0069Ā Ā |Ā Ā April 29, 2019
Michael Jackson: The One Percenters of Celebrity
Megastars like Michael Jackson seem to be exempted from critiques of their wealth. Rarely do you hear Jay-Z or Tom Hanks referred to derisively as “the one percent.” Why don’t we care about extremes of wealth in our entertainers?
C.T. WEBB: 00:19 | [music] Good afternoon, good morning, or good evening, and welcome to The American Age podcast. This is C. Travis Webb, editor of the American Age, and I am speaking to you from Southern California. |
S. FULLWOOD: 00:29 | Hi. This is– |
S. RODNEY: 00:30 | Hi. No. Go ahead [laughter]. Go ahead. |
S. FULLWOOD: 00:33 | So this is Steven G. Fullwood. I am the co-founder of the Nomadic Archivists Project. I am coming from Harlem. It’s rainy here. It’s a little overcast, as well as gray, but it feels good. |
S. RODNEY: 00:45 | Yeah. I’m Seph Rodney. I’m an editor at Hyperallergic and on the part-time faculty at Parsons. And I am kind of tired of the – as Plath would call it – desultory weather. I would like to move on from this and get to the May flowers part [laughter] of the limerick. And with that, that’s my two cents to lead us in. |
C.T. WEBB: 01:14 | This is to remind our listeners that we practice a form of what we like to call intellectual intimacy, which is giving each other the space and time to figure out things out loud and together. So last podcast on Michael Jackson, we kind of went at it from a different angle, talking about sort of whether celebrities of Michael Jackson’s caliber sort of function as kind of deities and what those gods require as sacrifices in order to participate in their world. And so I have a question. It kind of comes out of that but also in more practical terms, as well. And now, this may– neither one of you may answer this in the affirmative. I’m actually not sure what you think about this, and I’ve not detected it in any of our other conversations, but it is certainly true in general that people tend not to be as upset or bothered by the extremes of wealth that celebrities possess. Not the ways that they are bothered by the extremes of wealth of, say, CEOs or captains of industry. The immorality of mass accumulations of wealth doesn’t seem, in the mainstream, to me, to touch celebrity in the same– now, it still touches athletes. Right? You get lots of jawing around overpaid athletes. A lot of people– it’s certainly true of all sports but definitely true around kind of college football versus professional football, college basketball versus professional basketball. And so there seems to be some offense that is taken around athletes accumulating that money. And obviously, there’s a whole way to read that from a racial lens, I mean, which is going to probably help lead us to some kind of insights. But I’m talking about celebrity, and my reading of how most people look at the vast sums of wealth that people like Michael Jackson when he was alive, Jay-Z, certainly Madonna, etc., etc. Actors, as well. I mean, I think actors fall under the– why do you think– or maybe you don’t think this is true, and in your circles, it does cause more hand-wringing. Why do you think we give a pass, why do we gloss over extremes of wealth when it comes to our celebrities? |
S. FULLWOOD: 03:59 | Well, Seph, do you want to have a stab at it? I’m still thinking through the question. |
S. RODNEY: 04:05 | I can. I can just talk until I stumble onto something that actually sounds coherent [laughter]. I do think we tend to give celebrities a pass because, in some ways, we feel that they’ve earned it. We feel that they embody some talent, some magic, that the rest of us just do not have. And I think that corporate CEOs are viewed– and I’m guessing here. But I imagine that they are viewed as pretty normal human beings. They probably have pretty good organizational skills, and they probably have a good deal of emotional intelligence. You have to in order to lead a cadre of people in an organized fashion to accomplish a business plan, in most simple terms. But to be onstage– ah. Here’s the analogy. I got it. I was watching an episode of Comedian in Cars Getting Coffee, and one that stuck with me– several of them did, but the one that is apropos right now is the one where Jerry Seinfeld is having a meal with Chris Rock. Have either of you seen this? |
C.T. WEBB: 05:27 | I have not. I have seen Comedians in Cars, but I have not seen this episode. No. |
S. FULLWOOD: 05:31 | Exactly. |
