The Predatory Wasp

I don’t think I’ve ever listened to an album that has made me question contemporary music criticism quite as much as Charli XCX’s Music, Fashion, Film. I’m four listens in, and I just can’t do any more.

It’s not just because I dislike it. There are plenty of critically acclaimed records that simply aren’t for me, and that’s never particularly interesting. This feels different as it’s one of those rare occasions where I genuinely find myself wondering whether everyone else is hearing something that simply isn’t there, or whether we’ve reached the point where the narrative around an artist has become so compelling that it no longer really matters what’s coming out of the speakers.

I come at this from the position of being a fan, especially of what could loosely be described as her mid-period. Number 1 Angel is still my favourite album of hers, which I guess immediately opens up to criticisms of “not properly getting it”, as it’s far from her most critically lauded album. But I was fully on board for Pop 2 and most of that which followed, and think Wuthering Heights is one of the year’s best albums. But Music, Fashion, Film is just a bad album.

The reviews have been extraordinary. The Guardian described it as “another gorgeously astute and disarmingly deep album about the instability of identity”, adding that it “hits just as hard as Brat. ” Pitchfork, awarding it Best New Music, celebrated what it called the album’s “first-draft, ‘one for me’ feeling”, effectively arguing that the very qualities which might once have been criticised as unfinished are, in fact, central to its brilliance. Elsewhere, the Associated Press praised Charli as “one of pop’s great contrarians”, presenting the record’s refusal to meet expectations as evidence of its artistic success rather than something that should necessarily be judged on its own terms. Even the notoriously hard to please The Quietus argued the case that it might be “the best punk album of the decade”.

I mean, actually listen to this song and try and judge it free from all the narrative that surrounds it.

This is where I start to lose the plot and begin ranting on a very small blog that barely anyone will read. Because there seems to be an assumption running through so much of the coverage that intention is enough. If something sounds slight, that’s because it’s rejecting excess. If a chorus never really arrives, it’s dismantling pop convention. If the songwriting feels undercooked and sarcastic, that’s because the whole thing is deliberately exposing the artifice of songwriting itself. Every possible criticism already has an answer built into it, and that answer is almost always some variation of: that’s the point.

But what if, actually, this isn’t the point, or perhaps more importantly, what if it is, and it still doesn’t matter?

I’ve never really understood why irony is treated as some kind of artistic forcefield. If I deliberately paint a boring painting, I’ve still painted a boring painting. If I intentionally write an uninteresting song, it doesn’t become interesting simply because I anticipated that criticism. At some point the work has to stand on its own, rather than on the explanatory framework that’s built around it afterwards.

I think that’s what fascinates/riles me most about this album. Strip away the essays about identity, celebrity, self-parody, performance and deconstruction, stop reading interviews about rejecting the expectations created by Brat, forget the idea that Charli is one of contemporary pop’s great disruptors for a moment, and just sit with the songs. I keep coming back to the same conclusion: they’re just very boring! Not challenging. Not confrontational. Just… a bit dull. And sticking three auteurs looking serious on the cover doesn’t change that.

Are we genuinely all saying that this:

Is better than this?

All of this makes me wonder whether Charli XCX has reached that weird point in an artist’s career where critics have become more interested in interpreting the work than evaluating it. Every great artist eventually acquires a mythology, and mythology has a habit of bending criticism around itself. Choices that might look lazy in another context become fearless. Incompleteness becomes vulnerability. Ordinary ideas become conceptual statements. Before long, the discussion has drifted so far away from the experience of actually listening to the record that the music itself almost feels incidental.

None of this is to suggest that reviewers are being dishonest. I don’t think they are. I think they really are (somehow) hearing all of these things, just as I genuinely don’t. But I do think there are moments in criticism where consensus becomes self-reinforcing, where everyone is so busy engaging with the cultural significance of an album that they forget to ask the oldest and simplest question in criticism: Is it actually any good? And to that I say an emphatic: no, no it isn’t.

For me, Music, Fashion, Film never clears that most basic of hurdles. It feels like a collection of sketches that have been elevated into something profound largely because of who made them, and because we’ve collectively decided that every left turn Charli XCX takes must, almost by definition, be an important one.

Maybe time will prove me spectacularly wrong. Perhaps in ten years’ time this will be regarded as another pivotal moment in pop music, and I’ll happily concede that I missed it.

Or perhaps we’ll all look back slightly sheepishly and realise that, somewhere along the way, we became so captivated by the idea of what the album represented that we stopped noticing how little there was to hold onto once the record actually started playing. Perhaps Pitchfork will do one of those excruciating mea culpas and shave 4 points of her score alongside a “sorry guys, we got caught up in this one”. We can but hope.

My fantasy is that in six months time, Charli will issue some kind of “gotcha” statement: “Lolz this was shit and you all loved it ha ha idiots”. But she’s too smart for that. Maybe she’s thinking it though. That would be enough for me for now.