4. Idol Worship and Personality Cult

Now, if you've been paying attention, you're going to say, wait, Cayce – did you just say “idol worship”? Isn't that one of the phrases you mentioned earlier? If fan idol worship is what brought rock music to Japan, how can it be “solipsistic yet virulent” as you described it? “Solipsistic yet virulent” – what does that even mean?

What it means, my friends, is “insufferably self-obsessed, yet spiteful toward others.” And no, idol worship won't get us to solipsistic virulence on its own. For that, we need the other two elements, as well: personality cult, and identity erasure.

So what is a personality cult, anyway? And how is it different from idol worship?

Idol worship means putting someone else on a pedestal of admiration. The reasons for that admiration could be anything. In the case of Japanese boys listening to Western rock bands, the reason for admiration was probably some combination of ineffable cool-factor with actual musical talent – but the actual musical talent likely played a large role. Why do people decide to take up guitar? Oftentimes, because they see someone play guitar who's really good at it, and they decide they want to get good at guitar, too. That's the positive side of idol worship – when idolization leads to inspiration.

Many people are idolized for their talents. We idolize great scientists for their ideas, great artists for their paintings, great writers for their words. In fact, most of the time, we entirely overlook the human side of the people we idolize, focusing only on their impressive accomplishments. That's where that axiom about “never meet your idols” comes from – if, in meeting your idol face to face, you discover that he or she is not such a nice person, it might destroy your admiration for his or her accomplishments, leaving you feeling disappointed and betrayed, so why risk it? Let idols be idols. Look but don't touch. This is the negative side of idol worship: dehumanizing the idol by assuming he/she is perfect and infallible.

Personality cult is kind of the opposite of idol worship, in that targets of personality cults don't have to have any accomplishments whatsoever. Oftentimes they do have accomplishments, but whether they do or don't is immaterial, because targets of personality cults attain their status based simply on their personalities, or more correctly, based on the public personae which they've either crafted for themselves, or which have been crafted for them, either by a manager of some sort, mass media herd behavior, adoring fans, or a combination of the above. Again, the new President of the United States is an excellent example of someone whose electoral success rode more on him being a personality cult figure than on anything he's actually done. Other personality cult figures: Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian...you get the picture.

Another way personality cult differs from idol worship: idols are held up as infallible, but the targets of personality cults are often celebrated for their flaws. Flaws create relatability, and more than anything, what the worshipers of a personality cult target want is to feel close to cult leader, and to feel that he or she understands them.

Combine idol worship with personality cult and what do you get? You get a person being put on a pedestal for no real reason, and while he's on that pedestal, his fans both dehumanize him by lofting him to godlike status, and they obsess over him in an intense personal way as they imagine sharing an intimacy with him that in fact, does not exist.

Sound familiar? Perhaps you're beginning to see where I'm going with this, but before we apply it to Japanese fangirls, let's talk about the third element: identity erasure.

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