A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations. Cintra Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ to improve their character or personality in any way—they will have been perfect all along, and everyone around them was too fucking dumb to have noticed it before.

      When I was growing up and in the prepubescent emotional stage that is the primary feeding ground of rock-icon phenomena, we had the Monkees (despite the fact that the show had long been canceled and was already in syndicated reruns by the time I was hip to it). The Monkees were great; they were goofy and moronic and they wore ponchos, and they existed outside of worldly angst and the hazards of physical romance. A date with the Monkees would consist of jumping out of an oversized box of Fruit Loops and playing freeze tag with wigs in a penny arcade. My six-year-old friends and I kissed pillows named Davy and Mickey (Mike was too mature, Peter too doglike and retarded).

      We just LOVED the Monkees. We never imagined them without pants, but if we did, they had the same hairless nether-mound GI Joe had in lieu of an actual unit. We talked about marrying a monkey vs. marrying Speed Race, or marrying half-Mickey-half-Davy—it was all the same. This amorphous non-sexuality was factory-built into the Monkees along with the string you pulled on their chests to hear “Last Train to Clarksville,” and is the crucial difference between prefab-musical-teen-crush-bands-assembled-by-teams-of-marketing-experts then and now. Now, instead of castrating the stars, like the TV spin surgeons did to the Monkees, band creators imbue these quasi-musical teens with frightening levels of artificially generated erotic power.

      Children moaning in trained vibrato and writhing in sexual anguish have always been a big attention-getter for old talent-contest shows like Star Search and other questionable TV experiences. On The Mickey Mouse Club, back in the fifties, fresh-faced little teen vixens like Darlene and Annette once sang unabashedly doltish ballads about puppy love written by fifty- year-old men. The Little Rascals dressed as adult hipsters and sang each other speakeasy songs of cheap drunken courtship, winking and wiggling. Now children barely out of training pants are wearing asymmetrical Victor Costa ballgowns and belting out how “Their Man is Gone” in the smoky tones of world-weary, dope-sick B-girls who’ve been beaten like donkeys for loving too intensely. Naturally, most of this can be blamed on the parents; over-zealous soccer and ice-rink moms have nothing on the white-sweatered harridans who seek entertainment-industry success through their unblemished tykes. No bog-banshee wailing for untimely death in an Irish family could send more Freon up the spine than a Backstage Mother howling darkly at her toddler in showgirl makeup, “Pretty FEET! Make PRETTY FEET for the agents, Missy!”

      The recent rash of female pop singers have already figured out that crawling around in their panties on MTV is the best thing they can do for record sales. As singers proceed to get younger and more naked, child versions of lingerie bands like Vanity 6 are sure to ensue: undulating eleven-year-old boys and girls wearing Cuban-heeled fetish nylons and tiny athletic-support cups will be filling an arena near you, running microphones suggestively over their undeveloped chests, grabbing their unfinished nether parts, flipping their hair, pouting, feigning sadomasochism with the mike stand. Oversexed R&B tykes like Immature and Tevin Campbell have already been down this catwalk – they were boys who were not old enough to drive, who frothed crowds of grown women into surging jungles of wrongful lust. Somehow, to the wanton fan of any age, a charismatic stage presence means that the performer is possessed of a mature, diabolically super-charged mega-sexuality, and the fan responds to the performer as such, even if he is barely over four feet tall.

      New Kids on the Block had a frighteningly sexual, Jesus-like sway over the female species. At the peak of their success, I remember, I read an actual newspaper column about how a three-and-a-half-year-old girl who had been displaying nothing but autistic-like behavior for her entire life was watching a New Kids concert with her older siblings, then suddenly snapped into lucidity, grabbed her mother by the arm, and drawled out her first words, her maiden voyage into the English language, a fiery demand: “I want Joe!” --Joe, of course, being Joe McIntyre, the youngest and shortest of the New Kids. In the early nineties, he was probably singlehandedly responsible for more kundalini-firehammers of sexual explosion in the twelve-and-unders than Elvis and David Cassidy and Mickey Dolenz combined. All of the New Kids, at one time, had to suffer being regarded as Emissaries of the Divine or worse.

      I was once given a box of actual fan letters, left behind by a vacating fan-mail-distributing service, that were written to New Kids on the Block. These things were gut-freezingly weird and evil: they weren’t just stacks upon stacks of love pleas from little girls, but bold propositions from forty- year-old women who had been sucked into the most terrifying brand of slavering fanhood by their preteen daughters. You could just see these desolate single mothers with posters of Donnie Wahlberg’s shiny naked chest on their walls over the breakfast table, arguing viciously with their fifth-grade daughters over which of the New Kids was “more fine.” Receiving countless amounts of these letters is the type of thing would screw up nearly any boy under the age of twenty that I’ve ever known, forever—and just to prove it, I've supplied some prime examples from the collection that provide a fairly good overview of the bulk of fan mail in general.

      EXAMPLE #1: The Pink-Faced Teenybopper Letter

      This letter, written to Donnie Wahlberg of New Kids on the Block, typifies a “normal,” “healthy” fan letter. There were at least two hundred more of these, with minor variations, in the box.

      All spelling and grammar in this and the following examples were left exactly as I found them. All small i's in this letter were dotted with a circle.

      Donnie,

      hello!

      My name is______and I am 17 years old! With this letter I have written 1,450 times “I Love You”!!

      Because I really do baby!! Not because you are rich and famous, but because you are Donnie Wahlberg!! You could be pour and not famous and I would still want you!! I got over 600 posters of only you and I love them all! I think you are so cool! I love the way you walk, talk, sing, dance, well i might as well say I love everything about you!! The other guys are alright too, but you are number one in my heart and soul!! I got everything there is on you!!

      [Etc.]

      I just want to say that you are the best and don't forget it!!

      Well bye!!

      Love ya lots

      Your #1 Fan

      EXAMPLE #2: The Bored-Slutty-Young-Mom Letter

      This next letter, also to Donnie Wahlberg, represents another cross section of fans whom I still consider “healthy,” if somewhat squalid and pitiable:

      Hey

      This will be the first of many letters. I am 26. + I also have two sons, one 8 ½ and the other 4. My 8 ½ bought a NKOTB tape. I admit I have heard your music before, I liked it but honestly did not think much of it. I saw you on that Disney special. I must admit, I really thought you were really tough looking. I have seen your tattoo it's a killer. I have two, one one my left breast a rose on a vine. A butterfly on my back. I like to dance and stay in shape. Really only flaw I can tell is that I am short 5'2”. But dynamite comes in small packages they say.

      My music tastes tend to run wild. I like Patsy Cline, Tchaikovsky, but I also like Warrant, Great White, Bobby Brown + especially Def Leppard. I am not a blockhead, but I wouldn't mind having a block's head. Get me. I know I am five years older. But you know the song older women. Baby lets just say, I'm clean + don't believe in screwing around, I'm to safe. One thing I hate is condoms. But I use them until I am definitely sure. I like the real thing. I wrote to you on kind of a dare, I just wanted to see if you would write back. I have a bet with a friend, its between me+her+now you, I will have you, just one night if you can take it. I'm giving myself a year. If you do write the letter СКАЧАТЬ