They exist on totally opposing ends of the entertainment spectrum. Lady Gaga, wearing something designed by Alexander McQueen that looks like haute couture’s answer to Predator and belting out The Star-Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl. Fat White Family reeling around Peckham, struggling to pay their rent, and spending their afternoons inspecting jars of embryos and jellied noses with Noisey.com.
Yet, as fortune would have it last night, Lady Gaga uploaded a bunch of pictures of Fat White Family to Instagram, taken backstage at the band’s headline show at Le Poisson Rouge in New York, where they all hung out afterwards. I know right? Lady Gaga likes Fat White Family? Wild. It’s almost as if famous musicians also like music.
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It actually makes total sense in a way. They both enjoy creative shock value – whether it’s wearing a dress made of meat to a red carpet event or naming their album Champagne Holocaust – and operate at the point where art and squalor intersect, even if they’re approaching it from two very different perspectives. Still, it’s pretty funny that she sent out a picture of Saul Adamczewski showing off his tooth gap to 16.5 million followers.
So what next? Does it even mean anything? Will Fat White Family end up on stage at the Grammys or, heaven forbid, The Brits, next year? Considering TV and FM radio stations in the UK still struggle to represent anything that hasn’t been backed by a wealthy parent or an aggressive social media campaign, maybe the onus lies with the already famous to give everyone else a leg up. Maybe high profile cosigns will become the benefactors of 2016, like when rich tycoons used to just pay a poet to be a poet for a year, back in the olden days, when Game of Thrones wasn’t around to entertain everyone and poets were revered like Madonna and that. Now you need someone like Lady Gaga or Rihanna to cosign you into global fame. Why not, I guess.
Or, maybe celebrities are also mere humans with likes and dislikes and social media accounts to share them on. The mind boggles.
