> after his 40s was trapped in a sad cycle of reunion tours because the band still needed the money.

Celebrity memoirs are often written for the same reasons, or to promote other ventures. For instance Peter Wolf seemingly reluctantly shared vignettes about Dylan, The Stones, Faye Dunaway, and rock 'n' roll life in the 1970s to promote his newer stuff:

"I was putting out solo CDs. Not to sound self-congratulatory, but I thought each one got better and better— but they weren’t finding an audience. I thought a book might encourage people to check out the other stuff. So basically, the intent of the book was to find a wider audience."

https://www.boston.com/culture/books/2025/03/10/peter-wolf-m...

That's the fate of many acts from that period. So so so many artists who were stratospherically popular but are still touring for cash playing to nobody younger than them. It's sad.

It was interesting and a fun read, but not a “good piece of writing” in my opinion. Apart from some spelling mistakes, the sentences droned on and it read more like a semi-coherent rant than a thoughtful piece on “being a pop star”.

> He told me once that when he returned home, he was struck by the trivial problems people had and obsessed over.

I always feel put in a position when I'm in an interview and they ask about handling pressure in the workplace.

I sometimes wonder what my widower grandfather thought, sending his only son off to war.

> Your average NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL athletes are broke 5 years after they are out of the league. Fame, is mostly a curse.

I'm not familiar with the financials of music / media production (I didn't read the linked article yet, sorry). But I feel this over-pitying attitude towards professional sports players is misplaced. They do often go broke after their career. That is sad. It is also completely avoidable with _very_ basic financial planning. I think feeling sorry for them is a disservice, because it makes it seem that this outcome is hard to avoid. It's not hard when they're making 500k+/year:

1. Spend (a lot) less than you make. At 500k/year anywhere in the US, you should easily be saving 200k / year.

2. Invest the money you've saved. There's lots of good advice online, and realistically if you're saving 200k/year you don't have to worry about making the best choices -- just decent ones.

3. Don't accept generic lifestyle creep!

People need to be responsible and take control of their finances. You can't rely on somebody else to watch your finances, or make you eat your vegetables, or brush your teeth. The same advice applies to lots of people in tech, IMO.

It's interesting to observe that fame (and the money that usually comes with it) seems to follow something like a log scale. People usually don't become gradually more famous in a linear way. They're more likely to spend a few years with 50k listeners and then get a big hit and get 1 million listeners overnight, then the next big jump is 20 million, and so on.

It's possible to be semi-famous and still able to go to the grocery store and pump your own gas without getting recognized. The local sports radio guys don't need an entourage, even if they do get recognized. But as a rising artist, you hit a point where you can no longer go out in public at all. It's really shocking when it happens because it's so abrupt. My dad's famous friend was a regular at a local restaurant and wasn't bothered for a long time, even when his name/face started showing up in the media. Then one day another customer shouted his name and he got mobbed by fans, and he realized he couldn't go out to eat like a normal person anymore. I think Charli crossed that line with the success of her album Brat last year. It's the point where you start to ask yourself if it's really worth it, and maybe consider going full recluse like Thomas Pynchon. (That's not even getting into the online stan culture stuff that Charli talks about in the article.)

The "average" player in one of those sports leagues isn't really a celebrity at the level the article is talking about. Charli XCX's last album was nominated for 11 Grammies and won six of them, and it has the 15th highest aggregate rating from Metacritic of all time. If you're comparing to athletes, this is All-Star roster, potential MVP winning-level performance for at least that season. By no means it's every player who hits 50 home runs in a season is going to be set for life financially, but the chances they're going to struggle are a lot lower than some some random utility infielder or middle reliever.

Pro athletes also have higher divorce rates than the general population - 60-80% vs 50% source NYTimes/Sports Illustrated

His music has that vibe through and through.

yung leans interview on nyt popcast is good https://youtu.be/p1FF3r6raSc?si=Yq4kxIuQCUkW8IBr also his doc on Noisey years back was really good https://youtu.be/6wgFliyJ4Bk?si=B1DdlOQZH9NBsve1

Not just fame and celebrity. Any major success occurs within a certain narrow context, and when people stray outside that context they are not necessarily going to be better than anyone else. There are plenty of examples of business leaders, scientists, etc who tried to hop domains and fell on their faces.

what qualification does one need to be US President (besides being born in the US and of certain age)? celebrities certainly won’t be doing any open heart surgeries anytime soon :) so there are things you absolutely do not need any qualitications for (Actor/Actress, US President) and there those you do (Surgeon, Attorney…)

> The most powerful man in the US right now is just a reality TV star.

That's a strange characterization; he was famous across the country before there was even a concept of "reality TV".

Tim Ferris once made the point that at an incidence rate of psychotic episodes (~26 per 100.000 people) compared to expected influencer reach (several million if you're doing well), statistically you are expected to have a few dozen severely mentally ill people in your audience. Several of those may project you to be the cause of all their problems, even if you are literally the most wholesome person in the world just because they are not experiencing reality in a sensible way at the moment.

Link: https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/

What does shithoused mean in this context? All the meanings I know for it don't fit, not even metaphorically...

What you're saying is a very common "poptimist" trope of the last decade or two. To say that, actually, these vocalists are highly intelligent and largely responsible for their own success.

Charli XCX, like nearly all popstars, was propped up by the producers and writers who shaped her sound and composed large parts of the music. Producers have been there the whole way. In particular, her blowing up was highly influenced by the stylistic direction, composition, production and sound engineering of people associated with the PC Music record label. The statement that she had good enough taste to have been around these people is rather unfair -- she was around artistic innovators like Sophie, yes, but THEY are the ones that pioneered the sound.

