Picture a hot, sweaty hole in the wall: bodies bodies bodies with skin-to-skin contact; radiating heat against one another, burning up; wrists frozen from ice, and noses chilled from snow; club rats trapped in an endless cycle of self-sabotage in their attempts at conflating their egos and sense of vulnerability. This cycle—whether brought on by a desire to be seen and appreciated by the world, generational trauma, or simple escapism—is not unique, as everyone can be a bit of a brat.
CharliXCX, the “young girl from Essex” who mainstreamed the term “brat,” was born into club culture. She grew up a “club rat” amidst her haphazard upbringing, often accompanying her parents to raves and nightclubs kept just out of view of the law.
CharliXCX’s 2012 breakthrough single, “I Love It,” which she wrote for Icona Pop, laid the foundations for her long-awaited 2024 release, BRAT. The album cover’s in-your-face lime green square with “brat” typed in a fuzzy, blurred, Arial Narrow across its center is a stark contrast from any previous release by the artist: it’s a rejection of the idea that female artists owe the music industry their bodies and sex appeal to succeed. Subsequently, every other previous release of CharliXCX’s received its own brat-themed remodel, adding to the overall impeccable marketing of the album.
First introduced to the public through a sold-out February Boiler Room set, BRAT saw a slew of four cult classic singles that spring (“Von Dutch,” “Club Classics/B2b,” and“360”) as well as a music video accompanying “Von Dutch” in which Charli is chased through an airport by the paparazzi, beating up the cameraman while dancing provocatively. It is an egotistical parody of a powertrip, full of camera flashes and the assertion that “you’re obsessing, just confess it, put your hands up/ It’s obvious I’m your number one.”
“Von Dutch” ushers in an era of volatile and abrasive pop music. It’s an ode to “Bimbo Summit,” and alongside “360,” a manifestation of “It Girl” energy. “Linked with Addison on Melrose,” “Von Dutch, featuring Addison Rae and a. g. cook” is more laid back, but is still an attack on fake fans and features the most iconic scream of 2020s pop music.
BRAT is abrasive, but emotionally vulnerable as well. Charli’s comically large ego on this album allows her lyrics to sound conversational and unfiltered, almost as if she had recorded the entire album through voicemails and wine-drunk texts after winding the night out down.
In “Sympathy is a Knife,” Charli struggles with fame and the feeling of self-hate that comes with feeling like one is never amounting to enough. She sings “Why I wanna buy a gun?/ Why I wanna shoot myself?/ Volatile at war with my dialogue/ I’d say that there was a God if they could stop this/ Wild voice tearing me apart.”
The volatility of the high-strung synth beat mimics the paranoia of Charli’s anxiety, whose gripping presence on the track makes the listener feel uneasy, as if they are the one being attacked with sympathy. It isn’t until the following track, “I might say something stupid,” that the knife twists. This pity party of a song grapples with the same current image exposed in “Sympathy is a Knife,” but goes a step further with Charli moping flat-out that she “doesn’t belong.” Her lament, “I’m famous but not quite/ But I’m perfect for the background/ One foot in a normal life,” expresses the phenomena of being known for only making it to the top 10 through features, subject to tour-opener status, and never feeling that one’s artistry is adequately appreciated.
The industry is seemingly her biggest enemy, one that she grapples with in “Rewind,” singing, “I used to never think about Billboard/ But, now, I’ve started thinking again/ Wondering ‘bout whether I think I deserve commercial success.” Reminiscent of her throwback anthem “1999,” “Rewind” is a poppy love letter to her inner child, accompanied by references to celebrity culture as well as burning CDs in her bedroom.
Around the time that Charli’s breakout hit “Boom Clap” was released in 2014, she was largely overshadowed by New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde. Both artists, known for their untamed black hair and introspective songwriting, were interchangeable in pop culture in the early 2010s, which South Park spoofed and iheartRadio spun into a joke interview.
