Janis Joplin is gone, by now just one more we've seen succumb in the public arena of the pop marketplace. It's not just that this kind of early death has become a fact of life that is disturbing, but that it's been accepted as a given so quickly. We're getting to the point where we merely anticipate between exits, idly wondering which will be the next among our "heroes" to go. And caring less all the time.
I don't know which is worse, the cannibalistic impulse of the public and the pop music industry which mutually encourage artists in disintegration because that's the flash and we really do think that someone else can live our lives and deaths for us, or the sickly, not to say
Read More
sickening, spate of "Eulogies" and "Memorials" and "Remembrances" which sweep the pop press as soon as another star done gone. But perhaps they are the same thing.
Because as soon as another Name's dead, the slick magazines and tabloids alike get out their plumes and their crying towels and indulge in all sorts of disgusting bathetic paeans to the deceased. But unfortunately, they almost invariably pay tribute not to the actual person but to the self-consuming myth, the larger-than-life persona which had no more than a marginal existence in the first place and ballooned so that eventually it dwarfed the person carrying it around: The composers of the Memorials make sure that we will keep on worshiping exactly that lie which contributed so heavily in almost every case to the desperate, self-consumption which killed the Name. They almost never write, on the other hand, and the public almost never comes to understand, anything about the real, different, scared individual behind the flash and its bluff. Maybe it just doesn't make good copy.
Janis Joplin was the most tragic example of this; even if you didn't much care about her music, her death came as a shock. Following so close upon the heels of Hendrix's undoubtedly had something to do with it. But there is something more, namely the fact that Janis Joplin was almost totally helpless, a true waif adrift in the world, and after a certain point anyone with enough interest in the pop scene to read this paper could have sensed it. Many did, I suppose. Others just remarked on how her singing got worse, more raspy and out of control all the time, and wished that damn yammering bitch would just go away. After all, we were the ones who had her hype splashed in our faces, Janis The Spirit Of The Blues, Janis The Spirit Of Bessie Smith, Janis on the cover of Newsweek magazine and represented inside as what We ("we"?) were all about. Janis Suffering, Drinking, Going Through Changes And Searching For The Right Band and The Right Man, her every swig and sigh duly recorded and preserved for the Fans who like to saturate themselves in it.
Those of us who didn't and might also have been rather hypersensitive about having our noses rubbed in hype for months on end, well, it was only natural that
