Not so long ago, I lost a job and got this dreadful neck-cramping twinge that told me I was too old to be losing jobs. I couldn’t expect anyone to hire me when there are freshly printed humans who’ll do the same work for half the head pats. But it turns out that dreadful shock was just middle age, and it’s stayed with me since.
For normal people, whose worth is measured in small units like biweekly checks and child count, it’s equally normal to experience a caesura, an ungraceful dip in circumstances, a pause on the seemingly limitless love that carried us this far in the first place.
Some of my friends weathered divorce. In the worst cases, an organ failed or a parent died. This year was layoffs. These provincial tragedies can inspire great changes, but they often guarantee repeat visits from sleep demons and panic attacks.
Aging happens in public under a ruthless lens when you’re famous. Your worst takes slip out before millions like a hospital robe guarding your tidbits as the “cool” passes you by. Dave Chappelle and Nicki Minaj still contain enormous power and attention. Yet their halting approach to the middle stage of life makes me hyper-aware that neither fame nor money can solve the gross problem of mortality.
We all die someday. Fame just keeps a special headline in the drafts.
The pretend relationships I have with Black celebrities are unbecoming. My delusion allows me to gawk at them as they wither, flopping out of the limelight like an old grouper on the final hook. They can’t look at me back though. So when I watch them, I’m really readying myself for my downfall—though one much smaller and more pitiful.
Nicki Minaj might’ve lost her marbles already, but the epic rise of her foil, Cardi B, turned a minor midlife drag into a fiasco. She shows all the signs: blossoming into a conspiracy junkie, becoming a post-and-delete social media ranter, and now, soft launching her right-wing turn. I remember when she was the rapper from Queens who had me running to my friends spitting and re-spitting that “Monster” verse like it would end rap misogyny.
She still moves cultural mountains, just not as much and not in the direction I thought. There’s a TikTok meme of her hit “Beez In The Trap” that’s peaked at suburban moms and Netflix stars, so it’s effectively dead and cringe while also reiterating the archival potency of her catalog.
@whoiisonika#nickiminaj #foryou
And isn’t everything about catalog? “Nicki Minaj” as an idea is still au courant, sturdy, and hip-hop, even if Maga Minaj the person isn’t. How will she handle aging out of allure and relevance and into stodgy and grotesque? The past year’s shown she won’t handle it well, defaulting to petulant barbs and hideouts on the fringe. Her persona’s always been mean-girl-meets-theater-kid but the hits that smooth over her antics are internet light years behind us.
She met with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, for a bizarre dive into the Christian nationalist right-wing feeder system. Which would be disappointing if it weren’t so…regular. Black stars who were once resistance symbols (James Brown, Muhammad Ali, Ye) moved reliably to conservatism as they got older. Malcolm X’s warning about celebrities not being leaders rings true but we’re in a void, an iPhone camera house of mirrors that won’t let up until we’ve clicked every post, shot every nerve, and stopped reading history altogether.
Dave Chappelle’s special, the “Unstoppable N*gger Show,” treads old ground. His career answers the clumsy question: What if we gave the most famous Black comedian in the world the keys to political thought? It’s not like he asked for it. Chappelle’s leaned into ballsy jokes, topic and texture, since 2002. But his sharpness on race crowned him as a foremost voice on cultural norms that transformed around and without him. Comedy doesn’t age well because people don’t. The crowd who lauded his defiance had to accept him as the institution’s new face. And the contrarians who held on for the ride have camped out in a phobic, dissociative state, holding his misanthropy up as a virtue even as it mainly highlights his disdain for everything poor, Black, and feminine. Everything about them.
I watched the special hoping for a belly laugh and got one. The comedian’s middle age has been unreasonably kind to his star power, piling up trophies as he grumbles about being cancelled and misunderstood before packed arenas. Jokes about buying the town out from under his neighbors are meant to hit harder because his neighbors are white and poor. And isn’t that what we all wish could happen?
I wasn’t sure.
I read some studies on middle age that said it’s no longer defined by crisis. The “peak responsibility” of this time period weighs heavy on us (aging parents, career on the brain, kids) but it’s also when wisdom and experience kick in for our biggest gains. That’s for the regular folk, though. Rap stars and comedians with hits from when we were smart enough not to know better can’t keep up with our bills, our surgeries, our discovery that fame might be on the wrong side of a viral video at best. The same way our waistlines never seem to do what we want, time takes no prisoners, only victims.
The best I can give this is that celebrity midlife is, in fact, death. There’s no money or power in aging while Black. I’m hoping I can pack it up gracefully in the back half. Or at least have a sense of humor about it.