In this episode, Simone and Eric discuss the decline of celebrity culture, and the impact it has had on our society. They discuss J.K. Rowling's recent caning of Emma Watson, the anti-transphobic stance taken by the transphobic right, and Taylor Swift's decline in the public eye.
00:00:00.000Hello, Simone. Today, we are going to be doing something of a follow-up to an episode that we did recently that we called The Last Show on Earth on how, you know, sort of Hollywood and the zeitgeist movie or the zeitgeist television show was no longer a thing.
00:00:17.060And the thing that sort of connected the world was U.S. political theater and the conversation around that. The Trump White House, the Trump, the Elon thing, everything like that, right?
00:00:31.140Today, we're going to be focused on the other side of this, which is the collapse of celebrity culture.
00:00:37.520And how little relevance, and I think you'll be shocked by some of the stats that we're going to go into, celebrities have on our society anymore.
00:00:47.720Yeah, well, there's been some recent, you know, just absolute caning of Emma Watson.
00:00:52.400I don't know if you saw this by J.K. Rowling, where Emma Watson is basically like, hey, you know, I'm besties with J.K. Rowling, I'll always be friends with her.
00:01:01.220And it's like, we remember everything you were saying about her, you psychopath.
00:01:06.120Like, J.K. Rowling remembers when you thought it was cool to defend this whole trans thing and the gender transition of minors and forcing women in spaces where they are not safe to have trans women inserted into them, whether it's prisons or anywhere else.
00:01:23.580And J.K. Rowling was like, hey, can we have, like, a reasonable conversation about this?
00:01:28.640Which, really, she got defenestrated before she began to go more and more right.
00:02:26.920I can only imagine the existential horror of being a trans kid in the U.K. right now.
00:02:31.720With people trying to get those unaliving numbers up to actually prove that not transitioning minors has any potential negative effects to them.
00:02:39.520All you gotta do is just read the words on the teleprompter here.
00:03:21.520But to not talk on that, I also want to use Taylor Swift's decline recently in sort of the public eye as sort of a framing device for this.
00:03:32.120Because I think in many ways, Taylor Swift was the last celebrity.
00:03:39.820The last true pop star that had a giant fan base that cared what they thought, the drama in their lives, their politics.
00:03:50.160And if you're young and you're watching this, you don't, like, get the way it used to be.
00:03:57.580When I was growing up, you would see people, celebrities, like actors, whose only qualification is that people knew them as actors, go on major news stations, like CNN or MSNBC, and give their thoughts on, like, wars or, like, political developments.
00:04:22.680If you watch Team America World Police, the Matt Stone, Trey Parker, very good puppet thing, if you haven't seen it, I think it's hilarious.
00:04:30.380And it's gotten a lot better with age as well.
00:04:32.440It's like they really predicted a sort of zeitgeist.
00:04:35.340And it's funny that when it came out, it was considered an anti-Republican movie because it was seen as criticizing American foreign policing, which was like a Republican issue.
00:04:47.800And now it would be seen as a pro-Republican issue movie because it's criticizing America policing the rest of the world with our troops.
00:04:56.340It's so interesting that that switched and it went from an anti to a pro-Republican movie.
00:05:00.360And there's the Film Actors Guild, a.k.a. F.A.G.
00:05:06.680The point I was making here is the cultural power of celebrities was huge.
00:05:12.940When you walk through checkout lines in stores, you know, any store, any grocery store growing up, I don't know if you have vivid memories of this, you would have these just, like, racks of magazines.
00:05:24.680And the magazines would all be covering what was going on personally in celebrities' lives.
00:07:03.660But the whole, I think that the reason why they went up there and they did this is celebrity culture in the 90s was like, you would actually do stuff like this and everyone would be forced to cheer for you.
00:07:17.100Like, because, and if people don't understand what led to this, I want to talk about, like, what led to this before I get into the statistics of what caused it all to break apart.
00:07:50.500The problem is, is that none of those outlets could really criticize because I am a CNN, right?
00:07:57.460Well, my parent company owns their label company, right?
00:08:02.720Like, my parent company owns, for the movie stars, this is especially an issue because they're often owned by the same companies, right?
00:08:08.540Like, this is why it was so hard to criticize Scientology for a long time.
00:08:11.880Because the actors who are Scientologists would say, well, I won't promote my movie if The Daily Show or South Park is criticizing Scientology on another network, right?
00:08:22.880Like, and so you basically could not publicly criticize these people.
00:08:27.820And when you could publicly criticize them, it couldn't be for something that everyone knew, like their self-aggrandizing and went on a ship.
