Building pop music stardom in the 1990s and early 2000s: Sakis Rouvas’s mediatic images

In this article, I examine the mediatic images with which Sakis Rouvas, the biggest male pop music star in Greece, built his stardom. His charismatic profile is an ideological text based on the one hand on a creative mixture of western references, authenticity and professionalism and on the other hand, on the performative expression of gender and sexual discourses that circulated in Greek society in the 1990s and early 2000s. I look into his television appearances and music videos to locate his participation in discourses about modernization, his authenticity as an everyday, humble and inexperienced young man, and his evolution into a hardworking professional. I also examine the images of masculinity and sexuality on which Sakis Rouvas’s stardom is set and play an important role in differentiating him from other male singers of the period. Capitalizing on the fertile ground and the transformations in Greek society, Sakis Rouvas became the image of a Greek ‘New Man’ building on an ambiguous, but non-threatening, desirable sexuality for young audiences, especially young females, while at the same time absorbing emerging homoerotic identities and participating in their concealment.