There is something special about watching a man burn through serious money. It is lurid, even grotesque, and the faster it happens, the greater the spectacle.
Take Stanley Burrell, who was just another poor black kid from Oakland, California until the early 1990s, when the whole world came to know him as MC Hammer. His single "U Can't Touch This" was a worldwide mega-hit, and suddenly Hammer, with his parachute pants, repetitive lyrics, and catchy production, was a cultural phenomenon. His second release "Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em" sold over 10 million copies. Hammer became a pitchman for Pepsi, a staple of MTV, performed at the Super Bowl and wrote songs for Hollywood movies. His likeness was emblazoned on lunch boxes, and he was the animated star of a Saturday morning children's cartoon. For a moment, he was the brightest star in the entertainment industry, and naturally, by the mid-1990s, he was bankrupt.
In American culture, nothing is held in higher esteem, nothing is more sacred, than being wasteful, and one can view these gaudy exercises in self-destruction as modern iterations of religious sacrifice: the gods no longer demand livestock or incense; their furious hunger is slaked only by reckless spending. The fantastically wealthy protagonists of these rituals are folk heroes of the contemporary American moment, and Hammer followed the typical script. He moved from Oakland's gritty streets to Fremont, a suburb thirty miles south and a world away, into a mansion worth over $10 million. Here, he housed an entourage of more than twenty friends from the old neighbourhood, maintained a monthly payroll of $500,000 and paid an interior decorator $110,000 to transform the place into a monument to his ego. According to reports, he spent $1.4 million just on the gates, which were adorned with two giant, gold-plated "H"s. He developed a taste for luxury cars and racehorses, spent millions more on such necessities as antique golf clubs and Etruscan sculpture, and outfitted his four Rottweilers in thick matching gold chains. There's more, of course, but in the end, even a partial catalogue of Hammer's opulent spending habits reads like pornography: it is not unrelated to something you and I might do, but at the same time it is utterly unrecognizable. We know the gestures, but the details don't compute. When it was all said and done, Hammer had burned through $30 million, and was nearly $14 million in debt.
The debauched slide into bankruptcy is not only the birthright of the entertainer. Mark Twain lost it all, and was forced to lecture into his old age to avoid complete financial ruin. Mike Tyson, one-time world boxing champion, is estimated to have lost around $400 million in his career. Even Donald Trump, the real-estate mogul, made-for-TV tycoon, has declared insolvency before. Businessmen, athletes, venture capitalists, artists – one suspects that what makes these men and women successful is also what fuels their destruction. The pathological belief that one is destined for success is at the heart of it - a kind of confidence that can easily tip over into delusion. Money does grow on trees. No reason to save for a rainy day, because the rainy days will never come. But they do, of course, then things go sour, and in the blink of an eye, the money is gone.
Ed McMahon, best known as Johnny Carson's sidekick on The Tonight Show, celebrity spokesman for the sweepstakes sponsored by American Family Publishers, recently faced foreclosure of his multimillion-dollar Beverly Hills estate. He overspent, made a few bad investments, couldn't afford the payments and quickly became a national symbol of a borrower wrestling with the mortgage crisis. What he didn't realize when being interviewed on Larry King Live is that he chose the wrong storyboard. He did not lose his money the way it should be lost. He just frittered it away. Coming from an older generation, in his 80s by now, Ed McMahon failed to understand that the culture of money worship, which always existed in the United States, has changed its rules. The fatalist hip-hop ethic of those who believe they will die young has become almost universal among young people. Sportsmen, musicians, performers buy champagne bottles simply to pour them out. An entire generation has embraced this principle. Being wilfully, militantly, extravagantly wasteful is the last and most important sacrament of the capitalist religion, a project worth dedicating one's life to, worth dying over; and in the streets of American cities, young men do. They gather up every denial life has dealt them over the years, they steel their anger, and submit to this blood sport with a myopic zeal that makes Hammer's recklessness seem almost quaint. If McMahon really wanted people to identify with him, he should have set his house on fire – just to watch it burn.
More fittingly, Hammer, still living in Fremont, became a pastor at a church. In every interview he proclaimed his faith in Jesus, but whatever lessons he gave from the pulpit could not overwhelm the example he had already given the world: his heroic descent into ruin, first mocked and ridiculed then celebrated, spoke of survival. And another young rapper burst on the scene with a hit song. His name was Nelly, he toured all over the country, all over the world; he filled stadiums and the crowds chanted along with his first single "Country Grammar" which said it all: "I wanna blow thirty million like Hammer." It might be the surest way to feel alive.
