brat but it's a 3000 word article on substack
A love letter/paranoid schizophrenic rant about Charli XCX
The first time I saw Charli XCX in concert was at Pitchfork Music Festival in the summer of 2019. I went with two of my best friends that I have known since the second grade, and we started in the middle of the vast crowd until the very first song began to play. Suddenly, at the moment the music began to play, my body was pushed by a surge of homosexuals, all aching to be closer to the stage, to the second row. I can still remember that concert like it was yesterday. Despite being all alone in a sea of concertgoers, I was having the time of my life, and I can still vividly remember being so close that at one point, I swear to fucking god, she pointed at me and smiled. Now, as I sit here writing this a little over a week after seeing her live for the fourth time, I can still say that the magic of a Charli XCX concert has not gone away, but has only grown more powerful over the years.
I must confess, I am not the oldest Charli XCX fan in the world. While I do remember having “Boom Clap,” off of her 2014 album Sucker, play whenever you entered the desktop version of my high school Tumblr blog (vaginaholics.tumblr.com), and I vaguely remember hearing the song “Cloud Aura,” from the 2013 album True Romance (and featuring the incomparable Brooke Candy), around the same time, I have not been here since the beginning. No, sadly I wasn’t in the trenches with the True Romance Angels, and it took me about five years after them to catch up to what they were onto all along. I discovered Charli XCX almost purely by chance, at a Super Bowl party my freshman year of college. I detailed a little bit of that here, but the long and short of it is that it was a liberal arts college, and no one cared about sports. After the two girls that did care left in a tizzy because no one would stop talking over the game, we muted the TV and someone hooked their phone up to a speaker and began playing music. That was the first time I ever heard Charli XCX’s “Unlock It” off of the 2017 mixtape Pop 2.
“Unlock It” is a very glittery and bouncy song, and it’s one of the easier songs from Charli XCX’s more recent oeuvre to get people to listen to. The song features the lyrics of a much easier person to like at the time, Kim Petras, inexplicably, K-pop star Jay Park, and is produced by A.G. Cook and Life Sim (the latter the founder of the UK-based record label PC Music and pioneer of the since-bastardized genre of “hyperpop”). When I heard the song I was immediately obsessed. It was one of those songs that was very clearly “for The Gays,” and yet I’d never heard it before. In high school, I listened to things like Lady Gaga and Beyonce, until a very hard pivot senior year into almost entirely EDM. In my mind “Unlock It” felt like the perfect fusion of the two, music for gay ears with electronic influences (though not as insanely bro-coded as the EDM I listened to in high school), blended brilliantly into one. A song made perfectly for me, by an artist making music entirely for me.
But that was only the beginning, and it wasn’t long before I was an obsessive Charli XCX superfan. As it turns out, one of my closest friends actually had been in the True Romance trenches, and I was more than grateful to have someone show me the ropes. I made it my mission to learn everything I could about Charli XCX, I learned about Pop 2, its predecessor (and, sorry to everyone else out there, perhaps superior) mixtape Number 1 Angel. I learned about the Vroom Vroom EP (the title song of which I have permanently tattooed on my body), produced by one of the most visionary artists of our time, SOPHIE (rest in peace, angel). I learned about her scrapped third album, XCX World, which will never see the light of day on Spotify despite it living on the phones and laptops of thousands of homosexuals all over the world due to various leaks throughout the years. I learned about the hundreds of other scrapped and leaked songs in her discography, and I downloaded them all on my college laptop to play endlessly.
All of this knowledge had to go somewhere, and this was a time before long-form essay writing on Substack.com was an option for me, so I instead devoted much of my time in college to a Twitter account dedicated to Charli XCX. The name began as @bvrnrubber, a reference to a SOPHIE song Charli lip-synced to once at a concert promoting Number 1 Angel (though, if we’re being technical, which I am, the actual song doesn’t feature Charli’s vocals at all), and it functioned as a depository of sorts for every inane thought or joke I had about Charli XCX and the musicians surrounding her. It was a shrine to the musician I had grown to love so much so quickly, and every tweet was an offering at her altar. Though I still tweet very regularly, and some of it is still very much about Charli XCX, @bvrnrubber was suspended by the faceless and nameless puppet masters at Twitter after I said I was going to kill someone with my bare hands my sophomore year of college (as a joke). Here are some highlights you probably won’t understand unless you listen to Charli XCX:
The second time I saw Charli XCX in concert was for her fourth album Charli, only a few months after I saw her at Pitchfork. My two friends and I arrived at the Chicago House of Blues at about 4 am to attempt to wait in line to get meet-and-greet tickets, but it didn’t appear that the line had even begun (probably because it was 4 in the morning). We went back home, waited a couple of hours, and when we returned at a more normal hour the line was so long that we missed the meet and greet tickets by maybe two people ahead of us. By the time we got into the venue to wait for Charli’s first opener Dorian Electra, I realized I had barely eaten or drank water the entire day, and was also running on minimal sleep after having woken up so early in a feeble attempt to meet Charli XCX at 4 am. It was at that point the world around me started to spin, and I pushed my way out of the crowd to the bar to get a drink of water and an order of french fries before I passed out.
