brat red, brat blue, brat me, brat you

struggling to define Charli XCX's "brat" is exactly the point

The Vice President of the United States got a briefing on the lyrics to “360.”

Vice President Harris, along with many former Presidents and sitting members of Congress, now know what, “I’m so Julia,” means.

Let that sink in.

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The universal fascination with the world of “brat,” British pop star Charli XCX’s fifth studio album, has created a cultural moment so globally relevant, it’s reimagining the way we market music. 

Memetics are key to its fast spread: Team USA track and field athletes mime the now-viral “Apple” dance to each other at the Paris 2024 Olympics. The “brat”-green shade of the summer can be found featured in every storefront, from the windows of fast fashion retailers to local vintage shops. “You walk like a bitch,” indie popstar Lorde’s croon in second verse of “Girl, so confusing,” is now the backdrop as young women share their early experiences of sexism on (what else?) TikTok. As we speak, the latest “brat” remix, “Guess,” is racking up social engagements, from the latest choreographic trend to philosophical analyses of its lyrics (Hint: It’s about celebrity worship). There are 31M TikTok posts about “Bratchelorette” ideas. Just today, former President Barack Obama released his Summer Playlist, where he attempts to convince us that, he too, lives the 365 PARTYGIRL lifestyle.

With this level of spread, it can’t just be the memes. After over a decade ghostwriting, shaping, and shifting the pop music industry of today, the 31-year-old Charlotte Aitchinson’s sixth studio album is chock-full of technical expertise. The (deliciously) crunchy production has added to the post-pandemic club renaissance, of course, but it’s the lyric quandaries about womanhood, career, family, and future that make “brat” stick.

With “brat,” Charli has touched on a cultural nerve, delivering her even more than her well-deserved flowers. It’s smashing success is a prophecy fulfillment; Charli, as the “brat,” is experiencing commercial success, including the billboards she names in “Rewind.” While tracks like “I might say something stupid” demonstrate the fear behind the “brat”’s vulnerability, it appears that vulnerability is exactly what escorted Charli into the spotlight of her career.

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from authenticity to meta-authenticity

In the midst of the 2024 Presidential election cycle, ever-rising inflation, the AI boom, and a growing influencer economy, it’s clear young people are thirsty for something—anything—real from their music. Charli XCX’s fifth studio album did more than that. With the creation of the “brat” as a character, Charli has done something inimitable; she has given us someone new we can be.

The resonance of this “brat”—from music and fashion, to global commerce and politics—serves as a periscope into the simultaneous restlessness and malaise of today’s urban-dwelling youth. The “brat” is more than Charli’s alter ego: the album is semi-autobiographical, yes, but the ensuing cultural phenomenon has turned “brat” into an entity in her own right. 

The “brat” in question, while providing us the club tracks of the summer, isn’t only present between the snappy lyrics of “Von dutch” or the electrifying, final notes of “365”. You won’t only find her proselytizing in a dive bar or sharing her lighter at a house show; the “brat” is tortured by hangxiety, shut in her house after a night of social performance. The “brat” is on the perpetual run from her family, catching flights and numbing herself to escape her inherited rot. The “brat” feels simultaneous shame at the trajectory of her career and defensiveness over the integrity of her creations. The “brat” is jealous, paranoid, suicidal, grieving, grateful, ready to give up, ready to reinvent, ready to accept herself, horrified at that prospect. 

The “brat” is not a 2024 “girl’s girl”—she is human.

Paradoxically, performance of this authenticity has been key in “brat”’s marketing and commercial release. Charli took to the same avenues we did—TikTok—to discuss the album, explaining her process directly to her audience. She tells us exactly which tracks are diss tracks (it’s only “Von dutch”), explains her read on the politics of “female artistry,” even lets us know at what point in “365” she imagines us being coked out in the bathroom. In a recent interview, she even made sure to define “brat” summer as being something within reach for anyone; As long as you can buy a pack of Marlboro's and sneak your way into a club, you can be a “brat,” too.

This approach is markedly different from the direction other women artists typically take. In a forever race for the title of Most Sexy, Young, and Relevant, the female stars of today opt toward the element of surprise. Highly manicured, highly curated, and tightly controlled, big names like Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, and Megan Thee Stallion function first as brands. While we connect with the artist through their music, their public appearances, social posts, and media interviews are brand-oriented, fluffy, and painstakingly scripted. And these are far from criticisms: Women in music experience a double-bind similar to that of female political candidates. These PR moves create boxers out of these women; they are protecting their reputations, their artistry, and their image by moving quicker, better, and cleaner than artists of their caliber. Smoke and mirrors are required to stay on top, and continue delivering something new.

