The future of pop performed and the gays were living
The most recent addition to The Times Square EDITION is their newest club located on the 7th floor of the hotel. The Paradise Club brings everything that encompasses the chaotic and fast-paced lifestyle of New York City into one place. And to introduce this new space, The House of Yes partnered with Times Square Edition to throw a week-long celebration featuring some of the biggest stars in music. And on Friday night, pop superstar Charli XCX was set to perform.
As soon as Charli took the stage, the audience broke into applause and cheer. The gay messiah was here and we were ready to be saved. And what better way to start the rapture and deliver us than opening the show to her hit song “Unlock It.” Charli has this infectious stage presence that has the ability to energize an entire audience. As she performed this song, everyone was singing along to it, almost chanting “Lock it, lock it, lock-lock it, lock it, lock it, Unlock it.” As she continued to perform this pop masterpiece, Charli even invited some people from the audience to get on stage and dance with her. It was a perfect moment watching Charli and a bunch of drag queens get down to her music.
She went on to perform a variety of her hits, taking classics from each Charli era. She performed to songs such as “Femmebot” from her latest mixtape, “Pop 2,” all the way to her breakout hit “Boom Clap.” One of the most memorable performances from this night was when she performed her song “Boys.” She prefaced this song by saying that everybody needed to sing along with her and that “it’s only one word so it shouldn’t be hard.” And when that chorus came on, everybody in the audience shouted at the top of their lungs, “BOYS!” Another fun moment was how she went on a little preamble saying that she makes “music for the gays” (and she isn’t wrong) and so she went on to perform, what I would like to call, the gay national anthem which is “Vroom Vroom.” Just the intro to that song made every gay and girl in the room shout in excitement because this was definitely a song we all wanted to hear her perform. She got up to the front of the stage and had fun interacting with people and having them sing along to the song. Naturally, she performed her latest smash hit “1999,” where we all had fun singing along to the chorus,
Take a ride to my old neighborhood
I just wanna go back, sing, “hit me, baby, one more time”
Wanna go back, wanna go”
One of the biggest highlights of the night was when she started performing “I Love It.” It got everybody screaming at the top of their lungs and jumping up and down, as instructed by our queen Charli. It was even better keeping in mind that a video of her performing in Germany went viral recently. And in this video she is performing “I Love It,” and nobody knew the song, and it was even funnier because in the video Charli shouted, “Do you know this fucking song?… I thought this fucking song was big in Germany!” The juxtaposition of this video with an entire room of people screaming every single word at the top of their lungs was magical. To end the show, she performed two of the songs that put her on the pop culture map (although we need to preface that even before the Sucker Era, Charli was a forced to be reckoned with). “Fancy” was the second to last song she played and it was a fun throwback that helped introduce Charli XCX to America. The last song was obviously “Boom Clap,” one of the highlights of her Sucker Era. The song is pop perfection with the slow building and then the hard-hitting chorus that goes into it. And that was the energy that was felt for this last song.
All in all, this was a concert to remember. Charli XCX is an incredible performer with the most magnetic energy. You could tell she was having fun all throughout the night and that carried over into every single audience member who was there to witness a pop concert masterpiece. The future of pop looks bright because the future of pop is Charli XCX.