S. RODNEY: 05:32 | Okay, cool. So they’re sitting down to a meal, and Chris Rock turns to Jerry and he says, “Can you imagine if you came to your child’s kindergarten class and–” and he was making an analogy between what they do and what a child of theirs might do. “You came to your child’s class, and they were standing up and they were declaiming. They were just telling stories, and the whole class was just sitting there in rapt attention, just watching him or her. Right? You would think, ‘This child is possessed. Like, what the fuck are they doing listening to him? What is he going on about? Like what?'” And he said, “That’s the thing about what we do is that we can speak 1,000 people. Right? We can speak to 10,000 people, and there is something about that.” And that’s the sort of small end of the scale. Right? Just that you can comfortably speak to large numbers of people and hold their imaginations for a good amount of time. Now take it to Prince – right? – who can speak to 50,000 people, 80,000 people at a time, play an instrument, sing, coordinate activity around him, visual-oral activity around him, diverse instrumentation, syncopation, guest stars coming on the stage with him, and costumes, and lighting, and you have what is, in essence, a kind of elaborate magic show. You have something that, really, we don’t have anywhere else in our experience. So I think for someone like Prince or Michael Jackson, Jay-Z, they do something that I think people cannot do for themselves, and they recognize that all those things make them somehow, yes, godlike. Whereas the CEO, people– and I actually do think this, that they do have a modicum of intelligence, emotional intelligence and organizational intelligence and verbal intelligence. You can probably work your way up to a relatively high perch in a typical corporation, assuming, of course, that you have some knowledge of that thing that the corporation makes or produces, la la la. Do you see? So I feel like because they are so special, the expectations aren’t that they shouldn’t have as much money as Howard Schultz or someone like that. |
C.T. WEBB: 08:47 | I don’t know if I believe that about CEOs, the characterization. But I find that characterization of what celebrity means– I find that plausible. But Steven, I’m sorry. You were about to step in. |
S. FULLWOOD: 09:01 | No, no, no. You gave me a second to figure out how I was going to frame this. So I don’t know if celebrities have actually earned it. I think we’re talking about some celebrities, obviously. Right? [inaudible] extreme wealth. So when you first posed the question, I was like– well, I think the reason why people sort of give entertainers a pass when it comes to extreme wealth versus, say, a CEO– entertainers hit us differently than a CEO or a baron of industry. They’re more magnetic. And I think the key thing here is, regardless if it’s sports, entertainment, or the military, these are jumping-off points for certain people to get out of the ghetto or get out of a certain economic situation. And so I also feel very strongly that people identify with celebrities in ways that they don’t identify with CEOs and other folks. There’s something about them that says, “I can do that, too,” which I think is very different than Steve Jobs or some people who are more– they’re sort of between the two, a business person [and?] Steve Jobs who has a personality. He’s always wearing black, a black turtleneck and all that. So he’s a face. He’s a different kind of face. But for someone like– because I was thinking of someone who has extreme wealth, like a Kim Kardashian. And a couple episodes back, we were talking about Kim Kardashian and, “What do they do all day long?” Well, and I mentioned, I think people want to do nothing all day long but do their nails [laughter] and go get their hair done and social medias and [whip?] themselves into wealth. That there’s something that people can attach themselves to around celebrities. I was thinking about Confidential magazine, and I was thinking about the sort of history of celebrities, and there’s an aura. There’s a star thing. There’s something glowing about it. But I live in New York City. People come here to be stars. People come here to be that thing. And I think that having that kind of ambition or that kind of– even if you don’t have the ambition and you’re just kind of like, “Oh, they’re so wonderful and beautiful,” that’s the smokescreen. That’s the thing. You’re maybe not thinking about what they do with their extreme wealth. And the pass, I think, is that they’re stars [laughter]. |
