While some may be convinced that a Lorde-featuring remix of “Girl, so confusing” is just a red herring to distract from the fact that it’s still ultimately referring to MARINA (#thatfrootlooksfamiliar), Charli XCX seems to want to put fan theories about a feud between her and the other big-haired singer to rest. It actually appears to be a week of “laying to rest feud” songs, with Ariana Grande also achieving the impossible and getting Brandy and Monica to come together on her own remix of “the boy is mine.” But with Charli and Lorde, the signs of the “feud” were subtler, even though they arose from the same place: women feeling jealous of one another’s success thanks to the assumption that there isn’t “enough room” for “everyone” (read: just women) in the entertainment industry. Even though Britney Spears, angel that she is (or at least that’s how Spring Breakers bills her), did once declare, “There’s room for all of us” at one of the many press conferences of her early career.
If only that were true. Alas, in the present landscape, the competition between women in music has only seemed to become more fierce as they vie for the ever-diminishing attention spans of listeners who can barely focus on a song that’s longer than two minutes, let alone multiple artists that keep cropping up like a game of whack-a-mole. That Lorde herself “cropped up” in 2013 was a bit of a bane for Charli XCX. For this similar-looking girl (a.k.a. they both had dark, curly, big hair) came along right before XCX was finally about to break through ever so slightly into the mainstream with 2014’s “Boom Clap.” And since people apparently can’t differentiate women who have the same hair color (see also: Lady Gaga dyeing her hair blonde early in her career to avoid being confused with Amy Winehouse), it was going to be a problem. So much that she was actually mistaken for Lorde during a now illustrious TV interview. Rather than correcting the interviewer (a fellow female, to boot), however, Charli decided to just run with it.
Two years prior to 2014, her name was becoming more prominent thanks to her feature on Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” but it wasn’t her own solo effort. “Boom Clap” would mark her full-on breakthrough on the charts, but only after she was featured on yet another hit that same year: Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy.” Alas, in Charli’s mind, a lot of that success was mitigated by how easy it seemed for Lorde to get “all the flowers” right away. Whereas Charli had already been around since 2008, creating her version of Lana Del Ray a.k.a. Lizzy Grant in the form of an unreleased album called 14 (technically before Adele thought to start naming her own records after her age, as Charli was recording some of these tracks as early as 2006).
It was in the booklet of said album, distributed to a very select few, that Charli wrote, “The songs I write are about my mates and experiences.” Not much has really changed on that front, with the entire Brat album being a reflection of those two preferred topics. Except that Lorde falls somewhere in between. Not necessarily a full-on “mate” (though maybe more of an “experience”), Lorde has been, at the very least, something of a “driving force” in XCX’s professional life, with the latter at one point commenting, “When ‘Royals’ came out, I was super jealous of the success that that song got, and that Ella got. You piece all this stuff together in your brain, like: ‘She was into my music. She had big hair; I had big hair. She wore black lipstick; I once wore black lipstick.’ You create these parallels and think, ‘Well, that could have been me.’”
Instead, Charli was destined to take a much more circuitous path toward becoming a respected, applauded pop star of her own kind. Nonetheless, “Girl, so confusing” sets out to address many of those early insecurities that have lingered on even after XCX’s irrefutable success. But it’s been hard-won in comparison to Lorde’s, a singer who was instantaneously embraced and praised for her brilliance. Deemed a musical prodigy (like Charli, Lorde also has the benefit of synesthesia to help her compose songs) from the outset, it’s easy to understand why XCX would home in on Lorde as a source of envy. That XCX’s debut album, True Romance, was released five months before Lorde’s in 2013 also set a competitive precedent in that, technically, the two were “launched” the same year. To add insult to Charli’s injury, Lorde was also garnering more praise and sales at an even younger age than Charli (the two are four years apart).
