Yesterday I was upset with the fans. The diehard "I-live-vicariously-through-you-in-hopes-that-I-will-one-day-be-you". I found it quite strange that people idolize Beyonce, throw themselves at the feet of Rihanna, dress like Nikki Minaj, model their lives according to the phases Jay-Z enters/leaves in his life, etc. It perturbed me to a point of annoyance and disdain. I felt slightly ashamed because the death of Michael Jackson and several artists of late brought immense pain to their fans. These artists touched them ("us" perhaps) because of the tremendous impact they made on our lives through their talents. Artists -a term which is the most all-encompassing category for the broad scope of entertainers- bring about varied emotions from their fans. The range is from ultimate hatred to apathy to appreciation to adoration to idolizing. The idolizing is what I'm having a hard time understanding.
People place entertainers on this pedestal once they're deemed worthy of it by the upper echelon puppet masters. What I'm finding difficult to discern is the difference between those who look at specific identifiably consistent characteristics of an entertainer as something they admire versus the fans who live and die by every character trait, quote, song, dance move of an artist. If most artists didn't have someone to look up to many of them may not have been where they are today. This is an attribute to the fame game. But at the same time it seems that fans follow these "society-proclaimed" role models with such devotion that they lose themselves as a singular entity by getting enraptured in the image. It bothers me to see males and females alike squabbling over whether or not one picture dictates what is going on in the life of an entertainer. It's quite frankly stupid (haven't used this word in a minute). But the simplicity of it all leads me to such a simplistic word. The men and women of my family have a habit -a good one- of not becoming followers. It was never in my blood to follow the lives of others or live vicariously through others. I can appreciate talent from afar, but let's not get it twisted, there are ARTISTS everywhere whose talent supercedes many of those who had the opportunity of joining the fame game. My life is what I make it, not what they say it should be. What the fame may tell me, may not be the truth afterall.
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