Charli XCX

I want to say "Breaking Up" would have been better (as much as it pains me to say it, I can see it alongside "Lips Are Moving" etc) but it didn't really get much traction either so who knows?

there aren't any obvious hits on Sucker, at least not any who work for Charli. she comes across as too canny for her own stuff a lot of the time. I could see some pubescent Disney kid have big hits with Break the Rules and Famous with the under-12 segment (with some lyrical adjustments, of course).

it seems like people knew her as the girl on the iggy song and the one from that movie and weren't really invested in her career personally

Need Ur Love sounds like the hit to me but then I thought Superlove was going to be massive when I first heard it. It got to 63 in the UK charts.

Well in a just universe True Romance would have been as era-defining as OK Computer

what a terrible video. her record company must really hate her.

she's doing stuff with PC music now btw: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4PJuhE7XMyjYkJTODdqSWpnSGc/edit

she comes across as too canny for her own stuff a lot of the time

omg bingo, this is exactly what i haven't quite been able to put my finger on

I could see some pubescent Disney kid have big hits with Break the Rules and Famous with the under-12 segment (with some lyrical adjustments, of course)

yeah same - "break the rules" is potentially a brilliant pop song, way better and more immediate than "boom clap", it just didn't ultimately fit her very well

amusingly "break the rules" became a hit in germany which is one of the bigger/tougher music markets. i think it's b/c it was attached to some tv promo there but i like to pretend it's because a smaller proportion of the ppl there can understand the lyrics.

but yeah the attempt to make her a ~star~ is evidently not really working out at least for now

i actually don't think that "famous" video is that bad, some parts are a bit amusing

of course being attached to a tv commercial didn't help "doing it" on this side of the pond lol

I could see some pubescent Disney kid have big hits with Break the Rules and Famous with the under-12 segment (with some lyrical adjustments, of course).

― Leonard Pine, Wednesday, 25 March 2015 21:52 (Yesterday) Permalink

that's the thing though -- this didn't happen either! charli xcx wrote a couple songs on bella thorne's EP and they got very little traction even with the radio disney crowd. (given that the radio disney crowd is enamored with the likes of shawn mendes, this honestly isn't so surprising.) I feel like whatever mechanisms make people ~~celebrities~~ just weren't put fully in place for charli, for whatever reason.

yeah but i meant someone a lot less terrible than bella thorne, charli can't do all the work (and boyfriend material is no break the rules, it's not even a famous)

i feel like the odds were always stacked against her being a celebrity in that way, but she had a window and with a really effective campaign for sucker, who knows? i mean it would be great if she didn't care about mainstream success and was happy just appealing to 30 year old music nerds like me, record blogbait and play small dives to our grateful, sweaty faces, but it would seem not!

i would like to think this is her betty boo stage after which she will carve out a very nice career as a backroom songwriter for pop startlets who will the play the game a lot more effectively than she does.

have to admit i was quite suprised to see simon price label her as a lidl ke$ha today in the metro (or something along those lines).

it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that people who haven't been over-invested in her tortuous and grasping career arc see her as a lidl ke$ha

I don't really see the comparison, but if true she is ke$ha with worse promotion ("blah blah blah" is still an awful song and were it not for the fact it became a hit, it'd come off as THE MOST baffling follow-up single in recent pop history)

yeah that's probably true buttt when your career arc goes "gothy tumblrpop for internet pop fans" => "iggy azalea collaboration" => "shampoo-style kiddie-punk bratpop", it's hard not to seem like you have no commitment to any sound or image

i don't really care about her commitment to anything, in fact it's kind of cool to have no idea what she's going to do next. i've enjoyed the fuck out of pretty much every stage you just described.

but yeah, maybe not so shocking that she sold like 8 copies of her album. like i give a fuck, though.

I mean, you can say that about a lot of pop artists, if not every pop artist:

"Rascal Flatts songwriter" ==> "collaborator with C-list tween actresses" ==> "doo-wop revival"

"Christian contemporary artist" ==> "shemo singer for The Matrix" ==> "arch, sarcastic mean-girl Warped Tour pop" ==> "America's Sweetheart pop" ==> "Juicy J collaboration"

"piano-rock artist playing NYU showcases" ==> "writer for Britney Spears" ==> "RedOne electropop" ==> "omg it's art it's pop and it's secretly back-of-the-bar hair metal" ==> "Tony Bennett collaboration"

"Sheryl Crow wannabe" ==> "middle-tier post-Spice girl group member" ==> "super-bubbly bubblegum pop star"

(bonus round)

"girl with a bunch of blokes covering the Beatles in pubs" ==> "arty art-rock lady"

