Five Song Friday: Into the Celebrity Inferno
This Week: Warbling, Beans on Toast and Sacrilegious Booty Shaking
There are way too many celebrities in this world and we should stop making them.
I fear the center will not hold and I worry about our planet.
The infrastructure of popular culture cannot bear the weight of millions and millions of “celebrities.” We are not built for this kind of mass notoriety.
At some point, the whole thing is going to collapse like a poorly constructed Malibu party deck and everyone will tumble over the cliff into the sea.
And that would be a goddamned shame.
Look, I don’t have scientific proof that inflated egos are damaging the ozone layer.
There is no hard evidence that cheek implants (both kinds) are made from a blend of baby pandas and coral reefs.
But I’ve yet to read an academic study showing me these things AREN’T happening.
Full disclosure, I am NOT an economist. For me, any conversation involving math sounds like an auctioneer speaking Farsi.
But one concept I’ve always understood is that the more money you print, the less that money is worth.
Value comes from scarcity.
If you could go in your backyard right now and dig up a dozen Koh-i-Noor sized diamonds? Jennifer Lopez would wear a macaroni necklace to the Oscars.
If EVERYBODY is famous is ANYBODY famous?
I get that people who “do a thing” or are “on a thing” or “have a moment” might deserve to enjoy themselves for a minute.
But do we have to let every one of them fill out paperwork, get a membership card and henceforth refer to themselves as a Famous Person?
Our modern celebrity surplus has radically damaged the currency of fame.
It’s not completely worthless, but it definitely has to be worth LESS, right?
If it was a stock, Jim Cramer would be shirtless and covered in pigs blood on live TV screaming SELL! SELL! SELL! at the top of his lungs while he rings a bell and sets fire to a pile of supermarket tabloids.
I remember a time where there were only like a few dozen famous people and everybody knew who they were and we could talk about them for fifteen minutes and get on with our day.
“Did you see that thing that Michael Jackson did last night?”
“Of course I did. Literally EVERYONE was watching.”
“Did you catch Johnny Carson’s last show?”
“Oh, you mean the one that close to 20% of the entire United States population watched? Uh, yeah. I saw that.”
Today there is overabundance of people/personalities/brands who are famous for fixing houses, cooking weird-ass food, popping pimples or being morbidly obese.
People get famous for doing weird jobs like fishing for tuna, digging for gold, driving trucks on icy roads and selling real estate.
Sometimes they act and sing and dance, but mostly they just show cleavage and complain about stuff.
I don’t know how these people get created.
Maybe there’s an Area 51-style factory, hidden deep inside the Montana mountains. Maybe it broadcasts a frequency only narcissist exhibitionists with childhood trauma can hear. The signal says, “You deserve to be seen.”
Ordinary housewives are lured in, dunked in radioactive waste and released into the world as horrible duck-lipped monsters who throw glasses of white wine and scream at each other about disrespect.
Restless chefs are kidnapped, given weird haircuts and neck tattoos and sold into food competition slavery.
Husky bearded men are grown inside secret labs, where they are taught basic construction and paired with petite Midwestern mates who enjoy handicrafts and shiplap.
Or maybe this is a less organized, more organic kind of phenomenon.
Maybe we spend so much time looking at screens, we desperately want them to become mirrors.
Stepping into that spotlight is easier than ever.
As long as there are cameras pointed at your face, you can be famous for raising a dozen weird kids, searching for love on an island, running around naked in the woods or arguing with Whoopi Goldberg.
Thanks to the internet, you don’t even need to leave your bedroom.
Back when this celebrity infestation started, we had an alphabetical scale from A to D to keep track of how famous someone was.
I’m pretty sure we’ve exhausted the entire alphabet by now.
Does that mean we start doubling up letters like some massive Excel spreadsheet?
That seems silly.
Do we thin the herd with a massive Hunger Games style battle royale?
That sounds awesome… but wrong.
Alas, I think we are stuck with this problematic proliferation.
The problem runs way deeper than a simple plague of Z-list celebrities.
We are beyond a pandemic of “famous for being famous.”
We’ve gone full Dante’s Inferno.
Lust. Gluttony. Greed. Fraud. Treachery. Etc.
It’s only going to get weirder from here, folks. More epic. Even more awful.
We’re talking all nine circles of Hell.
Ten, if you count podcasters.
Sincerely,
DJ CrankyPete
Five Song Friday 099
“Birdsong” - MOULD
I'll admit I feel ripped off. On the surface this song seemed like it was going to provide lots of tweet-tweet and warbling and whatnot. I was prepared to be transported to the forest on a bright spring morning. Instead, I get a British guy who is screaming at me to “hibernate in a head of all your wants.” WTF? I want to speak to a manager.
“Suspens” - La Securite
Oh great. This song is entirely in French. I don’t speak French. I don’t read French. And I definitely don’t listen in French. I thought I could just relax and let my brain interpret the music, you know, FEEL the meaning that’s there underneath the language? But the best I could come up with is that it might be about two people starting a revolution… in their pants? And maybe… pastries? Seems right.
“I Don’t Know That You Don’t Know My Name” - Ten Years After
Ugh. I thought I was sharing a sweet and super-cool indie rock jam that was hot off the presses from somewhere cool like Northern California or the Bahamas. Turns out this song came out before I was even born! And the dudes who made it are from England, so they are probably super old and eating beans on toast and yelling at their televisions. I apologize for my mistake.
“Stop! (Don’t Worry About It)’” - Lonette
I want to say something silly about this, but GUYS… I just read that Lonette McKee was a child prodigy and recorded this song when she was only 14. It became a big Detroit soul/R&B hit. She went on to become an actress that you would totally recognize from Richard Pryor movies like Which Way is Up? and Brewster’s Millions and Spike Lee joints, including Jungle Fever, Malcolm X and He Got Game. That’s legit wild.
“Some Funky Moods (remix)” - Boztown
Look, I know this may be sacrilegious, but I am totally here for a French DJ remixing vocals from Public Enemy into a funky, somewhat goofy and simple, head-nodding, booty shaker. Any day you get to hear the great Chuck D say, “Five-O said freeze and I got numb / Can I tell ‘em that I never really had a gun,” is a good day.
“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson