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.
> after his 40s was trapped in a sad cycle of reunion tours because the band still needed the money.
Celebrity memoirs are often written for the same reasons, or to promote other ventures. For instance Peter Wolf seemingly reluctantly shared vignettes about Dylan, The Stones, Faye Dunaway, and rock 'n' roll life in the 1970s to promote his newer stuff:
"I was putting out solo CDs. Not to sound self-congratulatory, but I thought each one got better and better— but they weren’t finding an audience. I thought a book might encourage people to check out the other stuff. So basically, the intent of the book was to find a wider audience."
> especially when your old friends mock and ridicule you for caring about something absolutely pointless.
My dad flew 32 missions over Germany. He watched men die. 80% of his cohort did not return. He expected to die and made his peace with it. He told me once that when he returned home, he was struck by the trivial problems people had and obsessed over. After all, they weren't flying a mission tomorrow with near certain death.
He said whenever he felt down, he'd recall the men that never had a chance to grow old, and his problems would melt away.
I sometimes wonder what my widower grandfather thought, sending his only son off to war.
This was great stream of consciousness. Sub-stack is more appealing now.
Courtney Love wrote a fabulous article explaining the realities of a million-dollar album (2000 - https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/) and it explains so much of whats actually going on that the public doesn't fully comprehend. Its a great read if you've never read it.
The realities are similar to what we are reading in this article. Most of what gets talked about is gross numbers not net. Most of the benefits of the job, are in the journey not the destination - if you're even into that stuff... i.e. having your music impact lives.
I wish sooooo much that people could read these things so when I go to a dinner party or random event, some GenPop person knew that JK Rowling makes billions of dollars but your average published writer loses money publishing a book. Your average NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL athletes are broke 5 years after they are out of the league. Fame, is mostly a curse.
Good on charli xcx for writing this and for writing period.
> Your average NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL athletes are broke 5 years after they are out of the league. Fame, is mostly a curse.
I'm not familiar with the financials of music / media production (I didn't read the linked article yet, sorry). But I feel this over-pitying attitude towards professional sports players is misplaced. They do often go broke after their career. That is sad. It is also completely avoidable with _very_ basic financial planning. I think feeling sorry for them is a disservice, because it makes it seem that this outcome is hard to avoid. It's not hard when they're making 500k+/year:
1. Spend (a lot) less than you make. At 500k/year anywhere in the US, you should easily be saving 200k / year.
2. Invest the money you've saved. There's lots of good advice online, and realistically if you're saving 200k/year you don't have to worry about making the best choices -- just decent ones.
3. Don't accept generic lifestyle creep!
People need to be responsible and take control of their finances. You can't rely on somebody else to watch your finances, or make you eat your vegetables, or brush your teeth. The same advice applies to lots of people in tech, IMO.
You're right, of course.
But often there are obvious and "easy" answers that are anything but easy for the person who needs those answers.
"Just cheer up, depressed person!"
"Just eat less and exercise more, fat person!"
"Just stop shooting up, heroin addict!"
"Don't accept generic lifestyle creep, pro athlete who's teammates are all living it up like they live in a gangsta rap music video!"
I'm sure there are lots of pro sports players that get and heed advice just like yours, and finish out their short and bright sports career well financially set for their remaining 60-ish years when they're no longer capable of earning half a mil plus a year being athletes.
But I'm also fairly sure the career and lifestyle, and the managers, hangers on, and sycophants they're surrounded with push then hard the other direction.
I'm not from the US, so I don't have a real understanding of US pro sports and the way people end up there, but I have this impression that it's "one of the ways out of the ghetto" for at least some of them. People who won the genetic lottery, but lost the birth demographics lottery. They've never had generation wealth or even a middle class safety net. They don't have family or friends who have experience or advice about what to do with suddenly having way more money that anybody the have even known. They don't have family or close friends who can recommend trusted financial advisors or lawyers. Any advice they're getting risks coming from people they ane not certain they can trust to have their own interests at heart, and aren't trying to skim their own percentage off the top.
I don't exactly pity someone who earns 500k+ a year in a short pro sports career, and blows it all ending up poor. But I think I can understand how the system is set up - if not to actively encourage that outcome, at the very least that system probably doesn't do as much to protect against it as they could.
Logistics are a nice guard rail for the pro-sport wealth management conversation. Let's presume rates of success are still low. Why.
Consciousness. We all have a wealth consciousness.
Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Do you really? I keep a blog here[1], but it’s very sporadic and not very focused — i mostly write to satisfy myself
It's interesting to observe that fame (and the money that usually comes with it) seems to follow something like a log scale. People usually don't become gradually more famous in a linear way. They're more likely to spend a few years with 50k listeners and then get a big hit and get 1 million listeners overnight, then the next big jump is 20 million, and so on.