I’ll leave out the part where my other friend also fainted and had to leave the concert out of respect for him, and also brevity’s sake, but once Charli got onstage we decided to watch from a distance to try to prevent anyone else in our posse from succumbing to a lack of sleep and nutrients. Despite being far away from her, I could still feel her energy, and I still had a great time watching her sing songs like “Blame it on Your Love ft. Lizzo” and “Warm ft. HAIM” from far away. There was still something so undeniable about her that drew me in.
Everyone suspected it would be a while before Charli released another album. Though she had released Vroom Vroom, Number 1 Angel, and Pop 2 between her second album Sucker, and her newest album, Charli was still only her third album proper, and it had taken five years for us to get what we all called on Twitter “XCX3.” God smiled upon us, however, and delivered something none of us saw coming. For in the wet markets of Wuhan, China, a bat was making love to a pangolin, and someone else was eating their twisted offspring in an airport before their international flight, and suddenly the whole entire world was locked down and I lost my job at American Eagle.
While her last several projects were produced by the likes of A.G. Cook and SOPHIE, and very much considered “hyperpop,” How I’m Feeling Now, Charli’s pandemic project created entirely in her own home, felt like the moment when she started leaning into that angle. Hyperpop as a genre had been gaining steam for several years, and new DIY hyperpop musicians were popping up and being added to the official Spotify “Hyperpop” playlist every day, so it made sense for Charli to want to capitalize on the microgenre’s newfound success. Songs like “Claws” produced by Dylan Brady, one-half of hyperpop mainstay 100 gecs, and “Anthems” produced by another prominent figure in the scene, Danny L. Harle (and lyrics literally written by fans over the course of an Instagram Live session), really feel like Charli fully inhabiting the bleep-bloop-robo-femme persona people had projected onto her since as early as Vroom Vroom.
Though hyperpop’s light has diminished, I have a soft spot in my heart for How I’m Feeling Now. It was so “of its time,” and, yet again, it felt like she was releasing something for me right when I needed it. Unfortunately, the album would not be toured (bat, pangolin, Fauci, etc.), but I was fine with that because it made the album a little bit more intimate and special. The song “Forever” will always remind me of my best friend who lives in another state, and I decided fairly recently that “Party 4 U” will be my wedding song. My boyfriend will learn to love it.
It has been a bit of an open secret in the Charli XCX community that Charli and her label have never quite been on the same page, so it was less of a surprise when we found out that she was already starting to tease a new album, the final album in her contract, just a little over a year after How I’m Feeling Now released. Crash, the fifth album by Charli XCX, is a bit of a black sheep. And I know what you’re thinking, “Isn’t Sucker the black sheep? She literally said ‘Break the Rules’ is her least favorite song of hers.” But you’d be wrong because years and years of shitting on Sucker have led to a maybe-semi-ironic love for the album, and “Break the Rules” has always been a good song.
Where How I’m Feeling Now was Charli in Hyperpop Queen mode, Crash is just the opposite. There isn’t a song on Crash that sounds anything like the previous five projects she made, it’s a dance/synth-pop record that you probably wouldn’t imagine yourself sniffing poppers or snorting ketamine to. People begrudge the album because of this, I’m sure. Charli has made herself the poster child for parties and raves and having a crazy cool time, and this is just not that album.
In a sense, Crash is a concept album. The persona she concocted for this era was one obsessed with being “mainstream” and “commercially viable,” because all of these years that’s what Atlantic Records wanted her to be. That’s surely what they wanted Sucker to be all the way back in 2014, and that was a huge flop. So here, with Crash, we see Charli let the idea of being a Main Pop Girl™ wash over her as she ends her deal with the devil that is Atlantic Records. Though it may seem like she is succumbing to the whims of more powerful people, it is her choice to do so because in the end she will be free. Much like in the movie the album is named after, David Cronenberg’s Crash, there is sort of catharsis and power in putting yourself in the hands of God or the universe and careening off a bridge.
I saw Charli XCX live for the third time after Crash came out. Again, I went with two of my best friends and after a certain point they got sick of being in the crowd and I was there by myself. Though the bulk of the music wasn’t like Pop 2 or Charli or How I’m Feeling Now, that didn’t stop me from having the time of my life, because I was there listening to Charli XCX sing about crashing a car, and what’s not to love about that?
As it turns out, Charli XCX was kinda sorta fine with her deal with the devil. Everyone waited with baited breath to see who Charli was going to sign with next (Could it be a smaller label like 4AD? Could she be resurrecting her own label, Vroom Vroom Recordings, from the dust?), and, while we all did that, she re-signed with Atlantic Records. Despite what people may say about Crash, it was her most commercially successful album, and I guess Atlantic really loved that, because here we are today.