The difference in their paths, personalities and general “vibes” couldn’t have been more apparent than in the only photos of the two of them together that exist (apart from that rando snap of them with Carly Rae Jepsen)—taken at the 2014 VMAs. In one of them, Charli holds up two peace signs while sticking her tongue out in typical bombastic Leo fashion while Lorde, ever-staid, cool, calm and collected (such a Scorpio), stands next to her with a close-mouthed half-smile. Her aura of disinterested ennui being something that Charli only managed to cultivate much later, having perfected it in the Crash era.
In the meantime, Lorde’s own lack of confidence seems to have shined through more openly in recent years—and perhaps most openly of all in the lengthy verse she contributes to the “Girl, so confusing” remix (marking her second release of the year after a cover of “Take Me to the River” for Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense). For there is a portion where she gets extremely candid about her body image issues via the lines, “You’d always say, ‘Let’s go out’/But then I’d cancel last minute/I was so lost in my head/And scared to be in your pictures/‘Cause for the last couple years/I’ve been at war with my body/I tried to starve myself thinner/And then I gained all the weight back.”
Considering that women in the public eye are deemed “fair game” for the media on all matters body critical, it’s no wonder Lorde would be paranoid about having her photo taken in a state of anything less than “perfection” (by warped societal standards). Knowing full well it could be dissected and analyzed for all of eternity on the internet. XCX knows all about this heightened fear too, commenting on her own struggles with body dysmorphia on “Rewind” as she admits, “Nowadays, I only eat at the good restaurants/But, honestly, I’m always thinking ’bout my weight.”
The power in joining together—especially in the wake of so much speculation as to whether or not they had “beef” (though, again, it’s nothing compared to the speculation about XCX and MARINA’s beef)—comes at a time when patriarchal forces still seek to keep women pitted against one another. Some recent examples include Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter (which spawned the latter’s “because i like a boy”), or Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift (surprisingly, though, not Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish), or Taylor Swift and Charli herself, or Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish—or, shit, Taylor Swift and every other female artist. Thus, for two women in the music business to team up like this does not go unnoticed. Nor does its powerful message.
Lorde’s candor about female competitiveness only adds to the remix’s power as she sings, “I was trapped in the hatred/And your life seemed so awesome/I never thought for a second/My voice was in your head/‘Girl, you walk like a bitch’/When I was ten, someone said that/And it’s just self-defense/Until you’re building a weapon.” In other words, protecting yourself, as a woman, can end up turning dangerous for other women who are just as insecure. Take, for example, Lily Allen stating of her early twenties propensity to openly criticize other women (including the fellow singer she was pitted against at the time, Amy Winehouse) that she was extremely dissatisfied with her own self during this period (Paris Hilton would make a similar assessment of her rampant racist and homophobic comments in the 00s).
Putting forth a “tough as nails” facade, women convince both genders that they’re impervious to what anyone thinks when, in fact, they’re crumpling over in fear of others’ opinions on the inside. Thus, Lorde adds to her verse, “She believed my projection/And now I totally get it/Forgot that inside the icon/There’s still a young girl from Essex.” In short, even Lorde can forget, thanks to her own deft ability to project a false persona and confidence, that Charli has probably been doing the same. That she’s still, in spite of the steely exterior, that unformed rave scene girl at heart.
The two singers eventually join one another to sing a version of the chorus that goes, “People say we’re alike/They say we’ve got the same hair/It’s you and me on the coin/The industry loves to spend/And when we put this to bed/The internet will go crazy/I’m glad I know how you feel.” It’s after this line that Lorde goes back to singing solo so she can say, once and for all: “‘Cause I ride for you, Charli.” Only during the outro can Charli finally return the sentiment with the declaration, “You know I ride for you too.” It only took about ten years to get to that point, but hey, some feuds between women never end at all (here’s looking at you, Bette and Joan).
And yet, XCX still leaves the feud potentially open for further fodder when the song concludes with: “It’s so confusing-ing” (which plays in the same pitch as Grimes). Perhaps confusing enough to make Charli and Lorde fall into old competitive habits once more. Though hopefully it’s nothing but “love you, mean its” and musical collabs from here on out. Because the two do pair (un)surprisingly well together.
