American Myth Story II: Celebshit

Last season on “American Myth Story” we discussed the presence of Superheroes as modern day mythology in America. This time, we take a look at a much less whimsical facet of American society: Celebrities.

The idea that superheroes were a part of modern day society in America as living mythos was fun. I quite enjoyed toying with the idea that these larger-than-life characters had a similar, if not more widespread, effect on people globally than their historical counterparts. Celebrity, however, is a much more sinister beast, and its influence on people has gotten exponentially worse with each passing year. At this point in time, the obsession with celebrity as a concept or celebrities as people have wrought catastrophic, and at times deadly consequence.

“Kendrick made you think about it, but he is not your savior 

Cole made you feel empowered, but he is not your savior 

Future said, "Get a money counter," but he is not your savior 

'Bron made you give his flowers, but he is not your savior”

- Kendrick Lamar, 2022.

After spending a career using his music as a vehicle to both express his own personal and political views, Kendrick Lamar would then reflect on flaws in his 2022 release Mr. Morale and The Big Steppers. Among such reflections, Lamar would take a moment to absolve himself of the responsibility he’d spent a career accumulating to that point. While the Pulitzer Prize winner’s words would strongly resonate with people and their socio-political concerns year after year, Lamar found it paramount to remind even his most staunch supporters that, at the end of the day, he was just a man, and that he was certainly no infallible prophet to follow. While that may seem hypocritical coming from someone who covers the subjects he does, it is, inarguably, a moral objective he has as someone with even a modicum of social influence: neither he, nor any other celebrity, should be looked towards to validate one’s own moral compass and decisions.

Despite Lamar’s best efforts, and the efforts of other celebrities who have raised similar points, Americans have insisted on doing exactly that. Moreover, the dominance of Western culture in global media has actually allowed this incredibly dangerous brand of zealousness to infect global societies. No matter where you look, any country whose media or societal structure has been influenced by the way America digests its own, this issue arises. Across Europe, across the Middle East, South America, anywhere that doesn't make a conscious effort to distance itself from American media.

While this phenomenon didn’t start in the United States, it is America that would learn to weaponize the allure of celebrity while exiting the 20th century. Celebrities have, in effect, become mouthpieces for socio-political propaganda. The issue is, they’re all really, really, deplorably fucking stupid and have no idea what they’re talking about half the time.

You’d think the general populace would grow wise to the idiocy of otherwise regular people who happen to be skilled in producing a single thing that happens to be commercially viable  (good music, movies, are good at a televised sport, etc.). However, the only thing the average American has been able to accomplish is champion their idols when the celebrity in question does something they approve of, or witch-hunt them when said celebrity does something they do not. 

Case in point: Chappell Roan, a talented and accomplished singer would be championed by her largely left-leaning fanbase when condemning record label’s exploitation of their artists, only to be aggressively lambasted by that same group of people when she criticized the Harris Walz Presidential Campaign for being, objectively, a fucking disaster.

It would be one thing to be like “that’s pretty neat” or “not sure I agree with that” about either of those points. However the reality was that the reaction was quite violent, with people questioning whether or not Chappell Roan was even a good person to begin with.

My response: For the love of God. Shut. The Fuck. Up. 

Retreading my post from a couple days ago, Roan is nothing more than a regular person who happens to make music good enough that you decided to tell your friends about it. Outside of that, you should not expect her to contribute anything meaningful to discussions outside of her area of expertise, which, again, is 80s influenced pop music. If she does choose to voice her opinions on Gaza, it should be no more important to you than your plumber uncle’s opinions on it. Please stop taking your favorite hyper-pop artists medical advice as gospel. Please stop taking your favorite author’s opinions on transgender issues as validation. It shouldn’t have even gotten this far. No one should be taken seriously if they quote JK Rowling when discussing Trans rights. Similarly, no one should say their opinions swayed on Gaza because Gal Gadot happened to be part of a billion dollar movie. Listen to experts in the subject. Not. fucking. celebrities. 

This goes down both ends of the isle, and I’m sorry if it’s upsetting to hear: Celebrities should literally be nowhere fucking near a presidential campaign, they should not be able to influence your vote. We should not as a country be swayed to vote because Kid Rock or Quavo show up at a rally of their choice. If these are the types of things that even remotely influence your opinion, you're stupid. If it doesn’t influence your vote, it influences someone’s because if they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on these campaigns and this type of shit is part of the itinerary: it works.

And that there is the issue, it works because it works, because it works. We are already so steeped in the ideology that some guy who played a glorified extra in a Scorsese movie is somehow qualified to validate our collective moral compass. Please make that make sense. If you try and make that make sense, jump on one leg and honk your nose because you’re a fucking idiot.

