Charlie Brooker: The life of Mariah Carey sounds terribly demanding
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I can scarcely imagine the level of forelock-tugging servility Mariah Carey must have encountered during her lifetime
Last week Mariah Carey turned on the Christmas lights at the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherds Bush, west London. That might sound like a trivial event of interest only to cretins, but remember: hundreds of thousands of brave men and women died in combat so the current generation could enjoy such freedoms. The assembled masses weren’t simply taking mobile phone snapshots of a vastly overrated singer emptily promoting a commercially- appropriated religious festival celebrating the birth of a man who would have doubtless vomited up his own ribcage in disgust at the mere sight of the hollow, anaesthetising capitalist moonbase that is the Westfield Centre. No. They were honouring the fallen. Sort of. Vaguely. OK: not at all.
Anyway, any story featuring Carey has to at some point dwell on a list of outlandish arch-diva requests, and this one didn’t disappoint. According to early press reports, she demanded to be driven along a long pink carpet in a vintage Rolls-Royce before arriving at the podium (also pink) at which point she’d activate the lights by waving a magic wand, accompanied by 20 white kittens and 100 white doves. Pink, butterfly-shaped confetti would shower all around her at the end of the ceremony.
In the event, that turned to be bullshit. She arrived in a Merc, burbled a few inanities (“Wow, I’ve never been to a mall in London before!”), shook hands with some charity kids, and sodded off out of there. In fact the most startling thing about Carey’s turn was her outfit: a pair of jeans so tight she was virtually ingesting them. No kittens. No doves. Not even a pink podium. You could be forgiven for thinking the papers had just lazily printed a load of PR bibble cynically engineered to promote the event by playing on popular assumptions about Carey’s caprice, and had done so without bothering to check any of the facts.
Thing is, even if Carey had made a string of crazy demands, I wouldn’t blame her. I doubt many celebrities start out behaving like foot-stamping little Caligulas, but years of having their arses kissed left, right and centre – yes, even on that centre bit – steadily drives them insane.
I’ve seen it happen in my own life, in my own little way. About 10 years ago I was co-presenting a technology show on a niche digital channel with an audience of about six. This was my first time in front of the cameras. I had less screen presence than the Invisible Man and the sex appeal of a fatal headwound. Since the show was shot in the “zoo” format popular at the time, the camera often roved dangerously close to my face, which made the experience of watching me a bit like gazing through a security peephole to see John Merrick leering ominously on your doorstep. I was unfunny, uncomfortable and charmless. Things have changed since then, obviously. I’m fatter.
Anyway, during the first week of making the show, the runner would come over between takes to check whether I needed anything. A chair, perhaps? A glass of water? At first, this was embarrassing. I didn’t want anyone making a fuss of me. But one of the primary rules of television is to keep “the talent” happy, and consequently there was no let-up. So you accept the proffered chair, sup the glass of water. And after several weeks of pampering, something snaps in your brain. You grow accustomed to the attention; like wireless broadband, it’s an everyday miracle you simply take for granted. Before long, the moment you get thirsty, your first thought is no longer “I’ll go and pour myself a drink”, but something along the lines of “Where’s that runner gone?”, “Why haven’t I been watered already?”, or “Isn’t this a disgusting breach of my human rights?”
And that’s the treatment given to an ugly bloke on a cheap satellite show. I can scarcely imagine the level of forelock-tugging servility Carey must have encountered during her lifetime. Her record company probably employs someone to walk 10 paces in front of her, breathing on all the doorknobs in her mansion so they won’t feel cold to the touch. Not that she’ll have touched a doorknob in 15 years. She must think every door in the world opens by magic at the first sign of her approach.
Under those circumstances, you’d rapidly lose all respect for “regular people” and start issuing lunatic demands for them to follow, partly to keep yourself amused, and partly out of sheer disgust. After all, if you’re going to bow each time I enter the room, I might as well make you kiss my feet a few times while you’re down there.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s why it’s hard to detect much in the way of palpable feeling in Carey’s music. Her singing voice wavers up and down through the octaves, like someone slowly tuning a shortwave radio in search of an authentic emotion. It’s technically amazing, but almost impossible to relate to on a human level – possibly because she no longer experiences anything akin to regular human life. She might not even experience proper emotions these days. She might have people who do that for her. Aides who rush in and hitch up the corners of her mouth each time she starts to smile, and mop down her cheeks with tiny hand-knitted towels when she cries.
