How to build a pop star
Apple Music aren't knocking at the door to interview me about this stuff yet, so I'll do it my damn self
One of my favourite types of music media to watch is worldbuilding media. That could be a simple interview (I think Zane Lowe’s on Apple Music tend to be the benchmark for me), or clips of the artist talking about how they developed their identity in their work, their inspirations, and their story. You tend to quickly learn how deep artists’ lore runs, and perhaps more existentially realise that every single person has a pretty deep and interesting lore themselves.
Like probably many millions of people, I have countless memories of talking to myself pretending I was answering interviews about my own work. Some people grow out of it when they hit puberty, but I didn’t. If my roommate is out the house you can bet I’m walking around talking to myself about my work and inspirations and lore.
Unfortunately in the age of TikTok, a lot of upcoming artists aren’t incentivised to talk about their own lore or develop their own character. My absolute pet hate is when an artist uses a format akin to ‘If you’re a fan of [insert five artists who are not them], you’ll like my music’ or ‘If you’re looking for an artist that sounds like [insert artist who is not them]', congrats, you found me’. I will never, never ever ever ever, ever ever ever consider it a good thing to showcase your art using someone else as an adjective. I’m not making music for the [whoever] fans; I’m making music for my fans.
And walking around my house imagining those interviews where I’m being lauded for my own uniqueness and pioneering style and tenacity in subversive decisions (because of course), it does actually make me think quite deeply about the building blocks of my artistic choices. I don’t have an Apple Music podcast to talk about them on yet. But I do have a braindump roleplaying as a Substack page!
When you share music, the process is quite narrow, in the sense that you may have 20 reasons for having done something but you need to collapse it into just one digestible and communicable statement. And that’s somehow supposed to encompass your project. I enjoy the ‘characterisation’ of releasing music - the idea that the artist is an exaggerated version of themselves and you want to create a recognisable style, personality and silhouette in the same way a cartoonist does for their creations. But that also involves untangling all the inter-connected reasons for your own traits and deciding which ones to emphasise and which ones to ignore.
For me, the most obvious central trait is the inspiration I draw from the West Coast. It’s no secret to the people who follow me and my work that I spend a lot of time in Southern California, feel most at home there, and have been working to leave my home country to move there for half a decade now. People on Reddit and Twitter have often claimed that I ‘live in California now’, which isn’t true, but I never correct them. The ambiguity is actually quite fun for me.
The way I dress is pretty appropriate for that part of the world too. Which is fine in London’s hot and humid summers, but a bit harder to maintain in the rest of the year. When I look in the mirror I see someone designed for the Pacific coast; not someone from the indie metropolitan sleaze of London. That doesn’t negate the London part of my background - I love being an Englishwoman transplanted into Southwest America. I’m not a Californian; I’m someone who discovered California. There’s still London blood that colours everything I do.
For me, I think this perfectly aligns with the way I approach my music. A lot of what I write pays direct homage to California and the multitude of feelings I have about the place. I indulge in the colours and sights and sounds of LA and I’m forever bleach blonde, bikinis and bronzed skin. But I’m from the city of bass, and the way I inject those darker, grimier sounds into my music dopes the squeaky clean ‘Malibu Barbie’ effect just enough to create its own unique mixture. You wouldn’t picture me in a pink dress dancing to 808s, but you could imagine me dressed as a Baywatch girl singing to thumping sawtooths or dreamy, LA arpeggios.
It’s hard sometimes to plan out aesthetic decisions, because I don’t ever really know how to define the ideas I have well enough to suit a search engine entry. I hear a lot about TikTok aesthetic trends (something grandpa? Eclectic I think? Office siren is one of them too. They all have names) and consider it largely my worst nightmare: choosing your look based on someone else’s named, defined idea. Don’t get me wrong, I like plenty of popular things, but I pick and choose them in a permutation that ascribes to my taste. Great for the soul, bad for Pinterest searches.
But, when I come across pieces of media or moments in pop culture that really speak to me, I get that internal excited resonance that reminds me that when you know, you really know. The first time I felt this was probably in 2010 when Alexander McQueen showcased what would later be his final collection, Plato’s Atlantis. It blew up a bit after Gaga used one of the pieces in her Bad Romance video, but I remember watching the show and feeling jaw-dropped. It still to this day remains one of the most defining works of art I’ve ever come across in my life. The day I bought my McQueen skull knuckle bag felt like a rite of passage for me. I know that everyone was after a Chanel flap at that time, but I didn’t care - McQueen was what spoke to my soul.
