Authenticity

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

Swept up in the Instagramization of the 2010s, the contemporary poetry world saw an exaltation of ‘honesty’ as an aesthetic priority. Poetry not as craft, but as ‘outlet,’ with the goal not of developing ourselves and enriching our understanding of the world, but of sitting more comfortably with how we already were and what we already believed.