With only thirty minutes of music to its name, Charli XCX has produced one of the most polarizing records of her career. For some, Music, Fashion, Film is her best incarnation; for others, it’s the worst album of her career. It’s hard to ignore the gravitational pull of the monumental ‘brat’ era, the project that pushed the British artist to a level of fame and commercial success she’s unlikely to replicate again. I actually prefer MFF to brat. Am I crazy?
What comes to mind when you think of ‘brat’? If the iconic green of its cover isn’t the first image, you’re lying. In today’s climate, it seems almost impossible (until proven otherwise) for an album to spark a cultural phenomenon with music as its sole engine, even when that music is as superb as on brat. What began as a personal exercise in resisting the conventional and tolerable monotony of ‘Crush’ ended up becoming a marketing monster that at some point detached from its artistic aim.
With Music, Fashion, Film, Charli wasn’t willing to go through the same motions, designing her own anti-campaign. She had already spoken about the idea of “antimarketing” in a recent tweet: “It’s still marketing, but it takes a different, more intimate, personal, private, one-on-one approach, and it’s not about the projection of scale,” she explained. No ‘MFF summer’ or exclusive drops for Bershka and H&M. Now Charli’s vibe is to project her austere film in independent cinemas.
It’s not that Charli renounced the brat era; she understood that the smartest move after mass success is to hold a mirror up to herself. The cover of her new album remains minimalist, but where there was color before, now there is black and white. Where there were lyrics, now there is a photographic statement. Where there was universality, now there is a niche. Everyone understands the brat cover, but who the hell knows John Cale?
All of this isn’t enough to place Music, Fashion, Film ahead of brat, but it’s enough to justify almost blind faith in the artist’s vision. She’s the only current pop star capable of alienating her fans in this way, and I haven’t even mentioned the most striking aspect of this era: now Charli makes rock. She will trust her instincts even if that means commercial failure. On its fourth day of release, there are zero MFF tracks in Spotify’s global top, but I doubt she cares at all.
In the end, whether you prefer brat or MFF will depend on your musical background. If you come from club music and the catchiest pop, from Madonna to Lady Gaga, it won’t surprise anyone that you’d pick the former. If Velvet Underground or The Clash once meant everything to you, you’re more likely to choose MFF, as it’s the ideal fusion of both worlds. Yet they aren’t that different.
Both albums are intensely conceptual, both sonically and lyrically. ‘brat’ was Charli’s definitive, artsy and refined version of everything she’d done before, while MFF might be the most divergent record of her career, though not necessarily the most experimental. In the lyrics of ‘brat’, Charli spotlighted and celebrated her flaws. In ‘MFF’, she meditates on them. It’s the post-‘brat’ clarity. I love the music on both projects. The major difference is the origin: the latter is a complete stylistic pivot that, unlike ‘brat’, doesn’t spring from rejecting her own music but from an unusual source of inspiration.
“I hadn’t planned to make this record when I did. I thought I’d take a break, enjoy life, stay at home fooling around with George or whatever and not much more, but the inspiration arrived and I had to follow it,” she said in the album’s Instagram launch post. In her interview with Zane Lowe, she also claimed to feel “very fortunate” to sense this calling.
Music, Fashion, Film has been made, literally, for the love of art. Perhaps my more pretentious side is trying to control my affection for this album, which promised so much with its four singles and whose final result hasn’t quite lived up to my ambitious expectations. Nevertheless, can’t we celebrate that an artist chooses to “fail and be ugly” rather than be consumed like so many others?
