is the diva in the room with us right now?

on charli xcx and the twilight of the ingenue

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I.

When I was 16, I made the choice to become a teenager. I think everyone does this at some point, but as with most things, I ran slightly behind schedule. My sophomore year ended, marking the halfway point of high school, and puberty still hadn’t hit. The hormonal goblins that seemed to drive my classmates toward effortless rebellion hadn’t shown up yet. But the clock was ticking. I only had three more years with that hallowed “teen” label, and I wanted to make the most of it. If adolescence wouldn’t come to me, I’d force myself into it. 

So I took matters into my own hands, and went full Daniel Day-Lewis on the role of the American teenage girl. Luckily, there was plenty of material to pull from. I spent the early days of that summer devouring Freaks and Geeks, making massive collages on my bedroom wall, and copying down Rookie quotes in my Moleskine journal. I got a pair of American Apparel shorts, a slightly sketchy job at a berry shack, and a boyfriend. My learner’s permit turned into a real license, and the radio in my shitty Ford Focus was permanently tuned to the pop music station. I knew that was the music teens were supposed to be listening to; its emotional extremity and lyrical simplicity seemed like a plausible shortcut to the clarity that others seemed to access so easily. I listened obsessively, as only teenage girls can. 

Honestly, the hits of summer 2014 are still seared into my brain to a degree that’s frankly frightening: there was the reggae song about a guy getting rejected by his girlfriend’s dad, the Minions one, the one where Jason Derulo compares a butt to “two planets.” Suffice it to say, shit was rough.  

But there was an exception – a shining jewel atop the pile of weird post-EDM midtempo bangers. There was one song that I turned up while speeding past the berry fields in the late afternoon, one song that made me feel I wasn’t just playing the part of a teenage girl. I literally hate myself for telling you this, but if you’ve read the subtitle, you can already guess. I’m being vulnerable and brave right now. Deep breath. 

That song was “Fancy” by Iggy Azalea. 

I know! Bad! We memory-holed it for a reason! The racial politics are NOT GOOD! When I revisited it just now, I realized there’s a random slur in there, too, which is ALSO BAD! We live and learn! But at the time, something in those faux-DJ Mustard synths and Azalea’s snot-nosed boasts fucking got me. 

But the highlight, of course, was Charli. Visually, she was the epitome of the era’s aestheticized teen angst, with a mop of curls hanging over winged eyeliner and a wardrobe that seemed pulled out of an Urban Outfitters dumpster. She had the brooding look of a Lana or Lorde ripoff, but didn’t whisper into a bedroom microphone like they did. Her voice was jarring – shouty, snarling, borderline atonal – and her consonants bled together like she was already wasted. 

The hook was proudly stupid: I’m so fancy/you already know/I’m in the fast lane/from L.A. to Tokyo. The lyrics made no goddamn sense. If Charli’s delivery didn’t sound so appealing, I probably would’ve pushed my thick-rimmed glasses (again, it was 2014) up my nose to um, actually her from the safety of my car: “actually, Charli, you can’t drive from L.A. to Tokyo unless you plan to re-build the Bering Land Bridge first.” But something in the song – something in her – trumped my ever-present urge to be a cynical know-it-all. 

She was proudly obnoxious, aware of her role and intent to deliver. She’d already made a hit about crashing her car on purpose and telling a 40-year-old man to fuck off. In the bridge of “Fancy,” she doubled down on the cheerleader-from-hell act, imploring repressed 16-year-olds nationwide to trash the hotel and get drunk on the minibar for no reason at all. Did we do that? No. But she made us feel like we were meant to.

Charli was the opposite of wise beyond her years, and abrasive to a degree that felt theatrical. It felt like she was engaged in the same project that I was – performing the tropes of female adolescence – and doing it way better. I don’t know if I was admiring, envious or a little bit scared of her. But I was mesmerized. I knew she was someone worth listening to.

II.

If you’re around my age and grew up on the same corners of the internet, you probably see Charli’s basic biography as common knowledge. But my mom reads this newsletter, so I need to provide some context. 

