CMAT and the shopping centre

euro-country, ancient egyptian Pizza Hut, the marian keyes of it all....

Inflatable women with bright hair swoosh up and down in the lift, or round and round and round on children’s rides that seem impossibly low-stakes. They are bouncy but liable to topple. They are fun and gimmicky, but indisputably haunting, too. One of them falls into a fountain, and begins to float away. We see other people in the background, fairly unbothered by the inflatable women. These people are just going about their days, seemingly content.

The inflatable women are the popstar CMAT, and they have been floating through shopping centres for the past few days. They are producing promotional content for the “shopping centre versions” of tracks from her new album. I am (very predictably) obsessed with that new album, Euro-Country. On it, CMAT describes herself as a barmaid with no lines living on Coronation Street, and turns in on her own psyche re intense rage at the image of Jamie Oliver’s face on a counter full of sausage rolls. CMAT deals in a specificity of pop-cultural reference that pleases me, and my tendency towards cultural materialist thought, very, very much. What is meant by that is, for one, the idea that we can best understand our relationship to the means of production, and the structures of power that shape our lives, through our relationship to culture, but also, the idea that culture isn’t something that nicely, neatly, purely “reflects” those things, but is an active force in the world, too.

In less loftier terms, this means that when I hear a line of CMAT’s, like:

“Oh, the Marian Keyes of it all…”

I feel as though there are at least 1000 words begging to be written pulling it all apart. What does it mean to talk about Marian Keyes as a feeling or a mood? Maybe to begin to think about: being glamorous / what it means to be meaningfully popular / derision and dismissal / the now well established fact of a certain kind of Irishness as marketable / being an ordinary woman in the specific economic climate of the 2000s: shopping, often, with a credit card / feeling sexy / feeling like you-will-always-be-just-a-little-bit-fat / experiencing clinical depression / self-mythologising …. this just to scratch the surface.

I think it’s quite easy to spot the difference between faux-authentic references to “real” life peppered into songs, to make popstars feel like your friends, and the kind of references in your average CMAT song: a diet-coke from KFC, Sketchers trainers, Bacardi Breezers, Calpol, Kerry Katona. These are references so particular to the generally dull but nonetheless inevitably idiosyncratic fabric of life in the UK and Ireland in the 2000s that, if you know them, you’ll also likely feel them in some way.

You’ll feel, too, the force that is the shopping centre, which has, in a kind of high-intensity-vibrant-nostalgia-fever-dream-way, become something of a motif for this album, and how it has been packaged. As well as the ‘shopping centre versions,’ and the video for Euro-Country, you can buy a CMAT for-life bag-for-life, or a branded token for your trolley. There’s been a host of headlines picking up on this preoccupation with economics, and write-ups which, I think rightly, begin to touch on the fact that CMAT’s brand is increasingly that of the anti-capitalist pop princess, all the high kicks and eyeshadow of Kylie Minogue, mixed with powerful articulations of solidarity with Palestinians, or denouncements of post-financialisation politics in Ireland.

It’s a marker of the palatability of particular kinds of feminism, that it is much more likely CMAT be branded a liberatory girlboss queen, than recognised for her interest in either of those causes. After all, this is a woman who has the extreme and earth-shattering audacity to be a size 14 and still dance around on stage - a fact misguidedly taken for a political stance in and of itself. In fact, many of her apparently exclusively feminist anthems are interested in all kinds of material conditions for people of all genders, and in all kinds of varied felt responses to them. “Running / Planning,” which was heavily billed as a track about the pressures of womanhood (general), was conceived of as an articulation too of the realities of the gig economy. This is just one example. On her own Substack, CMAT wrote that “EURO-COUNTRY is the type of loss, pain and lack of community that I feel we are suffering from under modern capital isolation,” elsewhere describing the album as partly about “the pain of losing community under capitalism.” Journalists have asked: are we finally getting good recession music? I think this might be one way of putting it, but if so, what exactly makes it good? Maybe it has something to do with all those shopping centres.

A few months ago, I gave a paper on some of my research at UCL. I spoke about one argument at the core of the book I’m trying to write. One of the main contentions is that working-class women have a particularly useful, (and particularly neglected) insight into the operations of late-capitalism, particularly within the context of contemporary Britain. Historically, left-wing critics here haven’t really known how to write or think about young working-class women’s lives, so we don’t tend to get books about capitalism that are also about shopping at Primark, or buying a particular type of branded kitchen cleaning spray because you saw someone else buy it on TikTok, or paying on Klarna or feeling that you have to buy a pair of eyelashes to stick onto your existing pair of eyelashes with a small tube of vaguely toxic glue. I think the lack of thought given to these experiences is a big oversight.

