Rock Vibes: on Charli and The Strokes
The Strokes and Charli XCX both have new indie rock records out in late summer 2026, and everybody including me wants to compare them. Sonically, Casablancas’ vocals gesture towards the heavily-AutoTuned style of Charli’s previous album brat, and Charli’s album gestures towards the modern rock tradition The Strokes were once hailed as rescuing from middlebrow corporate grunge.
This looking to the past as a way to disidentify with the present mainstream is a gesture that, according to Theo Cateforis, defines the modern rock tradition as such. Traditionally, it’s what made punk and post-punk – and the Strokes – cool: drawing influence from postwar rock, disco, and reggae (or the 70s post-punk that did this the first time around) distinguished “modern” rock from mainstream, blues-oriented rock. At the turn of the millennium, The Strokes looking beyond grunge to garage represented a return to cool itself as alternative rock’s defining aesthetic. (Middlebrow corporate grunge organized itself not around the racial and gender politics of cool, but around white masculine grievance, mainly about women, but also about “PC” culture, affirmative action, etc.). As I argue in my WOXY book, that renewed indie rock cool soon got co-opted into hipster capitalism, where the cultural capital cool granted those who departed from the mainstream was monetized as personal brands and craft businesses. If The Strokes breakthrough was in some ways the last reprise of traditional 20th century rock cool, theirs & Charli’s new records are navigating a very different terrain where the political economy and cultural politics of the 20th century culture industry have become entirely scrambled.
I talk about that scrambling in the new, expanded second edition of Resilience & Melancholy (preorder at the link!). The TL;DR is: musical labor is demonetized, listening and taste are privatized, and the old gendered rock/pop or high/low hierarchies that structured modernity no longer organize social status or aesthetic value. Men have largely left music for ventures that pay better, like crypto or sportsbetting, and taste has become less an expression of a sensus communis and more one of private (patriarchal) mastery. Popular music writ large is populated by a wide range of femininities, though metrics of status are an open question at this point: some like Taylor Swift taut asset ownership, others like Charli build cultural capital, while others like Olivia Rodrigo position themselves as popular feminist curators of hidden histories. At the same time, the pop charts are dominated by songs that, despite their popularity, fail to generate or drive The Discourse, like Stella Lefty, the nepo baby of a Groupon co-founder. The pendulum has swung from the 2000s poptimism debates, when poptimists argued that non-rock music was also worthy of critical attention, to a situation where critics ignore the sloppy but well-vested pop that dominates charts and focus instead on artists with less actual wealth and revenue but more cultural capital. Underneath it all, tech platforms and finance capital are operating with a new, vibes-y political ontology that models reality as profiles or phenomenological orientations.
One lens I use to frame these shifts is the cultural politics of cool. Because cool has always been about racialized, gendered, and classed disidentification, appropriation, and the extraction of cultural capital, it draws together many of the shifting threads into a digestible picture. In 2001, by aligning their racialized gender performance with post-punk iterations of cool, The Strokes could disidentify with what Chris Molanphy calls “the most loathed period for music of the last half-century” simply by virtue of performing their identities as cool xennial white cishet men (look this philosopher is never going to say “by virtue of being who they are”). Their coolness was a signal of their cultural capital, which Fred Durst, Linkin Park, and Daughtry all lacked. White masculine cool has always been about elite white men establishing their difference from and status above regular mainstream white masculinity, and that’s what happened with The Strokes hype of 2001. (If you want all the links and references for this argument, find them here.)
Reality Awaits is about the transition from being an outsider (complimentary) to being an outsider (derogatory). The 9/11 era Strokes stood apart from the mainstream as cool and elite because their style of white masculine performance looked and sounded like a “new wave” of rock innovation. Fast forward a quarter century to the release of Reality Awaits, and they stand apart from whatever the mainstream is today not by virtue of being the next it-boys, but because they are old. (For the record I’m a year older than Julian Casablancas.) Eric Harvey’s (also a xennial) Pitchfork review centers (middle)age as the ground of the “midlife alienation” expressed throughout the album. That alienation, or feeling of distance from the mainstream or center, manifests as “ironic padding” or “tongue-in-cheek radicalism.” The cool distance from the mainstream they are accustomed to performing doesn’t work the same way now as it did in 2001 because nobody expects almost-50somethings to otherwise be at the center of the mainstream. Cool’s disidentificatory politics only mark elite status for people who otherwise clearly fall in the mainstream, like middlebrow corporate grunge once was. The Strokes’ use of irony and tongue-in-cheek-ness doesn’t quite land these days not just because they are old enough to get targeted ads on Insta for Centrum Silver (happened to me this morning), but because their paradigm for coolness is stuck in either of the Bush administrations. They might as well be Bill Clinton playing sax in shades on Arsineo…or, as Reality Awaits’ album cover suggests, the Marlboro Man.