00:08:34.680It had to be some sort of gossipy thing.
00:08:37.060So the information just didn't go out there, right?
00:08:39.020But today, we, the general public, can have our visceral reaction to people wasting a lot of money on something, seeking personal validation.
00:08:47.340And we can just be like, that's ridiculous.
00:09:22.540In terms of YouTube and TikTok, now there are so many micro-celebrities that you can really get deep into the life and get tons of gossip and dirt on people in a much more intimate way.
00:09:36.180And an issue with original celebrity gossip was you never got enough.
00:09:41.320You know, the front page would make so many promises.
00:09:44.200And then it was just a bunch of conjecture from third parties speaking on background that you knew.
00:09:50.560One, like the vast majority of it was manufactured.
00:09:53.440And it also wasn't even substantive what you got.
00:09:56.340And now you can get the real deal on social media.
00:09:59.900And they're letting you into their lives.
00:10:02.300They're giving you full behind-the-scenes access that there's just no way that actual or legacy celebrities can compete.
00:10:18.340I think, I mean, there were other people who could talk on this stuff.
00:10:23.980I actually think the main reason why celebrities were in our face so much was simply because the news stations were owned by the same people who owned the record labels and the movie production studios.
00:10:34.540Well, that was even more the case when there were those movie studios that literally, like, ran every element of celebrities' lives.
00:16:15.400There just haven't been that many new celebrities outside of, like, genuine interest through social media and stuff like that generated any time recently.
00:16:23.260So I will say there is still celebrity gossip.
00:16:32.400And there are a few young celebrities that do get a decent amount of attention, what they wear, the way that they break up marriages or cheat or do things like that gets decent coverage.
00:16:43.460And especially the way that they flame out.
00:16:46.140While Harry and Meghan messed up by banking on the fact that merely being celebrities would be enough and they'd be able to sell anything just because they were celebrities, there are still economies and entire careers built on just hate, hate commentary on them.
00:17:01.840So it still kind of exists, except now it exists more from a place of disrespect and not aspiration.
00:17:27.700I do think that Taylor Swift, though, is one of those few last, perhaps now waning stars who did really capture.
00:17:37.360Her album was her biggest debut in terms of actual sales.
00:17:42.040Commercial success, the showgirl album.
00:17:44.360But there's been a lot of pushback in it.
00:17:46.100We'll get to an article that came out in The Atlantic called Taylor Swift's Fairy Tale is Over.
00:17:50.640And the subtitle, the singer has everything she wanted.
00:17:53.500Her new album suggests that it's all sort of a drag.
00:17:56.800If we go into quotes on this, Slate on October 3rd said, quote,
00:18:03.260A masterpiece of cringe, this year's the life of a showgirl marks the first time I might say distance helps about a Taylor Swift album.
00:18:11.940It's not that Swift at 35 has by any means aged out.
00:18:15.880If anything, she's still acting too young, end quote.
00:18:18.560And they also make fun of the song Wishlist for being a laughable, humble brag.
00:18:22.980The New York Times, October 6th, said, quote,
00:18:25.880A deceptively modest set of songs about the facade of fame.
00:18:29.940Swift is hungry to move on from the battles of her past, but not until she attends to some unfinished business.
00:18:36.220A Hollywood reporter rundown said, quote,
00:18:38.700Every song had the potential to be a smash versus nowhere as good as it should have been.
00:18:44.240And John, this is a guy on TikTok, said,
00:18:47.240I just watched a TikTok where the creator calls the life of a showgirl everything that people have ever complained about Taylor Swift defined in an album.
00:18:55.460She's managed to sum up every criticism about everything that has ever gone into her music and just do that exactly.
00:19:01.780Now, if you're like, how bad can this be, right?
00:19:05.900Because this is one of those things where it's like, people are like, well, what if an AI wrote it?
00:19:09.880I'm like, an AI would not write this badly.
00:20:08.560Well, and she's also, I mean, like, when she did her Eras tour, people were just so impressed by the amount of physical exertion that she put into her performances as well.
00:20:17.780Like, she got a lot of respect for it.
00:20:26.440And when people like Katy Perry started to falter, and you could see, like, her dance moves on her most recent tour, and who knows what physical issues she might be dealing with.
00:20:36.640But, like, there was the one where she, like, was not moving at all.
00:20:41.220Versus, like, Taylor Swift, like, just killing herself to do all this.
00:20:47.200I think the issue, though, and I've seen some, I've watched a bunch of commentary on this by this point, is that she, for a while, was emblematic of the childless cat lady.
00:20:55.420And that really meant a lot to her single female followers.
