Maybe you don’t have to take that statement completely seriously. It’s less a manifesto, more a declaration that this record is not going to be a retread of Brat’s ferocious celebration of club culture and “365 party girls”. But the idea of dying recurs again and again in Music, Fashion, Film’s lyrics. Sometimes it’s a kind of figurative suicide: “It makes me wanna throw my life away,” Charli sings on “Camera”, as she reflects on the risk that her acting ambitions could come at the expense of her pop career.

Sometimes, death here is the measure of affection: “I’d cry if you died,” she promises on “Magic Metal Montana”, a platonic love song addressed to her long-term collaborator AG Cook. Sometimes, there are shades of apocalypse: in “SS26” (a self-aware skip through the marketing conventions of the entertainment industry), Charli deadpans that we are all “walking on a runway that goes straight to hell / Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion or film.”

It’s completely fitting that, when Rolling Stone magazine asked Charli to suggest a location for an interview, she proposed the Hollywood Forever cemetery. And by the end of the album, death has become literal. “No One Lasts Forever” is built around a sample from a conversation between Charli and the 83-year-old Canadian horror director David Cronenberg. It cuts in midway through Cronenberg describing an incident in which he collapsed. “As I was lying there on the sidewalk, I did not think about art at all,” he says. “I thought about people, I thought about life.”

“Yes, some artists have created art that has really survived thousands of years,” Cronenberg continues, “but experientially, for them, they are dead, they are gone, they are not experiencing that.” The track, and the album, ends in a minute and a half of Cronenberg’s voice looping around the words “they are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever” while the music disintegrates underneath him. It’s beautiful, it’s profound, and it’s one of the strangest pieces of pop music ever recorded. 

This isn’t a completely new fixation for Charli: you can see Music, Fashion, Film as a second act to the gothic masochism of her Wuthering Heights collection. Or you can watch her mockumentary, The Moment (an imperfect but also underrated satire on the music industry), which imagines a version of Charli who went all-out to cash in on the Brat phenomenon. As things spiral out of control for the Charli of the film, she veers ever closer to self-destruction, until she goes AWOL, sparking suicide rumors. 

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In the film, this all works out for the best, commercially at least: when the fictional Charli comes back from the dead, she’s hotter than she’s ever been. But she’s also creatively moribund. Her juggernaut success comes at the ultimate Faustian price for an artist. After The Moment’s release, there was a lot of speculation about whether it was intentionally mocking Taylor Swift’s Eras tours. The inclusion of a special thanks in the credits for the Swiftologist, a video essayist who posts critical takes on Swift’s work, suggests that the answer to that is “maybe”.

The alleged Charli-Taylor beef begins publicly in 2024, with the song “Sympathy is Like a Knife” on Brat — an earnest, self-lacerating account of Charli’s feelings of inferiority around another pop star who she sees “backstage at my boyfriend’s show”. (Both Swift and Charli were at one point dating members of the 1975: Swift broke up with singer Matty Healy, and Charli married drummer George Daniel.) 

Swift appeared to respond the next year with “Actually Romantic” on her album The Life of a Showgirl, a clod-hopping and misjudged track addressed to an obsessive hater. “It feels like you’re flirting with me,” croons Swift, in an unconvincing imitation of someone who doesn’t care. Compared to Brat, The Life of a Showgirl sounded pedestrian and self-satisfied, and “Actually Romantic” was one of its weakest tracks. The song reaches an apotheosis of cringe with the line: “It’s kind of making me wet.”

What’s interesting here isn’t so much the ins and outs of two women in their thirties who may or may not have had a falling out (neither has gone on the record regarding their feelings about each other). Rather, it’s the contrast between two different ways of dealing with making it. Since 2022, Swift has settled into an imperial phase that has seen her brutally expunge experimentation and vulnerability from her output. The last traces of risk-taking seemed to leave her body somewhere around the album Midnights. 

