- She hasn’t had a concert tour in years.
- She’s as smart as a post.
- Her ex-husband is a smart as a post.
If we all just would ignore her, she would disappear from the news.
She’s still surfing on that jail bait/naughty schoolgirl persona from 7 years ago, coupled with her playing out every stereotype of behavior associated with Caucasians Living in Transportable Domiciles. The buyers of celeb rags eat that shit up. Other media notice that People outsells The Economist , they follow suit, and now we can’t get these bleached cows-dead or alive- out of the papers.
I’ve been thinking about this lately since all the Britney stuff comes behind the Anna Nicole fascination.
I think there must be some comfort in seeing people who have more money, are (or used to be) beautiful , talented and famous and they still aren’t happy. So we somehow feel superior in a way…“She had all the money in the world and is still a mess, makes me feel better about being poor and happy”.
I also found it interesting when I read somewhere that Britney’s main income has been coming from her perfume sales the last few years and now that is dropping like a rock. So she might not have alot of money for much longer!!
She isn’t. Never really has been. She’s a mere blip on the media screen. What we are seeing now is her denouement.
… if she remembers to wear her underwear we won’t have to see her denoument ever again…
She’s significant because she is able to call attention to herself in ways that makes interesting stories.
- Blonde
- Boobs
As demonstrated by Anna Nicole Smith, that’s all you need to be famous.
I don’t think she is significant. I certainly wouldn’t have started a thread about her - why did you?
I’m not sure how it’s spelled, but I heard a bit of a program this week on NPR (probably Monday) which talked about “fame-yness”. Emphasizing that it used to be that people who were famous had some substance to them, but due to the prevelance of the tabloid press, and the blogosphere, and various other factors I don’t remember, there are now people who aren’t so much “famous” as they are possesed of “fameyness”. Perez? Hilton, who aparently spends his time reporting on Paris Hilton, etc. was a key person in this discussion.
While listening to the discussion of how this is a new phenomena, I was underwelmed. But it’s possible I’m just not old enough to remember what life was like before famyness.
Update:LA Times OP-ED column by Meghan Daum whose ideas about “fame-iness” got her on Talk of the Nation February 19, which is where I heard her.
Brittney is perfect for the tabloids. She is half Courtney Love and half ANS.
She’s significant to me because I’d still very much like to do her.
I wouldn’t call it a new phenomenon; the Victorians did it too, though to a lesser extent. It’s happened for over 100 years now (at the least; I bet there were some Regency celebrities like that 200 years ago too), and as we get more and more mass media, faster communication, and lots of little cameras, it just happens more often and with higher saturation, to a wider audience.
Back in the day, when most people lived in small villages and towns, you could gossip about your neighbors and know that everyone you were speaking to would know who your talking about. The Preachers daughter who can’t keep her legs shut, the young farmer who cheats at cards, the weird old woman who lives alone and talks to herself, etc. People like to gossip, it makes good small talk and social bonding (except for the target of the gossip, of course).
Now we live in larger communities that don’t intersect much, so gossiping about say, our workmates to our neighbors isn’t going to necessarily make much sense, since the two groups are unlikely to ever meet and probably don’t care what members of the other group are up to. So now we have a bunch of minor celeberties who become more important to us for having the titillating details of thier life known by everyone then for whatever made them famous in the first place (I wasn’t even sure what Ana Nicole Smith was famous for till I looked it up a few days ago). They fill a nitch, I can talk to basically anyone about the Brad Pitt/Jennifer Aniston break up, and they’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. As an added bonus, there’s little chance that I’ll offend or piss off anyone, so it beats making small talk about religion or politics or the like.
I don’t think its such a bad thing in moderation, we can’t spend all our time talking about Quantum Physics and rival national Health Care policies after all. But it is a little depressing when a story about Britney’s haircut takes up half the time on the news networks.
dangermom,
Your opinion is more or less in line with my own. But the claim they made during the time I was listening to the program was that this “fame-iness” without any good reason to be famous is new.
Of course, just because someone writes a column and gets a few minutes to talk on NPR doesn’t exactly prove that she’s got a hold on some big chunk of absolute truth.
Well, I think she’s so insignificant that I wouldn’t even post in a thread about her . . . D’oh!
The Gabor Sisters (and Mama Jolie) were “famous for being famous”. At least they had class & style (and in the case of Eva - a modicum of talent) to back it up. ZsaZsa Gabor would be Paris Hilton’s step-great grandmother, but the apple has fallen far from that tree.
VCNJ~
This reminds me of an old “Beavis and Butthead” exchange:
“Why is he on TV?”
“Because he’s famous.”
“Why is he famous?”
“Because he’s on TV!”
The point was meant to be that she is made significant by people’s interest in her. I’m not interested in her, but I do find the phenomenon itself - in this case, people’s interest in her, interesting.
I’ll agree with all thre paragraphs. For several years I lived and worked in a small (pop. 30,000) city. My friends back in the big city were shocked with the tales of adultery, drug use, embezzlement and other assorted human failings that I would bring with me when I visited.
I explained to them that my little city was no more or less corrupt than any other area, but in a place that size, it was virtually impossible not to know (or at least have friends who knew) just about everyone.
While the term may be new, the concept behind “fame-iness” is NOT new. It owes a lot to The Image by Daniel Boorstin, a book that first came out in the 1960s, which I believe is responsible for having popularized the term “famous for being famous”.
As for Britney herself, I agree that a lot of the appeal is that a lot of us find it comforting to see that money and fame can’t buy happiness…it makes us feel better about having a normal, mundane life ourselves. Some people’s purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others. 