It was inevitable that I would end up writing about Charli XCX’s Brat — without question not only the album of the year but the pop-culture event of the year. But the crazy thing is how the nature of this essay changed so dramatically several times in the course of just a few days, from fatigue and resignation, to the unexpected return of my initial giddy exhilaration (at that point, I kid you not, the essay was going to be called “Brat Century”), and finally to crushing disappointment.
When you’re talking about Brat, you’re talking about two separate but connected and overlapping things. You’re talking about Brat the album, the sixth from Charlotte Emma Aitchison, arguably her best yet and a masterpiece of hyperpop perfection. Her Dark Side of the Moon or Led Zeppelin IV, if you will, an artist at the peak of her artistic powers and cultural relevance unleashing a paradigm-changing bomb of an LP.
And you’re also talking about Brat Summer, the phenomenon that took over pop culture with its blizzard of radioactive-green text memes and endless references to the album and its themes — party girls of many genders, late nights, later mornings, and drugs, for starters; but also mental-health struggles and the confusion of being a girl in this fucked-up world.
In the power of its audacious sleaze and media-savvy genius united with genuinely terrific music and liberatory relevance to an entire generation, it was like nothing I’d seen since the 80s heyday of Madonna and Prince.
Before I talk about the extreme disappointment that undid all that in an instant and signified the depressing, disastrous early conclusion of Brat Summer (its creator and star allowing the phenomenon to be co-opted by a political party that is currently backing a genocide), I have to walk you through the roller-coaster ride that led to this point. First, some background.
Ive been a fan of Charli XCX for about four years, since the release of How I’m Feeling Now, the brilliant album she wrote and recorded at home in six weeks during COVID lockdown in 2020. That LP, which I considered her best before Brat, was big for me for a bunch of reasons. It was my gateway drug to the world of hyperpop. Despite or probably because of the loose, improvised, hectic recording process at home, it represents that genre at its very best, combining the pleasures of shimmering pop songcraft, bedroom-indie experimentalism, and dope electronic beats and production. It felt like a mashup of the candy-coated 80s dance pop of my youth and the underground club and rave sounds that have been the soundtrack of much of my life since.
Take a track like “Detonate,” like liquid drum and bass via the Postal Service; or “Anthems,” with its crushing big beats and rave synths that activate ancient traces of 90s MDMA in my brain.
Discovering Charli also made me look beyond the hyperpop genre, opening me up more broadly to the golden age of pop that we’re living in. Having decided a 50-year-old dad could listen to this stuff with no shame I started exploring the discographies of other new pop artists including Billie Eilish, Lorde, Halsey, Banoffee, and Caroline Polachek. I even got over my prejudices against Taylor Swift and gave Folklore a listen recently — and really liked it!
This was not only relevatory but brought me full-circle. I was majorly into pop in high school and college — I was the one spinning Madonna, Janet Jackson, and George Michael alongside Public Enemy, Soundgarden, and Ministry. I was the one arguing that the work of those pop artists was just as vital and adventurous as punk and alternative. I was very proud of my holistic tastes; it mattered to me on an intellectual or even political level.
But as I ventured further into the world of underground house and techno (here’s my autobiographical piece about that time), I completely missed the pop of the 90s and 2000s. I have no idea about Britney or Katy Perry or whoever else (sorry).
Getting back into pop in this decade was a joy and a relief. It’s fascinating seeing how it’s evolved in all the years since I paid attention; and returning to that holistic approach of my youth makes me feel like myself again.
Being open to pop is such a great antidote to the typical syndrome of a lot of guys my age: lapsing into being a grumpy middle-aged DJ who complains constantly about new music. What the grumpsters are missing is that many of these artists are influenced by the electronic and rave music of our generation, and are erasing the boundaries between pop, indie, and the underground. The way Eilish’s Happier Than Ever owes a clear debt to Portishead, for example; or Polachek’s explicit Björk-isms.
But none of the others do for me what Charli does; she towers above her peers as far as I’m concerned. First of all she’s one of the greatest songwriters alive. She never misses with a melody; her verses feel like choruses and her choruses feel like designer drugs. A throwaway song from Charli would be a lesser artist’s best.
I love how fun and alive her music is. I love her hip-hop-style braggadocio (Cash register goes “click” / You can’t fuck with my clique) and the way she cuts against the pop-princess paradigm with lyrics and imagery that are hilariously sleazy and druggy, or sometimes dark in a way that’s almost goth, like the gory photo shoot for the Crash LP.
