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- Bret Easton Ellis: the most musical author? | Ben Myers
The American Psycho author's appetite for pop culture ensures his work influences music as much as literature
There are plenty of novelists out there whose work pulses with the influence of contemporary music, but none use music references quite so effectively as Bret Easton Ellis. Few divide opinion quite as much as him either. Those who love him, really love him. His critics, however, dismiss him as an empty stylist, a yuppie or, even worse, a misogynist.
While Ellis's work over the past quarter century (doesn't that make you feel old?) has always been littered with enough casual sex, drugs, designer clothes, dark humour and nihilism to pull in younger readers, it's his connection to, and appetite for, pop culture that has ensured his work continues to influence music as much as literature.
Pop culture has responded to the work of Easton Ellis by writing songs about his characters (Bloc Party's Song For Clay, Manic Street Preachers' Patrick Bateman) and there are more songs and bands that allude to American Psycho than you can shake a glinting cleaver at. And without even realising she is basically a minor Bret Eason Ellis character, even Peaches Geldof got in on the act when she attempted to launch the short-lived, Less Than Zero-inspired magazine Disappear Here.
Fans are currently excited about his new novel Imperial Bedrooms, the long-awaited follow-up to his epoch-defining debut Less Than Zero, novels which are named after an Elvis Costello album and song respectively. Imperial Bedrooms covers similar ground to Less Than Zero – broadly-speaking, the moral bankruptcy of Hollywood's wealthy – and reads like an oncoming anxiety attack. That's meant as a compliment, by the way; no-one does anxiety and foreboding quite as brilliantly as Easton Ellis. And, true to form, among the rising levels of paranoia, there are nods to contemporary bands like Bat for Lashes, The National and The Fray, each casually namedropped to give an insight into the mind and tastes of its protagonists.
It's an effective scene-setting ploy. I dare anyone to read American Psycho Patrick Bateman's articulate and impassioned monologues on the recorded output of Phil Collins or Huey Lewis and the News, delivered in the dry, humourless tones of a particularly joyless type of music critic, and not crack a twisted smile. Ellis's underlying message was, of course: a) only tasteless fools found any depth or meaning in the emotional platitudes that Phil Collins squeezed out in the mid-80s and b) innocuous pop is just as likely to drive people to murder as anything. And also possibly c) music critics are borderline sociopaths.
You think of the white, affluent, empty characters of Less Than Zero and you think of the early days of MTV. White, affluent, empty pop, basically. Music plays a big part in the glossy world of Glamorama too, whose disconnected male-model lead, Victor, spends his nights spotting the major pop stars of the mid-90s (including, memorably "the two Aphex Twins") and yawns out Green Day lyrics rather than actually form sentences of his own.
Fortunately, as writers go, Easton Ellis appears to have good taste – his recent preferred listening choices were compiled from many months of his tweets in a Vice magazine playlist. But I have to admit to feeling a twinge of disappointment when he recently tweeted that "the happiest I have been in a long time" was when The Psychedelic Furs' Richard Butler performed the amazing Pretty in Pink live with the decidedly drab Killers.
Then again, given they've always sounded like they're writing songs for mid-80s brat pack movies about rich white kids and are called The Killers, it all kind of makes sense.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Переслать - Glastonbury 2010: We want your pictures!
Whether you were belting out the hits on karaoke, raving it up at Bloc 9 or simply taking in the peace of the Green Fields, we want your pictures from Glastonbury 2010
As the dust settles on this year's Glastonbury (and there will be plenty of dust, thanks to a rain-free festival), many of us are left to contemplate what we missed. At a festival this size, with everything from Japanese tea ladies to tantric speed dating on offer, it's near impossible to cover all bases. So we're after your pictures to show us what everyone else was doing with their Glastonbury weekend.
Did you catch Vanilla Ice's impromptu set at Cocktails and Dreams? Did you capture the perfect Stone circle sunrise? Add your pics to our Flickr gallery and we'll publish the best ones at the end of the week (here are some of the brilliant images we published after last year's festival).
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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