Latest news with #BratTour
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Charli xcx at Glastonbury review – a thrilling hostile takeover by a pop star at the peak of her powers
For my money, one of the best pop tours of the 21st century was Kanye West's Yeezus tour. Like the album it was supporting, the Yeezus tour was abrasive and minimal and totally spectacular: West stood in front of gigantic bright-red screens and blasted arenas with some of the harshest, most acidic sounds ever considered mainstream. That tour was unrelenting and uncompromising and, as a result, totally compelling. Charli xcx's Brat tour may be the only clear successor. It is a show whose main components are a curtain, a few stadium strobe light rigs, and one star whose vision is so specific and so well realised that the 'necessities' of an A-list pop show – dancers, set pieces, etc – suddenly seem like crutches for anyone less in tune with themselves. This makes sense, given that Charli is also our clearest successor to West himself: despite being a prodigiously talented mainstream songwriter, she has dedicated her career to exploring the most caustic, hallucinatory sounds of the underground, and working out how best to synthesise them with the pleasures of pure pop music. With the release of last year's Brat, an album that became a cultural moment without ever diluting Charli's ingenuity, mainstream culture finally caught up to Charli. So it's fitting that she's here at Worthy Farm headlining, by some metrics, the biggest music festival in the world. Of course, she's not really headlining – Charli's Saturday night set closing the Other stage is, on a purely technical level, second billed to Neil Young, who is headlining the Pyramid at the same time. But ask anyone here, and the headliner of the entire weekend is Charli. Her audience at the Other stage is dizzyingly huge, surely at least 60,000 people – a surreal sight for the many gay men who saw her perform in 200-capacity clubs as recently as 2019. And from the very first moments of her set, when she intones, gravely, 'Glastonbury, don't fucking play with me', it's clear that she is at the height of her powers, totally capable of holding the attention of a stadium's worth of people. After all – who else could warrant a general expanding of the Other stage and the addition of more screens and speakers? Even if Charli wasn't first billed, everyone at Glastonbury knew she was headlining. This was made clear with an intense, totally uncompromising set in which Charli performed totally alone, not even with collaborators such as Lorde, who was also at Glastonbury. The Brat tour is at its most effective when the viewer has to submit to Charli's world, and this show, loud and bawdy and sometimes very unnerving in its intensity, was practically Charli-led hostile takeover. Her skill is in welding sophistication on to brute force – consider a song like Club Classics, which deftly stitches together at least four different styles of dance music in barely four minutes, but also brandishes a chorus of simply 'me, me, me, me' – and even when she breaks script, you see that skill in action. 'I'm known to have a heart of stone,' she tells the crowd, 'But this is very fucking emotional.' She should save her tears – with an audition so memorable, so fun, so spectacular, the Pyramid has to be next.
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Watch ROSÉ of BLACKPINK Perform Charli xcx's ‘Apple' Dance at Final Brat Tour Show in Brooklyn
ROSÉ split the apple down symmetrical lines at Charli xcx's final Brat Tour show in Brooklyn, N.Y., Sunday night (May 4), with the BLACKPINK star performing the viral 'Apple' choreography on the Jumbotron amongst thousands of fans at Barclays Center. As is tradition on the 'Von Dutch' singer's trek, venue cameras singled out one guest in the crowd when it came time for the star to perform 'Apple,' one of the biggest hits from her breakthrough 2024 album, Brat. This time, however, that guest just so happened to be one of K-pop's biggest stars, with the 'APT.' singer jumping up and down with excitement before nailing the song's TikTok-originated dance moves with a friend as fans cheered her on. More from Billboard Lorde Explains How Charli xcx's 'Brat' 'Forced' Her to Step Up Her Game on 'Virgin' Ghost Earns First No. 1 Album on Billboard 200 With 'Skeletá' Fans Choose Maroon 5 and LISA's 'Priceless' as This Week's Favorite New Music Right afterward, ROSÉ leaned in and kissed the camera lens before rejoining the crowd on the floor at Barclays, where Charli has spent four nights on tour ending with Sunday's show. The Essex native first kicked off the Brat trek late last year in England, after which she spent much of February touring through New Zealand and Australia before traveling around Mexico and the United States in April. Also on Sunday, ROSÉ posted a TikTok of herself doing the 'Apple' dance, seemingly backstage before the show. 'how'd we do @Charli XCX ??' she captioned the clip, to which Charli replied, 'epic.' The girl group star is just the latest famous face to star as a featured 'Apple' dancer on the Brat Tour. On night 1 in Brooklyn, Clairo did the honors, followed by Jenna Ortega on Saturday (May 3). Back in September, when Charli was supporting Brat on her joint Sweat Tour with Troye Sivan, the original creator of the 'Apple' dance, Kelley Heyer — who is currently suing Roblox for allegedly featuring the dance in its gameplay without permission, though the company has denied any wrongdoing — got to have her moment during the song. Watch ROSÉ do Charli xcx's 'Apple' dance both on and off stage below. Best of Billboard Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1 Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart
