[HN Gopher] The realities of being a pop star
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       The realities of being a pop star
        
       Author : lovestory
       Score  : 46 points
       Date   : 2025-11-22 17:47 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (itscharlibb.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (itscharlibb.substack.com)
        
       | carabiner wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | varjag wrote:
         | Yeah there's a 'delve' there but it almost feels it was put in
         | as a taunt.
        
         | some_guy_nobel wrote:
         | 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."
        
           | beepbooptheory wrote:
           | 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?
        
           | quamserena wrote:
           | 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"?
        
         | plasticeagle wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | cypherpunks01 wrote:
       | > "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.
        
       | decasia wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | andrewinardeer wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | wewewedxfgdf wrote:
       | I'd hate to be a pop star.
       | 
       | The more anonymity the better.
        
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