Photo by Bella Howard
At 22, Charli XCX is young to be fixated on the price of fame, but it’s been on her mind a lot lately. Over the last few years the successes have piled up for the British pop singer, first “I Love It,” the 2012 hit she wrote for Icona Pop, followed by an even higher-profile feature on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” and some huge hits of her own, including last year’s “Boom Clap.” But with each hit, she’s faced the increased attention and scrutiny that comes with celebrity. “Fancy” was the tipping point.
“It definitely changed my social life,” the singer says of the song’s success. “After that, people were more interested in me as a person, and as a private person. It took me into the realm of gossip magazines, and that was weird for me, since I’m very private. I had to think about what I said a little more, which was very hard for me. I’m still getting used to that.”
Of course, celebrity has always come at the expense of privacy, but never more so than today, in an age when stars are expected to integrate their personal lives into their brands. That’s something Charli XCX says she isn’t ready to do.
“I never really talk about my personal life, and I think sometimes that might frustrate my fans and my record label,” she says. “I think especially in this day and age, it can make you a bigger outfit. But, you know, it freaks me out sometimes.”
If there’s one thing Charli XCX dreads more than the notion of sacrificing her privacy, it’s being told what to do. That’s the driving frustration behind her latest album, Sucker, a heated set of sneered confections that sounds like pop but plays like punk. The album takes the same criticisms about music-industry conformity that Lorde so diplomatically outlined on her 2013 album Pure Heroine and hollers them through a far louder megaphone, casting Charli as a sort of Joan Jett of the post-“TRL” Top 40 scene.
As Charli describes it, the whole album was an act of rebellion, her personal pushback against the label suits who requested she repeat a proven formula and pelted her with unwelcome tips on how to dress, how to speak and how to carry herself. “It’s a very uncreative thing, the whole game of the music industry,” Charli says. “It’s something where people only care about you if you have another hit, and I’ve never really been one for that—which is probably one of my bigger flaws. I just couldn’t get over it.”
Now that she’s made the album she wanted to make, some of that anger has subsided. She’s still highly weary of the music industry, but those frustrations don’t eat at her the way they did when she wrote these songs. “It’s funny, when I was giving interviews at the beginning of this project, I was so loud and bitchy,” she says. “Now I’m in this different place, so happy and bouncy all the time, so it’s very difficult to get back into that mindset of, ‘Bah, fuck everyone!’”
But she’s still on the fence about where to go with her career. She’s clearly got the star power, and there’s a sense that, with a little extra push, she could be absolutely huge, not just a hit maker, but a Katy Perry-sized household name. That is, of course, if that’s what she wants.
“I think I could totally do it,” Charli says. “I think I’d just have to be bothered to do it—which sometimes I really am. And sometimes I wake up and I’m just like, ‘Nahhhhhhhh.’”
Charli XCX plays the Rave on Wednesday, Aug. 5 at 7:30 p.m. with Bleachers and Borns.
