Charlie XCX: The Chorus Girl

[DocumentaLy]

Lengthy, but interesting interview, with basically the only current pop girl I listen to: http://www.vulture.com/2018/08/charli-xcxs-path-to-becoming-pops-preeminent-hook-maker.html

 

 

There were some interesting points:

 

 

“I am living a double life right now,†Charli says. Or maybe it’s a triple life. There’s the performer Charli XCX you get on the tour. Then there’s what you could call her day job as a songwriter-for-hire, responsible for tracks like Selena Gomez’s “

 Together, these allow Charli the artistic and financial freedom for her other identity, the voice and creative force behind a wave of new tracks Pitchfork has called “an uninhibited, anti-algorithm vision of what pop music could be.â€

 

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Charli’s work with Sophie and A.G. have earned her rave reviews, as well as a spot on the New York Times Magazine’s list of â€œ25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going,†but so far the trio hasn’t produced any songs that young men in Joker makeup are likely to sing along to in football stadiums. Part of this is personal — Charli says she’s a lot happier now that she’s not chasing radio hits — and part is business. In recent years, hip-hop has taken pop’s space as the lingua franca of mainstream culture; it’s the source of our biggest characters, most popular dance crazes, and hottest memes. As a result, pop now is just a niche like any other. The Taylor Swifts of the world will be fine, but Charli, as well as artists like Carly Rae Jepsen and Tove Lo (both of whom appear on Pop 2), faces a conundrum: What is pop music without hits?

 

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As for the downsides of streaming — that all music is now in the hands of unaccountable tech companies — Charli deals with this the same way that many of us deal with the prospect of climate catastrophe: by trying not to think about it. But it’s hard to avoid entirely. Lately, pop-writers rooms have been preoccupied by the metric of “skip rate,†the time it takes someone on Spotify to click to the next song. “Everybody’s like, ‘Get to the chorus before 30 seconds; make sure the intro is two seconds long,’ †Charli says. “Why the fuck are we thinking about that when we’re writing a fucking song?â€

[ocean berry]

I love her, she's such pop/bubblegum trash.