If I had to pinpoint the moment Swift stopped being interesting to me as an artist, it would be the 2023 tweet in which she announced a re-recorded version of “Snow on the Beach”, her duet with Lana del Rey: “You asked for it, we listened: Lana and I went back into the studio specifically to record more Lana on ‘Snow on the Beach’.” You asked for it, we listened, as though making pop music were a question of beta testing and tweaking based on user feedback until the product has been perfectly refined. The customer is always right.

This is the absolute antithesis of the Charli approach to creativity, which is to court danger for the sake of experimentation. On “Camera”, she sings about how acting offers the prospect of “Something new and undiscovered/ And something kind of violent/ Daring to fail and being ugly/ I’m inspired and alive.” Charli recently posted Lou Reed’s despised-at-the-time 1975 album Metal Machine Music to her stories. Better, in her version of the creative life, to flop than to fade away: nothing is as frightening as inertia. 

Music, Fashion, Film is several orders of magnitude less confrontational than Metal Machine Music, but like Reed in the Seventies, Charli is facing in the direction of the future. Her post-Brat death-drive caught a mood that has been picked up by some of this year’s greatest pop albums. Worst Girl in America by Slayyyter (an artist Charli singled out for praise in her Rolling Stone interview) is a concept album about a party girl’s rise and demise: the last song, “Brittany Murphy”, is a giddily hook-filled suicide note. 

Even more powerfully, Madonna’s Confessions II is — under the thumping return to the floor-fillers of Confessions on a Dance Floor — a record filled with thoughts of mortality. Having spent the years since the first Confessions frantically outrunning her own age, Madonna at 67 suddenly sounds like an artist coming to terms with both her own mortality and her influence. “People really think there’s a beginning and ending to this thing called life. But energy never dies,” she says over the intro to “Fragile”. It is the inverted version of Cronenberg’s words on “No One Lasts Forever”.

You don’t need to be in your pensionable years to feel that existence right now is precarious. This is an unstable world politically, and a frightening world environmentally: large tracts of Europe and North America have been turned to ash this summer. Charli is correct that art is not going to save us — not music, not fashion, not film. The restless desire to make something new, the impulse to create is still worth following for its own sake. It’s one way of knowing you’re alive. When you’ve accepted that your life is finite, why would you waste it doing the same thing on repeat to please other people?

For reasons of commerce, the punter is driven to disregard the fact that the shops will be closed for only one whole day, and is instead encouraged to feel that they are prepping for an imminent world war. This, combined with our current tendency to pathologize even the slightest mental pothole, means that magazines are running pieces with the headline “How to help your children manage their festive emotions”, while the rest of us hit the shops to the soundtrack of Mariah Carey in a wild panic. Kiddies have been eating too much chocolate, puking and crying at Christmas for as long as anyone can remember, but now it must be yet another bit of emotional housework on the part of harassed parents striving to make things “perfect”.

You’d think that with all this going on, listening to a cheery Christmas song might provide a moment of aural respite. After all, as far back as the fourth century, soothing early hymns such as “Jesus Refulsit Omnium” were associated with the celebration. But in Victorian times, secular festive songs which swerved the religious aspect in favor of the comfort and joy motif became more popular. And it was this idea of mindless scoffing and quaffing which has proved a devastatingly rich seam for Christmas popsters ever since; whenever I hear Slade’s 1973 “Merry Xmas Everybody”, I get a rush of gratitude that I was a teenager when such unifying proletarian jollity ruled. Noddy Holder, true to form, wrote the lyrics in one night at his mum’s house in Walsall after an evening out drinking in Wolverhampton; he has referred to the song as “a nice pension plan…it’s like having a hit record every year”, with the annual revenue coming in at around half a million pounds. He would later recall the lyrics as describing a distinctly “family-based”, “very working-class Christmas”, with the closing line “Look to the future now, it’s only just begun”, somewhat counterintuitively influenced by the power cuts which were a side-effect of the miners strike. This was the old optimistic way of thinking, the pull-up-your-socks, the there’ll-be-bluebirds-over-the-white-cliffs-of-Dover-tomorrow-just-you-wait-and-see mindset which we appear to have lost now that “Helping Your Children Manage Their Festive Emotions” is an actual thing.

