Popstar Charli XCX is turning her hand to acting in the new film Erupcja. In it, she recites Lord Byron’s poem Darkness. Charli and Byron may be 200 years apart, but the legacies of Romantic poetry are alive in Brat, the singer’s sixth studio album.
Byron has often been described as the first modern celebrity, notorious in regency England for rumours of incest, homosexuality and vampirism. Irish writer Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, wrote in 1823 that “Byron had so unquenchable a thirst for celebrity, that no means were left untried that might attain it.”
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Brat is similarly concerned with the self-construction of identity and celebrity in Charli’s “party girl” image. Her interest in fame is reflected both in her album’s extensive branding and in lyrics like, “When I go to the club I wanna hear those club classics/I wanna dance to me”.
In Might say Something Stupid, Charli admits that she is “famous but not quite” and doesn’t know if she “belong[s] here anymore”. This echoes John Keats’ 1818 poem When I have fears that I may cease to be, in which he laments that he might die before he experiences true literary achievement and fame. Charli has inherited the identity of lonely artist obsessed with creative genius from the Romantics.
Anxieties around legacy resurface in Apple. Charli uses the apple as a Gothic metaphor for inheritance and cursed fate, not unlike Byron’s On Leaving Newstead Abbey, in which he imagines his ancestors haunting him until death. Romantic poetry is full of this tension between inheritance and decay, and Charli’s lyrics show how those anxieties still haunt us today.
Romantic poets were obsessed with the archaic and classical through Greek and Roman mythology, ruins, and medievalism, like John Keats’ poem Ode to a Grecian Urn. Similarly, Brat frequently looks back with references to Y2K aesthetics and early 2000s culture.
Charli romanticises nostalgia in the song Rewind:
Used to burn CDs full of songs I didn’t know
Used to sit in my bedroom, puttin’ polish on my toe
Recently, I’ve been thinkin’ ‘bout a way simpler time
Sometimes, I really think it would be cool to rewind.
In both cases, romantic nostalgia becomes a creative lens to explore our relationship with the past.
Romantic poets were fascinated by the sublime, characterised as the overwhelming power of nature. In Wordsworth’s Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, he contrasts “the din/Of towns and cities” against awe-inspiring “steep and lofty cliffs”.
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In the song, Everything is Romantic, Charli instead finds beauty in juxtaposing symbols: the man-made (“Bad tattoos on leather tan skin/Jesus Christ on a Plastic sign”) contrasts nature (“Lemons on thе trees and on the ground/[…] Pompeii in the distance”).