What do Michelle Obama, Chery Strayed and Meghan Markle have in common? Well yes, they are all women in the spotlight, each of whom has made powerful public statements in different ways. The first, not just because she was the first African-American first lady, but also because of how she turned that role into something more than a shadow of her presidential husband. The second because of her empathetic and honest autobiographical writing. And the third...well, throw together a successful television sitcom and a royal wedding, and you have the elements of what you might term, arguably, either public interest or voyeurism. But 2020 brought them together in another way—they joined the world (bandwagon?) of celebrity podcasting.
That’s not entirely true. Cheryl Strayed has been a podcast host for longer—her show, Dear Sugar Radio was launched on National Public Radio in 2016, and later became part of the New York Times podcast stable. The podcast was an extension of her column in the Times, and, along with co host Steve Almond, offered “radically empathic advice” to deal with the many problems that plague our everyday emotional lives.
Michelle Obama’s eponymously tilted podcast dropped as a Spotify exclusive in July 2020, and in my review for The Hindu, I noted that it was “designed as a series of intimate conversations between the former US First Lady and those in her circle of friends and family.”
Meghan Markel announced her new podcast, co-hosted with her husband Harry, a collaboration between their company Archewell Audio, and Spotify, at the end of 2020. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will use the platform to “spotlight diverse perspectives and voices” and “build community”. Lofty but vague goals. The first episode, a Christmas special launched at the end of December, has many famous—and a few not-so-famous—voices talking about what sustained them through the pandemic.
Celebrity shows are not a new media phenomenon, and certainly not restricted to podcasting. Media makes celebrities, and in turn, celebrities make media...profitable. Fame (or even infamy) adds a hart-to-resist layer to even the most ordinary pieces of information; consider celebrity game shows where recognizable faces trade off trivia, their (okay, sometimes feigned) ignorance and stupidity saved only by the glamour of their presence and the commitment of their fan base. Or shows like Big Boss and its variations, which mixes in some ordinary folk to keep it somewhat edgy. Or shows that feature skillful hosts (who themselves become celebrities) in conversation with well-known people from various fields.
But when celebrities host the show, the dynamic is a little bit different. Not only does their celebrityhood serve to pull in an initial audience, their position also grants them access to a wide range of people who might be difficult for the regular (non-celebrity) podcast host to draw in. So of course, it’s no surprise that Michelle Obama’s first guest is a former President who happens to be her husband. The Sussexes have on their first show a range of other celebrities including Sir Elton John, Naomi Osaka, Matt Haig and Hussain Manawar—and Democrat Stacey Abrams for good measure. Cheryl Strayed’s pandemic podcast, Sugar Calling, was a series of conversations with bestselling authors, from Margaret Atwood to Alice Walker (she drew some criticism over her failure to question Walker on her anti-Semitic views). It’s a no-brainer that when someone like Oprah hosts a podcast, she can pull in the incredible range of content already available from her television interviews for the Oprah Winfrey show, and then some. In India, media personality Cyrus Broacha was among the early podcasters (617 shows and counting at the time of writing), and BBC enlisted Kalki Koechlin to host ‘My Indian Life’ (which I reviewed here), and more recently, Kareena Kapoor (who counts among the guests on her video podcast, Saif Ali Khan and Sharmila Tagore), Karan Johar and Neha Dhupia have all launched their podcasts, drawing on their networks in Bollywood and beyond.
If there’s one thing that’s common to most of these shows (with the exception of ‘My Indian Life’ which features socially and culturally driven stories about non-celebrities), it’s the notion that these celebrities have something to share—deep insights about life, relationships, and all the challenges that these bring. Michelle Obama talks about parenting and friendship, while Kareena Kapoor talks about navigating the “modern marriage” and managing a career and motherhood. Their very celebrityhood seems to give them both authority and wisdom, and lends special legitimacy and weight to their views on everything from physical fitness to eating right to mindfulness. They have voice—granted to them by circumstance or gained through self-expression—and they have assumed the right to use it in specific ways.
But it’s voice in a particular sense that makes celebrity podcasts work, and that gets people –and keeps people—listening. The podcast to a large extent eliminates the distance between speaker and listener, a distance that any form of visual necessarily generates. Some researchers, commenting on the success of conversational podcasts, have noted that “informality and self-disclosure reduces the distance between podcaster and audience”. Even where the host is speaking to another person on the show, the listener has the sense of being in on the conversation. Having the voices play within your personal space makes the listening a particularly intimate experience. Michelle Obama’s relaxed, casual tone as she has what is a convincingly spontaneous exchange with her mother and brother about their childhood and adolescence, or Margaret Atwood telling Cheryl Strayed about buying plants from a neighbourhood nursery...the very everydayness of these conversations renders the celebrity more mundane, more accessible, more in your world. This is not so much about parasocial relationships (the perception of a media consumer of a relationship with a media personality), as it is about a sense of presence.
Researchers at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, for instance, spoke of how podcast listeners were able to “gain moments of solitude while still feeling connected and not alone”, and this is fostered by the sort of reflective listening that is made possible in these specific kinds of celebrity podcasts. Since podcast listening is a solitary practice, these researchers found, participants in their study emphasized that they valued it as “me time” that allowed them to “escape from the mundane”. The celebrity podcast thus offers such an escape even as it occasionally offers ways to make sense of the mundane, with discussions around the most routine challenges of life—challenges that are experienced by people whose lives might be considered anything but mundane. As Matt Sienkiewicz and Deborah L Jaramillo note, “podcasting is also startlingly unpublic, solitary, and personalized. It is the medium of the earbud, the quiet voice nestled cozily, almost out of sight, and chosen just for you.” They argue that the intimate nature of podcast listening represents “an opportunity to reclaim a lost potential of mass media” as it brings into focus the existence of a listening public—something that we had felt the loss of in a media saturated, noisy news landscape. They hold up the intimacy of podcast listening as a positive alternative to the publicity of much of mass media as a force for a more deliberative public sphere.
Of course, there are a wide variety of celebrity podcasts, and not all of them adopt the slow, deliberative pace required to promote reflection. The kind of intimacy these scholars speak of can only be generated in quieter conversations, of the kind that a few of the celebrity podcasts adopt; they make the everyday important, and they give it a place within the public discourse—how we raise our children, the attention we give our plants and our pets, the care we must take of our bodies, minds and spirits. Celebrities give voice to these issues, drawing us into their inner circle as they speak, and as we listen.
Loved reading it, Usha. Lot of information. Nowadays many celebrities are being increasingly drawn to the podcasting medium.