TF/M unmasked the celebrity crisis

[Anveeroy 58,974]

Those who are old enough to remember what famous people were like before social media might recall red carpets, fawning Extra interviews and Vanity Fair covers as the trappings of ultimate fame. Celebrities were products, delivered in public relations packaging and kept several arms’ length away from the rabble. Columns like Us Weekly's "Stars, They're Just Like Us" (founded in 2002) closed the gap between stars and their gazers, and increased access to digital photography and the early online foibles of celebrities on social media compounded the process. The 2000s dragged stars down to our level, exposing their flaws and vices as the internet grew ever hungrier for more access, more information, more blood.

While we feasted, a young artist named Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta watched, learned, and at the end of the decade released an album+extension combo that encapsulated everything that had happened to fame — first to celebrate the false glitter of the public’s newfound access to the channels of celebrity, then to expose and predict the effects of our total cultural shift.

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta is, of course, Lady Gaga. Those albums are The Fame and The Fame Monster, two banger-laden texts on the celebrity lifestyle she desired and what would happen when she got it. Together they define the allure of bedazzled Razr phones, poorly hidden drug habits, and the uniquely 2000s idea that fame is a reality show following those who chose the life of the rich and famous.

Katy Perry may have kissed a girl in 2008, but she didn't dabble in wacky, Gaga-adjacent costumes for another year, when the videos for "California Gurls" and "E.T." solidified her candy-covered alien vibe. Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday appeared in 2011, blending pop and rap with the bombastic costuming and large-scale "look at me" aesthetics that by then had become a requirement for a certain caliber of star. Celebrities got bigger, louder, brighter, and spikier after Gaga recognized what it took to keep an audience; the seeds of social change she gave voice to in The Fame/Monster bloom to this day as influencers on every platform grasp at the same concepts she sang about in 2008. We follow them until they love us.

Lady Gaga’s wholehearted embrace of the aspirational possibilities of The Fame summarize the technological and social shifts that gave way to our current, influencer-led, up-close-and-personal understanding of celebrity. She achieved that fame, grasped it tightly, and has not yet let go. It’s remarkable that it only took a year to also summarize, in a crack of musical lightning, the mirror world reflected in those very same shifts. Eleven years later, Gaga is one of the most celebrated musicians in the world because she got it from the start. She conquered because she understood the 2000s as they occurred, and could see the future of what they would create.

More: https://sea.mashable.com/entertainment/12122/lady-gagas-the-fame-monster-exposed-the-bad-romance-of-a-celebrity-crisis

[Virgin Ryan 1,334]

She knows exactly "The art of Fame"

[Anveeroy 58,974]

44 minutes ago, Virgin Ryan said:

She knows exactly "The art of Fame"

[Sister 9,907]

Wow that was a great reminder for Lady Gaga