00:21:01.280When Vance made that quip, Taylor Swift's response to that was taken as a definitive response.
00:21:25.240Like, Ophelia kind of has, the song Ophelia in the Showgirl album kind of has this theme of, like, you know, you saved me from singlehood, essentially.
00:21:34.180And people now find that very insulting, because they, now, they, like, she has invalidated what she used to validate for them.
00:21:42.400Yeah, they showed the most famous, the most wealthy, the most sexy woman in the world doesn't need no man.
00:21:51.820But now, now she meets a man, and everything else is falling apart, because also, she is white, she is wealthy, and she has a largely white, like, middle class basic bitch fan base.
00:22:08.380And, oh, and she married, like, she, or she is going to marry, like, the Chad football player, you know, basically, like, yeah, like, it, it's just, it, the one thing she had going for her that made her, that made her acceptable to the left, to progressive, and keep in mind, when we look at political divides of young men, women, they are overwhelmingly going more and more left, was the fact that she was a childless cat lady.
00:22:33.060And now that she's lost that, and all you have left is a billionaire who believes in marriage and children, and married a football player, this is not going to work anymore.
00:22:43.880And, and so I think that, yeah, I guess her, her succumbing to wanting to live a complete life has, may be.
00:22:53.060Well, and I think that, I, I mean, I would not be surprised if Taylor Swift does end up just moving right in her politics.
00:22:58.140I think it's important to remember for people who are aware of Taylor Swift today, I actually used to be a Taylor Swift fan back when she was a country musician.
00:23:10.100I don't care if it's pop country, you know, whatever.
00:23:12.020Well, I, I actually like the song Ophelia because I watched, I just watched the music video of it, and it has a big Busby Berkeley reference in it, and I love Busby Berkeley, so, like.
00:23:21.020He is the man who had this, like, there was this period in, like, the 1950s, early 60s, that had these huge, elaborate, coordinated dance scenes, often involving water, where women kind of acted like robots in clockwork, and I loved it.
00:23:37.740It's, so, you know, she, she's now golden in my book.
00:23:41.400No, but I, I think you capture something about her and her fame, and this is something that, because we did end up watching K-pop Demon Hunters, and it had something that I liked as a trope was in K-pop Demon Hunter.
00:23:51.000Was that, I always am a little confused by the versions of hell, where it's, like, and this is, like, weirdly popular in shows, where, like, you get a higher rank in hell if you were more evil on earth, and your rank in hell determines how good your life is in hell, and so.
00:24:12.320I never thought about that, but yeah, I mean, like, if, if that's the way things work, you need to, like, really lean in to your evilness.
00:24:18.240Or, like, you'll be a people in hell, you don't want that.
00:24:21.680Because that gives you either in, in, like, for example, in Hell of a Boss, it gives you additional, like, superpowers in hell, right?
00:24:28.220Yeah, you don't want to be middle management, you want to be, like, an executive, so, like.
00:24:31.640Or in other ones, it's like, oh, you know, like, Hitler is, like, a, you know, Satan's one of his generals or something.
00:24:37.660It's like, wait, he gets, like, a position of power because he was evil?
00:25:03.180No, but the point here being is, they, they pointed out the thing that, like, being a demon, being on that side is just always being empty and in pain.
00:25:14.880It sucks, but I think that part of what we're seeing, and this is what this Atlantic article is talking about, and what we're seeing in some of these songs is that Taylor Swift, and we see this on the other side.
00:25:27.240Like, we view ourselves as fighting this sort of amorphous, urban, monocultural sort of collection of demonic beings, I guess you could call them, you know, hypothetically beings.
00:25:37.700And when you pledge yourself to this side, this constant search for pleasure and self-validation, no matter how high-ranking you are, no matter if you're the general, no matter if you're the Taylor Swift, your life is a living nightmare, right?
00:26:00.120That it is, it is, and, and, I mean, one is.
00:26:03.160Well, you know what, I also think that you haven't watched it, but Succession does a great job at that, too, in depicting the empty misery of extreme wealth of Nepo babies, so it's actually been done a decent amount in contemporary media.
00:26:17.620But I'm not saying even just extreme, so I grew up around extreme wealth, and my mom was always very disappointed that she never saw me chasing it myself.
00:26:43.600Not that anyone, I mean, there are many ways to make an impact.
00:26:45.700Yeah, there are many ways that you can do that, but I just wanted to, you know, work on everything I did, try to change the world.
00:26:52.020And she could never understand, and I remember being like, mom, you took me to all those parties, you introduced me to all those people, not one of them was happy.
