by Lillian Supanich
I enjoy a transfemme and queer corner of life, and in that social setting, nearly everyone I pass has a manicured stance on Charli XCX, preferring to tell stories of their history with her rather than to list favorite tracks. For my part, I collect obscure remixes of her songs on Soundcloud, excited to share links to my playlists. I overhear her name in public when new singles come out, but also a near-constant topic of intrigue in a queer-filled space. Charli easily fits within the ranks of queer anthem artists along with Kate Bush and Madonna, and she’s no doubt earned that place through thoughtful collaboration with queer artists and committed allyship in her musical and online practice.
This state of things felt right to me during her 2016-2021 rollout, with abundant features of lesser-recognized artists like Kim Petras, Cupcakke Tommy Cash and Dorian Electra (Charli & Pop 2) and reflective ballads in the midst of a global pandemic (How I’m Feeling Now). Even if her privileged quarantine narrative was less than reflective of the lives of working-class queers, we could find our own voices under the umbrella of her flowery lyrics. Her anthemic practice was able to reach beyond personal woes fit for diary entries. In these years, her output provided backtracks to drag shows and cunt-serving TikToks.
In her more recent work, an aesthetic shift to throwback beats and more accessible lyrics beckons a new relation to our pro-gay heroine. Her shift from shared grief to a more bedroom-pop confessional voice alongside singles that burst with sellout pastiche continues to be widely celebrated. Our fiercely honest it-girl queen has stayed in vogue without much re-evaluation following a dramatic redirection of her creative voice.
The woman that gave us anthem after anthem has shifted in brat, leaving behind lyrical care for an immediate and unguarded voice. She trails off on the best songs of brat, like her influences, free associating over house beats, startling and surprising (sympathy is a knife). Her vulnerability bursts in and out of a closet on, choices subject to immediate revisions for a messy and contradictory character, but she can’t always thread the needle on songs like “So I, Girl so confusing, I might say something stupid” She abandons the hedonic party voice for the openly reflective, but because she surreptitiously manicures her speech in ways the party girl doesn’t. This comes off like the #nomakeup trend, where we’re led to believe in influencers’ impossibly thick natural lashes and lips, resulting from impossibly little work. Her vulnerable individual voice is commodified, leaving us to buttress her confessions with our own emotional baggage. This is the opposite of an anthem, of the collective experience, and she had opted recently to broadcast confessionals that are conveniently tidy.
In brat, her confessionals have been on full display, she juggles her life-of-the-party register with a voice of interiority. Her wild, “bratty” mood swings don’t always carry the freedom we associate with indulgent youthful emotion, and she opts again and again on brat to put her party-girl mask back on. It’s hard to feel this mask is as imposed as she claims as she unhesitatingly embraces its rush of power. This persona seems intoxicating to her, like the haunted mask of Green Goblin in Sam Raimi’s Spiderman (2002). Inverting this trope of the evil mask, however, Charli isn’t able to reveal to her listeners the truth behind one persona, for beneath is simply another construction, a new brand to reveal and market. Our only relationship to her is that of celebrity pop star. We will never meet her, never know her interiority.
The slut-pop of Charli past was more fitting for camp reenactments of prosthetic femininity than her current “cry with me” ballads. For us to hear eulogies of friends, inner industry tensions or swooning over her fiancé, we can’t develop past our already artificial bond to a fictional Charli. This has been a characteristic tension in recent pop music, as influencers pretend to be our friends, or parasocial podcast hosts sell us their favorite brands. At the same time, meaningful gathering spaces are harder and harder to find, especially in queer life. Nearly everyone of us is searching for monoculture, but in brat we find ourselves gathered around the obelisk of a frankly spoken party girl, who’s recently started contemplating entering the reproductive ranks of her well-to-do late-thirties friends. This is far afield from the campy voices of her beloved peers: the raunchy Cupcakke or coked-up bimbo Ayesha Erotica. Charli’s lyrics “She’s a radiant mother and he’s a beautiful father / And now they both know these things that I don’t” sit with soggier implications for queer life than the self-aware zeal of her peak.
Culture, be it the queer underground or American culture writ large, has a recent habit of reserving for our artists the status of “genius” from which they can stand and promote their own isolated truth. Success in this model is aspirational, one we can all fantasize about reaching, belting out our own confessions/ideas. In her video for 360, she fills a room with such well-to-do it-girl friends as Emma Chamberlain, Chloe Cherry, and Julia Fox, adding to their ranks a fresh face: an everywoman—a waitress. Charli affirms through this that any one of us is worthy of her station, transferring onto herself the listeners parasocial imaginations of celebrity. I want us to dream bigger than to measure up to viral stand-ins, and opt instead for a collective model of voice. One where we return to crowd-sourcing stems and remixes of a camp high-femme, communally ventriloquizing and repurposing figures, rather than excavating their raw diary entries to find hints of our own voice.
