In 2011, CSS released their third album, La Liberación. Still finding it difficult to recreate the “virality” of 2005’s “Music Is My Hot Hot Sex,” CSS didn’t make it easier for themselves to do it again with this record. After all, they chose to release just one official single from: “Hits Me Like A Rock” featuring Bobby Gillespie. And yet, after the video—filled with what would now be called “TikTok dancing”—came out, CSS released another visual accompaniment for a song from La Liberación called “City Grrrl” featuring SSION. In the same way that Charli XCX’s new single, “In The City,” pays homage to how a sprawling metropolis lends the kind of anonymity necessary to feel totally free, CSS’ “City Grrrl” took it one step further by speaking to how a city (specifically, a city like New York), after enough time spent there, can make you so numb that “nothing hurts.”
Many see this as an advantage, while others posit that the idea of eventually losing all sense of humanity as a result of living in a city (again, mainly New York) simply isn’t worth it. However, for the oppressed and repressed collection of misfits that tends to (or once tended to) gravitate toward those “bright lights,” pain has been the norm in some way for their entire lives, so feeling nothing sounds pretty good in contrast. The thing is, New York is so chock full of normies now thanks to how much money it takes to live there. It’s hardly a place where “being different” is easier to conceal anymore. Not among the Rag & Bone-wearing ilk. Or even the Uniqlo types. For homogeneity has become so unavoidable in society that it’s seeped into the city landscape. A milieu that people were (and still are) so convinced stood out as a bastion of uniqueness. Though, from the get-go, cities were designed to have their own “inverse” homogeneity to the suburban alternatives that are often mocked and ridiculed by city dwellers who presume their lifestyle is inherently better. Particularly those, like Charli XCX, who grew up in such environments, frequenting the clubs and raves of London and its outer reaches as she made a name for herself (beyond just making the user name of Charli XCX on MSN Messenger).
In the early days of her recording career, Charli’s lyrics and tone possessed echoes of fellow Brits Lily Allen and Kate Nash, particularly on a song titled “Art Bitch” (side note: CSS also has a song called the same on their debut album). A nod to the sort of girl who would inevitably flee to the city to turn her art into financial gold (because that’s what art is all about now, right?). So it is that Charli sings, “You use a needle and a thread to sew up your dreams/Of going to France or New York or wherever it is/You’re gonna get there one day.” This is the same archetype CSS’ lead singer, Lovefoxxx, embodies in the video for “City Grrrl.” In fact, the premise for it comes off like a combination of Madonna blowing into New York for the first time meets her eponymous character in Desperately Seeking Susan riding back into town from Atlantic City. Lovefoxxx starts the video in a similar fashion, opening on a Coach USA bus with the destination “NEW YORK” emblazoned on the sign above the windshield. From there, Lovefoxxx pulls another Susan maneuver by proceeding to conduct her hygiene affairs in the public bathroom of the bus station, dyeing her hair pink with Manic Panic and changing her ensemble to reflect her inner “punk rock” edge on the outside. Now that she feels liberated enough in the city to do so.
The idea that you can be whoever you want to be, finally see yourself as you always dreamed you could be, is also the crux of Charli’s “In The City.” Which additionally offers a requisite gay feature (like “City Grrl” with SSION) via Sam Smith. Because what would any song showing love for the big city be without mentioning or alluding to the gays that populate it? In “City Grrrl,” Lovefoxxx calls it out directly by singing, “When I was a little girl/I wanted to be a citizen of the world/Being busy with my job and my gay friends/Laughing and drinking with my one-night stands.” For Charli, having Smith on the song to lend his vocals to a verse about meeting an accepting lover seems to be sufficient, with Smith declaring, “I knew the night that I met you/Underneath the New York City lights/Baby, no matter what I do/There’s an angel standin’ by my side.” Though one is surely likelier to find a devil at their side “in the city” instead. Especially during the less sanitized times of 2011, when “City Grrrl” came out.
In fact, it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that Charli’s city ode has a sound very similar to another 2011 track: Rihanna’s “We Found Love.” It’s got that same EDM infusion—one that also harkens back to Charli’s earlier musical sound before it veered more sharply into pop. This is thanks to co-production by Charli herself, A. G. Cook, George Daniel (a.k.a. the drummer for The 1975 and Charli’s boyfriend), ILYA and Omer Fedi. And, just as “We Found Love” was described, “In The City” is also “the rare song that manages to be sad and joyous all at once.” To that end, “In The City” transports the listener back to the early 2010s of Rihanna’s pre-Fenty heyday. Charli even invokes use of the word “diamonds” by saying, “All the lights are diamonds in the sky,” as though to deliberately remind us of Rihanna belting out, “We’re like diamonds in the sky.” And why not conjure up this not-so-distant period by mimicking its distinct sonic trends? After all, it was a simpler time not just in the twenty-first century, but in New York as well. Arguably the last blip in its history before every corner was taken over by a corporate entity.
With “In The City,” Charli appears to be part of the massive cabal that keeps perpetuating the myth that this is how New York still is. Even if its generic title can also be applied to other megalopolises like London, Istanbul, Tokyo and Los Angeles. But, of course, with Smith directly name-checking New York, it’s clear that’s the town they want people to associate the song with. Regardless of it no longer being the place where one can assure, “I found what I was lookin’ for.” Unless what you’re looking for happens to be a ramped-up obsession with money, status and a whole slew of other things that have nothing to do with being the kind of “art bitch” Charli once talked about or that Lovefoxxx once portrayed as a “City Grrrl” of yore. Where saying, “Don’t live your life, girl/Unless it’s just like a movie” has now become, “Live your life like any little banality set against a basic urban backdrop could go viral on TikTok.”
