The Singles Jukebox

We opened July by giving you a Charli remix; we now close July by giving you a Charli remix. Let’s work it out in the blurbs, then see you next month!

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[7.62]

Julian Axelrod: The girls are fighting. The girls have always been fighting. Sometimes with each other, sometimes with their labels, usually with themselves. But even in a year dominated by petty beef, the girls are rarely fighting on record. Leave it to Charli to realize pop music is all wrestling and execute a perfect reverse heel turn. The week BRAT dropped, pulling back the coke-stained rug to reveal a trap door of professional insecurity, fans and critics clung to “Girl, so confusing” as the last vestige of the carefree club romp we were promised, spawning a million think pieces about which curly-haired brunette started the beef. Bringing Lorde into the mix one week later was at once an escalation and denouement, negating the feud narrative and digging down to the real emotions buried beneath its glossy sheen. Charli resents Lorde’s success, her flakiness, and her critical acclaim. Lorde sees Charli as a 365 party girl too cool to acknowledge her, let alone invite her to collab. It’s all so insular and meta and self-obsessed and earnest and honest and real, to the point where it’s almost too intimate to witness. But it’s a testament to Charli and Lorde that the whole thing doesn’t topple under its own weight, and hearing them write to each other’s style makes you realize they have more in common than just hair. The girls are talking. The girls are collaborating. The girls are working it out on the remix.
[9]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Iconic! Culture-changing! This could have been a podcast!
[5]

Andrew Karpan: Upon release, it was funny to hear the speculation that this record was about Lorde, in that way that it is always funny to know something that feels intimate and real about a roving symbol of pop phenomenology. At any rate, it was satisfying to hear that we were right. Turning this from subtext to text feels like a decisively modern gesture, a living and breathing genius dot com annotation, something one could easily confuse for Taylor Swift’s 1989 rollout or any other kind of “this phony fake friends fake girl power shit” — but I’m less inclined to be cynical, even in the meme economy of it all. The fiction of these two people with their relatable problems is played so straight that I practically cried at the end. She rides for Charli! Charli rides for her! Hang it in the Louvre, but down in the back. 
[8]

TA Inskeep: I’ve traditionally not been a fan of Charli XCX, for various reasons not worth getting into here. That’s relevant because I am thoroughly knocked the fuck out by the next-level-meta “girl talk” dialogue of this meeting-of-the-minds remix. Lorde responds to Charli’s verse with a lacerating one of her own, spilling her guts and getting very real; talk about “work[ing] it out on the remix,” goddamn. Charli, of course, is expert at riding producer A.G. Cook’s hyperpop rhythms, but to hear Lorde matching her as the track heaves and bumps is a shock. This is profoundly soul-baring pop, what with Lorde candidly talking about eating disorders and Charli admitting on her opening verse “I don’t know if you like me / Sometimes I think you might hate me.” That they’re doing this so publicly is frankly stunning. This feels like — this is — a true pop moment.
[10]

Alfred Soto: They’re having fun, and for once one of these interrogations sounds lived-in. The beats pop harder. Listening to Lorde and Charli ribbit around the cheerful electro-frogs is a visceral pleasure. Few of the problems they describe code as “girl,” though, so I’ll be the spoilsport.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: The original “Girl” had three problems, none of which got worked out on the remix. Problem the first: As with hot girl walks and girl math, this stuff is not especially girl-coded. Social anxiety and fake friendships are the human condition! Problem the second: I know it’s a fandom joke, so apologies for bringing reality into your memes, but it must be said that basically no one is out here seriously comparing Charli XCX to Lorde, at least that I recall. I did a quick search to prove that I hadn’t gaslit myself for a decade, and all I could find was this interview; which was almost definitely a bit; this anecdote about a taxi driver, which is mostly telling about the tastes of taxi drivers; and this Vox piece, which is… not good (or if you want to be charitable, maybe also a bit). In a music world where half the girls are regularly compared to half the other girls, that’s an honestly impressive display of how much something hasn’t happened. I know that none of us are privy to the actual lived history of Charli and Lorde’s friendship, and I can certainly admire Charli stoking a grudge for 10+ years. But the emotional stakes just don’t feel as dramatic as they’ve been hyped to, and thus the Internet inside my heart remains unbroken. Problem the third: There’s also a song beneath the parasocial moment-making, and it sounds like “Take My Hand” but not as fun.
[6]

Will Adams: Will I be sent to the gallows if I admit that this pairing had about the same emotional impact on me as when Taylor and Katy reunited in the “You Need To Calm Down” video?
[6]

Hannah Jocelyn: I got thrown into the fire when it comes to female friendship, and honestly I still don’t get it. There are entire movies about how nobody gets it, men just assuming women disappear into each other without a man to anchor them. I feel like cis women have the same bafflement, and they’ve been women for longer than I have. The questions are the same: do you like me? What do you need from me? Do you desire my company? What can I be, and what do I look like from this particular angle? Am I the one you tell your fears to? Do we have the same hair? Do you want to be me? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is in the tracklist right after the SOPHIE tribute of “So I”; it’s the same push-pull dynamic, the fascination and the fear of getting too close. Lorde’s devastating verse reveals the insecurities underpinning her decade of coolness, but she manages to add another quotable to her pantheon at the same time: “let’s work it out on the remix” is as sweet as “you buy me orange juice” and “down the back, but who cares, it’s the Louvre.” I don’t care much about the rivalry (if there really is one) and don’t need to, and that lack of care for extraneous knowledge is why I don’t quite love Brat like the rest of the internet. The juxtaposition between electroclash and Real Feelings occasionally feels like a gimmick, but the best songs make the melancholic subtext into text. This one, with its flanged chorus and cyclical chord progression, gets across the angst underneath the blurry JPEGs and silly memes.
[8]

