Pay to get Whipped: An Interview Mixtape by Derrick Martin-Campbell
Do you have a hard time imagining Tom Cruise murdering someone?
Interviewing an athlete or an actor always seems like a good idea in theory because we pay both to act like protagonists all day long and let us watch. In actual practice, though, it’s usually a pretty big coincidence when your favorite professional ball-thrower also winds up being really good at commenting at said ball-throwing.
Interviews with artists fare better, I think, because makers evoke for a living. Kanye’s New York Times interview may veer wildly between casual sagacity and dumbassness, but it remains a complete, coherent performance throughout. Jon Hamm just sounds confused and even a little bored when people ask him about Don Draper. But Kanye West really does seem like the actual main character of his own life, for the duration of that interview, anyway.
I love artist interviews and read them a lot to “get inspired”/procrastinate. I love that even the most choreographed, advertising-money-dictated interview still holds out the possibility of devolving suddenly into a swirling storm of genuinely human chaos. It’s why celebrity handlers work so hard to choreograph them in the first place.
Another thing about interviews is that, as a format, they remain our first model for how to use social media. The prevailing literary mode of the status-update, the unique mix of funny-anecdote and Joycean-interior-monologue, that makes everyone else on Facebook sound insane?
That’s our celebrity mode, and it’s only one of the reasons why it’s so disappointing when you watch a famous artist you love totally blow an interview. Come on, dude, some of us have been practicing for this our whole stupid lives!
The interview is also the model for the therapy session, of course, ostensibly none of which are included below. Because this is America and we still feel weird about therapy. Truth, beauty, awesomeness, you guys, 24/7/365.
Derrick’s Interview Mixtape:
Bob Dylan vs. various European press, Don’t Look Back, 1965
Songs shmongs. Dylan cracks the code of modernism when he realizes that the quickest way to get people to adore you is just to act like a dick. Booze, sex, and pills are great, sure, but, for a midwestern Jew chain-smoking his way across Europe for the first time, the discovery of rudeness must have been something like opening the ark of the covenant. Did anyone else out there spend their young life watching this movie over and over, aching for their chance to someday indignantly demand of someone, anyone, “Did you ask the beatles that?!” “Who would to pay to get whipped?!” Whoa, Bob, have you been reading my wish-journal?
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Ice Cube vs. bell hooks, SPIN magazine/Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, 1993
Lest we forget, even the interview is really just capitalism’s corruption of a good old-fashioned conversation. Remember when two of the biggest personas in black American pop-culture talked about black self-love and dumb white people for 10,000 words and SPIN magazine published it and it was hilarious and brilliant and kind and unique? Probably not, because SPIN chickened out and famously cut everything but bell hooks talking about buying herself a BMW. The complete transcript as it appears in Outlaw Culture now reads like an artifact from some utopian pop-culture that almost was: charismatic smart people talking frankly about movies everyone has seen.
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Tom Cruise vs. Oprah, Oprah Winfrey Show, 2005
I almost feel stupid including this here, it’s so obvious. A really myth-making cultural performance doesn’t just alter the future course of events in a character’s story, it recons everything that came before it. Tom Cruise always just kind of seemed like a dark, gifted airhead until the radioactive spider-bite/perfect storm of Scientology, gay-panic, and this interview transformed him into the manic dervish of ambiguity and grinning teeth we know today. Not to be mean, but do you have a hard time imagining Tom Cruise murdering someone? I don’t.
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Michael Jackson vs. a documentary about Michael Jackson, This is It, 2009
Documentaries about living people count as interviews, even (especially) if that person is now dead. Like the Kanye interview, MJ, it turns out, talks a lot of shop. My first instinct is to compare This is It to Triumph of the Will, but that seems glib and ungenerous. Instead, I will wonder here if there is any more forgiving lens through which to view a human being than watching him work hard at the thing he loves, blissfully unaware that it’s almost the end of the movie.
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We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: the collected Interviews
Harmony Korine vs. David Letterman, Tonight Show, 1995, 1997, 1999
More conversations over interviews. Borrowing a power-move from Patti Smith, Korine walks out on that stage in ‘95 dressed like Arthur Rimbaud, the lingerie of all bright, young things. Letterman really ties himself to the mast but, by the time he and Korine jinx each other simultaneously remembering the name of little person baseball star Eddie Gaedel, it’s clear they are actually in love. Korine was scheduled to appear a fourth time but got 86ed from the show the night-of when Letterman caught him going through Meryl Streep’s purse. He must have felt betrayed.
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Werner Herzog vs. Sniper, BBC Interview, 2007
“It is not a significant bullet,” says Herzog after getting shot, mid-interview, “I am not afraid.”
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Jesus vs. Pontius Pilate, The Gospel According to Mark, Bible times,
Just as all courtroom dramas use the interview as their climax, so are all celebrity interviews a kind of trial. The puritanism of our culture demands that we celebrate Christ’s stoicism here, his noble refusal to apologize for, or to explain his actions to Pilate. But we are not really stoic creatures.
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Britney Spears vs. Kevin Federline, stoned, 2004
“They don’t love you like I love you.”
Derrick Martin Campbell is a writer living in Portland, OR. You can find more of his work here.
[Main Photo Via: Pink Smoke]