In Pop Ramblings’ continuing look at the decade, we turn our eyes and ears to the the fame monster and debate whose star fell the most in this decade. Offering the (wrong) counterpoints in this argument is my good friend and roommate, Sir Bradley Pearson. He’s got the chops folks, but I don’t need to tell you that, you can just read what he wrote. You CAN read right?
Opening Statements:
Brad: There are many ways to argue this point, so, first, a word on my methodology (I’ll try to make this brief), One, as Shakespeare once wrote (and also one of only three Shakespeare lines I possess in my long-term memory): When beggars die there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes. For one to fall/flop/decline, they must have first been at the top in terms of talent but also in terms of popular recognition. No indie hype bins here. Second, those persons or people already in decline at the beginning of the decade have been omitted. Now its fair to say that a band like Metallica has lost much of whatever relevance it had in 2000, but really, that decline began in the leadup to Load and has just kept falling out since. I’m looking for a person or group that began or at some point in the aughts had such high expectations and seemingly the world before them and then threw it all away. Finally, no flashes in the pans. Rarely has a flash in the pan had long-term expectations for success by a legitmate population–in fact most flashes in the pan are designed to peter out sooner rather than later. Federline, I’m looking at you. Popozao could have been epic. So who does that leave me with? Those celebrities, musicians, actors, etc. who were destined to be the new voice of our generation, who seemingly had popular support and talent and opportunity and unlimited respect from their peers who merely needed the proper venues to exercise that potential at a semi-reoccuring clip to continue to grow in our hearts and minds. And then they blew it. Cold hard blowin’ it. Through either a bad choice, bad album, bad movie, bad tv show, bad lifestyle, or just idiocy, they blew it. And it didn’t just leave people saying, “Eh, he/she/they coulda been somebody.” It left them saying, “Wow. That kinda makes me depressed.”
I struggled to find an example in my preffered popular medium–music. Sure there were the boy bands and girl acts of the early aughts that had their declines, but really the fact that they still make music in some form is quite a success for that genre (even BSB still gets calls to appear on figure skating specials on NBC afternoons). Britney looked promising and, yes, she did bottom out after Crossroads and some strange lifestyle choices, but she refuses to dip out and keep coming back with legitimate pop albums. Mariah similarly had a falling out but regained some of her lost cred by stopping the crazy.
TV and movies have a few great examples. I sincerely considered Lindsay Lohan as my number one downfall of the decade (and I’m still willing to admit that maybe her downfall was the greatest–I just didn’t feel like devoting so much energy to her case).
A few arenas that I don’t think it pertinent to look too hard: Politics and reality TV. Really, those two areas are designed to build people up and them burn them down with utter abandon.
So that leaves me with my selection: Barry Bonds.
Seth: The Aughts were a time that saw many rises and some epic falls. The public eye has been intensified by the ever present paparazzi and the continuous connection via the internet, facespace, Twitter, and your fancy iPhones (I know jealousy isn’t a pretty color on me). There have been some epic flameouts that deserve consideration, but when I posed this question I had one name immediately come to mind. Before I reveal my candidate for the Biggest Flop of the Aughts. I’d like to just do me a favor and write down the name of the person you think of when you read this: “Who in popular culture went off the rails in the Aughts?” I think I may know exactly who you said. The name is Spears, Britney Spears. I note that she has resurrected herself, but it has been nothing short of a Phoenix-like effort to reclaim part of her status. Britney has been at the highest of highs, but tumbled faster than I’m not sure exactly what because I’ve never seen anything tumble so quickly. Not only was it fast, it was furious and deep. Ya know when you throw a rock down a hole and you wait for it to make a sound, Britney wouldn’t have made a sound. I look forward to showing that her decline was beyond a shadow of a doubt, the greatest of the Aughts.
