Charli XCX Made A Beautiful Monument To Impermanence

SAN FRANCISCO — Charli XCX had a cold. You could only tell after five songs and one costume change, when the backup dancers and full backing band briefly disappeared so she could perform “Track 10,” the furthest she reached into her back catalogue. Alone, she sounded a little shredded, and would occasionally let the backing track sing for her. Probably this would sink other would-be headliners, or at least meaningfully affect the performance, but no, whatever mild illness Charli was contending with gave her a slightly plaintive warble, one that was coherent with the show and further shaded its grand thematic ambitions.

Her headlining set this past Friday night at the Outside Lands festival, coming weeks after the release of Music, Fashion, Film, was so much more than pressing play on the new stuff and the old stuff and pleasing her massive new fanbase. It was a monument to art, mortality, and fame, and the ways those three do and do not square the contradictions of each other.

Two years after the final sunset of BRAT Summer, Charli finds herself in one of the trickiest and least forgiving positions any pop star could occupy. BRAT was a world-destroying phenomenon, a meteor that struck at exactly the right moment to launch Charli out of pop’s impossible middle class and into the rarified stratosphere of mainstream fame: seven movie credits, a sold-out arena tour, none other than the Democratic National Convention prostrating itself before her green glow. Charli achieved escape velocity because BRAT was, both sonically and lyrically, an immediate, defiant album, an album about continuing to party and have fun and try stuff after turning 30, set to A.G. Cook’s best work synthesizing a decade of the bloghouse era for the generation that arrived 15 years too late for MSTRKRFT.