Scream it at the top of your lungs now: “LET’S RIDE!”

The question that lingers now is: what then? How do we actually engage with “Vroom Vroom” outside this persistent and oppressive logic? What is it that actually becomes accessible when assuming these tracks to be hiding nothing? As for now, the pretty might appear completely flat, any musical gesture could be any other when the preclusion is successful. By turning to a specific contemporary account of nihilism, we might find a beginning to an answer that does not fall prey of a flat and stale musical ontology.

In Nihil Unbound (2007, chap 7), Ray Brassier poses a determining question to the long tradition of nihilism: how can nihilism hold the world to be devoid of anything to believe in and still believe in this negation? By holding on to the belief this becomes a reprise of how unbearable the world would be without belief. In one of the notorious accounts of nihilism, the Nietzschean, the point-zero meaninglessness becomes a site of existential determination through “eternal recurrence” and affirmation of “joy” and “will to power”. Such a nihilism seems, perhaps counterintuitively, more geared towards saving the human from meaninglessness, than accepting it. Brassier resolves this by considering the world and its philosophies as being grounded on not the negation of meaning and life, but the assertion of non-meaning and non-life. This is, thus, not an attempt to save the world, its life and philosophies from the “threat” of nihilism but uses nihilism to shape a “speculative opportunity” that arises when the world is no longer seen as founded on life or philosophical vitalism. When rejecting the exceptionality of life, the attempt of recuperating something humanly exceptional from the nihilist point zero is not needed. Any politico-philosophical landscape would be significantly rebuilt if we were to lose the idea that some kind of life or meaning is the driving force in the world (Nihil Unbound, 2007, p. xi).

For the present purposes, the crucial point of this type of nihilism is how life and meaning are no longer of exceptional ontological or libidinal status. When the world is predicated upon its pointlessness and lack of meaning, there is no way any life form (yes, humans too) can claim exceptionality since the long held defining traits (life, meaning, purposefulness etc.) have exactly no place in the nihilism as explored here. Which is to say, a nihilism based on the assertion of a non-life, non-meaning.

Without dwelling in the vast philosophical topology opening up here, I want to investigate this specific notion of nihilism in relation to Charli XCX and the “pretty” pop aesthetics of “Vroom Vroom” and “Charli Next Level”.

When Brassier founds his nihilism on a completed dethroning of the exceptionality of the human, life and meaning, Wark’s makes a parallel move when she concludes that the pretty does not hide anything. Both these ideas share an insistence on being non-intrusive, non-paranoid (and, as follows, non-cynical) to the point of the very preclusion of these concepts. Brassier grounds his nihilism in the world as predicated on non-life/meaning with the corollary being that the unearthing of meaning is replaced by the empowerment of a “corrosive truth”, which allegedly no longer reinforces destructive human narcissism. In such a nihilism, the paranoid order where appearance hides essence is ruled out – no such opposition can exist, no hidden essence, no hidden meaning can be disclosed because its negation is the fundamental ontological assumption.

Wark’s inversion of Marx’s exchange value leads to a similar position but reaches it by means of aesthetics. Within late capitalist societies, the paranoid logic of exchange value is pretty much omnipresent. One of the few tools at hand for the fugitive is, obviously, aesthetics as a constructible space. Being an aesthetic device, the “pretty” does not imply allegiance to nihilist philosophy. It’s raison d’étre is to preclude and, as Wark has it, form the utopian potentials of the pretty minor gestures happening throughout the preclusion and after. Still, “Vroom Vroom” is hardly utopian.

“Vroom Vroom” hides nothing because its composition is founded on a musical nihilism of the kind above described and constructed as a “pretty” track.

“Vroom Vroom” emerges from a vitalist point zero, where nothing can possibly be disclosed, no essence lying under appearance, no meaning behind the words and structures. As discussed, the song refrains so adamantly from offering anything that could pass as a credible story. Here also, Wark’s characterization of the pretty in in the cinematic context is of great use. Starting from the premise that cinema is deeply entrenched in cis-patriarchal investigation in how the eye of the camera functions as the eye of an order of sexualized control, Wark wonders how cinema could be made where that function of the camera is ruled out. The cinematic pretty, as in Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli’s “So Pretty”, is, in very short, about having the camera to picture relations and never objects or bodies in isolation. Relations are bound to bore that gaze of sexualized control and preclude it. As a direct consequence, she notes that “the pretty isn’t egalitarian, as it has to remain rare.” And Charli XCX makes, by no means, egalitarian music. It is for these reasons that the pretty is politically exclusive. It is not made to be investigated. The listener yearning for nimble confession and interiority will be excluded, there is no credible story of a life to be disclosed.

Against this backdrop of Charli XCX, as heard through the pretty and the nihilist, the reimagined instrumentalization previously described is, not a move of deconstruction, but of its false opposite: a move to construction. We are wryly cornered into thinking “Vroom Vroom” as an emergent speculative musical form. It is, in a nihilist way, emerging from the grounds where any meaning and the commodifying projections of interiorities are destroyed. What could be devoured as superficiality is actually what rises from an aesthetic device that has fool-proofed itself from the suspicion that it is hiding something and has ridiculed the attempts of harvesting meaning from its political vector. Instead, Charli XCX engages in the calculated construction of something pretty.