Pride & Opinions

In case you don’t know, last night the “Happy Birthday, Elton” show, commemorating Elton John’s 60th birthday and 60th performance in the Madison Square Gardens, aired on The Network Formerly Known as UPN–also called My Network TV, the channel that people watch when they don’t have cable and can’t find anything else on. After suffering through two hours of badly-sequenced concert footage interlaced with clips of celebrities spouting the equivalent of a verbal handjob for Sir Elton John while set against backgrounds that looked like a bad acid flashback, I can see why the overly long tribute ended up on My Network TV. It’s the only place fitting for something so camp that even deliberately camp shows cringe in embarrassment.

I willingly admit, I’ve mostly missed the boat on gay pop culture. I’m geek-gay, not trendy-gay. I don’t watch much TV, and my tastes in music range over many genres and many decades rather than sticking to the pop-culture icons that make the “fabulous” list. You’ll find me reading Slashdot before I read Perez Hilton, and frankly while I like Tori Amos’s music, I don’t understand why she’s worshiped as diva and goddess to the mainstream gay man.

And so I don’t understand why Elton John is such a sensation as a gay icon, despite his outrageousness–which admittedly, in its time, was actually something novel instead of the commonplace scene that the strange and outré have become now. I don’t find his music or even his voice particularly appealing save for in one or two songs, and I don’t understand how he came to be the tubby gay Elvis of the twenty-first century. Maybe I’m just not cool enough to get it.

What I do get, however, is that he’s done remarkable things for the gay community simply as a hardworking individual, and with his HIV/AIDS foundation. With that in mind I could easily see a half-hour-long special, even an hour, discussing his life and his achievements. I’d watch, I’d smile, I’d say “Good man, he deserves it”…

…rather than wishing, more than anything, that I could have back the two hours I spent slogging through that droning, ill-produced mess.

The only reason that I didn’t flip it off 30 minutes through was because I thought, for the sake of this blog, that I should watch the entire thing in case anything noteworthy happened. This is a gay blog, Elton John is a gay icon, therefore I had a duty to suffer through light displays that could induce a seizure, Kate Thornton wearing enough makeup to easily pass as a drunken prostitute, Jim Carrey’s usual unsuccessful attempts at spontaneous humor (while sporting my haircut, which I wear well and he, unfortunately, does not), and Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters declaring that a man who looks like a Troll Doll that got its hair chopped off by a lawnmower is a sex symbol.

There’s camp, and then there’s tacky. This crossed the line into tacky.

I mean, seriously. There were at least five montages of various celebrities, most of them former A-listers sliding quickly down the slope to B-listers, saying the same ego-stroking thing over and over in different words to the point where my eyes glazed over and I simply tuned them out. Then again, I did the same through Elton’s performances. It was either that or spend my time trying to figure out if he was drunk, had a speech impediment, or simply wasn’t singing in English–only some slurred pidgin language that happened to bear a passing resemblance to the mother tongue. And honestly, who needs to come parading out in a suit coat emblazoned with some unintelligible logo about 60 years while one’s name lights up in ten-foot-tall rainbow letters and Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, and Bernie I-don’t-care-what-your-last-name-is lead the crowd in an off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday”?

I don’t think anyone could deny that Elton John is a gloriously unrepentant diva riding on decades of egomania, but my gods, I’ve seen presidential tribute specials that ran shorter than this, with less repetitious grinding in of how spectacular His One-ness is–and if I’d seen one more shot of Elton’s oh-so-clever hands, his “I’m concentrating so hard I look like I need Metamucil” expression or various people in the crowd sashaying around yet again, I think I’d have gone off my bloody rocker. If I want to see (arguably) attractive men dancing badly I can go to one of dozens of local gay bars, where I can at least join in the fun of dancing with them. By about the second celebrity montage and the third camera cycle through hands-face-crowd-face-crowd-face-hands, it was a relief when Kate Thornton appeared to once again remind us what we were suffering through watching and that we’d be right back after commercials. Great.

Honestly, after thinking back I’m wondering if the commercials weren’t the sole motivation behind this spectacle. The show went to commercial break practically every five minutes (no doubt the reason for the length)–all of which looked as if their production budgets were twice as large as what was spent to hack that tribute together. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the airing of the show, although not the performance itself, was mainly to use the lure of Elton John’s name to attract as many people as possible before flashing as much product as the besieged eyes could tolerate at the spellbound viewers.

In that light, despite his grandstanding–which can kindly be called showmanship–the interminable dullness of the show can’t really be dumped at the feet of Elton’s ego. I’m sure he didn’t ask for the TV audience to be subjected to Simon Cowell’s sad attempts at dour wit, Celine Dion’s unintelligible babbling, or the minute that Mariah Carey spent focusing less on what she was saying and more on posing to make sure that the camera caught her breasts at the best angle. Heck, he didn’t even have to endure them, and he was still looking rather bored and impatient by the end of his performance. I got the distinct impression that he was getting just about as tired of the whole thing as I was.

So despite that sadly off-kilter excuse for a tribute: happy (one day late) birthday, Elton John. I’m glad you made it to 60 years, and I hope that after that show you went home to a quiet evening and a bottle of bubbly. I recognize your contributions even if I don’t quite understand your appeal, and I’m glad for what you’ve done for the gay community.

Now will you please tell your fan club to sit down and shut up about it?

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