After the seminar, someone from the audience asked me if I really felt that working-class women had all that much to say about the totality of capitalism. This was odd, because the totality of capitalism, the idea that this economic framework permeates all aspects of our everyday life and practices, was precisely what I had just spent 45 minutes talking about. As it turned out, it didn’t really matter. The listener was unconvinced, and seemingly more importantly, just really wanted to use the phrase “the totality of capitalism.” There’s a tendency for (some, bad) Marxist readings to get carried away with self-congratulatory fatalism.

Some of the readings of Euro-Country that I’ve been coming across seem to get carried away with themselves, too. The very sexy CMAT does not a 19^th century German philosopher make, and to be clear, I mean this in the most strongly complimentary terms possible. One particular write-up described “soulless shopping plazas” as the heart of modern Ireland, and by extension, of Euro-Country itself. It’s not a wildly unconvincing idea: perhaps ethically soulless, yes, in the sense of avaricious but unrelenting appetites, or emotionally soulless, in the strangely potent sadness that can be conjured by closed down, boarded up, shops. But if shopping centres are really oh-so vacant spaces that nobody likes to be in, how did we end up in a world where people happily buy clothes made at the hands of modern slaves, skipping between aisles, sipping drinks iced by companies that profit from war and starvation? And, much less importantly: why would CMAT choose them as the aesthetic and moral centre point for an album so full of complex, contradictory feelings (see: rage, infatuation, desire, grief, obsession, ambivalence, nostalgia, disappointment, total optimistic joy)?

I think the suggestion of the straightforwardly soulless shopping plaza forgets why the shopping plaza works so well in the case of this album, because these places are, thanks to the humans that inhabit them, aesthetically and emotionally varied and complex and weird. Consuming things is varied and complex and weird. And I think this matters, because that forgetfulness is something that I don’t think CMAT herself suffers from in the slightest.

Writing this, I can’t help but conjure up in my mind the shopping centres that make me feel this way. I think first of the Westfield Stratford, (alongside its West London sibling, something of a city-wide gold standard for the kinds of evil excess and gluttony we are all encouraged to participate in, after work, or at weekends). It is at this point that I should confess, sadly, how much I love the Westfield Stratford. I think this is because I spent most of my younger life living in quite small places, and so the novelty of an entire complex where you can try on lots of shoes and go to an all-you-can-eat-buffet and visit a casino and watch a film and have your nails painted maybe pick up some sushi and a new sofa on your way out hasn’t worn off for me, yet. In fact, it usually feels like still a bit of a thrill. The Westfield Stratford is also a large-scale riposte to the idea that nobody goes to real-life shops anymore. There are so many people at the Westfield Stratford on any given evening that I sometimes feel like I will faint. I still always want to keep going back.

Then, there is Lewisham Shopping Centre, the closest shopping centre to my flat. I once spent the early evening of the 31^st December wandering around Lewisham Shopping Centre, trying to find a plain pair of high-heeled shoes for under twenty pounds. For reasons I cannot fully remember, my boyfriend was carrying a cauliflower for the entire trip. Naturally, several people engaged him in the noble act of piss-taking, noting how ridiculous a sight he was, in a Shoezone, with a cauliflower, on New Years Eve. I think about this whenever I go back. The cauliflower memory is important, I think, because it sums up something vaguely strange about The Lewisham Centre. People really like to roller-skate through it, like it’s a music video or a leisure centre from the past. The entrance hall is plastered with random snippets of vividly illustrated local history, and because the history of Lewisham is genuinely fascinating and politically pertinent, this is slightly out of sync with the invitation to buy another bit of unneccesary plastic from Tiger, or to spend a frankly wild amount of money on a stretched slab of dough from a man that I have long coveted, but never quite managed to experience first hand, Mr Pretzel. Most of all, I like that there are several of the kind of unbranded clothes shops you can find in precincts and markets up and down the country, that sell exclusively, obscenely mad sartorial wonders: neon synthetic furs, Lycra unitards with inconceivable holes cut out of them, diamante platform heels. It was the latter I ended up buying on that search for some plain old shoes.