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For despite Slade’s flagrant vulgarity, and the ceaseless leering at some imaginary dolly-bird which was Holder’s resting lech face, Christmas songs were still innocent then — wholesome, even. “Merry Xmas Everybody”, with the granny who maintains initially that “the old songs are the best” before being “up and rock-and-rolling with the rest”, was an heir of “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” and its line “Everyone dancing merrily in the new, old-fashioned way!” In both, the generations, though initially hostile to each others’ cultural choices, eventually come together.

But since then, a corrupting rot has set in. And The X-Factor must shoulder much of the blame, given that, from 2005 to 2010, it seemed as if one of the great Christian festivals was being co-opted for the empire-building purposes of Simon Cowell. One didn’t have to be a big fan of Rage Against the Machine to feel brattishly pleased that “Killing In The Name” was 2009’s Christmas Number One after a public campaign to get it there — thus preventing Joe McElderry’s “The Climb” from reaching the summit. RATM even gave the profits from the single to Shelter, which made their record far more Christmassy than the X-Factor offering which simply laid some Christmas bells over the schmaltzy “my struggle” lyrics.

Another wretched commercial castration of the power of pop music was on hand to take over from The X-Factor; the John Lewis Christmas ad, which specialized in either taking good songs and wringing all the juice out of them with desiccated cover versions or playing the originals of great songs (this year Alison Limerick’s “Where Love Lives”) and thereby mugging one’s memories in the name of turning a Yuletide buck.

It’s censoriousness, though, which has had the most enervating effect on the Christmas record. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was condemned as a date-rape duet several years ago, while in 2020 the BBC announced that the audience for “Fairytale Of New York” would be segregated; unexpurgated on Radio 2, for the sassy old, and censored on Radio 1, for the sensitive young, leading me to believe that if rock and roll were invented these days, old people would be out there dancing to it and young people would be burning the records. This year, a live version of the track — often named the nation’s favorite, but never to reach Number One — has been released, prompting the BBC, in best Scrooge mode, to announce a ban on it across all playlists.

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Christmas makes us think of not just what we still have left (our loved ones, our sanity) but what we have lost (ditto). The best festive records inspire a wistful nostalgia, summoning our ghosts of Christmas — past and present. My most beloved Christmas music memory is of my mother, who would die in my arms a few years later, and my son Jack, now 10 years a suicide, cuddled up on the sofa at my parents’ home in Bristol, singing along to the Spice Girls “2 Become 1” on Top of the Pops. It should have been comical (the song is about sex, with a few lines dedicated to the importance of wearing a condom) but their voices blended so beautifully together, the old lady and the little boy, both of them so full of hope.

Now the Spice Girls are gone — the last pop group to unite the generations, and probably the only one apart from the Beatles — and so has the sainted George Michael, who died on Christmas Day 2016 of heart disease. His “Last Christmas” was last week’s Number One, and has been the Christmas chart-topper for the last two years, something it never achieved in his lifetime, and very likely prompted in some part by the public tenderness felt for him following posthumous revelations about his immense generosity.

He would have been happy, I feel, to have been toppled by Kylie. Now that the Queen is dead and a weak and divisive monarch is on the throne, it’s possible that Kylie is the nearest thing we have to one who can unite the nation — in every degree of fondness from casual affection to wild adulation. Over the years (she’s 57 now), we have seen her go from ingénue to grande dame with grace and skill — Sex Kitten turned Mother Courage; Show Pony turned Stoic. The Christmas Number One spot has been won by her at the merciful closing of a bad year — a spark of sequined light in the darkness. So with Kylie-shaped order restored, we may go about the allegedly dreadful slog of shopping, traveling and party planning with a spring in our step however briefly, before we once more resume our lives in a benighted nation where it is always winter and never Christmas.

It’s easy now to condemn the media of the 2000s as a theater of humiliation. At the time, though, the prevailing concern was that everyone had become too soft. A generation that had been coddled by an “all-must-have-prizes” mentality had grown up entitled, lazy and egotistical. “In today’s celebrity-obsessed world, every youngster wants to be famous,” as Cowell sneered in his 2003 autobiography — called, in an impeccable piece of branding — I Don’t Mean to Be Rude, But… Cowell’s job, as he saw it, was to “prick the bubble of what I regard as this self-absorbed egotism” on behalf of an audience that was sick of the tyranny of talentless wannabes. 

