Mr. B-A-D
I haven’t been following the Phil Spector trial, which is weird, because I am usually completely riveted by a sordid dark-side-of-Hollywood tale. Dissipated celebrities, creepy mansions, curdled genius, crushed dreams, guns. Sunset Boulevard, duh!
The slideshow of the crazy motherfucker’s hair over the years in Sunday Styles struck me as a crass trivialization of a Serious Thing. This guy is an alleged murderer, and we’re snickering about his hair? Gawd.
Whoa, I thought. Is it possible that I’m not going in for the sort of lurid schadenfreude circus that is normally my lifeblood? Am I above this?
I decided to look it up on Google News today, as an experiment. At the very least, I figured, there’d be a bunch of good/bad punny headlines.
“Then He Shot Her,” perhaps?
But no. They’re just bad/bad: “Facing Murder Rap, Pop Genius Spector ‘Lost That Lovin’ Feelin””? “Spector’s Wall of Scorn”? Who writes this shit?
I couldn’t read any of it. Just couldn’t latch on. My eyes caught on certain things, sure. B-movie star/cocktail waitress. Castle Pyrenees. “She kissed the gun.”
Sigh. Truth is, I’m not above anything. I just don’t want to know that much about Phil Spector.
Last week I listened to “Be My Baby” on repeat for a half hour or more, thinking, this song is not a song in any ordinary way. This song was quarried from a cave, or plucked from heaven, or sprung from the skull of Zeus! A divining rod may have had something to do this song! The world wouldn’t be the same without this song! (Same with “Then He Kissed Me,” and “He’s a Rebel,” and “I Love How You Love Me,” and so on and so on and so on.)
Phil Spector is completely batshit, and has been forever. Everyone’s heard that story about him holding the Ramones at gunpoint.
And Ezra Pound was a fascist!
Why do I feel so guilty?
Because today I had the thought that even though this poor murdered woman was a human being, and as undeserving of her fate as any of us, and somebody’s baby once, if I had to choose between her life and all those Wall of Sound songs… Shudder.
Of course nobody is asking anybody to make that choice. But that doesn’t mean I’m not a bad person.
I was better off not paying attention to any of it.
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