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SHOOT: It's disarming hearing the charming Khanye Mbau admitting to being a gold digger, admitting to being a 'survivor', and being so frank, and frankly, intelligent, with Gareth Cliff. She can't be accused of trying to sell and support the newspaper industry because she admits to it, she calls herself 'being an entertainer'. It's fascinating to follow her 'career', from her 6 months as Doobsie, on SABC2's popular Muvhango to becoming [in]famous the Queen of Bling. Kyanye was fired, as a 17 year old, for partying too much, ending a brief but effective career on the smallscreen...and from there achieved notoriety for just that. Partying. She's a South African, African even, Paris Hilton. People love to hate her, but most seem to secretly admire her.
There is a problem though...and it's hard to put my finger on what it is. I think it's this. That ordinary people are being 'played'. It's a game orchestrated by both the 'celebrity' and the media. Ordinary people are the participants and the perpetrators. People basically are fed troughs of what they want to hear. It might be reality, but it's a reality infested with our own vices. Is that in the public interest? No one seems to care.
It's celebrity for the sake of celebrity. Money begets money. And it is the worship of the greed motive, the money motive - something which by now ought to be tasting filthy-wicked terrible in the average person's mouth. Khanye is a product of our times, but she also represents the persona of those who greedily obsess about her life, and those secretly envious of that kind of destructive and subhuman avarice. A life where the most important thing is money [not people, not even who you are]. Until that changes, until that ego-fixation, that hyperindividual vanity, that addiction to excess and selfishness changes, we are on the highway to collective ruin.
That highway is signposted with the icons and celebrities we've adored...Michael Jackson, Elvis - for their vanity, and their excess. Their road, that road, is the one we wish we were on, and that wish is coming true. Because the last thing we can afford is excess, when everything around us shows us the opposite is happening. Fewer jobs, less money, limited resources. A psychology of excess, and worse, a popular psychology of hyper-consumption and hyperindividualism, given the contemporary issues, is nothing less than insanity.
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