The Celebrity Weapon

Joe Hill was the closest thing to a people’s troubadour that I can think of. He was a member of the Industrial Workers Of the World – the Wobblies – and he wrote and sang songs that the workers could use as weapons in their strikes and organizing efforts. Many of those songs are still sung today. He was executed by firing squad in Utah in 1919. The state said he killed somebody but most everybody else figured is was a frame-up. They had to stop him, those songs of his just caused too much trouble.

Now, suppose somebody wanted to engineer a self-policing society where no one would ever get that far in the first place - by using some sort of mechanism whereby success led to failure, tricking people into feeding the hand that bites, so to speak. What would that look like? Well, it might look very much like our modern celebrity system. Let’s just tilt things a little bit and look at them that way for a while and see what happens when celebrity becomes a weapon…

Eugene Debs, probably the most honorable man ever to run for President – and from prison, at that – said, “When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.” Now, that’s a good attitude to have. Prince, on the other hand – the artist formerly known as *@! – said “pop life, everybody can’t be on top.” See the difference? Prince was, of course, putting himself up there on the top and singing down to us commoners, saying it’s okay, we can’t all be great like him. But hey, love me, I’m your pop star. That’s why I don’t own any Prince records.

Now, everybody knows that in order to have an effect as an artist you need to achieve a certain level of visibility. A certain stature. So what they did (“they” being the architect generals of the music industry) was to invade, colonize, and in fact own that level of artistic existence. To get there you have to go through them. Most people approach them asking for approval: “Please make me a star, oh great ones.” If the applicant is willing and the raw putty of their talent is moldable something might happen and a one-hit wonder may be born. But sometimes an independent figure appears, gathering meat and muscle on their own road, owing to none. This one has to be cut off at the pass: a billionaire steps into the road, with an enormous Congratulations! and a fat wad of cash and says something like, “You made it, welcome to the Wonder Dome,” and shoves the cash wad directly into the applicant’s mouth. Hard to sing straight with a mouth full of money.

Oh, I can hear it already, “Come on Page, that’s a bit of stretch.” Yeah, well, I told you we were going to tilt things for a while. We’re almost done… Not everybody gets caught, but enough do to make it pay for the money-bag bankers of music row. And enough to warp a lot of the young impressionables who watch those award ceremonies, seeing all those glittering gold trinkets and flash bulbs, those rock stars and heart throbs.

And that’s the end of any future Joe Hill. That does it more effectively than any firing squad. Because once he’s got that medal, once he’s joined that club, once he’s made that pact with that billionaire, its all over, the system owns him. Or her. Or it. And that’s the way it’s done. As long as “they” own the terms of success, the puppet is King.

But so far they don’t own the street. Whose streets? Our streets, that’s whose! And success out there is measured in interpersonal immediacy, with no middle man. Like the whispered rumblings of a mass movement about to happen, a million unencumbered tongues sing us into the 21st century. We should listen.