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‘Age of barbarism’: are we doing enough to protect young pop stars?

Vaseline October 21, 2024

“I used to be in a boy band, that’s why I’m so damned.”

According to reports, these were among former One Direction star Liam Payne’s last words before he died aged 31 after falling from the third floor of a Buenos Aires hotel last week.

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Death at a young age is “not unusual” in the music industry, Bruce Springsteen told The Telegraph in an interview last week, following Payne’s death. Young music stars “don’t yet have the inner facility or the inner self to be able to protect themselves from a lot of the things that come with success and fame,” said the singer-songwriter, who eventually turns many of them toward “drugs.” pushed. or alcohol”.

“Plucked from obscurity like children” and “given inexorable global stardom on a plate almost overnight,” it’s no wonder teen stars have trouble coping, wrote Nikki Peach for Grazia. The dream that the industry bosses are ‘peddling’ is that of ‘fame, fortune, fans, girls queuing outside your hotel rooms for photos, number one albums, stadium tours’ and ‘access to pretty much anything you can imagine. want, whenever you want’. But they don’t warn of “the immeasurable toll” this all can take on “your mental well-being, your ability to make wise decisions, your family, your friends, your private and public relationships, your self-esteem, privacy and health . “.

Making children into world stars, “putting them on the world stage and spotlighting all their actions, at the same time sexualizing and infantilizing them, telling them they are demigods but not letting them make decisions for themselves,” is “dangerous,” wrote Jennifer Weiner in the New York Times. And “there is a long line of damaged lives – from addictions, mental health issues, flames, tragic deaths – to prove this.”

“Will we one day look back on this era of teen pop stars” as “an unfathomable age of barbarism, and wonder what the hell we were thinking?” Martha Gill asked in The Observer. It certainly wouldn’t be “such an incalculable loss to culture if producers had to shelter teenage singers for a few more years before releasing them to the public,” so perhaps it’s time for a “law that protects children under 18″ against the kind of work that leads to enormous worldwide fame”.

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‘Age of barbarism’: are we doing enough to protect young pop stars?

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‘Age of barbarism’: are we doing enough to protect young pop stars?

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