Did Drake make up his rise from the bottom? Is Lady Gaga just a manufactured persona?
And did you know about Yungblud's Disney channel roots? Keep watching to learn the shocking truth!
Back in 2009, before fans gifted her the Mother Monster mantle,
Lady Gaga took the effort to assure Rolling Stone that every last inch
of her performance in the public eye was authentic, not contrived, saying,
"The largest misconception is that Lady Gaga is a persona or a character.
I'm not. [...] I am 150,000 percent Lady Gaga every day."
However, as her career evolved, Gaga appeared like an art-pop Russian doll,
shedding her costume layers to reveal Stefani Germanotta, the diminutive artist at the center.
Be it crooning duets with Tony Bennett or insisting she never broke her "House
of Gucci" character for the nine months of filming, Gaga had seemingly dropped
the act to go legit. Or had she? In 2019, Spencer Kornhaber of The Atlantic argued that
"[...] the showtunes-singing Italian American family girl
we see in latter-day Gaga projects is a performance, too."
Certainly, Gaga has suggested as much in interviews. Speaking to Digital Spy,
she once described the image she projects to the public as being, quote,
"a show with no intermission." And in a Variety interview with Jaime Lee Curtis,
Gaga described herself as an artistic mix of reality and creation.
"What I am, at any given moment, is some sort of amalgamation.”
Ever-shifting and inscrutable,
Gaga may remain an optical illusion of celebrity for as long as she remains in the public eye.
Like Lady Gaga, Lana Del Rey has likewise been subjected to accusations of existing
within a carefully crafted persona. In 2012, the artist formerly known as
Lizzy Grant first garnered controversy when leaked footage of the star's shy,
organic earlier work stood in stark contrast to the laconic, Lynchian seductress of "Video Games."
According to The Guardian, Del Rey was promoted as a fresh,
authentic voice from the underground. So when it was discovered that her millionaire dad
helped bankroll her career, some fans felt they had been conned by a false narrative.
Over the years, the star has continued to push a persona of authenticity.
Her music can feature painfully confessional elements — or at the very least,
they're presented that way. But as Ann Powers argued in her NPR essay about the star's 2019
album "Norman F—--g Rockwell," Del Rey's musical storytelling seemingly stems from her,
quote, "persona as a bad girl to whom bad things are done." The musician's persona,
Powers suggested, is much like her music: A fiction composed with the help of collaborators.
Outraged, Del Rey slammed Powers' observations in a Twitter rant where she insisted,
"Never had a persona. Never needed one. Never will."
An enigma of a different variety, Machine Gun Kelly has always liked to front as being a
ferocious outcast oddball. He has the appearance of a tattooed tough guy who isn't afraid to diss
industry heavyweights like Eminem, Conor McGregor, and Slipknot. But on the sly?
Kelly is something of a softie — and that's not a bad thing.
For a starter pack of evidence, you needn't look much further than the
star's adorable relationship with his daughter,
Casie. Speaking to Billboard, he copped to the fact that he mellowed for his child.
"I wanted to make her proud, and a lot of fans saw that as soft. And it's like,
no, it's the most beautiful thing you could do."
Meanwhile, his public affection for partner Megan Fox has further revealed him to be a greater lover
than a fighter. Sure, he wears her infamous blood necklace, but as he indicated to Nylon,
their romance has helped him find calm. And during a GQ interview,
Fox revealed that Kelly is a huge Nicole Kidman fan
who loves watching her in shows like "Big Little Lies" and "Nine Perfect Strangers."
Who's the tough guy now?
For over 50 years, Dolly Parton carefully built a phenomenal career around her now iconic image:
A buxom, bubbly blonde with big ... well, everything.
People are often keen to make sexist assumptions that such women follow the stereotype of not
being too bright — something that the country legend played up to and used to her advantage.
Speaking to Billboard in 2014,
Parton explained that people would often underestimate her because of her looks.
"I really looked like easy prey to a lot of guys, just looked easy, period. [...] I look like a
woman, but I think like a man and you better pay attention or I'll have your money and be gone."
