Why should politicians pontificate about pop stars?
Posted on Friday 26 June, 2009
Filed Under Politics
BOTH the prime minister and the leader of the opposition have been quick off the mark to offer their condolences to the family and friends of Michael Jackson. Never mind that most of the people who fall into these categories will have no idea who these creepy limey guys are anyway; what I want to know is why politicians feel the need to have an opinion on the death of an American pop star in the first place.
I mean, I can just about see why comment is called for in the event of a national disaster on the scale of Aberfan or Hillsborough. It is probably appropriate to issue a few lines of tribute on the demise of a prominent politician of one’s own party, although I expect Brown and Cameron will strive to out-do each other in nauseating eulogy, encomium and panegyric when Thatch finally kicks the bucket.
But why come out one way or the other on Michael Jackson? I know the guy’s fans tend to be pretty dedicated. But can there really be anybody on any electoral register anywhere in Britain whose vote at the next election depends on what party leaders have to say about Wacko Jacko?
All of this puts me in mind of the time New Labour spindoctors sort to convince the nation that the Brown listens to the Foo Fighters and the Arctic Monkeys during his early morning workouts. It later transpired that the contents of his iPod are rather more bland, tending towards the Beatles and popular classics.
I loved that Guido Fawkes post that included footage purporting to be a long-haired Cameron at a rave somewhere off the M25, circa 1988. But while the Tories insisted that this was a case of mistaken identity, Cameron’s image makers did set up a photoshoot of their man posing outside Salford Lads’ Club, in emulation of a Smiths album cover. Even Conservatives are allowed to like dad rock these days.
Given what we know of the two men’s musical tastes, I’d put money on the proposition that neither of them ever attended a Jackson gig. The likelihood is that neither ever owned any Jackson music on vinyl or CD, either. A simple ‘no comment’ from their respective press offices would have been rather more dignified.
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26 Responses to “Why should politicians pontificate about pop stars?”
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…will have no idea who these creepy limey guys are anyway
In all fairness, even Liberal Democrats are likely to be less nerve-rackingly creepy than Mr Jackson and the rest of his family.
It’s not just Saddo Gordon and Smiley Camerooooon.. the BBC seems to have devoted its entire 24/7 news output to the demise of the Wacko One.
As I was falling drunkenly asleep last night I heard…
“Michael jackson is dead, it’s not confirmed, but if so it will be a truly Kennedy-esque moment!” (sic/lowd larfter) – Richard Bacon BBC R5 …..hey, who said Blue Peter premium coke messes up your brain? Jacko shot in Dallas? By his brothers?
Now on Radio 3: “Suite for Jacko” ~ Garry Glitter String Quartet. Followed by a reading of Lord Mandelson’s NEW poem… “He was a thriller, but now he’s banged up in the chiller”.
About one-third of the half-hour BBC telly news at 13.00 today has been devoted to the death of this popular singer. Enough of this ‘mourning sickness’.
I too find this excessive preoccupation with the pop star to be strange, but isn’t it just a reflection of something deeper in part of the human psyche ?
I am not sure, but it seems like a detach hero worship to me
That’s something all politicos will remember?
The days of mourning for Lenin?
The weeks of grieving over Stalin’s demise?
The wasted time lamenting Trotsky’s passing?
If blogs had existed, during those times, I am fairly sure we would have seen a similar spectacle as to that around the death of Michael Jackson.
So when you get down to it, hero worship, whatever form it takes, political, cultural or musical is not terribly rational, but people still do it even in the 21st century.
I don’t think you can compare Michael Jackson to Lenin or Trotsky, Lenin and Trotsky were significant, conscious agents in human history.
Their contributions to human liberation were immense, and the legacy more enduring than some 80s pop tunes (I’m not a fan of MJ).
I agree with what Dave says, interesting how they decide which people are worthy of a tribute, and who isn’t. Tributes for Jade Goody and Michael Jackson, but not for Jack Jones. Strange.
For me the big news is the victory at Lindsey, a good day for the working class. Now for the end of the theocracy in Iran please.
Compare, a Great such as Lenin with anyone, perish the thought!