But times change and so, apparently, does Cowell. Simon Cowell: The Next Act, which launches on Netflix this week, is yet another talent show format. We watch Cowell, now 66, as he attempts to create a new boyband to follow in the footsteps of One Direction, the X Factor-forged five piece whose global success marked the pinnacle of his starmaking powers. Since the death of ex-member Liam Payne in a drugs-related balcony fall last year, the band has also become a cautionary tale of fame’s savagery. Shortly before he died, Payne reportedly told an onlooker: “I used to be in a boy band — that’s why I’m so fucked up.” 

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Which helps to explain why Cowell is so keen to be seen to be reinventing himself. The Cowell of 2025 is still tough (“You’ve got to be sort of ruthless,” he says in the trailer), but this is a kinder, gentler kind of entertainment. As he told The New York Times in an interview to promote the new series: “I changed over time. I did realize I’ve probably gone too far… I got that. What can I say? I’m sorry.” To further underline his newfound vulnerability, the series even features his partner Lauren Silverman, with whom he has an 11-year-old son.

The show’s drama rests on the idea that Cowell is putting everything on the line for one more shot at svengali success, but the stakes really are high. The pop culture world that made Cowell has imploded in the past 10 years. He became famous the old-fashioned way: on prime-time TV, with the backing of the tabloids, and the help of disgraced publicist Max Clifford, who had a talent for keeping his clients in the spotlight while squashing stories that might harm their image. In his autobiography, Cowell — playing up the part of the cynical impresario — wrote that “hiring Max was one of the best decisions I ever made”. 

At its peak in 2010, The X Factor was watched by over 14 million. That year, The Sun and The Mirror had a combined readership of over 4 million. Today, the red tops probably have a circulation of less than a million — and more people watch YouTube than ITV. In an effort to grasp the elusive younger audience, the next series is introducing the YouTuber KSI as a judge – a sign of where the real power lies in entertainment. The most recent series of Britain’s Got Talent averaged just over 5.5 million viewers and the last big act to come from a Cowell show was Little Mix, who won The X Factor in 2011.

Meanwhile, the less said about Clifford the better. In 2014, he became the first man to be convicted of historic sexual offenses under Operation Yewtree, and died in 2017 while serving an eight year sentence for indecent assault. The schtick of Cowell’s shows was that they were laying bare the mechanics of the entertainment business, and turning the public into entertainment insiders. While there is no suggestion whatsoever that Cowell has ever been involved in sexual impropriety, cases like Clifford’s revealed a depravity that had been concealed beneath the glitz all along. 

The market has changed, too. South Korea took the manufactured pop model embraced by Cowell and turned it into something even more ferociously disciplined and even more successful. Now, K-pop rules the world when it comes to manufactured bands. In Britain and America, the charts belong to solo girl auteurs such as Chappelle Roan and Charli XCX — artists whose fans love them precisely because they write, record, perform and create their own image with no need for a puppet master like Cowell. 

Even his own creations have turned against him. Jade, formerly of Little Mix, launched her solo career last year with the song “Angel of My Dreams”, a delirious satire of the pop industry, including the line: “sellin’ my soul to a psycho.” Cowell had signed Little Mix to his own label, Syco, so it was pretty obvious who she was referring to. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child, Cowell might have thought, if he were given to quoting King Lear, which he probably isn’t. But how apt it is for an aging ruler of a fallen kingdom.

Meanwhile, the tongue-lashing style Cowell perfected is now sorely out of step with contemporary concerns about mental health. In 2019, the TV presenter Caroline Flack — who, among other gigs, had once hosted The X Factor — killed herself in the midst of being prosecuted for assaulting her boyfriend, a case that had captured ferocious and, according to her family, unfair press attention. Her final Instagram post read: “In a world where you can be anything, be kind.” #Bekind has since been adopted as a social media watchword. It’s an injunction that would preclude making teenagers cry for entertainment. 

