Best of a bad lot

The departure and return of some golden oldies.

It was appropriate that football's alleged first media superstar should unleash such a media circus on his death – and indeed even before his death. It seemed anyone who had ever seen a round ball was invited to comment on George Best's "legacy" and the "right way to remember him". Levels of platitudinous irrelevance ranged from bland to embarrassing: with all due respect, one hopes this is the last time we have to read Pat Rabbitte and Trevor Sargent's thoughts on football.

Among our media experts too there was not much in the way of penetrating assessment. In the Irish Times, Peter Byrne's obituary was both begrudging and banal, while Eamonn McCann's intriguing article, suggesting Best was out-of-touch and clueless about his Belfast origins, read like it had been badly cut. Moreover, while Meejit is inclined to bow to McCann's knowledge of most things, one wonders if he should confidently place so much emphasis on the ignorance displayed in Best's last autobiography, George Best: Blessed surely its crass errors about, say, the Best family's religion could owe more to "co-author" Roy Collins than to a presumably distracted Georgie.

Among the sharpest comments available in the deluge of pontification was Gwen Halley's short piece in the Sunday Independent. She observed, effectively, that while women may well have loved George Best, there is little evidence that the feeling was mutual, beyond the most vulgar sense.

Music hath charms

Back in the days when Meejit was watching thirtysomething George Best squander what was left of his footballing talent playing (or not) for various American clubs, Ciarán Mac Mathúna had already been presenting Mo Cheol Thú for almost a decade. The programme's passing last Sunday won't cause national keening a la George, and thankfully Mac Mathúna himself lives on. But it is nonetheless worth reflecting on the meaning of its legacy, apart from its not-insignificant role as the gentlest possible way to wake up on a Sunday.

The legacy pre-dates even Mo Cheol Thú. As the final programme made clear, Ciarán Mac Mathúna was out with his recording equipment gathering tunes and performances while George Best was still a skinny kid kicking a ball against garage doors. Despite what it sounds like now to most younger listeners, Mac Mathúna's was not a nostalgia trip, but the exploration of a living tradition. That tradition lives on, but its role in Ireland's wider culture has changed considerably, as that culture has itself changed beyond recognition.

Media work isn't an anthropological or historical exercise. But Mac Mathúna reminds us that, for as long as archives exist, all our published and broadcast work has these dimensions, that our responsibility to probe and report accurately, actively, thoroughly and creatively is not just to this week's listeners and readers but to those in future generations. Mo Cheol Thú will be among their most valued artefacts, and not just on a Sunday morning.

Like a rolling stone

Bob Dylan, thankfully, hasn't passed on like George or passed off our radios like Ciarán. He has just passed through, puzzling thousands of Point-goers who were prepared to sway and sing the lyrics of his familiar songs, but not to bounce along to a country-blues boogie-woogie band while rock's "poet laureate" rasped out some of his more obscure verses in unaccompaniable style.

Good for Bob. As TV viewers learned recently from Martin Scorsese's amazing documentary, for the first few years that he was performing young Dylan was not unlike Ciarán Mac Mathúna, collecting songs and performing techniques, a keeper and inheritor of tradition who never gave much thought to writing his own songs.

Now the tradition Dylan keeps is his own, the collector is himself the "roots" musician, a funny old guy in a hat who never speaks a word to the audience beyond introducing his band. But by playing new and obscure songs, Dylan reminds us that his tradition is alive, uncanonical, irreducible. And by his approach, he reminds us that the music is, in the end, a matter of entertainment.