Here’s the quick version: Charlotte Emma Aitchison first typed out the name “Charli xcx” in her Essex bedroom, posting songs to MySpace at age 14. She was obsessed with London’s rave scene, and eventually convinced her parents to accompany her to underground parties, where she started performing in her mid-teens. A record contract came, but the label wasn’t sure how to package her in a straightforward teen-pop mold. She found initial success as a songwriter, but then two of her singles (Icona Pop’s I Love It and the aforementioned Fancy) made her a star in her own right. 

She released her second album, Sucker, in December 2014. After that, she rode out the high of a Fault In Our Stars soundtrack placement, retired her punk-lite Tumblr aesthetic, and started working with SOPHIE – the then-anonymous Scottish producer known for her plasticky, experimental sound. The result was 2016’s Vroom Vroom EP – an overwhelming, schizoid take on pop pageantry that presented Charli as an unhinged party monster. It had choruses that went down like sour gumdrops and approximately 4,000 references to cars. Critics hated it. It was perfect.  

Many see this EP as the true beginning of Charli’s artistic project, which she openly admits is more in service of “the concept of being an artist and the concept of pop music” than the expression of any stable or (ostensibly) authentic identity. That made her an ideal collaborator for SOPHIE and her milieu, who were collectively obsessed with pushing the devices of pop music to their logical extremes. The result was ruthlessly digitized and glitchy, with every track riding the line between the ecstatic and the ugly. She carried this general aesthetic through a series of mixtapes and loosely-defined albums through the late 2010s. 

Her lyrics covered the standard pop bases – heartbreak, love, money – but she rendered them in extreme, violent metaphors. Her constant references to cars speeding and crashing have become a meme at this point, but it goes further than that. In 2019’s Charli, she offers to jump off a building to show her affection, and in 2022’s Crash, she likens love to being choked. In an otherwise lightweight song about moving to the U.S., she jumps in a car and says she feels just like JFK, with the clear implication of an assassin hiding around the corner. I’m jumping forward in time here, but in a recent bonus track, she threatens to blow up the Staples Center if she doesn’t get a Grammy nomination. She takes every opportunity to express her appetite for approval and love in the most off-putting terms possible. 

Her emotions are so huge that she seems disgusted by them, and the word “want” is near-constant. Here’s an abbreviated list of things that Charli has told us she wants over the years: money, a trophy, a time machine, the ability to liquify her lover and drink them. But mostly, she wants to party. On her 2020 pandemic release how I’m feeling now, she stutters out “I just want to go real hard,” like a manic mantra, becoming increasingly agitated by her inability to access the raw sensation of a loud, sweaty room – and increasingly terrified of her own inner world. Often, her desires seem too extreme to be contained by the human voice, so she autotunes them into distorted, histrionic registers. At times, it’s hard to tell if she’s singing or crying. 

There’s a fundamental fear at the heart of the greatest pop songs; an understanding that a feeling will not last forever, that the intensity of the moment will fade. For Charli, that terror is the main event. It’s that anxiety, that cavernous sense of want, that still hovers behind her cool-girl persona, forcing the mask to slip just slightly. 

III.

In Wayne Koestenbaum’s 2001 memoir-slash-critical text on midcentury opera stars, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, he describes the unique relationship between gay opera fans and the women they thrill to: 

“The opera queen must choose one diva. The other divas may be admired, enjoyed, even loved. But only one diva can reign in the opera queen’s heart; only one diva can have the power to describe a listener’s life, as a compass describes a circle.” 

The term diva is key here; not merely a star or a singer, but something derived from divus – a goddess, an archetype. Koestenbaum describes his coming-of-age as encircled by a small group of domineering sopranos, most notably Maria Callas, whose obviously effortful version of feminine power offered a template for his own expression of queerness. He dedicates an entire chapter to hypotheses on why he and other ‘opera queens’ love Callas, an American-born Greek soprano who was frequently booed at The Met due to her wobbly and idiosyncratic voice. But her flaws made her more of a diva, says Koestenbaum: she “seemed to value expressivity over loveliness,” and “offered an acceptable, digestible anarchy, a set of sounds on the verge of chaos–but enjoyably so. Here lay the danger, the lure: she was a mess and she was a goddess.”

