Kurt Coleman: Social media ‘celebrity’ the most famous Queenslander you’ve probably never heard of
HE says he’s “perfect” and makes a living out of taking selfies. Is he self-obsessed or giving ironic social commentary about his generation? You judge (just know, he doesn’t care what you think).
QLD News
Don't miss out on the headlines from QLD News. Followed categories will be added to My News.
RECOGNISE this face? Chances are — if you belong to what’s coyly known as an “older demographic” — you won’t. But show this face to someone between the ages of 15 and 25, and chances are they will. Because it belongs to Kurt Coleman, the most famous Queenslander you’ve probably never heard of — if you’re in that older demographic, that is.
Coleman is 19, and lives with his grandparents at Robina on the Gold Coast. He left school in Year 11, he doesn’t have what you would call a regular job, he doesn’t study, and he has no widely recognised skills, hobbies or interests.
Yet he has, at last count, in the sort of numbers marketing executives circle like sharks, about 293,720 Facebook friends, about 184,000 Instagram followers and 56,500 followers on Twitter.
COSMETIC: Teens want Kurt Coleman’s jaw
Such is his popularity, the Gold Coast teenager is paid thousands of dollars by nightclub owners on the Gold Coast, in Brisbane and Melbourne to literally (one of his favourite words, by the way) just turn up.
In short, Coleman is famous for being famous, part of a new breed of celebrities, the so-called “Insta-Kids”, young people who chronicle, curate and, increasingly, create their lives on social media.
Their Instagram/Facebook/Snapchat/YouTube feeds record their daily movements, from sleepy, doe-eyed morning shots to late-night tequila ones. It is a world inhabited by hundreds of thousands of wannabes jostling for position, hoping to somehow cut through the millions of images and videos to become a Kimmi Smiles, or a Tyde Levi, or a Jamie Curry, or perhaps the next Sjana Earp, Tyler Oakley, or Eva Gutowski.
All of these people are social media superstars, the ones who have hit the internet jackpot with their particular talent, skill set, or life manifesto — be it travel vlogging (video blogging), fashion advice, makeover tutorials, creating comedy skits or performing pranks for YouTube.
Then there’s Coleman, who doesn’t do any of those things — he doesn’t sing, or dance, or make up funny skits, or perform cover songs, or give tutorials.
What he does do, and there’s no denying he does it very well, is himself. His social media accounts are filled with thousands of “selfies” — photos taken on his phone camera of his striking, perennially spray-tanned face.
Kurt awake. Kurt sleeping. Kurt eating a burger. Kurt sitting. Kurt standing. Kurt at the beach. Kurt on a bike. Kurt on a fence. Kurt in a car. Kurt with his sunglasses on. Kurt with his sunglasses off … it’s all Kurt, all the time.
And Kurt, as he will readily tell you, is perfect.
“I’m amazing,” he tells Qweekend, “and I’ve always known I’m amazing. I do love myself so much, why wouldn’t I? I’m perfect.’’ He smiles, his lips like two plump pillows resting on his face (he says he recently had “a little filler”).
Unlike other internet sensations whose YouTube and Facebook videos are often well-rehearsed, or obviously scripted, Coleman’s are impulsive, stream-of-consciousness pieces. They are usually filmed in the moment, when someone or something has irritated him — like finding a chicken bone in his McNuggets, or another video he uploaded to Facebook where he rants about ugly female shoes.
“When I was 15 or 16 all these chicks started wearing those jelly shoes all day, you know those weird plastic things?” he remembers.
“All day long I saw them on chicks’ feet and I was thinking about it, so when I got home I made a video, and I was like, ‘What is it with these bitches and their jelly shoes? How could anyone think they look good? You know what? They’re disgusting. I don’t want to look at them. They’re like toddler shoes, are you a baby?’ ”
The other thing to know about Kurt Coleman is that he is — intentionally or not, it really is extremely difficult to tell — very, very funny, and that while it is easy to mock his belief that he is perfect, he thinks you are too.