As much I’m enjoying this new wave of pop, I’m not into it for its own sake. I couldn’t care less what’s popular or influential; if the sound doesn’t grab me I’ll give it a miss. Take Dua Lipa’s new album, Radical Optimism, which features extensive collaborations with Tame Impala, one of my favorite musicians (just so you know I was fully on board). There’s nothing wrong with it and it’s pleasant enough. If I heard any given track on the radio at the grocery store I’d enjoy it. But listening to the whole thing, there’s a kitschy blandness to it, a need to please everybody, a sense that this might as well be the soundtrack to one of her many corporate sponsorships.
By contrast, Charli’s ability to mix euphoric mass appeal with experimentalism, edginess, and plain weirdness is unparalleled. Like Madonna during her imperial phase, her heart is the club, and in the underground. That, and the influence of boundary-breaking producers like the late, great SOPHIE, is key for me. Nothing else hits like “Track 10,” from 2017’s Pop 2 mixtape, the way it evolves from gorgeous hushed ambience worthy of Four Tet or Boards of Canada to freaky Autotuned pop ecstasy.
For these reasons Charli’s always had an uneasy relationship with the mainstream. This is an explicit theme on the new LP: I’m famous but not quite. I’ve always found that ambivalence about fame charming and relatable. Honestly, it’s helped keep me invested in Charli because I really have no use for celebrity culture and all the influencer stuff that’s an increasingly crucial component of a pop career these days.
For the most part I tune out Charli’s social media. I recognize that’s she’s very good at that aspect of the game — an expert at crafting her own image, a style queen to her legions of followers (who are called Angels, in case you didn’t know). Yes I think she’s hot, but honestly — and this may sound disingenuous in a straight guy, but take it as you will — that’s not what it’s about for me. It just doesn’t work on that part of my brain at all; it’s the least interesting thing about her.
The endless posing, the Instagram posts of expensive dinners or Mediterranean yacht cruises, the Armani partnership — it’s hard for me not to find it all incredibly vapid and silly, when I know this is the oppressive world we live in, that in today’s music business, young women in particular often feel that influencing is survival.
To the degree I do pay attention, I like that Charli often seems to be satirizing celebrity culture. It’s always felt to me that she finds it all very silly too, and that she’s just going along with it. Wear these clothes as disguise just to re-enter the party.
That hyperpop in general and Charli in particular are especially embraced by gay and trans people is significant for me. There’s an arch irony to her sleaze and sexuality, a performance-art quality to it, that makes it easy to compartmentalize so I can focus on the music.
But let’s put in a pin in this idea that Charli is uncomfortable with fame and influencer culture. I’m going to return to it when I get to the massive disappointment of recent days.
Even before Brat dropped, I knew it was going to be a watershed for Charli. Crash, her previous album, released in 2022, was her biggest commercial success yet. When she played the World Pride opening night here in Sydney in 2023, she was billed higher than anyone except Kylie Minogue. Soon after, her profile was raised considerably with her inclusion on the Barbie soundtrack.
Even the album’s title, announced a few months before the June release date, sounded buzzworthy: Charli’s entire persona, her entire project captured in one word.
In interviews about Brat before it was released, Charli spoke about being frustrated with the whole game of trying to appeal to the mainstream and the accusations of selling out with Crash. She indicated the new LP would be a return to her weirder, edgier roots, and a return to the dancefloor.
I thought Crash was genuinely good (I reviewed it here); and if you ask me, Charli is weird no matter how pop she gets, and pop no matter how weird she gets. That’s what makes her great. But this sounded to me like she was in the right headspace and feeling confident. I figured Brat would see Charli in top musical form, but no matter how edgy she told us it was, she was about to go to another level and get bigger than ever.
It’s not like I make it my business to predict what’s going to be hot in pop music — I’m just an old, burned-out autistic DJ with a blog over here and I hardly have my finger on the pulse — but damn, was I right this time.
Let’s start with the cover, designed by Brent David Freany for New York-based Special Offer Inc., based on a concept by Charli. It’s a work of absolute genius, one of the greatest and most memorable sleeve designs in music history. It’s just four letters of black text on a green background, but everything about the font (a custom job based on Arial) and the blurry distortion of the letters and the lurid shade of green and the anti-design of the whole thing is perfect. It captures so well the feel of text messages on Nokia phones, low-res memes and user icons in the MySpace era, club lighting, fluoro rave gear, cans of energy drinks, packets of condoms. Thus it matches the nostalgic update of circa-2007 “indie sleaze” (as the kids have retroactively tagged it these days), electroclash, and EDM that defines the sound of the album.
