I don't want another Brat summer

On pushing back against idol worship

As if it wasn’t bad enough that music journalism is dying a slow death, with viral and huge interviews given to tasteless influencers, the way we consume and engage with music as listeners is also in a sad state. Criticizing anything is deemed as not letting people enjoy things, being a misogynist, being jealous of an artist’s success (especially if your own fav has not seen similar success) or just plain being a hater. We’re supposed to just listen and clap and stare wide-eyed at musicians, embracing idol worship and bowing at their altars. They can do no wrong! They’re pop stars!

I am of the belief that the kind of art that is enjoyed by everyone is sacrificing something. Things that are widely and easily palatable have usually been watered down to suit everyone’s tastes. And in today’s music consumerism landscape, it’s easier than ever to appeal to everyone. But is people-pleasing really the goal of great art?

Oh no, another essay using the Charli “They don’t build statues of critics” pic!

What happens when you get everything you ever wanted?

Let me start this off by saying: Brat was absolutely a cultural phenomenon and crowning achievement for Charli XCX. It is a display of originality and artistry that I admire. Charli’s belief in herself and her vision for this record were powerful to witness. On a personal level, it is meaningful to me to see a woman my age reach new heights in her career, as someone who religiously looks up successful people’s ages to compare myself and make myself miserable.

Brat was heralded as Charli XCX’s return to form and originality in the wake of her previous record, Crash, which she’s essentially said she regrets making as it was her attempt to break into the mainstream. In an interview with The Face ahead of Brat’s release, she said she was “sick of the ​'vanilla palatable flatness' in the pop landscape.”

The fact that Brat, a true examination of her career and innermost feelings, the music she wanted to make and be represented by, took off into the mainstream in a major way is very cool, in that sense–that she got there by being herself. Despite her proven ability to write a catchy mainstream pop song, Charli focused more on writing experimental music, and making something that felt true to her, which resonated more than she anticipated and became a runaway success.

But bravery, vulnerability and artistry aside, the album’s entry into the mainstream allowed people to misinterpret it and Charli herself seemed pleased to allow this, too, as long as it led to more widespread commercial success. The outside the lines, party girl image Charli was projecting got co-opted by the masses who used it for social media clout without ever listening to the record, some instead, making a joke out of it, with every comment section on any post of hers full of idiots making the same generic comment of “I know it was snowing in there! 🤪” and she didn’t seem to mind.

The very thing that made Brat as cool as it was was–originality and punk grassroots marketing–was quickly replaced with palatable, mass marketing and memeification, relatability to the average consumer, allowing it to be embraced by the Democratic Party, every big brand with a social media account, the same white sneaker wearing carbon copy girls across the world and everyone else, too. How did the alt-princess of pop turn into the very same pop stars she was shading? Well, what if that was the plan all along?

If you ask me, it all starts with the “girl, so confusing remix.”

When Charli dropped Brat, there was a lot of speculation about who songs or lines were directed at. Is “Sympathy is a knife” about Taylor Swift? Was that line on “Von Dutch” about FKA Twigs? Does anyone think global warming is a good thing? I love Lady Gaga. I think she's a really interesting artist.

Speculation about the inspiration for the original version of “girl, so confusing” aside, some people immediately related to the song and how it details the confusion of being a girl, which apparently consists of worrying if other girls like you, hate you, or wanna be you and vice versa. The themes of jealousy, comparison and ping-ponging between being so confident in yourself that you think everyone wants to be you to wanting to buy a gun and shoot yourself are all present on the album, and perhaps it’s this instability that is the most relatable. Even so, this track became heralded as a deeply vulnerable exploration of “girlhood,” a word that now triggers my gag reflex.

Charli’s repeated utterance of “I’m just a girl” leaned into a widely used online phrase that I personally haven’t thought about the same since I saw someone post a screenshot of their dad responding to them using it in a text, saying “I don’t know what that means but it sounds like it minimizes you as a person.” Tea! That one lyric made the track ripe for social media posting across all platforms, including this site, with many heralding it as such an important and vulnerable song, something I also took offense at considering it’s not even the most vulnerable song on Brat.

Now, I can’t blame this all on Taylor Swift, but one of the worst things she has contributed to culture as a whole is a white feminism informed, self-indulgent outlook that her fans and listeners mistake for a validation of “girlhood.” I have some old post draft from years ago about how angry I got reading a tweet from a white woman with a lot of Twitter followers who claimed that “men don’t have a Taylor Swift,” which to her meant an artist who spoke about universal “girlhood” experiences.

