John Mellencamp’s Void in the Heartland
Was Bruce Springsteen really successful with Born in the U.S.A.?” asks John Cougar Mellencamp one crisp spring afternoon in Bloomington, Indiana. “Think so? I think the record was great — that has nothing to do with it I wonder if he’s the same guy he used to be. That’s what success is about: happiness. I wonder if he’s as happy as he was.”
Mellencamp takes a pull on one of his ever-present Marlboros and continues. “I’m not bad-mouthing him. I like the guy. Every time I’ve been around him, he’s been a blue-chip fella to me, right? But I wonder about his happiness. I wonder about Madonna’s happiness. I wonder about Michael Jackson’s happiness. We put him down so bad that he feels he has to make a statement about it. Let’s quit feeding off these people.”
Mellencamp is looking at the big picture these days (“Is Madonna happy?” — now there’s a puzzle worthy of a Zen master), and he doesn’t like what he sees. He is full of questions — about his own identity, about the pop-culture world that envelops him, about the life he has led to this point — and that makes him extremely uncomfortable. It’s not a place he’s used to being. Growing up as a hell raiser in a small town, playing in rock bands through your teens and landing a record deal in your early twenties are not great incentives to the contemplative life.
Nor is the fiery singer suited by temperament to indecision and ambivalence. Confronted with a problem, Mellencamp is far more prone to ride roughshod over it than to analyze it coolly. Brash, even arrogant at times, he likes to shoot from the hip and from the lip. He can be stubborn and demanding, and his temper is legend. By the close of the seemingly endless world tour that followed the release of Mellencamp’s album The Lonesome Jubilee, in 1987, Mellencamp’s band had dubbed his dressing room Valhalla, in honor of one of the singer’s favorite jokes: “You know what makes a good Viking, don’t you? Severe mood swings.”
As his raw, poignant new album, Big Daddy, indicates, Mellencamp’s mood has swung into darkness. The bitterness that courses through the album’s first single, “Pop Singer,” in which Mellencamp excoriates the music industry and declares, “Never wanted to be no pop singer,” is palpable — and some say hypocritical. There’s no doubting that Mellencamp — the product of a pre-punk world in which bigger was better and it was assumed that rock & roll stars were supposed to be popular — ardently pursued mass success and occasionally made a fool of himself in the process.
Unfortunately, going after something doesn’t necessarily guarantee that it will be what you thought it would be once you get it. Also, in Mellencamp’s younger years pop music was a term that stood in direct opposition to rock & roll. Rock & roll was tough, Dionysiac and serious; pop music was light and frivolous. In Mellencamp’s view, pop has won out.
“At thirty-seven years old, I am at total odds with the pop business,” Mellencamp says. “That’s what ‘Pop Singer’ is about. As I sit here every day, I just become at total odds with my generation, too. I hate to say this, but I feel like what John Lennon must have felt: I don’t want to be in this race anymore, because it leads to nowhere. “I’m living the dream of a nineteen-year-old boy from Indiana,” he continues, “and I’m thirty-seven years old. Some people would say, ‘Well, then, hell, you’ve got it made, man. You’re young forever.’ But what happens when you don’t want to be young anymore? When the fascination of being a young man has left you?”
In the course of what Mellencamp will later describe as “probably the best Marlon Brando interview I’ve ever done, where you just hate everything,” it becomes clear that the singer has arrived at the critical point reached by many rockers before him — Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen among them. It’s the point where, amid the delights, temptations, rewards and horrifying fun-house reflections of media-driven celebrity, you either find yourself or lose yourself. It’s growing up in public: the rock & roll midlife crisis.
As he nears forty, the self-mocking “Little Bastard” — a sobriquet Mellencamp borrowed from that other Indiana icon, James Dean — finds himself facing some hard realities with nothing but wildly contradictory emotions to support him. Despite a string of first-rate albums — Uh-Huh, Scarecrow, The Lonesome Jubilee and now Big Daddy — Mellencamp is rarely regarded with the seriousness accorded the likes of Springsteen and U2, and it bothers him.
“There was a writer who likes my music — I know this guy — and I’m reading one of his articles about another artist, right?” Mellencamp says. “He says, ‘Well, it was a good record, but it was like a John Mellencamp record.’ It wasn’t what they should have been doing. I’m thinking, ‘Man, there’s a thousand guys that sold out — use their name, don’t use mine, like I’m a second-rate artist’ And he did, and it was like ‘Well, thanks, bub. Appreciate it.’ That hurt me.”
Mellencamp’s uncompromising stance against corporate sponsorship has made him feel anomalous in an age when even esteemed figures like Lou Reed, Steve Winwood, Robert Plant and Eric Clapton have hawked products. The trivializing of rock & roll is a problem he sees in the media as well. “Nothing against USA Today,” he says, “but that’s what people want — ‘Let’s cut to the chase, give me the dirt.’ This is our generation doing this. It’s sad. And, like, Rolling Stone, there’s the Critics Poll, and then there’s all those advertisements around it. How are we supposed to take you guys seriously when you’ve got a corporate sponsor underneath your names?”
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