today, we’re taking a break from the glorified travel blogs. i humbly dedicate this edition to the hordes of teenagers crowding the front of Charli’s Outside Lands set who didn’t know a word from anything other than Brat. may this find you ⛵︎

at age 6, my first concert was Britney Spears on the Oops I Did It Again tour, Nissan Pavilion, Manassas, Virginia, 2000. we sat in row QQ and she was the size of a thimble. since then, i’ve never been so amped to see a concert—until Charli xcx at Outside Lands, San Francisco, California, 2026.

Charli xcx and i have a few things in common. she’s said, “I get so bored, so I like to move really quickly.” i do too. she has a unibrow (in British, monobrow); so did/do i. she is a dark creature coated in a shell of plastic. similarly, i am a bundle of cynicism shrouded in doe eyes.

but mostly, Charli xcx and i are nothing alike. she loves Porsches, and cars give me climate anxiety. she’s more than just a party girl, but she is one, with cigs and cocaine ingrained into her aesthetic. i am a quiet lesbian who doesn’t know how to party but is willing to learn. she likes to show her nipples at awards shows; my wardrobe comes exclusively from REI dot com. she acts almost entirely on instinct, and mine has gone missing.

still, something has magnetized me to her—perhaps this series of opposing poles. i swim in the r/charlixcx subreddit. i download unreleased albums like the LimeWire days. i drag my friends to her films (The Moment, Erupcja, I Want Your Sex). she appears in my dreams, a shimmering delight in a sea of night terrors.

Music, Fashion, Film, her new album, was born last month. i’m no scholar of music. my public-school music education consisted of banging colorful plastic tubes on the floor in the 4th grade. a handful of boys tried to teach me guitar tabs in high school, but i got no further than “Smoke on the Water.” and i’m certainly no scholar of fashion (my wardrobe comes from REI), nor of film (The Devil Wears Prada 2 and SATC franchise aside).

but what i do have is a monomaniacal obsession with artists and albums, a penchant for playing them on repeat until i’ve made it into the top 0.01% of listeners.

my fandom is both premature and belated. i’ve been saving Charli’s songs in my playlists since “SuperLove” in 2013, “Gold Coins” in 2014, “Trophy” in 2016. but i skipped the Brat era entirely, outside of its Kamala implications and one pool party where it played on loop. rather, i had my own Brat summer last winter, a year and a half late. then Music, Fashion, Film came out, and i memorized it ahead of her headlining set at Outside Lands last weekend.

i tried to worm my way up to the front but aborted mission among a pressing sea of youths. squeezed to the point of panic attack but still not close enough to see stage nor screen, i retreated to the hill and landed in the equivalent of Britney’s row QQ. i couldn’t feel the music pulsing in my chest, and i sang and danced in a club of one among nonbelievers. it did not quite sate my thirst.

still, the aesthetics bled through: black and white, shooting columns of flame, shredded fabric, a hundred lithe dancers, six costume changes, ascent and descent, guitar, heavy feedback. the set felt Brat-heavy, at 35% of songs compared to 44% Music, Fashion, Film. but, as someone on Reddit pointed out:

the set list brought the normies on a wild ride. without knowing the layers, the, lore, or the context, one might leave deeply confused. she humped the ground to “I think I’m gonna die in this hhhhooooooouosseee” x8, from the Wuthering Heights soundtrack. she spliced clips of David Cronenburg droning “oblivion is freedom” between songs, among other head-spinning transitions bridging moods, paces, and themes. such choices reflect Charli’s disregard for palatability and even comprehension—or perhaps a level of success that transcends the need for either.

in an attempt to explain myself—my obsession, and what i think the music says about the rest of us—i’m going to take us on a wandering path through the new album, with plenty side trails to vistas of the past and of the bigger picture.

come with me on this multimedia journey and be rewarded with two tips, one offer, and one invite.

accompanying playlists (on Spotify, because while they are evil, i need to save $ and Kbaby pays for the Duo sub 😘):

• every song mentioned herein, in order

• Music, Fashion, Film

• Outside Lands set (playlist, video)

♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯

[1] Rock Music

Charli xcx started making music at 14 and putting it out on Myspace. songs like “Dinosaur Sex” mark her work as stylistically consistent and lyrically clever, even if it alarms a person to hear, “I like unicorns, strawberries, X-rated porn“ from a middle schooler. her parents drove her to raves to DJ, and her stage name comes from her MSN screenname. (should i make my stage name misslilgreekgirl?)

genre-bending, -busting, and -hopping are cool now, thanks in no small part to Beyonce’s RENAISSANCE and COWBOY CARTER. from the latter’s “SPAGHETTII” we get Linda Martell’s sampled line, “Genres are a funny little concept, aren't they? In theory, they have a simple definition tdesthat's easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.”

