MODERN CELEBRITY CULTURE, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND CONFUSION IN YOUNG CAMEROONIAN TALENT
I never thought I will find myself picking up a dictionary to refer the definition of ‘celebrity’ but there has been a lot of unfounded talk about what it means to be a celebrity here in Cameroon which pushed me to go and check again just in case I have been losing brain cells lately.
I think many people here are mistaken on the subject of celebrity. A celebrity according to the collins dictionary is “someone who is famous, especially in areas of entertainment such as films, music, writing, or sport.“ I want you to note here that the definition did not say a celebrity is someone with a good sense of fashion, physically attractive, wealthy, owns a car, and is hardly ever seen in public.
I have written on here in the past about how a false formula of how to achieve celebrity that is being propagated in our industry is going to keep many of our aspiring entertainers in the dark or derail their focus. I talked of people who want to make music but focus more on their looks than they do on their craft. There is also this belief that to be treated like a celebrity and respected, you do not have to be seen - basically you have to create scarcity as it is supposed to increase your value.
I said in that article and I will repeat here that, if you do not get pushed to the floor by people trying to take selfies with you when you move on the streets, then you have no business hiding in your house in the name of packaging. Swag is an auxiliary characteristic of being an admired celebrity - not the thing that makes you a celebrity.
I am concerned about those wanting to be celebrities by spending more time picking outfits and layering fake gold chains on their necks to give a false sense of prosperity. Instead of going out and building a fanbase through their work and genuine interaction, they chose to lock themselves believing if they act like they are already super famous, it will become a reality - in the process ‘blocking their blessing.’
I am even more concerned about the fans who increasingly overlook the positive behaviors and characteristics that they should be copying from celebrities to focus on things which do not matter. On an individual note, it might seem harmless but when we all indulge in such miscalculations, the results is a watered down, numb, and brittle culture.
The entertainment industry is one of the most vicious industries in the world and to succeed in it, you have to posses certain skills and characteristics which many people do not know how to come about. I am talking about things like work ethic, integrity, emotional intelligence, and guts. There are many more but I think those listed above can cover for everything else.
We all saw what Stanley’s rise to fame did for the urban music culture and for the youths of Cameroon in general. It gave hope to many - that they too could become acclaimed and recognized around the world. We are seeing that again with Tenor. The hope their successes brings also comes with a lot of confusion for many young people.
The point I am trying to make here is that our specific circumstances require that we have celebrities but not just any kind of celebrity. We need celebrities who are leaders and not opportunists. We need celebrities that are honest about their struggles and the realities of our society - not celebrities who want to show off without showing how. We need to redirect the focus from hype to responsibility and I believe we can do all that while making more money than we now make.
So why are we finding it difficult getting the kind of celebrities we want or should I say inspiring the growth of the kinds of celebrities we need?
Our youth find themselves in a very delicate situation. Unemployment is looming over their futures and most of the visibly successful people in this country are too old to be relatable. fortunately or unfortunately, we are also coming up in an era where the sermon on the mount is that we are all brands. An era in which influencers are becoming the new media. An era in which every one of us needs to act like a brand.An era in which our resumes are being replaced by our social media footprints. An era whose novelty also means confusion because we are basically creating the rulebooks as we go. An era which I very much like because you do not have to come from a certain background to dream and achieve certain things, fame included.
Fame used to be explained by the existence of an innate attribute or talent. To that was added the concept of manufacture with the rise of traditional media with an emphasis on image construction and packaging (hype). There was a time when we hardly got to chose who our celebrities were. They were prescreened and handed out to us. If we had to select, we had to select from the selected few that were presented to us on TV and other traditional forms of media. Now things have changed quite a lot. We chose Locko quite early on from his YouTube videos before we now see Universal having to bring him back to us in another face and to another audience who never got to pick him before - Same for Tenor. But it doesn’t end there.
That anybody can achieve fame for any reason also means there has been a depreciation in the currency of fame. We might also be tempted to believe in the complete democratization of fame but we will be wrong. Major label deals are new to us so what happens when we send Tenor and Locks off to universal is that they take them and in redefining their personalities also redefine what we vote for in our social media democratic front. Now we are no longer interested in the likes of Tenor before the Universal deal we are now expecting the upcoming Tenors to be the Tenor under Universal and that’s why we have the up comers having to do the packaging thing.
You see we end up with a win-lose situation instead of the desired win-win. Nobody really cares anymore about what Stanley did before he got Hein Pere. People trying to be the next Stanley are rather trying to do the things that Stanley is doing after Hein Pere.
How does that hurt us?
Basically, we are building a culture in the clouds; a culture with no foundation of our own. With foreign machines snatching our celebrities from us, we are seeing more of a Western celebrity culture being perpetuated in our local contexts with many negative effects on our own society which obviously has different underlying factors and realities. So instead of creating the modern age Richard Bona, they are trying to copy and paste a Lil Yatchy on our society. This has nothing to do with the sound of music but rather with everything to do with the characters and behaviors we idolize.
I am all for the importation of ideas but we have more leverage when we negotiate our hybrid culture. It is for this reason why I had to pause my musical career to write first. It is for this reason why you see me getting dirty to make my own furniture know some will make jokes out of my ‘seeming failure’ to make it as an artist.
Basically, we have different problems to solve as creatives. Globalization, urbanization, and the rapid development of consumer and pop culture have brought with them a societal fascination with the lives of mass-mediated celebrities, culminating in a sort of ‘worship’ of these figures. God knows everybody wants to be worshipped but God also know the pressures of fame and the quest of it can be deadly. Think Tiwa Savage’s husband who almost jumped off a bridge to take his own life. I wants to package the right products, not crap. I want us to show but also show how. I want us to redefine cool to what benefits our society and lifts it out of its current predicaments. Not cool that try to cover it in hype. Let’s promote doing the dirt because only by that can we enjoy the view from the clouds.
- Tino Foy
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