We Don’t Make Rock Stars Anymore
By: Cathy Campo, Co-Editor-in-Chief
I’m not a music obsessive. In fact, I wouldn’t even say I’m a mild music fan. But I remember exactly where I was when Michael Jackson died. At 11 years old, I understood something enormous had happened. We had lost a legend (albeit, a deeply flawed one).
On opening night, I went solo to the theater to see Michael, the new Michael Jackson biopic starring his nephew in the eponymous role. A few months earlier, I stood inside Paisley Park, Prince’s Minneapolis studio-turned-museum, with two of my best Kellogg friends, wandering through purple halls that still felt like he had just stepped out for a cigarette. Somewhere between those two experiences, I became fixated on something I hadn’t fully articulated before:
We do not make stars like this anymore.
And maybe we can’t.
Prince and MJ were, famously, intense rivals; frenemies before the word existed, each representing different poles of superstardom. Prince was erotic mystery and artistic rebellion; Michael was precision and spectacle. But they shared something we rarely see now: total, almost supernatural talent.
They didn’t merely sing. They performed. They danced like gravity was optional. They wrote every note. They played several instruments. They had actual voices—not merely good studio engineering or strategic TikTok virality. And perhaps most interesting, their personas were not “relatable.” They were unknowable.
And that mystery mattered.
Michael Jackson, despite being arguably the most famous person on earth, was notoriously private. Before his 1993 sit-down with Oprah Winfrey, he hadn’t engaged in a formal interview in over a decade. CNN later described him as “a fiercely private man, rarely giving interviews.”
Prince was no different. GQ noted that when he finally sat down for a major interview in 1991, it was “a crazy-rare interview”—he had answered questions publicly just four times between Purple Rain in 1984 and that moment, seven years later. He intentionally cultivated what many described as an aura of mystery.
They understood something the modern celebrity has forgotten: access cheapens awe.
Today, with the help of TikTok and Instagram, we have access to everyone. We know what celebrities eat for breakfast. We know who unfollowed whom. We know their skincare routines, their breakup timelines, and what they looked like crying in the backseat of an SUV. Fame is no longer built on distance; it’s built on constant availability.
Social media democratized stardom, and in many ways, that’s a good thing. It opened doors that used to be locked by studios, labels, and gatekeepers. It allowed creators to build audiences without permission. It created careers that never would have existed otherwise. There is a straight line from this shift to influencer culture, to creator economies, to people like Paris Hilton becoming not just famous, but foundational.
But it also killed mystique.
The algorithm rewards consistency, intimacy, and oversharing. It punishes silence. Imagine telling a modern record label that your artist refuses interviews, disappears for months, and would prefer people only hear from them through perfect, fully realized work. Today, that would be considered a terrible brand strategy. Back then, it made you immortal.
Taylor Swift is probably the closest thing we have to monocultural superstardom now. Her global scale is undeniable, but even she exists in a different system—one built on intimacy, Easter eggs, confessional lyrics, parasocial relationships, and constant access. Her audience feels like they know her. No one felt like they knew Michael Jackson. (And Swifties, please don’t come for me, but she’s not exactly a performer in the Michael or Prince sense. She can sing, she can sort of write, but that’s about where it starts and ends with her).
Perhaps the real difference is not access itself, but control. MJ and Prince were obsessive about controlling their image, but they used that control to create mystique, not visibility. Prince fought record labels over ownership and presentation so fiercely that he changed his name into a symbol rather than let the industry define him. Michael curated every public appearance so precisely that even his silence became part of the performance. Their control was rooted in withholding, in deciding what the public did not get to see.
Today, celebrities are just as controlling—arguably more so—but the objective has changed. Control now means curated Instagram dumps that look spontaneous, PR-approved vulnerability, and carefully managed intimacy. The goal is not transcendence but relatability. Stars are still performing authenticity, but instead of asking audiences to look up at them, they want us to feel like we are sitting next to them.
Both are strategies, but only one creates lasting legends.
As someone who spent years working in entertainment—at Netflix, at NBCUniversal, in television development rooms where executives asked how to make content feel “authentic” and “sticky”—I think about this all the time. We are brilliant at optimizing engagement. We are much worse at protecting mystique. We know how to manufacture attention. But we have forgotten how to cultivate legend. Sometimes value comes from restraint and allowing people to wonder.
Prince’s studio in Minneapolis felt sacred because it was not built for us. It was built for his work. Michael’s greatest performances endure because they still feel untouchable—almost impossible. They were not optimized for content clips; they were built for awe.
Maybe the future of entertainment is not figuring out how to make everyone more visible. Maybe it’s remembering that some things become powerful precisely because they remain just out of reach.
In a world obsessed with access, who will have the discipline to stay mysterious? Read More by Cathy Campo: Where Did All the Presidents Go? The Bureaucratic Battle to Bring Broth to Kellogg Who Is Cameron Greenwalt? Inside the Mind of Kellogg's Most Prolific Slack Poster Trolley Night Sparks 1Y Prom Funding Controversy
