Ro-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ck Music, to two decimal places.
[Video]
[5.33]
[3]
Josh Winters: The meta-narrative of a Charli XCX rollout can often be more exhausting than the actual music, and “Rock Music” lands squarely at that friction point. Pronouncing the dance floor “dead” while utilizing A.G. Cook to construct a jagged digital facsimile of an indie-rock riff feels like a highly calculated intellectual exercise — a preemptive strike to build an ironclad boundary before anyone can accuse her of running out of club anthems. There’s a striking, almost agonizing tension between the hyper-curated aesthetic of the visuals and the raw, uncomfortable intimacy of the lyrics. When she mumbles through Auto-Tune about taking pictures and kissing friends with incestuous vibes, it registers as an intensely protective craving for safety and hyper-local belonging, wrapped up in a package explicitly engineered to spark online discourse. Yet, for all its structural neatness, the track ultimately feels emotionally marooned. The distorted guitars lack the genuine sweaty heat of a live room, leaving the brief runtime feeling less like a song and more like a beautifully framed yet detached mood board. It balances perfectly on the tightrope between earnest diary entry and cold irony, but by trying to look flawless from every possible angle, it stops short of letting you feel the actual bruising.
[5]
Alfred Soto: More than a decade ago she recorded rock music, not “rock music,” and three months ago she released one of her strongest albums haunted by the ghosts of ’70s pre-punk. Now she plays meta games. “I’m really banging my head,” she sings without making scare quotes with her fingers, a promising distorto-riff gnarling in the foreground it shares.
[6]
Claire Davidson: Let’s put aside the fact that Charli XCX actually has made rock music in the past; I should think that readers of a site dedicated to pop music will recall her dalliances with guitars on Sucker, even if that album skewed more power-pop than heavy metal. (To say nothing of the punk covers she performed at contemporaneous shows!) Let’s also put aside the fact that, contrary to some odd online debate, the song “Rock Music” does fit the titular genre — that roiling undercurrent of blown-out guitars is there for a reason. No, the problem with “Rock Music” is that it feels like a first draft of itself. The track’s abrasively strobing synths and aforementioned electric groove do pair well together, their shrill, rough-hewn edges a good fit for Charli’s brand of bloodshot, all-night rager soundtracks. The song’s conspicuous lack of a bassline does it a real disservice, though, robbing it of any foundation to ground its erratic defiance. What’s most immediately off-putting about “Rock Music,” however, is Charli’s vocal delivery, a bizarrely deflated sprechgesang that deliberately veers off-key throughout the entire track. The galling thing about this choice is that Charli could convey a rocker’s power if she really tried: she’s by no means the most technically refined vocalist, but the traits that make her so distinct — the vocal fry, the voice cracks, the raspy belting — have an unvarnished rawness that would suit a harsher rock timbre quite well. The song barely even has a climax beyond Charli’s Auto-Tuned delivery of its central line — I think the dancefloor is dead, so now we’re making ro-o-ock music — leading me to suspect that this song is more branding exercise than anything else, a pivot away from the club bangers that would’ve inevitably sounded redundant in the wake of Brat ubiquity. It bears repeating, though, that Charli XCX does have the means to achieve this kind of genre swerve with genuine credibility. That she chose to approach it with such apathy — especially in comparison to her current glut of film projects, which she wants you to know she takes very seriously — reveals a telling hierarchy of her own priorities. We may have reached the point where the Charli XCX persona has become the mask that’s eating Charlotte Aitchison’s face — where maintaining the image of a cutting-edge artist has taken precedence over the actual art.
[4]
Charli Jae Brister: I can chop up a Yellow Pills compilation, too, you know.
[4]
Nortey Dowuona: Here lies Easyfun, who realized he was better off making really bad The Strokes pastiches rather than having real original ideas. May he rest never cuz we will always play this song on his birthday and he should always be spinning in his grave to it.
[0]
Hannah Jocelyn: I still don’t like “Von Dutch”, and I was weirdly cynical about it two years ago, calling her “halfway to the headliner of an inevitable ‘hyperpop’ nostalgia festival.” I was wrong, particularly once the full album came out and had real moments of tenderness (“Apple, “Girl, So Confusing”) to offset the abrasive production. I actually dug The Moment because it refused to give the gays everything they wanted, promising This is Spinal Brät and delivering The Last Jedi instead, with genuinely sincere moments like the closing “Bittersweet Symphony” needle-drop — yes, really. “Rock Music” is in an awkward middle ground: Charli delivers “I’m really banging my head/I’m really hurting my neck” so deadpan, I’m not sure if she’s kidding; it’s like yassified MJ Lenderman or something in its pseudosincerity. But that chorus has already been meme’d to death, so if she tried to make “Rudebox,” she messed it up. Still, the things I liked about Brat creep their way in: the incestuous vibes line is an eye-roll in a vacuum, but makes more sense when the B-side details an intense homoerotic friendship. If you’ve ever been in one, you know how easily it can slide from a sisterhood to something more intimate and harder to define. I’m glad there’s still a human in a wannabe “Robot Rock.”
[6]
Ian Mathers: I have found the discourse around Charli exhausting since roughly when I first heard “Nuclear Seasons,” and Brat summer is not likely to change that anytime soon. I’m pretty sure I’m going to see some discourse icebergs float by, but I’ll just be over here having only these thoughts: 1. I bet the timeline doesn’t work out for her to read that fucking awful “the Strokes are the real radicals” essays before writing this, but it feels like she did. 2. Charli is one of our funniest pop stars, but maybe especially when people doesn’t seem to know that she knows she’s being funny (and why). 3. Song slaps.
[10]
Andrew Karpan: The other night I was on a roof in Bushwick and I suddenly asked my friend, after a long summery pause, “so.. do you like ‘Rock Music’?,” and she immediately understood that I was talking about the Charli song and I think that’s a kind of success that means something, even if that meaning is foggy and hard to exactly discern. What I keep coming back to is the way Charli’s voice turns, that catchy ick-ick-ick of her voice and how it makes me feel like it’s 2004 and I’m listening to the Who for the first time after Limp Bizkit covered ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ and there’s something monumental about those Baba O’Riley synths, a sound so big and unmysterious and frank, and maybe it does just sound like Pop 2 Charli, but that’s fine, I’ll keep searching and-
[10]