{"id":1910,"date":"2009-05-02T07:51:57","date_gmt":"2009-05-02T15:51:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=1910"},"modified":"2009-05-02T07:51:57","modified_gmt":"2009-05-02T15:51:57","slug":"the-idolmaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2009\/05\/02\/the-idolmaker\/","title":{"rendered":"The Idolmaker"},"content":{"rendered":"

That’s what Tommy Mottola did so well, following in the steps of legendary, antiquated, Clive Davis.\u00c2\u00a0 He created an IMAGE!\u00c2\u00a0 You didn’t sell who the person actually was, but who the audience wanted them to be!<\/p>\n

Everyone was aspirational.\u00c2\u00a0 If only you could party with Mariah…\u00c2\u00a0 You had no idea she was a junk food junkie in real life, hell, you had no idea who she was, other than the girl with the voice prancing in the videos.<\/p>\n

This Susan Boyle story is amazing.\u00c2\u00a0 A prepackaged video is released by Simon Cowell, fanning the flames of her obscurity to ubiquity story.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfortunately, it’s not true.\u00c2\u00a0 She’s been trying to make it for eons.\u00c2\u00a0 New videos keep surfacing of the way she was…<\/p>\n

That’s today’s clip, Susan’s rendition of "The Way We Were"<\/a>. You’ll be stunned, she’s thin, almost fuckable.\u00c2\u00a0 As for her vocals?<\/p>\n

Not quite as good as her version of "Cry Me A River"<\/a> from 1999.<\/p>\n

Nor as good as her take on "Killing Me Softly"<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We can analyze the impact on the Susan Boyle juggernaut, but more interesting is the impact on those with more talent, who are not beneficiaries of train-wreck publicity\/hysteria.<\/p>\n

If you’re trying to remake someone, trying to project a perfect image, not long after you release your finished product, Awful Plastic Surgery<\/a> will post the before pictures.\u00c2\u00a0 And then TMZ and Perez will pick up on them and spread them (hell, I found out about the "Way We Were" video on Mario Lavendeira’s site…he reaches the target demo, those interested in music, possibly better than ANYBODY!)<\/p>\n

Eventually, your complete resume will end up online.<\/p>\n

Not only where you went to school, but your summer camp pictures, videos of you in the talent show…\u00c2\u00a0 Your old love will unload your story on Facebook…<\/p>\n

That’s the price for playing in the public eye.<\/p>\n

But it’s even worse.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s the price for being a PERSON these days.\u00c2\u00a0 Unless you’re willing to live in a dark closet alone, your life is public property.\u00c2\u00a0 The only question is, does anybody other than a small circle of friends care?<\/p>\n

Get injections for Trout Pout, word is on the street almost immediately.<\/p>\n

Fuck up in concert because you can’t really sing and a homemade video revealing your screw-ups will be online the next day.\u00c2\u00a0 Have you been following the Britney mistakes?\u00c2\u00a0 She may be trying to rehabilitate her image in the straight press, but anybody who follows her online knows she’s looney-tunes.<\/p>\n

Madonna falls off a horse and blames it on the paparazzi?<\/p>\n

Truth outs.\u00c2\u00a0 Photographers were nowhere near the accident.<\/p>\n

This is a SEA CHANGE in publicity\/image-making.\u00c2\u00a0 In other words, you can no longer spin the public.\u00c2\u00a0 You can have friends in the press, but didn’t you hear that newspapers are dying?<\/p>\n

So you have to ask yourself what you’re selling, and focus on THAT!<\/p>\n

In the music world, we focus on music.\u00c2\u00a0 On one hand that sounds simple, on another REVOLUTIONARY!\u00c2\u00a0 Because it hasn’t been about music in oh-so-long, certainly not in the mainstream.<\/p>\n

Looking good has just gotten demoted.<\/p>\n

If you’re a product of handlers, the truth will out.\u00c2\u00a0 If you can’t sing a note and are auto-tuned, if you have ghost writers, you’d better be proud of this, because the public is going to know the truth soon.<\/p>\n

So reveal the truth first.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not about holding back, but delivering more info.\u00c2\u00a0 If you reveal all your warts on your site, people will soon ignore them, will stop playing a game of Gotcha! and focus on what you’re truly selling. Rather than holding information back, publicity reps need to focus on getting info OUT!<\/p>\n

Susan Boyle’s publicity is mega, but those truly interested, outside of Britain, are a niche at best.<\/p>\n

This week, the number one album is by Rick Ross, it sold a grand total of 157,544 copies.\u00c2\u00a0 Pretty stinky in a nation of 300 million.<\/p>\n

But let me speak a language you’ll understand.\u00c2\u00a0 The vaunted Miley Cyrus?\u00c2\u00a0 The soundtrack of her supposed hit movie?\u00c2\u00a0 After five weeks in release, it’s got a cume of 658,835, and the movie’s already slipped to number 8, on its way to oblivion.<\/p>\n

So all that publicity, it doesn’t deliver the success of yore.\u00c2\u00a0 There are no diamond sellers like in the nineties.\u00c2\u00a0 We all take a peek at the train-wreck, most of us move on.\u00c2\u00a0 Those that last have substance, they’re not creatures of some marketer’s dream.<\/p>\n

We live in a changed world.<\/p>\n

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That’s what Tommy Mottola did so well, following in the steps of legendary, antiquated, Clive Davis.\u00c2\u00a0 He created an IMAGE!\u00c2\u00a0 You didn’t sell who the person actually was, but who the audience wanted them to be! Everyone was aspirational.\u00c2\u00a0 If only you could party with Mariah…\u00c2\u00a0 You had no idea she was a junk food […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business","category-the-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-uO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1910"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1911,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1910\/revisions\/1911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}