The Art of Your Public Persona, and Why You Should Embrace It
I watched the biopic Michael on my recent flight, and it turned into a strange kind of time travel.
If you didn’t live through Michael Jackson’s fame, I’m not sure it can be explained to you. He wasn’t famous the way people are famous now. He was an event, a happening. A video premiere was history in the making. The world stopped, and we all tuned in. An album release stopped the culture cold for a week. There has been nothing like it since, and I’m not convinced there can be.
One line in the film gave me pause and made me reflect on the world of entertainment and what it means to be a performer today. Michael says he doesn’t want to do interviews. He doesn’t want the press tour. Instead, he wants to be mysterious.
I was immediately thrown back to my childhood and the experience of idolizing the bands and artists I worshipped. Bands like Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses — yes, I was a kid in the hair-band eighties, and I say that proudly. It wasn’t just Michael who was mysterious. They all were. Watching videos on MTV was a glimpse into another world entirely. It was not an everyday thing, and these were not everyday people. They were larger-than-life, mythical gods we felt fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of, to touch hands with briefly at a concert, to get an autograph from. Michael was just the Zeus atop a whole Mount Olympus of entertainers.
Today, it seems the gods have descended and now live among us. They are normal, if not common, and we feel a connection to them because of their relatability. That is just a wildly different experience than what I and generations before me experienced.
I am not talking about the past.
Don’t worry, this is not a Gen-X nostalgia piece waxing about the “good old days” of drinking out of hoses and running feral through the streets. Nor is it about Michael Jackson — who beyond his fame was a complicated person steeped in controversy and serious allegations that have tarnished his legacy — or the movie Michael, which entertainingly stays on the very thin surface of his music, success and fame. But being reminded of that time made me reflect on the world artists currently live in, how they present themselves and engage with their fans, and the future.
Mystique isn’t dead. It just stopped being free.
Because here is the thing: mystique did not die with MTV. It is alive and available to anyone who wants it. Daft Punk wore the helmets for twenty-eight years. Frank Ocean disappears for years at a stretch and the silence sells the record better than any campaign could. What changed isn’t whether it’s possible — it’s that it used to be free. There were three networks, a handful of magazines, and a label deciding what got out. Distance wasn’t a strategy. It was the infrastructure, handed to every artist whether they wanted it or not.
Now the default runs the other direction. Every platform you use is engineered to extract more of you, more often, and to pay you in the cheapest currency in circulation. Mystique still works. It just costs something now, and you have to choose it on purpose, against the grain of every tool in your hand.
It’s worth choosing, for two reasons. Start with the smaller one.
Scarcity moves price. Even when the product is you.
Mystique creates intrigue, and intrigue is how you get noticed in an environment where getting noticed is nearly impossible. You are not competing with the other artists in your genre. You are competing with every piece of content ever made, all of it free, all of it one thumb-swipe away. Setting yourself apart from that ocean of noise is the entire game.
And this is just supply and demand. Scarcity moves price — the oldest law in economics, and it doesn’t stop applying because the product happens to be a person. When you are everywhere, all the time, available on demand, you have flooded your own market and solved your audience’s scarcity problem for free. Abundant things are cheap. That isn’t an insult; it’s arithmetic. What stays scarce is devotion — the person who buys the ticket, the record, the shirt, and who is still there in year eleven. We’ve run the numbers before on why ten thousand real fans beat a million streams. The scarce thing is where the value lives.
Your likeness, your image, your persona: we count these among your creative assets, sitting on the balance sheet beside your catalog and your audience. The same logic that makes ownership the foundation of real wealth applies here. Assets get managed. They have terms. They don’t get given away because a notification asked nicely.
But the money is the smaller reason
The bigger reason has nothing to do with price.
Your art exists to express something. To convey something. To land on another person and change the temperature in the room. That is the point of it. And how you present that work — the vessel you deliver it through — determines whether it actually arrives. This is not packaging. It is part of the why behind what you do, and it deserves the same care you give the work itself.
Being larger than life is one vessel. It hands people something to aspire to, a version of what’s possible that pulls them upward. That is what Michael was for millions of kids, and what as a young guitar player Slash was for me. Nobody aspires to their neighbor. You aspire to something above you.
Being vulnerable is another vessel, and sometimes the more powerful one.
