‘MUSIC, FASHION, FILM’ AND THE END OF THE WORLD
In Music, Fashion, Film, Charli XCX makes it clear that she’s just as scared as the rest of us. Her highly anticipated follow-up to BRAT grapples with fame, legacy, and the end of the world.
The expectations for Charli’s seventh studio album (excluding the Wuthering Heights soundtrack) were huge, given the cultural phenomenon that was BRAT. The pressure to follow an album that has an entire season named after it might have debilitated other artists, but Charli decided to meet the challenge by subverting expectations. She makes it short, snappy, and clear that she doesn't care what you think she should do. Unlike the hyper-synth and autotune of her previous albums, Music, Fashion, Film takes a different approach; it’s filled with catchy and distorted guitar riffs, and is much lighter on the production.
In the lead single “Rock Music,” Charli opens with rage bait. First by labeling a pop song as rock, and then by stating “I think the dance floor is dead.” The dance floor isn’t dead, but Charli is grappling with her place in dance and pop music. Her struggles with legacy and fame are clear throughout Music, Fashion, Film, as Charli keeps questioning what it means to be an artist.
Or maybe this is all just for show. She references her habit of doing just that in “Wink Wink” when she sings, “Maybe I f**ked your dad/Just kidding, I’m only saying that for effect.” Whatever she’s trying to do, it’s clear she has a great sense of humor.
Charli seems to fluctuate between her frustrations at what is asked of celebrities and with celebrity itself in “SS26,” criticizing the expectations that are put onto artists and the hollow nature of celebrity/brands. It’s tongue-in-cheek with its calling out of bad PR, fake apologies, a DARVO approach to valid criticism, and an unwillingness to engage with the world during dark times. Directly following this, “Card Declined” takes us through how we distract ourselves from the state of the world with materialism.
Although we saw elements of this on BRAT, Music, Fashion, Film might be Charli’s most mature and introspective work yet. We really start to see this in “Camera” and “I’m Afraid,” where Charli questions the purpose of art and how fame can distort it, and whether being a “tortured artist” is just an excuse she uses. “All this pain makes me believe I’m a better artist now/An excuse I tell myself to act selfishly.”
“Persona” is one of the more introspective tracks on the album. It hooks listeners with the mystery of trying to figure out who Charli could be speaking about - in a similar vein to “Girl, so confusing” from BRAT. But, after sitting with the song for a bit, it seems like Charli might be talking about herself on this one.
This plays directly into the core of the album “No One Lasts Forever.” After years of working as a songwriter and feature artist on some of the most successful songs of the last 10 years, Charli had finally gotten the recognition she thought she deserved with BRAT. But now, two years into a new level of fame that no one can be prepared for, Charli bewails the pitfalls that come with said fame. She really drives the point home by dedicating almost two minutes of the album’s 30min runtime to looping a sample of David Cronenberg repeating the phrase “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever.”
In the end, she seems to assure herself that whether or not her art survives, it doesn’t really matter because she won’t be around to know… and the world is probably ending anyway.
