Posted on 01/18/2016 9:59:21 AM PST by rey
Not a Fan
by Theodore Dalrymple
January 16, 2016
One should not speak ill of the dead, of course, especially of the recently dead, but it does not follow that one should speak well of them, or speak of them at all. Personally I was astonished at the amount of coverage given to the death of David Bowie. One might have thought he was really a figure of world historical importance such as David Beckham or Leonard DiCaprio.
On the day after his death, the supposedly serious newspaper that I take most often when I am in Britain, The Guardian, ran a special 12-page supplement on his life and activity, as well as five pages in its normal section. There have been articles about him on the two subsequent days. I wait patiently for the tide to turn.
(Excerpt) Read more at takimag.com ...
“Popularity itself neither confers value on anything nor detracts from it.†He began his essay on Malraux by telling an anecdote against his admirers. A parish priest gives an impassioned sermon that reduces the entire congregation, except one man, to tears. Afterward the man is asked why he remained unmoved when everyone else was so powerfully affected. He replies, “I am not of this parish.â€
Well, when it comes to David Bowie, I am not of this parish. It is true that I know, or knew, practically nothing of him. I recognized his face, I need hardly say, as a North Korean necessarily recognizes the face of Kim Il Sung, for omnipresence brings its consequences, but that is about all. I am sure I must have heard, though not listened to, some of his music as it was pumped like poison gas into the public space; but I made no particular effort to increase my acquaintance with it.
I acknowledge that by avoiding contemporary Anglo-American pop music (contemporary, that is, with my life) I may have missed productions of genius. But on the whole I have preferred to listen to what a cultivated American friend once said to me: that you don’t have to eat a whole pound of butter to know that it’s rancid. I prefer the popular music of almost any region of the world to the Anglo-American (especially the Anglo). By comparison with the latter, Latin American, African, Arab, or Indian has long seemed to me infinitely preferable, and greatly more civilized. Popularity itself neither confers value on anything nor detracts from it.
The immense coverage of David Bowie’s death in The Guardian did not entirely convince me of his genius, except for self-exhibition. There, it is true, he excelled. In his public appearance he seemed to appeal to our culture’s magpie instinct for the militantly meretricious. I listened to a little of his music on the Internet and suffice it to say that I was not transported by it. The last page of The Guardian’s commemorative supplement, no doubt for its readers to treasure for fully three days, had a couple of facsimiles of the manuscripts of a couple of his lyrics, treated with reverence: If the manuscript of a sonnet by Shakespeare had been found, it could hardly have been treated with greater reverence.
The first lines of one of the lyrics read:
There’s a brand new dance But I don’t know its name That all people from bad homes Do it again and again…
I accept, of course, that the lyrics of songs are not to be compared to pure poetry, and that their function is different. All the same, the principle characteristic of the lines above is their banality and not their genius. Moreover, when I looked up more of his lyrics, I did not find any that were of a much higher or deeper quality. Nobody should be judged by his worst work (only a very mediocre writer, said Somerset Maugham, is always at his best), but the principle characteristic of Bowie’s lyrics seemed to me their appeal to people whose idea of human suffering is the natural consequence of their own self-indulgence. And this is now a mass phenomenon. We live in societies in which an unprecedented proportion of the total of suffering is self-inflicted.
It is true that any artistic production that is popular to the extent that David Bowie’s was or is popular is significant. A book that sells 100,000,000 copies tells us something important, whatever its quality or content. The anecdotes of people who met Bowie that The Guardian printed were revelatory in their extravagance: Like any girl, I’d like to touch him, wherever one went with him there was always a seismic shift, space and time changed. Golly! This is the kind of abjection that Hitler was once offered. One is tempted to say that they are the words of natural, or at least willing, slaves who seek to dissolve their selves and forego their will for that of some other person.
An interesting question (interesting to me, that is) is why a newspaper directed at the most highly educated and intellectual portion of a large population should devote so much space to the posthumous adulation of such a person as David Bowie, and why his activity should be treated with such breathlessly awed veneration. Was it sincere? Was it insincere? Is it worse if it was sincere than if it was insincere? On this difficult question, I cannot quite make up my mind.
I suspect, however, than in the extravagance of the coverage there was an element of flattery of the popular taste, that is to say a willing and dishonest suspension of judgment. You can criticize authorities all you like, but when it comes to criticizing masses of ordinary people—there the critical faculty must halt.
If you want to hear a genuinely great popular singer, listen to Umm Kulthum—whose funeral, incidentally, was attended by 4 million people.
“One should not speak ill of the dead, of course, especially of the recently dead, but ...”
This guy lost me when he said that The Guardian was a serious newspaper...
Well the Daily Mail, UK, has basically been doing the same thing, day after day after day.
“One might have thought he was really a figure of world historical importance such as David Beckham or Leonard DiCaprio.”
Oh, please.
Stopped reading right there....lol
I think that was a joke.
I took that as a tongue in cheek comment.
As if the two were anything to be proud of.
Daily Mail screws up my computer so I don’t go there that much. I love reading the insane anti-American screeds on the Guardian and tallying up their worst geographical mistakes when talking about America’s heartland.
Right ... was that comment supposed to be sarcastic or serious? Is the author actually trying to make some kind of point, or is he just demonstrating a weird sort of snobbery?
He is a snob because he doesn’t care for Bowie and thinks all the press space lent to him is over the top?
None of this is about David Bowie. It’s all about western society obsessed with celebrity worship. It’s no more complicated than that.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
I go with the latter. I've read the article twice now and can't make out any larger sort of point. Bowie was an extremely talented pop musician and song writer, for whatever that's worth in the scheme of things.
Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello and Leonardo...................TMNJ...................are all more talented than DiCaprio...................
I’m no fan of David Bowie, never was. A whole lot of people were/are. They like music the author dislikes, so apparently he feels free to look down his nose at them. He has the right to do that; I have the right to suggest that there might be a bit of snobbery going on.
Are you one of Umm Kulthum’s 4 million fans? If not, you might want to take a look at the author’s nostrils. He’s showing them to you.
That's the point i kept trying to ferret out of the piece but just couldn't get there. His constant snobby implication that the music he likes is so much better that the music I like dominated the whole thing.
Princess Diana and Mother Teresa died on the very same day.Mother Teresa was,during her life,a far,far,*far* greater force for good than Princess Di ever *dreamed* of being.I,for one,first heard of Mother Teresa’s death about 6 months after it happened.
Come on, guys. That’s sarcasm.
You have to read other Dalrymple to get his sardonic humor. He is quite brilliant.
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