My Issue With Jeffree Star

A few months ago I got sand in my vagina and wrote a 1000 word diatribe against Jeffree Star, a gay cross-dresser who makes a living...well, to be honest I'm not sure how he makes a living.

Jeffree Star was scheduled to play in Des Moines last month along with the even more curiously popular Brokencyde and I threw a hissy fit. I dropped the following critique a few months ago, calmed down a bit, and promptly forgot about it.

Now, I offer you this strangely angry assessment of Jeffree Star from the archives.


Is it a sign of getting old when you become frightened of things that don’t make any sense?

Probably.

What confounds me is how people can pretend to be a star, or a celebrity, or even a musician, and in some cases, they’ll actually become what they pretend. Whether or not that truly qualifies them as becoming what they project is a matter of debate, but what frightens me is that there are people who are willing to believe it and they foster the ruse with their (or their parent’s) hard earned money.

Take Jeffree Star, a talentless gay man who dresses like a woman and has parlayed a franchise from just repeating the words “I am a star” over and over.

I’m being mean, of course, but there really isn’t a lot more substance than to my flippant opinion of a man who parades himself around like a celebrity without any real resume to prove it.

And yet, for some people that is enough.

The karma comes from knowing that their curious surge in page hits, video views, and song streams will come to an end and that their contribution to pop culture will be quickly forgotten. You will find Jeffree Star dead in a few years, or working in retail or some other position where the reality of life has finally lay its harsh hand on his existence.

Knowing this, I feel this unbearable urge to tell people like Star to take it easy, be nice, and try leaving something good for those dipshits that fork over their cash so that you can get loaded tonight and try to sleep it off in the next town that you’re looting.

The town tonight will be Des Moines, and it will feature another pockmark of music-Brokencyde-that is probably more culturally damaging and even more inexcusable than Star is.

Brokencyde sings about getting drunk and getting into chick’s pants. Nothing new, I suppose, but they do it with such a complete disregard for musicianship and total lack of talent that it makes you feel dirty listening to it. And not “dirty” in the sense of anything sexual, I mean dirty in the sense of mowing the lawn in 100-degree heat with 90% humidity followed by a shower of hot cow diarrhea.

Star, on the other hand, is a gay glitterati with so much past trauma that he builds a façade of femininity on with his clothes and covers the skin underneath it with permanent tattoos of Sharon Tate, Jean-Benet Ramsey, and I thought I caught a Breakfast at Tiffany’s era Audrey Hepburn somewhere on him.

There’s some symbolism there, I suppose, but it’s mixed with some weird pan-sexual gay/girl power mantra that’s a beacon for confused teenage girls and gay teenage boys (the ration seems to be about 75/25 female/male) who have no idea who’s portrait is on Star’s skin, but they know it’s “empowering” when he says the word “cunt.”

It’s that sense that Star has come from something troubled that gives one pause when dishing out criticism, but make no mistake, there is little inside him that qualifies this hot-pink twenty-something to have a record company that’s distributed through Warner Brothers.

As far as I can tell, his music is merely pre-programmed electronica with a few provocative catch phrases repeated over and over. The entire project probably took a week to create, and it shows. The rest of the time, Star has someone videotaping him while he yells profanity at anyone he thinks has ridiculed him, allows his dog to shit on the neighbor’s yard, or while he walks around with his equally foul-mouthed entourage like he’s someone important.

Other times, he looks provocatively into the camera lenses while he lip-synchs to rap songs and shows us that it takes an infinite amount of time to become the plastic figurine that he’s desperately trying to become.

Sure, there’s a clothing line and a fragrance coming to a Hot Topic near you, but don’t let that distract you that he’s just released his sixth single, one that’s sure to fail miserably like the previous five.

To hear Star, or Brokencyde, or any number of the “I’m a star cuz I say so” contingent, the sales don’t matter, neither do the critics (aka the “haters”) or the other musicians who are forced to share the stage/backstage with a bunch of shithuffers who’ve never loaded their own gear, let alone learned how to play it.

Yet the promoters of the Warped tour, a traveling sideshow of mediocrity and marketable angst, felt the need to include the tripe just mentioned on last summer’s line-up, which should have caused any self-respecting musician to bow out of the tour completely.

But because fame is so fleeting and because success doesn’t require you to have any real talent, they all stayed to collect a paycheck while occasionally lashing out at artists like Brokencyde or Jeffree Star, after they’ve collected their own paycheck, of course.

Even Brokencyde and Star seemed to hold some contempt for one another, with one of the Brokencyde “singers”-the one with the bad case of facial rosacea-stated that they didn’t “get along” with Star.

Yet here they are, touring together, because they know a package deal would sell more tickets than one headliner.

Fans can be so fickle, especially when they figure out the bands they’re supporting are too fickle to even invest the time needed to actually play an instrument.

What’s sad is that music provided both Brokencyde, Jeffree Star, Attack! Attack!, and any number of their ilk an opportunity to move away from the confines of their town, their past and situation. And since none of them have managed to pay a modicum of respect to their respective tickets out of those predicaments by investing in getting better, learning their craft, or giving back in some basic way, their fall-which is assured-will be swift and just as damaging as the situations that brought them here.