THE PHENOMENON OF CELEBRITY

The phenomenon of celebrity is complex, besides which it’s been around for a very long time. Longer in fact than most people can imagine. Roman Emperors had their favorite gladiators and chariot racers, as did the crowds who watched them perform in arenas all over the Empire. Like the modern celebrities of today they were essentially entertainers. The most famous and successful gladiators for example were widely acclaimed and became public figures in their own right. However as I’ve said the nature of celebrity itself is complex, particularly regarding what it actually is and who creates it. In the English speaking world today celebrity has become something far greater than a handful of individuals from the world of entertainment whether it be sport or popular music. It has taken on the character of a culture, uniquely individual and existing for its own sake as much as a vast public that supports its existence.

Celebrity is no longer a function of individuals with powerful and highly diverse talents, simply because it is not necessarily the talents of those who have them that make them celebrity figures. Celebrity is something that is made. Something created by others. It is an artificial construct created to make those individuals something much more than they actually are, turning them from solitary existence into public property. The essence of celebrity in some cases is that the qualities and talents of some individuals is universalized, whether it is appearance or ability of some form or both. In other cases however, if no qualities or talent exist, it is simply the appearance and name of the individual that is externalized for public consumption. Thus many celebrities have no other public function than to exist as public figures within the culture itself. They exist to live as celebrity in the public eye simply by virtue of their existence without any talent or ability of any kind. The best way to describe such a thing is self-created nothingness whose private life and public antics are cultivated to create public interest.

Such`people are a self-perpetuating phenomenon that would not exist without public interest giving it life. It’s public interest that is the oxygen for this rarified form of existence that from the point of view of any outsider must seem utterly alien. A kind of life form created by typeface or electrons! Fundamentally do nothing people creating an existence purely for public consumption. And there’s the contradiction really. Fundamentally non-existing people who large sections of the public are madly curious about and sell newspapers and magazines. Magazines entirely devoted to figures from a cult of nothingness! But then the question remains, who is it that actually creates this cult of celebrity? Surely not the nonentities themselves. In themselves they are only its vapid participants. Is it then the public, the millions who chew on the carefully contrived not so private lives of celebrity meat? Only in a passive sense, perhaps. As the vultures who feed on it.

No, the cult of celebrity just like its members are creations of a mass media. These are the providers, the institutions that create those individual candidates for cult membership. The first stage lies in ascertaining their potentiality and the second developing a story around them. Finally all that remains is communicating their existence. Creating a public interest situation as it were. Physical appearance is important but so too are specific attributes of personality. In this sense the mass media, whether newspapers or television, are vultures in a much more fundamental sense. They feed off the creatures they create and feed off the public who buy their creations. They are the pimps of a large slice of modern Western culture. But then in truth it is not really they who create the cult in the first place. They only take a lucrative cut on the adulation created, that is from the profit they make out of it. No, the real promoters, those who use the media as a facility are those who have the greatest political need for it because the cult of celebrity is in its essence a social and political distraction. Something given to the lower classes of society free of charge to gain their attention, occupy their thoughts and divert both from their own concrete circumstances of life.

Not that those chosen for this role are averse to its attractions of glamour, status and financial reward. Such people are not above pimping themselves. Using agents to help them strut their stuff publically and make full use of the role given to them just as much as they themselves are touted out and pimped by the media establishment. It is a lecherous blood-sucking relationship indeed with all parties in on the act and the public culturally seduced, bought and sold as a mass of people often incapable of diverting their attention to the real social and economic ills surrounding them in the society in which they live.

The cult of celebrity is mainly directed at young people. People with a chance to make a difference but who have become apathetic and soporific since the 1960s, the time of the last great political involvement of British youth subsequent to which they have mostly been apathetic. This cannot be simply excused by what political parties and politicians have become in recent decades and the vile nature of both; neither can it be excused by the appalling consequences of the Thatcherite philosophy of individualism, social greed and a general dumbing down of critical intelligence. Neither has this disconnection from the life of our society been a function of a growing drugs culture or the steady growth an unfettered culture of drinking and boozing created by New Labour’s Tony Blair. Both of which you can see on the streets of major British towns and cities most weekend nights. No, the malaise runs deeper and its cause lies in the purposeful created alienation of our youth from what they experience around them and diverting their attention elsewhere.