It's possible to be semi-famous and still able to go to the grocery store and pump your own gas without getting recognized. The local sports radio guys don't need an entourage, even if they do get recognized. But as a rising artist, you hit a point where you can no longer go out in public at all. It's really shocking when it happens because it's so abrupt. My dad's famous friend was a regular at a local restaurant and wasn't bothered for a long time, even when his name/face started showing up in the media. Then one day another customer shouted his name and he got mobbed by fans, and he realized he couldn't go out to eat like a normal person anymore. I think Charli crossed that line with the success of her album Brat last year. It's the point where you start to ask yourself if it's really worth it, and maybe consider going full recluse like Thomas Pynchon. (That's not even getting into the online stan culture stuff that Charli talks about in the article.)
It's fascinating to me that her new album's name is "Wuthering Heights", the name of Kate Bush's debut and number 1 single from 1978. Kate Bush is well known (in the circles of people who know about this sort of thing) and as fiercely independent and self-controlled artist. I hope Charlii manages her career and fame as well as Kate has over the decades.
> I think Charli crossed that line with the success of her album Brat last year.
In Hollywood, that line gets crossed at a surprisingly low level. I am friends with Josh Sussman, who played Jacob Ben Israel on Glee. I occasionally visit him in LA, and we can’t go anywhere in public without getting constantly stopped by people wanting photos. It’s exhausting.
The "average" player in one of those sports leagues isn't really a celebrity at the level the article is talking about. Charli XCX's last album was nominated for 11 Grammies and won six of them, and it has the 15th highest aggregate rating from Metacritic of all time. If you're comparing to athletes, this is All-Star roster, potential MVP winning-level performance for at least that season. By no means it's every player who hits 50 home runs in a season is going to be set for life financially, but the chances they're going to struggle are a lot lower than some some random utility infielder or middle reliever.
never heard of them before this HN article lol. the only thing that struck me was no paragraphs in the article, just one giant wall of text. and also how bored id be living that lifestyle (personally)
I was aware of her name, and roughly her genre, but couldn't have named or even recognised a single track of hers.
I looked her up and started listening as I read the article, and the while listening to the two track released so far from her upcoming album I was thinking "this is really good, why haven't I listened to her before?" then I put on her last album Brat, and realised "Oh, right. That's not my style of music. She's never been writing for me, and I know who she is writing for, and I understand why they like her and why she's so popular." And I respect that.
I'll keep an ear out for her new album, and based on what I've heard so far I fully expect to enjoy it, way more than I'm enjoying Brat. I've also added her substack to my rss feeds, no guarantee it'll stay there long term, but I'm at least curious enough to follow along for her next few blogposts.
Did we look at the same article? I counted 6 or 7 paragraphs
Pro athletes also have higher divorce rates than the general population - 60-80% vs 50% source NYTimes/Sports Illustrated
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.
What does shithoused mean in this context? All the meanings I know for it don't fit, not even metaphorically...
Sorry for the bogan nomenclature.
I mean "fell upwards". Gave it a shot for shits and giggles and made it.
I didn't know what bogan meant either so I looked it up and I have to infer we are speaking with an Australian or New Zealander, hence the small vocabulary differential in our English.
Aussies speak something that sounds vaguely like English but it ain’t.
Tim Ferris once made the point that at an incidence rate of psychotic episodes (~26 per 100.000 people) compared to expected influencer reach (several million if you're doing well), statistically you are expected to have a few dozen severely mentally ill people in your audience. Several of those may project you to be the cause of all their problems, even if you are literally the most wholesome person in the world just because they are not experiencing reality in a sensible way at the moment.
The James Blunt documentary has similar qualities of the insanity and the banality of fame. "You look just like..." type commentary, from ordinary encounters. Both reviled and admired, he managed to leverage haters on Twitter into an image of self deprecating humour. Combined with some PTSD from his army career and stage effects.
Ed Sheeran gives off what i suspect is a very carefully managed vibe of ordinariness. If it's not curated it's very well done.
> "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.
It is a great interview, thanks. Never heard of him, he's a smart young person. Goes hand in hand with Charlie's post. Hey it's Saturday night we can talk about culture stuff, right? Edit to add: young prodigies in artistic pursuits have similar choices as young tech prodigies.
>young prodigies in artistic pursuits have similar choices as young tech prodigies.
How so?
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It is correct to be skeptical of people who parlay their fame in one domain into another. The most powerful man in the US right now is just a reality TV star.
At best, it allows "celebrities" to hop into any domain of their choosing without any real qualification or having earned their way in that particular field.
