The realities of being a pop star.

According to my experience...

Being a pop star has its pros and cons like most jobs in this world but before I state some of them I want to clarify that firstly I don’t view what I do as a ‘job’ and I secondly don’t really view myself as purely a pop star, I’m just using that terminology specifically for this piece of writing. I’ve always been delving into different creative zones adjacent to music. Building out an entire album roll out obviously constitutes immersing yourself in many different mediums but now more than ever I feel a pull away from music and into other realms. Unfortunately this probably means I’d describe myself more as a ‘creative’ (gross) or plain and simply put: an artist. However, for the purposes of this piece I’m focusing purely on the 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.

One of the main realities of being a pop star is that at a certain level, it’s really fucking fun. You get to go to great parties in a black SUV and you can smoke cigarettes in the car and scream out of the sunroof and all that cliche shit. At these parties you sometimes get to meet interesting people and those interesting people often actually want to meet you. You get to wear fabulous clothes and shoes and jewelry that sometimes comes with its own security guard who trails you around the party making sure you don’t lose the extortionate earrings sitting on your lobes or 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. You get good free shit like phones and laptops and vinyl and trips 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 get to enter restaurants through the back entrance and give a half smile to the head chef (who probably hates you) and the waiters (who probably hate you too) as they sweat away doing an actual real service industry job while you strut through the kitchen with your 4 best friends who are tagging along for the ride. You get to feel special, but you also have to at points feel embarrassed by how stupid the whole thing is. You also get to hear a lot of incredible music that undoubtably is going to shift culture and public perception months before its released (the time Addison played me Diet Pepsi for the first time while driving around New York after dinner at Casino springs to mind). Sometimes you get to help out your other pop star friends by providing an opinion or lending an ear or a helping make a decision relating to their work which allows you to feel a part of a interconnected community of people you love and respect. You also get to have fans and their dedication to your work makes you feel like they will be there for you until the end of time, even though in reality they won’t. You get to stand on stage and feel like a God. You get to make people cry with happiness, you soundtrack their break ups, their recovery, their crazy nights out, their revenge, their love, their lives. You get to travel the world and see all kinds of different places and you never even have to worry about booking a single element of the travel yourself because you have an amazing tour manager to do that for you. You get to call in sick whenever you want and you never have to worry about bailing on work last minute because you know for certain that there’s another pop star out there who’s actually way more unreliable and flakey than you. Thank God.

You will also end up spending a lot of time inhabiting strange and soulless liminal spaces. Whether its the holding area of the event you’re about to enter, the airport lounge, the visa office, the claustrophobic tour bus, the greenroom with no windows, the underneath of a stage or the set build of a photoshoot or music video you’re on, you are often caught in the in-between. You’re in transit, you’re going somewhere but the journey itself takes up the majority of the experience. When Rachel Sennott came to shoot her scene in our upcoming film The Moment she was overnighted in a van straight from the front row of the Balenciaga show in Paris to the back doors of a warehouse in London’s Docklands. She was bundled up with blankets and pillows and shipped directly to us like a package. The journey took all night but she was only on set for around an hour.

Another thing about being a pop star is that you cannot avoid the fact that some people are simply determined to prove that you are stupid. I’ve always been completely fascinated by this and think it has something to do with self projection. Being a pop star has always been partially about being a fantasy and obviously the fantasy is decided mostly by the consumer. Marketing and strategy and packaging and presentation can do it’s best to guide a viewer to the desired outcome but at the end of the day the consumer gets to decide whether a pop star is a symbol of sex, or anarchy or intelligence or whatever else they wish to see. Sometimes people don’t like to be lumped in with general consensus, they like to go against the grain of public opinion and that’s when a totally opposite defiant stance is born. Instead of “she’s a sex symbol” it becomes “she’s a whore”. Instead of “she’s anarchic” it's “she’s a fucking drug addict”. Instead of “she’s intelligent” it’s “she’s pretentious and said a whole load of nothing” and so on and so on. I find that this is often where the stupidity narrative can be born. I’ve always wondered why someone else’s success triggers such rage and anger in certain people and I think it probably 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 box that public perception has put them in. I think subconsciously people still believe there is only room for women to be a certain type of way and once they claim to be one way they better not DARE grow or change or morph into something else. Also people obviously want the clicks and an opposite stance is more likely to get that. When I joined substack there were a flurry of think pieces and questions as to why. Some people theorized on the desire for long form content and a deeper connection with a fanbase, some people were just purely excited, some people suggested I might be heeding the advice of my record label in attempt to be omnipresent across all platforms, some people were surprised I even had enough brain cells left to write because of all that partying I do (!). The truth is I’ve always loved writing so why the fuck not? I felt generally welcomed to the community but also did see the small wave of people being annoyed I’d broken down the walls of my box they were determined to keep me in, the box, or should I say the brand, of the party girl who smokes cigs, does coke, loves the color green and has the capacity for nothing else. To them I’m a silly little idiot because that’s what they desire me to be. I guess sometimes that’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 discrepancy in lifestyles becomes more and more drastic the more successful and paranoid you become. As a British person the longer you stay 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 too, especially when your old friends mock and ridicule you for caring about something absolutely pointless. In ways being a pop star makes me 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 couple of weeks ago Yung Lean came for dinner at my house and we were discussing some industry adjacent friends of ours and whether we felt they had changed after their successes in their certain fields. The next day my brain was stewing and so I text him to ask him whether he thought I had changed. I knew he would be honest because he always is and I know he sees through everything, all the persona and all the facade. He is probably one of the wisest people I know. I’m sat there waiting for his response and the three speech bubble dots kept appearing and disappearing on my phone screen which was sending me into a total spiral. When he finally pressed send his message said that he thought I had not changed from the person he knew when we were younger and that he didn’t think I would in the future but also that I definitely do have ‘yes people’ around me that blow smoke up my ass. I said I could see the truth in that but luckily he went on to say that generally speaking I’m too British and self deprecating to actually believe any of the wild compliments the ‘yes people’ might pay me so I was probably safe.

My final thought on being a pop star is that there is a level of expectation for you to be entirely truthful all the time. Over recent years some people seem to have developed a connection between fame and moral responsibility that I’ve never really understood. All my favorite artists are absolutely not role models nor would I want them to be, but maybe that’s just me. I want hedonism, danger and a sense of anti establishment to come along with my artists because when I was younger I wanted to escape through them. I don’t care if they tell the truth or lie or play a character or adopt a persona or fabricate entire scenarios and worlds. To me that’s the point, that’s the drama, that’s the fun, that’s the FANTASY.

I’m ending the essay with a link to one of my favorite Lou Reed interviews. Is it performance? Is it truth? Is it lies? Who fucking cares? In my opinion it’s just funny and cool.