King Adz: No more heroes
Adz lays into the culture of celebrity worship and asks why our heroes aren't what they used to be?
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So Justin Trousersnake likes this magazine? So fucking what?! What I want to know is why does the opinion of a celebrity count for so much? What is it with all the brands just hiring celebrities to ‘endorse’ their product. I opened some shitty magazine the other day and spotted Kevin Costner shilling for Turkish Airlines. It certainly didn’t make me want to fly Turkish. And then we get to every fucking Z-list personality who’s ever been near a cooker having their own food line in the supermarket. I used to love Ken Hom and still use one of his books from the 1980s, but now I’m accosted by his ‘cook your own shit’ range on heavy rotation in my local hypermarket from hell. I’ve got nothing against any of these people personally, but when they are shoved into the bright spotlight of promotion and I keep seeing them around (on TV, in a mag, in a ‘news’paper), I have to ask myself, 'Why?' It's not like they're even my heroes. By the way, speaking of which, what happened to them?
It may be a cliché, but they don’t make ’em like they used to. As a guy who has spent a lifetime sniffing after artists with something revolutionary to offer, my list of heroes is ever diminishing. It’s heartbreaking to say this but there are no newcomers, no real renegades – just a bunch of media-savvy careerists playing some pseudo-rebellious game to establish themselves before kissing corporate arse as soon as they cash the cheque from their paymasters. Okay, so there are still some artists who don’t go the obvious route. But the moment Banksy decided it was okay to accept the commercial dollar, a little piece inside of me withered and died.
I want my heroes to be swashbuckling adventurers riding in and out of our lives on the edge of oblivion, not giving a shit about anything except themselves and whatever adventure they’re on. I want my heroes to be people who don’t even know about silly things like shifting units or social networking, as they’re too busy creating works of genius, dodging bullets and avoiding their enemies and exes to care.
The traditional media used to be completely controlled and it was only through these channels that you could get some notoriety; some heat. Nowadays, thanks to the access-all-areas wonders of the internet, everyone and anyone can be ‘a little bit’ famous and – as wonderful as that may be for you, me, the little dude in the corner over there – I can’t help but feel that it’s taken the spotlight away from the real heroes of our time. It’s like there’s only so much vegemite to go around and it’s been spread too thin.
Entire days of our lives are spent glued to a screen watching, reading, sucking in data, but never really participating. I’m into places and things that aren’t on the Internet. Stuff you really have to schlep around to discover. Things you need to taste, hear, see and feel to appreciate. People who don’t need websites to be classed as heroes.
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No more heroes (text) by King Adz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (3)
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A true hero is someone who will live humbly for others.
Who is our modern day Batman?