I want to talk about the brilliance of the first three lines of Charli XCX’s song “Boom Clap” and why they are so expressively incandescent.

Those lines are:

“You’re picture perfect blue
Sunbathing on the moon
Stars shining as your bones illuminate”

The song leads with an alliterative cliché in the second and third words — or is it really a cliché? The subject is the songwriter’s ubiquitous and anonymous “you,” with this innominate personage being described as “picture perfect”…blue? What does this “blue” mean here? This phrasing is evocative but it also serves to subvert the triviality of the “picture perfect” idiom and converts the nameless “you” into something that might be more than human, or different than, or something more like an apotheosis of a feeling rather than just the boundedly human subject we’d initially presumed. This at first seemingly-incongruous “blue” conjures thoughts of sky, of water, of something elemental.

The second line confirms this hypothesis in that we find ourselves, and presumably the subject as well, transported off the planet and sunbathing, as the song says, on the moon. This is my favorite line of the work both because it smashes into the cliché of the first line and further recontextualizes it, deepening it into something yet more, while also alluding to the overwhelming intensity of the feeling of love and infatuation, especially when one is young. Sunbathing on the moon would be a totalizing, obliterative event and this perfectly equates to the profoundly consuming experience of being utterly besotted with another person. All of this is delivered in iambic meter with rap-like plosives and prosody, striking precisely with the beat like a heart hammering against a ribcage.

“Stars shining as your bones illuminate” describes the luminous intensity with which the songwriter’s desiderata seems to blaze. She does not mention the “soul” or anything metaphysical and non-corporeal like that; no, she mentions “bones” which firmly ground the work in the somatic and the real. And, notably, the narrator of the song still notices the stars, which serves to situate her still in the larger universe and all its resident appeal. That is, she is not so enamored of the subject of her yearning that she fails to notice the other beauty present, beauty that complements rather than detracts from the primary object of her notice and desire.

These three lines do a lot with a little, which is an enviable achievement for any writer. They grab and then smash your expectations within the first four words, and gleefully subvert the apprehensions of physics and feeling. All of this is achieved with an expedient economy combined with little lexical flair but lots of pluck, strategic consonance and assonance, and a perfect sense of the nonsense of infatuation with and adoration of another human.