And then there was Payne’s death, which happened during the filming of Simon Cowell: The Next Act. In his New York Times interview, Cowell talks about his shock and sadness — “It was just awful, awful.” But when the interviewer presses him on whether what happened to Payne is a sign of the inherent toxicity of fame, Cowell does something curious. He starts discussing his own relationship with celebrity. “I honestly don’t know what is harder: trying to be famous or managing your fame,” he says. 

“Not every day has been amazing, but I’m glad I did what I did,” he continues. “I signed up for it because obviously there was something inside of me saying, I want to be well known. And I would do it all over again.” Is this the self-exculpation of a deeply cynical man? Cowell got to make his choices as an adult with a successful career in the music business behind him. One Direction were still children when they first came into contact with Cowell’s empire. Payne was just 14 when he first auditioned, and 16 when he returned to the show and was cast in 1D. 

No one so young could have known what he was letting himself in for. But even so, Cowell is telling an awkward truth about fame. We tend to talk about it now as a kind of violence done to its subjects, which it is, but it’s a kind of violence that almost never happens to people by accident. To become famous you have to want it, and want it painfully. Want it enough to sacrifice anything — including, most of all, the possibility of ever having a normal life. Want it as much as Cowell wanted it.

Cowell knew precisely how to pierce the souls of his auditioners because he was, like them, hungry for fame. He could be sublimely cruel, because he could sympathize completely with the hopefuls before him. Maybe time has softened him. Maybe fatherhood has blunted his edges. Maybe the death of Payne has given him a reckoning. But he’s still on TV because he still wants fame, and for the aspirants on Simon Cowell: The Next Act, that means he can still be a dangerous man.

The Paris La Defense Arena is where, last night, Swift began the European leg of her Eras Tour, which sprouts records and superlatives like Midas makes gold. The 2023 dates made it the first concert tour to ever gross a billion dollars. It’s forecast to double that this year. After sweeping through Asia — where a minor diplomatic incident went down when Singapore offered government subsidies to get regional exclusivity — Swift has now reached the old world. Four shows in Paris and 51 across the continent in total, ending with a five-night run at Wembley Stadium in August. She’s not the only American in town. Both the Eurostar from London and Paris itself ring out with well-projected US accents. Forget the doomy warblings about Washington’s geopolitical ebb: the spring sun is out, the dollar is strong and Europe is America’s playground.

Concertgoers — mostly young, mostly female — are in sparkly dresses, cowboy boots and glitter. The few guys here are dressed down to the point of invisibility; tonight, humanity joins those few species of birds and insects where bright colours are for babes only.

Swift is scheduled to start at eight. Two minutes beforehand, a clock on the giant screen which stretches across the back of the stage counts down — and right on time, we begin. As the arena lights dim, the tens of thousands of swaying smartphone cameras illuminate, like a phosphorescent ocean. Dancers shimmy out trailed by billowing fabric, which they manipulate to form a kind of liquid clam shell. And out of that, like Botticelli’s all-American Venus, emerges Taylor Alison Swift, 34, of West Reading, Pennsylvania, USA.

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Taylor Swift inspires love, dedication and obsessive fandom. In me, she has kindled about a decade and a half of mild but increasing curiosity. There are seven Swift songs I recognise from their titles, and none come after 2014. My musical knowledge of her petered out when she was merely a very big star, and in an era where culture was coherent enough for everyone to absorb a certain level of commercial pop. Then I started seeing her in Bloomberg and the Financial Times, attached to stories about inflation and foreign policy.

Taylor Swift’s current era — dating, it seems, from the pandemic onwards — is out-and-out imperial. She was last year’s best-selling artist worldwide, and the year before that too. Her current relationship, with the puppyish American footballer Travis Kelce, is theorised by the more batshit US conservatives to be an elaborate psyop to boost Joe Biden in this year’s presidential election. The European dates of the Eras Tour are the first after the release of her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, in April. It was not a critical success. “Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this!” read a review in Paste magazine — anonymous, because writers who criticise Swift can reliably expect online death threats from fans. Nevertheless, upon release it smashed multiple streaming records.

