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

“I used to be in a boy band, that’s why I’m so f***ed up.”

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

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week’s Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

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

“Plucked from obscurity as children” and “handed unrelenting global stardom on a plate, almost overnight”, it’s no wonder teenage stars struggle to cope, wrote Nikki Peach for Grazia. The dream that industry bosses “peddle” is of “fame, fortune, fans, girls queuing outside your hotel rooms for pictures, number one albums, stadium tours” and “access to pretty much anything you want whenever you want it”. But they don’t warn of “the immeasurable toll” all of this can take on “your mental wellbeing, your ability to make sensible decisions, your family, your friends, your private and public relationships, your sense of self, privacy and health”.

Turning children into global stars, “putting them on the world stage and shining a spotlight on their every action, simultaneously sexualising them and infantilising them, telling them they are demigods but not letting them make decisions for themselves”, is “dangerous”, wrote Jennifer Weiner in the The New York Times. And “there’s a long line of damaged lives – of addictions, mental health struggles, flameouts, tragic deaths – to prove it.”

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

To continue reading this article…

Create a free account

Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.

Already have an account? Sign in

Subscribe to The Week

Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.

Cancel or pause at any time.

Already a subscriber to The Week?

Unlimited website access is included with Digital and Print + Digital subscriptions.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.

READ SOURCE