"In the best modern works there is a unity of theory and practice. Listening to actual performances is likely to be the best way of determining whether a musician whose own assumptions lie some way behind the latest developments will thereby be debarred from an adequate appreciation. The recognition of frontiers implies the possibility of crossing them. It is just as urgent for musical theory to reflect on its own procedures as it is for music itself. It is the bitter fate of any theory worthy of the name that it is able to think beyond its own limitations, to reach further than the end of its nose. To do this is almost the distinguishing mark of any authentic thinking."
(Adorno, "Vers une musique informelle," 1961)
"If you stretch my love till it's thin enough to tearI'll just stretch my arms to reach you anywhereAnd like a rubber ball, I'll come bouncin' back to you"
(Bobby Vee/Marty Wilde, "Rubber Ball," 1961)
She's a little thirty-three-year-old girl, and she never leaves her room.
"No, you don't get me," she retorts. "No, you don't."
The advance words about the new Charli xcx album did not prepare for anything useless, let alone useful. The words were about a "retreat" to rock. A backsliding to odorous old convention.
But the words have painfully missed the point. "Rock Music," the song which opens this briskly interminable (because no one lasts forever) thirty-minute album - Aitchison's Half Hour, which could equally have been titled Stone Me...What Is Life? - is a smeared photocopy of "classic rock"; not in the same way that the first Strokes album was a photograph of a rock record (and how ironic that the new Strokes album, also out today, has received little if anything in the way of recognition ["All the music, all the people...not a single goodbye"]) but in a way that signifies this record is going to be Rock As Hospital Nightmare, a twisted and distorted amendment of something that might have spoken to,or for the fourteen-going-on-fifteen Charli for whom the bedroom of "2007" represents her Holy Grail...something that has been lost and can never be returned to (like Limmy's Millport).
Nor can this record be dismissed as opulent frittering of a spoiled...well, you know the word which comes next; it was all over the globe two years ago...who self-obsesses as the world burns. The opening "Rock Music" makes it clear that this is relentless pain rather than any sort of liberation: "I'm really hurting my neck/The nerve damage is real/But it's the only way to feel somеthing."
We know she's hurting, not least because in the midst of "Persona" she observes: "I know that you're hurting." But is it too late for everything now to be alright?
Charli xcx is hurtingly aware that Music, Fashion, Film - oh, that title, some scoffed, very who-cares-about-your-Manhattan Millionaire-opulence - isn't really about any of those three things. It could serve as a requiem for, or memento of, a world hurtling towards a programmatically violent end. "SS26" - for "Spring, Summer 2026" - is a Click Clack Anti-Symphony ("Yeah we're walking on a runway that goes straight to Hell") for everything and everyone that is beyond saving. "Nothing's gonna save us," she announces, "not music, fashion or film."
On the musical clock ticks - bleakly stuttering reproductions of what "rock music" might once have sounded like, but cut up into pixels of beats and chants; Charli's own voice mostly numbed by quiet shock. The startling "Yeah" slams into the listener's body, almost in the fashion of the Penguin Café Orchestra attempting to reconstitute the atoms of "rock," while the voice frets over and over "no I don't wanna" until the accompaniment gradually slows down like an exhausted music box.
Does "Wink Wink" sound like "Homecoming" by late noughties MVE bargain basement perennials The Teenagers, and unless you were A.G. Cook burrowing around those same basements at the time - in which case we may well have unknowingly bumped into each other - does it matter? What does matter is that it sounds chattily self-aware, as the work of most girl groups of the period, from Girls Aloud to Northern State, managed. Not to mention the grandmother of hyperpop, Elastica's routinely laughed-at belated second album The Menace, which now sounds as though recorded two months ago. But this is subtle. Have I changed, she asks before rhetorically responding, no, not really.
"Card Declined" is a quite masterful essay in anti-capitalism. Nine of this album's eleven songs are brisk and swiftly done with - in the exact manner of side one of Low - and this song could have said all it had to say in one minute and 27 seconds, but the music then collapses into hovering post-intensive care syndrome fragments before the music, and Charli's voice, reassemble themselves and deliver a slow, patient straight-to-camera lament: "I keep thinkin' about you every single day..." - remember "So I" from the album sometimes known as brat, and you may gather whom she is still, still remembering. If this bears any residual P.J. Harvey influence then it's that of White Chalk, one of her less immediately palpable albums from that bedroom-friendly year of 2007.
"Persona" may or may not be about Taylor Swift and is probably much more likely to be about Sky Ferriera. In the self-lacerating "I'm Afraid," however, the newly-married Charli completely demolishes any magic wand tradwife fantasies by wondering if she's any good for this kind of life ("Take the ring, take the RING!"), even though, as in the touching, Stereolab-ish tribute to A.G. Cook that is "Magic Metal Montana," she can't imagine living without him. "I'm Afraid" is Music, Fashion, Film's "Be My Wife," the moment where the underlying emotional wound bleeds through the protective skin.
I am afraid that I am underselling and hopelessly failing to articulate the importance of this record. This tells us to our faces that everything we believe in and profess to love is, finally, not going to be enough to save us from a painful nothingness. People like RAYE may have the strength and courage to save themselves. But what Charli is arguing is that Manolo Blahnik shoes, cobwebbed or not, aren't a symbol of anything. What if the girl under the grey cloud saved herself, but it was already too late for everybody and everything else to be saved?
The closing "No One Lasts Forever" hurtles at speed towards a reassuring wall ("I don't wanna go home") - she ends where HOPE. began, in Paris, perhaps slightly drunk but certainly not alone. The song canters agreeably for a few minutes before the voice of David Cronenberg arises, out of a cried ocean of "forever"s, He is lying on the sidewalk, thinking in that curious peace about art and immortality, before concluding that, yes, although the art is going to last - just like Chartres Cathedral - artists don't, and won't. His words freeze in a loop: "They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever" over another oddly comforting electronic loop which is then systematically assaulted by random explosions, shots and other unclassifiable noises, as though humanity is being eradicated.
Remember how - or perhaps you don't - in 1998, Cronenberg made a film called Last Night, set in Toronto on the last night before an unspecified apocalypse. He himself appeared in that film, playing a character called Duncan, who is later killed offscreen. As the new morning dawns we understand that this was never the world ending, but a chance for a new world to begin. Note that throughout almost the entire record Charli's voice has been Autotuned like the Earth's last surviving robot. But there appears to be no element of salvation at the culmination of Music, Fashion, Film. It is the horrible realisation that none of these three things, in the end, are going to count, or account, for anything.
It plays like the final album to be made on Earth. Yet so did Music For A New Society, made forty-four or so years ago by one of the gentlemen pictured on the cover of Music, Fashion, Film, which culminated in his screaming through an Ode To Joy mutation at the microphone "DEAAAAAAAD-UHHHH!," succeeded by a retrieved post-blast fragment of feminine recollection. And the world failed to end.
"and I a ball of blue light shoots into my forehead and bursts and I say reeling inside myself Ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in hora"
(Jon Fosse, A New Name [Septology VI-VII], 2021)
"You used to know me, now you don't."
(Charli xcx, "Used To Know Me," 2021)
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