While it’s hard for me to rank Charli XCX’s albums and projects, there are different things I love about each one of them specifically, her newest album Brat has to be one of her best, if not the best. There is something about it that captures a feeling, the feeling of partying, the feeling of fun, so vividly. If Vroom Vroom was Charli hatching from her egg, Crash was the chrysalis she protected herself with before she emerged, fully formed and at the top of her game as a magnificent, coked-out, neon green butterfly with Brat.
I don’t go to clubs or out to the bar, I don’t go dancing with friends and the only thing I have ever snorted was Adderall before my junior year government final in high school. I’m not necessarily the “365 party girl” Charli sings about on Brat, but somehow it doesn’t matter, because when I listen to her sing “Should we do a little key? Should we have a little line?” over fast, heavy, thrumming beats on “365,” I feel like I am, or at least that I could be if I wanted to.
Things like riding the train or walking through Whole Foods seem so much grander and less banal when you’re listening to Charli XCX singing about blowing up the Grammy Awards on “Spring Breakers,” and it’s hard to imagine that everyone isn’t staring at you as you pass by, thinking you’re sooooo sexy, while blasting “Von Dutch.” It’s just fucking fun, and that’s what life is all about. You don’t need to be out at the club, you don’t need to be partying until you’re passed out in somebody else’s bed, but you also shouldn’t be letting your life be unlived, boring, wasted away and with nothing to write home about.
In a world where quite literally everything seems designed to make every person in it feel depressed and complacent, Charli XCX challenges you on Brat to have a little fucking fun. Forget about tomorrow, forget about the world, put your fucking headphones on and fucking dance, bitch!!!
I saw Charli XCX for the fourth time about a week ago, on a Wednesday that I worked, and I worked again the very next day. I didn’t buy anything to wear, so I made my own outfit using a white t-shirt and a permanent marker spelling out “brat but i made this shirt an hour before the concert because i didn’t have anything to wear,” as a not-so-subtle homage to the deluxe version of her album Brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not. It was no surprise that there seemed to be a million other people there, Charli’s fanbase has only grown over the years and she was no longer just the object of the True Romance Angel’s affections, nor just mine. There were teens there with their parents, there were bi girls there with their straight boyfriends, I saw a woman who looked over 50 behind us in the line to get in, and she was more decked out to go to a rave than I was. People who, in normal cases, would probably never look twice at one another walking down the street all lined up to see the “Boom Clap” girl live in concert.
Charli XCX never fails to get the crowd moving, and when the music started the venue was electric. Jumping, dancing, singing, raving, people were going buck wild. When I see Charli XCX in concert it’s like a switch-flip in my brain, I’m uncontrollable, I’m on fire, it’s truly a transcendent experience. It’s almost as if all of the time I spend at my laptop writing, or wasting away in front of the television, endlessly watching The Real Housewives, is simply just saving energy for the most important thing in life: seeing Charli XCX live.
After a few songs, my friends told me they were going to the bathroom, and probably wouldn’t be able to make their way back, but they’d catch up with me after. Once more, I was alone in the crowd at the Charli XCX concert. But being alone in the crowd at a Charli XCX concert isn’t like being alone at lunch in middle school, or alone at the bar hoping for someone to buy you a drink. Being alone in the crowd at a Charli XCX concert is actually amazing. The energy of the crowd, the pulse of the music, the tequila shots I had going straight to my head, you could lose yourself in it all. Everyone was there to do one thing, and that was to have a good time. And despite the two gay guys in front of me (who were literally just swaying and being boring) wagging their finger in my face to stop bumping into them in a crowd of a thousand people… I had a good fucking time!
I didn’t see Charli XCX perform onstage not one time that night. I took out my phone a couple of times to record some songs, but even then I was too far away to see her in the videos, and the stage lights (or maybe just her mere presence) too radiant. But you know what? I don’t care. Sure, it would’ve been nice to be so close to the stage that she points at me and smiles like she did all those years ago (do you think she remembers me?), but that’s not really what it’s about. In a crowd of thousands of people you probably aren’t going to have the most intimate experience with the artist, and that is okay. I was there to have fun and let loose, to partake in an experience that I was only going to experience one time, and I was there to do it with everyone else. As corny as it may sound, I’m thankful to Charli for giving me the chance to feel free and uninhibited, not just a person alone in the crowd, but a fan amongst my own people. I wasn’t there to jump over the barricade and try to hug Charli onstage, and I wasn’t there to stand there and sway and wag my fingers in someone’s face for enjoying themselves, I was there to party and have fun, because to Charli XCX that’s literally what life is all about.
Also buy her album like I bought Taylor’s! And ps, Charlie, I don’t hate you.