In the twentieth century the cult of celebrity took off from the 1920s and became an important feature of American and British society mainly in the sports and entertainment industries. Hollywood, theatre and baseball stars for example while in Britain it was football. It was relatively dormant during the forties and fifties, returned marginally in the sixties then took off spectacularly from the 1990s into the heated celebrity cult fervor we have with us today. In Britain a kind of footballer celebrity madness along with the pathetic character of popular music idols who are more often lyrically illiterate than not. It’s the same in America though in the latter substitute basketball for football. Many participants have certain ability if not talent but anything there is infinitely magnified and blown up out of all proportion for public consumption and the creation of celebrity status for public adulation. Others, whose celebrity is wondrously mysterious have little to nothing to offer but have celebrity status all the same.

In the latter case what seems mysterious to the critical eye is indeed a magical thing. People who have virtually nothing to offer, have almost no redeemable feature and quite frankly virtually nothing going for them are referred to as celebrities and have celebrity status given to them by such wretched prompters as the BBC Television  and Radio Services along with the Murdoch outfit, Sky Television. It is the BBC particularly that encourages the creation of celebrity. Something that is essentially a political act. But then as anyone with any intelligence knows, the BBC is the British Establishment’s highly political news media channel. A major force in British society for maintaining social order. However, having pointed to the recent historical appearance of individual celebrity and its recent generalised explosion into a cult, it is worth noting that apropos my argument of celebrity having the key function of creating distraction, its  appearance is always connected with times of economic depression. The 1920s and 30s for example and certainly the last two decades.

In the United States, where economic depression has run unchecked for three decades or more the cult of celebrity has turned into a major industry, incorporating sport but far more the mass media, particularly television. In the latter case, countless programs all with advertiser support promoting celebrity entertainment shows and drama. And along with it countless magazines featuring their participants. Indeed, there are specialist channels entirely given over to celebrity performers! In Britain we have popular entertainment programs in which celebrities are created, often out of political ghouls or media ghouls of one form or another and turned into creations for public adulation in programs such as Strictly Come Dancing. What actually possesses people to like such people and scenes says a lot about those who watch and their own problems, same as those who hook in to celebrity drama reality shows. These audiences are indeed comprised of people who bond with those they observe. People who live other lives from their armchairs! Choose their heroes or villains without having to do much let alone think!

Countless people in our society have the ability to become their own heroes. Heroes of their own action and care. Instead they sell their own life force and often their conscience to distraction, whether it’s in the form of garrulous, smart and smarmy television show presenters and their participants or the flimsy infantile creatures of popular music or worst of all, the mostly offensively useless celebrities of football whose performances are more often than not an affront to the eye. And yet it is entirely natural that these creepy-crawlies are among the most cultivated creatures of celebrity in our society. Cultivated since the 1930s for an industrial working class but now more than ever in recent decades for those who are left. A tribalised institution for tribalised working communities many of which have long gone has turned into a tabloid back page obsession.

Celebrity and its cult has been sold to a passive, mainly uncritical public by those who know about the buying and selling of people, but then the public more often than not has been only too willing to buy what’s on offer. Give themselves up willingly to those without any real individual worth or talent just to be entertained. But then that’s really the problem isn’t it? What kind of entertainment is being dished up by creatures like Jedward? What it might actually mean is that the intrinsic character of entertainment itself is changing into something coming at them from such a low level that they can no longer recognised it for the awfulness it is. It’s a frightening prospect. Anyone now under twenty-five no longer having the ability to appreciate any song, sound or music from three, four or five decades back because there’s nothing these days to compare it with! Their critical, analytical facility, something nurtured historically, has been castrated.    

Where for example is this critical facility in relation to the current wave of the last decade of modern pop music. There has been an almost complete abandonment of melody, lyrics and vocal delivery. Most compositions if you can call them that are reduced to a few words repeated over and over, neither clearly pronounced nor understood, often sandwiched between heavy electronic syncopation, emerging as little more than a rasping sound in an, at best, moronic tuneless indulgence. Rap music on the other hand is a kind of structured oral indulgence of supposedly meaningful lyrics which are often nothing more than culturally or sexually abusive, lauded because it is supposedly representative of black Caribbean culture. Both are soulless and lacking in harmony but they and their performers promoted as performing artists for British youth.

