Too many of today's stars and celebrities think their notoriety gives them a platform to pontificate on their favourite causes ad nauseum. Success as an entertainer, however, doesn't qualify someone as an expert in politics or war or the law or the environment or whatever. This seems to me so obvious that it hardly needs to be said, but some entertainers apparently have a high opinion of their expertise in whatever fashionable cause they have signed on to.
Keith Richards is not like that. He can elicit a kind of grudging admiration because he knows who he is and just why he's so successful and well-known. Not because people want him to speak up about world poverty, or the situation in Darfur, or the current travails of the British Labour Party or the Church of England, or alleged injustices perpetrated on deer. He's as rich as Croesus because he has gifts for playing electric guitar and writing rock 'n' roll songs. That's it—and he seems to know that better than anyone else. Rex Murphy comments:
I like him, too, because he seems to be cause-phobic. No chance of Keith Richards showing up in PEI or Newfoundland some day, shading himself under the blimpish canopy of Pamela Anderson's hyperinflations, to plead the cause of the seals and chimps. No chance of him showing up wearing a Kabala trinket to "raise our consciousness" on the declining pitch of the howler monkey, or whatever happens to be the cause of the week, in a tête-à-tête with the Chairman of the Bored, Larry King.
I liked it, too, when he declined the world-wide exhibition of the superfamous and the superrich when they gave of their glamorous time to Make Poverty History. He asked the right questions and made the right remarks.
To Uncut magazine, he said: "I mean, who's this gratifying, and where are the Africans? Where was their say?" Referring to the pressure on him to participate, he said, "Oh yeah, all the Sirs had a bash, believe me."
"All the Sirs had a bash." There's a T-shirt slogan worth a million "I care" wristbands. All the Sirs, the Dorian Grays of rock geriatrics, are caricatures of themselves.
But not Keith Richards. He's still not letting anyone tell him how white his shirts should be—and he's not trying to tell us, either. That's refreshing.
I'm not saying he's any kind of positive moral example (although he may be a saint: he does attend church). He's been busted for drug possession, including heroin, and he has in the past treated his wives and girlfriends abominably (although Patti, his wife of twenty years, and her parents are very happy with him and claim he's a Christian). I'm just saying he's not a hypocrite, and he hasn't let worldly success seduce him into believing that he's an expert in anything really important. He's an entertainer and he knows it.
Keith had surgery today to relieve headaches that began after he fell out of a palm tree ten days ago while vacationing in Fiji. The operation has been pronounced "a complete success".
For access to Rex Murphy's full column, click here.
Contact Music link via Nealenews.
Posts
