RockStar

I released a rough demo version of this song over a year ago but I have been meaning to re-record it at a higher standard for a while now.

As my skills, knowledge and abilities in regard to home music recording and production have been steadily improving as the months go by, I have been revisiting a lot of my older songs like this recently. I hope to create records out of all of them that more closely resemble my artistic vision for them when I wrote them.

I’m still a long way off where I want to be, but I’m getting better everyday - learning and improving incrementally. I am also still writing new songs and trying to record them of course because my current art will always more closely represent my current emotional and creative state. But revisiting these old songs is extra practice at the recording and production side of my art, and I desperately need that.

For this new and improved version of the song, I made a new music video as my video editing skills are also improving steadily - although admittedly not at the same pace as my music production skills due to me spending far less time honing them. I use iMovie, the free Apple software that was pre-installed on my Macbook because I can’t justify forking out money on a decent program like Adobe Premium Pro/After Effects or Final Cut Pro. The software I use is limited, but it means I have to get creative with it.

I also don’t want to go down the Ai video generation route like so many artists are doing because it still feels a little off to me. To that end, I still use ‘free to use’ media sites like Pexels to source visual media where I mine for videos and photos that fit the theme of the song.

The first video I made for this song (above) used stock photos of girls partying, directly playing into the ‘party-girl’ archetype that is the protagonist in the song. As ever I included the lyrics in closed captions throughout.

But I felt this never really highlighted the exploitative and nefarious nature of what I was getting at in the narrative, so I had to rethink what I was going to do for this remix.

The song is about a young and talented woman whose passion for her art and compulsion to express herself creatively has been hijacked by those in an authoritative position over her. They use her, exploiting her talent for their own financial gain, all the while encouraging behaviour that is self-destructive and detrimental to the girl.

As I was recording this version, I mused on what I outlined in the previous paragraph and somewhere along the way I made the connection to ballerinas. They too are young, talented women with a passion for creative expression who suffer greatly for their art. And there are plenty of historic examples of them being exploited and mistreated by those who gain from their struggle to become who they want to be.

I didn’t want to make the video too depressing and on the nose however by showing somber ballerinas suffering for their art or (heaven’s no) indeed being abused. So rather, I juxtaposed them with the lyrics about a rockstar chick and tried to make them an allegory (or is it a metaphor?). Hopefully people will infer that allegorical intent and not just think it’s a completely disconnected mismatch of visual and audio messaging.

I will repurpose some text from my original essay below to explain the story behind this song as all of that remains unchanged.

I wrote this song during my second year of university as part of a module of which the main focus was songwriting. The class was headed up by a part-time freelance tutor called Ryan who is an excellent songwriter in his own right and has regularly bumped heads with some big name stars over the last decade or so in his musical career. He is a genuinely nice guy, a superbly talented musician and I am forever grateful for his help during that class and since.

I was expected to write 2 or 3 songs for the final submission and we all worked with Ryan in the weekly sessions to develop our ideas.

The first song I wrote was some garbage political protest song and I can’t for the life of me remember what the second song was (it can’t have been any good if I’ve completely forgotten it). The third song however was this one; ‘rOcKsTaR’.

The inspiration for this song first came from a conversation myself and Ryan were having about Nirvana songwriter and frontman Kurt Cobain. We were discussing the man himself as a musician, his politics, his mental health, etc. We ended up getting on to the concept of the cliched anti-establishment ‘Rockstar’. The hotel room trashing, ‘fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’, cocaine snorting, rebellious type. A self destructive creative genius who is a gold mine to a record label but difficult to manage due to their disruptive behaviour.

Ryan dispelled this notion for me when he informed me that record labels often encourage this kind of behaviour in artists where they can market them as rebels. They can sell this archetype to the audience as it is a popular trope and they essentially manage the fallout that their behaviour creates with a cost/benefit analysis approach.

We talked about our suspicions that this was possibly what happened with Amy Winehouse’s drug-fueled and debaucherous off-stage life. She was always in the papers for her drunken antics and ‘no publicity is bad publicity’ as they say. She was famous for her song ‘Rehab’, of course, and she made a big deal out of apparently saying ‘No, no, no’ when asked to check into one.

It could be a marketing ploy by her label to, instead of trying to rein her in, they market her as a hedonistic, carefree party girl and just let her get on with it.

But this irked me as a notion. I remember saying something like ‘Wouldn’t the danger be that the label could become incentivised to not only allow this destructive and harmful behaviour, but actually encourage it?’

