(CNN) — Earlier this month, Charli XCX watched “Point Break,” the 1991 action flick starring Keanu Reeves as a rookie FBI agent. It was, she said, “top to bottom the coolest everrrrr.”
How do we know that? Because she logged it on Letterboxd — in an account that has become a sneak peek into a pop icon’s personal artistic appetite. It’s a portrait of a woman who’s as likely to consume low culture (“The Idea of You,” the schmaltzy Anne Hathaway boyband rom-com) as high (she gave Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 masterpiece “L’Avventura” 5 stars). The film reviewing account has lent itself to Charli’s overt styling of herself as an arbiter of taste and an unabashed fan of pop culture.
The rollout of Charli’s newest album “Music, Fashion, Film,” released Friday, is a kind of Rolodex of references, proof she’s done her homework. The album’s main cover doesn’t feature the pop star at all, but instead titans from the three sectors in the title: John Cale, the legendary Welsh singer and producer who helped found The Velvet Underground; Marc Jacobs, the fashion designer for whose campaigns Charli has posed for in the past; and the director Martin Scorsese, looking characteristically nonchalant (Charli’s latest review of a Scorsese film? 5 stars for “Cape Fear,” the 1991 psychological thriller).
Charli has good taste, and she wants you to know it. With “Music, Fashion, Film,” she also wants you to know that the icons she looks up to agree, thinking she’s important enough that they’ll fly out for a photo shoot in a “random kitchen,” per Cale. The end product is, like her Letterboxd, a perfect juxtaposition between high and low, three iconic artists in a dingy room — and, in an alternate cover, the singer herself smoldering among them, like their spiritual heir — or the superfan who’s snuck into the heavyweights’ club.
It’s cool, Charli says, to care deeply about art. Apathy is out.
“Coolness is something I value, because without it everything sort of feels random and nondescript,” she wrote on her Substack in December. “The second you apply a ‘something for everyone’ approach to art in an attempt to deliberately appeal to more people that, in my opinion, is the moment that coolness dies.”
‘Your favorite reference’
Charli’s own curation of taste and yes, coolness, stems from the reputation she’s built over the years as a kind of anti-Taylor Swift, strutting on stage in massive sunglasses and knee-high boots, making dance music about key bumps and her own club adventures. She’s presented herself as an alternative to the platonic ideal of a pop princess: messier, grungier, less predictable.
Her mega-successful sixth album “Brat,” released in 2024, saw Charli taking that image to its neon-green extreme, channeling the hot-mess it-girls of the mid 2000s remodeled for the internet era. The product was an album uniquely and specifically of the moment, so hyperpresent that its trademark color became the backdrop to an entire summer.
Aesthetically, the version of cool on “Music, Fashion, Film” is instead a blast from the pre-iPhone past. The videos released so far are all black and white, the sound stripped back. “I kind of want to make a Lou Reed record, to be honest,” she told Billboard at the height of “brat summer” in 2024.
The songs off “Music, Fashion, Film” don’t quite sound like Lou Reed (though she does mimic some of his deadpan sing-talking) — but Charli surely gets her rocker credit by collaborating with his longtime musical partner Cale, with whom she co-wrote “House” for the “Wuthering Heights” soundtrack. And she does convincing rockstar drag in the video for “Rock Music,” head-banging and pacing around mountains of discarded cigarettes as she professes “the dance floor is dead” over distorted electric guitar.
The references liberally littered throughout “Music, Fashion, Film” demonstrate how deeply Charli values counterculture — and wants to share it with the masses. Scorsese might appear on the cover, but it’s the godfather of body horror, David Cronenberg, whose oeuvre of cult classic films invoke sex, death and transformation (classic Charli themes, too) who gets a feature and a writing credit on the album’s last track.
The video for another track, “Camera,” stars legendary French actor Vincent Cassel, who played a Cronenberg-proxy in the Canadian auteur’s latest feature, “The Shrouds.” Why cast Cassel? “Simply because he’s the coolest,” Charli said in a story for the newsletter Drafting.
The video, shot entirely in one take, features Cassel as a frustrated actor — based, spiritually at least, in part on an image of an exhausted James Dean getting his makeup touched up on the set of the 1955 film “Giant.” Cassel snipes at crew members while doing messy reshoots of a scene in which he’s shot in the chest. The shooter is Charli herself, who enters perfectly poised in Louboutins astride a camera dolly.
Charli, creator of worlds
Charli’s depiction of herself as the auteur directing Cassel is an avatar for her broader project: Building a world for her music to live in. She went viral after declaring “music is not important” on SubwayTakes. “Music is not giving me the world. I need an artist to create the world,” she went on. Her Letterboxd, her Substack, her carefully coordinated explorations of fashion and film: It’s all part of the sprawling scaffolding that surrounds and supports her musical output.
Despite her Cronenberg fandom, the singer’s kaleidoscopic palette of references isn’t limited to the avant-garde. Charli is, per music writer Spencer Kornhaber, a “student of mainstream pop” who has drawn on the musical and aesthetic styles of Janet Jackson and Britney Spears. You can hear the echoes of Britney in Charli’s frequent experiments with autotune and see traces of her styling in the bikini tops and low-slung pants of Charli’s “Vroom Vroom” era. She knows where she fits in the pop pantheon (even while wearing more black than the rest).
The difference, said Kornhaber, is Charli’s commitment to autonomy and her public manipulation of her own image. “She takes that archetype and she flips it and makes her own authorship a central, undeniable part of the art,” said Kornhaber, a staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of “On Divas.”
On her newest album, she toys explicitly with how much of her cool, bad girl image is an artifice, too — an expansion of the Charli XCX cinematic universe. “Maybe I f**ked your dad / Just kidding, I’m only saying that for effect,” she sings on “Wink, Wink,” a raunchy, half-hearted rejection of her risqué persona.
What else is just for effect? Her Letterboxd looks candid, unfiltered — but it’s also been a means for her to disseminate messages about the films she starred in during the “Brat”-”Music, Fashion, Film” interregnum. It’s still marketing, even if it’s marketing of the “more intimate, personal, private, one on one” style she recently praised on X.
Chasing cool
Charli’s newest challenge seems to be figuring out how to stay cool after achieving the meteoric mainstream success of “Brat.”
It’s a careful balancing act. Can you be both counterculture and mainstream enough to become a main character in Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign? An underground icon who’s also collaborated with H&M, Skims and Converse?
“The apex of cool and commercial has always been interesting to me and I have always mused over the point at which something cool dies and is rejected by the initial group of people who made it desirable and aspirational in the first place,” she wrote in the December Substack piece. “Of course I would much rather be considered ‘cool’ by a select few group of people than known by everyone. And yes, I know it’s inherently lame to care about that kind of stuff, but I’m just being honest.”
Fifteen years into her career, Charli is, like Scorsese and Marc Jacobs, a lot closer to being “known by everyone” than most artists could ever dream of. She’s just shy of hitting 30 million monthly listeners on Spotify. But she’s still chasing cool: what she characterizes as art that’s “specific and niche and a true expression of a person.”
Achieving mainstream stardom hasn’t stopped Cale, Jacobs and Scorsese from maintaining the glimmer of coolness decades into their careers. Maybe she situates herself among them on the album cover as a kind of protective amulet against the revolving door of culture that sees pop stars — particularly women — discarded one after the other as the zeitgeist shifts.
Charli’s shameless celebration of her taste comes as AI companies are promising everyone can be an artist. If anyone can make work of technical high quality, then taste and discrimination become even more salient. Taste, artistry, coolness: They’re the currency of a new world. And Charli, she wants us to know, is rich in them.
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