Everyone Loves You When You're Dead. Neil Strauss
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Название: Everyone Loves You When You're Dead
Автор: Neil Strauss
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Музыка, балет
isbn: 9780857861214
isbn:
With his catchy single “Dur Dur D’Etre Bébé!” (“It’s Tough to Be a Baby”) at number one in multiple countries—and sales of one record for every minute he’d been alive—Jordy, France’s five-year-old dance music sensation, seemed to be succumbing to the decadence of stardom. When Details magazine assigned me to meet him, the first thing he did was ask the translator to take him to the toilet, where he peeped under occupied stalls in the women’s bathroom. When he returned, he demanded that a young girl be brought into the room.
What do you want a young girl for?
JORDY: Pour jouer au docteur.
TRANSLATOR: To play doctor.
What about Alison [his girlfriend]?
JORDY: Oui, j’ai baissé ses pantalons et j’ai dessiné des fleurs sur ses fesses.
TRANSLATOR: Yes, I lowered her pants and drew flowers on her butt.
Do you ever play with boys?
JORDY: Je n’aime pas les garçons. Ils se battent.
TRANSLATOR: I don’t like boys. They fight.
When Jordy’s parents enter the room, we discuss his fame as he sketches a picture of a fire engine on a piece of paper. Oddly, beneath the fire engine, he begins drawing a row of lines dangling to the ground.
What are those lines there?
JORDY: Des zizis.
TRANSLATOR: Penises.
Ten minutes later . . .
Do you think all this attention is affecting his development?
PATRICIA CLERGET [Jordy’s mother]: He’s a very normal child. All the attention hasn’t affected him at all.
CLAUDE LEMOINE [Jordy’s father]: He still wants to be a policeman or a fireman when he grows up.
As his parents speak, Jordy jumps on the table, grabs his crotch, and proclaims . . .
JORDY: Je suis Michael Jackson!
TRANSLATOR: I am Michael Jackson.
Less than a year after this interview, the French government banned Jordy from television and radio due to concerns that he was being exploited by his parents. Jordy later legally emancipated himself from his parents and formed his own rock band.
Artist is an overused term when it comes to musicians. Most are primarily entertainers, giving the public what it wants. Their motivation is not self-expression but attention and acclaim. If no one were watching, they wouldn’t be making any noise. When I met PJ Harvey—one of the most important rock musicians of her generation—at a London hotel, I pretty quickly discovered she was not an entertainer.
Do interviews serve any purpose for you?
PJ HARVEY: Well, I don’t enjoy them.
Oh yeah?
HARVEY: I hate interviews. I don’t particularly want to sit here and talk about myself. I’m not thinking about my fans. I do them because I feel like I have to do them.
Why do you have to?
HARVEY: Because it’s good for people to know that I’m here and because maybe someone that hasn’t heard the music before will pick the article up and will want to buy the record.
But the interviews don’t serve any purpose for you, even as far as getting to talk out ideas or thoughts?
HARVEY: No.
Because you—
HARVEY: They mean nothing to me.
I had heard that you were very open in your first interviews but then regretted it.
HARVEY: I think to begin with, I was. I tried to answer every question as best as I possibly could, and then you learn slowly not to trust anyone. And you learn you have to put barriers up and give only what you want to give.
I think people do that because they’re worried they’re going to be judged for communicating what they really think.
HARVEY: You know, I’m not sitting here talking to you being myself at all. It’s very guarded, and I’m just giving you exactly as much as I want to give and what I’m comfortable with today. Maybe if you’d interviewed me tomorrow, it might be different.
I actually am interviewing you tomorrow, too. But I get what you’re saying. For me, the point of an interview is not necessarily to promote someone’s music, but to let people know who someone is beyond their music and maybe enable others to learn from their experiences or outlook or creative process.
HARVEY: Yet people who write these things form their own kind of opinion. And none of it is right. I mean, I hope one day I get to the point where I have to do very, very few interviews, because I do feel it’s an intrusion of my privacy.
Yesterday, when you were talking to those two Japanese girls, they were saying that they had sent you a couple of letters. Do you read your fan mail?
HARVEY: No. Some people have managed to find my home address and they send it there. But I find it a bit intrusive, so I tend to not read those out of principle.
So you’ve never corresponded with your fans at all?
HARVEY: No.
Not even—
HARVEY: No.
What’s written on your hand, by the way?
HARVEY: Serum. I’m not going to explain that for you.
Maybe I don’t want to know.
HARVEY: It’s my personal notepad. Everything I have to remember goes there. And when I see this person, I have to talk about serum. [. . .]
Could you record what you felt was the greatest album you’ve ever made, and then bury it in the ground somewhere afterward—knowing СКАЧАТЬ