Many big celebrity stars were born with silver spoons in their mouths and given all the best chances and opportunities in life due to good educations and high ranking social networks. However there are many tales that do not have such easy beginnings. The following are a handful of the musicians that have made the big time by sheer determination or perhaps necessity.
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MARIAH CAREY was one of the biggest stars around at the height of her career but she didn’t always enjoy such an illustrious lifestyle. She grew up in a poor neighbourhood in Long Island, New York in a situation very close to what you would call poverty. Her grandfather immigrated to America from Venezuela and took the name Carey on arrival in New York. Her parents being of different ethnicities (Mother; white, Father; black) not only caused difficulties in the area where they lived but estrangement from Mariah’s maternal Grandparents; this disownment caused deep grief for Mariah as she grew up. Her parents divorced when she was only three years old and she grew apart from her father completely. She found comfort singing along to the radio; music became her peace. After several years of financial problems Carey and her family were able to move to a better area within New York and from here Carey made friends, who became her first co-songwriters, and began the development of her talents. She worked as a waitress to pay the rent but never held down a position, being too busy aspiring to become a musician. Eventually she managed to get a demo tape together and by chance met an executive from Colombia Records at a party…the rest is history!
“It’s been difficult for me, moving around so much, having to grow up by myself… my parents divorced. And I always felt kind of different from everybody else in my neighborhoods. I was a different person ethnically. And sometimes, that can be a problem. If you look a certain way, everybody goes ‘White girl’, and I’d go, ‘No, that’s not what I am’.”
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JUSTIN BIEBER’s pretty boy good looks were not from a groomed and advantageous lifestyle. Justin’s early life consisted of him sleeping on a pull-out bed, eating mainly macaroni and cheese and living amongst rats. Bieber’s parents were very young when they had him and were drug-addicted teenagers when his dad walked out on him and his mother, leaving them in a destitute situation. His mum managed to raise him alone (with a little help from her mother and stepfather) by working low-paid office jobs. He learnt piano, trumpet, drums, guitar and trumpet at school and developed a thirst for performing. He came second in a local competition where he sang Ne-Yo’s song Sick. A video of which was posted on You Tube for friends. As he continued to record himself covering R&B tracks and they were posted on You Tube he gained popularity and eventually got noticed. Justin Bieber is now worth something like 65 million dollars and has millions of fans all over the world (and just as many haters!).
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SNOOP DOGG was named Cordozar Broadus Jr. but was nicknamed Snoopy when he was a child due to his looks. He began his musical life singing and playing piano at church but in sixth grade began rapping. His early days consisted of him selling drugs on the street to scrape a living together and attempt to avoid the squalor in which he was living. He went to prison a few times, for short periods, but after which he started to record music with a friend. This friend happened to be the stepbrother of the one and only Dr. Dre. How lucky to have friends in the right places! When he heard a mixtape on which Snoop featured Dr. Dre brought him in for an audition. Following this and some education in the music business he went on to make the big time and become a worldwide household name.
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JAY Z is these days the king of a financial empire but things were not always so lucrative for the husband of Beyoncé. His ambition, intuition and talents have given him the drive to become one of the richest men in the world. Being born in Brooklyn in a housing project he was raised by his mother alone. Growing up in the projects subjected him to a rough upbringing where graduating high school was not something of a normality, being shot and selling drugs and shooting your own brother were typical situations to occur. They didn’t have much but when Carter (Jay-Z) began banging the kitchen table for want of some percussion his mother saved up to buy him a boom box, mainly to avoid him waking up the whole house with his drumming. Followeing this his talents developed as he wrote lyrics and began free-styling. Known as Jazzy to his friends and neighbours the boy gradually developed into the worldwide success phenomenon that is our man Jay-Z.
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MARK WAHLBERG is not strictly just a musician but he dabbled in a few of the arts before he settled in as an actor, and his story is one to be told. He was the youngest of nine kids growing up in a very rough neighbourhood. He dropped out of school at the age of 14 and went to work as a street thug. He made many bad moves, drug dealing alongside addiction and got into trouble with the police over twenty more times in his home town of Boston. Civil action was filed against him at 15 for a racial attack on some Afro-American kids, at 16 he violently assaulted two different Vietnamese men on the same day for racial reasons. He was charged with attempted murder, pleaded guilty to assault and served only 45 days in prison.
There were many other incidents involving violence throughout his teens and early twenties for this clearly wildly angry, frustrated young man. He repented eventually and his Catholic upbringing gave him a big sense of regret and guilt for his actions. “You have to go and ask for forgiveness and it wasn’t until I really started doing good and doing right by other people, as well as myself, that I really started to feel that guilt go away. So I don’t have a problem going to sleep at night. I feel good when I wake up in the morning.”
