Richard Dyer's star theory proposes that pop stars are constructed images rather than real people. They are manufactured by the music industry to appeal to audiences and make money. Pop stars represent cultural values and ideologies that enhance their appeal. Their persona is based on characteristics like gender, race, and generation as well as the meanings expressed through their music, image, and cultural discourse. To maintain their status, pop stars must continually develop and nurture their constructed character and personality over time through new music and engagement with fans.

1. 
Star Image
Applying Richard Dyer’s Star Theory to Pop Stars – 2 Lessons

2. Question
 What is the difference between a pop
performer and a pop star?
 Decide this with the person sitting next to
you

3. Answer
 Pop Performer – Someone that is known for
performing pop music.
 Pop Star – Someone who has an identity or persona
that is not solely restricted to their music.
 Can you name some pop stars?

4. How do people become pop stars?
 Can you think of ways people can make that
transition from a pop performer to pop star?
 How did Britney do it?

5. 1. How do you become a pop star?
 Clever management
 Well placed news stories
 Famous boyfriend/Girlfriend
 Attendance at premiers and parties
 Features in magazines
 It is easy to forget about the music in light of love
affairs and outfits

7.  A true pop star does have a lasting
significance, and has "brand awareness"
amongst a wider market over a period of
time. Many of the so-called pop stars
populating the top forty currently have not
made a sufficient sociological or cultural
impact to be classified as true stars if we
return to Richard Dyers’ definition. They will
be forgotten by all but their most avid fans
within a few years.

8. 2. Stars As Constuctions
 Stars are constructed, artificial images, even if they
are represented as being "real people",
experiencing real emotions etc.
 It helps if their image contains a USP (Unique Selling
Point) — they can be copied and/or parodied
because of it.
 Their representation may be iconic — Madonna's
conical bra in the early 1990s, Bono's 'Fly'
sunglasses, Britney's belly, Justin Bieber's hair..

9. Dyer Proposes that
 “A star is an image not a real person that is
constructed (as any other aspect of fiction is) out of
a range of materials (eg advertising, magazines etc
as well as films [music]).”

10.  Yet that construction process is neither automatic nor fully understood.
Record companies think they know about it — but witness the number of
failures on their books. TV programmes such as The X Factor show us the
supposed construction process, how an ordinary person is groomed, styled
and coached into fulfilling a set of record company and market
expectations.This is not true stardom, which must happen through a
combination of factors. None of them labelled 'X'.
 Imagine showing us 15 years ago to Simon Cowell! That's the problem with
Pop Idol. They're auditioning cabaret singers. It's not pop music. It's Batley
Variety Club.” - The Pet Shop Boys, quoted in Q, March 2002
 “[Cowell is a] dreadful piece of crap who drags the music business down
whenever he rears his ugly head... Pop stars today have no longevity. Rock
'n' roll is not about singing perfect notes or being a showbiz personality. It's
about the anger and the angst. I hate what Pop Idol has done to the
business.”— Roger Daltrey [of The Who], ibid
 As a record buying public, we prefer to believe in stars who are their own
and our constructions rather than a transparent offering designed explicitly
to appeal to our blander tastebuds served up by a record company
interested only in our wallets.

11. 3. Industry and Audience
 Stars are manufactured by the music industry to serve a purpose — to
make money out of audiences, who respond to various elements of a
star persona by buying records and becoming fans.
 Record companies nurture and shape their stars — as the TV talent
show processes have shown us. They tend to manufacture what they
think audiences want, hence the 'photocopied' nature of many boy
bands, teen bands etc
 The record industry also has a duty to provide bands/artists who are
perceived as 'real' (for 'real, maybe read 'ugly' or unpolished) for
these audiences that are bored. Stars can also be created by this
route.
 Pop stars, whatever their nature, are quite clearly the product of their
record company — and they must be sold.

12. Dyer Says
 “Stars are commodities produced and consumed on
the strength of their meanings.”

13. 4. Ideology and Culture
 Stars represent shared cultural values and attitudes, and promote a certain
ideology.
 Audience interest in these values enhances their 'star quality', and it is
through conveying beliefs ideas and opinions outside music that performers
help create their star persona.
 A star may initiate a fashion trend, with legions of fans copying their
hairstyle and clothing. Stars initiate or benefit from cultural discourse (e.g.
via their Twitter feed), and create an ongoing critical commentary. Now
more than ever before, social networks give pop stars the opportunity to
establish their own values outside their music. Lady Gaga tweets frequently
about LGBT issues, and expects her Little Monsters to engage with that
discourse just as much as she expects them to listen to her music.
 Stars also provide us with a focal point for our own cultural thinking —
particularly to do with Youth & Sexuality.

14. 5. Character and Personality
 A star begins as a "real" human, possessing gender & race
characteristics, and existing against a socio-historic background.
 The star transformation process turns them into a construct, but the
construct has a foundation in the real. We tend to read them as not-
entirely-fictional, as being are very much of their time and culture,
the product of a particular generation.
 Stars provide audiences with a focus for ideas of 'what people are
supposed to be like' (eg for women, thin/beautiful) - they may
support hegemony by conforming to it (thin/beautiful) or providing
difference (fat/still lovable).
 Much of the discussion of stars in celebrity magazines is about how
stars compare to the current hegemonic ideal, and how we compare
to the stars.

15. Dyer says
 “In these terms it can be argued that stars are representations of
persons which reinforce, legitimate or occasionally alter the
prevalent preconceptions of what it is to be a human being in this
society.There is a good deal at stake in such conceptions. On the one
hand, our society stresses what makes them like others in the social
group/class/gender to which they belong. This individualising stress
involves a separation of the person's "self" from his/her social
"roles", and hence poses the individual against society. On the other
hand society suggests that certain norms of behaviour are
appropriate to given groups of people, which many people in such
groups would now wish to contest (eg the struggles over
representation of blacks, women and gays in recent years).Stars are
one of the ways in which conceptions of such persons are
promulgated.”
 Richard Dyer — The Stars (BFI Education 1979)

16.  Pop stars establish their character and personality through songs and
performance and will strive for immediate star identity with a first
album.
 They appear to have control over their persona in that many of them
write their own songs, and that their body of work develops,
chronologically over time, along with society
 They produce 45-74 minutes of music which gives a clear indication of
their interests, moods, appetites and lifestyle at a particular point in
time; audiences read music=person, and will base their understanding
of the star's persona on the sentiments expressed by their songs.
 This understanding may be very personal and intimate, the star's
music can infiltrate every corner of a fan's life. Albums are continually
read and re-read as texts think of the 100+ times you might listen to a
track, whereas films tend to be watched once or twice only.

17.  Because a pop star's persona is constructed on the basis of a
narrow text, continually re-read and reassessed, this may
lead, in many cases, to second album syndrome, when an artist
is unable to sustain their persona over a period of time (largely
because they got rich off the back of the first album and bought
all the houses cars etc they'd ever wanted) and they are unable
to create a consistent account of their character and personality
in their second major release. The rootspring of their persona
then disappears, or becomes confused.
 A pop star's persona, therefore, as depicted in terms of
character and personality, is a fragile thing which needs
constant nurturing, and is the product of constant discourse
between the star and his or her audience.

18. Your Task
 1. Give a Summary of Richard Dyer’s Star Theory applied to pop
starts
 Pick an artist that you believe fits the brief of a pop star.
 Go through this PowerPoint giving evidence of how they fulfill
all of the criteria (there are 5 I have numbered them on the
slides.)
 Present this on your blog with images using a slideshare, prezi
or however you feel best.