Word: fame
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This month Leiber and Stoller, now Rock and Roll Hall of Famers, celebrate their half-century mark as partners and accept the Johnny Mercer Award from the National Academy of Popular Music/Songwriters' Hall of Fame. As songwriters, record producers, record-company owners and music publishers, they are legends in the business, having written and produced scores of hits--from the rhythm and blues of Kansas City to witty pop ditties like Yakety Yak and Poison Ivy and soul classics like Stand...
...potential money and fame generally don't hurt. That was the explicit draw of Making the Band, the ABC reality show that chronicles the auditioning and training of aspiring boy band O-Town. "It was the sweetest," says Trevor Penick, 20, of getting picked for the show. "Just like The Real World, you know?" Indeed. Some seasons, The Real World has seemed like a postgraduate program for aspiring actors, models and singers, with more than 35,000 applicants a year. "The ideal candidate [for a VTV show] would be a strong narcissist," says Atlanta psychologist Robert Simmermon, a fellow...
...camera, and he sees these series as a case in point. "Reality has become the greatest entertainment of all," he says. "It's symptomatic of a larger phenomenon that all of life is entertainment." It's a grand argument, appealing to our now conditioned distrust of the fame machine. But it's an easy one to take too far. In fact, most of us don't want to, in Gabler's words, "get to the other side of the glass," not this way. That's partly why we goggle at these shows, dumb struck...
...Schwimmers, with their phalanxes of publicists and flunkies, don't. You feel you're seeing, if not the true person, at least a less mediated version. (The charming gent on the island could be a complete jerk at home, but so could your charming dentist.) This puts these fame-game amateurs in the awkward position of having their very souls judged in public. "People stop me in the street and say, 'I really related to your character,'" says Real World vet Kevin Powell, 33. "I wasn't a character. That was me." And these noncelebrity celebrities tend to be bite...
...identity the most logical or academically honest way to classify knowledge? Consider the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center, which achieved a brief moment of fame two years ago after conservative senators tried to use its more prurient components to block Hormel's nomination to be ambassador to Luxembourg. Alongside the racy books that so flustered Jesse Helms are such bland fare as Love, Ellen, Betty Degeneres's heartwarming tribute to her lesbian daughter, or the newest biography of k.d. lang. Academic tomes about lesbian and gay studies nestle alongside gay personal finance books and travel guides. The selection...