By The Landlord
“Maybe your weird is my normal. Who's to say?” – Nicki Minaj
“Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. Their ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.” – Sigmund Freud
“Whatever situation you are in, that is what is normal for you.” – Jo Brand
“Normality is to be different. Every person is a different person. And one day you need to be aware of your difference. Aware that you are not the same as the others. That is to be normal.” – Alejandro Jodorowsky
“I remixed a remix, it was back to normal.” – Mitch Hedberg
Everybody is someone else's weirdo. This is a phrase I've used many times when discussing catch-all contexts over conflicts of opinion, whether that's personal or perhaps political differences, clashing perspectives, behaviour and outlook. I've been using it so long, I can't remember if it's one that I thought up, or read somewhere. But the point is that even the most conventionally normal person can seem bizarre to someone, somewhere, or indeed vice versa, and everything, and everyone, is relative. I think I used it for the first time when asking a very good friend from university days who was the strangest person she knew. I was quite shocked to find that, when considering the many the people I had met through her who were as nutty as a Dundee fruitcake, her unequivocal answer was – me. What? But I'm really normal! At least I am in my head. Comparatively. Aren't I?
So did you wake up this morning feeling normal? And what does that mean? What does it feel like to be yourself? And what is a typical day? And what would you habitually do this weekend? For our US readers on this particular one, that would normally be visiting family for Thanksgiving and all the usual trimmings. And then for many more of us in a month's time, the usual Christmas or other traditional holidays. But for much of this year already, what feels like normality, or our definition of it, has turned upside down. It's now normal to wear a mask much of the time, only leave the house for essential reasons, and almost only see friends and family online. Are we already in some sci-fi dystopia?
And there are bigger trends that aren't normal as such, but being normalised. The idea of it being acceptable by someone in public office to state things that clearly aren't true, as fact, without that being scandalous. Or that it's OK to say anything racially offensive because it's simply your opinion. Perhaps then it will become normal to always carry a gun, or a sword, or an AK-47? Or not go out for weeks on end due to extreme climate change or disease? Then again many of these things have happened before, from the Black Death to having to go underground every night to bomb shelters during the 1940s blitz and sing: "Yes we have no bananas." What seemed abnormal becomes the new normal. For anyone who has been watching the 2019's BBC and HBO TV series Years and Years, several of these things could become normal over the next decade. But one thing is normal, we humans are certainly very adaptable.
“Children are amazingly adaptable,” says the Star Trek’s George Takei, who played Sulu. “What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower.” The actor and human rights activist had a tough childhood. Although he was born in California in 1937, because of his Japanese parentage and the Second World War war, in 1942, the Takei family was forced to live in the converted horse stables of Santa Anita Park before being sent to the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas, basically a Japanese-American concentration camp, and then Tule Lake War Relocation Center in California.
Just your average Jo - Jodorosky that is …
But all this is getting a little serious now, because I'd prefer to think about this subject when picturing an old friend who liked to walk around the supermarket dressed as a giraffe, or in a beekeeper's outfit. And of course think about songs. So what might qualify for this topic? As a starting point, anything that might focus attention on normality with words such as regular, usual, ordinary, typical (or indeed stereotype), standard, or even natural. So the idea of normal behaviour, normal ways to dress, talk, think, regular lifestyle, a regular guy, the girl next door, a normal job, an ordinary town, Joe Public Joe Bloggs, John Smith, or a normal family. But what is that?
I didn’t grow up in what constitutes a normal family at all, so I’m not sure what that is. I’d really like to know.
"I don't think anyone has a normal family," says the actor Edward Furlong, who plays the the young John Connor in 1991's Terminator 2: Judgement Day, a kid who lives with his foster parents who are then killed by a molten-metal shapeshifting T-1000 cyborg, while his mother Sarah Connor is in a secure mental health asylum having insisted that the entire world is danger from nuclear attack after previously being pursued by an earlier cyborg model from the future, and conceiving John with a soldier who had travelled back in time to protect her from the same machines as well as his own future rebel leader son who he didn't know would be his. And during a relentless and deadly chase, John subsequently adopts the original Terminator, played by big Arnie, who has also come back in time, to protect them and become a surrogate father figure.
Indeed. No families are normal, but some are more normal than others.
Here’s another normal family, with all the usual problems:
Normal family values, with the usual problems. Addams 1991 vintage
So then, there’s a group of normal, or not so normal guests here to talk about us about this topic in different ways.
