Roll with Me: Charli XCX’s Never-ending Love Affair with Cars

A black stiletto drops down from a Chevy Escalade. It’s Grammy’s night. Most of the awards have been given away, but there’s still one girl just rolling up to the party.

A white sedan dangles vertically above a dry field, the driver’s hand still on the steering wheel as she pleads, “Don’t say you love me / ‘Cause I can’t say it back.”

A woman is splayed out on your cracked windshield, caught somewhere between a sexy car wash and a hit and run. She’s serving body and blood from the hood, fixing the driver with her signature heavy-lidded gaze. Pleasure, risk, love and danger are all interlocking like an engine’s churning gears.

From her first breakout single, the car—its velocity and its inevitable collision—has been the central image of Charli XCX’s music. Rubber on cement. A sleek lavender paint job. Crying in the backseat. Lip syncing out the back of a convertible. In the breakneck world of Charli XCX, the tensions of womanhood and sexuality take shape in the machinery of the road. The car’s duality—on one hand hard titanium, and on the other precarious and vulnerable—reflects femininity’s own inherent dichotomy. 

If technology is just an extension of what the body can do, then a car can be the body the same way music can be the body: a tool that we wield for our own desires, the outward expression of our own hapless wants.

The hulking forms of cars have haunted pop music from the beginning, but across genres and eras, the car and the road have belonged to the men—it’s William DeVaughn’s flex of a “diamond in the back” Cadillac or Chamillionaire’s dangerous power game “riding dirty.” There’s the Easy Rider road trip picaresques from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan or Tom Waits, or a rollicking backroads grab at freedom in country and folk tunes. Our male heroes posture and flaunt, choose to leave it all behind. There’s never the implication that they might not be meant for the road or, worse, that they might spin out at any moment.

And sure, Charli knows how to ride like that. She stunts. She flexes. She rolls up in the passenger seat with that “get in, loser” glare. She fucks like the boys, is flirty then flighty. She knows you can’t handle it, so she stuffs you in a taxi. But there’s also a vulnerability behind all that hot metal siding. It’s a side of Charli that, up until BRAT with its diaristic lyrics and hushed vocals, hasn’t always been foregrounded but has always been present. It’s the dark backseat confession. It’s the impulse to drive to the airport and buy a one way ticket after a family fight. Or a road trip with friends in that moment where you’ve run out of things to say and are just happy in the silence, staring out the window.

What Charli and her collaborators are so good at doing, with their rippling sequencers and modulating toplines, is recreating the sheer intensity of emotions the moment they hit, when the lies we tell ourselves (“I’ll love you forever,” “I’ve never get over this,” “He’s a worthless piece of shit,” “We can never change”) are at their most real. Her project is putting face to fantasy, shape to sensation, pedal to metal. Her songs are at their most alive when their containers can match their scale. A club packed with bodies pressed flesh to flesh, a car with all the windows rolled down and an empty highway screaming past.

At some point we must consider the thought that it’s not some ironic twist of fate that, in the music we listen to and the lives we live, we once again find ourselves at the scene of the crash; we actively seek it out, in some drawn out game of chicken, staring blindly into the headlights. After all, a crash is nothing if not something to gawk at. For many women and queer people, there is no greater pleasure—nor greater discomfort—than being seen.

Joan Didion once wrote that the freeway system is the only true object of worship in Los Angeles. Anyone can drive, but not everyone has a feel for the road. In “Bureaucrats” from her essay collection The White Album, she writes, “Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over. A distortion of time occurs, the same distortion that characterizes the instant before the accident.”

Both Joan and Charli know that LA’s hottest club is the freeway, all rhythm and loop and body shake. Although she was raised in Essex, Charli XCX has spent most of her adult life splitting her time between LA and London, and it’s hard not to see her music as an extension of a lifestyle defined by events and the long stretches of road in between. “Driving round in Hollywood / I can only think about you,” she sighs in “Thoughts.” Is it ego death or is it communion working it out with the DJ, watching the miles slip by?

