Charli XCX is the Best Pop Star We Have

Past Canons are great and all, but what about Pop?

Given all my concern for past literary canons and the aesthetic tradition, I don’t actually have anything very pessimistic to say about popular music or cinema. At least, I think there is still great stuff everywhere, especially compared to the general boredom of twenty-first century literature, or the absolute wasteland which is contemporary art. It’s just a lot harder to find these days. We look back at the 1960s and 70s especially as times when great popular music and film were, if not always greater, then at least much much more common, and capable of reaching real audiences. Where has that world gone? Probably, it was buried by sheer risk-averse capital. Though not all of it. If anything, the 2010s recently brought with it an explosion of extraordinary independent pop music all over the Internet. What’s different now is that the most brilliant pop music barely reaches a sizable audience. Part of the mission of Vita Contemplativa is (along with, yes, re-connecting our desiccated literary culture with the still-living power of its past), celebrating the great popular culture we have right now, because it’s too often stuck in the recesses of the internet, or the backlogs of streaming services, or underrated by gatekeepers, or kept far from the algorithms which cater only to the dull middle “mainstream.”

This one’s gonna digress a little, so bear with me.

The first Obama term marked the absolute nadir of American culture. Not that he really had much to do with it—the world’s first genuinely global culture, which had begun the new century basking in the End of History, immured in a gluttonous belief in limitless growth, had been ground to crumbs by the end of the Bush years. Pop culture was miserable. Aaliyah was dead. Her champion Timbaland (the genius producer of the Y2K era) was working with OneRepublic. For every Timberlake or Beyonce there was a Nickelback, or a Plain White Ts. Shitty, whiny emo and horrible screamo were everywhere. American Idol was cloning endlessly, reality TV was reaching its crescendo, and while the international and independent cinemas were still producing plenty of brilliant movies, Hollywood was trying to figure out how to make superhero movies work, starting the mass shift from modest budgets to hulking new franchises.

As the young blogs like Pitchfork made clear, there was still a lot of great rap, tons of great electronic music, and good indie rock (though if you weren’t on the coasts and weren’t yet on the internet, you often didn’t find out about it until long after). Early on, people were talking a lot about a “rock revival” but even the best of that music—The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio—today sounds very much of its time (which is part of its continuing charm; lesser bands like Interpol, Bloc Party, The Libertines sound all but dead). Meanwhile, country music still couldn’t fathom that 9/11 had happened. In retrospect, the greatest pop album of the Bush years was probably Back to Black—a document of a remarkable, doomed voice already frozen in amber, a woman who (let’s face it) was never going to make music that felt like the twenty-first century, whom many people were only using to feed a desire to go backwards in the search for new pop paramours.

Obama’s election and the 2008 Recession brought on a kind of general frenzy, all the accelerated idiocy of the Bush years revving up into a glittery, trashy party that could barely disguise all the rot and exhaustion. EDM was conquering, and the pop songs of the era were becoming tyrannically fun - in fact the biggest “rock band” in the world was called fun. and they sang about how tonight was the only time that had ever existed. "I’ve Got a Feeling,” Ke$ha, “Gangnam Style,” LMFAO. The hit songs were all variations on the same thing (always half-sung in thick, gloppy, sparkly Autotune): we’re partying/the fun is never stopping/we’re going to party until we die/we’re never going to die/drink until you puke then drink again/Molly molly molly molly.” MySpace was giving way to Facebook, YouTube was the new MTV, music festivals were getting huge again. “Serious” pop music meant Adele, who was nice enough, though mostly turgid and overdone. At least the “new” indie rock was better (though the success of Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver cursed us with years of horrendous hey-ho-ing). Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, Arcade Fire—the better indie artists of that moment now sound less of their time, and more timeless, and were already starting to feed into the a rush of independent music opportunities.

By 2012 things were starting to change. Drake and The Weeknd had made hip-hop and R&B sad. Kendrick and Frank Ocean helped make both genres vaguely prestigious again. In 2013, Miley Cyrus twerked on Robin Thicke at the VMAs and we all just felt kind of queasy about it. Miley was late to a party that was already ending. In 2014, a weird goth-y New Zealand teenager had the biggest pop song in the world. Lady Gaga started falling off. Party drugs were giving way to opiates and fentanyl and lean; trap music was leaking out the trap (slowly replacing EDM as pop’s bedrock style, just like rock n’ roll once did jazz); and while the news showed us images of black teenagers being murdered, pop struggled to keep the party going. Many songs weren’t even about how fun it all was but about how we couldn’t stop. The new culture was becoming fucked-up and faded.

And Lana had the greatest pop song of the era:

People forget it, but even before she was becoming the soundtrack for a certain kind of TUMBLR-adjacent attitude, this song felt like something else. The new nostalgia was in full bloom (and Lana is still a very potent artist of nostalgia) but this woman was crooning. This was a different kind of grandness, a deliberate romanticism. The ersatz orchestra behind her was ironic but not really—in 2012 everyone was kidding about kidding, more and more we were all David Foster Wallace, talking very sincerely about the poison of irony. Before long we were utilizing the whole apparatus of Web 2.0 to shout at each other about politics, believing fervently in things we’d only heard of yesterday. Unaware of how ironic, or secretly cynical, it was.

The strange road which followed is harder to sketch out with such a broad brush. The stasis of the second Obama term, and the mania of Trump’s term, were as vapid as ever at the mass culture level, yet people had at least somewhat figured out how to use the Internet to turn the interesting into the discoverable. All the weirdos and brilliant basement-dwellers who once made their music in their rooms might even get on the advanced festival track, or land on bigger records’ guest spots. Tyler, Frank, Tame Impala, Mac Demarco, Grimes—in 2012 these were boutique indie kids and upstarts which the blogosphere had just seized on. Now they have hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify and Apple (the first three with songs that have passed a billion), Zoomers still know who they are, average listeners might encounter their music on average playlists. Though this was the age of rampant Poptimism™ (which may be ending now, given all the Pitchfork postmortems), the truly great pop productions were still happening far from the actual Billboard charts. They still are, for the most part—a genuine auteurist like Caroline Polachek can release one of the best pop albums in years but will never be as big as the small economy that is Dua Lipa, one of the least-compelling pop stars to ever draw breath. Our two remaining pop giantesses —Beyonce and Taylor—are the only artists to have stayed at the top through the last fifteen years (or more), the one by casting herself as an avatar of social progress, the other by understanding better than anyone the Internet’s demonic gifts for para-social fandoms, and those fandoms’ fetish for performed vulnerability.

But (and I should probably brace for impact) neither Beyonce or Taylor make great music. Beyonce did early on; Taylor probably never has. That’s not to say it’s not all perfectly fine. But it’s also often artless, craven, or false. As for the younger phenoms, Billie Eilish keeps falling just short of making really interesting music, despite a clear aesthetic sense, and maybe only Olivia Rodrigo has the tunes to make a go of it, if she’d just ditch the maudlin ballads and stick to anthems (though even those are a bit too much of a pure nostalgia project).

No, we only have one great pop star remaining, and that’s Charli XCX. Really: Charli may just be the savviest and the freest pop star of the century, even if her best and most adventurous music never finds as big an audience as it ought to. Yet somehow—whether because she understands the weird history of the Internet, our obsession with Irony and Anti-Irony and Post-Irony—or else because she doesn’t care—she’s become the most sincere pop performer alive. “Sincere,” which is to say always aware of the pose, the voyeurism, and the calculation of it all (the maze that is Internet “authenticity”), and always rather simply and rather endearingly saying, “Yes, fine, but I’ll do it the way I want to.” She could and should be our Madonna. After all, she’s already got as many good albums under her belt.

