Charli XCX, John Cale, and the American Minimalists
Nobody captures a vibe quite like Charli XCX. From the catchy Euro-pop vibes of 2012’s “I love it” to the cultural phenomenon that was 2024’s “Brat summer”, the British singer has had a pulse on what culture needs and where it’s headed. Culture, it seems, is headed for a big shift. “I was excited to escape into something entirely new, entirely opposite,” she posted.
She’s not joking. “House”, the first single from the soundtrack of Emerald Fennell’s upcoming “Wuthering Heights“, is a collaboration with the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, and it’s as far away from the It Girl persona of “Brat” as you can get. It’s stark and ominous, with a pulsing string ostinato punctuated by crashing, distorted guitars. You don’t even hear Charli for the first two minutes — it’s just John Cale delivering a monologue, in his unmistakably reverberant voice, over shifting string harmonies. Charli’s vocals, when they finally appear, are jagged and fragmented, ranging from a hoarse whisper to a full-throated wail. It’s not your typical club banger.
Cale gets co-writing credits on “House”, and the sonic influence of the Velvet Underground is there: the droning string harmonics, the distortion, the caustic textures of “Heroin” and “European Son”. But you also hear the influence of Cale’s classical background — he was, after all, trained as a classical violist, who counts Aaron Copland and John Cage as early mentors. Cale and Cage participated in the first full-length performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations” in 1963; Satie’s piece, composed in the early 1890s, consists of 840 repetitions of two-line theme. A typical performance lasts anywhere from 15 to 40 hours.
“House” positions itself firmly within the realm of the 1960’s classical avant-garde. It recalls, more than anything, Terry Riley’s “In C”, where melodic fragments of increasing textural density and harmonic ambiguity interrupt an eighth-note ostinato on a single pitch. But whereas the minimalism of Riley and his colleagues was meditative and soothing, Charli and Cale opt for something far more unsettling. “House” subverts the immutability of Riley’s droning C by using a string harmonic, lending it an ominous, spectral irregularity in pitch and timbre. Riley and Cale were to collaborate on 1971’s “Church of Anthrax”, which creates a dense, sinister sonic world and merges strings and electronics in a way that prefigures “House”.
This vibe isn’t just Charli’s — you can hear how “House” aligns with “Wuthering Heights” director Emerald Fennell’s abrasive, discordant Gothic aesthetic. Charli describes it “raw, wild, sexual, gothic, British, tortured”, and you’re never sure whether she’s talking about Cale, Fennell, Heathcliff, or the Yorkshire moors — perhaps all of the above.
But Charli is tapping into another vibe, one that counters the AI-adjacent formulas of pop hits and that subverts listeners’ expectations. This week, Robyn released “Dopamine”, a euphoric synth-pop banger that does what the Swedish singer does best; meanwhile, Rosalía’s new album “Lux” advocated for the opposite. “The more we are in the era of dopamine, the more I want the opposite,” argued the Spanish singer. But whereas “Lux” is a collision between the worlds of pop and classical, “House” is a true synthesis of the two. Just as Cage and Riley rebelled against the constraints of classical music, Charli and Rosalía seem to tap into a boredom, or even cynicism, with the mass-appeal pop of the past.
