“BEEN seeing a lot of you in the newspapers lately. Good money, ah?” an acquaintance once quipped about a decade ago when my first compact disc EP was picked up by the local press.

The answer to the question was “no”. But it has got me thinking about how simplistic we are as a society in equating media coverage or fame with monetary gain.

The word “fame” has its roots in the Latin word “fāma”, meaning talk, rumour, report, reputation.

Growing up in the 1980s, I recall an American film aired on our local channels called Fame, which had an infectious theme song by singer Irene Cara, itself a long line of cultural products which mythologizes the “talk, rumour, report, reputation” cycle of all things associated literally with “fame” and being “famous”.

The people who are the subject of “fame” are often called “stars” through a phenomenon known as “stardom”. Whether you know it or not (since a majority of Malaysians my age are either engineers or business graduates, whom I assumed read this humble column of mine), stars and stardom are valid fields of studies and research in the arts and humanities.

While most would just brush aside stars and stardom as modern capitalist nuisance, to the cultural researcher it is a valuable subject for analysis to understand how culture operates and its long term social and ideological function in most modern capitalist societies.

Let’s focus on understanding the context of stars and stardom from the perspective of the field of popular music studies to give some focus and clarity on this rarefied field of fan boys/girls and blushing/gushing. Roy Shuker in his 2005 academic tome, Popular Music – The Key Concepts, nails it with: “Stars are individuals who, as a consequence of their public performances or appearances in the mass media, become widely recognised and acquire symbolic status. Stars are seen as possessing a unique, distinctive talent in the cultural forms within which they work. Initially associated with the Hollywood film star system, stardom is now widely evident in sports, television, and popular music. While there is a large body of theoretically oriented work on film stars (see Hayward, 1996 for a helpful overview), the study of stardom in popular music is largely limited to personal biographies of widely varying analytical value.”

The public – everyday people like you and me – have also been bestowed the status of media producers (at your own choice and will) with the advent of social media via the punk rock game-changer, which our lives are now tightly entwined with: the internet.

If you didn’t know, the internet is punk rock. Calvin Johnson – indie doyen and founder/owner of independent American record label K Records – calls the internet “the most basic form of the punk rock revolution”.

To argue on Calvin Johnson’s behalf, I propose we take greater scrutiny on our own personal media habits and what we make technology we use work for us, as opposed to making technology dictate our life and expectations about “reality”.

I confess, it’s inescapable – while I did not resist the smartphone (more ignorance than anything else), I was supplied one by my wife, alarmed probably by my outdated long-term bliss with my primitive but reliable Nokia 1280. I was living in an app-less reality and I was just fine.

WhatsApp unleashed something in me – you could create more varieties of ways and content to annoy your friends with. The possibilities seem limitless – that’s the empowering punk rock thing about the internet.

One must wield it with much care and appreciation – not disdain. It’s liberating and social media liberated many things – some individuals to some dictator states. In the aforementioned interview with Johnson, an excerpt from the idea of “Appropriate Technology” in E.F. Schumacher‘s book, Small is Beautiful struck me: “…it is generally recognised as encompassing technological choice and application that is small-scale, decentralised, labour-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, and locally controlled.”

We, the people, are now the stars and for once it mirrors its namesake – the stars in our universe that twinkle in the night. Many stars have been made and broken since the internet came about.

But most importantly, the already present stars would now have to professionalize further to keep their status and allure alive since stardom is a breadwinning career more than just a fancy.

Yet, the idea and concept of stars and stardom still persist in its “traditional” forms – albeit with some minor adjustments. In the past, who would have thought that literally sitting in front of your computer in a room could lead you to fame and stardom: that has now become the norm and in fact the latest currency for mobility in this system.

The personal biographies of everyone have transcended into the hyperreal by virtue of the shape of the technology and apps that we interact daily with – the age when the word “intelligence” came to be associated with “artificiality” (‘artificial intelligence’) and “reality” with the “virtual” (‘virtual reality’).

Do we see ourselves in the “stars” we see in the media or do they symbolise something you despise? These are simple yet important questions to build one’s media literacy muscles. 

It’s hard to say now where and when our daily life begins and ends into tomorrow or who is the star of today and who will it be tomorrow – our virtual avatars and everyone else’s’ are still “socially” out there in the ethers of the internet, since “if it’s on the internet, it must be true”. Andy Warhol once said that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”.

Even though it seems that the internet is a virtually noisy space where information (and disinformation) overload is very real, we must also occasionally wade ourselves through – like heading downtown during rush hour – to get things done for real, for we are physical beings rooted in some biology, rooted in a physical reality.

While one must tune out to tune in with one’s self, it’s ironic that to go anywhere now in our reality we must virtually declare our existence periodically using an app – just as our stars of old had to deal with the paparazzi and prying eyes.

We are all stars in our own little lockdown operas.  – May 28, 2021.  

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.