False Idols
it girls, HBO's the idol and beyoncé RWT
This LOOSEY picks up where A Parisian Past Life left off. It’s a loose successor, not necessary to read prior but there is some connective tissue between the two. Consider checking it out here if you haven’t yet.
By the time this is published, his neighbours will be fast asleep. Not him though. His gaze remains steady, grey pupils affixed to the Arabian Sea. Even 123-feet up, he is the second tallest of his kind, preceded by another in Rajasthan. He is the first yogi ever, and yet, born in 2006 at the price of ₹25M, he is Gen Z. Part of the generation that will allegedly “save us all,” which is the bare minimum for a religious idol.
Body and head forged from granite and concrete, the Murudeshawa Shiva is located on the edge of a hilltop in Karnataka, India. An essential component of the Hindu Trimurti, Shiva is the god who created and protects the universe. Although height varies, there are countless Shiva statues in India. More generally known as ‘an idol’ rather than a ‘statue,’ an idol is defined as a cult image that is the physical representation of a god. As such, idols are worshipped across a collection of belief systems, from Christianity’s holy cross to the Leshan Giant Buddha.
The aforementioned idol in Karnataka has established himself as a major pilgrimage site, drawing an estimated two million visitors every year. With this continuous traffic, it’s ironic that this Shiva locks eyes with a nation where his existence would be forbidden. The Murudeshawa Shiva glares southwest, across the Arabian Sea, directly into Somalia. Known for its ancient ruins, nomadic culture and supermodel Iman, the country’s official religion is Islam. Different from Hindu, Islam forbids any visuals and/or physical depictions of God as the Qu’ran dictates that ‘there is only one God and that God alone deserves worship.’ As a result, leveraging an idol for worship or praying directly to one diverts worship from God and towards something else. Despite this, 8,633 miles northwest of Somalia, it appears that Western society is diverting its attention anyways.
In the United States, ‘belief in God’ has reached a 60-year all-time low at 81%, tanking from a near 100% in the 1950s. As my Jamaican mother would query when I brought home a near-perfect test in high school, “Where is the other 19%?” Well, if we assume that ‘believing in God’ and ‘not believing in God’ is a binary, one could argue that our worship levels have not diminished, they’ve been reinvested. As to where? Streaming services would posit that we’ve reinvested our faith and attention towards ‘the celebrity’ as an emerging type of idol. This year alone has been bloated with releases that attempt to articulate the societal impact of our engrossing celebrity ecosystem and subsequent stan culture. In the past few months, we’ve received Amazon Prime’s Swarm, Hulu’s Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl documentary and tonight we finally observe the conclusion of HBO’s The Idol. But how effective are these portrayals in capturing the power of a living idol? How believable are these depictions of celebrity worship when compared to reality? Pretty mid, if you ask me.
As an admirer of Atlanta and Dominique Fishback, I wanted to love Swarm. The series portrays a fan named Dre who becomes so fevered with obsession for a Beyoncé-like artist that it sends her on a killing spree. She kills for concert tickets to see her idol (can relate). She murders anyone with any critique of her favourite artist (can’t relate). What I originally assumed was going to be a nuanced analysis on the dark side of stan culture turned out to be a half-baked ‘on the road,’ escape narrative for a serial killer. And yet, as a ‘crime story,’ Swarm failed in presenting an origin story for Dre. The plot was devoid of any explanation as to why Dre was so fixated on Ni’jah (the Beyoncé dupe) and… why… she… randomly…started… killing… people?
As a nosey an inquisitive member of the Beyhive, I finished the whole thing only to be ambivalent about its conclusion. The plot isn’t perfect and I would not recommend it for immediate consumption, but Fishback’s portrayal of Dre almost redeems the limited series. Her characterization of Dre is so pungent and maniacal that it’s a feat that she was able to personify so much with presumably so little on the page. Finally, whilst watching, I realized that I have never seen a true crime story where a Black woman was a serial killer. There are obvious reasons for this that come to mind but it was almost radical to watch a Black woman kill and kill and kill again with such a flimsy motive. She was bad because… well, because!
It’s important to note that Swarm was released with a Swarm EP on streaming platforms so viewers could experience the songs that enraptured Dre within the universe of the show. Show creators Janine Nabers and Donald Glover tapped real-life songwriter KIRBY (who has written for Beyoncé) to be the voice of Ni’jah. This is where my opinion moves from ambivalent to resolute as the music is the greatest offense of the show. Upon re-listen, I understand why the show didn’t work for me and, perhaps, for so many others. The music is bad bad. The production sounds as though it was constructed on a water-damaged Motorola Razr with a pack of hot Takis and pocket lint as percussion and not in a cool Charli XCX-Arca kind of way. Moreover, the lyrics and vocal arrangements do not match the artist Dre was stanning. The songwriting feels juvenile, too rap-laced and lack the innovation an artist worth frothing over could produce. Ni’jah’s visual aesthetic draws obvious inspiration from Beyoncé, with a handful of dog whistles for hardcore fans, and yet her music sounds constrained, missing the lavish vocals and world-building sonics that makes Beyoncé or any of her contemporaries, if you believe they exist, stan-worthy. And so, with no motive to help narrate what is propelling Dre’s murderous behaviour and without a dope beat to step to, I wasn’t convinced. This is not an idol worth killing for.
