ROCK MUSIC

The Strokes and Charli xcx offer contrasting lessons in the technological expression of gendered feeling

Roughly concurrently, The Strokes and Charli xcx released new albums that are equally invested in the genre of rock music, like dialectically opposed twins. With each, I had immediate and thoroughgoing personal reactions: I hate Reality Awaits and love Music, Fashion, Film. More to the point, I think the former is bad and the latter is great, and at least part of why I believe my admittedly subjective reaction is linked to a more substantive perspective on their relative quality is because of how these records engage with the present. Each, in its own way, comments on the status of rock music and gender in our current cultural interregnum; given the state of things, it’s not entirely surprising to me that The Strokes completely miss the moment here, perhaps for the first time.¹

Rock Music

What does it mean to make rock music? Although Charli turns to rock because “the dance floor is dead,” it seems at first to involve a violent catharsis very much in line with brat:

I’m really banging my head

I’m really hurting my neck

The nervе damage is real

But it’s the only way to feel somеthing

Hurt yourself

Yeah, maybe jump off the stage

I hope they catch you today

But if they don’t, it’s okay

As I repeatedly argued about brat, Charli’s always doing double work with her performances of damage, both constructing a bad girl persona and giving us clues about what’s informing her drive toward destructive behavior, all of which point to larger structural conditions and hint at politics. With brat, the focus was more on gender; with Music, Fashion, Film, the stakes are arguably more universal:

Spring, Summer ‘26

When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it

Yeah, we’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell

Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion or film

Side Bar

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about this kind of posture, which simultaneously critiques the world and self-reflexively acknowledges the futility of critiquing anything given that all evidence suggests the structures of our living are organized around nihilism. I think we need to find new terms for talking about how capitalist realism takes on distinct aesthetics when the certitude of the system’s continuation is buttressed by a fatalistic understanding of humanity’s trajectory when faced with imminent climate collapse and political responses that seem accelerationist, like we’re all shooting ourselves into the comet instead of just ignoring the fact that it’s headed for us anyway.

The comparison here is probably less Don’t Look Up—where people in denial act absurd right until the end—and more Melancholia, where at a certain point we know the end is here and we go on doing our little things anyway. Either way, I think our music is increasingly reflecting the widespread belief that while many worlds have already ended, all the rest of them have also been marked for erasure.

In this, Music, Fashion, Film is actually pretty similar to Reality Awaits (though I read the latter as a more muddled statement). For example, both records include songs about having ambivalent feelings while shopping, and from the 2:43 mark, Charli’s even references the very 2000s garage rock moment that The Strokes continue to represent more than anyone.

But for all the surface similarities, Music, Fashion, Film is far and away the better, more effective record because it actually has something interesting to say about the genre it’s participating in. And genres always speak to broader social conditions.

Rock Music (2)

Let’s back up to that opening track, the thesis of the record.

Me and my friends, we go out

We take pictures and make stuff together

And sometimes we cry

We kiss each other, real incestuous vibes (I knew you’d like that)

Yeah, we’re so inspired

Basically all the time

Yeah, we’re on to the next

Every single line in this opening stanza describes behavior opposes the model of normative rock masculinity by providing a vibrant alternative. Normative masculinity follows capitalism in valorizing the strong, independent, single actor (the archetype for which has long been the cowboy), disparaging notions of community, mutual interdependence, and friendship as weak. Rock and roll culture in the white/masculine mold (itself obviously a distortion), follows suit by inventing the rock star who stands in the center of the band, from Mick Jagger to Kurt Cobain. In contrast, it’s significant that Charli opens this record situated in the middle of a group of girls.

What they do together also matters: they “take pictures” and “make stuff together,” they “cry” sometimes, and “kiss each other.” In an era of neofascist reaction, creative impulses of any kind are read as effeminate and abject. Certainly, shedding tears or otherwise showing emotion have always been understood as feminized and therefore as anathema to masculine reason. Finally, though normative masculine culture is relentlessly homosocial, it is also pervasively and paradoxically homophobic.² With spare opening lines, Charli leaves all that behind, celebrating friendship, creativity, emotionality, and queer intimacy in a song called “Rock Music.”

As men have abandoned all notions of aesthetic judgment or even engagement, they’ve also given up caring about performing coolness. In part reflecting these shifts, the best rock music of the past decade plus has been made by bands with women and queer folks at the helm. Charli xcx follows suit in her own way, both making a rock record and questioning what a rock record is or needs to be. Even though Charli is taking up the mantle of rock and roll cool, she’s also critically revising what it means.

