The History of Hysteria

People are confused about my goals, thanks to the constant meddling of those who want me to give up so they can be stars with my work. I get confused, myself, sometimes, as my circumstances change and I am forced to adopt new strategies, but I have thought about it long enough now for me to state my goals confidently online. In order to know what you want to achieve, you first must know who or what you are. People think that they want to be artists, but in many cases, what they truly want is to be elevated to an impressive place in society and see art or music as a way to advance in society. Such people are more likely to be focused on trends and on the mood of the crowd than on the quality of their work. In my case, I am an artist. I was born that way. My goal is to create high quality work of which I can be proud, as well as to improve on past works with my new creations. This separates me not just from most of those who seek success in show business but from the media. The media appears to be indifferent to talent and utterly absorbed by the behaviors of the crowd. No one is more impressed by a crowd of girls screaming for a pop star than the media. I believe that this is because the media cause this reaction. When girls are screaming, the media can admire themselves for a job well done. But I think that there is more to doing this job than merely making girls scream: the girls should scream for an artist they can trust. Technically speaking, young girls scream for the mass media. Take it from me. That's why I don't get screamed at and mobbed like the ones who stole my music. Before the Beatles landed in New York for their first U.S. tour, they were hyped by the U.S. media, who played Beatles songs around the clock, punctuating the broadcast schedule with repeated cries of The Beatles are coming! The Beatles are coming! The Beatles' success was assured before those four lads even stepped off the plane from Liverpool. The internet is also a kind of broadcast media that can sometimes cause a similar effect. Back in March 2012, immediately after I first posted my song Business under the working title Psych, I was met outside my drop-in center by just about the prettiest ten-year-old girl I've ever seen. Not only was she excited, she was crying. She couldn't even speak, and if only she knew how adorably cute she looked. I gathered that she liked my song and I smiled and said hello before heading back home. At the time, Tina Fey was on the loose, paying little girls to whistle at me, so I'm not altogether sure that this girl was really into my music. But I hear that efforts were made to kill this song by associating it with social undesirables in my place, so that tells me it was popular. Perhaps if I'd erased it, it would be on the radio now - in a simpler time signature. The mass hysteria we see today at events featuring popular talent is, on the scale of history, a new phenomena. I saw an elderly lady being interviewed about a favorite musician of mine from the 1920's who said that her generation did not scream at concerts the way girls do now. This got me thinking about what has changed in our world since the 1920's to make this mass hysteria possible. I believe the answer to that question is technology, especially the technology used to broadcast programs across large regions. We may have seen this new technology first being used in Germany in the 1930's to make young German girls lose control at the sight of their fuhrer. Hitler needed to force his people to accept him, just as business now needs to force people to buy products they might not even want. Then in the 1940's, Frank Sinatra appeared to have the women hypnotized. Then came Elvis in the 1950's. The Beatles appeared the 1960's. I recall girls screaming for the Bay City Rollers in the early 1970's. Michel Jackson had this effect in the 1980's. Nirvana excited girls in the 1990's, and so on, through to the stars of the present. Some of these people are still loved today. Some of them, like Hitler, are reviled. There is a purity in this young girl's way of showing her love. A young girl is, after all, an innocent child. But there is another sinister side to it when this behavior is imposed on her by powerful outside influences of which she is unaware: marketing techniques, psychological conditioning, and the invisible broadcast signals of the mass media. When the mass media cause girls to scream for the wrong person, as George Strombopoulos was so proud to tell me that CBC had done for the Crystalids in 2008, those screams do not reflect real love, they merely show an artificial effect. If girls really loved the frauds who stole my songs, girls would still scream for them now. Instead these music fans look back on how they acted with embarrassment. I've seen how much control the business and the media have over the crowd and I see no point in performing at the present time. To perform without the support of the business would leave me looking foolish, standing there and singing in front of four people, none of whom would be particularly excited about my appearance. I think I've been humiliated enough by the business now. I am an artist whose primary goal is to create good work, not to go on a stage and perform. If you want to see me on a stage, talk to the people who had girls screaming for bands that stole my music. I refuse to perform without their support. Frankly, I think they owe me their support after so zealously supporting frauds in my place. In the meantime, I plan to continue to post live videos on YouTube of me playing my songs. I hope that's enough for my music fans under these conditions.
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