The Day Celebrity Culture Died
A Global Lockdown, An "Imagine" video, and The End of An Era.
Make no mistake; celebrities are still big business. They fill our box offices, break Netflix streaming records, and occasionally speak to extraterrestrials on our behalf. But celebrity culture as we know it— the belief that celebrities are just like us, but better — has been dead for awhile. In fact, it died on March 18, 2020.
On that day, during the early pandemic lockdowns, the world was treated to a video of famous celebrities singing lines from John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Each line — mostly delivered by popular Hollywood stars, with a few musicians and popular social media influencers thrown in for good measure — was intimately filmed on a simple camera phone from each celebrity’s respective quarantine location. They were dressed down, wore minimal makeup, and looked directly at the camera as they sang; it evoked the overall feeling of joining an A-lister group FaceTime call. The message was clear: We’re all in this together. And the general public responded with a very emphatic message of their own: one that began with a “F” and ended with a “Y-O-U.”
It’s hard to imagine that any of the participants expected this reaction. After all, their hearts were clearly in the right place — the intent was clearly to foster some goodwill and a spirit of togetherness, to help keep our morale high through a very difficult time. As a musician myself, I was perhaps a bit troubled by the fact that each line of the song was recorded in a different, random key (couldn’t anyone have picked a key for this thing and told everyone to match it?? Sia? Norah Jones? Anyone?!), but I appreciated the effort, nonetheless. The general reaction of the public, though, wasn’t focused so much on the Schoenberg-12-tone-style arrangement as it was on the very fact that these were celebrities, doing…well, what celebrities tend to do.
This was unexpected because generally speaking, we love celebrities. We celebrate their talents and accomplishments and reward them for their willingness to suffer the slings and arrows on the world stage. We laugh with them, as they demonstrate humility through self-deprecation, and applaud them for their charity and humanitarian work. We wonder what it’s like to sit on that couch, opposite a famous talk show host, under the fresnel lights, basking in the warm glow of fame and admiration.
When times are tough, though, all that goes out the window pretty fast. We don’t have time to aspire to fame; we have more important things to worry about. We don’t want to see videos of celebs crying in their mansions, or posting vacuous virtue-signaling tomes to Instagram. We no longer care about their many accolades and awards; we’re busy with real life stuff. We have little patience for those that are still chasing relevancy, when relevancy itself is no longer of much value to us.
In these moments, we stop seeing celebrities as idols on a pedestal and start seeing them as, well…a bit like their extended family and classmates probably saw them. Sometimes, they’re very entertaining and fun to be around. Sometimes, they’re annoying and attention-seeking. They’re just people — people with the same shortcomings and insecurities as everyone else, but magnified, due to a life spent working in the most bizarre work environment imaginable. The last couple of years have been difficult ones for pretty much everyone that wasn’t a guy on a longboard, listening to Fleetwood Mac while drinking Ocean Spray straight out the bottle. We’re not as invested in keeping up the illusion that celebrities are our betters, and as we watch them preen and tweet and livestream on Instagram — often without handlers —we’ve become far less forgiving of their slip-ups and tone-deaf transgressions (no pun intended).
Conventional wisdom says that we had to invent our own royal families to make up for America’s fundamental lack of a monarchy — hence the appeal of both the Kennedys and the Kardashians. Becoming famous has become big business ever since the mid-20th Century, and that business has scaled quite a bit since the days of Elvis, James Dean, and Michael Jackson. Now, the word “famous” is often too vague a description to be meaningful; the popular figures of today are better described as “Instagram famous” or “TikTok Famous.” There is an ever-widening generation gap among celebrity fan bases, as well; Gen Z might not know your favorite Boomer acting legend, but they do know that kid on TikTok that posts quirky comedy videos from their parents’ house. Not only that, they probably follow that kid’s friends that appear in their videos, too (and said kid’s parents, because of course they’re on TikTok, as well). Fame has been fully democratized, but the supply is starting to exceed the demand: If everyone is famous, no one is famous.
Fame also comes with a bit of a Faustian bargain: You will be known to all, but known by none. It’s not quite the same deal that comes from getting rich, since money doesn’t change who you are inasmuch as it magnifies who you are. An increase in fame, on the other hand, also increases the gap between who you are and how the rest of the world sees you. You no longer can reasonably expect to be recognized for who you are as a famous person; you instead become known as what you represent. This is why we hear celebrities claim to be misunderstood so often: because fundamentally, they are.
Our fast-paced, technology-obsessed society doesn’t have the bandwidth to truly get to know a public figure; that’s the province of their long time friends, loved ones and eventual biographers. Instead, society views celebrities as the latest iterations of well-worn celebrity archetypes: The Rebel. The Saint. The Trainwreck. The Genius. The Tycoon. There is nothing new under the sun, even if the names and mediums for discovery have changed. The most savvy celebrities understand this, and give the public what they want, with the understanding that they are fulfilling a role similar to a clown at a kid’s birthday party — albeit with much better pay and travel accommodations.
I’ve experienced a very minor level of fame through my musical endeavors, and that’s been enough for me. The rare instances that I get recognized at an airport far from home are fun, but my immediate reaction afterwards is always to recount what stupid thing I might have been doing right before I noticed I was being recognized. Was I rude to them? Was I too boring? Even at a low level of fame, I understand the deal, and I don’t want to break the illusion for them. In these moments, it’s clear to me that relative anonymity is actually a gift; it allows you to be yourself (or at least as much yourself as polite society would reasonably allow) without the need to uphold some sort of impossible-to-maintain image, or to feel some responsibility to entertain someone, instead of telling them to move out of the way a bit because they’re blocking the baggage claim and that’s your luggage that just came out. Real fame just sounds exhausting.
As the veil of celebrity culture drops and we enter a new, Post-Celebrity Era with the understanding that celebrities are just like us [FULL STOP], perhaps we’ll also learn to be a bit more forgiving of one another. Perhaps we’ll learn to understand that a 15 second video of someone’s worst moments or an out-of-context tweet isn’t nearly enough to get a clear picture of an individual. Perhaps the next time some cringey-but-well-meaning video gets sent our way, we’ll just have a chuckle about it privately with our friends, instead of leaving nasty comments to try and ruin someone’s day. On the other side, perhaps the next generation of celebrities won’t feel the same pressure to meticulously craft their image, day in and day out — and, once freed from their golden handcuffs, will be permitted to focus all their considerable talents and energy on their craft, once more.
You might say that I’m a dreamer, but…you know what, just forget it.
Pick a key, somebody!!
-SB