Hulu’s meditation on idolism occurs at the regional level. In Queenmaker, filmmaker Zachary Drucker examines the mid-2000s media ecosystem that amplified a congregation of New York socialites to prominence like Tinsley Mortimer, Olivia Palmero and Lauren Santo Domingo. The documentary recounts how now gone sites like Gawker, Park Avenue Peerage and Socialite Rank acted as real-life Gossip Girl, inviting their readership to track every move of notable socialites as they traversed from fashion week party to private membership club to charity benefit gala. The thesis is clear: the online publications were the ‘queenmakers,’ wielding the power to create gods from mere mortals and denounce them at lesiure. In retrospect, this era of online media is a natural precurser to the current one we are in where idols and ‘it girls’ are seemingly generated on the fly only to be swatted out as fast as they’ve come. It’s easy to replace some of the names in Queenmaker with the latest socialites online publications tout such as Julia Fox, who was bolstered in Interview Magazine’s sexy Fox News weekly segment, and socialite-sister turned Chanel-girl Sophia Richie, whose star power catapulted after a Vogue wedding feature.
The influx of ‘it girls’ continues to rise under the tide of social media. No longer does one need to wait for a magazine to dub them ‘it.’ Their followers can anoint them ‘queens’ as long as they post and share their lives to the masses in exchange for idolization. With this exchange, one can only wonder who is in servitude: the idol on her online pedestal or her followers who can reject her with the click of a button. New York magazine recently dubbed this moment as ‘it girl inflation’ and devoted an entire issue to documenting the long succession of ‘it girls’ from the nineties to now, contributing to the media-sponsored idol-making system.
When I watched Queenmaker, I only recognized a handful of the ‘it girls.’ They had come and gone swiftly, evaporating before an algorithm could bring them to my echo chamber of the internet. Critic Terry Nguyen outlines the fickleness of online idolization in her recent essay for mixed feelings:
I often think about the viral Wendy Williams quote: “She’s an icon, she’s a legend, she is the moment.” Despite being a good soundbite, it doesn’t quite make sense in today’s culture, which is composed of many moments; each online platform has their own distinct lineup of stars. The moment is actually quite fleeting. This has, to a certain extent, affected the longevity of It Girls. Their time in the limelight is limited, and their relevance, much like ours, is predicated on posting for a brief blip of virality.
Alas, to be dubbed ‘it,’ means that you’re capable of eventually being ‘not it,’ exposing the mortality of the online idol. It appears only God can be ever-present.
Finally, a project that attempts to showcase the toxins of both stan culture and celebrity worship is The Idol. I won’t offer too much of a critique as I am curious to see how it all wraps up tonight but, I will say, I am enjoying it more than I anticipated. At times, it’s not great, and most of the time it’s pretty vapid but I am coming to sense that that is the point. Above this, I am willing to admit that the show succeeds where the Swarm fails: the original music slaps. Both The Weeknd’s songs and the ‘Joceyln’ / Lily Rose-Depp songs are really fun and conjure the tinted, Gotham-coded, underworld that both Levinson and Tesfaye have been designing their whole careers. It reminds me of Lady Gaga’s best album A Star is Born soundtrack where the songs in which her character, Ally, is supposedly ‘selling out,’ low-key hit the hardest. Perhaps there is an Ally and Jocelyn collab in the future.
In terms of creating an idol that mirrors the star quality of those worshipped in our reality, I do question if Jocelyn is really that girl. First of all, I am in moderate disbelief that anyone with the stage name ‘Jocelyn’ would really be a bad bitch. Secondly, I tend to agree with this Twitter user in regard to Jocelyn’s hair:
But if there is one thing Levinson gets right with his personification of Jocelyn, it is that she has no last name. It is a well-known fact that all of the best idols have mononyms: Cher. Madonna. Rihanna. Zendaya. Prince. In fact, most religious gods have mononyms: Jesus. Vishnu. Allah. Could I be forgetting anyone?
By the time this is published, she will be back home after blessing Warsaw, and Frankfurt, and before that Hamburg and Amsterdam. The Americas are next. An idol in motion. Upon a dazzling horse, the Queen migrates, receiving worship at every stop of her 40-city and counting world tour. Not carved from concrete and granite, she’s born of melanin and bones. To travel to witness her is to be a part of the global pilgrimage. When I saw her in Amsterdam, I was surrounded by others who also travelled. From Brazil, from Sweden, from Canada. People who have never left their country before. People who couldn’t even pronounce the name of the country they were visiting. An odyssey to get a glimpse of the idol. With this, the idol becomes Mecca. Her body: a moving holy ground. Her concert: a baptism. She is her own opening act and closing act, the beginning and the end. A cult image ready to be worshipped. An everlasting renaissance.
