Alain de Botton is wrong to ask the One Direction star to tell his fans to read Hegel. Styles just needs to get them all thinking
Adorable little pop poppet Harry Styles raised a few eyebrows among his 10 million Twitter followers this morning, when he shared the following nugget of knowledge:
Socrates, born in Athens in the 5th century BCE, marks a watershed in Ancient Greek philosophy.
— Harry Styles (@Harry_Styles) February 13, 2013
The message was slightly less random than it first appeared. In an interview in Metro today, Alain de Botton described meeting Styles briefly at a party, prompting the philosopher to speculate on how stars of popular culture could use their influence to create interest in the intellectual canon.
"My plan," he said, "is to shut the Arts Council and get people such as Harry Styles to go on television and recommend to everyone they read Proust and Hegel, which would achieve more in five minutes than the Arts Council achieves year in, year out. David Beckham could do Aristotle and Plato. The cause of intellectual life in this country would be helped immeasurably."
We can presume (or hope) that de Botton's proposal was tongue in cheek, but I have to admit, I would love to live in a world where Perrie from Little Mix could be interviewed about their latest hit single Change Your Life and say something like:
"Well, the opening metaphor of the dropped mirror plays on the central motif of Sartre's La Nausée, in which the mirror presents the individual as an external reflection that can never reflect the true essence of the self. The chorus, "Change Your Life", ironically echoes Roquentin's disdain for the autodidact. And it's also about, you know, boys and stuff."
As it happens, footballers at least have made occasional forays into literary and philosophical evangelism. Joey Barton may have added to the gaiety of the nation with his musings on the work of Nietzsche, but I'm unaware of widespread discussions of The Will to Power on the terraces. Similarly, Eric Cantona's declaration of his love for Rimbaud didn't have a huge effect on the popularity of the French poet, although it may have accidentally helped shift a few Sylvester Stallone DVDs to United fans.
Musicians, if not footballers, can and do influence the thoughts and the reading of their fans. I personally hold the Canadian prog rockers Rush entirely responsible for the surge in popularity of the works of Ayn Rand in the 1980s, and I will never forgive them for it. I'll never forgive them for the drum solos either, but that is a different matter.
Bands with followers in their late teens and 20s could certainly point enquiring minds towards serious philosophy, and the likes of the Manic Street Preachers have done exactly that. Alain de Botton forgets that the role of bubblegum pop is to provide aural wallpaper on daytime radio, and its main commercial market is prepubescent girls who are more likely to be reading Michelle Paver than Marcel Proust. It's a pop star's job to be pretty and dumb, and there's nothing wrong with that – venture too far away from the formula and they will alienate their fans more than inspire them. Harry Styles could genuinely do something good just by telling interviewers or his Twitter followers that his plan for the day was to curl up under a duvet and read a book – any book.
There is something else I believe pop music could do, as an industry. Philosophy is not about knowing the century in which Socrates was born, but about learning how to think. My first pop obsession was for Blondie, and I remember spending hours and hours poring over lyrics, trying to make sense of verses like this: "The beams become my dream / My dream is on the screen / Dusty frames that still arrive / Die in 1955 / Fade away and radiate." What does it mean? I'm still not entirely sure, but I'd say the same about Remembrance of Things Past. I have a hunch the two works cover very similar ground. I do know that those happy hours spent untangling the riddles of pop lyrics were my first experiences in genuine intellectual challenge, and have stood me in good stead since. By comparison, the new One Direction single is called Kiss You, and contains lyrical gems like this: "Oh, I just wanna show you off to all of my friends / Making them drool down their chinny-chin-chins / Baby be mine tonight, mine tonight / Baby be mine tonight. Yeah."
So my own plea to the pop stars, their songwriters and svengalis would not be to harangue their fans with reading lists and address the nation with lectures on Hegel. Nobody wants that, not even Hegel. Just give them something to think about – and please, please stay well away from Ayn Rand.
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| READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.guardian.co.uk |