But more on that later, because right now, there are fans to meet, and selfies to be taken …
“Oh my god, it’s really him — I can’t believe he’s actually here, just you know, walking around like a normal person.”
On a mid-week, mid-afternoon at Pacific Fair, that sprawling, high-end retail monolith in the Gold Coast’s Broadbeach, Coleman is shopping for clothes for a mooted move to Melbourne later this month, and he’s starting to draw attention. School’s not out yet, so the teenage crowds are thin — nothing like, for example, at last year’s Schoolies, where he says he needed security personnel.
But there are young people working behind the counters, and the odd university student wandering about, and they are thrilled to have the chance to snap a picture with Queensland’s selfie king.
Peri Crawford is 20, studying fashion at Queensland University of Technology’s Creative Industries in Brisbane, and she’s at “The Fair”, as locals know it, with her friend Kate McCabe, also 20 and studying psychology at Brisbane’s Griffith University.
Posing for a photo, they stand either side of him like bookends while he pouts, preens, cocks his head to one side, then the other, and generally behaves as if he is on a shoot for GQ, rather than providing a quick memento on someone’s mobile.
“He’s so lovely,” Crawford says afterwards. “I was surprised, actually, because he’s so famous on the internet, but he’s just so warm and approachable.”
McCabe echoes her friend. “He’s perfect,” she smiles. “You know ‘Perf like Kurt’.” McCabe is referring to the hashtag that began circulating a couple of years ago — #PerflikeKurt. It was invented, Coleman says, by a “random” (person you do not know) and taken up by his army of followers who often end their comments on his page with it.
So when did all this begin? When — and how — did Kurt Coleman become a future, aspirational hashtag?
It all started, he says, when he was about five years old and asking — when all the other boys were begging for Lego and Hot Wheels — for a camera to take photos of himself.
“It’s why I’m so good at it; I’ve been doing this for a long time, long before I posted anything. I’d ask my parents to buy me digital cameras or to use the video camera and I’d just spend all day videoing myself — it’s weird, I know, but that’s just who I am. I live on camera, I always have.”
In fact Coleman’s career, such as it is, as an internet star, began almost by accident. Unplanned, and with certainly no marketing strategy in mind, he began posting the photos of himself he’d been taking his whole life, after he voluntarily left Miami State High School before, he says, “being kicked out”.
“Randoms” apparently liked what they saw, because he started getting hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands of “clicks” on his profile, and somewhere along the line, an internet star was born.
At Miami High he was labelled a troublemaker, the subject of many written statements by students and teachers to the principal about his rudeness, bad behaviour and attitude — charges he says were sometimes true, sometimes not, and all caused, he claims, by the way he really doesn’t have to do anything at all to push people’s buttons.
“People just … there is something about me, something in me that makes people react, you know? They always have, even when I was just a kid. It used to freak me out, when I was a little boy I didn’t understand it, people would just have these really strong responses to me, good and bad.
“When I was a little boy I remember half the kids wanted to play with me, and the other half wanted to kill me. They’d call me names, say ‘you look like a girl’, but the others were like ‘please come and play with us Kurt, please be with us … ’ ” Things haven’t actually changed that much.
Here are some comments from Coleman’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, randomly chosen.
“You are the most beautiful boy in the world.”
“I f-----g hope you die, you ugly, stupid c---.”
“Please marry me and make the world’s most beautiful babies.”
“I am going to kill you, then your family, everyone knows where you live.”
“You are so pretty it hurts my eyes #PerflikeKurt.”
“You look like you head butted a tub of foundation.”
“I would die to kiss you just once.”
“Come on cancer, you can do it.”
It seems Coleman is spot-on when he says he causes extreme responses in people.
On the positive side, they respond to his charisma — and make no mistake, Coleman is charismatic — which goes some way to explaining his social media success; of answering the question of why him, and not others.
The dark side of the coin is the bullying, the endless, relentless insults and threats, both online and IRL — In Real Life, as the kids say.