Bruce Springsteen’s entire covenant with his audience rests on the sense that there is no separation at all, that he is one of us. That isn’t a failure of mystique. It’s a different instrument, played deliberately, by a man who knows exactly what he is doing. Springsteen on Broadway makes this clear when he says, “I made it all up. That’s how good I am.” Springsteen made a career of representing the blue-collar, factory-working American. Yet, as he admits, he never held a real job or even set foot in a factory. It was all a performance, a public persona built to help his art land.
Don’t be fooled by Bruce saying he made it all up — his persona was not a fiction. It was based on the most intimate experience he had, a truth so ingrained in his character that he wanted to portray it in his art. That truth was his father.
So this is not an argument for distance. Neither approach is right in every situation, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who told you otherwise. The argument is for choosing — deliberately, with your message in mind and your effectiveness as the measure.
Turn it up. Don’t make it up.
Here is the constraint that keeps all of this honest: your public persona has to be an authentic extension of you.
It does not have to be all of you. That’s the point. It can be a single facet turned up while the rest stays yours. Take the pillars of who you actually are — your real strengths, the things that genuinely drive you — and magnify them until they’re visible from the back of the room. Dolly is not walking around her house in rhinestones. Alice Cooper is a golfer and a family man. Bowie built an entire alien in order to say things he could not say as David Jones. None of those are lies. They are amplifications of material that was already there, and something true comes through the costume.
The test is simple. Everything can be turned up. Nothing can be made up.
This is also the line between a persona and a cover. A persona is an artistic choice about how your work meets the world. A cover is concealment in the service of harm. One is authorship; the other is deception with better lighting. If you are building distance in order to hide something rather than to focus something, that isn’t mystique. That’s just hiding.
A persona built from real material can be sustained for a lifetime, because you aren’t performing it so much as concentrating it. A persona assembled out of whatever seemed marketable is a job. You will clock in every day to maintain it, it will crack the first time you are under real pressure, and audiences feel the difference even when they can’t name it.
Worse, a fabricated persona cannot serve your purpose, because it isn’t yours. You end up building a career for a character — funding someone who doesn’t exist, chasing outcomes that wouldn’t mean anything to you even if you caught them. And the more successful that character becomes, the more trapped you are inside it.
You already know how to do this. Then you pick up your phone.
Here is what gets me, and it’s why I think this is a solvable problem rather than a generational tragedy.
Every performer I have ever known understands that who they are on stage is not who they are at home. That is not a controversial idea in this business. It is the job. You walk out there and you are bigger, louder, more certain, more magnetic than the person who was eating cereal over the sink that morning. Nobody calls that fake. Everybody calls it a show.
Then the show ends. You get in the van, you pull out your phone, and you post — and almost without exception, the person doing the posting is the cereal-over-the-sink version. Same audience. Same relationship. Completely different person showing up.
That is the gap. Not oversharing. Not social media itself. The gap is that artists apply everything they know about performance to ninety minutes on a stage and nothing at all to the other twenty-two and a half hours they are just as visible.
Sometimes the cereal version is exactly right. If your story is that you’re accessible, if your message depends on people believing you are one of them, then closing that gap on purpose is the strongest move you can make. That is a legitimate choice and often a great one.
But it has to be a choice. For most artists it’s a default — a reflex with an audience attached. And a reflex cannot serve a purpose, because it was never aimed at anything. The artists who still matter in fifty years are the ones making that call deliberately.
It is still art. It is still performance. The stage just got bigger, and it doesn’t have a curfew.
And some of it isn’t anyone’s business
One last thing, and it has nothing to do with strategy. Your persona can be part of your art. Your private life is not material. Your marriage, your kids, your grief, your faith, your worst week — none of that owes an audience anything. Converting your entire interior life into content is one of the fastest routes to creative burnout I know, because when everything is content, nothing is yours. Learning to say no applies to what you reveal, not just to the gigs you take.
The real reason this matters
Michael’s instinct wasn’t a media plan. He understood something about how meaning travels.
If you explain everything, you leave nothing for anyone else to bring. The listener’s imagination is half the art. A song a person can walk into and furnish with their own life becomes theirs in a way a fully documented one never will. The magic was never the absence of information. It is the space you leave for someone else to fill.
That space is where your message gets received, and believed, and carried. The gods on that Mount Olympus understood it instinctively. So can you — you just have to decide what you’re building, and then build it on purpose.
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