Jiexiong Zhang
Week 4 assignment
7/12/2012
Dave Grohl is one of my favorite celebrity. He is a American musician. I have listened many songs of his bands, Nirvana and Foo Fighters. I have became a fan of him since I listened one record, The Pretender of Foo Fighters.
Being a rock celebrity, Dave has changed in many different ways. The biggest change of him happened when Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, killed himself by a bullet. Being the drummer of Nirvana and a friend of Kurt, Dave felt hopelessness. Because Dave lost his best friend and his band at the same time, he hide from public view. He went back to his home, and he started to sort his old prototype records and composed some new experimental records in his basement. After about one year, Dave build a brand new band, call Foo Fighters. This is the first biggest change of Dave Grohl.
The second biggest change of Dave happened when Foo Fighter were making a album, called One by One. During that time, Dave and Taylor Hawkins, the drummer of Foo Fighters, had a contradiction. They both thought the each other lead the band's music style in a wrong direction. In the meantime, Dave kind of quited the Foo Fighters temporarily. He play drum in the Queen of Stone Age, which even made Taylor mad more on Dave because Taylor felt that Dave thought Taylor's drum skill was not good enough. The whole band thought that time may be the ending of the Foo Fighters. However, after Dave finished one of Queen of Stone Age's tour, he returned to Foo Fighters, and then whole band turned to work well. The new album, One by One, got really successful. Also, Dave became more kind. In my opinion, Dave may realize that how important Foo Fighters is to him, and he may not want to see Foo Fighter breaking, just like Nirvana.
I agree that social media make people more famous than the time when it did not exist. For my personal experience, I learn the information of almost all music bands form social media way. For instance, I know Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters from one of my friend on Facebook. I'm not a person who watch TV every day, so pick up news and knowledges via internet. Also, my biggest interest is gaming, so I don't really check musical website. Without social media site, I might not know who is Dave Grohl and who are Foo Fighters in my entire life.
Also, in my opinion, it was hard to be famous for celebrities, especially for people who did not really show their imagine to audience. Back to 90s, or earlier, musicians were not able to sell as many record as nowadays. After social media was invented, celebrities became to be famous easily. People use Facebook, Twitter, etc. to share their artwork or musical work via their page, and audience are able to learn these works more easily than before. Audience may recommend some celebrities' works to their friends via write a status. This is also a free advertisement method for celebrities. Instead of the advertisements on TV or newspaper, this social media type advertisement is more acceptable for audiences. For instance, a boy may not interested in rock music; however, if a girl who the boy had a crush with write a status about some rock bands, he might try to reach their music.
Nowadays, the definition of celebrity is not only limited in specific catalogue, such as, actors, musicians, sports players, but some normal people could be also called celebrities. For instance, Some video gamers become famous because they play some specific video games well. Even some people become famous only because they upload some interesting story on their social media site termly. Nowadays, if a person are able to publish some thing interesting, such as a funny video, on the social media website, he or she could be a un-super famous celebrity. For example, I know a girl on Facebook, and she is a coser who dresses up as some movie and video characters. She put her photos of cosplaying on her Facebook, and she got many fans only because of her cosplaying photos.
In my opinion, even many traditional celebrities become more and more close to audiences because of social media. Some actors and sports players have their official page on social media websites. For instance, I can find Dave Grohl on Twitter, which make me think that Dave Grohl is not very far from me.
