Transcription
[music] >> What happened to Victoria Monét? 15 years writing hits for everybody else, including Ariana Grande, Chloe and Halle, Fifth Harmony. She eventually steps into the spotlight, wins three Grammys in one night, and she stands on that stage and says, "My roots have been growing underneath ground unseen for so long, and I feel like today I'm sprouting finally above ground." And then she disappears. Not even 2 years later, people are on forums asking, "Victoria Monét's career has fallen off. What happened?"
She noticed, and she said it herself. People love rooting for the underdog, but the moment she actually got what everyone said she deserved, it was like some of them never wanted to see her win in the first place. Last year, I had a really tough transition in my team, um, with management and with my agent, and then I also felt unprepared for the next chapter. I felt lots of pressure, um, musically, because I didn't feel like I had the right body of work to give to people, but they wanted it now. The label was like, "There's like a lull in time, and you're losing momentum. You're getting older. You're Like all of these really negative thoughts that don't belong to me were coming." And I just felt really down. And after the Grammy win, the way that people celebrate you as an underdog and the moment you win switch is really alarming.
And she's not the only one. LeBron James, for example, the beloved prodigy from Ohio. Well, there was one televised free agency decision, and suddenly Cleveland fans were burning their jersey, and the team owner called him a coward in an open letter. A free agent chose a different employer. That was it. But the audience treated it like this massive betrayal because he made a choice that didn't include them. So, why do people rally behind the underdog until the underdog actually wins? Until the underdog can make their own decisions, until the underdog is very rich, or until the underdog is very successful. And this happens to so many people in different ways, mind you.
What's interesting about Victoria's case through my research is some people don't have a legitimate reason as to why they no longer support her apart from the fact that they feel since she won the Grammy, since she now is in the spotlight, she hasn't necessarily improved. She's just, quote unquote, the same. So, it's not that she released a bad album, or that she was involved in a scandal, or that her personality has changed. They feel, well, now that you've made it big, you need to level up. They feel she's pretty much the same. Okay.
I really want to first off talk about why we actually root for underdogs. So, in 2008, researchers at the University of Richmond published the study called rooting for and then abandoning the underdog. Across four experiments, they found that people consistently support the weaker party in a competition, even when there's no rational reason to do so. But the moment the underdog stops being disadvantaged, the support somehow disappears. Think about Victoria before the Grammys. She got her first publishing deal for $2,000. She was using the money from writing Thank U, Next and 7 Rings, back-to-back number ones for Ariana Grande, to fund her own independent music videos out of pocket. And if you were one of the people who knew her during that era, if you knew that the woman behind those massive records was also making her own R&B that nobody was paying attention to, that knowledge felt like something special. It felt like you had taste. It felt like you knew the industry didn't.
And there's a sense of I social identity as well because you almost relate to this person who is trying to achieve their dreams in a way that you probably are as well. Maybe you're not trying to be an artist, maybe you are trying to become a doctor, you're trying to make it out of the hood. Whatever it is you're trying to do, there's a sense of that shared ambition essentially. And there's also something that Dr. Doug Garland calls tall poppy syndrome, the cultural impulse to cut down anyone who rises above the group. He breaks it into two types, private, so families, workplaces, classrooms, and public, celebrities, influencers, viral success stories. Social media basically supercharged the public version. You post a photo of an award and suddenly you're a tall poppy in an open field.
So, think about Simone Biles. When she was overcoming abuse and systemic failure to become one of the greatest gymnasts alive, you could root for her and feel good about yourself. Her struggle was emotionally safe because she hadn't surpassed you in a way that forced you to look inward. But the moment she stood at the absolute pinnacle, the dominant beyond comparison, she stopped being a mirror for your hopes and started being a mirror for the distance between your life and hers. And the easiest way to relieve that discomfort isn't to rise and change your life, it's almost to pull them back down, which sounds horrible, but this is an example as to why some people will root for you when you're not that successful and they'll stop rooting for you when you're very successful. When Biles withdrew from the competition in Tokyo to protect her mental health, the speed at which people turned on her tells you it was nothing about gymnastics. It was about the audience losing a story that they needed.
