Keeping up with Kanye and Kim

ON New Year’s Eve, Kanye West interrupted his Atlantic City concert to announce an urgent bit of news. “Stop the music,” West demanded.

“Can we make some noise for my baby mama right there?”

As 5,000 shrieking fans were doubtless aware, West had just announced that Kim Kardashian — his girlfriend and subject of his new love song, “Perfect Bitch” — was pregnant.

The tabloid press salivated, the Twittersphere churned with speculation and congratulations, and some of us — admittedly a small group — yet again wondered why Kardashian was the object of such public scrutiny.

My allergy wasn’t elitist: the tabloid industry wasn’t beneath me; my love for Kipling and Keats doesn’t preclude an appreciation of Kardashian sisters Kim, Khloé, and Kourtney; and I don’t think reality television is a debased and pornographic genre. Indeed, I’m a dedicated reader of the New York Post and the Daily Mail.

And a decade ago I gleefully consumed The Osbournes; empty calories, for sure, but ones that featured the wonderfully talented and often brilliantly funny, Ozzy Osbourne.

But why would one be interested in the daughters of deceased OJ Simpson lawyer Robert Kardashian?

My existing knowledge of Kardashian could be summed up in two related facts: she has a rather generous behind, which is photographed and analysed in more detail than potential drone-strike targets, and she made her acting debut in a much-discussed, much-downloaded sex tape.

I was vaguely aware of the ubiquitous product endorsements, like the “Kardashian Kard,” a prepaid debit card promptly removed from the market after Connecticut’s attorney general questioned its exorbitant fee structure, and QuickTrim, a Kim, Khloé, and Kourtney-endorsed weight-loss product that resulted in a class-action lawsuit for making, “false, misleading, and unsubstantiated”, health claims.

One wants to be culturally literate, and as America is to be blessed with another Kardashian — one whose first photograph will be worth seven figures, a certain level of knowledge was required to participate in this cultural moment.

To decode the reasons for the family’s fame, I indulged in a Netflix marathon of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, their hugely popular reality-TV show.

The very first bit of dialogue in the very first episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians was hardly clarifying.

Establishing that Kim would be the show’s breakout star — she’s the prettiest one, and in the world of reality television that’s what matters most — the other family members ruminate on Kim’s “junk in the trunk”.

But I already knew about this talent. When properly introduced to viewers, though, we’re told that Kim works as a “wardrobe stylist,” but as the show’s popularity expanded so too did her résumé. Her Wikipedia biography distills her new occupations: “Kim Kardashian is an American socialite, television personality; businesswoman; fashion designer, model; author, and actress.”

Like most reality television, the drama in Keeping Up is stagey and contrived — a forgivable sin, but less so when the family is filmed engaging in the quotidian chores of daily life.

It’s unclear why 500,000 YouTube users viewed a clip in which the Kardashian girls “become infatuated with a cute puppy at the pet store”. Perhaps it’s this bit of added drama: “But will [mom] Kris approve a new addition to the family?” Remove the plot lines involving Kim’s dating life, with its shifting cast of professional sports figures and singers, and Keeping Up is a soap opera of the commonplace.

After consuming a dozen episodes of Keeping Up and its various spin­offs, I followed the sisters into the liberating world of fiction.

Like others working backward from fame, the Kardashians decided to test out their skills as writers, collectively producing a novel that mined the raw material of the tabloid existence.

In Dollhouse, Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé are transformed into the ambitious and smart Romero family. “Overnight,” they explain in an “exclusive” letter to Amazon.com shoppers, “one of the Romero sisters becomes famous-magazine-cover, fashion-icon, headline-making famous! Trailed by paparazzi, invited to every red-carpet event, she sets a new standard for Hollywood royalty” (there’s that word again).

But the novelised Kardashians mostly do the type of things the television Kardashians do — drink acai-berry smoothies, get married and divorced in record time, (though “the glut of publicity even ended up helping her professionally because suddenly, overnight, everyone in the country knew who she was”), and engage in endless discussions about relationships.

Dollhouse became a New York Times bestseller. But I was no closer to understanding the Kardashians.

In one sense, it’s unfair to single out the Kardashians for disapproval. Within the world of reality television, there are more frivolous celebrities than Kim and more morally questionable shows than Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

The Kardashians exist quite a few levels above the popular genre of moral-failure reality TV — teen pregnancy, a dozen kids with a dozen partners; polygamists.

