The Official Chart for May 8
New Charli XCX! And it’s fabulous, the kind of insouciant pop banger Charli XCX does so well. Most importantly, it’s a hell of a lot better than her last track, “Vroom Vroom,” which was fucking garbage. Her last EP was produced by Sophie, and was the kind of half-assed lazy shit that has come to characterize him and his PC Music mates. It’s instructive to compare PC Music’s slapdash product with the genuine insouciance of Charli XCX’s work, or, even more so, Rihanna’s Anti. Just as making sad music doesn’t just involve the unmediated recording of sadness, so the perfect representation of Rihanna’s no-fucks-given instagram attitude on Anti isn’t achieved by just not giving a fuck: it requires some sort of thought, craft, or practice that adds up to the sublation of not giving a fuck. The problem with PC Music’s artless recycling of 90s post-modern cliches about pop music is that it pays no attention to this dialectic. To be fair, some of the tracks on Vroom Vroom were better than the title track; “Paradise” suggests that if Sophie stopped dicking about and put in a bit of effort, he could make fair-to-middling happy hardcore. Read more↴