old man look at my life, i’m not like you

It all happened so fast. One minute I’m listening to The Idiot in a Le Fanfaron, a debauched rocknroll bar, the next I’m sneering at an album cover in an empty record store, and it’s all because of this man, Michel Houellebecq (pictured). 

This antagonist, hermit, drunk and womaniser has – through the brilliance of translated texts – become the rockstars’ rockstar (Iggy Pop has written the soundtrack to a documentary on Houellebecq’s attempts to make a movie based on his book La Possibilité d’une île) and I’m beginning to see why. The book in question is written from two perspectives, that of blogger Daniel and Daniel24 (if my memory serves me right) and is consistently scathing towards the internet and its functions. In his earlier novel Extension du domaine de la lutte, Houellebecq, himself a former civil servant and IT manager writes,

I don’t like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke. My entire work as a computer expert consists of adding to the data, the cross-referencing, the criteria of rational decision-making. It has no meaning.

In an interview for the release of his new album, Préliminaires, an expansion of his soundtrack to the documentary, Iggy Pop explains that when he was recording the songs he had an internet savvy assistant who sent the songs for the Louie Armstrong-esque backing to be recorded. He comes across rather nonchalant when saying this, but you can guess that Mr. Houellebecq and Mr. Pop probable see eye-to-eye on technological matters – and they’re not the only ones. On Neil Young’s latest record, title track Fork in the Road the aging Canadian sings,

I’m a big rock star
My sales have tanked
But I still got you
Thanks
Download this
Sounds like shit

Keep on bloggin’
‘Til the power goes out
Your battery’s dead
Twist and shout

Ouch! I want to agree with the two old rockers, maybe they’re right, maybe this internet malarkey is so impersonal that through endorsing it we are only distancing ourselves from those around us, maybe as Houellebecq argues, ‘It has no meaning’, but I can’t. I find myself deserting these canonised artists because the transcendental qualities of youth – one of the key selling points in their respective oeuvres – is destroyed in the instant they come over all nostalgic on us and start singing about how good it wasin the pre-web era. Young has used the same venom that he had for the establishment in songs like Ohio and directed it at web users. The whole experience is just debasing on their behalf. 

It’s not a political qualm I wish to add; it’s not because they they’re all a bunch of Right-wing warmongers, because they’re not even if they do all swing that way. It’s not because they’re all out to make a quick buck and live their paid-up professional lifestyles that grates on me; although that advert is pretty horrendous, and Young is just as bothered about his revenue streams as he is the bloggers in his lyrics. It’s because when I listened to The Idiot back in Paris I believed that it could have been written about me and those around me. It spoke to my neurosis and the end of existence, of war and bombs. However when I hear that Iggy Pop is releasing a concept album around a book that openly attacks the web and only weeks after hearing Neil Young spit vitriol about the digital age, I just think, ‘Fuck ’em. They’re past it. They don’t know me anymore.’

When they attacked Nixon and gave a voice to those who had been silenced, when they shared the pain and strife of the underdog, that’s when they mattered; nowadays they sing not-so-tongue-in-cheek anecdotes about being King of the Dogs in a world they cannot fathom. They’ve given up, they sit there in their cabins taking pot shots at the world as it is, if anyone has lost touch with reality it’s not the bloggers and web users, it is them. 

There’s a lovely moment in Extension du domaine de la lutte (tr. Whatever) where an office worker gets drunk at the Christmas bash, strips and gyrates about. Down to her knickers she realises what she’d done and has to collect her clothes while her colleagues look on. I’d like both Iggy Pop and Neil Young to come to their senses like the female office worker does. To feel a sense of shame and embarrassment that the party’s over and they’re exposing themselves.