The Pop Star

This morning I drove past a building in Thai Town where I spent a summer exactly ten years ago. It was a studio that I was technically squatting in, alone. Six months after I’d moved to LA from London with a very different idea in mind about what I was doing. I had suddenly found myself friendless, homeless and stuck in the crosshairs of one of the most powerful people in the music industry, because I basically I had something she wanted. Let’s call her The Pop Star.

This is my party trick story. It usually takes about two and a half stiff drinks to get through and it is a delicious blend of love, sisterhood, betrayal and drama. It’s a hit and I’m saving the full thing for the book I will one day write, and the tyrant – sorry The Pop Star – will sue me, and it will be worth it. None of it is a lie.

(I still have one piece of furniture from the squat. It’s a black side table. All of my furniture was black. I landed there on the July 4 weekend 2015 and went to the IKEA sale on July 4 and bought only black furniture because my heart was black and my eyes were black and everything felt BLACK).

I was abandoned by my best friends in one fell swoop because of The Pop Star. Not even just abandoned. Erased. Like I never existed. Like I had nothing to do with them or anything they had done. They were very talented but everyone knew that they had a secret weapon, and that secret weapon was me.

At the time The Pop Star was re-branding, and pivoting for her big crossover into the mainstream. She wanted to be bigger than anyone had ever been and at that moment she was using the cause of fake feminism to get her there. Everything in The Pop Star’s sights was collateral. She knew how to do one thing better than anyone and that was selling an image. So as all the fake feminists do, she usurped about and inserted herself into the lives of women she thought would boost her image, and damn to hell any other girls who got squashed along the way. GIRL POWER. More like: GIRL COERCIVE CONTROL! (Lol that would not have caught on so quickly for The Spice Girls). The Pop Star was big into creating the story around this via her Instagram, and the paparazzi which she excelled at feeding, and she essentially groomed the women of her new sisterhood to be in certain places at certain times. It seemed like for like. The Pop Star got hers and they got theirs. Momentarily.

Anyway, I was a problem for The Pop Star because she had her eyes a/ on my approval and b/ on my friends who were in a band she wanted in her cohort. So The Popstar had me surgically removed from their lives because she needed them for her image and I would not play ball. In fact, despite her threats to impress me, I wrote a mediocre review of her Big Tour. And that became the original sin. I mean, I was set up. I was literally set up by The Pop Star. She had already laid the land full of mines, and I stepped on one, and BOOM everything incinerated. Of course, she couldn’t be next to my friends (who if memory served didn’t even like her) if their rock was the one standing behind of and walking in front of them. When The Pop Star pivotted to something else that wasn’t feminism a year or so swiftly after, nobody blinked. Yesterday feminism, today the environment, tomorrow… she’ll finally come out when she’s 50?

It wasn’t public - what the Pop Star did. I made it public when I wrote about aspects of it later. That began in the squat. When I confided in people about what had happened because I was suffocating from treachery and hearbreak they said, “Bitch, you have to take her down.” Let me tell you, I discovered very quickly that everyone may have been sold an image of a lovely, kind “girl’s girl”, but the second word got out that this was going on, all of the crawlers came out of the woodwork with similar if not worse experiences. She had left a trail of destruction and receipts behind her. But people were afraid. They trembled.

Anyway, this morning I was thinking about the band. A few years after 2015, I remember they played their biggest gig to date in LA. I wasn’t invited. It was a milestone gig. I bought a ticket anyway, because I deserved to be there. Their friend/producer saw me across the sound desk, and texted me a heart. I believe that person is no longer around either.

I was wondering if it was worth it. If it worked out for them. The Popstar made herself the centre of their story for the next decade. My friends discarded me for a fake empty machine. They let her come in and evict me from their lives because it benefited her image and they thought it might do the same for them. If it sounds like high school, it felt like high school. It’s not even that far away from what happens when people join cults. It’s not that far away from what happens when social justice causes become popularity contests usurped by, well, terrorist organizations rather than… Real Work. It’s just an ecosystem of power and everyone inside is a pawn.

The band didn’t become what I once believed they could have. They got stuck. Stuck in an arrested development that is there in their own lyrics. I ran into them a while back. They mentioned they were stalling for inspiration in the studio. I sent on a YouTube clip. I listened to their last album when it came out. Track one came on. I laughed. They sampled the YouTube clip.

In 2015 I went on. I wrote a story about it. It became a Big Deal. I was young. I protected the band actually. That was important to me. I wanted them to emancipate themselves but I didn’t appreciate a/ the grip The Pop Star had on them or b/ how selfish they were. I cared about them a lot. They were family. But I never saw them go beyond that moment. That’s what happens when you’re not brave enough to stand alone in your work. You don’t grow. When you need someone’s stamp of approval, you lose your power, and your freedom. You don’t need meddlers or hangers-on. They’re in it for themselves.

Be you. Be honest. Be real. You’re cool. You’re enough.

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Did The Pop Star ever show up? Did she ever go to one of their shows without making it about her? Doubt it. I will always love this story. It’s a metaphor of everything that’s wrong with power ecosystems, with Hollywood, with users and abusers.

It reminds me that I can’t be bought, can’t be sold, can’t be forgotten, can’t be replaced. A good thing is a good thing until it ceases to breath. I am a good thing. Freedom is me. Freedom doesn’t have power. Control has power. If you seek freedom, stop playing with power.

My heart never abandons the truth, even in the face of exile. I cannot be killed. I'm still here. Still moving with good intentions. I don't retaliate. I don't shame. And I never collapse. I protect. Good luck defeating me.

The song they sampled is called Freedom.