Here’s what happened: Charli XCX – branded an icon from Essex by fellow pop iconoclast Lorde – wrote the most zeitgeist defining album of the past few years and released it at the beginning of the summer. Brat – coded by its instantly recognisable lo-fi lime green cover, boorish lyrics about cocaine and felonry and sex, its loud electronic club beats – was completely trend busting.
After summer 2023 was defined by the so-called Clean Girl aesthetic (where yoga and sobriety and skincare were lauded as the foundations of the most aspirational lifestyle) in 2024 Brat arrived to say, “Enough! Let’s take drugs again” (“Don’t eat don’t sleep… shall we do a little line?”). Partying is back in vogue, Diet Coke and a cigarette is a perfectly satisfactory breakfast. And thus it was christened: Brat Girl Summer.
It’s an obvious antidote to all the data suggesting the youth are descending into puritanical boredom: they don’t drink, they don’t have sex, and they certainly have not – to this point – embraced the Brat philosophy. Pitchfork got it right when it appraised Charli XCX’s bid to make “the Apollonian pop landscape Dionysian again”. The secret to all genius – literary, musical, vibes – is to break the status quo, not ride its wave. And so, Charli XCX and Brat have cemented their position among legends.
Then the heavily memed album reached a new stratosphere. On the resignation of Joe Biden (and the all-but-coronation of Kamala Harris as the Democrat nominee) Charli XCX transcended Brat summer and heralded Brat election: “Kamala IS brat” the pop star tweeted at the fittingly Brat-time of 1.29am on 22 July. Soon after, Harris’s people changed her X header image to that iconic lime (puce-adjacent) green prompting a flurry of interrogation: could Charli XCX make Kamala cool? Could the former tough-on-crime attorney general of California really be a “365 party girl”?
Not really! So went the general consensus… In XCX’s own vernacular, the essence of Brat is “blunt, a little bit volatile, [a girl who] does dumb things”. It does not exactly cohere with reality. Harris the senator, the more-eloquent-than-given-credit for, the prosecutor, operates in a different universe to the world imagined by Brat. Instead, the true political heir to the meme is Donald Trump.
“Now I’m on the news with the DUI stare, who cares?” XCX sings insouciantly on “Spring Breakers”. Trump might be tee-total. But being a convicted felon? It hardly gets more Brat than that. And without wishing to undermine the severity of the former US President avoiding being shot by less than a centimetre, surviving an assassination attempt is very Brat indeed. Even his known preference for McDonald’s shares a similar ineffable Bratness. Meanwhile, there is no more obvious foil to a felon than a public prosecutor: Harris’s and Trump’s sensibilities are anathema and only one is imbued with the lime green stamp of Brat.
Though of course within all this frivolity there is the obvious case that the spirit of Brat should probably stay far from the political realm. “Hi it’s me, you’re all in danger…” Charli XCX boasts, “Got my finger on the detonator.” Bad vibes to cultivate in the Oval Office!
The political memeland is a limited place. And the Bratification of this election has taken the cliché “politics exists downstream of culture” to its logical breaking point (a harmless mischaracterisation of Kamala and a missed opportunity for Trump). Though, helpfully, it has reminded us of one thing: 365 party girls probably don’t make very good presidents.
[See also: The Democrats can learn from Labour on fighting populism]
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