While Thelma Houston might once have been the queen of saying, “Don’t leave me this way,” Charli XCX and Rina Sawayama are now throwing their hats in to be considered for the crown by pleading with the object of their affection, “Don’t you leave me this way.” It’s just one of many instances of “Beg For You” grafting from other lyrical and sonic sources, most notably September’s 2006 hit, “Cry For You” (a title, surely, that must be deliberately similar to “Beg For You”). What’s more, because September “unintentionally” did the same with grafting Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy,” there’s elements of that in “Beg For You” as well. And why shouldn’t there be? The iconic 80s song is an indelible ditty that pulls at heartstrings each and every time the opening notes commence and the moan of Jimmy Somerville suffuses the track.
And maybe Charli and Rina wanted to suffuse their own single with that level of earnestness. In fact, it’s nice for a song to take us back to a time when yearning and burning for love instead of money felt more common—or at least more relevant. In the present, these notions of craving, Romeo and Juliet-style, another real-live person seem like part of some bygone era before Grimes assured us that AI would be taking over. And, try as we might to convince ourselves, androids can’t really feel anything (something German film I’m Your Man gets across rather effectively). So that doesn’t leave much hope for the future continuing the often literary tradition of all-consuming, Shakespearean-level romance. Not that the future has much hope of anything, but still. It would be slightly more hopeful if we could believe that even the construct of love wasn’t going to be commodified by technology (as it already has been thanks to the plethora of dating apps in pervasive use). Plus, there’s bound to be an inevitable increase in technosexuals.
Looking somehow like twinsies (despite their divergent ethnicities) in the visualizer for the song, Charli and Rina perform a vanilla interpretation of lesbianic interaction as they sing, “You know I go insane/Every time you have to catch a flight.” Already Charli and Rina are establishing that their love issues are more a product of affluence and privilege than anything else (and yes, when you do have money, it’s easier to focus on amorousness as its own full-time job). Because, honestly, who is catching a flight these days if it’s not private? Charli also sounds like she’s frozen in the twentieth century when she asks, “Can I take you to the airport/Make out under the bathroom lights?” Uh, no. Probably not, considering all of the restrictions both post-9/11 and post-pandemic-related. But again, this song appears to be all about conjuring an era of yore, one in which love was a person’s primary wistful focus over “being rich.” Which is essentially the requirement for even existing at a baseline tier on this Earth anymore.
Yet perhaps another reason Charli comes across as “so twentieth century” is because something within these lyrics harkens back to her ostensible confirmation that her forthcoming album, Crash, is inspired by the J. G. Ballard novel and David Cronenberg film of the same name. In each version of the narrative, the airport parking garage provides a key setting and role in the sexualization of the machinery that is a car—with those fucking each other in that car becoming, in effect, “at one” with the machine. This underlying interpretation lends a certain irony to how the hunger for another human being—and their love— is a concept so “analog” in the current landscape of mechanophilia (which doesn’t extend only to cars, though Titane did recently re-popularize the association of mechanophilia with motor vehicles) that it’s almost incongruous in its “retro-ness.”
Maybe the appeal of machines is the fact that they’re more reliable, less mercurial. Whereas, on the topic of the person being lusted after in this song, Rina adds in her own verse, “You’re like an ocean breeze/Comin’ and goin’ just as you please.” Who wants that when you could have the Taurean stability of something like an android? The constancy of a “being” that’s incapable of letting you down if preprogrammed correctly? Well, maybe those who, like Charli and Rina, prefer the roller coaster “thrill” of being kept guessing. Of being made, pretty much, to feel always just a little bit overly needy and underappreciated by the more disinterested or distant party.
In this regard, it appears pop music is currently our only modern window into “the way it used to be” in terms of actually being affected by another person. Or maybe it’s just easier for pop stars—who actually have a robust bank account—to concentrate their energies on such presently luxurious topics as a pining form of love between two humans. Then again, when you think about it, most classic literature addressing the same topic was also written by rich folk. You know, like Edith Wharton. Who also could have easily penned “Beg For You” in her day.
