{"id":594,"date":"2026-07-26T23:36:32","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T23:36:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=594"},"modified":"2026-07-26T23:36:32","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T23:36:32","slug":"charli-xcxs-death-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=594","title":{"rendered":"Charli xcx\u2019s death drive"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Charli xcx is having a death summer. Music, Fashion, Film <\/i>\u2014 her first proper album since 2024\u2019s season-defining Brat<\/i>, and her second if you include her soundtrack to Emerald Fennell\u2019s Wuthering Heights <\/i>from earlier this year \u2014 starts with a statement of creative destruction. \u201cI think the dance floor is dead,\u201d she announces on album-opener \u201cRock Music\u201d, a celebration of hanging out with friends and making art.<\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s tariff addiction<\/a><\/p>\n

Maybe you don\u2019t have to take that statement completely seriously. It\u2019s less a manifesto, more a declaration that this record is not going to be a retread of Brat<\/i>\u2019s ferocious celebration of club culture and \u201c365 party girls\u201d. But the idea of dying recurs again and again in Music, Fashion, Film<\/i>\u2019s lyrics. Sometimes it\u2019s a kind of figurative suicide: \u201cIt makes me wanna throw my life away,\u201d Charli sings on \u201cCamera\u201d, as she reflects on the risk that her acting ambitions could come at the expense of her pop career.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, death here is the measure of affection: \u201cI\u2019d cry if you died,\u201d she promises on \u201cMagic Metal Montana\u201d, a platonic love song addressed to her long-term collaborator AG Cook. Sometimes, there are shades of apocalypse: in \u201cSS26\u201d (a self-aware skip through the marketing conventions of the entertainment industry), Charli deadpans that we are all \u201cwalking on a runway that goes straight to hell \/ Nothing\u2019s gonna save us, not music, fashion or film.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s completely fitting that, when Rolling Stone <\/i>magazine asked Charli to suggest a location for an interview, she proposed the Hollywood Forever cemetery. And by the end of the album, death has become literal. \u201cNo One Lasts Forever\u201d is built around a sample from a conversation between Charli and the 83-year-old Canadian horror director David Cronenberg. It cuts in midway through Cronenberg describing an incident in which he collapsed. \u201cAs I was lying there on the sidewalk, I did not think about art at all,\u201d he says. \u201cI thought about people, I thought about life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, some artists have created art that has really survived thousands of years,\u201d Cronenberg continues, \u201cbut experientially, for them, they are dead, they are gone, they are not experiencing that.\u201d The track, and the album, ends in a minute and a half of Cronenberg\u2019s voice looping around the words \u201cthey are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever\u201d while the music disintegrates underneath him. It\u2019s beautiful, it\u2019s profound, and it\u2019s one of the strangest pieces of pop music ever recorded.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t a completely new fixation for Charli: you can see Music, Fashion, Film <\/i>as a second act to the gothic masochism of her Wuthering Heights <\/i>collection. Or you can watch her mockumentary, The Moment <\/i>(an imperfect but also underrated satire on the music industry), which imagines a version of Charli who went all-out to cash in on the Brat <\/i>phenomenon. As things spiral out of control for the Charli of the film, she veers ever closer to self-destruction, until she goes AWOL, sparking suicide rumors.<\/p>\n

In the film, this all works out for the best, commercially at least: when the fictional Charli comes back from the dead, she\u2019s hotter than she\u2019s ever been. But she\u2019s also creatively moribund. Her juggernaut success comes at the ultimate Faustian price for an artist. After The Moment<\/i>\u2019s release, there was a lot of speculation about whether it was intentionally mocking Taylor Swift\u2019s Eras tours. The inclusion of a special thanks in the credits for the Swiftologist, a video essayist who posts critical takes on Swift\u2019s work, suggests that the answer to that is \u201cmaybe\u201d.<\/p>\n

The alleged Charli-Taylor beef begins publicly in 2024, with the song \u201cSympathy is Like a Knife\u201d on Brat <\/i>\u2014 an earnest, self-lacerating account of Charli\u2019s feelings of inferiority around another pop star who she sees \u201cbackstage at my boyfriend\u2019s show\u201d. (Both Swift and Charli were at one point dating members of the 1975: Swift broke up with singer Matty Healy, and Charli married drummer George Daniel.)<\/p>\n

