Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, and the Unstable Hierarchy of Pop
Critics at Large | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.4 • 679 Ratings
🗓️ 15 August 2024
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“ ‘BRAT’ summer”—so named for the Charli XCX album that’s become the soundtrack of Kamala Harris’s Presidential run—has given pop fans much to discuss, from Charli’s own flirtation with mainstream stardom to the meteoric rise of Chappell Roan. On the first in a series of Critics at Large interview episodes, Naomi Fry talks with her fellow staff writer Kelefa Sanneh about the state of the music landscape. The two consider the breakout successes of the moment—including “Espresso,” the Sabrina Carpenter song that launched a thousand memes—and the catastrophic failures, namely Katy Perry’s new single, “Woman’s World.” These highs and lows speak to the nature of the genre, in which artists can be cast aside as quickly as they were embraced. “Pop music, in particular, tends to be quite cutthroat,” Sanneh says. “If it’s not working, it’s flopping. And when it’s time for people to jump off the bandwagon, people jump off.”
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“BRAT,” by Charli XCX
“Woman’s World,” by Katy Perry
“ ‘Woman’s World’ Track Review,” by Shaad D’Souza (Pitchfork)
“Mean girls,” by Charli XCX
“Good Luck, Babe!,” by Chappell Roan
“I Kissed a Girl,” by Katy Perry
“SOUR,” by Olivia Rodrigo
“emails i can’t send,” by Sabrina Carpenter
“Espresso,” by Sabrina Carpenter
“Please Please Please,” by Sabrina Carpenter
“Not Like Us,” by Kendrick Lamar
“The Night We Met,” by Lord Huron
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm Vincent Cunningham. |
| 0:08.2 | I'm Alex Schwartz. |
| 0:09.4 | And I'm Nomi Fry. |
| 0:10.8 | Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. |
| 0:17.4 | Today is our inaugural episode of something a little bit different that we're going to be doing throughout the month of August. |
| 0:24.8 | Yes, we are surrounded. It is no secret by many brilliant people at The New Yorker. |
| 0:30.1 | Friends of the Pod, and we wish we could have them on the show all the time. |
| 0:33.4 | So we thought, why not? |
| 0:34.7 | Why the heck not? |
| 0:35.6 | Yeah, over the next few episodes, we've each selected one guest critic, |
| 0:40.3 | who we're going to sit down with, one of us at a time, |
| 0:42.9 | for special interview episodes of critics at large. |
| 0:46.0 | I'm going to be talking with wonderful writer-in-human Nick Poundgarten about Las Vegas, |
| 0:51.0 | not just the place itself, but the mythos that's crept up around it. |
| 0:54.5 | And I'm going to sit down with our colleague Jennifer Wilson to talk about why astrology, |
| 0:59.3 | the occult, woo, whatever you call it, has infused itself into so many parts of our world. |
| 1:07.6 | Today, though, for our inaugural episode, a drum roll, please. |
| 1:14.5 | Yes, yes, today. |
| 1:17.3 | On a recent episode, we talked about Kamala and her brat connections. |
| 1:23.9 | But besides the brat of it all, I think, you know, it's no secret that pop has been dominating in a way I haven't noticed in a while. |
| 1:31.3 | And Charlie X, ZX, of course, is a big part of this. |
... |
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