Oblivion is Freedom
how Charli XCX transcended the party-girl aesthetic
I won’t revise history and pretend like I’ve always been on #TeamCharli.
Truth be told, I never understood Charli much at all, prior to Brat. I had seen her perform at smaller festivals, and while I enjoy a pulsating electro-pop set as much as the next gay, nothing about her aesthetic or lyrics really drew me in. She was always the club girl who bragged about doing too many drugs — which is cool, but not my vibe.
I dissected Brat extensively when it came out in 2024, but in short, that album was the turnkey that finally unlocked Charli’s artistic merit for me. I suddenly understood how self-aware she was and how everything she was singing about was an illustration of insecurities, mimicries of criticisms, or imaginary dialogues with her inner demons. Moreover, her work with producer A.G. Cook helped me finally click with her auto-tuned voice and Drum & Bass approach to melodies in a way that her previous records sort of lacked with a throughline necessary for an old curmudgeon like me.
When she took Brat on tour in 2024, I was really hoping to catch Charli live again so I could finally connect the dots live that I hadn’t been able to for so long. Unfortunately, her surprise set at the Radius was impossible to get into, and both of her Allstate Arena shows were the same nights as Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Coachella 2025 (the final leg of the tour) wasn’t an option for us that year, and so I watched from home with visceral vicariousness, especially for older songs I had heard played live previously but hadn’t “figured out” how to interpret until now.
And then, by providence or sheer willpower (apologies to my liver), I managed to snag a ticket for her performance at Lollapalooza last Friday.
Firstly, a word about Charli XCX’s music in 2026.
Oddly, Charli never really rested after Brat’s monumental success throughout 2024 and 2025. She absolutely could’ve taken a deserved year or two off and let the dust settle before returning to the limelight, but instead, she released a faux documentary (a la This Is Spinal Tap) this past spring — The Moment — and started teasing grandiose collaborations with legends like John Cale, Martin Scorsese, Marc Jacobs, David Cronenberg, etc. etc. etc. while recording the soundtrack to the 2026 film version of Wuthering Heights.
Just a week prior to performance at Lollapalooza, Charli XCX released Music, Fashion, Film — a brand new 30 minute album comprised of 11 stripped down rock songs.
On its surface, Music, Fashion, Film is a minimalist, bordering on simple, record from an artist known for maximalism and audacity. Moreover, much like Charli’s earlier works, the lyrics are easy to misconstrue if one isn’t really aware of all of Charli’s backstory going into the piece. Her strange back-and-forth with Taylor Swift, her struggles with Brat’s measurable impact on the pop scene, her finally being accepted into the awards scene and building bridges with pop giants like Lorde and Billie Eilish, and most importantly — how much dudes on the internet fucking hate her.
“If you take away the music, then what has she got?”
I only got to listen to the new record once before the Lollapalooza performance, and while I did enjoy it, I didn’t have time to really ingest its meaning or hidden complexities. But even on face value, the album is an OBVIOUS counter-point to Brat. It’s an explicit middle finger to anyone who attacked Charli for being all-DJ-produced EDM wannabe, for not being able to ‘sing properly’ without autotune, for writing about nothing but drugs and clubs, and for not being a ‘real’ artist.
This set the stage (ha) for a fascinating sort of palpitation going into Lollapalooza Friday evening. An already cool and rainy day, folks were on-edge just hoping that Charli’s show would go on unabated by the dreary weather, especially after sub-headliner Lil Uzi Vert cancelled at the last minute, sending most of the stage’s scheduling off the rails.
But Charli XCX’s set did start promptly on time, and was quick to answer the question, “just how much of the new album is she going to play?”
The answer was: pretty much all of it.
Which is BALLSY for an artist who just dropped a whole new album a week prior — an album that, frankly, was a complete 180 from the one just two years prior that had made her a global superstar.
I surely couldn’t have been the only person in the crowd to have not seen Charli post-Brat, so her starting off the set (the very first of this tour) with 4 of the first 6 songs being from Music, Fashion, Film was a daring choice. One that I was personally vibing with, because I did quite enjoy the album the one time I had listened to it, but one that I wondered how the rest of the audience (almost definitely bigger Charli fans than I) would react.
They were ecstatic.
Part of that was probably a reaction to a headliner proceeding in spite of the weather, part of that is the drugs and alcohol coursing through one’s veins at a big dance party like this, and part of that was likely a reaction to the sheer awesome presence on stage.
