The Pop-Culture Hereafter

For every singer who manages to keep a career going for decades, there are hundreds of flashes in the pan – people who get a one-hit-wonder in their teens or twenties, have a brief spurt of stardom, and then…

…well, nothing.

What happens to them?

Nick Duerden at the Guardian wondered the same thing, enough to write a book about it. The article abridged from it zooms past an array of “where are they now” artists in a dizzying variety of genres, including one I’d been wondering about myself for a while, now:

In 1987, seemingly overnight, Terence Trent D’Arby became the most arresting new pop star of his generation. To hear him sing songs such as If You Let Me Stay and Sign Your Name was to bear witness to the art of aural seduction; the knees buckled. He became terribly famous, terribly quickly. He was 25.

Of course you remember Terence Trent D’Arby.

Er, Sananda Maitreya.

“I wanted adulation and got it,” D’Arby tells me almost 35 years later, by now working under the name Sananda Maitreya, “but I had to die to survive it.”

If his ascendancy had the stuff of legend about it, then so did his demise. Like Prince before him, he began to feel himself capable of anything, each new song he composed a masterpiece. His record company felt differently – it wanted hits, not ornate rock operas – but D’Arby was not someone easily restrained. And so, in pursuit of his muse, he spent the early 90s reportedly living the life of a tormented recluse in a Los Angeles mansion. When I speak to him – which takes six months to arrange – he suggests he was grateful to move on “from such excess and artifice. I didn’t give a fuck about it then, and even less about it now that memory has been kind enough to allow me to forget most of it.”

Prince had died, Michael Jackson, too. D’Arby was still here, albeit with a name change – prompted by a dream he had in 1995 – to help him better bury the past. Today, Maitreya lives in Milan, is happily married with young children, and writes, records and produces his own music, which he releases on his own label, behaving as he damn well pleases.

And Trent D’Arby…er, Maitreya – hints at something that dogged me and my mental state through my early thirties:

The question of whether anyone is listening any more doesn’t seem to trouble him unduly. When I ask what, if anything, he misses from the old days, he replies: “I miss the unbridled, bold, naked stupidity of youth’s vibrant electric hubris.”

As someone who oozed vibrant electric hubris himself? Even though I never had a hit (or came much closer than this single glorious evening), I do miss feeling that way pretty badly, sometimes.

Not all the side-effects, of course. I’m one of those guys who wants four metaphorical Old Fashioneds, but no hangover.

As the article shows, it doesn’t work that way, literally or figuratively.

2 thoughts on “The Pop-Culture Hereafter

  1. Today, Maitreya lives in Milan, is happily married with young children, and writes, records and produces his own music, which he releases on his own label, behaving as he damn well pleases.
    Sounds like he done good.

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