Fred Vermorel - Fantastic Voyeur: Lurking on the Dark Side of Biography

FANTASTIC VOYEUR

BY FRED VERMOREL

Lurking on the Dark Side of Biography

Village Voice Literary Supplement,  November 2001

 There was a metal fire escape up one side of her house. At the top was a black emergency door with a bar, the kind you find in cinemas. Such doors could be jimmied open. But was it alarmed? I often climbed to the landing outside this door and made a nest, camping on the iron slats. Sometimes her cats passed below and looked up at me. Would they tell? Sometimes she passed below, wheeling her bicycle for nocturnal sorties. Squatting there, refreshing myself with sandwiches and tea from a flask, I would listen to her dwelling as a lover sprawled over her body, detecting her heart.

Like everything else today, biography is about celebrity. Creating it, celebrating it, knocking it. We have little time or taste anymore for that forgotten genre of modest reckoning, where "nonentities" could find publishers and publics for nothing more or less than life lived—a few lessons learned. For example, M. Vivian Hughes's A London Family, 1870-1900 is so reserved, so populated by the humdrum and homely, that when the one big event happens—the death of her father—we are as devastated as she means us to be. Today, you need a line to fame or power to make you sexy: J. Edgar Hoover's lieutenant or Diana's ex-bodyguard or ex-boyfriend.

Two things intervened to change the face of biography: the celebrity industry and popularized psychoanalysis. Both are offshoots of the Romantic movement, which, as one American scholar put it, is the big bang of modern culture.

The Romantics invented modern celebrity. Byron and Napoleon were exemplary Romantics with a flair for news value and "human interest" stories: revolutionary, volcanic, excessive, restless, sexually voracious with "unusual" tastes, hovering between lunacy and inspiration—the emperor riding to battle with Young Werther in his saddlebag; the poet dead in a quest to liberate Greece (decked out in Michael Jackson generalissimo camp). Byron was a showman and self-publicist who knew how to blend his biography with his art into a seductive mystique in which—and this is crucial to Romanticism and to contemporary celebrity—deeds become synonymous with the "work," the personality inextricable from the individual, the individual rooted in the legend.

The foundational Romantic text was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions. Rousseau began with the assertion that here, for the first time ever, was an autobiography that gave it all away, told it all. The killer ingredient, which sold the book for over two centuries on a whisper and a nod, was Rousseau's confession of sexual masochism and his recollection of the childhood spankings that provoked it. Aside from this, Confessions is 600 or so pages of dissimulation, self-contradiction, treachery, special pleading, innuendo, raving, revenge, and lies. But what gushes out is the overwhelming "presence" of Rousseau himself: the paranoiac, the plaintiff, the pervert. The scandalous incoherence of precisely this person, no better, after all, than he should be, behaving badly, just like us in fact: real, really here.

It wasn't long before behavior itself became considered an artwork—think of Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, the Beats, Kurt Cobain, and innumerable rock stars, or most modern artists since Duchamp. Think of the way van Gogh's slashed ear has become as much an artifact of his oeuvre as Sunflowers. Such genius-type behavior was a script to follow to whatever bittersweet closure: despairing suicide, or sudden death in pursuit of the ineffable. There's some debate about which of these INXS singer Michael Hutchence achieved, but, discovered dangling from a hotel door with a stiffie, he was an instructive illustration of that key Romantic invention, the full-time genius, who, as Sartre quipped, is a genius all the time, even in the morning while cracking open a boiled egg.

Cue Freud. Psychoanalysis is an intensely Romantic psychology, especially in its crowning fable, the unconscious—code for yet another Romantic sublime that can only, with caution, great delicacy, and $X an hour, be approached by trained and sanctioned specialists with access to privileged knowledge. The record shows that psychoanalysis was eagerly seized on from the start, and became fused with popular culture from around 1915. Hidden motives, repression, fantasy, and catharsis were the hot topics from Eugene O'Neill to Tennessee Williams to Rodgers & Hammerstein, which then transferred to Hollywood and screens worldwide.