But is it Mariah’s fault if she’s over-indulged? No. It’s yours. You specifically are to blame.
Oh OK: it’s society’s fault. If society insists on treating celebrities like royalty, there’s little point lambasting them for behaving like princesses. It’s nurture, not nature. And besides, the press is probably making it up anyway. Tales of the cosseted few whistling through an unreliable sphincter into the eyes and ears of the many: that’s entertainment news, that is.
• To order a copy of Charlie Brooker’s latest book The Hell Of It All for £8.99 (RRP £12.99) call 0845 606 4232 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop
‘Nubian monkey’ song and Arab racism | Nesrine Malik
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The fairness of Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe’s skin makes her patronising lyric all the more problematic for black Egyptians
Haifa Wehbe, a popular Lebanese pop singer, has always been a controversial figure. The queen of a relatively new breed of voluptuous, coquettish starlets, her provocative lyrics, attire and music videos have won her popularity among Arab men who lust after her, women who want to emulate her, and now children targeted by her latest album. It is in objection to allegedly racially insulting lyrics from this album that a group of Nubian lawyers submitted an official complaint to Egypt’s public prosecutor calling for one of the songs to be banned.
The offending track, Baba Feen, a children’s ditty shot in a bizarre Alice-in-Wonderland-meets-Teletubbies video, features Wehbe as a very sexy mother trying to cajole her young son into going back to bed – which he refuses to do unless she meets several demands, one of which is to fetch him his teddy bear and “Nubian monkey”.
This perceived reference to black Egyptians has provoked anger among the country’s Nubian minority and the diva is now facing claims that the song’s lyrics are discriminatory and are fuelling racist attitudes towards Nubians, allegedly contributing to playground bullying of dark-skinned children. The episode seems to have galvanised members of the Nubian community, who originate from southern Egypt and north Sudan, the descendants of the founders of the Nubian kingdom, one of Africa’s earliest black civilisations, which flourished along the banks of the Nile some 3,000 years BC.
The singer has apologised profusely for any offence caused and claimed that the song was penned by an Egyptian writer who told her that the term referred to a popular children’s street game (which makes no sense in the context of the song, where the boy is ticking off a list of toys he wants including a teddy bear, Barbie and toy musical organ).
It is one of very few incidents I recall where racism against black Arabs has been addressed or discussed in the media and public arena apart from flash points over the treatment of foreign Arab black refugees. In an infamous incident in 2005, more than 20 Sudanese refugees died after heavy-handed treatment by Egyptian authorities.
While Egypt’s Nubian minority are largely absent from popular culture and the upper echelons of politics and business, some dark-skinned figures such as Mohamed Mounir and the late Ahmad Zaki achieved iconic status. Residual attitudes still remain, though. It always annoyed me that Zaki was often referred to as “the asmar (loosely translated as dark or dusky) artist”. That struck me as casual racism in the guise of fetishised endearment, similar to the way black girls are treated in the streets of Cairo when apparently being complimented on their dark complexions (being referred to as “Kit Kat” just isn’t cute). Perceptions are so entrenched that they are not seen as offensive and find their way into pop media.
The fact that a surgically enhanced fair-skinned Lebanese singer is at the centre of this controversy is perhaps not just bad luck. Lebanese standards of beauty and complexion have taken the Arab world by storm since the resurgence of the Lebanese in media after the end of the Lebanese civil war, further limiting the accepted definition of beauty as light-skinned, catty-eyed and slim-nosed. Fair & Lovely, a popular whitening cream, advertises itself on Arabic TV when a model is rejected for being too dark, only to be ecstatically accepted after a few weeks of applying the magic cream. As Wehbe is the very epitome and embodiment of this standard, the lyric is that much more patronising.
The absence of a culture of political correctness in a society that generally promotes very limited and monolithic ideals of identity means that minority rights suffer, and that most would dismiss the complaint as an overreaction to a mindless children’s tune sung by an equally vacant performer. But it is not only through obvious flare-ups and incidents that discrimination is perpetuated – it is also also through the everyday normalisation of racist address and the apathy this breeds.
The Nubians want a formal apology and an end to airing the song in Egypt. Perhaps this will call attention to an endemic culture of racial stereotyping in the region and raise the standards of reference to darker-skinned Arabs in Egypt and elsewhere.
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November 23rd, 2009
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