Charli XCX Muses on ‘Realities of Being a Pop Star’ in Highs, Lows & Whoas Substack Essay: ‘All My Favorite Artists Are Absolutely Not Role Models’

Charli xcx is not gonna lie: being a pop star is freakin’ awesome. The parties, the free stuff, meeting other famous people, swanning to the front of every line, hearing amazing new music from other pop stars before anyone else, thousands (or if you’re lucky) millions of dedicated fans, never having to book your own travel and did we mention the tons of free, fancy stuff?

But in a lengthy Substack post last week, the “360” singer also weighed in on some of the less glitzy “Realities of Being a Pop Star,” as she titled her essay. “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,” Charli wrote, noting that she’s always gone in-and-out of different creative zones “adjacent” to music, including her recent dive into movies and acting, but that for the purpose of the essay she is focused on her “original dream” of being a pop star.

“Because it’s the role in my life I have the most experience navigating and because it’s also the most ridiculous one,” she said. “One of the main realities of being a pop star is that at a certain level, it’s really f–king 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 s–t. 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.”

And then there is the free stuff: phones, laptops, vinyl, trips, shroom gummies, headphones, clothes and that killer electric bike that has been sitting untouched in her garage for nearly five years. Don’t forget entering restaurants through the back entrance and smiling at the sweat-drenched chef and waiters who are toiling away at their service sector job while you “strut through the kitchen with your 4 best friends who are tagging along for the ride.”

Being a pop star, she mused, means you get to feel special, but also sometimes embarrassed by “how stupid the whole thing is.” You also get to hear tons of incredible music that is likely to shift the culture and public perception way before anyone else, like that time Addison Rae played Charli “Diet Pepsi” for the first time while driving around New York after a posh dinner. “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,” wrote Charli, who has worked with everyone from Troye Sivan to Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, BTS, Iggy Pop and Selena Gomez, among many others.

“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,” Charlie said. “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.”

But, of course, there is also the not so fun downside of global fame. Among the items Charli mentioned were the endless hours in “strange and soulless liminal spaces,” from holding areas at arenas, to airport lounges, visa offices, claustrophobic tour buses, greenrooms with no windows, the space under a stage or the set of your music video, all spaces she described as a soul-deadening “in-between.”

Those transit places are often where she depicted spending hours while on a journey that takes up most of the time of the experience. Most troubling, she wrote, was that when you are a pop star, some people are determined to prove to the world 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,” she noted. “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.”

That’s when instead of being considered a “sex symbol,” Charli said, the artist is sometimes labeled “a whore,” or instead of “anarchic” they are dubbed a “f–king drug addict.” Intelligence becomes “pretentious,” prompting the singer and producer to wonder why one’s success triggers such “rage and anger” in other people.

“I think it probably all boils down to the fact that the patriarchal society we unfortunately live in has successfully brainwashed us all,” wrote the Grammy-award winner. “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.”

And if she’s really being honest, sometimes, Charlie wrote, 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 success you notch, the more you notice the lifestyle discrepancy and the more 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,” she wrote.

“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?” Charli asked, recalling a visit a few weeks ago from rapper Yung Lean, who came to her house and had a discussion about some “industry adjacent friends” of theirs and whether they had changed after some success.

“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,” she said. “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 a–. 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.”

In conclusion, she wrote, being a pop star is about having an expectation that you will be “entirely truthful all the time.” But, again, if she’s being honest, that phantom thread between fame and moral responsibility has never made sense to her, especially considering that all her favorite artists were “absolutely” not role models, nor would she want them to be.

“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,” Charli said. “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.”

Naturally, then, she ended with a link to one of her favorite interviews with punk godfather Lou Reed, a 1974 Meet the Press chat in which the legendarily cantankerous Reed steadfastly refused to tell the truth the interviewer was desperate to foist onto him.