Continuing to unveil more finished tracks as we approach May 15, the release of Charli XCX’s “quarantine album,” How I’m Feeling Now, the British pop powerhouse admits that maybe she’s beating a dead horse in talking, once more, about her relationship in the song. Yet isn’t that what serves as the driving force behind every great pop record?–from Lorde’s Melodrama to Ariana Grande’s thank u, next. No, Charli need not apologize, and it seems as though the enforcement of quarantine, along with the crumbling of the live music industry, has fortuitously brought her closer together with her boo, Huck Kwong.
When interviewed about “I Finally Understand” by Beats 1, XCX explained, “I’m writing about what I know, and we’re quarantined together, and our relationship wasn’t in a brilliant place prior to quarantine. I’m not going to say at the end of the road, but close to it—we were living on separate sides of the country, and even though we were physically far apart, we were emotionally quite distant as well.” With the sort of late 90s Massive Attack meets The Prodigy flair (as much as a pop song can have) in terms of rhythm and pacing, XCX iterated where the title of the song originated from by adding, “I finally understand that this person is somebody who I can trust with my life and I will have my security and protection at the front point of their heart no matter what. So that’s what it’s about, very emo.”
But “emo” (which still never got an update from 00s vocabulary) is the name of the game these days, when one has much more time to sit around and think about themselves, and their relationship to others. And, when you’re rich enough, continue to self-explore thanks to sustained chats with your therapist, hence Charli’s lyric, “I finally understand, finally understand/My therapist said I hate myself really bad.” Which, of course, can tend to lead to someone feeling like they’re not deserving of love, that they don’t have the worth to receive such bounty. When you’re young and in the media, this feeling of inherent self-loathing can often intensify. Fortunately, coronavirus did Charli a solid by forcing her into confinement to work her shit out with her boyfriend.
For when else has there ever been a time in history when the world was forced to stop? Therefore bringing couples together in a way not known since Noah’s Ark. That shit didn’t even happen during the Spanish Flu era (probably the reason way more people died) that many are so fond of comparing COVID-19 to. It’s almost as though destiny has conspired to force couples throughout the world to go through the quarantine wringer together to finally admit to themselves whether or not the relationship is a sham (a sentiment also explored in the recent “Stuck With U” from Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber). To that end, could Aphrodite be the one secretly responsible for this pandemic?
“You love me even when I hate myself, I’m sure,” Charli gushes to the persistent frenetic beat of the Palmistry-produced track. Because whoever said that if you can’t love yourself then no one else will obviously didn’t know what true love was. As XCX also comes to terms with the fact that she’s been suppressing her emotions for so long, dodging real commitment by constantly touring, she realizes that it was all a result of not wanting any admission of feeling to be her undoing. As she phrases it, “’Cause lately I finally understand/That maybe this feeling that I’ve found/Might kill me, put me in the ground.” Well darling, as long as it’s that and not corona, what’s the big deal?
