notes on a failed brat summer

I primarily listened to brat in hours-long auto commutes as an escape from deadlocked Mumbai traffic. I visualized Charli XCX’s Boiler Room set in Ibiza with a 40,000 waitlist that only accommodated 400 people, thinking about how Mumbai clubs (the few I’ve been to) are still doing 2000s “That’s What I Call Music!” style sets. Last year, Barbie embodied the “girly but not a girl” feminism. This year, Charli described herself as “bitchy but not a bitch” when talking about the song “Girl, so confusing.” I wondered, who is this type of person, and where do they live? Is it in Dimes Square, NYC or Dublin, UK or Dadar, Mumbai? What are the spatial and cultural requirements of brat? You might need cliques, a garage rave scene to speak of, an it-girl ouroboros that hates itself, cult bookstores selling SCUM Manifesto in zine form, maybe a rundown local shop for cigs and cheap booze. I assess my options in Mumbai: a type of contrived scene in Antisocial sometimes (if you can pay a few thousand a pop and know someone who knows someone, which I don’t), speakeasy clubs in Bandra (which I’ve never tried to go see), bookstores (also in Bandra) selling zines above full price (they’re “vintage”), no real it-girls that I envy or emulate, and cigs and booze at your doorstep thanks to the gig economy. It’s bratty, but can anyone say it’s brat?

Which is to ask: what has brat done to all of us?

The internet collectively thought it had a brat summer because the idea made us feel free and unabashed despite our lives not being like that. It was a return to the pure rapture of physical sensation: when you imagine yourself in the club Charli’s talking about, you can see how the strobe lights make everyone look like a singular, writhing mass together, and the sound makes everyone’s hearts jump in unison. Her famous Boiler Room set looks like a religious experience. And then you remember you’re already exhausted from a commute that began at 8am and that nobody can really be a partygirl in this economy. Nothing beats the cognitive dissonance of listening to Charli XCX vocal-frying about guessing the color of her underwear while running to catch a cab and getting splashed with stagnant rainwater by an asshole in an SUV.

Nevertheless, brat reawakened my – and I suspect a lot of people’s – yearning to be a cool girl. In a last-ditch effort to find something in common to connect with her, I listened hard to search for any hint of Indianness in Charli XCX, aka Charlotte Emma Aitchison, who is half-Indian, but I never could find it. She’s too chic, too unreachable. She is a wildebeest of a personality – her unruly cascade of dark curls, the Earth-shaking stomp in her strut, her basslines thundering like a thousand hooves in the near distance. It is absurd to think she has something to do with Gujarat, the birthplace of Gandhi, the seat of Narendra Modi’s power, the dry state, the vegetarian state, the state with bloody religious riots in its past, the state with the regimented development narrative. What kind of a person gets to have ancestry in such a state and never even have to talk about it? I marvel at the possibilities of feeling untethered to any place or category and the freedom to be something new. Boxing oneself into a category like “diaspora” or “South Asian” automatically invites serious questions, but Charli wants to be unserious, and brat is how she gets to be without being asked any questions. And maybe that’s her right. But every time I try to feel brat in my own life, I just feel silly and out of touch. What was I missing?

On the remix of “Girl, so confusing,” Lorde reminded us that “inside the icon” is a “young girl from Essex.” I studied this young girl to understand: She was an aughts Internet girlie who crossed paths with a random guy on Myspace, who invited her to raves. She wanted to run away with him: her parents compromised and decided to accompany her to said raves instead. She was 14. So that’s step one to being brat: be a half-second generation immigrant in the UK with chill parents who’ll come with you to parties that begin at 3am.

Obviously, brat is also a homage to a subculture. Step two: be a part of a subculture. Charli’s generous exposure to rave culture led her to go on to do a lot of alt-electronic stuff. She met all the people who were sort of niche but would go on to become alt-icons, the way she did. On the podcast Switched on Pop, musicologists Nate and Charlie explain that the brat album is a sonic tribute not only to Dubstep, house, and trance but also to a person: Sophie, the glamorous and avant garde producer who died tragically young. Which makes brat an album with depth and personality, like a hot, sad, partygirl. Meanwhile, I grew up too insulated to have participated in a subculture of any kind. I’m a woman in India – I had curfews, self-imposed dress codes, and a mortal fear of vulnerability of any kind. Who is allowed to let their guard down enough to absorb and create culture?

Step three: to be an alt-girl, draw inspiration from the other alt-girls. Pitchfork’s review of the album identifies another cultural influence: the Red Scare podcast, with hosts Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Kachiyan, two women who love talking about wanting to be skinny and using slurs that aren’t theirs to reclaim. They generally defined “dirtbag left” culture, the ideology that’s so jaded with progressive piety politics that it bends sharply to the alt-right. There’s even a song on the album called “Mean Girls,” which is an ode to the type of girl who loves being called anorexic and fingers her necklace while calling a man “daddy,” the embodiment of ironic coquette-core. The type of girl who operates under seven layers of irony, until you can’t tell where she stands or if indeed she stands for anything anymore. Postmodern, post-feminist, post-race, post-politics, post caring about anything. The type of girl Charli wants to be.

She said as much in her New York cover story: in response to her “Kamala IS brat” tweet, she said doesn’t want to be “a political artist” and dodged another question about Dasha.

