Every so often, some musician becomes enormously popular and famous despite being of only mediocre talent, or perhaps precisely because of it. Some people who don’t quite reach the heights of popularity still get promoted way above their talents and get recording contracts far better than those landed by most people of much greater talent. I’m not talking about musical humorists like Spike Jones who could no doubt play very competently nor his one-time side-kick Mickey Katz whose genuine klezmer recordings are brilliant. I’m talking about incompetent musicians who are known to be psychologically disturbed. The fact that they think they are better musicians than they really are seems to be an essential ingredient in their success. Here are three examples.
Some psychologically disturbed musicians are truly great and the fact that their distubance comes through in song does nothing to alter the fact that their work is fully competent and perhaps moving in ways that healthy people might not be able to be—the late, great, Ted Hawkins comes to mind. But none of the above are like that.
On one side, there is something genuinely funny about an inept performance presented by someone who thinks sincerely that they are highly talented. And at least one of the above, Madame Foster-Jenkins seems to have been blissfully happy about her singing career. Yet there seems to me also to be something disturbingly voyeristic about the people who feed their delusions and something sadistic about those who promote them. Andy Warhol’s ghastly exploitative use in films of very sad people as ‘stars’ is perhaps the worst example of this sadism.
I wonder what you think.
BTW, the links I have given are just samples of what’s out there on the net regarding these people. I would assume you can hear soundfiles of all of them on the ‘allmusic’ website.
Geez, I thought you were gonna be talking about someone like Jessica Simpson (note I’ve never heard a thing of her singing, she might have a great voice, but she really is dumb as a fencepost). I’ve never heard of the first two, but remember Wild Man Fischer. I’d always put him in the same mold as Captain Beefheart, but a couple of echelons down. Did he have any commercial success at all?
Last weekend I was doing some work in the basement, and I took out some Zappa records. My wife doesn’t like him, so I try to listen where it’s not in her face. I put on Bongo Fury, which features Beefheart prominently. There’s one song (if you can call it that) called Debra Kadabra, which Beefheart sings but (I was surprised by this) Zappa wrote. It’s the perfect vehicle for Beefheart. At one point, with the tortured, harried delivery that only he has, he says:
Cover my entire bodice with Avon Colog-na
Take me to some relative’s house in East L A
Just until my skin clears up
I put it on two or three more times. It’s one of those rare moments in music where you have two geniuses (shit, the rest of the Mothers were pretty damn fine, too) who mesh perfectly.
Just thought I’d share. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Beefheart is eccentric, to be sure, but I’ve never thought of him is particularly disturbed. I just found and bought a cheap copy of his box set of unreleased material and it has sent me back to the original recordings. Perhaps it says something about me and my upbringing in the Melbourne modern art scene of the 60s, but a lot of Beefheart’s stuff strikes me as curiously sane. If he is disturbed, his art should be viewed as roughly on a par with that of Hawkins, probably even better.
I just noticed how long the link to Helfgott is. For those who lack the patience to read it, he’s the guy the movie Shine was about. But, if you haven’t heard F. F-J or Fischer, dig up the sound clips. You will be truly astonished. I’m not at all sure that these ‘artists’ are all to be evaluated alike. They just struck me as clear examples of people evoking in audiences the response I found suspicious.
What about Mrs. Miller? Or The Shaggs? The latter were compared to Ornette Coleman!
There’s a whole school of “Bad Music,” “Outsider Music” - this last is people supposed to be working in total isolation from our perceived notions of aesthetic quality, you might say. Damn, I should take up ethnomusicology, what flowery gibberish! Try the American Song Poetry archive, ECBrown’s MP3 links page has more stuff along these lines.
I read recently that Beefheart still writes a song or two per day - and he hasn’t released an album in 24 years. Sounds like he’s at peace with the world. I’ve always enjoyed his music myself.
I also thought this would be about Tom Cruise, etc. Pleased to see that it’s about more interesting types.
I thought of Mrs. Miller but she didn’t seem extreme enough. Maybe I’ve just forgotten how bad she is. Never heard of the Shaggs but I’ll check them out. Maybe there’s a fine line, but I don’t think these ‘artists’ thought of themselves as bad or as requiring a new aesthetic. Part of their appeal seems to have been the fact that they were oblivious to the fact that they were excruciating by conventional standards of competence.
I come from roughly the same social and cultural world as the Helfgotts and one of my ex-colleagues was a friend of his and his boosters who actually believed the ‘new aesthetic’ stuff. We had a couple of quite heated rows about teh matter. It’s not as though I’m not sympathetic to the artistic avant guard. My mother was one of a small but increasing number of people painting and selling modern art in Melbourne in the 60s and I grew up enjoying 20th century art, literature and music. I was listening to Ornette Coleman in my early teens.
Hence the popularity of American Idol (and like shows).
Yet there seems to me also to be something disturbingly voyeristic about the people who feed their delusions and something sadistic about those who promote them.
I always wonder about those poor souls on AI who are shocked - absolutely shocked - when they are told they are bad singers. Since their parents, friends, teachers, everyone around them tells them how fabulous they are. I think they think they are just protecting the self esteem and feelings of the person, but really, I think they are doing more harm than good.
I looked up clips of their music. Florence Foster Jenkins reminds me of a little mentally retarded girl I used to know. She would dance and give “performances” for the other kids at school, but the other kids didn’t enjoy her talent, they enjoyed laughing at her and she never really knew it; she thought they all loved her.
