Pop Stars and the Human Need to Worship
The Absence of the Divine Leaves Us with Meaningless and Flawed Idols
I recently came across a video of a band called the 1975 singing their song ‘Robbers’ at this year’s Reading festival. Girls in the front row scream the words on the verge of tears, holding their arms out to the singer Matty Healy who stumbles around the stage in a vest, drinking wine out of the bottle and generally looking like someone in need of a sympathetic arm and a little holiday in rehab.
I am someone who has perhaps just crested beyond the age where I idolise musicians into the age where said popular musicians are about my age, and so have the unavoidable realisation that as talented as many may be, these are just people living the same flawed lives of the rest of us. I’ve seen plenty of pop stars from my youth age into addiction and unhappiness as the sheen of popularity has left them, and so something of the glamour has gone, naturally leaving behind a little cynicism.
But it’s worth the observation that until a handful of decades ago, for thousands if not millions of years of human history, the impulses expressed in these pop settings have been wholly religious. The speed of this transition is strangely both unbelievably quick and yet somehow far enough behind us that it largely goes unacknowledged.
