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Pepina @ May 12 2005, 04:39 AM
It's not like Michael's fame happened suddenly and over-night. The fame Michael incurred as a result of Thriller was something he had been working toward since he was 5 years old. Michael had already been a star since he was at least 10. If Michael was still a "beautiful little brother" by the time they were recording Thriller, his psyche wasn't going to change suddenly at 26 because of the success of the album. If Michael Jackson's ego was going to go out of control, it would have when he was 10 years old and knocking the Beatles out of the number one spot. And then he'd be Corey Feldman, but he is obviously anything but.
Quincy likes to feed into this popular perception within the music industry and media that Michael became irrelevant post-1983 (i.e. without Q), even though Q's senile mind seems to forget that he was involved in 1987's Bad, too. His so-called irrelevancy is supposedly a direct result of his "descent into madness" and that's bullshit. Listen to Michael's interviews from 17, from 27, from 37 and now when he's damn near 47...the person in those interviews hasn't changed. He sounds a little more defeated now, but the message is still the same.
Fame wasn't too much for Michael. The jealousy that people unleashed at him as a result of his fame and the maliciousness that he's been subject to since catapulting to phenomenal success might be, though.
2005-5-23 03:04 PM
pinkhouse:
all of these people were talking endlessly at the time how generous mj was, tenderhearted, etc. has q forgotten that it was mj who put down most of the lyrics to we are the world? not humble enough for you, q? what about donating his share of tour profits to charity, or ensuring that sick children had some of the best seats in the house? hmm?
mj was very rich and famous before q started working with him. q knows that. he was a young man looking to make the transition from formidable "child star" to formidable adult star. and q is damn lucky mj jumpstarted his career.
that's right i said it.
quincy said so himself that the powers that be at mj's label wanted mj to work with someone else on his solo effort, and mj went to bat for him when they first started working together. so q can shove it.
as you've stated, it was everyone else's reaction to mj's fame that was crazy. can you imagine people being ANGRY with anyone else for purchasing a music catalog? ANGRY with anyone else for selling that many copies of one album? ANGRY with anyone else who married the daughter of an equally famous music star? ANGRY with anyone else who was self-conscious and insecure with his looks and decided (rightly or wrongly) that he desired plastic surgery? ANGRY with anyone else who broke all sort of records? ANGRY with anyone else who built a park which serves a majority of the time as a haven for sick children and their families? ANGRY with anyone else that has had to battle a debilitating skin disorder that he can do nothing about?
are people angry at elvis or the beatles the way they are at mj for his fame and accomplishments, whatever shortcomings any of these people had as men? i see all sorts of compassion for elvis; is there none for mj?
i'm glad that i didn't read quincy's mess, and i stand by my earlier post that he should have shut the f**k up. he is getting cheap publicity for himself, and slagging off someone else who has done nothing to him.
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LONER:-
Celebrities live in a world of myth and fantasy, where limits have been peeled back by money and fame. Boundless opportunities can feel like a prison with silken walls, luxurious in its isolation. However, much the world opens up to celebrities, a part of it also closes down. There is a massive loss of privacy. It is a challenge to maintain human contact.
The seclusion and grandeur imparted by fame can trigger paths of thinking that resemble schizophrenic or paranoid delusions. Ask any therapists they will tell you that their celebrity clients often develop an adaptive form of personality disorder: a split between their private and public selves. There are constant accolades from outside based on how they look, who their characters are. It's easy to lose track of who they are holding on to a sense of self is difficult.
Celebrities struggle every day with their private persona who am I to the world, who am I to myself, who am I to my family? There are two types of celebrities the first type is self-confident and secure, and retains their ego strength.
The second is driven by inferiority to gain approval and masks this with narcissism, constantly demanding special attention. But there are commonalities in people who are drawn to the genre and succeed. They tend to be iconoclasts, people who need to live the gypsy life. They love challenges, stimulation, and verbal expression. They're usually social and gregarious, and have great charm and wit.
