Charli XCX - Music, Fashion, Film
I listened to Music, Fashion, Film for the first time and was pretty confident that I didn’t like it. I was convinced that it was a bad record altogether. But that’s why re-listening to music, exploring past releases, and doing your research is important to any form of criticism. All art requires context; said context endows it with meaning. After all of this, I’ve come to appreciate the record far more. As far as Charli XCX goes, I’m not sure how often I’ll be returning to Music, Fashion, Film as a whole, but I understand what she’s trying to do here.
It is not a traditional pop record (then again, she’s never really released traditional pop records). Similar to other artists in the pop culture echelon, Charli XCX has always strived to reinvent whatever image people have had about her, build it up, revise it, tweak it, and then tear it all down and subvert expectations. 2024’s Brat was a cultural phenomenon, evoking images of sweaty nightclubs, insecurities, and bad decisions laced with an electropop orchestra. Music, Fashion, Film is the opposite of Brat in its minimalist approach, bitcrushed-to-death guitars, and subdued vocal delivery. Throughout its eleven songs, Charli XCX (Charlotte Aitchison) seems to be working against everything we’ve ever known about her, and the result is more museum art piece than Top 40 radio hit. I think that’s the point.
If you had any expectations that this was going to be Brat 2.0, Charli subverts these expectations with “Rock Music”, an opening track that barely clocks in under two minutes about partying with her girlfriends, declaring that the dance floor is dead. The instruments used feel like they’ve all been pushed through some kind of filter, with Charli’s delivery of the word “rock” manipulated with an overly exaggerated stuttering effect, enough to drive anyone mad. But again, I think that’s the point. As a single, “Rock Music” doesn’t work; in the context of the album, it does.
Music, Fashion, Film is equal parts nihilistic and optimistic. “SS26” finds her opining about the end of the world, how “music, fashion, and film” won’t be able to save us, yet she concludes the album with a track that talks about the everlasting value of art, thousands of years after we’re gone (more on that later). She goes on a shopping spree for items both material and immaterial on “Card Declined”, while “2007” feels like a Myspace-bedroom-pop track that could have fit in with the likes of artists like Lights and Breathe Carolina. She gets even more tongue-in-cheek on “Wink Wink”, delivering deadpan lines about the expectations people have placed upon her as a person. She swears “I’m not a bad girl anymore”, yet she delivers most of the song in such an intentional monotone as to lay out the sarcasm.
For an album that is trying to take the piss out of the seriousness of being a pop star, Charli XCX manages to craft some truly intimate portraitures of storytelling on “Camera” and “I’m Afraid”. The former track finds her in the midst of an identity crisis, wondering if she should be trading a career in music for acting (“Do I wanna make music? Am I being fucking stupid/If I try to be a girl on the screen when I’m turning thirty-four?”) The latter strips away any semblance of the party facade that Charli has crafted over the last decade and finds her genuinely worried that she might ruin her marriage (“I’m afraid, I’m afraid/I’m nothing without him/What if I ruin it?”). The song is followed by “Yeah”, which mostly repeats the words “I don’t want to” before exploding into an indie-rock-inspired chorus that would fit in perfectly at The Mercury Lounge during the genre’s heyday.
“Persona” finds her confronting what appears to be a difficult friendship, being overtly critical while also reveling in the difficulty (“You call me your best friend, I secretly love it/I find it frustrating, sometimes I get triggered/And that’s probably ‘cos you and I are alike/Yeah, I think I’m so clever, you think I am too). “Magic Metal Montana” is an ode to A.G. Cook, one of her longtime producers who worked on this album, before closing with “No One Lasts Forever”, a hushed yet upbeat indie-pop conclusion that finds Charli (sort of) at peace with her world, or at least what it’s become. She knows that everyone has an opinion, yet she understands that none of this will last forever (“Everyone thinks I’ve got a problem/Since everyone knows my name/That I’m irresponsible and rude/That I’ll put the drugs in my veins”).
The track closes with a spoken word piece from director David Cronenberg, known best for his visceral body metamorphosis films like Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, and A History of Violence. Cronenberg speaks about how some art has lasted for thousands of years, but the creators of those pieces are no longer around to reap the rewards, the praise, the cultural reimaginings of those pieces. The words “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever” are looped twenty-seven times, an interesting nod to the infamous “twenty-seven club” in music (i.e., famous musicians who have all died at the peak of their career and at the age of twenty-seven).
Is there even a purpose to reviewing records anymore, if not to just generate clickbait headlines and be the loudest person in the room with an opinion? I hope this is not the case. I hold out hope that debate, discussion, and contextualization of music will still exist, thousands of years from now, long after we’re gone. Music, Fashion, Film is an interesting entry in Charli XCX’s catalog, yet it certainly won’t be the last one to stir up conversations about the meaning of art and what we should expect from those who achieve stardom. Much like her, I’m looking forward to seeing what the future holds.
