050 - i. brat summer
i can't not write about this...
I’D LIKE TO SAY I’VE REACHED 300 SUBSCRIBERS AND WHAT AN ACHIEVEMENT! And if that wasn’t already enough, this is my 50th issue! If you’re feeling as happy as I am about this, feel free to buy me a coffee. As part of the 50th issue, I’m writing a two parter! One on brat! and the other on literary it girls (coming next week)!
brat
A couple weeks ago, brat arrived. The internet was swept away with an “offensive, off shade” lime green, and distorted arial. With half of the internet not knowing why, the other half went crazy. I went crazy, this is proof with my spotify most played in the last 4 weeks:
i went crazy as in I dove deep into charli-lore; Crazy as in I even made a small presentation for work. And thought it was only fitting to talk about it here too. (Don’t worry it will be brief). Here is why everyone is obssessed with brat in three reasons:
(1) brat rollout
before the album came out, charli made sure to appear everywhere. sure, this is typical of the usual album rollout. But more typical for her, she made sure to appear where her audiences were. Doing street interviews with tiktok creators from @trackstarshow, to @hannah_berner, or @subwaytakes, and @recesstherapy, or @octopusslover8 the list goes on!!! she teased her album at an oversold boiler room in bushwick (which is around the time I jumped on the train). Some would argue that this is a natural way of leveraging influencer culture. But as Grace Gordon says (brand executive, Cashapp), it demonstrates the role and evolution of authenticators in world building, “contextualising a brand and validate it in real time”. They “drive adoption among valuable core communities, acting as a two-way bridge between brands and discerning consumers.”
The rollout was also helped by how lo-fi it felt. With the album having simple (and loud) imagery, it became immediately recognisable. The green was a signal. Pick up a green bic lighter, find a green traffic sign, - its brat summer. the brat generator, let audiences make their own version of her covers. Charli gave over to her fans the power of creating, leading to a handful of memes thats fed into this world building. She’s our favourite reference baby.
(Also I think we can’t forget about the timing of the album coming out, being the beginning of pride, which “underscores a keen understanding of the keystone role that queer and trans people play in the acceleration and adoption of pop culture”)
(2) chronically online
In addition to charli being everywhere (So julia), the album is uniquely made for the chronically online. For the 360 music video, she recruited an exhaustive list of it girlies, Chloe Sevigny, Julia Fox, Emma Chamberlain, Gabriette, Chloe Cherry, etc, etc etc. She collaborated with Addisson Rae, for the von dutch remix turning her into a pop icon. she released her album, and then her deluxe one, and then her lorde remix, each time they were announced via a live tiktok stream.
From her own roots making music on myspace, the album seems to be a culmination of her presence online. When we look at the trajectory of all the aesthetic trends from clean girl and tomato summer trends to rat and feral girl summer, the album gives these flat aesthetics an answer by outlining the nuances of being a woman in this modern world. “The title of the album and its design is subversive and playful, while its tracks are messy and chaotic which resonates with the instability felt by younger generations, particularly Gen Z.”
(3) leaning into the lor(d)e
After Dua Lipa’s summer album came out, I was a little underwhelmed? It felt flat to me, and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Then I stumbled upon this article, about Dua Lipa’s lack of lore, and somehow it made sense. When you look at Taylor Swift’s fame, it doesn’t seem out of place to argue that her popularity can be linked to the little easter eggs, and stories that relate to her lovelife. Linking this back to Grace Gordon’s article, “allowing and empowering your stans to tell your brand story is more powerful than doing so yourself”.
So when it comes to brat, I felt that the internet’s storytelling helped me gain more emotional context about the songs. With sympathy is a knife, fans speculate whether the song about taylor swift or riya sawayama. With talk talk, fans hear about the beginning about her relationship with now fiance George Daniels (drummer of 1975). Each song gives fans/ listeners a curious context to deep dive further into the lore, increasing emotional investment with the album.
Even if you don’t care about the lore, there are songs on brat that resonate deeply with women: I think about it all the time was a wild listen the first time. Charli talks about the looming decision of having a baby before “I might run out of time”, and whether “it would make her miss her freedom”, and everyone felt it too. Before going into the club thumping 365, reflecting how we go having introspective moments to being somewhat oblivious at the flip of a switch. With apple, I ended up liking it so much more when I found out that it was a song about generational trauma (I think the apple's rotten right to the core, From all the things passed down, From all the apples coming before). And of course, I can’t leave off this analysis without talking about the remix of Girl its so confusing, [a song thought to be about lorde (whom Charli has been confused for in the past)]:
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“It’s about her relationship to women in her life, her feelings about SOPHIE, competitiveness with female artists and her primary relationship with a woman: the connection she has with herself…That contradictory cocktail of brashness and ambition and insecurity and vulnerability are central to what makes her such an enduringly — and perhaps, to some, off-puttingly — three-dimensional pop star.” - Hannah Ewans, Rolling Stone
AND THE LAST THING i’LL SAY ABOUT BRAT is the pervasiveness of it?? demonstrated by this random man run-reviewing. okay now i think i’m done - happy brat summer!
field notes
I finished reading Minor Detail, a book that looks at two parallel stories of two women in Palestine, one story right after the Naqba, the other 25 years after. It was beautiful, and gut-wrenching. The writing made me think about how you’d analyse a book when you were in english class. How intentional decision making in art can make (or break) the story.
Hawk tuah and the zynternet which explained to me what is trending for “a broad community of fratty, horndog, boorishly provocative 20- and sometimes (embarrassingly) 30-somethings--mostly but by no means entirely male”. And as I was asked today is the rawdogging trend like a man thing? Yeah.
Yargos Kinds of kindness made me very confused and I still don’t know what I watched. a Review thread on reddit. If you’ve watched, let me know what you think? I felt like if I really wanted to I could understand the threads he had in place throughout the three stories, but it didn’t necessarily stay with me. Or maybe I made sure it didn’t.
Kyle Chayka continues his thought leadership in this piece about the new generation of online curators, “they organize the avalanche of online content into something coherent and comprehensible, restoring missing context and building narratives.”
When I first moved to london, there were only a handful of good malaysian restaurants. Now there aren’t just good ones, but different restaurants that only serve specific dishes (Shiok sambal). One of the first good ones was Roti King, Euston. This summer, they came out with a five-part episode series with snaccdiaries about life before and up to Roti King.
leaving you with this, an accurate representation of our minds right now,
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