Psychoanalysis equally became the paradigm for biography, which began to seek out the youthful traumas that haunt adult destinies, courted childhood, dwelt on the novelties of sexual repression and frustration, and narrated itself increasingly as the peeling away of layers of self-deception all the way down to an "inner" truth or self—down to those unconscious desires and dirty secrets even saints entertain. It was Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians which in 1918 started that now ubiquitous trend of dishing the dirt on the great and the good, trashing Florence Nightingale among others, with "a sudden revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined." Lytton's brother, James, was the British translator and editor of Freud.

This practice is nowadays de rigueur. Witness Albert Goldman's Elvis, a nerd's revenge, or a biography of the sculptor Eric Gill a few years back that "exposed" him as an incestuous sexual monster and drew calls for his works to be removed from public places, or recent biographical revelations of Michel Foucault's gay sadomasochism, which certainly put a new twist on Discipline and Punish.

From Rousseau's buttocks to Freud's couch to the tumbling chairs of Jerry Springer . . .

 

After the war, the explosive growth of mass media accelerated and amplified celebrity, improving on Romantic devices in a number of ways. Take spontaneity, which dissimulates the distance between an artwork and the experiences it provokes. A Romantic artwork is really only there as provocation and ruse to catapult our "selves" out of humdrum states and reach greater heights, or depths, or whatever else seems weird, dizzying, and naughty. Equally with those Romantic artworks we call celebrities: We annihilate distances—geographic, cultural, pecuniary—in a sleight that brings these alien and inaccessible beings "into our lives." Hence the production techniques (camera closeups, mikes, and F/X that capture every breath and tongue tremor) that "produce" such audiovisual hallucinations as Madonna or Michael Jackson and allow us to gaze into the very eyes, to get right inside: up to the very eyelashes and pores, checking the backs of their hands for sweating as a sign that they might be lying, assessing their trembling buttock cheeks for beads of tumescence. This "persona production" renders every inkling and breath of presence up front, here and now, in your head, in your bed: Madonna's voice, throat, tits . . .

They are so real, these intimate strangers, so unbearably, overwhelmingly familiar. We are inducted into their lives, lured into their houses, enticed by their opinions; we meet their kids, learn all about their sex lives and their ailments and favorite colors and favorite songs.

How does celebrity exert such fascination? If you jettison the childish explanation of talent and the mystical one of charisma, and focus, as I did with Judy Vermorel in our 1985 book, Starlust, on the other side of the equation, if you talk in depth to the consumers of celebrity, if you consider music fans, for example, as consumers in a consumer environment consuming products that happen to be music stars, and map their desires in their own terms, you realize that celebrities are blank screens onto which we all project our fantasies.

This is what celebrities are really rewarded for. A celebrity's "act" readily spills from "real life" to "screen life" because there is no distinction to be made here between private and public spheres. In fact, a celebrity's raison d'être is to erase such distinction. Celebrities are made-up creatures, fictions from the very start and to the very end. We own them.

Sometimes I pressed my ear to the door and heard distant comings and goings. The gist of events and conversations, uncertain threads and emissions of her and her brother's lives. Explosions of hoohas, pounded stairs, slammed doors, flushing cisterns, music. It was as if they were putting it on to fascinate and tease me. Listen here, Fred! What is this noise here? And that one?

The most interesting bios weave the writer-as-obsessive into the text until the biographer and the obsession become part of the story. Sartre's psychobiographies took this over the top, from Tintoretto (the most convincing and shortest) to St. Genet. Genet was apparently so stunned by Sartre's biographical avalanche that he never wrote another word and was ungrateful enough to call his biographer a con ("cunt").

Less flamboyant are Walter Kaufman's Hegel: A Reinterpretation, which lovingly settles scores and guides us through a labyrinth of receptions and misunderstandings to make Hegel's project comprehensible, and Greil Marcus on Elvis Presley (Mystery Train and Dead Elvis), which certainly tells us more about Greil than Elvis, but then the writer has more to say than the singer.