That’s where “brat” is different. With Charli, we’re not searching for easter eggs or piecing together a puzzle: she is giving us our “brat” summer on a silver platter. Aside from her well-prepared media moments, the album’s very appearance helps her case; “brat” takes the typically-antisocial “indie sleaze” and adds a CGI-editable backdrop to it. The greenscreen behind “brat”’s now-iconic album art is not to be overlooked; not only does it generate organic, audience-driven marketing with its simplicity, but it demarcates something uniquely 2024. If the “brat” background can become anything, can’t anyone, anywhere, be a brat?

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creating a new “girl prototype”

On one hand, in a time when every type of person has a “-core”, it’s refreshing to see an artist create a cultural moment imbued with such inclusivity. The messy authenticity of “brat” is in almost complete opposition to the “clean girl,” one of the lasting cultural characters to come out of women’s online circles during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Produced first in late 2021, the “clean girl” aesthetic became a hallmark of women’s self-imagining: post-pandemic, post-Trump (inshallah), and eventually, post-Roe. Routinely criticized for its racist, classist, and appropriative origins, the clean girl has been redefined and readapted the “cleanliness” of this girl is non-negotiable: glass skin, fresh scents, and effortless femininity are all derived from an inherent “clean”—but the boundaries of this “value” are almost exclusively related to consumption and purity.

Get this: Tankinis are “cleaner” than bikinis. “Clean girl makeup,” a trend requiring luxury skin products, an endless supply of liquid blushes and Dior Lip Glow, and preferably, a few cc’s of filler, has replaced the bold eyeliner and bitten, plum lips of yore. Young women, once freed by tattooing their own skin—marking it as unquestionably theirs—are expressing new anxieties around looking “unclean” in their wedding dresses…all because their ink is visible. It’s an alt-right pipeline in waiting, just for us.

The cultural anxieties of these young people are the canary in the coal mine. While young men define their masculinity through online forums—now regularly cajoled as incels and alt-right freaks—young women have been doing the same. The rules for femininity these young men have parsed out have been clearly communicated to us. We suddenly want to be easy, we want to be beautiful, we want to be taken care of.

In short, it’s not clean the “clean girl” is after, since that would be easily achieved with a washcloth and some soap. She’s scrubbing away at her skin cells in the hopes of unearthing something else: something pure, something young, something virtuous and good and unquestioning. The adoption of this new framework communicates something about the women who don this mask; they are, perhaps, trying to find the self they were before the years of lockdown, isolation, loss, and the fast-spreading fascism now spanning most of the West. The younger sisters of the #GirlBoss generation, exhausted, are now willing to conform—so long as we don’t think too long about it.

The “brat” both exists as a product of and in opposition to this new culture of gender. If the “clean girl” is the manufactured visage of youth, effortlessness, health, and fertility we used to assuage ourselves, then the “brat” is 2024’s pendulum swing. We're finally ready to graduate beyond "clean girl" to become something dirtier. It's still branded, it's still curated, but it's endlessly cooler, because it doesn’t just communicate effortlessness—it’s actually supposed to be.

We’re not just doing our eyeliner like it’s been slept in; the new “brat” culture would prefer you actually sleep in it (complete, preferably, with a faded stamp on your hands from the night before).

In some ways, I'm glad for it, because "brat" summer hits far closer to young and marginalized people's realities. But I've written before on the mixing of femininity and effortlessness, and while the world of “brat” claims to decry perfection, the “brat” herself remains a product of global capitalism and patriarchal competition between women. Perhaps she couldn’t exist without her counterpart, the “clean girl”; but as usual, Charli’s way ahead of us. The “brat” has a song for that.

Through vulnerable lyricism in “Sympathy is a knife,” “Rewind,” “Girl, so confusing,” and “I might say something stupid,” Charli solidifies the “brat” as someone, ultimately, self-aware. Instead of turning a blind eye toward this culture of competition—requiring us to overthink, overspend, and market ourselves as narrow Girl Prototypes—she turns a spotlight on it. Charli frames her relationships with women in the industry entirely through her own anxieties; while she both names and hints at peers like Taylor Swift, Lorde, and (funnily enough) Addison Re, she bares her soul in the meantime. She doesn’t ask these women, or her audience, to see her as a victim; she simply asks us to listen.