If Reality Awaits expresses the new alienation of white cishet men who are accustomed to being at the center of a world designed around them, Music, Fashion, Film expresses the knowing disidentification of a mixed-raced cishet woman who has repeatedly described her experiences of never fitting in. Since crossing over to the international pop mainstream in 2024, Charli XCX has always been happy to discuss her identity as a mixed-race woman, but she’s never foregrounded it in her self-presentation. With lines like SS26’s “my heritage could give me quite the USP” or unique selling point, you get the sense that she has seen other women’s artistic contributions reduced to the fact of their gender and/or race and/or sexuality (i.e., the original thing she brings is her identity and its difference from white cishet men’s) and she would rather stay focused on the art. She told podcaster Nicky Reardon that “I feel like there is this world where I could really play that up a lot. It doesn’t come natural to me probably because of the way that I engage with being a mixed person.” As someone who felt out of place on either side of her family, Charli didn’t experience her identity as a source of empowerment when she was growing up, and 2026 is well past the moment where resilience discourse was a bankable way for femme pop stars to flip their identity-based damage into viral success. Instead, her experience of never feeling like she fit in on either side of her family become the basis for her cool disidentification with the mainstream. Girl knows how to be an outsider in a way that doesn’t come with praise, and she uses her comfort in that role as a way to take creative risks. That’s what makes her cool.
That cool disidentification is perhaps most iconically audible in the extremely deadpan “wow” on the album’s lead single, “Rock Music.” She’s taking up rock music as something she’s inspired by, but not as an orthodoxy to be followed the way some Jacobin writers might desire. (See Dan DiPiero write about how she ‘deconstructs’ the rock tradition here.) You might say she dis/identifies with rock the way femmes classically dis/identify with stereotypical femininity, thus making this more of a femme cool than the macho cool of the tradition The Strokes follow (and further evidence that another thing that puts The Strokes out of place in today’s women-dominated music industry is precisely the fact that they are men). Music, Fashion, Film also has a whole track titled “Wink Wink” – a well-known signal for irony or sarcasm – where Charli does her best James Murphy/”All My Friends” impersonation. However, this cool distance is not the only vibe she performs on the record; there’s genuine sincerity about her friendship with AG Cook on “Magic Metal Montana” or her creative practice on “No One Lasts Forever.” Cool may be the strongest node in Music, Fashion, Film’s profile, but it’s not the only one.
Responding to a question about who she would pick as the representatives of music, fashion, and film on the women version of the album cover, Charli makes it clear she’s thinking in terms of profiles (or vibes) and not, say, the sorts of universals (like bourgeois good taste) to which cool traditionally frames itself as an (equally universal) alternative. She says that
Cale, Jacobs, and Scorsese define Charli’s cool profile. If you listen to the record, you will also hear women like Kim Gordon and Poly Styrene, who are clear influences on “Card Declined.” We might even hear a little Liz Phair if not in the sound then in the attitude on “Rock Music.” These references are all nodes on a personal taste profile…exactly like the sort of taste profile Spotify or ad-targeting algorithms maintain for users of digital platforms. Cool originated in mass commodity capitalism, first as a Black radical aesthetic that eluded enclosure, and then as appropriated cultural capital white performers used to distinguish their abstractly identical commodites from one another. Charli is updating cool to work in the era of platform capital, where it’s a profile (or vibe!) that can be applied to any content. That a mixed-race woman is doing this also shows that the racial and gender politics of cool are likewise fungible in the way the occupants of “music, fashion, and film” can be.
The video for The Strokes’ “Going Shopping” likewise points to the shift from commodification to platformization. As Harvey notes in his Pitchfork review, the video riffs on Paul Simon’s 1986 “You Can Call Me Al”; appearing on his album Graceland, which broke UN BDS anti-apartheid sanctions to record in South Africa with traditional South African musicians, the song has a penny whistle solo this former high school marching band piccolo player still remembers how to play (derogatory). That is, Graceland models the music industry’s traditional extraction and appropriation of Black diasporic musics: Simon’s appropriation and commodification of niche African musical traditions made him stand out from say Phil Collins or Robert Palmer as “cool.” “Going Shopping” eschews that sort of direct appropriation-via-commodification and instead gestures towards other forms of extraction: platformization and franchise capitalism. The first time we see a Black person in the video is when an extra appears as an app-worker delivering food. Instead of providing the intellectual property and/or cultural capital for the white music industry to enclose, this character depicts gig-work extraction that preys typically (and especially in NYC) on immigrants. Here, the undocumented status of these laborers pushes them to the lowest-waged app-based work, which floats the stock price of platforms like Uber. In places like LA most of that work is done by robots. The point is to create the semblance of a functioning company – a vibe, you might say – so that shareholders can make real money on the stock market. The performance of dehumanizing labor contributes to a company profile aligned with investors’ expectations of what a good bet looks like.
This sort of vibe or profile is also how “Going Shopping”’s video relates to other IP, like “You Can Call Me Al” or Walton Goggins(™). In the era of franchised media, The Strokes’ reference to Simon’s original is less a remix or riff or interpolation and more like a franchised iteration, where the versioned brand identity is what ensures the intergenerational transfer of wealth and status from original to new iteration remains legitimate. Like Charli’s album cover, “Going Shopping” takes a collection of reference points – the two men in chairs, the comedian lip-synching the vocals, the dance – and turns them into a profile that aligns the new iteration with the original IP. But unlike Charli, who thinks these profiles are personal and can contain whatever individual preference one imagines, this profile traces a line of patrilineal descent: as my wife said last night when watching the video, “there are no women in this.” Framing “Going Shopping” as franchising the “You Can Call Me Al” IP situates The Strokes as the rightful inheritors of a masculine rock tradition. As aging xennials The Strokes may not be cool in today’s terms, but “Going Shopping” positions them as men whose elite status comes less from the surplus of cultural capital they have over other commodified labor and more from their position in a patriarchal property lineage.
Charli and The Strokes are each negotiating cool and status as differently-situated artists, but they’re both adapting to the platformed, financialized, vibes-based reality of the mid 20th century.