"Safe" is dead. The only "safe" performers are those directly aimed at pre-teens, like the Wiggles. Looking back beyond 30 years ago, there were a multitude of pop stars who didn't need to venture out on the edge in order to maintain their appeal -- in fact, back then, "the edge" was dangerous. Jerry Lee Lewis was, in his time, even "edgier" than Elvis by suggesting that girls "shake baby shake." Marrying his 14-year-old cousin wasn't fatal to his career, but it sure stopped it with air brakes.
I still remember the first time I saw a commercial with a Ramones song on it -- it was a Budweiser spot in which a Bud truck morphed into a hot rod. After NYC and LA, San Francisco was huge hotbed of the punk movement (spawning the then-shocking Dead Kennedys), and I never thought that the grimy, scuzzy likes of the Ramones would be deemed worthy of commercial embrace. Just as surprising was the fact that such a licensing deal could only occur with the complicity of the "punk."
At the time, I thought that this would never happen with the so-called "Only band that matters," The Clash. I was wrong. Before the end of the 20th Century, "London Calling" was the soundtrack for Jaguar ads, and "Should I Stay or Should I Go" was plugging Stolichnaya vodka.
I was thinking about the devaluing of pop stardom that has occurred in the past decade or so -- such that half way through the '00s, a frog-voiced lightweight like Ashlee Simpson has a #1 CD. (BTW, I believe the "acid reflux" story; it isn't as if she wouldn't have sucked if she wasn't syncing to a CD, because, after all, it's still her.) I was thinking about the last pop star that actually grew over the years of his/her stardom, and I could only think of one person: Madonna. As much as I detest her activism, her promotion of immorality, and her mocking of organized religion, when she first came on the scene she was a thin-voiced chirper singing Latin-tinged dance pop ("Holiday", "Borderline," "Lucky Star" ) that was the specialty of her boyfriend, Jellybean Benitez. But in the same way that I reluctantly admitted the genius of Edward Van Halen (the guy who took Valerie Bertinelli away from my marriage -- and honeymoon -- fantasies), I acknowledge that Madonna progressively grew as a singer. The early-80's Madonna could have never managed "Vogue." (However....recently, she has shown she is behind the times and running out of it. Music and everything after has been dreadful.) Britney Spears is, in my opinion, looking forward to being a mother because she knows the sand is just about out of her time as a performer -- she has stretched her meager talent to the limit, and now, even her earliest fans see right through it like gauze.
Oh, yeah, back to Clooney's question. I don't know who will be "safe" in 2035. If Eminem is up on the 50-yard-line during halftime of Super Bowl LXX joking about telling his mother to lie still as he rapes her, I am not sure I want to be in a world in which that's family fare.
Ice Cube has rehabbed himself pretty quickly from rapper of explicit lyrics to star of the family film "Are We There Yet?" So you never can tell about Eminem. I'm surprised at how many middle-aged women liked him in "8 Mile".