Read more The poet who invented Burnham\u2019s North<\/a><\/p>\n

Swift appeared to respond the next year with \u201cActually Romantic\u201d on her album The Life of a Showgirl<\/i>, a clod-hopping and misjudged track addressed to an obsessive hater. \u201cIt feels like you\u2019re flirting with me,\u201d croons Swift, in an unconvincing imitation of someone who doesn\u2019t care. Compared to Brat<\/i>, The Life of a Showgirl <\/i>sounded pedestrian and self-satisfied, and \u201cActually Romantic\u201d was one of its weakest tracks. The song reaches an apotheosis of cringe with the line: \u201cIt\u2019s kind of making me wet.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s interesting here isn\u2019t so much the ins and outs of two women in their thirties who may or may not have had a falling out (neither has gone on the record regarding their feelings about each other). Rather, it\u2019s the contrast between two different ways of dealing with making it. Since 2022, Swift has settled into an imperial phase that has seen her brutally expunge experimentation and vulnerability from her output. The last traces of risk-taking seemed to leave her body somewhere around the album Midnights<\/i>.<\/p>\n

If I had to pinpoint the moment Swift stopped being interesting to me as an artist, it would be the 2023 tweet in which she announced a re-recorded version of \u201cSnow on the Beach\u201d, her duet with Lana del Rey: \u201cYou asked for it, we listened: Lana and I went back into the studio specifically to record more Lana on \u2018Snow on the Beach\u2019.\u201d You asked for it, we listened<\/i>, as though making pop music were a question of beta testing and tweaking based on user feedback until the product has been perfectly refined. The customer is always right.<\/p>\n

This is the absolute antithesis of the Charli approach to creativity, which is to court danger for the sake of experimentation. On \u201cCamera\u201d, she sings about how acting offers the prospect of \u201cSomething new and undiscovered\/ And something kind of violent\/ Daring to fail and being ugly\/ I\u2019m inspired and alive.\u201d Charli recently posted Lou Reed\u2019s despised-at-the-time 1975 album Metal Machine Music <\/i>to her stories. Better, in her version of the creative life, to flop than to fade away: nothing is as frightening as inertia.<\/p>\n

Music, Fashion, Film <\/i>is several orders of magnitude less confrontational than Metal Machine Music<\/i>, but like Reed in the Seventies, Charli is facing in the direction of the future. Her post-Brat <\/i>death-drive caught a mood that has been picked up by some of this year\u2019s greatest pop albums. Worst Girl in America <\/i>by Slayyyter (an artist Charli singled out for praise in her Rolling Stone <\/i>interview) is a concept album about a party girl\u2019s rise and demise: the last song, \u201cBrittany Murphy\u201d, is a giddily hook-filled suicide note.<\/p>\n

Even more powerfully, Madonna\u2019s Confessions II <\/i>is \u2014 under the thumping return to the floor-fillers of Confessions on a Dance Floor <\/i>\u2014 a record filled with thoughts of mortality. Having spent the years since the first Confessions <\/i>frantically outrunning her own age, Madonna at 67 suddenly sounds like an artist coming to terms with both her own mortality and her influence. \u201cPeople really think there\u2019s a beginning and ending to this thing called life. But energy never dies,\u201d she says over the intro to \u201cFragile\u201d. It is the inverted version of Cronenberg\u2019s words on \u201cNo One Lasts Forever\u201d.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t need to be in your pensionable years to feel that existence right now is precarious. This is an unstable world politically, and a frightening world environmentally: large tracts of Europe and North America have been turned to ash this summer. Charli is correct that art is not going to save us \u2014 not music, not fashion, not film. The restless desire to make something new, the impulse to create is still worth following for its own sake. It\u2019s one way of knowing you\u2019re alive. When you\u2019ve accepted that your life is finite, why would you waste it doing the same thing on repeat to please other people?<\/p>\n

Read more Why we can\u2019t outrun the Neanderthals<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charli xcx is having a death summer. Music, Fashion, Film \u2014 her first proper album since 2024\u2019s season-defining Brat, and her second if you include her soundtrack to Emerald Fennell\u2019s Wuthering Heights from earlier this year \u2014 starts with a statement of creative destruction. \u201cI think the dance floor is dead,\u201d she announces on album-opener […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":593,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop"],"yoast_head":"\nCharli xcx\u2019s death drive - \u0421ity Flow Journal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=594\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Charli xcx\u2019s death drive - \u0421ity Flow Journal\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Charli xcx is having a death summer. 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