The realities of being a pop star
11 comments
·November 22, 2025andrewinardeer
I couldn't think of anything worse than to be known world wide.
You couldn't go out in public without being hounded or swamped by people. The parasocial relationships people form with you can put your life in danger.
Even worse is being a politician - particularly at a global leader level. Surely there has been an average Joe who has shithoused their way into being a leader of a significant country. Once you do that, with politics being as toxic as it is, for the rest of your days you can be a marked person.
cypherpunks01
> "A couple of weeks ago Yung Lean came for dinner at my house .. He is probably one of the wisest people I know."
Two sentences I would've not predicted in close proximity to one another! Hah, love it. Guess he's been through a lot over the years.
wewewedxfgdf
I'd hate to be a pop star.
The more anonymity the better.
carabiner
Fascinating. Also impressive rawness, and it doesn't even seem like she passed it thru Chatgpt. It's insane that my first inclination is to detect those telltale signs in a blog post, and here I found none.
plasticeagle
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.
varjag
Yeah there's a 'delve' there but it almost feels it was put in as a taunt.
some_guy_nobel
Is this an astroturf comment? Which parts did you find 'raw'?
I found the piece to be utterly hollow, almost a caricature of the third paragraph written about criticizing intelligence.
It reads exactly as I'd expect a piece to read from a PR team looking to humanize their client, without providing any real, 'raw' details. Her texting "Young Lean" and asking if she changed is the most 'raw' thing mentioned, and of course the answer was "No."
mrdependable
I found it pretty hollow too, but I probably went into it with the wrong expectations. The title of the article sounds promising, and the writing is decent enough that I believe something interesting could be said, but in the end it felt less introspective and more self-indulgent. I'm sure she could write the essay I was hoping to read, but it turned out to be the essay I should have expected instead.
quamserena
It clearly hasn’t been passed through a PR team or ChatGPT; if it had been you’d expect them to fix the grammatical errors. It’s an honest stream-of-consciousness blog post almost certainly written by Charli XCX herself and herself alone about her thoughts, and it is honest and unapologetic. What word more describes this than “raw”?
beepbooptheory
What do think could of been added or taken away or changed to make it better? What would a "good" version of this piece of writing be like for you? Is it a matter of voice, pacing, structure? You seem to imply maybe a lack of juicy details I guess?
I thought this was a really good piece of writing. It’s rare to do something like this because the job discourages it by putting PR filters on everything you say.
My uncle was a pretty big pop star in the 1960s. His group at one point had a big fanzine, they were household names across the country, over time they had stalkers and weird fans and all that, made movies and albums, had big parties and knew other famous people, pretty much all those things that the OP writes about (circa 50 years later, some of it has changed but not that much).
He could be charismatic and surprisingly eloquent and I could picture him writing a piece like this, if the mood had struck.
He also lost pretty much all the money through mismanagement (several times over), eventually moved out of LA, had a tumultuous family life with numerous spouses and wasn’t around much for his kids, and after his 40s was trapped in a sad cycle of reunion tours because the band still needed the money. The tours still had some level of excitement and crowd enthusiasm, even pretty late in life and I guess he always loved the stage, the performing, all that. But in the end, I kinda felt it seemed like a lonely existence. Hard to form really deep connections when you’re always traveling and often away in your head.