By Zoe Sottile, NCS
(NCS) — Earlier this month, Charli XCX watched “Point Break,” the 1991 motion flick starring Keanu Reeves as a rookie FBI agent. It was, she mentioned, “top to bottom the coolest everrrrr.”
How can we know that? Because she logged it on Letterboxd — in an account that has turn out to be a sneak peek right into a pop icon’s private inventive urge for food. It’s a portrait of a girl who’s as seemingly to devour low tradition (“The Idea of You,” the schmaltzy Anne Hathaway boyband rom-com) as excessive (she gave Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 masterpiece “L’Avventura” 5 stars). The movie reviewing account has lent itself to Charli’s overt styling of herself as an arbiter of taste and an unabashed fan of popular culture.
The rollout of Charli’s latest album “Music, Fashion, Film,” launched Friday, is a sort of Rolodex of references, proof she’s achieved her homework. The album’s foremost cowl doesn’t function the pop star in any respect, however as an alternative titans from the three sectors within the title: John Cale, the legendary Welsh singer and producer who helped discovered The Velvet Underground; Marc Jacobs, the style designer for whose campaigns Charli has posed for previously; and the director Martin Scorsese, trying characteristically nonchalant (Charli’s newest evaluation of a Scorsese movie? 5 stars for “Cape Fear,” the 1991 psychological thriller).
Charli has good taste, and she wants you to know it. With “Music, Fashion, Film,” she additionally wants you to know that the icons she appears up to agree, considering she’s essential sufficient that they’ll fly out for a photograph shoot in a “random kitchen,” per Cale. The finish product is, like her Letterboxd, an ideal juxtaposition between excessive and low, three iconic artists in a dingy room — and, in an alternate cover, the singer herself smoldering amongst them, like their non secular inheritor — or the superfan who’s snuck into the heavyweights’ membership.
It’s cool, Charli says, to care deeply about artwork. Apathy is out.
“Coolness is something I value, because without it everything sort of feels random and nondescript,” she wrote on her Substack in December. “The second you apply a ‘something for everyone’ approach to art in an attempt to deliberately appeal to more people that, in my opinion, is the moment that coolness dies.”
‘Your favorite reference’
Charli’s personal curation of taste and sure, coolness, stems from the fame she’s constructed through the years as a sort of anti-Taylor Swift, strutting on stage in large sun shades and knee-high boots, making dance music about key bumps and her personal membership adventures. She’s offered herself as a substitute to the platonic ideally suited of a pop princess: messier, grungier, much less predictable.
Her mega-successful sixth album “Brat,” launched in 2024, noticed Charli taking that picture to its neon-green excessive, channeling the hot-mess it-girls of the mid 2000s transformed for the web period. The product was an album uniquely and particularly of the second, so hyperpresent that its trademark shade turned the backdrop to a whole summer season.
Aesthetically, the model of cool on “Music, Fashion, Film” is as an alternative a blast from the pre-iPhone previous. The movies launched to date are all black and white, the sound stripped again. “I kind of want to make a Lou Reed record, to be honest,” she told Billboard on the top of “brat summer” in 2024.
The songs off “Music, Fashion, Film” don’t fairly sound like Lou Reed (although she does mimic a few of his deadpan sing-talking) — however Charli absolutely will get her rocker credit score by collaborating together with his longtime musical accomplice Cale, with whom she co-wrote “House” for the “Wuthering Heights” soundtrack. And she does convincing rockstar drag within the video for “Rock Music,” head-banging and pacing round mountains of discarded cigarettes as she professes “the dance floor is dead” over distorted electrical guitar.
The references liberally littered all through “Music, Fashion, Film” reveal how deeply Charli values counterculture — and wants to share it with the lots. Scorsese may seem on the quilt, but it surely’s the godfather of physique horror, David Cronenberg, whose oeuvre of cult basic movies invoke intercourse, loss of life and transformation (basic Charli themes, too) who will get a function and a writing credit score on the album’s final observe.
