What’s brat? Okay, picture this: it’s been a long, hot day on a train and you finally make it to your bed and breakfast in Naples. On the way there, your taxi driver asked where you were from and then when you told him nodded silently and said “New York and Napoli… the same.” As far as you can tell, that’s true—all you’ve seen so far is winding narrow streets and luxury storefronts and the noise and chaos of a major city, a kind of city that feels like it’s built on a foundation that has always been there, just occasionally refreshed with a coat of paint. But your little bedroom with its little balcony is a better vibe. You’re sweating through your clothes and you need a shower so bad, but the breeze coming in from the open balcony, the swaying of the white cotton curtains, cold water already in the fridge for you, all of it makes you feel a peace you did not think was possible.
You step out onto the balcony and stare at the turquoise blue sea of the bay of Naples—soon, on a rainy day, you’ll visit one of the little islands in the distance, but you don’t know that yet. You turn your head and see what you think is probably Mount Vesuvius, and when you visit Pompeii in a few days your suspicions are confirmed. You think, “I could live forever in this moment,” this small morsel of time already feeling like hours, days, a lifetime. Your husband comes up behind you, kisses you, pulls you onto the bed, and you want to be so loud that everyone in Naples knows how sexy you feel. That’s brat.
Brat is also the breakthrough album for Charli XCX, an artist I’ve listened to since her debut single “Nuclear Seasons,” which I first saw on Tumblr in 2013. It is the purest encapsulation of everything Charli: it is big loud beats and fart-y synthesizers and blunt non-rhyming lyrics and drugs and insecurities and passing moments of sincerity and reveling in people kind of hating you. It’s fantastic, and I’ve listened to it every single day since it came out. It’s bracingly honest, and often very funny (“Why I wanna buy a gun, why I want to shoot myself” Charli sings on “Sympathy is a Knife” and it cracks me up every time.). When I listen to it, I feel like it gives a voice to parts of myself that I’ve tried to hide from other people—the parts of me that are messy and unsure, but also some of the parts of me that are so confident that it’s embarrassing.
Brat is also a meme: brat was an album released in June, and now we are all having our brat summer. It’s hard to describe what it means to be “brat” in this sense other than saying “listen to the album.” Patrick Zweig from Challengers is brat; the G train, which barely runs but is fantastic when you can get it, is brat; Chloe Sevigney, Gabriette, Julia Fox and Salem Mitchell are all brat, and fittingly all appeared in the music video for “360.” Charli herself describes brat as, “You’re that girl who is a bit messy and loves to party and maybe says dumb things sometimes. She’s honest, blunt, and a little bit volatile.”
Sometimes I put the album on with the intention of just listening to a few songs, but I always end up listening to the whole thing. It has the ability to transport me so totally to a place and a mood, to make 7am on a Monday feel like a coked out 3am weekend night. Like that moment in Naples—Charli wrote at least one song on the album in the neighboring city of Sorrento—it is the feeling of the eternal present, the transcendence of being completely embodied in the here and now. It is a representation, one might say, of existing in the context of all that's come before you, though unburdened by what has been and imagining what can be.
Kamala Harris is not my first choice for president; she is also not my last choice for president, which is the guy who is also currently in the running. I think she largely sucks and has sucked for a long time. Please don’t confuse these opinions for being against her run for the presidency; she is the best of a lot of bad options.
Her position as Attorney General of California meant that she was in charge of keeping people in prison, an institution I would like to see abolished. She’s great at political “moments,” like when she admonished Joe Biden for not supporting desegregation through federally mandated busses, but of course, she would also later become his vice president (not to mention that her own position on federally mandated bussing is a lot more wishy washy than her mic drop implied).
As vice president, she has done a lot of nothing. She shows up to places and says stuff like “I love venn diagrams” and then disappears for months. On the fourth day of her presidential run, she put out a statement condemning the people who protested Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. My basic measure of her is that she is a coward with a spine made of jell-o who’s trying to get as close to the center of power as she possibly can.
Harris has also become the object of an internet meme that I find truly funny, and has what appears to be totally organic growth. Bolstered by fancams set to Charli XCX’s music, Kamala Harris supporters are now “coconut pilled,” in reference to Harris frequently using the phrase “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” to refer to the way that we all live in a society and are affected by the actions of others. This phrase, and Harris’s now iconic giggly laugh, have been remixed hundreds of times on TikTok, including one person who used these tones to recreate Charli XCX’s song “360.”
The meme is easy to create—there is literally a generator that gives you the exactly correct hex code for the acid green background—but as a result, it has already crossed the precipice from fun to over-saturated. Writers like Arielle Gordon at Pitchfork have deemed Kamala Harris’ campaign’s embrace of the brat meme the end of “brat summer.”
