shock me shock me shock me
a fan's notes on Charli XCX, part 3
III. with that deviant behavior
In 2016, Charli XCX began a blazing hot streak, a run of albums that topped each others’ greatness in swift succession, growing weirder and weirder. “Vroom Vroom” was the first moment of departure.
Everything about title track seems engineered toward the edge of what would be comfortable. The bass line anticipates the downbeat just enough to make you feel like you’re being thrown back against the car seat as an insane leadfoot teenage girl peels out of a high school parking lot. And everything that follows is off from where you expect it—minimalist beat where you think it would build, sweetly and nearly fake voices on the chorus.
My previous Charli fandom took the form of fairly conventional pop star adulation—the songs gave me access to a way of thinking about myself that felt freeing and beneficial. I don’t mean to denigrate this identity-building dimension of music fandom, although what I’m about to say will sort of rherotically move like that. But everything Charli made after “Vroom Vroom” is completely different. Instead of rendering songs that are reasonable inclusions on The Fault in Our Stars OST, the direction is (thanks to production from SOPHIE) chipward, glitchward, with voices transforming mid-note into distorted Auto-Tuned rips. And I stopped being a fan in the “girl power” sense. Instead, I began appreciating Charli for pushing the edge of what is popular, what is enjoyable, what is even possible to dance to.
Pitchfork gave it a 4.5, calling Charli a “vapid cypher” and bewailing the disappearance of her Sucker era, “pop with a death drive.” This assessment has aged poorly—if nothing else, building a song around the Pulp Fiction sample of Mia Wallace saying “I want to win, I want that trophy” kind of makes you want to drift a car across a parking lot. (The writer Laura Snapes later walked back her review, apologizing for failing to recognize that Charli was way ahead of her time.)
But I can understand the initial pan of the EP, because it engages so thoroughly with edge and discomfort. If you were hoping for another “Boom Clap,” you would have to look elsewhere. “Spring Breakers” takes the lyrics of what had previously been her biggest hit and recasts them as the sound of Charli blowing up the red carpet at the Staples Center with a lit cigarette and a slick of gasoline. (Literally, this is the lyric content.) It had the sound of someone who had gotten sick of playing by everyone else’s rules and was now determined to do her own thing, even if that was a totally abrasive pivot. “Never get invited cause I’m such a hater.” So literally, why not blow it up?
I have written, more than once, a story about a seemingly placid woman who does something violent and unexpected. She sets her hair on fire (“Someday Soon, You’ll Be On Fire”). She locks an attempted robber in a barn and tortures him (“Killers”). She commits arson at a museum (“Kerosene”).
I have only so far managed to publish one of these, the first. The others have gotten some consideration, but they haven’t yet made the cut. One little bit of feedback I hear quite often is: “This isn’t believable—why does the character do this all of a sudden?” To which I say—why not just believe that she does, and work backward from there?
Earlier in this essay, I mentioned that I discovered Charli around the time that I moved back to Pittsburgh and got a full-time job post MFA. I went to work in the morning, went to the gym and an AA meeting after work, and then went home to write. I turned down social invitations. I sacrificed what felt like a lot of life in order to have those nights. It was a time of tremendous discipline and intense focus. But the thing that people might not understand about writers is that sometimes we don’t work out of generosity of spirit—sometimes we work out of a hunger to exist on our own terms. To prove something, defeat someone. (“I want to win, I want that trophy.”)
What I’m going to say next will sound ungraceful or possibly a little too self-censuring, but: I had a lot of energy to write Marilou Is Everywhere because I believed it would change my life. It did change my life, of course. But not to the impossible degree that I had hoped. I angled that book and its subject matter toward a sweet spot that I knew lots of people had a (not entirely charitable) hunger for: the poor sad Appalachian teenage girl in a too-tight Tweety Bird shirt.
Please don’t get me wrong—I love that book, and I’m proud of it. In spite of myself, I think it ended up being greater than my ambitions for it. (Books are wiser than people.) But without a doubt, I wrote it very much with someone else’s “rules” in mind. These are subtle, if they are even real at all. Most of them are probably my projections. (Although some aren’t—there is a vast appetite for the kind of pathos that flattens characters and reaches for cheap tears [see: Glenn Close in Hillbilly Elegy]). I wrote the book that I thought would be acceptable, and after I had the good fortune of publishing it, I discovered that I hadn’t won the game. There would always be more rules, conflicting rules. And until I rejected them all, my metric for success would be in others’ hands, and never my own.
The Vroom Vroom EP is where Charli diverges from the slightly scattershot early career of an undeniably talented person to proper lore. And for years, she had a sort of cult status. Art that chases the ugly edge and reclaims it as beauty isn’t for everyone, but it is very definitely for some of us.
One question in her career had always been: when will she cross over, and why hasn’t it happened yet? Presumably the writer of hits like Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” could write a hit for herself, no? And yet, somehow, there was always the sense that Charli’s efforts on her own behalf were held back by some invisible force. (When Crash came out in 2022, there was some speculation that the lyric “I always let the good ones go” wasn’t about men, but rather about the chunes she wrote for others.) It seemed like she had cast the die back in “Spring Breakers” with the line “Always gonna lose to people playing safer.”
But you all know what happens next ….
Thank you for reading! The usual weekly bibliomancy forecast will be back soon. Until then, I hope you enjoyed this! And, to be real for a second, I love writing about music. If you know anybody who’s hiring for that kind of thing, tell me where to find them. I write about stuff that isn’t pop music, too.