Charli XCX: Hyperpop's New "Mother"

Charlott Emma Aitchison or Charli XCX is a critically acclaimed English singer-songwriter who has increasingly asserted her presence on a global scale. Gaining most traction in her "The Fault in Our Stars" feature, "Boom Clap", her initial allure in the US was fortified by other features like Icona Pop's "I love it" and Iggy Azalea's "Fancy".

From here, her career has exploded in numerous unprecedented ways. First, she has written for artists like Shawn Mendes, Camila Cabello, Selena Gomez, and Madison Beer. Her most critically acclaimed album at this point is 2020's "How I'm Feeling Now", which features quintessential hits of her transition from mainstream pop to electronic hyperpop. Audiences obsessed over the synth and glitch-like club hits amidst the pandemic's lockdown, particularly as she conveyed a digital party sound while all music listeners were in pure isolation. Post 2020, she continues to refine her hyper pop sound seen in the 2022 album, "Crash" and the movie "Bottoms"'s soundtrack. Before and after this explosion were also numerous collaborations with Kim Petras, Caroline Polachek, and the late SOPHIE. 

Currently in the works is a new album entitled "Brat", set to release on June 7th, 2024. At this point, she has released 3 songs of the album: Von Dutch, Club Classics, and B2b, also releasing the Von Dutch remix featuring Addison Rae and A.G. Cook. The album has been received in a multitude of ways, but this is largely orchestrated by Charli's creative production process. Trying to move further away from her mainstream pop image, she has created a private Instagram account, @360_brat, where certain accepted fans receive exclusive access to song snippets, tour dates, and merch. However, anyone who publicly leaks the context is immediately blocked and subject to the punitive discretion of zealous Twitter fans.

But this lore of curating a distinct reception of "Brat" goes far deeper. As I mentioned, Charli has worked alongside both Kim Petras and SOPHIE (who tragically passed away in 2021 at age 34): two trans women at the forefront of the hyperpop genre. This new(er) branch of pop is most commonly associated with queer communities and aesthetics - a dramatization of pop music to demarcate it as experimental and fluid. The glitchy and electronic sound often enables artists to play with their gender presentation, and they often humor typical pop tropes like the "bimbo" or seductress hypersexualized caricatures. From here, the genre emerges with groundbreaking commentary on the sexual status quo via this experimental and avant-garde art. SOPHIE especially has been vitally instrumental in crafting the artistic sound and conceptual framework in which this music operates; however, she did tend to somewhat disregard the elements of hypersexualization. Charli has stated that she identifies as a heterosexual, cisgender woman, but she, like many others, accredits the birth of feminized hyperpop to SOPHIE.

"Brat" seems to be drawing upon SOPHIE's legacy of raw, queered electronic music - significantly more than other albums have done in the past. Meanwhile, Charli has also meshed this with her own heterosexuality, specifically protesting her experiences of objectification by male viewers. One instance of this lies in her decision of the album cover: a plain, green background simply with the word "brat". Fans were critical of the decision, asking why she, herself, was not on the cover. Charli responded, "I think the constant demand for access to women's bodies and faces in our album artwork is misogynistic and boring." Here, we see Charli's upcoming album seems to be interrogating pop to navigate her association with both mainstream pop and hyperpop. Specifically, she has detailed that many of the upcoming songs are actually inspired by SOPHIE and Charli's grief surrounding her unexpected death. She notes, "I didn't feel like I was magical enough for this unbelievably magic person, and that makes me ashamed now...for being a coward...I'm sad for myself that I didn't experience all this person had to offer." It seems she holds an intrinsic motivation to further hyperpop, namely, by attending to SOPHIE's grander vision of fluidity in abstract queer art.

Therefore, Charli's creative process holds reference to the matriarch of the genre, SOPHIE, while also including her own narrative and protest of heterosexual femininity amidst patriarchal norms. This connects to the internal dialogue of Faith Ringgold as she navigated the construction of Black women's art. Ringgold writes about the tension between her Blackness and womanhood: "It was a real challenge to try and define oneself and one's art outside the narrow parameters of the mainstream art world. But we were doing this and it felt good" (Ringgold, 180-181). In many ways, both artists find themselves constrained externally, feeling "pulled in two differing directions." For Ringgold, she has established herself as an artist of Black liberation. At the same time, she was drawn to the realm of feminist art, but she was made to feel that the two were mutually exclusive. Moving forward nonetheless, Ringgold produces a myriad of critical pieces integral to her legacy: revolutionizing art to intersect Black and feminist themes. Likewise, Charli feels pulled in two different directions: engage with pop and hyperpop expectations that hypersexualize women or protest the expectations to sell music at the expense of her artistic and sexual autonomy. I would speculate that given her inspiration from SOPHIE and other comments, Charli will likely mesh these in an intersecting way that honors women's sexuality while bypassing it with conceptual addendums. It will be interesting to see how/if she revolutionizes hyperpop similar to how Ringgold did within the world of visual arts with Black feminism.

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