George Michael has crashed his car, again, this time into a Snappy Snaps at 3.30am. Cheryl Cole is the second most beautiful woman of the 20th century – between Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe – and she has malaria. Ozzy Osbourne is now the health columnist for Rolling Stone and his genetic code is being mapped to see how the hell he has survived to 61 going on 356. Lady Gaga is the new creative director for Polaroid, the lenses she wore in the "Bad Romance" video pose a risk to eyesight, she thinks money is boring and has overtaken Barack Obama with her Facebook followers to become the first living person to have more than 10 million fans. DJ Tiësto has issued a statement denying that he is dead, which must mean he's alive. Fernando Torres thinks Kasabian are the best group since the Beatles and you can ask Liam Gallagher questions at Ask Liam via his Pretty Green fashion label.
Cheryl, as I write, and it is hard to keep up – by the time you read this she might have turned into a carnation – has now been moved to a special centre for tropical diseases, and the newsreader says, "We wish her well". Oh, Jedward are apparently already planning her funeral.
Everywhere you look, there seem to be increasing signs that we are living inside a novel that JG Ballard started to write at the exact moment he died, a novel that takes the form of a reverberating hallucination that just keeps giving. Perhaps the novel/hallucination ends when Ballard himself is the most followed character on Facebook, his brain radiating astounding time-bending realities at the centre of the new post-internet universe where the numerous and multiplying levels of our existence interact. For reasons that help the writing of this column, the soundtrack to this novel/hallucination would be best supplied by Prince, himself currently mucking around with reality and his possible mysterious connection to it in ways that mix up the Ballardian with splashes of obsessive Gaga narcissism, madcap McLuhan theorising, larky Russell Brand lunacy and teasing Dylan masking.
Prince's latest album, 20Ten, something like his 33rd since 1978's For You, came as a gift inside yesterday's Mirror. This suggests he either knows exactly what he is doing, and is plotting his career in just the right conceptual way as one music industry dissolves and another materialises, or he is as lost as anyone can be faced with a stunning change in circumstances that suggest in 20 years' time we might all be living full-time inside our dreams and wildest desires as monitored and limited by Google, Facebook, Apple and Cheryl Carnation. The Mirror itself gives a rave review to the album it is marketing, as if to say "it is his best album for 23 years" makes some kind of sense, as if everything is as it always was, even though it cannot be because we live in a world where one of the greatest musical minds of the past 50 years is giving away his newest work, one he says he is proud of, which even if it is just another Prince album, or just another album, is still part of the tiger-bright Prince canon, which does unfold with fertile, otherworldly, Dylanesque consistency. But then new Prince music, however it appears, is surely something to be enthusiastic about. I mean, if we lose our enthusiasm for being enthusiastic, perhaps the one thing we can really call our own as we're increasingly hemmed in by all this choice, then all we have left is mere desperate survival.
The idea that it might suit him as the kind of imaginative legend, artist, guitarist and composer he is to release his music on a postmodern traditional label such as Nonesuch, XL or Warp would be too narrow, small‑time and old‑fashioned for an abstract sensationalist like Prince, and ultimately not the act of someone who likes to be in control of his destiny, his general distributed aura, as much as his music.
Is the mad, conniving and neurotically prudent Prince joining forces with the Mirror as a peculiar, slightly undignified hybrid of art, celebrity, gossip, commerce, stunt, ego and news one of the daftest signs of a collapse in the essential 20th-century pop reality that enabled a Prince to be who he is? Or is it a perceptive, if eccentric, collaboration of threatened superpowers that will lead to an ingenious reinvention of that pop reality?
As Ballard makes clear, all things are possible, and as Prince makes clear, ooh wee sha sha coo coo yeah.
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