I wouldn’t waste your time explaining to you who a celebrity is, because in our part of the world, anyone who appears on TV is placed into the shinning star box of celebrities. Even at the international front, being a celebrity today does not have any sort of real correlation with ‘to celebrate’.
But one thing both the deserving and worthy celebrity title holders in the West have in common is; they understand what being a celebrity is about—at least most of them do. It is about fame, it is about trading a huge percent of your privacy for silly things like red carpet appearances and turning yourself into a news punching bag so that the blogs, the tabloids and the newspapers can attack you from all angles. The Court even accepts this—to some greater extent.
The reality of life is that, you do not gain anything without having to give away something and the Western celebrities perfectly understand and embrace this.
The whole celebrity lifestyle and pop culture is alien to us but we love the West more than ourselves, so we’ve all bought into it, and since we even copy things of less substance from the West, this seems far better in value to be copied.
However, our celebrities and those who desperately want to wear the celebrity crown do not understand the relationship between a celebrity, the fans and the media. They want to become celebrities—in fact they believe they are but have no clue what the lifestyle entails.
I wouldn’t want to say they are ignorant because that does not capture it all, some are plainly stupid without any understanding of what part of their lifestyles people are keenly interested in…
No one really cares about Jackie Appiah’s Charity works, though we may pay occasional attention to that. Unfortunately, we are more interested in who she is ‘chopping down’ at night than which church she attends on Sundays.
In the world of celebrities, the only valuable news to the media and even the fans centre on what these celebrities do not want the public to know. There has always been an increasing tension of hide and seek between celebrities and the media and it will forever remain this way.
Can you imagine how far the kick-boxing between Solanage and Jay-Z travelled? My mother who does not even know who the heck Solange is had the ‘beat down’ footage on her phone. I am sure Solange does a lot of charity work and good things in this world but the media and even the real fans do not really care. Nothing Solange has done under the sun has gotten such attention before…
