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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
But John has a gift for minting money on a scale that perhaps no other pop performer ever has. In just the last 10 years -- writing songs for hit Broadway musicals (including "The Lion King"), touring and collecting songwriting royalties -- he has probably made more than $100 million. A star like Elton John doesn't have to worry. He can set himself up for life again with just another short stadium tour with Billy Joel.
His commercial feats are impressive to this day; from 1972 to 1975 he had seven straight No. 1 albums; during this period he occupied the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album chart approximately one week out of four. In the meantime, he was by far the dominant singles artist of his era, and remains second only to Elvis Presley in terms of singles charted. Throw together singles, albums and tours, and he can safely be placed among a commercial pop elite of the 20th century that includes Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Paul McCartney and no one else I can think of.
He is of course the least of this pantheon, but so what? In some primal way, John tapped into something his audience of the day desired deeply -- a star outlandish enough to tickle its fancy, yet ingratiating enough to like without hesitation, and safe enough to take home to mom. He was never a great artist, because he wasn't supposed to be one; he'd make the necessary mumbled demurral when the idea came up. It made him and his audience feel a bit more elevated, and that, too, is one of the pleasures of pop John dispensed so unselfishly during his heyday.
In the 1990s, he evolved into a chuckling celebrity, someone whose agreeable persona and beloved back catalog reach such a critical mass that his star could continue to burn merrily for as long as he'd like. Accordingly, he acted the part in an unfortunate way; the documentary "Tantrums and Tiaras," directed by his boyfriend of the time, filmmaker David Furnish, was accurately titled. In England he's a knight, that meaningless honor that makes some people ooh and credulous journalists suddenly begin calling him Sir Elton.
He served us as lead mourner to a dead princess and a martyred designer; his grief seemed genuine in both cases, and it must seem sometimes to John that his venerable if useless species -- the beautiful people -- is endangered.
But he persevered -- his retooling of "Candle in the Wind" for the dead Princess Diana, captured by a world awash in grief both real and nostalgic, may be the bestselling single of all time. He is still able, when he concentrates, to produce an album of some seriousness, if not actual quality; his latest, "Song From the West Coast," with a single called "I Want Love," is a good example of this. A video for the song has actor Robert Downey Jr. mouthing the words as he wanders through an empty apartment.
John is apparently one of those who think Downey is being unfairly prosecuted for victimless crimes that hurt no one; others, like me, resist a world in which celebrity lawbreakers are given Get Out of Jail Free cards while other anonymous ones are ground down by society's indifference. Does John care about matters like this?
Perhaps he does. He is unquestionably the greatest charity force in rock. (His knighthood was specifically for his charitable work, notably for AIDS-relief organizations.) John's support for Downey, however, comes from a slightly different strain of his psyche. It is tinged, perhaps, by his sadness over recent deaths in his life; but there are also overtones of the emotional commitment and personal philosophy that, recently, created the finest moment of his latter-day career.
That was a year-and-a-half ago, when he stepped out on stage at the Grammys, to pound an electric piano and sing the chorus of Dido's "Thank You" in accompaniment to a young man named Eminem.
Eminem's a difficult call -- depraved on account of being deprived, true, but an unrepentant fag-basher, a guy who hits women, and something of a fuckhead generally. But he's also merely a boy, one with real talent as a writer, a scintillating rapper, a manipulator of pop symbols of some accomplishment and a provocateur who seems to choose his targets, even the inappropriate ones, with giddy integrity.
Eminem's appearance on the Grammys, heavily hyped, was no epochal moment -- both he and the Grammys were using each other to bolster their credibility, after all. But it is important to note that John himself was getting nothing out of this. Yet he stood on stage to sing backup for a homophobe. And he did it because ... why?
Because rock's not always pretty, and art gets created in weird places. Because John was a chubby boy once whom no one took seriously. Because sometimes, when an artist is attacked, however justifiably, there's a danger that Art is at risk as well.
John believes in all these things, but there was something more as well: Elton John knows that fuckheads need love too. In this manner he made a political point, and a human one too. Or rather, he made the point that the human sometimes must trump the political, which some in a fractious age will find confusing. But to rock's kindest and most malleable star, it came naturally.
