by Sohorpem Kazingmei
There is a growing sense of the profound incompatibility of realities.
I see a sharp fault line through which two politics get split—my seemingly innocuous enjoyment of the art of Cindy Sherman or Jenny Holzer is going to stop; I’ve always had a strong aversion towards Gal Gadot, and detest Amy Schumer even more—still, in between there is equivocation.
The Modernist poets were skilled wordsmiths, confrontational in the face of grim realities, diagnosing the pathologies of their context in the style of grave erudition that we seem to have lost flair for in this zeitgeist—everything that would offend the anti-intellectual of today. I find myself sitting with the discomfort of knowing that while fascism and white supremacy are violently wreaking havoc in the world, I continue wading through the crowds everyday, in the metro station, listening to the thumping refrain in my IEMs of Everything is (Romantic), positively moved by the infinite yearning of the hot and anointed; for the romantic.
What do you think about Charli? has been the question du jour repeatedly passed back and forth between myself and anyone who’s been so inclined to opine—in a manner so fanatic—the Brat era, ever since its release earlier this year. Nothing fits neatly. She makes it difficult to reject her just as much as she makes it so hard to love her completely. It’s so brat. It was kamala IS brat, compounded by that cringe NATO co-opt, tangled with an opiate-induced web of dirtbag leftist, rage baiting, NYC-rat-elite-edgelords association of the Mean Girls infamy, that made it hard for most of us to reconcile the rest of Charli’s art, which was so cool and authentic, bitchy and heartbreaking, melancholic and beautiful, emotionally multifaceted and so intensely human.
Any artist/writer/creative putting work out into the world in these times will tell you how daunting it is to entertain the prospect of getting caught in the crosshairs of the cultural Manicheisms of scoldcore internet, that cold hill’s side where utterances fall to their calcifying end. The crux of Charli’s appeal is her bratness avant la lettre. She’s always been Pop’s enfant terrible. The synthesis of her creativity is not infused by the same predictable formulations and references, nor deference—there are no gratifying resolutions. She’s the kind of star that will pull up and put the convertible top down to say bitch get in, but it’s the kind of ride that vrooms past the banal to go crashing into the heart of “one percenter solipsism”—it’s seductive and it’s obvious, we’re jealous and obsessed with that Von Dutch, cult classic; albeit a little frustrated too. The disaffected pose against critique tends to feel glib and betrays the desire, in truth, to be co-opted and eternally remixed by the forces of consumerism.
The golden rule of interpretation is to not take shit literally. Still, the irony of “ACAB tag on a bus stop sign” is not lost on me as Caroline Polachek then proceeds to vote for Harris. I draw upon two reflections—on autofictional writing and the problem of reading Keats—in my response to EIR, to also work through a crisis of interpretation experienced within the broader landscape of internet discourse.
In a recently published essay for Spike magazine titled Against Autofiction: Two Paths for the Internet Novel, Conor Truax touches upon the phenomenon of auto fiction writers where authorial persona is often conflated with the work. “The problem with this paradigm is that, in practice,” Truax asserts, “it displaces the object of literary critique from the novel to the persona”. That is to say, “what the author performs becomes the primary subject of critical evaluation rather than what they produce.” As it pertains to the act of consuming and engaging with content through the internet, he invokes Byung-Chul Han’s critique of neoliberal market forces that thrive on the commodification of relatability and vulnerability, subsequently generating toxic byproducts in the form of “cultural narcissism” and a kind of parasocial voyeurism between the reader-writer, and by extension, influencer-follower, celebrity-fan relationship. Truax contends with the challenge of evolving the forms of prose to circumvent the flattening affect of Social Media— “literacy becomes conflated with social media literacy and critical evaluation becomes rendered to ad hominem critique.” Conversely, within the altered conditions of platform physics, how can forms of engagement broadly, and critique specifically, retain the dialectical—beyond persona and platform?