Hundreds of years ago in Rome, actors were widely discredited as nothing more than entertainers on part with prostitutes. While I’m NOT saying that actors should be relegated so some repugnant bracket of social class (and we WILL have a different conversation about how sex work is legitimate work that needs to be destigmatized very soon), there has to be a middle ground. It cannot exclusively be “your word is gospel” or “you are a gutter trash spawned scum of the earth clown for entertainment”. They’re just people, and should be appreciated as people.

So where does the “mythology” come into this episode?

It speaks for itself. Much in the way that people have adopted the hallmark traits and messages of superheroes, people have also based their entire identities on their favorite celebrities. Throwing sometimes thousands of dollars at their already-corporate-sponsored puppet-of-the-month out of what’s certainly feverish zealousness and not benign support. I saw someone cry at seeing Beyonce from 100 yards away at a concert like their fucking mother got gutted in front of them. Be reasonable. I can appreciate that good art can speak to the soul, but the amount of investment we as a society put into celebrities who do not know us, and do not care about us is asinine. Appreciate the art, do not sell your soul to the artist.

The worst part of all of this is having to constantly remind people that celebrities are flawed human beings, and that it’s almost always only a matter of time before some less-than-favorable shit is dredged up about “the guy who literally, like, totally saved your life back in highschool”. R Kelly is actually a pedophile, Taylor Swift is an actual eco-terrorist, and JK Rowling is actually a eugenicist piece of shit. I do not care what type of connection their art has to you, stop using the quality of their art to give them passes for their objectively terrible behavior, or allowing the fact that “a person who wrote a book you like thinks it’s okay to bully trans people so you should also be allowed to bully trans people”.

Worse then, is when the offense is so objectively and categorically bad that said celebrity is (rightfully) widely condemned and thrown into the annals of history. You’d like to think people would just forget about them, but what ends up happening usually falls under 3 camps:

1. It spawns a fringe group of die hard supporters who think what the celebrity did is now totally acceptable (“Actually that Kanye shirt was pretty cool”) WRONG.

2. It spawns a group of die hard witch-hunters who persecute anyone still silently enjoying whatever that celebrity was involved in. (“You’ve watched the Harry Potter Christmas Marathon on TV every year since you were a kid? Must hate gay people”) WRONG.

3. It spawns a group of morally conflicted former die hard fans who spend the next 8 years of their life acting like someone killed their child for no reason (“I literally don’t know how to keep going after finding out what happened between Johnny Depp, he’s my favorite actor”) WRONG.

All three of these scenarios are really fucking pathetic. You should genuinely be ashamed of yourself if you react this way to finding out that your celebrity of choice isn’t an infallible saint. More importantly, you’d be more correct to assume that every celebrity is hiding something incorrigible. Fame and fortune do unspeakable things to people’s psychology, almost always, because that’s the inherent human nature of power.

Instead, we’ve arrived at quite possibly the apex of how bad this could go. An idiot with no political experience under his belt aside from turning an interest free million dollar loan into two million dollars, a Home Alone cameo, and a loud yet shockingly charismatic mouth ascended the presidency in 2016 off of? Not even sure.

You can like celebrities, shit, you can even love celebrities. They have (hopefully) all been able to produce something that you enjoy. But you cannot ask someone whose most notable feature is a Billboard charting single what they think about violence as an appropriate form of resistance against tyranny, and then threaten to kill yourself when they say something that doesn’t explicitly line up with your understanding of the situation.

What has made realizing a world where celebrities do not have such a stranglehold on the general population’s perceptions of actual real world events they have no business communicating that much more difficult, is “stan culture”.

25 years ago famed rapper Eminem would release “Stan”, a song about a fictional overzealous fan of his who went to extreme lengths to get the rapper’s attention. Over the years, the term has been diluted, and largely just means “huge enjoyer of the celebrity in question”, but there are cases where “stans” are just as neurotic as their fictional inspiration. The fact that it’s worn as some sort of badge of honor within fandoms is at best cause for concern, and at worst an earmark that the person you’re about to engage with is psychologically unwell, stupid, or both.

I have, far too often, seen cases of “stan culture” result in: death threats, rape threats, smear campaigns, doxxing, verbal assault, physical assault, and socio-political echo chambers where entire groups of people use a celebrity as a northstar for their own socio-political opinions.

This is, quite simply, too far.

