X-Factor contestant Chloe Mafia, a nineteen-year old ‘100 per cent English Yorkshire denizen’ prostitute who wants to “blow… you away” could well be 100 per cent correct in arguing that she not only knows, but is “the recipe for a star.” Given that the call-girl who goes by ‘Candy’ has already almost doubled her rates both hourly and nightly while concurrently negotiating a ‘five-figure’ interview deal with a top UK tabloid journal, we think it’s about time someone’s taken a closer look at that recipe…
First the unsurprising attributes: Chloe, who has “the words I am nasty tattooed around her pierced bellybutton,” speaks in an almost undecipherable English slang, and takes ‘at least three hours to get makeup every day,’ … kind of like Jersey guidos not pronouncing the letter ‘r,’ and bathing in their hair gel. Each to his own we assume…
Less obvious, but probably more integral, Chloe’s ‘fame and fortune’ the UK Daily Mail reports, “has nothing to do with her singing ability, and everything to do with the fact that she is a prostitute” – which has led to praise across the channel, even by the stalkers at Gawker, who called her maybe ‘the trashiest reality star ever.’
And while this hints that reality TV super-stardom can be determined by nothing less than pure sleaziness, such a blanket value judgment amounts to nothing short of a critical cop out. Surely something else has helped her out other than her ‘tarantula’ lashes, giant boobs, and aggressive sluttiness. After all, if that were all it took, we’d quickly lose our interest…
In her moments of on-stage vulnerability Chloe manages, like any successful star on the reality circuit, to pit the judges firmly against the audience. That is, to make us identify with her despite her stereotypical trashiness, making those in power applaud her to appease us despite their better, well, judgment.
And why not? Watching her we get the sense that anything could happen, we feel excitement, uncertainty, the dice roll, compounding probability: the very essence of ‘reality.’
The press’ choice to slam our dearest Chloe almost universally for stating, up front, her deepest wishes to ‘get famous’ betrays a reactionary resistance to increasingly common creeping fear that talent has become nothing but measurement of fame-whoring ability. A trickier trade than at first meets the eye, and, I’ll be first to argue, an art unto itself.
But the more difficult question is, or at least should be, whether there’s something about fame that’s simply innate, or, if as we in America so often dream, anyone can capitalize on such a recipe… at least if they have the right backers and enough old money.