While her collaborations with Lorde and Addison Re more directly represent the kind of musical conversation I’m referring to, it’s “Sympathy is a knife” that better illustrates the archetypes we’re up against. As countless Angels and gossip TikTokers have named, the track is rumored to be a one-way conversation from Charli to Taylor Swift. And it’s a cathartic one—for anyone with a high school frenemy or a brunette complex, the zigzag between processing insecurities and being a hater feels comfortable. And that’s the thing: Charli isn’t necessarily playing nice, but she’s not lashing out, either. She’s honest, she’s confrontational, she’s insecure, she’s messy. She embodies all the things women are rarely allowed to be, in the most challenging of contexts; in opposition to the beautiful, white, blonde, songwriting Bezos of pop music.

The “brat” is anything but demure.

Charli’s “brat” is the text, the deep magic, the old ways for those of us willing to don this new Girl Prototype. But her lyrics can only go so far against a green screen; it is the allowance of her audience to become “brat” that renders her, sometimes, out of its control.

panic, fandom, and the brat

Defining an in-group in this context becomes complex. For all of “brat” summer, The Angels have been in an online negotiation, seeking to know the “brat” once and for all. 

They create TikTok dance videos nodding toward intergenerational colonial trauma. On video, they yak in public trash cans—digital footprint regardless—and call it “cunt.” They painstakingly edit fancams of all footage in existence where Charli is doing, or has clearly done, coke. They engage in sociological, often phrenological discussions as to whether Charli is a white woman (the answer is yes, and), often followed by equally lengthy conversations around white women’s place in the “brat” universe (again: yes, and). 

The “brat", independent of Charli, is being continuously redefined by her fanbase; this is a uniquely 2024 phenomenon. In decades past, artists were the sole creator, arbiter, and gatekeeper of the communities their art creates. Who would dare to question the likes of Prince, of Diana Ross, of Biggie, of Joni Mitchell when they define the boundaries of their art? There is no dispute over the themes of “Silver Springs,” for example; and if there was, it would be found in the paper or Rolling Stone the next week…not in Stevie Nicks’ TikTok DMs.

Art critics and industry experts had the kind of power that molds and pushes artists; now, instant connectivity grants that kind of power to fans. The special concoction of celebrity worship and cultural panic that marks our times has caused fans to tightly guard the boundaries of the music they love—to the point of occasionally forfeiting the artist, herself.

“Mean girls”, a raunchy club track built to scream-sing to, was Charli’s first transgression. Complete with an array of prolific cultural references—Lana, cigarettes, anorexia, coquette girls, Daddy’s money—the track could have easily been about anyone. About half of the girls in my women’s studies major (me included, at certain points) could have inspired this song. 

It was shocking to parts of the Angels community when it was revealed that the song was inspired by Dasha Nekrasova—the fascist tankie darling best known by white leftists for hosting the Red Scare podcast…and by everyone else for being a racist freak. This was met by many of the Angels with a collective…ick.

Despite my personal abhorrence for her as a political and philosophical figure, Dasha’s casual reference to the track, “Happy to be a muse whenevs,” is very brat. Despite my ick for Charli’s reference point, I believe an exploration of the “mean girl” is important, both for her art and for larger conversations on gender, girlhood, race, class, and more. But her audience, like most fanbases, is left in the dark on what collaboration with controversial figures means for their beloved artist. Can we interpret it as cross-promotion? An endorsement? A scathing indictment of the “Mean girls” lifestyle, gift-wrapped in irony and sneers? 

Charli hasn’t yet enlightened us, but we know with certainty that the “brat” is layered, complicated, and not always what you see on the surface. For her fans—most of whom keep a parasocial relationship with her, exclusively online—that’s a much harder reality to accept. If you’re defining your summer—or worse, yourself—with “brat,” then its politic must define you, too. For Charli to step out of line with each of her fan’s unique sociopolitical beliefs feels, in a word, earth-shattering.

the “brat” endorsement

In fact, for some, the presence of “brat” in the American political conversation signaled an end to its cultural moment. When President Joe Biden opted to bow out of the 2024 Presidential race, just weeks before the Democratic Convention, he was swiftly replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris: the potential first Black & Asian woman president in U.S. history. The news was collectively processed against the backdrop of “brat” summer; coconut tree connections and elaborate fancams were soon plentiful online. With a new, Gen X candidate—assumedly more amicable to memetics in her campaign—“brat” officially came into the political forefront. 

In the opening hours of her campaign, @KamalaHQ used countless references to “brat” to earn favor among younger voters, including a “kamala hq” X profile banner in “brat” branding. Sitting Members of Congress shared their public endorsements of the Vice President in “brat” green. DNC donors sported “brat” green baby tees reading simply, “kamala.”

All this buzz resulted in the dream for a political campaign targeting young people: Charli herself responded on July 21, tweeting her support with the simple message: “kamala IS brat".

