brat-green summer
Or, don't look too long
When I heard Charli XCX’s brat for the first time, something happened that’s been happening more and more in my listening habits: I adopted about half the album as representative of the state of my soul, and I didn’t really care about the other half.
I’ve kept a low-key eye on Charli—“London Queen,” from her 2014 LP Sucker, was a running-playlist fixture—but not exactly kept pace with her output. Earlier this year I found myself visiting how i’m feeling now, which dropped in the first throes of the pandemic: its vibe was somewhat more introspective and meditative than I’d anticipated from the party girl I knew Charli to be (an identity she proudly reclaimed on brat’s lead single, “360,” and proceeded to step into fully). The new record straddles both and looks cool doing it. And everyone is paying attention, everyone has opinions: you either love or hate the color of the cover sleeve, which has lent its custom name to this season, but either way you’re talking about it. Having felt Charli was destined to be the hottest pop gossip one day, I’m glad to see that day arrive. She’s getting her due.
What pushed me at last to a listen-through was the remix of the track I’d heard about, “Girl, so confusing,” featuring someone I keep a high-key eye on: Lorde! Whose claim to green has passed into legend. I was unaware the two had any kind of friendship, let alone such a rocky one as depicted in the reworked song, but good thing I found out so I can stan them platonically. Now I think of it, I guess they do have the same hair. Anyway, it feels like the counterbalance to Taylor’s “Bad Blood” (or Avril’s “Girlfriend,” for that matter), and that’s an era I want to live in.
On the whole, the artist seems intent on portraying all sides of the 365-party lifestyle, seedy underbelly included. The closer is a manic, even demonic twist on the opener, and some of the grooves overstay their welcome. And, as mentioned, she doesn’t shy away from the big ideas (see “I think about it all the time,” plus “Hello goodbye,” a personal favorite on the expanded version). Interestingly, there’s a defiance in both entertaining these big ideas and refusing to entertain them (“Mean girls”)—we, the girls for whom it is confusing sometimes to be a girl, can dress up and go to the club and clog our camera rolls with selfies and dare to ponder what we want for our futures all at once. It can be hard to hear our inner voices over the music, and hard to enjoy the music when our inner voices insist on cutting in. No wonder we’re confused. My brain has been more crowded for the past year than Berghain could ever hope to be.
A non-native-English-speaking friend asked me what the word ‘brat’ meant when I told him about the album. Even as I defined it as a term mostly applied to young girls, I wondered if that was true: I hear kids of all genders called brats or bratty. But they’re almost always very young, younger than Charli XCX and me and most of the people who are consuming these songs. I think the reason brat has swept the summer, color scheme and all, is that it’s given all age groups permission to indulge those feelings of being denied, those garish look-at-me moments, those give-me-what-I-want-or-I’ll-take-it urges. I can see “Girl, so confusing” becoming an intergenerational anthem among the women in families. And I can see Charli taking her spot in the top hyperpop echelon, as is her right.
My song rec: “Apple,” whose structure is so simple it might loop around to being complex