His role models and peers were not much of a good influence “Three of my brothers had done time. My sister went to prison so many times I lost count. Finally I was there locked up with the kind of guys I’d always wanted to be like. Now I’d earned my stripes and I was just like them, and I realized it wasn’t what I wanted at all. I’d ended up in the worst place I could possibly imagine and I never wanted to go back. First of all, I had to learn to stay on the straight and narrow.” Luckily for Mark he had an angel on the other shoulder that was a little bigger than the devil on the other and he ended up making good. He never blames his upbringing for the mistakes he made, he takes full responsibility claiming that he was always taught right from wrong and it is a choice make within ourselves. Nobody else has that power. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life and I’ve done bad things, but I never blamed my upbringing for that. I never behaved like a victim so that I would have a convenient reason for victimizing others. Everything I did wrong was my own fault. I take full responsibility”.
His brother Donnie Wahlberg, of New Kids on The Block fame helped his little brother to get a record deal and put a stop to his street days. And so was born the star we know today, although his early fame was made as Marky Mark and The Funky Bunch, he went on to become a serious actor with worldwide critical acclaim. His Hollywood blockbusters include; Boogie Nights (1997), The Perfect Storm (2000), Planet of The Apes (2001), The Italian Job (2003), The Departed (2006) – for which he was nominated for an Academy Award and more recently Ted (2012) and Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014).
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SHANIA TWAIN, the country singing beauty had a very poor upbringing in Canada where food was something of a luxury. At one point things got so bad they w2ent to a homeless shelter for help. Her already struggling family was given a harsh blow when her mother and stepfather were killed in a car accident. Twain had to support and raise her three younger siblings by herself. She used to sing in local resorts to get by. Once they were old enough to take care of themselves she left for Nashville to win her place in the heart of country music. In 2008 Shania was reportedly worth a whacking $450 million.
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SEAN COMBS was born in a public housing project in Harlem, his father, Melvin Combs, was an associate of convicted New York drug dealer Frank Lucas. At age 33 he was shot to death while sitting in his car in Central Park West whilst Combs was still a child. Diddyplayed football at Catholic school and was given his nickname “Puff” for the way he used to huff and puff when he was angry. Sean “P Diddy” Combs left New York City after his father was murdered and moved upstate with his mother, who reportedly worked several jobs to support them. Ambitious from a young age, Combs got his first break as an intern at Uptown Records while he was a business student at Howard University. He quickly worked his way from the mailroom to management, making his big break with the recording artist Notorious B.I.G. Since those days P Diddy has built up something of an empire and is now worth around $700 million!
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LEIGHTON MEESTER’s beginning was beyond humble: Her mother gave birth to her while incarcerated in a Texas prison, where she was serving time for drug smuggling. After 12 weeks in a halfway house, Meester’s mother went back to prison and Meester went to live with her grandmother in Florida, where she stayed until her mother was released. In addition to her acting career, Meester has also ventured into music. She released two singles, recorded songs for various soundtracks and collaborated with several artists, being notably featured on Cobra Starship’s “Good Girls Go Bad (2009). Her musical style has since shifted from pop to folk. In 2012, she embarked on a mini tour with folk band Check in the Dark, whom she had been working with since 2010. Meester has maintained that her parents gave her a normal upbringing and, despite their criminal past, are good people with experience that has only made Meester more open-minded and non-judgmental, “It made me realize that you can’t judge anyone—especially your parents—for what they’ve done in their past, because people change. Meester has joked, “Look, I could’ve turned out a lot worse.” She has cited her mother as her style icon. When Meester was 11 years old she began modeling in New York, her photographer happened to be the now filmmaker Sofia Coppola. She was in many ad campaigns and had a very confident attitude which seems to have pulled her through to the front of the line. Her powerful determination and talents got her a leading role in the madly successful Gossip Girl TV series. This was her big break and has assisted in her being worth an estimated $5 million today.
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CELINE DION. This one tops them all for sibling rivalry; Celine was the youngest of FOURTEEN children. Born in Canada to French Canadian parents, she was raised in poverty in a happy Catholic home. She started very young and dreamed of being a performer. She began to make her dream a reality wen she began to perform in her parents’ piano bar. She never gave herself a chance to become a normal teenager as she spent it travelling around signing, not that she regrets this; “I missed my family and my home, but I don’t regret having lost my adolescence. I had one dream: I wanted to be a singer.” Her brother Michel Dondalinger Dion sent a recording to music manager René Angélil, whose name he discovered on the back of an album. Angélil was moved to tears by Dion’s voice, and decided to make her a star. Her popularity spread to other parts of the world when she sang and won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1988. In the nineties she hit the big time (namely America) During the 1990s, with the help of Angélil, she achieved worldwide fame after signing with Epic Records and released several English albums along with additional French albums, becoming one of the most successful artists in pop music history. Though she has faded from the spotlight since her late ’90s super stardom Dion is still ranked as one of the highest-grossing female entertainers and in 2007 was listed by Forbes as the fifth richest female entertainer, coming in at $250 million.
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