Before you are six of the most prolific human beings to ever walk the face of the Earth in the past 100 or so years.
From left-to-right on the top are musicians Michael Jackson, Prince, and James Brown. From left-to-right on the bottom are filmmaker Jesús Franco, writer Walter B. Gibson, and writer Harlan Ellison.
These six are inspirations to me.
Michael Jackson was a multimedia tour de force, combining genre-bending pop with inventive choreography and continually pushing the medium of the music video forward with each album he produced. Someone who managed to, in many ways, marry his own love of higher culture with his love of popular art. Thusly, he was crowned by the public as the King of Pop.
If MJ was the King, Prince was, as the great Stevie Wonder once put it, the emperor. A multi-instrumentalist demigod who not only crafted a decades-long library of funk-infused records, but also wrote more songs for others and made more bands within his own musical scene. In the end, he had truly forged his own sonic empire, one that changed the fabric of modern American music forever.
James Brown is where the boys both learned it from. A wild-eyed dancer, a tight band leader, and gifted singer/songwriter who once clocked five albums in a year, and managed to still give it his all right until the end, breathing life into the funk genre just as American rock began to go beyond its rhythm-and-blues roots. The Busiest Man in Show Business, The Godfather of Soul, and a juggernaut of the rock-n-roll era.
Jesús Franco was a machine. A Spanish filmmaker who thrived in low-budgets and on continental Europe creating exploitation films at such a frequency, he could have his name on 10 pictures within a year. While no one bats a thousand, Franco developed a lyrical style of surrealism that blurred the lines between lurid genre fiction and inspired experimentation, making his films more than just exploitation films, but never quite enough for the hoity-toity arthouse sect.
Walter B. Gibson, was the machine to end all machines. The man who took The Shadow from a nondescript radio framing device to a darksome specter of justice who never failed to prove that crime has not and never will pay. The man who managed to take on the awesome task of The Shadow Magazine’s twice-a-month publication schedule, and more often than not, delivered the goods with few guest writers brandishing the pen of Street & Smith’s “Maxwell Grant.”
To better clarify, THE MAN WROTE TWO NOVELS A MONTH.
And then there is dear old Harlan Ellison. Hundreds of stories, essays, scripts, and more to his name. Ellison was a defining voice in “New Wave” speculative fiction, and the only thing more overpowering than his sheer volume of work was the steadfast, singular voice behind each page. A forthright, bold writer who drew on a fount of unending knowledge, and brought forth a style of prose and a magnetic brand of storytelling that could only come from the mind of one Harlan Ellison.
I cite these six as being terrific inspirations for me because, for all you can talk about their God-given talents, any and all luck that befell them, or other such matters of circumstances, I look up to these men because they worked. They busted their asses off. Went to the grindstone and came up sharp as an axe, ready to swing down on every problem that came their way. Jackson would loose pounds of sweat over the course of a concert, Prince never stopped recording music, making dozens and dozens of tracks that would never see the light of day.
These were people who fought long and hard to have their vision seen through. This point goes out especially to Ellison, whose honesty, while wielded like a blunt-force weapon, was backed by a conviction you could sense in every word he spoke. In the case of Jackson, he had to stump for his 1983 single “Billie Jean” to be included on the landmark pop record Thriller, and in the end, came away with perhaps the grandest jewel in his crown.
They were all indeed gifted in some way or another, but those gifts mean nothing without the motivation and drive to see them used in the name of realizing your work. And these six had it in spades.
My reason for relaying this to you is because, to those wishing to see their culture changed for the better, be they left, right, center, or pear-shaped, I keep seeing the pundits and talking heads doing nothing but bitching and moaning about shit. This is perhaps more an indictment of right-leaning parties, but I swear to God, I keep seeing this nonsense. Michael Knowles whining about Prince’s music not being good, or yesterday Scott Greer was bitching about Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element and decided to write the man’s entire career off.
I won’t even dignify them with titles of employ because, quite frankly, I don’t care what hole they crawled out from. I have no more patience for people with all problems and no solutions. I’m sick of them making fusses over Cubist art and why we can’t return to classical forms.
I already ranted and raved about all this horseshit here:
I probably shouldn’t even be writing this article because I got too much shit to get done. I’ve got 365 Infantry #5 due out in two weeks, I’m busy helping get Anvil #1 pieced together for all those wonderful folks out there in Iron Age Land, I got music to write and movies to review.
But that’s the point. While these kvetches keep yammering on and on about “why does the culture suck, why does the culture suck,” I’m out there making it happen. I’m out there moving and shaking like a Saturday night. I tell tales of grand adventure and heavy metal hair-raising, I write music that captures the mind. And when the time comes, I’ll be back in the saddle reviewing the arts on YouTube, Dailymotion, Rumble, and Bitchute. And maybe Odysee if I can get some synchronicity going.
But I come to you all with a simple plea. If you want me on my knees for it, I’ll get down on both and bow like Alice Cooper’s in the room:
Don’t Let These Guys Run The Show.
Fuck them, and fuck you for letting them. This is why nothing ever gets done. You all have to constantly keep justifying yourselves as if there’s any conversation left to be had. The choices have been made, the beliefs of those in power are cast in iron, and their only true tenant is their self-interests. What’s good for THEM, not YOU.
This is the era of ACTION. Getting down, getting dirty, getting into the weeds. If you don’t like something, “see something and say something” don’t cut it anymore, Jack. You hate the movies on the marquee, go watch the works of John Ford, Orson Welles or Howard Hawks. You hate the music on the radio? Honey, we got millennia’s worth at home. Classical, jazz, funk, rock, blues, country, folk. You name it, it’s yours. Can’t find anything good to read on the B&N shelves? Try Bradbury, Huxley, Fleming, or good old Bill Shakespeare himself.
None of that float your boat? Pick up a guitar or an electric keyboard. Grab a camera. Brandish a pen and stab at the heart of the world you find swamped with mediocrity and hate, and draw the one you want to live in. There is no one to stop you, and everything there to help you send that vision of yours into the world.
There’s a brilliant line from Mr. Ellison I’m quoting in my 365 show bible, my handy pitch for a proper animated program or any potential A/V production. It’s an extremely truncated version of a beautiful screed, but it gets to the point all the same:
“THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT NOTHING BUT DEBASEMENT, FRUSTRATION AND IGNOBLE DEATHS...PUT YOURSELF DEAD ON THE LINE EVERY TIME”
“The Harlan Ellison Hornbook: Essays”, p.170, Open Road Media
Those six men I call heroes, idols even, were not perfect. Not in the ways you are thinking either. We’re not talking about cruel allegations, ill-tempers, or omnipresent addictions. I mean they were human. Flesh and blood. And it is that humanity that gave them the soul and wit needed to create masterpieces. Maybe not on the caliber of Rembrandt or Shakespeare or Bach, but masterpieces nonetheless.
Those six changed the world through the stories they told and the music they made. They did it through conviction, commitment, and bulldog determination. They did it for themselves, and contributed to the world through their art and their belief in it.
What the hell are you doing for your culture?
Hell yeah! This is the energy we need. Love Ellison too. I'm about half way through"Angry Candy" and bought another collection yesterday. This piece fired me up this morning and is a good reminder that the opportunities are truly endless as long as we are willing to work for them. Thanks for this!
I’d add Frank Zappa to that list but otherwise HEAR HEAR.