In my copy of The Queen’s Throat, these lines are underlined with “Charli?” scrawled in the margin. “Digestible anarchy” is the best description of Track 10 I’ve ever heard.

Then there was this line: “the diva overturns the world’s gendered ground by making femaleness seem at once powerful and artificial.” Next to that one, I wrote “CHARLI!!!”

I need to be careful here; I don’t want to imply that the definition of identity and the embrace of gender-as-performance in mildly awkward teenage girls is anywhere near as fraught as that of gay men. But I think there’s a reason that both groups tend to gravitate toward the same brand of loud, imperfect female genius in their search. These women, the divas, make the gap between identity and performance visible, and perhaps more manageable as a result. 

IV.

At the risk of sounding obvious, we’ve been talking about girlhood a lot lately. Last summer’s wave of mary-jane shoes, baby tees and Barbie-themed everything made every Blue Bottle and overpriced flea market look like the Target toy aisle. 

The linguistic tics toward “girl math” and “girl dinner” and “girliepops” launched approximately one billion thinkpieces. The bland girl-gang feminism of the mid-2010s made a comeback in the TikTok comments section. Hordes of full-grown women put bows in their hair and giggled over friendship bracelets while listening to the world’s most powerful entertainer vent about boy problems. Someone dubbed 2023 “the year of the girl,” and we haven’t known peace since. 

While the political and aesthetic merits of these trends are uh…debatable, it’s clear that a very specific, very marketable brand of youthful femininity became the cultural lingua franca throughout the summer and fall of 2023. While its trappings were rooted in the most basic, brain-dead view of gender possible (girls love pink, boys love blue etc. etc.), there was something about the general attitude of being “one of the girls” that transcended gender lines. 

As Delia Cai wrote in my favorite of the aforementioned billion, “Self selection as ‘one of the girlies’ is not a matter of gender, but an inside joke: an identifying passcode for the unserious, untroubled femme modality of the life we all wish to inhabit.” 

“Girlhood” became code for a specific brand of joyful immaturity, a luxuriation in over-the-top emotion, an evasion of adult responsibility for shameless sensation-seeking. Girlhood was a dinner of popcorn and wine. Girlhood was writing in a tear-stained diary and posting it on Pinterest. Girlhood was relentless self-mythology and main character energy. It was doing it for the plot. 

There are a lot of possible reasons for this turn toward girlhood, but the pandemic seems like the most obvious. A turn toward silliness and frivolity, even overt immaturity, seems like a necessary overcorrection for the dour, introverted mood that prevailed from 2020 onward. It matched up well with my personal circumstances in 2023: I was newly rootless, blinking down the first bright, real post-pandemic summer after what felt like a three-year fugue state. The sense of lost time was palpable, like I’d fallen asleep in one of those trendy nap dresses at age 22 and been shaken awake at 25. Suddenly a college graduate, suddenly a full-time employee, suddenly an adult. I hadn’t made this choice consciously like when I was a teenager. It just happened. And it was terrifying. 

Okay, I know that technically, I became an adult at 18. But no one really believes that. For the first half of my twenties, I don’t think I ever called myself an “adult,” much less a “woman.” I was a student, or an early-career professional, or, yes, a girl. To me, adulthood seemed like a black hole. The journey to it sounded like a rusty iron gate clanging shut behind me, trapping me in a world of tax codes and secure attachment styles. I didn’t want any part of it, but it had found me anyway. Even as I breached 26, I continued to avoid the label at every turn. 

I don’t think this sense of dazed or unearned maturity is unique to my age group – everyone seems to be haunted by their imaginary, non-pandemic doppelgangers to some degree. The effect is magnified among the mid-20s set for obvious reasons. 

Still, I find it hard to talk about, even among friends. I feel both of us resisting the urge to become bitter about the fact that our peak fuck-around years were stolen, and we were plopped right into the find out part. We don’t want to fixate on the past, so we calmly intone that everyone’s place in history shapes them in frustrating ways and that we made the decisions we could with the options we had. We joke that our age should be adjusted: sure, the driver’s license says 26, but really, I’m 23. But there’s a current of rage under the therapized wisdom. There’s the sense that a certain version of carefree youth was stolen from us. More notably, there’s a manic desire to claw it back.

