The Ghost In The Spotlight

The world loves a good rebel—but somehow it keeps looking in all the wrong places.

Across the years, there have been some good rebels in the world but now I look closer, I see that our heroes of pop-culture are not quite as rebellious as we’d like. They were decent enough for a passing nod of the head at rebellion when you’re a teenager, but now... not so much.

I just watched a great documentary about Michelangelo and yeah, I’ve always been a bit starstruck by what he achieved but he was a real mover and shaker who went against the grain from the inside, not always able to do whatever he liked but once he was on the inside, you guessed it, he did whatever he liked and it wasn’t just being a dick about it. He made massive, uncompromising statements in art that still echo centuries later. I’m not sure I can say the same about many other people.

We tend to confuse “loud” with “rebellious.” Someone with an attitude problem stands in front of a mic wearing eyeliner and spandex and we call them a revolutionary. But maybe the rebel isn’t always the loudest person in the room—maybe it’s the one who stays in the room and changes the focus without anyone noticing. Rebellion is a long, long game. The best I can describe it is subversion wrapped in discipline.

Take Nina Simone. She didn’t burn anything down—but she did rewire the soul of the civil rights movement with a piano and a voice that could turn your heart to jelly.

Or Rosa Parks. Everyone focuses on the bus seat, but that wasn’t a single act of random defiance, no matter what history tells you. It was years of quiet resistance, strategy, and nerves of steel.

The Pistols did a good job with Anarchy but they were also a managed band with a marketing plan. Meanwhile, Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, got himself imprisoned for stacking porcelain sunflower seeds into art. That’s a whole different ball game (and a crazy story worth looking up).

Even David Bowie wasn't a rebel because he dyed his hair red… he was a rebel because he kept shape-shifting long after the world had settled on a version of him they were comfortable with. That’s true subversion: refusing to stay still long enough to be pinned down and it was a brilliant tactic. When you finally convince everybody that the only thing they can be sure of is change, you’re free to do whatever you want. I wish I could say the same about Bolan but alas...

Spare a thought as well for the quiet ones—the writers who kept going after the world had turned away. Think Oscar Wilde, who died exiled and disgraced, but with a quill in his hand. Rebels aren’t always holding flags. Sometimes they’re holding receipts. Sometimes they’re planting seeds.

Being a rebel sounds appealing but I’m not sure I want to be one or ever did–people assume I am because I haven’t cut my hair for years. Not a real one. I rather think I belong with the anti-rebels I admire.

Charles Bukowski was anti-establishment for sure. He was absolutely an outsider, but he didn’t rebel against anything really. He didn’t want change—he just wanted to be left alone to drink, screw and complain about the post office. That’s not rebellion. That’s resignation dressed up like nihilism. He’s the poet laureate of “fuck it,” which is also, very cool.

Jack Kerouac just wanted to break free, but not burn the system. He rebelled from within—romanticised the road, the outsider, the sacred intoxication of experience itself—but when the Beat movement started turning genuinely political, Kerouac tapped out like a yellow belt. A dreamer? Yes. A trailblazer? Yes. A rebel, not so much, but there’s a massive amount of freedom in choosing not to change the world and just sitting with a good book, a bag of doughnuts, the ocean and your own wandering thoughts.

Then there’s Richard Brautigan. He was the guy standing just outside the Beat circle, smiling into his beer and writing his strange little books about trout fishing and watermelon sugar. He didn’t want a revolution. He wanted a softer world made out of surrealism, kindness, and loneliness. He whispered when everyone else was shouting and as I get older, I see more value in that than screaming at a world that’s sure as hell not going to listen to me .

Or maybe John Fante? Long before Bukowski was slipping off a barstool, Fante was doing the same—except cleaner, sharper and infinitely sadder. He wrote about failure, obscurity, and fatherhood with such bone-deep truth that his book, Ask the Dust, feels like a quiet scream from the gutter. Bukowski called him a god and he wasn’t wrong. Damn I wish Fante had written some songs in my own lifetime. That would have been something to hear.

See, rebellion is pretty simple to manufacture. Being a loud-mouth punk-ass is easy because you come out swinging with a bottle in your hand and looking like you mean business but what are you actually achieving for your efforts? A temporary shift in the status quo... and maybe that’s OK. Maybe the world sometimes needs that too but resisting quietly for years without applause? That’s a whole other beast entirely.

Every dog might have his day but not every dog will live to see it.

It’s a shame because being a punk-ass can get you fame—and that’s the point where you could actually change the world. But most just end up shovelling powder up their nose and spending money faster than they can make it. After all, playing Who Gets To Die With The Most Toys sounds like fun.

Took me a while, but I see it now. Fame is the great corruptor. The disco mirror ball that turns poets into products, all in service of the holiest god of all.

Money.

Maybe obscurity is a gift. Maybe cult status is a kind of superpower. Maybe fame was never the goal to begin with—not for the ones who actually had something to say, something always just out of reach and too fragile to get down quickly, too important to scream.

It takes more than fifteen minutes in the sun to change the world. Or even just the way you see the world.