When does Brat summer really end?
Maybe you’re in Brat winter or maybe you’re over it. This essay is eight months late and I don't care.
When I was in Europe this past summer, I was given a tip to check out a club venue called Paradiso in Amsterdam. It was an old church, converted to host multiple performances at once. Not quite brazen enough to go clubbing by myself, I picked an event that was more sober – an artist talk called Sounds of the Night. It started as a small and intimate conversation. The artists and their interviewer sat among the concentric chairs of listeners. One artist, Bogomir Doringer, spoke of his experience of the night as a teenager in Belgrade in the 90s. Dance was “a choice against isolation” amidst the political crisis of the time. Doringer called this kind of dance a “dance of urgency.”
A dance of urgency is not “rose-tinted, pretty and palatable.” It arises when there is no other path to resolving one’s individual or social crises. Doringer’s talk got me thinking about music that is rose-tinted, music that is pure entertainment, or more fittingly, music that is True Romance, Charli XCX’s first studio album.
True Romance came out during the era of EDM pop, which started when I was in middle school. EDM pop was born out of the slow, writhing tension of EDM, but it kept only the beat drops and added pop vocals from singers like Ellie Goulding or Halsey. But the power of EDM pop was the way you could mix and match the available array of DJs and vocalists to make a song that made you want to jump. This made EDM pop sickeningly sweet. If you were a teenager during this era, it probably polarized you like it did me.
But EDM pop thrived in a period of optimism. It was the early 2010s. And one of Charli’s hit songs, “I Love It,” turns the turmoil of post-breakup destruction into an anthem.
For me, the EDM pop era ends with The Chainsmokers’ song “Closer (feat. Halsey),” released the summer of 2016. By November, Trump is elected and the abundant idealism of the Obama era is over. Liberal optimism became liberal cynicism, and our cultural appetite became twisted with nostalgia. We’re currently in this maximalist moment where kitsch relics of the 90s and Y2K are being refashioned in a way that pulverizes them, makes them more kitsch and therefore more “now.” Fashion has reached a peak state of girlhood: bows upon frills upon poof. Except that girlhood must be undercut with black eyeliner or one’s natural eye bags – what Emma Chamberlain has called, Tim Burton vibes. Charli XCX in the early 2010s, with her indie grunge look, was therefore the perfect image to revive and make cool. She did away with the red lip, the skinny jeans, and kept the black and the distressed.
When Brat began blazing an internet fire, it wasn’t totally obvious yet that Charli was now cool. Still put off by the easy optimism of songs like “I Love It” and “Boom Clap,” I approached the album with some skepticism. I braced for a beat drop and was surprised that it never came. I realized that this was going to be a different kind of club experience, one that is more about tunneling into the rhythm, into a kind of cool that is also about being sad, and a kind of movement that is not about purpose but simply about urgency.
Much of the sonic inspiration of Brat comes from Charli’s origins playing warehouse raves at 14. Her parents would chaperone her to these raves, which meant that it was very much not cool. In her interview with Emma Chamberlain, Charli talks enviously about Billie Eilish’s early success. “When I was 14, cause I was making music when I was 14…, I was so lame,” she exclaims.
Listening to this interview, I was surprised that Charli wanted to be cool. The word feels outdated–reserved for high school popularity contests and therefore something you stop chasing once that era is done. Throughout Brat, Charli evaluates the past and present with a clenched fist, wanting more. The post high school definition of cool is perhaps what Charli wants most, “commercial success.” But she’s older now and there are other possibilities on the horizon. In the song “I think about it all the time,” she observes how her friend is “a radiant mother and he’s a beautiful father / And now they both know these things that I don’t.” She’s thinking about these alternative futures, but she is also still “playing demos on my iPhone.” Cool, whatever that means, is something that can’t be let go of.
And if there was ever a time to be cool, now is the perfect time. The internet has turned cool into the byproduct of research, of being “well read,” as Charli calls it. And Charli understands the internet now. The facade of humor and meaninglessness in meme culture sends Brat to the vast reaches of the internet, perfectly packaging the emotional resonances that hide behind the green cover.
So Charli becomes cool – if cool means commercial success – and the “360” music video is the tutorial for those who wish to access Brat’s version of cool. It’s perfectly rebellious in an innocuous, if not self destructive, way: blowing vape smoke at old men, taking demure selfies or throwing coffee down the street. It’s also a video in which Charli fashionably struts from scene to scene with nowhere to go but the next scene. In the song “Rewind,” Charli sings about wanting to go back to a “simpler time.” The funny thing is that Charli XCX of the early 2010s was likely a simpler time for many of us. But Brat goes further back, “rewinding” all the way to girlhood when she burned “CD’s full of songs I didn’t know,” and sat “in my bedroom putting polish on my toes.”
After the artist’s talk at Paradiso, a DJ called Oceanic moved to the center of our circle and began a sound performance. He wore an artist’s red turtleneck. Tall and thin, he hunched over a platter of knobs and buttons, adjusting them as if he were touching a hot stovetop. The sound that came through the speakers began with that familiar writhing and mechanical sound. As new rhythms ebbed and flowed, I scanned the room to find many eager bodies, engaging in the rhythm by pulsing their chests to it, moving their shoulders and their heads back and forth. Relieved to see others focused on the performance, I felt less guilty about covering my ears. I didn’t particularly enjoy the way the sound felt inescapable. Covering my ears was a way of asserting a sense of control or personal space.
Freedom doesn’t always feel safe in the anonymity of a crowd. I personally prefer the privacy of headphones. Brat is about “club classics” but it’s also about the individual relationship between artist and listener. Charli’s lyrics in Brat are ultra-conversational, almost diaristic except for the fact that she’s very much aware of the listener. One of my favorite lyrics is a couplet with an unstable second person: “When you’re looking in the mirror do you like what you see? / When you’re in the mirror you’re just looking at me.” The first line is insecure. Maybe Charli is asking herself this question, or she’s asking the listener. But it doesn’t matter. The second line moves on. Now, she’s seeing through the eyes of the listener, and the listener sees Charli reflected back at them. Is this the Charli that is insecure, or the Charli that’s made it, admired and recognized by the listener?
There is a Sisyphean aspect to Charli’s introspection. Brat questions everything, whether it's friendship, romantic love or self love. The repetition in electronic music becomes a conduit for that sense of endlessness. In “Everything is Romantic,” the refrain “fall in love again and again” repeats over and over again, carving out a liminal space. Just when you think it is going to take a turn in rhythm or melody, it returns quickly to its predestined path. To let the music change or to let the beat drop, is to produce a sense of false optimism akin to the bygone era of EDM pop. Perhaps the most enchanting and productive quality of the club is the fact that you leave when you want to, while the music goes on and on, every night. Charli’s last song takes the elements of “360” and calls it “365.” We start with reckoning and end by establishing the endlessness of that reckoning. You only leave when you’re ready, the music won’t tell you when it's time.
Thank you to Alanis, Hristo and Sarim for being early readers.
Relevant links:
Interview with Bogomir Doringer by Minimal Collective
Dance of Urgency Lecture by Bogomir Doringer
Charli’s interview on the Emma Chamberlain podcast