Project 365 New Things: Day 19

Today, for the first time ever, I watched (wait for it): Friday, by Rebecca Black.

Now, before you balk, let me stress that being the pop-cultural hermit that I am, I had actually never seen it before, only heard about it. I decided to make today's new thing something that I would never, never do if I weren't going out of my way to try something that is as yet an alien sensation to me. And it was every bit as awful as I expected. Honestly, I don't know why I do these things to myself.

That being said, I do not condone the obnoxious negative behavior that people tend to engage in when discussing this video. Yes, the song is poorly written. Yes, the artistic direction of the video isn't very good. Yes, the song is out of sync with the lips of Rebecca Black, who is not very good at singing in the first place. But I think that celebrity culture-- in which the majority of a population chooses a random person and elevates them to an insanely high status that they may or may not deserve-- can make us forget that behind that microphone and under that stage makeup, a real, live person with wants and hopes and fears lives and breathes.

We put people up on pedestals for two reasons: so that we can tear them down, and thus feel better about ourselves, or so that we can create a (false) image of perfection, thus making that perfect ideal something tangible and attainable (at least in our heads). By 'fictionalizing' real people and turning them into celebrities, we are able to explore who we are by comparing ourselves to that other person. This can sometimes be a dangerous thing, because we imagine them as, well, perfect-- or at least, only as perfect as we want them to be in our imaginations. Because (spoiler alert) celebrities are just human, that can be unhealthy for both the fan and the famous person.

Now, I'm not saying that comparing oneself to someone else is necessarily a bad thing, conceptually speaking. It's very important for humans to learn from other humans, because one of the main reasons that we are so successful as a species is that we are very social, and share knowledge with one another. Before the age of newspapers and radio, people compared themselves to people that they actually knew, and so these comparisons, by virtue of their nature, did not rise to the level of obsession that comparable comparisons do nowadays (yes, I'm looking at you, Tumblr).

This was because it would be pretty awkward to obsessively follow around someone you know in real life because a) seeing as you know them in real life, you've perhaps seen examples of their faults thrown into sharper relief, and b) wouldn't it be awkward if they came to your house and saw all those swimsuit photos of themselves plastering your bedroom walls? But because we don't actually know celebrities, it's easy to imagine them the way we want to. This becomes unhealthy when we forget that they are real people and either start bashing them in ways we would never do to people we know, or start making ourselves miserable by believing that we can never be as physically attractive or talented as the idea of that person that we've cultivated in our minds is.

Perhaps I'm getting a bit too philosophical over what is really just a bad music video, but that's what I took away from this experience, and so that's what's going on this blog. Deal with it.

Hope your day was filled with pretzels and/or other lovely things,

~Maddie