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."
That's the fate of many acts from that period. So so so many artists who were stratospherically popular but are still touring for cash playing to nobody younger than them. It's sad.
It was interesting and a fun read, but not a “good piece of writing” in my opinion. Apart from some spelling mistakes, the sentences droned on and it read more like a semi-coherent rant than a thoughtful piece on “being a pop star”.
I thought it was excellent for something that appears mostly off the cuff. This is what lots of good writing looks like before the editors get to it, btw
It is thoughtful, that's not the problem. It's just not written in the standard language "written English", but instead in "spoken English" with some attempts towards the former ("My final thought on ...") that sound like someone trying formal writing for the first time.
The sentences do drone on, but they're fully coherent; this is above-average writing. It wouldn't likely meet publishing standards, but it's a lot better than you'd expect a randomly-chosen person to produce.
I'm sure an editor would go through and suggest tightening up some points, but I agree it's good enough as a first draft.
The problem is there are too types of writers who don't get the help of an editor, those who are too big and famous to accept one and those too poor to afford one.
I sort of feel the people who are saying it's bad aren't very able to separate their own preferences from determining quality
As interesting as I find it, cannot agree more. It's very childish writing - feels a lot like it was written by a teenager. It sort of reminds me of my young 8 year old niece telling me a story she finds so exciting she barely comes up for air.
> 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 wondered about that as well. I would do whatever I can to avoid my sons going to war because these wars are fought for interests that are completely remote.
I can imagine resistance when you are invaded (and still, you need to weigh your real chances). Sending someone to Africa from France to protect some interests there, well not that much.
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.
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.
Can you expand on that? I feel like it’s the most misused and overused word in my vocabulary and one I wish I could just get rid of a lot of the time and never seem to manage. It just creeps in.
Just in the usage being complained about argues that whatever it is modifying does not need or benefit from analysis.
It just creeps in, but why? Why does it creep in? Often because we do not want to do the complicated analysis as to why things are the way they are because then it does not validate our preferences which are often emotional and not movable by logic anyway.
Just exercise more, fatty, says that the problem of being a fatty has a simple solution that anyone can see and there is no need to argue the point here. Start jogging!!
Just in the rather archaic meaning nowadays as being right and proper and what should happen in a fair and balanced universe is tangentially related, the archaic meaning of Just is memetically echoed in the assertive mode of Just doing things. If the world was fair and balanced and most of all really simple then Just jogging would cure the fatty, but it doesn't.
To be a good "team player", it's good to be liked by your teammates. If you want to be friends with your teammates, who all spend money like there's no tomorrow, it probably helps if you do the same.
I'm not saying you can't save up as an athlete, but it's probably harder than we think.
>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:
this is a good point and also I believe obviously wrong.
What are the stats on people making 500k a year on losing that going broke? Do they outperform sports stars etc.?
If it is the same then that implies that on the average people do not handle 500k basic financial planning well, or two that basic financial planning won't do what you say with that amount of money (for what, 5 years?). At any rate it would mean that generally people suffer this way and thus it is doing a disservice to point out how dumb they were for not doing basic financial planning.
If it is not the same then it implies that there may be something about the career that makes it harder then it does for other people in which case you are doing even more of a disservice.
I believe it is actually there is something about the career that makes it harder (this belief is formed by just thinking about it and doing absolutely no data analysis because I just do not have the time to devote to it past this HN post)
But I think we can create a thought experiment that shows why it is different
Many of us here are familiar with careers the top of which make 500k a year, there are a few engineers who could make that much. Or management at tech firms, it doesn't matter. There are people who can make that much.
Now if you lose your 500k job in tech what happens? You probably fall down a level to a lower paying job in tech. Let's say 390,000. That's a significant drop, but it's still a pretty nice wage.
The reason for this is because the tech career is a pyramid, 500k at or near top. And a pyramid means that the levels lower than the higher levels are wider (this being an analogy) and being wider has more entries for you to fall into.
