Hedonism, Lobotomy Core, Anorexia! I am so cool and edgy!
Conflating commenting on culture to endorsing it. Charli XCX & Red Scare.
TW: Discussion of Eating Disorders.
#Lana Del Rey #ed Tumblr #lolita #red scare #girl interrupted #coquette #Kate moss #brandy melville #Bella Hadid girls !
I am walking home from the gym listening to Von dutch (the Addison Ray remix of course) by Charli XCX and feeling on top of the world. I am a hot girl. Grey headphones. Dior saddle bag. Coffee in hand. I am untouchable in my material presence. I get home to a scalding hot shower. Retreat to my armchair to read my recently purchased Sylvia Plath biography. As it often happens, I end up opening Twitter. Charli XCX’s new album BRAT comes out tomorrow and I am ecstatic. I cannot wait to drink cosmopolitans with my girls, gays and theys and dance around my living room with the records spinning. As per usual the album has leaked and people have started tweeting lyrics. I stumbled upon this verse (pictured).
I laugh. It expertly taps into the era of coquette, lobotomy chic, office siren, cottage core and all these other sub-genres of performativity and internet brain rot. A new sort of narcissism has been born, Narcissus of Greek mythology no longer needs to look in the lake, he can look at his iPhone. We are walking talking signals of mass consumption to be seen in the algorithm. But what happens when these cores signpost unhealthy behaviours? She’s forever ‘mid-twenties’ with ‘dead eyes’ and doesn’t mind if you think she’s ‘anorexic’ . She's cool cause she reads Foucault and doesn’t mind if you say racist shit on the internet. When I think about Red Scare and Cumtown and the dirt bag left I begin to ask myself, are the fringes of culture worse than the mainstream? By that I mean they are not held to the same standards; most mainstream media are unaware of their existence, yet they hold an unexplored power over the generation who lives on the internet. Charli XCX knows this and it using it to sell records. In an interview with The Face magazine she said she is ‘inspired in part by Dasha Nekrasova, co-host of podcast Red Scare’ signposting to her audience that be contrarian is new ‘Hot girl.’
I first saw Charli XCX live when she opened for the Reputation tour in 2018. She had just released her mixtape Pop 2 and I seemed to be the only person in the crowd who realised how momental seeing her live was. I went on to go to Laneway despite my deep hatred of festivals to her. I was at the barricade in snakeskin pants with stickers of her face glued to my butt. Most recently I saw her at an intimate show at the Northcote theatre. I went alone in a Brandy Melville tennis skirt and a Sasha Grey t-shirt. Honestly I didn’t feel particularly welcome in the space but I was there for a good time. Despite being a gay icon, Charli seems to operate in a space where she tries annoyingly hard to be cool and edgy and a contrarian. Yet I fell in love with her through SOPHIE and the sacred nature of these open queer spaces. Sweating, dancing and not caring what anyone thought of you. This is seemingly my second essay critiquing Charli. I have thought about why this is considering how much I love her music. Mostly it is because her art practice is tethered to modernity and pop culture and I am boundlessly fascinated by how these articles interact with how we view women.
I honestly can’t remember what year it was but I was working on my relationship with food and attempting not to associate my weight with a determinant of my beauty or success. I was on one of my long walks. They had become an obsession now that my eating was better. I was listening to Red Scare and they started chatting about how Taylor Swift had spoken candidly about her struggle with anorexia. They said she wasn’t skinny enough to be anorexic and was just trying to be cool. I am announcing my bias here as a massive Taylor Swift fan but I think the point still holds and words would sting for many whether they were fans or not. These women often say contrarian things to gain traction- defending Woody Allen, singing praises for Alex Jones, calling vaccines retarded to name some highlights. These all are controversial, do not think I am saying otherwise but these comments about Swift really stung and stayed with me. If a size double 00 wasn’t skinny enough to be anorexic, what was I? A pig? I went back to heavily restricting and lashing out on my loved ones because I felt so alone. I know I am ultimately responsible for my own actions and how I treat my body. Comments on women's bodies from both men and women are never going away and have permeated culture before culture was known to be culture. But much like how I have written about my fears of #Proanna communities on TikTok, I worry about the girls younger than me.
Much Like their comments on Swift, in 2021 the Red Scare girls called Lana a whale and encouraged her to go back to coke. Yet these comments were not isolated to the dirtbag left. I am thinking back to how I saw a lot of gay men and women viciously bully Lana Del Rey when she gained weight and somehow equate it with the downfall of her career. Just this year with her headlining performance at Coachella, dozens of articles were written claiming ‘Lana Del Rey is back’ , unsurprisingly they were not talking about her incredible performance or teases of new music but her body. The TikTok search bar on all her performances was ‘Lana Del Rey Weight Loss’ and the comments filled up ‘Yass ozempic’ and the to ‘oh no it ages her’; I am tired! Do we reduce female artists to their aesthetics rather than their art?
This year I have seen op-eds by The Spectator claiming Sydney Sweeneys breasts are somehow an indicator that objectification is back and the Left is failing politically. I have seen tweets about small breasted women being an image of decadence and old money. I have seen viral photos of Swift performing without a flat belly and people calling her pregnant. I have seen society going backwards. There is nothing glamorous about eating disorders. They ruin your life. Your health, your relationships and your ability to use your brain to think critically and intelligently. Having an eating disorder doesn’t make you a cool girl. Charli please stop trying to be an edge lord and keep making Club Classics.