00:27:25.100But the point here is that it's not just them.
00:27:29.820That was one degree of unhappiness, which was just sort of hollowness that I saw in those populations.
00:27:35.720There's the other degree of unhappiness, which is the unhappiness of totally giving yourself to the urban monoculture, which seems astronomically worse.
00:27:44.060And we've talked about this from the perspective of the celebrity drug addict burnout, right?
00:27:50.060Like, it is so sort of a poetic justice that even the individuals who rise to the top, even the generals of the urban monocultural cause, you know, of eventual mass global cultural genocide,
00:28:08.420so that only they remain, that they are the most tortured.
00:28:13.840The average, you know, like, lefty mom or whatever is generally going to be living a decent life, right?
00:28:20.900You know, but it is the ones, and Taylor Swift, I think, shows this through this album and everything like that,
00:28:28.260is she believed that the reason why she felt unfulfilled in life, despite having everything that she thought that she wanted,
00:28:37.640and the great quote here from, you know, Jim Carrey that I always love on this is,
00:30:18.020I mean, some of the songs are also like, why are you doing a song about this?
00:30:21.260Like, she wrote a song called Ruin the Friendship that mourns a high school crush and what could have been when she's just, like, engaged, right?
00:30:30.120In the title track, featuring Sabrina Carpenter uses the Kitty Persona to lament showbiz's grind with lines that feel like Kitty Perry's cry for relief.
00:30:39.440They're like, they ripped me off like false lashes, and they threw me away.
00:30:44.620Hey, thank you for the lovely bouquet.
00:30:46.960You're sweeter than a peach, but you don't know the life of a showgirl, babe.
00:30:51.100Showgirl feels like Taylor's crying for help.
00:30:53.720All this Keel love, but she's stuck reliving high school in scooter fights?
00:30:59.100By the way, I understand that there's a song in which she refers to a really happy moment in high school where she played on a trampoline, but then she broke her arm.
00:31:07.340And this is why we don't get a trampoline, okay?
00:31:21.860She just doesn't sound like she's having fun.
00:31:23.980She has the team captain, the cushion-cut diamond, the fans who will show out for yet another branded cardigan, but Taylor Swift's life of a showgirl, and the life it seems to portray is a charmless chore.
00:31:37.720Swispin's 12th album, Pondering Familial Blunders, Rivalries, Regrets, The Countdown Clock of Her Own Moratality.
00:31:46.080What's new narratively is her football player fiancé and the happy ever after he represents.
00:31:50.980But she can't quite convince herself or the listener that she's getting what she always said she wanted.
00:31:56.380She's become too cynical to sell a fairy tale.
00:32:14.660I mean, like, it's hard to communicate these things.
00:32:16.360People are going to read in a ton of stuff.
00:32:17.680I mean, what you and I know, and what family members have told you who've been very famous, is that the stuff you get accused of is annoyingly not true.
00:32:29.780Like, the evil stuff about you that you worry about going out doesn't come out.
00:32:34.680And then, like, the evil stuff people say about you just isn't true, and that's kind of frustrating.
00:32:38.960Yeah, so I'll articulate what you're saying a bit better about fame is what was said to me by one of my famous relatives is they said that the reasons that he goes, when you become famous, a lot of people will hate you, and a lot of people will love you.
00:32:56.560And what makes it so, you know, sort of unfulfilling is that the things that people love about you aren't true, and the things that people hate about you aren't true.
00:33:35.060And I pointed this out on other podcasts, but I've noticed that the relationship people have with fame and the relationship they have with their fans actually comes down to that original quote, which is,
00:33:48.060the ones that are hated and loved for things that are true about them typically are very happy with being famous and quite like the public perception of them.
00:33:57.560The people who are hated and loved for things that are not true about them are the ones that really seem to be drowning under their fame.
00:34:10.520Yeah, because we know people who are really, really, really famous who don't like their fame, and they are also massively misunderstood.
00:34:17.720And I think that, you know, in the amount of renown that we have, it's actually fairly accurate, and we freaking love it.
00:34:25.340Yeah, like, the progressive stuff will, like, make up stuff about us, and they'll lie about us in the pieces, but they're usually not, like, they're, like, directional lies or something like that.
00:34:51.700But I think the general, like, sane person who has taken a bit of time to, like, research or try to understand us, they have a very real understanding of who we are.
00:35:18.000That is a reminder of, like, oh, they actually like me, right?
00:35:21.260Yeah, or, like, some reminder that we have to live up to an untrue standard, which I think a lot of other people really feel of, like, oh, it's not actually true that, like, I'm this healthy.