M.I.A. and the Problem of Unreliable Celebrities

Lynn Hirshberg's cover profile of rapper M.I.A. in this weekend's New York Times Magazine has provoked the kind of reaction normally reserved for a significant movie or album, and for good reason. The spectacular—and spectacularly nasty—takedown is full of repudiation by scorned lovers, French fries as means of character assassination, policy wonk soundbites, and first-world-third-world clash. But the piece's reverberations really come from a question Hirschberg doesn't pose or answer directly, but that has been a consistent animating theme in her best work. In an age of faked memoirs, staged reality programs, and self-reinvention as quasi-religion, do we need our celebrities to tell the truth about themselves?

Some celebrity personae, of course, are so patently false that there's nothing to do but enjoy them. No investigative journalists need to be dispatched to determine whether David Bowie is actually an alien manifesting as an apocalyptic rock star, or whether Sasha Fierce causes trouble in Jay-Z and Beyonce's marriage. They're just vehicles, and amusing, harmless ones at that. No one is deceived, but everyone enjoys the music.

Queasy but great entertainment—and great entertainment journalism—have often come out of the disjunction between established celebrity narratives (at least the ones that are meant to be taken seriously) and reality, or the breakdown of a once-true narrative. Vanessa Grigoriadis's 2008 Rolling Stone profile of Britney Spears came as the former teen pop star was punishing her handlers, America, and herself for imposing a restrictive, virginal life story on her by going publicly, shockingly crazy. But the piece also exposed that story as false in the first place. Britney was sexually active before her breakout album, and she'd had breast implants. What was interesting was less that she and her management team lied about those events, but how she succeeded, and then failed, to live out the history that was retroactively created for her. CONTINUE READING...