The irruption of the author into the picture occurs equally with biographical novelizations like In Cold Blood or Norman Mailer's Marilyn (but Mailer is such an all-male schmuck he loses the plot whenever Monroe needs to become "female" and can't even understand why, to his chagrin, she'd prefer a Clark Kent like Arthur Miller to a Superman like Mailer), and, more recently, Gary Indiana's book on Versace-killer Andrew Cunanan, Three Month Fever. Such "factions" force us to confront the artifice of the biographical project and the fragility of its "facts."

There is also a sensuous and flirtatious aspect to biographical research: breaking seals and confidences, untying ribbons from bundles of documents, raising the dust of strangers' lives, dealing and unpacking other people's intimacies, deciphering their photos . . .

All games I played while researching The Secret History of Kate Bush, an absurdist experiment to see how far the rock bio could be stretched without snapping. I adopted the persona of a mad professor so obsessed that he traces Kate Bush's genealogy back to the Vikings. And I also stalked the woman, as a phenomenological acting out of that uneasy and twisted boundary between fascination and obsession. Oddly (or perhaps not), the book became the bestselling bio of that singer. But what most struck me was how straight were the readings people made of this text. I still find discussions on the Internet debating whether "I" was "really" obsessed with Kate Bush, as well as allegations I not only had an affair with her, but that while researching her life I ran over her cat.

Far from running over her cat, I seduced both her cats, Zoodle and Pywacket. I'd watch her let them out the door at night and coo them over to my hiding place, where I'd stroke their grumbling fur. Her cats were my Trojan horses to carry the smell of the hand I caressed them with back into her house, into her very lap.

Relevant here is the work of performance artists like Sophie Calle. Calle is known for randomly following people in cities, examining the sleeping habits of strangers she invites into her bed, or posing as a chambermaid and scrutinizing the property and lives of hotel guests. Calle's work is interesting, though it may be a cop-out that she protects her intentions behind avant-garde rhetoric and trades in high art rather than commercial discourses—which would be a more dangerous strategy. More suggestive, because more troubling and tentative and unsupervised, are the explorations of Oreet Ashery, a Jewish female performance artist who disguises herself as Marcus Fisher, a male orthodox Jew, and penetrates Orthodox Jewish communities and other milieus in that persona (www.sexmutant.com).

The cutting edge of such work today, the agenda that biography needs to address, is the phenomenon of the stalker. This is where the contradictions and fantasies of identity and desire are most tested and exposed. The stalker refuses to be intimidated by the "celebritariat" and its massive security apparatus, disrupting the celebrity economy by voicing the unspeakable and demanding the impossible (the impossible which is, however, promised over and over). There is an accelerating momentum here, from John Lennon, who conspicuously threw every shred of his soul on the market and was duly "consumed" by a fan, to the awesome global presence and mass-produced intimacy of Madonna. Madonna, who had the effrontery to play the little-woman card while having the stalker Bobby Hoskins jailed, and refused until forced by threat of imprisonment to attend court because she would thereby fulfill Hoskins's fantasy of contact with her. "We have made his fantasies come true," she complained. "How? By sitting in front of him." Madonna "felt incredibly violated": "That day I looked into his eyes he became even more real to me." What a delicious subversion of celebrity.

The morning John Lennon was shot I woke suddenly around 4:15. Numbers were flashing through my head: a phone number. I jotted it down on a pad. Turned over but still couldn't sleep. Around seven I turned on the radio and heard the news. A few days later, out of curiosity I rang the number. Kate Bush answered.

Frank Owen - Pop Journalism overview - Melody Maker - May 24th 1986

   

Frank Owen

Pop Journalism: Write or Wrong?

Melody Maker, May 24th 1986

So you want to be a pop journalist? Free records, free tickets, the occasional trip abroad and the chance to tell your favourite rock star what was wrong with his last album. But you don't want to be a hack, I hear you say. Neither do you want to be a media brat or vacuous lifestyle sociologist sussing out every pose. You want to shine but you also want credibility. A difficult one that.

In the absence of a strong street style like punk you're not going to make your reputation jumping on to the latest bandwagon. Pop music these days is a culture of fragments and you're going to have to reflect that in your writing. You're also going to have to come to terms with the fact that pop as counter-culture, as radical disruption, is long since dead.

