buses and hotel rooms. So they are thrown wildly between adulation and abandonment. It’s no wonder that the latter is hard to deal with. No wonder the star often wants to just keep partying – because they know when it ends they’ll be alone.
A relatively common thing to see on twitter in a rock star’s feed is them retweeting positive things other people have tweeted about them. Sometimes this is remarked upon (not kindly). The more you think about it though, the less surprising it becomes. Of course, as the positive comments are just about the external appearance of their existence – them as an idol, rather than them as people – it is ultimately as defeating as it is immediately sustaining. It can prop up the ego, but that just leaves more space to crash into when the hotel room empties, as it were.
The first I saw of this – though I didn’t really grasp it at the time – would have been watching The Jimi Hendrix Story. He really was quite alone, despite all the people around him. I recall later reading about Brian May suffering depression, and thinking “how can that happen?” He’s a rock star. He’s got everything.
Right?
… Guess not.
Rock stars are really like Birds of Paradise: it’s a sexual display on a massive scale. Consequently they attract many people – but it is, or can be, superficial. Particularly when the music business itself is factored in, and you think about all the hangers-on and various sycophants, how is the star to figure out the real motives of the people surrounding them? How do they find or keep real friends? That’s not necessarily the easiest thing in the world for the average person; how much less so for someone who feels they must constantly be second-guessing the intentions of any friend or acquaintance?
That led us to reflect on rock star tweets in general. They’re not exactly replete with suggestions of time spent with friends. Music biz acquaintances, yes. Other stars, the beautiful people, yes.
“Catch you all later I’m off to a BBQ with me best mate”? Not so much.
Ok maybe they just don’t want to share that sort of thing… But I’m not convinced it’s really that simple. It just doesn’t seem that the sort of relationships most of us take for granted are that easy or common for stars. So it appears there’s not much middle ground to balance out the extremes of idolisation and isolation.
Lest you think I’m pitying the dude with the badass hair whirling a guitar around onstage, with the adoring cries of tens of thousands ringing in his ears, let me be clear that they choose (if any of us can truly be said to choose) their path, and they do get plenty of rewards for doing so.
The litany of premature deaths, alone and sad, is pretty sobering though (apologies for the unpleasantly hyper-religious tone of that link, but it seems to have driven them to collate a fairly thorough list – though they’re not all suicide, or drugs etc, they’re all pretty young).
I’m not sure I have an overall point … Other than to highlight the dichotomy, and the way that pretty much every aspect of the lifestyle accompanying that type and degree of success reinforces it. Without a balancing middle ground then, the unhappiness that these people talk about becomes much more explicable.
As perhaps do the deaths.
In memory of Jani Lane, here’s my favourite Warrant song (though I was never a big Warrant fan, I really love this song):
“I don’t need to be the king of the world.
As long as I’m the hero of this little girl.”
Unwanted Sexual Attention?
This morning I read a post by skepchick which shall we say, pointed out the problems with a post by a sex therapist named Marty Klein. (Skepchick appears to have quoted the guts of his post, with added meme hilarity, so I haven’t bothered to go and find his post.)
First off, a problem with the Skepchick post (which also highlights a problem with Marty Klein, to which I might return): she refers to him as a psychologist, and as a psychiatrist – as well as a sex therapist. Psychiatrists and psychologists are sooooo not the same thing. It really gets wearing when people don’t get that. They’re different words even, which should be a clue.
That said, when I went to Marty Klein’s website to find out what he really is, I came back none the wiser – save perhaps for some insight into Marty Klein. He certainly describes himself in extremely glowing third person, but I didn’t see any mention of what his basic qualifications are.
Whoops.
Anyhoo… Enough casting of nasturtiums.
The point he appears to be making is that not every sexual advance is a sexual assault, and that everybody should just recognise that, be grown-up enough to just say no, and not get upset and hurt and feel victimised.
Skepchick points out pretty clearly the problems with what he says – as superficially reasonable as it might sound. For a start, she wasn’t being hurt or victimised: she was pissed off at a rude unwelcome cowardly socially-inept offensive bumbling pervy invitation to a threesome – made by a couple she didn’t know, and with whom she had no connection, and who clearly knew it was super-dodgy, because they didn’t even stick around to see her reaction.
That’s the specific case, but it has more general relevance to Klein’s “argument”. He seems to suggest that we should all be “grown—up” enough to tolerate “unwanted sexual attention”, without falling apart. There are a couple of things here: first, we have social rules, which are necessary to stop us tearing our society (even perhaps each other) apart. Some of those (many of those) govern interpersonal conduct. This clearly trampled all over those: it wasn’t “just” unwanted sexual attention; it was unwanted sexual attention that was given in such a way that it broke a bunch of important social conventions. It’s not like your platonic friend (who you really don’t fancy) telling you they really fancy you and would like to be un—platonic. Granted, it shouldn’t — mostly, and I’ll come back to this — cause distress and falling apart and everything Klein appears to be lamenting, but I reckon Skepchick was perfectly right to be pissed—off and offended. The approach was shitty and offensive.
Now, the second point, as I’ve indicated, is about the fact that there really are some people for whom such “unwanted sexual attention” would actually cause major distress — and it’s got nothing to do with not being “grown—up”. A distressingly large proportion of women in our world are sexually abused, assaulted, molested, victimised … in any number of ways. Many of them might well have a serious, even catastrophic, reaction to “unwanted sexual attention”. And it’s not because they’re not “grown—up”. And you know what? They don’t have it tattooed on their foreheads or something, so “Mary and Jane” wouldn’t know if the person they’re approaching might have had past experiences that would affect them pretty seriously in such a situation.
Am I suggesting that we big strong men need to protect poor weak abused women? Hell no. Society needs to be sensible though. Remember what I said about rules governing social interactions? And this sort of unwanted sexual attention totally stomping on those rules?
Yeah.
I’m not saying (and just quietly, I doubt Skepchick is either) that we should treat women as delicate little flowers and refrain from making any sexual advances because they might crumple. I’m simply saying that there are ways of approaching people that are ok, and ways that aren’t. Sure, it’s not all codified, and it’s not going to work out well all the time.
But I think that, when it goes wrong, calling the recipient of the “unwanted attention” out for being annoyed and offended is fairly moronic.
And putting down their insistence on the need for clear policies about bad behaviour at events is similarly wrong—headed.