Even more significant than the sleeve’s mood is its amazing replicability as a meme. Anyone can approximate the font and add a bit of distortion with the most basic photo-editing software on their phone. This was surely intended by Charli and her collaborators. Again, genius — inviting the audience to be part of the project, to expand and improve on it, as if it were open-source software, very much in the spirit of MySpace. Official comms and official merch are beside the point here. The more glitched and slapdash the memes, the more handmade the t-shirts, the more in the spirit of Brat they are.
And though the memes often refer to the album’s themes of hedonistic partying and girlhood, the thing about Brat is that anyone or anything can be Brat (well, not just anyone, but I’ll get to that). The sillier or more random the connection the better, as long as it has to do with being yourself and not giving a fuck — especially if you’re marginalized by society in the first place.
Three days after the release of Brat, Charli dropped the bonus LP, Brat and It’s the Same But There’s Three More Songs So It’s Not, which featured a variation on the cover with the same font on a white background. Incredibly, that too became a meme. When has the cover of a bonus LP ever been a meme?
We can argue about whether music promo should resemble a viral marketing campaign, but the way the Brat meme took hold in such a massive and organic way couldn’t be planned around a board table, not entirely anyway.
However, once again, let’s put a pin in that, because one of the worst things about the betrayal of Brat Summer is the way it imploded that wonderful grassroots aspect of it.
Im grateful that no matter how over Brat Summer is, no matter how uncool Charli is for letting this happen, there will always be this amazing album.
When I first pressed play on Brat, I remember thinking, damn, she’s not fucking around. The difference between Crash and this set in terms of intensity and invention is instantly apparent. “360” hooks you within seconds with an infectious, shimmering synthline (the first of many great synthlines on the LP) giving way to Charli’s singsongy vocals riding a killer bassline and a dope electro beat. It has such an exhilarating glide to it, the way Charli’s syncopated phrasing on I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia teases the beat, the way the melody buffers the unapologetic swagger of the lyrics. When you’re in the party b-b-bumpin’ that beat / 666 with a princess streak.
Brat is so stacked with great songs one after the other it feels like a greatest hits. It effectively is a greatest hits since Charli’s songwriting has never been better. The fact that nearly every track on the album has been the subject of memes — nearly every track an organic hit in its own right — speaks to that. It’s really something the way it hits you with bombs like “Sympathy Is a Knife,” “Talk Talk,” and “Von Dutch”; and then just about the time another album would start dropping off, it keeps reaching more peaks in the back half with outrageously good tracks like “Girl, So Confusing,” “Apple” and “B2B.” The first time I listened to the album all the way through, I swear “Apple” made me laugh out loud with delight (that melody! that bassline!), the way a good DJ can do that to you with those continuous peaks.
Charli’s music has often referred to the music of earlier eras. I’ve mentioned the old-school rave mood on some of her best records; Crash featured pastiches of 80s dance pop and 90s house. Brat takes this to another level. As I said it explicitly calls back to the club and indie music of the 2000s, much of which was, in turn, calling back to the new wave and postpunk of the 80s. The result is an album that mashes up the last 40 years of music history, the 80s filtered through rave filtered through indie filtered through hyperpop, the references multiplying geometrically and becoming a blur of melody and wicked beats. It’s as if Charli is Neo realizing she’s the One, and suddenly it’s all so effortless.
These layers of influence are on display in “Girl, So Confusing,” which sounds like Madonna if she was produced by LCD Soundsystem; “Mean Girls,” with its gorgeous gospel-house piano laid over a jagged electroclash groove; and the techno-Goth of “Sympathy Is a Knife,” worthy of New Order’s best, most blatant copies of Latin freestyle.
I find it so interesting that a 32-year-old artist is mining nostalgia for the music, art, design, and technology of her youth (Charli turned 15 in 2007) and hitting it big with Gen Z. Of course kids today are fascinated with the signs and signifiers of an earlier era, but it also speaks to how well she fuses those nostalgic elements with contemporary sounds to give it more currency. This isn’t a new process — the pop of my youth in the 80s constantly referred to the 60s, for example. The best of that generation, like Prince, made those 60s references feel fresh and exciting.