Ten years later, Charli’s official response was heard in “Girl, so confusing” in which she sings about the parallels, pitfalls, and envies of girlhood as both artists grew up under a public magnifying glass. She and Lorde were able to “work it out on the remix,” creating a vulnerable song that reads like a conversation over text, yet is acutely aware of the current rebirth of womanhood. “People say we’re alike/ They say we’ve got the same hair,” Lorde and Charli sing, “It’s you and me on the coin/ The industry loves to spend.” Together, “Girl, so confusing,” is a reconciliation of differences and a healing of relationships through a celebration of girlhood.
The repetitiveness and self-referential nature of the album is simply another part of the brat mythology and compliments the danceability of the album. One can lose themselves in the bouncy, pounding synths of “B2b” or “Everything is Romantic” as well as the frizzy deconstructed production of her more intimate tracks such as “So I,” an ode to the friend of CharliXCX and late producer SOPHIE, which samples their song “It’s Okay to Cry.”
“I think about it all the time,” which brings up the idea of motherhood, is equally raw and unfiltered. Charli ponders, “I think about it all the time/ That I might run out of time/ But I finally met my baby/And a baby might be mine.” For her, time regards the rapidly closing window of commercial success. A common trope in the music industry is that a female artist’s career is over once they have a baby—that they are shunted to motherhood. Charli’s internal monologue feeds temptations to quit, and the self-doubt starts to creep in, saying “Should I stop my birth control?/ ‘Cause my career feels so small/ In the existential scheme of it all.” Again, she feels a lack of legitimacy within her career, that she might just quit music and retire to motherhood. Essentially, Charli thinks about starting a new branch of the family tree all the time.
Already an apple hanging on a branch of her family tree, Charli feels as though she can’t help becoming a parent herself, or stop herself from turning into her own parents. This sentiment is highlighted as she sings, “I guess the apple don’t fall far from the tree/ ‘Cause I’ve been looking at you so long/ Now I only see me.” Sonically different from other songs on BRAT, “Apple” covers themes of generational trauma, how Charli wants to “drive to the airport” and escape her parents. She sings, “I think the apple’s rotten right to the core/ From all the things passed down/ From all the apples coming before.”
Charli is confronted with the fact that she, the apple, is afflicted by the same ills that plagued her parents, and is unable to gut herself of her rotten core passed down from generation to generation. So what better way to cope with the fact that most apples don’t fall far from the tree than going for a drive? Charli can only hope that her daughter falls far away from the family tree.
Charli is finally living her unapologetic it-girl fantasy.
“Mean Girls,” a track that has garnered ambivalence amongst “Charli’s Angels,” as her fans are called, is built on a lively piano melody, which is attributed to BRAT Producer A. G. Cook. In this song, Charli describes her ideal mean girl dressed “In the sheer white dress, wearing last night’s makeup /All coquette-ish in the pictures with the flash on/ Worships Lana Del Rey in her AirPods” and “she’s kinda [messed] up, but she’s still in Vogue.” Nonetheless, she’s a brat and CharliXCX “knows that you’re obsessed.”
The thesis of the album and introduced on track 1, “360,” the phrase “keep bumping that” evokes the wartime phrase “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Both mantras of continuation have British origins. However, one is more noble than the other. “Keep bumping that” is a double entendre, “bumping music” as in blaring music, as well as to do cocaine, (i.e.: “do a bump”). On “365,” Charli’s ode to party girl culture, she goes full brat.
She sings, “Who the f- are you? I’m a brat when I’m bumpin’ that/ Now I wanna hear my track, are you bumpin’ that?” Charli is finally living her unapologetic it-girl fantasy. In her lime-green magnum opus, she welcomes in her “it-girlhood,” singing, “Yeah, 360/ When you’re in the mirror, do you like what you see?/ When you’re in the mirror, you’re just looking at me/ I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia.” Or, in her endorsement of Kamala Haris’s Campaign, tweeting “kamala IS brat,” “I’m everywhere, I’m so Kamala” has gained traction as well. The album, popular amongst a young and online community has spawned a remix of “Apple” and Harris’s “coconut tree” speech. Harris’s campaign in turn, has started appealing to Gen Z, as they will be a new influential generation of voters this upcoming election season.
CharliXCX, whose album has become intertwined with American politics and pop culture, is, undoubtedly, an artist whose career commands innovative and artistic acclaim.
