bumpin that

the clean girl is dead, long live the brat!

I’m addicted to brat

The phrase ‘brat’ has quickly been canonised into the internet’s vocabulary over the last week as Charli ushers in her latest musical era and seemingly, our new world order. In a recent interview, the Britpop babe defined brat as “really trashy”: attainable through the essentials of sunglasses, cigs, a bic lighter, a white tank and a black bra. Maybe the best embodiment of brathood is Charli’s latest concerts, where the superstar sings on an empty stage – decorated by only a (probably) toxic white mist pumping from smoke machines and coating an already sweat-soaked club full of people.

The images of club brat are visceral. I’ve never had the honour but I can confidently set the scene. It smells like a mix of natural deodorant, alcohol-thick sweat and soured Santal 33. Your friend has probably lost their phone. You will wake up and not be able to feel your pinky toe tomorrow. You just betrayed your promise that you wouldn’t do substances with strangers anymore. You want to go there more than heaven itself.

A brat summer succeeding Barbie summer feels all too on the nose from the universe but here we are. And just as those plastic Bratz incited a moral panic for being too sexy, too trashy and too cool. It seems brat is here to give us those three very things – all when we need it most. 

bratology seems to be marvellously hedonistic. Despite the cries that the culture overindulged in individualism, most of this culture tends to be worried about an imaginary future self instead of the here and now. The clean girl and her offspring subcultures sparked an infatuation with order and preached the piety of self-discipline. After a few years of ‘doing the work’, something had gotta give before clean-girl fatigue set in. 

What I mean by that is you can’t 75-hard your way out of the fact that you live in a hellscape. The ‘heads down, work hard’ is teetering on feeling like a conspiracy at this point. In hindsight, the clean girl feels like capitalism’s handmaiden. What better way to distract ourselves from the malaise of reality than obsessing over a hypothetical future? Be it tomorrow morning or three decades away.

The pandemic-perpetuated obsession with wellness and the self were very respectable causes – ones that could be conveniently attained from the comfort of home. But now as the world finds its new normal, maybe I want to be a little brat.

There’s something about Charli 

The thing about Charli is that she has long embodied a type of celebrity that feels real. She’s on Las Culturvistas with a monobrow. Her album release IG posts were her drunk on the street. She takes cigs from fans. You can easily imitate her look from your closet and a pack from the servo down the road. It’s unpolished in a way that doesn’t feel concocted in a board room. Because in reality most of us aren’t the clean-girl caricatures who haunt us.

I can cook but my fridge always has mouldy containers in it. I changed my sheets this weekend but they’re all still littered with blood stains because apparently, I’m a free bleeder now. Not because of some feminist or ecological belief, I’m just lazy. My aesthetic bedside table is decorated in rings from the three used coffee cups I keep on it at any given time. The coffee that I drink on an empty stomach and let spike my cortisol and puff my face. I buy myself flowers and inadvertently let them rot in a vase on my dresser for [redacted period of time].

All this to say: I wasn’t very good at clean girling at all. In fact, I think I was just pretending.

Sweat marks on my clothes

In this new era, Charli indirectly positions herself as the clean girl’s foil, even recently announcing her upcoming arena tour, ‘Sweat’. The title of which doesn’t feel overtly sexual but once again, excitedly hedonistic. Sweat as a concept encompasses the kind of aloofness we demand from cool girls: ‘don’t sweat it’ or ‘without even breaking a sweat’. It’s the expectation that she must be remarkable but without even trying – for trying too hard runs the risk of being cringe. Charli begs to differ.

Provocative performers are no strangers to the motif of sweat in art. Groups like Bikini Kill were known for getting sweaty and greasy on stage – motifs often reclaimed as signifiers of their humanness. These punk performers – and Charli – were not as Kristeva would say: “clean and proper.” They discharged traces of their humanity for the abjection of the masses (or the feeling of disgust we get when our bodies leak, bleed, or shed). Philosophers like Sarte understood these bodily fluids as feminine due to their association with chaos and emotion. He literally described slime (the colour we’d describe the brat album cover) as "the feminine revenge”.

The sweaty and chaotic brat world feels unafraid of the abject and indifferent to all its messy grossness – because Charli knows that’s the key to a good time. For a clean-girl generation, a foray into the abject feels like a welcome source of respite.

Just livin' that life

The music of brat has a personal inflection. Charli ponders the question of children, the awkward relationship she has with a colleague and feeling overwhelmed by Taylor Swift. So: the three main tenors of adulthood.

Whilst the album concept is strictly party girl, none of the music is empty and vapid. Charli knows a night out doesn’t render her mindless. With songs like ‘Apple’ and ‘So I’, Charli reinforces her it-girl status through her vulnerability. Like all hot girls, she knows that both things co-exist interdependently.

The album also ventures far away from the newly minted tradition of artists disclosing secrets through music. There’s nothing to decode in the track ‘365’. No red-scarf red herrings. You feel you know Charli and in the next song she reveals something that reminds you maybe you don’t at all.

At the forefront of the album are Charli’s musings on nostalgia, regret and identity, set to the sound of hyperpop. In songs like ‘Rewind’, she says: “I'd go back in time to when I wasn't insecure to when I didn't overanalyse my face shape” after declaring “It's okay to just admit that you're jealous of me.” This tension is my favourite part of the album that has come to life in a moment obsessed with neat categories and crafting ‘cores’ and ‘eras’. brat is a coalescence of it all. She’s both the hottest person in the club and insecure. She doesn’t fucking care what you think but is asking if she belongs here anymore. The push and pull is what makes brat. It’s not one clean-distinct perspective, it’s a messy, sweaty swirl of everything and nothing.

The brat is dead, long live the brat!

I wanted to originally write a light-hearted brat manifesto in response to this album before I realised such an act felt very un-brat. It’s not because I think Charli wouldn’t like taking things so seriously, it’s that brat is so good because it’s not one thing. I can’t force her into the mould we’ve been using to understand the girls that came before her. She’s too ever-changing. She wouldn’t stay still for enough time for me to even try.