The story arc of Keeping Up With the Kardashians is comparatively uplifting, and while it might seem frivolous that news websites generate headlines like: “Kim and Kanye’s cutest PDA moments” (CNN), and “Kim Kardashian Shows Curves in Cut Out Dress” (ABC News), better Kim, Khloé, and Kourtney than the mainstreaming of other reality TV.

It will irritate those who believe the media mustn’t follow free-market principles and must refuse to provide readers and viewers with content they like to read and view.

The media-watchdog group Media Matters for America, for example, upbraided “major American news outlets” for covering the Kardashians “over 40 times more often than ocean acidification over the past year and a half”.

If America could be purged of superficial pop culture, the argument goes, it would be replaced by meaningful social change.

Indeed, the Kardashians are regularly tagged as symbols of cultural decline: we once valued seriousness but have, in our “dumbed down” world, replaced it with fluff.

Mad Men star Jon Hamm singled out Hilton and Kardashian as evidence that “stupidity is certainly celebrated” in the United States. “Being a fucking idiot is a valuable commodity in this culture,” Hamm told Elle, “because you’re rewarded significantly.”

But the Kardashian phenomenon isn’t new, nor is it particularly American. In England, Martin Amis, whose most recent novel (Lionel Asbo) features a character inspired by Katie Price, complained that his fellow Britons were “worshipping... two bags of silicone”.

Novelist Lynda La Plante lamented that Price, who has produced eight bestselling and ghostwritten novels, regularly outsold the Booker Prize finalists, while Amis shivered that the words “number one bestseller” on Price’s book jackets were “more terrifying than anything inside”.

In 2001, long before we were entranced by the Kardashians, Ohio State University professor Steven Reiss studied America’s obsession with reality-TV stars.

“[T]he attitude that best separated the regular viewers of reality television from everyone else,” Reiss concluded, “is the desire for status.”

According to Reiss’s research: “Fans of the shows are much more likely to agree with statements such as, ‘Prestige is important to me’ and ‘I am more impressed with designer clothes’ than are other people.”

In his 1940 essay “Boys’ Weeklies” George Orwell attempted to divine the popularity of adventure tales set in expensive and elite private schools that so entranced British youth.

These “penny dreadfuls”, Orwell commented, were “a perfectly deliberate incitement to wealth fantasy”. And because there were “tens and scores of thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a ‘posh’ public school is wildly thrilling and romantic”, the boys’ weekly, like 30 minutes with the Kardashians, allowed them to “yearn after it, day-dream about it, live mentally in it for hours at a stretch”.

We are guilty of “wealth fantasy” — that great engine of capitalism — but are less afflicted by class envy.

The Kardashians possess great material wealth, but none of that old-money stodginess and inherited elitism, both of which intrude upon the fantasy of upward mobility.

The Kardashians allow a glimpse into a rarified world to which most viewers have no connection, but where the rich are vacuous and not uniquely talented. In other words, you too could live like this — it’s not unattainable like Downton Abbey — but you’re smarter and probably more moral, too.

After endless episodes of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, I was no closer to kinship to Kim, and I was still uninterested in the contours of her private life.

Sure, she’s not particularly talented and not particularly cerebral.

She has a singing career, but the songs are written by professionals, her voice modified by software developers.

She is a published author, but this was achieved with the assistance of a professional ghostwriter.

She is an entrepreneur, but others do the heavy lifting.

But why she is famous, I realised, isn’t the interesting part.

Kardashian might have all the advantages in life, but so do many people in Hollywood. (It’s worth noting that the anti-Kardashian, Lena Dunham, writer and star of HBO’s Girls, attended the elite Brooklyn private school Saint Ann’s, as did two of her co-stars.)

And she might not have talents that a journalist would recognise, but Kim Kardashian’s bank account proves that she is producing a product that many people are happy to pay for.

Those who reflexively denounce her rely on a variation of the “my kid could paint that” dismissal of abstract art. To which the response is “well, he didn’t”.

They might not produce the great novel, or even the most watchable television show.

But in a week when a US network announced ‘All My Babies’ Mamas’, a reality show documenting an Atlanta rapper’s 11 children with 10 women, the news that Kanye West and Kim Kardashian will soon produce a dauphin seemed almost quaint.

After overdosing on Kardashiana, I have decided I will submit to the madness of the crowd, the will of the American people.

I will reluctantly “make some noise” for Kanye’s baby mama.

* (c) 2013 Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC.