{"id":558761,"date":"2026-07-25T09:57:21","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T09:57:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/558761\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T09:57:21","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T09:57:21","slug":"how-charli-xcx-became-the-arbiter-of-taste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/558761\/","title":{"rendered":"How Charli XCX became the arbiter of taste"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n Earlier this month, Charli XCX watched \u201cPoint Break,\u201d the 1991 action flick starring Keanu Reeves as a rookie FBI agent. It was, she said, \u201ctop to bottom the coolest everrrrr.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n How do we know that? Because she logged it on Letterboxd<\/a> \u2014 in an account that has become a sneak peek into a pop icon\u2019s personal artistic appetite. It\u2019s a portrait of a woman who\u2019s as likely to consume low culture (\u201cThe Idea of You,\u201d the schmaltzy Anne Hathaway boyband rom-com) as high (she gave Michelangelo Antonioni\u2019s 1960 masterpiece \u201cL\u2019Avventura\u201d 5 stars). The film reviewing account has lent itself to Charli\u2019s overt styling of herself as an arbiter of taste and an unabashed fan of pop culture.\n <\/p>\n

\n The rollout of Charli\u2019s newest album \u201cMusic, Fashion, Film,\u201d released Friday, is a kind of Rolodex of references, proof she\u2019s done her homework. The album\u2019s main cover doesn\u2019t feature the pop star at all, but instead titans from the three sectors in the title: John Cale, the legendary Welsh singer and producer who helped found The Velvet Underground; Marc Jacobs, the fashion designer for whose campaigns Charli has posed for in the past; and the director Martin Scorsese, looking characteristically nonchalant (Charli\u2019s latest review of a Scorsese film? 5 stars for \u201cCape Fear,\u201d the 1991 psychological thriller).\n <\/p>\n

\"An<\/p>\n

\n Charli has good taste, and she wants you to know it. With \u201cMusic, Fashion, Film,\u201d she also wants you to know that the icons she looks up to agree, thinking she\u2019s important enough that they\u2019ll fly out for a photo shoot in a \u201crandom kitchen,\u201d per Cale<\/a>. The end product is, like her Letterboxd, a perfect juxtaposition between high and low, three iconic artists in a dingy room \u2014 and, in an alternate cover,<\/a> the singer herself smoldering among them, like their spiritual heir \u2014 or the superfan who\u2019s snuck into the heavyweights\u2019 club.\n <\/p>\n

\n It\u2019s cool, Charli says, to care deeply about art. Apathy is out.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cCoolness is something I value, because without it everything sort of feels random and nondescript,\u201d she wrote on her Substack in December.<\/a> \u201cThe second you apply a \u2018something for everyone\u2019 approach to art in an attempt to deliberately appeal to more people that, in my opinion, is the moment that coolness dies.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Charli\u2019s own curation of taste and yes, coolness, stems from the reputation she\u2019s built over the years as a kind of anti-Taylor Swift, strutting on stage in massive sunglasses and knee-high boots, making dance music about key bumps and her own club adventures. She\u2019s presented herself as an alternative to the platonic ideal of a pop princess: messier, grungier, less predictable.\n <\/p>\n

\"Charli<\/p>\n

\n Her mega-successful sixth album \u201cBrat,\u201d released in 2024, saw Charli taking that image to its neon-green extreme, channeling the hot-mess it-girls of the mid 2000s remodeled for the internet era. The product was an album uniquely and specifically of the moment, so hyperpresent that its trademark color became the backdrop to an entire summer.\n <\/p>\n

\n Aesthetically, the version of cool on \u201cMusic, Fashion, Film\u201d is instead a blast from the pre-iPhone past. The videos released so far are all black and white, the sound stripped back. \u201cI kind of want to make a Lou Reed record, to be honest,\u201d she told Billboard<\/a> at the height of \u201cbrat summer\u201d in 2024.\n <\/p>\n

\n The songs off \u201cMusic, Fashion, Film\u201d don\u2019t quite sound like Lou Reed (though she does mimic some of his deadpan sing-talking) \u2014 but Charli surely gets her rocker credit by collaborating with his longtime musical partner Cale, with whom she co-wrote \u201cHouse\u201d for the \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d soundtrack. And she does convincing rockstar drag in the video for \u201cRock Music,\u201d head-banging and pacing around mountains of discarded cigarettes as she professes \u201cthe dance floor is dead\u201d over distorted electric guitar.\n <\/p>\n

\n The references liberally littered throughout \u201cMusic, Fashion, Film\u201d demonstrate how deeply Charli values counterculture \u2014 and wants to share it with the masses. Scorsese might appear on the cover, but it\u2019s the godfather of body horror, David Cronenberg, whose oeuvre of cult classic films invoke sex, death and transformation (classic Charli themes, too) who gets a feature and a writing credit on the album\u2019s last track.\n <\/p>\n

