The Sash Is Funny

Charli XCX brought out Troye Sivan, Lorde, and Billie Eilish at her Coachella set on April 12, but the most noteworthy cameo wasn’t any of her featured artists but a sash she wore at an after-party later that night. “Miss Should Be Headliner” pays homage to Miss America competitions and references the singer’s relegation to an earlier time slot above that night’s headliner, Green Day. In the photo, Charli beams, tongue out, posing such that the sash is fully legible. While not perfectly congenial, it’s an innocuous joke — and like many innocuous jokes made by celebrities, the whole thing has been taken completely out of context.

First, people wondered if she thinks she is better than Green Day. But maybe Charli XCX is better than Green Day? What does Spotify say about all this? But if Green Day are more political, don’t they deserve a headlining spot above someone who joked about politics, then backed off from it? Are the normies at fault? Kamala Harris? Are Charli XCX and Billie Joe Armstrong enemies? Why are we pitting our two beautiful eyelinered queens against each other? Does anyone really care about this all that much?

Both Green Day’s placement on the Coachella schedule and Charli’s relegation to second string make plenty of sense. Green Day play a ton of festivals — in fact, these days they mostly play festivals exclusively — and their appearance at this year’s Coachella marks the first time they’ve played in Indio ever. For a band with more than 30 years of experience under their belt, that’s a pretty significant first. Charli, on the other hand, popped up at the 2023 festival. Rising to just before the headliner in two years already feels like an astronomical jump forward for her career.

But beyond the logic of Coachella programming, the sash is a plainspoken continuation of the singer’s victory lap of last summer’s Brat. Thinking you should be a headliner is brat. Drawing attention to the fact that you feel slighted is brat. Honestly? Seeing Green Day live is kind of brat, the petulance of Armstrong’s early years well in line with what Charli tries to do now. That was the whole conceit of the album, her post-performance styling a continuation of the character. Being brat means you’re going to embrace everything that might raise some hackles — the sash no crazier than her “They don’t build statues of critics” T-shirt from a few years ago. She has always been like this, and it’s only in the past year that everyone got onboard with the persona. That Charli’s performance went right into Green Day felt, more than most of Coachella’s adjacent performances, thematically apt, each indulging in an enfant terrible persona to create outsider art that eventually became insider art. If there’s anything to glean from Charli’s Instagram carousel, it’s mostly that playing at Coachella looked like a lot of fun. Maybe next weekend she’ll bring out Armstrong for “Mean Girls” — just to rub it in.

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