BraggOnIt >> Is Mystery More Powerful Than Knowledge?

Welcome back to the FastLife!!! Bragg here with you…(or as @JasminFranjul called me this week “Bills” which made me laugh…never heard that one before).

So it looks like quite a few people checked out my blog last week about “Making It Happen.” In reading all the comments and tweets, many of you will be putting Kevin Liles 10 rules for success to the test! Hopefully, combined with your own talent, drive and ambition they will help guide you straight to the top.

Now this week I wanna touch on the POWER OF MYSTERY. I’ll go ahead and warn you now…this one is kinda long, but if you don’t have 5 minutes to read then you probably aren’t looking for helpful advice in the first place. So last night I read a tweet from Perez Hilton and he was supposedly welcoming @Rihanna to Twitter but he was upset because she hadn’t sent any tweets. I immediately responded back to him and said “If she’s smart, she won’t.” Ever since then, I’ve been thinking about something I’ve professed for years…there’s just no mystery about today’s generation of pop-stars. Whether its Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Ustream, SayNow or MySpace…not to mention the countless gossip blogs like TMZ…young artists and celebrities in general are broadcasting their entire lives for the world to see. In their defense, I will say that it all looks good up front and can be quite prosperous in the short term since many of these social networking services are now sharing ad revenue with the artists that use their services…but how long can it be maintained??? Is anyone that interesting to be able to whore out every aspect of their personal and professional life and still be idolized after 10 years….I guess we’ll see, but I doubt it.

Mystery, obviously, is everywhere. Is there a God? Mystery. What about life after death? Mystery. Excuse me, what material is the ShamWow made of? Mystery. Stonehenge? Big Foot? Loch Ness? Mystery mystery mystery. McDonald’s Special Sauce? I don’t care how many bottles of Thousand Island Dressing you show me, it’s Special Sauce. Mystery.

And yet: For all that mystery, why does it feel like the world has been ripped open, all parts exposed? Why does so much seem absolutely and thoroughly demystified? These days we can leap, all of us, from a casual curiosity about anything to a sense of satisfying understanding. Instantly. Want to fold origami? There are more than 200,000 Google results on that subject available to you, now. Need to know the capital of Mauritania? A recipe for sticky buns? How to pick a bicycle lock? You could answer all these questions in less time than it will take you to finish reading this article.

Which brings me back to Rihanna…her and a handful of others have managed to maintain their status without the aid of Twitter, YouTube or any other number of social networks. Rihanna specifically is in a unique position to become something of an idol…she has exotic beauty, she’s backed by the biggest names in the business, she’s relatively quiet in public, she has questionable talent, high profile relationships & peculiar fashion sense. But what if she does join Twitter…what will her fans think after 5,000 tweets full of insider talk with Teyana Taylor, Ciara or GASP!!! Chris Brown…How long will it be before she’s just as ordinary as every other cookie cutter artist on the radio today?

As a fan, it seem like the most amazing thing in the world for their favorite stars to be on services like Twitter….but most fans aren’t very loyal and right now some new artist is signing up for Twitter as I type that will one day steal the attention of another, and another artist will eventually steal it from them and on and on.

So whats the point??? The point is, as an entertainment professional that studies music and artists, I have not encountered one single artist or person that I have liked more b/c 200 times a day they updated me on what they were doing. But for 40 years Michael Jackson was cloaked in mystery…and he’s without a doubt one of the greatest entertainers of all-time. Could you have even imagined him on Twitter or giving the world weekly Ustream vidoes??? Ummm….NOPE!!! Michael Jackson understood the power of mystery and he worked it to his advantage for his entire career.

I’m not saying technology like Twitter isn’t useful or beneficial because it is. But strategy is everything in this business…it’s all about how you play the game; you cannot be careless. So Rihanna, with your Twitterless Twitter account….I say, leave it just the way it is, don’t give us one single tweet. You will still receive millions of followers and in 6 months CNN talking about your power. How one person could do nothing and still hold the entire world in their hands…and it’s all because you kept us wondering; because we wanted so bad to know all about you and you wouldn’t tell us….proving that mystery IS more powerful than knowledge!!!

Until next time…Bragg

By the way…follow me on Twitter HAHAHA @BraggOnIt