hey, anyone order some thoughts on fame, success, and morality? anyone looking for some unsolicited thoughts on community and social responsibility in response to an ultimately unimportant celebrity scandal? good news queen!
I am someone who tries very hard to hold space for mindless enjoyment and social responsibility in equal measure. I don’t think there are many opportunities in life to make a pure, untainted, certified Unproblematic choice in a world where everything comes from something and every choice has a million tiny consequences, and I think that especially in entertainment the balance of engaging with things you enjoy and holding moral standards for artists you support can come down to some very fine lines. I think that artists are humans in complicated circumstances, and we each have to make choices of what expectations we hold for the artists we choose to support, AND that background checking every artist we enjoy can be exhausting. I think that fame and success ultimately make morality complicated.
I think about this stuff a lot, especially in regards to zionism and the ultrawealthy, but also in smaller moments - how much do I have to personally like someone in order to feel comfortable supporting their art? do I hold them to the same standards as my close friends? what percentage of their decisions to I have to agree with in order to feel comfortable relating to them?
right now, I’m thinking about the current bts Discourse (google gemini collaboration+posing with chris brown after attending and posting about his concert). I spent a few years as a pretty solid bts fan, and really appreciated the thoughtful creativity and political awareness they promoted (I know if you’ve only heard dynamite+butter this probably seems insane to say, but genuinely that was the majority of their message pre-dynamite). they spoke openly about feminism, sang about social issues, gave speeches at the UN and the white house, and generally were pretty open about the things that were important to them, even as they made mistakes and learned and improved.
in 2023, there was (and still is) a huge outcry of people asking bts to use their unimaginably huge platform to speak out against the genocide - and bts, un ambassadors, political activists, human beings, said nothing. have still said nothing. have never made so much as an allusion or implication of support, even when much smaller and less powerful acts under the same company, same military restrictions, same societal pressures have spoken out. there was a video of someone in Palestine going through the rubble of a bombed home and pulling out a photocard of taehyung, along with some other memorabilia. among all the other horrific footage coming out of the genocide, that in particular was crushing even as a relatively casual fan; a reminder of the full lives being cut short and that it really is nothing but luck and circumstance separating us. bts said nothing and continued to work with mcdonalds, coke, and known zionists. that video, truly, was the last time I was able to stomach listening to their music.
imagine seeing your own face pulled out of the wreckage like that and having no public response? bts built their public persona and fan base directly and intentionally on being politically aware + active, and once that platform raised them above consequence they abandoned it. every controversy since then has been disappointing, but not surprising.
for me it’s unforgivable to choose career over morality, especially when, even if they’d lost 50, 75, 90% of their fan base, they would still be making more money in a year than most of us will see in a lifetime. I think they’ve reached a point where their success has made them feel untouchable, so activism/political awareness is an inconvenience they choose not to engage with. silence is a statement, at the end of the day - there’s no world where they’re genuinely unaware of the controversy and criticism they’ve faced in the past few years, and claiming otherwise is infantilizing a group of very well-educated men in their thirties.
there’s a lot to be said about their specific circumstance and how they got to this point (growing up under the strict kpop PR regime, controversies they’ve faced in the past, having the weight of representing their nation to the entire world put on their backs as very young adults, and not least of all having their only reentry/exposure to a ‘regular’ life after ten years in the bubble of extreme fame being the classically very feminist+moral+woke environment of the military) but it’s part of a broader conversation about fame, morality, community, and accountability.
bts is by no stretch of the imagination unique in changing their behavior since finding out they live above consequence. happens all the fucking time! and it’s sad and disappointing and incomprehensible to all of us still living down here! it took RM less than five years to go from singing “fuck AI, fuck the algorithm” to apparently admitting on live that when he can’t sleep he ‘talks to’ chatgpt. Taylor swift went from speaking out for democrats, bringing sexual assault lawsuits for $1 to prove a point, speaking out against spotify’s shitty business practices, and making music videos surrounded by drag queens and queer artists to hanging out with maga republicans, being best friends with rape apologists, and having nothing at all to say when trump uses her music for political materials. artists and actors star in ad campaigns for the very generative AI that steals their work and exploits their image. it’s almost expected that once you get rich and famous you’ll make a complete departure from your own previously established ethical standards.
so imagine for a second facing public scrutiny for years and years over things like your hair color or your dance moves or your cringy talk show appearance. you learn that public opinion is cruel. you disengage and focus on your fans - people who support you, maybe even when you do something wrong. you learn that small missteps don’t stop these people from supporting you. you still make money, you still sell out arenas, ultimately you’ve yet to make a mistake so big that a shiny new single can’t overshadow. the people around you all make money off you or are just like you, so they don’t want you stop and think! if they judged you, they’d have to judge themselves! you exist in a world where the only things that matter are things that happen To You. I think it’s a remarkably slippery slope from ‘public opinion doesn’t affect me’ to ‘the only opinions I need to pay attention to are my supporters’ to ‘what I want is more important than what other people want’ and ‘nothing I do can be Wrong if I still have fans’.
I think the thing that starts to make sense as you get older is that sometimes it does take effort and sacrifice to live by your morals. it is easier (less challenging) to live your life without considering your impact.
and sometimes the thing that keeps you from completely disengaging is shared sentiment with your community, knowing that other people are making the same difficult choice. or even sometimes, if you’re honest, ‘this is difficult but I know I’ll be judged if I abandon my morals.’
but I think it’s a privilege, truly, to live in communities with social accountability, and I think it’s sad for them that they don’t live in that world anymore. there is humanity in considering how your actions affect others, and there is growth in acknowledging your mistakes, and there is value in Caring About Stuff, and living in that Other World where all hardship can be sidestepped takes those things from you, or at least makes them easy to give up.
