LET'S CALL THE WHOLE THING OFF:
A Modest Proposal – A Moratorium on Rock Star Interviews

by Rob Brookman

Happily skipping her way through the group genuflect that passed for media coverage of her mega-selling crap-bomb ... Baby One More Time, Britney Spears reportedly encountered one question she didn't like:

What was the deal with her breasts?

I can't confirm this, made queasy as I am by the idea of ogling suggestive pictures of girls half my age. But the story goes that Britney's upper body underwent a suspiciously aggressive growth spurt at some point in the recent past, an expansion some Spears-watchers felt could only be explained by surgical augmentation.

Spears was said to be shocked - shocked! - that a professional journalist would stoop to inquire about her personal accessories, and abruptly canceled the interview. After that, the word went out: Britney's ta-tas were verboten, at least as far as the press was concerned.

Now, I'm no fan of private-lives journalism; just because someone's in the public eye doesn't mean their dirty laundry should hang in the wind along side them. But let's face it, Britney's boobs are definitely part of what she's selling - they're the kicker in the deal. They're featured on magazine covers, music videos, bubblegum cards, everywhere you look, for chrissakes, presumably to add a little oomph to sales for her core business, which I guess you'd have to say is music.

For that reason, asking Britney about her chest is like asking thechairman of Procter & Gamble about Tide. It may not be the whole of his enterprise, but it's definitely adding to the bottom line.

Nonetheless, the Britney ban on tit-talk held up, and subsequent interviewers obediently steered future questions toward more "appropriate" topics. (Among those weighty subjects? Rumors of a budding relationship between Spears and Prince William. Alert the Queen!)

Admittedly, the Britney incident didn't do much to wound the rock star interview. The form had already been moribund for going on two, if not three, decades. But it did cast on spotlight on its cause of death, and why it's time to give the institution a much-needed rest.

Former rock critic Richard Meltzer, writing in Spin about 15 years ago, accurately circumscribed one phenomenon that sent the rock star interview to its untimely demise (for the record, the spelling and capitalization irregularities are Meltzers):

"With megabuck dice at last rolling generally , not just for the Beatles and the Stones, 'publicity' departments grew in size, stature and malfeasance at companies great and small, not so much to generate sales (the domain, more properly of 'promotion' and 'marketing') as to placate the overpriced talent and forcefeed fans a see-Spot-run of unfolding corporate b.m. Necessitating us writefolk trash, if we wanted in at all, to abdicate our Responsibility, that of being rock & roll, and accede toot sweet to our first official 'duty,' that of SHILLING for the bastards by keeping the urgency down, by (like nice li'l ladies & gents) re-viewing, pre-viewing, inter-viewing - in a word, writing about."

"To stay in," Meltzer concludes, "we hadda get Out."

But the fact is, very few writers - and almost no publications - got Out. That's because, at the same time eager-to-appease publicity departments began treating even middling musicians like heads of state (in the same article excerpted above, Meltzer tells of being ordered by the trifling Jim Capaldi to get him a cup of tea moments after they'd been introduced), media outlets and more than a few journalists realized that rock interviews, no matter how insignificant, drew in readers/viewers, and drew them in big numbers.

So, at the same moment artists began pushing for more control over their public personas, the people who had previously shaped those personas - the press - declared their formerly unassailable position indefensible for economic reasons. If Jim Capaldi wants tea, journalists were told, by God be sure to ask him if he takes it with sugar.

The aftermath of that no-contest battle proved ruinous. In just a few short years, the rock interview devolved from a no-holds-barred dialogue between peers (I'm thinking of a particularly entertaining discussion between Nick Tosches and Patti Smith that included an in-depth analysis of masturbation, not to mention Lester Bangs' memorable tete-a-tetes with Lou Reed) to a one-on-one press conference that often revealed less about a musician than the liner notes of his/her latest CD.

The Rolling Stone Interview (which is probably trademarked to feign the appearance of cultural relevance) is perhaps the most blatant example of the deterioration of the rock and roll discourse, not because RS's conversations with artists are any worse than average (they're actually not) but because the magazine's reputation and sales figure would suggest it could spend more time and assign better people to get a story that matters.

Unfortunately, that's almost never the case. To illustrate, here's a typical example of RS dreck, pulled randomly from - to carry on a theme - the rag's recent profile on Britney Spears:

"Today, she has completed high school correspondence classes up through grade eleven. You ask Spears why her parents allowed her to leave [school] at such a young age.

'Because they knew I wanted it so bad,' she says. 'I thank God every day for my parents.'"

Well, blow me down.

In the same issue, Rolling Stone offers readers a chance to win the red-white-and-blue halter top Spears sported for their cover. Call me a cynic, but those kinds of cozy, you-sell-more-albums/we-sell-more-magazines cross promotions don't exactly reassure me that RS writers are cutting into every interview subject with a steely sharp surgeon's knife.

Sadly, conditions aren't much better farther down the totem pole. Whereas writers and editors with high-wattage music magazines at least suspect they're being used as sales tools, do-it-yourself fanzine scribes tend to pollute the few unrehearsed comments they get with a general sense of reverence that borders on the subservient.

"Fugazi's next record is going to be a 10-track endorsement commercial for George W. Bush?" you can imagine some little skate-punk-turned-rock-writer asking. "Dude, that is weird, but SO COOL!"

There are occasional exceptions, of course. I remember a particularly revealing profile of Elvis Costello in Musician back in the mid-1980s, not to mention a relatively forthcoming chat with Kurt Cobain in Rolling Stone circa 1992 or so. And a 'zine called The Big Takeover always seem to extract a kernel of truth from the diverse targets of their curiosity.

But on the whole, the stars stick to their scripts and the writers take it all in, like bad drunks at an open-bar wedding.

So how about this proposal? We declare a moratorium on the rock and roll interview. Everyone from Rolling Stone to Entertainment Tonight on down to those of us who ply our trade for a few measly readers in the electronic ozone called the Internet. No more Ricky Martin, no more Billy Corgan, no more Sarah McLachlan, no more Steve Malkmus, no more Pearl Jam or Stone Temple Pilots or whoever. Nada. A blackout on interviews, and for one whole year.

Let's see what the publicists and their pampered charges would do then, when, say, Britney Spears' rack gets fewer line-inches in the paper than the gun control debate.

And blowhards like Jim Capaldi have to get their own fucking cups of tea.