Prolegomena to 'Why I like Capoxxo'

An incomplete series

This year, there have been three different blockbuster movie biopics of elderly pop musicians.

I have only seen one of them, for no other reason than to bear witness to the total physical decline of Timothee Chalamet – a man who threw in his weight against Merit when he invoked the ghoulish idol of ‘sincerity’ in his award speech and is thereby condemned to get fat have short hair and grow a moustache and get piercings – he is now, I believe, making biopics of minor Litvak gangsters, or something of that nature. As I write this I bore witness to the final bullet fired into the corpse of Chalamet’s dead career as he is now visibly aged, shucking and jiving with a Scouse person, a shadow of his former self. It is a damning indictment of the supposedly sophisticated taste of homosexual men that the Big Boys in Hollywood could convince them a bog-standard teenager with short hair from New York suburbs whose favourite film is almost certainly The Italian Job was some sort of fey eidolon “from France.” Now that was a Witze!... This might seem like a digression but we will find the topics covered resurface, like an overture, throughout this piece.

Anyway, what explains the musician biopic craze? Three years before the music-biopic craze, a number of ‘stars’ began selling their entire catalogues. This anticipates what the industry believes will be the total automation by LLMs of most music by the end of this decade. The films are clearly intended to prime a younger audience to see legacy musical IP as ‘cool’ and thus advance the cause of stuck culture. The big money buying up these catalogues desperately need them to stay relevant so they can sell. I can thus predict that next year there will be biopics of David Bowie, the Rolling Stones and other elderly geezers. There is thus a lot of commercial interest riding on the illusion that youth no longer make music. Against this we have the thesis of perhaps the most underrated J’accuse piece that culture is going to change very, very quickly in about 15 years time when the Baby Boomers decisively pass away and the huge edifice of culture held up by their massive purchasing power suddenly becomes obsolete. You’re going to go, almost overnight, from the average consumer being someone who saw the Sex Pistols to the average consumer being someone who was born watching Western fan-dubs of Evangelion with the average middle aged dad being someone who played the first DOOM game.