Swift’s fanbase is a shining example of women minimizing women, even if they don’t recognize it. If you fix your fingers to type anything negative about her, you are deemed a misogynist. She is immune to criticism. She can’t make mistakes. It’s OK for her to hang out with Trump-loving WAGs. Stop being mean to her about it, she’s really sensitive! She’s just a girl! Why do so many people struggle to find the irony in coddling an adult woman and making excuses for her capitalist-fueled business decisions?

But on the internet today, minimizing women is actually fine, because we should all want to be exactly like each other. The problem exists outside of Substack and social media. If you read the viral New York Magazine piece about West Village girls from last week, you saw that the author painted these young women and their lack of originality and desire to be just alike as “sweet,” instead of sad, which would maybe work if it was a piece about 13-year old girls in a random middle school, but it’s about adult women living in a city that thrives on its originality and beloved weirdos, although the pandemic and TikTok and the rise of consumerism have all contributed to the dangerous return of monoculture, with people here wanting to be just like everyone else in every other part of the world–hence the Targets everywhere, the Stanley cup holders, the way Soho now looks like a suburban shopping mall. The FOMO instilled in every trend-following influencer and brand meant that everyone had to be “brat” and have a “brat summer,” without ever even listening to the album or trying to sit with the themes explored on it. It wasn’t at all about the music or what Charli wanted to represent anymore–it was just anything lime green and trendy enough to make a TikTok out of. For Christ’s sake, a PET STORE in my very non-hip South Brooklyn neighborhood had a brat window.

Charli pokes at Taylor on Brat; both on “Sympathy is a knife,” where she hopes Taylor and Matty Healy break up quick and also on the “Guess?” remix and in shady tweets alluding to Swift’s slimy habit of releasing remixes whenever another pop star has a debut, just to place higher than them on the Billboard charts, referencing the shade in the track: “You wanna guess what me and Billie have been textin' about? (We've been disrespectful)". She does imply, on “Sympathy is a knife,” that she’s jealous of Swift’s fame and feels she could never be her if she tried, she’s opposite, she’s on the other side. But from where I’m standing, the side is starting to look the same.

Along the way, something that started out as an antithesis to Swift’s style became associated with the same things that Swift’s cookie cutter, immune to criticism music and approach did. There’s a disconnect in the way that “girl, so confusing” is a song supposedly meant to celebrate the universal experiences of girlhood and how relatable they are, while both alt-pop artists on the track are now finding themselves drunk on idol worship. Lorde, who had been out of the spotlight for years, got a taste of it again with this remix, and now she’s attempting to go for the same virality for her own record. While I love to be in a world where Swift’s pop legend status is knocked down, I don’t want her replaced by artists who don’t question or fight back against the systems in place. And if Swift herself gets to sit back and laugh at how her competitors are embracing her formula, has she even really lost in a meaningful way?

Here we are, a year out from brat summer, with Charli teasing some semblance that it isn’t over. But why can’t she let go? Not to blame Swift again, but her negative affect on music fans’ expectations of output, touring schedules, album releases, etc. has been a major disservice to the music industry and the artistry of music. It’s harder for artists to make money now in a streaming era, but the answer to that isn’t compromising your artistic integrity with half-ass “remixes” and 40-track albums (anytime you’re taking a page from a Chris Brown playbook, you should be re-examining your choices.)

Charli released a REAL remix album, which I truly respect. I respect most of the collaborators she called on for the album, because I do believe for the most part¹, that she collaborates with people based on an appreciation for their artistry and not for shock value, and not for damage control or control² in general. I also respect how candid she’s been about what it’s like to linger too long in the spotlight. She has made performance art out of her stage show, she’s working on a film about a pop star–there are times when it’s clear she does interrogate the culture. But if she falls victim to the highs of idol worship and starts believing she can do no wrong, she stands to find herself becoming another cog in the Swift machine, resistant to challenging herself, and losing herself and the values Brat was built on in the process. There’s a real danger in clinging on to this moment instead of accepting it for all it’s already given her.

