However...
I was all set to speak tirelessly of Ricky's golden legitimacy and flawless panty-heat, but I caught a little throwaway interview with him. Normally, when Ricky speaks, he's all chocolaty corporate cheerleading—for example, when he picked up his World Music Award in Monaco: “To all you leaders,” he said, presumably meaning World Leaders, “you should take the music industry as an example—it's all about creating, not destroying.” Idiotic, but heartfelt. Maybe forgivable. But later, he gave two spontaneous answers that made me think the Golden Ricky might be more hollow than solid.
A love-struck fan-girl interviewer asked him: “Who is your favorite singer and biggest influence?”
“Journey. Steve Perry,” said Ricky without a beat of hesitation. Oooch.
“Who is the most important person in the world to you, and why?” asked the interviewer.
Ricky then got an unfunny paranoid shrapnel gleam in his big puddly eyes and started mumbling about how he always wanted to invite “his enemies” to dinner, because he wanted to keep them very close, even closer than his friends. The Wheel in the Sky Keeps on Turnin'. Wo-oh-oah.
I wonder if I’ll ever see it in my lifetime: a whole generation of naked people too high to say no to anything, with some super-legitimate, undeniable Mick-like Rock Lord at the center of it all, driving it all like a many-limbed Magic Bus. But when it does happen, I’ll probably disapprove.
CHAPTER 2
CHAMPIONSHIP KARAOKE:
Singing to Win
From Pan
laughing & fucking
& making light
of all devils…
to the Devil himself
the Man in Black
conjured by
the lusts of Christians…
O for a goat to dance with!…
O unicorn in captivity,
come lead us out
of our willful darkness!
– Erica Jong ,
“To the Horned God”
While I like to embrace all cultures, no matter how remote, reveling in their difference and adopting their trinkets and religious idiosyncrasies and snacks of exotica, I fear that there is nothing to love about the goddamned dijeree-doo. Leave that noise to the aborigines. Dijeree-don't. If I never here that wobbling burp sound again I’ll be only too happy. Likewise, the Peruvian bamboo pan-flute. Pan—the leaping satyr! Pan—Father of panic! Pan—with his pan-flutes, gallivanting through the primeval forests of myth, arousing flame in loin! Oh, the laughter and randy skirt-hoisting! Maybe, once upon a time, it was OK, in a movie about the Amazon rain forest, to hear a mellifluous, airy tune being hooted through a quaint little pan-pipe while soaring over lengths of wild black river and tangled jungle majesty; but when you are in a subway, and some cocksucker in an alpaca pullover is spitting out “My Heart Will Go On” and emoting so hard the veins are sticking out in his neck, it’s enough to make you want to destroy all young trees so that hamburgers and chemicals and cancer can prevail uncontested on the earth.
How, you may wonder, did I even recognize the theme from Titanic, as popularized by songstress Celine Dion, when it was in such a heinously bastardized form, arranged for the Peruvian pan flute, as it were?
I will tell you.
Living in the world right now, unless you are building pipe bombs in a little shack in the woods full-time, you are going to be aware of a certain sedimentary layer of information. If you never watch television or listen to the radio; if you attempt with your every waking hour to avoid the Top 40 song list at all costs, you will still end up knowing every godawful lyric of a certain batch of bad pop music by heart, because you will be utterly unable to avoid it. Someday, you’ll have to go shopping somewhere where some girl with hubcap-sized earrings who chews with her mouth open is listening to the radio. You will call your oral surgeon and be put on hold. You will live near a stop sign and snatches of heavy wailing will crawl from bass-heavy car speakers through your window with all the musk and ferocity of a heat-maddened rapist. In any case, you will end up hearing and inadvertently memorizing a lot of terrible songs, because several zillion people you don’t know just love the living shit out of them. These invisible nations of people so love the Top 40 that they not only will wade through the barking retail-carpet and auto-body ads to listen to the endless rotation of them on the top Big Radio Stations that are piped like the Word of God into their workplace, but they will then, after their workday is over, go out and buy the same CD’s for the full $14.99 price tag and play them voluntarily when they get home in the evening, in those relaxing moments that don’t involve television.
The Top 40 has been dominated for years now by that royal family of singers who can twist all the air out of their larynx in an inhuman display of lacy, high-gospel vocal-emoto aeronautics and wild flights of forced musical hysteria, accompanied by string-heavy orchestrations and a commanding hairstyle blown into a backlit power-aureole by a large industrial fan. Often, leather pants are involved. Billowing white shirts are also important to their effect, which I suppose is to evoke the drama of being trapped in a strong, prevailing wind, which I suppose is to evoke the drama of being trapped in a strong prevailing wind, which I believe is supposed to evoke the drama of being tempest-toss'd in a fever pitch of heart-wrenching that no mere mortal could stand. Their platform is an incredibly heroic dissatisfaction with Love, a ranting of Zeus-like proportions against Love itself, utilizing such universal laments as “I can't be strong,” which is ultimately resolved through a revelation of forceful self-empowerment, such as “I will be strong”, fueled by a lot of soft-jam vocal arpeggios. There is a tremendous need for this oversized, synthetic junior-high emotional wallowing. Teenagers all over the world rock back and forth on their beds, singing in hurtful little voices along with the radio as the cyber-violins choke tears out of their love-deprived eyes. Teenagers understand codependent musical statements such as “I will never breathe again” or... “walk again” or “love this way again.” This music distills the emotional torpor and the whining indignities of puberty and filters it through hundreds of thousands of dollars of production value into a kind of sap-like audio cologne, which, for some inexplicable reason, appeals to billions of adults as well as the emotionally hairless teen. We are a Soft-Jam Nation. Walking into various shops, you start to realize that insipid, cloying lyrics with huge pop-symphonic orchestrations are the emotional wallpaper of the working class. “I’m down on my kneez, beggin’ you pleaz, baby baby baby woah,” etc., seems to pacify an otherwise disgruntled, non-movie-star work force at their delicatessen and gas-station jobs and keep them in a semi-permanent state of glazed, flavorless passivity. Listening to such music makes me feel as if I have just rubbed a floral-scented electric blue toilet puck all over my face and neck, but I am a tiny minority in the vast world of music listeners.
Barbra Streisand is the monster that started it all. All those Top 40 sound Titans emerged fully formed from the terrifying loins of the Streisand. The world has yet to see another Tiberius-level, power-drunk control tyrant like Barbara, who executive produced many films starring herself where the male protagonist had to look down at her as she was nested coyly under the freshly-dampened sheets and say, “God… you are so, so beautiful. Do you know that? Do you have any idea how incredibly beautiful you are? Look at yourself. [he offers a large hand mirror.] Have you ever seen anyone more beautiful than you are, right now?” At which point Babs, almost but not quite showing a breast under the sheet, mouths “I love you” through a thickness of beige lip gloss. The plots are always the same: Barbra, in some profound way, through her immense greatness of person, invariably saves Nick Nolte from himself or Jeff Bridges