For political operatives and Washington strategists, this was a victory for youth vote prospects and the candidate’s relatability factor. Now, it’s not just that you’d get a beer with her. We are being convinced that Vice President Kamala Harris—a former California Senator, California Attorney General, and San Francisco District Attorney—is a “cool girl” you could smoke a cig (or a joint!) with outside a club. (Read that sentence one more time, and revel in the absurdity of these times.) This is a smart move for Harris’ rapport with young, politically exhausted, working people…but the Angels aren’t entirely buying it.

Given the makeup of Charli’s fanbase—largely queer, working people of various racial and ethnic identities based in the West—her de-facto “endorsement” of the 2024 Democratic hopeful was met with intense online criticism. Against the backdrop of widespread police violence, a U.S.- and U.K.-backed genocide in occupied Palestine, mounting student loan debt, and a burning planet (literally), many of the marginalized people within Charli’s fanbase see the symbolic representation of a candidate like Harris as only that—symbolic. The same Middle Eastern and South Asian creators who took to TikTok to share their “Apple” dance—complete with their thobes, abayas, saris, and every kind of glittery cultural dress—are the same ones warily watching Charli (arguably, a member of our own community) support a candidate brutalizing their homelands. 

It begs the question of Charlotte, the Gujarati-Scottish woman we idolize: The apple is rotten, of course, but don’t we deserve a place to plant our seeds? Don’t you think we deserve to live?

Despite the domestic threat of an American dictatorship, the complete federal loss of the right to abortion, birth control, and other sexual health needs, and growing attacks on queer and trans people, many young voters do not consider foreign policy priorities to be exchangeable. With the growing awareness of political theory (even if popularized and simplified) and globalism in youth online spaces, “the first woman president” or “the first Black and Asian president” are no longer conversation-ending qualifications. Young voters are interested less in who the candidate is, and more what the candidate will do to affect their families, their finances, and their futures.

Genocide, occupation, gun violence, financial burden, chronic illness, and widespread addiction cannot be solved by a “brat” president, and young people are less and less inclined to choose between the rights and privileges we want. To put it plainly, we want that better world—in full—for better or for worse.

With the endorsement of an institutional U.S. politician, Charli’s in-crowd card was quickly revoked by this (important) subset of fans. Let this be an important lesson to all of us: Writing “Apple” doesn’t make you anti-imperialist; it means Charli is dealing with the same diaspora blues all children of immigrants do. Featuring Lorde on the “Girl, so confusing” remix does not a feminist theorist make, nor does “Mean girls,” or “Sympathy is a knife,” or even “I think about it all the time.” 

These are pieces of art: complicated, highly involved, and up to interpretation. As audience members, it’s our responsibility to receive it, then attempt to make it our own. The digital landscape has changed what that means for artists, and has given fans the new power of actual, cultural redefinition of a piece of art. And to be honest, even in conflict, I believe Charli would admire those who challenge her for being very brat. 

conflict as the ultimate brattitude

The defining of the “brat,” both by Charli herself and her online fandom, has proven to be inherently impossible: that’s because the “brat” is built to be all of us if we choose to see it. And it may be harder than meets the eye: this character is threatening to multiple schemae of who women—especially white, British women—ought to be. 

The “brat” is a woman who tells her friends what’s wrong. The “brat” backslides into seeing her ex again, and again, and again. The “brat” glamorizes anorexia, club drugs, cigarettes, tiny tops, and most things a high school PTA would gawk at. The “brat” makes defining yourself as a “slut” cool, desirable, and edgy. The “brat” shakes up the post-pandemic social order so powerfully because the “brat” is, first, a contrarian.

Charli XCX’s last laugh comes in her impenetrability. Even as we attempt to revoke her “brat” card, the fact that her music causes such conflict, derision, and conversation is a sign of its artistry. Her brattitude is only increased by the fact her own fans don’t always pick up what she puts down; the conflict is part of the experience. She tells us from the start: “If you love it, if you hate it, I don’t fucking care what you think.”

When announcing “brat”’s release, Charli described the project as her, her flaws, her fuck ups, her ego, all rolled into one. Two months out, I’d say that still rings true, even if the “brat” mobile is dragging some cans it didn’t start out with. It’s a rare miracle to create art that feels so authentic to its creator, it transfigures into a collective experience. Charli XCX has, with “brat”, achieved transcendance; may we all engage in our own artistry in an equally true way. I’m inclined to cheer on Charlotte’s rights, wrongs, and everything in between—and I hope she keeps steering us in the “brat” direction.