In recent months and years, I’ve been grooving on a specific and extremely powerful kind of musical magic I like to call “vulnerable pop.”
These songs are the booming, energetic, synth-heavy bangers that, while ready for radio, also reach great depths in their 3 minutes. Every time you hear them you’re seized by the desire to dance your ass off at the club and simultaneously cry at the raw emotion and unflinching honesty in the lyrics.
There are many artists that could fall under this sub-genre…The 1975’s entire discography, anyone? But at the moment I’m particularly taken by my favorite female musicians who are doing it their way and making it super fun and cool to feel your feelings fully: Chappell Roan, Carly Rae Jepsen, Sabrina Carpenter, Ariana Grande, and especially Charli XCX—our patron saint of Brat Summer, finally getting her due thanks to a new album that epitomizes vulnerable pop.
There are important, brash, soul-baring moments all over the Brat tracklist that have yanked at my heartstrings since first listen, but “Girl, so confusing” takes the cake, astounding me so much with every listen that I had no choice but to write this love letter dedicated to it.
“Yeah, I don’t know if you like me
Sometimes I think you might hate me
Sometimes I think I might hate you
Maybe you just wanna be me”
We all get self-conscious and desperate to please; who hasn’t felt this way at some point in their life? But I think the reason this specific song instantly captured people’s attention is because it perfectly conveys the universal tangle of emotions common with frenemy situations, female friendships, social acquaintances, and individual inner conflicts.
This can take the form of so many different thought and behavior spirals. Discovering your identity and realizing how little you know about anything in life, puzzling out how you feel about your friends or other women whom you may not talk to but are in your orbit, feeling threatened by them but also a strange need to impress them and/or know everything about them (regardless of whether they love or hate you), creating narratives about someone’s character based on what little you do know, cutting them off, distancing yourself from them without a word or vice versa…all so you can feel a little more liked, stable, powerful, in control, better about yourself. It really is confusing—and exhausting—sometimes to be a girl!
The “Girl, so confusing” remix is the most wholesome kind of plot twist, turning Charli’s original dialogue about her insecurities and projections into an open conversation with the very person rumored to be on the other end of those projections, Lorde.
Lorde lays out her side of the story with a hefty dose of vulnerability herself—don’t get me started on the gut punch of “It’s just self defense until you’re building a weapon,” seriously?!?—and explains her own incorrect assumptions, overthinking, and internal battles that contributed to the tension. She ends her verse with the declaration that she’ll ride for Charli and honestly, the whole damn thing feels like therapy. Nonexistent beef squashed, misunderstanding resolved, air cleared, two underrated self-aware pop queens ready to be friends and continue making incredible music!
This song is empowering, emotionally intelligent pop genius. This is a big middle finger to the traps society likes to put women in, especially the ones that tell us the only way we can have it all/achieve success/love ourselves is by climbing over each other in the race to the top. I absolutely love when music is done this way, witty and succinct lyrics that simplify the complex, excavating a personal and therefore universal experience and resolving it against a punchy beat.
To me, the tidal wave of virality and praise the “Girl, so confusing” remix has received in the last few weeks also reflects many people’s shared desire for honest communication—from ourselves, from and with everyone we hold dear. I don’t think anyone in the public eye should lay themselves bare and expose their flaws for our consumption, nor should we demand they do so, but it is delightful when they create real, vulnerable art for themselves and we get to experience it too. In an odd way, the juxtaposition of Charli’s and Lorde’s intimate reflections on their problems with the upbeat club music gives us permission to see our own wrongdoings and embarrassments in a lighter way and allows us to breathe, to move through and beyond them.
Digital communication has become our primary way of interacting with society and the world, and this makes it easier than ever for us to be dishonest. Not always maliciously, but in even the small ways we dismiss our feelings, curate our online personas, brush things off, put on a cheery and surface level air of ease for our friends, we hide parts of who we are. Better to keep our anxieties and less desirable traits and “too much”-ness tamped down inside, right? Better to stay quiet about that problem with that person instead of doing the more difficult, painful, right thing of addressing it? Nope, no more excuses! This Charli and Lorde remix proves our self-limiting tendencies wrong and goes to show that if both people are willing to communicate, on the other side of awkward confrontation lies clarity, fresh starts, true connection. How refreshing! How necessary!
It could be revolutionary if instead of allowing ego and self-shaming to control how we act and react, instead of letting resentment silently fester or misunderstandings linger in the air, we told the truth about how we feel. May this “vulnerable girl pop” moment inspire us all to be more authentic and committed to working it out on the remix IRL.