teenage vision quest
cosmic vault of unreleased tracks OR Charli XCX: a fan's notes
Welcome back to part II of a Charli XCX: A Fan’s Notes. A long essay on my favorite pop star and the gifts of fandom.
II. certain damaged lemons
When I grew up, it was entirely possible to hear a song without knowing what it was. Furthermore, it was possible to hear a song you didn’t know and never find out what it was. I mean never. And furthermore, if you listened to college radio in your rural teenage bedroom (WGLZ from West Liberty, West Virginia), or if you had to position your boombox just so in the northeast corner of your room to get 104.7 the Revolution all the way from Pittsburgh, a swarm of static might obscure the moment when the DJ said the name of the song you liked so much. My friends made mixtapes off the radio, and sometimes they didn’t know the names of the songs on them, either.
Discovering music was not a given, and for that reason, it felt valuable, personal. A process. A conspiracy theory. A vision quest. It felt personal, even though by nature, the recording and distribution of a song is anything but.
That experience is by now an inherently nostalgic one (and it freaks me out, how old it makes me sound to describe it at all). Discovery is an increasingly mediated process. Instead of geographical proximity—i.e. hearing “Stereo” at the Den in Morgantown, WV, in 1998—you might hear Pavement for the first time due to quantitative proximity, because an algorithm decided that 7 times out of 10, a person who just listened to Yo La Tengo would also like Slanted & Enchanted. No more scene. No more cool older brothers. No more jukeboxes in dive bars acting as a subcultural archive. Just probability, measurability. Prediction is anti-excitement, and if a song isn’t on Spotify, it might as well not exist at all.
But there is one way you can still have some version of the teenage vision quest. Go to YouTube and search “charli xcx” + “unreleased.”
I know, I know. YouTube is also an algorithm. One which notoriously nudges viewers predisposed to conspiracy content toward troughs of lizard people garbage. But it is also one of the few places where you can reliably go to find music that isn’t on Spotify, and it is the place where I discovered the enormous hidden catalog of unreleased Charli XCX songs.
Oddly enough, I have Google to thank for this—at that job I mentioned last week, we worked on company ChromeBooks without download permissions, so if you wanted to listen to music while you taxonomized the Google Shopping Experience, you had to open YouTube in your browser. I tended to listen to full albums, but I was often so engrossed in my shopping ontology (ultimately, what is the category difference between a doll and a stuffed animal? Beware, this is not a simple question) that I didn’t immediately notice when the Protomartyr record or whatever was done playing and the YouTube algorithm took over.
My acquaintance with Charli XCX began in a mode fairly common with pop stars, or anyone, really: I found a future version of myself in a song. The music was a bridge from one place to another (one self to another). But when I discovered the absolutely massive catalogue of unreleased Charli XCX songs floating around on YouTube, my fandom modulated into another shape, one I don’t know exactly how to describe.
For one thing, I am and always have been a pop simpleton. I love a hook. The only thing better than a hook is three hooks and a prechorus. I love the dance between the predictable and the surprising. I love the familiar twist of a bog standard chord change. And before Charli was the face of PC Music, she was a neverending fountain of hooks.
Her unreleased material is fathomless. I haven’t listened to all of it—not even close. For every studio record, there are probably 40 or 50 unreleased songs. Some are just demos and sketches, but many of them are fully produced songs that didn’t make the cut. Every time I discover another randomer on soundcloud with a 300+ playlist of unreleased material, I think I have at least found the edges of the pool. And then I find another, and another.
It is totally normal—and super teenage—to use songs and movies as the building blocks of a self. Before you know what anything means, you know that you like the way a person moves. You learn the moves. Maybe in a studied way, maybe not. (Like the first time I ashed a cigarette into my bathwater, high on Franny & Zooey). (Or maybe the first time I peed in the street between two parked cars, high on Ke$ha.)
There’s first-order pop song fandom—a courage that kindles in you when you run into the dance floor, for example. That’s for everyone. But second-order pop song fandom happens when you fall into a vault of gems—riches that have not seen the light outisde a twink’s anonymous dropbox account. Some kinds of fandom thrive on the manufactured sense of insider-ness that true heads cultivate to lord over pretenders to the scene. But from another angle, there’s this incredible sense of discovery. It’s like realizing that you have identified yourself not just with a person, but with a cosmos.
Thank you for reading! I feel incredibly scattered this week and am not quite convinced that I said any of the things I meant to say here—but come back next week, I’ll try again. xS