And that's the part about consumer psychology, When people don't have legitimate reasons to stop being supporting someone, sometimes it's generally because it's like, well, I loved you when we were both kind of struggling, we were both trying to make it. Now you've made it to a level that is so extreme, you're so far from me. And I think it's a subconscious thing. I do not believe that fans are out there basically getting jealous and wanting to be horrible. It is subconscious, and there is a lot that is happening right now in the world from the job market, politically, socially, culturally, you name it. I generally believe this is a legitimate reason as to why basically people support the underdog until they don't.
Now, let's talk about the underdog as a market position. So stage one is the discovery, right? An audience finds someone talented, underappreciated, struggling. They feel like they discovered a secret. Stage two is advocacy. The audience actively roots for that person. They share, they stream, they defend. The fans' identity becomes tied to the underdog's rise. Your success is their success. The audience feels like collaborators, not consumers. And that is the best period to be in because they are so supportive.
Now, stage three is the breakthrough. The person wins, and two things happen simultaneously that most people don't separate. First, the audience's role changes. They were essential during the rise. Now they're spectators. Second, that scarcity basically breaks down. The artist goes from a niche to mass, and everyone starts liking them. And once everyone likes them, the early supporters lose the thing that made supporting this person feel special. And that is the exact dynamic that you could say killed punk bands in the '90s. Dan Ozzi wrote a whole book about it. It's called Sellout, basically documenting how bands that are signed to major labels were dropped by their earliest fans, not because the music had gotten worse or even changed, but because the exclusivity had gone. That exclusivity is what made fans keep coming back for more and more, especially at a time where you feel like you can't get anything to yourself.
So, the same thing happens to streetwear labels, underground scenes, indie anything, the moment that it crosses into the mainstream. I mean, you can look at what happened to Chappell Roan, right? When she was playing small rooms, the queer pop fans who found her felt like they discovered something precious, something theirs. And then Coachella happened, and suddenly she's everywhere. Your coworker knows her, your mom knows her, TikTok won't stop, and almost immediately TikTok ruined her. New fans don't get it. People started making all these TikToks about Chappell Roan has changed, Chappell Roan this, Chappell Roan that. And that prestige of being early basically disappears overnight. And this beloved person suddenly starts getting a lot of hate.
Stage four, resentment. The audience starts to feel something they can't always name. It's not hate, it's displacement. The relationship that felt collaborative now feels one-directional, and perhaps transactional. They went from being part of the story and getting this intimacy with the artist or the brand to basically just being a big part of the revenue, merch drops, brand deals, sponsorship saturation. And this artist is no longer doing intimate gatherings or performing at very small venues. You barely get to even get a like to even see them, because now they've got millions and millions of people uh chasing after them. And that's where the qualities that make someone a great underdog become the exact qualities that can make them a target. Confidence reads as inspiring when you're coming up. For some people, it reads as arrogant when you've arrived. So, ambition reads as determination when you're chasing, it reads as greed when you're collecting.
So, and we see this all the time with content creators as well, because content creators will be like, "I want to reach my first million. I've got 90 days or I've got, you know, a year to do it." People are supporting you. And then once you reach the million, you might say, "Mhm, I want to reach, you know, 3 million." Now suddenly people calling you greedy. Now people calling you toxic, too ambitious. They're telling you to settle down, focus on having children. I don't know. Why does that happen? The vast majority of what I've seen so far is people just saying that, "Look, like she was great because she was being underappreciated, but now she's in competition with some of these great people who have great brands. They're not just talented singing, but they're great overall, and she's falling flat." And that's another thing. Once you go from being the quote unquote underdog and now actually winning, who you compete with, how you're being measured also changes.