Main Arguments:
Brad: I really wanted to avoid sports in this discussion because that is really a forum for stars to come and go quite easily within a decade. NFL players for sure. So instead of looking at just pure dropoff in production I applied some of my methods to certain sports stars and found a couple of good examples to consider–Griffey (though he didn’t really squander it; rather a victim of unfortunate circumstances) and Vick were first to mind. Vick is all right to consider but he really was never that good–just exciting. And while his downfall was epic, it was nothing compared to one of my biggest falls of the decade–Barry Bonds. He came along poised to make the aughts the next golden age in baseball–the two-headed monster of McSosa brought the dinger back into the spotlight and no one hit them better than Bonds. Sure he was always kind of a douche but his skills were undeniable. Even before his downfall he was probably the best all-around hitter and a top-tier defensive player. Then he did it–he captured the single season record and set his sights on the career record. While it’s a stretch to say that the entire baseball loving population was behind him, we certainly were excited at the prospects of so much history being made. Then the whispers and allegations of the steroid era really boiled over. Former MVP Ken Caminiti admitted to roiding, just before his death of drug overdose in 2004. A McCarthy-esque melange of a steadily leaking list of players who tested positive for steroids in 2003 and the Mitchell Report brought down the aforementioned McSosa and dozens of others–Clemens, Giambi, Palmeiro and Tejada among others. All of a sudden the care-free pursuit of 755 took on shadowy and destructive overtones–destructive to the game’s fans and the game itself. The outcry against Bonds steadily grew into a fever pitch–even Hank Aaron himself couldn’t help but hate. Then, in 2007, he finally hit 756. And there was not the joy of a nation who was witnessing the new greatest of all time. It was a moan, or a heavy sigh, of THANK GOD ITS OVER. Even the Giants could barely wait to ship him off (Bonds was released in Sept. 2007–a little over a month after hitting 756). Then, as Soze would say, “He’s gone.” Nada in 2008 and 2009–and not because he was ready to retire, but because no one would hire him. So there you have it. In less than a decade he shattered two of the holiest records in baseball and fell to an unhirable, public pariah #1. And while some of this can be attributed to a drop off in skills, the lion’s share, as I see it, was really due to his general douchiness and his shear inability to give a straight answer to a simple question.
Seth:
Before the fall:
Britney as the new Queen of Pop. Sorry Madonna fans, we all know where Brit was headed. Then something happened.
First she married this guy:
then rapidly got it annulled. No biggie. Besides it gave her the opportunity to meet this gem:
Whoops, Britney, that’s your husband. These lovebirds had two children together. Then they split up. Then this happened:
Classic shaved head, umbrella attack look. This was really big in Europe. She was checked into rehab and her former beau called for an emergency custody hearing which she lost. So quick recap: was pop’s brightest star and then turned into Sinead O’ Connor’s militant umbrella-wielding cousin who was seen as less fit than this guy (link of Federline).
Rebuttal/Closing:
Brad: Yeah she went crazy. And chunked up. And married what appears to be some relative of Jim Breuer. And then some relative of a human being. But isn’t her downfall not a downfall at all, rather a modern celebrity arc from being loved for what she elicits from boys and inspires in girls to being loved for how she comforts a populace worried about their own descent into madness? What I’m saying is this: Britney fell off of whatever pedastal she was on at the turn of the century. No doubt. But she didn’t fall into the depths of obscurity or the wastebin, rather onto another equally high pedastal that allowed us to continue to admire her in our infinite schadenfreude. And we kept her there long enough to give her the motivation to claw her way back to the other pedastal, albeit this time with a little more distance and tempered expectations.
The main difference I see between her and Barry Bonds is that Barry doesn’t even have a milk crate to stand on anymore in the eyes of the public at large. Even at her “lowest” Britney was prime fodder for any news/celebrity outlet and they would line up to just catch a glimpse, but at Barry’s lowest no one really wanted anything to do with him: dropped by his team, show cancelled on ESPN, ignored by his peers. That, to me, signifies a more depressingly spectacular fall–from front page to no page, once the new sultan of swat to being a swatted gnat on the face of baseball.
Seth: While it’s certainly true that Barry has fallen greatly, I find it hard to believe that Britney’s fall was not more stunning. Bonds was a revered hitter, a masher of pitches, but that didn’t make anyone care about him beyond their fantasy numbers. I guess for me, I look at Bonds and see a man who fell off the radar after being lambasted with charges of cheating, a man who literally had syringes thrown at him, but not a man anyone cared about. Britney captivated a nation as a young songstress and grew into a sex symbol the likes of which haven’t been seen since Marilyn Monroe. A woman at the top of her game who just flipped out and STAYED in the limelight so we could see all the gory details of her downfall. Bonds certainly had a mighty fall as the greatest hitter in baseball, but once he was out of the game, he was truly out of the game. His name would pop up on occasion when teams would be looking for a big bat, but in truth he was gone. The question really boils down to what’s a worse way to fail: in the spotlight or in privacy? Personally I’d rather deal with my problems alone. Not with the eyes of literally millions on me. Besides, Barry can pull off the bald head, Brit, not so much.
