Anyone familiar with my tastes in music and other forms of entertainment would be aware that they lie, in many cases, outside the mass market mainstream. As a result my almost total disinterest in celebrity gossip is almost non-existent though, from time to time, something impinges on the personal radar...
Rant: Art vs Artifice
Unaccustomed as I am to spending lengths of idle time away from home and all the books and all the records of my lifetime, a while back I found myself looking out over the Southport Broadwater with not much apart from my laptop, a load of washing in progress and dig Radio for company.
The view isn't too shabby at all early in the morning with the sun's rays seeping over a bank of clouds out to sea. Unfortunately the night time view isn't quite as good. True, looking away to my left I'd be able to enjoy the night lights of downtown Surfers Paradise, but that's not a prospect that generates great excitement as far as Hughesy's concerned.
As a result, the night before I'd left the television on slightly later than I would at home, where there are other things that I could use to pass the time while I wait for the time to make a phone call to my brother between eight-thirty and nine.
This was before I discovered that Dad's new TV set offered dig Radio among its many options, you understand.
So, where in 999 cases out of a thousand a program about a prominent member of Australia's celebrity media would have produced questions like Why should anybody care? and a flick of the off switch or the channel changer, the set stayed on and while I wasn't watching intently I had a vague general awareness of proceeding until I heard a comment along the lines of (and I know this isn't an exact quote) Who do you blame, the photographers, the magazines or the people that buy them?
The particular instalment of Australian Story dealt with a bloke who's achieved a degree of notoriety for dogging Nicole Kidman's footsteps. Not that I'm a big Nicole Kidman fan. As related in one of the movie blogs I wasn't able to identify Our Nic from a distance of fifteen metres at six-fifteen on a Wednesday morning.
Like a substantial segment of Bowen's population the presence of the paparazzi while Baz, Nicole and all the rest of them were in town was a source of some irritation though it did produce the occasional lighter moment.
Somewhere in the morning of Day One of filming one of these dudes turned to a Movie Volunteer and asked, Would I get a better shot if I climbed up into that tree?
I wouldn't go up there, was the response. There are green ants up there.
The prospect of obtaining a few better shots of the Lady Under the White Parasol was, however, too tempting, and the advice was ignored. About forty-five seconds later said dude was back on terra firma.
See? remarked the Volunteer. I told you there were green ants up there,
Yes, was the reply, but you didn't tell me they bite.
For a good deal of the proceedings there was a bloke lurking in the vicinity of the Volunteers watching the action, or what passed for it, making an occasional phone call and apparently trying to pick up a gig as a movie extra. From a couple of brief conversations I was led to believe that these activities constituted work for talk-back radio in Sydney.
On the other hand, the program suggested the paparazzi pay spotters who'll provide them with the avenue to get that worldwide exclusive of Someone's Secret Love Tryst or something, so TalkBackRadioDude may have been picking up extra pocket money by sitting around within earshot of the locals hoping to pick up a paparazzi-friendly snippet. Or that might have been his full-time gig all along.
Thinking back over the program in the predawn darkness I was left pondering a significant question.
Why?
I guess I'd be able to spot the standard responses.
The pappadudes would tell me that these photos equate to big bucks if you can pick up the right exclusive shot.
The magazine editors would tell me that these photos equate to a significant boost in sales if you splash a taster on the cover with a lurid headline and the prospect of Exclusive Celebrity Goss inside.
And the readers?
I guess they'd say the photos made them buy the magazine, or maybe I'd find that I'm talking to a Celebrity Goss junkie who always buys everything the genre produces, or someone whose limited financial resources restrict them to buying whatever promises the most salacious tawdry tidbits.
Or something.
One thing that I was sure of as I waited for sparrow fart on this particular morning was that it wasn't always this way.
Back around the time the music hall content of Richard Thompson's excellent Thousand Years of Popular Music was originally being performed, photography was in the black cloth over the photographer's head and watch the birdie stage.
The chick who sang Waiting At the Church would, I imagine, have been a saucy sheila of risque or ribald renown who was able to translate a certain stage presence into an ongoing career on the music hall circuit, by vamping outrageously, playing up to the audience as she regales them with the tale of woe from a wronged woman whose suitor has been unable to marry her today because (and I quote) My wife won't let me.
No photographs, no recordings, no celebrity goss. Apart from the odd theatrical poster it would have been a career built more or less on word of mouth, and the word of mouth would have stemmed from minor factors like vocal talent, stage presence and performance skills.
