The first time I heard a Charli xcx song, she wasn’t singing it. I was sitting on the asphalt with the rest of my middle school P.E. class, and a girl started singing “I’m so fancy, you already know …” and the rest of the class joined in.
It was so catchy that, once I found out what the song was, I bought Iggy Azalea’s CD so I could listen to it (there’s a silly and very dated picture I took of it somewhere, with me showing the bottom half of my face smiling with an old Instagram filter on it). It broke my brain as I tried to figure out what made the song sound so good, and what made it so satisfying to sing.
The drive to figure it out perplexes me to this day, leading me to ask one of her producers if there was something she does in the studio that people may not know about.
“She freestyles on the mic, then knows which ones she likes and doesn’t like immediately. If she doesn’t like it, she immediately says so and moves on.”
Through the years, I loved how she had these mind blowing pop songs just sitting around on random projects, that somehow didn’t go number one. “Boys,” “Official,” and “7 Years” among them, I collected them like gems. It felt like I lived in an alternate universe, where there’s a completely different music charting system, and Charli had made these hit songs specifically for a universe only I had access to.
The real world, until more recently, had always felt too far behind. But today, you may know her more from her (very overdue) explosion for her solo work into the mainstream with brat (which won three Grammy Awards, and sparked a cultural phenomenon dubbed Brat Summer), a moment long overdue. A moment which also served as the inspiration for Aidan Zamiri’s film The Moment that Charli starred in. Having grinded from humble beginnings posting songs on Myspace and the London rave scene, her latest record Music, Fashion, Film (MFF) sees her contending with who she’s become since then, almost two decades later, and explores the aftermath of brat. Charli analyzes her life from multiple angles, from a surge of inspiration she touches on in her Spotify bio (my favorite one I’ve read so far): “I feel so lucky that I feel so inspired. If you feel inspired then you’re lucky too. But if you don’t feel it right now, that’s okay. Because one day you’ll feel it and when you do, you’ll feel like you’ve been let in on the best secret in the world. And then it will fade away again.”
I was lucky enough to review her tour for this record, one that I had no knowledge of at all before attending. I was really excited to see that Charli was bringing underscores to open, I’ve been a fan of both of them for a long time, and the opening performance was an incredible mix of sound and technology that could be an entire piece itself.
As Charli’s set started, the show kicked off with the lead single from MFF, “Rock Music,” with her standing on an enormous, tiered, rectangular structure. The boxes flashed with light along with the music as she stood and writhed around, looking confidently bored. Album cuts “Yeah,” “Wink Wink,”“Persona,” “Card Declined,” and “I’m Afraid” saw Charli on a catwalk, as giant lights illuminated her and a team of dancers strutting threateningly.
As a fan of “Track 10,” I was surprised to hear her perform it. She oscillated between strutting and flitting around the stage, which seemed fitting as she sang, “every time you get too close, I run, I run away.” Other fan favorites included “pink diamond,” “party 4 u,” and “Vroom Vroom.”
Sadly, she did not bring Lorde out for “Girl, so confusing” (like Lorde did last year in the same venue), but she did bring out a stacked string of guests: Chappell Roan for her throwback hit “Boom Clap” (the screams were deafening), PinkPantheress for a cover of “Stateside,” and The Dare for “Guess,” as pairs of underwear were shot from cannons into the crowd (I am very sad I wasn’t able to grab one). I was amazed to hear the “Boom Clap” intro, since it was the one song (besides the tour’s record) I chose to play on the drive over, because I was missing it. “She said she would only come if I played this song,” Charli shared as she introduced Roan, later saying “let’s get a bit more British” when bringing PinkPantheress out.
Charli also played songs from her Wuthering Heights soundtrack, including “House” and, my personal favorite, “Dying for You.” I was also shocked to hear this song, and was really hoping she’d play it or “Out of Myself.” The intro brought me back to Valentine’s Day, when I saw Wuthering Heights with my boyfriend at the drive-in.
Charli then played some brat classics, including, of course, “Club classics, “365,” “Sympathy is a knife,” and “Von dutch.” After, she played “If You Take Away the Music Then What Has She Got?,” which was one of the unexpected highlights of the show for me. It’s a song that simply drones on with the title being repeated over and over. But something about the way Charli delivered it with both self-awareness and earnestness, after a slew of some of her biggest songs from her most culturally significant record yet, the performance framed the previous songs in an entirely different light; one that made their defensive bravado seem intimately fragile.
Charli played a few more songs from MFF, including “2007,” “SS26,” and my personal favorite, “Camera.” It hit me, deeply, on first listen, and I encourage any artist to give it a listen if they can, with the lyrics, “maybe this is it, maybe it’s what I need, ‘cause it’s the only way to feel like I’m not actually me.”
The show closed with the last song of MFF, “No One Lasts Forever,” ending with a zoom out of Charli standing completely still amongst her dancers. She looked straight down the camera (like she mentions in the song), and the speech from the end of the song played in the background, white text on the stage screens. “Some artists have created art that has really survived thousands of years. And that’s fantastic, but experientially, for them, they are dead, they are gone, they are not experiencing that. These are true things and thank goodness for them … you hear me assuring you that oblivion is freedom. They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever.”
In a show that turns the camera on herself then back at you, Charli captured her life onstage in a spectacle that was, in equal parts, both introspective and grand. I could truly feel her attention, care, and how important creating this show was to her.
The world may not have, and may never fully catch up to Charli xcx, but we’ve come closer. And, for someone always ahead of her time, this show proves that Charli not only predicts culture, she creates it.
You must be logged in to post a comment.