La niñez desfavorecida y el complejo tutelar

The connection between shamanism and popular music goes back to the birth of the Blues, which, in the Southern states of the USA was known as

‘the Devil’s music’. The murder of the Delta blues-man Robert Johnson in 1938, poisoned by drinking strychnine from an unsealed bottle of whisky, created a shamanic hero of the Blues, virtually overnight. In the 1940s and

’50s the stereotype was taken over by jazz musicians like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, whose playing and transgressive lifestyles were yoked, in the public imagination, by supernatural powers. Coltrane must be the only celebrity to have a church founded in his name: St John’s African Orthodox Church in San Francisco. In their best work Coltrane and Davis achieved a purity of expression that was indeed religious in its inten-sity. Yet precisely because it carried the capacity to transport audiences away from earthly cares, it was associated with possession and magic, thus reinforcing the links with shamanism and the devil.

But, arguably, it was not until the emergence of rock in the 1960s that the twinning of the shaman with certain types of charismatic musical personality became uniform. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Marc Bolan and David Bowie consciously presented them-selves as shamanic figures. Bowie invented the part of the alien rock messiah ‘Ziggy Stardust’. As with Pete Townshend’s earlier creation of the eponymous youth messiah in Tommy (1968), it was never exactly clear what Ziggy Stardust’s sacred mission involved, or who he was interested in saving. The content of religious convictions did not matter. Rather it was the state of collective effervescence that these characters induced that was

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the main lever of their cultural power.

Shamanism is a potent source of fantasy and self-delusion. Alan Parker’s film The Wall (1982) emphasized the thin line between rock shamanism and Fascism. The concentration on image, might and moral certainty occurs in both genres. In 1976 David Bowie outraged the media and many of his fans by apparently greeting them with a Nazi salute when he arrived at Victoria railway station from the Continent. The press publi-cised his comment made to a Swedish reporter that ‘Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader’. Not surprisingly, Bowie later recanted, and explained his flirtation with Nazism as a by-product of physical and psychological exhaustion. However, the mythologizing aspects of Nazism, notably the passionate concern with regeneration and the search for new order, has strong overtones with the myths of finding spiritual wholeness and emotional integration through worshipping the Übermensch, the prototypal celebrity in Nietzsche’s philosphy.

However, in this regard, the fate of the hated statue of Stalin that stood at Letna Plain overlooking the Vltava river in Prague is perhaps instructive.

Unveiled at the peak of Communist power in 1955, the 14,000-ton, 98-feet-high granite statue was the largest figure of Stalin ever erected. Khruschev denounced Stalin in the following year, leaving the Czech Communist Party with a prominent and embarrassing white elephant. The monument was eventually blown up in 1962, but the plinth remained as a reminder to the Czech public of temps perdu. In 1996 it was occupied by a ten-metre-high inflatable replica of Michael Jackson, who was passing through the city on his latest world tour, which, one may ruefully note, was called ‘History’.

The rock shaman produces excitement and mass hysteria rather than religious salvation. The ability to act as a conducting rod of mass desire, and to precipitate semi-orgiastic emotions in the crowd, are the most obvious features of this form of shamanic power. When an attempt is made to articulate or codify creeds, it usually falls flat. Coltrane boiled down his religious conviction into two words: ‘live right’. The message of

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The Beatles was equally attractive yet just as tenuous: ‘All you need is love’. The efforts by later rock shamans, such as Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Kurt Cobain, Michael Hutchence, Bono and Liam Gallagher, to express a creed of living, are confused and often embarrassing. ‘All you need is love’ is a truism, but one that obviously glosses over many diffi-culties and inconsistencies.

Perhaps one reason for the significance attributed to these simplistic celebrity philosophies is that they are generally presented to an audience that is peculiarly impressionable. Typically, rock shamans address youth cultures. For people who are consciously seeking role models that contrast with the models of family life, passionate convictions, delivered with sincerity and glamour, have a strong resonance. In societies where rates of divorce are high, and where the future of the nuclear family is in doubt, celebrities are notable ‘significant others’ in the public management of emotions. Because youths are the immediate ‘victims’ of divorce and mari-tal troubles, the impact of celebrity culture is likely to be particularly strong on them.

However, it is a mistake to limit this impact to the status of youth. Judy Garland’s iconic status in gay culture partly derived from her ability to cope with disapproval, rejection and marginalization. The enduring celebrity of Marilyn Monroe derives from her projection of vulnerability as a mode of communication with her audience. Monroe enables audiences of all ages to escape the category of their private worries and troubles by iden-tifying with her highly public personal difficulties.

Yet it is undoubtedly in youth culture that the category of celebrity possesses deepest force. This is one reason why the method of rock celebrity presentation is usually intensely sexual. As cultural icons they adopt the public face of a sexual object. Because their mass appeal depends on presenting themselves as constantly available, their stage dress and presentation coaxes crowds to want them, especially in the sexual sense.

The fantasies born as youths listen to a CD or tape in their parents’ home or 70 C E L E B R I T Y

in a bedsit are part of the energy used in the stage performance, which presents the performer as someone who apparently lives without taboos.

‘Jesus died for somebody else’s sins, but not mine’, declared Patti Smith in the 1975 album Horses.

