Do you remember ‘Dirty Talk’? I do. Aside from hearing it or some remix of it at maybe a house party or Sideway or that uphill OG Infinity Worm stage (stay with me) at one point in the last couple years, I haven’t heard it in over a decade, but still I remember it. I suspect you do too, Redshift reader.

Wynter Gordon’s EDM-inflected house stomper ‘Dirty Talk’ reached number 1 in Australia on the 23rd of January 2011 and stayed there for three weeks before being toppled by Rihanna’s ‘S&M’. It was the biggest song in the country at the very peak of summer and didn’t fall out of the top 10 until two months later. I don’t actually remember the song making an impression on me at the time – not least because I had just turned ten and had no way of knowing how delectable the line “I am no angel / I like the way you do that stuff to me” was – but The Fox and Nova have a way of stitching certain pop tracks onto your temporal lobe and therefore I will know ‘Dirty Talk’ until I die.

I am a regular reader of the Number Ones, Tom Breihan’s series for Stereogum where he is progressively reviewing every Billboard number one hit ever (his piece on Taylor Swift’s stratospheric ‘Shake It Off’ dropped today). Aside from being fantastically entertaining, it is a window into a parallel pop music universe that I had previously not been aware of. Generally, songs that go big in the US are similarly popular in Australia, but occasionally there are curious discrepancies. For instance, ‘Gangnam Style’ never went to number one in the US. What the fuck? I can scarcely think of another track that maintained peak virality for as long as ‘Gangnam Style’. In Australia, it was the second-biggest single of 2012, the 17th biggest single of the decade. Another oddity is Katy Perry. In the US, her Teenage Dream album spun off five number one singles, the equal-most of any album in history (tied with Thriller), yet only one of those singles was an ARIA number one. A few years later, she released ‘Roar’, and while it only topped the Billboard charts for two weeks, in Australia it was the biggest song of 2013 and the 7th biggest of the decade. There are many such examples – ‘Royals’, ‘We Found Love’, any Pink song – that reveal subtle differences in the preferences of Australian listeners compared to those at the centre of the Western pop world.

How does this relate to ‘Dirty Talk’? Did the song not reach number one in the US or something? Well, yeah, but it goes deeper than that. It didn’t even chart! It never entered the Hot 100. That kind of thing happens from time to time, an Australian chart-topper that never crosses the Pacific, but almost exclusively for Australian artists – Guy Sebastian, Justice Crew, Sheppard. Wynter Gordon is an American artist who barely made a dent on home soil. The success of ‘Dirty Talk’ in Australia is one of the strangest pop phenomena I can remember.

‘Talk talk’, the fifth track of Charli xcx’s latest album, BRAT, is a water-tight piece of French house revivalism, in the vein of Carly Rae Jepson’s ‘Psychedelic Switch’ but not as ecstatic. It’s also a sly rip-off of ‘Dirty Talk’. The hook is immediately recognisable; I chuckled when I first heard it. Yet despite the deluge of critical and literary attention already devoted to BRAT since its release on Friday, nowhere has the connection between the two tracks been made. Only now do I realise why: almost no one in America actually remembers ‘Dirty Talk’.

Charli xcx does. The track didn’t do numbers in the UK, but pumping house music has always seen more pop success over there and ‘Dirty Talk’ managed to peak at 25. And even if it was never a raging commercial hit, it got solid traction at the UK queer clubs where Charli plied her trade in the early 2010s. She has also met Wynter Gordon before. She knows the song. I’m quite confident she knew exactly what she was doing when making ‘Talk talk’, overtly referencing a club-pop sound that both isn’t new and isn’t remembered. This is the shrewd approach that has allowed BRAT to transcend (it is easily tracking to be her biggest release yet): fooling us all into thinking we have never heard music like this before.

It helps that her pop star instincts have never been sharper. Charli singlehandedly ignites brash tracks like ‘360’, ‘Von dutch’ and ‘Mean girls’ – which threaten to be anaesthetised by excessive post-irony – with brilliantly tumbling cadences and endlessly quotable couplets like “Legacy is undebated / You gon’ jump if A.G. made it”. She makes weapons out of the songs that meditate on insecurities and regret – ‘Sympathy is a knife’, ‘Rewind’ and ‘So I’ – potentially the most important tool in any pop artist’s arsenal. And she also cedes the spotlight when the beat deserves it. In the first act of ‘B2b’, Charli falls into a dreamlike loop that accentuates Gesaffelstein’s bulletproof dark disco without distracting from it.

It should be no surprise (to me) that an album as finely tuned as BRAT from an artist as determined as Charli would sound better with repeat listens. I had the album pegged at a 69 after my first spin and felt pretty out of step with the gushing praise flowing out of music publications left-right-and-centre. I felt like BRAT languished in a nether-region between pop and the club that prevented it from achieving either hedonistic release or weightless bliss. Then I realised that might be by design. BRAT doesn’t play nicely with pop music nor dance music: on the one hand, from A.G. Cook’s steel-cut production flair to Charli’s manifesto, the album has an air of exclusivity that won’t abide by chart-friendly utilitarianism; on the other, the album rarely launches into a no-holds-barred drop, and when it does (see ‘Everything is romantic’ for baile funk) it is fleeting. In other words, Charli forces you to come to party on her terms. Dance, but hit the melody on the chorus. Act like you’re the next hot internet girl, but pay attention to the words of ‘Sympathy is a knife’.

In the Northern Hemisphere summer to come, there will be clubs that play ‘Mean girls’, and when it locks into its giddy piano house stride the crowd will fall into delirium. But for that first minute and a half, something strange will happen. On a big soundsystem, the song will sound a little out of place – too thin, too fizzy, too brazen – and yet it won’t matter. The crowd will hang on with anticipation, not because it hits like dance music should, but because it gives them a familiar feeling they can’t quite put their finger on. Why? It sounds just like Rihanna’s ‘S&M’. You know, that track that came after ‘Dirty Talk’. It’s nothing new, it’s just Charli.

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Sam Gollings

11 June 2024