Charli XCX Gets Candid About the Actual ‘Realities of Being a Pop Star’
3 min readTHE RUNDOWN
- In a new Substack post, Charli XCX wrote about the highs and lows of fame.
- “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,” she wrote.
- She also reflected on the moral responsibility that gets placed on artists.
Charli XCX is getting candid about the “realities of being a pop star.”
In a new Substack post, the Brat singer reflected on fame, starting off with the highs. “One of the main realities of being a pop star is that at a certain level, it’s really fucking fun,” she writes. “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 cliché shit. At these parties, you sometimes get to meet interesting people, and those interesting people often actually want to meet you.”
She goes on to list other perks, like being gifted free things, traveling all over the world, and getting to hear unreleased music from her peers. “The time Addison [Rae] played me ‘Diet Pepsi’ for the first time while driving around New York after dinner at Casino springs to mind,” she wrote.
Charli then wrote about the downsides of fame. “Sometimes being a pop star can be really embarrassing,” she wrote, “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.”
Being a pop star also makes her question whether she’s changed. She recalled a recent conversation with her friend and fellow artist, Yung Lean.
“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,” she wrote. “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.”
Charli XCX and Yung Lean in 2024.
He responded that, no, she hadn’t changed but did point out that she surrounds herself with “yes people” who “blow smoke up my ass.” She continued, “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.”
Charli ended her post by reflecting on artists and their responsibility to the public. “Over recent years, some people seem to have developed a connection between fame and moral responsibility that I’ve never really understood,” she admitted. “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.”
She added, “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.”
Read her full Substack post here.