Explaining the title of her latest album, Charli XCX defined ‘Brat’ as “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes.” “A little bit volatile… but it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat”. The album has the cadence of a rambling voice note with brisk tonal shifts and rolling synths, uncompromising authenticity undercutting the sharp production with gravelly cracks in the autotune. Beyond the album itself, the lime green cover has cast its hue on all corners of the culture; a fashion statement, the background of Kamala Harris campaign’s Twitter page and the cultural force of the ‘Brat Wall’ in New York spreading the word, all coalescing in a “brat summer”.
It is easy to be cynical about brat as a movement as it appears to wane with the autumn breeze. It’s a pixelated buzzword stamped across an empty green background, it’s a soon-to-be dated phenomenon that encapsulates everything and yet nothing new. No one can quite define it beyond a vague notion of messy hedonism in a predictably prompt knee-jerk reaction against the prudent, minimalist aesthetics of the last few years, which in itself are not so clear-cut when the vision of our age is split off into a million marketable moodboards.
But as much as just another of these, it is a word that I have found myself using many times in the sweaty crowds of newly accessible 18+ spaces, turning to a friend and declared the scene – “so brat”. No longer the kids stuck in lockdown from the ages of 13-15, watching Skins for the first time and wondering when the colour and music would filter in through the hospital-blue of the news and masks and four walls of our bedrooms. No longer clumsily crafting identities from the music we discovered in these isolated spaces but understanding them as a first-hand, communal experience.
As I was let loose on the crowds at this summer’s Boomtown Festival, the musical knowledge I had meticulously piled up during that period of enforced loneliness fell to irrelevance as my body moved to DJs I couldn’t name. And as I hear Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter on the radio and never dream of switching the stations, the steely, petulant resistance to the charts I also developed at that time falls away with it. I am brought back with the inescapable rhythms to the “recession-era pop” of my childhood – Lady Gaga and Kesha narrating a promised adulthood that Charli now soundtracks in real time to newly grown-up kids like me.
Brat somehow defied the algorithm, broke down the private walls of tailored content and pulled everyone into the same crowd, whatever it means to them. In the first week of September this year, Charli posted on instagram with the caption “goodbye forever brat summer”. The post honoured this unity in a series of dancing Tiktoks to tracks from the album, everyone from Bella Hadid and Kim Kardashian to a child somersaulting on the beach. Like all great, evanescent cultural moments, it is defined more by people than creators, the crowds taking the slim Brat essentials Charli prescribed – “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra” – and choosing their interpretation. And for my pandemic generation specifically, Charli emerged at the perfect time, a raven-haired brat messiah leading us out of our lonely rooms and into our first clubs and the world.
