When I was growing up in the late 70’s and early 80’s one of my favorite things to do was to hunt down information about my favorite musicians. I would spend hours reading about Elton John, Siouxsie Sioux, Morrissey and Bono in Rolling Stone magazine among others. Listening to their music captured my attention and fueled my imagination. It made me want to find out more about who these people are. It was part of my growing experience and the reason I fell in love with music.
Fast forward to the information age where the internet has made not only music, but information about the musicians, song writers, producers, and even the janitor on duty in the studio during the recording session readily available. Music is fed to us in a constant stream via whatever service we have chosen, be it iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Pandora or any of the other services available out there. But now, not only do you have immediate access to the music and information about those involved in it’s creation, but we have a direct line to the artists themselves via Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat and a multitude of other social media services. We can now Tweet instantly and directly to our favorite musician and, more often than not, get responses DIRECTLY from them too!!!
At first glance that’s a really awesome concept. Every time I Tweet something about my favorite music and see that the artist themselves (or their publicist) has re-tweeted it or liked the tweet, I literally feel the urge to turn into a squealing teenaged fan-girl. It’s so awesome…
Ahem…but the other side of that is that the mystery is now gone. We no longer need to wait for the latest interview in our favorite entertainment magazine or talk show to get an understanding for who these musicians are and their intention behind their music. They are on Twitter interacting with us, talking to us or just offering opinions and insight, wanted or not. Not only do I feel that this has done away with the mystery and hunger for more information about the artist but also, in quite a few cases, it draws attention away from the music.
A perfect example is Azealia Banks. She’s a wonderful musician and has dropped some wonderful, thought provoking music that may stand the test of time. She built a massive following on social media and was a very active Tweet-er. And it has been that activity on Twitter that has led to a great deal of trouble for her with comments that have often been interpreted as racist, homophobic and just outright rude. She got into so many feuds on the service that ultimately she was banned from Twitter and hasn’t been heard from much again thanks in part to a 14-year old Disney star named Skai Jackson.
And this is where things take a twisted turn on Twitter. There have been so many feuds on Twitter that reveal a disturbingly dark and unkind side to some of our favorite celebrities. Just last week there was a brief feud between recent exes Taylor Swift and Calvin Harris. Swift is very active on Twitter. However, it’s very hard to maintain a squeaky clean image when you have so many exes running around, yet she’s somehow managed to do so. That is until last week when Calvin Harris decided to air his grievances about their breakup…and her use of a pseudonym for writing credit on his recent hit with Rihanna, This Is What You Came For.
Harris reveals that Swift didn’t want to be given writing credit on the song initially. The song was released and became an instant hit. But then her team suddenly revealed that it was indeed written by Swift in an attempt to discredit the producer. This has backfired on Ms. Swift as Harris shot back the fact that she not only wrote the song but sang on it as well but didn’t want credit, hence the pseudonym.
One week later and now Taylor Swift is at the center of another Twitter war with the Kardashian-Wests over whether or not the singer was aware that Kanye West would be including a line about her in his latest single Famous. Swift has vehemently denied that West got her ok, only to be discredited again with a recording of a conversation where she does exactly that. The recording was uploaded to Snapchat by Kim Kardashian. Could Twitter lead to the end of that good girl image that Taylor has worked so hard to build? Stay tuned…
Those are just a few ways that social media has become, to put it lightly, a public relations nightmare for so many. After a few too many drunken and silly tweets that required deletion and retraction, Adele’s PR team took over the account and have forbidden the singer from tweeting without their approval. Then there are singers like Rihanna who manages and is very active with social media and yet has avoided getting into any scandals due to her use of it.
These are new and different times that we are living in and I like to think that I’ve adjusted fairly well with the changes and have a healthy understanding of social media and how it can be used to promote and spread your art to places that it may have never reached back in the 70’s and 80’s. But I think it wise to maintain an air of mystery about you as an entertainer or artist. There are aspects of your personalities and ego that will be a turn off to your fans when you put them out there so flagrantly. So use your social media wisely, celebrities, because we ARE listening, we ARE watching and we most definitely ARE judging you.