Despite how many producers there are on Brat (every track has multiple producer and co-writer credits, including big names like A. G. Cook, Hudson Mohawke, and Gesaffelstein), and despite its range of styles and moods, from dancefloor destroyers to more intimate and introspective modes, it has great cohesion and flow. This is down to Charli’s vision. Of course her producers deserve credit for their brilliant contributions; but there’s a tendency when discussing women in pop to put too much emphasis on their (frequently male) producers, as if they are the true masterminds. On Brat, it’s especially apparent that Charli is the author of this work, and the producers simply helped her realize it.
That said, like Madonna at her best, part of Charli’s genius is in picking great studio collaborators and then knowing exactly how to make the most of the tracks they create. Take the awesome pitch-bending synth sound on “Von Dutch,” one of the best synth sounds I’ve heard since my 90s rave days, the kind that makes your stomach feel like you’re on a spaceship that’s careering out of control. Once again, perfect unity between style and content, the way that sound rubs up against Charli’s intoned vocals and imperiously bitchy lyrics (It’s okay to admit that you’re jealous of me). I love the way it pitches up when she sings I know your little secret, put your hands up! It amplifies the clever double meaning: a demand for the subject to raise their hands in confession is also a demand for an audience to raise their hands in celebration. That’s just great songwriting.
There are so many wonderful details like that. Charli and her team delight in depth and texture, like the dramatic orchestration on “Everything Is Romantic,” which reminds me of the orchestral passages on André 3000’s The Love Below; but they don’t miss the slam dunks either. Of course a track called “Rewind” needs a spinback on the dropout! But it’s perfectly executed and really elevates the 90s breakbeat-hardcore feel of that cut.
Like The Love Below, Brat finds Charli reaching her greatest commercial success with her deepest and most personal album — not to mention her weirdest. It’s really something how the lyrics zigzag between vainglorious cattiness and crippling self-doubt and alienation. She goes to some dark places here. I don’t remember another pop star who’s ever sung anything like Why I wanna buy a gun? Why I wanna shoot myself?, as she does on “Sympathy Is a Knife.” It’s jarring, especially in contrast with the hedonism and girlpower.
Someone made a great reel about these wild mood swings:
It’s not all manic depression; there are more expansive moods too. On “Everything Is Romantic,” Charli lets loose rapid-fire spoken-word impressions of an epiphany on a trip to Italy, with some of her best lyrics ever (honestly she’s a good rapper):
Bad tattoos on leather-tanned skin
Jesus Christ on a plastic sign
Fall in love again and again
Winding roads doing manual drive
On “I Think About It All the Time,” she pours out her stream-of-conscious hopes and fears about aging and motherhood over a jittery indie-dance track:
So, we had a conversation on the way home
Should I stop my birth control?
’Cause my career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all
It’s unexpectedly the emotional center of the album. Her vocal here is lovely too: so vulnerable and wavering.
Because she’s so well-known for her image, and because her vocals are often deliberately distorted by Autotune, I fear Charli is underrated as a vocalist. The more you pay attention the more you realize how powerful her voice is and the control she has over it, whether she’s singing, rapping, or an in-between sprechgesang-type situation, as she does often.
This is not to say I have a problem with the Autotuned stuff: I love that shit. The creativity of that electronic vocal modulation, making a voice sound like another synth, is thrilling.
Maybe these contradictions — the pop star versus the uncertain young woman; I’m your favorite reference versus I’m perfect for the background — aren’t so contradictory after all. Maybe the reason Brat is so huge right now is that these confessions of anxiety beneath the mask of performative girlpower, dealing with the crushing expectations of beauty and success and motherhood, and trying to forget it all with a good time, all resonate with millions of young women who aren’t pop stars or jetsetting influencers, especially in this age of permacrisis. There’s a reason the most memorable and memeable lyric on the album is It’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl.
What I love most about Brat is that it takes a form people say is dying — the album — and proves that it not only has currency for younger generations, but can be relevant within contemporary media (the memes, the TikTok dance, etc).
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A few weeks after the album came out, some line was crossed and Brat Summer started to feel out of control. Those green and white memes were everywhere, along with the “Apple” dance and references to the lyrics of every song and the jokes about b-b-bumpin’ that coke and so on and so on. As delightful as it all was at first, I became a bit sick of it, like I’d sipped too much of some electric-green apple-flavored concoction.
This was something new for me: I’d been used to having to explain to people who Charli was, feeling like one of the cool kids; but her days as the queen of avant-pop, the queen of the outsiders, seemed suddenly over. She was now just a massive pop star like any other.
As much as I fight it, I still sometimes have that tendency in music fans of my generation to be suspicious if not sullen about success. Dude, I like her early stuff.