And it is how he handles that endless and at times brutal bullying that also goes some way to explaining his social media popularity.
Because Coleman’s schtick, if he has one, is that he appears to be the one person who is not affected by online bullying, who has seemingly cracked the code for sincerely, deeply, and highly believably “not giving a f---”.
“Kids come up to me all the time and say ‘thank you, because I’m bullied at school, I have a bad life at school, they say I’m fat, or I’m stupid, but I watch you and I listen to you and I know I’m perfect’,” Coleman says. “I love to hear that, because it’s true, because we all are.
“I know I’m amazing, because I know I am 100 per cent myself, and that there’s literally no one like me on this entire planet, so why wouldn’t you love yourself?
“And they can’t stand that, the haters. Because who the haters really hate is themselves, because if they loved themselves, if they thought they were amazing, they wouldn’t have all these terrible, negative thoughts. So who cares about the haters? I literally do not care. I have literally heard every insult you can imagine, they’re always the same, ‘oh you’re so ugly’, ‘oh I’m going to kill your family’, and I look at them and think ‘you are obsessed with me’.
“Sometimes when I’m out, someone will come over or call out to me ‘you’re a f-----g loser’, so I go over and say ‘are you kidding? Just look at this situation — you’re the one trying to talk to me — I take up all this space in your head and you take up literally none in mine’.”
Somewhere in all these words, Kurt Coleman is making a lot of sense, and while we may not completely understand the message, we’re not his target market — and they understand him just fine.
“Why is Kurt popular?” Crawford muses while shopping at Pacific Fair. “Well I think there’s a few reasons, firstly his message has never changed, it’s just be yourself, and that yourself is just fine, perfect actually.
“Then I think people really admire the way he’s been able to build a brand just out of his personality — that you can go that far just on being yourself.
“Plus he’s hilarious, and while some people think he’s really stupid, I think he knows exactly what he’s doing.
“I think it’s all an act, it’s a comedy, he plays on our generation’s self-obsession, and has some fun with it — what he’s actually doing is ironic social commentary about our generation.”
Is he? Is all this — the spray tans, the poses, the self-adoration — a tongue-in-cheek nod to the supposed narcissism of his generation? If it is, he isn’t letting on, saying he “literally” has no idea what that means — and perhaps he doesn’t. Either way, he is making a living from it and while those of us who are not digital natives — those of us who did not grow up with social media — may not view his popularity as a viable or valuable career path, plenty of teenagers do.
Educator and author Danielle Miller, founder of Enlighten Education, which delivers positivity and resilience programs to thousands of teens across Australia, says the cult of Kurt is not necessarily a trifle.
“Times, as they always have, are changing,” Miller says. “So we have this work ethic where you study hard and you earn your stripes, and many of today’s young people have turned that on its head. They have complete disregard for that, and although it may not be a skill set we understand, it is a skill set.
“Those who make it on social media display incredible savvy to their audiences, they are very good at knowing how to build a fan base, they know how to connect emotionally to a brand and that is why we are increasingly seeing advertises connected to them, instead of traditional methods. It’s so easy for us to look at what someone like Kurt is doing and say ‘well, that’s not real, you can’t make a living out of dropping out of school and making a name for yourself’. ‘Brand Me’, if you like, but actually you can.”
One of the several pitfalls in online success however, Miller says, is being highly vulnerable to the vagaries of the internet. “It’s an incredibly fast-moving and fickle landscape, so if it was to change for Kurt, and he was not to be quite so popular, would he be able to handle that — does he have a sense of worth outside of his online life? Does he have any other skills or competencies besides being Kurt?”
Does Coleman, in fact, in that age-old phrase used by parents the world over, have a back-up plan?
“No, of course not,’’ he says emphatically with a look that young people have been giving their stupid parents for centuries. “Because if you want something, if you really want something, you have to focus on it 100 per cent and believe in your ability to do it 100 per cent. So I hate that idea, because if I have one of those it means I don’t believe in the plan I’ve got now.”
Which is?
