Pop Sublime: Charli XCX, Gen Z’s answer to Romantic poets

Pop star Charli XCX is turning to acting in the new film Erupcja, where she recites Lord Byron’s poem Darkness. Though two centuries apart, Charli and Byron share a fascination with celebrity, legacy, and self-mythology — themes that also run through Brat, Charli’s sixth studio album.

Byron was notorious in Regency England for rumours of incest, homosexuality, and vampirism, while contemporaries described him as addicted to fame. Irish writer Marguerite Gardiner remarked in 1823 that “Byron had so unquenchable a thirst for celebrity that no means were left untried that might attain it.”

Brat is similarly preoccupied with the construction of identity, with Charli building her “party girl” persona through aggressive branding and lyrics such as, “When I go to the club I wanna hear those club classics / I wanna dance to me.”

In Might Say Something Stupid, she admits she is “famous but not quite” and wonders if she “belong[s] here anymore.” This recalls John Keats’ 1818 poem When I Have Fears, where he fears dying before achieving literary greatness. Charli inherits the Romantic image of the lonely artist haunted by the pursuit of genius.

The anxiety of legacy surfaces again in Apple, where she uses the fruit as a Gothic metaphor for inheritance and cursed fate. Byron’s On Leaving Newstead Abbey conjures a similar sense of ancestral haunting. Romantic poetry often wrestled with the pull between inheritance and decay; Charli’s lyrics show how those same tensions resonate today.

Romantic poets also turned to the archaic and classical, looking back through mythology, ruins, and medievalism, as in Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. Brat mirrors this impulse with nods to Y2K aesthetics and early 2000s culture. In Rewind, Charli sings:

Used to burn CDs full of songs I didn’t know /

Used to sit in my bedroom, puttin’ polish on my toe /

Recently, I’ve been thinkin’ ‘bout a way simpler time /

Sometimes, I really think it would be cool to rewind.

Here, nostalgia becomes a creative lens, just as it did for the Romantics.

The sublime — nature’s overwhelming power — fascinated Romantic poets. In Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, towering cliffs overshadow the “din / Of towns and cities.” Charli adapts this mode in Everything is Romantic, but with a twist: “Bad tattoos on leather tan skin / Jesus Christ on a plastic sign” juxtaposed with “Lemons on the trees and on the ground / Pompeii in the distance.” Where the Romantics often privileged nature over the artificial, Charli embraces both, expanding Romantic ideas into a 21st-century aesthetic.

The most overtly Romantic track on Brat is So I, an elegy for producer Sophie, who died in 2020. Charli mourns her as a lost genius: “Your star burns so bright / … You had a power like a lightnin’ strike.” Shelley’s elegy Adonais for Keats makes a similar claim — that poetic brilliance endures through art. Charli echoes this in: “Your sounds, your words live on, endless.” Romantic elegies live on in popular music, shaping how artists memorialise one another and confront grief.

Romanticism also endures as rebellion. Media scholar David Tetzlaff calls it the “common language of middle-class rebelliousness.” Brat channels this in neon branding, hyperpop textures, and distorted autotune, earning a place in Rolling Stone’s 250 greatest albums of the 21st century. While “Brat Summer” may feel like a TikTok fad, the album demonstrates how Romantic concerns reappear in unexpected forms.

Far from fading, Romantic poetry’s legacy thrives in pop music’s neon heart.

The Conversation