Not just fame and celebrity. Any major success occurs within a certain narrow context, and when people stray outside that context they are not necessarily going to be better than anyone else. There are plenty of examples of business leaders, scientists, etc who tried to hop domains and fell on their faces.
what qualification does one need to be US President (besides being born in the US and of certain age)? celebrities certainly won’t be doing any open heart surgeries anytime soon :) so there are things you absolutely do not need any qualitications for (Actor/Actress, US President) and there those you do (Surgeon, Attorney…)
There is a weird assumption people make that somebody as successful as Charli XCX isn't smart because her persona is "I like cocaine and partying," and then are surprised when she can express herself like this. Like she says: "Another thing about being a pop star is that you cannot avoid the fact that some people are simply determined to prove that you are stupid."
Making music at any professional level is extremely hard work. Touring and dancing and hosting shows is even harder. It requires a substantial intellectual capacity and stamina to achieve. You either have these things yourself, or you are propped up entirely by others who have them and are invested in you for money's sake. Given Charli XCX's background, it's not actually surprising that she, in fact, has all the talent, skill, and intellect required to do this stuff herself.
Editing to add: Another place to look to learn that people with this skillset often have very very deep inner lives is Dua Lipa's book club podcast (https://www.service95.com/tag/book-club). As someone who used to run these kinds of in-depth interviews, I can say, she is damn good at it.
Charli XCX is diverse and experimental enough that my first instinct would be to assume she’s rather intelligent. For example, her collaboration in the PC Music scene comes off rather nerdy and eccentric actually, not exactly pop. And her lyrics usually have more to it than meets the ear, e.g. sometimes intentionally being a commentary on the party persona keeping her distracted from worse things. “I hate the silence (uh oh), that's why the music's always loud”
Of course, that isn’t a shallow opinion so perhaps someone unfamiliar to her would think otherwise
> There is a weird assumption people make that somebody as successful as Charli XCX isn't smart because her persona is "I like cocaine and partying,"
Considering cocaine is both illegal and has an obviously unethical supply chain, you'd think someone would try, you know, prosecuting her or something.
If she's prosecuted before a long queue of others, we'd be entitled to suggest the law is not being applied equally. Start a little higher up the food chain with the politicians.
The politicians aren't announcing they use cocaine in public, are they? Even if some of them do sniff a lot on camera.
In a lot of places drug enforcement is being deprioritized, for good reason. Of course then you run into all the problems with only enforcing against people someone doesn't like.
One of my rules for travel is don't go to places where the laws are basically selectively not enforced for the convenience of tourists.
I wonder if I'm missing some sarcasm, but I feel I need to clarify that "I like cocaine and partying" is her _persona_, it isn't necessarily true. It's largely marketing. I feel this was the main point of the article, lol.
> I’ve always wondered why someone else’s success triggers such rage and anger in certain people and I think it probably all boils down to the fact that the patriarchal society we unfortunately live in has successfully brainwashed us all. 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 assume roughly half of pop stars are male, give or take. Or, given the quote and speaking in generalities, at least roughly half of successful people are male. I’m sure we can all name wildly successful males who garner the same hate she is speaking about.
I don’t think it’s patriarchy, I think it’s simply jealously, insecurity, and judgmental feelings all wrapped up into a big ball of hate.
Or it’s the patriarchy. Just doesn’t make sense for the point trying to be made.
The Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" is one of my all-time favorite 80s hits. Mark Knopfler pretty much composed the lyrics simply by transcribing some remarks he overheard from blue-collar servicemen working at an appliance store, and adjusting them a bit to make them scan and rhyme.
The deliberate irony is that contrary to the servicemen's belief that rock stars live a life of ease, the life of a musician can be grueling. You have to spend years mastering your instrument(s) and then win the record-deal lottery; after which your time is pretty much divided between being in the studio recording, on tour performing and promoting the album on a round-the-clock schedule, and with the rise of MTV shooting music videos. It's no wonder rock stars are prone to hedonism; they probably think they have to drink deeply of relaxation and pleasure while they have the opportunity, in order to reset and be ready for the next album, the next concert tour, the next press event...
In similar vein, the U2 song Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me has similar self-deprecating lyrics on what it is to be a pop star.
They want you to be Jesus
They'll go down on one knee
But they'll want their money back
If you're alive at thirty-three
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.
Nobody who likes writing would use ChatGPT to write. First of all, it takes the fun out of it, and second of all, its writing is clinical and corporate. I'm writing to express myself, how would I accomplish that through someone else?
I don't think trying to detect ChatGPT is a good use of time. Either the writing is good, or it's not.
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.
not all of us, just most of us, apparently
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Yeah there's a 'delve' there but it almost feels it was put in as a taunt.
I never quite understood this “tell”. I use the word all the time. As do a lot of the people I have know. Written and spoken.
Is this maybe an American thing? Ie it’s just not used much there?
"Delve" was one of the words whose usage spiked most dramatically after the launch of ChatGPT, relative to its usage pre-ChatGPT.