Consequently, when I shared my list of the best albums of 2024 at the halfway point, I had Brat ranked at number four (below new LPs from Kim Gordon, Beth Gibbons, and Waxahatchee). In my heart I felt Brat was the most noteworthy album of the year, but I just felt over it (and mind you those other three records are fantastic).
Soon after that, several things happened in the space of a few days that reignited my passion for Charli and for this project.
First, Kyle MacLachlan went viral for his love of Brat. He posted the most adorable video of himself bopping along to the remix of “Girl So Confusing,” and raved about how much the album meant to him in interviews:
There’s a real mix of the styles on it… but then there’s also these reflections. I thought that her also referencing some of her influences — she talks about SOPHIE — is great. And the other one that I really like is “I might say something stupid,” because I was like, I totally relate to that. We all do. I think it’s kind of universal, when you’re out somewhere and you’re feeling like you don’t quite fit in, or oh god I’m gonna do something dumb. Or you feel insecure.
Finding out that Agent Dale Cooper has so much passion for this album too, at the age of 65, and could even talk knowledgeably about SOPHIE, was so validating for me — it made me feel a lot less lonely as a middle-aged dad among Charli fans.
When I shared a photo of Charli with McLachlan to my Instagram story, a comrade responded by saying they were sure they could easily convince her to be a Leninist. I wasn’t even entirely sure what they meant, no doubt it was mostly in jest, but something about that made me go, Yes! Yes dammit! Charli is with us! Absolutely no evidence of communist sympathies on her part, and if anything it’s just embarrassing evidence of how much of ourselves we read into the artists we love, but in the moment it somehow just made sense and fired my imagination.
And I think the reason it made sense had to do with something else I saw around the same time: an interview with Charli in which she describes Brat Summer as “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra.” She means the working class, I thought. The word she uses is “trashy,” but what she means is the working class.
Specifically working-class girls and LGBTQ+ peeps. In another hilarious interview clip I saw in the same post, Charli talks about interactions with her gay fans: “When my fans and I meet, they always get me to hold poppers and go ‘Gay rights!’ or like sign their poppers bottles.”
This sympathy for the young, precarious working class, this acute awareness of their emotional highs and lows, this intimate knowledge of how they like to party and why they need to party when there’s so little else to cling to in this crumbling world — it struck me all of a sudden that this is the reason Charli matters so much right now.
This Guardian commentary (one of several on Brat: it’s a sign of your cultural dominance when every Guardian journo feels the need to weigh in) approaches the point when it speaks of “recession pop,” but in doing so misses the point entirely. If you think a concept as surface-level and transient as “recession” captures the despairing, apocalyptic mood among the younger generations as the world literally burns, you are woefully unprepared for whatever happens next.
Finally, just a couple of days after this epiphany, Donald Trump was shot and (unfortunately) survived. I saw the below post just hours after the news broke, and I laughed so hard I almost choked. The fact that Brat Summer was so instantly applicable made me shake my head in wonder at its genius all over again.
At that point I admonished myself: why on earth am I holding this epochal work at arm’s length?? Number four, are you kidding??
That weekend, I put Brat on my hi-fi while alone at home, turned the volume way up, and danced all over the house, loving it more than ever. As my body grooved along to it, my mind raced, and an early version of this essay sprang into my head fully formed — the lede, the outline, the conclusion, everything.
But my outlook would change again very soon, and drastically.
The next morning, I woke up to the news that Kamala Harris had replaced Joe Biden as the Democrats’ presidential nominee. The morning after that, I woke up to the news that Charli XCX had tweeted “kamala IS brat.”
Literally my first thought lying there in bed was, Damn, I guess Brat Summer is over. I mulled over posting that, and feeling deflated, I wondered if anyone else would see it that way — that Charli endorsing a candidate who’d been overseeing genocide for nine months was the exact worst thing that could happen to this wonderful album and this pop-culture moment. True, the Democrats’ popularity has plummeted among young people in the wake of the Gaza genocide; but many still hold faith in presidential candidates as agents of change, especially if they’re running against Trump.
But it turned out lots of people felt that way, and a post expressing that exact sentiment had already gone viral. I should not have doubted the youth.
Even better was this one explicitly calling out the genocide using the Brat cover meme. It’s since been deleted (the author was, among other things, subject to vicious transphobia in the replies from Elon Musk’s blue-check bros), but not before it got at least 160,000 likes — impressive numbers next to Charli’s original post, which was sitting around 260,000 likes at the time I checked. I don’t see how it’s possible Charli was unaware of this pushback.