“To be famous,” he smiles, his teeth like a perfect, white picket fence. “And I don’t need a back-up plan for that.”
What you do need, however, is a manager to take you to the “next level”, because even in this social media-obsessed age, there are only so many selfies one man can take.
Coleman has appeared on all the usual suspects on Australian lifestyle television — The Project, The Today Show and Studio Ten — and has also been the subject of hip YouTube shows such as Sneaky TV, and the groundbreaking, US-based documentary channel Vice.
He has also been the focus of BuzzFeed posts, and was one of the star turns at both last year’s and this year’s Amplify Festival — basically a national touring rock festival for internet stars.
All the big names were there — Tyler Oakley, JC Caylen, Andrea Russet, Tyde Levi — and Kurt, who thousands of screaming fans lined up to take selfies with.
“I am surviving on being me, but I need to do other things,” Coleman notes of his career.
To do those other things, Coleman is leaving the Gold Coast for Melbourne, or perhaps Sydney, wherever his new manager is hoping a pilot television show, based on Coleman’s life, is picked up, as well as other regular television and/or radio gigs.
There is a feeling that he can’t leave his hometown soon enough. The Goldie, as much as he loves it, was perhaps not always the kindest place for the boy who was born to stand out, one way or another.
For someone who has hundreds of thousands of Facebook friends, Kurt Coleman says that, IRL, he has only five, a posse of four girls — Tory, Christa, Joyce and Shae — he has known since Year 7 at Broadbeach State School, plus a new one, David, he met two years ago, although he can’t remember where.
The girls, now all studying or working on the Gold Coast or interstate, are he says, the people he feels “safest” with.
“I met them in my final year at Broadbeach school and they were just really nice to me, so I kind of just kept them, no matter what school I went to after that.”
Coleman’s upbringing was a somewhat fractured one, raised by his hairdresser single mother, Maureen, he has one brother and a half-brother. He has not seen his father, who has another child he says he “doesn’t really know”, for some time.
Coleman says he went to several different primary and high schools, depending on where his family had moved to, eventually anchoring himself with his grandparents, Maryanne and Dennis, at Robina.
“My family has lots of issues, a lot of dramas and I am not so good at handling those sorts of situations and … ”
Coleman does not finish the sentence, but one of his many thousands of selfies, posted, then taken down soon after, on Instagram a couple of years ago featured him in hospital with facial and head injuries after an altercation at a family event.
At the time, The Gold Coast Bulletinspeculated he had been “disrespectful” to his mother at the party, and a middle-aged family friend had caused the injury.
Such is Coleman’s world that, a few days after posting his hospital snap, he posted another one of his now flawless, unmarked face with the caption “still perfect”.
It’s not the only physical altercation he’s been in. When he goes out at night with his posse of girls, there are always young men keen to be the one to take the self-proclaimed Mr Perfect down.
“I’ve been hit a bit and I get pushed a lot. I’ll just be walking down the street and someone will come up and start shoving; safety is a bit of an issue for me.”
There is a vulnerability about Kurt Coleman, which his Instagram photos don’t reflect, and a likability that doesn’t come through, either.
There is also a growing realisation in the teenager that “screen life” is not real life.
“I used to upload hundreds of pictures a day; now I might post once or twice, maybe when I wake up and when I go to bed. I’m not living my life if I am on my phone — it’s not real to me, it’s just holding the screen up in front of your face.
“But just because that’s how I got famous doesn’t mean I’ve got nothing to offer the world, because I know I do.”
Of course he does — because he is young, and he is eager, and he is confident, and he is vulnerable, and he is open to new experiences, and he is anything but perfect. ■
Crime spree mapped: Fed-up suburb takes fight into own hands
A 3000-strong group of residents in a Brisbane suburb are tracking crime and patrolling their own streets. CRIME SPREE MAPPED
Chilling details emerge as woman’s home birth tragedy in court
A Brisbane doctor who allegedly assisted a home birth that caused the death of a mother did not tell paramedics she was a medical professional when they turned up, a court has heard.