I was suggesting how their acolytes are similar, in an often quasi-religious idealisation of the individual.
To the outsider it seems peculiar but there are similarities.
I’ve just watched an hour long programme of snippets from various videos produced by Jackson over the years. Yes, he was a brilliant entertainer, but to be honest I don’t know how much of that shrieking I could take. His vocal range seems fairly limited, although that is probably the nature of the type of song he is singing to be fair, and the dances and dramas struck me as rather juvenile although slickly produced. To be honest, what they mean when they talk about the Greatest singer of all time is the Greatest earner. He has been a cash cow for record companies, worth is always measured in the amount of money you produce for someone else. i was interested to see that he has actually died owing $500million, a not inconsiderable sum. I’d also like to point out that he was fortunate in that he was very marketable at a time when media were expanding ie pop vidoe, MTV, the internet etc. All of which rack up sales. Apparently the NUS held a two minute silence for him. Forget about the students in Iran being raped and killed in their dormitory, that’s not important….
The difficulty is that its not really a case of choosing between opposing imperialism and supporting the movement in Iran. There is, as you note, zero evidence beyond the ‘who benefits’ argument (which is a dumb argument to start with: I benefit from plenty of things I’ve had nothing to do with). And its not really a matter of choosing between a liberalism which abstracts from class inequality and a socialism which emphasises the importance of limiting individual property rights in the interests of justice. There is zero evidence for the spontanious sociology of the movement we find, not just amongst those mistaken people you are discussing, but also in much of the media (the secret of much of the argument is that those making this mistake are simply turning the liberal media’s presentation upside down without bothering to examine any empirical arguments whatsoever). The liberal media does this because it is taken with the idea of globalisation and the rise of a new middle class as a source of human liberation. One suspects that this is buttressed by simple conveniance. Most western journalists will spend most of their time in a country like Iran with people just like them. But to criticise this by swallowing the account whole, and refuse to engage with any argument that is not the opposite: well it reminds me of PC Snapper Organs who followed the Piranna brothers every move by reading the colour supplements. Iran is a country which has experianced massive capitalist development and urbanisation since the fall of the Shah. As a consequence there is a much larger group of very rich people and a much larger prosperous middle class then ever before. But these groups can be found on both sides of the current political divide. There are Revolutionary Guards who send their kids to private schools in the west. Rafsanjani is one of the richest individuals on the planet. Those behind the puppet Ahmendinajad will chide him publicly about his insulting remarks about those who have done well in the regime (as Khameini did in his recent speech). He was a populist mayor of Tehran who became popular because he pointed these things out. He was selected as a useful idiot who might divert mounting anger. Unfortunately he was also a true believer. Which meant that, as with the French Jacobins, he did not understand that everything the regime did would produce the opposite result (famously the Jacobins both fiercely defended private property but believed that this would lead to a small property holders democracy: of course they cleared the way for the wealthy rather then the small property holders, and became, as a consequence, more and more draconian in an attempt to manage a situation which they had created but did not understand). So you have a country called the Islamic Republic, based on piety and political virtue, in which levels of anomie and alienation are so great that a member of the Guardian Council admits that MOST of the population are prepared to believe the election was fixed. Ahmedinajad believes that IF ONLY people followed their religion properly, IF ONLY people were not corrrupt, none of this corruption and alienation would exist. Hence in his case a growing rigidity and a growing fanaticism about virtue, which not only does not address the root problems but makes the very suffering he claims to be addressing worse. It is as Olivier Roy noted, the classic pattern of Political Islam in power. So you have a few palliatives to the poor and ferocious repression if any of them try and organise to defend themselves against bosses, who just happen often, to be the same virtuous folk in political power. It was once an attractive ideology for many, because it SEEMED to address real suffering. If you are being exploited or rentracked or suffering the effect of corruption, and someone tells you this is against religion and if religious values were restored, then all this would end, it can