\n The video for another track, \u201cCamera,\u201d stars legendary French actor Vincent Cassel, who played a Cronenberg-proxy in the Canadian auteur\u2019s latest feature, \u201cThe Shrouds.\u201d Why cast Cassel? \u201cSimply because he\u2019s the coolest,\u201d Charli said in a story<\/a> for the newsletter Drafting.\n <\/p>\n

\"Charli<\/p>\n

\"Actor<\/p>\n

\"Vincent<\/p>\n

\n The video, shot entirely in one take, features Cassel as a frustrated actor \u2014 based, spiritually at least, in part on an image of an exhausted James Dean<\/a> getting his makeup touched up on the set of the 1955 film \u201cGiant.\u201d Cassel snipes at crew members while doing messy reshoots of a scene in which he\u2019s shot in the chest. The shooter is Charli herself, who enters perfectly poised in Louboutins astride a camera dolly.\n <\/p>\n

\n Charli\u2019s depiction of herself as the auteur directing Cassel is an avatar for her broader project: Building a world for her music to live in. She went viral after declaring \u201cmusic is not important\u201d on SubwayTakes.<\/a> \u201cMusic is not giving me the world. I need an artist to create the world,\u201d she went on. Her Letterboxd, her Substack, her carefully coordinated explorations of fashion and film: It\u2019s all part of the sprawling scaffolding that surrounds and supports her musical output.\n <\/p>\n

\n Despite her Cronenberg fandom, the singer\u2019s kaleidoscopic palette of references isn\u2019t limited to the avant-garde. Charli is, per music writer Spencer Kornhaber, a \u201cstudent of mainstream pop\u201d who has drawn on the musical and aesthetic styles of Janet Jackson and Britney Spears. You can hear the echoes of Britney in Charli\u2019s frequent experiments with autotune and see traces of her styling in the bikini tops and low-slung pants of Charli\u2019s \u201cVroom Vroom\u201d era. She knows where she fits in the pop pantheon (even while wearing more black than the rest).\n <\/p>\n

\"Charli<\/p>\n

\n The difference, said Kornhaber, is Charli\u2019s commitment to autonomy and her public manipulation of her own image. \u201cShe takes that archetype and she flips it and makes her own authorship a central, undeniable part of the art,\u201d said Kornhaber, a staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of \u201cOn Divas.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n On her newest album, she toys explicitly with how much of her cool, bad girl image is an artifice, too \u2014 an expansion of the Charli XCX cinematic universe. \u201cMaybe I f**ked your dad \/ Just kidding, I\u2019m only saying that for effect,\u201d she sings on \u201cWink, Wink,\u201d a raunchy, half-hearted rejection of her risqu\u00e9 persona.\n <\/p>\n

\n What else is just for effect? Her Letterboxd looks candid, unfiltered \u2014 but it\u2019s also been a means for her to disseminate messages about the films she starred in during the \u201cBrat\u201d-\u201dMusic, Fashion, Film\u201d interregnum. It\u2019s still marketing, even if it\u2019s marketing of the \u201cmore intimate, personal, private, one on one\u201d style she recently praised on X<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n

\n Charli\u2019s newest challenge seems to be figuring out how to stay cool after achieving the meteoric mainstream success of \u201cBrat.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n It\u2019s a careful balancing act. Can you be both counterculture and mainstream enough to become a main character in Kamala Harris\u2019 presidential campaign<\/a>? An underground icon who\u2019s also collaborated with H&M, Skims and Converse?\n <\/p>\n

\"Charli<\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe apex of cool and commercial has always been interesting to me and I have always mused over the point at which something cool dies and is rejected by the initial group of people who made it desirable and aspirational in the first place,\u201d she wrote in the December Substack piece. \u201cOf course I would much rather be considered \u2018cool\u2019 by a select few group of people than known by everyone. And yes, I know it\u2019s inherently lame to care about that kind of stuff, but I\u2019m just being honest.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Fifteen years into her career, Charli is, like Scorsese and Marc Jacobs, a lot closer to being \u201cknown by everyone\u201d than most artists could ever dream of. She\u2019s just shy of hitting 30 million monthly listeners on Spotify. But she\u2019s still chasing cool: what she characterizes as art that\u2019s \u201cspecific and niche and a true expression of a person.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Achieving mainstream stardom hasn\u2019t stopped Cale, Jacobs and Scorsese from maintaining the glimmer of coolness decades into their careers. Maybe she situates herself among them on the album cover as a kind of protective amulet against the revolving door of culture that sees pop stars \u2014 particularly women \u2014 discarded one after the other as the zeitgeist shifts.\n <\/p>\n

\n Charli\u2019s shameless celebration of her taste comes as AI companies are promising everyone can be an artist. If anyone can make work of technical high quality, then taste and discrimination become even more salient. Taste, artistry, coolness: They\u2019re the currency of a new world. And Charli, she wants us to know, is rich in them.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this month, Charli XCX watched \u201cPoint Break,\u201d the 1991 action flick starring Keanu Reeves as a rookie…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558762,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409],"class_list":["post-558761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}