Media Slag
A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the media machine. This month Thomas H Green snarls on unrepentantly about rehab culture.
Lily Allen’s saying she’s “through the worst” at 21. She’s talking about hedonism, drugs, late nights and misbehaviour. What is she on about? She’s 21, for heaven’s sake. She should be just getting started. She’s not the only one – there’s a list of them longer than the arms of that guy in the Fantastic Four. From Kerry Katona to Keane’s Tom Chaplin, celeb culture has reached a stage where young stars have to receive media absolution for their sins before they’ve even learnt how to sin heavily in the first place. Part of the modern celeb myth is falling foul of ‘evil’ drug’n’party culture – which they supposedly only use ‘addictively’ or to ‘mask the pain’ of being famous in the first place – , and then see the error of their ways. The rest of their lives is spent talking endlessly in bland magazines about nothing because there’s nothing left for them to talk about. They’ve dropped off the interesting meter before they’ve even lived.
It all makes me recall Menswear, a long forgotten Britpop-era London media fad band. Their first interview with Select pop mag contained rampant egotism and obvious drug madness and made for an amusing read. Their second interview a few months later for the same magazine and they were on the verge of breaking up, most of them were on the wagon, and they all advised against taking the path they’d taken. IN THE SPACE OF A FEW MONTHS! Fucking fluff-merchants. Whatever happened to rock star spirit? Most ‘60s rockers put their back to the wheel for at least a decade, usually two, before giving up, and even then it was done with quiet dignity rather than fanfare. Iggy Pop gradually wound down his ‘partying’ but you’d never know it, and still occasionally dips a finger in the pond when he fancies, as do Keith Richards and the rest. Who said absolutism, complete sobriety, was the best path? Someone like Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue stopped because he was headed towards the grave, but he’d already accumulated about eight lifetimes worth of crazy adventure stories by the time he did. All biographies of classic rock stars have a great narrative arc that usually ends when they clean up. Even if that was years ago, the book almost always captures the mot recent years in just a couple of chapters. This isn’t because that’s what people want to read (although it is) but because once life had grown ordinary, comfortable, there’s no story left to tell. Check out the fantastic ‘My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize’, the story of Creation Records by David Cavanagh – not only is it one of the best books ever written about popular music, but it has the classic narrative arc. For the first two thirds of it Creation boss Alan McGee lives a party lifestyle to match 1970s Aerosmith, then he cleans up and the book becomes a catalogue (albeit quite an interesting one) of his financial deals with major labels in the wake of Oasis’ success.
People are built differently, some are born to be raving addicts and some just roll with the opportunities life throws their way. Most people have a bit of both aspects to their character. No-one, for instance, could claim that the story of Daniella Westbrook was a rock’n’roll lark. Instead it was a real life ‘Christiane F’, a horrifying descent into a chemical abyss of wrongness from which she had to escape. But she’s an extreme case. She isn’t every-celeb. There are decades of stars who have dabbled if an when they fancied, and stopped when it felt right. What I object to is the accepted norm within mainstream media circles that caning is ‘bad’ and people need to excuse it later on. Bollocks. The human desire to get high, to party and socialize, is an imperative that’s up there with food and sex. Whacked out strangeness should be celebrated and often makes for great art. There’s a difference between the caners with vision and the boring little shits whose only ten minutes in the spotlight are the result of the coked up spotlight-hogging they did for a year. Then, unfortunately they invariably stay in the Heat’s pages due to their physical looks and profile but are, in fact , utterly tedious. Some of these figures were only ever interesting in the first place because of their bawdy, drink’n’drug-induced bad behaviour. Take busty Brit glamour model Jordan, by way of example. When she was falling out of taxis, showcasing her sex toy collection and frightening bourgeois sensibilities on chat-shows, she was great, a gaudy threatening force of lewd manic womanhood. Now that she’s pastel-clad soft-spoken Katie Price on the cover of Hello with yawnsome Peter Andre, however, she’s duller than a two hour lecture on economics.
No, let’s have a bit of class. Imagine if Dean Martin had given up drinking in 1948 and appeared on TV programmes talking about it. I know I’m being trite and that there are bigger issues, people’s personal problems and issues at stake but, please, can’t we have a little more blasting hedonism celebrated for its own sake and a little less mealy-mouthed post-‘addiction’ sanctity. Gawd bless Kate Moss and let’s chant along to Amy Winehouse instead: “They tried to make me go to rehab, I said, ‘No, no, no.’.”
In fact, why not let that sharp-mouthed king of lumpen prole guitar, Noel Gallagher, have the last word: “I had a good laugh in the 1990s taking coke in Supernova Heights, but when it all got a bit much, and I got bored of it, I didn’t go into any poncey rehab unit; I just stopped doing it. I mean, that’s just fucking common sense, isn’t it?”
Rehab is for quitters.
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