By Quarantine in America is over. It did not end with great fanfare. The pathogen that put everything on pause and in disarray had not suddenly been cured or curtailed or even all that convincingly understood—the powers that be simply decided the show must go on. The levy leaked on Memorial Day weekend when states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona forced millions of their residents off unemployment and back into extremely dangerous working conditions. The floodgates lifted on May 25th in Minneapolis when a white police officer murdered an innocent Black man, George Floyd, in the street. After three days of protests in the city, the sparks became a wildfire as protestors in Minneapolis set the 3rd Precinct’s police station ablaze, an unprecedented moment that galvanized a nation who had been locked inside for months. As May turned to June, every city in America saw massive protests against racism and police brutality that were met by some of the most overtly fascist displays of police violence in our nation’s history. Protesters in New York learned what it’s like to be a cop’s wife as they were beaten to a pulp by officers; demonstrators in Atlanta were arrested en masse for being outside after 9 P.M.; Portlanders gathered around a chain link fence erected by the police and were shot with a torrential downpour of tear gas. You couldn’t go 10 seconds online without seeing footage of police just absolutely brutalizing innocent people in the streets. But before long, protests faded from public consciousness. There have been brief resurgences in Portland and Kenosha and D.C., and things have escalated recently in the wake of a Kentucky grand jury failing to offer any kind of justice to Breonna Taylor, but everything has mostly been relegated to Instagram activism, lost in a flurry of posts about California burning to the ground and strong opinions about the Post Office.
All the while, COVID has continued to ravage the country. The Rube Goldberg Death Machine that is our public health infrastructure has done what it was designed to do: throw those who can least afford it into the meat grinder. No matter how many times you hear a politician proclaim that “the virus does not discriminate,” it does not change the unassailable fact that our institutions absolutely do and the most marginalized are dying at rates exorbitantly higher than the wealthy. Those who are fortunate enough to survive the pandemic will live the rest of their lives clawing for every last inch out of the impossibly deep hole they’ve been destined to die in, while those who’ve never had to face anything resembling struggle are exponentially multiplying their wealth and comfort.
No help was coming, no help is coming, no help will come. The country is operating exactly as it was built to; that it’s all being overseen by a senile game show host is simply cosmic fate. There is no end in sight because we are on Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride and there is no revert-to-last-save file.
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Entertainment has bent to the pandemic’s will. Sports are stale and hollow, late night shows are as aesthetically dumb and sloppy as the jokes, Zoom sitcom reboots are even more glaringly uninspired cash grabs, and political conventions have made it crystal clear that the American Empire is dying. The end is nowhere in sight. New entertainment options range from Love Island COVID-19 Remix Edition to The Nolan Blockbuster That’ll Get Us to Herd Immunity to Qanon Warped Tour.
There was, however, a new Charli XCX album, so maybe the world is good, actually.
It’s a miracle that something as good as HOW I’M FEELING NOW was made in such an awful time. Conceived, created, and commercially released all within quarantine, Charlotte Emma Atchison’s fifth studio album stands as the only exceptional piece of Quarantine Art, a remarkable achievement for a record that could’ve just as easily been a fleeting comfort relevant only to its precarious moment. But it’s Charli baby; this classic is concrete.
HOW I’M FEELING NOW is the rare example of a time capsule that tells the story of a moment without sounding kitsch or dated. It’s both an intensely personal record—Charli, an unusually open book for such a public figure, has never been quite this emotionally vulnerable—and a universally relatable one, weaving the uniquely strange and disaffecting psychosis of quarantine with the broader feelings of loneliness and atomization that have plagued our generation into a manic masterpiece.
The album isn’t even explicitly about quarantine; not once does she utter buzzwords like “corona,” “Zoom,” “social distancing,” “mask,” “essential worker,” “ventilator,” “COVID,” “pandemic,” “quarantine,” or anything else we’ve woven into our vocabulary this year. You could travel back to 2019 and show a Charli stan this record and they wouldn’t have the slightest clue it was made mid-plague. HOW I’M FEELING NOW is just like any other Charli XCX record: super horny and all about pahhhtiies.
What sets it head and shoulders above her previous efforts is the pure laser-focus of it. It’s the first full-length in the PC Music-adjacent portion of her career without a bloated list of features, and as a result stands toe-to-toe with her opus VROOM VROOM. Like that 2016 EP, HOW I’M FEELING NOW has both feet slamming the gas from start to finish (with the exception of “enemy” and “i finally understand,” a brief reprieve both in pace and punch). There are a million little moments to gush over: “pink diamond” is exactly the kind of chaotic track one that Charli’s discography lacked, “c2.0” continues her tradition of reworking old classics into new classics, the “forever” music video captured the nostalgia for the month before, “claws”’s “I like, I like, I like, I like, I like” refrain is extremely pure, “detonate” is the sweetest thing she’s ever written (don’t forget to watch the video), and the “anthems”/”visions” closing kick is proof-positive that 100 gecs have indeed seismically shifted the culture.
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It’s a great injustice that we can’t hear these songs the way every Charli song is meant to be heard: in a dark, sweaty club surrounded by friends and strangers screaming at and with Ms. XCX. There’s no reason to believe that night will come anytime soon. There’s no reason to believe much of anything good will come anytime soon. There’s no reason to believe “soon” should still be a word we even say. The future is so distant it’s impossible to even muster a murky vision of it in your head. But that’s part of what makes HOW I’M FEELING NOW so great. The last six months have broken everyone’s brains and completely eroded the linear concept of time. but in the concussive rubble, XCX delivered a promise. Everyone’s lives have gotten markedly worse (with some notable exceptions 🙂 ) but never before has our collective trauma been so clearly shared.
In the weeks leading up to HOW I’M FEELING NOW’s release, Charli offered an unprecedented glimpse into the process of making a record. Zoom conferences and Instagram live sessions gave fans the chance to offer feedback on song snippets, artwork, and merch ideas, blurring the parasocial relationship into something resembling collaboration. Some days she was inspired and energized, others she was stressed and depressed, but no matter her mood she fulfilled her promise of breaking the boundary between her and her fans almost to a fault—there were times where she seemed to need some space. But the illuminating takeaway from these sessions was not so much the tinkering with tracklisting or shirt designs but the community it fostered. Here was a smattering of people from all across the globe who’d made these Zoom calls appointment viewing; it was the gathering place. Sure, people missed concerts and movie theaters and sports and bars, but above all else, they just really fucking missed their friends.
Charli’s online studio sessions weren’t a magic elixir that made the pandemic go away—truthfully all the little Zoom boxes only reinforced the reality of the situation. But it was the closest simulacrum of a communal space in a time when it was illegal to go sit on your friend’s couch. HOW I’M FEELING NOW is not the greatest album of all time, and it’s almost certainly not gonna top any decade lists either. But it was, and is, essential to understanding and undertaking quarantine; the manic highs and lows, the moments of intense vulnerability, and the all-encompassing feeling of loneliness.
Whether you’re working from home for some awful corporation that doesn’t want you to have healthcare let alone any independence, or working a service job where you’re more likely to catch COVID than make a living wage, or helplessly looking for work when there are no jobs, no government help, and nowhere to go, there is some comfort in knowing that amidst all the shit, we can at least thrash around in our room to Charli’s new masterpiece. Maybe one day we’ll thrash around together, without Zoom.
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