Charli xcx reveals the ending in the second song on Music, Fashion, Film, confirming that the art forms and life forces that keep her inspired will not be her salvation. That doesn’t preclude her from spending the next twenty-five minutes trying. “It’s not that I’m like, an expert in those fields,” she explains in the accompanying visual album/documentary. “It’s more just that they’re so intrinsically what my life is about, you know?”
Instead of taking the advice of another polarizing British musical titan, Charli repeatedly puts her life in the hands of a rock and roll band (or a director, or designer, if you want to get into the technicalities about what constitutes a rock star). An act of devotion is inherently an act of surrender; to love something is to accept that you may lose it, to finish a work of art is to abandon the vision you had of it when it was still in the drafts, and to create something new is to destroy a piece of yourself. Charli said it herself: she had to “kill” Brat, the project that catapulted her from critical darling to main pop girl. Suddenly, the pop star of the future had become the moment. Now, it’s Charli xcx who is at the mercy of her art, not the other way around, and she’s not mincing words about it: “It’s like looking down the barrel of a gun (fucking shoot me).”
Seasoned Charli fans know that her work has long been a commentary on itself, something that can be traced back to the tongue-in-cheek title of 2017’s Pop 2; its self-titled follow-up was a feature-heavy tug-of-war between experimentalism and commercial sheen. When the world was locked inside, Charli liveblogged the process of making an album about being a party girl in partyless times; when it opened up again, she made her “if I went mainstream” album that failed to bring her into the mainstream—it was the “I guess I’ll never be mainstream” album that succeeded. “If you love it / If you hate it / I don’t fucking care what you think,” Charli talk-sang on “360.” And then she proceeded to show us just how much she really does care.
Music, Fashion, Film takes us deep into Charli’s ouroboros of self-referentiality, each statement containing its own contradiction. She claims that she was lying when she said she was making a rock record—all as part of the rollout for an album that runs the gamut from Auto-Tuned pop punk to horror movie soundtrack strings that break down into a nu-metal chorus to a track made with a guitar pedal “made specifically to piss off Kurt Cobain” (as A.G. Cook, Charli’s friend, collaborator, and subject of the song “Metal Magic Montana,” puts it). She’s as in on the joke as possible on “Wink Wink,” a track that recalls The Teenagers’ “Homecoming,” whose recent indie sleaze revival owes something to Charli herself.
“2007,” which Charli calls “a song about making TikToks” is a turducken of her own musical history—the teenage “popstar in my bedroom” uploading scratchy synth pop songs to MySpace stuffed inside the quarantined party girl hosting a Grindr-sponsored Instagram Live DJ set stuffed inside the fictional sellout Charli from The Moment who starred in an Amazon-exclusive concert film with the tagline “Be a 365 party girl from the comfort of your own home.” It doesn’t matter who “Persona” is quote-unquote “about”—Charli’s compared it to “You’re So Vain” in its “your words, not mine” attitude—because the song says more about the person singing it than whoever they’re singing to, so they might as well be singing about themselves.
It feels significant that the avatars in Charli’s triptych of artistic identity are all men. John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese grace the album cover; the album closes with a monologue on artistic philosophy from David Cronenberg; French actor Vincent Cassel stars in the “Camera” music video while Charli, in-universe, is “behind” the camera. The muse, a role historically considered female by default, is consistently male throughout Music, Fashion, Film—a prism through which the woman at the center of it all can see herself refracted: a woman watching herself being looked at. It’s as if Charli herself is hinting at this implicitly gendered storyteller/subject divide, two parts that make up the whole of her artistry, questioning to what extent the audience will take her seriously as both. “Am I being fucking stupid if I try to be a girl on the screen when I’m turning thirty-four?” she asks. Meanwhile, the men on the screen are well past fifty.
