A Charli XCX concert, to give it a little context, if that’s possible — because there’s really nothing like a Charli XCX concert as far as traditional concerts go — is your niece’s Margaritaville. But also, your nephew’s nihilistic post-apocalyptic vampire rave. And maybe your mom’s Deadhead utopia. For two hours at Allstate Arena, the world, the universe, school, work, disappointment, money — it all vanishes. It’s a Monday in Rosemont but the whole thing becomes so enveloping, you stop noticing the gray concrete arena. This place that hosts monster truck jams and Disney on Ice disappears.
What replaces it is proudly prurient, hedonistic, chest-crushingly loud, chaotic, fueled with last-night-on-Earth abandon, rarely pausing, never standing still, until the lights come up — even then, on Monday, when lights came on, pockets of the audience kept dancing. The night, literally by design, is a blur. Charli XCX, or Charlotte Aitchison, producer, excellent songwriter, a party girl’s party girl, seems to grab the collective audience by the hand, occasionally allow for a moment of doubt, a second to walk out onto the veranda and wonder anxiously if they should have said that at the party — “Sometimes I just want to rewind,” she agrees — then tugs them back to the dance floor.
She even, no joke, at one point, spits on the stage and licks it back up.
Yes, it’s a complete night.
The guy in front of me threw his body around impressively, like one of those waving balloon men in front of a car dealership. A woman beside me sat for a second yet continued dancing and smacked her head against a concrete ledge behind the row then looked at her friends, stunned, laughed and kept going. Dress code: Mad Max at the club. Men in orange Speedos and mesh tank tops. Bug-eye sunglasses. A woman walked past in angel wings and a T-shirt with a single offensive word — probably the worst thing you can call a woman, worn proudly here. Think more brat green than a crossing-guard convention. And leather boots, barely-there flayed skirts, faux leather, faux ostrich feathers, and while crowds at Lollapalooza may edge ever closer to public nudity, Charli and her ongoing Brat Summer tour clearly inspired a cleavage arms race for the ages.
As for Charli: Red bra, black bra, snow white sorta ostrich-y feather corset dress, a tornado of black curls whipping around her head and sweat, sweat and more sweat. She stomps, stomps, sashays, poses, writhes, poses, stomps, writhes. She lets the guy following her with a video camera even show her pushing sweat from her eyes. When her microphone came untethered from her outfit, a stagehand rushed on stage but Charli waved him off, continuing with the wire wrapped around her.
Hot mess as lifestyle choice.
Or as she puts it in song, wistfully: “Guess I’m a mess and play the role.”
Look, this is the first time I went to a concert and left wondering if “concert” needed quotation marks. And yet, that “concert” is a great, even insightful time and thoughtful time, from time to time.
Charli, who broke huge last summer with her great “Brat” album after a decade defined by the songs she wrote for others, began as a teenager bouncing around London’s underground rave scene. Her stage show takes a cue from those days. It’s a one-woman show, on a stark stage bathed in harsh white light, with a cage for Charli to stomp inside for video screens. There’s no band, no dancers, not even a DJ to suggest some part of the music is crafted live — other than her singing, which is live. The use of backing tracks is an open secret among many performers; last summer, footage of Frankie Valli, at 90, barely keeping up with his backing track, caused a brief viral scandal. But a Charli XCX show suggests a strange post-live-music concert landscape that, if done smartly, might work here and there.
Good songs, of course, help. Her best songs often drop a few hints at how strange it is to be a pop star, and how you’re not supposed to show, never mind sing about, jealousy, self-consciousness, how uneasy you can be around talented people. Real vulnerability cuts through. She sings of having “one foot in a normal life,” yet needing the flash and fun of the job. The show mirrored those dueling emotions: She boasted “I’m your favorite reference, baby,” then, on “Girl, So Confusing,” admitted unease around another, perhaps smarter singer (the New Zealand pop star Lorde). In Rosemont, it became a balancing act, going from a party track about parties and a party track about being cool, to songs tinged in doubt and a touch of self-loathing.
You could hear the ongoing influence of Kanye West’s auto-tuned confessional “808s and Heartbreak” — whether intentionally or through osmosis — in the ominous synth backbones of those moodier songs. But Charli is a riskier songwriter. As she built to “Sympathy is a Knife,” the night’s physical, anguished climax, she sang of being needy, and not knowing if she’s being condescended to or just being paranoid. As much as she’s wildly, somewhat satirically, cloaked in posturing and artifice, she’s relatable. She closed with “I Love It,” her best-known song, a 2012 hit for the Swedish duo Icona Pop, which lands on a sweet spot in her writing voice, between unhinged and righteous:
“I crashed my car into the bridge, I watched, I let it burn.
I threw your (expletive) into a bag and pushed it down the stairs …”
The arena sang and bounced like this was the last concert they would ever attend. Still, again, I wanted to ask: Was this even a concert? The better question is: Does it even matter anymore? There is no future, the future is dead, long live the future.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
