The Niche Is Dead: Charli XCX's Music Fashion Film is a Manifesto

 

Charli XCX, the English hyperpop legend, has announced the title of her new album: Music Fashion Film (MFF, get the joke?). From the moment I saw the title, I knew it was a declaration of war against something I’ve been hating for years: this cultural moment’s obsession with locking us into smaller and smaller, suffocating niches.

Music, fashion, and film as a concept is no coincidence. It’s a slap in the face to the idea that we must pick a lane and stay there forever. Having scattered interests, jumping from one world to another without asking permission, that’s something we should applaud standing up.

If you ask me, the perfect title already existed and Charli let it slip by. Sound, Style, Cinema would have been devastating. “Music” is a vague term. How many times have I said, “this music is bad”? Sound is something else. Sound is Stravinsky, it’s John Cage, it’s something that unsettles and transforms the listener. “Fashion” sounds like something imposed on us by others. Style is personal, what we decide to do with that imposition once we make it our own. “Film” can be Will Smith, it can be superhero movies, it can be a vulgar Adam Sandler comedy. Cinema is Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, or Pedro Almodóvar invoking poetry, literature, dance, painting, architecture, and sculpture all in a single instant.

A few months ago, Charli announced that the dancefloor was dead. Goodbye to Brat Summer. Madonna, of course, disagreed. And then there’s Rock Music, that short but shrill and bizarre track that evokes SOPHIE, Skrillex, Justice, or Slayyyter. Distorted guitars and compressed dissonance packed into just a few minutes that manage to move you more than songs three times as long. Charli says her neck hurts from headbanging. I agree, sometimes pain is the only way to feel anything.

Charli crossed the border between music and cinema with the Wuthering Heights soundtrack. I didn’t like the album and I didn’t see the film. What caught my attention was her collaboration with John Cale, the legendary Velvet Underground member and producer for Nico, The Stooges, Patti Smith, The Modern Lovers, Sham 69, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and The Jesus Lizard. No small feat. A collaboration that, if we’re honest, didn’t make much sense to me. Lou Reed was no longer available, he had already been taken toward the light. Charli has said in several interviews that she’s as big a fan of Reed as Lana Del Rey is; I’ve seen her wearing his T-shirts. After working with The Killers, Gorillaz, and Metric, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Reed had agreed to collaborate with her.

Recently I discovered a fact that blew my mind: John Cale’s first wife was Betsey Johnson, the avant-garde designer many unfairly blame as the Yoko Ono who supposedly destroyed the Velvet Underground. Johnson is to the United States what Vivienne Westwood was on the other side of the Atlantic, the woman who took punk rock and turned it into a fashion language (though I think Richard Hell and John Lydon deserve equal credit in that story). Johnson and Cale end up being, without anyone planning it, the perfect bridge between Charli, music, and fashion.

This year we saw Charli at a peculiar Met Gala dominated by the Bezos family. There she presented SS26, a solid track that plunges you into the universe of runways. If we’re talking about fashion, Charli was already avant-garde before, with her noisy collaborations alongside the legendary Sophie and an album recorded under strange conditions during the pandemic that still feels ahead of its time. How could we forget Crash, that record which at more than one point seems to dialogue with David Cronenberg’s film of the same name, based on J.G. Ballard’s book? Could it have been Music Fashion Film Books? Welcome to Intellectual Girl Summer!

The cover of Music Fashion Film is already iconic. It features John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese. No girls. Charli mentioned that having a woman on the cover was partly female exploitation. Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment, because that cover could have been truly epic. What if they had included Kanye West, one of the biggest influences on Charli’s career? What about Nick Cave? Bob Dylan? And Martin Margiela, the designer very close to Björk who remains the closest thing to a true rock star that fashion has produced (like Thomas Pynchon in literature, in addition to Alexander McQueen), enigmatic to the end, genuinely disruptive? Marc Jacobs, on the other hand, is the man who took flannel and Doc Martens boots from Seattle grunge and shamelessly turned them into a runway collection. A man who scammed rich people by selling them what lumberjacks wore in the forests of Washington state. I don’t think that puts him in the legend category, sorry Sofia Coppola.

Don’t get me wrong, Scorsese is an absolute god of cinema (Absolute Cinema!). But if Charli already surprised us by announcing a collaboration with David Cronenberg on the track No One Lasts Forever, and if she also has an album called Crash (as I mentioned), why not include Cronenberg himself on the cover? It would have been a masterstroke. Cronenberg Summer!

Cronenberg has been close to the fashion world for years. Saint Laurent Productions, Yves Saint Laurent’s production house led by Anthony Vaccarello, produced his film The Shrouds, in addition to his previous collaborations with Prada. Charli had a home run (or a goal, to speak in English terms) right in her hands, or at her feet, and let it slip away.

The cover will be central to the zeitgeist. But it also leaves the door open to a thousand versions that would have declared the death of the niche and the arrival of the random as an art form with even greater force. Unexpected connections, paradoxes that only make sense when you look closely and open your mind. Cale is a giant and his mark on music is indelible, no one disputes that. But I would have preferred Brian Eno, Kanye West, or better yet, a resurrected Lou Reed, David Bowie, or James Brown.

In fashion, I would have gone with Margiela or Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, and if we’re feeling ambitious, Alexander McQueen or Vivienne Westwood. Jacobs may be a 90s legend, but he doesn’t belong on the same level as those names. Scorsese does represent the word “cinema” better than almost any other living filmmaker, that has to be acknowledged without reservation. He is the perfect bridge between the deep auteur cinema of Luis Buñuel, Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the more modern and massive cinema of Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, or Quentin Tarantino.

Personally, I would have loved to see Werner Herzog, Lars von Trier, Harmony Korine, or Pedro Almodóvar there. And if we could resurrect the dead: Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Kubrick himself. That would have been a brave cover, one that screamed at full volume that crossovers are real and that niches should no longer exist.

Many of us have already created our own Music, Fashion, Film style cover using artificial intelligence. I made mine with Lou Reed, Rei Kawakubo, and Werner Herzog. Some will say that using AI for this is sacrilege. Curious, because Martin Scorsese himself already uses it to build his storyboards, and the fashion world has been relying on it for a while to design at high speed. If I went to the extreme, I’d put Dorian Yates, Chuck Palahniuk, and Nicolas Cage. “Mass Monster Transgressive Minimalism Nouveau Shamanic.”

I only have one more question for Charli: What about literature? What about books? Imagine that cover with Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Emmanuel Carrère, or Karl Ove Knausgård appearing alongside the others. That would have been truly ferocious. Does Charli not read? Is there not going to be an Intellectual Girl Summer?

In the end, Charli proves me right. Locking ourselves in a niche and ignoring everything else is unpleasant. The freedom to be different, to mix interests that apparently have nothing to do with each other, remains for me the most attractive and fascinating thing that can exist.

Welcome to Intellectual Random Summer.