Breaking muscle down, building muscle up, repeating it

In the airless roll-out for Brat, we witnessed Charli xcx perform the self-maximal demands of late capitalism. Its cover art was washed in the assertive green of go, but its debut image arrived in the whip pans of the “Von Dutch” music video. Charli thrashes through Charles de Gaulle before scaling a Boeing 747, then flung from the wing, dropped onto a baggage cart, and tossed across the arrivals carousel—bruised but unbowed, lying motionless on a looping conveyor belt. Later, she corralled it-girls into pile-ups, drank wine on treadmills, and drove skiploaders through house parties. If Jean Baudrillard made it to “brat summer,” he might have pathologized her vroom-vroom fixation as a desire for the comforting void of endless circulation, though I think she’s chasing a crash. The gradual defacement of the brat banner during her international arena tour indexed this impulse, but it’s only a year after the final curtain drop, in her meta-mockumentary film The Moment, that it resolves. Charli pushes her exploitation by the pop machine to its limits in a desperate bid to keep her bankable “moment” from crashing—but when it does, she confronts her tenure as a commodity for what it is: estrangement. This excavation of the wounds accrued through years of orbiting, desiring, and eventually claiming the “main pop girl” status once glimpsed from the economic silos of the “Khia Asylum” met the freedom to finally become something else.

The xcx extended universe outstrips The Moment in articulating the crash-born body. There’s Titane and Tetsuo, but the real lodestar—signaled by the title of her preceding album—is David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash. The film follows symphorophiliacs who catalogue crash sites, stage collisions, and eroticize their accumulated gashes. Baudrillard once argued that Crash invents nothing so much as it simulates a world already structured by its compulsion toward destruction. I would agree, but wreckage doesn’t always beget wreckage. The crash is more than an event that absorbs us; its inner nature instantiates a moment in which matter that once seemed stable is no longer apprehensible on the same terms. The symphorophiliacs do not desire destruction, or even sex, per se. They desire an agentive encounter with a material matrix from which we have become estranged, whether enclosed in slaughterhouses, hospitals, and landfills or diffused through techno‑economic infinities of clouds, logistics, and command chains—even as it mutates our bodies and inscribes dispossession in manners alien to sense. Only by integrating with the wreckage of modern life do they bring its obscenities and intrusions into sharp relief. Each wound alters their consciousness: desire is thinned of its usual abstractions until wanting no longer gestures elsewhere but seeps directly from matter itself to remake them in turn.

Charli’s crash arrives through “hyperpop,” which embraces pop as a legitimate medium while holding that coherence is a false expression of the neoliberal, hypermediated, and disorienting ambiance of digital life. If pop protocols privilege lyrical, aesthetic, and market legibility, hyperpop performs their futility by accelerating those same codes to collapse: synths that spike and stall without resolution, fractal consumer references piling up faster than they can be processed, and vocal modulation so extreme it slips into unintelligibility. This technē of simulation, born from the gender praxis of its trans and nonbinary pioneers, for whom the sound opens onto nonconforming modes of embodiment and expression, is also transformative. The sonic environment of hyperpop is a crash held in suspension. The body is broken down in voice compression, then pulled into plastic tension across metallic surfaces, glitching seams, and pneumatic pops, until it reemerges in a material state that cannot be reduced to a unified substance. By binding destruction of commodity forms to practices of bodily mutation, hyperpop turns the technification of subject positions back against the interpellative force of capitalist performance. That is, the market-stabilized self is pushed into failure to fabricate bodies illegible to the systems that once secured their value. It is hardly SOPHIE’s Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, but this experimentation with the body—its limits and the terms of its expendability, carried out from within capital itself—is what Charli inherits and cannot be cleanly disarticulated from Brat.

The crash doesn’t dismantle the cruelty of the structure that produces it, nor does recognition alone grant us the power to master that structure, or even withstand it particularly well; what it does is make its punishing effects feel less inevitable—less convincingly dressed up as destiny—and leave open, in the scars scored by impact, the possibility that we might exceed it, be remade, or at least hold it against a horizon not entirely dictated by its own relentlessness. I see it in Charli, but also in friends: some sift through the trash pile afterlife of capital for building materials to make “homes for friends and lovers,” while others drip paint using a “hacked-together machine” to transmute—beyond measurability—the quantified gestures of anonymous digital workers that hold up our platform economies. Perhaps this valuation is an indulgence of my own Cronenbergian romanticism. He and I do share similar pathologies under the Sun of identity and in the Venus of desire.