Martians, Venusians and Other Figments of the Popular Imagination (2/4) by The Silver Fox

(1/4), (2/4), (3/4), (4/4).

It's the music that matters, after all, and the truly 'down' or 'hip' (delete as appropriate to your age/inclination) care nothing for externals. A brief examination of prevailing attitudes to two popular figures shows this airy assumption up for the towering edifice of horse-shit that it is.

If the current crop of fashion victims, poseurs, and identikit rebels can genuinely be said to constitute a viable counter-culture (and believe me, it's easier just to assume that they can; were we to discuss the reasons they might not be, there'd be no room on the Internet for anything else), it is a counter-culture dominated to two latter-day icons: Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse - God help us, eh?

Both of these cultural colossi are what the media like to call 'troubled'; partial to a sherry or two, and prone to a certain amount of pharmaceutical restructuring, their turbulent relationships and brushes occasional run-ins with the constabulary have become rather a staple of our daily media intake. Aside from which, I believe they write and perform songs.

In fact, there is very little do distinguish the two, except for testes and talent (Winehouse lacks the former and has the latter, while the reverse is true for Doherty), yet they are viewed very differently.

Doherty - crackhead, occasional housebreaker, and generally Babyshambolic wreck - is, it appears, an heroic figure of near Byronic dimensions; his travails and self-destruction are (some say) the symptoms of the inner struggle between madness and divinity, two entwined yet contradictory forces that reside within the tortured souls of those cursed with true genius. Even those who profess to despise and abhor the man (tabloid hacks who chart his apparent decline with a sententious yet strangely voyeuristic disapproval) serve mostly to further the image of a magnificent ruination.

Love him or hate him (and there are plenty willing to do both), it seems that there is something epic about him; far from being the mere tone-deaf, weak-willed, self-absorbed and inconsequential junkie thousands of others less happily placed might be seen to be, Pete Doherty represents something: Art vs Nature, perhaps, or the modern-day scapegoat upon whom all the sins of our age are laid.

He has become a living art installation depicting 21st Century Malaise in pallid, unwashed microcosm. The same cannot be said for Amy Winehouse. Although on the face of it, her 'troubles' are viewed more sympathetically, this goes only to diminish both their severity and her status as an artist. While Doherty is seen (for good or ill) as a debauched 'wild man of rock' exercising the prerogatives of the debased modern Messiahs the industry throws up now and then, the attitude towards Winehouse is essentially that of a benign but clueless uncle bewildered by a favourite niece's decision to shave her head and get a nose-ring: 'such a shame; she was such a pretty little thing when she was younger - and she sang like an angel.'

While much is made of her considerable vocal ability, little attention seems to be paid to her gifts as a songwriter and the considerable intelligence and sensitivity that underlie them. The waste of her youth, beauty, and vocal chords is dwelled upon far more than that being visited daily upon what animates them. There is no place in the public's conceptions, it appears, for a Lady Byron - be she ever so 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know.' She is, after all, just a girl.

Continued ......next page (3/4)

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