Fashion in creating celebrity status is everything. Never mind the awfulness of the music. Concentrate on the performer. In this way, what became known as boy and girl bands achieved huge celebrity status in recent decades from Bros to The Spice Girls. The carefully timed, carefully promoted so called musical releases of the latter achieved huge financial success for their financial backers while the girl group itself achieved almost iconic status for a song most of whose words repeated over and over, shall I tell you what I want what I really really want. Each Spice Girl was individually promoted by the media to an almost shameless degree and elevated to royal status in the world of popular music before their money making potential began to drain. The creation of celebrity in this case as in so many others in this kind of febrile world specifically designed to exploit youth was never anything more than a shameless money making device whose cast has always comprised the financial promoters, the media publicists and the untalented performers plucked out of nowhere to gain a brief carefully contrived moment of fame for being something instead of actually nothing.

There are examples of this shameless enough to make any intelligent person’s hair curl. Here I’m thinking of Michael Jackson.

Celebrity however is not limited to sport and popular music. One of the most iconic celebrities of recent times has been Princess Diana, she of the wretched marriage to Britain’s future monarch. You know him don’t you? The one who talks to flowers, believes in crackpot ideas like homeopathic medicine and thinks that President Putin behaved like a Nazi in the Ukraine. Well let me tell you Little Lord Fauntleroy that the Nazis brutally murdered five million Soviet civilians in the Ukraine between 1941 and 1944 including large numbers of Jews so I suggest that you shut your ugly gob. Furthermore Putin’s baby brother who he barely knew died in Leningrad while it was under siege by the Nazis in the Second World War. Altogether your remarks are not only insulting but damnably insensitive. Back to your celebrity wife who publically accused you of cheating on your marriage and ended up loathing you. Almost from the beginning the British media took hold of her in their best disgusting manner and refused to let go. The  relationship between Princess and news-pimps however was two way and grossly exploitative. Both fed off each other throughout. The media in its usual crawling, sycophantic manner of vampires who simply can’t help themselves, the Princess successfully using it to put herself about. It was they who propelled her into the fixed orbit of eternal public adoration where she still remains so long after her death. A celebrity still orbiting the hearts of millions of British across the whole social class structure.

There’s celebrity and celebrity. Diana was someone who had no special talent going for her, but then she didn’t need to. She was married to royalty but came down to Earth to be the public’s Princess. Came down from heaven to Earth to be one of us and returned there to shine there immortal. Only Michael Jackson currently comes near to having that kind of status.

What then is celebrity when all’s said and done? What do large groups of people perceive in individuals that captures their attention, their imagination, their interest, their fascination and even more fundamental, their devotion? Is it some kind of emotional or spiritual bond? Something that connects what they perceive, some quality or ability, to themselves? If that is indeed the case then it’s a quality or ability that switches on the same perception in many. This leads to the conclusion that whatever it is, many groups of people have that same something within them, never mind whether it’s for a footballer, popular music performer or television personality, all of whom, by the way, whether Royal or not, are performers. The real question is, what is that something? To my mind it’s a combination of things. A need to worship something seemingly attractive and greater than themselves… a need to connect into a popular phenomenon like a political leader or group of musicians like a rock band. Why for example do huge numbers of youths and adults attend open air pop music concerts? It couldn’t be the music itself because the lyrics are convoluted and barely audible. No, it’s a case of being there and identifying with the group itself, in essence its celebrity.

Identification is the vehicle, but identification between what? Something within you and something in them! In you it’s a need. Understood by those who promote. In them it’s a facility to present. Your need and their offering! Interaction at a level of psyche. But then is this need to love and adore, if that’s what it actually is, in any way rational? Well actually it’s not and that’s the key to it all. It’s a basic personality disorder! Celebrity taps into an irrational need in so many people, something well understood by those who seek to manipulate, whether it’s the social media pimps who promote people like products or the barely hidden socio-political Establishment of power and wealth? It is they who exploit the generalised personality disorder within the general public. Entertainment, an essentially passive process, is activated for the purpose of participation, of bonding with the performer. You are removed from the reality of life to an emotional somewhere else. Temporarily or permanently damaged as a social actor.

Fine. Go on worshipping your Premier Star or Celebrity media performer trying to get out of somewhere or other. They live in mansions. You eat your fish and chips. And do you really care anymore anyway? That’s the real question. Are you still ABLE to care anymore, or has celebrity taken that away from you too?