Unlike the editor of the NME who still believes in the rebellious spirit of the paper, and unlike the bimbo from MTV who, on the BBC's recent history of the pop video, proclaimed that "MTV was for the rebels", pop is now fake resistance and there are few sights more pathetic than a pop writer selling you some dodgy new band under the guise that they're going to bring about the downfall of Western capitalism as we know it.

I know what you want to be. You want to be what Jon Savage calls "a post-modern pop journalist".

HOW TO BE A POSTMODERN POP JOURNALIST

ONE OF THE most interesting commentators on pop writing is Jon Savage, a one-time writer for this paper and now a regular contributor to The Face and New Society. Though there's been a massive increase in the sheer volume of pop writing (about a third of the magazines in your local newsagent will be advertising some sort of pop tie-in), Savage believes that most of it is merely a consumer guide to attract a certain market. This lack of critical perspective afflicts even the likes of The Guardian and The Observer whose increases in pop coverage have been brought about by the realisation that pop is no longer kids' music and is the perfect vehicle for catching that 25-35 audience. Savage feels that the inkie pop papers fare little better.

"You can't write good stuff if you're on a weekly deadline," he said. "Journalists who have to meet weekly deadlines soon get into the burnout syndrome. In my experience, a monthly deadline is ideal. The other problem on the weekly papers is the ego syndrome — the rock journalist as star. Writers should take great care not to become stars.

"I started writing about pop music firstly because of punk but mainly because I always wanted to be a writer. That's very important. I didn't want to be a publicist, I didn't want to form a record company, I didn't want to be a rock star, I wanted to write. I'm very serious about writing."

Savage believes in a postmodern approach to pop writing — a writing across disciplines that refuses musical authenticity and the attempt by the old pop writing to identify this with political radicalism. But, having got rid of the old politics of pop writing with its bogus dualism between rootsy "real" music and synthetic "unreal" music, Savage believes that the postmodern approach has failed to develop a new politics, often descending into incoherent solipsism. The blame for this he rests squarely on the shoulders of Paul Morley and his "I, Rebel Executive" posturing.

"I have liked Morley's writing in the past. But his problem nowadays is that his credibility as an independent observer — which every good writer should have — is severely undermined by the nature of his involvement with ZTT. Of course we've all got our hands dirty to some extent but not to the extent that he has. To me, his influence is one of the reasons why rock writing is so bad. He should go away for a couple of years."

THE LAST PUNK IN TOWN

CLEVER SIMON Reynolds in the next edition of Monitor (a fanzine with a severe case of discourse fever) writes an excellent article on the recent punk retrospectives commenting that "far from being 'like punk never happened', our music scene is massively overdetermined by punk... It seems to me that the music scene is still fatally hung up on punk and, at this moment, every possible construction of those events... is being lived out, carried on, by someone."

None more so than Paul Morley. At a recent Eugenie Arrowsmith bash that Ten Records threw atop the Kensington Roof Gardens, Morley commented after viewing the assembled hordes of liggers, music industry sycophants and has-been punk stars (John Lydon was there), "I'm the only real punk here".

After having his fingers burnt with FGTH ("slags", as he refers to them now), Morley is back with the NME and is about to release a collection of his interviews under the auspices of Faber And Faber called Ask — The Chatter Of Pop. Whether you love or loathe his writing, there's no denying that Morley is one of the most imitated writers around. Though some would say that his posing as the only journalist left writing with any credibility — "The Last Punk In Town" — is becoming increasingly tedious. Mind you, he can still talk a good interview. Here he is slagging off the new generation of "boy journalists" and their bogus authenticity.

"This endless search for authenticity is like a perverted campaign for real ale. The boy journalists have to cling to the notion that pop is rebellious and a confrontation against mediocrity. The new pop writers are a series of boy Arthur Neguses who constantly search for an echo of Pete Shelley or the Velvet Underground. That's why the market for the inkies is shrinking.

"The inkies are completely out of date and that's why they are attempting to become multimedia magazines, incorporating sport, to stave off their inevitable fate. But even when they cover sport they, by and large, look for authenticity, so they choose Pat Nevin because he likes U2.

