I’m writing a novel, which has been making me think about my legacy, and inevitably, death. The best cure to my existential crisis was Charli XCX’s Lollapalooza set.
I’ve been listening to Charli, born Charlotte Aitchison, since I discovered her on Tumblr when I was in college. At that time she was singing about boys and partying—which she continued to do as I descended into alcoholism and struggled, like she did, to find the success she craved in her career. All that changed for her with Brat, the neon green album she released two summers ago, which turned her from a kind of a niche, underground pop star into a worldwide sensation.
Music, Fashion, Film is her first follow up to Brat, after Charli composed the score and soundtrack for the film Wuthering Heights. It is a swerve in the absolute opposite direction from Brat, ditching her dancefloor-ready beats for crunchy guitars and fuzzy vocals. It is also about what to do once you have the commercial success you’ve always wanted.
Watching Charli headline Lollapalooza this weekend felt, in some ways, like a celebration of myself, given that I’ve used her music to soundtrack my life. In 2025, she wore a sash that read “little miss should have been headliner” at her Coachella afterparty; now, she is one. It’s honestly so strange to see someone living out a bigger version of the feelings you feel in yourself. A few years ago, I was considering giving up writing and changing careers. Now, I am achieving a childhood dream: a novel, with my name on it.
The last track on Music, Fashion, Film is called “No One Lasts Forever.” It’s a simple enough song, one that eschews metaphor like in a lot of Charli’s recent work. It’s got my favorite lyric on the whole album: “I’m sitting on the floor of a Parisian apartment with a French girl talking about reality.” If you are kind of an adventurous person, a kind of person who at least used to stay out all night making new friends you’ll never see again, this is a familiar late night setting. It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of being a person who likes to go out—to have an intense, clarifying, existential experience with a complete stranger.
This song is about, of course, mortality. No matter what I achieve in this life, I will die, which has frequently been my motivation for working so hard. But now, things are actually working out. I don’t have to struggle as much as I used to. I am not constantly shouldering a burden. It’s been difficult to adjust to this new reality, one where I can think further ahead into the future than the next week. You’d think the idea of my eventual death would put a damper on my achievements, but I’ve actually started to find it quite comforting.
After Charli repeats the chorus over and over like a mantra, the song fades out and into an interview with the director David Cronenberg. In an interview with the podcast Tape Notes, Charli says that this song has changed the way she thinks about her life, as it has done for me.
“I had this really interesting conversation with David when I met him in Toronto in October of last year,” she says. Cronenberg went on to tell her “quite intricately” about a near death experience he had. “I was like, were you thinking about your art and your work? And he was like, no, of course not.”
As Charli was working on this song, she flew back to Toronto to interview Cronenberg again and incorporate it into the track. After Charli’s voice fades out of the track, Cronenberg’s voice replaces hers.
“I mean, we can talk about immortal artists of various kinds,” he says, his voice deep and occasionally cracking. “And it can turn out that, yes, some artists have created art that has really survived thousands of years, and that's fantastic, but experientially, for them: They are dead, they are gone, they are not experiencing that. These are true things and thank goodness for them. I really feel, and you hear me assuring you that oblivion is freedom.”
At the end of Charli’s set at Lollapalooza, it started to rain. She couldn’t have asked for better weather. “No One Lasts Forever” was the last song on her set, and she stood in the rain with her dancers, her blown out hair slowly turning into soft waves, as the entire interview with Cronenberg played out, his words transcribed on a screen behind her: “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever.”
After I first listened to Music, Fashion, Film, I watched the Cronenberg film The Shrouds, which I had not seen when it was released in 2024. It’s a movie about a man named Karsh who is so deeply in grief about his wife’s death that he has created a new burial method that allows people to watch their loved ones slowly decompose. He already has a plot prepared for himself, next to his wife. He dreams of her every night, dreams that she keeps going to a doctor that takes away parts of her, her body so frail that an embrace breaks her hip. The lack of her physical presence drives him crazy. All he has left is a decaying body and his desire to eventually join her in death.
Cronenberg’s wife died in 2017 from cancer. He told RogerEbert.com that making this film wasn’t about catharsis.
“To me, art is not therapy, and there’s no catharsis. It’s not cathartic to do something like this film, for me,” he said. “Doing the movie was more because, as an artist, you tend to shape your experience of life into some kind of art, and that’s your impulse to do that. But, as I say, it’s not for catharsis, and it’s not for therapy. I mean, listen, if there’s some sculptor or painter who said, ‘No, what I do is therapy,’ fine. I’m not going to argue. But for me, I don’t see art as being that; it’s something else. I’m the same as Karsh. You’re looking at it, but that doesn’t make it less painful.”
I think I’m like that too. Art helps me understand myself better, process things—I do have that tendency to shape my experiences into art—but I go to therapy for my therapy. In multiple interviews promoting The Shrouds Cronenberg also says “the body is reality,” a line taken from another recent film of his, Crimes of the Future. His focus on this world, this moment, this reality, not any other possible realities, has been incredibly clarifying for me these days. I cry when things are hurtful. My heart feels warmed when I feel joy. And some day, all these neurons will stop firing and I’ll die, and I’ll never know what happens after that. That used to scare me a lot, but now it just feels like a miracle that I’m alive at all.
“You need to discover that feeling of the crushing highs and lows of ego,” Charli sings on the last track of her album, “where one minute you know you're the worst, and the next minute you know you're better than everyone in the room. But know that nothing's gonna last forever.”
No pain lasts forever. No love lasts forever, either. No art will last forever, but also fascism won’t last forever. The whole world will turn over and forget me, some day. And thank god for that.
