Over the past ten years it has become a commonplace that pop stardom is not all it’s cracked up to be. With Britney Spears as the cautionary tale, few people need convincing that the music industry can be grimy, exploitative and traumatising. Never mind pulling back the curtain, these days it seems the curtain has been yanked off its rail and torn into rags.
The dark side of celebrity has been so thoroughly illuminated that there is now even a micro-genre of documentaries in which performers lay out their struggles. The former Disney star Demi Lovato has made a four-part series about her issues with substance abuse and eating disorders. The 2023 drama The Idol, starring the Weeknd and Lily-Rose Depp, portrayed pop stardom as a psychosexual nightmare.
The Weeknd and Lily Rose Depp in The Idol
EDDY CHEN/HBO
But what if, in many cases, the ills of fame are more trivial than that? What if being a pop star isn’t necessarily abusive but just a bit cringe? Earlier this month the singer-songwriter Charli XCX launched a newsletter on the Substack platform, with the self-explanatory name Charli’s Substack. Her second post is titled The Realities of Being a Pop Star (subtitle: According to My Experience).
This insightful, chatty essay contains one of the first genuinely startling admissions I have seen about the music industry for a while. “Sometimes,” writes Charli XCX, real name Charlotte Emma Aitchison, “being a pop star can be really embarrassing.” In its own way this disclosure does more to puncture the glitz of celebrity than any number of high-profile lawsuits could.
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In present-day culture Charli XCX is the pop star. That is not the same as being the world’s biggest artist, a title that indisputably belongs to Taylor Swift thanks to her blockbusting Eras tour and the subsequent success of her (critically underwhelming) album The Life of a Showgirl. But it is Charli XCX who has crystalised what 21st-century pop stardom looks like and taken it in experimental new directions.
Taylor Swift is open about the pressure to be immaculate, but rarely looks less than perfectly polished
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Last year her album Brat was so inescapable it even had a season named after it. The combination of her aggressive electronic sound and defiantly unpolished attitude caught the strange mood of the moment. In a media environment that prized an anodyne “clean girl” aesthetic, here was a celebration of being messy and having fun.
Charli XCX was hardly a pop neophyte. Brat is her sixth album and her second to go to No 1. She has worked with many of pop’s biggest names, including the K-pop juggernaut BTS (on the 2019 song Dream Glow) and Swift herself (Charli XCX supported Swift on the Reputation tour in 2018). But Brat confirmed her as a tastemaker and a star in her own right.
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That meant a whole new set of frankly bizarre experiences. Much of being a pop star is, as she concedes, “really f***ing fun”. “You get to go to great parties in a black SUV … 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 jewellery that sometimes comes with its own security guard.”
Sounds great. But you also “end up spending a lot of time inhabiting strange and soulless liminal spaces”, she writes. “Whether it’s the holding area of the event you’re about to enter, the airport lounge, the visa office, the claustrophobic tour bus, the green room 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.” Pop stars are shipped around “like a package”.
Being at the centre of this strange circus does odd things to a person. And that’s where the embarrassment really kicks in, especially when you spend time with the people who have known you prefame. “The discrepancy in lifestyles becomes more and more drastic the more successful and paranoid you become.” Old friends “mock and ridicule you for caring about something absolutely pointless”.
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This all sounds like a fundamentally healthy level of insight to have into a potentially unhealthy way to exist. The best way to avoid being driven mad by fame is probably to remember that fame is by definition completely demented. But it is also a sign of a strange truth about modern stardom: the cringe has become cool.
Just look at the case of 2025’s breakout star, Addison Rae, who started her path to fame as one of the most embarrassing things it is possible to be: a TikTok star. A few years ago she was known for posting simple dances to other people’s songs. She was popular but hardly respected. “TikTok girl” is about as far down the chain of talent as it is possible to come.
Addison Rae went from TikTok star to pop star
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Her first attempt at transitioning to pop stardom was not well received. Her song Obsessed missed the charts and the consensus rapidly formed that she was lame and low-charisma — just another wannabe promoted above her pay grade by social media. Compilations of Rae’s most awkward moments circulated on the internet. She was a punchline.
Many people might have taken this as a sign to give up and get offline but Rae kept going and in summer 2024 released Diet Pepsi. In Charli XCX’s essay one of the high points of being a pop star is getting to hear “incredible music that undoubtedly is going to shift culture and public perception months before it’s released”. The example she cites is Rae playing her Diet Pepsi for the first time while driving around New York.
Suddenly Rae was cool, but not because she had rebranded herself or jettisoned her past (in the way that, say, Lana del Rey erased the “Lizzie Grant” persona of her deleted first album when she became the first chanteuse of dark Americana). Rae was cool precisely because she had fully inhabited her cringe and so alchemised into its opposite.
The internet has made it expensive to make mistakes. For some pop stars the response to that has been a retreat into perfection. Beyoncé really is, as she once sang, flawless. Her music and her image are calibrated so slickly, there is no room for error. On songs such as I Can Do It with a Broken Heart Swift is open about the pressure to be immaculate — but when did you last see her looking less than perfectly polished?
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For an artist success can become a trap. As the public want more of the same, creativity founders. It is something Charli XCX experienced with Brat. “It was fun, don’t get me wrong … But by the end of the process I sort of felt like I was squeezing blood from a stone, trying to get every last drop of liquid life out of an idea I had already sat with for years prior.”
Doing anything new and exciting opens the possibility of mistakes. But taking risks is the only way to move forward. In that spirit, Charli XCX’s next projects include a move into acting (The Moment, a mockumentary out next year) and the soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. House, the first song from that to be released, features the Velvet Underground’s John Cale. It is about a million miles from a party anthem.
For anyone expecting Charli XCX’s next move after Brat to be even brattier, this might be an unwelcome development. It is possible that some of her fans are going to hate her next phase. It is even possible that she might, embarrassingly, fail. Then again, as she has noted so acutely, being a pop star is already embarrassing enough. From that perspective, what has she got to lose?