Leo Hornak
Jackson: hell was other people
In this month’s Prospect podcast, Nigel Warburton considers Michael Jackson’s death in the light of Sartre’s observation that in death we become ‘prey to the other’. (Download the podcast here, or click on the box on the right of the page).
Which of the many Michael Jacksons should we remember? And should a performer’s personal life be allowed to overshadow their work after their death? In Michael’s case of course, the personal eccentricities developed in public alongside his musical triumphs. For some public figures however, there is a much greater contrast between private and public personas. When it was revealed that George Orwell had denounced other writers as communist sympathisers to MI5, there was a sense of shock among many on the left. Andrew Motion’s biography of Philip Larkin revealed Larkin to be (in his personal life) distressingly bigoted and reactionary.
Do these kind of posthumous revelations ever matter? Or are they always a slightly squalid excuse for us to indulge our interest in an artist after they have gone? Let us know your (public, but not bigoted) views below-
Tim Footman
Steven Wells RIP
As you may or may not have noticed, a Famous Person Has Died. Which leads, of course, to any number of questions for media-type folks. What priority should we give to the news of the Famous Person’s death? How long should we carry on, before the bulletins become, in effect, Famous Person: Still Dead? At what point might it be OK to mention the, y’know, icky stuff about the Famous Person? At what point do we unleash Uri Geller? Oh yeah, and what do we do about the economy and Iran and all that boring stuff?
Moreover, if a Famous Person Has Died, should that mean that other, slightly less famous people who die around the same time should get the same treatment. I know, you’re thinking of Farrah Fawcett. But I’m thinking of Steven Wells.
Steven Wells, aka Swells, Susan Williams and a few things less pleasant, was probably only truly Famous (that’s Jackson Famous, Farrah Famous) to those of us born between about 1960 and 1975, with a fondness for noisy music in which attitude trumped ability every time. He was a poet, novelist, film-maker, sports writer and political activist, but his Famousness derives from his long association with the New Musical Express, in which he lauded Napalm Death and Kylie Minogue, while pouring scorn on Morrissey, Radiohead and Belle & Sebastian (you know, the kind of acts that NME readers really like). To read his views was like voluntarily submitting oneself for re-education.
But his true genius was expressed not in his reviews or interviews, glorious as they could be, but on those magnificent occasions (once every six weeks or so, I reckon, although my memory could be playing silly buggers) when he was allowed to edit the NME letters page, known since forever was a toddler as ANGST. That was when the caps lock was taped down; that was when the adjectives and expletives and exclamation marks exploded around the page; that was when perfectly sensible letters from people who bought the paper and were entitled to their views were eviscerated in public for liking, I dunno, Aztec Camera or something. It was childish, it was cruel, and for a few thousand of us, it was the funniest thing we’d read until the next time.
But not funny enough it seems. Steven Wells died last week, and as the news trickled in, occasionally poking its nose out from behind Farrah’s hair and Jackson’s… well, Jackson’s nose, I suppose, it turned out that he really wasn’t even famous enough for a Wikipedia page.
This has now been rectified; but the Wikiprefect (or whatever they dub themselves) had a point that the people howling against the decision couldn’t be arsed to find citations to support the inclusion. And this does raise an issue, specifically about journalists, but also about anyone who achieved notability in his or her field before about 2000. The pinnacle of Swells’s achievement lies in his belligerent marshalling of those letters pages. And that’s what they were; pages, which survive in attics and garages and people’s memories. They were physical, tactile things where layout and artwork and smudgy ink came together with the readers’ earnestness and Swells’s nihilism in a dialectic of verbal violence that made them bloody near essential. Because of the physical size of the old-style NME, scanning them and reproducing them on a computer screen would necessarily diminish their impact. Yes, you could cite the references from your old, mouldy copies, but the mice ate them some time in the last century. Doesn’t mean they weren’t great. Swells could twist the conventions of Web 2.0 to his own Satanic purposes with coruscating wit, but his glory days were analogue. As were many hacks who have been tagged for deletion on the basis of notability and lack of citations.
So here’s the question: in Wikiworld, and the culture that shares its values, is it notability that’s the issue, or Googlability?
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