THE GREAT GADFLY:

No Fun

So, um. Just thinking out loud here.

Wouldn't it be nice if Andy Warhol rose from the grave and resurrected popular culture at the same time? Now, okay, I'll throw in the obligatory "I don't mean to paint Andy as a messiah" comment (there it was), but, well...in terms of the resplendency of artifice in All Things Pop...he kinda WAS all that and a bag o' manna.

After all, he was the guy who said, "in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." Et voila - reality television. If anyone has to do a Google search when I display the name RICHARD HATCH, then Warhol's prediction has indeed come to pass.

I'm not saying this is a GOOD thing. I'm not even sure Warhol thought this was a good thing when he made the prediction. I think he was simply forecasting the direction of pop culture and electronic media, and he was dead-on in his foresight.

But when that foresight died, the sands of fabulousness and paying no attention to the men/women behind the curtain slowly crept through the hourglass into an unfashionable obscurity, as we became more and more expectant on media personalities who were willing to "keep it real" and give us a "what you see is what you get" presentation.

In the early '90s, one guy did a pretty good job of blending the oaty cynicism of grunge with the never-a-dull-moment spectacle of showmanship. He even married a larger-than-life shrew of a wife who dressed him as a woman and went on rampages about cheese. (Little known fact: the shrew was actually PROFILED on Warhol's MTV series in the mid '80s, back when she was a chubby teenaged semi-goth "poetess".)

Uncle Andy woulda LOVED these two. He'd have loved the shrew simply for her natural talent for shock value and pretense, and he'd have loved the guy because he seemed so able to ride the balance of artifice and sincerity with such bleeding accuracy.

Yeah, well. The guy shot himself in the head in 1994.

Interestingly, things haven't quite been the same since. I mean, they weren't exactly so hot before - I, for one, will never forget the travesty that was C+C Music Factory - but at least there always seemed the possibility for some iconographically bountiful superhero of a pop star to come bounding on our airwaves to ooh and ahh us with over-the-top behavior and larger-than-life diversions.

But, hey. You know. We haven't done so bad in the past few years, right? We got to see Britney Spears trotting around with a big snake on her shoulders. We got to see J.Lo in a fluffy green boobie dress at the Grammys. We got to hear Lance Bass mewl about wanting to be the first celebrity in space for a couple of years. Okay, maybe that's not Gene Simmons spitting a blood-n-fire medley on the Midnight Special, but we've made do with what we got, haven't we?

We've learned to live our lives in quotation marks over the past few years. We have "celebrities" that we vote into "fame" by calling a 1-800 number. We have a "president" that we "voted into office" and has done "a great job" in office during a time of "war". And all of this has been sanitized and scrutinized and seemlessly packaged into an audience-tested and carefully marketed time-released dosage so obsessive-compulsively perfect that we're left to do nothing but poop out a stream of quotation marks into the sewer of pop culture consciousness.

But maybe...and I'm just saying MAYBE...the past is due to come back and haunt our asses a little. Or maybe more than a little.

Or maybe I just have faith in our inability to be bored past a certain threshhold.

Or maybe it's just the cough syrup talking.

We create celebrity to give us what we can't create in our own mundane lives of 9-to-6 drudgery and bureaucratic ho-hummery. When some attention-starved fame-hag acts out on national television, behaving poorly for the world to see, we love it. We say we hate it, we say it's outrageous and inappropriate, but come on. You KNOW you want Madonna to say the F-word on Letterman, and you KNOW you want Bjork to wear a swan dress to the Oscars. These things make our worlds go 'round. They give us something to talk about. They give the henhouse a reason to cluck. And we know the difference between audacity and "audacity". It's been a while since true, good ol' fashioned public tantrumming has been let free of the shackles of quotation marks.

Come back to the five and dime, David Lee Roth, David Lee Roth.

And so, now that we've all experienced the shared anxiety of a recent "war" which has "polarized" us into flag/peace-sign waving "teams" of "us" and "them", we're ready to have our asses kicked by someone we can all agree has GONE TOO FAR, but in a way that can be either celebrated or laughed off. We're ready for the balls-out ridiculous and the heights (or depths, depending on your POV) of pretentiousness. Bring it on, and bring it in an ass-revealing Bob Mackie sequinned number.

Calling all drag queens, all exhibitionists, all deluded divas, all coked-out porn stars, all rock'n'roll suicides, all Studio 54 trainwrecks, all Gong Show also-rans - cue positions, baby, cuz you're on next. Andy Warhol might have left the building, but the familiar odor of Chanel No. 5 and vitamins still hangs in the air. Those fifteen minutes have come full-circle and it's time for good ol' fashioned star power and ambition to shine once more.

Or so I'd like to think. But then, I'm a little bit sick this week and messed up on cough syrup, so don't mind me.

I think in our moments of repose lately, we've been thinking about it...where did the freaks go? What happened to our Alice Coopers, our Boy Georges, our Marilyn Mansons? Where are our Cyndi Laupers hiding, our buzz-cutted Annie Lennoxes, hell, even our LaToya Jacksons and Apollonias?

Okay, maybe I'm going too far with the LaToya/Apollonia thing. I'll give ya that. But bear with me, 'cuz when I say Kelly Clarkson just ain't cutting it, you know and I know it's the truth.

When did being gaudy and trashy and tacky and shamelessly skanky become such an unpardonable sin, to the extent to which we have plummed even more gross depths of tastelessness? I say it's time for women to start wearing too much blush again, and LIP GLOSS for God's sake. Men, too. Heck, especially men.

I'm tired of having a huge 84-pack of crayons to choose from, but only getting to see drawings colored in earth tones. I'm hoping I'm not the only one suffering from such ennui. I'm thinking perhaps I'm not.

Anyway. The cough syrup is kicking in. Time for some luscious, lurid, avant-wicked fever dreams in the unstoppably outrageous media conglomerate that is my warped little flu-stricken mind. Ta!

Y'all come back now, y'hear?