Charli feels the same. despite her formative influence on electropop, hyperpop, and then regular-ol’ pop, she’s never hewed to genre. for this album, she trolled us with a lead single called “Rock Music” but then said she’s not making a rock album.

she’s popular, but she dabbles. culturally, she makes pop music, if not always sonically.

this song jarred me at first: the timing of the opening line, “Me and my friends,” which appears a split second before you think it should, and the grammatical travesty of it. (”you and me could write a bad romance.”)

this song, of course, represents the first of the three pillars of Music, Fashion, and Film. i stuck with it.

[1b] I Keep On Thinking Bout You Every Single Day and Night

for each of the album’s three singles, she dropped a semi-secret b-side on her then-private Instagram account.

verse two of this b-side for “Rock Music” stirred up much speculation:

Now I'm wonderin' if maybe I could be gay
But come on, look at me, I'm probably not.

I've always wondered if you were actually gay
Or if that's somеthing you just say for your career

like, damn, what a dig! what, lesbians can’t be hot? but also…yeah.

is she queerbaiting? is she just she accusing others of queerbaiting?

or did she write these lines from the perspective of her character in Erupcja, embroiled in Sapphic tension with Lena Góra?

or is she really bringing back the Questioning in LGBTQQ?? every day we pray!

[2] SS26

bringing us to the second pillar of the album, SS26 stands for the fashion houses’ collections for Spring-Summer 2026. on it she parodies non-apologies (”But I didn't do it, even if I did / Wrote a really good notes app apology”) and her own temptation towards convenient self-marketing (”Think my politics could work as a press strategy / And my heritage could give me quite the USP”).

as Miranda Priestley taught us, none of us can escape fashion (not even the most gorpcore among us). music and film influence us too, whether we choose to engage directly or not. none of these disciplines will save us, but they do anchor us to each other.

[2b] Playboy Bunny

in this b-side for “SS26,” Charli lists song ideas that seem pitched by a marketing robot:

Write a song with one word
Write a song like a slogan
Write a song and then print it on a T-shirt
Write a song like the Playboy bunny

during Brat, she masterminded the marketing machine but also got sucked in by it, as she parodied in The Moment, a mockumentary of a concert film. “Playboy Bunny” tugs gently at this paradox between making art and selling it, being pulled in different directions by the cadres of people who’ve placed their expectations on you.

Charli likes to work in pairs. of the b-sides, she wrote, “it felt natural to pair each song with a fitting counterpart - something that’s adjacent to the album but not entirely part of it.”

her tendency toward doubles works at the album level too. she’s described the sequence of CRASH and then Brat as “one for them, one for me”—the former, her label’s attempt to turn her commercial, and the latter, a creation she thought would never escape the tight circle of her closest fans. (she was wildly wrong, of course, but she learned, and taught us all, that when you make something true, people will respond.)

preceding this duo, a similar dynamic: 2014’s Sucker found commercial success, but she’s said she wouldn’t choose to sit down and listen to its “best” songs. after Sucker, she made Pop 2 (and the Vroom Vroom EP and the Number 1 Angel mixtape) for herself and her fans.

[3] Card Declined

with a list of things to buy (handbag, smile, personality) and the message “card declined,” this song plainly pokes at the limits of what buying things, and by extension commercial success, can do for you.

at Outside Lands, she made a deft transition from this song to “Track 10” from Pop 2, an era before the commercial acclaim she’s reached now. “Track 10,” a fan classic, contains long instrumental stretches with blips of lyrics—”Every time you get too close, I run, I run away / And every time you say the words, I don't know what to say.” sound familiar?

those lines would later be made into “Blame It On Your Love” with Lizzo, once both their stars started to rise.

“Track 10” is long—pushing 6 minutes. it is unpalatable, with static, frequency, and scratching noises. “Blame It on Your Love” transformed it into something flatter, something digestible.

her set also included “pink diamond,” another song that’s hard to listen to if you’re not in the middle of the club. i’d say this type of unlistenability—you have to be in the zone or it doesn’t work, it hurts—carried over to Brat as well. now, for the Music, Fashion, Film episode of the Tape Notes podcast, her producers recounted, “we’re literally…doing the worst sound, playing stuff, trying to find the ugliest things.”

people say pop music is popular for a reason, and that reason is usually that it is palatable. but Charli has managed to make things that are both unpalatable—sometimes physically grating to the ear—and popular.

