the world is finally understanding charli xcx

on the delirium of the brat era & what decides an artist's time

photo by: @hredcliffe

At 19, I was in a car with two friends driving fast at night through the streets of Los Angeles, when one of them queued up a new song. It was “I Love It” by Icona Pop featuring Charli xcx.

My ears immediately blasted into a continuum. It was so brash, so magnetic, so girlish, so pure. It felt like who I wanted to be. They screamed,“You want me down on Earth, but I am up in space” — and it all felt so resonant. I was in college and had big, big dreams of being an artist in Hollywood. Dreams I didn't know what to do with except run towards.

I saved the song and later did some digging. Discovering the work of Charli xcx.

Songs like “You - ha ha ha”, “What I Like”, and “You’re the One” quietly dominated my college soundtrack. Quietly, because the music was always just for me. Other friends didn’t really listen to Charli, so for me she became a solitary experience. Someone for me to listen to as I scrolled through tumblr and dreamed of a new life. The infectious, clashing melodies of her first album True Romance played in my car as I went to internships and first auditions trying to do whatever I could to express myself on camera.

A few years later, Charli reached mainstream acclaim with the notorious “Boom Clap”. A soundtrack feature from The Fault in Our Stars that catapulted her towards the doors of main pop-girl stardom. She performed at the VMA’s, had the backing of a major label, and lined up her next album Sucker.

However, there’s something about reaching a type of mainstream success that can often isolate how an artist is understood. Some parts of them go missing. Often, what is most digestible clouds the artists’s true current. Through their enlargement to the general public, their artistry can be left minimized. It seemed, the Charli I fell in love with during her previous album True Romance felt more hidden during this rise.

In 2014, I dropped out of college. I only had one year left but I was so unhappy and so lost, I had to do it. I had to find myself outside of the metrics of routine societal success. I wanted something different for my life.

Over the next two years I established myself as a prominent on-camera entertainment host and interviewer. Working with the likes of Disney Channel, Comic-Con, and other notable entities. I had begun to find my groove as an adult and what I wanted to give to the world. Though I still wanted to be an artist, I just didn’t know how.

In 2016, Charli released the Vroom Vroom EP. Truthfully, I had kind of forgotten about her. Through my disillusionment with Sucker I had moved on. Until I stumbled upon the title track, Vroom Vroom, and proceeded to lose my fucking mind.

Have you heard that song? Every time I hear it it’s like the first time. The stripped, demented ferocity of Sophie’s excruciating production paired with Charli’s lashing, girlish lyrics felt like access to a world that was divine and new. There was no pop music, or any music at all, that sounded like that. “All my life I’ve been waiting for a good time” she swoons before the chorus and nothing had ever felt so true. All I had wanted was to hear music that made me feel razor-sharp, power-infused, and sparkling.

The EP was a masterpiece despite being only four songs. But, each song was so filled to the brim with a complexity of pop experiments bursting from the deified syncing of Sophie and Charli. The cover, a sleek black sports car, was sublime.

In 2017, I had devoted fully to being an actress. I left my hosting career behind to be taken seriously as a real artist, mostly to see if I could fill the hole that started appearing from not being fulfilled by my hosting work. I was tired of being seen as the polished, commercial girl who did pop culture interviews. I wanted to access something more raw.

Financially, I fell from grace. Embodying the stereotype of the struggling actor juggling plates of jobs while dashing through auditions for major films and TV shows, hoping just one chance would break through. I was exhausted, I was tired, and there were moments I stopped believing in myself. I began to turn dark towards the world. My radiating optimism that shot me to this point in my career was diminishing. It was in the red. I began yelling at people in traffic, had a severe scarcity mindset, and grew extremely depressed.

Within that year, Charli released Number 1 Angel. A glowing red mixtape that bounced confectionary pop into an undercurrent of the dark, experimental, and bubbling. The atmospheric, pounding “Dreamer” carried me home after each long double-shift at work. In those moments, in my car alone on the empty night streets of LA, I felt surged with a kind of energy. Replenishing yet superseding. I felt like I could do anything.

Later that year, Charli released the infamous Pop 2. The mixtape that would solidify her as queen of the pop underground. In response to her devastating album leak of XCX World, Charli released this genre-bashing, futuristic, complete oblivion of a pop dream gone candied and thrashing. Pop 2 is the most fitting and crucial title, because Charli shocked the genre into new extremities. With songs like “Track 10”, “Femmebot”, and “Unlock It”, Charli was unstoppable.

Yet, in the mainstream pop world, she was ignored. The excitement of her musical excavations hardly transferred outside of the queer underground bubble she occupied. I’d show friends her music often to no avail. People weren’t really getting it. I continued to listen in solitude. Occasionally dragging a friend to a show, buying them a ticket to come with me.

