November 8, 2025

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic tries to understand why, in 2025, pop stars and underground musicians alike are still obsessed with the allure and curse of being in the spotlight.

Autumn de Wilde

Hello creative thinkers,

Everything is so meta these days. Art about artists’ lives abounds in movie theaters, on streaming channels, in nonfiction best sellers and prize-nominated novels. Producers are betting on audiences’ interest in how artists become successful, and even moreso, how they survive their lives in the spotlight. Same as it ever was, I know, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Bowie’s “Fame” — but I think there’s a reason why the pose and the monologue, all the ingredients of show life, have come to the fore in our shared narratives. Katie Kimamura, whose Booker Prize-nominated novel Audition features an actor whose roles on and off stage are growing hard to navigate, told The New Yorker that her goal was to examine “the degree to which performance is present in our everyday lives.”

This is a theme constantly shoved in our faces as we stare at our own staged and screened scenarios for much of the day. It’s easy to feel a little bit famous, and a little bit besieged. In the video for her freshly Grammy-nominated song “Anxiety,” Doechii tumbles through a surrealistic mental breakdown only to be interrupted by a glam squad descending to touch up her makeup. “Quiet on the set, please,” she barks. Is this intrusion unique to someone like her, a rising star struggling to master life under an ever-hotter spotlight? Or is she just like us, no longer able to imagine a truly private moment?

In Hamlet — a masterwork whose backstory is, in fact, coming to a theater near you — Shakespeare raised similar questions. That’s why he wrote a troupe of actors into the tragedy, to remind his audience that all shared stories, even family ones, are both enriched by and infested with artifice. Hamlet interrogates storytelling as deception, as labor, as organized dreaming, as the always mutable result of many choices and challenges, and as performance. The purpose of performance, the Danish prince tells the actors who’ve entered his court, is “to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” In other words, he’s saying that performance should be transparent and true to life. That’s a neat trick, since Hamlet arguably invented being meta in 1601 by baring its own artifice with that play within a play.

A story told is never true, Hamlet reminds us, and never a lie, but a third thing that blurs the distinction. Today we see the same confusing process play out not on the Globe stage but in TikTok videos. People are fascinated more than ever with the lives of professional storytellers, whether they’re playwrights or pop stars, because the relationship between truth and fiction has been muddied up in new ways. Most of all, we want to know how those who make their own lives into stories shared by the masses (or even just a reasonably sized audience) live with themselves. How do they survive being objectified or fetishized? What part of themselves do they strive to claim as theirs alone?

In music, the impulse to make songs about both artistry and fame — about creating stories and embodying them — is intensifying and growing more complicated. Lately I feel almost surrounded by songs about fame, about being onstage, about making music. The subject’s been a favorite for songwriters at least since the self-mythologizing 1960s, when the burdens of touring life and the shocks of sudden celebrity gave relatively privileged white rockers a chance to craft laments. The celebrity self-portrait is increasingly a must on virtually every star’s latest album. Pop’s reigning generation has conquered every corner of the classic Hollywood mythos: Lana “F***** [her] Way To the Top,” Sabrina enjoyed her “15 Minutes,” Billie wielded her “NDA” and Olivia stuck a spike in the heart of a “fame-f*****.” Gaga claimed the subject as her own, living for the “Applause” and playing footsie with the “Paparazzi.” These divas pointed to their own glamor, but also questioned the value of the very thing they work so hard to achieve. “Who am I, if not exploited?” sang Rodrigo on the opening song on her 2021 debut album Sour, the aptly-titled angstfest “Brutal.” (There are other notable examples, of course.)

In 2025 this matter continues to inspire and trouble artists. The light if perverse touch of Addison Rae’s “Fame is A Gun,” in which the influencer gently hints at the dark side of celebrity while breathily reveling in the power it gives her, is uncharacteristic of a year more marked by screaming fits and breakdowns. Gaga herself offered the scathing critique “Perfect Celebrity” on her return to pop Mayhem; she’s performed it while lying amidst skeletons onstage. “You love to hate me” is the song’s vocal hook, which Gaga delivers sacrificially, her voice rising as the guillotine falls.