seem to make sense. Particularly if you live in a society, as many did in the 1970s, and many do today in the rest of the Arab world, were the regimes are so brutal and the mosque is a place where you go to get help. The tragedy is that Ahmedinajad was once of this generation. Today he unleashes the police and thugs on demonstraters, on women who are not dressed properly, on minorties and all forms of ‘backsliding’ believing that the result will be a juster society. But it is not. It is a more and more unjust society, and the corruption continues to grow at the same time as the religious police make peoples lives more desperate and more miserable. But the trouble for a liberal as opposed to a socialist, is that socialists can argue about the underlying cause of the unhappiness that leads to the search for religious palliatives AND ensures that they are no answer. For Capitalism is not a system compatible with communities living lives according to political virtue. Part of the heightened crisis in Iran is precisely the astonishing gap between professed piety and actual behaviour, just as the fervour of the Jacobins was created by the gap between Republican ideals and the reality of an emerging system of extreme inequality which made fraternity a joke. The liberal rightly lambasts the unfreedom of the religious police. But what does the liberal sayWhen it comes to imperialism in the region there are similar problems. For despite the claims of a new and revolutionary type of regime, Iran’s relationship with those most oppressed by the consequences of colonialism and western hegenomy is as deeply cynical as that of the old Arab Nationalist regimes. It does support movements of resistance to Israeli militarism. But only those movements which also support Iran. And when it came to Iraq, whilst Hezbollah in Lebanon were making great play of rejecting sectarianism between Sunni and Shia, the Iranian regime was exploiting these tensions in its waiting game with Iraq, like their Sunni fundementalist opposite numbers, more concerned to head off anything which might undermine their geo-political game in Iraq (all this was covered in detail on Lenin’s Tomb at the time). Trouble is you can’t really follow through this logic if you don’t believe the west has had an imperial relationship with the region, or if you don’t believe that part of that legacy is the position the Palestinians now find themselves in. Both of these points are demarcations between socialist understandings and liberal ones.
Because a socialist understanding of imperialism is not simply about what the CIA does but the nature of the system we live in which produces hierarchies of class inequality within nation states, and hierarchies of national inequality between them. And its capitalism that does this. To seperate the argument or even counterpose them, in ways which both John Wight and many contributers on this blog do (just from the other side) inevitably produces complicity with oppression. Both arguments involve turning away from the project of what needs changing on a global level to stop the oppression which grows out of a global system of exploitation. Both will produce variants of the Jacobin dilemma.
I strongly suspect that if Ahmedinajad survives politically (I doubt this: either from below or above he’s finished in my view: looking at his face during Khameini’s speech one sensed the confusion of the true believer) he will end up a Mubarak. In the end the path he is treading leads only there. But of course most readers on this blog will not understand quite what a damning judgement that is.
I don’t know. Both Cameron and Brown strike me that they would have been Michael Jackson fans if only they had been the right age.
I see Brown as having a few Phil Collins, 10cc, Pink Floyd and whatever that Scotsman who used to present that terrible Hogmany show was called’s albums. Cameron a later equivalent – Radiohead maybe?
And this is significant. Age c20 (which is when most people are most into music) you can tell who will prosper politically and who won’t, from what is on their MP3 player.
So, in say, the LPYS, 25 years ago, whilst I liked obscure ultra leftfield stuff beyond Cabaret Voltaire, e.g. King of the Slums, you just know my contemporaries like Jacqui Smith and Caroline Flint were buying Michael Jackson, Roxy Music, Madness and Phil Collins. Lots of Phil Collins.
Green types, like safe festival type music, with a ‘just for show’ twist e.g. a sitar player sat behind the bass player. They like to engage in traditional ‘call and response’ type banter from the stage (‘Sing along for me Glastonbury and chant for Tibet’ ). I don’t know what the current equivalent band is for them now but when I was at school those who would have become Greens would have been the (earlyish) Genesis fans, who would also recite the lyrics to Monthy Python sketches at breaktime and read the Lord of the Rings all lunch time.
Sadly, the cabinet type’s main opposition, the fake Left, never managed to progress beyond Bowie who they adored and adored so very much – He’s so daringly androgynous. And bisexual (of the not actually sleeping with men type.) Gosh, how radical.