[4] Camera

Charli xcx is a film buff. her once-secret Letterboxd account was traced to her, and the people can’t get enough. it’s a lesson in high-low, with long, critical commentary interspersed with quippy, quick takes. cinematically, she has references upon references for both her acting and her music, and she talks at length about befriending and learning from directors like Martin Scorsese.

in the video for this third pillar of the album, the French actor Vincent Cassel meta-plays an actor on a film set shooting a taxing, violent scene. Charli appears for only a few seconds, sweeping by on a rolling camera like a figmented dark angel, a mirage.

like the video, where she barely appears, she doesn’t appear on this album’s cover—rather, John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese represent the eponymous music, fashion, and film. similarly, she (now iconically) didn’t appear on Brat’s cover. she’s called the expectation that women appear on their covers “boring” and “misogynistic,” as people don’t demand the same of men.

the song, about her forays into acting so far, end with a canonically dark, “And maybe this is it, maybe it's what I need / 'Cause it's the only way to feel like I'm not actually me.”

at Outside Lands, she transitioned from “Camera” to “party 4 u,” an older song that landed on how i’m feeling now. Charli made this album from her house in five weeks at the beginning of the COVID lockdowns. there’s a documentary about the process, and i enjoyed this archived Instagram Live where she wrote “anthems” with her fans.

like the ending of “Camera,” much of how i’m feeling now reveals the inner state so convincingly papered over by the aesthetic she projects. if you don’t look too closely, you’ll miss it behind the BPM and starry effects, but “detonate” describes an instability that makes her question how others can love her. in an interlude on “enemy,” she pins a recording from a therapy session, her voice cracking. two years later, in CRASH’s “How Can I Not Know What I Need Right Now, she sings, “I tell good lies when they ask me / But I cried all night in the backseat / No one knows what I feel inside.”

[4b] If you take away the music then what has she got?

more of a songlet than a song, this b-side includes only choruses—only one line!—one of several distinctive structural choices that appear throughout the album.

after releasing all three b-sides, she wrote, “i felt adamant i wouldn’t put them on streaming because it sort of felt counter intuitive to the whole ethos of those songs, but i know you all really wanted them so i’ve begrudgingly put them on itunes lol. you can call me a hypocrite, i don’t mind ;) love you all and i hope you enjoy these special songs in ur ears xx.”

theories abound about the choice to put them on iTunes (“Apple Music”): though she knows the limits of commercialism, she remains ever the marketer, so perhaps she just wants more money. perhaps she’s smart to diversify her streaming revenue away from vampiric Spotify. perhaps she sees Spotify’s owners running ICE ads and investing in war-crimes weaponry and wants to turn elsewhere. the thing about parasociality is that we can project whatever reasoning we prefer until we’re told otherwise.

[5] 2007

the influence of Charli’s friend Kim Petras pops out on this song. it opens with the chorus, a clear-as-day bang on the head like the start of Petras’ “Coconuts” (”My coconuts / You can put 'em in your mouth”) or “XXX” (”I wanna X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X / I'll make it X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X”).

for Charli, it’s “I can take you to heaven like it's 2007 / Pop star in my bedroom like it's 2007-7.”

this song draws a line through time from celebrity posters and magazine cutouts on bedroom walls to the eternal, immediate access to the panoply of images on our phones (”Pictures on the sofa become pictures on the screen”).

and now, the fans can become the celebrity; the viewer becomes the viewed: “All from your apartmеnt, you can shine bright like a star.”

she’s said she’s “not only interested in the making of the work but how the work fits into the world.” she treats internet culture seriously. a lot of her fandom are queer kids stuck in the Midwest who have no other way of reaching each other.

the visual album for this song arrays a satisfying compilation of her TikToks.

[6] I’m Afraid

the opening bass chords smack me in the face with Blink 182’s “Adam’s Song,” played to me on repeat by my alcoholic high-school boyfriend as an attempt at romantic overture.

in this song she paints the parallels between her relationships with her father and her husband. of the former, she sings, “As we know, I'm insecure, he might've missed out on my birth.” she replicates that anxious attachment with George.

during how i’m feeling now, she talked about her father’s adoption leaving a core feeling of abandonment or unwantedness that ripples through generations. (see also: “Apple”—behind the viral TikTok dance, ”I think the apple's rotten right to the core / From all the things passed down / From all the apples coming before.”)

[7] Yeah

“Yeah” is a song about edging. i don’t really care what Charli says—that it’s “about the feeling of making a song.” it’s about edging:

I don't wanna, I don't wanna
I don't wanna, I don't wanna
I don't, I don't, I don't
I don't, I don't, I don't wanna
No, I don't wanna
I don't want to
I don't want to
I don't want to

Wait, now I wanna feel it

i’m sorry, but am i not supposed to be edging during this? once again, Erupcja was an entire movie about edging. structurally, the chorus contains six words in three lines, but the music starts to collapse at the end. the empty spaces chunked between sections grow longer and longer, melting like a cheap vibrator broken from overuse. this is my case.

in addition to the edging, this song demonstrates one of the things i enjoy most about Charli: she does not make background music. i want songs that demand decibel levels that shred the little hairs on your eardrum, or silence.

in a time when “Music consumption has largely cleaved into two patterns: the passive, casual streamer who lets the algorithm serve up good-enough background listening, and the ultra-invested ‘stan,’ who builds a fiercely rooted group identity around their favorite artists,“ she serves the latter.

elevator slop washes upon the streaming shores, devoid of personality and sometimes of any person at all, as AI-generated music materializes with no oversight. rather than give in to the tide of easy consumption, Charli bets on forthrightness and builds worlds around her music. those worlds revolve around her, but she invites her fans in.

at Outside Lands, another wild transition: “Yeah” (edging) into “Apple” (generational trauma). dichotomies, multitudes. fabulous.