Two years later, Charli was released. Her first proper album since 2014’s Sucker. It was a trail-blazing configuration of the avant-pop currents she created, this time with the sheen and backing of an official album. I thought, maybe this would be her time. Maybe, people would start to see and recognize what she was doing. I’d watch Charli in interviews during this era and I could feel a type of frustration probe through her. Something felt dissatisfied. Off-center. Charli was being regarded in these underground circles as a genius and a superstar, but was struggling to achieve that recognition in the mainstream corridor.

It’s not that breaking into the mainstream is the most important, however, it bears thinking — why can’t our great artists be popular? Why was Charli trapped in this liminal pop space while also writing chart toppers for top 40 acts like Camilla Cabello and Shawn Mendes? Why was it that when it came to her own music, she wasn’t probing through?

This was all in 2019. In my own life, I had grown deteriorated from auditioning and began leaning back into my entertainment hosting work. I missed doing something I was good at. Also, I loved it. Getting to interview actors and musicians about their art and lives spun a sense of purpose in me. But, something always felt missing. I didn’t always want to be the one asking the questions. I wanted someone to ask questions about me.

Though acting brought me tribulations, it taught me how to be alive and how to express that aliveness. Of how to speak the language of how you individually process this world. How emotions and feelings can translate into mediums. Through this, I began to discover writing. And it felt like the thing that had been missing all this time.

Charli soundtracked some of my most brutal and terrific moments. Of the transcendent understanding of my growing voice as an artist, alongside my complete disillusionment with the Hollywood pipeline. Driving through Sunset Blvd playing the aching “Thoughts”, winding through the night wondering what it was I had to do to make my life feel right. Listening to “February 2017” with tears in my eyes, dancing like a disco ball had just broken inside of me.

I felt like Charli. I felt trapped like her. Caught between the desire for commercial success and the desire to be raw and experimental. At this point, almost everyone around me made a living from social media. I watched the algorithm reward people, heavily, in real time. How sharing aspects of their lives, both real and fabricated, gave them major platforms and obscene amounts of money. I wondered, should I just be an influencer? If people’s eyes are going towards this kind of content, shouldn’t that be what I skew my work into? Shouldn’t I just build an audience doing get ready with me’s, makeup tutorials, and shopping hauls, and THEN start sharing my personal writing projects? Wouldn’t that be the smart way? To actually make a living? To not be ignored?

But, an influencer is not an artist. And I am an artist.

On March 6th 2020, my birthday, I played my favorite Charli songs in the uber on the way to dinner with friends. After roughly 30 seconds, they formally requested I change the music. They just couldn’t get into it. I stared out the window wondering how the fuck I didn’t have friends who liked Charli.

The following week we entered the pandemic.

In the following two months, Charli released how i’m feeling now, an intense test of artistry where she publicly challenged herself to complete an entire album in six weeks during lockdown. Its entire conception was collaborative, with Charli reaching out to fans during IG live streams for lyric suggestions and peeks at production. We got to see her outside of the smoke and mirrors of pop star production and see her as she was, in her element. A true lover of creation. When the mechanics of the world stopped turning, Charli was there in her home, still making. Still connecting melodies and hooks.

I danced to “party 4 u” alone in my room during those solitary months. Visions probing through me of stories I would write to later transform into movies to star in. In the song “visions” she sings “I got pictures in my mind, I can see it so clearly, see it so bright.”

Come 2022, I had officially quit acting. Or at least, the idea that I would audition for other people’s projects. I had leaned fully into writing and released my first self-published book. My friend dynamics had almost completely shifted, outside of certain core relationships. I had so many new people in my life who reflected the artistry I, too, wanted to create.

This was the year Charli released CRASH. The last album on her major label deal she signed back when she was a teenager. Conceptually, she presented the album as her “sell-out” album — where she would mark a departure from her avant-pop roots and trek into radio-friendly pop music. She would be who her label always wanted her to be. But even, “selling out” Charli was still exemplary. An artist cannot hide themselves. My Spotify was near combustion from the amount of times I replayed “Yuck” and “Constant Repeat”. I also began to discover, a few close people around me were just as big of Charli fans as I was.

With this album, Charli achieved her highest chart acclaim. She was finally getting the recognition she deserved. I felt her happiness and it felt like she could rest. Like she finally reached some semblance of making it as the main pop girl act she’d wanted to be.

In 2023, Charli revealed she was working on her next album. It would be a club record, returning to her London rave roots fused with her notorious pop experimentation.

—

What we have been witnessing with BRAT is unprecedented.

I’ll be at parties and people will request her music. I’ll be at work and she’ll play on the main speakers. I’ll go online and see people making videos, tweets, and meme’s with her tracks. What once felt like a private experience, listening to Charli, has now become very public.

Everything about this era has been glistening.

From the caliber of the music videos, to her styling, to the precision of her point of view. It’s Charli, but it’s a clarified Charli. She is direct and undiluted. Charli’s ouvre is sparkling. Her albums crack in all different directions, yet the waters run clear and source from the same root. BRAT feels like the center of that root.

