Like most jobs in this world being a pop star also has its pros and cons, but before I tell you some of them I want to make it clear that firstly I don’t see what I do as a ‘job’ and secondly I don’t really see myself as a pop star altogether, I am using that terminology specifically for this writing. I have always been focused on various creative fields related to music. Producing an entire album is obviously about immersing yourself in many different mediums, but now more than ever I feel the pull away from music and into other areas. Unfortunately this probably means I would describe myself as a ‘creative’ (gross) or simply put: an artist. However, for the purposes of this piece I’m focusing solely on the realities of being a pop star because it was my original dream, because it’s the role in my life I have the most experience navigating and because it’s also the most ridiculous.
One of the main realities of being a pop star is that, on a certain level, it’s really fun. You get to go to fancy parties in a black SUV and you can smoke cigarettes in the car and yell out the sunroof and all that cliche bullshit. At these parties you sometimes get a chance to meet interesting people and those interesting people actually want to meet you. You get to wear fabulous clothes and shoes and jewelery that sometimes come with their own security guards who follow you around the party and make sure you don’t forcibly open earrings that are sitting on your ears or let someone you just meet in the bathroom wear a necklace around your neck that is the equivalent of the heart of the ocean. You get free cool stuff like phones and laptops and vinyl and tripe and shroom gummies and headphones and clothes and sometimes even an electric bike that will sit in your garage untouched for the best part of 5 years. You enter the restaurant through the back entrance and give a half smile to the head chef (who probably hates you) and waiters (who probably hate you too) as they sweat doing actual service industry work while you wander into the kitchen with your 4 best friends who are tagging along for the ride. You feel special, but sometimes you’re also embarrassed by how silly the whole thing is. You’ll also get to hear a lot of incredible music that will undoubtedly change culture and public perception months before its release (come to mind the time Edison first played me Diet Pepsi while walking around New York after dinner at the casino). Sometimes you can help your other pop star friends by giving them an opinion or listening to them or helping them make decisions related to their work, which allows you to feel part of an interconnected community of people you love and respect. You also have fans, and their dedication to your work makes you feel like they’ll be with you until the end, even if in reality they won’t. You stand on the stage and feel like God. You get to make people cry with happiness, you get to soundtrack their breakups, their recoveries, their crazy nights, their revenge, their love, their lives. You get a chance to travel around the world and see all kinds of different places and you don’t have to worry about booking a single part of the trip yourself because you have an amazing tour manager to do that for you. You get to call in sick whenever you want and you don’t have to worry about getting off work at the last minute because you know for sure there’s another pop star out there who’s actually even more incredible and flaky than you. Thank God.
You’ll also spend a lot of time living in strange and benign liminal spaces. Whether it’s the venue area of the event you’re about to enter, the airport lounge, the visa office, the claustrophobic tour bus, the windowless greenroom, the underbelly of a stage or the construction set of a photoshoot or music video, you’re often stuck in the middle. You are in transit, you are going somewhere but the journey itself takes up most of the experience. When Rachel Sennott came to shoot her scene in our upcoming film The Moment she had to spend the night in a van driven straight from the front row of the Baleniaga show in Paris to the back door of a warehouse in London’s Docklands. It was bundled up with blankets and pillows and shipped straight to us like a package. The journey took the whole night but she was only on the set for an hour.
Another thing about being a pop star is that you can’t escape the fact that some people are just hell-bent on proving that you’re an idiot. I’ve always been totally fascinated by this and think it has something to do with self projection. Being a pop star has always been partly about having a fantasy and obviously that fantasy is mostly decided by the consumer. Marketing and strategy and packaging and presentation can do the best job of guiding the audience to the desired outcome, but at the end of the day it’s up to the consumer to decide whether the pop star is a symbol of sex, or anarchy or intelligence or whatever else they want to see. Sometimes people do not like to join the consensus, they prefer to go against public opinion and that is when a completely opposite defiant stance is born. “She’s a sex symbol” becomes “She’s a prostitute” instead. “She’s anarchist” instead of “She’s a drug addict.” Instead of “she’s intelligent” it’s “she’s pretending and didn’t say much” and so on and so forth. I think this is often where a silly story can arise. I always wonder why someone else’s success creates so much anger and rage in some people and I think maybe it all boils down to the fact that the patriarchal society we unfortunately live in has successfully brainwashed us all. We are still trained to hate women, to hate ourselves, and to be angry at women if they step out of the neat little boxes that public perception has put them in. I think subconsciously people still believe that there is only room for women to be a certain way and once they claim to be one way they better not dare to grow or change or transform into something else. Furthermore, people clearly want clicks and those with the opposite stance are more likely to get them. When I joined Substack it got me thinking and asking why. Some people theorized over the desire for long-form content and a deeper connection with a fan base, some people were downright excited, some people suggested I might heed the advice of my record label in an effort to be omnipresent on all platforms, some people were surprised I even had enough brain cells left to write because I party (!). The truth is that I have always liked writing, so why not? I felt generally welcomed into the community, but I also saw a small wave of people angry that I had broken down the walls of my box, that they were determined to keep me in that box, or should I say brand of party girl, who smokes cigarettes, does Coke, likes the color green and doesn’t have the ability to do anything else. To them I’m a stupid little idiot because that’s what they want me to be. I guess sometimes it’s just part of the deal.
Sometimes being a pop star can be really embarrassing, especially when you’re around old friends of family members who have known you since before you could talk. The more successful and more insane you become, the more serious the lifestyle discrepancy becomes. As a British person the longer you live in LA, the more you lose touch with the realities of certain things, but that’s why being a pop star can also be seriously humbling, especially when your old friends mock and ridicule you for caring about an absolutely meaningless thing. In some ways being a pop star I think about the person I used to be compared to the person I am now. How is that person different? Or is she still the same? A few weeks ago Yung Lean came over to my house for dinner and we were discussing some of our friends in the industry and whether we think they have changed after their successes in some of their fields. The next day I was losing my mind and so I messaged him to ask if he thought I had changed. I knew he would be honest because he will always be honest and I know he sees through everything, all the personalities and all the facades. He’s probably one of the smartest people I know. I sat there waiting for his response and three speech bubble dots kept appearing and disappearing on my phone screen, which was completely confusing to me. When he finally pressed send his message said that he felt I hadn’t changed from the person he knew when we were young and he didn’t think I would change in the future, but also that there were definitely ‘yes people’ around me who were blowing smoke up my ass. I said I could see the truth in that, but luckily he added that generally speaking I’m too British and self-deprecating to actually believe the ridiculous compliments the ‘yes-men’ would give me, so I was probably safe.
My final thought about being a pop star is that you are expected to be completely truthful at all times. In recent years some people have developed a connection between fame and moral responsibility that I have never really understood. Not all of my favorite artists are role models at all, nor would I want them to be, but maybe that’s just me. I want my artists to have a sense of hedonism, danger, and anti-authority because that’s what I wanted to escape from when I was younger. I don’t care whether they tell the truth or lie or play a character or adopt a personality or create entire scenarios and worlds. For me, this is the point, this is the drama, this is the fun, this is the imagination.
I’m ending the essay with a link One of my favorite Lou Reed interviewsIs this a performance? Is this true? Is this a lie? Who cares? It’s absolutely fun and great in my opinion,