Meeting the Moment
Every popular art form of the 20th century has been destroyed, degraded, and cheapened in the 21st. Radio, film, television, music, and literature no longer reach or communicate with a mass audience. You may have a massive audience, but you’ll be siloed just like everyone else, forever unknown to a certain number of people. Even Super Bowl halftime headliner Bad Bunny can hardly be called a superstar on the level of Prince, Madonna, or Beyoncé. I know the name Bad Bunny, but I couldn’t tell you one song, couldn’t pick him out of a lineup, and couldn’t tell you a single thing about him or his music; I don’t follow Kendrick Lamar (last year’s performer), but his song “Not Like Us” was inescapable in 2024. Ditto Usher, who performed at the Super Bowl two years ago and likely played “Yeah!” I wouldn’t call Lamar or Usher superstars, but they’ve had crossover moments where they ruled the airwave and put everyone on the same page whether they liked it or not.
Charli XCX is another famous name who’s never had a crossover hit. All of my friends insisted that I knew “Boom Clap,” but not so. I don’t lie when it comes to pop music. Charli XCX’s crossover moment came in the summer of 2024, and more than any song, it was the title and the cover of her album Brat that lodged itself into the pop culture firmament. I thought I knew one of the songs, but apparently “Espresso” is by Sabrina Carpenter. While I may be flaunting my ignorance regarding contemporary pop music, I’m not bragging—I wish there was an organ like Rolling Stone or Pitchfork or the constellation of 1980s and 1990s zines to read regularly and keep up to date, but nothing has replaced them this decade. The lack of any significant critical outlet has contributed to the slow death of the music industry and its once powerful reach and influence.
But why didn’t I ever hear any Charli XCX? She emerged in the early-2010s and I remember reading her name in Pitchfork fairly often; but while I continued to read the site every day until about 2018, I never embraced its “poptimist” turn at the beginning of the decade. Why did so many indie rock writers start covering Carly Rae Jepsen? Writer Kerwin Fjøl tweeted that, “It was the only thing critics could do to deal with the fact that their careers were facing immediate extinction. Literally every generation would have done the same under like material conditions… With millions of people writing user-reviews for free online, there was no longer any need for professional critics, so they had to scramble to find a strategy to keep their jobs, which was: talk about stuff that everyone is already talking about. Nothing could have changed this.”
Critics could’ve changed it. By embracing poptimism, music critics signed their own death warrants, their near total abandonment of underground and DIY culture contributing to the rapid demise of both. I’m sure there are still house shows in Philadelphia, San Diego, and Cincinnati, but how are any of those bands going to find an audience if not through a corporate agent/manager/impresario? Where’s the Millennial Jann Wenner or the Zoomer Ryan Schreiber? Maybe they’re out there, and maybe there’s some website, zine or publication that covered Geese years before their Saturday Night Live appearance. I hope there is. I hope I’m wrong. But I know Pitchfork didn’t break Geese—they were late, just like Nirvana and Rolling Stone in 1992.
The Moment is a meta-mockumentary starring Charli XCX as herself alongside performances by Rosanna Arquette, Alexander Skarsgård, Rish Shah, Kate Berlant, and Hailey Benton Gates; Kylie Jenner, Rachel Sennott, Julia Fox, Mel Ottenberg, and A. G. Cook play fictionalized versions of themselves. Among the relatively few rock/pop superstar documentaries, the most obvious precedent is 1991’s Madonna: Truth or Dare. That film doesn’t have a story or clearly fictional characters, but it’s not a regular tour documentary or concert film. Released at the peak of her popularity, Madonna: Truth or Dare presaged reality television in its use of “behind the scenes” candor, most of which is clearly staged or manipulated. Notably, Madonna allows herself to look bad: sloppy, crass (lots of bathroom humor), fame-sick, too much to bear. Watching Madonna: Truth or Dare, you understand why The Rolling Stones buried Cocksucker Blues and why the original Let It Be documentary will remain out of print as long as The Beatles (and Yoko) are alive.
Like Madonna: Truth or Dare, The Moment marks the peak of an artist’s fame, just before they started their inevitable slide into irrelevance and obscurity. Madonna had Ray of Light in 1998, but the late-1980s and early-1990s were her zenith; I’m not sure Charli XCX will ever best the cultural penetration she achieved with “Brat Summer” in 2024. Charli XCX has described The Moment as “a 2024 period piece,” a metafictional response to “all the pressure” she received to make a concert film. Aidan Zamiri directs from a script written with Bertie Brandes; Sean Price Williams is the cinematographer and the reason why The Moment looks so good, even if the people in The Moment are a bit worse for wear. Unlike so many contemporary cinematographers, Williams lights faces and isn’t afraid of hard light; as a result, the thirtysomething party animal subjects of The Moment look bloated and pock-marked, the last people at the party, “so uncool it’s cool,” according to Charli XCX.
Like so many works by Millennial artists, The Moment checks technical boxes but doesn’t innovate, doesn’t offend, says nothing, doesn’t work taken at face value or as satire, and doesn’t have ANY SIGNS OF LIFE. It’s a movie you can sit and watch and never think about again. As uneven as Madonna: Truth or Dare is, there’s far more going on with Madonna and her movie than Charli XCX and hers; ditto Gen X and Millennials, who’ve always been most comfortable following the dotted line, living a life of mediocrity from the cradle to the grave.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith