"It was a queer, [brat] autumn, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in [St Andrews]" — Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (probably)
Last week, it was announced that the term ‘Brat’ was deemed important enough to be labelled the Collins Dictionary word of the year. To describe something ‘Brat’ now means it possesses a ‘confident, independent and hedonistic attitude’. Moreover ‘Brat Summer’ is a defined as ‘way of life’. What does any of this mean, and more importantly, what does the popularity of ‘Brat’ say about the way art is consumed?
Brat is Charli xcx’s (FKA Charli XCX) sixth studio album and her most successful to date, finally liberating her from the asylum of nugudom. The album is a vindication of the hyperpop movement, which sought to stretch pop music towards the opposite ends of maximalism and minimalism before bending every rule and pushing them together so that they touch.
The album sees Charli, traditionally an underdog in the music industry, discuss everything from jealously, feminism, motherhood and doing lines through autotuned vocals atop club beats. As someone whose brain chemistry was forever altered after being exposed to Charli’s seminal mixtape Pop 2 in 2018 at the age of 14, following her career has never felt so rewarding. Now ignore that last paragraph. As shown by the dictionary (who doesn’t love the dictionary?) Brat has long since gone far beyond the original reach of the album, and in doing so has lost the plot.
Perhaps the best way to find the original meaning of Brat is to embark on the ‘via negativa’ and start with what Brat is not. Charli herself in an interview with The Face claimed to be ‘over this idea of metaphor and beauty in art’. Centuries of philosophical debates and literary and art criticism have been discarded in favour low-res text on putrid shades of green. After all, they don’t build statutes of critics.
Credit: Instagram/@charli_xcx.
In theory, Brat’s thesis is one of anti-aesthetics. In reality, not so much. Charli cannot escape the use of metaphor, evident in the title alone of Sympathy Is a Knife and the genius conceit of Apple used explore the complexities of intergenerational trauma. Despite its apparent ugliness, the Brat iconography became instantly recognisable, something you would want to wear on a t-shirt or make your profile picture on Twitter. Accompanying the album was a return to critical acclaim for Charli after the slight misstep of 2022’s Crash. Brat is a paradox. Unstable in its identity and embodying everything it claims to go against.
It did not take long for Brat to go mainstream, spawning viral TikTok dances, collaborations with Bershka and Dress to Impress, and even the tragically fated Harris Walz campaign. A quick Pinterest search will return images of neon green everything, indie sleaze throwbacks, and a lot of cigarettes and partying. Such an explosion in popularity culminated in last month’s Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat (or to use its Christian name, ‘tarb llits osla tub tnereffid yletelpmoc s'ti dna tarb’), a reimagining of the album with a slew of guest features ranging from cult rapper Bladee to megastar Ariana Grande.
The latter is particularly interesting given the context. The original version of ‘Sympathy Is a Knife’ is a whirlwind experience that perfectly encapsulates everything the original album stands for. The track has Charli caught in a spiral of insecurity, comparing herself to a much more successful woman and contemplating both suicide and a turn to religion.
Credit: Instagram/@charli_xcx.
On top of all this, Charli’s brutal honesty and specificity did not make it hard to figure out who the mysterious industry fellow who would be backstage at a The 1975 show in 2023. It’s a real time playback a vicious circle of confused, irrational hatred towards a fellow woman and a highlight of an already brilliant album. The addition of Ariana Grande, however, does little to advance such an interesting topic.
This new version of the track loses the sharpness of the original; sympathy becomes a butterknife. Lyrics like ‘it’s a knife when somebody says they like the old me and not the new me’ and ‘it’s a knife when they won’t believe you’ essentially boil down to the trite message of it isn’t nice when people don’t like me. The sword of Damocles is hardly a novel concept, even in the realm of popular music, with Kanye exploring the exact topic some 14 years earlier. If the original embodies manic desperation, the remix is little more than mild irritation.
Is this really Brat? Ariana’s feature is also frustrating in its lack of specific, amounting to nothing more than a series of vague denials; a disappointment given the rich potential how turbulent the Break Up with Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored singer’s public image has been in the past year. The result is Brat in name only. It wears the same skin but has none of the meat.
So, does Brat actually mean anything anymore? Does anything? Obviously ‘Brat’ as we know it in 2024 is inconceivable to somebody just 10 years earlier, but this misconstruction of the term as originally meant reveals something rather disturbing about today’s society.
Credit: Instagram/@charli_xcx.
In today’s attention economy aesthetics have never been more important. The classical narcissism of loving yourself the way you are, no matter how awkwardly it may fit in with the rest of the world has become an endangered species. Social media has spawned a new type of narcissism concerned only with the image of the self as an object rather than subject. Hacking pieces of ourselves off in order to fit into tidy categories, an essential part of any marketing campaign, has become common.
Brat can easily be substituted by any number of labels: gay son, thot daughter, thought daughter, almond daughter, clean girl, boy pretty, girl pretty and so on and so on. Underneath all these labels is the exact same person, too concerned with how they are perceived or what specific Taylor Swift album they should organise a year of their life around to actually exist in the moment. Despite Brat’s best efforts, it too has become aestheticized.
Social media has dissolved us into some sort of primordial stew. Some people get caught up in small bubbles that we mistake to be true individuality, but these do not last long before bursting. Fortunately, new bubbles appear all the time and the cycle can continue. Even those who claim to reject this new society by labelling their ‘basic’ peers as NPCs or sheep fail to recognise how they are the same people they claim to loath, just in a different font. Any attempt at making any artistic statement as Brat intended to do is unappreciated, getting chemically peeled for mass consumption.
Ethel Cain, in a deleted Tumblr post, expressed her frustration at our ongoing ‘irony epidemic’ and how we as a society have lost the ability to, either out of personal choice or genuine stupidity, engage with anything with sincerity and humour is just one symptom of this problem. Everything can be boiled down to the same blurry font on a green background. It’s the online equivalent of a nervous laugh before checking your exam results.
Credit: Instagram/@charli_xcx.
Does anyone actually care about what Charli has to say about the prospect of motherhood on ‘I Think About It All the Time’, or can it just be boiled down to a joke about how not one track later is a club banger about drugs?
This societal malaise is hardly surprising given the state of art as a whole. Humanity has invented machines, which when fed the entirety of our species’ art and history (along with dozens of square miles of rainforest), can spit out a glossy, uncanny, if not passable imitations of genuine emotion. The result of every heartbreak, first kiss and funeral ever put on paper, tape or canvas has been distilled into one homogeneous paste. Style and substance have never been easier to separate.
Perhaps this has just been an overly pessimistic rant about a B-list popstar that quickly snowballed into something else entirely, but the point still stands. The bare minimum of critical thought, applied not just to artists and their work but to everyone, has become all too rare. Dig beyond the superficial and try to thing about the art you consume. Art is more than just a Halloween costume.
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