Everybody is talking about it, it’s all over the news and many would rather already stop hearing about it. The whole net went ballistic, twitter went down for it, wikipedia had a bitter war about it and speculations about the conditions run rampant like no tomorrow. Yeah, the death of MJ. I’m not going to talk about the king of pop though, but rather the interesting phenomenon of fandom and idols.
It’s not unlike religion.
In both people are looking up for something bigger than themselves, something to believe in. In the religious form it’s usually something pure and spotless, but the rock-version can easily be tarnished and rotten as long as there is some suffering involved. Just today it read in the news that Michael Jackson had finally moved to the category of suffering idols. “He’s been through hell!” This could be said about Jesus or Michael Jackson. To us there seems to be something quite interesting and noble about the suffering of an idol.
The word idol originates not as a popstar, but as a substitute for God. In fact the second commandment in the Christian Bible says “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them…” Now ofc the word has a much lighter meaning today, but still if someone is an idol for someone else, the fan can be seen as a devout and a worshipper. The word “fan” on the other hand is derived from the word “fanatic”. That word has also suffered some inflation in the modern language, but the roots are interesting.
R&B star Akon said: “Just to be in the same room [with him], I felt everything I wanted to accomplish in life has been achieved….That aura … that’s how incredible that aura is….The way he thinks….some artists think regional, some think national, I was thinking international. He thinks planets! It’s on another level!” Some other random fan quotes: “He lives forever, he’s not dead”, “He brings meaning to my life”, “He is my everything”. These were said about MJ, but we could aswell replace the target as God. I bet if we were to do a brainscan, the same areas would show activity for both religious people and some other type of devotees.
Naturally there are many different levels of fandom, as there are many different levels of religious commitment aswell. Not all fans and religious devotees are fanatics. Still, the mechanic works just the same. We try to look up for something that is bigger than ourselves, larger than life, and mysterious. We need these higher beings or ideals as points, from where we hang on, to where we anchor ourselves. We cannot attach to something thats our size, or it wouldn’t hold us; the “ground” has to have enough mass. We must be unable to move it. Why that is, I don’t know, we just seem to be built in a way that we cannot exist alone by ourselves. We cannot be gods ourselves.
As for the idol itself, in the end, a human being cannot bear a god-status. He knows that he’s not perfect and the pressures from outside grows unbearable. The idols persona gets separated from the actual person, and ascends as a glorified, mystified and shining icon to heavens. An inner discrepancy forms between this icon and the real self and any number of conditions can follow. In many cases it leads to drugs, as we have seen. (Not to argue, that it’s the only reason for stars to take drugs, mind you)
This blog entry is not here to make any moral judgements about idolhood or fandom. Bible tells us we should not have substitute gods, but i think we all have common sense as to what that means. Most of the idols we have in this life are more like role models and not really competing against God. But interestingly, the mechanic is the same in both and that’s why I can easily understand why Bible tells us not to have these substitutes. We have it in us, that we seek a higher force and thus we should seek it in the right place.
This week in the federal jury in Minneapolis ruled that a 
Just the other day I was traveling by train and happened to overhear a conversation this fancy finely dressed lady was having over the phone. She was quite extensive in her defending of a position she had taken in an issue they talked about. One particular statement she said caught my interest: “It is like this ecology and recycling, they are kinda nice things as long as they don’t concern me.”