With Tinashe now experiencing the same kind of “at last”/“it’s about time” success with her eighth—that’s right, eighth—album, Popstar, that Zara Larsson did after releasing her fifth album, Midnight Sun, it’s worth noting there’s even more that link the two aside from slogging it out for many years before achieving mainstream success. And no, it’s not just the fact that they both released their debuts in 2014 (Tinashe with Aquarius and Larsson with 1). It’s also two particular songs that each of them wrote that speak to their insecurities about not achieving the level of success they wanted in those years before their respective “you know you that bitch when you cause all this conversation” moments.
Funnily enough, each of those songs would show up on their respective breakout albums, with Larsson’s “The Ambition” appearing as track eight on Midnight Sun and Tinashe’s “Empty Stadium” appearing as track four on Popstar. The latter, some might argue, is a bit heavier than the former, but that theory does a disservice to the depth of Larsson’s insecurities revealed on “The Ambition.” Along with the admission that always striving for “the top” is enough to drive even the most ambitious (therefore, theoretically “stalwart”) person crazy. Which is why Larsson’s chorus cautions of the “fine print” about wanting to be “number one,” “But that’s the thing with the ambition/Everything’s a competition/Yeah, it got me a lot/But that’s not good enough/I wanna be loved, loved, loved/I live and learn the hard way/Yeah, it’s a chronic heartbreak.”
Tinashe addresses something similar both in the lyrics to “Empty Stadium” and in her Popstar-promoting interview with Zane Lowe, telling the latter, “There is a kind of hamster wheel that you go on when you start thinking about success… there’s always this feeling of, ‘But what if there’s more?’ Like, what if there’s more out there? What if I haven’t reached my full potential? And like, what if that’s not enough?” Larsson expresses that same conundrum of falling into the “hamster wheel” trap of wanting success so badly that you become “consumed by aspiration/Numbers meaning more than words/But what’s it worth?/Millions of people listening/So driven, couldn’t live in it.”
And yet, at the same time, that’s all that striving pop stars stuck in the “Khia asylum” (as it is bizarrely said) can live in. The constant loop of needing to do whatever it takes to make the masses see their worth. For Larsson, as she herself admitted, that often translated into making music that didn’t necessarily resonate with her on a personal level. Particularly as she found herself being pressured by different people to chase having a “hit” and replicate the “chart potential” of So Good, her sophomore album released in 2017, bearing what is now one of her most streamed songs ever, “Lush Life” (itself released as a single in 2015).
Tinashe, in contrast, was never really in the same boat of having even a flicker of mainstream recognition. Not even, apparently, as a featured artist on Britney Spears’ 2016 single, “Slumber Party,” or with the virality of “Nasty” and “No Broke Boys” from 2024’s Quantum Baby. Perhaps that’s part of what allowed her to stay truer to herself than Larsson, never compromising what she wanted to do musically for the sake of pleasing some producer or record label executive. Something she boasts about on “Empty Stadium”—even if that boast comes with more than a hint of concern as she sings, “I never lied to be accepted/Now I hope I don’t regret it.”
Based on the listener reactions to Popstar, as well as it becoming her highest charting album on the Billboard 200 to date (debuting at number six), Tinashe clearly shouldn’t regret it at all. In fact, out of all the pop girls who have been toiling away for years to be noticed—including the likes of Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan—Tinashe is arguably the one who never compromised when it came to the music she wanted to make. For even Charli had her pandering-to-the-crowd era from roughly 2012 to 2015 with “I Love It” and the Sucker album. Tinashe, however, can undeniably say (as she does on “Empty Stadium”), “I put the work in and waited/Don’t wanna die underrated, oh yeah.”
