Review: Charli XCX broke through with ‘Brat’ memes. At the Forum, she proved her staying power
The men’s room line at the Kia Forum for the Charli XCX and Troye Sivan show Tuesday night was suspiciously long. Inside, it became clear why: Mostly women were in there, dressed in Charli’s shade of key-lime green from her summer LP, “Brat.â€
“This is, like, the one show where gender doesn’t even matter,†one woman said to her friend, laughing in a mesh crop-top only slightly more opaque than the Juul cloud that followed her in.
She was right. Charli’s album release in June heralded the arrival of Brat Summer, 2024’s much-memed season of desperation for a good time in spite of global chaos. For a minute or two, it even defined the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris.
But how does an artist like Charli keep that flame cooking, once presidential aspirants are no longer using her font?
This savvy, ambitious and uncompromising electro-pop artist finally caught the fame she’d sought for close to two decades. Now, she has to make sure the music stays important for the next 20.
Tuesday’s opener of a two-night stand showed the path forward. Charli — one of the most insightfully self-aware songwriters of our time — isn’t simply a pop star but also an artist extremely attuned to the machine of fame and what pleasures and anxieties it wrings out of you. The only way to deal is to bring a lot of friends along.
This package tour with Sivan — an Aussie with an enticing falsetto who delved into ragingly horny house music last year on “Something to Give Each Other†— was booked well before Charli rose to the A-list over the summer. Sivan is compelling and getting more interesting now that his music sounds like it belongs in Castro District bathhouses.
This tour’s round-robin format, with three or four songs from each artist before swapping out on the same set, showed Charli’s generosity and thrill for collaboration. That flexibility and camaraderie will be what sustains her.
A short set from the compelling British singer, DJ and label owner Shygirl kicked off the night with an apropos mix of pheromone-drenched, future-shock electronics. Her album “Nymph†deserves arena stages, and what a delight to see her find them.
Sivan then took the baton, with strobe-flicking odes to the cravings of lust like “What’s the Time Where You Are?†and “Honey.†Sivan has come a long way from the azure-eyed, impossibly cheekboned seraph that he embodied at the start of his career, and on club songs such as “Silly†and “Rush,†he danced like someone who has seen the range of human possibility at a Berlin fetish dungeon.
That also gave him room to take real chances, like the cutting, sidepiece ballad “One of Your Girlsâ€: “Give me a call if you ever get lonely / I’ll be like one of your girls or your homies / Say what you want, and I’ll keep it a secret.â€
Charli, for her part, is no longer a secret for pop girlies, gays and theys. She was a dervish of black curls on one of L.A.’s biggest stages, licking the plexiglass stage floor while flashing her underwear for the cameras once the deliriously slutty Billie Eilish collab “Guess†kicked in (no Eilish in person Tuesday, alas).
Charli’s stage setup was minimal — no dancers, no band, just Charlotte Aitchison alone on some scaffolding and a big LED rig. She seemed determined to strip her fame of all artifice while still claiming its pleasures.
Seeing and hearing “Brat†was a vivid reminder of just how smart this record is, feverishly assessing her place in the pop firmament on “Sympathy Is a Knife,†owning up to the jealousies and insecurities of public femininity on “Girl, So Confusing.†“Brat†did one of the hardest tricks in pop. It’s an album about how weird it is being a pop star, made vivid and relatable in the particulars.
As Charli kicked back and forth between club-bashers like “Von Dutch†and “365,†she worked in older material like “Vroom Vroom†and tracks like “Speed Drive†from “Barbie†to make the case that this auteur’s ambition and dedication have always been there.
Charli’s late collaborator Sophie hovered over the set in spirit, a producer in love with the emotional scale of pop while dissatisfied with its cliches. Kesha was there beside her, reclaiming “Tik Tok†as a founding document of Charli’s hot-mess aesthetic and well-honed songcraft. When Charli nodded to her after-hours Boiler Room DJ triumphs on “365†or thrashed on the floor to “Blame It on Your Love,†she changed what was possible for an artist at this tier of fame.
To judge by the chartreuse-covered Forum crowd, Brat summer may yet endure as Gen Z’s own Margaritaville, an ageless mentality about decadence and unruliness. Charli finally got what she wanted but knows she has to move forward.
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