HRH Queen Charli xcx has, as you may be aware, recently released a song called 'ROCK MUSIC'. The song is, by and large, not rock music. It is also, in places, a little bit rock music. Both of these things are true at the same time, and if your brain finds this offensively difficult to compute, I'm afraid I have some bad news about most of the good pop songs of the last fifty years.
You will have noticed, possibly with a degree of weariness, that 'ROCK MUSIC' has already done that thing where the discourse arrives roughly ninety seconds before anyone has actually finished listening to the song. Somebody on the internet has already produced an open letter, signed by no one, lamenting that this is not experimentation but calculation, not rebellion but the aesthetic of rebellion. Dear Reader, the open letter was written using a chatbot. The chatbot doesn't even really know who Charli xcx is. We are in trouble.
Here are the basic facts, in list format because 'real' rock 'fans' love a list:
#1 The song is short (this is good).
#2 The chorus says "I think the dance floor is dead, so now we're making rock music" (which is, depending on your tolerance for that sort of thing, either a thrillingly brattish provocation or a deeply annoying line, and I would suggest you can ENJOY it being both at once, but anyway).
#3 It was made by Charli, A. G. Cook and Finn Keane, who have been making Really Very Good and Really Quite Clever music together for roughly a decade.
#4 It is not, despite its title and despite a small skip fire's worth of online speculation, a rock song (or indeed, a rock album) in disguise. Charli has said this herself. On the internet. Where you can read it. With your eyes.
The reason 'ROCK MUSIC' is causing a small fuss in certain quarters of the internet is that it is - like a great deal of Charli's catalogue, and like the entire PC Music project alongside which her artistic instincts were essentially forged - operating on at least two frequencies simultaneously. The lyrics are funny but they aren't jokes. Charli does have nerve damage from headbanging. She has, for years now, been mentioning in interviews that she'd like to make a Lou Reed album, which has been filed under "things people say in interviews and probably won't happen" by everyone (except, presumably, Charli, because Charli does what Charli wants, and the rest of us are, as ever, several months behind).
A short history lesson, then, because a worrying number of people appear to need one. PC Music was misread on arrival as a piss-take. Hyper-glossy, plastic, fake pop stars, all of it. Most people thought it was a joke about pop. It was not a joke about pop. A. G. has said this in interviews until he is blue in the face. Charli even gently pointed out that the discourse around 'ROCK MUSIC' reminds her and her friends of exactly this. The thing it always actually was, and always actually has been, is pop made by people who love pop. If you were paying attention, it was obviously a love letter. If you weren't, you have failed, on a fairly basic level, to understand the science of pop.
Charli came up next to all of this and absorbed the lesson better than anyone. The bones of 'ROCK MUSIC' have been sitting around for a couple of years already, in plain sight, on Thy Slaughter's 'Soft Rock' - Cook and Keane's 2023 record, which had Charli on it alongside Caroline Polachek, Alaska Reid and Ellie Rowsell (who is, as a matter of settled fact, British rock's greatest frontperson of the last decade). People who paid attention to that album are not currently surprised. People who did not pay attention to that album are currently filming three-minute TikTok videos about how surprised they are.
There's a separate but related point here, which is that the brightest pop minds in the UK have been merrily mucking about with the question of where the artist ends and the bit begins for at least five years now. Matty Healy's stage shows, the baiting, the entire podcast-went-horribly-wrong business he and The 1975 ran during their last campaign, the deliberate refusal to draw a clean line between Matty The Man, Matty The Pop Star, Matty The Artist and Matty The Provocative Steak Gobbler — same conversation, (thankfully) different framing. The little enclave of friends and collaborators around and adjacent to Charli is, frankly, the most interesting thing happening in British pop and has been for years. None of this is new. We just keep pretending it is because most other people are a little bit boring in comparison.
What's less funny is the wider thing 'ROCK MUSIC' has stumbled into, which is that we now appear to live in a culture where the loudest possible response to a piece of music is to immediately strip it for parts. Hot takes. Video essays by men who resemble a King Edward spud talking into a tiny microphone. Screenshots circulated for ratio purposes. (The microphones, by the way, keep getting smaller. At current rates the microphone will be invisible by 2028 and inaudible by 2030, which, frankly, can't come soon enough.) The point of a song, increasingly, is not to be enjoyed. The point of a song is to be a thing you can have a position on, ideally for the purposes of being seen having it. Earnest or ironic. Good or bad. Pick. One. Now.
The trouble, of course, is that the best pop has never worked like that, and will never work like that, and 'ROCK MUSIC' very specifically refuses to. It is silly in a 2009-2015 tumblrcore, house-party, Skins-on-E4 way. It is also a real artistic move. It has a daft chorus and some secretly brilliant lyrics for a song that quite a lot of people have decided has bad ones. Charli knows perfectly well she's never going to make another 'Brat', and that trying to would, frankly, finish her off creatively. So, after a film and a soundtrack and some more acting, she's pushed further into the dance-punk corner that's been quietly waiting for her in the catalogue. Which is, fundamentally, the entire job of a good pop star.
Charli's last real stab at rock-leaning music was 'Sucker', which she has since openly disowned. Which is a story almost too neat to be real: the major-label pop signing being asked to chase 'Boom Clap' once made a sort-of-rock record under duress, hated it, spent a decade becoming the most interesting pop star of her generation, and has now circled back round to make a different sort-of-rock record entirely on her own terms, with her actual friends, while telling the dance floor it's dead.
Some people will think it's earnest. Some people will think it's ironic. A reasonable number of people will not like it, which is fine, because not liking a Charli xcx song is a long-standing and entirely valid pop-listener tradition, especially if you've got a terminal lack of good taste. And quite a lot of people will simply not get it, which is also fine, but probably warrants a bit less of the loud public processing if you'd rather not look a bit silly.
Charli herself put it more neatly than anyone: "things can be funny, earnest, sincere, and joyful all at the same time". Which is, broadly, the entire argument, delivered by the only person whose opinion on it actually counts.
'ROCK MUSIC' isn't for everyone. Pop songs aren't supposed to be. The ones that try to be are usually rubbish.
