Doused in goo green, the powder was aplenty and the fucks were afew as we floated through this brat summer, disciples of Charli xcx as she spun the shared turntable of womanhood. But fleeting, maybe this euphoria was doomed to be commodified. BRAT took a sharp left on capital lane when the great evils (corporations, politicians, and even fucking NATO) saw the traction of the once untouched movement, and appropriated our fun and games into a mimicry marketing opportunity. Please y’all—nine groceries cost a hundred dollars, California is on fire, and we just lost years of our lives to a virus. Couldn’t they let us have this one thing?
Our lady Charlotte has come a long way since bullying Germans who didn’t know “I Love It” in 2013. On the opening night of her and Troye Sivan’s co-headlining SWEAT tour, she yelled “I don’t care / I love it” to a sold out area, who yelled it right back to her. Just before BRAT was released on June 7, 2024, Charli xcx had about 16 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Now? 42 million.
Angels know she’s been a life long partygirl long before BRAT was born, but Charli had only ever grazed that level of commercial success through singles like “Boys” and “Boom Clap,” or as a featured pop princess on Iggy Azalea’s FM radio anthem. BRAT is her first full-length project to burst into the mainstream, and considering the scale of the marketing budget, maybe the movement that got my girls through their breakups was destined to explode.
It’s weird, watching the imagined intimacy between yourself and Charli dwindle as the Alo influencer from your high school is posting brat summer this brat summer that. Of course, we’re so happy for Charli, finally reaching a level of acclaim we know she’s long deserved, but still, why is it so hard to watch her blow up?
There’s no greater fuel to the ego than following an artist before they were famous. The great pioneer, you were there first, and you picked the biggest, ripest fruit from the tree. Your support probably actually means something to them, and though they may not be close by, they’re not necessarily far, either.
With fame comes greater budgets, greater expectations, and an inevitable shift in the persona you once knew so well, and we’re left to grieve our idea of them. As the venues flood, we get left behind, because the bigger the crowd, the more heads blocking your view. And so, we yearn for the pink dipped bob as we watch the work of an artist so beautifully authentic be meme-d and appropriated beyond control.
Take someone like Lady Gaga, now a multi-millionaire Hollywood star who has become further and further removed from her avant-garde origins so she can serve LinkedIn headshot instead. This past summer a clip from Gaga’s 2007 Lollapalooza set resurfaced, and I replayed that shit until my contacts got dry. It felt like stumbling upon a trap door, or spotting an extinct species through the trees. An untouched, brunette Gaga grooves to a small, stationary crowd with a spirit so fresh it makes you want to cry.
Perhaps those humbling moments of the flop era are good for the soul, and crucial in the pacing in the making of a superstar. Charli xcx’s debut album, True Romance, is more than a decade old, and that girl has certainly put in her time, eight studio albums later, establishing her aura and feeding the Angel fire while always staying close to her PC roots (with the exception of Crash obvi).
Whereas someone like Ice Spice woke up a superstar before she even finished freshman orientation. Seniority doesn’t necessarily mean anything in music, but did you even know that Ice Spice’s debut album, Y2K!, came out this summer? Most people didn’t, because she’s struggled to keep her art paced with the magnitude of her celebrity.
In August of 2022, the second song Ice Spice had ever recorded, “Munch (Feelin’ U),” soared overnight, going viral on Twitter and TikTok, and now she’s prancing around at the Met Gala, rapping with Nicki, and pretending to like Taylor Swift at the Superbowl. The sheer speed of her fame surely isn’t helping her beat the industry plant allegations, but it’s also put her at a disadvantage for developing a foundation with her fans. There are no Ice Spice pioneers, there’s no early flop era for fans to look back on, and no nostalgia element to capitalize on.
Chappell Roan has been publicly struggling to navigate those quantum mechanics of overnight fame. While she’s got years of music making on Ice Spice, uploading original songs on YouTube and as early as 2014, she hasn’t been able to ease into the horrors of the mainstream the way that Charli has. Sure, she flopped for almost a decade too, but nothing about Chappell’s rise to fame was gradual or digestible.
But on the surface, it seems like we the fans are more at war with Charli’s colossal fame than she is. Who really knows how she’s feeling now.
So if you can, keep that outside noise at bay, because through and through, BRAT is still yours. For me, BRAT is the tranquility of plunging into a crisp body of water, it’s the release from the pressure of scrolling through your feed of pregnancy announcements, it’s the youth of underage drinking at a Calvin Harris concert, and it’s the confusion of domestically coexisting with the girl who used to hold your hair and wing your liquid eyeliner. BRAT is yours more than anyone else’s.
The Peeling 