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Has the Internet killed the myth of the rock star

"In the last three or four years the internet’s taken a stranglehold and killed off the myth of the rock star," Tom Meighan of Kasabian told Bangshowbiz last week. "You know when you used to buy records and there was a myth behind them? There’s too much on blogs now and I think it’s killed it off. There are so many rock stars writing these self-pitying blogs and it’s not in the spirit of rock’n’roll."

The irony of giving such a headline-grabbing opinion to an internet-only news service seems to have been lost on Meighan, but as a singer clearly in thrall to the mystique of Bowie, Bolan and Björk, he makes a good point. For all the wrong reasons.

We are in danger of losing the enigma of the rock star: you only have to stand Grizzly Bear next to pop stars like Dizzee Rascal, Florence Welch, or Lady Gaga in her blowtorch bra to see that the mainstream has gazumped alt-rock in terms of retina-frying freakishness. Dolled up in Napoleon outfits for their last promo stint Kasabian seem like a throwback to a time when rock favoured the fantastical. A time before hair metal made dressing up seem corny, long before lad rock forced music to be "real", and long before Pitchfork made a star of the bearded troubadour.

But it’s not Twitter that has exploded the myths behind the rock star.

If anything it’s magnified them, making it easier to sort the say-nothing chaff from the proper-bizarre wheat. Yes, Calvin Harris and Mike Skinner go on a bit with tweets about sandwich fillings and train delays, but that’s because they’re fundamentally ordinary blokey-blokes; only a particularly naive T4 guest booker would kid themselves that they were "pop stars". Follow the Proper Rock Stars on Twitter and there’s plenty of propagated myths – there are pictures of Muse playing futuristic digital clarinets in Japanese airports, while Liam Gallagher roars expletives about his brother’s haircut. Even if it’s not actually the star in question doing the tweeting, the fact that an impostor can convincingly impersonate them is testament to a heroic or cartoonish character in the best rock-myth tradition.

Any rock star worth the name is a rock star as much in tweet as in a glossy video, tour-bus boudoir or fatal strangle-wank accident. True, had Twitter existed in the 70s several major stars might well have been ruined by the exposure – Clapton would have seemed less God-like if he’d been squeezing his "rivers of blood" rant into 140 characters, while authorities might have been alerted to Gary Glitter much earlier. However, today’s rock-star bloggers are more interested in breaking down the barriers between them and their fans. The real rock icons maintain their mystery simply by not blogging.

No, the reason the internet may kill off rock-star mystique is that the blogosphere, by its own limitation and design, is not in thrall to image. Traditional music media requires cover stars to be the complete package, looking as good as they sound and producing snappy, controversial pull-quotes at the drop of a Dictaphone. To earn the status of rock legend, the old-school star needs to lure in the browsing commuter with the secret Strokes shirt on under his office clobber.

Music websites, however, have no news-stand to leap out from; their "covers" consist of pictures little bigger than postage stamps, so they rely on Google to draw in traffic. The click-to-hear-it nature of the web goes against the alluring band-as-gang image readers buy into, copy and adore long before they hear a note. It doesn’t matter if a singer has anything important, funny or interesting to say, or if they say it dressed as Caligula with a chicken on their head; the music is all that matters online.

The blogosphere’s appeal is momentary so attention-seeking bands are turning to shock tactics to create a controversy buzz while the printed press is now forced to chase internet hype for their next cover stars.

词句笔记：

stranglehold：压制，抑制

self-pitying：自怨自艾的

headline-grabbing：吸引眼球的

thrall：奴役

be held in thrall to：被……深深迷住

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