Was 2013 really that boring? After all, yahoo.com tells us that the year’s biggest news story was the tawdry-but-insignificant Jodi Arias trial, and Google includes “Celebrity Pregnancies” on its 2013 Zeitgeist lists. For many people, governmental shutdowns, Boston bombings and Obamacare glitches played second fiddle to the coming of Prince George.
Maybe that’s just an illustration of our society’s continuing tilt away from hard-hitting news and toward more celebrity-centric fodder: They caught that singer where? She’s hanging from a wrecking ball wearing what? Batman’s going to be played by who? Yes, celebrity news ruled the roost in 2013, meaning publicists and gossip columnists the world over had much to crow about.
And, indeed, this being a Plugged In blog post, many of my picks for the 10 people who rocked pop culture in 2013—for better or for worse—come from the world of entertainment. All of them intersect with it.
Bauuer: This New York-based DJ and music producer shouldn’t even be on this list, technically. His main claim to fame actually showed up in the summer of 2012—but no one noticed it at the time. No, it wasn’t until his ditty “Harlem Shake” was paired with a goofy YouTube video in February that anyone paid Bauuer much mind at all. But then we all paid him plenty. “Harlem Shake” became the year’s first runaway viral-music sensation (the second being Ylvis’ “The Fox“). Despite next-to-no radio play, it debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, went platinum and became the fourth-most popular song of the year. Oh, and just about everyone and their uncles created a parody/homage video set to the song’s shimmy-shake, too—all of which can be seen forever on YouTube. (But not all of which should be seen.) Now there’s some temporal immortality for you.
Beyoncé: Mrs. Carter knows how to keep our attention. Need proof? Consider her sultry Super Bowl gig, in which she arguably outperformed the Baltimore Ravens. Or look at her ongoing world tour, which has earned $105.9 million through the first 60 shows. (The average ticket sells for nearly $360.) Or that she and hubby Jay Z are now likely worth $1 billion, according to Vibe. And if all that wasn’t enough? Her new album Beyoncé—released in secret earlier this month with 14 tracks and 17 videos—is not just a game changer (because of both its content and how it was introduced) but one of the year’s biggest releases. No, Beyoncé isn’t exactly family friendly. Her album absolutely oozes sex. But pair that sultry allure with unquestioned talent and an astonishing amount of attention to business savvy, and Queen Bey simply couldn’t be a bigger influencer.
Justin Bieber: Yes, sex sells. Yes, celebrities are supposed to make headlines. But Canada’s young singing heartthrob may have finally proved the old adage—there’s no such thing as bad publicity—wrong. Tabloids were full of wall-to-wall Bieber news throughout the year, turning him from the boy next door to a disaster in waiting. Breaking up with Disney starlet Selena Gomez was just the beginning. He had a profane confrontation with paparazzi in London, had a pet monkey confiscated in Germany and wondered out loud on Twitter whether Anne Frank would be a “belieber.” He’s posted pictures of himself drinking beer, holding what appears to be a marijuana joint, baring his buttocks and singing to his grandmother naked. Oh, and we must not forget about how he urinated in that mop bucket. If the flop of his newest concert doc, Justin Bieber’s Believe, is any indication (only $2 million made in the year’s last weekend), Bieber has some image repair to do.
Mark Burnett and Roma Downey: The Bible has been the world’s best-selling book for a thousand years or so. But it turns out that people may want to watch it more than read it. Enter power couple Mark Burnett and Roma Downey. The reality television magnate and the Touched by an Angel actress brought a 10-hour miniseries based on God’s Word to the History channel and, to the surprise of just about everyone, The Bible became a runaway hit. That’s great in and of itself, of course, but there’s an even more important upshot: As did The Passion of the Christ back in 2004, the success of the miniseries has convinced Hollywood to roll the dice with more biblically themed fare. A recut version of a part of The Bible series will show up in theaters in February. Russell Crowe will star in Noah. Christian Bale will be Moses in Exodus. Odeya Rush will merge with Mary. And scads of other biblically themed projects are in the works as well. Oh, and NBC plans to run another Burnett/Downey miniseries, called A.D., in 2015. We already know that not all of these God-inspired projects will stay true to the source material, but it’s still interesting to watch the Good Book gain new secular relevance.
Miley Cyrus: Oh, Miley. What more can we say about you this year? You took a wrecking ball to your sweet Hannah Montana legacy, stuck your tongue (and other parts of you) out for all to see and became the most talked-about star of the year. Your song “We Can’t Stop” became your first No. 1 song ever—buoyed in part by folks wondering whether you were saying “Molly” (and thus lauding drug use) or “Miley” (which would just suggest normal celebrity narcissism). Then came the MTV Video Music Awards, which forced even our grandmothers to learn the meaning of twerking. And if that wasn’t quite enough, your video of “Wrecking Ball” features you swinging on that iron pendulum buck naked—inspiring some very unfortunate copycats. Yes, we spent the last half of 2013 talking about nothing but you. But at what cost?