Intriguingly, Parton has almost always been upfront about her ruse. In 1978,
she confessed to Playboy that her look was something of a fabrication, telling them,
"Can you imagine anybody wanting to look this way for real?"
To this day, Parton still proudly rocks her dollybird persona — and her jaw-dropping
$350 million net worth proves that she was definitely smarter than some people assumed.
In 2014, British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran's rags-to-riches narrative was cemented with one
key anecdote from his book, "A Visual Journey." Writing about how he, quote,
"didn't have anywhere to live" between 2008 and 2010, Sheeran revealed how he'd often sleep
on the train, and even roughed it outside Buckingham Palace four a couple of nights.
It seems this wasn't entirely the truth, though. For starters,
Sheeran's parents are apparently quite comfortable financially: His dad was an art curator,
and his mom a culture publicist and jewelry designer. Sheeran later backpedaled to suggest
his anecdotes had been, quote, "taken out of context." Speaking to Capital FM, he revealed
that in reality, he wasn't homeless — rather, he, quote, "went without a bed for some nights."
Sheeran admitted as much in the song "Homeless" — which he wrote while
squatting outside Buckingham Palace— where he sings, "It's not a homeless night for me,
I'm just home less than I'd like to be." Regardless, in 2021, the story resurfaced online
and some fans were reportedly outraged to discover Sheeran's backstory wasn't quite
what they thought. One fan even accused the star of, quote, "cosplaying as poor."
From one questionable rags-to-riches story to another. Drake has long maintained that he
faced his share of struggles before hitting it big. But he's also had his doubters,
to the point where Drake wrote a track in 2013 called
"Started from the Bottom" to explicitly deny accusations that he was lying.
It didn't exactly silence critics like the NYU Local blog, which wrote, quote, "Drake did not,
in fact, start from the bottom." Their beef? When Drake was 11, he moved to Forest Hill,
one of the wealthier suburbs of Toronto. HelloBeautiful agreed, writing that, quote,
"Drake's identifiable 'bottom' feels inadequate," since he enjoyed a middle class upbringing and
managed to score the role of Jimmy Brooks in "Degrassi: The Next Generation" at the age
of 15. They accused him of trying to claim street cred that he hadn't really earned.
Speaking to Complex in 2011, Drake defended himself by saying that they essentially lived
in an apartment rather than a full house, and that he struggled to fit
in at school because his classmates were so much wealthier than he was.
As a teen, he did show off his home on an episode of "Degrassi: Unscripted," so you
can judge for yourself. But he told Katic Couric that he never fit in at his all-Jewish school.
"I just always felt like an outsider."
Regardless of where you stand on Drake's personal struggles, though,
"Know Yourself" is still a banger.
When enigmatic blues performer Seasick Steve suddenly got big in the UK,
it came with the added caveat of a great backstory. As recounted in a
2008 interview with The Guardian, he had once been a self-proclaimed rambling hobo
who got along by hopping freight trains in the deep south. A keen storyteller, the musician
was renowned for his powerful and seemingly authentic mythology. He told the newspaper,
"That's what the young kids like. They're tired of being sold all this smoothed-out, cleaned-up s—"
One problem: he was apparently selling a totally different kind of s—*.
In 2016, The Guardian reported that a writer developing a biography of the eccentric musician
uncovered all sorts of holes in Steve's story: Namely, that his anecdotes were
largely exaggerated, if not fabricated. In some of the years he was said to be hoboing it up,
he instead apparently lived comfortably in San Francisco. During another time that the singer had
claimed to be enduring the "rough" life of, quote, "living and playing in Paris on the street," he
was actually playing bass in the rock fusion band, Shanti. At one point, Steve was even part of a
successful disco ensemble and once sang backing vocals for a group related to the Beach Boys.
In short: It seems as though Seasick Steve isn't quite who some fans thought he was.
Ironically, the fact that he never made it big in the U.S. might have helped him with the deception,
since people in America might have recognized him more quickly, given that he lived in California.