Sports is also a pyramid. Or really several pyramids. There is the small pyramid of multi-million dollar players who can fall into single millions and then into the hundreds of thousands. But mainly the pyramid you are dealing with is an inverted pyramid. That is to say the sports career chart is top = player, most players, when you fall out of player level you fall into a level with fewer slots - coaches, commentators, agents, recruiters. If you can't fall into one of these slots and perform adequately (perhaps because you are doing a high paying job that also has high risks of causing brain damage [depending on sport obviously]) then when you lose your 500k sports job you are probably significantly worse off than most of us are when we lose our 500k programming jobs (obviously counterexamples abound, like if you lose job due to illness that means you won't get 390000 programming job either)
Anyway I believe your point that these people should not be pitied over much because they could handle their problems with basic financial playing probably is a bit mean, and one I often hear around here.
as it the case with most analogies, the pyramid analogy is severely flawed, but I do think it makes the one point clearly which is that when you loose a 500k programming job there are more lower paying jobs in the same industry you can fall into, when you lose a 500k sports job you might not have a lower paying job you can fall into because there just aren't that many in the sports industry.
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.)
> 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.
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.
As I understand, Charli’s album is the soundtrack to a movie called Wuthering Heights. Which is loosely based on the 19th century novel of the same name. And that novel was also the inspiration for the Kate Bush song.
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.
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.
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.
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…)
The idea that you shouldn't need qualifications - which, might I add, is not the same as certification - to be the President of The United States is a wild one.
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.
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.
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.
You know how it's said that eskimos have 50 words for "snow"?
Aussies have 50 meanings for the word "cunt". It can simultaneously be both the worst and the best thing you can call someone. And aussies know exactly which meaning is intended from context.
It's easier than that, the meaning is defined by the previous word. Although you do have to be an Aussie to know that being called a "sick cunt" is high praise, while being a "dog cunt" is a mortal insult.
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
Does she write her own lyrics? Or does someone else write those for her?
I’m not saying she is or isn’t intelligent, and either way she clearly is talented in some area of music, just wondering if she is a singer or singer/songwriter :)
> 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.
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.
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.
Her essay makes it seem like she's mostly powerless. She gets shuttled around from place to place because other people make money by using her as a prop. She gets paid lots of money and is given freedom, in a sense, but it's freedom to gorge herself on basic pleasures like attention, drugs, and wealth. Overall it seems like a childlike existence.
> 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.
Splits up as 31 men to 19 women on their top 50 richest singers list. So closer to 2/3rds men that half.
I did realise while counting, that my gut feel wouldn't have included a lot of those men as "pop stars", in retrospect probably because my interpretation of "pop music" leans heavily towards women, and rightly or wrongly I'd label at least half the men on that list as "rock stars" instead (and very few of the women).
Maybe it's related to the decades during which I grew up, but I'd say "rock star" had a better connotation than "pop star" when I was growing up.
"Pop stars" contained a lot of boy/girl bands or solo artists who "don't write their own songs/music" (among many other accusations of not being "real musicians").
I also don’t understand why people don’t ascribe some inherently bad behaviours to human nature. Everyone knows people aren’t perfect, but somehow we have to blame some institutions or perceived societal phenomena instead of just acknowledging that we are, in our very nature, flawed - but capable of great change, and should just all endeavour to “be better”.
It is ironic that she talks about "the patriarchy" brainwashing people. I have serious doubts that she came up with the thought to blame it on the "patriarchy" herself.
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...
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.
I used to wear a mask when I was sick but still had to be around people. It was just normal life. Then after COVID it became a political statement. Now if I did that people would assume I’m trying to say something.
I’ve always liked the American flag. I have a little pin on my jacket. People assume something by its presence.
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.
Spottily has clearly identified a paying market for "incidental" music, something that people will play just to fill in as background noise while not caring about it. But it relies on a huge number of people who're prepared to pay a vanishingly small amount for it, or even to put up with ads to have it play for free.
But that's not "the audience" that all "creatives" are seeking or writing for. At least some of them are writing for the sort of person who actively seeks out and values "manually created art". People like me. People who'll not only go and listen to an artist's back catalog after enjoying hearing a previously unknown artist, and who'll buy the music that they love (including buying the vinyl even though they have access via streaming and paid downloads as well). People who'll keep an eye open for tours, and who'll buy concert tickets and encourage friends to do so as well.