But let's just go back a little bit. Think about what this woman did to actually get to where she is. She quit her job as a bank teller, and she moved to LA. Her girl group Purple Rain fell apart before they ever released an album because the the label changed hands and dropped them after they'd already recorded about 21 songs, which is awful. She was sleeping on producers' couches. She wrote "On My Mama" weeks after giving birth, breastfeeding in the studio between takes, battling postpartum. When she did get pregnant, people in the industry questioned the timing. She said it herself, all of her biggest success came after her biggest blessing, which I personally love because as you guys know, I recently gave birth. I gave birth about 2 and 1/2 weeks ago, and I am just so grateful for my baby boy. And I pray to God that all my biggest success will equally come from my biggest blessing, which is my son, because having a child is a beautiful thing. There's never the right timing. Honestly, there's never the right timing. I think especially for women >> [sighs and gasps] >> who have careers. But anyway, so you can understand why people are rooting for her. I mean, just listen to her story. Of course, you want to root for her. You're like, damn, like I want you to win. I want you to do very, very well.
Now, where things started basically just taking a little bit of a left is if the underground if the underdog narrative has a built-in expiration date, what you actually do when you win to ensure you don't lose your fans? Like, what do you actually do? Most public figures get this wrong because they assume the audience will follow them from underdog to winner automatically. That is not true. Some people will, but not everyone. The support was never unconditional. It was tied to a specific story, a specific a specific role the audience played in that story. Once the story resolves, the audience needs a new reason to stay. Not every backlash is irrational. Sometimes people generally change. Sometimes fame amplifies real flaws and insecurities. People who survived this transition from underdog to winner understand that the underdog is a launch pad, not a permanent brand. Well, some people I guess you're going to argue that Kanye West has been the underdog. And we can talk about him later.
So, once you win, you need what I'd call a post underdog operating system, a new structure for the audience relationship. So, Taylor Swift has been at the pinnacle of mainstream success for years and only recently started experiencing sustained backlash with enormous cultural insulation. The grace period for a white woman at the top is measured in years. For a black woman, it's measured in months and sometimes weeks. I mean, we I always have to talk about sexism in the industry, colorism, racism because people are not measured the same. That is just a fact. Argue with me later, right? The threshold for too successful is structurally different depending on who exactly we're talking about, and there are double standards. Now, the audience Well, let me not generalize, right? Please know when I'm saying one of these, it is I'm not trying to generalize. I'm not saying it's every single fan. I'm not saying it's every single body. But, some people in the audience don't want you to win. They want to watch you almost win forever.
In a movie, the underdog wins and the credits roll. You leave the theater feeling good. But, on Instagram, the underdog wins and then posts a selfie from first class, and then a yacht, and then a brand deal, and then a house tour, and then suddenly the person you were rooting for looks a lot like the people you resent. The distance between inspirational and annoying is exactly one success story plus three months of visibility. And, there's something that a lot of people don't want to admit or look into. When you root for someone, you're investing social capital. When they succeed, you feel validated. I called it. But, the moment their success outgrows your contribution, the moment it's clear they would have made it with with or without you, that validation kind of disappears. And, the easiest way to avoid sitting with that feeling is to decide that the person didn't really deserve the success after all.
I feel like this is where the industry plant conversation comes in, which I never quite understand because most of the people who are accused of being industry plants, when people actually just take time to do really basic research, they would find that this person has actually been grinding for 10-plus years. Whether it's Sabrina Carpenter, whether it's Doechii, these industry plant allegations, I'm like, who, what, where, how? Because this person has been trying to make it. Obviously, there are different definitions of industry plant that people seem to be using now, but I'm always like, guys, come on. We live in a culture that worships the underdog story, but has almost no framework for celebrating someone who already is at the top, and I think that's the real problem. Maybe what we actually love isn't the success. Maybe we love proximity to success. The feeling that someone's rise still include us, because once a person fully escapes the conditions we recognize ourselves in, they stop functioning as a mirror for our hopes and start functioning as a reminder of the distance between their life and ours.
If you're building a public brand, whether you're an artist, a creator, an athlete, anything that requires an audience, one, well, audiences need participation, not spectatorship. Find a way to build your community and don't allow them to just I don't know, be viewing all the time. How do you actually involve them? How do you include them in your journey? Two, visibility must scale slower than intimacy. It kind of goes back to my first point. Yes, you can go viral, but what's the point of going viral if there's no intimacy with your audience? People will stick with you when there's a real relationship, which is kind of difficult, cuz it seems like people are trying to avoid parasocial relationships, and I don't know, they're trying to protect themselves or have boundaries with their followers, but understand there are pros and cons to that as well.