"The industry doesn't care about the black and white papers any more because those papers know nothing about the pop process. The black and white papers know nothing about how the phenomenon of A-Ha is constructed, for example. They think they're above all that. It's like when I had Kim Wilde on the front cover of the NME, there were all these people running around and saying 'How dare this happen! This is the end of the NME'.

"For me, pop music is a glamorous confusion of self-consciousnesses and you can write interestingly about it. The critical perspective should be absolutely glamorous."

If Morley is unimpressed by the New Authentics, he's also critical of the style-over-content school of pop journalism represented by the likes of Peter York and Robert Elms. In the face of these writers' consumerist frivolity, Morley intends to instigate a campaign for "the return of seriousness".

"I'm a very serious person," he says. But if neither Peter York nor Stephen Wells are suitable models for the pop writing of the future, what should young writers be writing about. Monitor suggests that writers should be addressing the materiality of music, "writing that attends to the surfaces of sound, the madness of rhythm, the allure of spectacle, the possibility of surprise."

Less fancifully, I would suggest that we need to insert the body back into music — the skin-thrilling effectivity of a piece of pop, the bass-body interface, the way a certain piece of music can literally change the way you walk through the world.

Morley again: "All those things you're talking about like the sensuality of language and the body, I was at the forefront of doing that. But can you make it accessible in the face of the ubiquitous chatter of pop? That's the problem.

"The best theoreticians of the 20th Century, from Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes, were entertainers. But perhaps more importantly than the materiality of pop, is initiating a discussion on the history of how we got to this point so that we are able to have this conversation. That's what should be discussed in the music papers every week."

What about the criticism that Morley is unable to have a proper critical perspective because his presence looms so large in the interviews he does — the ego syndrome again? What about the i-D philosophy of the hardly mediated interview? You'd hardly expect Morley to support that and he doesn't.

"It's a nice idea in theory but if Dylan Jones (assistant editor of i-D) really wanted that idea to work he wouldn't put his name at the bottom."

A DIFFERENT KIND OF JOURNALISM

PEOPLE OFTEN slag off i-D for being trendy. This is rather like accusing the sky of being blue. Of course i-D is trendy but it's not the sort of obnoxious "someone, somewhere is having a better time than you" trendiness of some of its glossier rivals who are engaged in the sordid business of substituting envy for desire. Dylan Jones believes this is due to the fact that i-D has a very different set of journalistic ethics than its rivals.

"In general, the i-D philosophy behind the writing is to express ideas without editorial opinion — our interviews are meant to be probing and investigative without being sycophantic or vitriolic. The question and answer interviews are done in such a way so as to expose as much as possible about the interviewee, and not the interviewer... and to be pertinent, unlike the Ritz style which can be entirely conversational.

"If we don't like something, then we don't mention it, because we want to be positive. If it's no good then why should we tell our readers about it, when there are so many things out there worth talking about? We don't condemn anyone... we haven't got the room in a monthly magazine anyway. Objective criticism yes, slagging no."

While I would question the possibility of objectivity in these relativist times, it is refreshing to read a magazine that has none of the thorough-going misanthropy that writers on the inkies often indulge themselves with. But perhaps more importantly i-D is one of the few magazines that's willing to give space to things that fall outside the press release circuit. The sheer eccentricity of some of its coverage (half-completed books, bands that are not only unsigned but probably haven't even had a rehearsal yet, etc.) is what saves i-D from the creeping South Molton-streetitis that afflicts all of its cousins.

PLANET POP

IF WE'RE TALKING about postmodern pop journalism, then we've got to mention the maverick talents of the extraordinary husband and wife team of Fred and Judy Vermorel, the writers behind the book Starlust and ace theorists of what they call "Ubiquitous Pop". In case you hadn't noticed, pop music is everywhere. From Wogan to Women's Own, from Labour Party political broadcasts to Absolute Beginners, from the TV Times to beer adverts — seen the Heineken advert's appropriation of the Einsturzende Neubauten school of metal-banging yet?

Pop saturation and the pop tie-in is the order of the day. Pop is the media air we breath. Pop is no longer an option but a massively expanded network of communication that everyone feels he or she must occupy a place in.