With Brat, rather than adjusting her image and sound to appeal the mainstream, Charli demanded the mainstream meet her where she was at. This is what a great artist should do. But how much more of herself would she have to sacrifice to maintain a place at the top of the mainstream?

I just ask, if we’re going to girlboss, can we at least gatekeep a little too?

While Charli may not have had control over every flat and tasteless influencer or every random storefront that cashed in on using “brat” as a marketing tactic, she definitely had a say in how she allowed the Democratic party to co-opt her image for gain. When she first tweeted “kamala is brat,” some people were quick to call the death of brat summer. But plenty of others leaned into it, with Twitter booming with an influx of posts of people rejoicing in “libbing out.”

What made the whole ordeal more confusing was Charli’s mixed messaging on American politics. It’s actually unclear if the Democratic Party really *is* “brat” to Charli, considering her ode to “mean girls” on the album, which she’s stated is inspired by Dasha of the loser alt-right podcast the Red Scare, who has been loudly praising Donald Trump on Twitter, even posting the photo of him signing a law banning trans women from sports and captioning it “beautiful” and also posting videos of herself at a gun range shooting targets she placed headscarves on, proudly boasting her Islamophobia.

You could argue anyone would go this route, allowing anyone and anything to inform and co-opt their image for the sake of visibility and capital gain, but then you have someone like Chappell Roan who saw a massive rise in popularity overnight and didn’t waver on her values. People were literally blaming her for the reason Kamala wasn’t elected because she dared to criticize the Democratic Party’s complacency and responsibility in the ongoing genocide in Gaza (meanwhile, she literally also said she’d be voting for her, but that she wouldn’t be happy about it). I also happened to be present at Chappell’s iconic Gov Ball 2024 performance, where she stated that she turned down an invite to perform at the White House for their Pride celebration, saying: “We want liberty, justice and freedom for all–when you do that, that’s when I’ll come!” before dedicating “My Kink Is Karma” to them.

I wish more artists would be like Chappell Roan and Lucy Dacus and reject their music and image being used as a prop by brands or politicians.

Another thing to admire about Lucy and Chappell: both have spoken out against the toxicity of fans who worship them and use that worship as an excuse to stalk, berate, and dehumanize them, in interviews and for Lucy, in song, too. They also have both responded to critiques they’ve received in interviews, with Chappell talking about the backlash she’s received for her political statements and anti-harassment statements and Lucy addressing complaints from fans that the casting for her “Best Guess” music video wasn’t inclusive enough.

More artists should be interrogating brands and political entities appropriating their likeness for their own gain. But in a world where marketing increasingly relies on an artist (in any medium)’s own efforts, many seem to have adopted the mindset that any press is good press, any attention is good attention, and actually, it’s a good thing if the Duolingo owl likes your trending new song!

It’s not just brat. I don’t want any kind of summer built off a trend that takes a term or phrase or idea and bleeds it dry until its devoid of meaning.

What would it mean to have another “brat summer”?

Would it simply mean more partying? More cocaine? Would it mean knocking the mainstream pop girls down another peg? Or would it mean succumbing to idol worship, rejecting the idea that there is anything to improve on, and falling full-force into the capitalism-fueled, crazed stan-deluded machine that chews you up and spits you out without an ounce of originality left? If there’s any chance of that last one coming to life, I’d say we cant afford the risk.

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Thank you so much for reading this. It took me a while to break apart the numerous essays I was trying to write here and reform them into something cohesive. Editing myself is always harder than I expect it to be. I hope it gets easier in time. That being said, don’t be surprised if future essays revisit and expand on points made here. I still have a lot more to say about toxic stan culture and mainstream monoculture and girlhood culture, etc. and I hope to create a through-line with some of my essays on here.

I recently spoke about similar topics explored in this essay with Imogen Rose as a part of her Lesbian Literary Library series. Please give it a read if you’re curious to learn a little more about my background!

And in case it wasn’t clear, for the record, I love Brat!

1. I have my qualms about allowing Ariana Grande to get on a remix of one of my fav Brat songs to try and squash rumors that she has an eating disorder and proclaim that she didn’t steal that lady’s husband.

2. Yes, I believe T.S. brings some artists on tour and collabs with them just to make sure they don’t try to get ahead of her/take away their ability to say anything critical of her. And Ice Spice on the Karma remix was so stupid and unnecessary but! It happened right after Matty, Taylor’s bf at the time, made racist and weird comments about her.