Brat is everywhere but I think I might not be brat

Brat is everywhere but I think I might not be brat

Trying our best to fall in love with one of 2024's pop sensations

View this email online October 19, 2024 by Ann Powers This week, we’re starting (and, honestly, losing) fights with our significant others about one of the year’s biggest pop sensations. Is it brat to be wrong about brat? Courtesy of the artist Hello to all my contrarians, Do you know what’s a curse and a blessing, for real? Having an exceedingly confident spouse. Mine, a music person like me, keeps up with the latest releases on long weekly drives to his job in another state (that’s academic life for many people), and he’s always very clear about what’s good and what’s discardable in any given playlist. It’s mid-October now, which means thoughts of year-end rankings are creeping into music nerds’ minds, and of course my guy has an opinion about what the top album will be. A strong opinion. Actually, he considers it a fact.  “Clearly,” he said as we were playing said instant classic in the car on the way to the movies on Monday, “Brat is the one. It’s head and shoulders above anything else. Everyone loves it. It defined the year.” I couldn’t argue – not because I agreed, but because his certitude deflated me. “I know,” I replied. Moment of silence. “I mean there’s just no other choice,” he insisted. “I hear you!” I replied. I slumped in the passenger seat. “But…” Oh, the moments in marriage when you simply can’t rise to the occasion. “I just can’t figure out a way to feel it.” Since June, when Charli XCX, the reigning queen of thinking people’s dance pop, released the album that’s made her pop’s main character, I’ve nursed that weird feeling you get when you know an album’s excellent but you haven’t come up with your own reason for the endorsement.  There’s so much to admire about this 32-year-old auteur and her career-defining album. I’m intrigued by the way it blends old-school confessional songwriting with the synthetic sounds and angular attitude of her generation, for whom public self-construction is both a vocation and a game. And Brat does elevate her game, going deeper than the usual party fare and morning-after ennui to confront what’s expected of women in a culture that fetishizes yet still often disempowers them. The plasticity of hyperpop suits the earthiness of Charli’s persona and her unpretentious voice; its vocal distortions and startling sonic juxtapositions bend lyrics, rattling meaning. They serve her quest to locate the substance in style. Brat never reaches the grandeur her late soulmate Sophie attained, but it’s blazingly au courant.  Not only my guy, but most of my colleagues and friendly acquaintances have welcomed the album as an instant touchstone, quoting lyrics in group chats and doing the viral dance for her song “Apple” for their own pleasure. “You’re wearing a Brat ring,” a friend said the other day, pointing out the neon lime green band a friend gave me 15 years ago. “Um,” I answered. Just weeks before, the hue had gone beyond meme status to become an actual political force when Charli blessed Kamala Harris’s campaign with a clever endorsement — “Kamala is Brat” — and the candidate changed her Twitter banner to that shade.  By the time Charli released her remixed version of Brat last week, everything, it seemed, had gone “brat,” meaning it was fun, messy, outrageous, unbothered by others’ judgments. The mainstream was realizing that in a world of striving, earnest stars, Charli is an icon for the Aubrey Plaza types, the girls who roll their eyes at the very thought of fulfilling an ideal when it’s so much more fun to stay at street-level, where nothing is that serious and the trash gleams with diamonds. We want that now, when gravity feels extra heavy. And I always wanted it, in different forms. I can’t deny that Charli inhabits a space previously ruled by my icons. Rizzo from Grease. Janeane Garofolo in Reality Bites. Amy Winehouse minus the tragedy.  It’s that stance as an “it” girl who questions what “it” gets her that allows Charli to balance anti-establishment impulses, outsider insights and world-dominating pop ambition on Brat. Yet I think it’s actually Charli’s dance on that knife edge where pop meets cool that makes her music a little bit hard for me to love. Pop was always cool, in the sense that it defined trends even as it chased them; but emotionally it’s more hot, reaching out toward anyone who might love it, spilling over into inappropriate places the way a crowd of teenagers take over a parking lot when its idols come to play.  Brat is not a neat album; its most engaging songs strive to capture the melting sensations of doubt and confusion and alienation by matching lyrical descriptions of those states — captured in images of snagged stockings, fluctuating weights, skipped birth control — with the blip-heavy, melting chrome mixes of hyperpop. Yet I still sense restraint here, or, as one critic put it while reviewing Charli’s recent tour, nonchalance. Blasé, blasé – Charli’s vocals are never ruffled, and the emotions she confronts never fully disrupt her pose. In the video for “360” she walks across long restaurant tables, through a wall a man punctuates with a chair, and past car wrecks. But she always maintains a runway model’s strut.    I get this — it’s part of a critique of feminine power from the inside, part of a lineage that connects Charli to my high school hero Debbie Harry, who also struck high glam poses on trash-strewn avenues. Blondie also streamlined music that was rough around the edges, blending punk’s speed and noise with the gum-snapping pathos of the Shangri-La’s. But Debbie Harry’s voice itself punched through walls. She raised a ruckus, and that hit me. I’ve had a hard time finding that ruckus on Brat. Raised as a romantic by the self-styled rebels of punk and indie rock, I could never overcome the belief that art is most meaningful when it offers a full-body hit of inspiration, a surge of identification and euphoria that actually does seem to transform the ordinary world. “Hang up and run to me!” Debbie wails over and over at the end of Blondie’s “Hanging On the Telephone,” Clem Burke’s double-speed drums compelling her to shed all of her allure; when I first heard her do that I felt something break free inside myself.  