Rushdie: Anyone still care?

I picked up a couple of Rushdie hardbacks in a sale for $5 each a bunch of years ago, and as part of my ongoing mission to read everything on my bookshelf I finally picked one of them up. I went for ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’. This is Rushdie on rock music and fame, following two characters who become huge stars through the eyes of a third who is their friend and a photographer. The narrative is constructed to echo the tale of Orpheus, but doesn’t stop there, blending in numerous mythological and magic-realist layers. There’s a huge amount of stuff to get your teeth into here.
Trouble is, it mostly doesn’t work. While I’m glad I stuck with it, I almost ejected from the book in its long first half about the youth of the main characters, in which Rushdie indulges himself in near-endless digressions about their relations and their pointed, literary foibles. It improves in the second half, as the main characters actually start doing things, and the parade of oddity kept me interested if nothing else.
It has the aura of a man trying too hard to be literary, and the subject matter is complicit in exposing this. Rock and roll (or, later, just rock) music is the opposite of the flights of fancy in this book, which are designed to be read through one’s reading glasses with a smirk on one’s face. None of it convinces, even for a moment, which is surprising as Rushdie is consort to the famous and has no doubt spent a great deal of time chatting with genuine rock gods.
The breadth of Rushdie’s vision here is unfortunately matched by a serious lack of depth. The alternate-world-of-rock Rushdie creates seems a weak attempt at Alan Moore, the weird intrusions from antoher world seem a weak attempt at David Lynch, and the supergroup he envisions seems unlikely to take the world by storm forever.
There is enjoyment to be had from this book; I was genuinely having a good time for the second half. But I don’t think I’d bother recommending it to anyone. Perhaps I need to dig out a copy of Midnight’s Children, which I remember enjoying immensely, and refresh my memory for Rushdie’s gifts.
But the question in the title does hang over me. Those Rushdie novels on my shelf have seemed less and less essential every year. Does anyone really care about his work any more? Is there any need to go beyond the Booker of Bookers and read the rest of his work? Inquiring minds want to know.