Colwater High. Ian Hunter. 1975. CBS.

 American voters who cast ballots electing Donald Trump 47th President of the United States fell, with some overlap, into one of three groups: those who trusted in his supposed business acumen, hoping they, or the national economy, would somehow benefit from it; those who were enthralled by the mien of his celebrity, mistakenly assuming it was an imprimatur of top tiered success; and those who identified with his bigotry, anticipating that the office of the Presidency would once again sanction their indecency. Americans are enamored of confidence, and we’re a sucker for the con. Conditioned by postwar mass media to accept an idealized, archetypal image of the American consumer as the omniconfident gender normative freak of normality whose transubstantiated bones we still gnaw at today, we offered ourselves as committed adherents to a consumer cult as wildly uncontrollable as any organized religion we have imagined. Rock and roll quickly became a viable opposition to this cleverly concealed form of conformist madness. By the 1970s even the homogeneous boredom of gender norms were being challenged. Among pop artists, it was David Bowie who found an audience that saw itself mirrored in his dazzlingly arrayed multiplicity of selves, each one a daringly reimagined image of the generic consumer persona. Bowie’s artistic hustle was so successfully far-reaching that his influence eventually benefited the careers of fellow musicians. Three years after the success of Mott the Hoople’s All The Young Dudes, vocalist Ian Hunter, working with former Spiders From Mars guitarist Mick Ronson, released his self-titled record on CBS. I can think of no better use for Hunter’s singing voice other than to excite a rock and roll audience. From the gospel tradition of Little Richard, Hunter’s power of confidence comes from his style of compressing the melody with carefully measured emotion before articulating it with a masterfully restrained expressive strength. Where Little Richard took himself and his congregants to the depths of ecstasy, Hunter practices a less ruthless form of snake handling,  preferring instead the secular praise of audience self-realization. That singing style, though not as culturally galvanizing as the overall Bowie effect, extended Little Richard’s deliriously conceived tradition well into the decades to come, when that tradition had already calcified into predictable hard rock and heavy metal conventions. The confidence game of rock and roll—in 1997, Bowie sold $1000 bonds to investors for shares of future royalties; seven years later, the bonds were downgraded to one level above junk. He died in 2016, with an estimated net worth of $230 million dollars—was boringly orgiastic, dreamlike and predictable, pretentious and exhilaratingly disappointing. Today pop  music has given itself over entirely to the world of high consumer finance, its celebrity artists even going so far as segregating themselves within a culture  of exclusivity presided over by magnates and young, ambitious, entrepreneurial staffers. The struggle to redefine the new normality with the anxious prerogatives of sociopathic incel energy hasn’t yet reached the nationally broadcast fictional dimension of the consumer cult. But the armed insurrectionists have just  been granted White House security clearance.