Let’s hear first from a group of music stars sat around our biggest table with some film stars also in the mix. Grace Jones is the biggest personality of them all of course. Is she a normal woman? “Well, I go feminine, I go masculine. I am both, actually. I think the male side is a bit stronger in me, and I have to tone it down sometimes. I'm not like a normal woman, that's for sure.” You don’t say, Grace.
“Well, girl, normal is in the eye of the beholder,” says Whoopi Goldberg, with a smile.
But what does it mean to be a normal girl, or normal boy? Does one wear pink and the other blue? And is that normalised? This sort of idea might come up a lot in song. In this video, Tayla Parx, who normally writes songs for pop starlets, plays with this in many ways, incuding an excess of colour. Watch out for the pearl …
Many famous musicians, and stars in other fields of course strive to be different, perhaps because they are, but also want to be normal outside of their professional lives.
“I'm really normal. I play football, go to the beach, drive. We have dogs. I can imagine people calling me a character, but I'm Joe Straight,” stresses River Phoenix, an extraordinary actor who left us far too early.
“I appreciate my music is famous, but I'd rather my face wasn't so that I can just live a normal life,” says prolific songwriter and singer Sia, whose trademark look is wearing a big wig to cover her face.
One artist who likes her privacy is Kate Bush: “I suppose I do think I go out of my way to be a very normal person, and I just find it frustrating that people think that I'm some kind of weirdo reclusive that never comes out into the world.”
“Well,” says Nick Cave. “People are always surprised to see clues to my being a normal kind of guy. As if I'm somehow letting the team down,” perhaps referring to scenes of him driving, or getting out of bed at the beginning of the documentary film 20,000 Days on Earth.
“I love grocery shopping when I'm home. That's what makes me feel totally normal. I love both the idea of home as in being with my family and friends, and also the idea of exploration. I think those two are probably my great interests,” adds the extraordinary American cellist, Yo-Yo Ma.
What constitutes normal in songwriting as a process? Here’s Sweden’s Lykke Li: “If you take the hard facts of a failed relationship, it's pretty grim. But if you make an album out of it, and if the violins represent all the tears, you create something magical out of something very normal.”
Nicki Minaj - just your regular, ordinary weirdo?
How about on the psychological level of what it means to be normal?
“A multiple personality is in a certain sense normal,” suggest the American sociologist and philosopher George Herbert Mead. After all, many of us do lead complicated lives where we have to be different things to different people.
“The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person,” reckons P. J. O’Rourke.
The Irish author Roddy Doyle agrees. “Some of the people who look the most normal are probably the maddest people trying to look normal.”
On a different table we now have a perspective on the idea of normalisation on a political and societal level.
“There are forms of oppression and domination which become invisible – the new normal,” says the French philosopher Michel Foucault.
“If you keep saying two plus two equals five over and over again, then that is what people are going to think. Maybe it does equal five if we keep changing the definition of what's normal and what's right and what's wrong,” says the actor Kevin Sorbo, in a statement that’s certainly relevant to what the current president has been doing.
“When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society,” adds Orson Welles, from another time, but still bang up to date.
And that great heroic figure of the bus incident, Rosa Parks, adds her perspective which still remains relevant. “Whites would accuse you of causing trouble when all you were doing was acting like a normal human being instead of cringing.”
But talking of cringing, but for entirely less serious reasons than this, there’s also the idea of what constitutes natural in the context of normal. For some that means walking around without clothes, which is entirely normal, or abnormal depending on who you are. First up, let’s watch this fabulously funny BBC report from 1973 about reaction to the introduction of nudist beach in Hornsea, Yorkshire.
Some people find nudity a perfectly normal way to behave, at least when performing on state, such as British poet and standup Glory Pearl, who is as normal a person as you can imagine, but will ask you to freely “check out my bits” while she reads you poetry.
Glory Pearl - fully natural poet
Then there is the case of Australian classically trained violinist Glen Donnelly who played his instrument while parachuting naked over the city of Coffs Harbour to raise awareness about body image issues among men. He’s playing Vaughan Williams’ Lark Ascending, but he’s descending …
And then there’s those totally normal girls, The Slits, Ari Up, Viv Albertine and co, who subvert the entire normality idea to dress in the way that our ancestors did for thousands of years.
Typical girls. The Slits album cover for their album Cut
Let’s see these typical girls then, in all their glory, in a famous London park on a bandstand, in a song that has previously been chosen for the topic of feminism:
So then, it’s time to turn your ideas of the normal over to this week’s guest guru, who, I’m delighted to say, is making her debut - the excellent IsabelleForshaw! Put your songs in comments below for deadline last orders on Monday 11pm UK time, for playlists published on Wednesday.
So what is normal? I’ve really no idea. Can you help?
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