Far from being controversial, it was quickly apparent that “Brat Summer is over” was in fact a mainstream position. Even Pitchfork got into the act — well, kind of — headlining an article, “Brat Summer Is Dead, Long Live Brat Summer.” The piece doesn’t mention the genocide (which is both weird and very typical of the mainstream media right now), but does at least nod at the idea that the Democrats are the complete antithesis of Brat.
While they aren’t nearly as hopeless as Republicans when it comes to pop culture, the Dems are still super corny and square, as you’d expect from the preferred party of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. They’re the party of awkward Lin-Manual Miranda and Lena Dunham routines aimed at NPR dads. It’s just so lame and depressing that Charli is helping them rehabilitate this Shareblue, Bill Clinton sax playing, This American Life ass image, and tarnishing her own in the process.
No, Kamala is not Brat — she’s a 59-year-old career politician who’s helping run an empire. She’s a former district attorney who criminalized the parents of truant schoolchildren and refused a trans prison inmate gender-affirming care. Before we even get to the Gaza genocide, the latter is enough to make Charli’s endorsement problematic, considering the outsized number of trans people in her fanbase.
It’s even worse when you consider the possibility that all this was arranged in advance: that Charli was approached by Harris’s PR team for her endorsement even before Harris’s candidacy was announced. I can’t share the reasons why I suspect this, but you don’t need inside information to see how quickly Kamala HQ changed their Twitter avi to a Brat meme and ran with the whole thing. Suddenly the internet was inundated with “Kamala is brat” (it made searching up images for this article so annoying!).
You have to admit it’s really savvy marketing. It’s a good look for the Democrats — and literally no one else. It’s terrible for Charli and her fans. It’s terrible for all the people the Democrats and their allies are bombing while the coconut memes are being shared.
Do you need me to explain why it’s terrible for Charli or for anyone to support Harris or the Democrats? If you have a problem with that, you probably closed the tab long ago. But just in case, let’s hit the main points.
The Gaza genocide has gone on for over ten months with the full, unwavering, stubborn support of the Biden administration. I call it stubborn because most American voters want a ceasefire — nearly 80% of Democratic voters and over half of Republican voters agree on this most basic of demands. There is no popular mandate for the US’s Gaza policy. The Biden administration has not only ignored or rebuffed calls for a ceasefire, but has actively undercut international efforts to seek justice.
The administration has also relentessly portrayed pro-Palestine protesters as violent and antisemitic, and has never apologized for spreading lies about Palestinian militants beheading babies on October 7 — all of which has provided important ideological cover for the genocide (in which thousands of real babies have been murdered).
It’s not US troops who are attacking hospitals and refugee camps in Gaza, targeting children with sniper rifles, and leaving a man with Down syndrome to bleed to death after mauling him with a dog, but it’s very much an American genocide as well as an Israeli one. It’s plainly obvious that Israel could never continue bombing Gaza (not to mention continue occupying Palestine) without the ongoing support of its most important ally — without a steady stream of US dollars and bombs. In his haste to supply Israel with weapons for bombing schools, Biden has bypassed Congress on multiple occasions; the weapons are shipped so often it’s impacting the climate.
Though the official death toll stands at about 40,000, according to an important article published by the British medical journal The Lancet it’s likely closer to 186,000. Read that number again. Tens of thousands are missing or buried under rubble and uncounted; and starvation and disease are now rampant in Gaza due to the total collapse of healthcare infrastructure and the deliberate destruction of the enclave’s water supply.
Keep in mind that Israel is blockading the Gaza strip and preventing food and medical supplies from getting in. Through its steady support for Israel, the US is ensuring the blockade continues, and thus ensuring the starving and dying continues.
All this could change with one phone call. Biden could literally pick up the phone and end the US’s military and financial support for genocide today. Never doubt that the US’s policy is anything but determined support for this brutality; never believe US officials when they throw their hands up and make like it’s “complicated” and there’s nothing they can do. To the degree they talk about holding Israel accountable or pausing arms shipments, it’s just spin. The typical dynamic is that they express “grave concerns” while shipping more bombs.
As the sitting vice president — second in charge of the most powerful nation in history — Kamala Harris is directly complicit in all this. There’s no case to be made otherwise. She’s sat at the table with Biden in the war room while these decisions have been made for ten months. She’s been a spokesperson for the administration’s Gaza policy, affirming Israel’s “right to defend itself” in December even after tens of thousands of civilians had already been slaughtered.