For all intents and purposes, Charli’s first car song is her breakout single “I Love It,” released with Swedish duo Icona Pop in 2012. Revving in with a beat from Patrik Berger and Style of Eye, “I Love It” goes from zero to 60 and stays there. It’s the unfiltered, relentless energy of a teenager who’s just got her driver’s license (and might lose it just as fast). She’s indestructible, bouncing away from a head-on bridge collision and floating up into space, away from any man too old or too slow to ever keep up. The only impulse is to let the hard machine of your body love what it breaks.

Eight years later on “forever,” another relationship ends in a wreck, but Charli is wiser, more wistful. “Love suicide / You and I drove for miles” leads into “Now we’ve got to let this go / Drove the car off the road.” And as with the complications of seeing and being seen in “Apple” (“I’ve been looking at you so long now I only see me”), Charli writes into the complicated ways that caring for someone reshapes us as people: “You’re not a ghost / You’re in my head.” When you let someone into the passenger seat, you’re responsible for the both of you.

Charli’s most iconic vehicular verses are, of course, found in 2016’s game-changing Vroom Vroom EP. Propelled by the metallic thump and grind of SOPHIE’s production, the song is an ode to pure velocity. Written and produced shortly after SOPHIE and Charli moved to Los Angeles, it was something of a creative renaissance when Charli and her collaborators wrote the bulk of Number 1 Angel, Pop 2, and the ill-fated XCX World. 

Fueled by SOPHIE and A.G. Cook’s post-human production, the car songs from this mixtape era—exemplified by tracks like “Dreamer,” “Porsche,” “3AM (Pull Up)” and “Unlock It (Lock It)”—are woozy, a headrush, night bleeding into day with your friends by your side. As much as they’re showing off like a new luxury car for every day of the week on “Dreamer,” they’re also odes to collaboration and friendship, densely packed with the kind of thoughtful and electrifying features that Charli’s become known for. On “pink diamond” in the deepest throes of lockdown, the only thing Charli wants is for her friends to “come round, pick me up in your truck.” On “Next Level Charli,” heaven is a drag race in the sky, just her and all the Angels.

Cars have long embodied the tensions between public spectacle and interior turmoil for famous women, from Princess Diana’s untimely death to Britney Spears smashing a car window with an umbrella. If the car is your own private universe out in the big bad world, then it might be the only home of the touring pop star, smuggled into a limousine while the cameras flash and the fans close in. But these barriers are more precarious than ever before. In his analysis of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, a novel centered on a group of car crash fetishists who get off on recreating celebrity car accidents, Jean Baudrillard writes about porous barriers between bodies in sex, violence, and performance. “The automobile crash had made possible the final and longed-for union of the actress and the members of her audience,” he writes.

Although Charli XCX hadn’t nearly reached the commercial heights of BRAT, how i’m feeling now and CRASH explore this dissolution of the boundaries between pop star and audience. In the pandemic when there was more plastic between us than ever before and too much closeness felt like it could cause a wreck, we found ourselves alone together with Charli on Instagram Live and Twitter, watching her songwriting in real time. It was a new step in intimacy between Charli and her fans, and the music reflected it: hushed therapy sessions, shouted anthems and visions for the future just a few more miles away.

The CRASH era was self-described by Charli as her attempt to perform pop stardom metatextually, all big hair and choreo. This was the message: See me, but don’t see me wanting you to see me. It’s her essential seduction. Charli XCX plays hard to get. Even in the BRAT era, the wandering, brutalizing eye of the public continues to relentlessly pursue the pop star in the hit-and-run “Von dutch” music video. The pop star, driven to extremes in her desire to be seen, welcomes you into the spectacle: “I’m about to crash / Come watch me, baby.”

Songs that mention cars: 43
Music videos that feature cars: 9
Songs that end with a car crash sound effect: 2
Album with the most car mentions: Pop 2