In February, Interview magazine published one of their classic conversations between two famous people of a rarefied status who seemingly are the only ones who understand each other, this time, Mariah Carey and Cardi B. The two discussed many things, at one point devolving into a tangent about the perfect bra, but the main crux of their conversation centered on a key part of their lived experience: what it means to be a celebrity.
Inevitably, as these conversations go, they got to what it means to have fans. Cardi said it feels like in some ways, fans understand some of her world better than people she actually knows. Later, she explained that meeting other celebrities makes her nervous. “My fans want me to interact with more artists, but if I love their music, I don’t want to meet them because I don’t want to hate them. I’d rather just not know them at all and love them than meet them and be like, ‘Oh my gosh, this person’s a weirdo.’ When your friends hurt you, you can vent on social media. When a celebrity does you wrong, you can’t vent because it becomes a problem.”
While most of us cannot relate to beefing with a celebrity on Twitter and it causing “problems” (or even necessarily venting about friends publicly), Cardi was accidentally outlining a particular, many-sided tension, in which what it means to be famous and what it means if you’re not has only gotten more complicated as celebrity culture has grown. There is no famous person without fans, and vice versa, and lately, there seems to be less and less of a distinction between the two categories. If the rich and famous were once considered a class above, the past decade, at least, has seen the line between them and us become increasingly blurred. While some have of late suggested that celebrity culture is over, in actuality, it’s continued to do what it always does: evolve. Stans can derail a celebrated career; celebrities find comfort, community, and solace in their fandoms; and fans can become celebrities themselves (just look at our cover subject, Chase Icon). Where there was once an A-list and a B-list and a D-list, now there are whole new categories of people that have upset the entire concept of a hierarchy. For as much as the wealth and power of the world remains deeply polarized, the fame industry itself and all it touches—gossip sites, talent agencies, real estate, technology—is in the middle of extreme transition.
The Fame Issue, our first issue of 2021, is a look at that fine line between famous and fan—the power of each, and the strange businesses around both. Now that fans are famous, it’s anyone’s game—whatever that game is.
—Kate Dries, Editorial Director, Features
