FEATURE:
Second Spin
Charli XCX - Sucker
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THIS is an album…
PHOTO CREDIT: Emma Swann
that was positively reviewed when it came out in 2014, though the songs from it are not played as much as they should be now. In fact, when people talk about the very best albums of the 2010s, how many mention Charli XCX’s Sucker? Her second studio album, it was an incredibly accomplished, confident and exceptional release from the twenty-two-year-old Cambridge-born artist (real name Charlotte Emma Aitchison). Even though, years after the album came out, that she felt some of it felt fake now (2018), I feel it is a great album that solidified the status of one of the world’s best young Pop artists. Although subsequent albums have been truer to Charli XCX’s true talents and potential, Sucker is a brilliant album that should be hyped! I want to get to a couple of contrasting reviews for the 2014 album soon. Most of the reviews were very positive, though a few were a bit more mixed. Prior to that, there are a couple of interviews from around the release of Sucker that I want to bring in. COMPLEX covered an artist who was definitely ion the rise:
“Charli’s songwriting process is astoundingly spontaneous and reactive: Listening to a beat for the first time, she sings and records whatever comes out. Sometimes there are additional takes, but not always.
There’s a distinctly electric, kinetic quality to “I Love It,” the hook to “Fancy,” and “Boom Clap”—they’re built for parties and mixtapes, totally singable anthems. Incredibly, when lacking anything remotely resembling self-consciousness, Charli XCX produces hits that resonate around the world. But what about her more deliberate, self-conscious efforts?
True Romance, released in April 2013, didn’t have any hits, per se. The album had catchy songs about relationships destroyed and young, dumb love—common pop wheelhouse stuff. It was the packaging that set her album apart to its vocal admirers, many of whom were music critics. Lush, dreamy soundscapes and bedroom-ceiling musings with the coolest girl in school, finely produced to a tee, with each note exuding Charli’s naturally charismatic, smart edges. Maybe too smart. The album was a critical success, but despite building Charli’s devoted following, it struggled commercially, never cracking the Billboard 200. She loves True Romance but admits to making music in a way she’s not entirely proud of: “I just wanted to make sure people thought I was cool,” she says. “That’s what I was worried about.”
Charli went to Sweden. She recorded those punk songs. She stopped caring about pleasing critics or becoming famous. After turning down so many people in the industry for writing work, she decided to work with whomever she felt like, appearances notwithstanding. She wrote for Britney Spears and with Dr. Luke. Iggy Azalea’s people sent her a beat. Charli was a fan of Iggy’s song “Work.” She wrote several hooks to the beat. “I had that rap in my head, the ‘Who dat, who dat? I-G-G-Y,’” she says. “I was like, that’s fucking cool. Then I just did my thing.”
Her “thing” resulted in yet another No. 1 single. And her not giving a fuck resulted in new sessions, with Batmanglij, Cuomo, and über-producer Stargate, that birthed material for a new album, Sucker, to be released this fall. She acknowledges that some people—maybe even some of her core fans, Charli’s Angels, as they call themselves—might not like it, that it might be too pop for them. “Some people will look at that like, ‘She’s working with Stargate, she’s sold out.’ That’s the kind of person I used to be—and now I think that kind of person is fucking retarded.”
Of course, mixed in with all of the work, there’s semblance of a life. She still has a handful of close friends who “literally do not give a fuck about Charli XCX” and a few real friends she’s made in the music industry. It’s a close circle. Charli considers herself an awkward person, or at least has felt like one lately. She’s had panic attacks in the studio, during which she’ll start to crawl on or under the equipment. She’s shut down before, emotionally. She’ll quickly cop to feeling self-conscious at existential moments of recognizing her weird, sometimes isolating existence.
In another interview, Pitchfork asked whether it was more difficult for Charli XCX to stay private and have some space now that she is a bigger artist and is getting attention from various quarters:
“Pitchfork: It’s funny to hear you say that because one thing you really excel at on Sucker is bridging the gap between the mainstream pop world and the “cool” pop world—you’re mixing big Top 40 producers and songwriters, like Stargate and Benny Blanco, with critical darlings like Robyn producer Patrik Berger, Cashmere Cat, Ariel Rechtshaid, and Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij.
XCX: That’s what I aim to do as an artist. I hate the idea of people thinking that I’m just a little girl who goes into studios with pop producers, and they work their magic. I executive-produced this record myself and I put those people in a room together because I thought it would be right. A lot of artists in my position, particularly before “Fancy”, would be very afraid to work with Stargate for fear of what people would say about them. But I don’t give a fuck because I think Stargate are tight and I work really well with them—they can sit in a studio and write seven songs in a day. And Cashmere and Benny have worked together forever, they live in the same house. I want to bring those people together because I think I can make it work. I’ve always been good at never being the same thing twice, and it’s partially because I like collaboration.