And I think it says so much, that Charli at her purest, is what has broken all walls of her career. Charli at her most essential is what has reached her widest critical and mass acclaim. She is not only satisfying the underground, she is satisfying the above ground. She has won over everybody.

To watch your favorite artist essentially go ignored, you begin to think that maybe the things you love aren’t supposed to be the most popular. Like your taste isn’t tuned to the masses. Which in one way can look like, “Well, good taste is rare!” — but, it’s also an isolating way to think. Because it makes you think that incredible things, profound things, can’t hit like a meteor. You begin to think the art you want to make won’t matter. Watching Charli reach this level of success, has cured a kind of thinking in me. It’s making me believe an artist’s time can come. That the culture will reward a true exploration.

With BRAT, Charli has reached a state of vulnerability in her music that is so striking it ripples a sense of raw vitality into the pop landscape that almost feels frightening. It has sent an electric shock through the world. People are paying attention. And they’re not paying attention in the ways they were before, where they’d listen to one or two of her popular songs, which weren’t completely representative of her. Now people are getting it. They are really getting her. They’re understanding what she’s doing.

And I’m just so happy because all that has happened is she feels so clear now. There’s such a clear portal into who she is and it’s connecting to the music. The fact that this clarity has allowed a legion of new people to connect to her is just fascinating. It only took all these years for the world to catch up.

BRAT is direct, yet relaxed. Compulsive and bright. Elusive, dark, nuclear, and hypnotizing. Charli captures us with the transparency of her feeling. Like she’s sticking her fingers down her throat and vomiting her every feeling as a 31-year old pop-star. The result, a neon-green pool of radioactive feeling.

“Sympathy is Knife” is the combinational climax of her career. It is the perfect Charli song. It oxidizes the nostalgia of True Romance, the ferocity of Vroom Vroom, the electrocution of Pop 2/Charli, the confessional nature of how i’m feeling now, and the pop stickiness of CRASH.

But, Charli is also revealing new sides of herself with this record. “Everything is Romantic” a true example of this through her neon-warped abstraction of an Italian romantic getaway. Its electro-orgasmic realization of true love, wicked beauty, and the transformational nature of the Amalfi coast reaches a tone I’ve never heard in her work before. Every time I hear this song a new dimension opens. Like a disarranged, kaleidoscopic mansion I’m traveling through. Discovering new doors and entering rooms with my mind and my body.

When you listen to BRAT, you hear a 31-year old woman grappling, partying, and really fucking ruminating about it all. From the volatility of her confidence, the extreme beauty of living, the daunting psycho-social relationships that circle her, and the question of whether or not to procreate— all while in coated in shattering dance production. The album cover erratic for pop music. Faceless, bodiless. With only text, it’s an alert.

“I went my own way and I made it” she smoothly states in the future-forward “360” — the opening track of the album. And in her declaration, she has made it true. No label could have concocted a star like Charli. She created herself.

Later on “Rewind”, she ruminates “I’ve started thinking again, wondering ‘bout whether I think I deserve commercial success”. Which makes the whole experience of this album very meta. Because we are watching her now receive what she wasn’t sure would happen to her. Her radical openness of discussing her own career add a layer to the music that feels participatory. Like we can look at her both as the product but also the human laboring over that product. Not many pop artists let you get to see that.

At her BRAT concert in Los Angeles, the energy in the room was charged and vibrating. We were all witness to the brink of a moment sweeping. Only a few weeks into her album release and the whole room sang every lyric back to her.

Even Charli, herself was in awe.

She mused on stage while swinging a glass of wine, “You know when Pop 2 came out, they didn’t get it…you know, with BRAT, I’m like seeing DMs from random fucking people…It feels really crazy, like, I won’t play it down. I’ve been doing this since I was what, 14? Now I’m 31. It’s just really cool. Like, I just feel like artistry shines through.”

When an artist is called to create a piece of work, I believe they are receiving a nudge from outside of themselves. Something in their desire to create is connected to what someone on Earth needs. Whether it be one person or one million. An artist gives what someone doesn’t necessarily know how to ask for. They are activating an unspoken wish.

What decides when an artist hits? And not just a one hit wonder, but a real spasm in our ether? For some reason, now is Charli’s time. And I don’t quite understand it, but, when I really observe and look, I feel like maybe I do.

She closed her LA show with “party 4 you, “Vroom Vroom”, and unexpectedly “I Love It”. The room was shocked with electricity and oblivion. The crowd went so fucking insane, we ascended into new tier of energy. I beamed and jumped so hard I nearly felt like I would shoot into the sky. And, in the midst of it all I was laughing. Between mouthfuls of lyrics, I was laughing, and in disbelief.

Both Charli and I are the same age.

Look at how from 19, everything and nothing has changed.