Why Are Pop Stars as Big as Ever When Other Celebrities Aren't?

Over the years I have written about the decline of celebrity, and seen this as partly a matter of broad social and technological developments (like the fragmentation of pop culture), but also developments relevant to particular kinds of celebrity (like the way that franchises and hyper-edited special effects-packed spectacle have overshadowed actors and thus stars in the biggest movies around, or sports have become less central to the entertainment-media world with all that means for how big a sports star can get).

However, music would seem an exception--this an area where the biggest Names are as big as they ever were, maybe bigger. (Pre-Taylor Swift, how many recording artists were honored by TIME as "Person of the Year?")

If one sees such a phenomenon as telling us something about the state of the culture in which we live it seems reasonable to give a moment's thought to explaining it.

One attempt by the BBC's Steve McIntosh to explain the matter (actually as attentive to the decline of the film star as the prominence of the pop star) stresses, on the positive side, the sense of closeness of people to pop stars in a way not the case with actors. He makes much of the personal connection people feel with a singer listening to their song, and especially the presentation of many of today's top pop stars as singer-songwriters, the source of their own lyrics which therefore mean that much more.

This can seem plausible--but also questionable. Pop stars and their performances are as manufactured a product as anything else, down to the voices we hear in the recordings as processed as any image to come out of Industrial Light & Magic, and their lyrics that we are only told they wrote, while these, are just part of productions that, whether the matter is a concert, music video, or even just the sound we hear through our earbuds, the musical equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster for the vast deployment of money, personnel, technology in the making of that sound to create an effect, and out of the effect a professionally marketed image. Live concerts, even concerts seen by way of concert films like The Eras Tour, add a crowd aspect that, I think, complicates any sense of intimacy between listener and singer. And as for the content itself . . . to the extent that fans feel emotional intimacy with the performer, it is more than ever a matter of intimacy with a raging narcissist.

Of course, that in itself does not mean that this sense of intimacy, of connection, is not there--just that this sense involves a good deal more illusion, delusion and frank deception than many realize, as fans give a pass to some very unattractive traits in their idols. (Narcissism is no way to make friends and influence people, but those of hierarchy-respecting conventional mind accept, defend, even celebrate, narcissism in a "star.")

It seems to me that other things are going on as well--like the combination of that intimacy with remoteness. As McIntosh points out, actors spend a lot of time promoting the movies they star in (so much so that many in the press looking for cheap non-structural explanations of Hollywood's lousy box office year in 2023 blamed the actor's strike's disruption of their promotional efforts) but the biggest names in popular music maintain a greater distance from the public, to the point of almost totally keeping clear of the press. McIntosh treats this as a reflection of their stature, but one can at least see this as contributing to their stature--for a star is supposed to exist in the heavens, and not on earth. (One can also see the touring so essential to a recording artist's career as a promotional tour, but a subtler one than doing interview after interview more in keeping with that remoteness and its fascination.)

All that said, it also seems worth thinking about the fact that the biggest names, like Taylor Swift, have been around for quite some time now--Swift having had her first big hit way back in 2006, in a different media universe, before the smart phone, before streaming became what it is, before a good deal else made for the fragmented media universe in which we now live. Beyoncé, the only figure who I think can be compared with Swift, made her name even earlier. It does not seem implausible to think that those who arrived on the scene later than they will never get to make so big a splash--that what we are looking at is "peak pop star," and that perhaps not too many years from now we will be looking back and thinking that, just as today we remember Michael Jordan and think no sports star since has loomed quite so large culturally since his day, no one ever got to be as Swift was in her extraordinary heyday.