It’s fitting that Charli XCX accompanied her post on X about “the realities of being a pop star” with a photo of Lou Reed — the enigmatic frontman of the Velvet Underground. The image is a screenshot of Reed from a 1974 interview where he answers rapid-fire questions as laconically and languidly as possible, much to the chagrin of the rabid journalists huddled around him. As Charli, who once said she wants to make a “Lou Reed record,” might put it, that’s art, baby.
In her new Substack published Friday, Charli begins with a few clarifications. While she writes “being a pop star has its pros and cons like most jobs in this world,” she says, “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.” Instead, she opts to describe herself “more as a ‘creative’ (gross) or plain and simply put: an artist.” However, for the purposes of her essay, she focuses “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.”
First, she addresses the obvious: being a pop star is “really fucking fun.” Charli proceeds to list off the benefits of the gig: parties in a black SUV and “all that cliche shit”; meeting interesting people and “those interesting people often actually want to meet you”; getting “free shit” such as phones, trips, clothes, and shroom gummies; entering restaurants through the back entrance with your best friends and smiling at the staff (who probably “hate you”); and hearing Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” before it’s released. She also adds that, yes, “You get to feel special, but you also have to at points feel embarrassed by how stupid the whole thing is.”
Still, Charli acknowledges the parts that go beyond this and nods toward her fans and how 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,” adding that performing on stage can make you “feel like a God.” She says, “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.”
The Brat singer then moves on to the time spent “in transit,” likening a pop star’s time spent traveling from one matter of business to another as feeling like a commodity inhabiting “strange and soulless liminal spaces.” She offers an example of when Rachel Sennott arrived to shoot a scene in Charli’s upcoming mockumentary The Moment “bundled up with blankets and pillows and shipped directly to us like a package.”
The public’s perception of her a pop star has also caused Charli to “think about the person I used to be compared to the person I am now.” Old friends and family members have a way of humbling you, she points out; after asking Yung Lean whether he thought she had changed, he replied via text that while she’s still the person he knew when they were younger, the “yes people” around her “blow smoke” up her ass.
In ending her thoughts on the pop star life, she muses that while there is a “level of expectation for you to be entirely truthful all the time,” all her 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 adds. “To me that’s the point, that’s the drama, that’s the fun, that’s the FANTASY.”
She offers a link to Reeds’ interview from the Seventies, before asking and answering: “Is it performance? Is it truth? Is it lies? Who fucking cares? In my opinion it’s just funny and cool.”
When speaking to Vanity Fair about The Moment last month, Charli, once again subverted the line between fact and fiction, said, “It’s not a tour documentary or a concert film in any way, but the seed of the idea was conceived from this idea of being pressured to make one.” She added, “It’s fiction, but it’s the realest depiction of the music industry that I’ve ever seen.”