Greatest fall? Debate it up PR Nation!
fine job Brad, Seth
But
Tiger Woods = Epic FAIL
Brad puts forth a good model for collapse when he brings to attention the idea of fading into obscurity. This is why I can’t root for Britney because no matter how badly I would like to see her fade into a Cheetos induced coma of irrelevancy, she is still front page news. Bonds is a good example but lacks the pop culture punch. Not enough people give a damn about baseball. This could simply be remedied by force feeding James Earl Jones beautiful Field of Dreams soliloquy on ever coming of age youth…but I digress. I think the real power of the Bond’s example is the shame he induces in fans. Do I feel shame for shaking my bum to “Toxic”? Hell no! Do I regret having fallen under the spell of Brady Anderson’s juiced up sideburns? Hell yeah! The difference is that while Brit did make a complete ass out of herself she didn’t embarrass me personally. She still managed somehow to make butt swaying music. Bond’s, on the other hand, questioned the integrity of my favorite game.
So using this shame model, I put forth Mel Gibson. He created a nation wide collection grimace after his antisemitic meltdown. All of the sudden people seemed to forget how much they loved Mad Max as a kid or how charming he was in my personal guilty chick flick pleasure “What Women Want”. He just became a complete douche bag that couldn’t sell a movie to save his life. Tom Cruise could fall into this mold as well but Scientology isn’t quite as abrasive as blaming Jews for “all the wars in the world”. Plus Tom was pretty funny in “Tropic Thunder”.
So there you go– Mel Gibson. A big fall, yet to have a resurgence. Makes me feel shame for having once turned me on.
The one thing I think Brad overlooks is the possibility of a racial contribution to Bonds’ downfall. I’m not saying its an overriding factor, but Bonds is a black man in a sport that has an overwhelmingly white fan base (and media…). Bonds was a caustic, anti-social personality for sure and he certainly did not have as shrewd a PR team as McGwire, but he also had a litany of pesky, bespectacled white newspapermen and lawyers crawling up his butt looking to bring him down every day. In other words, Bonds’ downfall wasn’t all his fault, many were rooting for him to fail. Nobody openly rooted for Britney to fail.
Gibson is intriguing, but didn’t we know he was kind of a crackpot to begin with? After all, and even though it hasn’t shaken out yet, I think Le Tigre d’Amore will be the most remembered because he truly was at the top of his industry and was successfully maintaining a sense that he was impervious to PR disaster.
Yeah Tiger pretty much follows the Bonds model but it all transpired after we finished this writing. But I agree, when all’s said and done he’ll probably have a bigger fallout than Bonds. Here’s a few thoughts I have on this though:
1 – Race is playing an even bigger role (GOLF = WHITER THAN BASEBALL). It’s almost like people have been waiting years to take Tiger down and now they’re just flinging everything they have at him.
2 – I think Tiger and his team are faced with much more upfront and immediate scrutiny than Bonds ever had to deal with (his was more of a slow burn). I don’t know how that will play out (i.e. will he be able to fully squelch the fire in the coming months and then rebuild, or by dropping out of the arenas for which he’s known is he irreparably damaging himself?).
Mel Gibson certainly did lose a lot of credibility this decade, but I think he’s been downhill since Braveheart. He didn’t really enter the decade poised to expand his game.
I think there is a potent difference between Tiger and Bonds though. No matter was is stacked against Tiger, there is always the redemptive power of the game. That opportunity is taken away from Bonds (because he cheated on the game, not his wife…). I think what happened to Tiger is similar to what happened to Jordan during the baseball retirement, only much more poorly handled. If Tiger comes back in a year or six months (or sooner), divorced, angry, and bitter at the media and then proceeds to rip off another Tiger Slam and smash Nicklaus’ record, we will forgive him because that is what being the greatest has to offer, permanent immunity. As evidenced by his HoF speech, Michael Jordan is a total asshole who definitely cheated on his wife and probably gambled away a quarter of his fortune but we forgive him, because he is the best and there is no arguing that fact. Bonds doesn’t get that chance, no way.