Behind the stage names
Plenty of pop stars perform under names they picked themselves. Stefani Germanotta became Lady GAGA, borrowing from Queen's song 'Radio Ga Ga'. Gordon Sumner became STING after turning up to rehearsals in a black-and-yellow striped jumper that made him look like a bee. Marshall Mathers turned his initials, M and M, into EMINEM. Peter Hernandez became BRUNO Mars, keeping a nickname his dad gave him as a toddler, after a famously tough wrestler.
Abel Tesfaye first called himself The Weekend, then dropped a letter to avoid a clash with a Canadian band that already had the name — hence WEEKND in the grid. And back in the 1960s, David Jones changed his surname to BOWIE so that nobody would mix him up with Davy Jones of the Monkees.
Reinvention is part of the job
The pop stars who last longest rarely stay the same for long. In 1972 BOWIE turned himself into Ziggy Stardust, a rock star from outer space, then retired the character on stage a year later, to the surprise of his own band. MADONNA changed her look and sound so often through the 1980s and 1990s that reinvention became her trademark, and Guinness World Records lists her as the best-selling female recording artist of all time.
Others reinvent the business around them. RIHANNA launched a make-up brand in 2017 with 40 shades of foundation, far more than most brands then offered, pushed the whole industry to widen its range, and became a billionaire in the process. PRINCE went the other way and kept everything in his own hands: on his first album, released in 1978 when he was nineteen, he was credited with playing 27 instruments.
Records, ages and a lucky click
ADELE names her albums after the age she was while writing them: 19, 21, 25 and 30. BEYONCE holds the record for the most Grammy Awards won by anyone, having passed the old record in 2023. SHAKIRA wrote her first song at eight and made her first album in Colombia at thirteen, and 'Waka Waka', written for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, has been watched on YouTube billions of times. CHER has had a number one on one of Billboard's charts in six decades in a row, from the 1960s to the 2010s, and DRAKE has placed more songs on the main American singles chart than any other artist.
LIZZO is a classically trained flautist, and in 2022 the Library of Congress let her play a crystal flute made for President James Madison two hundred years earlier — on stage, in front of a cheering crowd, which is not how most museum pieces spend their evenings.
The route to fame keeps changing too. Stars were once found by record-company talent scouts or on TV talent shows, but BIEBER was spotted in 2008 after his mum posted videos of him singing on YouTube and a music manager clicked on one by accident. For groups rather than solo singers, see our bands puzzle; for how the songs are put together, try pop music.