The Shining Ones

luka

Well-known member
I posted Katy Perry's Teenage Dream to our birthday party thread.


And I was watching the video and scrolling through the comments and

"To the people who are not teens trust me this is not what teenage life is like: it's just a dream"

And it reminded me of what I was saying at the start of the year

"The universal is the face of the market. In some very strange way these people become the mouths and bodies of capital. I've talked about this a little bit before. How we are trolled by these young, beautiful rich faces, but the actual voice is impersonal. It doesn't belong to a human."

These huge flawless faces looming over us and laughing. Though what I was actually thinking of when I wrote it was songs like

 

luka

Well-known member
This video was one of the things which really crystallised this perception for me

 

luka

Well-known member
And previously I've linked it to Americas unofficial religion, The Law of Attraction. The magical ability to manifest your desires. Under this belief structure the rich and the famous are those who have Learned how to use this underlying magical law of the universe, mastered those forces.
 

luka

Well-known member
Beyonce (Cloned Queen Nefertiti) Orders Fans To Bow Down To Michelle Obama (Another Possible Egyptian Clone)
 

luka

Well-known member
"In Soviet Russia you would have been forced to give up any notion of artistic freedom if you wanted a slice of the pie. In today’s Russia, if you’re talented and clever, you can have both. This makes for a unique fusion of primitive feudal poses and arch, postmodern irony. A property ad displayed all over central Moscow earlier this year captured the mood perfectly. Got up in the style of a Nazi poster, it showed two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan ‘Life Is Getting Better’. It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it’s not quite serious either. It’s sort of both. It’s saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we’re just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we’re making money playing it and won’t let anyone subvert its rules). A few months ago there was a huge ‘Putin party’ at Moscow’s most glamorous club. Strippers writhed around poles chanting: ‘I want you, prime minister.’ It’s the same logic. The sucking-up to the master is completely genuine, but as we’re all liberated 21st-century people who enjoy Coen brothers films, we’ll do our sucking up with an ironic grin while acknowledging that if we were ever to cross you we would quite quickly be dead."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n20/peter-pomerantsev/putins-rasputin

The Katy Perry video is this exactly. The sucking up to the master is completely genuine.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Is it just a dream of mine or did rap only really really get big when it became very bling orientated?

Puff Daddy exemplifying the American dream. A mogul, with his own clothing label and cologne.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Complete sidebar but the thread title triggers:

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
 

version

Well-known member
"To the people who are not teens trust me this is not what teenage life is like: it's just a dream"

This is a problem I've always had with American high school/college films. The reality just can't compete and that sense of missing out on the image you've been sold can suck the life out of people.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
That must be more acute now with Instagram

The feeling that you're the only one living an unideal adolescence.
 

version

Well-known member
Nobody actually fits the ideal though, the Kardashians are basically the Instagram benchmark and they've had to have masses of surgery and still 'shop their photos. It's a fantasy.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
I don't think talent or hard work or luck or whatever they possess that have allowed them to become celebrities is very exciting. But I am drawn to them because they have experienced life at that level.

The fame and the money. What's at the end of it? We have an idea that it will fulfill our lives or grant us happiness, but we can't know for sure what's up there. With that ultrarich celebrity status comes also a philosophical enlightenment. You reach the peak of the mountain and you can look down upon the rest of us.
 

version

Well-known member
They all seem as fucked, if not moreso, as the rest of us though. I read an interview with Brad Pitt a while back where he said he had people hiding in the bushes outside his house every day trying to snap him going for a pint of milk and that he eventually just had to go hide out at a mate's to get away from them. He also said something about how grateful he was that nobody in his Alcoholics Anonymous group shopped his story to the press. That stuff seems difficult enough as it is without constantly having to worry whether whatever you open up about is gonna end up all over the internet within a few days.

So many seem to go completely nuts from the lifestyle too.

 

version

Well-known member
That was a response to what entertainment was saying, not you.

I don't think talent or hard work or luck or whatever they possess that have allowed them to become celebrities is very exciting. But I am drawn to them because they have experienced life at that level.

The fame and the money. What's at the end of it? We have an idea that it will fulfill our lives or grant us happiness, but we can't know for sure what's up there. With that ultrarich celebrity status comes also a philosophical enlightenment. You reach the peak of the mountain and you can look down upon the rest of us.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
The most fucked up are the most fascinating. The ones that reached the nirvana of the capitalist religion and saw a truth that absolutely shattered their foundation, sent them adrift. I'm deeply fascinated by Dennis Rodman and have probably seen every interview he's ever given.
 
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