Charlie Puth Kicked Off the Charlie Puth-aissance at the Super Bowl
When I brought my theories of a possible Puth-aissance to the office slack, GQ’s wellness and grooming director Alyssa Bereznak immediately came out as a die-hard Puther, stanning since 2014, when he released an ode to O2L—perhaps the world’s first hype house—that subsequently went viral. (It starts off with the irresistibly Spearsian line, “It’s Charlie Puth, bitch”)
“He just seemed very enterprising to me—wanted to make music, wasn’t necessarily a Bieber heartthrob, so ingratiated himself with super popular YouTubers so he could earn exposure and then built a career off of it,” Bereznak told me. “We love a resourceful king.”
Meanwhile, GQ associate social media manager Trishna Rikhy remembers Puth mostly for the halcyon days when he was one of the Internet’s leading thirst traps, posting ass on main like your most feral Grindr contact—only to later reveal that he was, in fact, getting married to a woman. “I think that was when I stopped paying attention to him,” she tells me. (Heterosexuality can really tank a twunk.)
For his part, Puth seems to know that some of those stunts obscured his gifts, calling his past self “cringe” in a recent Rolling Stone interview. “Saying things in interviews that weren’t true, because I was told by higher-ups that I’m a white guy with brown hair. Literally, they said I need some excitement around my project,” he says. “It was just so much inauthenticity.… I thought I had to be a certain way to be popular.”
(While his antics sometimes distracted audiences from his musicality, his talents were never overlooked by legends like Stevie Wonder, Elton John, and Babyface, earning their approval and when needed, tough love.)
All that sets up Whatever’s Clever! as a potential return to form for Charlie Puth. And in the lead up to its release next month, he’s largely put the focus on the music and his formidable skills as a songwriter and producer. On TikTok, his series “Professor Puth” sees him taking on the role of music-theory educator to his millions of followers. And in a recent guest appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Puth suavely showed the audience in real time how he’d turn a raw voice note from Fallon into a sharply-produced pop song in the span of a few minutes.
Of course, if there’s truly a true Puth-aissance afoot, we might have to give Taylor Swift credit for getting the ball rolling. Two years ago, Swift gave Puth a shout out on the title track of her Tortured Poets Department album—name-checking him in the same song, mind you, as Patti Smith and Dylan Thomas. “You smoked, then ate seven bars of chocolate/We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist,” the pop juggernaut sang.
The Puth-aissance has been in the ether since. The first season of Benito Skinner’s hit series Overcompensating featured a recurring joke featuring a frat boy who repeatedly confused Charli XCX for Charlie Puth—not exactly an unflattering comparison at the peak of Brat. Charlie, so confusing!
