“i think the constant demand for access to women’s bodies and our faces in album artwork is mysoginistic [sic] and boring,” tweeted Charli xcx in 2024. She wasn’t on the fluorescent front cover of brat, her EDM magnum opus, and she isn’t on her new one, either. It’s rather helpful that she isn’t. The key to Music, Fashion, Film is ageing rock musician John Cale, who stares out at us from the front cover. He serves one purpose as Charli’s Euterpe; Scorsese is there for film and Marc Jacobs, lurking in the background, is fashion. Cale functions as a living link to a particularly pertinent bit of history. In 1960s New York, he co-founded the Velvet Underground, the experimental rock outfit known for its collision with Andy Warhol’s art scene. Warhol booked them their first gig (it was at a meeting of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry) and illustrated their most famous album cover (it featured a peelable banana).
After a childhood preoccupation with Hollywood stardom and an early career as a commercial fashion illustrator, Warhol became fascinated by the visual and sonic hallmarks of mass production. The obsession led him to his famous soup cans and Marilyns, but it extended to music, too: he liked to work to a looped selection of the most repetitive pop songs of his day. The Velvet Underground worked with Nico, who cut a stylish figure singing mostly tuneless dirges in a German accent. Warhol didn’t care about inborn talent. He cared about fame itself. In a bit of metacommentary, he took on the role of a latter-day Metro-Goldwyn Mayer executive to anoint Nico an automatic “superstar.”
Charli xcx is a significant figure because she has spent the last decade morphing into a Cronenbergian fusion of Nico and Andy Warhol. In 2016, after achieving a modicum of radio success with “Boom clap” and “Fancy”, she became a semi-mainstream poster girl for the London record label PC Music. The label operated along Warholian lines, with a roster of art students piloting imaginary pop star alter egos. Standout producers Sophie and AG Cook specialised in collages of bubblegum and industrial distortion, playing with autotune and vocoders to mimic the aesthetics of mass-produced celebrity. They took cues from cult avant-pop figures like Uffie and Nadia Oh, who specialised in a Nico-esque pose of counterintuitive disengagement from party culture, and from 2000s Japanese producer Yasutaka Nakata, whose signature sound resembles Phil Spector if he were sucked into a robotics factory.
Charli’s earlier work subverted assumptions about mass-produced pop music, injecting personal meaning into seemingly asinine lyricism, and assimilating the bubblegum palette into the momentous song structures of progressive rock. The mainstream embraced brat.
Her pop project is over. But Music, Fashion, Film does some subversion of its own. A decades-long war between “poptimists” and “rockists” saw rock fans dismissed as buzzkills with authenticity fetishes. This album is brat or Pop 2 in different sonic trappings: this time, Charli and producer AG Cook have plucked the most interesting sounds from the annals of grunge, Britpop and 2010s indie rock.
The lyricism is just as minimal and repetitive as it’s always been. On lead single “Rock Music”, Charli deliberately positions herself as a poser. “I think we’re onto the next,” she talk-sings. “The dancefloor is dead / so now we’re making r-o-o-ck music.” There’s a particularly Warholian edge to SS26, which sees her musing on the artificiality and arbitrariness of her own fame. “Think my politics could work as a press strategy,” goes one verse, “And my heritage could give me quite the USP.” “Yeah”sounds like a fusion of Blur’s Britpop standard Song 2 and a previous AG Cook production, GFOTY’s demented, distorted “Don’t Wanna / Let’s Do It”.“You don’t wanna, you don’t wanna / You don’t wanna, you don’t wanna / you don’t, you don’t (You might),” sings Charli. “Wink Wink”might have featured on a Skins soundtrack in 2007; “Card Declined” plays on the grunge sounds of mid-90s Sonic Youth before degenerating into discordant noise. “Let’s go shopping,” she sings, like Edie Sedgwick in one of her famous periods of mania. “I’ll buy a handbag / I’ll buy some shoes / I’ll buy a smile.”
“No One Lasts Forever” plays on the idea of repetition. First it takes on the melodic progression of “forever”, a standout track from Charli’s pre-rock corpus. Then comes arthouse-sci-fi director David Cronenberg, who narrates his near-death experience. “They are dead, they are gone / Nothing lasts forever,” he says, by way of an ending. In another rock approximation of a pop convention, Charli loops the line over 20 times. It could be a nod back to her electronic phase: 1990s dance outfit Orbital started their second album with the line “Time becomes a loop,” repeating and overlapping for nearly two minutes. But it could also take us even further back to the 1960s, to Warhol’s Factory, where he played the same R&B tracks over and over again. Music, Fashion, Film uses its John Cale co-sign to successfully complete a 50-year prophecy: Charli, like Andy Warhol, is a one-woman unit of mass-production. While Music, Fashion, Film lacks the transcendent highs of her electronic work, it is a genuinely new sonic turn got Charli xcx’s milieu of pop artists.
[Further reading: There are no highs in Trainspotting the Musical]