Ok, here we go. I’m going to try to explain why I love Brat so much. But the truth is I don’t know why, same as I don’t know why Marina And The Diamonds’ “Bubblegum Bitch” is my favourite party track. It goes beyond music, though the music is great. It’s something about the message.
But first up, the music. Charli XCX, for those who don’t know, likes to dance. Beats are sharp, arrangements are lean, basses squelchy, synths just slightly unhinged. At its best, it’s minimal and hard-edged and straightforward. Nothing screams “experimental” but so much is imaginative. And it’s mixed for the club, where you just know it’s going to smack you in the face. But it’s Charli’s alternately rhythmic/melodic vocals that, for me, steal the show. Tunes resolve gracefully on unexpected notes, and the way longtime collaborator AG Cook chops her up and glitches her out, while Charli strategically leans into the Autotune, is genius.
But all that, great as it is, is not why I love Brat so much. So why do I? Maybe there’s a clue in the song that unfailingly makes me cry, “Girl, So Confusing”:
Girl, it’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl
Girl, how do you feel being a girl?
Man, I don’t know, I’m just a girl
I’ll tell you a secret: I’m trans. And although I struggle, despite the encouragement of my woman friends, to claim the term “woman”, in my trans second childhood I don’t have the same misgivings about “girl”. So when Charli XCX sings, in that haunting off-kilter half-mechanised fashion, about how confused she is by girlhood, I am 100% on board. And when, in the remix, she enlists Lorde, the song’s subject, to flesh out this true story of girl-on-girl jealousy, well, I have no words. As a show of feminine solidarity this surpasses even the aching “So I”, Charli’s requiem for Scottish transfeminine synth pioneer SOPHIE, but the truth is Brat is for the girls. An entire pop album, by a straight woman, with nothing more than a single arch nod to romance (“Everything is Romantic”)? Someone should subject Brat to a reverse Bechdel Test; it would lose, with flying colours, and that is awesome.
But that’s not why I love Brat so much either, or not the only reason. Take the lead-off single “Von Dutch”. I dig that song with every fiber of my body, but I barely followed its lyrics until recently; Charli squawking “It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me” was quite enough. It wasn’t until I talked with a friend today about how I’d never learned to flirt like a girl and how, in the wake of TikTok sensation Jules Lebron, I’ve been called “very mindful, very demure” a suspicious number of times lately, that it struck me: Charli (like Marina in “Bubblegum Bitch”) is the brat I never got to be. And she’s proud of it.
Now, I’m aware that this review has become personal and that my self-discovery may have little appeal to anyone who did get their brat on in their girlhood. But here’s the thing, Charli XCX isn’t just a brat. A fine art student with a taste for hard EDM who does bumps in bathrooms and obsesses on rivals far more than love interests, she’s not the best singer, not the best dancer, not even the best-looking girl in pop. But she just might be the smartest.
Brat, despite Charli’s self-conscious gestures to the contrary, is supremely artful. The way she scrawls lyrics like journal entries, sing-reading them with evocative pitch swoops to underscore their stiltedness. The way she peels away the party-girl patina to expose the yearning underneath, the would-be mother in “I Think About it All the Time” who just might stop her birth control because her career “feels so small in the existential scheme of it all”. Even that drawling Essex accent, that vocal fry, is enlisted to humorous, seductive effect. And yet at root Brat is still just a bunch of bangers. Listen closely, or don’t. If you’re anything like me, you’ll still be bouncing like crazy to “360”, “Sympathy is a Knife”, “Club Classics”, “B2B”, “365”. As Charli says, “This one’s for all my bad girls.” It’s a gift, of sorts, free of judgement, to the kinds of girls that demure girls like me might otherwise tend to disparage.
P.S. Charli says Brat Summer is over, but we all know in Australia it’s only just begun. Sure, we’ll be six months out of step as usual, but no way will that stop me boogieing down if some DJ spins “Von Dutch”. And if they play “Girl, So Confusing” (the Lorde remix), I’ll cry like a baby.
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