[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Room For Us, a space where queer voices thrive.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host, P, and every single week.
[SPEAKER_00]: I like to sit down, get vulnerable, and talk about all things queer with all of you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for this week's episode, I wanted to talk about Charlie XX, and her latest film, The Moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know this came out, I want to say like it was maybe the end of January, but released worldwide early feb.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I am a little late to watching this film, but I actually can't get it off my mind and I really wanted to speak about it on the podcast, just as my own personal review.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I saw this a few nights ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to break down basically what I thought the message was at the film a little bit about Charlie XEX.
[SPEAKER_00]: And just a warning before we get into this episode, there are going to be spoilers that I talk about, so if you're interested in seeing the film, make sure you do do that and then you can come back and listen to this episode and we can break it down.
[SPEAKER_00]: So here's a quick synopsis of the film.
[SPEAKER_00]: As her arena tour debut looms, a pop star finds herself caught inside the afterglow of a breakout summer, under the mounting pressure of what it costs to stay on top.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the cool thing about this film is that it is shown as a mockumentary, which Harley Xiex playing herself amid the explosion of her album, Brat.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the film is starring Charlie Xiex, directed by Aiden Zimiri, who was worked
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you don't know much about Charlie X the X, I can give you a little bit more info, because her story is actually very interesting, and she has been in the music industry for a very long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So her full name is Charlotte Emma Hesen.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was born on August 2nd 1992 in Cambridge, England, and she comes from a mixed background.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her mother is of Gujarati Indian descent from Uganda,
[SPEAKER_00]: spent time with her family in Crawley and attended Bishops' Stortford College.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as a kid, she actually struggled a lot with bullying and discrimination for being mixed race in a mostly white environment.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing about Charlie is she has always been a pop girly.
[SPEAKER_00]: She loved pop music early on, especially artists like Spice Girls and Britney Spears.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she started writing songs at just 14.
[SPEAKER_00]: She got the name Charlie XX from an old MSN messenger username and decided to keep it.
[SPEAKER_00]: She actually kind of got her start in the music scene, as early as 14 when she was writing music.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she actually persuaded her parents to grant her a loan to record her first album titled 14.
[SPEAKER_00]: She would post songs and demos from the album on our MySpace page, which caught the attention of a promoter running numerous illegal warehouse raves and parties in East London.
[SPEAKER_00]: Charlie was invited to perform at these raves and was billed on flyers under the stage name Charlie XCX, which also means Kish Charlie Kiss.
[SPEAKER_00]: Since then, Charlie has expressed a lot of distaste for her MySpace music going as far to call it gimmicky dance tracks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then from 2012 to 2015, Charlie Xiex releases the album's true romance and sucker, where she collaborated with various producers at artists and her music career really started to grow.
[SPEAKER_00]: As the years go on, Charlie releases more albums like room room, number one angel, pop two, how I'm feeling now in crash.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, from 2023 to 2025, is the whole era of Brat.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that like green album cover, the lowercase writing for Brat, we've sought everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in early 2024, Charlie Xiax performed a highly exclusive party girl set for boiler room in Brooklyn.
[SPEAKER_00]: Over 37,000 people RSV peed, the most ever, but only 400 were let in.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the show featured surprise guests and previews of songs from her upcoming album.
[SPEAKER_00]: And soon after she released singles like Von Dutch and 360, leading up to her 6 album Brat, which ended up dropping in June of 2024.
[SPEAKER_00]: The album was met with huge critical praise, earning one of our highest review scores of the year.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's bold lime green cover and brat aesthetic went viral online and actually also crossed into politics being used by Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential campaign.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, as we get back to the film, Charlie Xiex is the moment is brilliant because it pulls back the curtain on what success actually feels like for a pop star at her peak, not glamorous, but very pressured, and at times a little hollow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Coming off the massive commercial and pop cultural impact of Brat, the film captures that uneasy space where you've made it.
[SPEAKER_00]: gets suddenly everything becomes more controlled, more manufactured and less personal.
[SPEAKER_00]: It speaks to the fear of losing your edge once you become mainstream.