Over fifty years ago, in addressing the impossibility of perfectly transliterating one of poetry’s most famous concluding statements, literary critic Marco Mincoff made a distinction between poetic thought in contrast with philosophical or rational thought. For him, it’s important to recognise the form that is specific to poetry and the way it works. A poem is not an autonomous entity, and neither is the author. Both exist on the slippery foundation of language, which exists in relation to culture—shifting, accelerated—and further emboldened by technology. Mincoff writes, “ideas are far easier to discern than emotions, and infinitely easier than beauty”. Poetry is similar to music in the sense that it is concerned with the stirring of emotions, but emotions are hard to pin down and present in contained articulations—the singularity is not absolute, it can be infinitely iterative; if it’s one of the things that Brat and… also proves, you can always (re-) work it out on the remix.
Therefore, to read the Keatsian maxim “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” as though it were delivered “as a conclusion based on a premiss” (sic) would be to err critically, to miss the point entirely. Mincoff argues that the value of the statement does not lie in the logical confirmation of the idea that beauty is truth, but rather in “the aesthetic and affective emotions” resulting from the flight of imagination that the urn arouses in the poet, ultimately bringing him “in connection with truth and beauty”. This quality of abstraction lends itself to Charli’s lyrical flourish in EIR, what Mincoff might describe as “a certain perplexing of emotions as in a symphony”—party mode, the highs of success, yearning for domesticity, fame, adoration, the desire to have kids and settle down but also the greater desire to attain nonpareil status, spinning in the whirlwind of the gilded and beautiful—all get orchestrated into the feeling of EIR. A recurrent overlay of glitching remembrances and imagery, each evocation a recalibrated effort at grasping at the expanse of this sublime mood.
There is a photographic quality to the two songs. Charli enters the emotion on a spiral momentum, leading us through the open Roman landscape and into the vaulted enclosure of clubs, pulsating. The city is experienced with a sense of historicity and popular iconography. This is mirrored in Polachek’s version; though the city is constructed through a slightly grittier and gothic aesthetic. A sense of loss softly makes its way into the remix, subsequently shifting the momentum of the song towards a vaguely spiritual reverie that will make your heart compulsively contract as the empyrean melody of Polachek’s vocals wash over you. It’s the loss of conviction in the feeling of EIR as it slips through the refrains in this version, the emotions taking on not only an affective and aesthetic, but also a moral dimension. Charli’s tone is riddled with doubt—
A nostalgic corpus of memoristic substance, a melancholy sets in the waning moments of the song as the clarity of each image starts fading against the rapid superimposition of memory upon memory upon memory, growing ever distant beyond the soundtrack until it’s washed away by the slow dawning of sobering reality—the train speeds into the station, a gale of wind from the subterranean passage, all things change in the blink of an eye—and what you’re left with, subsumed under the modern greyness of state infrastructure, is the dulcet questioning of Charli’s Living that life is romantic, right?
About the Author
Sohorpem Kazingmei is a writer and researcher based in Delhi. She is currently working with Anant Foundation for the Arts as a Programme Coordinator. Previously, she has participated as a curatorial fellow at the Kochi Students’ Biennale; co-curated an exhibition with Ether Project; written for Critical Collective; and was the critic-in-residence for the Peers Residency programme at Khoj in 2022.
Works Cited
Mincoff, Marco. “Beauty Is Truth: Once More”. The Modern Language Review 65, no. 2 (1970): 267–71. https://doi.org/10.2307/3723528.
Truax, Conor. “Against Autofiction: Two Paths for the Internet Novel.” Spike Art Magazine. Accessed November 22, 2024. https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-against-autofiction-two-paths-for-the-internet-novel.
Yalcinkaya, Günseli. “Dasha Nekrasova: An Edgelord Death by Cringe.” Dazed Digital. Accessed November 22, 2024. https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/63238/1/rip-dasha-nekrasova-an-edgelord-death-by-cringe.
D’Souza, Shaad. “Charli XCX: Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat.” Pitchfork, October 14, 2024. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charli-xcx-brat-and-its-completely-different-but-also-still-brat/.
Eliot, T.S. “The Hollow Men.” All Poetry. Accessed November 22, 2024. https://allpoetry.com/the-hollow-men.Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed November 22, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn.