The Performer is a Super Lemming

Performers are insane. It takes a madman to want to stand up in front of people and somehow find a sense of self-worth from doing that. The performer is as insane as the audience drives them. They are as insane as the media wants to make them. We, the audience, are lemmings, making super lemmings out of performers. We equip them with our own self destruction, and then we drive them off the cliff so we don’t have to jump ourselves.

I was told to “crank it up.” So I took my gloves off. The point is: there is something really twisted about the whole performance industry and the way it is affecting the world. For example, who is making decisions about disaster international aid these days? Millionaires and other public figures like Bill Gates, Paul Simon and Jennifer Lopez. I mean, so much for education. We are living in an idiocracy these days; decisions are made according to popularity. The audience is empowering and moving massive forces.

And the performer is the tool for this manipulation, trapped within this system and driven insane by it. This is so big it is religious in scope. John Lennon had a point when he said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus Christ. The sixties and the seventies were only the beginning of this; advertisers were just discovering the power of the baby boomers. You can understand a teenage girl wanting to tear off the singer’s clothes maybe, but now the market has grown into something monstrous and digital with endless octopussing tentacles reaching into many dark and unknown places.

And we, the audience, get as caught up in our own artificially created mania, and we drag the performer with us. We turn the public figure into our own negative mirror as a buffer against our own insecurities. “Oh, that guy is a maniac, an idiot, a loser, so that makes me all right.” And that is not a job for a sane person to have, and even if you start out that way it is hard to maintain your sanity once you have it, but the performer gets paid well for it.

I mean it is a one in a million shot to even be able to support yourself as a musician. It is even slimmer to find the gravy train making music. Only the insanely talented and immensely lucky can key into the audience and massive amounts of money, status and power. Only those with no self-doubt, who are willing to give up everything, have a chance of reaching “it.” You never hear about the crushed, but I am sure there are many, the pieces of the defeated strewn about and their ghosts living alone on street corners.

You also never hear about the struggling bands packed into vans doing gigs in different little towns every night. You don’t hear about the thousands of studio musicians with no marketable personality but who can drop a note on a dime. You never hear about the second and third violinist.

Look, being a performer is a question of values. People should do what makes them happy to earn money, but does earning money mean feeding your family or buying that second summer house in the south of France? We need money to live, but when money becomes a value in itself and leads us into the cycle of possession then it is dangerous. It causes the possessor to steal from those around him and, in doing so, devalues the possessor.

At a very basic level I understand being on stage and having people cheer for me and getting a rush from that. I also understand giving the audience my all and being totally ignored. The energy is incredible and it can make or destroy a person. I don’t understand when the audience is hidden behind the camera eye or the electronic filter of the internet which conceals millions and billions of people and dollars. That is incomprehensibly overwhelming.

I understand that people like Kurt Cobain, Syd Barrett and Jim Morrison had an understanding and an aversion to the audience. Maybe Cobain was just a guy who wanted to write songs about connection with the rest of the human race. But, maybe, the human race as a group monster is not something you want to have a connection with. Maybe they were the sane ones, because the sane ones can’t make it in the business. So, who is responsible for these people when they fall? We put them out there and dress them up in the Sun King robes to act the fools for us so we don’t feel the fools that we are. The audience makes their super lemming and pushes him over that edge so they don’t have to jump themselves.