The standout title track from her soul-searching solo album Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party (also nominated for multiple Grammys), has Hayley Williams staging a flintier but no less impassioned protest against fame’s distorting effects, mourning the tacky gentrification of her beloved hometown, Nashville, while simultaneously melting down over whether her own fame outside the country music world means anything there. She spirals as she stands in “some racist country singer’s bar,” unrecognized and undone. “Can only go up from here,” Williams repeats again and again, not sure where “up” will take her.

In “Favorite Daughter,” from her bracingly self-reflective album Virgin, Lorde sings of “dancing till I get sick” to please her mother, a writer who channeled her artistic ambitions through her daughter. At a time when the classic stage-mother saga Gypsy is enjoying a Broadway revival, this song has a particularly poignant sting: Ambitious parents are the engine behind so many current stars (including Lorde) who were barely old enough to leave the family home when they first went viral. Gaga, Williams and Lorde all secured their stardom the old-fashioned way, through radio hits and major tours; but they’re still avatars of the always-online age, afflicted by celebrity instead of being able to manage it, with nowhere to hide.

My colleague Sheldon Pearce recently wrote about the former singing-competition and girl-group star Jade, whose That’s Showbiz, Baby! recalls Kitamura’s Audition in its explorations of how private life is full of little performances. CMAT, the Irish pop provocateur whose sunny blend of sharp social commentary and theater-kid charm has already made her huge in the U.K., wrote “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” in response to so-called fans who derided her appearance at the Glastonbury Festival. Playfully confessing to the many roles she’s inhabited to find favor as both a woman and a performer, adding a note of solidarity to the “party girls” donning similar costumes for nights out that end in tears: “I’ll be here in your afters,” she croons, opening her arms.

“New David Bowie,” from rapper-produce Jim Legxacy’s excellent mixtape Black British Music, is also about the different roles an artist must inhabit to gain notice — but instead of female archetypes, Legxacy feels the touch of other stars on him and tries to cast them off. Trying to connect with a new flame, he realizes that what she sees in him is the legend he could be — the residue of artists whom she admires and chooses to see in him. Oasis, Andre 3000 and A$AP Rocky all make appearances in her wishful dream, and in truth he’s no better, seeing a “Left-Eye waterfall” in her. Legxacy’s clever pastiche evokes the way that not only performers but regular people keying into each other’s fantasies must navigate a sea full of images, history’s flotsam and jetsam, before forming any real connections.

Other sonic adventurers have used this collage approach to suggest how the incessant stream of performances we all must absorb is making it hard to see or hear anything clearly. “Playing Classics” by Water From Your Eyes was written as a disco song to greet the apocalypse; its jagged sound is all bent metal, distorting whatever it reflects. Rachel Brown’s fragmented lyrics aim to impose order, some kind of message, on the flying junk in the mix, but in the end it’s futile. “We’ve got modern idols for the end of an age,” she mutters, her voice melting and bouncing like mercury. “There’s no real life, TV … no lost future, baby.” Jane Remover’s “Star People” is an even more warped take on the futility of finding freedom or coherent meaning in musical performance, shared from the dystopian road instead of the dance floor. Shards of images, threats and boasts pile up; soundbites are stolen from George Michael and Mariah Carey, and through it all, the teenage Jane tries to watch her own back: “You better not film this ‘cos you might get hurt.” Then she suggests making a sex tape. She knows the camera’s always on.