The video for an additional observe, “Camera,” stars legendary French actor Vincent Cassel, who performed a Cronenberg-proxy within the Canadian auteur’s newest function, “The Shrouds.” Why solid Cassel? “Simply because he’s the coolest,” Charli mentioned in a story for the e-newsletter Drafting.
The video, shot completely in a single take, options Cassel as a annoyed actor — primarily based, spiritually at the very least, partially on a picture of an exhausted James Dean getting his make-up touched up on the set of the 1955 movie “Giant.” Cassel snipes at crew members whereas doing messy reshoots of a scene during which he’s shot within the chest. The shooter is Charli herself, who enters completely poised in Louboutins astride a digital camera dolly.
Charli, creator of worlds
Charli’s depiction of herself because the auteur directing Cassel is an avatar for her broader undertaking: Building a world for her music to reside in. She went viral after declaring “music is not important” on SubwayTakes. “Music is not giving me the world. I need an artist to create the world,” she went on. Her Letterboxd, her Substack, her rigorously coordinated explorations of style and movie: It’s all a part of the sprawling scaffolding that surrounds and helps her musical output.
Despite her Cronenberg fandom, the singer’s kaleidoscopic palette of references isn’t restricted to the avant-garde. Charli is, per music author Spencer Kornhaber, a “student of mainstream pop” who has drawn on the musical and aesthetic types of Janet Jackson and Britney Spears. You can hear the echoes of Britney in Charli’s frequent experiments with autotune and see traces of her styling within the bikini tops and low-slung pants of Charli’s “Vroom Vroom” period. She is aware of the place she suits within the pop pantheon (even whereas sporting extra black than the remaining).
The distinction, mentioned Kornhaber, is Charli’s dedication to autonomy and her public manipulation of her personal picture. “She takes that archetype and she flips it and makes her own authorship a central, undeniable part of the art,” mentioned Kornhaber, a employees author on the Atlantic and the writer of “On Divas.”
On her latest album, she toys explicitly with how a lot of her cool, unhealthy woman picture is an artifice, too — an growth of the Charli XCX cinematic universe. “Maybe I f**ked your dad / Just kidding, I’m only saying that for effect,” she sings on “Wink, Wink,” a raunchy, half-hearted rejection of her risqué persona.
What else is only for impact? Her Letterboxd appears candid, unfiltered — but it surely’s additionally been a method for her to disseminate messages concerning the movies she starred in throughout the “Brat”-”Music, Fashion, Film” interregnum. It’s nonetheless advertising, even when it’s advertising of the “more intimate, personal, private, one on one” model she not too long ago praised on X.
Chasing cool
Charli’s latest problem appears to be determining how to keep cool after attaining the meteoric mainstream success of “Brat.”
It’s a cautious balancing act. Can you be each counterculture and mainstream sufficient to turn out to be a foremost character in Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign? An underground icon who’s additionally collaborated with H&M, Skims and Converse?
“The apex of cool and commercial has always been interesting to me and I have always mused over the point at which something cool dies and is rejected by the initial group of people who made it desirable and aspirational in the first place,” she wrote within the December Substack piece. “Of course I would much rather be considered ‘cool’ by a select few group of people than known by everyone. And yes, I know it’s inherently lame to care about that kind of stuff, but I’m just being honest.”
Fifteen years into her profession, Charli is, like Scorsese and Marc Jacobs, loads nearer to being “known by everyone” than most artists may ever dream of. She’s simply shy of hitting 30 million month-to-month listeners on Spotify. But she’s nonetheless chasing cool: what she characterizes as artwork that’s “specific and niche and a true expression of a person.”
Achieving mainstream stardom hasn’t stopped Cale, Jacobs and Scorsese from sustaining the glimmer of coolness a long time into their careers. Maybe she situates herself amongst them on the album cowl as a sort of protecting amulet in opposition to the revolving door of tradition that sees pop stars — significantly girls — discarded one after the opposite because the zeitgeist shifts.
Charli’s shameless celebration of her taste comes as AI corporations are promising everyone will be an artist. If anybody could make work of technical top quality, then taste and discrimination turn out to be much more salient. Taste, artistry, coolness: They’re the foreign money of a brand new world. And Charli, she wants us to know, is wealthy in them.
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