The absence of guilt and taboos are also prominent motifs in Hollywood celebrity culture. The shaman figure in Hollywood is typically associated with amoral and dangerous influence. Rudolph Valentino in the Jazz Age symbolized the threat that male American audiences professed in the face of ‘erotic outsiders’. For females, Valentino was an object of desire precisely because his body and behaviour refused to comply with ethno-centric masculine stereotypes. For males, he was condemned as an indolent foreigner whose public face concealed the genetic inferiority attributed to all such immigrants.

Moral panics about the amoral attitude of Hollywood on sexual ques-tions in the 1920s were replaced in the 1930s with fears about the influence of violence in gangster films. Movies like Doorway to Hell and Little Caesar (both 1930), Scarface (1931) and Public Enemy (1932) were criticized for glorifying violence. Actors associated with gangster roles, such as Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, George Raft and James Cagney, were vilified for playing parts that taught audiences that crime does pay. The gangster movies seemed to comment directly on the perceived American lust for money, and the invalidation of American males in repressing their desires.

Robinson’s mobster, Rico Bandello in Little Caesar, is evidently a psychopath, but the film is ambiguous about others who, unlike Rico, simply accept their lot as jobsworths and stable family men. They will never have Rico’s wealth, or experience his unbridled aggression. They must rein in and disguise their desires and thus, the film suggests, they cannot, like Rico, ultimately be true to themselves.

In the 1950s, Elvis Presley, James Dean and Marlon Brando symbol-ized the lust for money and violated stereotypes of masculine invalidation in other ways. They were obviously profligate with money; they prioritized

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self-expression over conformity, and they placed hedonism above responsi-bility. In the eyes of the moral majority, unlike Valentino who symbolized

‘foreignness’, they were ‘the enemy within’ – the youthful, ingrate inheri-tors of the sacrifices made by the adults of Eisenhower’s generation who had defeated Hitler and Tojo in the Second World War. Their insouciance was an affront to the work ethic that demanded relentless endeavour in the workplace and sobriety at home.

David Riesman captured the state of public anxiety that existed in the early 1950s with his famous distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘other’ directed personalities.⁷Inner-directed personalities are the archetype of pioneering stock, who rely on the Bible, the example of their parents and their own efforts and energies to construct a tenable moral framework and make their way in the world. Other-directed types abandon internalized moral systems in favour of the fashions and fads of the mass-media. It was the seductive role model that Presley, Dean and Brando presented to impres-sionable, other-directed types that so perplexed the moral majority in the 1950s. Riesman was troubled with the fear that Western society had already exchanged the principle that work is the central life interest for an addiction to consumption as the end of life. Further, the Hollywood stars expressed this metamorphosis in highly conspicuous and morally danger-ous ways.

The exiled Frankfurt School theorist Leo Lowenthal had already antic-ipated an historical dimension to this thesis. He argued that, in the 1920s and ’30s, American popular culture exchanged its respect for figures of industry and administration, such as Thomas Edison and Teddy Roosevelt, for the adulation of show business idols, such as Charlie Chaplin, James Cagney, Al Jolson, Clara Bow, Theda Bara and Mae West. For Lowenthal, the entertainment celebrity was now the most desired object in popular culture, leaving the traditional role models of industrial society – the inven-tor, the teacher and the public official – stranded.

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deeply ambivalent construct. The wealth, freedom and popularity of stars fulfilled the American dream. Hollywood celebrities were self-made indi-viduals who achieved their wealth and power by their talents and industry.

This was in stark contrast with the inherited wealth of the lazy, self-approv-ing European aristocracy or the children of the American nouveaux riches that the economist Thorstein Veblen had rebuked in his attack on the perils of conspicuous consumption. Conversely, Hollywood celebrity was also regarded as the worm in the bud of the American dream. Stars worked, but unlike other Americans, they seemed to enjoy their work. They were paid, but by the standards of Middle America, they received a king’s ransom for their labour. Moreover, in the highly public reporting of the sex lives of Hollywood celebrities, Middle America sat goggle-eyed at the freedom from moral restraint and public censure enjoyed by the celebritariat.

Hollywood film directors have exploited the popular association between celebrity and superhuman powers. Oliver Stone’s film The Doors (1991) was built on the premise that, as a child, Jim Morrison’s spirit was possessed by the spirit of an Amer-Indian shaman. For Stone, nothing but mana could explain Morrison’s uncanny ability to encourage audiences to shed inhibitions and be carried outside themselves.

Inviting Hollywood celebrities to play the role of the Devil and take the audience on a journey into the Underworld is also a theme in American film. In recent years, Robert De Niro (Angel Heart, 1986), Jack Nicholson (The Witches of Eastwick, 1987) and Al Pacino (The Devil’s Advocate, 1997) have played the Devil, while Brad Pitt has played Death (Meet Joe Black, 1999). The choice of these actors is revealing. Each of them has claim to be regarded as a shamanic emblem for their generation. In a variety of films in the 1970s and ’80s, De Niro and Pacino played rebels, anti-heroes, out-siders and romantic misfits who symbolized the rebellious and misplaced sense of identity in large sections of the audience. Jack Nicholson broke through to mainstream audiences with Easy Rider (1969), a succès de scan-dale in Hollywood, not only for its controversial content but for its

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enormous box-office appeal too, which briefly created independent film-making as a sunrise industry. Brad Pitt in Fight Club (1998) played the ultimate shamanic figure by representing the id (Dionysus) to Edward Norton’s ego (Apollo).