> and it doesn't even seem like she passed it thru Chatgpt
Oh my god, can we stop with the obsession of whether something has been chatgpt-ified? I like to know when things are true, or when they are good. I couldn't care less if they are chatgpt-y.
I think people disliked being fooled. Something seems good and true, and then you realize it was ChatGPT, and you realize it’s all fake. The connection you were forming with the author is gone (because they phoned it in) and the sense of truth is gone (because who knows what was hallucinated).
People like authenticity. ChatGPT ain’t it.
She may be of the final generation of real creatives who aren't at a disadvantage relative to those who take the path of least resistance and put out slop. The current/next generation of the audience may look at manually created art as a curiosity, the way most of us think about listening to vinyl.
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I found it pretty hollow too, but I probably went into it with the wrong expectations. The title of the article sounds promising, and the writing is decent enough that I believe something interesting could be said, but in the end it felt less introspective and more self-indulgent. I'm sure she could write the essay I was hoping to read, but it turned out to be the essay I should have expected instead.
Weirdly enough, I went in thinking it would be a deep-dive into the actual process and job of being a pop star.
Presumably she's not just being carted between parties, gigs, and the recording studio - how does she spend her time? Who manages her schedule? When she's putting out an album, is she the one driving the process? How does she (or her manager, label, PA, etc.) find graphic designers, producers, videographers for the ad campaign, contractors to arrange a tour, and PR firms to arrange talk show interviews and press hype? Where does the money go - does she have a family office, does she have an emergency trust fund, how does she protect against fraud and embezzlement, and is she even thinking about that stuff? How does the job of being a pop star work?
The essay is exactly what I should have expected, and that's fine. Even if someone is writing in an unfiltered way it doesn't mean their stream of consciousness will contain the overly detailed trivia I'm interested in.
Britney Spears always struck me as an idiot, and someone who is unable to think very deeply at all. But I read her testimony, in very unsophisticated language, of how her father treated her with fascination and sympathy.
I think hearing an authentic voice about what it's like "on the inside" of music industry, being a celebrity, etc. is valuable, even if the speaker doesn't meet the average HNer's standards for intelligence, originality, creativity, or depth.
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”?
Wouldn’t the best PR team be the one who you couldn’t tell touched it?
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist and all…
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?
I'd hate to be a pop star.
The more anonymity the better.
> I find that this is often where the stupidity narrative can be born. I’ve always wondered why someone else’s success triggers such rage and anger in certain people and I think it probably all boils down to the fact that the patriarchal society we unfortunately live in has successfully brainwashed us all. 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.
Nah it's nothing to do with women, it's simple jealousy. Everyone wants to be successful. If they can dismiss successful people as lucky or whatever (tbf some are) then it makes them feel better about their own failure to be successful (they are just as good; they just weren't as lucky).
A natural human tendency. Look at all the people saying Elon Musk isn't really an engineer. Yeah right, he definitely is heavily involved in the high level technical decisions. Yes he's an arsehole and moderately racist and probably quite lucky too but he is good at his job.
I think the people who argue about whether Musk is an engineer are the people who look up to him as a sort of Tony Stark figure. He certainly isn't Tony Stark, but then again, no one is.
How’s that 2016 promise of LA to NYC autonomous driving goal going for Musk? Or his Cybercab venture going? And the decision to not use LIDAR in his vehicles? Or the Cybertruck’s dismal engineering and sales?
Elon promises 10 revolutionary things and only delivers 9. Sheesh, what a loser!
Delivering 9 of 10 revolutionary things would, I agree, be amazing.
making 31 public predictions about his self-driving cars over 20 years and only being right about one of them is not so clever.
Musk really is that good and nobody else is capable of building factories in the US, but the skills are in raising money and defeating NIMBYism. Raising money (and starting startups) involves a lot of lies and delusions which are not always adaptive skills.
He fell off when he lost his egirl and became a drug addict.
> Nah it's nothing to do with women, it's simple jealousy.
On the same note here. It's quite interesting what women are quick to attribute any negative behaviour or feeling against them as a sexism and maybe this is a result of some popular culture behaviour.
I had to go on Youtube to listen to some of the music mentioned here, as I'm pretty out of the loop on it. Given what I heard I honestly think we're basically at the point where AI can generate equivalent or even better music. It's just very simple and doesn't feel particularly innovative or noteworthy.
Point being, I think it's likely this person is one of the last pop stars.
Actually, as I'm writing this, I realized that probably the music being produced by this person is actually done by a computer. So, maybe she's in the first wave of totally artificial pop stars.
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.
> after his 40s was trapped in a sad cycle of reunion tours because the band still needed the money.