When her debut record, 2013’s True Romance, came out, she was an ambitious MySpace go-getter who’d given Icona Pop their only hit. But there was something in the air, and the album felt a little like an advance guard, like Korine’s Spring Breakers, and like some of the glitchy, curatorial TUMBLR sprit leaking into the broader culture. Also like the first wave of unapologetic ‘80s throwbacks, which probably climaxed later in the decade with the opening credits of Stranger Things. It was glossy but tasteful—Ariel Rechtshaid produced it, and 2013 was his year: Modern Vampires of the City, Sky Ferreira’s Night Time is My Time, the first Haim record, all arrived with months of each other, all baring Rechtshaid’s stamp. It was fresh music at the time, especially coming off an era of Mumford and Sons and Avicii and the Black Eyed Peas. Like Ferreira, many of Charli’s songs mapped out clear ‘80s territory but managed to shift the focus just enough to feel contemporary. Yet that stuff is now the most dated music on the album. But the best thing on the record flipped a classic instrumental by producer Gold Panda into something even catchier:

Again, like Spring Breakers, the video perfectly encapsulated an era in which Internet “aesthetic” curation was starting to take on an ironic junk quality, tacky girly-ness bumping up against droll gangsta poses, the trashy glitter blitz of the EDM period beginning to change into something more self-consciously “cool.” This was where Charli XCX was really born.

But True Romance failed to chart and Charli started making duller music. Though it was, of course, when she finally broke through—“Boom Clap” and “Break the Rules” and (sigh) “Fancy” all had a curiously similar feeling: two had music videos set in high schools, “Boom Clap” got big from a weepy teen movie. All felt pandering and all have dated terribly. Until she started making music with the P.C. Music kids on 2016’s Vroom Vroom EP, she was in danger of being just another Rita Ora—vaguely known and very well-sponsored but hardly interesting. The burgeoning hyperpop thing ended up being great for Charli. And though P.C. Music had been going since 2013, it was Charli who really elevated what they were doing. Even the best record in the P.C. wheelhouse, SOPHIE’s Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, is more often of era-specific interest, though it occasionally reached towards genuinely huge, moving pop. Rather than being “revolutionary,” SOPHIE and A.G. Cook and the other P.C. Music people made music that was more interesting as a laboratory for further electronic exploration. But those digital extremities never really had anywhere to go. And anything that’s hyper for long enough necessarily collapses from exhaustion.

Charli got better: 2017’s Pop 2 and 2019’s Charli were critical successes. Both were too bloated by guest vocals, though there were interesting moments where she could fold in memorable tunes and new textures. The main accomplishment of those records was to make her no longer just an in-demand It-Girl with cool hyperpop friends. The sheer number of guest artists gave the impression that she herself was a center of gravity around which aspiring pop performers were revolving, who could only gain traction by being invited onto her stage. She was becoming an established pop curator. And she later returned to this less interesting, more algorithm-friendly pop format with 2022’s Crash, which is a fair bit better than those two, though it still sounded too much like other things.

What happened in between, in 2020, however, is what finally made Charli an artist. how i’m feeling now is (and I say this without exaggeration) one of the best pure pop albums of my lifetime. No more guest spots, no more tunes which could be mistaken for anybody else: how i’m feeling now plunged straight into genuinely adventurous electronic music, smartly pruned and shaped to fit the sexy, un-self-serious persona Charli was building. Of course nobody appreciated it as such, but it was the most forward-thinking thing anybody at her level of popularity had produced in at least a decade. It was also earnestly romantic. Charli had figured out how to balance personal confession with a great, droll sense of humor, and still keep her dark-room-dance-floor-sexiness intact. It was a conceptual coup too effortless for anyone to notice.

It was also the moment where all the fun experiments of hyperpop could, under the direction of someone with a littl vision, finally become a real human thing. Humanity swished around in a soup of Internet glitch, sure, but still genuinely sensuous and alive. It was the exact moment that all those blippy synths and crazy-pitched drum-pads and general post-everything Internet kitsch finally became functional pop music, not just a vaguely avant riff on pop-music-as-machine-music. Which was all down to Charli’s good taste. Naturally, how i’m feeling now was her lowest-charting album.