"These days, post-Band Aid, everyone has to run," say the Vermorels.

What they're running to (whether it's Norman Tebbit at the BPI Awards or Charles and Di at Live Aid) is the rhythm of what the Vermorels call "Planet Pop" — pop as a moral imperative, pop as bourgeois charity that reinforces the myth of universal brotherhood, 'We Are The World'. As Greil Marcus has remarked, you used to hear in pop music an eagerness to reach other people. In Planet Pop all you hear is the confidence that people will be reached.

But what of the role of writers in the seemless ubiquity of Planet Pop. According to Judy, writers nowadays are "freelance market consultants.

"Writers like Paul Morley have been fully integrated into a marketing function where they once used to have a critical function. Fred and I refer to this as consensus terrorism — the process whereby writers, artists, management, etc., work together as a team in order to conscript emotions as part of these huge worldwide marketing strategies."

In the face of this situation, a retreat to the margins and to avant-gardism is no solution. As Fred points out, all that hot and spicy rhetoric about challenge and provocation, tactics of shock, breaking down resistances, is merely more grist for the consumerist mill. Pop is the key medium for the dissemination of avant-garde attitudes to the masses, is the major process by which "avant-garde mythology becomes teenage rampage."

As Fred wrote last year in an article on The Face in Creative Camera: "First come the art ultra-mags. Like ZC, ostensibly about theoretical discourse and all that atonal jazz, but equally, and more importantly, ransacking specialist and scholarly journals and rarefied avant-gardism for desirable slogans, attitudes, associations, moods... all then filtered, cleaned up and rounded out (often by the same writers and illustrators) into art/fashion glossies like The Face and Blitz.

"At which point the ideas — gestures, pictures, stories, manifestos — are available to aspiring pop stars, boutique owners, A&R and ad men, pop managers, publicists, rock journalists... and the next stage is to try out these ideas on potential consumers through independent releases and interview features in the rock press.

"If the idea then takes, the majors then move in with production bucks and you will next see so-and-so's dissertation on sidelights in reification in the philosophy of Surrealism on Top Of The Pops."

If the margins aren't a refuge, neither is the flocking of journalists like Robert Elms and Paolo Hewitt to the Red Wedge cause going to change much.

Fred again: "The politics that people like Billy Bragg and Red Wedge are involved in is the politics of celebrity and they're trying to evade that point. When me and Judy were on The Tube with him we tried to engage him on that point. But he wasn't interested. He was there to sell the Labour Party and we were there to sell our book."

All that indignant fuss about Robert Elms operating an elitist door policy at a recent Red Wedge bash is pompous nonsense. Old Bobby may be a bit vacuous but he is sussed enough to know that the politics of fashionable youth subcultures is not about party politics but about exclusion — separating the hip from the unhip. Socialist fraternity and clubland culture are uneasy bedfellows at the best of times.

WE ARE THE MONITOR CREW

IN SEARCH OF a post-modern pop journalism, it would be unfair to finish without a brief look at the fanzine scene. Frankly, only two are worth any consideration, Vague and Monitor. It's no coincidence that neither of them actually look like fanzines. Monitor is the more interesting in this context being a magazine set up by a bunch of Oxbridge graduates with a strong interest in using sexy French theorists like Baudrillard and Foucault to talk about pop.

Monitor tends to read like it was written by a bunch of disillusioned NME readers. Mind you, disillusionment with the NME is not necessarily a bad thing. At its best Monitor occupies a fertile ground between journalism and that Left tradition of critical theory. A common occurrence in other countries but a difficult position to maintain in a country notoriously resistant to new fangled ideas from the Continent.

At its worst, it gives Steve Sutherland a headache and makes me wonder they allow the intellectual hardman posturing of Chris Scott to go unchallenged. But with great writers like our own Simon Reynolds and David Stubbs ("the Mick Jagger of post-rock incandescent/apocalyptic journalism") it's well worth the 60p they demand every three months.

Simon Frith has suggested that Monitor is struggling towards a new pop aesthetic. I hope so, we certainly need one.