On Celebrity, Promotion, Consensus and Kanye (An, albeit long, response to Mr Ewan) [Fishman]

This post contains references to Kanye West, Hurricane #1, Little Boots and Martine McCutcheon. I’m sorry.

Another great celebrity book quote, which Rich Hall took great delight in savaging at the time, was “proud non-reader of books” Kanye West’s proclamation that he doesn’t like books because ‘sometimes… they just be so wordy’. This was during the promotion of Kanye’s 52  page (some are blank) book Thank You And You’re Welcome.

Loath as I am to deflect any flak from the ghost-of-denim-clad-man-past that is Clarkson, as well as a tv presenter and author, he is also technically a journalist, if not one known for book reviews. The Top Gear team wield something ridiculous like five regular newspaper columns between them and many of his books are compilations of his, so the use of his name is a little less clear cut than that of Williams’.

In many ways the problem’s societal rather than the industry’s. You want to tie your relatively unknown product to whatever will draw the most attention, and in this age that’s not publishers or thinkers, but celebrities. The idea of people making a name for themselves through specialised study has been well and truly sidelined – look at the amount of discussion on appearance taking place around the televised debates. Even the intellectual names given most coverage recently – Pullman, Dawkins and Amis to name three – received it largely on the back of controversy. And where the celebrities are matched correctly, as in the Clarkson and Williams examples, it works and works well. It’s interesting to note how far up the scale of books you have to go before journalists names start getting used, rather than just the publication the review appeared in.

The documentary Starsuckers notes the argument that it’s a basic human instinct to pay closer attention to, and put more value in, the actions of those who are most visibly most successful – even if they are now successful due to skewed societal standards. (It also had some cracking stuff about how press releases effectively dictate their own news coverage.) In a society which prizes celebrities, living in such a society gives a constant suggestion that this is how to be successful in life. A good illustration of this would be the recent Home Office report on sexual imagery’s claim that sexuality and image are increasingly becoming a dominant influence on school children’s ambitions for the future.

We might dislike celebrities swanning into involvement with publishing – either through endorsements or publishing their ‘own’ books – but an alternative is high culture books promoting themselves with the names of journalists that even much of the high culture audience don’t bother to be familiar with, while bemoaning celebrities being hugely successful despite not engaging with anything of substance. (Kanye being an interesting exception, spending far more time disserting on design, architecture and fashion than your average hip hop icon.) There’s also an interesting crux in the idea of celebrities’ involvement, which was the elephant being narrowly skirted around throughout a cracking Guardian discussion with AL Kennedy and Martine McCutcheon (http://tinyurl.com/ybu7o8s). In these hip media times, as Alison Kennedy seems painfully aware, the underlying implication of these people being underqualified, too stupid  to be involved with these books, risks painting publishing back into an elitist tower, sending everyone back to tv, internet and Playstations.

The balance falls between publishers being able to attach these widely recognised brand names to their products, using them to boost the attention given to culture, and the presence of these brand names dumbing down the market. The third way would of course be the innovation you’re looking for, where publishers devise promotional techniques in and of themselves which can rival the draw of a celebrity name, or indeed as Canongate near-succeed at doing, making the publisher’s character itself the celebrity.

Rather than it being a solitary pursuit though (people will sit and watch a DVD alone without thinking twice), I think the core objection to reading is simply that you do it rather than it plays to you. It’s necessarily active rather than potentially passive; it’s just not as easy. If you’re watching tv or listening to music and you lose track of what’s happening, nothing stops and you can try and pick it up later, or not. It takes an exceptional writer to keep you in the flow of reading their book when you haven’t understood what happened in the previous twenty pages. And I think that’s at the crux of your points about high culture and politics – war, expenses etc have disillusioned people from their convictions, and researching and deciding on new ones is far more wearisome to do after a day’s work (and still susceptible to further deception) than watching FlashForward. Just like someone you don’t know being retweeted by someone you’re a fan of on Twitter, the endorsement can be viewed as a safe and easy substitute for actually evaluating the book yourself.

I think in terms of where the markets are now (and here’s how in depth the music/publishing industry comparison can go) both are in the same place that the music industry was in the late ‘90s and, to a lesser extent, the mid-noughties. The aftermath of a huge consensus (in the this case Oasis et al) produces two approaches – in the late 90s, the music industry was signing anything that sounded remotely like Oasis in an effort to milk the momentum as fully as possible (fond memories of Hurricane #1, anyone?) while swathes of smaller acts appeared in the vacuum as the oppressive consensus waned (and if you don’t love Campag Velocet, you should). What’s interesting now is that with the vast range of choices provided by the information age, people have no real need to gather under a consensus. In both publishing and music now, anyone wishing to make the effort to find things of more substance can do so and small labels/publishers, acts/authors and commentators are able to find a sufficient audience of fanatics while the mainstream adopts lowest common denominator tactics. While no musical movement in Britain since The Strokes/Libertines has had the (inter)nationwide dominance of grunge or Britpop (with the debatable exception of Florence/La Roux/er, Little Boots?), publishing has still had the Rowling/Meyer/Larsson phenomena and vampires/angel trends. Perhaps this is an indication, as with the later arrival of digital issues, of how the publishing industry’s timeline lags behind that of the music industry; and so also an indication of how it will develop next.

Advertisement