And this, to me, accounts for the difference in the two records. No matter how much they wink and nod to the cultural construction of rock and roll, The Strokes have also always participated in it—one foot in and one out, wanting to have it both ways. Their new record doubles down on this participation so that we’re never quite sure if images, sounds, and lyrical references are satirical or sincere, starting with the cowboy on the cover. Music, Fashion, Film on the other hand actively works to deconstruct rock and roll’s genre markers, all of which are caught up in questions of gender.

Gender and Instrumentation

Let’s take the use of auto-tune as an example. Both Charli and The Strokes use the technology creatively, meaning that they use it as a sound effect rather than (just) a tool of pitch correction. But as Catherine Provenzano demonstrates, the stakes for engaging with pitch correction software vary wildly for men and women.

Historically, men have been allowed to experiment with auto-tune as a creative means of expressing a wider range of emotionality than the standards in a given genre have been understood to allow, almost as if they’ve needed the technological assist to get over their thorough indoctrination into the cult of the strong, silent type. But women who do the same have often been chastised; their use of auto-tune to manipulate the human voices is instead seen as a betrayal of the “authentic self” that the gendered-feminine-voice supposedly represents. Rather than engaging pitch correction software as a vocal effect (what Provenzano calls “the auto-tune effect,” or TATE), women have been historically more likely to have pitch correction applied to their vocal performances non-consensually by male sound engineers.

This dynamic persists in part because there are hardly ever women sitting behind the mixing board, and in part because it follows/reinforces sound and gender dynamics that originate with the Greeks: auto-tune is a way of keeping women “in line” or in sophrosyne: “Like soundwaves more generally, voices are unruly disruptions and sites of desire. One way to read pitch correction is through the lens of containment and control that tames the desire and the excess voices precipitate, a taming that often occurs non-consensually” (Provenzano 2019, 69). In this patriarchal tradition, men (the audio engineers) think, rationalize, and technologically manipulate women’s supposedly natural and unruly vocality.

By contrast, male singers are given artistic liberty to experiment with auto-tune as a special effect for achieving performances of heightened emotionality that they otherwise have trouble accessing.

The acceptance and celebration of male artists who employ Auto-Tune for effect (e.g. Bon Iver, Daft Punk, Kanye West, Future), and the stark lack and/or demonization of female artists who do the same, speak to the ways the Auto-Tuned male voice is heard as technologically and emotionally literate, whereas in the popular imaginary, no such technological literacy is granted to women, though their pitch-corrected voices are still expected to sound “natural” emotionally. (Provenzano, 76)

When women do use auto-tune for effect—that is, outside of pitch correction—they are most often subjected to authenticity discourses that question their ability to sing, as was the case with Ke$ha in the 2010s. “When used by male performers, Auto-Tune is understood as a tool of exteriorizing that which is ‘inner;’ when used by female performers, Auto-Tune hides or splits the authentic self” (81). This is what makes it especially important that Charli has made a big deal of her friendship with A. G. Cook, who collaborated with her instead of trying to “perfect” her voice. (The Strokes on the other hand, worked with…Rick Rubin.)

The Strokes’s use of auto-tune does nothing so well as continue and reinforce the dynamic Provenzano has clocked, using auto-tune in exactly the same way as many male predecessors. The novelty here is that they’re quintessentially a rock band—they turn to auto tune apparently for some new perspective, but in reality this too is an extremely normative/masculine move, in line with everything that keeps this record boring and stale. Rock and roll has always been the place for uninhibited expressions by white men; it has never been the place where women could do the same.

This lends political weight to Charli’s contrasting use of auto-tune as just one tool in a massive arsenal of vocal manipulation techniques, starting with the stuttering utterance that opens the record (“Now we’re making rock music”). While sometimes her voice is audibly auto-tuned, it’s more often chopped to bits, stretched unnaturally, and otherwise glitchified, challenging listeners to hear such digital techniques where they don’t “belong”: in and alongside the “rock music” she keeps reminding us she’s making. In this, she insists on her right to cyborgian manipulation as creative expression in a genre space that critics can’t seem to comprehend as anything other than the exclusive purview of men.

