Charli XCX And Lorde Gift Us The First Anti-Diss Track
If you’ve seen chartreuse green plastered all over your social media for the last few months, it’s because pop culture has officially entered brat season.
The marketing rollout behind Charli XCX’s sixth studio album, BRAT, should honestly be studied at this point because fans have devoured everything the singer has fed them and left zero crumbs.
Charli has meticulously leant into her “hot internet girl” persona, doing so with an air of being somewhat in on the joke. She deeply understands pop culture, meme culture, club culture and the power of having the cool clique, and has utilised this knowledge to create a brand so unique that it’s sparking a cultural reset. We’ve shed 2023’s poised Barbie pink skin, and this year we all just want to be unapologetically messy.
Since its June 7th release, BRAT has been everywhere. Critics and fans have simply frothed it, with the album debuting at No.2 and No.3 on the UK Albums Chart and Billboard 200 album charts respectively. BRAT even received a 95/100 on Metacritic, which as Time Magazine explains, is, “A site that aggregates reviews from different publications and gives projects an average score out of 100,” (translation: this is huge). You can hear snippets of the song all over Instagram and TikTok reels, and, I cannot stress this enough, everything in my algorithm is green.
Image Credit: @charlixcx/Instagram
While I myself have always enjoyed the hyperpop genre, I was slightly hesitant listening to the album for the first time. I’ve well outgrown my club days and I am so far from an internet cool girl that I almost felt like an imposter searching for BRAT on Spotify. What I wasn’t expecting to discover amongst the pulsating synth lines and heavy beats were some of the most interesting lyrical musings I’d heard in a while.
Songs like ‘I think about it all the time’, ‘So I’ and ‘Sympathy is a knife’ (widely rumoured to be about Taylor Swift) honestly examine the topics of motherhood, grief and insecurity, while ‘I might say something stupid’ is a short but candid lament of the sad party girl (“I don’t feel like nothing special / I snag my tights out on the lawn chair / Guess I’m a mess and play the role”).
When it came to the track ‘Girl, so confusing’, I was keen to discover just what all the fuss was about, as I knew this track in particular had captured the attention of fans. I also knew that there was speculation the song was about NZ pop girlie, Lorde.
“Girl, it’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl / Girl, how do you feel being a girl?” Charli sings in the chorus. The verses are an exploration of her friendship with another woman, and how she’s not even sure the two like each other but there’s a pressure to maintain some sort of friendship. She says that even though they’re very different people, the world thinks they’re similar because they’ve got the same hair, and that the internet would lose its mind if they collaborated musically, but she’s unsure whether combining poetry with partying is honest.
It isn’t hard to believe that this song is about Lorde, given both the lyrical content and the fact that last month, Charli spoke extremely candidly about her jealousy over the singer during an interview with Rolling Stone UK.
“When ‘Royals’ came out, I was super jealous of the success that that song got, and that Ella got. You piece all this stuff together in your brain, like: ‘She was into my music. She had big hair; I had big hair. She wore black lipstick; I once wore black lipstick.’ You create these parallels and think, ‘Well, that could have been me.’ But it couldn’t have because we’re completely different people.”
While her contemporaries tend to err on the side of caution or crack easter eggs (cough cough Taylor Swift), Charli is refreshingly honest about her industry relationships, and I think it’s super interesting to hear about jealousy on a professional level (especially in a respectful way). Charli made sure to clarify that she and Lorde are on good terms in the interview, explaining, “You get over it and then you try to figure out all the things that are unique about you and you pursue that, and then probably in five months’ time you have a breakdown about something else.”
Circling back to the fact that every BRAT-related marketing move has been genius, Charli outdid herself last week when she suddenly dropped the single, ‘The girl, so confusing version with lorde’. As prophesied, the internet did in fact lose its shit.
Sharing a screenshot of her texts with Lorde displaying the remix’s lyrics and Charli’s response of “Fucking hell,” fans and peers went crazy. “Struggling to find the words for how special this is….” wrote British singer Arlo Parks. “This is literally pushing the medium of songwriting, it’s unreal,” commented American singer Maude Latour. “Actual cultural reset,” stated Aussie legends Cub Sport.
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And they were correct. Every time I listen to the song, I get chills. In a world of diss tracks (hello literal grown men Kendrick Lamar and Drake), how refreshing (and fucking smart) to have a collaboration that both highlights how women are conditioned to be pitted against each other, but also refuses to do so. OK, FEMINISM!?!
Lorde elevates the track by adding her perspective to the relationship, and by doing so, gives both us and Charli some clarity into the dynamics. “I was trapped in the hatred / And your life seemed so awesome / I never thought for a second / My voice was in your head,” Lorde explains, detailing the turmoil she was going through in her own head and how a protective, self-constructed confident exterior can be weaponised.
As perfectly summarised in Pitchfork’s review of the track, “Is it a performative detente about the many façades of art and celebrity or two people sincerely clearing the air? Incredibly, it’s both. It somehow accomplishes what the most cynical reality-show pop music does while transcending it through nuanced and vibrant songwriting. As Lorde says, they’re two sides of the same coin, and they’ve made an uncanny watershed moment in this therapized, tabloid era of pop.”
Given it really is so confusing being a girl, I’m manifesting more music like this that normalises feeling fucking insecure sometimes and empowers women to speak more vulnerably and transparently to each other.
And if we can explore all of this whilst having a dance, even better.
Written by Lil Friedmann, a staunch defender of pop girlies and a brat-in-training. You can follow her at @lilfriedmann on socials.
Image credit: Getty, @charlixcx + Punkee