I hope you had a brat summer. I hope you made intentional typos in your texts to show off your relatability. I hope you were “demure.” I hope you gave “indie sleaze.” I hope you streamed “Red Scare” semi-ironically. I hope you finished your screenplay. I hope you kept the scene with all the blood and latex. I hope you traded your Airpods for wired earbuds, the kind with the rubber coverings that you inevitably lose between cushions. I hope you had a good brat summer, now that its patron saint has officially declared it over—through a tweet, which itself is very brat.
What? “Brat” is a vibe, a 2020s update on camp, an energy, a mindset, a meme, a political campaign. More importantly, it is an album from English singer-songwriter Charli XCX (“Guess”). On “brat,” XCX distorts her voice into a smokey Auto-Tune for candid lyrics about it-girls, frenemies and the escapism of camera flashes, over abrasive techno beats meant to induce debauchery and tinnitus.
The album’s release cycle procured both irony and bravado, exemplified by the lead single “Von dutch”’s opening lines, “It’s OK just to admit that you’re jealous of me.” The infamous album cover taunted fans with fuzzy Arial Narrow text over an uncomfortable lime green. Even further, XCX switched the rest of her album covers to the same format, hopefully temporarily.
Despite the subtext of antagonism toward the casual listener, brat summer took off. It was a weird moment to have already been a fan. XCX lived in pop-star limbo: popular enough to command a fiercely dedicated fanbase, yet her current experiments into deconstructing electropop never eclipsed her reputation as the “Boom Clap” girl.
And then came Kamala Harris.
The “kamala IS brat” tweet, which the star posted soon after Harris replaced Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and which Harris’ campaign subsequently adopted, propelled XCX into the headlines for not only music buffs but politicos. The phenomenon tested my assumptions of media literacy; I had always assumed any news about XCX was a product of internet feed micro-targeting. Here she is now, the subject of morning talk shows.
Even more ironic: this is the successive album to “CRASH,” the ‘90s throwback XCX described as both her “Janet [Jackson] album” and her “sellout era.” It paled in comparison to the heights “brat” reached.
XCX, who cannot even vote in the U.S. election as a Brit, clarified in a recent profile for New York Magazine that while she was content with the Harris campaign adopting the “brat” aesthetic, her tweet was less of an endorsement than it was a joke. “I’m not Bob Dylan,” she told journalist Brock Colyar. “Politics does not feed my art.”
But the whole thing was very brat. What is more brat than turning politics into a meme and turning a meme into politics?
On Labor Day, XCX tweeted out the death of brat summer. Will there be a brat autumn? A “brautumn,” if you will. At time of writing, the open secret is an upcoming remix album, which XCX teased only as an untitled project within “the bratosphere.” “Brat” never existed in a vacuum; pop culture site Vulture dubbed the resurgence of indie sleaze-esque, rave-minded, vulnerably hedonistic electropop as a resurgence of “Obamacore,” a reference to the EDM-boom that defined the late-2000s and early-2010s. With the post-hyperpop, post-pandemic, post many things scene of XCX and her messy-pretense-as-art clique—The Dare (“Girls”), Shygirl (“club shy”), Frost Children (“FLATLINE”) and of course Chappell Roan (“Good Luck Babe”)—it seems like we are entering Kamalacore, through purely correlation.
So I hope you have a brat autumn. I hope you win the Halloween costume contest with your interpretation of a sexy financial consultant. I hope you drink pumpkin-spiced mocktails. I hope you wear a crop top to the voting booth, a copy of Sylvia Plath in hand. I hope you “work it out on the remix.” What I hope you do not do is think too hard about what I hope you do; I hope you learn to just live, because that is brat at its core.
Image by Charli xcx from Youtube
