Roll with Me: Charli XCX’s Never-ending Love Affair with Cars
Charli XCX has been putting pedal to the metal for her entire career.
A black stiletto drops down from a Chevy Escalade. It’s Grammy’s night. Most of the awards have been given away, but there’s still one girl just rolling up to the party.
A white sedan dangles vertically above a dry field, the driver’s hand still on the steering wheel as she pleads, “Don’t say you love me / ‘Cause I can’t say it back.”
A woman is splayed out on your cracked windshield, caught somewhere between a sexy car wash and a hit and run. She’s serving body and blood from the hood, fixing the driver with her signature heavy-lidded gaze. Pleasure, risk, love and danger are all interlocking like an engine’s churning gears.
From her first breakout single, the car—its velocity and its inevitable collision—has been the central image of Charli XCX’s music. Rubber on cement. A sleek lavender paint job. Crying in the backseat. Lip syncing out the back of a convertible. In the breakneck world of Charli XCX, the tensions of womanhood and sexuality take shape in the machinery of the road. The car’s duality—on one hand hard titanium, and on the other precarious and vulnerable—reflects femininity’s own inherent dichotomy.
If technology is just an extension of what the body can do, then a car can be the body the same way music can be the body: a tool that we wield for our own desires, the outward expression of our own hapless wants.
The hulking forms of cars have haunted pop music from the beginning, but across genres and eras, the car and the road have belonged to the men—it’s William DeVaughn’s flex of a “diamond in the back” Cadillac or Chamillionaire’s dangerous power game “riding dirty.” There’s the Easy Rider road trip picaresques from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan or Tom Waits, or a rollicking backroads grab at freedom in country and folk tunes. Our male heroes posture and flaunt, choose to leave it all behind. There’s never the implication that they might not be meant for the road or, worse, that they might spin out at any moment.
And sure, Charli knows how to ride like that. She stunts. She flexes. She rolls up in the passenger seat with that “get in, loser” glare. She fucks like the boys, is flirty then flighty. She knows you can’t handle it, so she stuffs you in a taxi. But there’s also a vulnerability behind all that hot metal siding. It’s a side of Charli that, up until BRAT with its diaristic lyrics and hushed vocals, hasn’t always been foregrounded but has always been present. It’s the dark backseat confession. It’s the impulse to drive to the airport and buy a one way ticket after a family fight. Or a road trip with friends in that moment where you’ve run out of things to say and are just happy in the silence, staring out the window.
What Charli and her collaborators are so good at doing, with their rippling sequencers and modulating toplines, is recreating the sheer intensity of emotions the moment they hit, when the lies we tell ourselves (“I’ll love you forever,” “I’ve never get over this,” “He’s a worthless piece of shit,” “We can never change”) are at their most real. Her project is putting face to fantasy, shape to sensation, pedal to metal. Her songs are at their most alive when their containers can match their scale. A club packed with bodies pressed flesh to flesh, a car with all the windows rolled down and an empty highway screaming past.
At some point we must consider the thought that it’s not some ironic twist of fate that, in the music we listen to and the lives we live, we once again find ourselves at the scene of the crash; we actively seek it out, in some drawn out game of chicken, staring blindly into the headlights. After all, a crash is nothing if not something to gawk at. For many women and queer people, there is no greater pleasure—nor greater discomfort—than being seen.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
