Charli XCX and the Avant-Garde in Pop

It sometimes feels, in UK poetry at least, like experimental as a term is fetishised. I guess an antonym is traditional (read: conservative), a triggering word for writers on the left. I’m reminded of a debate from November 2009 between Christian Bök and Carmine Starnino, now removed from the internet, in which Christian cited the political stance “progressive conservative”, noting those with traditional values don’t want to be seen as regressive.

I don’t know of many poets - Christian Bök not included - who, writing in relation to historical avant-gardes, use the term experimental. It seemed to have an online resurgence during the pandemic, with poets discovering erasure, asemic writing and cut-ups. I found this difficult to navigate. On one hand, yay writers playing in my sandbox; on the other, there was no engagement with the ideas these techniques originated from and so they became mere variations of the commonplace lyric: confessional blank verse with horizontal line breaks, not vertical.

Music has as many anxieties about the avant-garde as literature, the press restricting the term to the post-war New York composers (Feldman, Cage, et al.). This makes it all the more surprising to see it appended to Charli XCX.

If I say I’m surprised, it isn’t out of snobbery. I think Charli’s great.

While maintaining a stall at the Surrey Poetry Festival last month for Hem Press, a lovely reader asked me what I liked about... I can’t remember now. Whatever the topic was under discussion. The question used to take me so off guard I froze, and people assumed I was lying. Having built up self-awareness, I gave the answer I had partially rehearsed in my daydreams: I don’t know.

Or I should say: I don’t really know. The arts, and consuming the arts, are a continual working-through of desire. I tend to gravitate towards confrontation in the arts and extremes, whether operatic camp or severe repression. If these are hypersexual, all the better. They compliment - and compensate? - my lunar disposition.

Charli takes the signifiers of pop and handles them with self-awareness. This is deceptive since pop as a term is a fluid category. Come to think of it, my argument might ultimately be that Charli’s music formalises the fluidity; she reflects back a culture that commoditises using terms its not even sure of. Pop is revealed to be the container, not the contents. This is fitting, since Charli composes with surfaces, signifiers and references. (Stay with me: I’m not calling her music empty. There’s more to say here.) As these slide between delighting and alienating audiences, journalists call her music avant-garde.

Is Charli XCX avant-garde?

This is a soapbox I’ve been on many times before, in print and social media, alongside a whole drunken podcast with Anthony Etherin. The single-sentence definition, that avant-garde originates from a military term meaning advanced guard and therefore means cutting edge, is facile. Readers will be hard pressed to find a more nuanced definition online.

A… Not even careful reading… Let’s say: the most cursory glance at primary sources show a different definition. I’m referring to the dadaist manifestos, the surrealist manifestos, Maciunas’ well-known Fluxus manifesto and Dick Higgins’ statements, postwar American poetry from the beats to the beginnings of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, among others. Time and time again, an avant-garde is an attack against an actual enemy: the bourgeoise and the monoculture. At its roots, irrespective of its sojourns in academies and fine art institutions, it is a polyphony of working class creativity.

Readers in the know will point to Burroughs, or many of the New York School poets, who came from decidedly middle class backgrounds. Putting aside their disavowal of financial support (in Kathy Acker’s case at least), many of these folk continued to write against social hegemonies at times in history when activism wasn’t a social media commodity. To totalise someone’s identity on the basis of their background reinforces the structures an emancipatory politic claims it is against.

With a textually grounded definition of the avant-garde now at our disposal, let’s revisit Charli.

The articles pictured above praise Charli’s reframing of underground club music in a pop context. If I’m honest, I think this undersells her. Like many lauded “post-rave” artists, she knows how to draw on an entire history. 2022’s Crash (itself, obviously, a reference to Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation of Ballard’s 1973 novel) is the key album here.

“Every Rule” sounds directly influenced by the Twin Peaks theme in spirit if nothing else. “Beg For You” is built on the UK garage that was so ubiquitous in my youth. The synth in “Good Ones” is, for all intents and purposes, “Sweet Dreams” by Eurhythmics. Electro and 80s freestyle feels like the album’s bonding agent, most of all on “Baby”. After all the sonic hints I can gouge on, “Used to Know Me” directly borrows from one of my all time favourite tunes.

If an avant-pop is mere reference-play then does Charli steal the crown from Bjork, whose most recent album arranged a bass clarinet quartet over broken gabba? Probably not. It’s worth considering how traces of the post-war New York composers can be heard on Bjork’s Atopos. Avant-pop as a term is as useless as pop. Stereolab are avant-pop; Mica Levi is avant-pop; David Byrne is avant-pop…

Charli does share something with Bjork: her ownership of presentation. 2020’s how i’m feeling now (my favourite album by Charli, incidentally) continually presents and dismantles identity. In framing the recording within lockdown, the digital mediation that codes hyperpop is haunted. Amongst the shiny surfaces, listeners glimpse the psychological toll of isolation - the voice note in “enemy” - against the brazen announcements of “Anthem”, which begins “I’M SO BOARD”:

Uh, uh, uh, uh
These days exhausting
Uh, uh, uh, uh
Go online shopping
I'm so uninspired, I just wanna breathe
Flowers and the trees, dirt all on my knees
Got some hands to hold on to
I get existential and so strange
I hear no sounds when I'm shouting
I just wanna go to parties
Up high, wanna feel the heat from all the bodies

But here’s the punchline: these glimpses of a non-digital world can only be mediated digitally. This is the impasse that makes how i’m feeling now so uncanny. The container of pop isn’t empty. It contains containers. Madonna did this for her time; Lady Gaga did it for hers. Now it’s Charli’s turn.

If there is an avant-garde, it’s in playing with the material of social structures to show how fallible they are. This is what how i’m feeling now hints at, whether inadvertently or not. But there is a final point to be made.

From this Red Bull article, remembering that Charli’s legal name is Charlotte Aitchison:

how i’m feeling now was written, co-produced and creative-directed by Aitchison, who has near-total control over every element of her work. In an industry in which female pop stars have historically been dismissed as merely 'singers', she makes a point of highlighting on social media how she’s responsible for everything, from writing lyrics to directing music videos and shaping release strategies.

If someone takes control of dominant structures, is it avant-garde? It could be. Personally, I’d like Charli to do one of Yoko Ono’s performance pieces or a collab with Charmaine Lee. If one works exclusively with containers, there’s always enough room. Maybe this is the reason I like Charli XCX. Her music offers infinite potentials.