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Recently, the hosts of my favorite culture podcast, Las Culturistas, asked a question that made me smile in recognition: “Can straight people even hear Charli XCX?” They were of course joking, but I sensed a hint of earnestness in the query. Charli, to queer people is — like, the most famous pop star. But (and I don’t mean this in a mean way) do normies even know her?
I wonder this because by global metrics, Charli is perhaps a peripheral figure. This is not to say that she is not wildly successful, but when you get into the upper legions of pop music, where streaming success is determined by the hundreds of millions and not the paltry tens, Charli is far from today’s most dominant divas. Her most popular song to come out of her latest album cycle, “Good Ones,” has 50 million streams to date. Now I would commit most petty crimes for my music to reach an audience of that size, but to contextualize that number for a moment: the lead single from Ariana Grande’s last album, “positions,” has over 900 million streams. Now maybe some recent Charli songs will climb to those heights over time, but I’m talking numbers to set the scene for the gargantuan standards of major pop success. According to the data, Charli is not atop the mountain. And yet to me, based on my experience as a young queer music fan, Charli may as well be Britney at her peak.
Thinking about Charli as a cult pop star feels almost oxymoronic. Pop music is, by definition, popular and populist. It forgoes the niche boundaries of the underground in favor of the insatiable, candy-coated aesthetics of the masses. But Charli somehow reaches the former by embracing the latter. She takes those bubbly sounds of top 40 and turns up the saturation until those sounds melt and morph. It’s why Charli has become the de facto ambassador of hyperpop, that slippery genre that seems to mean everything and nothing at the same time. When people describe her as hyperpop, it’s an attempt to split the difference that’s always defined her: Charli as the major label artist and Charli as the underground experimental, queer club diva.
Even as she challenges pop aesthetics, no one should ever question her commitment to the genre. Charli makes pop music for people obsessed with pop. With her, we get no stilted, manufactured narratives about her personal life; we simply get an artist contending with her music and the trappings that surround it. And there is something pure and decadent about that project. To make pop about pop. That may be why she is the queer community’s cult pop princess. Because we love pop and we don’t care about if there is a salacious narrative connected to it. We simply want the anthems.
Charli’s commitment to pop music is why her latest album “Crash” is so exciting. She has had a long term feud with her label who could never really settle on if she was a niche superstar or a flailing global popstar-to-be. After a few albums that cemented her status as the queen of pop for weirdos, and then a highly experimental concept album that she made in quarantine, it seems that Charli finally decided to at least attempt some move towards making fully mainstream pop. The decision to make a mainstream pop album should be a formula for boring, unimaginative music. But because it is being done by someone like Charli, who has explored the very limits of the amorphous genre, the product is revelatory: it’s both a parody and love letter to the mainstream, a deconstruction and full-bodied embrace of its aesthetics. She even alluded to this recently when she talked to Zane Lowe. “I wanted to explore what it means to be a traditional ‘pop artist.’” She goes on, “Everybody is wanting to be as authentic as possible. And as we know I like to push against the norm.” In today’s culture, which is driven by (the veneer of) authenticity, the most punk thing to be is pop. To embrace the artifice because the rest of the world is so hellbent on selling you on the idea of rejecting it.
The album covers the gamut of big-pop sounds. “Good Ones” is giving House of Gucci-evil. It’s doused in ‘80s synth arpeggios and features a naughtily demure pre chorus. “I always let the good ones go,” she sings before the song’s irresistibly simple chorus drop that I can only guess was made in a lab as a way for gay preteens to practice choreo. Other songs like “Baby,” also explore the retro sounds of pop. Defined by its funky, 1970s synth chord wobbles and jittering drums, the song is an invitation to dance in ever quickening girations. And then there are those songs which feel like a more obvious bridge between pop’s past and future. “Constant Repeat,” which seems to be the fan favorite, moves at the exceedingly quick tempo of hyperpop but has the earnest simplicity of a straight-from-the-heart ballad. “Do you realize I could have been the one to change your life/you could have a bad girl by your side,” Charli croons over increasingly dramatic harmonic swells.
I could go on and on. Every song is a reference and an update. Every song, its own love letter to pop music. And while there is nothing lyrically or thematically that marks the whole thing as queer, there is something in the very nature of Charli’s project that is just so queer. It’s camp consolidated. It’s the high art of experimental music grafted over the trash that is mass radio music. It’s the shirking off of any desire to be anything other than pop that makes it so delicious. Because who cares if you’re trashy? Who cares if you’re pop? Because to many queer people, pop is not the sound of corporate boardrooms, but of freedom, of maximalist exuberance.
What a snob may jeer at and call a multi-million dollar aesthetic splash, queer folks see as a multi-million dollar embrace of being completely, utterly over the top. And that’s all we ever wanted. To wear the metaphorical meat dress. To dance. Charli is our pop star, because she’s a pop star’s pop star. She knows that pop to us is not a focus grouped product: but a lifeline. Our great queer wink at the mainstream. She winks the hardest because she loves it the most. And we love her the most for it. It’s Charli baby!
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I read this article when it came out and now Crash is essentially the only album in my lastfm stats. Thank you for introducing her to me :)
Yes It's like she made a mainstream pop album but in a campy well thought way that only Charli can achieve not in a my label told me to way