With the release of Popstar, it’s apparent that Tinashe is no longer at risk of that. If anything, she’s on her way toward the opposite (i.e., “overrated”) path if things keep continuing at this breakneck rate. And while that might be what she wanted all along, she also knows that there’s a certain amount of dissatisfaction that comes with reaching “the top” and finally achieving one’s longstanding dream. Mainly that, despite surmounting that obstacle, there comes the realization that now there’s the expectation to keep not only sustaining that status, but also surpassing one’s own achievements—as well as those of others—in order to stay at the top and remain “relevant.” Hence, the “hamster wheel” Tinashe was referring to. Or, as Larsson puts it on “The Ambition,” “See, I’ve been doing this long enough to be scarred/From what I learned before/But that doesn’t mean I wanna stop wanting more and more/I’ve tried to push it away, but at the end of the day/It’s the world to me/I’ll keep breakin’ my heart/If I can be your star.” Your pop star, that is.
What’s more, Larsson is honest and direct enough about her conflicting feelings when it comes to fame to open “The Ambition” with the simultaneously starry-eyed and single-minded verse, “Live the American dream [side note: Tinashe declares, “The American dream is outdated” on Popstar’s “Crash Out”] with billboards picturing me/My name on Hollywood Boulevard (I want it so much)/L.A. state of mind, I’m never satisfied/‘Cause I want number one/Doesn’t everyone?” (yes, rhyming “one” with “one” isn’t unlike 50 Cent rhyming “nympho” with “nympho”). The answer to that is, clearly, no. For when she asks the question, she discounts all the people who are perfectly contented to live a life mostly out of the spotlight while still making their music. Or at least only step into the spotlight very rarely, like, say, for small blips of time during their album promotion cycle (MARINA comes to mind).
For a while, Tinashe might have been able to claim that she was one of those people who only wanted to focus on the music, but, going back to that word, “starry-eyed,” it speaks to a kind of hypnotic effect that the ambition of being famous has on a musician. Especially a woman who makes a certain kind of music—pop. Which, as Tinashe has pointed out, applies to so many different types of genres, with pop essentially being an amalgam of everything from hip hop to rock to punk to New Wave to R&B to country. It’s often just a matter of what’s popular during a particular decade (e.g., the infusion of hip hop into just about every Top 40 song of the 2000s). So it is that “hitting the vein” of what’s speaking to the public at any given moment in time is as much a part of success as having actual talent is.
Thus, for all those years when Larsson and Tinashe went largely unnoticed by those who weren’t their fans from the start, it seemed they had yet to resonate with what was “trending” for people until now (it bears mentioning here that both pop stars are known for their choreo-heavy performances—and choreo was out of fashion for a large bulk of the 2010s). And yet, in all that time, “giving up” never truly would have been a thought on either woman’s mind because they are doing it for a larger reason beyond “recognition.” Though Tinashe couldn’t help but acknowledge that having an audience is such a key aspect of what it means to be a “pop star” (and a creative person in general), also telling Zane Lowe, “I think it’s an anxiety that potentially all of the work you’ve done, like, is kind of…no one’s there to hear it, no one’s there to appreciate it and where does it go? I think as an artist, as someone who creates something that the crucial element of, like, wanting it to connect with people and wanting it to be heard by people is, like, a big part of it.”
Yet, when it finally is heard—“received,” as it were—it appears as if, based on both Larsson and Tinashe’s “The Ambition” and “Empty Stadium” accounts of their hard-won rise to the top (almost as if they could foresee it even before their breakout albums were released), there’s a kind of void inside that forms afterward. One that they each must keep trying to fill in more elaborate ways forever after. Which is why Tinashe sings, “Finally almost had it/Everything that I imagined/And everyone would finally love me/But would that ever be enough?”
If Larsson’s lyrics, “I wanna be loved, loved, loved” are anything to go on, it’s going to have to be (even if the last place one should look for “love” is from fickle fans). And not just because to tell oneself it’s actually not “enough” after all those years spent working to achieve “the fame” would be tantamount to torture. Best instead to adopt an early-era Madonna philosophy on the matter: “People think that being famous is just about having your picture taken all the time and being rich, rich, rich. And you know what? They’re absolutely right.” Based on how Larsson and Tinashe are making their newfound level of fame look, not only do they seem to agree with that Madonna statement, but perhaps the insecurities expressed on “The Ambition” and “Empty Stadium” have also been slightly quelled…for now.
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