REVIEW: ‘Music, Fashion, Film’ is a Musical Hangover
WRITTEN BY EITAN OHANA
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Charli xcx’s latest record is an exploration of her world after ‘Brat,’ when the dance floor closes and everyone goes home
Photo by Aidan Zamiri
If you go into Music, Fashion, Film expecting a sequel to Brat, your illusions will be broken. Don’t fear, however, as Charli xcx makes sure to pour the cold water on your face early.
‘Yeah, we’re on to the next; I think the dance floor is dead; So now we’re making rock music,’ she says on the opening track “Rock Music.”
Is it a reinvention? No, not necessarily. It’s far more of an evolution. An exploration of a different life. Depending on your perspective, you might call it more mature or more boring, intelligent or a waste of time. The atmosphere is much lonelier. Again, the dance floor is dead. This record feels like when you reach the point in life where going out on Friday nights turns into solo movie dates in a dark room, your brain racing in an attempt to figure out what you want to say on your Letterboxd review.
But really, what this album and era at large seem to be most about is a desire to create, no matter the medium. Music, fashion, or film. They’re all avenues to explore the self and keep the self sane. The reason it works for Charli is the authenticity within it. It’s not a shock to hear her discuss these ideas or see Martin Scorsese on the album cover, David Cronenberg featured on a song, or Vincent Cassel star in the “Camera” music video. These are her tools for self-reference, a way to show the world and reaffirm to herself who and what she is.
‘Since everyone knows my name, all the parties got better; So now I’m sitting on the floor of a Parisian apartment, with a French girl talking ‘bout philosophy,” Charli says on the opening verse of the closing track, “No One Lasts Forever.”
There’s an idea in there of what progression should look like. Perhaps half-baked, but then so is much of this album. It feels like unfinished poetry, and maybe that’s the intent. Maybe we’re not supposed to be entirely sure in what we think or want to say or in how we dress or consume film. Maybe there’s room for revisiting previous eras or works while developing new opinions on them based on our new experiences.
In that way, Music, Fashion, Film and Brat are inextricably tied together, polar opposites rotating around each other in an eternal legacy. It’s Charli being earnest in the face of her persona, self-inquisitive in a time when identity is a leaf at the hands of the day’s winds.
What remains to be seen is if it’s okay that the dance floor seems to be dead. Can audiences handle a 180-degree tonal shift? Are we witnesses to Charli xcx’s own King of Comedy, or does she experience a kinder immediate fate than that of Scorsese in the early ‘80s?
The point, conceivably, could be that it doesn’t matter. It’s music, it’s fashion, it’s film. It’s art. And in spite of Cronenberg’s insistent chants that “no one lasts forever” to close out the record, what does is the never-ending pursuit of it.