What is real for most working musicians now isn’t fame and its accompanying anxieties. It’s scarcity. The mirror image of this year’s crop of complaints about fame (mostly by the famous) is a growing catalog of clear-headed and powerful accounts of just how tough it is to be an artist in a society that values attention-generated payoffs over thoughtful creative expression. That theme runs through several of this year’s best albums, including The Passionate Ones by Nourished By Time, Cuntry by Cleo Reed and Hooke’s Law by keiyaA. As Black auteurs making music that will almost certainly never fill stadiums — and demanding the space and resources to do so — these newer voices point out the material costs of the always-online 21st century hustle and connect it to larger issues of racial, gender and class inequity.

Reed’s album, composed as part of a multi-media project examining American notions of labor and productivity, plays with the tension between the joyful aspects of performance and its costs; in the Betty Boop voice of an ingenue, she tells truths that burn. “I’ve been out here hustlin’,” she chirps, her voice multi-tracked like a Disney choir, embodying the artifice that “being real” requires. And then she turns her gaze on the audience, just as much a part of this mummer’s play. “Can’t you feel the disconnection of us all?” she croons. The fourth wall breaks and what’s behind the curtain becomes clear: a world full of people posing, toiling to be someone else’s ideal, trying to make a dollar from the intangible.

What is left for an artist to desire, once every aspect of storytelling has been commodified and endlessly performed? That’s what Florence Welch seeks to discover in “One of the Greats,” the centerpiece of her band’s new album, Everybody Scream. Written after a dire illness resulting from an ectopic pregnancy, the Machine frontwoman’s latest call for catharsis is both characteristically grandiose and deeply poignant. This titanic vocalist and high Romantic is finally fully in her body after almost losing herself. Throughout the album she gravitates toward earthly touchstones — the buckle on a lover’s belt, the pleasure of listening to music with no aim to emulate it — to ground and reassemble her.

On “One of the Greats,” though, she’s somewhere between heaven and hell, and not exactly on earth: She’s onstage. It’s the place where she can become more than she could ever have dreamed, but also where she’s objectified others in her songs and, playing the hero, ritually sacrificed herself night after night. “Do you regret bringing me back to life?” she wails toward the audience, as if to connect musical stardom at this late date in history with the very first performances, which may or may not have involved ritual sacrifice. In her newly self-aware state, though, Welch has fewer delusions than she once did. She knows that to be one of the greats in 2025, she also needs to be a product, something bought and sold. “Did I win the prize?” she also asks. The song ends in a florid jumble of images as the language of self-help collides with mythic markers — streetlights exploding, the bones of the dead. “Arms outstretched,” Welch sings insistently. Like the star she is whether or not she wants to be, she takes it all in and gives it back again.

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I’m telling you, these are some great things to check out this week

I made a playlist of the songs I mentioned in this essay.
Shakespeare wasn’t alone in getting meta about theater; here’s a good Reddit thread on how the trend swept through Elizabethan theater, and a short essay about one of his elders, Thomas Kyd.
I’m obsessed with Roddy Bottum’s new memoir, The Royal We. It tells the story of the start of Faith No More and later, Imperial Teen, but more than that, it’s a wildly vivid immersion into 1980s San Francisco, where cheap rents and myriad colliding subcultures created a bohemia that will never be replicated. Roddy and I were in adjacent scenes in the Mission District back then, and this is the best depiction of that time and place I’ve read (well, I wrote one too, but this definitely matches mine and maybe tops it!).
Lotta divorce albums lately, but Stella Donnelly’s new Love and Fortune is something else: the story of a friendship gone sour and its aftermath. Tender, brilliant stuff from this wise Australian songwriter.
Another winner from Robert Christgau’s And It Don’t Stop Substack: Georgia Christgau’s deeply researched, hugely insightful deep dive into the life and career of folk music hero Peggy Seeger.
If you want to know me, watch Household Saints and Dogfight, both directed by the Bronx-born genius Nancy Savoca. Both are on the Criterion Channel this month, alongside a couple of shorts and a documentary by her daughter about Household Saints (which, by the way, features Lili Taylor in her most luminous turn).

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