Yeah, I wonder too. Even some of the winners seem to have disturbingly brief careers. They remind me a bit of the lottery winners who lose their millions in a few years through bad advice and worse investments.
But on the other hand you have people like Foster-Jenkins and the little girl Cran mentions. They just seem to be completely oblivious to the laughter and mocking. Something in me still insists that it is wrong to egg them on, even though they don’t seem to suffer. I really can’t explain why I think this.
Some of these “outsider musicians” are mentally ill - Wild Man Fischer, for instance, who had the first release on Rhino Records (“Go to Rhino Records,” 1975), and also apparently had something to do with Linda Rondstat! Backing vocals, maybe?
Anyways should we listen to these people? Perhaps we have something to learn from them.
The Shaggs were largely the product of a father’s encouragement - sort of a cheerful take on the Beach Boys’ story - their music is warbly, arhythmic in a sense but it has a sort of consistent internal logic, you know? It all adds up in the end. And the songs were very catchy! Hardly anyone would know who they are but Terry Adams from NRBQ convinced Rounder records to reissue their LP (of which only 100 copies had survived). ByTW, those of you who associate Rounder with Dave Grisman Old Time etc. should hear the group the label is named after, the Holy Modal Rounders.
When I was a child, there was a lady in the choir at my church who was completely and utterly tone deaf. She couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket if she’d had a donkey to load it on! That wouldn’t have been a terrible problem if she’d just sung in the choir…most church choirs welcome the participation of parishioners, regardless of talent, and rely on the stronger musicians to “hide” a difficult voice. But this lady was convinced that she was exceptionally talented, and was always after solos, which the choir director gave her. Everyone in the congregation cringed when she’d step up to sing, but no one could bring himself to tell her that her voice would bend metal. It just seemed too cruel. Instead they’d thank her for singing and some would even praise her voice! I’m sure that had been the pattern for most of her life (she was in her late 40s when I knew her)
What’s sad about this story is that it’s caused me to have terrible reservations about my own singing ability, which often results in severe performance anxiety. There’s always this haunting worry…what if I really have a horrible singing voice and no one will tell me? Part of me knows that’s not the case, but there’s always that little niggling voice in the back of my head that says “you know you’re only a poser…you can’t sing note one!”
David Helfgott is the fellow who the movie “shine” was about. Although I’m sure there was some ‘articstic lisence’ taken, the basis of the story was that he was indeed phenominal until a severe event that thogoughly stopped his career for a long spell.
I do not see the value of scathing commentary. If you don’t know who the man is, don’t go hear him. I would go, I think, but I would not expect him to perform to the level his original talent should have brought him without the serious breakdown.
I would go becaouse I appreciate his ability to survive and to perhaps see a glimpse of the gift he may have once had. Of course, I’d probably go see anybody if I could afford the tickets.
The music business has been this way for a long time. The right look, the right sound, the right themes, an interesting personality, knowing the right people, sleeping with the right people are more important than musicality or singing ability. Always have been, probably always will be. Deal with it.
It is strange when people with seemingly zero talent get a following, but there a strong anti-everything subculture that thrives on rewarding the stupidest, the lousiest, the dumbest and then making an inside joke of it.
Some of the highest paid American entertainers for 2005 include Howard Stern $100+ million, Jay Leno $50+ million, David Letterman $25+ million. Most people would admit these folks have talent, but virtually no one would say these three are the best of the best in terms of entertainers, comedians, whatever. And few would have predicted this top of the heap status for them early on.
Life isn’t fair, and less so for musicians and entertainers. Sometimes all it takes is slick packaging and promotion or one patron to back someone and that will be enough. The various boy band promoters and the Spice Girl promoters used that formula and milked it for millions and billions.
Payola, too. I just saw the rerun of that 60 Minutes segment where they showed how much money was spent to make “Closing Time” a mondo hit. It’s funny, because when that song was being played and played on the radio, I was grouchin’ about how bankrupt the lyricist was who wrote the immortal chorus (and too lazy to write a few rhymes)
“I know who I want to take me home
I know who I want to take me home
I know who I want to take me home
Take me home.”
Bill, this is not what I was talking about or illustrating at all. There’s no big mystery about why the world, as currently organised, tends to reward mediocrity and I wasn’t pretending that there was. If celebrity were a matter of real talent and hard work, most people would be non-starters and most people would not be able to even recognise what the really talented people had. By making the highest rewards available to someone who is no more talented than average, you make life more of a gamble than a game of skill. In a game of skill, only the best have a chance. In a lottery, everybody does. In a world where what is to count as celebrity is decided democratically, rewarding ordinariness at least apparently by lottery is exactly what we might expect.
What I was highlighting is something else altogether. The people I was pointing out are not highly successful by any of the ordinary criteria and probably even at the height of their celebrity they didn’t make all that much money. They win no awards and people laugh at them. This is not the crass sort of ‘democratic’ success of which you speak, the sort of world which elevates a Letterman to celebrity.
This phenomenon is much darker. These people aren’t simply lacking in qualifications; they actually have an abundance of disqualifications. If Letterman got a little bit better, would he lose fans? I doubt it. But if Foster-Jenkins had got to be just average, her appeal would have disappeared altogether. Her popularity wasn’t based on her being a poor singer; it was based on her being an excruciating singer. That and the fact that she seemed blissfully unaware of her shortcomings. Hollywood is full of mediocre actors, but Andy Warhols ‘stars’ were in another league altogether; there was no question of any of them getting a role in anybody else’s movies.
This isn’t just a slice of everyday reality; it’s a gentrified freakshow.