Worse, stan culture is encouraged by certain celebrities, fires are stoked and celebrities either willingly sic their fanatical fan bases on people who oppose them or do nothing when it’s happening in their name. How sincerely fucking corny, waging a Holy War in the name of some random 5’9” zoomer who decided to make tiktoks instead of getting a degree, or whatever the flavor of the day is. The smallest thing can set stans off, and quite simply I’m being vague and refusing to name certain camps because even as someone who writes a blog for like 20 people, I actually fear the consequences of implicating some of these fucking maniacs.

What type of world are we in where a people being drone struck to extinction ask you to boycott a coffee shop (because political leaders respond to the stock market more than anything else), but you can’t do it because your favorite singer has a collab drink with them. What. The actual fuck. Is wrong with you?

I digress.

The Ancient Greeks used to tell all types of tales to excuse and support the maleficence of their Gods, that Zeus was noble but cruel in the way only omniscience could be. They dared not question the intelligence of these Gods, as their actions were sanctioned by divinity.

You’re telling me that people have this attitude about someone who dropped a good album? Won an oscar? Played in the NBA finals? Became President of the single most fucking dysfunctional first world country on the planet? Nietzche would blush, truly. God is Dead and we’ve allegedly rediscovered The Almighty in Elon Musk. Holy shit.

This is the corniest fucking reality I could’ve possibly fathomed. Instead of an artist dropping a bad album and everyone agreeing that they’ve made better projects you get the following reaction, almost like clock work:

[Scene]

The artist dropped a bad album. Not just bad — catastrophic. But to the loyal few, it wasn’t failure. It was scripture. They gathered outside the celebrities base of operations, armed to the teeth with blind faith and weaponized devotion, their eyes burning with the kind of fire that only true believers can survive. To them, this wasn’t just music. It was a matter of war. And they would kill — or be killed — in the name of their god’s divine tracklist.

[Cut to a tree line. Distant shadows emerge.]

The opposition came silently. Stealthy, sure-footed, righteous. They were fans of a celebrity who was at odds with the militia’s god. Self identified “Crusaders of taste”, sworn to cleanse the earth of mid. Crucifixes on their backs. Judgment in their hearts. They moved like ghosts, preparing to exorcise the unholy sound from this world.

[Cut to civilians. Faces blank, eyes hollow.]

And then there were the spectators. The ones caught in the middle. Veterans of a hundred fan wars. They’d seen this all before. Different names, same blood. To them, this wasn’t a battlefield. It was a rerun.

[The fog lifts. A scream pierces the silence.]

The first shot comes from the tree line — a volley of sharpened tweets, each one dipped in venom and stamped with “you’re a r******* idiot.”* It hits hard. It hits fast.

[Gunfire. Screams. Chaos erupts.]

The cult responds in kind — a brutal fusillade of doxxing and death threats. No aim. No mercy. Just bodies falling where they stand. The trenches dig themselves.

[Planes overhead. The whine of descending bombs.]

Above them, bomber accounts screech across the feed, dropping payloads of blind allegiance. The words “whatever my goat says goes” echo like a national anthem.

[Silence.]

War never changes.

But the stans on both sides alway forget one thing — the part no combatant ever realizes until it’s too late. They all look genuinely fucking stupid, every single time.

[End Scene.]

I hope you can tell how much fun I had throwing that together. Jokes aside, while this is obviously overly dramatized, there is a concerning reality to how seriously these situations play out. People spend their hard earned dollars and invaluable time on ensuring that any given celebrity is either supported in totality or condemned completely.

Celebrities teach us nothing about being good people, nothing about being kind or upstanding, while they may impart a good story that helps us realize our own struggles or mistakes which we then reconcile internally, they do not, and should not, have such a magnitudinal impact on who we are, what we do, or what we believe as people. But as this country trends towards oligarchy, and the powerful are created and upheld by blind supporters, we only inch closer to religious idolatry. This time it isn’t even flawless Gods, it’s regular people who we should expect to be just as flawed as the average person if not more so. As more “standoms” are created, more pilgrimages to concerts are made, and more blind loyalism towards rich people who literally do not give a shit about us are spun up, we inch closer and closer to a world where everything we do and think is dictated by people who operate solely in their own self interest.

Kendrick Lamar is not your savior. No celebrity should be your savior. You are your own savior, but you’re allowed to enjoy good music.

The times of believing in the stories of the Greek Pantheon might be long gone, but unfortunately,  the times of blindly believing in random celebrities is upon us, and the fact that we as a society place so much importance on what they say or do, when 9 times out of 10 they have literally no fucking idea what they're talking about, is ruining the world.

They are the Mythology of America.