Though Charli has a recognizable voice, she isn’t a particularly great singer. But how I’m feeling now revealed that she knows exactly how to use it for what she’s doing, which in its skillful way is infinitely more interesting than a chronic belter like Adele or Gaga. And by whatever digital alchemy, something wonderful happens to her voice when run through the production fx gamut. She’s just about the only singer whose voice I could imagine actually working on an Aphex Twin track. She’s also the only pop star who can vaguely speak/half-rap the occasional verse and make it feel right, instead of precious or cringe. This is all part of the paradigm: I might even go so far as to say that Charli is the one genuinely popular musician who has precisely learned the lessons of all twenty-first century pop music, most of which has been an aesthetic failure, or at least a failure to shape popular taste with popular art, rather than just to command a kind of mindless popular allegiance to mindless corporate products. Whether unable to escape the confines of mass-commercial necessity, or incapable of generating something beyond rote nostalgia, or else just shackled by the increasing sterility of purely electronic sound (think of how much hip-hop of the past few years sounds like it was made in a virtual bathtub), contemporary pop usually fails to provide the goods. That is, the things which helped Anglo-American pop musicians dominate global culture in the late twentieth century: the presentation of some genuine Personality, with a genuine Sensibility, harnessed to the cutting edge of recording technology, and a sense of societal spectacle that turned to commentary and expression, not just to the service of high-placed monetary interests.

Charli’s best music has been one of the few current places where an intelligent pop persona has worked out a way of making all our metal machine music sound more human, not less. And now with Brat, she sounds more herself than ever. It seems reviewers are finally getting the picture—Brat is already starting to feel like the thing she’s been building up to, cementing her unique position in what’s left of mass culture. It’s not perfect (some of it still strays occasionally into the anonymous) but it’s still the kind of remarkable compromise between mass-commercial reach and genuine pop auteurism that hasn’t happened in a very long time. Few artists with this level of actual cultural impact are so willing to do something that feels this personal (even clumsily so, in some of these tracks) yet also sounds like it is happening right now, not five or ten or twenty years ago.

The hyperpop extremes of how i’m feeling now have been channeled into more focused rave anthems, one effortless hook after another. It’s more a proper dance album, with hyperpop inflections. Cut after cut—“360,” “Cult classics,” “Talk talk,” “Von dutch,” “B2b” —have the instant durability of established club classics themselves, in an immediately memorable way that dance music hasn’t felt since, I don’t know, Disclosure’s Settle. Something primal and Platonic: ur-dance-music, like Mr. Fingers, Frank de Wulf’s “Kinetic” remix, 808 State’s “Pacific State,” or Daft Punk—perfectly calibrated for that big rave gong down at the end of time.

But—this is crucial—all happening within Charli’s world. A world where people definitely still have sex, let loose, sweat too much, yearn, pine. The lockdown dreaming of how i‘m feeling now has given way to a renewed, public kind of dance-pop. And though Charli is still singing very intimately and personally about how she’s feeling now—about her new beau, about missing past glory days, about missing Sophie, about wanting a baby, maybe—it’s all facing deliberately outward. You’re clearly supposed to move to it, with other people. And without even a bit of preaching, it comes across like an antidote to the strictures of the last ten years of uptight politesse, an idea of a future that’s warmer and freer. Personal expression and unbothered fun on the dance-floor. Conscientious self-reflection and a healthy amount of hedonism. Having all the It Girl attention and wanting to get out from under some of our era’s crushing narcissism. Perhaps because she’s so unconcerned with overthinking what she's doing, she almost convinces me it’s possible.

If there really is another “vibe shift” happening—some vague revolution hangover, the morning-after of a certain frantic mode of progressivism, or the beginning of a new cycle of etc. etc. etc.—then I predict that Brat will be the album of that shift. The vague story it tells isn’t one of the ones we’ve gotten used to over the past few years: sheer vanity disguised as “empowerment,” the ostensible “calling out” of political authority, empty enjoinment to self-love or self-care, wokeness or anti-wokeness. Threaded through the album are prosaic and endearingly simple wonderings, little questions, some almost spoken rather than sung, about why anything is anything, where meaning actually is, whether she really wants the fame, a husband, a child of her own, or a room of her own, or both. The story it tells is of a young woman with impossible Internet savvy and unparalleled It Girl cachet, becoming interested in just being for a while, figuring out what all this shit means—figuring out why she does any of it. That, and of course just wanting to dance.

Perhaps I’m overthinking things myself, and our girl has simply granted us another great pop album. But great pop is a rare joy, and if she gets anything, Charli gets that. Which is why she’s the best pop star we have.