Meanwhile, Black rhythm and blues was pushing against the boundaries of the segregated music industry, infusing blues, gospel and jazz into something both louder and more physically direct. Rock and roll was not so much invented as assembled from these collisions: the blues guitar, the backbeat, country twang, amplified instruments, the erotic charge of Black performance and the adolescent desire to hear something that sounded less like the world their parents had built. By the mid-1950s, a type of music that had been considered marginal – even dangerous – had become the sound of youth itself.

Now, the conditions are perversely inverted. Pop music has never been more frictionless, more optimized, or more ruthlessly aware of its own marketability. A song doesn’t simply have to be good anymore; it has to announce itself before you’ve had time to decide whether or not you like it. Thanks to TikTok, songs are increasingly structured around the possibility that a fifteen-second clip might escape the song entirely and become content of its own. The result is a kind of pop that reaches for the climax before it has established a reason to care: hook first, payoff immediately, repeat until the song expires. Streaming economics have only intensified the logic – shorter songs mean more potential plays, while platforms reward tracks that can survive those first few seconds without being skipped. Music has become content that knows it is being watched, and increasingly, it sounds like it.

Few artists have embodied the internet’s transformation of pop as completely as Charli xcx, which makes her post-BRAT comedown feel like a minor act of cultural sabotage. BRAT was, in many ways, the perfect album for the attention economy: acid-green, immediately legible, remixable, and engineered without ever quite seeming engineered. It understood that a song could become a meme, a meme could become a personality, and a personality could become a marketing strategy – and somehow managed to make that loop feel genuinely fun. 

Then came Music, Fashion, Film. Released two years later, its opening gesture is not another euphoric club banger but “Rock Music,” a black-and-white, guitar-driven track that sounds suspiciously uninterested in grabbing you by the throat. The contrast is striking. Charli herself has said that she was “responding to the caricature” people had made of her after BRAT, noting that artists, like everyone else, are “multifaceted beings.” She has also described trying to step away from the internet after years of being “a very online artist,” wanting to follow her own instincts rather than the distractions surrounding her. That impulse is audible.