RIOT GIRL RISE : MUSIC HONOURS CHARLI XCX

'' RIOT GIRL ''. Hitmaker Charli XCX rages against the pop-music machine : The British Singer CHARLI XCX traffics in extremes. For Icona Pop's global smash '' I Love It,'' which she wrote and sang on, she imagined crashing cars to spite an ex-lover.

Then she bragged about trashing minibars and chandeliers in luxury hotels on '' Fancy,'' her No. 1 hit with Australian rapper Iggy Azalea.

Now she's riding the wave of her first Top 10 solo hit, '' Boom Clap,'' a song from The Fault in Our Stars, in which she likens falling in love to being on drugs.

Raised in England's Hertfordshire county, Charli got her start posting recordings to Myspace and scoring invites to perform at illegal London raves, to which her parents happily provided transport. These shows helped her build a buzz and land record deal at age 16.

Toward the end of recording True Romance, she wrote '' I Love It.'' Thinking it didn't fit with the rest of her album, she let Swedish duo Icona Pop record it, even though her label had told her to keep it, saying she was sitting on a huge hit.

The label was right : the song's boisterous ''I don't care!'' hook sold more than 2 million copies in the U.S. and went to No.1 in the U.K. But it has been wrong before. 

When Charli wrote '' Fancy '' with Azalea, she says her label '' felt nothing.'' The song later topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart for seven weeks.

The success of '' I Love It '' had its downsides. She and producer Patrik Berger were inundated with requests to write replicas for other artists.

Feeling uninspired, she and Berger holed up in Stockholm and routinely worked till sunrise banging out dozens of two-minute punk songs to vent their frustrations. '' We were both tired of the machine of pop music,'' she says. '' We just wanted to rebel against it.''

She eventually went back to writing pop songs - '' She can write so much, she competes with her own material,'' Berger says - but the punk session left a mark. Instead of showing off a newfound maturity, the feisty songs of  Sucker revel in juvenile delinquency and testing limits.

Charli says she and her label fought about. True Romance, but now everyone's on board with her vision. '' I never get questioned on anything now,'' she says.

She's taking full advantage of that freedom as she plans her next album. It's partly inspired by Japanese pop music, and she says it will sound like ''another planet up in the clouds'' and ''intensely weird and childlike. '' In other words, its yet another 180.

'' Just when people think they get it, '' she warns, '' I want to change it again.''

The World Students Society thanks Nolan Feeney.