After "Brat" and the Tension of Staying Too Long
Charli xcx: her music, her impact and her social experiment
I’ve been a fan of loud, chaotic, abrasive music with catchy refrains ever since Sleigh Bells hit the scene with their first grainy, jarring pop single “Crown on the Ground.” I’ve been a fan of Sleigh Bells and that sound ever since – the sound being, mostly, catchy and abrasive loud noise.
In the Early B.B. (“Before Brat”) era, Charli xcx was mostly an artist I really liked, but wasn’t obsessed with. I knew a couple of songs from each one of her albums, but I never played an album all the way through. Ever since hearing her for the first time on Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” a lot of her songs scratched that Sleigh Bells-adjacent noisy-pop itch whenever I needed it.
Then in 2020, I religiously listened to much of How I’m Feeling Now, Charli’s mid-quarantine release. I remember feeling like her music was healing something – not as a soothing balm, exactly – but it was serving as some kind of revitalizing reminder about pre-pandemic life, prompting visceral memories of dancing in clubs, going to concerts surrounded by thousands of other sweaty people, listening to pump-up music that would make you feel hot and confident before going out, partying with friends, falling in love, staying in love, fighting in love. Seeing as how she recorded the album alone very DIY-style in her house during quarantine and was reflecting on these very things herself, this makes perfect sense. During that time, I listened to “pink diamond,” “claws” and “anthems” on repeat at full-volume so much during my little quarantine walks that I’m surprised my ears didn’t bleed or just stop working at some point.
I joined TikTok early post-quarantine (2021-ish), and I think this is when I started to really appreciate Charli more as a performer and an artist. My algorithm was quickly flooded with videos of her performing at outdoor festivals hyping the crowds up like a pro, and usually all by herself up there on the stage. Something about a performer evoking such roaring excitement out of an audience after the world had been shut down for a year was inspiring, energizing, rebelliously hopeful. Seeing video after video of her unleashing a guttural, primal scream just before “Vroom Vroom” was a revelation for me. Hell yes, punk rock, I thought.
When Brat, her 6th studio album, came out in the summer of last year, everything changed for Charli, her career and pop culture as we know it. I won’t recap it because we were (mostly) all there and if you know you know. Just barely a year ago the hot topic on all of our tongues, on social media, and even on the regular news and MSNBC panels was “Brat Summer.” Brat and Charli xcx defined the entire second half of 2024, and we will likely never get anything like it again.
Now, we have officially entered A.B. – “After Brat.” Charli continues to mesmerize me and evoke thought-provoking themes as she closes out a year of Brat, most notably with her 2-weekend Coachella performances where she was (almost) a headliner. She made waves on the internet beyond Coachella with her ending set piece: her final thoughts on Brat Summer and where it should go (or not go) next. She rhythmically writhes on the floor of the stage while the screens behind her say things like, “maybe it’s time for a different kind of summer?” And proceeds to flash a list at rapid speed of various artists of different mediums in bold letters: “LORDE SUMMER.” “CRONENBERG SUMMER.” “CELINE SONG SUMMER.” The list went on.
In TikToks and Instagram captions following, Charli has discussed the idea of knowing she has to say goodbye to Brat Summer but not entirely wanting to, how it’s a part of her identity and brand now and she’s not sure how to let it go. She mentions her fascination with “the tension of staying too long,” citing how she knows the culture always wants a pop star – especially a female pop star – to hang it up and go home after she’s achieved a certain amount of success.
There’s something so strikingly poetic and intellectual to me in her phrasing: the tension of staying too long. I feel as though Charli is always not just creating and entertaining, but conducting some sort of social experiment of her own at the same time. She is something of a scholar-turned-Professor of entertainment, the music industry and Celebrity. Her past experience as a songwriter and producer for other artists before she was mega famous through her own projects has given her a behind-the-scenes view of this business and culture’s subsequent response to it. She has been able to study and take notes on how various people handle Celebrity, and undoubtedly has taken it all into account as her own fame climbed. And with it, she can also turn it on its head, rebel against it, flow with it, make us question it, teach us something about how we respond to popular art and treat our most famous artists once we’ve decided they’ve “had enough” success.
I feel hungrily glued to her career and persona as she navigates this soar of success and muses on what to do next. Hell, who am I kidding – she likely already knows what she’s doing next. This isn’t just music at this point for Charli. It’s performance art, it’s anthropological: a lifelong thesis on Celebrity, music and pop culture, finally able to be put on display in something like the world’s largest museum.
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