All You Need to be Famous is a Hairbrush

All You Need To Be Famous Is A Hairbrush

Hey All,

I discovered recently that all you need to be famous is a hairbrush, a video camera, and a big bathroom mirror.

I never thought that the days of air-guitar bands holding equal footing with the cheerleading squad and the football team would come back around but in a sense, they have. I just spent the morning looking over fan-made videos to the latest Kelly Clarkson single "Never Again"over at Yahoo Music.

Sometimes hard research takes one to dark places...

For a generation raised on Jerry Springer, The Real World, and Survivor, who've probably never heard of Andy Warhol and his prediction of our unified future fame, where any press is good press, where any exposure is good exposure, its no big thing to fake up your own rock video with a music file and a web cam.

Lip synching before the bathroom mirror was once a secret pastime for at least three generations, but in the 1980s, the barriers between public and private exhibitionism began to dissolve. Now I wonder, do they exist at all?

One cannot argue with the subtle brilliance of the Fan Video campaign. In no uncertain terms, it builds a web community around an artist, and ensures fan solidarity. With the release of former American Idol finalist Kelly Clarkston's latest single, Yahoo invites dozens of fans to submit their homemade videos to the Yahoo Music site.

Things haven't changed much in the body language of Lip Synch performance, would-be rock stars still rely heavily on the flipping, tossing, and preening of one's hair as a key emotive device, any cylindrical device clutched in the hand seems to conduct sound, and subtly is equivalent to foreign currency-it has no value here...

But for all the online unification of Clarkston fans, there is one thing in common, their isolation in the global community. No, really. Look at the videos and you'll find a vast majority of them made by a single person (usually female, but there are a handful of males) working at it alone in their bedrooms. You can tell the setting quite clearly from all the background dÇcor; the stuffed animals, the lace curtains, floor length mirrors, and posters of Orlando Bloom.

Old School Air Band performers, on the other hand, have always been a pretty shameless group, they get up on stage with their tennis rackets and entrenching tools and sell their songs like life hinges on it. But these new web cam performers create their work in isolation, upload it, solicit critiques from their peers, and, if very lucky, see their efforts bashed (edited) into a complete video featuring a collage of fan-made contributions. But never do they (I imagine), nor will they, find themselves before a live audience. It's all-virtual, and it's all very safe-for all concerned, to be sure.

The Air Band performer, in most cases, has everything they need to perform...save talent. That is to say, they have a modicum of stage presence and focus, and (God help us all) perhaps even a smidgeon of charisma. This isn't so evident with web cam synching. It's a private act made public, made "pseudo-private" by the virtue of cyberspace. There is no theatricality to the performance as you would find in the soul of the Air Band.

My point is that the web cam performer can construct a virtual rock star fantasy, complete with rock video, without the muss and fuss of things like stage fright, hot lights, crowds, or flying objects, whereas the old-school Air Band performer of old has to get up stage, at the risk of being pelted with corn cobs and put their fantasy currency where there silently-flapping mouths are and really, really go for it.

Where's the art in emoting for your web cam I ask you?

In the bigger picture, I'm sure it really doesn't matter, because web cam performers participate in something I shall always applaud; a contribution to a community. And community, at one time in the dark reaches of our ancestory, was the goal of a theatrical performance--its purpose was to bind us together...

...It's just tough to peg a no talent twink with a gooey-gray orange on line.


More later,
Coletrane