Charisma, Popularity and Cynicism OR More signs I am getting old
1. There is a credible self-propelled pop star (as opposed to a manufactured pop star like Britney or boy bands) several years younger than me! But the funny thing is, for possibly the first time ever in my life I am totally in puppy love with a [current] pop star! I literally want to hang his picture on my wall and moon over it! Look at him! ooo, those eyes! Listen to him sing! ooo, that ironic yet uplifting falsetto! Watch him dance! He's so freaky and yet he has that certain something...stage presence? charisma? To be fair, it started when I just liked the way his big hit song sounded (I mean, by definition a Big Hit song is going to appeal to a lot of people, implying that at certain level it's appealing--and there's some lowest common denominator business going on there. How many Big Hit pop songs feature a lot of dissonance, lack of music cheerfulness, lack a beat that you can dance to (or at least find), etc. etc.? Sure, a few, but not very many. In this particular case it's interesting that it works on a couple of levels: the inherent musical cheeriness, unavoidable hook, etc. but also if you want to be one of those serious pop music people, you can also appreciate his winking use and combination of sounds from previous pop eras.) and then they couldn't decide whether to compare him to Jack White or the Scissor Sisters, and then I saw the video and it was all over. I was in pop star puppy love.

2. I'm not so sure about this democracy business. Even stadia of fans screaming for Barack Obama make me at best uneasy, at worst nervous. On the one hand there's the fear that something could go horribly wrong (since part of me is audacious enough to hope)--a scandal, he turns out to be a fake, or gets overconfident, or the voters get overconfident and forget to actually go out and vote in sufficient numbers--something happens and we're all disappointed again. Did we ever recover from Nixon? But anyway, even if everything goes well and Barack Obama does become the next president and is actually able to implement much of the platform he ran on and act with integrity--those stadia of screaming fans still make me nervous. How much can they really know or understand about his platform? about the political landscape and process? I think part of the problem with democracy is that you need someone who is basically like a big hit pop song to win: someone with charisma and broad appeal. I don't think a person with broad appeal would necessarily be a bad president, but the traits that make one a good candidate are not the same as the traits make a good president, so if a good president does get elected it's almost epiphenomenal to the process. Why are we screaming like a fans at a rock concert instead of saying things like "Yes, I do think his position on healthcare is X, but he should be wary of YZ." And then of course there's his whole gay marriage waffle, but to honest I think it's pragmatically sound.

I guess the reason this actually bothers me is that I'm not at a point of cynicism where I think none of it matters or could affect anything (I'll say it again: I explicitly reject nihilism on pragmatic grounds). With pop music, sometimes there's no accounting for taste, and even if faceless multinational corporations are using some form of payola to control the charts you can still find smaller-named artists in smaller venues, or online now, etc. etc. In other words, I don't really care what happens with the charts, but I still do care what happens with the election. Unless it turns out that the elections don't really matter because it's all controlled by a cabal of the unelected. I haven't ruled this out.

Labels: aging, charisma, cynicism, democracy, pop music

- posted by k @ 4:16 AM