FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Willow Calls Growing Up a Child Star "Excruciatingly Terrible"

The 17-year-old spoke frankly about what it's like to go through puberty while being scrutinized by the public. Spoiler alert: it's bad!
Photo via Roc Nation

Being a teenager is generally dire, for obvious reasons. Your skin is creating new textures and liquids with the passion of a newly hired sous-chef. You keep trying to balance being horny and tired and suddenly inexplicably really angry with sitting through a bunch of physics lessons that you *already know* you won’t need in The Real World even though your only knowledge of said world comes from those older kids who hang around outside the Costa in town. If you were one of those people who went through your teen years looking the best you ever will, fucking someone you loved and getting top marks then well done: you are a freak. You can keep reading, imagining faintly what a messy teendom would’ve been like.

Advertisement

Thinking about doing all of this – ie: “figuring shit out” – in the public eye too thus makes my skin crawl. In a recent interview with Girlgaze, a platform and zine for female-identifying photographers, Willow Smith broke this down in some of the plainest terms. She spoke about how obviously terrible it is to find fame as a child – she was ten when she released “Whip My Hair”, which … christ – and then spend your teen years being scrutinised by the press, your fans, people who don’t know you and so on.

“Growing up and trying to figure out your life,” she said, “while people feel like they have some sort of entitlement to know what’s going on, is absolutely, excruciatingly terrible – and the only way to get over it, is to go into it. You can’t change your face. You can’t change your parents. You can’t change any of those things. So I feel like most kids like me end up going down a spiral of depression, and the world is sitting there looking at them through their phones; laughing and making jokes and making memes at the crippling effect that this lifestyle has on the psyche.”

The idea of a child star struggling with their sense of identity or self-worth is in no way new. Back in the peak days of teen idol mags like Tiger Beat, every detail about young actors and singers was picked apart and put in print each month, stripping them of a sense of privacy. Couple this with being thrust into adult environments and sometimes bearing the responsibility as a primary earner for your household and it’s no surprise that the likes of Corey Feldman, Amanda Bynes, Corey Haim and then later Britney Spears were torn to shreds by fame. Multiply those effects by social media's incessant intrusion into newer stars' lives now and I'm just about immediately ready for a nap. So it’s refreshing to see Willow speaking this frankly about celebrity, a concept so often idealised in the minds of young fans. You can read her interview in full here.

You can find Noisey on Twitter.