Jennifer Lawrence: Last year, The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen landed on this list based on the phenomenal success of the movie. But Lawrence barely needed Katniss’ help to make the cut herself this year. Sure, a new Hunger Games movie—Catching Fire—did come out, and it ended up just underneath Iron Man 3 as the No. 2 movie of the year (it’ll likely pass the superhero flick soon, though). But in the year of Lawrence, that was practically an afterthought. She won an Oscar for her turn in Silver Linings Playbook. She’ll likely challenge for another for her role as Rosalyn Rosenfeld in American Hustle. But it’s her casual, funny and unblinking interviews that may have made even more of an impression on fans—particularly her willingness to stand up to Hollywood’s tyranny of thin. “I’d rather look chubby onscreen and like a person in real life,” she told Marie Claire South Africa. She talks about how much it hurt when she was told by industry insiders to lose weight when she was a kid performer. And recently she told Barbara Walters that calling someone “fat” on TV should be illegal. She can be crass. She can be earthy. But Lawrence feels real—and that’s as rare in Hollywood as a poverty-stricken plastic surgeon.
Phil Robertson: Someone on the Duck Dynasty clan would’ve likely landed on this list even before Phil Robertson was interviewed by GQ. But when the Robertson patriarch got a little too real with the magazine, he and his family went from a sweet, unifying success story to divisive cultural flashpoint. And A&E suspended Phil for statements he made about homosexuality being a “sin.” Let’s not ignore that the (sometimes crass) way he made those remarks might—and arguably should—make even Duck Dynasty’s most loyal followers feel a bit uncomfortable. But no matter: An online petition to bring Phil back garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures, and after nine days, A&E relented and brought the beleaguered Duck Commander founder back. But methinks this won’t be the last we hear about this issue: This 2013 mover may shake 2014 too.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: He allegedly helped perpetrate the Boston Marathon bombing with brother Tamerlan, killing three people and injuring hundreds more. Still, the sweet-looking teen somehow inspired his own fan club in the aftermath, many members of which are teenage girls. With some supporters arguing that Tsarnaev is simply “too pretty to be guilty, ” a Twitter feed pushing for the suspect’s freedom ballooned to 6,600 followers. Pundits began wondering whether our society really did place too much value on how someone looks—a question that gained yet more traction after Rolling Stone featured Tsarnaev on its Aug. 1 cover. Tsarnaev’s strange celebrity illustrates how our fame-obsessed culture can twist in curious ways. “It’s not that he’s a bomb suspect, it’s that he’s notorious,” Sheila Isenberg, author of Women Who Love Men Who Kill, told yahoo.com. “A lot are going to say, ‘I just want to make sure he gets a fair trial,’ but that’s really window dressing for their inherent need to get famous themselves.”
Walter White: Speaking of being notorious, Albuquerque’s most infamous meth-making teacher died in 2013, bringing AMC’s brutal cautionary tale Breaking Bad to a close. That fifth-season finale drew in 10.3 million viewers—not just a record for the show, but 442% higher than its Season 4 climax. Why the rise? Thank Netflix, which allowed viewers to get caught up on the show in a television trend called “binge watching.” And thank White himself—played by former Malcom in the Middle dad Bryan Cranston. White was a compelling, deeply flawed protagonist, a character (broadly sketched) with a lot of company on TV. Beginning with mobster Tony Soprano (of HBO’s The Sopranos) and including such characters as a lying ad man (Don Draper from AMC’s Mad Men), a “moral” serial killer (Showtime’s Dexter) and throngs of others, television’s so-called golden age has been awash in antiheroes. And while these bad boys (and girls) give audiences lots to think about, I can’t help but wonder: With White’s passing, might 2014 be the year we see some real heroes back on the small screen?
The Zombie: There are some who say our corporate love of zombies is, well, decaying a bit. But from where I sit, these shambling mounds of undead flesh are just as lively as ever. The biggest cable show of the year wasn’t Duck Dynasty or Breaking Bad, but AMC’s The Walking Dead—which seems to set new viewing records with each new season premiere and finale. The critically acclaimed zombie-themed game The Last of Us sold nearly 4 million copies. Brad Pitt’s zombie thriller World War Z earned more than $200 million at the box office, and the zombie romance Warm Bodies was a surprise hit, collecting $66.4 million itself. In our society, zombies have long served as a flexible metaphor—rotting mirror images of our cultural weaknesses, be it racism or mindless consumerism or even spiritual death. Indeed, one of the narrative points of The Walking Dead is that the real monsters are the living. Not that every zombie fan cares about such metaphors, of course. Some watch such fare with glazed eyes, only sometimes lurching up from the couch to get another bowl of Doritos.
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