The circus of the poor

There's something terribly sad about fame, sacrificing a person to create a persona. In the age of celebrity, the celebrities themselves are the victims in our modern version of human sacrifice, their lives eaten up by tabloids and gossip websites as an offering to the masses. Arrests and accidents, public feuds, stints in rehab and divorces, with luck the star's eventual death - all a cathartic spectacle for public consumption.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of celebrities: those born rich, and those born poor. The rich ones are as a rule not very smart, illiterate and with no idea what to do with themselves; trying to become famous is a natural outlet for their ennui, the adoration of their fans compensation for what were probably loveless childhoods. They can be found mostly in reality TV.

The most famous musicians tend to be from the other end of the spectrum. As examples, I'd cite Kesha (I refuse to allow her that idiotic $), who was raised by a single mother who got by on foodstamps, or Lady Gaga who grew up in Yonkers. She had the advantage of a good Catholic girls' school education, yet her family could not have been better off than the middle of the middle class.

Despite what Americans like to think about their country, making money is very hard for all but the children of the bourgeois. Conventional wisdom holds that a good university education is the key; whether that holds true today or not (something yours truly will shortly find out), the fact remains that for the children of the lower middle and working classes the best they can hope for is to do about as well as their parents did. For many of them, getting into a good college and becoming a doctor or lawyer is simply unrealistic. It should be no surprise, then, that just as Edith Piaf narrowly avoided a career as a prostitute to become a singer, young women today with bleak economic prospects see the pursuit of celebrity as an escape from whatever other kind of work they could get.

This goes a long way to explaining the crass tone of popular culture, a circus of rather hopeless people whose only way to the top is public self-destruction. It also explains their endless penchant for referencing money in their stage names.