That will probably never generate Taylor Swift or Rhiannon style careers or income, but I think "1000 true fans" is a valid today as it was almost 20 years ago when it was written:
Anybody "putting out slop" using GenAI in their art is fooling themselves if they think it's ever going to be possible to become truly rich and famous that way. If there's money to be made from AI slop music, it'll be raked in by streaming services and AI companies who can produce a million tracks a day and A/B test then on streaming services with a billion listeners. And _maybe_ there'll be a very few specialist AI music production companies, someone with a finely tuned AI and extremely skilled prompters - and with enough skill and talent to recognise when the AI output is going to be popular enough to be worth releasing. Someone like Stock Aitken Waterman used to be back in the 80s. But those production companies are directly in the targets of enshittification by the AI companies (the same as every company in any industry that becomes dependent on someone else's GenAI).
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”?
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?
> 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).
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
Nobody said that. OP's point was to say "he is good at his job" as a counter to the people who say he isn't good as his job (i.e. "he isn't a real engineer"), not as a counter to people who think he's a jerk.
As for Musk... tbh I think as the vast majority of us want things from other people we temper our behaviour.
But when you have enough fame and money to do what you want the filters can come off and we can be the selfish nasty people we really are. And some people obviously like to play on that too to get air time or just prove a point.
Yeah it seems like rich people lose some of the feedback from society that helps keep people relatively "normal" - you can see it in the names of their children for example (not just Musk).
> You’re in transit, you’re going somewhere but the journey itself takes up the majority of the experience.
That's how most people function. People work their asses off so that they can do something fun two weeks a year.
> 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.
Because even though people clearly have different levels of intelligence, saying this out loud goes against values of the society, and keeping the society together is more important than being truthful. This is one of those things that "normies" understand subconsciously but never articulate, while autists rarely understand because it's never articulated.
> 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
Pop star gets successful by playing a role of a stupid person. Some people think she's actually stupid. It doesn't take a degree in social sciences to connect the dots.
> I’ve always wondered why someone else’s success triggers such rage and anger
Jealously has existed since the dawn of time. Various cultures have sayings along "nothing makes one happier than someone else's misery".
> the patriarchal society
I've noticed that many people who see themselves as oppressed get tunnel vision and attribute lots of unrelated problems to said oppression. This is one of those subconscious biases that exist because having them gives you massive social advantage because you can get all the pity you want.
> Over recent years some people seem to have developed a connection between fame and moral responsibility that I’ve never really understood.
Rich and famous people have power. They're expected to use that power for good regardless of how they got the power.
No, she means literally being in transit from point A to point B. On a tour bus, in an airline lounge, on a plane, in a cab, in some random hotel, backstage waiting to go on stage.
I did 100% business travel for a couple of a years, and it was pretty grueling despite mostly being stationed with the same customer for a couple of months. At the Charli XCX level, you may be doing 4 gigs in 4 different cities in 3 days:
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.
It makes me sad to think you have formed this opinion on her more than decade long career that spans a variety of genres and many collaborations based on a few brat songs you may have listened to
The novelty in pop music is not usually in the harmony. The novelty is usually in the presentation. The idea is that you hook the audience with familiarity (nostalgia) and then keep them with a novel expression of it. In recent years, this means really strange synth patches and vocal effects.
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.
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...
The problem is there are too types of writers who don't get the help of an editor, those who are too big and famous to accept one and those too poor to afford one.
I sort of feel the people who are saying it's bad aren't very able to separate their own preferences from determining quality
https://medium.com/luminasticity/to-speak-meaningfully-about...
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 always feel put in a position when I'm in an interview and they ask about handling pressure in the workplace.
I can imagine resistance when you are invaded (and still, you need to weigh your real chances). Sending someone to Africa from France to protect some interests there, well not that much.
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.
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.
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.
I often think this is the biggest word in the English language.
Similar to how I think "might as well" may be the most expensive phrase.
It just creeps in, but why? Why does it creep in? Often because we do not want to do the complicated analysis as to why things are the way they are because then it does not validate our preferences which are often emotional and not movable by logic anyway.
Just exercise more, fatty, says that the problem of being a fatty has a simple solution that anyone can see and there is no need to argue the point here. Start jogging!!
