The obsession of our popular culture with beauty has come to a tragic form of heroism. Celebrities in hearfelt and simultaneously over-produced pop songs assure the children who are their ideal audience that they are beautiful people. This assurance against evidence is premised on the knowledge that everyone is the same and that the effective truth of uniqueness is anonymity.

In societies where people are segregated by age, the young are helpless to withstand the times and powerless to attract or reward whatever attention they might get. The lie they wish to hear above all is that they have so much beauty within themselves that they can be justified. Their experience is being ignored, not found worthy of attention. The more celebrities rise spontaneously among the people, the more the people act as though they themselves were worth no attention. The celebrities then reflect this self-loathing back onto the worshiping crowds.

Whoever is foolish enough to stand in the way or take exception will not be treated kindly. Freaks are intolerable; they remind us of ourselves too much. Celebrity worship, on the other hand, is the next best thing to success worship, if not the way we train kids for it… This is the generalized problem of the Gay Nineties, when popular music was dominated by blithe beauty. At the outskirts, seething anger and a new attitude of rejection of the ideology of community-within-pop-music was rising, although it was silenced by the tyranny of record sales.