Newsweek: “How Lady Gaga Is Like the Aztecs” (Interview)

Click here to read Tom Payne’s Newsweek Interview:
“How Lady Gaga Is Like the Aztecs”

Excerpt:

“Megastars like Lady Gaga, he argues, are elevated to the status of demigods—but we demand sacrifices from them in return (their image, their privacy). ‘The crowd wants something, and anindividual is prepared to give it to them,’ Payne writes, and the whole affair is often tinged with ‘collective cruelty.’ It’s not so different from how the Aztecs liked to select a sacrificial victim, worship her as a deity, and then cut out her heart in front of a rapt crowd.”

Previously:

• Radio: Click to listen to Tom Payne discuss our cult of celebrity on NH Public Radio “Word of Mouth” (15 minutes)
• Radio: Listen to Tom Payne on “why [...] we revere but also revile our celebrities” – KERA “Think” (Dallas Public Radio; 1 hour)

• Fame Reviewed in The Onion‘s A.V. Club:
  Fame: What The Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity (A.V. Club Review)

“Payne’s questions and answers have a distinctly modern feel, a semiological argument that recalls Roland Barthes’ Mythologies [...]“

• “Why Cicero Would Have Loved Kim Kardashian”
  (The Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog)
• Tom Payne is interviewed in  Publishers Weekly.
  Click to read “The Fame Monster”
• In the same issue, Fame gets a rave review:

“Erudite and vastly entertaining… A charming, contrarian, and very witty look at how our stargazing can be ‘something that bonds us, and which expresses something about how our civilization works.’”

• And, if you missed it, Tom has an excellent piece in The Huffington Post:
  ”Lady Gaga and the Episode with the Meat”