Scottish warbler Lewis Capaldi is known for singing what The Guardian once described as
"full-force ugly-crying pop" music. In 2019, he hit the big time when his hyper-earnest,
damp-eyed, heartbreak ballad, "Someone You Loved," became a sleeper hit,
sneaking up to the top slot of the Billboard Hot 100 after 24 weeks on the chart. To hear him,
Capaldi sounds like a one-man choir of rugged yet harmonious cupids.
To experience him as a person, however, is ... a little different.
In the words of Rolling Stone,
"Capaldi's public persona is way less sad-sack than relatable goofball king."
Where other young singers may push a certain swagger along with grace and confidence,
Capaldi instead serves rough self-deprecation. Promotion for his debut album, for instance,
featured a willfully unflattering picture of the star with a towel wrapped around his head
alongside the playful suggestion that he's, quote, "the Scottish Beyoncé." And when he attended the
2020 Grammy Awards, he posted a harsh selfie of himself on Twitter, grimacing while on the toilet.
At the very least, Capaldi appears to be representing a true version of himself to
the public, which is more than what can be said about some other people.
Often seen in an apparently bottomless wardrobe of edgy apparel and makeup from the Robert Smith
school of cosmetology, Yungblud likes to give the appearance of being punk rock to the max.
There's only one problem: His background isn't very punk rock. An interview with
The Guardian highlights that the musician once starred on the Disney Channel show
"The Lodge," and he didn't exactly tear the system down from the inside while he was there.
Though he claimed otherwise, telling The Guardian,
"They had me for three seasons but I left after one. They knew I was a punk."
The Guardian also discussed what they called, quote, "the Yungblud origin myth."
That myth claims that Yungblud ran away from home to attend a performing arts school. But in fact,
his family was quite supportive of his desire to study ballet,
covering his rent while he stayed with, quote, "a cat lady named Marge."
Does any of this matter? Probably not, considering Yungblud told the website
PileRats that his approach to punk is about using an accessible music form
to discuss complex issues and to make young people, quote, "feel like their
voices are important." Yungblud's provocative image and Disney background may be at odds,
but his voice — and how he uses it — may still be on-point for his message.
"Just trying to make it in the big bad music industry, really."
Olivia Rodrigo's "Sour" was the angsty pop soundtrack for mopey glam girls the
world over in 2021, and it seemingly came from a place of raw honesty. The Disney star told NME
that she poured her struggles into the album in a bid for intimate authenticity. Rodrigo felt
refreshingly real and original. But then came the accusations that she was copying others.
As reported by PopBuzz, fans of the indie ensemble Pom Pom Squad noticed that Rodrigo's
look was notably similar to that of the New York-based band in a variety of ways. However,
others, such as Pitchfork, argued that the jagged "teen girl aesthetic" these artists
share isn't something either can lay claim to — especially not when
Rookie Mag was pushing the aesthetic publicly long before either of them.
Things got dicier still when "Sour" was hit with a glut of plagiarism accusations.
So much so that Paramore were given songwriting credit for the song "Good 4 U," and Taylor
Swift was given one for the "Cruel Summer" inspired "Deja Vu." Speaking to Teen Vogue,
Rodrigo defended how openly she uses her influences in her music, saying,
"Nothing in music is ever new. There's four chords
in every song. That's the fun part — trying to make that your own."
Whether she succeeded or not unfortunately remains up for debate.
Since dropping her hit crop of spooky girl dread-pop in 2019, Billie Eilish immediately
established herself as the high priestess of electro-doom. Early on in her career,
her narrative was simple and impressive: This was a legitimately weird teenage girl who wrote
and recorded her music in her bedroom, with the production assistance of older brother Finneas.
Her swift rise to stardom felt unprecedented but earned — which is exactly why she aroused
suspicion in cynics. Conspiracy theorists and internet crusaders came up with all sorts of
theories, some wilder than others, trying to discredit Eilish. So what's the truth?
Well, a BuzzFeed News investigation into the artist suggested that her
initial streambait success was, in fact, all her own. They do point out, though,
that in 2016 she was signed to Platoon, an A&R company located in London, where she was put
in touch with both the fashion house Chanel and a personal stylist, who helped her shape her image.