Don’t we all want to be like this sometimes? It’s tiring to always have to state your position on everything, always acknowledge your privilege, always try to be a good person. There are only so many more earnest platitudes about mental health and body positivity and feminism that we can stomach before it feels a little nauseating, especially when sometimes, the worst people you know are the ones on the pulpit, preaching. Sometimes you just want the latitude to call bullshit. This is the age of Ozempic. Maybe we do need to talk about body positivity, and we would, if it didn’t feel so trite and pointless. Brat was the moment that allowed that – but it also begs the question, once you start to call bullshit on everything, when do you stop?

If you zoom out, things are really very bad. Even if one might argue that bad things have always happened, there is the particularly new phenomenon of the year-long livestream of slaughtered children. As recently as a few weeks ago, Dasha Nekrasova was photographed in a gun range, practicing on a target draped in a keffiyeh. Why won’t Charli XCX confirm or deny or even address whether she made a song about her? Is it not brat to ask such an earnest question, or is it off-brand for her to entertain it? What’s worse: dishonest social justice discourse, or disenchanted nihilism?

Brat is a great album because it packaged and provided a great feeling – that of pretending like the world doesn’t exist or that consequences don’t matter. All the references to doing a little key and a little line reminded me of when I tried it – at an age where I just felt like I had to for the plot, not because I felt rebellious and young (which I don’t think I’ve ever really felt). The experience was only fun because of the way I got to feel disembodied from myself: Watching the image of myself in a pub bathroom doing a line, using my best friend’s $100 bill, who lent us the note purely for the descriptive value it added to the scene (and then took it back and thoroughly cleaned it), and feeling like I’m finally cool. Not because the line itself felt like particularly anything; the high was really just main character complex. It begs the question: is brat really about fun, or is it the performance of fun that feels fun? I just know that I told my other friends about the experience later, describing what it looked like and not what it felt like. Is that brat?

I woke up to an awful piece of news the next day, and my memory of the previous night was dampened with knowledge that such things are finite – not just because of the finitude of youth, but because my country’s political situation curtails all joy, all freedom, all levity. To unironically quote Kamala Harris, we exist in the context of all in which we live and what came before us. We all do, except Charli XCX, it seems.

Now that Charli XCX has bade her farewell to brat summer, I feel upset about her ability to opt out of a very political, very destructive year. Who gave her the right to unsubscribe from caring about anything and having so much fun? And how did it become such a culture reset? Looking back, I feel the old circular and righteous bitterness creeping in: she had her fun, but I think she should also acknowledge the state of the world more, and being half-Indian, she should talk about India. But it’s a catch-22: she’s brat precisely because people like me want such things from people like her. And she wants out.

NATO – yes, NATO, The North Atlantic Treaty Organization – just did a brat post on Instagram. It said “peace” in the brat font and colours (there’s a brat generator that’s free to use, a brat commons – you know, in case other militaries and corporations want free zeitgeisty branding). Now will Charli say something? Perhaps “NATO is NOT brat”? I doubt it. Brat is about nonchalance, even if it’s regarding the post-World War military industrial complex that is currently ravaging the planet.

It’s never a coincidence when a brash, reckless affect coincides with major political strife: like when dance music coincided with the 2008 economic crash and, a little before that, punk revival coincided with the Iraq war. But where those moments were laced with an underlying rejection of the political status quo, brat is rejection for rejection’s sake; rejection as anti-trend (still defining itself within the framework of trends). So we end up in a situation where brat was the year’s biggest cultural moment that coexisted alongside the century’s biggest one-sided “war”, currently taking place in Gaza.

It’s a dark place to be, this liminal space of not giving a shit while acutely giving a shit about being perceived as not giving a shit. While it is self-indulgent, it’s not morally wrong – just empty. The New York profile called Charli’s infamous “kamala IS brat” tweet a branding misstep – but really, it was perfectly on brand to say things without a filter, without regard for the consequences. Kamala Harris and Julia Fox are both brat and it’s not contradictory, because the ethos of brat is to just not care about what anything means – not even when brat-Kamala’s rallies are interrupted by protestors asking her if she will stop the genocide in Gaza, and Harris responds to them with a stern talking-to about manners.

Brat is a politics of not-caring, and it made us feel good for a while, but now what? I write for a living, and I try to write about things I care about. Where would I be if I didn’t care about anything, and where would any of us?

Brat is hopelessness, brat is trying to feel something, at best, in a world where we’ve seen too much and feel nothing, where therapyspeak and sterile mental health advocacy render all emotions meaningless. That’s why the simple act of crying at the club, as Charli said brat could sometimes be about, is now pedestalized as a cultural monument to authenticity in the 2020s.

Ultimately, it not only takes a lot of work but a lot of numbness to be brat; a club rat, in an economy where gentrification happens because roads and spaces are taken up by clubs built for a small cohort to have their best brat summer. Brat is the rehashing of what was, packaged in nostalgic and reactionary longing for something that never really existed, a soundscape of jarring discord and repetition to package a collective desire for meaningless hedonism.

But unadulterated pleasure doesn’t exist without suspending disbelief that things don’t matter. The suspension comes in starts and stops in brat – broken by stray musings about a career, a lost friend, a contemporary, a future as a mother, apples rotten right to the core from all the things passed down from all the apples before. But these are mere blips in the programme. Some will become inane TikTok dances. The rest is an exercise in Charli rejecting the sink of discourse about how to care about the world. She has now begun selling ironic brat merch, posing for Kim Kardashian’s Skims, going on tour because the partygirl life goes on – all the while making unironic dollars. Because she, more than anyone, is fully aware of the fact that there’s no such thing as brat. There never was.