kind of Rosetta Stone for her creations. It was only possible as she understood implicitly that greatness cannot be rushed and should never be truncated. The Vulture piece is a total outlier and Hollywood-style PR is the grim, soulless final destination for all this, where ‘access’ is deemed to be 15 minutes on the phone with the director and the star, where the director talks for half of it about camera angles just so the star doesn’t have to offer anything of substance. A few years ago, a friend who works for a highselling, high-end glossy magazine was flown from London to Malibu to interview an A-list TV and film star in their beachfront home. It was done on the condition that it was the cover feature and that the star would get photo approval (they got that) and copy approval (they did not get that, but it took a lot of push back). The entire run time of the interview? 15 minutes. What can anyone learn about another person in 15 minutes? As Andy Warhol didn’t say, in the future everyone who is famous will drone on for 15 minutes. The uncomfortable truth is that these stars – Groundhog Daying through a week of interviews chopped up into tiny slots – are bored of telling the same controlled and hollow stories over and over again and the journalists are equally bored of sitting through them, unable (or unwilling) to call time on their blank soliloquies and ask something interesting that might serve up an equally interesting reply. No one wins here. A bland quote trails a bland interview with a bland star and the vacuum it creates sucks our souls dry. Culture and art and beauty and insight all lie dead in the ditch, the roadkill of an industry that only cares for the surface of now and not for the depth of the future. I once had to endure a one-day press junket for a James Bond film (don’t ask me which, as we were not allowed to see it first) where you were expected to do roundtables with mid-level stars of the film and magic a story out of their monotone platitudes. Daniel Craig, we were told, was only doing one interview. It would not be with any of us. It was either with GQ or Esquire and he invariably spoke about designer watches, cars and expensive tailoring. ‘Oh, look,’ the public said, the words falling like night soil from their mouths, ‘I see Daniel Craig has done his interview again.’
Phil Rees / Alamy
XXXXXXXX COMMENT
“A bland quote trails a bland interview with a bland star and the vacuum it creates sucks our souls dry.”
This is the future the music industry is willing itself into and in the long term everyone – the fans, the label executives, the stars themselves – will be all the poorer for it. Really what we need is fewer interviews with pop stars, but better ones. Of all people, Bon Iver may just have stumbled across the solution. For his self-titled album in 2011, he felt he had done too many interviews and they all started to homogenise into a toothless blob. So for his 22, A Million album in 2016, he did two major interviews (one with The Guardian and one with The New York Times) and let the writers spend days with him and ask him anything. Nothing was off limits. The feeling was it was better to do two really good interviews rather than 1,000 repetitive ones in a tedious race to the bottom. If we don’t have the Bon Iver-ification of interviews, what are we losing here? We are losing stories. And music runs on stories as much as it runs on melodies, chords and lyrics that somehow capture what it is to be alive, now, in this moment. Imagine, then, the future. A six-part series on Netflix debuts in 2029 promising to tell the full and incredible story of [someone in the charts today] through… some tweets and a handful of pseudo-inspirational Instagram posts. This is what we risk bringing down on ourselves and down on music – a hagiography in emojis. 59