#14: brat
when I go to the pub, I want to eat those pub classics
It was the year the General Election took place on the 4th July, while the US voted on the 5th November. It was the year of the Willy Wonka immersive experience in Glasgow; it was the year Kendrick Lamar trounced Drake. It was the summer of Brat.
When the music video for the album’s opening track, ‘360’ was premiered, I was exasperated and wary. What a dreary, insular premise: the hunt for the next internet hot girl? Why should I care what a Gabriette is, anyway, and why is Emma Chamberlain driving a truck. Particularly at a time when thinness has been more enforced than in recent years, including those of us not on semaglutide, the roster of it girls, including Julia Fox, felt like an even more tiresome version of Taylor Swift’s 1989-time ‘squad’ but for people who experience comedowns. I wasn’t impressed, and I was hesitant to encourage that kind of try-hard stunt by engaging with it much. But ‘360’ the song, and Brat in turn, won me over. Which is to say that, while Brat has been as much a marketing campaign as a musical event at times this year, the songs were actually good enough for me to forgive some of the early missteps.
‘Von Dutch’ became my top-played track of the year after my friend’s wife forcefully, but not unjustifiably, insisted that it was the single of the year on the way back home from a barbeque maybe a week after the album came out in June. I get that the style won’t be to everyone’s taste: hyperpop is a genre best described by the title of a playlist on Spotify: ‘songs that would kill Prince Philip,’ which is illustrated with that photo of him in his later years somewhat alarmingly behind the wheel of a car. It’s also understood as the sort of music that could kill a Victorian child. SOPHIE, whose posthumous release came out this autumn, was a hyperpop pioneer and Charli collaborator. If you’re not familiar with her output, ‘It’s Okay to Cry’ is directly referenced in brat track ‘So I,’ which is a touching and honest tribute to the musician, though for me quite skippable — but I’d recommend starting by listening to ‘Immaterial.’ A song like ‘Von Dutch,’ though, owes probably more to the annoyingly catchy ‘Yeah Yeah’ by Bodyrox. The album’s appeal for me is partly that it feels like the spiritual descendant of some of the more irritating songs people would set to autoplay on their Myspace profile circa 2007.
Lyrically, Brat is an exploration of jealousy, the fear of being pitied, fame, situationships, the body, love, whether or not it’s the right time to try for a baby and continuing to make work after the death of a trusted colleague. Oh, and, wanting a bit of a dance. The album has made its way into my lexicon for now, at least. When I am eager for either fish and chips or a Sunday roast in a local boozer I think: when I go to the pub, I want to eat those pub classics. Pub classics, pub pub classics. And ‘work it out on the remix’ feels like a phrase I’ve had for much longer than six months.
When the remix of ‘Girl, so confusing’ featuring Lorde came out, I listened to it on the bus to work that same morning. My jaw opened hearing the New Zealand singer say ‘for the last couple years, I’ve been at war in my body…’ already being surprised at the frankness of opening her verse ‘Well, honestly, I was speechless when I woke up to your voicenote.’ Of course Lorde, like so many in the public eye alongside those of us who mercifully are not, has her struggles with body image. This should not be so big of a surprise. However, I think it was particularly poignant for me because at one point, she had set up an anonymish instagram account dedicated to onion rings, but her distinctive fingers betrayed her secret to megafans. Was that her way of trying to build a healthier relationship with food? And that low stakes outlet was lost to her because of standom?
I appreciate I am reaching hard here. I think it’s because I look back to friendships I have lost or warped due to the paranoia Charli XCX identifies in ‘Sympathy is a knife’ and indeed ‘Girl, so confusing’. From my mid-teens onwards, I have decided friends and potential friends don’t like me because: I am not erudite enough/I am too pretentious/I don’t have an Aga back home or a family abode in the countryside to use for bonding getaways/I am not thin enough/I do not have a sense of mystique because I talk about politics too much/I’m not fancied enough so I’d bring the group average down/I am distinctly lacking in chill. What would have happened if I’d been emotionally mature enough and confident in my ability to have difficult conversations to tackle those insecurities head on? Who knows.
I was at a club night where one song off the album was intro’d by a clip of Kamala Harris saying her famous coconut line — if you need reminding of it, it is in its appropriate context at the bottom of this post. I suppose Kamala was brat, in the sense that brat was a blip. The ‘Boom Clap’ singer may have seen her biggest success to date, but was it a worldwide mainstream phenomenon? Probably not. I don’t really care, to be honest. Not everything is for everyone. And, in a world where we are devoting Vogue profiles to Molly Mae — the patron saint of beige moderation — and the biggest tour of the world saw adults with disposable income exchanging friendship bracelets with one another in an approximation of playtime naiveté, it’s nice to have an ode to the dirty stop out. Even if I think devoting a song to one of the Red Scare podcasts hosts is silly, and, as a fibroids sufferer, I can’t get behind Caroline Polacheck wistfully singing about ‘free-bleeding in autumn rain’ on the ‘Everything is Romantic’ remix.