And this musical selection technique means, if you sneaked around the outside of Oxford colleges and worked out what each young politico was listening to in their rooms – who is listening to the current equivalent of say U2, and who is listening to obscure Paraguyan remixes of Algerian rap, so you can tell who will be in the cabinet in 2035 and who will will be sitting vainly waiting for Posdadist extra terrestrials to just kick start something, anything – as the support for their politics is too small to measure.
What political future might there be for a blues/soul/60s&70s RnB fan such as myself SPP? =P
God, I’d be a PR nightmare. The only way I’d be elected was if my constituency were a hippy commune.
Neil Kinnock used to be President of the Gene Vincent Fan Club…
Neil in a leather suit and a leg iron wailing “Blue Jean Bop” (baby wants to bop with Gene), stole Glenys’s young heart away. Back in the day.
They still carry out this “ritual” in private. After counting their money.
John
I’m not sure which post you are responding too – certainly not the one on dead pop stars – and I am not really sure what you are trying to say.
But it is rather presumptuous of you to think that you are the only one around here with an academic background in international relations.
Some paragraph breaks might be useful.
It does not constitute selling out for the left to occasionally write in an accessible style.
Anyway, Jacko: I’m not sure you can blame Brown and Cameron too much for their pat responses. Let’s face it – in the age of 24/7 quantity-before-quality avalanche journalism, you knew someone would be ringing them up for a comment. Their involvement in the story says as much about the contemporary media as it does contemporary politics.
Dave, you have to feel sorry for Johng. Last time he was this bewildered was when the SWP fell out with the Respect cabal. Just think all those inherently brownskinned people from repressive peasant societies who should have been inherently progressive and anti-imperialist turned out not to be!! Now, the same is happening again. It’s very sad, but it ain’t Marxism as we know it.
As John g informed us, the Iranian protesters are alright. He actually saw ‘a woman of the lower classes’ on one of the demonstrations. LOWER CLASSES OF THE WORLD UNITE; YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS!!!
I know, Sue. You just can’t get the servants these days, apparently.
Utterly incredible, John G.
7,571 characters
1,278 words
3 paragraphs
Zero relevance to the thread. OK, he posted in the wrong place.
“So when you get down to it, hero worship, whatever form it takes, political, cultural or musical is not terribly rational, but people still do it even in the 21st century.”
Well put, I think, Mr Morality.
Thatcher dies they can say what they like, I’ll be dancing in the streets and getting pissed with happiness.
I saw Michael Jackon in 1988 and I have nothing to say. Other than I got free tickets cause the girl I was sleeping with at the time … her dad worked for a telco sponsoring Jacko… and anyway. Ow!
I blame Harold Wilson, sucking up to the Beatles. Blair’s miserable and embarrassing “Cool Britania” (and-worse- his sick-making “peoples’ princess eulogy) followed on from that.
As a general rule, politicians should steer well clear of show-biz, whether it be Lloyd George and Marie Lloyd or FD Roosevelt and Bing Crosby: it rarely works out wll, and it usually diminishes politics.
FDR and Bing Crosby were lovers?
I’ll never look at a Road movie in the same light ever again.
FDR and Crosby: …eh, no, they weren’t lovers. Croby (a conservative Catholic) would have a heart attack, though Mrs Roosevelt (pretty wild) would no doubt, be amused at the suggestion…
I find it interesting that the Black Megastardom Royalty are out in force claiming Jackson as a leading light, when the man so obviously hated being black. He hated it to the point of using skin lightening creams in an attempt to whiten his skin, having his flat nose raised to be like a European nose and his hair striaghtened. He also hated being black to the exten that his children (and now we can at last see their faces) are totally white, with no african features what so ever. I know genetics is a tricky thing but they should be less caucasian than they are. Not his sperm, obviously. The man was a total fruitcake. Also, I can’t forgive him for abandoning his menagerie when he lost most of his money. He just left the naimals to starve and they had to be rescued by the equivalent of the RSPCA. No doubt he will have done the dame to ‘his’ children.
Q: What’s black and has 8 legs?
A: The Jackson 4.
But seriously, …
Michael Jackson was a freak and a pervert.