Hello, My Friend, Hello (pt.1)

"I’ve had one motto which I’ve always lived by:  Dignity.  Always, Dignity.” – Don Lockwood

When I hear the name Neil Diamond, the first thing I think of is Dignity.

Okay, there are a lot of secondary things that come to mind:  Sequins.  E.T.  “I hef no son.”  Egregious offerings of chest hair.  The Monkees, and now Shrek.  Will Ferrell.  Saving Silverman.  Urge Overkill.

I tend to wonder if I owe anyone flowers.

But there’s an eminence about the man, one borne of...  hell, I don’t know what.  His time spent in the Brill Building?  His decades-long career as a hit-maker?   His legacy of lyrical poeticism (“Today!”, “Bum-bum-bum”, “I AM, said I”)?  There are some great tunes, sure, but that can’t be it:  My favorite Neil Diamond song – good lord! – is “Crunchy Granola Suite,” and its best lines are “Deeddle-ee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-deedle-ee-doo,” “Crunchy granola’s neat!” and “Dig!”

I think it’s because my mother loved him, and it’s nice to think that your parents were right about something.  Perhaps our generation demands an addendum to an old adage:  Politicians, ugly buildings, whores – and pop singers – all get respectable if they last long enough.

I contemplate all this because, a little more than a month ago, Neil Diamond got a Myspace page.

Now, there are a lot of good things about Myspace.  It’s a convenient, well-branded, central location from which you can stream or download a lot of music.  Musicians should be on Myspace.  Especially since my QuickTime is all fucked up.

But Myspace is also yesterday’s new Friendster, and has all the pathetic-ninny drawbacks of said service.  Not to be judgmental, didn’t mean to be unkind.  Perhaps F’ster-stuff really does create some sort of interconnectedness in our increasingly isolated lives.  Maybe it’s not all artificial, pre-fab, and desperate.  Maybe it’s not just a popularity contest, maybe there’s more to it than self-promotion and self-delusion.  Maybe it doesn’t devalue the very notion of friendship.

*

Which brings me (finally) to my fascination with Mr. Diamond’s myspace page.

What happens when someone who’s famous – famous and dignified – drops his mullet into the webring?  Democracy, availability, that’s what the internet’s all about.  We all put our pantsuits on one leg at a time, right?

The page was erected as a bald ploy to court a demo.  The singer-songwriter has a new CD, 12 Songs; produced by future heart-attack victim Rick Rubin, it has received generally positive reviews, and was streaming in full (quite resolutely – you couldn’t skip (or download) tracks) for the first couple weeks of the page’s existence.

(Which was nice, because the CD has Sony’s toxic rootkit software, and you should not buy it.)

A lot of folks stopped by to listen to the album.

And a lot of folks decided that Neil Diamond was their friend.  A lot of those friends left messages for him.  38 pages’ worth.

Because you’re not a fanatic, or a Sony intern, I’ve cropped together a sort of best-of collection for you.  This is the first batch.

Gone are the nine billion quotes from Saving Silverman (“I want to party with you!”) and Saturday Night Live.  Gone are the casual thanks and the vague compliments.  No, I didn’t include every goofball avatar... though it’s awful funny (and, of course, awful) when (to invent an example) some guy whose icon shows him giving Martin Luther King, Jr. the finger says, “Neil, you’ve always been an inspiration to me and my work.”

After this jerry-rigged jump are messages that made me laugh, made me cry, made me thimk.  The outrageous and obsessive.  The self-aware (bless you, Ms. Stewart-Baxter-Burney) and helplessly hopeful.  It’s a good chunk to go through, these first couple parts.  But that’s only because me and you and Neil’s friends have a lot of catching up to do.

tags: neil diamond  myspace  hello my friend hello  

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