And so it also matters that the guitars work exactly the same way: yes, they’re distorted as in traditional rock music, yes the riffs are familiar to any fan of the genre. But they too are sampled, chopped, and stretched. Rockism fetishizes acoustic instruments, which we almost never hear throughout the entirety of this record. Taken together, it’s clear that Charli is invested not in reproducing rock but deconstructing it before putting it back together—recognizable, but alien.

In the same way that Olivia Rodrigo both joins the great rockist tradition of the concept album while also undermining it (by making the concept in question as girly as possible), Music, Fashion, Film makes a rock record that shows the category itself as inadequate, a category that The Strokes have not innovated themselves away from. This is reflected in every choice the two bands make right down to the language. Where The Strokes stick with grandiose and impersonal imagery that crosses Dylan with Nolan—

There once was a boy turned to Lucifer

He haunted many spaces, got lost down many streets

Mmm, sailed the seven seas, hunted wild rhinoceres

Please don’t call me, “Man,” I’m no fancy fallen angel

—Charli gives us the kind of colloquial stream of consciousness more typical of Lily Allen and (dare I say) Virginia Woolf:

I don’t feel embarrassed even if I suck

I’m always craving an experience that feels dangerous

And maybe this is it, maybe it’s what I need

‘Cause it’s the only way to feel like I’m not actually me

These aesthetic choices also matter, the small details as much as or more so than anything. Charli seems to have an unparalleled sense of balance, a fine-tuned feeling for juxtaposition. Everything on Music, Fashion, Film is energetic, and most of it follows the rest of her work in being powerful through abrasion; but in every track, there’s also something gorgeous contrasting against the angst, something small and essential whether “small” means “brief” or held onto by just one instrument.

As great as brat was, I appreciated it without loving it. I think it was both important and good while also falling outside that hallowed zone where all the music that viscerally pulls on my heart hangs out. Music, Fashion, Film hits dead in the center of my taste not only because it taps into my first love (distorted guitars) but also because of small musical choices that stretch time beyond conventional thresholds (tracks that turn into new songs halfway through, tracks that keep going way beyond what’s normally understood as acceptable, tracks that raise and then dash expectations, asking you to listen and find delight in what you hadn’t known you were anticipating). I always want beauty to be complicated and nuanced by unconventional sounds, want urgent noise to be balanced by something tender. Charli does that here while also saying something. To me, that’s an achievement.

Art/Music

And so I disagree with Lindsay Zoladz (a great critic), when she calls Music, Fashion, Film a “minor work.” I think the very opposite. In its length, subject matter, and style, it questions the terms of “major works” themselves, undermining men’s traditional criteria in the process. Charli made a rock album while avoiding its traditional hallmarks; “making rock music” really means making her own version of rock music, an interpretation that also pushes the genre into new territory. This marks a further intensification of a shift that had long been underway, wherein the genre that had been associated definitively with white men is now the purview of everyone else.

Zoladz suggests that David Cronenberg’s repeated mantra (“They are dead, they are gone. No one lasts for ever”) is artistically liberating for Charli and it may well be. But I also think it undermines the traditional, male-centric notion that Great Art transcends time and locks the highest achievers into a kind of immortality.³ “No one lasts forever,” Charli via Cronenberg insists. In calling out the fiction male artist’s most grandiose aims, the record itself achieves greatness.

In 2026, I just don’t think it’s possible to engage with culture ironically without that engagement devolving into out and out cynicism. Everything is urgent. You have to choose a side. You don’t get to participate and make fun of your own participation as a means of deflecting accountability. This isn’t a plea for purity tests or a holier-than-thou judgment; what I want out of music is evidence of an effort to somehow work against the cultural forces we’re stuck in, however hopeless that effort might feel. You don’t need to critique and transform genre in order to produce a great record, but in a world where our aesthetic categories can feel ageless and ossified, any effort at transformation becomes radical work.

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Cited:

Provenzano, Catherine. 2019. “Making Voices The Gendering of Pitch Correction and The Auto-Tune Effect in Contemporary Pop Music.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 31 (2): 63–84.

1. As a personal aside, I really love The Strokes! I think their first three records are fucking brilliant and hold up remarkably well. The rest of them are also just fine!

2. In fact, these two features have been shown to intensify one another. The more homosocial a scene, the more heterosexuality has to be rigorously and cartoonishly enforced. This is where hazing rituals in so-called “Greek life” come from.

3. All credit to Hannah for articulating this as we drove and listened to the record, the thought that started this whole post.