Describe popstars as a group of people

Describe popstars as a group of people --2004 Popstars are a curious breed everywhere in the world, but especially in Turkey. They refer to themselves as artists although they are simply singers and quite obnoxious ones at that. They display a horrid taste in everything including their music, videos, clothes, houses, cars and private lives. They are also different from other types of musicians in their numbers. Much to the chagrin of jazz-lovers, rockers or classical music fans, there are plenty of popstars. In fact, they are probably more numerous than our society can accommodate. A new star literally pops-up every other day in a sort of jack-in-the-box fashion with a cheezy album. To describe them as a group of people, though, it is imperative that we look at their backgrounds, because this pervasive poor taste every pop singer inherently has is deeply rooted in their social environments. Popstars mostly come from a troubled family and/or low socio-economic backgrounds. When asked in interviews, they proudly talk about how they had no shoes as kids or how their father neglected or abused them or how a relative raped them—read the bios of Özcan Deniz, Seda Sayan and Zerrin Özer, respectively. Hence, more often than not, they are ill-educated and it shows. They have no finesse or class in the way they dress, walk or talk. They wear shiny, colorful clothes exclusively and expensively designed for them. They try to sound important by talking about politics or world affairs, but at every sentence their ignorance betrays them. Lack of style is also naturally reflected in their music and videos. As pop music appeals to masses and masses do not have any distinguished taste, it is safe to say that pop singers viciously and consistently attack our audio-visual senses with a cacophony of jarring notes, despicable, phony and ill-fitted lyrics in videos shot in imitation of their western counterparts. The lyrics are usually and predictably about unrequited love and the mischiefs of the beloved. The videos depict half naked girls trying to simulate some kind of primitive dance routines in strange environments. As with anything that has a mass allure, pop singers make gratuitous use of sex in their clothes, the models they use in their videos as well as their private lives; a farce we cannot escape from even during dinner in most of the tv channels almost every night of the week. Since their lack of education and unhappy childhood stories contribute immensely to how extravagantly they lead their lives, it is also easy to observe a very basic psychological strategy at work here. That is to say, pop singers seem to overcompensate for what they lacked as children by buying luxurious cars, beautiful but terribly expendable, or should one say, disposable girl/boyfriends, huge houses and expensive but tacky, mock classical furniture. In short, they comprise a typical group of showy-offy, frustrated and needy people. In their effort to further attract attention, these needy creatures sometimes resort to funny acts such as getting involved in bar brawls and sex scandals of your garden variety. In this colorful and greedy lifestyle, it is not difficult to understand popstars having all kinds of links to the world of crime and even serving prison sentences as in the case of Serdar Ortaç, Haluk Levent, Gökhan Özen and Doğuş. Another fail-safe attention-grabber, hence money-catcher for pop singers is to look feminine or even gay. This may strike you as odd since we live in a patriarchal and conservative society. However, today’s Zeki Müren lookalikes such as Fatih Ürek or Kuşum Aydın very smartly cashed in on a peculiar tolerance or even liking for the feminine looking male singers in this society. In brief, pop culture is the dominant culture today, and unfortunately for some of us, there is little to be done to avoid the pop-attack, since thanks to the mass-media, pop culture and pop singers are deliberately and successfully marketed at every corner of our daily lives. It infiltrates into our living rooms. So it does not matter if we personally approve of the Televoles or not, because we are all directly or indirectly subjected to them.