Was Michael Jackson, as Dan Henninger argued last week, the world's last true celebrity? Have song melodies now been interred by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, as bandleader Eric Felten writes for the WSJ Taste page (beginning a new weekly column)?
DH argues that Jackson's iconic status enabled him to define his image permanently. But the global media fishbowl we live in, with TV & Internet 24/7, enables a nonentity like Anna Nicole Smith to dominate news coverage for a full week, as she did upon her death from a drug overdose. DH writes:
It has taken some time to see how modern media squashed the life out of genuine celebrity. Web sites, TV and magazines shot Michael Jackson and his white glove into the sky like a Roman candle. But in the nature of fireworks, modern media then fired thousands of other people into the same sky -- singers, actors, athletes, talk-show hosts, psychologists, comedians, models -- and turned them all into . . . familiar faces. We're awash in the washed up.
After that well ran dry, they created reality TV, which took nobodies and turned them into somebodies. It is no coincidence that the weird final version of Michael Jackson died when cable TV was running "The Real Housewives of New Jersey." The bottom had been reached.
The one person who knew this would happen was Andy Warhol, who back in the 1960s produced silk-screened images of the same famous person stacked like cheesecakes at Costco. Liz Taylor times 10, rows of Mao, "25 Marilyns," "20 Jackie-Os." Warhol saw the future: fame on a conveyor belt.
A real celebrity is beyond reach. Today, to hang out with famous people all one needs is the ability to mouse-click. Constant clicking rubs the shine off anyone's glamour. Beautiful people have become a dime a dozen. Modern media and publicists had an answer for that, too: famous freaks. Britney and Lindsay in rehab. Strange adoption compulsions. Wacko Jacko himself, perhaps understanding the unstoppable downward logic of modern fame, created and then disappeared into a place he called Neverland.
DH concludes: politicians are the new celebrities.
Felten notes that many films today use canned American Songbook recordings made decades ago; rare is the memorable song nominated for Oscar, so the Academy now reserves the right not to award (or even nominate) any song. The rare mega-hit, like Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On from "Titanic", is a rarity. (It is also a mediocrity, with a monotonous melody overstuffed with suspension tones--music-speak for tones that resolve to a note a whole or half-step below), and stilted, jarring key changes.)
What does one make of all this? Are the two related?
Bottom Line. I think so. The common denominator is thousands of TV channels & millions of Internet broadcast sites, that create an insatiable and gargantuan appetite for entertainment content, which cannot possibly be satisfied by high-quality content, because there is simply not enough talent to fill such space. What really happens is not, I think, the end of celebrity as such, but rather the end of stardom as a necessary route to celebrity status. Paris Hilton is not celebrated because she has talent, nor even for her looks, which while better than average are hardly sexpot standard. Nor is she even billionaire rich.
Decoupling stardom from celebrity reflects and encourages the decline of art, in music and everywhere else.
Comments