Authenticity

Pretty much everything in life is like this: there are some ways you can show up that just feel better. And when you show up for the truest and most beautiful version of your life that you can imagine, you feel excited and alive.

Confessional art can be beautiful, and it can be terrible; either way, to love it only as a representation of what we already know is to deny it, and ourselves, a much richer complexity. Pop music is where fantasies are played out, turned into mansions and lived in, where five hundred people can tumble out of a clown car and every dream comes true.

Through both the album itself and her content around it, Charli has been honest and candid about where she’s at. It’s a refreshingly honest contribution amidst a category clogged with insincerity. She’s holding the insecurity of being who she is, online, in the world, in these parties along with the rush of just being a person getting lit with her

Meanwhile, a fixation on honesty continues to pervade popular arts discourse, music included. Indie scenesters have historically been the ones to agitate most over authenticity, but in the golden age of confessional pop music, the aesthetic concern with honesty isn’t limited to subculture anymore. Direct access to artists’ personal lives seems more