Other examples would include Blake Lively’s 2018 Met Gala ‘Heavenly Bodies’ dress. In the press she got overshadowed by Rihanna, but undeservedly so in my mind. Gigi Hadid’s 2017 collaboration with Tommy Hilfiger would probably make the list. Paris Hilton’s custom Bryan Hearns rainbow one piece she wore for Tomorrowland in 2022. Lucie Rose Donlan’s red Pursuit The Label swimsuit. And perhaps most iconicly, the GTA V girl. Not just the bikini. Just, everything about her.
The latter on this list is a special one, because not only have I drawn comparisons to the GTA V girl from people anyway (biggest compliment ever), but it ties in quite deeply with my history in the videogame industry and my connection to LA.
When I think of ‘gaming music’, I think of old school Panda Eyes and Doctor P-style dubstep that made it into ‘gaming playlists’ on Youtube by channels like Dubstep Gutter. Either that or things which would purposefully incorporate chiptune noises so that you knew, indisputably, that this was related to gaming. As the years went on and companies like Riot Games started building a wider media empire beyond just League of Legends, music became more consciously intertwined with gaming as a culture. Worlds would have huge anthems and jaw-dropping opening ceremonies, and then K/DA came along following the success of Pentakill. Over the course of the last decade, music associated with gaming became far less a gimmick and far more a cool, natural thing.
When I build my image as an artist, I’m not seeking an explicit association with gaming. That’s not what I want at all. But I do think it’s cool to see where my history in gaming has left its remnants in the art I make now. GTA V was released in 2013 and fast became one of my favourite games of all time. Its story and open world were so immersive that I was being fed this snapshot of California years before I ever even stepped foot there. And importantly, I was feeling an affinity for it. As I grew up into someone who would look totally in place copying the GTA V girl, I began to actively appreciate the influences in my life: the city I’d fallen in love with, the caricature of its culture through a medium I loved, the fashion that was stereotyped as being a part of it, etc. It was all converging into a sense of self. In a way, I empathise with GTA V as an artwork now for its goal of representing a culture through a specific lens, just like I feel like I aim to do too.
It is not the only game to have ever influenced me, however. I can’t count the number of times I’ve referenced the Portal 2 soundtrack - whether on purpose or implicitly - in my sound design. My favourite game of all time and one deserving of its own essay, the soundtrack absolutely stopped me in my tracks the first time I ever played it. And continues to do so today. It’s industrial and dramatic without resorting to cinematic instrumentation tropes. It’s bitcrushed and uses Neapolitan 6th progressions and has Baroque references. Everything about it is pure gold to me, and it forever changed the way I make music.
Despite considering myself a pop artist, my coming of age was spent blowing my eardrums out with complextro, 00s trance music and the early era of internet music (think of overstimulating Lapfox Trax style music). My original foray into music production was motivated by the desire to be the next Samfree. I had layered bangs I cut with a razor at home and my internet friends were digital artists finding their style emerging from childhood anime phases. I was raised to be a maximalist and I consider that true to this day. I’d been a Muse superfan since I was a small child and after being introduced to the prog band Sky by my dad, I grew on to fall in love with Bach and Brahms and Scarlatti and Schubert. The feeling you got from the Little Fugue in G Minor and the feeling you got from the precipitous drop in Porter Robinson’s Say My Name both gave me a sense of magnitude that was like a high I continued to chase. As I grew up and improved my skill and collected and honed in on my inspirations and influences, I found more ways to try and recreate that feeling. And blending that in with the stories and pictures I was trying to paint from my own life, from California, from the way I styled myself, from the way GTA V froze society in a moment and described it with such meticulous precision, began to create a musical identity so unique that even if someone else used similar synths or melodies to me, they couldn’t really be directly compared.
I refer to my work as ‘The Aesthenoverse’ because what I’m really trying to do is build a universe that’s seen through my eyes and represented in my art, and I’m inviting people to indulge in it. It has its own shapes and sounds and colours and iconography. In it you will constantly find clues to its constituent parts. But you will also be able to turn it into whatever it represents for you, as it enters the same chain of inspiration that connects every piece of media on the planet.
I was thinking about these things because as an artist you can easily divert your attention to the creations of the people around you. You can question your own decisions and direction and feel the pull to be like someone else. But your lore is always what makes your shit real in the first place, and recalling it can be the therapy you need to set you back on your way again. I don’t need Zane Lowe to ask me about those things in order to permit myself to talk about them. I want my universe to be bright and full and robust and deliberate, and know who it is and where it came from. I want it to be a universe people can step into and get lost within.
I’ve been considering writing about media and things which inspire me lately, so maybe I’ll do that more. I kind of want this Substack to be less profound or a canvas for complaining when I feel frustrated, and more just a connection between me and the culture around me. Media is cool, culture is cool, inspirations are cool, and it’s a damn sight better than looking at my TikTok fyp and losing sight of what the fuck I’m even doing.