Taylor Alatorre: It’s unfortunate that the zero-sum economy of the pop remix led to the excising of the song’s most crucial lyric: “Think you should come to my party / And put your hands up.” Apart from its now-obsolete function as a barely veiled clue, it encapsulates the nervous mixture of resentment and admiration that bleeds through both versions and that is so hard to portray sympathetically, let alone with such an impish wink. Charli, as someone who attended more warehouse raves than I did in the early 2010s, had more of a reason to puzzle over that particular line from “Team,” to shake her head and wonder whether this post-twee moralizing was really what the kids were into – “the kids,” of course, being those three to four years younger than her. Like, it just seems so childish to be genuinely bothered by the chorus to a Flo Rida hit, doesn’t it? And yet Charli XCX still goes by the MSN screen name she had when she was 14. The “girl” in the title is as much an age signifier as it is about gender, and the humanizing awkwardness of the remix is a product of its function as an intermural high school reunion, the kind of event that’s “confusing” by necessity even if it goes well, which this one does. Your Pop Class of 2013, ’til infinity.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: In 2011, an eternity ago, Drake offered Kendrick Lamar an entire track on his Take Care album, giving the then up-and-coming Lamar space to talk over his worries about fame and the professional anxieties he felt regarding his more successful host. “React like an infant whenever you’re mentioned,” Lamar recalled of the Canadian. “He said that he was the same age as myself, and it didn’t help cause it made me even more rude and impatient.” Having worked it all out on the remix, surely no trouble between the two would ever rise again. So confusing! In 2024, Lorde and Charli XCX connect to puzzle out some feelings, and it works better as an event than a single. Lorde is a savvier writer than Charli and works away at old wounds and insecurities with a sense of intimacy that only appears artless. Unfortunately, the production runs her through filters and bleeps that mold her presence into simply another type of Charli, dispelling the tension created by bringing these two women together. Blame it on Ms. XCX.
[5]

Jackie Powell: The beauty of this remix is how it shines a light on how women in pop in 2024 deal with “diss tracks” — although, to be honest, the remix makes me question whether “Girl, so confusing” really was one in the first place. Diss tracks often don’t reveal complex emotions but just function in a universe filled with envy and pettiness, but this remix reveals the chaos that resulted from poor communication, fear, body issues, anxiety and depression. Both Charli and Lorde admit that the confusion of being a girl is a result of comparing your insides to someone else’s outsides, a mental exercise that’s often destructive but difficult to stop. “It’s you and me on the coin/The industry loves to spend” is their acknowledgment of what came across as transparent and icky on Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.” Also, Lorde sounds the most compelling she has since 2017’s “Melodrama”; while I always prefer less Auto-Tune than more, her talk-singing with audio distortion behind her vocals reminds me why she was so beloved. Her messaging is focused: Lorde at her best. Her vocals are dark: also Lorde at her best. What I find most fascinating here is the choice of words during the final pre-chorus. Charli and Lorde sing that they “ride for each other” after working this out, which sounds more sincere than singing that they now magically love each other. It’s not an artificial “love ya,” but the more sincere “I see you and I know now what you’ve been through.” I’m actually quite jealous of how seamless this appears. Charli and Lorde are somehow giving me some hope that maybe my own friendship breakups could have been resolved by something like this. 
[8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Too many friends, not enough time to keep up. Too much life. Too much work, too many health issues, too much doomscrolling. Too much fun and connection and joy had together, but then rewinding it back, wondering whether everyone else felt the same way. Too much anxiety, becoming paralysis, becoming withdrawal. Too much wondering, “Did people notice I was missing? Should I reach out? Is this made up in my head, and if so, why?” Too many panics, trying to find the exact date of their birthday. Too much energy spent internalizing the loss—or even the potential loss—of friends as my own fault, not enough time spent understanding circumstance and accepting change. (Coincidentally, too much “Bad Friend” on repeat, god bless.) Too much time wasted not reciprocating the love of others, when they easily and excitedly extended the grace that I didn’t extend to myself. Too much adulthood, so confusing. But in this song? Just enough. Just enough sweat, enough mess, enough of the internet going crazy. Just enough payoff for being terminally online. Just enough intrapersonal catharsis, brought by talking it out, and making it clear that you do indeed ride for each other and will always “work it out on the remix.” Just enough tears shed, understanding that others, including the ones I idolize, can feel the way that I sometimes do. Just enough possibility of redemption. Just enough hope for salvation. 
[10]

Nortey Dowuona: Two things I learned today. 1. Lorde is still her. 2. We need to re-evaluate Solar Power.
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