I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how certain artists and actors who are “famous by default” - that is, they’re purely right place/right time or lucky to be fulfilling a niche rather than particularly great or successful on their own. These people would have been b- or c-listers in any other climate, but they just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
It was spurred by reading about Rihanna, a completely and immediately forgettable, budget, cut-rate, cookie-cutter R&B singer who wouldn’t even stand out among an American Idol cast but is actually the biggest-selling and most popular performer in the genre right now. Wha?! Then I just realized that Beyonce and Destiny’s Child is kind of on hiatus, Mary J. Blige is doing that five-years-between-albums thing that she does, etc. and so Rihanna is what’s left over; famous and successful by default.
I can’t think of any band that embodies this more than Nickelback; they’re easily one of the biggest traditional mainstream rock bands out there right now, which is laughable considering how terrible and embarrassing they are, but more importantly the fact that they’re nothing more than a cut-rate Creed clone (and Creed themselves were nothing more than a cut-rate Pearl Jam clone!). So Nickelback is what happens when the band that’s famous and popular by default takes a young retirment - you become famous and popular by default BY DEFAULT. Embarrassing!
JK Rowling maybe? She’s not a perfect fit for your OP, but does check the following IMO: not particularly great on their own, would have been b- or c-listers in any other climate, immediately forgettable, budget, cut-rate writer. She brings to mind Julie Burchill’s summary of Helen Fielding (who wrote Bridgette Jones diary).
I don’t know what confluence of the planets resulted in the Harry Potter phenomenon - it’s a real head scratcher. You could probably take a PhD in Harry Potter studies nowadays, so I’m sure people have thought about it. She’s just one of those slippery phenomena that evades analysis in simple terms. What’s so special about Harry Potter? often gets answered with a lot of chin-stroking pseudery, her medicority is that impenetrable. So I guess she is (world) famous by default in some respects - take her on her merits and there is nothing particularly great about her.
Tom Clancy. He’s not that great a writer but had the good fortune to have Ronald Reagan make an offhand remark about how much he enjoyed The Hunt for Red October. Without that little bit of random P.R. the novel would probably have languished in small-press oblivion and Clancy would never have gone on to be the king of the technothriller.
My theory is: cyclical interest in fantasy plus 9/11 = Harry Potter.
Seriously. Fantasy has always been sort of cyclic, with movies/popular books/games/motifs/etc. coming around about once every 15 years or so. Harry Potter dropped right when it was due for its next cycle, but then 9/11 happened, which caused people to feel a need to escape. Harry Potter was already enjoying success because of the cyclic fantasy thing, but 9/11 pushed it into the stratosphere.
“Silver Side Up” (Nickelback’s breakthrough CD) is actually pretty enjoyable. It’s only after they followed it up with a CD that sounded exactly the same and then another CD that included the worst song ever recorded that made people think they always sucked.
Although “things that used to be good but now suck so people think they always sucked” would be another thread.
Speaking of American Idol, most of their bigger names were people who probably never would have succeeded in the normal scrambling to musical prominence. Can anybody imagine, for instance, a Sanjaya-mania or even Clay Aiken mania without the “safe boy next door” week after week exposure building a teenaged fanbase but rather having to go with strictly the music and occasional press/publicity.
Abe Vigoda is one of the most famous actors for this category. He was cast from a cattle call strictly because Coppola liked the way he looked (tall, menacing, intelligent, ageless) and because it turned out he could act the part was beefed up a bit for him (example: Vigoda cracked up at a prank on the set one day and Coppola loved seeing him go from humorless old thug to laughing grandpa, and he added Vigoda bursting into laughter into the scene where Mike volunteers to kill the Turk and McCluskey, and in the book it’s Tom- the overachieving non-Sicilian- who decodes the Sicilian message “Luca Brazi sleeps with the fishes”, but it was given to Tessio in the movie to show that the character was very street smart).
Vigoda was cast almost by accidence and he turned it into a career. He had some minor stage and very minor screen credits (walk-ons and extras) before GODFATHER but had pretty much given up on being able to pay the bills with acting. The next year he got Barney Miller because he showed up grumpy and sore from a workout (Vigoda was a major jogger even as a senior citizen) and the audition was for a grumpy sore old cop.