We seem to be engaged in a generation-wide negotiation with the very ideas of youth and time, and the summer of 2023 represented a collective turning point in that. We woke from the haze of 2020 and realized that a third of our twenties were gone. No wonder we all decided to become girls again – to pull on our dancing shoes, roll down our windows, and return to the women who taught us how to be teenagers in the first place. 

V.

Another Koestenbaum quote that made me lose my shit: “like Dorian Gray, the diva has a peculiarly poignant relation to the fiction of eternal youth, which we all may want, but women and gay men are imagined to want most intensely.”

VI.

In the annoying parlance of internet trend reporting, “year of the girl” was immediately followed by “pop girl spring.” Starting in about March of 2024, every female star in the genre seemed to release new material. Pop is, of course, the girliest of genres; its commercial aims and emphasis on celebrity meta-narrative make it an ideal vehicle for Cai’s conception of genderless girlhood. It aspires to reintroduce all listeners to their inner teen. Pop girl spring and the year of the girl seemed like a match made in heaven. 

There was one problem. Our pop stars aren’t girls any more. 

Their new material made that clear. Ariana delivered a floaty, subdued meditation on a broken marriage; Beyonce completed her American Studies thesis; Taylor’s lyricism became ever-denser. There were two explicit mentions of Saturn returns (three, if we count SZA’s single), as well as frequent mentions of divorce, motherhood and therapy. One thing became clear: the millennial class of pop stars were not interested in performing girlhood any more – and when they tried, it wasn’t working. 

They were making the jump from ingenue to diva, to varying degrees of success. After all, “girl” is an easier part to play than “woman,” one with far more references to pull from. 

It's only fitting that Charli, the great remixer and observer of the pop landscape, would insist on the final word.

VII.

At the opening of Charli’s Los Angeles show last month, the word “GIRL” appeared on the stage in thick, glowing text. The crowd pressed forward, hovering their phones above each others’ heads to catch the grand entrance. The final house lights went down. “GIRL” just sat there. Strobe lights skittered on. More phones came out. Then, an acid-green scrim fell from the top of the stage, cutting the “GIRL” in half. It read – you guessed it – BRAT. Charli burst through the neon fabric, sending the crowd into hysterics. The visual metaphor was almost too obvious: in Charli’s world, the year of the girl was over. Something else – the brat – had taken her place. 

I’m incredibly late on this particular thinkpiece train, and probably don’t need to parrot the basic Brat talking points. Again, my mom is here, so bear with me. Brat is Charli’s sixth studio album, and represents a return to form after her last release, the consciously-mainstream Crash. It was positioned as a head-empty club record from the start, with early singles “Von dutch” and “B2b” returning to the kind of brash, slightly disingenuous feminine confidence that “Fancy”-era Charli was known for. But when the full album arrived, its lyrical content came as a bit of a surprise – the writing was more conversational than her previous work, and directly addressed her career and personal anxieties. 

She told Rolling Stone UK that she approached the lyrics like she was writing in a group chat. The result is an intimate stream-of-consciousness portrait of a woman who has all the outer trappings of adult success, but still feels pushed by those intense, terrifying emotions she’s grappled with from the beginning. 

The album’s honesty verges on uncomfortable at times, with detailed descriptions of jealousy and petty hatred on one track, then grief and whole-hearted gratitude on another. And there’s no effort to hide who these songs are about. When barely-concealed references aren’t enough, she jumps straight to name-dropping. 

At first, I was turned off by this obvious approach, and I still think it forces the album into a state of diminishing returns. But there's bravery to that lack of filter, too. It’s a bold rejection of the faux-relatability that Charli’s peers tend to grovel toward. While it’s a bit annoying on the more gossipy tracks (“Sympathy is a knife,” “Mean girls”), it pays off when she turns her lens to deeper issues. 

“I think about it all the time” is the obvious example here: it’s the second-to-last track on the album, and explores Charli’s ambivalent feelings about becoming a mother. It’s structured like a digressive, looping voice note, jumping from mundane descriptions of a walk around Stockholm to an earnest question of “should I stop my birth control?” in less than 90 seconds. It feels quietly groundbreaking to hear a pop singer so openly share about the fertility math that hums in the back of every young uterus owner’s mind, but that’s beside the point. The point is that this is an obviously adult issue – one marked by dependencies and trade-offs.

