The Price of Fame

In 1978 the devil did not have Instagram.

He did not understand algorithms, could not promise followers and nobody had yet turned the word engagement into something capable of ruining breakfast.

He had to work with more traditional tools.

Fame, for example.

And a soul.

That is more or less where Sweet Revenge, Amanda Lear’s second album, begins.

For readers outside Italy, one piece of context matters. Lear later became a familiar Italian television personality: witty, provocative and instantly recognisable even to people who had never heard the albums that first made her a European disco star. Here, MOREL returns to the artist behind that later television image.

The first side works as a small narrative suite inspired by Faust: a woman is tempted by fame and wealth, discovers the price of the bargain and tries to escape it.

All of this, naturally, while remaining perfectly danceable.

Faust with a mirror ball.

That is what interests me about the record.

Not nostalgia.

The contract.

Because almost fifty years later we have changed the tools, but not necessarily the desire.

Being seen

Amanda Lear interests me as an artist-character.

Voice, clothes, accent, theatricality, ambiguity: for decades people tried to establish who she really was.

Meanwhile she continued being Amanda Lear.

It seems a better use of time.

A character can become a prison.

But it can also be chosen space.

The problem begins when we can no longer tell the difference between what we show and what we are now obliged to keep showing.

A character should be something you wear. Not something you hand the keys to.

In Sweet Revenge the temptation begins with a simple promise: follow me.

It does not sound very different from the contemporary version.

Be admired. Be recognised. Be chosen.

Enter the room where we imagine everybody else has already arrived.

Most of us want to be seen.

Sometimes by thousands of people. Sometimes by one.

The desire is not the problem.

The problem begins when we change in order to stop the gaze from leaving.

The devil now offers analytics

Once attention becomes measurable, it becomes extremely easy to mistake measurement for meaning.

Views. Likes. Matches. Followers. Saves. Replies.

The devil has upgraded.

He now offers analytics.

The danger is not that numbers are fake. They are real numbers.

The danger is treating them as evidence of worth.

If one version of us performs better, platforms teach us quickly what to repeat.

The photograph that works. The joke that works. The vulnerability that works. Even the pain that works.

And here identity can begin a very small gentrification.

We renovate the parts that receive approval.

We keep the façade that performs best.

We quietly move out whatever seems harder to sell.

Until perhaps we are perfectly coherent.

And no longer live there.

Perhaps we have been gentrified.

Visibility is not existence

This is where Sweet Revenge stops being a 1978 curiosity for me.

It becomes a useful fable about now.

The bargain no longer has to say: give me your soul and I will make you famous.

It can say something much smaller:

give me the version of you that performs, and I will keep showing it to people.

That version might even be true.

The problem is when truth becomes obligation.

When one successful self begins evicting every other possible self.

The right is not to become invisible. It is to be visible without becoming a metric.

We were somebody before the promise arrived.

Before the numbers. Before the gaze. Before the version of us that worked.

That person may change.

Good.

But change should not require turning ourselves into a product we then have to maintain forever.