We Know Too Much About Famous People to Be Fascinated by Them.

Sarah Kanaan
17 hours ago
4 min read

Have celebrities lost their personalities, or have they just learned to conceal them?

I feel it has become too easy to blame everything on our contemporary age, to say art is not what it was before, but is that actually true? Do artists really have nothing left to say? I find that hard to believe. We shouldn’t blame the artists themselves, but a force much bigger than them.

Think back to Jim Morrison, and it is clear what a stage presence used to look like. He didn't treat the role of the frontman as just singing; he treated it like something closer to a ritual. The shows got chaotic because he wanted them to, and because he was genuinely unpredictable. Drinking heavily, spiralling some nights, transcendent on others, you never knew which Morrison you were getting. That unpredictability is what led to the infamous 1969 Miami show and the legal mess that followed. But even that scandal didn't kill him in the public eye. If anything, it created the legend. The government and the courts were against him, but the crowd loved him more as a result.

And that’s the part that we've lost. Talent still exists, but the willingness to be spontaneous in public, to take risks and express one's individuality has become so rare.

Today, none of that could happen because artists have nothing left to protect. We know what they’ve had for breakfast, who they interact with on social media, etc. Every bad night gets a trending hashtag. Morrison could disappear into a myth because the public only ever got the performance, never the person behind it. Today, the myth is gone before it’s even formed, because everyone with a phone is documenting the person in real time, and there's no room left for any mystery. An audience used to fall in love with the idea of someone. Now it just watches and judges them.

So the unpredictability that made Morrison who he was would now get someone cancelled within a week. Not by the government or by the courts, but by us. That's the real censorship now. It doesn't come from above; it comes from an audience that has access to everything and forgives nothing.

But it's not just about hiding your personality anymore, it's about hiding your body too. And clearly, female stars suffer from this the most. In order to make it big, now you have to be "clean"; fit the perfect standard of what's expected from a pop star. Almost everyone is on Ozempic. It's not only about having a clean background, being scrutinized for everything you do (smokers get cancelled these days), but it's also about fitting the physical mould of what a celebrity is supposed to look like. Even that becomes part of the inspection. It's not enough to say the right things anymore; you have to look a certain way while saying them.

I don't want to be pessimistic and just say it was all better before. We had strong personalities like Jim Morrison. We had Michael Jackson writing Human Nature and They Don't Care About Us, songs that actually said something. We had Amy Winehouse, unlike anyone before or since, in her voice, her style, the mess of her, too. I'm not only talking about the social or political side of what they made, but I'm also talking about their stage presence, their personal style, the fact that you could tell who they were from five seconds of footage. We've become much more accepting of change, on paper, but everything today is monitored in a way that doesn't feel authentic anymore. And once you've found the formula that works, you're stuck with it. If Kesha dropped new music right now, with the same sound and attitude that made her a star, people would hate it. Addison Rae tried to rebrand, a new persona, a new look, and got called performative, not because the music is bad, but because it isn't who she was on TikTok six years ago. There's no room left to grow up in public. Whoever you were at twenty follows you forever; it doesn't get erased just because you changed.

Even Woodstock couldn't happen again. Although the youth still cares, there's no mechanism left to turn that strong force into one moment, one image everyone recognizes. The rebellion still exists, it's just scattered across hashtags and comment sections instead of one unifying moment the whole world could show up for.

Charli XCX and The Strokes, among others, are proof it's still possible, even if they're just two examples on a very short list. The Strokes closed their Coachella set with footage targeting the actions of the CIA and the US government. At Coachella, the most sponsored, most sanitized stage the industry has. And that's just one kind of risk. The point isn't that artists need to constantly be engaged to matter again; plenty of the best music ever made wasn't about anything more than a feeling or a sound. The point is that they should be allowed to do whatever they want without it being treated as a liability. People will complain when someone does take a stance; they'll say keep politics out of music, but they forget that most music was created from some kind of personal or political angle to begin with, some more vivid than others. The personal is political. They may choose to look past it, but that’s how it is!

So maybe that answers the question I started with. It's not that personality disappeared. It's that showing it now costs something it never used to cost. No myth to hide behind anymore, no mystery to protect you, no backstage. The ones still willing to risk it, Bad Bunny, FKA Twigs, and The Strokes, prove it's still possible. Roger Waters reimagining Comfortable Numb this year for the Palestinian cause, quite poignant, quite beautiful, most devastating, proves it's still possible. It's just rare enough now that when it happens, it feels like a rupture instead of the norm.