I think this is a claim worth hanging on to in an age in which celebrity can indeed be largely accidental (or at least hyper-accelerated). When Lana Del Rey says it, the immediate impulse a lot of people seem to have is to scoff at the audacity of it. How can someone who has been courted by a major record label, who re-made her image specifically to try again after her first try didn’t make much of an impact, claim she didn’t “sign up” to be famous? How could you do any more to “sign up”?

Well, it depends on how you look at fame. Fame has historically been noted for the nature of its trajectory; in the 1960s the popularization of an often-tossed-around tautologies of fame (“it’s famous because it’s famous”) makes what I think is the wrong move now that may have seemed like the right move then: One could argue that this kind of swirl of fame is highly intentional and contrived. But one could also argue that this kind of swirl is the result of how networks operate — theory that has at its heart the crucial concept of randomness.

It may be that as celebrity is more effectively “networked” (some strange amalgam of folk and top-down mass popularity — that is, mass media “priming the pump” for popularity by controlling barriers for entry) it also becomes more profoundly random. That means that one can be “struck” by fame, as one is struck by lightning, and to deride someone’s fame would be like deriding them for being outside during a rainstorm. There are many ways to shelter yourself from being struck by fame or lightning, but we wouldn’t dream (or maybe shouldn’t dream?) of victim-blaming the one who was struck by lightning. Yet victim-blaming the ones struck by fame isn’t just common, it’s the default position most commentators take on assessing and analyzing fame.

Lana Del Rey might have been “trying” to get struck by lightning, building a giant lightning rod and grasping on to it with her fingers crossed. That doesn’t strike me as an accurate way to depict the way that her PR and persona (two different things) actually worked in the world. The dropped ceiling of mainstream pop can also be thought of, in this corny (but whatever I’ll go with it anyway) metaphor as a reduction in the size and efficacy of available lightning rods. So where Lana Del Rey might have once been the “accidental contender” to Lady Gaga or Beyonce’s “playing field,” now Rebecca Black is the “accidental contender” to a playing field that doesn’t make as huge a distinction between Lady Gaga and Lana Del Rey. When fame can strike anyone, accidentally, it should (but for some reason doesn’t) get harder and harder to shoe-horn apocalyptic visions of media manipulation into the formula. But instead it seems to get easier to imagine that a minor player on a subsidiary major label was tactically using her two slow ‘n’ pretty songs to create a shitstorm around herself.

I wrote about some of this stuff in 2007, when the scorn seemed more targeted toward the teenpop world:

a blood-thirsty “adult” audience wants to have its scorn both ways—i.e., female teenpop artists like Lindsay are cynically manufactured/manipulated/marketed by their faceless middle-aged handlers, but also exclusively and personally responsible for the perpetuation and reception of their public image.

I lose the thread after that, in part because I think there was a more seismic shift happening than I could see at the time. It has something to do with expectations originating in popular theory from the boomer generation lingering into Millenial use of media, which is different, but, maybe more importantly, incompatible with mass media theory. Except I’ve always felt allergic to most “mass media theory” anyway, because of the way that it denies audience agency (“what ‘they’ do” becomes the sole focus of critique). Not so allergic, however, that I’d be willing to go “participatory,” something that I’ve seen too often stand for the equally untenable idea that “what we do with it is all that counts.”

I start to develop the idea from an attempted “celebrity” perspective a few columns later:

“fighting illness” is an accepted struggle and “fighting celebrity” is not.

And I guess where I find myself now in my thinking is wondering to what extent celebrity is a kind of disease, and to what extent it’s always been this way. The coping strategies that someone like Rebecca Black or Lana Del Rey necessarily would need to develop to not feel miserable all the time would make them delusional by design, further removing them from the possibility of normal interpersonal interaction. The deification of former celebrities, elevating them to a kind of royalty, doesn’t work when enough people simultaneously believe that celebrity is carefully planned but also happens for no good reason (emphasis on the “good,” since on any given day some other ad hoc signifier of talent or goodness or whatever else could become a good reason, for one star, in one context, that doesn’t have to transfer to anyone else). So LDR gets the (perhaps justifiable in a systemic sense) wrath and resentments of “subjects” without any of the privileges of royalty.

If celebrity-royalty is a dying paradigm, what we might be seeing is the unease with which many people come to grips with understanding their own role in the process of electing their pop leaders in a more unruly but more democratic space. If “we” made LDR and LDR’s no good (as a reality, not as a musician), then we need to talk more about us that’s no good.