“The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society,” explains C.J. Jung in 1928 in his landmark essay “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious,” “fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other hand, to conceal the true nature of the individual.”
This system is consistently at play in popular music, with music fans falling into relationships with these personas, attempting to try the pop star’s mask on for size every time they hold a hairbrush like a microphone whilst dancing in front of the mirror. It’s, in large part, why “back to basics” moves are so cyclical: artists become stars, stars become personas, and new artists emerge in opposition to the falseness of the existing coterie of stars, until they too become the stars they once despised and a new generation goes “back to basics” to oppose them.
The mask is the lie of the “art” in artifice, and the persona of the artist in popular music is essentially the relationship between the artist and the lie: fans love regular dude artists because they exude a comfort within their artifice, enveloping fans in their world and their art’s worldview in a way that just seems so natural. But as the business of music is made more transparent by the crumbling of the major label Music-Industrial Complex, and technology intrudes upon an artist’s desire to exude an aura of mystery, a fissure has grown between the artist and the lie, and even the most arch performers must constantly address the cognitive dissonance between who they are and who they portray on record, on TV, onstage.
Thus we have seen in 2013 the personas of Kanye, Gaga, Jay-Z, Britney, Miley, etc. all brought to the breaking point, crushed under the weight of having to explain a bunch of ridiculous bullshit and justify the wealth and adoration brought to them by fame.
Make no mistake, popular music has always been about myth-making; as Lester Bangs once said, “Rock n’ roll comes down to myth; there are no facts.” True true: if Kayne West proclaims that he is a god, there is really no empirical evidence to prove otherwise. But just as the burden of proof is on him to make us believe that he is said deity, it is also on:
A) Miley to convince us of her twerk-worthiness;
B) Death Grips to prove that they are something other than an elaborate ruse/hoax/bullshit;
C) reg’lur rock bands like Savages or Chvrches or Haim or Vampire Weekend to prove that they are something other than just another Siouxsie/Sundays/Fleetwood Mac/Paul Simon rehash.
As recently as 1995, a band like the Grateful Dead could be the most successful band in the world just by being amorphously drug-addled, prompting irrational fealty from a massive and mobile subculture. Music makers of today are finding that it is becoming more and more difficult to come anywhere close to achieving that kind of miracle of fan loyalty and/or cultural hegemony. We are living in a shattered time where cynical fans don’t believe in anything unless they are mentally unstable and/or really, really young.
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Mozart was tossed in an unmarked debtor’s grave, while Jim Morrison luxuriantly decomposes in Père-Lachaise; such was the upward trajectory of the musician in society, until a few years ago. Once, even the greatest musical minds were seen as nothing more than an unhinged miscreant capable of, at best, producing a few moments of beatification amidst the serious drudge of life; then the ’60s happened and suddenly it’s Elvis shaking hands with Nixon and Thom Yorke and his half-closed eye warbling saintly messages of techno-confusion to fields of enthralled minions on a nightly basis.
It is unlikely that today’s musical deities will get a 21 gun salute when their time comes — and in truth, the celebrities of today will be lucky if the unwashed masses, pitchforks in hand, don’t shove them six-feet-under while they’re still breathing. And don’t think that a lifetime of languishing in the quote-unquote underground will spare one from the wrath of the music enthusiast: the fanatical hype given to untested artists in today’s accelerated hip music cycle means that you are BNM’d today, kicked in the ass tomorrow — or worse, forever forgotten and forced to peddle your mp3s on a street corner like a common lunatic.
Because every time a thinkpiece bemoans the hard road for the musical artist in today’s inhospitable climate, the general antipathy towards the artistically/musically inclined by the general public notches up a tick. “Oh, it’s hard to sell albums when Spotify only gives you a millionth of a penny for a song? Try actually working for a living!” cry out those that could care less where their jams come from, as long as they are cheap and plentiful — which they always will be, because even though all of Earth’s cities will be underwater in forty years, we’ve all determined that the world’s smartest people should focus their attention on making sure that one can hear the new Beyoncé jammy-jam on one’s phone this instant.