Celebrity memoirs are often written for the same reasons, or to promote other ventures. For instance Peter Wolf seemingly reluctantly shared vignettes about Dylan, The Stones, Faye Dunaway, and rock 'n' roll life in the 1970s to promote his newer stuff:
"I was putting out solo CDs. Not to sound self-congratulatory, but I thought each one got better and better— but they weren’t finding an audience. I thought a book might encourage people to check out the other stuff. So basically, the intent of the book was to find a wider audience."
https://www.boston.com/culture/books/2025/03/10/peter-wolf-m...
> especially when your old friends mock and ridicule you for caring about something absolutely pointless.
My dad flew 32 missions over Germany. He watched men die. 80% of his cohort did not return. He expected to die and made his peace with it. He told me once that when he returned home, he was struck by the trivial problems people had and obsessed over. After all, they weren't flying a mission tomorrow with near certain death.
He said whenever he felt down, he'd recall the men that never had a chance to grow old, and his problems would melt away.
I sometimes wonder what my widower grandfather thought, sending his only son off to war.
This was great stream of consciousness. Sub-stack is more appealing now.
Courtney Love wrote a fabulous article explaining the realities of a million-dollar album (2000 - https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/) and it explains so much of whats actually going on that the public doesn't fully comprehend. Its a great read if you've never read it.
The realities are similar to what we are reading in this article. Most of what gets talked about is gross numbers not net. Most of the benefits of the job, are in the journey not the destination - if you're even into that stuff... i.e. having your music impact lives.
I wish sooooo much that people could read these things so when I go to a dinner party or random event, some GenPop person knew that JK Rowling makes billions of dollars but your average published writer loses money publishing a book. Your average NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL athletes are broke 5 years after they are out of the league. Fame, is mostly a curse.
Good on charli xcx for writing this and for writing period.
> Your average NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL athletes are broke 5 years after they are out of the league. Fame, is mostly a curse.
I'm not familiar with the financials of music / media production (I didn't read the linked article yet, sorry). But I feel this over-pitying attitude towards professional sports players is misplaced. They do often go broke after their career. That is sad. It is also completely avoidable with _very_ basic financial planning. I think feeling sorry for them is a disservice, because it makes it seem that this outcome is hard to avoid. It's not hard when they're making 500k+/year:
1. Spend (a lot) less than you make. At 500k/year anywhere in the US, you should easily be saving 200k / year.
2. Invest the money you've saved. There's lots of good advice online, and realistically if you're saving 200k/year you don't have to worry about making the best choices -- just decent ones.
3. Don't accept generic lifestyle creep!
People need to be responsible and take control of their finances. You can't rely on somebody else to watch your finances, or make you eat your vegetables, or brush your teeth. The same advice applies to lots of people in tech, IMO.
You're right, of course.
But often there are obvious and "easy" answers that are anything but easy for the person who needs those answers.
"Just cheer up, depressed person!"
"Just eat less and exercise more, fat person!"
"Just stop shooting up, heroin addict!"
"Don't accept generic lifestyle creep, pro athlete who's teammates are all living it up like they live in a gangsta rap music video!"
I'm sure there are lots of pro sports players that get and heed advice just like yours, and finish out their short and bright sports career well financially set for their remaining 60-ish years when they're no longer capable of earning half a mil plus a year being athletes.
But I'm also fairly sure the career and lifestyle, and the managers, hangers on, and sycophants they're surrounded with push then hard the other direction.
I'm not from the US, so I don't have a real understanding of US pro sports and the way people end up there, but I have this impression that it's "one of the ways out of the ghetto" for at least some of them. People who won the genetic lottery, but lost the birth demographics lottery. They've never had generation wealth or even a middle class safety net. They don't have family or friends who have experience or advice about what to do with suddenly having way more money that anybody the have even known. They don't have family or close friends who can recommend trusted financial advisors or lawyers. Any advice they're getting risks coming from people they ane not certain they can trust to have their own interests at heart, and aren't trying to skim their own percentage off the top.
I don't exactly pity someone who earns 500k+ a year in a short pro sports career, and blows it all ending up poor. But I think I can understand how the system is set up - if not to actively encourage that outcome, at the very least that system probably doesn't do as much to protect against it as they could.
Logistics are a nice guard rail for the pro-sport wealth management conversation. Let's presume rates of success are still low. Why.
Consciousness. We all have a wealth consciousness.
Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Do you really? I keep a blog here[1], but it’s very sporadic and not very focused — i mostly write to satisfy myself
[1] https://bagelpour.wordpress.com
It's interesting to observe that fame (and the money that usually comes with it) seems to follow something like a log scale. People usually don't become gradually more famous in a linear way. They're more likely to spend a few years with 50k listeners and then get a big hit and get 1 million listeners overnight, then the next big jump is 20 million, and so on.