Terry Brooks. I don’t understand how the first Shannara book was commercially successful; it was one of the biggest pieces of shit I have ever attempted to read. (IMHO, Thomas Covenant was not much better, but the real world/leper chapters demonstrated Donaldson’s ability to write).
Simple. Terry Brooks rewrote LOTR. The promotional materials that came with the book explicitly said he had to rewrite the first half to remove a lot of the similarities, but what was left still reeked.
One can argue that Ringo Starr’s career was due to his being at the right place at the right time. If the Beatles hadn’t dumped Pete Best, Ringo would have been just another Liverpool musician (even if the Beatles hit it big without him).
Ian Fleming became a major author because JFK listed Dr. No as a favorite book.
Idol itself seems to be a phenomenon no one could have predicted. Don’t get me wrong–I have a huge weakness for it–but it’s one of the lamest, corniest things out there. The TV business has tried over and over to replicate its success since then (eg, every talent competition now has a 3-member panel with a snarky foreigner and two washups), but the juggernaut cannot be reproduced.
If someone would have told me, in 2000, that the biggest show of the next decade would be a 2-3 nights-per-week knockoff of Star Search, spread out over six months of each year, and with an extra-large helping of schadenfreude, I would have died laughing. But here we are.
I’ll ‘third’ the JK Rowling thing. I made my way through 1/2 of the first Potter book…and I wondered what the fuss was about. If I had to pick a fantasy series for a young adult, I’d give them Susan Cooper’s *Dark is Rising * series, or Lloyd Alexander’s *Prydain * series. Or straight to Tolkien. If the person was older and looking for something escapist, I’d point them to Gene Wolfe (no-one said “escapist” had to be nice).
I’d also thrown just about any bubblegum band/boy/girl into the mix. I think that Backstreet Boys (and N’Sync, and 95 degrees, and O-something) were in the right place at the right time. Same for Spears/Aguilara/Simpson, etc.
You could probably put Jessica Simpson in a category by herself. She was an also-ran until she had her Chicken of the Sea moment. How sad.
Peter Straub. He’s a good writer but he greatly benefited from circumstances he had nothing to do with. Horror fiction was a minor genre in book sales and probably would have remained there. But Stephen King came along and broke through into a whole new level of popularity. Readers were clamoring for King books but there was a limit to how many he could write. So publishers fed the demand by pushing books by other authors who were similar to King and Straub’s sales benefited from him being a King-like author at the right time and place.
Dane Cook. There has never been a more bland, homogenous, sanitized, canned “edgy” comedian. But there’s nobody else out there doing REAL edgy, boundary-pushing comedy, so he gets to pass himself off as some sort of “rebel outlaw.”
This seems to have become a “Bitch about popular artists you hate” thread. In an effort to change the direction a little, I’ll offer:
The Ramones. If it hadn’t been for stadium rock, and the whole FM-AOR genre entering self-parody, they probably would have come and gone by 1977. They just happened to be doing the right kind of music at the perfect time for it.
JK Rowling. It had nothing to do with 9/11 (She was already a three-book phenomenon at the time); it was about the different tone her books had. They were written at a very low comprehension level, but they sounded adult at the same time. I think they appealed to parents born in the 60s because of it, and of course appealed to children as well.
Wow, I couldn’t disagree about this more. The Ramones took a love for Phil Spector, Wall of Sound pop and married it to simple, distorted guitars and teen obnoxiousness to create memorable, enduring and hugely influential music.
Now, if you want to be provocative, try Elvis Presley. Remember Sam Phillips famous line? How if he could find a white singer who could sing like a black singer, he (Phillips) would make a million dollars? Well, that would suggest that Elvis was merely in the right place at the right time to fulfill Phillips’ vision. Granted, Elvis was a brilliant singer across a variety of genres…
I’m not saying that they didn’t deserve their success (in fact, I think they deserved more), but I don’t think they could have found a record deal at any other point in time.
I would have to contradict this. I had an 11-year-old in 2001, and I can tell you there was nothing moderate about the books’ success.
It was a “billion dollars” and Sam Phillips sold Elvis’s rights for $25k.
Oops.
Of course, Sam was big friends with Kemmon Wilson and had a lot of pre-IPO stock in Kemmon’s hotel venture, Holiday Inn, one of the big growth stocks of the 1950’s and early '60s. So he did all right.