Ryan said he, although he couldn’t speak to the Amy Winehouse case, had no doubt that this exact kind of thing did in fact happen. Some artists were encouraged to live it up and get themselves in the papers for drug and alcohol induced misdemeanours. I said I found this morally reprehensible, that they would actively encourage a young artist to compromise their health and potentially put their lives at risk, and Ryan agreed with me. I then revealed my naivety when I said I was sceptical that any such practice had ever taken place.

Then he told me the story that inspired this song and proved me wrong. He had once been working as a session musician for a young, up and coming, female artist. She was either on tour or recording an album at the time that Ryan was employed to work alongside her.

I don’t know who it was as he wouldn’t tell me her name, but Ryan seemed to imply she might be someone I would have heard of. An artist in the public eye with some level of fame and profile. Someone that the record company seemed to be putting a fair amount of money behind.

Apparently, she liked a drink. She was a party girl in the image of Amy Winehouse and the record company was pushing this image as a marketing tactic. They wanted her to be photographed falling out of limousines outside of ritzy nightclubs. They wanted her throwing up while the paparazzis circled around her like vultures. They wanted her to maintain her reputation as a rebel. A jezebel. A rockstar.

And they made every arrangement to allow her to do so. Instead of intervening for the sake of her health, they flat out encouraged her to live her life to the kind of excess that cost Amy Winehouse hers. I found it disgusting. If she had died from an overdose or alcohol poisoning, I would have held them accountable.

Ryan challenged me to make this the subject of my next song. A narrative song from an onlookers perspective. To tell her story as I saw it but place the blame where I felt it needed to be placed. To pass judgement on the powers that be who disregarded her health, enabled her behaviour and put her at risk for their own gain.

I was working mostly on piano at the time anyway but I felt that a ballad on ivory keys made sense for what I was trying to achieve.

I was worried about being accused of appropriating this girl’s suffering (a massive NO-NO at my ‘woke as Hell’ university), so I decided to sing from the perspective of the exploiter. That way, I could tell this story from the perspective of the bad guy; a record company executive who is enabling this girl’s behaviour - exposing the cruelty and evil of this practice with a sense of irony and satire by overtly saying what is being done to this girl.

I wrote the chorus first and used a technique Ryan taught me to write the verses. It involved writing down key words, concepts and phrases that tie in to the songs theme on the left side of a piece of paper and poetic interpretations of them on the right side.

The cliche of a rockstar throwing a TV out of the window worked without much massaging and, as it so instantly conjures up imagery that matches my story, I made it my opening line.

‘Drinking until you pass out’ became ‘spend the night in the gutter’ as I wrote down all the kinds of things a rebellious rockstar would get up to. One is of course doing drugs and I went for a heroin reference to symbolise this in the most ear-catching way. I intentionally make the act sound as if it is an action of self-harm because it essentially is. ‘Stick that poison in your arm’. Then I tease the chorus at the end of the verse, which is another trick of the trade I had learned over recent years.

I relate the artist’s career ambition to climb the ladder to the ‘highness’ of being stoned whilst asking with a hint of irony if her life as a star is as great as she had dreamed of. This sarcasm is intentional and I have tried to insert it throughout the song to show my disapproval of her exploitation through satire. I try to signpost this sentiment with the spelling of the song’s title being in alternating CAPITAL & lowercase lettering; rOcKsTaR. This is commonly seen in online comment sections to signal sarcasm.

The pre-chorus summarises the entire motivation of the record executive. ‘It don’t really matter why you’re in the news. As long as every eye’s on you’. The chorus then nails home that the ‘rebellious artist’ is a product that is being manufactured, manipulated and marketed to the masses.

Verse 3 and 4 brings in themes of the double-edged sword that is fame, the scourge of paparazzi and the complete absence of privacy these superstars have to live with. This was inspired by the life of Britney Spears and the work of SIA as much as it was by Amy Winehouse. I have a lot of sympathy for these kinds of artists who have to act and perform almost every waking moment of their lives. The ‘where your mask’ and ‘smile for the camera’ lines were inspired directly from lyrics from Sia’s album ‘This is Acting’. Her stage persona, hiding her face behind a wig, smiling for the cameras and hiding her tears from the public to preserve her image; Sia inspired this song a fair bit.

So there it is. I credit Ryan as a co-contributor on this song but a case could certainly be made for a co-writer accreditation. His story inspired it initially, for one. But secondly, I was about to throw the song away the week I wrote it because I didn’t have any faith in it. Ryan asked me to play it anyway and said he loved it. So I finished it, performed it to video and submitted it as part of my portfolio and the end of the module. It would have ended up on the cutting room floor without him, so, thank you Ryan. This one’s for you, mate.

I hope you enjoy the song. Thank you for listening/reading.

Pete Brennan - Singer/Songwriter