Stars and Stardom

Richard Dyer

Is an academic at Warwick University who wrote a book called Stars ‘the mythology of stardom’ -he analyzed the appeal of different stars to the audience and came up with the notion that stars are ‘bought and consumed on the strength of their meanings’.

Stars depend upon a range of subsidiary media- magazines, TV, radio, the internet- in order to construct an image for themselves that can be marketed to their target audiences.

The star image is made up of a range of meaning, which are attractive to the target audiences. The star image is incoherent that is incomplete and 'open'. Dyer says that this is because it is based upon two key paradoxes ( an idea that has two sides to itself). 

What they symbolically represent to the audience and what they stand for e.g they project an image and the audience chose which bits they consume or reject.

Star

The term ‘star’ refers to the semi-mythological set of meanings constructed around music performers in order to sell the performer to a large and loyal audience.

The image of a star needs to change over a period of time- in order to keep the audiences interest and enlarge their fan-base.

Some common values of music stardom

-       Youthfulness

-       Rebellion

-       Sexual magnetism

-       An anti authoritarian attitude

-       Originality

-       Creativity/ talent

-       Aggression/ anger

-       A disregard for social values relating to drugs, sex and polite behavior

-       Conspicuous consumption of sex, drugs and material goods

-       Success against the odds

An example:

Tupac Shakur

- He shows how he was bought up from a poor family 

- Disregard social values in his music as he writes his own songs 

-  Consumption of drugs 

- His family were criminals and made many offenses  that were imprisoned which links to his song lyrics as he is a rebellion

The 2 Paradoxes 

1) The star must be simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary for the consumer. 

2) The star must be simultaneously present and absent for the consumer.

The star image 

The incoherence of the star image ensures that audiences continually strive to 'complete' or to 'make sense of' of the image.

This means that fans will go away determined to continue consuming the star in order to carry on attempting to complete their image.