[SPEAKER_00]: The references to things like branded, brat credit cards, highlight how art gets commodified, and your identity is turned into products and campaigns.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the beginning of the film, you kind of start to see how people are meeting about
[SPEAKER_00]: Charlie's brand.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's been doing all these other campaigns and you can see it slowly starting to grow and her team is like, how do we keep her on the top like this, this success of Brad has been explosive like something they actually didn't expect.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we actually find out in the film, and once again, this is very mockumentary style, so it almost kind of seems like you are there with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like you're not just an audience watching, you are with them through all these moments, through all these meetings.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's almost like the boring parts.
[SPEAKER_00]: in that they feel that you would believe wouldn't be shown in like a music documentary.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's not curated.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very, very real.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there is a scene when Charlie is in a car and she needs to hop on a Zoom meeting to meet this creative director that her
[SPEAKER_00]: label actually hired and his name is Johannes and he is played by Alexander Skarsgard and he plays this role so well and right away you can see that Charlie is confused saying where is Celeste which is a character who is meant to be Charlie's like own personal creative director like someone she works with very very closely but the label believes that bringing in Johannes
[SPEAKER_00]: is going to be a good move for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he is being pulled in to create a concert film for her tour.
[SPEAKER_00]: And right away, you can see that Johannes does not understand Charlie or Celeste Vision.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this symbolizes the industry machine taking over, where decisions are driven by marketability, rather than true artistic authenticity.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even if Charlie disagrees, she is locked into contracts and expectations and is forced to perform a version of herself, that sells.
[SPEAKER_00]: What makes it pretty powerful is the self-awareness.
[SPEAKER_00]: That Charlie does display in this film.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it's very real.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead of celebrating this like crazy fame, she's actually documenting the cost of it, the anxiety of staying relevant, the pressure to top your last success, and the sense that the moment everyone else envies might actually feel very isolating from the inside.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's both a critique of pop stardom and a confession about how fragile that position
[SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't help but think about my favorite pop girl, Britney Spears.
[SPEAKER_00]: Similarly to the era of Brat and how commercially successful that album is, Britney's success really, really skyrocketed the moment she hit the scene in the late 90s.
[SPEAKER_00]: And everything was like marketable with Britney's image.
[SPEAKER_00]: And most recently,
[SPEAKER_00]: Britney Spears sold her music catalog for 200 million, and she actually, I don't think she has come out to speak about this to the public, so it's more up to speculation as to why she did, but there's probably like a few several key factors that played into this role of her selling her catalog.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, there's immediate guaranteed wealth, so a lump, some payout, removes financial uncertainty, and instead of waiting on royalties over decades, she receives a massive up-front payment that she can control right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: This can also be some stability after the conservatorship, so after her long conservatorship ended in 2021,
[SPEAKER_00]: securing her finances independently was definitely a priority, so selling the catalog provides stability without needing to tour, promote or rely on industry structures that she just may not trust anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also her way of stepping back from the music industry.
[SPEAKER_00]: Brittany has been very open about not wanting to return to the pop machine full time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Selling the catalog allows her to benefit from her past work without actively participating in the business side of the music.
[SPEAKER_00]: and catalog sales are also booming.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many major artists have sold catalogs recently because valuations are extremely high in the streaming era.
[SPEAKER_00]: Buyers see classic pop catalogs as reliable long-term assets.
[SPEAKER_00]: And really in Britney's story, I think this speaks a lot to like the emotional distance and control.
[SPEAKER_00]: For some artists, selling can also be separating from a painful past, and much of Britney's career unfolded under intense control by others, so converting that legacy into personal freedom must feel very empowering for her in ways, despite it also being emotional, especially for some fans.
[SPEAKER_00]: And why this resonates culturally is that Britney's sale highlights a bigger shift in pop music.
[SPEAKER_00]: Songs are no longer just art.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're intellectual property portfolios worth hundreds of millions.
[SPEAKER_00]: It also feeds into conversations about ownership, autonomy, and what happens to an artist's work once it becomes bigger than them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like tying this back to the moment, Charlie XX isn't just worried about relevance.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's grappling with the fact that the Charlie XX brand has become bigger than she is.
[SPEAKER_00]: After the success of Brad, every decision suddenly carries huge expectations.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can see in the film she stops trusting her instincts and starts choosing what feels safest.