It's possible to be semi-famous and still able to go to the grocery store and pump your own gas without getting recognized. The local sports radio guys don't need an entourage, even if they do get recognized. But as a rising artist, you hit a point where you can no longer go out in public at all. It's really shocking when it happens because it's so abrupt. My dad's famous friend was a regular at a local restaurant and wasn't bothered for a long time, even when his name/face started showing up in the media. Then one day another customer shouted his name and he got mobbed by fans, and he realized he couldn't go out to eat like a normal person anymore. I think Charli crossed that line with the success of her album Brat last year. It's the point where you start to ask yourself if it's really worth it, and maybe consider going full recluse like Thomas Pynchon. (That's not even getting into the online stan culture stuff that Charli talks about in the article.)
It's fascinating to me that her new album's name is "Wuthering Heights", the name of Kate Bush's debut and number 1 single from 1978. Kate Bush is well known (in the circles of people who know about this sort of thing) and as fiercely independent and self-controlled artist. I hope Charlii manages her career and fame as well as Kate has over the decades.
> I think Charli crossed that line with the success of her album Brat last year.
In Hollywood, that line gets crossed at a surprisingly low level. I am friends with Josh Sussman, who played Jacob Ben Israel on Glee. I occasionally visit him in LA, and we can’t go anywhere in public without getting constantly stopped by people wanting photos. It’s exhausting.
The "average" player in one of those sports leagues isn't really a celebrity at the level the article is talking about. Charli XCX's last album was nominated for 11 Grammies and won six of them, and it has the 15th highest aggregate rating from Metacritic of all time. If you're comparing to athletes, this is All-Star roster, potential MVP winning-level performance for at least that season. By no means it's every player who hits 50 home runs in a season is going to be set for life financially, but the chances they're going to struggle are a lot lower than some some random utility infielder or middle reliever.
never heard of them before this HN article lol. the only thing that struck me was no paragraphs in the article, just one giant wall of text. and also how bored id be living that lifestyle (personally)
I was aware of her name, and roughly her genre, but couldn't have named or even recognised a single track of hers.
I looked her up and started listening as I read the article, and the while listening to the two track released so far from her upcoming album I was thinking "this is really good, why haven't I listened to her before?" then I put on her last album Brat, and realised "Oh, right. That's not my style of music. She's never been writing for me, and I know who she is writing for, and I understand why they like her and why she's so popular." And I respect that.
I'll keep an ear out for her new album, and based on what I've heard so far I fully expect to enjoy it, way more than I'm enjoying Brat. I've also added her substack to my rss feeds, no guarantee it'll stay there long term, but I'm at least curious enough to follow along for her next few blogposts.
Did we look at the same article? I counted 6 or 7 paragraphs
Pro athletes also have higher divorce rates than the general population - 60-80% vs 50% source NYTimes/Sports Illustrated
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.
What does shithoused mean in this context? All the meanings I know for it don't fit, not even metaphorically...
Sorry for the bogan nomenclature.
I mean "fell upwards". Gave it a shot for shits and giggles and made it.
I didn't know what bogan meant either so I looked it up and I have to infer we are speaking with an Australian or New Zealander, hence the small vocabulary differential in our English.
Aussies speak something that sounds vaguely like English but it ain’t.
Tim Ferris once made the point that at an incidence rate of psychotic episodes (~26 per 100.000 people) compared to expected influencer reach (several million if you're doing well), statistically you are expected to have a few dozen severely mentally ill people in your audience. Several of those may project you to be the cause of all their problems, even if you are literally the most wholesome person in the world just because they are not experiencing reality in a sensible way at the moment.
Link: https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/
The James Blunt documentary has similar qualities of the insanity and the banality of fame. "You look just like..." type commentary, from ordinary encounters. Both reviled and admired, he managed to leverage haters on Twitter into an image of self deprecating humour. Combined with some PTSD from his army career and stage effects.
Ed Sheeran gives off what i suspect is a very carefully managed vibe of ordinariness. If it's not curated it's very well done.
> "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.
yung leans interview on nyt popcast is good https://youtu.be/p1FF3r6raSc?si=Yq4kxIuQCUkW8IBr also his doc on Noisey years back was really good https://youtu.be/6wgFliyJ4Bk?si=B1DdlOQZH9NBsve1
It is a great interview, thanks. Never heard of him, he's a smart young person. Goes hand in hand with Charlie's post. Hey it's Saturday night we can talk about culture stuff, right? Edit to add: young prodigies in artistic pursuits have similar choices as young tech prodigies.
>young prodigies in artistic pursuits have similar choices as young tech prodigies.
How so?
It is correct to be skeptical of people who parlay their fame in one domain into another. The most powerful man in the US right now is just a reality TV star.
At best, it allows "celebrities" to hop into any domain of their choosing without any real qualification or having earned their way in that particular field.