The most common refrain is that popstars often write their music. This is misleading: they write the lyrics, suggest a general vibe, and some rough melodies or chords. And even this is a stretch many times. They are not composing or producing the music in any larger sense, and this is the pivotal part of actually making music.

One famous exception that comes to mind is Grimes, who largely actually /makes/ her own music. She rarely seems to get credit for this.

This is not to say that vocalist popstars don't bring a lot to the table. They do. But what they bring to the table is incredible performance skill and charisma. I think poptimism has gone too far, to the point that we think the product was responsible for creating itself.

Charli XCX is diverse and experimental enough that my first instinct would be to assume she’s rather intelligent. For example, her collaboration in the PC Music scene comes off rather nerdy and eccentric actually, not exactly pop. And her lyrics usually have more to it than meets the ear, e.g. sometimes intentionally being a commentary on the party persona keeping her distracted from worse things. “I hate the silence (uh oh), that's why the music's always loud”

Of course, that isn’t a shallow opinion so perhaps someone unfamiliar to her would think otherwise

> There is a weird assumption people make that somebody as successful as Charli XCX isn't smart because her persona is "I like cocaine and partying,"

Considering cocaine is both illegal and has an obviously unethical supply chain, you'd think someone would try, you know, prosecuting her or something.

> I assume roughly half of pop stars are male, give or take.

I'd question that assumption. My gut feel says there are way more women pop stars?

I did a very quick bit of research, and maybe we're both wrong.

https://wealthygorilla.com/richest-singers-world/

Splits up as 31 men to 19 women on their top 50 richest singers list. So closer to 2/3rds men that half.

I did realise while counting, that my gut feel wouldn't have included a lot of those men as "pop stars", in retrospect probably because my interpretation of "pop music" leans heavily towards women, and rightly or wrongly I'd label at least half the men on that list as "rock stars" instead (and very few of the women).

I also don’t understand why people don’t ascribe some inherently bad behaviours to human nature. Everyone knows people aren’t perfect, but somehow we have to blame some institutions or perceived societal phenomena instead of just acknowledging that we are, in our very nature, flawed - but capable of great change, and should just all endeavour to “be better”.

It is ironic that she talks about "the patriarchy" brainwashing people. I have serious doubts that she came up with the thought to blame it on the "patriarchy" herself.

In similar vein, the U2 song Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me has similar self-deprecating lyrics on what it is to be a pop star.

  They want you to be Jesus
  They'll go down on one knee
  But they'll want their money back
  If you're alive at thirty-three

Nobody who likes writing would use ChatGPT to write. First of all, it takes the fun out of it, and second of all, its writing is clinical and corporate. I'm writing to express myself, how would I accomplish that through someone else?

I don't think trying to detect ChatGPT is a good use of time. Either the writing is good, or it's not.

I feel absolutely confident that Charlie XCX would never use generative AI in any form. And this sentence is lovely;

"...let some random person you’ve just met in the bathroom try on the necklace around your neck that is equivalent to the heart of the ocean"

Like you I always look for signs of AI in writing I see online, and it's incredibly disappointing how often it's there. There's no personality, no charm, nothing unique - just the same flawless grammar and overuse of cliche. This piece is filled with the quality of humanity that we once took for granted. This is what we are losing.

Yeah there's a 'delve' there but it almost feels it was put in as a taunt.

She may be of the final generation of real creatives who aren't at a disadvantage relative to those who take the path of least resistance and put out slop. The current/next generation of the audience may look at manually created art as a curiosity, the way most of us think about listening to vinyl.

> and it doesn't even seem like she passed it thru Chatgpt

Oh my god, can we stop with the obsession of whether something has been chatgpt-ified? I like to know when things are true, or when they are good. I couldn't care less if they are chatgpt-y.

I think the people who argue about whether Musk is an engineer are the people who look up to him as a sort of Tony Stark figure. He certainly isn't Tony Stark, but then again, no one is.

> Nah it's nothing to do with women, it's simple jealousy.

On the same note here. It's quite interesting what women are quick to attribute any negative behaviour or feeling against them as a sexism and maybe this is a result of some popular culture behaviour.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42057441

How’s that 2016 promise of LA to NYC autonomous driving goal going for Musk? Or his Cybercab venture going? And the decision to not use LIDAR in his vehicles? Or the Cybertruck’s dismal engineering and sales?

> Yes he's an arsehole and moderately racist and probably quite lucky too but he is good at his job.

So one can be a massive piece of shit as long as they're good at their job?

Many of us here probably have worked with people like that. It's not a good environment to work in.

I thought the same thing.

As for Musk... tbh I think as the vast majority of us want things from other people we temper our behaviour.

But when you have enough fame and money to do what you want the filters can come off and we can be the selfish nasty people we really are. And some people obviously like to play on that too to get air time or just prove a point.

No, she means literally being in transit from point A to point B. On a tour bus, in an airline lounge, on a plane, in a cab, in some random hotel, backstage waiting to go on stage.

I did 100% business travel for a couple of a years, and it was pretty grueling despite mostly being stationed with the same customer for a couple of months. At the Charli XCX level, you may be doing 4 gigs in 4 different cities in 3 days:

https://toursetlist.com/charli-xcx-tour-setlist/

It makes me sad to think you have formed this opinion on her more than decade long career that spans a variety of genres and many collaborations based on a few brat songs you may have listened to

The novelty in pop music is not usually in the harmony. The novelty is usually in the presentation. The idea is that you hook the audience with familiarity (nostalgia) and then keep them with a novel expression of it. In recent years, this means really strange synth patches and vocal effects.

Maybe you could tell all her fans how stupid they are and shouldn't enjoy her music.

Why not save them from themselves with some of your approved recommendations?