[8] Wink Wink

the technicolor video for this song textured my technicolor hike through the Dolomites. i’m not a bad girl anymore, either, because i never was, but i need more of that energy. (maybe the 22-year-olds in my grad program can help.)

at Outside Lands, Charli’s opening lines of “Wink Wink” sounded low, husky. afterward, people on Reddit diagnosed her with a cold from the quick turnaround from Lollapalooza and her 34th birthday (which resulted in dancing videos a la present-day Britney Spears Instagram).

in their diagnoses, the people urged, “protect our Choli!” the North Americans have given her this nickname based on her accent, but a choli is also a type of cropped top worn in South Asia. cue the memes:

[9] Persona

so many people thought this song was about them (”Don't fucking choke on your ego when you see me coming / I know you're performing, I know that you're hurting”) that she’s likened it to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.” to me, it was obvious upon first listen that she’s singing to and about her alter ego, the projection she’s created for the world.

it feels the most lyrically developed, and it exhibits a scalar quality that exists across her work. we are not all pop stars; we are not all operating with the reach of Charli xcx. but the themes of darkness and depression on how i’m feeling now and in songs like “Camera” apply broadly. we can scale the party-girl rhetoric to our own living-room dance parties. and now, we all cultivate a persona. public figure or not, we each must brand ourselves online and off. when employment is precarious and dating happens on a four-inch screen, you need to stand out among a flood.

the song also traverses dichotomies again, a toggling between states: identities, personalities, selves. when you don’t fit primly into one category or the other, you have to switch back and forth. in the right conditions, this challenge becomes an asset.

Charli travels through juxtapositions well. often it’s dark-light, but sometimes it’s high-low—it’s club beats and songs about grief, like Brat’s “So I,” about the late producer and her close friend SOPHIE. it’s wrapping big ideas in something shiny that pulls you in, like her raunch-filled remix of Caroline Polachek’s “Welcome to My Island,” which drew me, for one, into the heartfelt depths of the original. hedonic desire transports you to existential desire.

[10] Magic Metal Montana

she wrote this song for her longtime producer, A.G. Cook. the title’s three words stand in for Magic: The Gathering, metal (the material, not the genre), and A.G’s current home. its images echo the poignant symbolism of “Everything is Romantic” on Brat (both with and without Caroline Polachek): “Bad tattoos on leather-tanned skin / Jesus Christ on a plastic sign.”

the lyrics here are conversational, like how she’s described Brat’s lyrical approach as the way you’d send voice memos to your friends. i’ve come to appreciate the directness of raw lyrics and of pop music more broadly—the message is layered, but in an approachable way. when my writing starts spooling out of control, i remember the message won’t reach anyone if they don’t finish reading it. the pop star’s economy of language translates from the sung word to the written one.

[11] No One Lasts Forever featuring David Cronenburg

the Outside Lands set brought new levels of unpalatability to the normies with the final song from Music, Fashion, Film. discord, dissonance, and unlistenable static punctuate a half-song by Charli appended with a 2.5-minute outro chanted by the director David Cronenberg. he recounts a near-death experience and repeats the words, “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever” 27 times (literally). in the background, chords jar and lull you at once. the curtains close; the show is over.

this song about legacy in art reads aesthetically as a dirge, a suicide note if you don’t know better. but Charli relies on her fans to know better, and she trusts the normies to catch up quick.

♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯

thank you for reading / listening / watching thirst-trap music videos with me. i pray that my obsession is now exorcised. please let me know if this was the worst thing i’ve ever written.

i close with four (4) offerings:

gift: back when i wrote my technoligarchy love notes i became entranced by a lyric of Robyn’s on the “360” remix. i made tattoos. i meant to sell them but i forgot. so before i put them on the ol’ Etsy, smash reply if you want one (for free!).

invite: i’m considering skipping school to see Charli’s tour in LA or Vegas in October. smash reply if i’ve convinced you to join me.

tip: for those of us inclined toward volumes that leave us hard of hearing, iPhones have a buried accessibility feature that can show you the decibel levels of your headphones.

tip: did you know you can still make your ringtone an actual song??? now when someone calls, the opening beats of “i finally understand” startle everyone around me. and for my parents, “Apple” (don’t tell them). instructions here; accompanying song here.

have you ever been so deep, and about whom,
<3