After the opening number, Swift pauses, for half a minute at least, to take in the sound of the crowd. Blown up to a giantess on screen, Swift looks overwhelmed, as if she hasn’t experienced this reaction before. She has, hundreds of times. But each and every member of the audience must be broken free of the billions of dollars of revenue they represent and made to feel seen. After the pause, Swift extends her wrist, as if offering it up to be kissed, and says: “Enchanté.”

The Eras Tour, as its name suggests, cycles through each of Swift’s “eras”, or albums. The various stage setups reference cityscapes, forests and, at one point, a surreal landscape of steel cages sunk into the ground either side of an open highway. Periodically, Swift sinks down a trapdoor in the middle of the stage, into what must be her era-shifting chamber, then remerges, moments later, from an ingenious new position and in a different outfit. I get the sparkly costumes now, because this is very much what Swift goes in for herself. Sparkly hot pants, sparkly ball gown, sparkly miniskirt with sparkly thigh-high boots — even what looks like a sparkly dressing gown. The battalion of dancers go through endless outfit changes too, but no-one’s allowed to sparkle quite like Swift.

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Singing and dancing her way through a typical Eras setlist lasts between three and four hours. Swift began her career writing and performing country songs in Nashville, Tennessee, where music is whittled down to a perfect product. These days, she embraces an opposite but equally American approach: superabundance. Song piles upon song. And every great American genre seems to get a hearing: pop, rock, country, folk, rap, R&B (slow and sultry), R&B (fast and spiky). I almost expect a banger inspired by Washington DC-style hardcore punk.

Not everything works. An hour in, we’ve entered the era of Folklore and Evermore, her pandemic albums. It’s ballad central: wafty and witchy and, to be honest, a bit snoozy. But then we go back in time to 1989 (or 2014, which is when that confusingly named album came out). She launches into “Shake It Off” — one of my precious seven songs — and my subconscious flashes up memories of chugging brilliant blue alcopops in sticky student nightclubs. It’s glorious.

Swift is big in the way that no other modern superstar is. Orders of magnitude bigger. The logarithmic scale could have been invented for her. This bigness manifests in the thousands upon thousands who attend her concerts, and the probable millions that try and fail to get tickets. But out of the many, one — e pluribus, unum, as a teacher might have put it to Swift in an American history class around the turn of the millennium. At one point in the show, Swift compliments the crowd. “I’m making extreme eye contact with everyone; I’m dancing with everyone; you’re so present,” she says. “And it means the world to us as performers.”

Yes, it’s what the pro that she is would and should say. But in the moment, it sounds sincere, or at least well-meaning enough to discourage any attempt to prod at its veracity. For three hours and seven minutes — this ends up being a comparatively brisk performance — Swift assembles her fans, usually only joined up by the spindly limbs of social media, into a physical community. These fans don’t just adore her; they end up adoring each other. Inspired by one of her stray lyrics from 2022, they now make friendship bracelets to trade with strangers at shows.

Truly mass culture in its most tribal form barely exists anymore. The all-consuming influence of the internet has degraded it in two substantial ways. Algorithmically generated feeds on everything from Instagram to Netflix have given us all tastes which are similar but slightly different — amid this torrent of content, it’s harder for youth tribes such as punks or New Romantics to cohere around sets of cultural tenets. And the isolated and antisocial manner in which we consume what these feeds serve up — on our phones, alone — acts as a barrier to shared experience.

But Swift is one of mass culture’s last bastions. And she presents a very good case as to why we should cling on to what’s left of it. She, like few others, can out-muscle the brute force of the algorithm and bring people together to commune around her music — some of which is good, and some of which isn’t, but that’s hardly the point. The point is the ecstatic crowd in front of her.

Her last song is, again, one I don’t know. It’s an up-tempo electropop number with sugar-rush synthesiser lines, and as it plays, we’re dazzled with sparkles, primary colours, fireworks and confetti — all that is good in the world. Swift bows with her band and her dancers, then bows alone. Then she descends, for the final time, into that hole in the stage, to get ready to cast the same spell tomorrow.