Charli XCX Taps David Cronenberg For a Collab That Explains ‘Music, Fashion, Film’

Over the last few years, Charli XCX has emerged as the music world's most high-profile Letterboxd power user. (That'll come to no surprise of anyone who has a passing interest in online movie culture, has taken a cursory scan at the genre-bending pop titan's socials.) Yet still, plenty of eyebrows shot up when David Cronenberg, the legendary body-horror auteur behind gnarly hits like Crash—the inspiration for the title of Charli's fifth studio album—was revealed to feature on the closing track for her new album Music, Fashion, Film.Perhaps the last part of that title should've provided some clues. The album artwork also features similarly seminal Hollywood titan Martin Scorsese, alongside Velvet Underground frontman John Cale and designer Marc Jacobs. When revealed, the cover seemed to reflect two things: firstly, Charli's embrace of film and fashion as new modes of expression, be it through that aforementioned reinvention as an active online cinephile, or her turn towards acting as a side-hustle. But they are also all men who cast long shadows over the art forms they represent; cultural icons with god-like reps. Guys who have created, and will leave behind, seismic artistic contributions. Perhaps then, in the shadow of Brat— that all-consuming pop cultural moment that launched Charli XCX into the celebrity stratosphere in the space of a summer— legacy would be top of her mind, and what hers might be.The album itself is chock full of ironic, sometimes self-effacing lyrics about her post-Brat mega-fame. Plenty of the reviews have already made the point of how deliberately un-Brat it feels—not least in how many of the songs carry an atypically rocky sound (though it's hardly the big rejection of club music that fans had worried it might turn out to be). It's self-conscious, it's self-aware, it's all very self-interested. A wrestle with authenticity in the wake of an identity-breaking event. And then comes that final track, “No One Lasts Forever,” and the Cronenberg cameo, which might just be the key to unlocking it all.The song centers on Charli, seemingly, in the aftermath of a big night in Paris, chatting “philosophy” with a “French girl.” (It's giving strong 6 a.m. afters vibes, when the drugs are wearing off, the sun is cutting through the window blinds, and the birds start chirping, otherwise known as hell.) Once again, Charli grapples with her public persona amid the highs and lows of Brat: the parties might be more fun, but the scrutiny towards her character—people reading her as “irresponsible and rude,” or constantly off her nut—is less so. She concludes that this is all ephemeral, basically; if “nothing's gonna last forever,” as goes the chorus, why care?Which is where Cronenberg comes in. Sadly, he doesn't get to flex his singing chops. The feature takes the form of a spoken interlude taken from a hour-long conversation he and Charli had last year. (“I went to Toronto to sit down with him, and record him,” she told the music station Triple J. “We chose the parts that felt most related to the song, but the entire conversation itself is so interesting.”) In the excerpt, he seems to chillingly describe a near-death experience.“As I was lying there on the sidewalk, I did not think about art at all,” he says. “I thought about people, I thought about life.” Even as such a legend of the game, confronted with his own mortality, the things that seemed to matter were much smaller and personal: family, friends, loved ones. “Yes, some artists have created art that has survived thousands of years… But experientially, for them, they are dead, they are gone,” he continues. “Oblivion is freedom.” And then arrives the haunting end note that closes out Music, Fashion, Film, a refrain that echoes into the darkness: “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever.”It's a simple point, really: once you're dead and gone, and we're all just atoms floating around in the infinite cosmos, none of this will matter anymore. You might read that as nihilistic and, well, spooky as fuck. Instead, Cronenberg, in his soothing tones—and by extension, Charli—implies liberation. What we leave behind matters, sure. But it's not like, in death, we have any control of what people think of us, nor what we create, nor what might be our defining legacies. There have already been plenty of attempts to close the door on Brat: Charli burning the acid-green flag at Glastonbury; the meta satire of The Moment. But perhaps this is finally the moment that she is able to let go.This story originally appeared in British GQ.