Pop music
Fame's flip side
Marcus Berkmann
Hype of the moment, without ques- tion, has to be Madonna's new 'book' of smutty photographs, which is being shipped into the country at this very moment, no doubt already wrapped in drip-dry brown Paper bags. True, the genitally fixated song-thrush does stand to make a whop- ping amount of money out of this latest wheeze, but even her most dedicated fans must be beginning to wonder whether she Is now in possession of a full complement of marbles.
After all, it's one thing to have sexual fantasies and another to act them out, but it's a whole new bag of potatoes to hire expensive photographers and record them for posterity. And when you publish them between hard covers and charge £25 a throw, people start asking questions — the sort of questions that involve straitjackets and residential facilities for the emotionally overwrought. Here, it seems, is vanity pub- lishing taken to unprecedented levels of barminess — enough, one would have thought, to keep whole legions of psychia- trists in work for the rest of the century.
Sanity, though, has rarely if ever been Considered a vital ingredient of the rock Way of life. Given the absolute fame they now experience, it's perhaps surprising that many more pop stars do not flip complete- Y.. Some, of course, do. Despite his unimaginable wealth, we all now regard Michael Jackson 'as a pitiful figure — a
man whose main hobby is plastic surgery, and who thinks the rest of the world are his children. But other than Princess Diana, and perhaps the Pope, there's no one more famous in the whole world. Despite its sup- posed ephemerality, pop fame has become virtually the most comprehensive and widespread form of fame you can now experience. Most celebrity is, after all, lim- ited by language — Noel Edmonds doesn't mean an awful lot in the south of France, which is probably why so many people go and live there. But pop fame straddles the globe. Even film stars and leaders of crazed religious sects aren't as famous as pop stars now.
So when pop stars do buckle under the strain, there's nothing the rest of us can do other than nod sagely and agree that it was only a matter of time. For most artists, it's the terrible pressure to follow up the last huge success that proves fatal. When Michael Jackson released Thriller, he looked relatively normal: it was his attempts to repeat the trick that did all the harm. Even Bruce Springsteen went to Hollywood eventually, getting married and divorced and moving to Beverly Hills and releasing albums that just sounded like wooden parodies of earlier albums. In retrospect, it's only remarkable that it didn't happen sooner.
But if you really want documentary proof of the appalling effect of success on a pop star's mind, just listen to Peter Gabriel's new album, Us (Real World/Virgin). His last album So was his first worldwide best- seller, and was, by any account, a cracking little record. Unfortunately it has taken him six years to record anything else. As a result, Us is one of the gloomiest records I've heard in ages, a long, dense, self- pitying work about how awful it is to be Peter Gabriel. How awful indeed — this man used to go out with Rosanna Arquette. In every press interview he reflects upon the unfathomable horror of everything; in every photograph he looks as 'It's a night he won't remember.'
though he's about to burst into tears. Clearly it has all proved too much. Success has unhinged him.
So, as we tut-tut about Madonna's latest antics, perhaps we are reacting without due compassion. The poor woman is suffering in public, and it's unfair of us to mock. Per- haps, indeed, detailed psychotherapy would prove useful, with a small spell in what Bertie Wooster would call 'the happy tablet academy'. In the meantime, though, we should just treat her like any old loon who insists on whipping all her togs off in pub- lic: look the other way, and if she gets too close, call the police. I wonder if I can wan- gle a review copy. . . .
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