Pitchfork: There was almost lore around Sucker before it was even announced: how you went to Sweden to make a punk record to get out your anger and then abandoned that album in favor of a more traditional pop record. But I still hear the punk bits in some of these songs.
XCX: Some of the poppier songs on the punk record are now the most punk songs on the pop record. There were some full-on, two-minute-long, me-screaming songs. There was one called “Mow That Lawn”, which is so sick. It goes, “Oooh! Baby mow that lawn/ Oooh! Really turns me on/ Oooh! Got no mobile phone/ Oooh! ‘Cause the signal’s gone.” It’s about me moving to the countryside and being bored of taking too many drugs and drinking too much, and just wanting to have a cat and mow the lawn.
That experience was therapeutic for me, because I was bored of being the girl who didn’t sing “I Love It”, even though I do fucking sing all through that song—I’m pretty audible on it. I was bored of getting requests to rewrite that song for other people. I had lost myself in the music industry and in the idea of being “the best” songwriter; I was going down a Dr. Luke road with my competitive mentality. I didn’t like it. That’s not who I am. So I went to Sweden and spoke with Patrik [Berger] and Pontus [Winnberg, aka Avant of production duo Bloodshy & Avant] about it. Pontus worked on a lot of the Britney [Spears] stuff back in the day, and I asked him, “What do you think about how I’m feeling?” He said he felt like that, like the pop world is this weird competitive environment that he wanted to get out of. Everyone in Sweden is cool, it’s not like L.A.; I got all my shit out and felt better about myself belonging in the music world.
PHOTO CREDIT: Terry Richardson
Pitchfork: Do you find that it’s gotten harder to stay private as you’ve gotten more popular? It seems like there’s this expectation among pop stars who write their own lyrics to reflect their personal lives in a way that can be voyeuristic, and ultimately feed into the cult-of-personality cycle of fame.
XCX: The thing that differentiates me from someone like Taylor Swift is that I don’t live in gossip magazines. I don’t want that. It’s not a slight on Taylor—she’s a genius—but I’m not about to date a boy-band member. I don’t have interest in fame, at all. I have an interest in people listening to my music. That’s it. I don’t want to go to a fucking fashion party. It’s hard for people to be truly voyeuristic about me because they don’t know that much about me. I’m not getting chased while buying eggs, like Iggy was the other week. I don’t even buy eggs, I can’t fucking cook! Maybe I’m being naïve, expecting that I’m going to be able to stay like that if I continue to do what I’m doing. But I’m very conscious to keep it like that.
Also, I’m very selfish when I write songs and I don’t really think about my audience. My subject matters are broad, and I’m very much a blunt songwriter. So it’s quite easy for people to apply my shit to their life. That takes the pressure off me a little bit”.
To round off, I want to source two interviews. I will end with a mor positive one. The Guardian had some slightly mixed opinions when they sat down with Sucker:
“Indeed, you get the sense that Sucker has been attended by perhaps a little too much excitement for its own good. In the US, where the album was released in December (it appeared at No 6 in Rolling Stone’s best albums of 2014 list), reviews went big on its radical and uncompromising nature: it was frequently referred to as punk. That is obviously talk to get the blood up. Punk is a catch-all term, encompassing everything from the shouty vegan anarcho-syndicalism of Crass to the intricate concept albums of Fucked Up to the late GG Allin throwing his own excrement around on stage while singing Eat My Diarrhea. Adopting any of these as an influence would clearly represent a radical gesture on the part of a mainstream pop star.
In the case of Sucker, however, punk means the occasional presence of some distorted guitars and some swearing. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the listener should perhaps adjust their expectations of uncompromising radicalism accordingly. With its synthesisers topped with chugging riffs and powerchords, what Sucker usually resembles is a more unbridled, less obviously micro-managed version of the Strokes-inspired new wave pop style unveiled on Kelly Clarkson’s 2004 hit Since U Been Gone and later adopted, to staggering commercial effect, by One Direction. At its best, as on the withering string of put-downs that comprises Breaking Up or Hanging Around’s homage to I Love Rock’n’Roll, it’s great, fizzy, trashy fun. At its worst, as on London Queen, it gets a bit tinny and irritating: a criticism that’s been levelled at virtually every attempt to graft a new-wave/pop hybrid over the last 40 years, from Back of My Hand by the Jags to Busted.
