Guess featuring Billie Eilish: A Literal Cultural Reset

Remember Domo-kun, the Japanese mascot, the little brown monster guy that was everywhere 10 years ago? I do.

He came up on my algorithm recently. Along with ex-fashion-bloggers from the early 2010s rifling through their galaxy leggings. Along with Ian and Anthony of Smosh reminiscing on their days of Youtube Rewind and VidCon. Along with hypnotic dance videos to electroclash club bangers from my childhood; songs I couldn’t name, but instantly recognised. It was almost as if something was in the air. Hollister’s Crescent Bay body mist, maybe.

There was something strangely compelling about these fragments of how I’d once pictured adulthood. Collecting these pieces of early-mid-10s debris as they made their way back to me, I found myself making Pinterest boards, Spotify playlists. Even pining over the classical, square-framed ‘nerd’ glasses I’d once desperately wanted, after seeing them suddenly reappear on the face of my most stylish friend.

But I couldn’t help but feel that this sort of nostalgia was somewhat premature. This summer, rather, has belonged to a final white-hot flare of what was once a slowly burning revival of the indie sleaze era.

I am of course talking about Charli xcx, the famously-infamous pop icon who rose to stardom around the time of the first death of sleaze, her success owed in part to her charming British griminess – not unlike a character pulled right out of Skins.

Using our ever-quickening cultural Ouroboros to her advantage, her status as a veteran of the early 2010s saw her dominating almost every sphere of discourse with her 2024 album, brat. Its rollout saw Charli out in full sleaze: moonlighting as a basement DJ, embracing Web 1.0 minimalism, aligning herself with flash-photo party-girl aesthetics seemingly ripped straight from someone’s 2008 MySpace wall. Or an episode of Skins.

It’s not exactly news that nostalgia sells. But it was not mere nostalgia that called forth this year’s inescapable lime green deluge. In fact, it can be traced back to the same strategy that only a year earlier had our zeitgeist drenched in Barbie pink.

Childhood wish fulfilment.

Though trends may come and go, I believe it a fact that your internal compass of cool will always point towards whichever teenagers you envied as a child. And though Taio Cruz promised me that it goes on and on and on, now that I’ve finally reached the ages of the older cousins I was once all too impatient to emulate, I’ve realised: no matter how old I get, I will never be able to experience their early adulthood.

Which has been the actual key to Charli’s cultural conquest – indulging us in an era we grew up too late to inherit for ourselves.

But with the heretics and doomsdayers propagandising the end of brat summer, and the all-too-familiar death of sleaze at the hands of an election season’s false optimism, the question becomes – where to now?

Well. Guess.

Those cheap, prescriptionless nerd glasses I’d ordered arrived on the same afternoon Guess featuring Billie Eilish was released. Putting them on, it did something for me, looking in the mirror to see a fully materialised vision of the person I’d felt so impatient to become a decade ago.

Which, actually, made a lot of sense. Though sleaze was a fun exercise in imagining what might have been, its wish-fulfilment-potential is no match for the early-mid-2010s. But Charli already knew this. That, to make it through a brat winter, she’d have to expand the reaches of her cultural scavenging into a realm perhaps more familiar to Generation Alpha; certainly, to Z. To shift towards a cultural moment we were there for, albeit from the sidelines, even more desperate to engage.

As sleaze disappears beyond the horizon, dawn breaks upon a new era. Today, it’s finally arrived, touching down with the latest from Charli xcx, Guess featuring Billie Eilish - which takes place in the year 2013.

What with its incessant, syncopated dance beat – did it always sound that much like Blurred Lines? -- designed to bounce off the walls of a dark and sweaty room; The motel suite of gyrating bodies, muted concrete tones, unapologetic expanses of exposed flesh plucked right out of We Can’t Stop; And the reckless damage to property mirroring a beat drop that I thought reminded me of Harlem Shake, until I realised I was actually thinking of Turn Down For What.

Sleaze is fringe, DIY, duct-taped together, murmurs and shadows, basement set performed in an unmarked club. But, with Guess, we are ushered into a moment of raunch,of daytime bacchanalia, of large setpieces and stunts that wouldn’t seem out of place in, say, an early-10s Youtube Rewind.

I was struck with these images and references that had, all along, been written on the (now collapsed) wall for weeks. Even so – Charli knows that she alone cannot be the coroner of sleaze. Knows that from within its embers, a singular inevitability must be salvaged, if we are truly to be launched into an era she knows all too well. 

That’s why Billie Eilish, and her crisp, jauntily-placed snapback are here.

It’s a stroke of genius. Charli taps the infamous ex-Belieber for her first ever feature on a song, wherein she delivers something that could only be achieved after a close, obsessive study of such Bieberisms during a formative period of one’s life.

Eilish’s verse - sultry, but somehow vacant, close to the mic, bordering on spoken word - seems to channel 2012’s Boyfriend from beyond the grave. Toying-yet-chivalrous lyrical content is delivered with a sort of casual, masculine disinterest. The sonic equivalent of a lip bite. She assumes the role of a generational ambassador, at once able to so closely render a bygone era, yet with the capacity to see it remixed into the modern-day tongue of her alpha-heavy audience.

A new dawn breaks; a new victor emerges. In less than three minutes, sleaze is over.

But more importantly? Swag has returned.

Sophie Rosen

3 August 2024