"girl fronting a cheesy hair metal band with songs about pirates" ==> "introspective piano songwriter"

because this is just how the music industry works, has always worked, every artist goes through it in multiple iterations, only difference is the mechanisms are a little more public now that everything gets social media'd and thrown up prematurely and such. "commitment to any sound or image" is an illusion, always has been, but it only ever gets brought up selectively: always as a pejorative, and increasingly leveled at artists the industry failed to nurture. (there are exceptions -- Lana Del Rey, for instance -- but again, they're always pejorative.) it's the one-percentification of the industry again, basically. the difference between "no commitment to any sound" and "pop star eras" is pretty much the size of the marketing budget.

recent pop history
believe it or not "Blah blah blah" was 5 years ago. time flies.

no commitment to any sound or image
Compared to who? Katy Perry's last 2 albums were huge and weren't connected to any sound or image, whereas Charli seems like she's aiming to fill the Ke$ha void.

"Break The Rules" was a def a bad choice for riding momentum. Seems like they poorly chose the one most similar-sounding to "I Love It," and no one cared because it sounds boring on the radio.

upon thinking about this -- and trust me, there are little pieces of my soul dying as I think it -- the problem with charli is that there weren't enough MEMES. like, her verse on "Fancy" was one, but it wasn't really one about her, unlike, say, "brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack" or "wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy"

she needs more gimmicks?

not gimmicks, exactly, contrary to almost everyone in the industry gimmicks only succeed because of the pop star attached. (the No. 1 gimmick-producer in the industry might be rihanna -- that annoying "unlocking" thing, the rihanna plane, whatever fuckery happened today. but she gets away with it because she's rihanna)

the Icona Pop song was shampoo-style kiddie-punk bratpop

stuck trying to figure out who katherine is talking about in her last three example trajectories

i think it's a trick question and the answer to all of them is actually beyoncé

guessing kate bush and tori amos for the bonus round

your answers are: meghan trainor, katy perry, lady gaga and britney spears

(but that's not why I bumped the thread, I bumped it to say that "famous" is growing on me, albeit probably only me)

i like "famous" a lot!

its a great song like everything else on the record

Famous is one of the handful of songs on Sucker I'll happily listen to on repeat. I love the line "sweat drips from the roof", few pop writers can really put you right in a specific situation with only a few words like she can.

i had no idea britney was a girl group member!

http://www.pepatung.com.my/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Britney-Spears-Innosense.jpg

Having spent most of the 2000s on the side of poptimists who were like OMG WHY IS RACHEL STEVENS NOT HUGE HOW DOES THE RECORD COMPANY PUBLIC KEEP GETTING IT SO WRONG, these days, the failure of Sucker and Carly Rae Jepsen to get a second hit seem to make perfect sense to me.

Because, like, Sucker isn't very good at all, is it? Really?

I still think we should go see her and Tkay.

one thing i know is that Rivers Cuomo makes an appearance for a totally lame rewrite of "Beverly Hills," so that's one strike. (but i like "Doing It" (and the official A.G. Cook remix is one of the few PC Music things i'd say is god-level).)

There is a lot of lame stuff on Sucker. I wish I could perform an exorcism on all the college rock elements of it and be left with a decent 90s girl band best of. I'd still be dreaming about the Gainsbourg/ye ye/new wave-influenced masterpiece she talked about in interviews though.

come on that sounds terrible.

man i forgot about innosense

At least three people in this thread voted for Sucker in the P&J. I almost didn't, but then I listened to it one last time to decide whether it belonged in my top 20 or top 50, and it won me back over. For me, at least, the whole album is much more than the sum of the songs. Or maybe it's that it actually is worth the sum of its songs, where albums often aren't. Anyway, I don't know and don't care whether she "should" be a star, any more than some kid you admired in gym class in 4th grade "should" be in the Olympics, but I'm excited to hear her keep making records.

the bar feels kinda low for female pop stardom right now, like if Meghan Trainor and Ellie Goulding can be on the radio 24/7 and do solid album numbers then it shouldn't have been that hard for Charli to reach that level

That javelin thing in the Olympics doesn't look that hard.

had to check whether I voted for sucker -- I did, I mostly like it except for the two or three obvious castoffs, I'm mostly invested in her becoming a star because she almost (what seemed like) improbably became one, then didn't

come on that sounds terrible

a mashup of my three favourite genres, what could possibly go wrong??!

I know I know probably a lot but I can dream. I was actually pretty excited by the live version of London Queen and thought the new wave thing was happening and then I heard the recorded version and... eh

also I heard Red Ballon today but maybe I should post about that in the rolling worst songs thread instead

this album still ridiculously fun to put on, fuiud

she performed "famous" and "drop that kitty" (w/ ty$ and tinashe) on the mtv movie awards last night and it was pretty unbearable

i do still like the album tho

they're still trying to make "drop that kitty" happen, bless

that said, I am somewhat surprised she hasn't tried to go the EDM crossover route, because she's SO GOOD at it:

https://vimeo.com/33337865