On the Rolling Stones Super Bowl Halftime Show
By James G. Poulos
Posted On February 04, 2006
Having mutually manhandled U2 and Macca, the Super Bowl now turns to the Rolling Stones. In so doing, the trifecta of lumbering Americanized British mega-acts is complete; no one is more American than these titled zillionaires. One reaction this cultural synergy is that the Jackson family has annihilated the trust of Big Entertainment in American entertainers. Another is that Americans desperately desire transgressive idols who have long since segued into the safety and comfort of Elder Rebel status, and that one cannot keep returning to Aerosmith and Bon Jovi for second-rate versions of the real thing. There is an interesting scale of rebellion that has Sir Paul entrenched firmly at the right-hand edge and the Stones on the far left. Paul is the Organization Man of the 60s rebel class, a necessary antidote to Janet & Justin. His is the musical version of the American cultural metamorphosis Easy Rider/Tommy Hilfiger.
Those worried about the triumph of the anticulture need to account for the counterdesire among transgressive desires for effortless satisfaction. Even anti-culturals get lazy: they need lightning in a bottle, the simulacrum of real transgression. Dully flashing memories of getting stoned and freaked out when the White Album hit "Revolution 9" meet this need, and Paul grinning his way through "Live and Let Die" while festooned and bedecked with American flags completes the weird unity of hophead atavism and jughead jingoism that is the hallmark of the American Sport Spectacle.
Moving rightward from McCartney we hit the metamorphosis U2/Bono. Way less establishment than Paul, Bono's rebellion is simultaneously super-establishment. It is American patriotism taken above and beyond itself to the universe-wide level. Bono's appropriation of American symbolism is the same as that of Bill Gates, or of that other MLKJr enthusiast Steve Jobs. The Spirit of '76 in the hands of certain Americans is the exploding nugget of a radical project of global emancipation -- the use of the United States is put in the service of a far greater, humanity-wide freedom. What better spokesman for this vast process than Bono, the non-American American par excellence? Of course John Lennon, the anti-Paul, was the reverse of Bono -- the American non-American -- and was part of the demolition of Manhattan as it switched over on Lennon's death into a crypt of death-culture: Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, heroin and AIDS; a town in tatters, a culture shattered.
First among brains battered and splattered all over Manhattan, Mick Jagger embodied that singular moment in Anglo-American history when British culture came to the USA to commit suicide and the USA caught on enthusiastically. The Americans needed a push: the secret suspicion that Dylan doth protest too much has now been paid out in Robert Zimmerman's biographical confession that his generation bummed him out and wanted too much from him. American music never really reached the rootless, radically nomadic condition that the Stones did -- roving as they could from French villas and dungeons to LA mansions to the filth-slicked alleys of New York City. They were as denationalized as Bono wants us to be, but the lesson Britain taught the Irishman was that freedom meant something much different from letting it bleed. (The same goes when Bono complains of getting no satisfaction.)
The resort to the Rolling Stones strongly suggests that the post-9/11 mode has done its time in the Sports Spectacular. "Sweet Neo Con" sets a forgettable fire. But the fire it sets is no kindling of the spirit -- it's that old rebel arson; it's a bonfire; it's a party. When the necessities of ritual sport call for public healing, one does not turn to the Rolling Stones. Good for America, in that regard: but we're left with one lingering sore spot.
There are no contemporary American artists capable of mass appeal in the very real and legitimate way the Stones are. Which halfway-young artist in the United States has the talent, the sound, and the songs that can pull a huge audience -- all without resorting to S&M antics? Blame the turn to nicheification in American music; blame the extent to which one's onstage expression of nichetude trumps one's pop sensibility, one's chops, one's musical sophistication. Somewhere near the thin-air heights of irony, the colossal egos of the Rolling Stones reveal themselves as so very un-postmodern: they are consummate selves because they are consummate musicians -- not the other way around.
James Poulos is an attorney and writer in Washington, D.C. blogging as Postmodern Conservative.
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