My ten-year-old loves the Taylor Swift song “Fifteen,” which opens with the words, “It’s your freshman year and you’re gonna be here / For the next four years …”
My child sings along from the back seat, happy. Driving, I feel wistful. The lyrics regale us with a tale of a kid just being a kid, going to high school, dreaming about dates, experiencing some big feelings that seem like the most important thing in the world.
Swift sings about a life she didn’t get to live.
#
In the empire of the ancient Inca, the gods were appeased through capacocha, “the essential sin.” The most perfect children were brought to the temple: children who were uncannily beautiful, precociously wise, strong of body and agile of mind, as yet untouched by time.
And there, alongside material treasures, the children were sacrificed. Murdered, one by one.
The most perfect children were given to the gods, that the gods might deign to favor us.
#
In contemporary culture, not only are celebrities deified – their visages emblazoned on magazine covers and t-shirts, imprinting our minds more frequently than any other religious icons – but also, Celebrity itself is a god above them, more multifaceted than the Hindu Trimurti, more ancient than the Norse Yggdrasil, as concealed and inscrutable as the Gnostic supreme deity who ceded this world to be ruled over by Yahweh.
Children pray to be subsumed, wanting to be influencers, wanting to be famous, wanting to be seen.
Celebrity is a hungry god, devouring the lives of its devotees.
#
Michael Jackson is a complicated figure to discuss: he ruined several people’s lives. But it’s also undeniable that the deity Celebrity devoured much of his.
Near the end of his life, Jackson pined: “It’s my dream to go into a supermarket and just shop. Just be like everybody else and put things in a basket. I want to see the real world and what it’s like and it’s really difficult.”
He didn’t get to have that dream – instead, a friend closed down an entire mall and asked a set of trusted people who already knew Jackson to pretend to be workers or other customers inside the mall’s grocery store. And, within that simulacrum of reality, Jackson pretended to shop.
He was astounded by how many different ingredients there are. In his “normal” life, food was always cooked for him. It just appeared, in a finished version.
Being in the store “was a lot of fun. It gave me a chance to see, in my way, kind of what the real world is like – even though it wasn’t the real thing. It was like being at Disneyland, in my opinion. Because I got to do something I usually don’t get to do.”
#
Chappell Roan lit a candle at the alter of the god Celebrity, and recoiled in horror when the god finally appeared.
First, there had been years of practice; untold hours crafting songs and making music videos and performing from within a public persona. Years in which there was the work and there was also her life.
Then the god Celebrity made itself manifest and opened its jaws. Yes, indeed: the god would like to devour her!
Roan has said, “I miss frolicking, obviously, because now I’m too self-conscious to frolic.”
#
Taylor Swift cannot frolic. Simultaneously both deified and yet also devoured by that even greater deity, something other than frolicking is expected of her. Swift can have fancy things – all the material luxuries that money can buy – but she’s been expected to sacrifice her peaceful public time.
“I wish I’d never grown up,” Swift sings.
#
I am grateful to Chappell Roan. It does a lot of good for the world to have an outspoken celebrity who is clearly weird, and queer, and thoughtful. Also, I’m a huge fan of her drummer, Lucy Ritter.
And I’m appalled by the idea of capacocha. The idea that we could rightfully choose to sacrifice another to our gods. Children’s lives are their own; so is Roan’s.
Michael Jackson should have been able to buy some lettuce and a lemon and attempt to make an incompetent salad.
Swift should get to walk down the street on a sunny day.
Celebrity is a hungry god, but it has no body of its own. This deity can devour lives only by possessing ours. And we, the people who profess to love these artists, don’t have to let it use us to harm them.
Frank Brown Cloud 