Again showing a strange reverence for nature by performing destructive acts within it (see: “2099” video), Charli XCX returns again with another single from Charli, “White Mercedes.” This time, instead of jet skis, she’s opted for cars, re-teaming with the director of her “Gone” video, Colin Solal Cardo. Just as that video, too, puts a highlight on the importance of a vehicle as a prop, here we have Charli sitting in a suspended white Mercedes as some sort of presumable penance for her lover, realizing, “Like a white Mercedes, always been running too fast/When your heart is breaking, you keep on taking me back/Hate myself, I really love you/Hurting you feels like I’m hurting as well/All I know is I don’t deserve you.” In an underlying way, it almost feels as though surely she must be addressing the environment she seems all too content to pillage for the sake of her music videos.
Yet, as she rides atop a white monster truck (with the wheels to back it up) in a pink prom dress, it seems as though the stark contrast of her aesthetic against this almost Mad Max-looking backdrop is her attempt at asking forgiveness not just of her object of affection, but Mother Nature herself. As though saying, “Look Mom, I got all dressed up for you, doesn’t that allow me to set a car ablaze after dousing it in gasoline?”
Smoke stacks from what looks to be a power plant behind her add to the strange dystopia that has crept even into the furthest recesses of nature (even if signs of life exist in the project-looking buildings that occasionally appear behind her). And as the truck rolls over the white Mercedes, we can only assume it’s Charli’s unwitting statement about the need to demolish our fetish for that which destroys the environment (which, of course, has long been dealt blow after blow by the automotive industry). Standing under a white tent (or rather, what looks like some metal rods with laundry linens attached to them), we then see the white truck driving circles around her as she stands at the center–in fact, one can see the narrative of the video going in an entirely different direction at this point, with Charli suddenly deciding to bone whoever this Ghost Rider is driving the car.
It would seem she instead chooses to take her sexual frustration out on the white Mercedes by torching it and then settling for the real live horsepower of an actual horse, stroking it as the camera does a strategic close-up on her watch (accenting some sort of struggle between a love of material and the dormant knowledge that possessions are meaningless). Again, there appears to be some latent theme about the triumph of nature in the face of frivolous human acts (the nonsensical fireworks display toward the end of the video also being further proof of that). And as the horse gallops past the crushed Mercedes (interwoven with shots of it on fire because the sequencing in this “plot” is all very fractured), one can’t help but think that’s what all of the animal kingdom is trying to do at any given moment: get the hell away from man and his machines. At the very least, however, it seems Charli is advocating for recycling, as she very clearly raided Lily Allen’s closet for this pink ball gown from her Alright, Still era.