Not just fame and celebrity. Any major success occurs within a certain narrow context, and when people stray outside that context they are not necessarily going to be better than anyone else. There are plenty of examples of business leaders, scientists, etc who tried to hop domains and fell on their faces.
what qualification does one need to be US President (besides being born in the US and of certain age)? celebrities certainly won’t be doing any open heart surgeries anytime soon :) so there are things you absolutely do not need any qualitications for (Actor/Actress, US President) and there those you do (Surgeon, Attorney…)
There is a weird assumption people make that somebody as successful as Charli XCX isn't smart because her persona is "I like cocaine and partying," and then are surprised when she can express herself like this. Like she says: "Another thing about being a pop star is that you cannot avoid the fact that some people are simply determined to prove that you are stupid."
Making music at any professional level is extremely hard work. Touring and dancing and hosting shows is even harder. It requires a substantial intellectual capacity and stamina to achieve. You either have these things yourself, or you are propped up entirely by others who have them and are invested in you for money's sake. Given Charli XCX's background, it's not actually surprising that she, in fact, has all the talent, skill, and intellect required to do this stuff herself.
Editing to add: Another place to look to learn that people with this skillset often have very very deep inner lives is Dua Lipa's book club podcast (https://www.service95.com/tag/book-club). As someone who used to run these kinds of in-depth interviews, I can say, she is damn good at it.
Charli XCX is diverse and experimental enough that my first instinct would be to assume she’s rather intelligent. For example, her collaboration in the PC Music scene comes off rather nerdy and eccentric actually, not exactly pop. And her lyrics usually have more to it than meets the ear, e.g. sometimes intentionally being a commentary on the party persona keeping her distracted from worse things. “I hate the silence (uh oh), that's why the music's always loud”
Of course, that isn’t a shallow opinion so perhaps someone unfamiliar to her would think otherwise
> There is a weird assumption people make that somebody as successful as Charli XCX isn't smart because her persona is "I like cocaine and partying,"
Considering cocaine is both illegal and has an obviously unethical supply chain, you'd think someone would try, you know, prosecuting her or something.
If she's prosecuted before a long queue of others, we'd be entitled to suggest the law is not being applied equally. Start a little higher up the food chain with the politicians.
The politicians aren't announcing they use cocaine in public, are they? Even if some of them do sniff a lot on camera.
In a lot of places drug enforcement is being deprioritized, for good reason. Of course then you run into all the problems with only enforcing against people someone doesn't like.
One of my rules for travel is don't go to places where the laws are basically selectively not enforced for the convenience of tourists.
I wonder if I'm missing some sarcasm, but I feel I need to clarify that "I like cocaine and partying" is her _persona_, it isn't necessarily true. It's largely marketing. I feel this was the main point of the article, lol.
> I’ve always wondered why someone else’s success triggers such rage and anger in certain people and I think it probably all boils down to the fact that the patriarchal society we unfortunately live in has successfully brainwashed us all. 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 assume roughly half of pop stars are male, give or take. Or, given the quote and speaking in generalities, at least roughly half of successful people are male. I’m sure we can all name wildly successful males who garner the same hate she is speaking about.
I don’t think it’s patriarchy, I think it’s simply jealously, insecurity, and judgmental feelings all wrapped up into a big ball of hate.
Or it’s the patriarchy. Just doesn’t make sense for the point trying to be made.
The Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" is one of my all-time favorite 80s hits. Mark Knopfler pretty much composed the lyrics simply by transcribing some remarks he overheard from blue-collar servicemen working at an appliance store, and adjusting them a bit to make them scan and rhyme.
The deliberate irony is that contrary to the servicemen's belief that rock stars live a life of ease, the life of a musician can be grueling. You have to spend years mastering your instrument(s) and then win the record-deal lottery; after which your time is pretty much divided between being in the studio recording, on tour performing and promoting the album on a round-the-clock schedule, and with the rise of MTV shooting music videos. It's no wonder rock stars are prone to hedonism; they probably think they have to drink deeply of relaxation and pleasure while they have the opportunity, in order to reset and be ready for the next album, the next concert tour, the next press event...
In similar vein, the U2 song Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me has similar self-deprecating lyrics on what it is to be a pop star.
https://genius.com/U2-hold-me-thrill-me-kiss-me-kill-me-lyri...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.
Nobody who likes writing would use ChatGPT to write. First of all, it takes the fun out of it, and second of all, its writing is clinical and corporate. I'm writing to express myself, how would I accomplish that through someone else?
I don't think trying to detect ChatGPT is a good use of time. Either the writing is good, or it's not.
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.
not all of us, just most of us, apparently
Yeah there's a 'delve' there but it almost feels it was put in as a taunt.
I never quite understood this “tell”. I use the word all the time. As do a lot of the people I have know. Written and spoken.