Just in the rather archaic meaning nowadays as being right and proper and what should happen in a fair and balanced universe is tangentially related, the archaic meaning of Just is memetically echoed in the assertive mode of Just doing things. If the world was fair and balanced and most of all really simple then Just jogging would cure the fatty, but it doesn't.
on edit: changed than to then.
To be a good "team player", it's good to be liked by your teammates. If you want to be friends with your teammates, who all spend money like there's no tomorrow, it probably helps if you do the same.
I'm not saying you can't save up as an athlete, but it's probably harder than we think.
Consciousness. We all have a wealth consciousness.
this is a good point and also I believe obviously wrong.
What are the stats on people making 500k a year on losing that going broke? Do they outperform sports stars etc.?
If it is the same then that implies that on the average people do not handle 500k basic financial planning well, or two that basic financial planning won't do what you say with that amount of money (for what, 5 years?). At any rate it would mean that generally people suffer this way and thus it is doing a disservice to point out how dumb they were for not doing basic financial planning.
If it is not the same then it implies that there may be something about the career that makes it harder then it does for other people in which case you are doing even more of a disservice.
I believe it is actually there is something about the career that makes it harder (this belief is formed by just thinking about it and doing absolutely no data analysis because I just do not have the time to devote to it past this HN post)
But I think we can create a thought experiment that shows why it is different
Many of us here are familiar with careers the top of which make 500k a year, there are a few engineers who could make that much. Or management at tech firms, it doesn't matter. There are people who can make that much.
Now if you lose your 500k job in tech what happens? You probably fall down a level to a lower paying job in tech. Let's say 390,000. That's a significant drop, but it's still a pretty nice wage.
The reason for this is because the tech career is a pyramid, 500k at or near top. And a pyramid means that the levels lower than the higher levels are wider (this being an analogy) and being wider has more entries for you to fall into.
Sports is also a pyramid. Or really several pyramids. There is the small pyramid of multi-million dollar players who can fall into single millions and then into the hundreds of thousands. But mainly the pyramid you are dealing with is an inverted pyramid. That is to say the sports career chart is top = player, most players, when you fall out of player level you fall into a level with fewer slots - coaches, commentators, agents, recruiters. If you can't fall into one of these slots and perform adequately (perhaps because you are doing a high paying job that also has high risks of causing brain damage [depending on sport obviously]) then when you lose your 500k sports job you are probably significantly worse off than most of us are when we lose our 500k programming jobs (obviously counterexamples abound, like if you lose job due to illness that means you won't get 390000 programming job either)
Anyway I believe your point that these people should not be pitied over much because they could handle their problems with basic financial playing probably is a bit mean, and one I often hear around here.
[1] https://bagelpour.wordpress.com
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.)
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.
I lived in Camberwell, Australia for a while and I would run across Geoffrey Rush in the local supermarket fairly routinely.
Nobody bothered him.
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.
Luckily we don’t all enjoy the same music, that would be boring as well! :)
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.
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.
How so?
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.
That's a strange characterization; he was famous across the country before there was even a concept of "reality TV".
I added it’s a word way to put it. He became more famous generally but he was already known to NY and powerful people.
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.
Link: https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/
I mean "fell upwards". Gave it a shot for shits and giggles and made it.
Aussies have 50 meanings for the word "cunt". It can simultaneously be both the worst and the best thing you can call someone. And aussies know exactly which meaning is intended from context.
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.
Of course, that isn’t a shallow opinion so perhaps someone unfamiliar to her would think otherwise
I’m not saying she is or isn’t intelligent, and either way she clearly is talented in some area of music, just wondering if she is a singer or singer/songwriter :)
> Does she write her own lyrics? Or does someone else write those for her?
Even when a singer is performing a song they didn't write, they're often doing that because the song appeals to them.
Considering cocaine is both illegal and has an obviously unethical supply chain, you'd think someone would try, you know, prosecuting her or something.
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.
I'd question that assumption. My gut feel says there are way more women pop stars?
I did a very quick bit of research, and maybe we're both wrong.
https://wealthygorilla.com/richest-singers-world/
Splits up as 31 men to 19 women on their top 50 richest singers list. So closer to 2/3rds men that half.