Most of all, I think of the Trafford Centre in Manchester, my main exposure to shopping centres whilst growing up. I was disappointed to find, later, that not all large shopping centres are built to look like bricolaged time-travel adventures gone wrong. There, Pizza Hut is in Ancient Egypt, and the mandatory visit to Starbucks on the way out is Grecian in feel. The food court has a KFC, a McDonalds, a swimming pool, and a ceiling painted to look how the sky might look in a dream. They claim to have the largest chandelier in the world. There is a fountain into which people throw coins, a christmas tree with very big eyes, and a selection of restaurants gathered together in a pretend street built to look like New Orleans. I think of Mark Fisher or Frederic Jameson, writing of the compression of time and space under late capitalism, and dream about the two of them on an unhappy date in a Pizza Hut adorned with hieroglyphics. I didn’t really know what classics was when I applied to university, but what vague understanding I had, had something to do with incredibly gaudy giant lions guarding John Lewis. Just typing these sentences about the Trafford Centre, by the way, has rapidly improved my mood.

All of these places are very different, but none of them are soulless, and most of them extremely weird. There isn’t the space, I don’t think, to properly mention the Arndale Centre in Morecambe, outside which a man dressed as Michael Jackson still sings songs, daily. Of course, there are shopping centres up-and-down Britain that can feel depressing, especially to journalists who have no interest in, or experience of, shopping in them. Of course, many of these shopping centres are not what they once were, but then again, in even the most extremely dilapidated of the shopping precincts I’ve visited, there are always people, doing their best, being strange, and feeling all kinds of ways. For the majority of those in the shopping centre, those of us who are, on a global scale, the absolute beneficiaries of a ruthless economic system, the shopping centre is not only some gloomy, glum metaphor for recession. It is also strange, and hypnotic, and fun. Isn’t that the problem?

I read this week that CMAT was frustrated with some of the reporting of her anti-capitalist lyricism, and with how some of those lyrics have been interpreted as passive elegies for a situation we can’t change. It’s obviously a mistake to think she’s blankly longing for a romantic Ireland dead and gone (though the particular version of romantic Ireland on the Euro-Country album cover is one that I do wish I could teach Yeats with, with all that - what needs you being come to sense but fumble in a greasy till - type thing). She’s clearly not using capitalism as a catch-all get-out that buys her a sense of moral superiority, but that isn’t to say that prickly contradiction replaces meaningful commitment, either. (It’s easy to forget the last line of the bridge that started these conversations in the first place, the one where CMAT insists "it can be better if we hound it…”) Still, the absolute lack of superiority, the forceful embrace of hypocrisy and extreme contradiction, that which surely defines the anti-capitalist pop star, is one reason why her whole being has captured people as it has. I also think one of the more interesting aspects of the CMAT-world is the idea of trying to stress that the joyous aspects of her branding don’t in fact belong to capitalism, they might instead belong to, say, a folk tradition, but untangling the two, or making an album about it, is complex, messy work.

The kind of reviews that fixate on the absolute soullessness of wandering around the shops miss, I think, the very reason that CMAT, and this album in particular, are so good at capturing that precise vantage point I’m interested in. She gets it. Only a woman so taken by Diet Cokes in KFC, Calpol, Bacardi Breezers, Kerry Katona, only a woman so knowingly enthralled by the act of consumption, could articulate it as she has. In some ways, the branding seems to blow up that consumption, to make it camp, to show it for its own surreal nature. But then there are the songs themselves, with almost no trace of pantomime, but nuance and tender feeling and loss. That’s before we start to think about the form these songs take, forms which, in the very act of marrying Americana with trad-folk, also ask questions about capital, about who gets a story, about who is permitted tragedy and ballad, who gets to scream at the top of their lungs in layer after layer after layer. Who gets to make hits on a casio.

The CMAT brand couldn’t be further from soulless alienation. It is excess and intensity: it is in screaming, in headbanging, in being utterly present, or less enjoyably, in the imposed fetishisation of her (normal) size. It is wearing a euro as an earring, it is being weird, loudly, like removing your fringe to reveal another fringe. It is sounds from decades in the past but also maybe the future, it is crying a lot, it is eclectic blue stiletto boots with matching eyeshadow. To me, all of those things might just also feel like a bit like being in a shopping centre. Some of it feels a bit like what we wish being in a shopping centre was. Some of it feels a bit like what we (nostalgically and probably inaccurately) remember shopping centres being like, once upon a time. If the places we go to spend money were simply sad and alienating and grim, it’d be an easy win for anti-capitalist thinkers everywhere. They aren’t, and so maybe we need not only sober, serious critics, but those who can articulate the grimness and the alienation alongside the rush, the satisfaction, the strangeness hidden beneath the surface and written atop the surface in gilded script. Critics who can also let an inflatable version of themselves float through a vaguely quiet-seeming shopping centre in a small town, and let us, seeing that image, feel all kinds of ways.