Is this maybe an American thing? Ie it’s just not used much there?
"Delve" was one of the words whose usage spiked most dramatically after the launch of ChatGPT, relative to its usage pre-ChatGPT.
> and it doesn't even seem like she passed it thru Chatgpt
Oh my god, can we stop with the obsession of whether something has been chatgpt-ified? I like to know when things are true, or when they are good. I couldn't care less if they are chatgpt-y.
I think people disliked being fooled. Something seems good and true, and then you realize it was ChatGPT, and you realize it’s all fake. The connection you were forming with the author is gone (because they phoned it in) and the sense of truth is gone (because who knows what was hallucinated).
People like authenticity. ChatGPT ain’t it.
She may be of the final generation of real creatives who aren't at a disadvantage relative to those who take the path of least resistance and put out slop. The current/next generation of the audience may look at manually created art as a curiosity, the way most of us think about listening to vinyl.
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I found it pretty hollow too, but I probably went into it with the wrong expectations. The title of the article sounds promising, and the writing is decent enough that I believe something interesting could be said, but in the end it felt less introspective and more self-indulgent. I'm sure she could write the essay I was hoping to read, but it turned out to be the essay I should have expected instead.
Weirdly enough, I went in thinking it would be a deep-dive into the actual process and job of being a pop star.
Presumably she's not just being carted between parties, gigs, and the recording studio - how does she spend her time? Who manages her schedule? When she's putting out an album, is she the one driving the process? How does she (or her manager, label, PA, etc.) find graphic designers, producers, videographers for the ad campaign, contractors to arrange a tour, and PR firms to arrange talk show interviews and press hype? Where does the money go - does she have a family office, does she have an emergency trust fund, how does she protect against fraud and embezzlement, and is she even thinking about that stuff? How does the job of being a pop star work?
The essay is exactly what I should have expected, and that's fine. Even if someone is writing in an unfiltered way it doesn't mean their stream of consciousness will contain the overly detailed trivia I'm interested in.
Britney Spears always struck me as an idiot, and someone who is unable to think very deeply at all. But I read her testimony, in very unsophisticated language, of how her father treated her with fascination and sympathy.
I think hearing an authentic voice about what it's like "on the inside" of music industry, being a celebrity, etc. is valuable, even if the speaker doesn't meet the average HNer's standards for intelligence, originality, creativity, or depth.
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”?
Wouldn’t the best PR team be the one who you couldn’t tell touched it?
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist and all…
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?
I'd hate to be a pop star.
The more anonymity the better.
> I find that this is often where the stupidity narrative can be born. I’ve always wondered why someone else’s success triggers such rage and anger in certain people and I think it probably all boils down to the fact that the patriarchal society we unfortunately live in has successfully brainwashed us all. 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.
Nah it's nothing to do with women, it's simple jealousy. Everyone wants to be successful. If they can dismiss successful people as lucky or whatever (tbf some are) then it makes them feel better about their own failure to be successful (they are just as good; they just weren't as lucky).
A natural human tendency. Look at all the people saying Elon Musk isn't really an engineer. Yeah right, he definitely is heavily involved in the high level technical decisions. Yes he's an arsehole and moderately racist and probably quite lucky too but he is good at his job.
I think the people who argue about whether Musk is an engineer are the people who look up to him as a sort of Tony Stark figure. He certainly isn't Tony Stark, but then again, no one is.
How’s that 2016 promise of LA to NYC autonomous driving goal going for Musk? Or his Cybercab venture going? And the decision to not use LIDAR in his vehicles? Or the Cybertruck’s dismal engineering and sales?
Elon promises 10 revolutionary things and only delivers 9. Sheesh, what a loser!
Delivering 9 of 10 revolutionary things would, I agree, be amazing.
However...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
making 31 public predictions about his self-driving cars over 20 years and only being right about one of them is not so clever.
Musk really is that good and nobody else is capable of building factories in the US, but the skills are in raising money and defeating NIMBYism. Raising money (and starting startups) involves a lot of lies and delusions which are not always adaptive skills.
He fell off when he lost his egirl and became a drug addict.
> Nah it's nothing to do with women, it's simple jealousy.
On the same note here. It's quite interesting what women are quick to attribute any negative behaviour or feeling against them as a sexism and maybe this is a result of some popular culture behaviour.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42057441
I had to go on Youtube to listen to some of the music mentioned here, as I'm pretty out of the loop on it. Given what I heard I honestly think we're basically at the point where AI can generate equivalent or even better music. It's just very simple and doesn't feel particularly innovative or noteworthy.
Point being, I think it's likely this person is one of the last pop stars.
Actually, as I'm writing this, I realized that probably the music being produced by this person is actually done by a computer. So, maybe she's in the first wave of totally artificial pop stars.