The new Charli xcx album closes with an address from David Cronenberg, who slowly enunciates what it’s like to almost die. “As I was lying there on the sidewalk, I did not think about art at all,” he explains. “I thought about people. I thought about life.” On Music, Fashion, Film, the people make far more than the place. Charli has plenty of qualms about the industries surrounding the three disciplines that, as she told Apple Music, are “what my life is about.” But she chooses to represent them with living avatars: John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese, gathered in a kitchen so spare that it only has an ashtray. It’s not exactly idolatry, and it’s not exactly partnership. It’s more like proof of life.
The Stan Purge and Artistic Growth
Never before has Charli meant so much to so many people. The long tail of Brat Summer left her with lofty expectations and greener, stricter fans who’d prefer an endless train of “girl, so confusing” stunt casts to any real artistic growth. It’s fair to call the unwieldy and lo-fi Music, Fashion, Film a stan purge. But what she’s really doing is circling the wagons. For all the introspective spirals and “I” statements on the new album, Charli’s core cohort—namely her producers, A.G. Cook and Finn Keane, her director, Aidan Zamiri, and her husband, George—are rendered with uncharacteristic detail. (“Magic Metal Montana,” the first song she’s ever dedicated to Cook in 15 years of collaboration, is awkward and abundantly sweet.) On an album she has said is “about process,” it’s the friends along the way who star.
Squaring with Stardom
It’s a sound storyboarding call, given that Charli has more complicated feelings about the spotlight than ever before. If 2022’s ill-fated Crash was her committing to the pop star bit, Music, Fashion, Film is her squaring with actually being one: worrying about the rollout, thinking about the brand, wondering (on “Camera”) “Do I even wanna make music?” On the spare and uneasy highlight “SS26,” she deadpans about the futility of being famous when the world is going “straight to hell.” Over a metronome snare and a plucky indietronica loop that crumbles into electric guitar churn, she’s numb enough to embrace the distractions: “Can’t hide the fact I’d rather take the easy road/I think I’ll be alright if I look good in the clothes.”
Resignation as Radicalism
Charli may sound like she’s at arm’s length, but it’s a trick of the shadows. Her clipped, deadpan delivery and fatalist lyrics don’t land as pessimist so much as pragmatist. The world will end and everyone you know will die, so let’s have fun making what we want now. Earworm palette cleansers “2007” and “Yeah” feel designed to delight even a brat purist, but who’s counting? The hands-in-the-air shrug of Music, Fashion, Film is its most effective fakeout: the delivery and riffs are blasé, but the content reveals an artist who cares a lot, about the right things and the wrong things and the largely inconsequential things.
Like the Cronenberg which repeats on a swivel to close out the record (“They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever”), Charli’s at her best when she’s resigned to reality. It sounds pessimistic, but it comes off pretty radical—when everything eventually becomes whatever, you can do whatever you want. Paramount to Music, Fashion, Film’s success is that, despite the disillusionment and detachment baked into the concept, Charli’s still clear on her style, her substance, and her very human North Stars. She may be fucking around and figuring it out, but at least she’s pointing her arrow somewhere. What’s more optimistic than that?