What you need you have to borrow

Lately I’ve been thinking about fame. A lot of social media culture is obviously driven by a desire for fame of some sort or another — often a narcissistic desire that’s unhealthy in various ways. But does social media cause this kind of narcissism or is it the other way around: are people obsessing about how many likes and retweets they’re getting because we’ve constructed a culture where people are that way, and social media merely feeds or perhaps exacerbates those narcissistic tendencies?

I mean Donald Trump, who is Exhibit A of this particular phenomenon, was that way decades before Twitter and Facebook and the rest of it came around. I believe Trump’s need to be the center of attention is the most fundamental psychological fact about him, and basically explains why he was president and may well be again.

Andy Warhol’s famous quip about how in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes is what, 60 years old now? (And was that prophetic or what?)

I really want to read this book, which is being published in the UK today:

The Boomtown Rats reformed because bands do. It’s practically mandatory. When Tanya Donelly, of 90s US indie darlings Belly, quit after winning a Grammy (and promptly suffering burnout), she craved normal work and became a doula. When 10,000 Maniacs’ Natalie Merchant grew tired of being a marketable commodity, she quit for the quieter life of a solo artist, and was then duly horrified when her debut album, 1995’s Tigerlily, sold 5m copies, because “then came the treadmill again”. The next time she tried to retire, she did so more forcefully, and now teaches arts and crafts to underprivileged children in New York state. “I look at people like Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney,” she says, referring to the way both legends continue to tour, “and I think to myself: ‘If I were you, I’d just go home and enjoy my garden.’ It’s a question of temperament, clearly.”

And yet, just as Donelly would ultimately return to her old band, Merchant is also entertaining the idea of new music. “Maybe,” she says. “My daughter is off at college now, so I do have more time to myself … ”

But why? Why do they all come back? Perhaps because nothing else compares. It must be nice to be quite so loudly loved.

I read somewhere recently that Paul McCartney talks about the disorienting feeling he has sometimes when he suddenly remembers, in the middle of making a cup of tea or whatever, that he’s Paul McCartney (Remember when he was in that band, the Beatles? That was awesome). McCartney is both an illustration of and a kind of exception to Louis Menand’s observation that you can only be a star for three years — he’s been a STAR for nearly 60 years now, but for the past several decades his stardom has consisted of that strange phenomenon where someone was such a huge star that our nostalgia for that cultural moment of supreme stardom creates a kind of permanent secondary stardom — a sort of Crab Nebula remnant of the original supernova (This recent New Yorker profile captures some of that strangeness).

Anyway, I suspect the craving for fame is an under-appreciated aspect of our present cultural condition. For example why is J.D. Vance out there doing what he’s doing, i.e., making a total fool of himself in the service of a vile political movement? Because he published that stupid book and it hit and now he has a monkey on his back. Etc.

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