Camping in Charli XCX’s Brat Summer » PopMatters
The Camp sensibility in Charli XCX’s Brat and its many cultural offshoots propagated a new form of Camp that Susan Sontag might not recognize.
Brat Charlie XCX Atlantic 7 June 2024
The 2024 Brat Summer phenomenon is unlike any other pop music/culture of the year. Against the backdrop of a highly divisive Presidential Election, a 24-hour news cycle with new stories of misogynistic and anti-trans legislation every day, and increasingly impossible costs of living, young adults in their 20s and 30s took the rollout of Charli XCX’s most recent album, Brat. They breathed life into the album’s ethos until it became a cultural phenomenon that dominated the zeitgeist.
Brat transcended commercial success and went on to be at the forefront of an unprecedented domination of minoritarian culture, along with the success of such female musicians as Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, MUNA, boygenius, and Billie Eilish. Concepts like Brat Summer are exercises in pop culture curation. Brat Summer became a community-building vehicle as it entered the mainstream by popularizing specific behaviors, styles, attitudes, and visuals.
Contents
- About Being a Brat
- Punking “Brat”
Brat‘s themes and visuals are pure camp. In her 2020 essay “Camp and Pop: David Bowie, Oskar Schlemmer, Madonna and Janelle Monáe”, Kathrin Dreckmann writes:
[…] pop is always more than just its music, that it also includes its poses, hairstyles, images, texts, posters, gestures and attitudes, the material play with these signs is not only tied to pop culture, but also imagines a broader stage, one that has its own politics and media esthetics, which themselves always also point back to their own histories. […] Pop culture is thus an ensemble of gestures that are recorded and re-enacted through media technology—one could say, a Pathosformel that only emerged through a media engagement with camp.
Through references to her roots in the UK-rave scene in the music production and surprisingly vulnerable lyrics, along with a carefully crafted visual language for Brat, Charli XCX curated a distinct aesthetic that became instantly recognizable, to the extent that even Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign referenced it to appeal to young voters during the 2024 election cycle.
Popular culture has a symbiotic relationship with its context. It reflects public anxieties, biases, hopes, and aspirations of the time and responds to them. In her 2017 book Zombies, Migrants and Queers, Camilla Fojas discusses how popular culture mirrors the socioeconomic context within which it exists through the slew of zombie apocalypse movies released during the Great Recession:
The Great Recession found its emblem in the zombie apocalypse. […] The zombie film evokes fears and anxieties about the indebted life and of life in debt as a form of indentured servitude unto death. Zombie stories like Dawn of the Dead (2004), The Walking Dead (AMC 2010-), and World War Z (2013) are about proto-communal alliances across gender, racial, and class lines that form in response to a zombie threat.
Similarly, television shows like Gilmore Girls (2000) and Schitt’s Creek (2015) gained renewed popularity in 2020 at the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic. Alone at home for the foreseeable future, viewers, including myself, sought comfort shows with low stakes and a sense of humor to help cope with the loneliness and fear caused by an unprecedented global health crisis. In a review of Schitt’s Creek for The Advocate, Sa’ed Ashtan describes how the show helped him through the early months of the pandemic, noting, “Film and media can provide a welcome escape, especially in moments like this with a pandemic that has no end in sight.”
British sociomusicologist Simon Frith notes that popular culture depends for its effects on its context, the response of active audiences, and memory. The enthusiastic engagement with Brat Summer in America was a cultural response to the fear and stress caused by a high-stakes election campaign and news stories about discriminatory policies and war. It provided multiple musical and cultural symbols—especially to those most affected by the election and the emerging anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric in American politics—around which to create offline and online communities where one could, just for a moment, distract themselves from doomscrolling into the seemingly never-ending onslaught of bad news.
About Being a Brat
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a brat as “an annoying or ill-mannered person/child.” Before 2024, this word was generally negative; children of career military persons are sometimes called “army brats”, for instance. Typically, brats were considered “spoiled”. Charli XCX spent most of the early months of 2024 refining her definition and embrace of the word and rebranding it.
In 2024, Charli XCX hosted a Boiler Room rave titled Party Girl; this event received over 25,000 RSVPs—the largest in Boiler Room history. Several guests, like actress Julia Fox and singer/songwriter Addison Rae, were also featured in the performance. A wall in New York was painted to depict Brat’s album cover. This wall became affectionately known as the “Brat Wall” by passersby and fans. The excitement created by the Brat Wall, the Boiler Room rave, and the paparazzi pictures of Charli XCX with New York City’s “It Girls” slowly began to set up the new Brat, remaking it into a label that was not just acceptable, but desirable.
Every new Brat activation was an online conversation starter. I scrolled through Instagram and TikTok and sent posts to my partner and giggled at funny comments. Indeed, thanks to the Brat that Brat cultivated, I enjoyed being online in a way I had not experienced in a long time.
