Charli XCX vs the Titanium Carbide Stomach of Capitalism

Charli XCX had an interesting piece in A Rabbit’s Foot recently. It’s not interesting for any particular novel insight, but for the perspective it provides on the problem of “The Cool” and the tension of artistic quality versus popular acclaim. It’s worth reading as a case study of an artist who has released one of the coolest artifacts of the past decade, her 2024 album Brat, and their thoughts on the slow leeching of its power by the culture.

One of the most useful metaphors of the contemporary era was minted by Jean-François Lyotard and popularized by Mark Fisher. Lyotard referred to the process of co-option that transforms art from radical personal expression to entertainment and eventually into commodity as the “Tungsten Carbide Stomach of Capitalism”. This metaphor of digestion, of turning something rich and raw into an acidic, homogenous slurry, is apt for the struggle that Charli XCX is talking about. “The Cool”, in her words, begins to be dissolved when it passes into the wider world because it cannot be used by Capitalism in its raw form.

Charli XCX herself has a revealing aside that perfectly identifies one of the enzymes involved in this process:

Other people’s interpretations began to become fact, brands began to adopt a visual aesthetic that was clearly tapping into the album’s aesthetic but each time would get it slightly wrong, slightly off. The more time passed from the album release the more and more bastardized the representations of the album became. These representations were replicated and reproduced and deemed as truthful. This is when I feel that things become broad, things become passé, things become boring.

The modern Capitalist beast uses “brands” as one of the primary ways to dissolve and break down art into something that won’t upset the beast’s stomach. By pairing the art with the core, inoffensive pablum that most of our media diet is composed of (advertisements, branding, “influencers”, etc.) it aids the digestion, so to speak. That this makes it easier to shave off the most interesting or dangerous parts of the art (for the sake of space or time, ostensibly) is a bonus.

For instance, I’ve recently been getting a lot of covers of “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues served to me on Instagram. It’s a fantastic song and most are excellent covers of the first couple of verses. They always cut off before Kirsty MacColl sings to Shane MacGowan:

You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy f****t, happy Christmas your arse, I pray God it’s our last.

As folk are fond of saying today “too spicy.”

It’s a shame that they cut out the vitriol between MacGowan and MacColl. It’s a large part of what gives the song its emotional honesty and its artistic heft. The duet is between two people who hate each other in the way that only people who once loved each other possibly can. It has a potency that stems specifically from that fraught relationship. To cut that bit out is to desanguinate the song.

But it also means that it’s safe to play before all the ads for monthly fidget toy box subscriptions and teledoc hairloss medicine.

I like that Charli XCX doesn’t bother to define “Cool” in her essay. She more than anyone probably knows that, like God or the Tao, the Cool that can be defined is not the true Cool. Shane MacGowan was cool. He was punk. He was only ever himself artistically, and what he gave us as an artist can never be taken away. Toothless, slurring, sneering, he was always himself and he created cool art that forced society to digest it.

It’s not just art itself that can get co-opted by culture in this way. The artists themselves can get worn down and digested. Reading between the lines of Charli XCX’s piece, I think this is something she has an understandable horror of. Watching what is cool and interesting and dangerous about her record get dissolved seems to have instilled in her a bit of existential dread. Artists that give in to the co-option (John Lydon would be an apt example) are what we would call sellouts in an earlier era. Artists who, after an initial burst of cool, even of true artistic genius, chase money and fame and make content rather than art.

Those that resist this always end up with an uneasy path and an uneasy relationship to the culture. Shane MacGowan’s self-destruction became a spectacle. Sinéad O’Connor was made a pariah until she was suddenly universally beloved after her death (when she could no longer pose a threat). As I mentioned in my column on “dangerous music”, in addition to a rapacious stomach, Capitalist society also has a robust immune response.

To continue to be cool and to make great art, then, means conscious and continued resistance to society’s digestive enzymes. It means resisting brand identification. It means vocal and public stands that will invite backlash. It means making art hard enough and sharp enough that the artist at least forces Capital to break off the bits that it can’t stomach.

And it means constantly creating new works, knowing that some number of them, maybe even all of them, will be digested in turn. Charli XCX mentioned Julia Fox as an example of an artist she believes could do anything and still be cool. I think artists like that are also the ones that have to keep generating work. They have to move to always stay one step ahead of the process of co-option. Cool, then, is not an adjective, but rather a verb. One is never “cool”, one can only ever “do cool” and, more specifically, make cool art.

