Last week the eyes of the world turned to Edinburgh. One billion
people — one in six of the world’s population — tuned in to watch the
MTV Europe Music Awards. The whole city was taken over. Stars and their
entourages occupied the best suites in hotels and booked out the top
restaurants. Visitors, with and without tickets, swarmed through
Edinburgh’s streets.
Celebrity is the religion that matters to today's youth
Even the Executive got in on the act. First Minister Jack McConnell
bought a natty new pinstripe suit from Harvey Nichols and headed for
Leith with his shirt casually unbuttoned at the neck: no ties when you
are mixing with the kids.
For a brief moment, as the top entertainers in the global music
business awarded each other prizes, Edinburgh was not just a stunning
backdrop or even a marvellous stage. No, the city had slipped the surly
bonds of material reality and become a celebrity itself. This last
week’s event, for all its undoubted boost to the capital’s image as a
tourist destination — look out next year for an MTV bounce in visitors —
was primarily a celebration not of music, nor except tangentially of
talent, but of celebrity itself. What we tasted last week — and who did
not get a frisson at the thought of Justin, Christina and Kylie sleeping
in our city? — was the intoxication of fame, the true currency of the
world we now live in.
I am old enough to remember when music was an oppositional,
anti-establishment force. Indeed, as a one-time editor of a punk fanzine
I was an active participant in one of the last of the great
counter-culture wars. How moral and anti-capitalist we were, agreeing
with the late, great Joe Strummer’s sardonic observation: “You think
it’s funny/Turning rebellion into money.”
What we did not understand back then, during the last years of the
1970s when Jim Callaghan was Prime Minister and unemployment — the
figures as yet unfiddled — doubled to reach one million, was quite what
the 1980s and 1990s would really hold for us. Privatisation, monetarism,
the miners’ strike — these were all minor local skirmishes in the long
war we now call globalisation.
It has not all been bad, particularly if you are Western and middle
class. It cannot even be said that the music is worse — Eminem, for one,
is a true great who joins the apostolic succession descending from the
American trinity of Robert Johnson, Hank Williams and Elvis Presley. And
yet, something has changed, changed utterly. The full integration of
music — country, rock and pop — into the entertainment industry has, to
paraphrase Thom Gunn, turned revolt into commodity. Hollywood, which in
the 1950s looked as though it would not survive the onset of television,
has not only absorbed the upstart new medium, it has also exported its
model of cultural production and its dominant values into every other
sphere of paid-for entertainment. Wherever you look, you can find the
star system and all that it entails. Huge salaries, press operations in
total control of access, commercial exploitation of image rights: it is
there in TV, music and now football.
What does any of this matter — it’s all a bit of fun, isn’t it? There
is no doubt that, judged from a number of perspectives, the balance
sheet of this brave new world is not all debits. On the one hand, the
homogenisation of the film industry has left the once-great Hollywood
dream factory creating movies aimed at 10 to 12-year-old boys consisting
solely of extended special effects. On the other, the MTV generation —
those who have grown up with that channel as their primary source of
music — have had as the soundtrack of their lives a world in which
African-American creativity is dominant.
And yet, something really big is happening, something truly
significant is being lost. The globalisation of culture is not happening
in a vacuum, it is occurring at a time when the traditional institutions
which have shaped and preserved cultural and societal values are
suffering a crisis of legitimacy.
A few days before the MTV Awards in Edinburgh, a new bishop was being
consecrated in New Hampshire in the United States. Much press coverage
focused on the fact that Bishop Gene Robinson is the first openly gay
bishop in the modern Church. But the most chilling detail came from one
attendee who had hugged the new bishop to congratulate him and later
reported that under Robinson’s surplice he had felt a bulletproof vest.
The authority of the Church within society has fundamentally shifted
when this kind of protection is felt necessary.
This is, of course, an extreme example, but it is also an
extraordinarily resonant image. And it can stand for the decline of
secular institutions too — the politicians and their parties which no
longer provide a powerful enough framework to interpret the world, the
government and its agencies which are no longer trusted to do the right
thing. As church attendance declines, as turnout in elections declines,
where does the impulse that once drove people into public, collective
affirmations go? It has not disappeared, it has been redirected on to a
new object: celebrity.
Looking back, we affect to despise the medieval peasants who believed
that the touch of the monarch could cure them of chronic disease. Yet
what is so different about the motive which this week has driven people
to seek desperately for a glimpse of a star? If only some of their magic
could rub off on us, perhaps we could become like them, or at the very
least we can take some of their reflected glory — their aura — back into
our lives.
The most significant political event of this last year has not been
the Iraq War or Hutton Inquiry or the fall of Iain Duncan Smith. No, it
was the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California:
politics too is being absorbed into the vertically integrated monster of
modern mass entertainment. Where did the support come from for an
out-and-out Republican to be elected in an overwhelmingly Democrat
state? From voters who wanted to touch the hem of a celebrity garment.
If you cannot be a Hollywood star yourself, what could be better than to
associate yourself with one?
Do not for a moment believe that this is solely an American
phenomenon. Listen to the dreams and aspirations of young people. Many
of them want to be famous. But they aspire to become famous only for
being famous — the true definition of modern celebrity. The most common
vehicle for achieving this ambition is television. There is huge
competition to participate in Big Brother and the other reality soaps
because they provide instant access to the most desired platform of all.
And the ability of those programmes to create C, D and Z-list stars who
have an afterlife in tabloid newspapers in turn validates them. Truly
this is an infernal machine.
In our globalised, secularised, despiritualised world, the medium is
no longer the message — it is the meaning itself.
John McTernan
10 November 2003
http://www.news.scotsman.com/columnists.cfm?id=1236052003
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