The Lance Armstrong video is another page in rock's catalogue of stupidity
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Version 0 of 1. Oh, how glorious it would be if musicians would think before they spring their bright ideas on the world. If maybe they realised that having a platform doesn’t mean it has to be used. The latest offender is Tim Commerford, the former bassist of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, whose new group Future User have released a song called Mountain Lion, featuring a spoken word interlude (and video appearance) from one of Commerford’s friends. That friend happens to be Lance Armstrong. The song, the rock site Blabbermouth says, “is about the [US] government’s attempts to use the controversy surrounding performance-enhancing drugs as a distraction from their own global sins”. Armstrong’s role is a voice message in which he tells a steroid-injecting skateboarder: “You better step the fuck off me, motherfucker. Seven o’clock here in Aspen, Colorado, I’ve been training like a motherfucker. So fit, so yoked, so technically astute – you could never hang. Step the fuck off. Lance.” Commerford told Rolling Stone: “The amount of attention given to PEDs is incredible, especially when you consider the amount of drugs – recreational, illegal and pharmaceutical – that America supports and profits from.” He also spoke about his friendship with Armstrong – “an awesome person and, as far as I’m concerned, a punk rocker” – with whom he “trash talks” about their cycling rivalry. You want to put your friend in your video? That’s fine. No one’s stopping you. But there are a couple of things Commerford needs to be set straight about. First, Lance Armstrong was not brought down as a result of a US government conspiracy to draw attention away from its failures. In fact, a great many brave people had been trying to draw attention to doping in cycling for years, and Armstrong – that “awesome person” – had systematically bullied them, lied to them, sued them. The US government, surprisingly, was not at the forefront of this campaign against cheating in sport. Only in 2010, 11 years after Armstrong had told the rider Christophe Bassons to leave the sport instead of “making accusations [about drug use] that aren’t good for cycling” did the US Justice Department begin a federal investigation to see if crimes had been committed, followed a year later by the US Anti Doping Authority pursuing the allegations against Armstrong. As he has admitted, if he hadn’t himself returned to cycling in 2009, he would have got away with it. Second, Commerford is raising a straw man with his point about the usage of other kinds of drugs. Plenty of attention is given to the issue of over-prescription of big pharma products, and there has been no shortage of publicity about illegal drugs, but the debates around them are completely different conversations. Most importantly, PEDs have one very specific purpose: to cheat others. That’s why sports fans get angry about athletes taking them. It’s not necessarily that they’re anti-drugs, is that they’re anti-drugs that distort the nature of sporting competition. You might find many sports fans who would even take the position that PEDs should be made legal, and that all athletes should take what they want as long as they’re prepared to suffer the long-term health consequences. What they don’t like is some people playing dirty and some people playing clean. It’s called cheating, and it destroys what sport is meant to be about. There’s also the issue of Armstrong’s increasingly bizarre public stance on his years of lying, cheating and bullying. Two years after he apologised for his actions on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show, he has told the BBC – in an interview to be broadcast on Thursday – he thought he’d been punished too much, that he wasn’t a ringleader or a bully, and that if you took him back to 1995 he’d dope all over again. Tie that in with this video and its beginning to look like Armstrong doesn’t realise he’s done anything wrong. Tim Commerford, of course, is not alone in offering support to people who absolutely don’t deserve it. Take Primal Scream and their unedifying habit at the start of this century of dedicating songs to the Serbian warlord Arkan, who carried out unimaginable crimes of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war. And there’s an argument to be made that part of the very gaiety of rock’n’roll comes from people spouting their mouth off idiotically about things they really don’t have a great grasp of. No one wants their musicians to sound like focus grouped politicians, insisting that plans for the second album are very much on track and that they have listened to the public and are committed to delivering an album of sensible music to the hard working families of Britain. But in this case, I’m not absolutely convinced Commerford is stupid. I think there’s a large element of him being willing to do absolutely anything to draw attention to his music (a previous video featured John McEnroe being waterboarded). But I also suspect he genuinely thinks the same way as Armstrong, that sport’s most notorious cheat has been done over in the name of something that doesn’t matter – if he didn’t, it’s hard to believe he’d use him in the video. And that’s not stupid; it’s wrongheaded. |