Could you handle seeing this everytime you leave your home?
Right. So I was just listening to “Beat It” and really getting into it while driving back from Target and it got me thinking. We haven’t heard this much MJ on the radio since the 80’s, have we America? It made me incredibly sad. That dude was a creative genius, but our media became so obsessed with his quirks, his weirdness, his controversies, that it was all forgotten until he passed.
That’s really depressing. Truly. As a nation, we really can’t wait for our famous people to go off the rails. We love them when they’re on top of their game, entertaining us, pouring everything they have into their art. But that love moves into infatuation stage when they are accused of a crime, when they are caught with drugs, when they shave their heads in public and smash the windows out of cars. Why?
I feel that it comes from a place of judgement. There is this idea that, if that were us up there on that stage, we could handle it. We could manage a level of sanity and clarity when photographers are chasing us every place we go. When the fact that we have dinner with a friend turns into a media event and the best gossip of the week. When every one in the world wants to know, has to know, what toothpaste you use, if you drink or not, who you are sleeping with and who you’ve gone down on in the past. It’s a lot to live up to. We refuse to let any celebrity be human because, once they behave in an ordinary human way, we turn our backs on them. We leave them to rot and their careers turn to shit because, well, just don’t care anymore, do we?
It is absurd. Put any person’s life under a microscope and they aren’t going to come off any more or less rosy than your Britney Spears types, your Michael Jacksons, your Marilyns. Fame is the price you pay for being in the right place at the right time and/or being extremely talented and good at what you do. The price you pay for that fame is something much greater, probably greater than us little people could ever realize. For that, I am equally grateful and saddened.
With the exception of Paris Hilton and the entire cast of The Hills, celebrities should be known for what they do workwise. What happens behind closed doors is really none of our business. It is only when we make it our business that they fly off the handle and take their eccentric behavior to the streets, and the media just adds more fuel to that fire.
2 years ago • Notes