The one thing it never is, though, is particularly radical. It’s tempting to say that it doesn’t really need to be. If her songwriting occasionally misfires, churning out stuff that’s indistinguishable from every other indistinguishable song on the Radio 1 playlist – the Rita Ora feature Doing It is a case in point - it’s frequently dead on target, as evidenced by the closing So Over You, which distinguishes itself from dozens of other big, synthy mid-tempo pop tracks out there simply by being a slightly better song.
That said, there’s certainly a hint of screw-you subversion about the lyrics, at least in the context of recent pop music. The usual you-are-beautiful, believe-in-yourself platitudes are dispensed with in favour of paeans to hedonism, or “getting high and getting wrecked” as Break the Rules puts it. Famous features what appears to be a reference to taking LSD, of all things; the closest it comes to the arena of self-help is a song about having a wank. In marked contrast to the X Factor-peddled notion that celebrity is within everyone’s reach, Aitchison’s songs present her fame and success as something fantastic, unattainable by mere mortals. It would sound a bit snotty if she wasn’t so funny: Gold Coins depicts her literally building a castle out of money, pulling up the drawbridge, then sitting inside it, smoking a fag.
One of the reasons that image is funny is that it wildly overstates the level of success Charli XCX has achieved thus far: as it turned out, Sucker was a modest US success rather than a chartbuster. But for all its failings, and for all that it falls short of the more hysterical hype, it does enough to convince you that her long-delayed moment in the sun won’t be fleeting: perhaps she’ll get there yet”.
To end, I want to include AllMusic’s take on Sucker, it is far kinder. It is more accurate. I think that Charli XCX’s second album is one that everyone should hear and spend some time with:
“For a while, Charli XCX seemed to be tiptoeing into the spotlight. After co-writing and singing on Icona Pop's smash hit "I Love It," her album True Romance -- which had a darker, indie-friendly sound -- earned more acclaim than sales. Her next big break came with another collaboration, 2014's inescapable "Fancy," where she provided the sing-songy chorus to Iggy Azalea's brash verses. On Sucker, she keeps more of that hit-making swagger for herself, delivering attention-getting pop that's bold enough to ensure she isn't overshadowed by anybody. She makes her purpose clear with the album's title track, a musical middle finger to the clueless set to revved-up synths and stabbing guitars. It's a big change from the gothy pop of True Romance, though even on that album, XCX's hooks were undeniable. Sucker is also full of should-be hits, but these songs also show how creatively she fashions the shiniest parts of the '80s, '90s, 2000s, and 2010s into her own highly stylized sound. "Famous" bops along on a riff that nods to Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun"; there's a bit of Elastica in "Breaking Up"'s buzzsaw guitars and flirty put-downs; "Caught in the Middle" could be vintage Gwen Stefani; and "Doing It"'s retro dance-pop feels equally informed by XCX's own fascination with the '90s and HAIM's update on that decade.
Similarly, Charli still exudes plenty of sass on Sucker, but the exact kind of attitude has changed. She retrofits some of True Romance's atmosphere on "Boom Clap," turning it into a sparkly anthem to young love that seems more innocent than it actually is. If she was trying to keep up with the hip kids before, now she sounds like an older sister sharing her tricks on "Break the Rules," where she's literally too cool for school. Anytime it feels like XCX may have oversimplified her sound -- like the notable absence of one of her finest singles, "Superlove" -- she proves otherwise. There's a realness to her writing no matter how shiny the album's surfaces are, and while these songs are influenced by the success she's had with others, she's saved her most personal songs for herself. It's hard to imagine any of her collaborators or contemporaries belting out a lyric like "When I'm driving down the wrong side of the road, I feel like JFK you know" with as much mischievous glee as Charli does on the standout "London Queen"; later, she states her independence, sexual and otherwise, on "Body of My Own." From song to song, she bounces from hanging out in her friends' bedroom to flying on private jets, making both sound like the coolest possible thing to do. Sucker's mix of youth and sophistication is more than a little volatile, and sometimes it feels like XCX is still figuring out what really works for her music. Nevertheless, it succeeds as an introduction to Charli XCX the Pop Star while retaining her whip-smart songwriting and attitude”.
With her hotly-anticipated fifth album, Crash, due in March, it is a good opportunity to look back at an earlier album. One that deserves more spins and credit. An artist who grows stronger with every release (she turns thirty in August), Charli XCX is one of our best artists. A remarkable songwriter and modern-day star, it will be interesting to see how her career progresses. Sucker is an album full of brilliant material. If you do not believe me, then go and…
LISTEN for yourself.