Even since the start of her presidential run, she’s attacked pro-Palestine protesters, smearing them as antisemitic once again; and has repeated the tired old “right to defend itself” refrain after the IDF bombed Beruit and assassinated a Hezbollah leader (killing children in the process). She met with Israeli prime minister and architect of genocide Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to Washington, and while her supporters tried to portray this as a confrontation, the reality is that shaking hands with a war criminal only legitimizes him. A few days ago, Harris’s office confirmed that she in no way supports an arms embargo on Israel.
Last week, when protesters (mainly young Arab women) interrupted her speech at a campaign stop in Michigan (chanting Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide! We won’t vote for genocide!), she told them, “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that.” Even as I type it up I can’t get over that.
The beloved Palestinian poet and academic Refaat Alareer was clear about Harris’s and her party’s complicity in his very last tweet before he was targeted and murdered by Israel in December. Retweeting Harris’s “right to defend itself” statement, he said, “The Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the Gaza genocide perpetrated by Israel.” The point is that if we only blame “Genocide Joe” for these atrocities, assuming as some do that it’s been the policy of one old white guy and things might get better soon, then Harris and the many others in the administration who are also complicit are let off the hook.
Progressives who vocally support Harris are either clinging to a fantasy that she’ll push for a ceasefire at some hazy point in the future (as opposed to merely “expressing openness to the community’s concerns,” as she did with Arab leaders of the Uncommitted movement in Michigan); or they’re trying to ignore it all and hope it goes away.
This is why the campaign is so focused on personalities and marketing and memes. Everybody knows a genocide is happening; everybody’s seen the photos of the starving and dying children; everybody’s going through this mass trauma just like you and I are, even if they can’t admit it to themselves. And meanwhile they’re afraid of another Trump presidency (for good reason, I should be clear). They need hope.
But hope is all the Democrats have to offer. There’s no substance at all. Of course they aren’t going to talk in depth about policy (when they do, it often turns out their policies are to the right of Trump’s). Of course they aren’t going to entertain serious discussion of an arms embargo, or doing anything at all to stop the genocide. Of course they don’t want to hear about it from protesters. All they have is vaguely progressive pep talk, “expressing openness to concerns,” and memes. No ceasefire, just vibes.
I’m sorry to get so heavy in an article about Charli XCX and Brat Summer, but I just wanted to drive the point home HOW MUCH IT FUCKING SUCKS that Charli is helping the Democrats popwash genocide. I thought it was important to juxtapose Brat Summer with the horrors of Gaza just to remind you what an inane and frankly ugly thing it is to say “kamala IS brat.”
This fiasco has had the unfortunate effect of confirming some of my private misgivings about Charli. I’ve sometimes been troubled not only by the influencer stuff, but by the self-absorption, by the almost total lack of any social content in her lyrics.
How I’m Feeling Now is a glaring example. As much as I love that album, the fact that it was recorded during the apocalyptic early stages of the COVID pandemic makes it kind of cringe when she sings I’m so bored! — in other words, bored about isolating at her mansion in L.A. We were all bored in lockdown, but there’s no reference on the LP to anything else going on in the world outside the walls of that mansion.
Before now, I’ve rationalized this to myself. Part of me think it’s fine that Charli mainly sings about herself. It’s what she’s good at. It’s just a form, like Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits are a form; and a lot of people, especially young women, can relate to her highs and lows and find solace with her. So there’s a social subtext if not an explicit social text, as Brat Summer (RIP) demonstrated.
As I detailed in my essay about Barbie, I’m not the type of vulgar leftist who thinks mass entertainment is some kind of brainwashing, designed to distract us from what’s going on in the world. That’s a shallow and condescending view of how the working class consumes culture, and it has the damaging effect of portraying the left as no fun.
I also have mixed feelings about reading all these expectations into celebrities. Clearly many are afraid that speaking out against the genocide — speaking out against US foreign policy — will ruin their careers. But this is true of a lot of ordinary people too; the repression of dissent at all levels of society has been awful. I’m always heartened when someone like SZA or Mark Ruffalo or Dua Lipa (credit where it’s due) has the guts to support Palestine in public. If I had that kind of platform I would surely use it; and the more children are slaughtered, the harder it is to excuse those who don’t. But I don’t know how much it helps to obsess over their silence; it’s just another fixation among all the fixations of celebrity culture.
I also note that the celebrities who are most fixated on, most singled out to represent everything bad happening in culture or in the world, are usually women. Taylor Swift is the arch example of this. Of course she’s worthy of criticism, especially as a billionaire, but the intensity of the focus on her (especially compared to the people who are actually running the world) is unhealthy and kind of weird.