So when Eilish experienced an unexpected makeover transformation in 2021, some fans
felt they had their "gotcha" moment. But Eilish told Vogue that it's really the other way around:
her old signature look just happened to be the way she was at the moment she got famous,
and being stuck in that moment was becoming less and less authentic.
So by keeping it real, people thought she was fake. Sorry, haters! Keep trying.
In their transformation from child stars to a bona-fide power rock outfit, Hanson broke all
child-star stereotypes by successfully avoiding scandals. Their Take the Walk charity, which took
action against the HIV/AIDS pandemic and poverty in Africa, even suggested that they upheld strong
morals. They were good people and their former fans, now adults, continued to swoon hard.
And then, in 2020, scandal found them. As reported by Vice,
the problem started when fans expressed concern that the band weren't showing
enough support for the Black Lives Matter movement — particularly when
Hanson had been so open in the past about being influenced by music of Black origin.
They responded with an Instagram post which assured fans, in part, that,
"There is no question we believe that [B]lack lives matter." But the situation worsened when
a since-deleted Pinterest account verified as belonging to Zac Hanson was leaked online.
As detailed by Vice, it, quote, "housed a trove of pro-gun memes, many of which were racist,
transphobic, homophobic, and sexist," including one which supported George Zimmerman in the
killing of Trayvon Martin. The youngest Hanson brother apologized in a statement given to Vice,
and explained that it didn't , quote, "reflect [his] personal beliefs."
But the damage was done. A "PostHanson" sub-reddit was set up for former fans — the co-moderator of
which told Vice that her disappointment came from discovering this side of the band, who had, quote,
"always presented themselves as supportive of people [...] who are marginalized in any way."
Adele is revered for being one of the most successful and talented singer-songwriters on the
planet. She's also known for songs consistently centered around heartbreak and despair,
with a sound that can be assuredly popped into the waterlogged sobbing soundtracks
genre. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Adele self-described her music as "miserable" and
opened up about the fact that she can, quote, "slip in and out of [depression] quite easily."
There's no doubt that Adele is legit about this — her music has a tangible pain that can't be
faked — and it's important to add that depression isn't always a visible affliction in people.
That being said, away from the heartache and warbling sorrow of her music, Adele might be one
of the funniest women in music. In her homestead of Britain, the star garnered a reputation for
having audiences rolling with laughter — rather than in the deep — during her appearances on TV.
Adele throwing shade at Lindsay Lohan's acting ability on "Never Mind the Buzzcocks"? Masterful.
"Lindsay Lohan is a really talented actress."
"What?!"
As her career blew up, she continued to flourish as a comedic treat with
publications like Vulture and NME publishing lengthy lists of her funniest moments.
But Adele sealed what fans called her "comedy legend" status when the singer hosted "Saturday
Night Live" in 2020. Will that side ever come through in her music? We can't wait to find out!
For over 50 years, Alice Cooper has entertained audiences as metal's
leather-bound, outlandish clown. The grandfather of shock-rock theatrics,
this is a man who once released a love song with lyrics that said
"I'm a hungry man / But I don't want pizza / I'll blow down your house / And then I'm gonna eat ya."
Cooper has always been filthy, comedic, and vulgar. So much so that it'd be easy to assume
there's little to separate the alter ego from the man behind the face paint, Vincent Furnier.
According to Cooper, however, nothing could be further from the truth. An interview with
Reading Eagle points out that the star is a church-attending good guy who plays golf,
doesn't drink, and is faithful to his wife — a welcome surprise for anyone who's read even one
rock star biography. As Cooper explained to the website, the character is little more than a fun
creation that he shares little in common with besides their warped sense of humor.
"He's an arrogant villain, a dominatrix. In real life I'm the most easy-going guy."
However, it wasn't always the case.
Speaking to The Sun, Cooper confessed that in the early years of his career,
there was a period where he found it hard to distinguish between himself and his stage persona.
"When I was drinking and drugging, I didn't know if I was supposed to leave the house
with make-up on. [...] When I got sober, I went, 'OK, I have to co-exist with this guy.'"
Way to be well adjusted, Alice!
If you or anyone you know is struggling with addiction issues,
help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).