Charli XCX Is Throwing the Rules of Pop Out the Window

Teen Vogue is excited to share our music issue — Pass the Mic. In our July cover package we profile young women disrupting the music industry, how they are doing it, and why it matters. We'll have a new one every day for the next week. Stay tuned.

In the video for "What I Like" from her 2013 debut studio album, True Romance, a then up-and-coming artist by the name of Charli XCX is hanging out with her friends, eating pizza, and jumping on the bed at what looks like a quintessential late-night slumber party. All the elements of a teen pop aesthetic are present — she’s even wearing a Catholic-schoolgirl-style plaid miniskirt.

But the production is lo-fi, and in lieu of Britney Spears–esque white knee-high socks, Charli wears 12-inch-tall black platform sneakers, and her hair is large, messy, and flying around like Medusa’s snakes. Take a closer listen to the song’s lyrics, and you’ll realize they’re a bit more graphic than expected: “You call me up at six, come 'round/ Undressing in my house again/ Your T-shirt’s on the floor, yeah we're undressing in my house again/ You know just what I like.”

The themes in Charli’s music include not just sex but partying, boys, smoking, and all unapologetically so — not in a way where she’s trying to be empowering or honest — she just is. And in a pop culture landscape where we are often peddled sugarcoated visions of “girl power” or good girls gone bad, Charli defies those categories and paints a young woman’s world like it actually is: a complex and emotional terrain that we navigate imperfectly.

Charli, born Charlotte Aitchison (Charli XCX was her MSN username), who is now 25, has been making music for a decade. At 14, she was producing her own tracks inspired by electronic artists she was “kind of stalking on their MySpace profiles”; eventually, she caught the attention of rave promoters and started playing underground warehouse parties. That all sounds pretty cool, but she assures Teen Vogue she was not.

“When I started playing raves in London, I was still 16, so my parents would drive me,” she says. “I wasn't even really rebelling because I was going with my parents. I was kind of super uncool.”

We caught up with her while she was on tour with Taylor Swift and Camila Cabello for Taylor’s Reputation Stadium Tour. But this level of exposure is new to her; historically an icon of alt-pop, Charli is a prolific musician. She has dropped four mixtapes and two albums and appeared on dozens of tracks, notably the breakthrough banger “I Like It,” with Swedish pop duo Icona Pop, and “Fancy” alongside Iggy Azalea.

Today you’d be hard-pressed to find a single she’s released since 2013 that doesn’t have at least 5 million views (more like in the hundreds of millions) on YouTube. Critics love her, calling her “bombastic” and a “vision of what pop could be”. She’s been nominated for Grammys and Billboard awards, and she was honored in 2014 at the Billboard Women in Music Awards as the Hitmaker.

But Charli’s experience as a young woman in the music industry has been varied. When she was 16 years old, she started traveling to Los Angeles to work with different songwriters and producers. Back then she was not practicing choreography for sold-out stadium shows; instead, she was eating In-N-Out and hanging out in her hotel room.

She says that whether she was taken seriously or not as a young woman was dependent on who she was working with. “I think there is such a specific style of working, particularly in L.A…. It's this mechanical pop machine. And sometimes it's hard for people to take the ideas of a young girl who's new on the scene that seriously.”

While this was only eight years ago, she feels the pop culture landscape has evolved for women. “There's so much more scope for young female artists,” she says, explaining that the question of whether young women can control their own art always comes up. “There's always people that are in disbelief that Taylor would write her own songs or Camila or I would, or anyone. But I think there are so many more high-profile females [now].”

Charli is right — the landscape for women musicians has changed — but it’s not enough. A January 2018 report from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found that only 22.4% of all performers of the 600 most popular songs from 2012 to 2017 were female. Additionally, 2017 represented a six-year low, with women comprising just 16.8% of popular artists on the top charts.

The numbers might feel disconcerting, but artists such as Charli – and those she’s on tour with — have been hard at work and are overcoming the odds. Along with being on tour, she dropped a summer jam, “5 In The Morning,” and is teasing more mixtapes to come.

Charli’s musical aesthetic has changed since she dropped her first single, but all of it feels like her: equal parts gutting and wise, fun and accessible. She says she takes inspiration from ”everywhere and nowhere.”

“I know people always say, ‘Write about what you know,’ but I actually kind of think that's bullsh*t. Sometimes I think it's nice to write about total fantasy and things that you don't know and situations that haven't happened.”

Oh, and she’s also inspired by parties. “I think parties are the time, the places that you fall in love,” she says. “That you meet someone new or you cry or you break up or ... they're very emotional places, and I think especially from the age of 16 to whenever you party until.”

Charli might love to party, but like those of us who love to drown our sorrows in the blurry chaos of the dancefloor, she has also struggled with being lonely and fitting in. When asked what she would tell her younger self, she says, “High school ends, and all the cool, mean people in high school probably suck in later life.” She continues, “It's very important to be yourself. And I think that's so hard to realize and to kind of become happy with. But I think it's really cool to be yourself, no matter who that is.”

And be herself she has been, despite an industry that wants to pigeonhole women or not give them full creative control of their art. It’s clear from listening to her music or watching her videos that Charli is in charge of her vision — and that even when she plays by the rules of pop music, she finds her own way to break them. Or you know, just throwing them totally out the window by releasing as much music as she can.

"I feel like there's no rules anymore in pop music" she says. "So I just want to put everything out."

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Credits:

• Photographer: Campbell Addy. Campbell was assisted by Cailan O’Connell and Carlos Quinteros.

• Stylist Rebecca Grice. Rebecca was assisted by Alexa Eschert.

• Makeup: Grace Ahn. Grace was assisted by Mikey Castillo.

• Makeup: Lilly Keys.

• Hair: Rubi Jones. Ruby was assisted by Lydia Hwang.

• Hair: Sami Knight.

• Teen Vogue creative director: Erin Hover

• Teen Vogue senior visuals editor: Noelle Lacombe

On Charlie XCX:

• Prada Pre-Fall Look 28 Coat, $1,790. Available at select Prada boutiques.

• Prada Pre-Fall Look 28 Dress, $1,310. Available at select Prada boutiques.

• Helmut Lang Ankle Boots, $795. helmutlang.com.

• Kenneth Jay Lane Gunmetal Crystal Waterfall Drop Earring, $170. kennethjaylane.com

• Prada Pre-Fall Look 32 Shirt, $1,120. Available at select Prada boutiques.

• Prada Pre-Fall Look 32 Skirt, $1,120. Available at select Prada boutiques.

• Helmut Lang Ankle Boots, $795. helmutlang.com.

• Crap Eyewear The Ultra Jungle, $79. crapeyewear.com.

• Jennifer Fisher 3” Shane Hoop, $490. jenniferfisherjewelry.com.