AUTHENTICITY & CLUB CLASSICS | 3 SEPTEMBER 2025 | PARIS, FRANCE
“Bad tattoos on leather-tanned skin, Jesus Christ on a plastic sign, winding roads doing manual drive, early nights in white sheets with lace curtains, Capri in the distance”. You may know the song, the album, or at the least 2024’s ubiquitous lime-green hue that represented Charli XCX’s Brat project, infiltrating music, fashion, and culture for the past year, down to the ‘Charli clones’ still spilling out at 4am in New York and Paris. But how did she have this impact? The writing is crude, as is the production. The mix is aggressive and the album art is horrific. Yet it moved culture, and for the record, I’m a fan too.
One evening, coincidentally driving a lime green Vespa along the Amalfi Coast’s winding roads (presumably those referred to in the above lyrics), I realized the answer lay in something fundamentally and powerfully human; authenticity. While I may only be at the beginnings of understanding the true explanation as to why such states are powerful (ref. Joe Dispenza), I have at least had enough life experience to recognize the undeniable power of this state. Things can be crude, broken, low quality even, but there is an undeniability and emotion that comes through any medium when it’s delivered from this deeply human place.
So as I contemplate future projects, with my proactive mind reaching into calculations on commercial viability of certain pursuits, I hope I hold onto this knowledge and work with it. Writing from the heart, playing from the heart, and communicating in all aspects of life with transparency, genuineness, and truth - authentically.
