How We All Became Brat

It’s not about “in” and “out” anymore.

By Clara Unger

Photo by Clara Unger

Charli XCX knows that all the neon green is ugly. That’s why she picked it. She told Billboard in July that she felt the color “spark[ed] a really interesting conversation about [desirability]… It had to be really unfriendly and uncool.”

I’m not in my seat when the music starts to crest into the first beats of “Got Me Started,” the opening performance of Charli XCX and Troye Sivan’s Sweat Tour, which landed in Seattle last Wednesday at the sold-out Climate Pledge Arena. As the crowd’s cheers turn deafening and we’re still sprinting through a spottily-lit corridor looking for row 316, I scan the bodies below me — waves of fluorescent T-shirts, flouncy white skirts and leather harnesses. Everybody looks, for lack of a better word, brat. 

The paradoxical “coolness” of brat green now is representative of “Brat” as a cultural phenomenon. What does it mean for the album and its aesthetic to be cool when it is simultaneously popular? What kind of performance can meld muggy club beats with an airy, sanitized arena? What happens when a scene defined by its exclusion and licentiousness is injected right into the veins of popular culture?

This dichotomy of “inclusivity and exclusivity,” describes Charli in her Billboard interview, is a core tension at the heart of the project. “I like the marketing of pop music more than I am interested in actual pop music,” she says. “I think we’ve been living in this world now for a while where there’s this desire to appeal to the most people, to have the biggest smile and be the nicest person with the widest appeal.”

“Brat” is rooted in nostalgia. Charli XCX spent her teenage years DJing during the short-lived peak of “new rave,” a U.K. scene characterized by glow sticks and cheap party drugs, with a distinct DIY air. When she graduated this summer from “pop’s middle class” to superstardom, she brought with her the music of her roots, which lie deep in this underground club scene. Though Charli has had plenty of radio hits, including “I Love It” with Icona Pop and “Fancy” with Iggy Azalea, she has rarely drawn on the new rave sounds that inspired her to become an artist. 

The lead single “Von Dutch,” a swervy electronic club beat, was a radical departure from this play-it-safe strategy, a departure Charli teases in the song, with the repeated lyric “club classic but I still pop.” 

Though “Brat” is sonically designed for the club, it is the arena venue that best represents what the album means to Charli and the culture at large. 18,000 people writhe, sweat and ponder what their Instagram caption will read after the show. The line between performance and participation is thin here, unlike the cramped, muggy atmosphere of a club, where bodies press so close that movements are felt more than seen, shared more than separate. “Desire” says Charli to Billboard, “is cultivated by being a little bit hard to reach, a little bit separate.”

Before the performance I bought an $18.99 seltzer from an Amazon-branded marketplace inside the arena. I scanned my card at the entrance and walked out without passing a cash register, feeling like I’d stolen something. It’s not really illicit, but a sense of excitement still spikes in my chest. The concert gives me the same feeling. Charli whines about cocaine-induced brattiness and the perils of fame and I swing my hips to the beat from my nosebleed seat, high above the writhing pit of neon green and black-clothed bodies, a spectator as much as a participant. 

“Brat’s” marketing campaign, according to the album’s marketing guru Terry O’Connor, focused on “making and creating real-life, in-person moments” that translated well digitally, like Charli livestreaming the painting of the “Brat” wall in New York City, spawning thousands of tweets and TikToks speculating about her new project. 

“Brat” is the album of the digital native, a term coined by Marc Prensky to describe the generations raised on the internet. “Brat” would not carry the same cultural weight without the viral “Apple” dance, or the TikTok “in my brat era” trend, or the proliferation of “Brat”-style text generators on X. 

It is an easy phenomenon to remain cynical about. I am often guilty of knee-jerk reactions to goofy TikTok trends and eye-roll-worthy bait tweets. I didn’t expect to like “Brat” when it first dropped because people were being so weird about the album online. But “Brat’s” popularity does not preclude its masterful sonic and cultural production.  

When the encore ends and the overhead lights come on, we all turn to each other, taking in everyone’s wild hair and sweaty green t-shirts. I’m sure my mascara is smudged all over my face. My friend and I pose together with the stage in the background. I think of my own Instagram caption and how my chin looks in the photo. I’ve never seen so many people dance like that in my life. This is the last tour date in the U.S., but the brat era shows no signs of slowing down. 

Predicting the demise of the brat era became a fun hobby for trolls on the internet this summer. Surely, once Charli endorsed Kamala Harris, the masses would turn on her. They didn’t. But could “Brat” last into the autumn? Yes, with the help of Caroline Polachek singing “Free-bleeding in the autumn rain” on her “Everything is romantic” remix feature. 

“Brat” may exude exclusivity on the surface, but it turns out that anything and anyone can be brat. Charli said to Billboard, “Everyone can join the club. It’s just that everybody joins at slightly different times in slightly different ways — whether that be on my private Instagram posts, or the 400-person Boiler Room, or a random cinema screening of a new music video in L.A., or a text message from me.” 

“Brat” is not about who is “in” and who is “out.” The album instead wonders what it would mean if none of that mattered anymore.

After the show, I’m taking tiny sips from my gin and tonic at a bar. A man in his thirties, wearing a North Face fleece and a plaid button down, sets himself down on the bench beside us and asks if we want to see a magic trick. 

Thirty minutes later, I’ve learned that he is a terrible magician. He’s from Kansas and in “project management.” He shows us a timelapse of the student apartment project he just managed in Arizona and, in detail, how to perform all three of the mediocre magic tricks he opened with. 

I get the sense the whole time that he’s playing a character. When we ask for his name, he winks. He’s a little worse at the magic tricks than he needs to be. He’s uncool and captivating all at once, a wonder in a corporate fleece. 

“The anti-brat,” I think, then shake my head, feeling silly. Not everything needs to mean something else.