Pop and Truth

By Crispin Sartwell

Prince, Madonna, and Michael Jackson - the great American pop icons of the eighties and some of the most enduring figures on pop music history - were all born in 1958. For that matter, so was I. We were the first generation raised with television as a constant companion - raised by television as much as by human beings - and we were the first generation to make of the pure manipulation of images an art form.

The generation before us played with the postmodern, with transcending sincerity and truth. We were the postmodern, down to our DNA.

The three great pop figures were masters of the play with images, masters of superficial provocation, masters of a playful code of constant slight transgression. They were fairly talented musicians, but they were extraordinarily talented inventors of personae. They were shapeshifters, their outfits and stage sets at least as important as their music.

What''s happening now to the three of them is as emblematic as their careers themselves, as the postmodern obsession with surface has led back, as it had to, to enduring values of art and spirit, as the flimsiness and pleasure of appearance dissolved again into the seriousness and struggle of morality and truth.

Michael Jackson, of course, has disintegrated into sheer incomprehensibility and become a kind of posthuman morality tale. He went so far down the road of inventing himself as an image that he misplaced himself entirely. Yet obviously he also remained human, with the normal human desires now twisted almost beyond recognition.

Like the rest of us, he could not escape the complex realities under the costumes.

His music and his stage shows descended into self-reference, self-parody, and self-indulgence. Jackson has essentially been finished for a decade or more, and you will probably never hear a new song by him on pop radio. His very name is a joke and a warning, a hissing and a byword.

Madonna has endured, and now finds herself caught, as it were, between Britney Spears and the Kabbalah. Britney idolizes Madonna as the origin of the softcore porn, light-as-fluff pop persona that Britney carries forward. Madonna herself, meanwhile, is raising children, writing children''s books, and trying to find an authentic spirituality at the center of a world of mere appearance.

The quest may be quixotic. She has apparently changed her name to "Esther," which is indeed poised at the opposite end of the reality spectrum than the idea of "Madonna." But Madonna always played with spiritual symbolism (as has Prince, in fact), and the idea of changing her name (as did Prince, in fact) is a kind of perfect postmodern gesture, as if who you are could simply be replaced like a brand identity.

Her quest for reality is, I'm sure, sincere and it must be intense: she has a lot of self-manufactured fictions to overcome. But it is unlikely to get her anywhere except further into the funhouse. Meanwhile it's hard not to notice, even as Madonna tours with a new stage show, that she seems to have lost a certain edge, as well as the ability to make big hits.

In 1982, I would have said that Prince was the likeliest of the three to descend into madness and disappear. Instead, he is the only one of the three to claw his way back to reality and hence into the future.

His stage show - which I saw at the Meadowlands last week - is extremely simple, his outfits flamboyant but cut way back from the ridiculous stagewear of his youth. In one of the best concerts I have ever seen (and I've seen dozens of dozens; I'm a recovering rock critic) he simply rocked hard for two hours, depending on funk horns, a real live drummer, and his own astonishing guitar work.

The centerpiece was an acoustic set - Prince alone with his guitar. It showcased a beautiful ease on stage and a pure musicianship well beyond the ken of Michael or "Esther."

Maybe after all the shape-shifting, the videos, the conversions, the controversies, the divaesque ego trips, the mental illnesses and so on, what endures in music is actually . . . music.

And perhaps in the next election cycle, the postmodern politics of Bush and Kerry - a mere image construction that long ago transcended the apparently obsolete ideas of sincerity or truth - will give way to the postpostmodern politics of John McCain and Howard Dean.

The truth is hard, but necessary, and in the long run it reappears as the surfaces we make wear away. Prince shows that maybe others of us can find our way back and forward to it.

Crispin Sartwell teaches political science at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.