Y’all have likely seen the footage already — a pyramid of cages stacked with strobe lights and topped by a single massive subwoofer that emits smoke. A powerful image on its own, and one that continued to prove more relevant to the subtextual narrative being woven by Charli as the set progressed.
Even if audiences didn’t know all the words to “Rock Music,” “Yeah,” “Card Declined,” or “Wink Wink” just yet, there was no arguing against how much power these new songs had in a live setting, with a full live band and Charli in an oversized leather jacket that was clearly a cheeky reference to dudes in rock bands who always seem too cool to move around much.
Charli — to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge — has never been one for choreography. Her previous shows had always been a very lively and free-spirited act of endless kinetic energy that felt chaotic, bordering on directionless.
In stark contrast, this show was may be the most well-produced and choreographed show I’ve watched since Lady Gaga at Coachella (both 2018 and 2025.) While not as vibrant and staged as Gaga’s shows, Charli’s specific movements, endless array of backup dancers, and VERY DELIBERATE camerawork was clearly made for television and film above being just a festival set. There was a full blown fashion runway down the catwalk that bisected the audience, and a twenty-piece dance party on the pyramid that hearkened back to Charli performance at the Grammy’s in 2024.
Moreover, the choreography was not literal dance moves meant to be easily interpreted. The choreography felt experimental; confrontational. Twenty or so women atop the pyramid, flailing about desperately in precise but dangerous swings that felt like every beat was teetering on the verge of catastrophe — especially in the rain. Almost as if they were designed to mimic Charli’s old way of spinning and screaming on stage when she was but a solo artist with a DJ performing at 3 P.M. on a side stage at a small, indie festival in Union Park…
Older songs like “Track 10” and “Pink Diamond” didn’t just send the audience into an uproar — especially when the latter was punctuated by a torrential downpour supernaturally timed for precisely the song’s runtime — but were also met with a controlled yet potent performance from Charli that felt like a version of her I hadn’t seen at previous festival sets. Still the unhinged party girl, but now something declarative; controlled and intentional. Like she was feigning the party aesthetics with sober eyes and a heavy heart, as if to say something harsher, darker, and more poignant about herself and they way we’ve been looking at her this whole time.
I really need to circle back to the camerawork here, because as jaw dropping as the stage production and choreography was, there’s just no denying that Charli’s personal camera crew performed some kind of black magic ritual to make an electronic-laden-popstar-turned-rock-musician performance at a music festival in the rain into a full blown cinematic experience. I’ve dared since compared it to Beyonce’s Homecoming performance, if not in scope and breadth, then at the very least in artistic intention, cinematography, lighting, and intense dynamics between Charli and her voyeurs.
Quick shoutout to the Lollapalooza livestream for being absolute garbage — I rewatched the show the following morning and was so disappointed to see that the festival had chosen to use their own stage crew’s footage, which was poorly angled, never aware of where Charli was on stage, not properly adjusted to the lighting, and hadn’t prepared for the weather. The feed was a choppy mess filled with random drone footage of the BACK of the stage where we could see nothing. The few times they did cut to Charli’s camera, they removed the visual effects we had seen on the LED screens in person that were being used for specific narrative structures (black and white filters for her old songs, chaotic zoom effects for moments of intense introspection…) Just an all-around clownshow from Lollapalooza that further proved why it will never be the Midwestern Coachella that it so often tries to be.
Rest assured, there was a whole thirty minute section of the fest devoted to all the hits from Brat, as well as several tracks from her Wuthering Heights soundtrack that, again, felt like something completely different from what I had seen on the streams during Coachella and other Brat-era performances the year or two prior. A Charli that wasn’t flaunting (sincerely or ironically) in the audience’s face, but now instead almost inviting people to rethinking everything she had done, from “Von Dutch” to “Girl, So Confusing” and beyond — as if we were watching Charli herself reflect back on her own work in real time. And it’s unclear if she likes what she sees.
And I think I’m reading so much into the nuances of a fucking music festival performance — a thing I’ve never really done for any of the Lollapalooza headliners I’ve seen before (and trust me, I’ve seen a LOT) — because it was the first headlining show I’ve seen in a while that felt like a genuinely special moment.
Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Dua Lipa, Lana Del Rey, SZA, and so many others from recent years have all been excellent, sure, but they were also rehearsed. These were all artists mid-tour with shows that had been planned to death and back, to the point that the artists and all the performers on stage had every footstep memorized. It’s great to witness; pure joy and revelry throughout, but those kinds of performances tend to lack a vulnerability and realness that one only gets from an unscripted live show that feels dangerous or chaotic — i.e. a “rock” show. (I’m using that word liberally. I don’t literally just mean old white dudes with guitars.)