I don’t want to act like the album is more serious than it actually is, though. Part of the beauty of it is that these dumb, gossipy songs exist alongside the more serious ones. Charli’s desire for raw sensation is still there – she says “party” 17 times across the album – but she allows it to coexist with more complex, unsavory feelings. The brat is an abrasive, self-centered alternative to last summer’s idealized girl – not necessarily better, but certainly more mature. 

VIII.

There’s a moment in Maria Callas’ 1961 Paris performance of “Je suis Titania” where she hits a high note from the wrong angle – it’s at about 4:35 in this recording, but believe me, you’ll know it when you hear it. She was in her mid-thirties at the time, already thoroughly dickmatized by Aristotle Onassis, her voice inching toward decline. Even so, her diva status was growing in spite of – well, let’s be honest, because of – the edge of unpleasantness in her performances. As Koestenbaum writes, “During the harsh high note, we are closer to Callas. We befriend her. Through error, she seems to implore: "Art is punishment, and I am vulnerable. Have you ever been exposed, opened up in public? Find parallels in your life to this almost unacceptable note.”

Again, an underline: the word unacceptable. What could be more unacceptable than a brat – a woman who wants too much, who grows in public, who refuses to slot herself into a predefined story?

IX.

Brat is not a perfect piece of work, and I don’t even think it’s Charli’s best (that’s a tie between Vroom Vroom and how I’m feeling now, for my money). But I think its rabid reception reveals that it filled some cultural need beyond music. 

I think it offered a vision of adulthood that seems truly honest – one that incorporates the arrested-development freeze state that I and many of my peers seem to be stuck in. Charli played the teenage girl so well in her early career, and likely could’ve coasted on that image forever. But she seems past that now, intent on playing a new part. 

If we strip away all the mentions of designer clothes and industry drama, the brattified version of maturity is a hopeful one, rooted in a sense of resilience and genuine connection. Charli acknowledges her forebears, both literal and metaphorical, throughout the album, with a straightforward tribute to SOPHIE, who died in 2021, and musical references to rave-scene trendsetters like Justice and Gesaffelstein. She is not entirely healed or settled, and she doesn’t have to be. Her version of adulthood doesn’t feel like a void one falls into and never crawls back out of; it feels like a continuation, a building of momentum and skill. 

If Charli’s ingenue era was a black Corvette crashing on the highway, this is a slow acceleration on a winding seaside road. But she’s still inside, and she’s still screaming. 

X.

The summer of 2023, both personally and collectively, was marked by a joyful sense of regression. 2024’s mood seems to be more about renegotiation. Four years post-pandemic, I am faced with the uncomfortable fact that life does go on, that adulthood is here, and that I am tasked with defining it for myself. I’ve come to realize that adolescence – the ingenue years, the state of becoming – can be performed. Adulthood – the sense of truly being in oneself – can only be felt. 

XI.

If there is any moment on Brat that I wish I could re-hear for the first time, it's the transition from that second-to-last song, "I think about it all the time," to the final one. I was on a walk, not looking at the track listing, and hadn’t been too impressed on first listen. The chords at the end of “I think about it all the time” hung like a row of glittering icicles, and I thought damn, she’s really going to end on the do-I-want-a-baby, painful-meditation-on-modern-womanhood song? That’s heavy. Just as I fished my phone out of my pocket, the bouncy “360” chords, which had opened the album, pingponged back. It felt like Charli was winking at me, bringing the album right back to where it began, emphasizing the frustrating, spiral nature of true growth and, perhaps most importantly, reminding me to always go back to the party.

ily <3 this post is long as fuck and maybe doing too much to try to describe these disparate ideas that were kind of stuck together in my brain for the last month. but if ms. xcx can teach me anything, it’s that there’s value in being a little extra.

I’d love to hear about your summers (brat or otherwise) and your thoughts on charli through any channel, and I WILL actually start on my stupid little podcast now that this thing is out the gate. the guest form for that is still open, if you have big charli and or/diva and/or adulthood thoughts and want to share ‘em.

talk soon,

kylie