[SPEAKER_00]: It shows how pop startem can create the split between the artist and the product.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're staying on top can matter more than staying true to yourself and it's a very very harsh reality it happens all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's less about the artist's vision and more how to corporatirize their success for maximum profit.
[SPEAKER_00]: A big example in this film is the green brat credit card, and this is actually the biggest scandal that takes place.
[SPEAKER_00]: Charlie's label partners with a bank against her will to create the brat credit card, which is aimed for a young queer demographic.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fictional bank in this film ended up going bankrupt for several reasons, so there could have been like false advertising and technical failures.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Charlie failed to include the necessary terms and conditions in her Instagram announcement for the card.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a scene where she kind of impossibly announces the use of this card.
[SPEAKER_00]: I kind of have to like look into this a little bit more
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to tie something, I believe she did, they kind of brush over this, but it's basically showing that there's this mass fraud against the team and the credit card.
[SPEAKER_00]: So due to the improperly promoted terms, many have her fans who they call like little gay criminals in the film.
[SPEAKER_00]: committed fraud, causing the bank Howard Sterling to totally collapse, and this causes severe backlash.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fraudulent activity and improper promotion let the massive social media backlash, which forces the company into bankruptcy.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, the movie uses the storyline to critique the commercialization of the brat brand, and the dangers of attempting to turn art into an over-marketed product.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in truth, there was no Brett credit card or like a financial controversy through this like album promotion.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was also no single creative director served as the blueprint for the character Johannes.
[SPEAKER_00]: and there was never a concert film for Brat backed by Amazon.
[SPEAKER_00]: We know Charlie's personal creative director Celeste and the film is portrayed by Haley Benton Gates, and this draws inspiration from Charlie Xiex's real-life creative director, image and stress.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's this closing voice memo which Charlie Leaves for Celeste in the film where she says in another world, we made the show we wanted to.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is her finally letting go of Brad as she just goes through with this Amazon concert film.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, rather than getting your typical like music documentary from Charlie, I really think she took this moment and reframed the success of Brat as a statement on creative control.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also trying to show us like an alternate path, like the version of events that might have unfolded, if we had an all-decided to leave the Brat Party.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think over time too, as artists evolve, fans also start to put Brat Tibet in a way, you know, and embracing a different kind of celebration as Charlie gets ready to pivot into a whole new sound.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is like the importance too of like,
[SPEAKER_00]: allowing artists to take on that creative control and not feel like they need to stay in something because of the pressure or maybe it won't be as successful like nothing is going to be as big as brat.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think we are changing that narrative and fans are going to evolve with Charlie as she continues to grow herself.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Charlie did just release her latest album with her in heights and partnership too with the film.
[SPEAKER_00]: That stars Jacob Alordi and Margo Robbie.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I haven't had a chance to listen to whether in heights yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've heard a few songs, but I'm going to be sure to listen to it from front to back.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just to kind of see how this also differs from her past album.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm excited to see where her vision goes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And ultimately,
[SPEAKER_00]: there's so many messages buried in this film and I would love to know for any of the listeners who watched the moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: What did you think?
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to know, what did you think about this style?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a classic mockumentary.
[SPEAKER_00]: As mentioned, it's not your typical music documentary film that you receive a lot from artists or a concert film where artists are taking you behind the scenes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those can feel very heavily curated and what I loved about this film is that it's
[SPEAKER_00]: shows the realness even at times where it might feel dry.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's the reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is what you're seeing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I really appreciated she took us there to show us the not so glamour aside of being a pop star and being so at the top of your game.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am such a fan of Charlie XCX and I can't wait to continue watching her journey and I trust the vision.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am so here for it and can't wait to see what else comes up.
[SPEAKER_00]: But like I said, let me know your thoughts on the film.
[SPEAKER_00]: I did really enjoy it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's something that I want to go back and read more articles about it and understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: her meaning behind the film and I am a big pop culture lover.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean I grew up listening to pop music like I said Britney Spears was like my main pop girl growing up.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was always very interested in like learning more about what that industry is like and also in ways how corrupt it really is and what it can do to someone's creative vision.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think Charlie did a great job summarizing this
[SPEAKER_00]: mind is also so brilliant, very visually beautiful, and yeah, definitely something I want to watch again to see if I can like, to see if the message is remain as clear as they did the first time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode, and I will see you all next week.