Charli XCX and postmodernism
Last week, I went to see Charli XCX perform the Brat tour. Both Charli and her support act, Shygirl, were excellent. The audience held onto every word and sang every lyric; the arena was entirely full; and those sitting were standing. Party time for the party girl.
The aesthetics of Charli’s performance were fascinating. It was unquestionably a multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary performance. My thought at the end was: if someone thought in 1986 what a music performance would be like in the year 2000, it would be this. There was a hyper-reality to it that we expected to happen by the turn of the millennium, which sort-of-happened through consumer adoption of the Internet, but didn’t really happen stylistically. The setting was deliberately monolithic — I am performing to you, with the flashing visuals reminding the audience of exactly that action.
In particular, the huge hi-res LED screens either side of the stage were pumping out messages in flashing monochrome. At the beginning, CHARLI and XCX. At the end, PARTY and GIRL. This reminded me of a highly specific aesthetic from between 1986 and 1988 which involved the stretching of sans serif fonts and flashing them on the screen. Such a technique was very popular in pop videos and in the titles of television programmes which wanted to be part of the zeitgeist.
What’s interesting to me about such an aesthetic is its change in meaning between the 80s and now. In the 80s it was a technological leap with hardware such as the Quantel Paintbox making such visual effects fashionable. Until then, visual manipulations had to be hand-drawn and produced.
New hardware made it much easier to throw fonts, colours and shapes across the screen, quickly and cheaply. Now, of course, we can all do that ourselves. The difference in the Charli XCX visuals are that it’s something of an antithesis to do it in such — deliberately — poor quality. The visuals, both of the performance and her accompanying Brat album, recall both a lower grade of technology than we now find both accessible and acceptable, and a DIY culture that doesn’t really care about image pixellation. The former of course informs the latter, and it’s a very clever consideration of Charli’s designers and stylists that the cheap-looking fonts are expensively cheap. Warner Records has probably blown a ton of money to make it look this shit, and has — rightly — returned its investment many times over.
This is totally acceptable to younger generations, whose consumption of visual style and content is far less mediated. It’s totally original and totally not original at the same time. If the word Brat on an album cover is slightly hazy and imperfect, then that’s fine, because we no longer have a problem with the MVP-ness of digital media. We can delete 99 photos on a phone just to keep the 1, because there is no friction involved with either action. Take that view further and it means that we are entirely comfortable with volte face imperfection in an increasingly digital world, whether accidentally or deliberately glitchy. Autotuned vocals are not a problem because our brains are autotuning the entire sensory world around us.
“Therefore we will not listen to the source itself in order to learn what it is or what it means, but rather to the turns of speech, the allegories, figures, metaphors, as you will, into which the source has deviated, in order to lose it or rediscover it — which always amounts to the same.”
― Jacques Derrida
Another stylistic point for me was how the screens were being used beyond the display of gigantic slogans. There was no band — Charli’s performance was her singing/rapping from a backing track. This has initially led me to think — should she have had a band? — but then I remembered that performers have occupied stages with backing tracks for years, including many of the hip hop MCs and bands that I revered in my teens. This could have presented a problem in that she was just one person on-stage, but she frequently performed to a cameraman on the stage, who was filming for the two giant screens. This was fascinating to me, in that she was, at times, facing the audience but, at other times, walking around a specially-constructed stage performing to a moving camera. The postmodernism couldn’t have been purer in certain moments, where audience members were making videos on their phones of these giant screens — the screens themselves showing a live video of a singer performing that exact live video, performing directly in front of them at the same time. It’s cultural 4D chess.
Perhaps the loveliest moment in terms of this stylistic melee was not what happened at the performance, but before it. The dress code for Brat was, really, ‘anything goes’ — irrespective of body shape, gender, and personal preferences and comfort regarding style. Coincidentally, MCM ComicCon took place on the same day, and as elves, wizards, and Marvel characters were leaving the venue, the sexual postmodernists were going in. It was a wonderful collision of colour, texture, and, of course, style. Generation Z doesn’t care about any of that shit, and why should they? Few people in that demographic can afford a house, they are heavily indebted from university, there are slow and fast-moving elements of societal collapse around them, and climate change will materially make life even worse than it is now. Why the fuck should they have anything else on their plate?
The world is becoming harder, and both tangible and intangible experiences are becoming more glitchy. Our world is imperfectly perfect, and our nights out are perfectly imperfect. Charli exists in a harmony that is both fractured and beautiful at the same time.
