Charli XCX – Camera

Music, Video, Writing…

[Video]
[7.62]Al Varela: I’ll admit, I might’ve been successfully baited with “Rock Music”. I stand by what I said about that song, but with the full album out and the bigger picture recognized, I understand the song a little more as a deliberate reactionary sabotage, putting up a wall that gets knocked down pretty early into the album. Which means, rather predictably, “Camera” is more of what I wanted out of Charli coming out of Brat. It’s different, built off a stuttering guitar melody and a pounding drum machine that swirls into a really beautiful ethereal cascade of synths in the chorus. But more importantly, it’s honest. There’s no bullshit posturing like there is on “Rock Music”. Charli expresses her love of performing for the camera, being able to embody anything and anybody she wants. Everyone gets to see the persona she wants to convey, the glamor that makes her so enviable and gorgeous. But it’s not just for the camera, or some audience that she’s way to conscious of, it’s a performance for herself. A way to avoid confronting her own dislike of herself and all the insecurities that can be hidden away by the camera. She doesn’t have to be a stupid girl in her mid-30s trying to make music that she might not even want to make. The whole album lives in the shadow of Brat, and I imagine having to follow that up has impeded Charli’s creative drive more than helped it. The outro in particular has a harsh moment where after Charli describes looking into the camera like looking into the barrel of a gun, she adlibs the words, “fucking shoot me” under her breath. She may be performing for the camera, but she’s having a harder and harder time hiding her true self the older she gets and the more she confronts that pressure to be a great artist. I empathize a lot with that. It makes me look at the woman sneering about making rock music and declaring the death of the dance floor and see someone deeply afraid of what other people think of her, and avoiding that vulnerability for as long as she can. But I don’t think she really wants to hide it. She wouldn’t be giving the camera peeks at the real her if she didn’t.
[9]

Alfred Soto: The stuttering riff with which “Camera” begins reduces the new Strokes album to ash. I could explain how Charli XCX states the travails of performance in a hyper-real social media age; I’ll instead praise her instinct for switching from sung voice to monologuing.
[8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: I turn 30 years old this year. While I’m not dreading going over the hill as much as everyone makes me feel like I should, the occasion still feels like a moment of reflection for the lessons I’ve learned, the relationships I’ve made along the way, and person I want to become in the future. Thank god I have “Camera” as the soundtrack for this. Charli’s raw confessions—about still chasing discovery and danger and self-authenticity, about failing and questioning oneself, about eschewing embarrassment—make me feel powerful, excited, and confident in the unknown. I’ve been a Charli fan for over a decade now, and her music feels like a constant when I reflect on how much I’ve changed in my 20s. “Camera” makes me confident that Charli will continue to evolve—and I can continue to draw inspiration—for decades to come.
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I keep getting into debates with my friends and loved ones about Music, Fashion, Film. This is an activity that I highly recommend — when was the last time we had a pop star that was so fun to disagree about? — but, as the advocate in favor of Ms. XCX’s work, I have been left in a perplexing rhetorical position. I know that I enjoy “Camera”; I just can’t figure out why. The lyrics are blunt to the point of self-parody, the melody is tossed-off, the production is no better or worse than the median of what AG Cook has done for Charli over the last decade. The narrative around Charli’s music — which she herself has at times rejected and at times, perhaps ironically, embraced — is that she represents some kind of future of pop, an engine always running and reshaping the world in rejection of the strictures of the old. And yet, I keep coming back to “Camera” and the rest of Music, Fashion, Film for precisely the opposite reason: in its embrace of stasis, “Camera”, with its blank outlook and stuttering rhythm, does exactly what its namesake would imply. I feel captured by “Camera,” held in its gaze as much as I behold it myself. It’s a thrill, though I still can’t fully say I understand how it makes me, in particular, feel.
[7]

Claire Davidson: So much of Music, Fashion, Film surrounds Charli XCX’s fear that she’s outlived her utility as an artist—quite the conundrum for someone who just shot to stardom on the heels of their previous album. Charli’s confessional intimacy is still a core component of her brand, though, so it’s no surprise that, even while making a screen pivot that would ostensibly allow for mystique, she would provide fans with a lyrical annotation of this choice, the raison d’être behind “Camera.” I’ll admit, I’m not fully convinced of Charli’s skills as an actor: I found her rotely capable in The Moment, winsome but elusive in Erupcja and 100 Nights of Hero, and downright bad in Faces of Death (though largely due to a botched American accent). Charli herself seems to be the least certain of all that this newfound niche plays to her strengths: the first explicit mention of acting on “Camera” is preceded by the line “Am I being fucking stupid?” When pressed for a deeper explanation of her acting pursuits, Charli’s argument is essentially one of making art for art’s sake. “It makes me feel how it makes me feel,” she claims on the hook, which is to say, “inspired and alive”—freed by the catharsis of sublimating emotion into a character rather than spilling it on the page. This avowed commitment to such risky terrain would be more convincing if “Camera” showed a degree of the passion that comes with being bitten by the acting bug. At no point does Charli imbue that central refrain with anything close to conviction; one could easily imagine her stoically deploying the line in an interview, pairing it with little more than a resigned shrug. That apprehension is even stranger when paired with what might be the liveliest instrumentation across Music, Fashion, Film, comprised of glossily ramshackle guitar licks that give way to a quietly surging synth line, one whose roving wistfulness wouldn’t sound out of place in an aughts-era DJ set. It’s in these contradictions, though—of self-conscious sabotage preceding willful spontaneity, of structuring a pop hook around such a reluctant song—where we find our humanity, in this case located in the constant war of ambition familiar to anyone, regardless of occupation. Maybe Charli might be a worthwhile actor after all; she’s found the first step to crafting a character, at least.
[6]

Leah Isobel: “All I know is how it makes me feel/ And it makes me feel how it makes me feel” is the Charli XCX lyric; she has spent her entire career trying to gesture to mystical, teenage emotions in a way that can articulate their power while explicating none of their function. The mass recognition afforded by commercial success only deepens her restless insecurity, which in turn becomes a chance to sniff around a new feeling. Which is, ultimately, the reason why I even liked her in the first place. She got me again!
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: “But all I know is how it makes me feel.”
[7]

Hannah Jocelyn: I’m already regretting my crash-out review of this album; not because I suddenly love the album, but because I feel like I fell for bait, and I’ve never felt more out of touch than watching people whose writing I love and respect praise an album that I was unable to click with whatsoever. I genuinely resisted sending an apology text to another critic because it felt like I was offending them, or implying that they’re reactionary. Maybe it’s unavoidable; people tie their identities to Charli, even people who wouldn’t normally tie their identity to music. She’s the aspirational post-ironic yet cerebral partygirl, with the willingness to indulge in the “problematic” as part of the appeal. I am extremely not that, and that’s where I struggled. But it’s this song, where she sings about the camera lens, where everything works: the clean guitar riffs chopped and/or screwed, the loneliness and frustration Charli feels despite being big online (“All the music, all the people/Not a single kiss goodbye” is the most I’ve related to her), the way she finally feels anything after being so detached from her emotions throughout the album. The chorus is as gorgeous and euphoric as she’s let herself be in years, proving that the weak choruses elsewhere are deliberate self-sabotage. As much as I liked The Moment, I’m not as interested in the Lore; I just want good music. This qualifies, because it remembers what art in any medium is supposed to do: make someone feel.
[9]