The main stressor is the cyclical nature of the entertainment business, when working, the incredible hours. There's no time or energy left over for family. Then, during the hiatus, there's anxiety about if they'll ever work again. Commitments are not made from year to year. Fame is elusive - you're the darling today, and can't get a job tomorrow.
Celebrities, then, can scarcely enjoy their fame for fear of it slipping away. And while you are on top, the people who sign your paycheck, fickle lot though they may be insist on following you everywhere. You can't even go pee without being followed by hordes of fans demanding autographs.
For decades, an ever-expanding pool of celebrities has been competing for a finite public attention....Viewed in more ruthless economic terms, these movie stars, athletes, artists, journalists, and socialites were human commodities.
Most celebrities don't like to think of themselves as passing fads, or even plan for that possibility, for fear of jinxing their careers. They tend, instead, to make huge amounts of money in short amounts of time, then spend it very quickly. In a business that is feast or famine, Celebes may reward themselves when the big checks come in, assuming that they will be able to sustain their new lifestyle.
In a business where what you sell is, ultimately, yourself, appearance takes on a special significance. In acting and modeling, it has become almost chic to step away from your own image. Stars, like most of us, often fixate on their flaws, not on their best attributes. Women in the business seem especially anxious about fulfilling expectations of willowy beauty and ever-sustainable youth. It may be an understandable response, given the built-in insecurities of fame: There's always another talent arriving on the celebrity shuttle.
The late Gilda Radner did some soul-searching in her autobiography, "Its Always Something," written just before her death from ovarian cancer. "With fame, and the constant display of my image on television, came anorexia. I became almost afraid to eat," she said. But New York streets are filled with tempting kiosks. "During the second year of `Saturday Night Live,' I taught myself to throw up. I became bulimic before medical science had given it that name."
Many celebs had a third risk factor - "crisis of mobility," in which fame transports them from one world to another. "The know how to act, but then they become a stranger in a strange land. Life had, at some level, lost its bearings. Drugs can be a stabilizer, at least temporarily, providing anxiety reduction, feelings of omnipotence and power, or a soothing, deep peace otherwise unattainable.
For celebrities, especially in the entertainment field, the pressure is always on to turn in a perfect performance, to be better than before, to constantly hit the mark. At the same time, artists tend to be sensitive souls in touch with naked emotions they mine for our perusal.
Celebrities are the sacrificial victims of our adoration. They are delivered to us as perfect human beings. We look to them as ideals, and that gives us orientation.
Celebrities understandably become more protective when they achieve the level of fame where fans begin to swarm, track, or target them obsessively; they’ll buy burglar alarms, cars with tinted windows, guard dogs, body guards. Some of them even border on paranoia, like the stars who have four bodyguards with them at all times, even on a movie set, and change clothes five times a day. It's a fine line.
You've got the up side, where celebrities have the freedom and opportunities to go places and do things that bring them wonderment and joy. But their boundaries are constantly being pushed back, physically and mentally.
The tabloids, both print and TV, lead the pack, certainly. But even the mainstream press has incredible leeway when it comes to reporting on public figure. Where a private person must prove only negligence to claim libel, public figures (such as celebrities, politicians, and others who have sought the spotlight) must claim actual malice or knowledge that the statement is false.
Being constantly judged and evaluated by their appearance, whether attending the Academy Awards or stepping out to get a newspaper, denies celebrities any part of their life that is truly and exclusively their own. There in lies madness...or, at least, resentment. Does buying a movie ticket, owning a television, or subscribing to a magazine give us automatic rights to 24-hour surveillance?
We build 'em up, just to knock 'em down.
Just as we have created celebrities, we have created the hall of mirrors in which they so precariously exist. For the famous today, self-approval depends on public recognition and acclaim.
