Life Versus Art: Charli xcx's "Music, Fashion, Film"

David Lynch’s biography, Room to Dream, follows an unorthodox structure. The journalist and critic Kristine McKenna begins by recounting the director’s life, only for Lynch to interject afterward and engage with what she has written. The result is a dialogue between Lynch’s lived experiences and his work. At once reflective and intent on explaining his creative decisions without ever giving too much away, Lynch opens the door to the maze of his creative mind. Charli xcx dialogues with her own work in a similar way on her seventh album Music, Fashion, Film. 

If culture has given birth to one artist whose work becomes standard for pop brilliance time and time again, it’s Charli xcx. Through various mixtapes, forward-thinking albums, and creative collaborations, she has cemented her place within niches before they entered the mainstream--many of which were later canonized through her influence. She accumulated source credibility by owning her unprecedented vision, for which she has been constantly celebrated. When your artistry is the best thing since sliced bread, it becomes quite hard to detach yourself from the artist persona that is promised a legacy. “I would die for my art,” she recently expressed in a recent interview. The notion of sacrifice is always thrumming under her words whenever she talks about her work; her vision never comes off as a weightless matter. There is an over-identification between the self and the art, and she is also in on that very observation. In I’m Afraid, a confessional that draws its momentum from Charli’s anxieties, she credits her husband George for being “someone who knew how to balance” who she is. There seem to be fragments of identity situated at opposite extremes, sometimes finding harmony and at other times subverting one another.  

The curiosity about a life beyond being an artist finds its seeds in BRAT’s 14th track, “i think about it all the time,” where she reflects on the possibility that a relationship could offer her a new sense of purpose beyond her devotion to art. This time around, a similar question of life versus art gains more substance. In Music, Fashion, Film, she muses on what would remain if she were stripped of her artistry and the persona that extends from it. She chases fulfillment through legacy, yet remains wary of pop stardom and the structures that offer it. Performing and melting into different versions of herself– both created or repurposed– both nourish and deprive her. It’s hard to interpret the track Persona as anything else but a conversation between Charli xcx (the artist) and Charlotte Aitchison (the self that lies beyond the artist) 

When unity is found between her opposing natures, she is her most grateful and self-affirming. “Yeah, I can finally be totally honest / I don't feel embarrassed even if I suck.” she sings on Camera. More than ever, she allows creative expression to pour out of her without the suffocating filter of fear. The music is darker, woozier, and soaked in the same kind of murky atmosphere that made The Velvet Underground such an undeniable influence on her, especially on tracks like “Card Declined.” The autotune that once acted as her signature has been pulled back, revealing something far more interesting: a voice that sounds like herself.  It’s a dramatic shift, and arguably the strongest her vocals have ever sounded. On the live version of “SS26,” that transformation becomes even clearer; the song feels bigger and more alive where her dark delivery gives it a weight and intensity the album version doesn’t quite capture. It’s clear that she sees creativity as an elastic notion that can stretch over any sound. “I’m so lucky to be inspired.” is written on the back of the postcard that comes with the Music, Fashion, Film's B-Sides boxset. She clutches her vision to herself more than ever; each of her ideas comes from a well of inspiration that still runs remarkably fertile. Yet the abundance of creativity, illustrated through the album, is inseparable from the awareness of its own impermanence, prompting the artist to question the longevity of both her work and her authorship. On No One Lasts Forever, Charli confronts the tension between her yearning for posterity and the inevitability of transience. Music, Fashion, Film is Charli’s first attempt at reconciling that gap between life versus art. 

Over the course of the years, one of the most defining subject matters of Charli xcx’s work has been distance: the distance between the mainstream and the margins, the desire to enter the center while simultaneously preserving the separation that defines her. These contradictions have shaped the contours of the kind of pop star Charli xcx would become—one who would ultimately elude the title of the pop star itself. But after years of negotiating these external distances, the most remarkable distance left to explore seems to be the one within herself: the divide separating her near-religious identification with her art from the self that lies beyond it. Even if she is no longer confined to the position of an outsider looking in, she knows how to toy with the notion of being on the “inside”. Disappearing into her favorite movies, fashion and music references that double as post-modern iconography here, she inhabits models, filmmakers and plays on the imagery of rock musicians.

This is a confessional in a nontraditional sense, much like much of Charli’s creative process itself. Rather than offering direct autobiography, she works through representations, channeling a series of carefully constructed “bits”, the most enduring of them being the pop star. Yet, as always, she assumes the role only to dismantle its mythology from within. Once the sheen of stardom is stripped away, what remains is not an answer, but the search for a “feeling.” Throughout the album, we hear Charli circle around this desire from different angles: wanting to feel something (“Yeah”), knowing how she feels (“Camera”), hurting herself in pursuit of a feeling (“Rock Music”), and confronting the reality of feeling nothing at all (“I’m Afraid”). The feeling itself remains elusive, yet undeniably the most immediate and visceral truth she can access. Within this pursuit, Charli arrives at a realization that feels almost like a direct response to BRAT: nothing lasts forever. Where her previous album famously embraced the fantasy of wanting a moment to exist indefinitely, this record recognizes the impossibility of preservation. By continuously trying on different personas, each one functioning as a fragmented reflection of her identity through her favorite references, Charli acknowledges that neither performance nor selfhood is ever fixed. They will stretch eventually, or burn away into ash, only to become something else again, til another spark of inspiration hits. In the meantime, she finds herself closer to herself than ever before, willing to go the distance to narrow the gap between life and art.