Recently on a streaming app, I watched a documentary called “Dirty Pop”. It was quite an eye opener and shocking revelation for me on the back story behind the criminal underpinnings that went on with the music manager Louis Pearlman. Pearlman is well known for having brought to fame the likes of the Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, O-Town, Natural and many other boy bands, which also brought out of that singer solo careers such as Justin Timberlake, Brittany Spears and others. He is lesser known for his many other contractual companies under the same name of Trans Continental, such as, a fake aircraft company, blimps that he let crash for the insurance money, restaurants, a talent agency, a reality TV show, and a fradulaunt bank scheme or two. Lou Pearlman, as it turns out, was an self created expert con-artist and part of his genius was using these boy bands as his front. Wow! Just wow.
No one knew of Lou’s ponze schemes but only saw him as this music hit maker, and he got in with every star, politican and music mogul you can think of. The young men that went through his music cycle machine saw him as a second father. However, ultimately when things came crashing down in and around 2016 with the suicide of one his closest assistants after finding out the true nature of his fake investments, things began to unravel. Ultimately what we know now is bands like the Backstreet Boys, NSYNC etc were paid for off the backs of investors who never got to see a dime of that money. The band members were not fairly paid either as Lou used the money to pay off one scheme to finance another. Hard working people lost their life savings because of this man while young girls waved their bras to the latest boy band on the rise.
In the end, everyone was lied too. It wasn’t that the young boy bands didn’t receive any benefit. Of course they did. They got the start to a fantastic career but it was with a cost. In the background, people financed them who never saw a return on that investment. Also, they ultimately, as bands, would have to break from him and settle out of court in order to get the pay they deserved. They were, ulitmately, a front for one of his many very creative schemes. What can we learn from this? Well, first of all, how many stories like this have we heard? So many musicians get a great start from a mentor who becomes a manager who ultimately robs “said band” blind, and tries to control them while lying to them.
I watched a second documentary on “The Brat Pack”. The Brat Pack are stars from the 80’s that were common young actors in movies at the time. It was a unique time in movie making history where young actors dominated the film industry. However, when an article came out labeling these young group of actors “The Brat Pack”, it created a shift in Hollywood’s perception of them. These were actors like Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emillo Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy and others. Unbeknowst to many of us perhaps, as this article characterized them as untalented hacks who were getting by only because of their looks, many of their careers tanked for quite some time save a select few.
The article, written by David Blum, took an unsuspecting Emillio Estevez interview and turned it on it’s head and you can tell even in the documentary how difficult it is for Emillio to talk about because of the bomb it set off. Emillio clearly owns responsibility that he shouldn’t. He was young and niave setting himself before a snake of a reporter who justifies it by saying, “I never promised to be anyone’s friend”. I was reminded of Truman Capote and the Swans (a series I also watched on Hulu). He came out with a scathing article of the women who confided in him all their misgivings and life stresses around their husbands. He had lied or at the least gave false pretense that they could trust him with those secrets. Publishing them cost him dearly though he too justified it by saying they should have known bettter.
I think the lessons here is a sad one and two fold. You definitely can’t trust Hollywood on a microscopic level. On a more big picture level, we are living in a world of lies and liars. I wonder why that is, as I write this. Why do we want lies so much? For the most part, humans are usary in nature and not naturally empathetic. They can be sympathetic but empathetic is a gift though it too can be learned. Communicatation skills, relationship skills, and boundary skills can all be learned. I wish we taught more of this in our schools! So many don’t bother to learn new things and go with be usary or at the most sparingly sympathetic to others. This gives way to the world we have today. The extent of which you use people and will lie to get what you need is dependant on what type of person you are at your core.
None of us are beyond it. We all tell little white lies. We distract ourselves with fictional realities rather than do what should be doing more than ever before. Politicians make promises and create campaigns we believe in that often aren’t true because in reality you have branches of government that are involved to accept or deny those goals. Sometimes though, they too outright lie or exaggerate. Trump lied 30+ times in the last debate and 20+ times in his own Republican Convention where Biden was found to have possibly exagerated up to 9 times. I think of Trump’s children sitting there in support for him at the RNC–deceived, misguided by this Dirty Pappa. They know no better because this is their father.
In my own faith, Christianity, if you want to talk of book bans, many radical Christians burned books and libraries they didn’t think would be suited for the canon of something like a Bible, so we will never know what those writings were. We have some “Lost Books” that are out there but there’s no way to account for an entire library. To that end, we battle over stories some say are just stories and others say are literal in Biblical text. Without having been at the start of creation ourselves, we tell our children to really believe Adam and Eve ate an apple from a tree that started us being sinful creatures and that Satan was in a snake. We tell our children to believe in lies about a mythical Santa, Easter Bunny and Toothfairy. Our whole world is built on things we don’t know for sure or are out right lies that we deem “useful”– even for children. We flatter people and the moment they leave we talk about them behind their backs. We wear a public and private mask.
We have this absolutely ridicolous thing called Wallstreet. Here, people play Russian Roulette with your money if you want them to. The entire rise and fall of these markets are based on mere rumors. Heresay. Trends. It could be a total lie, a boogeyman, but if Wallstreet believes it, your money is going out the window. And in many cases, some people jumped out the window with their money to their death.
What is the saving grace, Mr.? What is the happy ending? Wrap this up nicely for us please! I’m not sure I can. I wouldn’t want to lie to you. As I age, I see the true nature of people and this world system. There is good and bad. You have to decide where you are going to align yourself. I want to know when my life ends that I hold no regrets and that I did good in this world. That will give me peace to die happy with. I’ve done the work and do the work to improve myself to live an authentic life and that’s what you must decide to do or go the other route and face those risks and consequences like the Lou Pearlman’s of the world. As for me, I choose life with longer lasting rewards that mean something to me and others.
Jamison's Writing Jams 