S. RODNEY: 11:19 | Well, what I’m really intrigued by is that we are essentially saying opposite things, Steven. You’re saying that– |
C.T. WEBB: 11:25 | Yeah. You guys are [laughter]– |
S. RODNEY: 11:27 | You’re saying that you think that regular people feel that celebrities are really just a sort of hand’s breadth away. Arm’s length. They could possibly have the life that they have. Right? |
S. FULLWOOD: 11:39 | But we’re saying the same thing in this way, though. I think, of course, most people won’t be extremely wealthy. Of course, people won’t be entertainers in that way because they don’t have that talent. So I agree with you on the talent part. But there are a lot of celebrities who aren’t as talented who made a lot of money. |
S. RODNEY: 11:57 | Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s worth mulling over. I just wanted to make it clear to the listener that we are, in some ways, on opposite ends of this argument right now. Because it seems to me that– but it’s hard to talk about this in this way because I end up saying stuff like, “Well, I think people think [laughter] that CEOs are more like regular folks.” |
S. FULLWOOD: 12:20 | Yeah. Yeah. I agree. |
C.T. WEBB: 12:21 | Me, too. Me, too. Yeah. |
S. RODNEY: 12:21 | But I don’t know that that’s the– that’s so obviously, porously anecdotal. I don’t know what to do with that. |
C.T. WEBB: 12:28 | If I could maybe try and bring it to a point, I don’t think what people think about it is all that relevant when we’re talking about large-scale social phenomena because I think people are enacting– I don’t mean that their lives are scripted. I definitely do not mean that. I do believe that people play off of social institutions and social mores in their own unique ways. I definitely believe that. That being said, I feel like our accepted notions around morality are fully socially constructed. And so, as a society, whether people think about it this way or not, I would lay money on the fact that it is true that there is less moral outrage around Jay-Z making $100 million– or I kind of pulled that number out. I don’t know if it’s 100 million. It’s a lot of money. Or Prince. Or fill in the blank. Maybe you get some cultural clashes around hip-hop music, country music – I mean, certainly that kind of stuff – but, I mean, just the actual access to excess material wealth, I think, reflects something around our aspirations not necessarily to be lazy, though I do think Steven’s right [laughter] that I think that that is an absolute aspiration for many people. I think that is an accurate read. But what music– I feel like you were kind of onto something when you were sort of talking about the aspirational path that entertainment provides. Right? The narrative is around being discovered, about the inner quality of the person being seen and revealed, and a kind of authenticity emerging so all the world can see sort of the light that is inside of you, that we don’t extend that story to labor – right? – to the people [laughter] sort of climbing the– our language is climbing the corporate ladder. Right? Even this sort of kind of wheeling and dealing, and MBAs, and all the rest of the sort of networking. Right? Synergy. All of the language that we put around business is distasteful. |
S. RODNEY: 15:07 | It’s not sexy. |
C.T. WEBB: 15:08 | Yeah. It’s distasteful to us. But I would say– I mean, to me, I think we’re talking an aporia– I think we’re talking about a blindness that we have, as a culture, that we’ve bracketed these two things. I feel like we are off-base as a society [laughter] when we take offense at mass accumulations of wealth in one area of capital but not in the other. Right? So this other way of accumulating sort of mass wealth is really acceptable and is all right because it’s magic. Right? Like, I think, what Seph had said. I think that magic thing is absolutely right. That is that feeling about sort of something special or unique. Anyway. |
S. FULLWOOD: 16:00 | Just thought of Cinderella, The Ugly Duckling. I was thinking about the stories that are a part of our fabric of who we think we are. Like you said, “I’m a special person.” Just watch any American Idol [laughter]. Some tone-deaf person’s coming up there. They’re, “This is the group that’s going to validate what I think about myself, and I’m going to be rewarded for this.” We don’t hear the same thing about business. No. It’s a grind [laughter]. |
C.T. WEBB: 16:23 | Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s another way we talk about it. Right? |
S. RODNEY: 16:27 | So okay. So that makes sense to me. It makes sense to me because what you’re saying, then, Steven, is that it’s not so much– how I’m hearing it is that it’s not so much about the person having some sort of special– the regular person having some sort of special talent, but rather that they are just special, period, and that they just need the mechanism by which to bring that specialness to the surface. And once people see that and discover that, then the pearly gates open, and mounds of cash start swimming towards them. |
S. FULLWOOD: 17:05 | Finally. Finally, they know they know how special I really am. Doesn’t matter if I can carry a note or two. Doesn’t matter if I’m really involved in my community or give a fuck about anybody else. Me [laughter]. |
S. RODNEY: 17:15 | I don’t need to be particularly articulate, either. I mean, and this does– I mean, I think where you see this in this sort of brightest aspect is in beauty pageants. Right? Where in the beauty pageants, you get dressed up, you essentially walk in a dress, in a swimsuit, and then there comes a moment when you’re supposed to talk about what it is that you care about [laughter], are moved by. And mind you, I have not watched– I have never, in fact, watched a beauty pageant all the way through. I’ve seen glimpses of them, of course. But the level of just dumbassery [laughter] that I experience– |
S. FULLWOOD: 18:01 | That’s [what you’re?] here for. |
S. RODNEY: 18:01 | –in hearing these women try to verbally represent themselves publicly, it’s astonishing. |
C.T. WEBB: 18:09 | Yeah. The anecdote that came to mind when you were talking, Steven, and also related to what you were saying, Seph, is– do you guys remember who Rebecca Black was? |
S. FULLWOOD: 18:21 | Exactly. I was just thinking of this. |
S. RODNEY: 18:22 | The singer. |
C.T. WEBB: 18:24 | I mean, sure. [inaudible]–? |
S. FULLWOOD: 18:25 | Call Me, Maybe? |
C.T. WEBB: 18:27 | No, no. This is the one– Friday. Friday was the song. “It’s Friday. It’s Friday. It’s Friday.” |
S. FULLWOOD: 18:30 | Right. Okay. It’s Friday [laughter]. |
C.T. WEBB: 18:32 | So the reason I remember who she was is because she actually went to my son’s middle school. I don’t know that they were friends, particularly. He knew her or whatever, but– and I remember the stories that came out at that time around Rebecca Black. So the song had gotten some airplay and some attention. I think she was on ABC and stuff like that. And cue the outrage and just sort of the umbrage at this person being sort of elevated, the jealousy that this exhibited. Because everyone wants that thing. Right? Everyone wants to be elected in that way by the community. And you got all– I mean, they got debunked at one point, but even major outlets were reporting about all the money she would have made. I think it was Forbes, actually, that a few days after kind of the initial frenzy had passed was like, “She maybe made like 70 or $80,000 off of this song. She’s not retiring as a millionaire. It’s just not true. She made a little pile of money or whatever, and that was it.” But the collective outrage– because that is how that works. Right? Once someone is actually elected, once someone is actually on Mount Olympus, then they’re idolized. But to see the people climbing to Mount Olympus– then, the claws come out. That’s like, “No, no, no. We can’t–“ |
S. RODNEY: 20:09 | You’re not supposed to climb. You’re not supposed to climb. You’re supposed to just– you’re supposed to just be beamed up. Right? |
C.T. WEBB: 20:17 | Right. Right. |
S. FULLWOOD: 20:21 | Maybe Christian angels. [inaudible]. There’s your soundtrack. Yeah. |
C.T. WEBB: 20:25 | What is that called? The rapture. The rapture. |
S. RODNEY: 20:28 | The rapture. The leftovers [laughter]. |
S. FULLWOOD: 20:33 | The leftovers. You didn’t ascend. |
S. RODNEY: 20:37 | Yeah, man. |
S. FULLWOOD: 20:38 | You did [not?]. |
S. RODNEY: 20:40 | Yeah. I do think that you’re correct, Travis, in saying that there’s a problem, there’s a blind spot in us when we allow for certain members of our expanded community – we can call it a society, I suppose – get away with or have– without imprimatur, have obscene amounts of wealth – right? – that are generally kept private. Right? There’s not like they have obscene amounts of wealth and then they’re making sure that no one in LA is homeless or that no child in the US or even in their state is going hungry. And yet, we allow another section of our society, another cordoned-off group of people to just get away with it. And I have to say– I have to say it feels– now that you said it out loud, it does feel like– it feels like part of that godlike thing. That the god gets to have sacrifices, and the god gets to not actually answer sort of more mundane, earthly concerns. And in fact– I mean, I hate talking about him, but he [crosstalk]– |
C.T. WEBB: 22:07 | Yeah. But please go. I know where you’re going– please, please, please go [laughter]. |
S. RODNEY: 22:11 | –he who shall not be named on this show, the orange menace, I think that’s what he wants. And I think, actually, in some ways, that’s what he expects. He expects people– |
C.T. WEBB: 22:20 | Oh, no. It’s entitlement. Yes. |
S. RODNEY: 22:22 | Right. Yes. We desperately want– go ahead, [Travis?]. |
C.T. WEBB: 22:24 | No. And, and it’s one reason why we hate him. Because he calls out what is actually real. When he says that he can grab women, and he can do these things, and they just let you do it, he is not lying. That is his experience, and you know what? That’s probably Mark Wahlberg’s experience. That’s probably, I mean, Tom Cruise’s experience. I mean, clearly, we’re talking about a certain entitled male. Right? I don’t know that it works in the same way for women. And there’s probably some racial component there, as well. Right? I mean, I think, probably, there’s a discomfort with black celebrity or non-white celebrity, and that encroachment, that fear that it produces. But what he says about what he is allowed to do is no lie. And I do think that it is– I mean, this is Matt Lauer. Right? I mean, this is like him locking his door and fucking the intern because he can. And that is one reason. I mean, sort of the kind of the disgust with his manners that causes such a strong reaction from us, I think, sometimes, not– as much as his politics. I’m talking about people in average, not necessarily the people in this conversation. |
S. RODNEY: 23:51 | Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that’s the thing. I mean, but there’s nothing magic about him. He is base buffoonery. Right? On his best day, he has the impulse control of a toddler and the reading skills of a toddler. So I mean, it’s like there’s fucking nothing there to pin one’s hopes to, so [laughter]. |
C.T. WEBB: 24:14 | Yeah. Yeah. Steven, you want to have the last word? I think we’re going to try and [crosstalk]. |
S. FULLWOOD: 24:19 | Oh. Do I have a last word? No. I actually enjoyed this conversation because I think– well, I was thinking about the moral sensibilities of the community. Really, it’s easy to see– well, not easy to see, but I think it might be– it can be measured in what we take in, culturally, and what we value, culturally. And so what I mean by that is why are the Kardashians still on the air [laughter]? Why are shows running for so long that we claim to hate but that– somebody’s watching it. And so that means it has some sort of– it means something to us, and it just can’t be hate-watch. Right? It can’t just be hate-watch. And so, I mean, that’s the point I kind of made earlier. But there’s something to it, and so– yeah. Yeah. I’m not sure, but there is Steven G. Fullwood’s last [word?]. |
C.T. WEBB: 25:09 | All right. Okay. All right. With that, we’ll let the conversation come to a close. And I think, are we ready to– are we moving on from Michael in the next conversation? Or you guys have something else you want to add to him in the next conversation? |
S. RODNEY: 25:22 | I don’t think that we really discussed– I think we’ve discussed a lot about Michael Jackson, but I [don’t know that?] we really discussed the ramifications of his transformation, essentially, from a black man to someone who’s not quite black. |
C.T. WEBB: 25:40 | Yeah. I think you’re right. |
S. FULLWOOD: 25:40 | I’d love to talk about that. I talked about that at the Mo Pop Conference in 2019, and I took it from a career standpoint. I’d love to find out what you guys think. So yeah. |
C.T. WEBB: 25:50 | Okay. Let’s do that– |
S. RODNEY: 25:51 | Yeah. Let’s do that. |
C.T. WEBB: 25:52 | –in our next conversation. Thanks very much for the talk today, and I’ll talk to you guys soon. |
S. FULLWOOD: 25:57 | Take care. |
S. RODNEY: 25:57 | Okay. Take care. [music] |
References
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