Still Brat After All These Months
For much of the last decade, being a fan of Charli XCX has involved a fair amount of pining for greater commercial notoriety. 2014 was a roller coaster for the U.K. pop sensation born Charlotte Aitchison. She logged credits on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” and “Beg for It” and had a solo hit in The Fault in Our Stars’s “Boom Clap.” But later that year, the punk-pop aesthetic of Sucker, her sophomore album, failed to set the world on fire, seemingly dissolving the singer-songwriter’s interest in an aggressively mainstream gesture. She eased off the Stargate, Ariel Rechtshaid, and Benny Blanco collaborations and locked in with A.G. Cook and SOPHIE instead. Mixtapes like 2017’s Pop 2 argued that Charli is just as formidable of a curator as a writer. She had pull with pop yeomen — a “Disco Tits”–era Tove Lo, Carly Rae Jepsen post–Emotion: Side B — but also modern queer creatives like Cali rapper Mykki Blanco and Brazilian drag star Pabllo Vittar. Yet by 2019’s Charli and 2022’s Crash, you could hear the singer circling more conventional sonics. Brat struck a sly balance between the approaches. It stuck out in the modern pop landscape because it didn’t scan as a self-conscious act of trying to rope the most people it could into listening. In a year of pop stars copying each other’s homework and avoiding uncomfortable conversations, “Sympathy is a knife” and “Girl, so confusing” said “Fuck you, I’m a real person with genuine and often uncomfortably perplexing feelings.”
No one could have predicted the pop-cultural joyride this refinement of Charli’s style would spark — not the election-year feeding frenzy still yielding nightmarish copy like New York governor Kathy Hochul proclaiming, “My staff is telling me New York is brat,” or the global goose chase for clues about A-list singers appearing on the just-released remix album, Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat. It was funny having that signature combative sorta-chartreuse seep into overuse, leaving social-media feeds looking like a Nickelodeon gak attack. But as the autumn chill and inclement weather tug the curtains closed on Brat summer, people who’ve never derailed a conversation declaring that Pop 2 is the future are still crowding a new Popular Thing.
The discourse around Brat has been weird. It was bizarre watching Charli initiates equate Brat with a 20-something party mentality when it is instead definitively caring-less-what-others-think-after-30 music. The album reached the point where interest in a pop-culture artifact begins to self-oscillate, and people hone in because they see a juicy outlet for youth attention and approval. New Jersey senator Cory Booker, who wore a “nj is brat” pin at the Democratic National Convention this summer (and whose TikTok profile picture remains Brat themed), is not doing it because he leads a life of coming to the club to hear the classics. This is the price of a rapid advance in global notoriety: Masses rush to familiarize, align, and occasionally embarrass themselves. The song remains the same, from the tacky corporatization of punk and grunge aesthetics in the ’90s to obnoxious, attention-seeking behavior documented at live shows of any artist in a moment of viral meme traction. The corniest claims to Brat status heed the same urge as the people doing backflips at Clairo shows. Everyone wants to be noticed.
Thankfully, Charli has remained calm in the heart of a maelstrom of people contorting to express that they Get It, with the singer leveraging increased visibility to have fun and broker cool collabs. Hosting the remix-album premiere event 60 miles north of New York City at Storm King Art Center displayed a commitment to presentation but also to making people work a bit for a memorable experience. Completely different is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too moment, where an artist coming off of an unexpectedly eventful album campaign can nudge it further into A-list company. It carries out the inverse function of Lady Gaga’s 2021 Dawn of Chromatica, which reveled in an air of indie cred the base-album Bloodpop bonanza didn’t have space for.
Completely different takes the critical darling and proves she can keep pace with the stadium headliners, while continuing to work feats of hilarious and distinctive taste. The “Sympathy” remix offers Ariana Grande something colder and ruder than the measured Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh beats she currently favors and pulls her delightfully to the precipice of meanness in a year where she’s trying hard to give Glinda. (This makes for a tamer track than the deliciously crunchy original.) Giving the 1975’s Matty Healy a verse on “I Might Say Something Stupid” after a year of sometimes well-deserved backlash is a funnier move than any r/popheads thread could dream up and lends a believability to his tender guest spot.
The original Brat offered a heterodox synth album and venting session dressed in pop-diva garments for normies caught in its flytrap, and Completely different reworks its source material, unraveling threads interwoven in Charli’s patchwork sound. Justin Vernon makes sense for “I think about it all the time”; the Bon Iver self-titled “Beth/Rest” and Charli’s “I Don’t Wanna Know” stage sonically complementary ’80s pop deconstructions. Julian Casablancas’s classic rock and new wave nostalgia push the Sucker-esque “Mean girls” to even more rewarding tonal shifts than the original. By cooking Brat’s slime-green goo over a Bunsen burner to see what it’s made of, Completely different bursts with ideas about the differing shapes pop music — and Charli’s own songs — can take. There were moments where the banter surrounding this music carried a whiff of the historic cringe of Hillary Clinton hitting the Macarena during the 1996 DNC. The parade of family-friendly types continuing to use Brat as a signifier of cool run perpendicular to the druggy soul-searching it’s actually talking about. But Charli XCX is seeing the shine she deserved all along, and blessing the year of mannered pop releases with something worth being annoying about.
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