Poor parents! Not only do you have to live with a multitude of anxieties hovering over the cherubim you have sired, but you also have to deal with this plague of our age: the lure of fame!
A child who wants to become a star, what a disaster!
Over the past few years, ministar factories have multiplied at breakneck speed. One of the most flamboyant is undoubtedly the competition Junior Song Eurovision whose final took place on Sunday, in Armenia.
This juvenile version of the European mega talent competition is aimed at young people aged 9 to 14 and brings together participants from around fifteen countries. This year, a 13-year-old Frenchman, Lissandro, won the honours. He was already known in France for having participated in The Voice Kidsanother similar event.
Lissandro distinguished himself with Oh mama! a song that will surely not end up on my playlists, but which should nevertheless find the way to success with a certain audience. It is said that this original composition is between the style of Bruno Mars and that of Elvis Presley, idol of Lissandro.
I watched the performance of the young singer. It’s licked, it’s nickel, it’s big ! But all of this makes me deeply uneasy. We are not in front of a 13-year-old singer, but of a boy who thinks he is Johnny Hallyday and who, devoured by an obvious ambition, wants to jump over his adolescence in order to know the most sacred glory.
We are far from the unconscious little Jordy and his famous song hard hard to be a babyhuge success of 1992 which allowed him to be at the top 50 from France for 15 weeks. Here, about Jordy: his parents swallowed up the receipts of this song in a project of amusement park which was a fiasco. Hard hard to have megalomaniac parents!
You will tell me that the phenomenon of child stars and competitions for young talents is not new. We only have to think of the Talent Catelli or to Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple. At home, René Simard, long before Gérard Barbeau, was the nightingale of a whole generation.
What has changed today is the magnitude of the thing. Junior Eurovision is a gigantic organization that makes (temporary) ministars on the assembly line. And the more we attend these breedings of talents, the more millions of young people all over the world want to win their star.
Specialists in the world of childhood tell us in chorus: children become teenagers faster than before. Already, at 10 or 12 years old, they try to be like the oldest, those who are 16 or 17 years old. The codes that are good for adults are also good for young people.
And since “celebrity accessible to all” is one of the most widespread codes for young people thanks to the tools of the digital world (while preparing this column, I came across a document aimed at young people and bearing the title of Become an actor in 12 steps), many children, pre-teens or teenagers succumb to the call of glory.
If the adult who wants to become famous does it for the power and, in many cases, the money, the 9 or 12 year old who is aiming for the same goal does it in order to please or to distinguish himself from others. That’s what bothers me about this business: believing that the fame obtained thanks to a tasteless song will make you a being… different.
The parents who accompany their child in this adventure may repeat that they leave all the freedom to their budding mini-star, I can’t help but wonder who is the one who is really living his dream in this affair: the child or the parent ?
We all remember the documentaries on the pathetic Mini Miss competitions where little girls, made up like adult women, pose like poodles in front of judges, themselves former fallen Misses.
I was looking at the pictures of theJunior Song Eurovision and I thought about the weaning that these young stars will have to go through. Adult performers who have known fame and who find themselves deprived of it after decades often compare this emptiness to the drug addict who no longer has the right to his daily doses. Imagine how this is experienced by a young person who faces emptiness after only two or three years of public adulation.
The first thing a young star has to learn is that she will have an audience made up of young people, like her, who will grow up quickly, like her. And one day, that audience will get rid of her like an old Kleenex.
You see how sordid it all is.
One thing consoles me however, and it is to see that in Quebec, we seem to resist (for the moment) these children’s competitions. The public maintains a wall between young people and the lure of hasty fame. Remember The junior voice and its little candidates that I went to meet in a hotel in Montreal during the auditions.
After two successful seasons, TVA mysteriously decided to withdraw the show in the winter of 2018. Was it because of this malaise I was talking about at the start of this column?
The other day, I came across a gossip magazine with the headline “35 children of Quebec stars who follow in their parents’ footsteps”. I thought that was a lot of child stars for a small company like ours. But I also said to myself that at the rate at which we produce headliners, anonymous people will become rare, and therefore more sought after. Take it for granted!