Debbie Adamson gripped the armrest as the plane accelerated down the runway, her eyes squeezed shut, the synthetic beats and honeyed vocals of BTS flooding her ears. She had handpicked every track—a “bulletproof playlist,” she called it—for this moment. For the first time in 17 years, the 67-year-old from Southampton was voluntarily leaving the ground. Before this flight, she had hidden her passport in an airport magazine to avoid a trip, had once sobbed uncontrollably for three hours on a plane, and, after 2008, simply stopped flying altogether. The K-pop septet, she discovered, did what no logic could: they calmed the sensory storm enough for her to begin rationalising her fear. “I closed my eyes during takeoff and also held on very tight,” she told a Brazilian newspaper. “After that, I started to rationalise the situation. That only proved to me that I allowed myself not to be afraid anymore.”

That personal act of sonic self-reinvention finds its mirror image in the machinery of pop culture itself. Over in Essex, Charli XCX, who spent 2024 soundtracking dance floors with the neon-green hedonism of Brat, has spent recent months setting fire to the very aesthetic that made her ubiquitous. Swedish cultural chroniclers note that the 33-year-old now feels compelled to “start from zero” and has declared, on her new album Music, fashion, film, that the dance floor is dead. Reviews from Gothenburg describe a work of depressive swerves and comedic genius: one track sketches a catwalk leading straight to hell; another closes with the filmmaker David Cronenberg intoning, “No one lasts forever, they are dead, they are gone.” It is, in its way, a public unmaking—an artist using her craft to shed a self that had grown too heavy.

If Charli XCX’s self-immolation is a spectacle of rupture, a different model of transformation emerges further along the timeline of fame. Time magazine recently surveyed a cohort of women in their 80s—Cher, Dolly Parton, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick—who were once derided for being too much: too country, too Jewish, too ambitious, too artificial. Rather than being diminished by the criticism, they transformed those very qualities into signatures. Cher, whose body was so scrutinised that rumour had her removing ribs, simply refused to soften, ageing into a persona that wielded excess like architecture. “If I want to put my tits on my back, it is nobody’s business but my own,” she once said. Here, self-definition was the engine of endurance.

What connects the bulletproof playlist in Row 12, the smouldering wreckage of a pop persona in a recording studio, and the feathered headdresses at an awards ceremony is the idea that music can function as a tool for becoming—or refusing to become—what the world expects. British singer-songwriter Beth Orton, whose ninth album The Ground Above emerged from a period of personal upheaval, spoke in an Australian interview about the dignity of living “as you are” rather than chasing a perfected self. “Even if you fumble it, even if you’re a bit of a mess,” she said, “you can still have the dignity to live as you are.”

The echoing “no one lasts forever” that closes Charli XCX’s record is not a surrender but a clarification. Debbie Adamson, now booking new trips with her BTS playlist at the ready, has found the same truth: the songs we choose to carry are, in the end, the ones that carry us.