Introduction
Whether it is film, fashion or even music, pop culture not only has mass appeal, but also general acceptability. For ages, music has been a key aspect of pop culture. Today, music is a crucial component of our everyday life and towards this end, it comes in formats and forms that are as diverse as its audience. Thanks to the special bond or connection that people have with music, they tend to develop a cult-like affinity to the composers of such music. Thus, the listening audience becomes drawn to celebrity musicians – and soon enough, the said celebrities are elevated to a deity status. The listening audience starts pegging all its hopes, aspirations, and dreams on these mortal composers of popular music; with the obvious result being celebrity worship. In addition to occasioning significant damage to the moral fabric, celebrity worship also infects the collective conscience of the society and leads to significant character weaknesses, amongst other things.
Discussion
It is important to note, from the onset, that for a large part, celebrities are largely characters that are not only packaged, but also primed and conditioned for dissemination via the relevant media so as to provide (and sustain) entertainment for a specific target audience (Levy 214). This is to say that in most cases, celebrities are far from the freely expressing and authentic beings that we deem them to be. As a consequence, it is the audience that becomes conditioned to specific ways of thinking via the interaction they have with their select celebrities via various mass media. It should be noted that for a celebrity, the relevance of maintaining a certain image for public consumption cannot be overstated. This is more so the case given that, as Levy points out, the public judges celebrities on the basis of what they appears to be – the image they projects (218). In this case, the image projected is rarely genuine. As a matter of fact, in entertainment, celebrities have over time refined the art of personality refinement – in which case they can successfully manufacture and sustain a character that is the exact opposite of their actual personas. The audience is in this case presented with a fake persona of their idol on which it anchors its fantasies. The result is what could be referred to as the worship of synthetic personas. According to Sheridan, North, Maltby, and Gillett,...
This is because unlike any other industry, the music industry tends to have a huge fanatical following. To begin with, most celebrities in the music industry have been branded bad role models, especially for young people who look up to them for guidance. Some of those who have been unfortunate enough to attract the tag of bad role models include, but they are not limited to, Nicki Minaj, 50 Cent, and Eminem. In the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards, there was a rather ugly confrontation between Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus, the host of the show. The public spar featured very aggressive behavior and an assortment of insults. Millions of young people across...…to issues differ from our own. Because they do what we can ordinarily not be able to do, we tend to envy them. However, as it has already been pointed out elsewhere in this text, the image projected by celebrities is often not only packaged, but also primed and conditioned to appeal to a specific target audience. Herein lays the solution to mitigating the negative consequences of celebrity worship. Towards this end, the mass media should be made to serve as a sieve so as to ensure that the general public, specifically young adults, is not fed toxic information emanating from celebrities. Such a course of action could be inclusive of not only censoring any celebrity content deemed obscene and misleading, but also refusing airplay for music whose content is likely to be injurious to the moral fabric.
Conclusion
In the final analysis, it is clear from the text above that celebrity worship happens to be detrimental to the society. Although die-hard fans could indeed pick some positive behaviors from their pop music idols, most times celebrities tend to have negative influence on their vulnerable fans. It is important to note that to succeed, the solution highlighted herein would call for the active involvement of various stakeholders including the relevant government agencies, the media, talent managers, etc. We all have a role to play. Rational fans could, for instance, add their voice to the demand for accountability amongst celebrities. We all ought to join hands in seeking to ensure that we leave the world a better place than we found it.
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