Secular Shamanism
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On advising Alice Cooper on how to be an icon:
If you’re gonna be my client, you just don’t owe your audience your songs. You owe your audience your life If you deserve to be a superstar, then you will become an iconic figure, and twelve-year-old kids will paste posters of you up on their bedroom walls, and you will be—you know the concept of the trellis, you grow a tomato plant on a trellis—well you will be the trellis on which people grow. You will be the role model. So your life is one of the most important things that you have to offer.
But I was not just after their superficial life. I was after this: When you sit down off an afternoon, let say two o’clock in the afternoon, with a blank computer screen or a blank piece of paper, and you need to write a lyric, you feel as if you could… You don’t know how you’ve ever written a lyric in your life. You certainly know you can’t write another one again. And by four o’clock in the afternoon on a good day, there’s a lyric in front of you. By four o’clock in the afternoon on a really, really rare good day, that lyric is so perfect in itself that it feels like it wrote itself through you.
When you go on stage, if you see the pupils of the audience dilating, if you see their faces melting, losing individual characteristics, if you see their energy fusing into a collective energy, rather than just individual energies, and if that collective force reaches a pseudo-pod out to you, and hooks into something inside of you that’s bigger than yourself, and again you feel like an empty pipe and something inside you is transmogrifying all of this energy, and flooding it back down to the audience in a reverberatory circuit, and you have an out-of-body experience, you watch yourself from the ceiling as you are danced, that self inside of you that dances you on stage, that is your fucking goddamn soul. And that’s my intent to find, and that’s what I intend to introduce you to. Why? Because you are about to become an icon.
Howard Bloom
(2017)
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