2005-5-23 03:06 PM
GIRLINTHEMIRROR:
What a fascinating, insightful and eloquently expressed commentary on the effect of fame on the individual, and the mental, emotional and physical prison that it can so easily become.
Michael, for a long time (1983-1993), had a level of GLOBAL fame and adulation that I don't believe anyone before or since has ever had. Even now, while decried as a 'has-been' he remains one of the most hounded celebrities on the planet. And his fame began before he was old enough to consciously choose it (at least most celebrities have the luxury of doing THAT), and certainly before he could even begin to understand it.
So Michael's experience with fame is not only unique because of its unprecedented magnitude. It is also unique because no one else on the planet has ever been as famous as Michael was at such a tender age, and still been so famous 35 years later. In other words, no one else was this consistently famous during their pre-teen years, their teen years, their twenties, thirties, early to mid forties and counting...
At least if you become famous when you are in your late teens to mid-twenties (the majority of celebs are born some time within that range) you are able to go through puberty and make the transition from adolescence into adulthood in the real world, and with your privacy intact. Michael did not have that luxury, and he has talked many times about how painful it was to go through those formative years with the unforgiving spotlight of the media shining on him. The younger you are when you have a dramatic or traumatic experience (and fame brings with it a continual supply of both), the more it affects you, as neurons in the child and adolescent brain are firing much more quickly than in the adult one, busy building the pathways which literally 'wire' the brain.
No doubt about it, fame messes with your mind, and the bigger the fame, the greater the damage. No one emerges from the hall of mirrors (love that analogy!) that is fame unscathed. I know this much though: given the life he has had, Michael is a much saner and much better human being than he should be. By a LONG shot. And it suggests to me that he never did ask God to leave the room.
2005-5-23 03:07 PM
wannabestartinsomthin21:
Fame is generally fleeting, most of our celebrities today have their 5 minutes of it. I look at all of our pop "stars" as being here today, and being replaced tommarow, because they will be, whether they realize it or not.
But when I look at Michael, and his situation, I cannot place him in the same catogory as any other "celebrity" or person of fame, because in honest truth, he simply is not on the same page. He is on a whole nother level, completely. He is seperate from all of them for several reasons. The first and most obvious reason lies in how he grew up and what he was put through as a child. He began working as an adult before any of us can even speak cohearently. He grew up as an adult, in an adult's world and was expected to be an adult, from the age of 5. That would leave no memories of actual childhood.
Now, second, and the less obvious reason I suppose, why Michael cannot really be compared to other celebrities is, he's just unlike other people, be it regular, everyday people or regular, everyday people who happen to be famous. I see celebrities as regular human beings, who just happen to be famous. Not Michael. Michael will never be not famouse, his level of notariety and recognition will never go down. While he may have lost a great deal of his popularity, his fame is still as intense as it has always been since the early 80s. He is still just as recognized, still just as known to the world.
And the reason for him never losing that fame is because he is not just a "pop star" created by the machine that is the music industry, delivered for our entertainment and for our own idea's of perfection, as you said loner. Michael Jackson is NOT that. He is himself, he made himself. His talent is beyond anything that has ever come out of the entertainment industry. He is not of that industry or any industry. He just creates, he is beyond an entertainer, he is a brilliant artist, someone who can see something in life that the rest of us are blind to.
And then there is who he is. He does not have an image manufactured by the industry or by the public. He's real, all the way. He may choose to keep certain details of his life away from the public, as to maintain himself as a good role model for children, but his image is not manufactured, he is not fake, as are other celebrities. And he wasn't created by anyone but himself, and God.
Well, just to wrap this up, you cannot compare Michael to other celebrities, you cannot place him on the same page as them, or put to him the same pyscoanalysis as you would to them, because he is not the same, nothing about him is the same.
He is a human being, and will deal with certain issues as others would, but his perception is different. He sees things differently then other people. And his situation is not the same. Michael does not have the same type of fame as do other celebrities. He is on a whole nother level, from any and everyone. |
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