{"id":1692,"date":"2026-07-30T15:16:25","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T15:16:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1692"},"modified":"2026-07-30T15:16:25","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T15:16:25","slug":"is-she-the-new-britney-spears-or-the-new-lou-reed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1692","title":{"rendered":"Is She the New Britney Spears\u2014Or the New Lou Reed?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Earlier this year, I wrote an article with the headline \u201cSlow Down, Charli XCX.\u201d The pop singer had followed a hit album, 2024\u2019s Brat<\/em>, with a steady pulse of output\u2014a remix album, a soundtrack album, a host of movie roles, plus many, many marketing stunts\u2014that had me exhausted by someone whom I consider to be one of the most exciting voices in music. Quantity was beating quality; good enough<\/em> was smushing great<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Read more The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs<\/a><\/p>\n

Five months later, a new Charli XCX album has arrived, with all of the memes and metacommentary that tend to swirl around music\u2019s most online star. It\u2019s called Music, Fashion, Film<\/em>, and it was conceived in what she\u2019s described as a burst of inspiration during last fall\u2019s Paris Fashion Week. With a spiky and Scotch-taped sound, the album is a 30-minute broadside against overthinking the artistic process. In direct challenge to those who feel she\u2019s saturated the market (I\u2019m not the only one), she\u2019s rallying for an idea that feels very now<\/em> but really is also very old: More is more.<\/p>\n

Love songs to the muse abound. \u201cYeah, we\u2019re so inspired \/ basically all the time,\u201d she sings on the opener, titled \u201cRock Music,\u201d whose glitch-kissed analog instrumentation and lyrical logorrhea announce the album\u2019s sound and attitude. \u201cCamera\u201d celebrates the sheer terror of acting by comparing the director\u2019s lens to a gun; \u201cMagic Metal Montana\u201d narrates recording-studio-forged friendship while cutesy New Wave riffs percolate. The album closes with a monologue from the director David Cronenberg, who preaches that long-term legacy really can\u2019t be the artist\u2019s concern. His implication is that what matters is what you do in this lifetime\u2014so get to doing it.<\/p>\n

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Charli is known for making self-aware, cybernetic dance pop\u2014the art-school take on Britney Spears\u2014but this album most flagrantly calls back to a rock band: the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed modeled the sort of petulant sing-talking that characterizes her verses. The album\u2019s producers, A. G. Cook and Finn Keane, have made a digital drag-and-drop collage of the Velvets\u2019 ingredients: tinny guitars evoking 1970\u2019s radio-rock foray, Loaded<\/em>; metronomic beats in the lineage of the band\u2019s sparse and steady timekeeper, Moe Tucker. Sitting next to Martin Scorsese and the designer Marc Jacobs on the album cover is the group\u2019s multi-instrumentalist John Cale, rock\u2019s god of noisy, dignified experimentation.<\/p>\n

Comparisons to the Velvet Underground recontextualize Charli\u2019s career in a useful way. By courting the charts while pulling from the avant-garde, she\u2019s long been at the center of the tiresome debate over \u201cpoptimism,\u201d an alleged cultural turn toward valuing easy gratification over difficulty in art. But the Velvets were sneering at the false dichotomy between those things back in the \u201960s. Yes, Cale droned with diffidence and dread, and Reed sang of scandalous topics (I wish Charli and other leading songwriters of her generation held his social-documentarian instincts\u2014rather than fixating on the person in the mirror). But Reed was also a bubblegum fan who sought big hits. He shared the ambition Charli sings about on the sterling Music, Fashion, Film<\/em> B-side \u201cPlayboy Bunny\u201d: to make a song as memorable as the canonical smut mag\u2019s logo.<\/p>\n

Read more Abdul El-Sayed Fuses Together Two Toxic Ideologies<\/a><\/p>\n

A few tracks here might indeed rate as future classics. With serene guitars and unnervingly beautiful vocals referencing the malaise of doomscrolling, \u201cSS26\u201d glides from the speakers like some chiffon-clad horseman of the apocalypse (\u201cSpring, summer \u201926 \/ When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it\u201d). The sludgy, distorted \u201cCard Declined\u201d well captures the existential futility of a shopping binge. \u201cYeah\u201d is a brilliantly simple distillation of the creative process in which Charli mumbles \u201cI don\u2019t wanna\u201d a bunch\u2014until she changes her mind. Surf-rock riffs, punctuated with pockets of silence, eventually slacken in tempo for a glorious, slo-mo finish. The track has a complete thesis about the ups and downs of art making, articulated almost entirely in sound.<\/p>\n

Generally, the more words in a song here, the worse it is. Charli\u2019s aiming for sprezzatura, but of course that\u2019s not something you can aim for\u2014and many of the results feel like careless rambling. On the otherwise-delightful, fuzzed-out \u201cWink Wink,\u201d a line in the first verse is as unpleasant as grisly steak: \u201cAnd maybe I fucked your dad \/ Just kidding, I\u2019m only saying that for effect.\u201d Meanwhile, the sweetly nostalgic \u201c2007\u201d is slightly undercooked: \u201cAll from your apartment, you can shine bright like\u201d\u2014and here the brain craves some twist\u2014\u201ca star.\u201d The most personal tracks on the album are convoluted yet bland, like the recounting of uninteresting dreams. \u201cMagic Metal Montana\u201d salutes her producer Cook, but her descriptions are superficial\u2014as if Charli doesn\u2019t really know him.<\/p>\n

With their unusual production style and intriguing subject matter, many of these songs point to far better versions of themselves. Is it churlish to ask for more oomph, more insight, more effort<\/em>? The album\u2019s cover seems to answer that question by featuring three masters of modern media who are known for being prolific. Jacobs used to put out 16 fashion lines a year. Scorsese\u2019s all-over-the-place 1980s output was criticized as inconsistent at the time, but fans have come to appreciate The King of Comedy<\/em> and After Hours<\/em>. Cale will always be thought of as a genius even if few listened to, say, 2024\u2019s Poptical Illusion<\/em>. These men create simply because creating is what they do\u2014and audiences have been lucky that\u2019s so.<\/p>\n

Charli has every right to take heed from that model. But the artists she\u2019s channeling are icons of a 20th-century paradigm now destroyed by overproduction. After the internet made creation, distribution, and consumption of media into frictionless affairs, pop culture seemed to become swamped: so much content, so few classics. Cronenberg is right that artists need not create with posterity in mind, but for a contemporary oracle such as Charli, the concerns of the present do merit consideration. And the great concern, right now, is too much mediocrity.<\/p>\n

Read more Iran\u2019s War Within<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charli XCX\u2019s new album is a broadside against overthinking the artistic process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1691,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nIs She the New Britney Spears\u2014Or the New Lou Reed? - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/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:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1692\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is She the New Britney Spears\u2014Or the New Lou Reed? - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Charli XCX\u2019s new album is a broadside against overthinking the artistic process.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1692\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-30T15:16:25+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1692#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1692\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"Is She the New Britney Spears\u2014Or the New Lou Reed?\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-30T15:16:25+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1692\"},\"wordCount\":1041,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1692#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/68d0ffdd731edd0f02bb934f7a16957c.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Culture\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1692#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1692\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1692\",\"name\":\"Is She the New Britney Spears\u2014Or the New Lou Reed? 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