FACEBOOK FRENZY: Altiyan Childs and the “Altimaniacs”
The Facebook Fan page of Altiyan Childs has reached almost 45,000 members, more than four times the number it had when he won The X Factor.
A very small fraction of that number are obsessive contributors, uploading not just a barrage of fan art but poetry, personal life updates, and stories about how seeing Altiyan on The X Factor awakened their own long-forgotten artistic talents.
A couple dozen or so are constantly posting flowery, soulful expressions of love for Childs and his family.
Not really shocked? Well, here’s the thing: both Childs and the family seem to be lapping it up.
When I started reading about Childs about a month ago, I was amazed to find that his personal FB page hadn’t been hidden from search, and that he was adding friends at every opportunity. Not that he’s had much opportunity. But nevertheless, he is fast approaching the FB limit of 5000 friends.
Childs’ father and sister were not on FB then, but have since created their own FB pages and made those open to fans, as well.
Those pages were immediately taken over by the “Altimaniacs” and swamped with rosey fan art and further supplicatory additions to the “love lake”. Childs’ sister in particular seems to be enjoying it.
I find it somewhat alarming that this small contingent of people is heavily over-represented by the number of posts that they make. I find it even more alarming to consider the effect that could have on the next album.
To look at it, you would think there’s a cult in the making; the religious element certainly aren’t shy about their feelings. And their feelings are that this man was sent as a personal gift to them by God Himself. Comparing Childs with Christ is becoming commonplace.
The fan page itself was started by the crew of The X Factor, but ownership will apparently be transferred to Sony. On December 3rd, ten days after the end of the reality TV show, Childs kept an appointment to be on that page with his fans for an hour answering questions.
I’d give a lot to know how many posts there were to the page in that hour. It was perfectly insane.
Even now, whenever there’s activity on Childs’ personal page (since performing at Carols in the Domain on Saturday, he’s added around two hundred friends), the rate of posting shoots through the roof to one every three or four seconds.
Word spreads immediately through the Fan page and Twitter, and the frenzy of love shifts focus from there to the personal page until long after Childs is no longer online.
His response, on the rare occasions when he’s had time to respond at all, has been to “flit about like a butterfly” as one fan put it, “liking” this or that photo and making a typically grandiose comment in answer to this or that expression of adulation.
Fans anxiously awaiting some personal attention report to each other whose post he was last seen commenting on, and frantically backtrack to read his words. Some are heartbroken when they don’t hear from him themselves.
These electronic fragments are treated within the context of the FB pages as manna from Heaven. It’s the done thing to report an “Altilike” immediately to the rest of the community, whereupon you’ll become the focus of much envy and be congratulated profusely.
Compilations of Childs’ comments are posted later on a Discussion tab.
Plenty of Childs’ supporters are made distinctly uncomfortable by all of this. I know from the response to my blog that there are people scanning the Fan page on a regular basis who wouldn’t dream of posting anything to it. A number have written to me saying how relieved they were to finally find someone talking sense on the subject. They’re trawling FB looking for news links - it’s the best source there is – but they’re also wondering if Childs is right in predicting that “My love for the human race could very well be the end of me one day.”
I just hope, selfishly perhaps, that Sony don’t let it derail him artistically. It’s so far back on the page’s timeline that I haven’t been able to recover it, but a fellow forum member tells me the fan response to Childs’ lyrics from the Masonia days wasn’t particularly favorable. Considering the title of one song was “Penis No. 9”, I don’t find that too hard to believe.
World on Fire by Masonia (2005) is a great album and I want to see a lot more songwriting like that from Childs. Currently he’s being judged on a selection of mainstream rock anthems that everybody knows, and a single which is utterly unlike anything Childs ever wrote himself.
I wonder if his spirituality is being overemphasized and misinterpreted in the absence of widespread knowledge of his own songwriting style, and by people who, perhaps, feel the need for a saviour in their lives and were given an illusory sense of intimacy as they watched Childs himself being redeemed from obscurity.
Here’s what I want: I want to see Altiyan Childs become the performer I imagined he could be when I saw and heard him on The X Factor. I want to be able to look back in ten years time, to remember Ronan Keating saying: “You are a rock star that the world deserves;” and I want to think – hey, the man was right.
I want to look back at that first performance of Living On a Prayer, when the fire first appeared in Childs’ eyes and the audience went berserk, and think – it was really pretty cool to be around for the start of that.
I don’t want to be wrong about him. If he allows himself to be influenced by the Christian Rock brigade on FB, I will be.
Motion into Lyric: Altiyan's Child Blog and Website
World on Fire can be ordered online from JB HiFi.
© Kathy Tuppurainen 2010