At what point does the project become a product, and vice versa? Does Charli know? Through “SS26”’s warped, psych-gaze basslines, the pop star who recently “predicted” the rise of “anti-marketing” sounds as if she’s addressing a boardroom, delivering her next big marketing pitch through a distortion pedal. “Card Declined” is a trudging piece of post-punk whose critique of commodity fetishism (which Charli freely admits she isn’t immune to) is delivered somewhere between current-day Kim Gordon and Fear Of Music-era David Byrne. Listening to these songs, watching these visuals, you can envision their primordial state as moodboards—that’s kind of the point. None of it is real; it’s not supposed to be. Or it’s as real as the light that gets caught in the optical cavity between two mirrors facing each other.
“Authenticity” is passé currency in an era of press releases that run down stars’ DSM diagnoses and astrological charts, pop therapy talk show interviews, and celebrities announcing major life events with Instagram-caption alternate-universe fanfiction about themselves. It’s up to the listener to feel something about the story an artist is telling, whether that story is true or not. It’s why I didn’t really care whether the alleged, now-squashed beef between Charli and Lorde that inspired “Girl, So Confusing” and its remix was fictional—same goes for the rumored beef between Charli and Taylor Swift. Either way, it all made for a great story and great songs.
The blurry boundaries between truth and artifice that make up Charli’s autofictional world on Music, Fashion, Film make its emotional echoes ring truer than the finer points of the plot. “Is the dance floor really dead?” is probably the least interesting question “Rock Music” brings up. “How does an artist keep the creative fire lit as their work becomes increasingly self-referential?” and “Can art for art’s sake even exist on this high a budget?” are far more compelling. Who knows whether the philosophical conversation with a French girl at a party actually happened? When it makes for a perfectly Lou Reedian lyrical passage, who cares?
Take away the proper nouns and the baggage of celebrity and you have universal emotional experiences: anxieties about sabotaging a good relationship, admiration for a trusted creative collaborator best expressed through shared references, desires that lay dormant only to resurface just when you think you’re no longer the person you used to be, questions about the lengths you’ll go to and the boundaries you’ll bend for the sake of artistic tension, determination to stay inspired even after you’ve reached your own standard of success, and fear of what happens when the fun inevitably ends.
It’s a testament to Charli’s restraint that she doesn’t address her Brat breakthrough head-on until the final track. That “No One Lasts Forever” is also the glitchiest, most hyperpop song on her Schrödinger’s rock record—and that, in a final act of artistic detachment, she lets one of her biggest influences have the last word—only reinforces it. In the visual album, the final lines of David Cronenberg’s closing monologue (“They are dead / They are gone / No one lasts forever”) repeat over a monochrome montage of clips from Charli’s old music videos—the last of which is a shot from “SS26,” of Charli stepping off the catwalk into a black abyss. She told us from the start that this could very well be the end of her. She’s made her peace with it—at least until the next album cycle.
Charli XCX said herself (or more accurately, Jean Sibelius said it and Charli put it on a T-shirt): They don’t build statues of critics. All my friends are painting and playing in bands and making movies and writing novels, and here I am, a hanger-on who surrounds herself with real artists and documents my own life alongside them in hopes that some of what they’ve got will rub off on me. Music, Fashion, Film is another entry in the countless procession of works of art across mediums, genres, and time periods that have brought me to the same conclusion: I want to make art that makes people feel like this, and by that I don’t mean “makes people feel the way this art makes me feel,” but “has the power to awaken a feeling in someone else that wasn’t there before.”
I’m ashamed to admit that I procrastinated on writing this review by reading a bunch of my own writing to get myself in the right headspace, telling myself that I was playing in the world that Charli’s created when I’m really just playing in my own world, once again. Maybe that’s why I find myself so drawn to overtly self-referential works of art, ones in which the process of telling the story is as important as the story itself—the work is woven into each beat and you can see the stitches. Maybe I love works like Music, Fashion, Film because they reaffirm my wavering belief that being a fan and a critic—I consider Charli one, though she probably wouldn’t—can be a gateway to creating something that is entirely its own. Or maybe there really are no new stories, only new ways of telling them. All I know is how it makes me feel. [Atlantic]
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound, and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