Moving slightly up-market in the same era you'd imagine that the latest Gilbert and Sullivan musical would have been marketed in the same way. Some posters, a couple of newspaper reviews (which I'm guessing weren't an issue with the music hall stuff) and a lot of word of mouth about Mr Gilbert's latest witty wordplay or Mr Sullivan's most recent catchy airs.
Head into the early years of the jazz era and I'm guessing we're still operating in the territory of talent, performance and word of mouth with the latest addition to the mix being danceability.
Then, at some indeterminate point everything changed.
Up till that point, in Hughesy's hypothesis, the entertainment industry was a relatively low-key business where turnover was based on talent, presentation and quite a bit of being able to spot what the market would accept.
That means record labels would have been run by people who were interested in, and knew something about, music. Contrast that situation with recent times. Evidence suggests that nowadays record labels tend to be run people who don't know much about music but know plenty when it comes to how to make a good deal.
Most importantly, up till that indeterminate point when everything changed, the market was something the business reacted to. These days the market is something the business reckons it has created.
Occasionally, of course, the business either gets it wrong or something slips under their guard. You can pick any number of examples of the first of those two categories.
Things the business got wrong? Try Michael Jackson's most recent record contract (or the one before, if that's the one I'm thinking of - I really don't pay much attention to that sort of trivia). Megabucks in outlay, mini-bucks (at least by comparison) in returns.
And the second category?
Things that slipped under the guard over the past fifty-something years?
There are any number of examples that spring to mind. Let's highlight a few.
Elvis Presley.
The Beatles
Robert Zimmerman, at one stage known as Hammond's Folly but famous worldwide as Bob Dylan.
San Francisco 1967.
The first wave of punk rock.
That's a few to start with. Some things that slipped under the industry's guard, of course, ended up as corporatised crap once the biz identified the bandwagon and jumped on.
Others, and Dylan's a prime example, followed their own muse wherever it might take them. For Hughesy's money, some of those diversions have been worth less than the corporatised crap that surrounds them. But they result from the artist's decisions rather than the managing director's perceptions about where the big bucks are located.
Which brings me back to the Why I posed a few hundred words back. How come people accept this situation?
Who do you blame?
(a) The performers?
(b) The record companies?
(c) The media?
(d) Something else entirely
The answer, in my view (and your mileage may vary) is, simultaneously:
(e) All of the above and
(f) None of the above.
In case that doesn't make sense, to an extent we're all guilty. Humans gossip. Fact. And, despite anything that anyone tries to do we always will. No one is blameless and there's no single factor you can point at and say He dunnit.
So, is there any way out? Or am I going to keep having my life endlessly infiltrated by irrelevant information about people I have no interest in knowing about?
Readers can toy with changing the I and my content in that last sentence to you and your if they share my dislike of these things - the people we have no interest in knowing about may well vary, but the point would be the same.
One way out would be some sort of legislation to outlaw the practice of media organizations cross-promoting their own content, making gossip and promotional material pretend to be news. It'd be wonderful if it happened, but it never will.
Alternatively, there's always the possibility that the internet-fueled fragmentation of the market will continue to the point where it's so diverse that the big media players become irrelevant. In that wonderful brave new world there'd be the possibility that you and I will be able to filter out large chunks of stuff that might be out there but holds no interest to us.
You can see the beginnings of something like that with services like Pandora, where you can develop what amounts to your own personal radio station, playing your own personally-matched playlist, something like having a giant iPod full of music that's been drawn from out there to match your taste.
It's not unreasonable to speculate that the same principle could be extended to all sorts of other content.
Given that state of affairs, I could create a world where, for instance, John Howard, Alexander Downer, Lleyton Hewitt, and Anthony Mundine effectively cease to exist, and the only time I hear about certain rugby league clubs is when they lose. It would be a world where sports news focusses on cricket and the AFL and basketball are totally alien concepts.
At least we can dream.
But when it comes down to tin tacks I think we'll end up with something at the other end of the spectrum as the big media interests buy up potential competition. I've even seen a suggestion that there will be attempts to turn the free internet into something resembling pay television - the sort of thing where your ISP supplies access to certain sites as part of your monthly payment and if you want to access anything outside that you'll pay extra for it.
I don't know whether that will happen, but I'm willing to take very short odds (say 20-1 on) that the bastards try.