And THAT is what Charli XCX’s performance was harping on so much on Friday.
Raw, dangerous, and something unexpected.
It’s the first show of the tour — she’s about to perform this same show 20+ times for countless other crowds across huge cities this year. I suspect if I ever go see this show again, I’ll feel less inspired because the show will feel more rehearsed and memorized (because it will be) and thus carry a lack of genuine emotion in the performances.
But to see the first show of its kind, the week after Charli released an album that — by design — completely skewered everything that had come before it, AND to watch her perform the WHOLE album to a crowd of screaming fans who probably went in expecting Brat 2.0 after an endless deluge of gray skies and downpours?
There was something about it that just felt more important than all the others. Save for maybe Miley Cyrus, who was the headliner on Thursday of 2021, effectively heralding the return to live music post-pandemic. Another treasured moment, albeit for an entirely different reason.
What probably drove the emotional resonance home was the finale.
Charli ended the set with the remaining tracks from the album (6 of the 7 last songs were from Music, Fashion, Film) and her band of live musicians returning to the pyramid while the dancers slowly incorporated themselves into parts of the stage.
Some folks did leave during this part, although not nearly as many as I would have expected. With the exception of “SS26”, which was a single prior to the album’s release, no one really knew the words to the rest of the show, yet we all remained planted in the dirt and watched with mouths ajar as Charli donned this sort of L7/Hole/Kim Gordon outfit and made clear the lyrics that had been reverberating through her mind ever since Brat become the cultural phenomenon we now know it to be.
We’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell.
Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion or film.
These words — the lyrics to “SS26”, along with the profound finale where Charli and the dancers stood in a stoic, Renaissance-like pose for five minutes while a monologue from David Cronenberg echoes across the park — is where I think I finally made sense of what we were witnessing.
The world broke Charli XCX. Brat broke Charli XCX. Our love for it broke her previous understanding of the world — whatever that was.
Forever the party girl, she doesn’t dance or do lines anymore to feel. She does them to NOT feel, if she can even be bothered to do them at all anymore. If Brat was a self-referential reflection of her stature in the pop world, then Music, Fashion, Film is an even harsher reflection on how useless Brat felt in the wake of everything terrible that’s happened in the world since its release.
And while Charli was clearly overjoyed to work with the likes of Cronenberg, Scorsese, Cale, Jacobs, etc. — as would anybody — it’s evident that her takeaway from this creative venture is that no amount of #ART can save the world.
Brat Summer came and went, and Charli walked away still unsure of what it said about her, and clearly didn’t necessarily feel like it had made anything better on a grander scale.
Per the words of David Cronenberg that flashed over the LED screens while the camera slowly zoomed out from Charli and the dancers in frozen poses, bathed in black and white:
As I was lying there on the sidewalk, I did not think about art at all.
I thought about people, I thought about life.
That’s why I like being close to my house,
somehow that was comforting, even though it makes no sense, you know?
But, no, I wasn’t thinking about art.
And I wasn’t thinking about art as endurance as immortality, you know?
I mean, we can talk about immortal artists of various kinds,
And it can turn out that, yes, some artists have created art that has really survived thousands of years.
And that’s fantastic, but experientially, for them,
they are dead, they are gone, they are not experiencing that.
These are true things and thank goodness for them.
I really feel, and you hear me assuring you that,
oblivion is freedom.
They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever.
These words repeated over and over as the audience left in droves, and I stood there in the spot my friends and I had carved out an hour before Charli hit the stage, just staring at the screens with wide eyes.
For all the heavy metal and punk and rock n roll dudes I had seen on stage over the years babble on about death and destruction and resurrection in nebulous terms that never struck a nerve or made me think twice…Charli XCX had just openly said that this 80 minute spectacle had meant nothing. That it may hold some intrinsic value to the audience, or that it may mean something more in the distance future, but it is now, for her, done and over with. She will die and not feel any one way or the other about it.
To be presented with such earnest, unnerving nihilism giftwrapped in the form of pop music is something that is hard to describe with words (though fuck knows I’m trying!) and something that I’m still chewing on three days after the show.
To finally get to experience Brat live was otherworldly.
To be the first to experience Music, Fashion, Film live was transcendental.