Charli XCX's "Rock Music" Must Be a Joke

I like it. I can't stop listening to it. It sounds unfinished in a way that makes you want to replay it enough times to fill in what's missing. The lyrics are stupid in a way that belies its melodic shrewdness. It makes sense that Charli XCX would want to deconstruct after a towering edifice like Brat. The only way forward was down – off the stage and into the crowd, where hopefully her fans catch her. But if not, oh well. Charli's no stranger to crashes. She can bounce back like the best of them, and historically speaking, she's delivered her best work when she has something to prove.

I'm speculating, but I think she's bored with being universally praised. "Rock Music" feels like an attempt at courting controversy just for the sake of it. To test the limits of her zeitgeist-molding powers and see how much mischief she can actually get away with. The premise of this song is utterly ridiculous. To assert that the "dancefloor is dead" in the time of Slayyyter, Ninajirachi, Bassvictim, horsegiirL – it's a troll. Discourse chum for the Pop Crave quote tweeters. Or maybe I'm just choosing skepticism in order to preserve this song's enjoyability. Because if you take Charli at her word, then "Rock Music" becomes less effective. It becomes too sure of itself, and its biggest flaw comes into focus.

The single's artwork is, I think, a transparent nod to New Order's Substance 1987 compilation, which is Charli's way of suggesting that "Rock Music" will incite a reverse "Blue Monday"; shifting the paradigm from synths to strings. I choose to believe this visual reference is just another bit of P.C. Music's metatextual tomfoolery, and Charli doesn't actually believe the words in her own hook. But if she does, then "Rock Music"'s forward-leaning posture goes limp, because all of the sounds on here are like five years old.

The production palette is lifted directly from A.G. Cook's 2020 album Apple, a prescient indietronica opus that landed the same year 100 gecs started leaking rock tracks that presaged 2023's guitar-laden 10,000 gecs. Meanwhile, Charli's juddering vocals on "Rock Music" immediately bring to mind Lil Yachty's "Poland," another snippet-length DAW drawing that sounded like the future for a couple weeks back in 2022 and then fell into the past. Charli's always been known for lifting left-field production ideas into the mainstream without watering down their outsider quirks, but Cook and Finn Keane's handiwork on "Rock Music" is straight and unpliable compared to the "rock music" that ear, The Hellp, and Bassvictim are currently making in pop's substrata.

I wouldn't judge "Rock Music" based on this criteria if Charli wasn't inviting it. If she wasn't daring her audience to challenge her bluster and crinkle their noses at this dinky reduction of Brat's club classicism. I think she wants to be counted out just so she can prove us wrong. "Rock Music" may be a preview of what Charli does next, but I don't think it's the next. I think the dancefloor's too alive for that.