At first, Charli XCX’s Brat represents a young adult in their 20s and 30s going through the ups and downs of urban life, and despite it all, she is still a “365 partygirl”. However, the word has grown past its initial definition and become a glorification of “character”. In her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp”, Susan Sontag elaborates on the idea of character:
Character is understood as a state of continual incandescence – a person being one, very intense thing. This attitude toward character is a key element of the theatricalization of experience embodied in the Camp sensibility.
The character of a Brat, as defined by Charli XCX, is distinctly feminine and queer; this is not to say that this character is female, but as Brat progresses, the listener begins to experience the work as a snapshot of Charli XCX’s lived experience. As she explores ideas like motherhood, generational trauma, and grief, one can see universal experiences most adults go through mirrored in the album.
Brat’s appeal to queer audiences isn’t limited to Charli XCX’s popularity amongst queer people. The album explores concepts like feeling misunderstood by one’s family, the loss of a queer mentor and friend, and a lack of belonging in professional and social settings (in “I might say something stupid”, over a lone synth playing melancholic chords, Charli XCX’s autotuned voice laments, “I wear these clothes as disguise / Just to re-enter the party / Door is open, let in, but still outside”).
The track list is skillfully curated to capture a surprisingly nuanced portrait of Charli XCX; with every song, Brat feels less like a pop album and more like an honest conversation with an old friend. Through these vulnerable admissions and the fast-paced club anthems that comprise most of Brat, one can see that outwardly she is confident and self-assured—almost cavalier, but she makes space for the questions she has involving these personal, vulnerable facets of her life.
Throughout Brat Summer, Charli XCX’s character had her fans adding semantic conventions for the word; now, Brat is no longer just an adjective, it’s an attitude. In this use of the word, one is not a Brat; they are either Brat or Not Brat. This is not limited to people either; any object, action, event, style, or behavior can be Brat. Typing in all-lowercase is Brat. Tesla Cybertrucks are Not Brat. As Charli XCX joked in her 2024 monologue on Saturday Night Live, she referred to Martha Stewart, who said she was glad that journalist Andrea Peyser, who wrote a negative article about her, is dead, that is Brat. Peyser, alive and well, making it clear she is still alive and quite well, is also Brat.
“Brat” has become colloquial. It’s common to see people on social media commenting with the metric of whether or not a thing is Brat. Those engaging with Brat Summer did not need a dictionary definition for the new meaning of “Brat”.
Punking “Brat”
The reveal of Brat‘s album cover was met with confusion and criticism. It confronts its viewer with an abrasive bright green color with the word “brat” written on it in large, low-resolution, Arial font). Critics and fans call the cover ugly and question Charli XCX’s decision not to be on the cover art. One X (formerly known as Twitter) user, @LMonsterReacts, posted the Brat album cover and said, “art directors must be on strike. dear god…”
In an interview with Vogue Singapore, Charli XCX explained her vision for Brat’s album art:
They were like, ‘Why isn’t she going to be on the cover? She needs to be on the cover.’ Why should anyone have that level of ownership over female artists? […] I wanted to go with an offensive, off-trend shade of green to trigger the idea of something being wrong. I’d like for us to question our expectations of pop culture—why are some things considered good and acceptable, and some things deemed bad?
The cover represents an absence of care, not in the form of an artist not caring about her work, but in the form of rejecting the perceived beauty and taste of glossy, expensive photoshoots for the average album cover.
Brat is supported by three lead singles, “Von dutch”, “360”, and “Guess”, featuring Billie Eilish, along with music videos for each song. In all three videos, Charli XCX maintains a consistent body language. Her walk is powerful when she enters or exits a room, every step a stomp. She rarely ever breaks eye contact with the camera, and her stoic, emotionless expression turns this eye contact into a challenge. These music videos “queer the gaze” of pop music videos, which is quite an achievement.
In her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey writes that pleasure in mainstream Hollywood film is bound by and maintains a structure of men who look and women who are looked at. Without agency, a woman’s body is reduced to a means to an end, devoid of depth, and an object meant to be consumed. Her onscreen demeanor is deliberate and communicates intention with every move.
There is something profoundly unserious about Charli XCX power posing amidst these music videos’ sometimes absurdist, sometimes awkward dramatizations of real life. As one places them in the larger context of Brat Summer, the Camp sensibility in Brat’s entire rollout comes together into a loving homage to the best parts of the popstar and fan culture of the aughts.
Brat Summer played a significant role in engaging young voters in the 2024 Presidential Election, especially once Kamala Harris entered the race. In the face of a chaotic election campaign, with a new candidate entering the race mere months ahead of the election, the community and hope marginalized groups found in Brat Summer are explicitly political.
Susan Sontag declares that Camp is one of the great creative sensibilities because of its failed seriousness and theatricalization of experience. She insists that Camp is style over substance, playful, and “anti-serious”. Charli XCX’s Brat proves that this notion of Camp is outdated.
The curation of character through Brat’s songwriting and visuals employs the Camp sensibility to form the aesthetic and artifice of the partier and the symbolic meaning of the human experience, vanity, and womanhood. The confessional nature of several songs paired with the party anthems on Brat demonstrates that Camp does indeed have space for seriousness, especially within its unseriousness.
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