White Dwarf Starlet / Music

• The streetwalker-soliciting narrator of "Cracked Actor" by David Bowie is another male example:
  I've come on a few years from my Hollywood highs
  The best of the last, the cleanest star they ever had
  I'm stiff on my legend, the films that I made
  Forget that I'm fifty, 'cause you just got paid
• Bucks Fizz's (never spoonerise that name) Golden Days and Now Those Days Are Gone seem to be about this trope.
• "The Right Profile" by The Clash, about the messed-up Real Life fate of Montgomery Clift, is a male example, complete with a heavy dose of Black Comedy or Lyrical Dissonance, depending on your point of view.
• Dog Fashion Disco wrote a rather creepy song, "Plastic Surgeons", that is a plastic surgeon's serenade to his white dwarf starlet clients.
  Would you like a new face to face a new day?
  It seems the mirror is your worst enemy
  For I am Christ to the shallow and aging
  A plastic surgeon to the stars of old
• Eminem portrays himself/Slim Shady as this on The Marshall Mathers LP 2. In "Rap God", he acknowledges that he can get away with joking about being responsible for the Columbine massacre now that he's not as big as he was in 2000 (but also, past the point where people would care). "Berzerk" is about a broke, down-on-his-luck Slim dressing like it's the 80s and partying with his fave oldschool jams, and contains several double-entendres in response to Kendrick Lamar's "Control" verse which seem to be him passing the torch. In "So Far...", Slim is humiliated when some hot girls turn out to be listening to Yelawolf instead of him. "Bad Guy" ends with the Monster identifying himself as "your time that's almost up that you haven't acknowledged".
  • On Revival, Eminem portrays himself as this in Sincerity Mode - "the crowds are gone, and it's time to wash out the blonde. Sales decline, the curtain's drawn, they're closin' the set, I'm still pokin' my head from out behind".
  • In Eminem's 2018 tour, he used this as his gimmick. For his stage banter, he would read out loud nasty Tweets about his irrelevance, agree with them, and then announce "can I take you back to a time when I was actually motherfucking good?" before launching into "The Real Slim Shady". On his eventual 2018 album, he would not be so willing to agree with these critiques.
• "Duchess" by Genesis depicts a starlet for whom "everybody cried for more" lose popularity with her fans, to the point where "nobody (cries) for more".
• Faith Hill's "When The Lights Go Down", dedicates a verse to this phenomenon.
  So another star falls from the Hollywood Hills
  without a sound, when the lights go down.
• Krayzie Bone's "What Would You Do?" tells the story of a washed up rapper who returns back to the life of crime with disastrous consequences.
• "Paperitähdet" (Paper Stars) by Finnish rock artist Juice Leskinen.
• Lola of the Barry Manilow song "Copacabana". Though to be fair to Lola, she pretty much had a mental breakdown after the love of her life was killed in front of her and spends her days drunk and grieving after that.
• Metallica's song "The Memory Remains" is about an unnamed actress past her prime. Especially poignant since they managed to have 1960s starlet Marianne Faithfull on backing vocals for the song and appear in the video. Talk about hitting close to home...
• "Mr. Richland's Favorite Song" by Harry Nilsson, about a male teen idol who goes from the heights of fame to being "a fallen star who works in a bar where yesterday is king."
• Prefab Sprout's "The King of Rock And Roll" is about a one-hit wonder who becomes one of these. It was their only hit... in the US.
• "Della Brown" by Queensrÿche tells the story of a middle-aged homeless woman who was once a great beauty that had the world at her feet and her pick of men. Once her beauty faded, she was cast aside and had to live on the street because she had no other means of supporting herself other than with her looks. The song ends with her waiting for a man to come along and make her happy again.
• Nina Simone's "Stars".
• "The Lucky One" by Taylor Swift is about an aspiring actress who went to Hollywood seeking fortune and fame, but ended up as one of these when she realized that said fortune and fame weren't what they were cracked up to be. It has a Happy Ending though: She uses her money to buy a big plot of land and retire to a quieter, simpler, life.
• Two male examples show up in country music, with Tanya Tucker singing "King of Country Music" and John Anderson doing "Would You Catch a Falling Star?"
• "New Age" by the Velvet Underground is about a love affair between a "fat, blonde actress" who is "over the hill right now" and one of her fans.
• "Yesterday's Hero" by John Paul Young is a song about the fleeting nature of pop stardom. It drew on Vanda & Young's own experiences as former teen idols

---