Fame, Online-Style

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I’m reading A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle (yes, I know Oprah’s big on it right now.) Anyway, I find the book rather interesting when it comes to ideas of ego, enlightenment and evolution. It’s worth picking up, if you like the whole New Age-y spiritual thing.

Yesterday, I read this sentence in the book, “The bane of being famous in this world is that who you are becomes totally obscured by a collective mental image.” (Pg. 83 in the paperback.) That struck a chord with me, for several reasons.

I’ve been accused of wanting to be famous at any cost. I’ve gained a miniscule amount of fame (like maybe some thousands of people I don’t know know who I am.) I’ve been given, and sometimes perpetuated, a certain image that isn’t necessarily who I am.

I guess I’m thinking about this idea of fame/image because of an email I got from an acquaintance recently. This is a man who doesn’t know me particularly well and undoubtedly carries around the above mental image of Maggie Roxx.

As everyone knows, I’ve been extremely, ridiculously busy in the past six months with moving to France, making an album and getting married. So acquaintances weren’t high priority for me in terms of keeping in touch. Not cool, I know, but you’ve got to draw your lines somewhere. And besides, there wasn’t much to say besides I’m making an album, moving and getting married.

Now this person chose to take the silence as pique on my part, which clearly it wasn’t. Negligence, yes; anger, no. So the email he sent reads in part as an apology for him not being a good enough friend to me (okay, whatever; I was obviously the negligent one here.)

Then he went on to make assumptions about the kind of person I was—”passionate and painful”—and how he would risk all that to be “close” to me. And also how well he knew me and how “connected” he felt to me. And of course, that if he had his druthers, he’d be “passionately making love” to me. Yuck.

And DOUBLE YUCK.

I read this email and it seriously made me want to vomit. I’d really like to know how people can (in sound mind and body) send emails like this to people they don’t know very well. Or maybe that’s precisely why. This rather sad fellow has created some sort of idea of who I am and who we are—or could be—together and god knows what he’s doing with that fantasy. I’d rather not know, actually.

Anyway, I blame the internet, Web 2.0, specifically. Before MySpace, Facebook, blogs, personal websites, etc… there was no way to feel really “close” and “connected” with your various artists and musicians. Now, you can feel like you actually have a personal connection to someone with whom you only exchange a few emails every few months. Or who you comment-reciprocate with. Or whose wall you write on. Or whose music or writing you are a fan/friend of.

There are some very wonderful things Web 2.0 has brought about, especially in terms of the dissemination of music. I don’t think any indie artist would want to go back to a time when our music couldn’t be easily heard by thousands of people. But what’s happening is that there are no clearly defined boundaries between the artist and the person.

For some artists, there is no clear boundary. Who they are onstage is who they are on the toilet.

(I love that I actually have this picture for illustration!)

But for a lot of others, including me, the performer is not who the person is. An exaggerated version or caricature of some part of their personality, maybe, but not who they really, truly are. And I think these false images and connections that people have (or think they have) with a particular artist can lead to completely inappropriate emails like the one I received. Or on the scarier/criminal level, stalking.

The music I make, the words I write, the pictures I take are only a small part of who I really am. And in this life, where it’s so hard for people to even know themselves, can anyone claim to “know” another person, especially a person whose job it is to perform?

Let me put it this way. If I actually were Maggie Roxx at all times, I’d be a boozing, slutting, over-aggressive, rather angry and perhaps slightly gender-confused and/or multi-sexually oriented singer-bassist chick who’d just as soon spit on you as she would have sex with you. Or something like that…

Instead, I’m a calm and happily-married French woman who likes her house clean and prefers to eat only organic food. Right…

So unless you’re actually living with me, sleeping with me, making music with me or writing with me (or you’re my sister), I’d say you don’t know me at all. But we can still be MySpace friends, right?

Just don’t send me delusional, vomit-inducing emails.

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Tags: A New Earth, artist, Asian, Blogs, boozing, Celebrity, connection, Eckhart Tolle, ego, enlightenment, evolution, Facebook, fame, famous, Friends, image, Maggie Kim, Maggie Roxx, making love, marriage, musician, Myspace, New Age, Oprah, Paris, Paris & France, passion, performer, personality, recording, relatives, Sex, slut, spiritual, stalking, Web 2.0, websites, wedding