I did realise while counting, that my gut feel wouldn't have included a lot of those men as "pop stars", in retrospect probably because my interpretation of "pop music" leans heavily towards women, and rightly or wrongly I'd label at least half the men on that list as "rock stars" instead (and very few of the women).
"Pop stars" contained a lot of boy/girl bands or solo artists who "don't write their own songs/music" (among many other accusations of not being "real musicians").
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...
I don't think trying to detect ChatGPT is a good use of time. Either the writing is good, or it's not.
"...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.
Is this maybe an American thing? Ie it’s just not used much there?
I’ve always liked the American flag. I have a little pin on my jacket. People assume something by its presence.
That’s life. Delve is now an LLMism.
Spottily has clearly identified a paying market for "incidental" music, something that people will play just to fill in as background noise while not caring about it. But it relies on a huge number of people who're prepared to pay a vanishingly small amount for it, or even to put up with ads to have it play for free.
But that's not "the audience" that all "creatives" are seeking or writing for. At least some of them are writing for the sort of person who actively seeks out and values "manually created art". People like me. People who'll not only go and listen to an artist's back catalog after enjoying hearing a previously unknown artist, and who'll buy the music that they love (including buying the vinyl even though they have access via streaming and paid downloads as well). People who'll keep an eye open for tours, and who'll buy concert tickets and encourage friends to do so as well.
That will probably never generate Taylor Swift or Rhiannon style careers or income, but I think "1000 true fans" is a valid today as it was almost 20 years ago when it was written:
https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
Anybody "putting out slop" using GenAI in their art is fooling themselves if they think it's ever going to be possible to become truly rich and famous that way. If there's money to be made from AI slop music, it'll be raked in by streaming services and AI companies who can produce a million tracks a day and A/B test then on streaming services with a billion listeners. And _maybe_ there'll be a very few specialist AI music production companies, someone with a finely tuned AI and extremely skilled prompters - and with enough skill and talent to recognise when the AI output is going to be popular enough to be worth releasing. Someone like Stock Aitken Waterman used to be back in the 80s. But those production companies are directly in the targets of enshittification by the AI companies (the same as every company in any industry that becomes dependent on someone else's GenAI).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_Aitken_Waterman
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.
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.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist and all…
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.
People like authenticity. ChatGPT ain’t it.
The more anonymity the better.
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.
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
He fell off when he lost his egirl and became a drug addict.
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.
So one can be a massive piece of shit as long as they're good at their job?
Many of us here probably have worked with people like that. It's not a good environment to work in.
As for Musk... tbh I think as the vast majority of us want things from other people we temper our behaviour.
But when you have enough fame and money to do what you want the filters can come off and we can be the selfish nasty people we really are. And some people obviously like to play on that too to get air time or just prove a point.
That's how most people function. People work their asses off so that they can do something fun two weeks a year.
> 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.
Because even though people clearly have different levels of intelligence, saying this out loud goes against values of the society, and keeping the society together is more important than being truthful. This is one of those things that "normies" understand subconsciously but never articulate, while autists rarely understand because it's never articulated.
> 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
Pop star gets successful by playing a role of a stupid person. Some people think she's actually stupid. It doesn't take a degree in social sciences to connect the dots.
> I’ve always wondered why someone else’s success triggers such rage and anger
Jealously has existed since the dawn of time. Various cultures have sayings along "nothing makes one happier than someone else's misery".
> the patriarchal society
I've noticed that many people who see themselves as oppressed get tunnel vision and attribute lots of unrelated problems to said oppression. This is one of those subconscious biases that exist because having them gives you massive social advantage because you can get all the pity you want.
> Over recent years some people seem to have developed a connection between fame and moral responsibility that I’ve never really understood.
Rich and famous people have power. They're expected to use that power for good regardless of how they got the power.
I did 100% business travel for a couple of a years, and it was pretty grueling despite mostly being stationed with the same customer for a couple of months. At the Charli XCX level, you may be doing 4 gigs in 4 different cities in 3 days:
https://toursetlist.com/charli-xcx-tour-setlist/
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.
Why not save them from themselves with some of your approved recommendations?