Sam Wolfson
The hard-driving 22-year-old pop phenom Charli XCX is one of the brightest stars in the music business. And she’s just getting started.
The first three times, I didn’t mention it, but at this point it’s worth bringing up. “You know you’ve slapped me four times during this interview,” I tell Charli XCX. “No, I haven’t,” she protests, rolling her eyes. I start to recite the incidents back at her, counting on my fingers and then giving up after two. Both of us arrived here needing a drink, and now we’ve had more than I can count. The specifics have gotten blurry.
It’s 1 a.m. in Oslo’s city center, and we’re at Kulturhuset, a rowdy bar filled with Norwegian hipsters, their beards dangling perilously close to their pints of pale ale. “Oh, whatever, they were more like facepalms anyway,” she says, as the next round arrives. Sam, her buddy from home whom she’s made her assistant, refreshes us every 20 minutes or so.
Charli’s a British singer (and a British drinker) who became globally famous in the most American way imaginable: writing and singing the school-bully hook of Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy.” The video, in which Charli had a supporting role, was a scene-for-scene re-creation of the Valley girl classic Clueless: an orgy of cheerleaders, house parties, and red cups. Since then her videos have touched on other archetypes of American-youth cinema: She’s a trashy mess in the video for “Doing It,” a prom-ruining alpha bitch in “Break the Rules,” and the world’s gnarliest cheerleader in her latest video, for “Famous.”
She grew up wanting to be “the bad kind of cheerleader, the one who smokes behind the bleachers” and is now obsessed with the forgotten pop misfits of her youth.
Read the exclusive interview with Charli in Maxim's Noise Issue, on newsstands now.
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