Yet another formative music superstar passed away yesterday. George Michael died at the age of 53 years and 6 months (no excess days; I find round numbers fascinating) on Christmas. Even though few of us know these stars on a personal level, we connect with them through their music and music videos. From an early age, my older cousins had me listening to the poppy sounds of Wham! followed closely by George Michael’s solo career. At the age of 20, George Michael had a #1 album in the UK, and by 21 he had a #1 album in the US to go with it. And yet, most accounts have Wham! getting their big break because a different band cancelled on Top of the Pops.
Serendipity plays a huge role in Presenting Princess Shaw, a meditation on the nature of stardom in the YouTube era. In New Orleans, a nurse working in a nursing home expresses herself on YouTube by putting out a cappella tracks featuring original songs while sitting around the house in pajamas. On the other side of the world, a cut-up artist stumbles onto her videos and makes them into full fledged songs using other samples from other people’s music videos. Things get viral.
In the film, the documentarians know that Kutiman found the YouTube tracks and is beginning the process of remixing her songs. Under the guise of making a film about “YouTubers,” the documentarians get access to Princess Shaw’s life, where they follow her around work, film her in line to audition for The Voice or travelling to Atlanta to look into their music scene, etc. The intent of the documentary is about how one person can change the life of another person through the free use of online content. As such, they catch her reactions when she first hears Kutiman’s remixes, and when his videos go viral causing her videos to go viral.
George Michael’s “Freedom ’90” was perhaps one of the most formative music videos of my adolescent life. Michael, embarking on a solo career, tired of the limelight and wrote a song lambasting the whole fame game while making a music video in which he doesn’t even appear. Supermodels literally set fire to his old image, giving Michael an attempt to retreat into his art at the age of 27 after he tired of being the center of attention. Presenting Princess Shaw is the inverse of that, where average everyday people seem to struggle for recognition while performing for a potential audience with their bare self.
Presenting Princess Shaw doesn’t interrogate how Kutiman stumbles onto the videos he finds, nor does it focus on him. The closest it comes to interrogating the nature of YouTube is having Kutiman stop washing dishes so he can hear her new video, and we watch Kutiman watching Princess Shaw making a video that strongly desires the audience that he, and us, are providing. After all, Kutiman barely says a handful of sentences throughout the movie. The emphasis is on Princess Shaw and how Kutiman’s videos improved her life. In that way, it’s almost a lottery version of America’s Got Talent where Princess Shaw is competing against hundreds of millions of people in the hopes she gets the right person to come along and make her famous. One band cancels on Top of the Pops, and Wham! gets their big break; one man looks for YouTube content to make his own videos and inadvertently makes one YouTuber a star.
Presenting Princess Shaw streams on Netflix