It was the critic Greil Marcus, the first writer to help me understand that writing about music could itself be a kind of poetry, that gave me a framework to understand this kind of excitement, the way art can make you feel changed. I can’t remember who gave me a copy of his first book, the mythopoetic study of American music Mystery Train, but I do know that after reading it I realized that writing about music could be more than just passing judgment on what was cool or uncool. If you tuned your pen to those vibrations emanating from art – not “vibes,” that passive idea, but the irresistible energy that actually rearranges the psyche – criticism could become something like music. Marcus, who is now 79, has often talked about wanting to write in a way that replicated this feeling. In his insight-packed new book What Nails It, a treatise on why he writes, he says it clearly: “If I can move anyone even a fraction as much as [an artwork] moved me, if I can spark the same sense of mystery, and awe, and surprise, as that sparked in me, then I’m not wasting my time, or someone else’s time.” I’ve strived to do this ever since he showed me it was possible. But experience has also shown me that art is often not exactly for you. And it can take a bit of work to grasp why others hold it to their hearts. It’s okay, I’ve concluded, if I’m not really Brat. I can still discern why so many have embraced the album’s world view. Its portraits of louche young society life, created by someone who questions her role in it even as she celebrates its pleasures, capture the slipperiness of self-defined success in a fashion-forward world that does run on rules and rankings but which obscures them through the incessant swipes of the finger that embody the quest for dopamine. Brat is that girl, then, that particular mess: the one who wants to fall apart, to demand, to yell, but who always recovers enough to strike another pose, make another impression. As it happens, just the other day, I found a way to feel Brat, too. Last week Charli released the drolly named Brat but it’s totally different but it’s still brat, a full set of remixes that genuinely reimagines its source material. It features a wide array of collaborators, including several singers whose voices always open doors for me; I’m a sucker for the butterfly gentility of Troye Sivan, Billie Eilish’s endlessly alluring intonation, Caroline Polachek's lush sighs.  But the track that cracked me open doesn’t feature another voice. It’s the extended version of “So I,” the elegy Charli wrote for her friend and frequent collaborator, Sophie. The original version finds Charli wrapping her grief in a poignant and delicate melody; it’s lyrical and a bit proper. The remix is a stream of consciousness. Instead of singing, Charli speaks her memories in rapid flow, not bothering to weave them into a coherent narrative. First met on the outskirts of Stockholm, all your things in a black suitcase. First time I ever felt alive onstage, in Texas in matching Latex. Sipping green juice, looking so chic, soft response while you play with the tension. This is how grief really works. It’s a jumble, outside anyone’s official story, overriding anyone’s control. A.G. Cook, Sophie’s and Charli’s main producer and the man who tied them together, builds a pulsating web of beats and effects around her memories, not holding them in so much as helping them burst forth in light for a moment and then give way to others. In the end these thoughts have faded and only her will to remember remains, the chopped up phrase now I want to think about all the good times going beyond language into something inarticulate. Something truly personal — a sound that can’t be named. Hang up and run to me, I think, while listening. This song breaks through and moves me.  Newsletter continues after sponsor message More stories from NPR Music In this week’s New Music Friday podcast, Sheldon Pearce and I talked about what does float our boats as critics while welcoming the new music publication helmed by ex-Pitchforkers, Hearing Things.  Over on the Tuesday version of the All Songs Considered pod, Hazel Cills and Robin Hilton share screams over their favorite scary movie scores.    As the classical world celebrates quintessential maverick American composer Charles Ives’s sesquicentennial,Tom Huizenga writes about a new album of his works by the pianist Jeremy Denk and the violinist Stefan Jackiw.  On the chart beat, Stephen Thompson shows how Coldplay used old-fashioned showbiz hustle (and more than a few modern stat-bending tricks) to return the No. 1 spot on the albums chart.  The tragic news of former One Direction member Liam Payne’s death hit a generation of fans with gale force. Here’s our obituary. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis shared some thoughts with Jennifer Vanasco on their album inspired by the cult movie Warriors. Here’s some stuff I unabashedly loved this week — no struggles South Indian, born in New York and residing in California, Ganavya is a vocalist whose works track the migrations of our time while tapping into something universal. She’s been on my radar for a while, and I can’t wait to hear her new Alice Coltrane-inspired album Daughter of a Temple, coming out on Nils Frahm’s label Leiter in November. The first cut — featuring pianist Vijay Iyer and sax genius Immanuel Wilkins — is out now.  At the delightful Jabberwocky Bookshop in Newburyport, Mass., I found a slim book with the simple, provocative title My Death. I purchased this novella by the weird fiction writer Lisa Tuttle and quickly devoured it — it’s a rich text on women as artists, sexual beings, and sometimes hungry time travelers. I’m going to seek out more by this author. Urgent: My Criterion Channel pick this week is leaving at the end of the month! Trust me, if you haven’t seen The Eyes of Laura Mars, you need this disco-tastic Helmut Newton-besotted half-thriller half-melodrama in your life. Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones: zero chemistry, but they’re both still so pretty in their polyester duds. Plus, Babs slays the theme song (her then-squeeze Jon Peters produced the film). If you happen to be in Nashville next weekend, I’m doing a ton of stuff at the venerable Southern Festival of Books. Come find me!  The air is crisp, the fleece jacket is on, and I’m making my favorite fall snack: Sally’s Pumpkin Bars. NPR Classical You never get a second chance to make a first impression ... Introducing NPR Music+, a new way to support what you love and explore new music and conversations sponsor-free. NPR Music+ includes two podcasts with one convenient subscription: All Songs Considered and Alt.Latino, both sponsor-free. Learn more and support us at plus.npr.org/NPRmusic Get NPR Music+ Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from Central Florida Public Media (edit station). Need a new playlist? Follow NPR Music on Spotify and Apple Music What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: nprmusic@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Books, Pop Culture, Health and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to NPR Music emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy

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