Charli XCX also talks about the Warholian school of, for lack of a better term, counter co-option. This involves the artist themselves using the elements of mass culture to try and create something artistic. This is a high risk strategy and one that I don’t have much faith in. It’s probably not incidental that Warhol himself never really did much for me. His art strikes me as sneering, ironic slop and I think he’s given license to some of the worst artistic impulses in contemporary art.

I also don’t think that the Warholian model works in practice. Artists who attempt it usually end up building ablative layers of ironic armor that only serve to deaden their art. This limits them to being, at best, a temporarily iconic phenomenon that ends up getting digested anyway. (Banksy may be the best contemporary example.)¹

The model of co-option as a sort of perpetual digestion also helps explain the twin pitfalls of nostalgia and hipsterism². Both of them are ways of comfortably compromising one’s artistic life in a reality in which Capital is constantly mulching everything vibrant and interesting in uniform, acidic gut-slurry. To finally extend the metaphor to the breaking point, nostalgia does this by feeding from Capitalism like a baby bird, hipsterism by grazing everything it can find, including fresh art, but also a whole lot of indigestible garbage as well.

The nostalgia response to co-option is to simply stew in co-opted art and to obsess over the scraps of feelings that we remember getting from that art in the first place. It’s the coffee shop I occasionally work in in Seattle which plays only Northwest indie bands of the early 2000s. I obsessed over “We Looked Like Giants” as much as the next awkward dweeb, but to hear it played in what is clearly a Spotify playlist titled “songs girls rejected me to in 2004” is a bit unseemly.

The false promise of nostalgia is that our emotional response to art can survive both time and the ravages of Capital. It assumes that just because we can remember the frisson a work elicited originally, reconsuming it will keep that feeling alive. That, in fact, it will do so regardless of set or setting. This leads to a kind of artistic neoteny in which the nostalgic consumer gets frozen in an immature state. They consume the art that formed them in a regurgitated format. They tell themselves that they’ve discovered the “best” when they’ve simply decided to only take in art that’s already been digested by both themselves and the culture. They fix themselves in a formative and infantile stage, all the better for culture to siphon money from them to sell their artistic fixations back to them.

The hipster overcorrects in the other direction. Seeing art they loved bleached and crushed into a paste that Capital uses to fill cracks in the culture, they become obsessed over finding the new and obscure for its own sake. They rightly fear and hate co-option, but they mistakenly think that the problem is age or popularity, rather than the conscious defanging of meaningful artistic experience.

As a result, they mistake novelty for greatness. Things that haven’t been co-opted become valuable for their raw state, not their actual artistic merit. They miss that the only things that get digested are things that affect people. Only good art poses a challenge that culture has to respond to by consuming and turning into fuel. The hipster, in the monomaniacal pursuit of the new, the obscure, and the avant garde, often ends up selecting for art that won’t be digested because it is, frankly, garbage. It’s unfit for human artistic consumption. This is how we get, for instance, Merzbow. Being opaque and unpleasant does generally prevent co-option, but it also often makes for ineffective art in general.³

It bears considering if there’s a positive side to cultural co-option. Here, I think Lyotard’s metaphor actually points us in the right direction. The positive side of co-option is that it provides artistic and cultural nourishment for parts of the culture that would otherwise not have it. Every car commercial that features “Blitzkrieg Bop” is a chance for someone to Google “hey ho let’s go rock song”, scroll past the AI summary and the ads, and actually click on a link that will let them listen to the song for the first time.

The process by which Capitalism turns works from art into commodity does, well, commodify them in a way that makes them more discoverable and accessible to people who may not have otherwise found them. It’s unfortunate that, by the time this happens, culture will have adapted such that anything revolutionary or dangerous will have been safely subsumed and neutralized by immune reaction.

Is there an alternative to this perpetual cycle of co-option? I think there is, but only insofar as there’s any realistic alternative to Capitalism. Proposing such alternatives is a little out of the scope of the current post. I’ll refer you to another Mark Fisher work, Capitalist Realism for smarter ideas about it than mine, and simply quote the punchline here:

The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative… possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.

At the risk of badly mixing metaphors, each new work of art is a tiny pin-prick in that gray curtain that could, in theory, be the point where it starts to tear wide open.

So the only answer is to keep growing and creating new art. We must foster and celebrate the artists that provide new fodder for the process and nourish ourselves from those sources, even knowing that the acidic enzymes of Capital have already started their work.