“By the end of June, the month of the album’s release, some were beginning to grow wary of how long Brat Summer could last,” Gordon writes. “Would it, like so many other online phenomena that broke free of the cloisters of the internet, shrivel and die in the real world, like a string of hosta flowers wilting in a heatwave?”
“Harris, certainly more than Biden, seemed primed for a Brat Summer—she did spend June in Las Vegas, after all, albeit apologizing for Biden’s verbal miscues at the first Presidential debate,” Gordon continues. “Charli XCX, perhaps sensing the twin swells of support for two powerful women, wrote the post that would, in three words, signal the end of Brat Summer: ‘kamala IS brat.’”
If brat is a broad enough trend that it can signify annoying your boyfriend and making chilled zucchini soup and making amends with your powerful peers—as Gordon describes—then I suppose it being co-opted by the girlboss class was inevitable. Even if Harris being subsumed into the meme is the beginning of the end, I don’t think it’s an incongruous move. As much as I like brat (and I like it so much), there’s an emptiness at the center of the album that sometimes creeps up to the surface. For every moment like “I might say something stupid,” where Charli describes looking at herself in the mirror during a party and feeling a sense of alienation, the album will re-center around Charli’s perennial fascination with dead-eyed, amoral mean girls.
The world that exists for the 365 party girl, the protagonist of a Charli XCX album, is one that centers around annihilating the self. Sometimes it’s in moments of rare altruism, like the now well known communal experience of the girl’s bathroom at the club. Other times it’s about becoming one with the crowd, dancing and screaming to music. Sometimes it’s also about real self-annihilation, a state I’ve experienced too much, about trying to feel something other and better than being oneself (with the aid of a lot of drugs).
Here’s the thing about partying a lot, from someone who used to party a lot: when you’re rolling super hard and making friends in the bathroom line, you’ll feel like you know a lot about those other people as you share that moment in time. But you don’t. And in the light of day you might discover that many of those people are fucking freaks.
It’s impossible for me to think about brat without thinking about Dasha Nekrasova, unfortunately. She’s somehow harder to explain to normal people than brat, despite having appeared as a recurring cast member on an HBO show. Here’s the short version: she’s one of the two hosts of Red Scare, a podcast that once had a leftist patina but now is a reflection of the opinions of a racist Republican uncle who’s on the verge of being uninvited from Thanksgiving. This is hardly an exaggeration: most recently, Red Scare featured disgraced Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson as a guest. She’s also the inspiration for the Charli XCX song “Mean Girls,” which isn’t a bad song but is my least favorite from the album.
“Yeah, it's 2 a.m., and she's out there/in the sheer white dress, wearing last night's makeup,” Charli sings of the eponymous mean girl, before diving into a description that more specifically fits Nekrasova on the second verse.
“Calls him Daddy while she's fingering a gold cross,” she sings, “and she's kinda fucked up, but she's still in Vogue.”
The slightly longer version is that you probably have actually seen Dasha before—she’s sailor socialism, as featured on the HBO television show Last Week Tonight. In the clip that went viral, she’s responding to an interviewer from the Alex Jones-owned network InfoWars, wryly telling her that she just wants her friends to get healthcare. Ironically, Dasha would take a picture with Alex Jones in 2021, after having him on Red Scare. She told the New York Times that she thought Jones was “an incredible entertainer.”
This viral moment would make Dasha an it girl for a very small social circle mostly centered around a small neighborhood in lower Manhattan that has dubbed itself “Dimes Square.” I don’t know that anyone outside of New York or online circles of horny leftist men think about her much. On TikTok, at this point the de facto gathering place for people younger than me, another woman named Dasha rules the “#Dasha” hashtag; most of the other popular videos that specifically mention Nekrasova are making fun of her.
Describing everything I dislike about Nekrasova would only give her the upper hand. Even if she has fallen ever so slightly out of vogue–in the right bar, no one will say her name without rolling their eyes or scoffing–everyone still knows who she is. Explaining why she sucks will only reveal how much you know about her, which is a victory for someone who traffics in attention. “Mean Girls” puts this succinctly: “You said she's problematic and the way you say it, so fanatic, think she already knows that you're obsessed.”
I wouldn’t call “Mean Girls” a flattering portrait of people like Nekrasova, but it feels true to life.The entire vibe of brat is “I’m here for a good time, not a long time,” a kind of narcissism that absolutely could lead to an adult convert to Catholicism declaring Pope Francis a “heretic” and “anti-pope.” Watching young fans of Charli XCX call this album or the artist behind it “feminist” has been confusing because the album has no ideology except The Party, and the beautiful Party People that you see there. Despite Red Scare having on Curtis Yarvin, someone who Trump’s running mate JD Vance considers a political inspiration, Dasha is mostly a Party Person. In the dark of the club, her political alignment is immaterial.
Here’s the thing that I think Harris, Charli and Dasha all have in common: above and beyond all political ideology, what they desire is proximity to power. For Harris it’s not altogether surprising: she is a politician and she is running for president for a second time. If you want to be the most powerful person in the country, you are absolutely a fucked up person. But Charli and Dasha are their own kind of politicians as it girls, ones whose policy positions are mostly about people paying attention to them.
If brat works as a kind of it girl hagiography, a study in what it means to be an it girl, then Harris absolutely fits within that category. She went from being an unremarkable VP to not only becoming the party nominee, but polling higher than the looming specter of a second Trump presidency. It is entirely possible that Americans are on the precipice of the first it girl president.
Going to parties and having people actually remember you is kind of like campaigning for president of being cool. You do not want to be behind, or a trend follower—you want to make an appearance and then have everyone show up dressed like you the next night. You can achieve this by courting controversy, as both Charli and Dasha do in various ways, or by openly seeking out avenues to power, like Harris is doing. Harris is hypnotic to watch as a speaker, not so much because I am wowed by her rhetoric as I am surprised by her ability to orchestrate the crowd. Every time she prompts a crowd to chant her de-facto campaign slogan, “we’re not going back,” she whispers into the mic in rhythm with the crowd. She looks starstruck by her own machinations.
Maybe this is what makes the dead-eyed, gravelly-voiced mean girls of brat so fascinating to Charli; they already have something that everyone wants by being beautiful, but they seem so bored by it. The only time Nekrasova has any light in her eyes are when she’s doing something on the internet that people will yell at her for, like going to a gun range to shoot at a target that’s clearly dressed as a Palestinian. It’s the same glee that you see in Charli’s eyes when she intones the first few lines of her latest single, “Guess.” Flashing a coquettish look from camera one to camera two, she says, “you want to guess the color of my underwear,” smirking as the song becomes a paean to oral sex; she and Billie Eillish literally climb a mountain of underwear in the music video.
After Charli’s birthday party—she’s the ripe age of 32 now—I saw a few people online call this the return of “indie sleaze,” referring to the New York music scene from the 2000s. I remember indie sleaze as it was happening; my husband is featured in a picture from a New Yorker article about an iconic DIY venue’s last show; I remember when Vice bought 285 Kent and I cursed them forever, and then a decade later took a job in that very warehouse space that Vice has since vacated.
While the photographer The Cobrasnake did give Charli’s party pictures that particular hyperreal aesthetic that was so popular at the time, the thing I liked about being in that scene when it was happening was that everyone was broke. The bands were all broke, the audience was broke, everyone owed everyone else twenty dollars, the entirety of Williamsburg subsisting on the same twenty dollar bill being passed back and forth. Sure there were people who were pretending to be broke, “Common People” style, but they had the temerity to know that their financial status made them uncool. By contrast, everyone at Charli’s party in Los Angeles is an international pop star or celebrity.
The nihilism of 2008 was ever present post-financial collapse, but it had a different tenor than Charli’s kind of self annihilation. The people I partied with were trying to build something in 2008—at the very least, they were building communities where they could make art and party together. Being brat is about Charli XCX and her fandom. It’s a fun party, but you’re not making something new; there is no chance of you “making the Cobrasnake” because you were at the right place at the right time wearing the right outfit. It’s absolutely a cool vibe, but it’s also just vibes.
Politics is also a kind of fandom—especially in the ways that it is enacted online. Kamala Harris’s campaign for president has been a stellar example of this, embracing the memes that surround Harris. Memes made Harris the heir apparent to the candidacy; memes uplifted Tim Walz from just the Governor of Minnesota to Harris’s running mate. You’re supposed to pretend that people like Harris and Walz are running for the good of the country, but given that there aren’t any policy positions on Harris’ website, it is hard to say what exactly she stands for. We know one thing she believes, based on her response to protestors in Michigan who want her to condemn the genocide of Palestinians.
“You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking,” Harris said. While she has added that she is open to meeting with the anti-Zionist “Uncommitted” movement, she has yet to do so. The very next day, Harris responded to another group of protesters with more grace, by saying that she is committed to a ceasefire deal. While this was a much better response, it also highlights some of the issues with Harris as a politician: there’s no there there, she believes in whatever position will get people to stop yelling at her.
Personally, I believe that winning campaigns are driven by more than just aesthetics. Harris’ nomination gives people something to hope for, at least temporarily, because she’s not a walking corpse. The songs on brat are so refreshing because they do not strive to be girlboss anthems, because they talk about insecurities and also extreme narcissism, because they are both full of substance and totally empty at the same time. But the kind of person who embodies all those things, the character that Charli plays on the album and the one that Nekrasova plays online, are complete voids. While I hope that Harris has more substance, it makes sense that her campaign embraced the brat of it all. We’re not going back, but also it is unclear if we’re going forward or just living in the eternal present, the end of history where there is no injustice that we have to fight against, no genocide that’s ongoing—just vibes.