A few months ago there was an online campaign to block celebrities on social media who hadn’t spoken out on Gaza. A few, including Lizzo and Charli herself, seemed to respond to this pressure and made tepid statements calling for peace, or promoting Gaza relief campaigns. It was amusing enough to see them squirm, but overall I found the campaign a bit moralistic and not the most constructive activism, just another unfocused consumer boycott.
But here’s the thing: by endorsing Harris, Charli is demonstrating that she does have a political perspective, and she actually can speak up when she wants to — just not for Palestine.
Look, if she feels she’s doing what she can to prevent the reactionary disaster of another Trump presidency, that’s fine. It just happens to be in support of an imperialist who’s complicit in genocide.
Either that, or she’s showing us she truly is that self-absorbed, and what she’s doing is leveraging her fame to take part in a presidential campaign because she reckons the proximity to power will be good for her career long-term.
Neither of those possibilities reflects well on her in light of what’s happening in Gaza, and the continual pleas from many of her fans to say something about it.
It makes me angry in many ways; angry at Charli, of course, but also at the way it feeds into those vulgar-left tropes about pop culture.
A growing number of people, especially young people, are angry and frustrated with everything these days. It’s not just about Gaza. Gen Z were already far more radical than their elders, what with the inflation crisis, the climate apocalypse, racist police violence, attacks on LGBTQ+ people, and dystopian public-health nightmares. The unprecedented mass radicalization that’s happening around Gaza is building on all of this. It’s as if, to a generation who came of age in COVID lockdown, who have plenty of rational reasons to give up hope in the future, this was one genocide too many — the tipping point for them.
Now a threshold has been passed and everything is different now. Gaza is changing all of us in ways that won’t be clear for years.
I think celebrities and other public figures will be increasingly questioned on their silence, or their complicity with the system, and they’ll increasingly find themselves subject to that anger. A recent example is Jack Black, who abruptly parted ways with Tenacious D bandmate Kyle Gass after the latter joked onstage here in Sydney about how he wished Trump’s shooter had succeeded (thus voicing what millions were thinking, including me).
Black throwing his lifelong partner under the bus — scrambling to cover his ass and protect his lucrative film career — did not sit well with a lot of people, and he quickly became the villain of the piece. He may never live down his newfound image as a weaselly, pearl-clutching Hollywood centrist; and the fact that he walked it back the other day and announced that Tenacious D isn’t, in fact, over yet just seems like damage control.
It might not have played out that way for a star as universally beloved as Black as recently as ten years ago. It must have been a shock for him.
I saw some of that dynamic with Charli’s endorsement of Harris — the viral pushback; the comments about Gaza on every post by or about her; the way she had to turn “Brat Summer is dead” into a joke because it became the narrative instantly.
I’m not saying Charli is over; she’ll likely weather this and remain a massive and influential star for some time. We’re a long way away from the kind of revolutionary movement that will put real pressure on celebrities to change their ways.
I’m not even saying I’ve given up on her. The week after her Kamala tweet she dropped a track with Billie Eilish and wore an Aphex Twin t-shirt in the video, and I found it so hard to stay mad at her. I haven’t stopped listening to Brat.
But still, I can’t help but think the grim, premature death of Brat Summer is a signal of how everything is different now.
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Feature image photo credit: @leagarn with edits by me
Under the Paving Stones 
you have a LOT to say about a LITTLE pop girl
peace
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thanks for reading! 😘
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I love this article. Thank you for writing it, it’s just the perspective that’s been missing.
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Thank you so much Hannah! It really means a lot to hear that from readers
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This was a lot… I love it! I agree with a lot of this, especially your politcal approach to Brat. Yes, it’s not a political album, but its use and implications in the presidential race and Kamala’s campaign have turned it political!
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Thank you, Namar! Really appreciate that feedback, glad my approach worked for you (honestly I wondered if it would work for anyone at all!). Thanks for reading!
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first time reader here. nice piece!
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Thank you so much, Emma, it means a lot for you to say that! 🙂
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Really? You think Charli’s support for someone with a shared heritage makes her complicit on Gaza? The world is so simple for the Left – it isn’t simple at all in reality.
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Since you read the article you should know I’m not arguing that she’s complicit. One of the reasons my argument is so lengthy is that I tried to explore the nuances of expecting too much from pop stars versus the shittiness of popwashing genocide, and I was as generous towards Charli as it’s possible to be, I think. Saying “it isn’t simple at all” is such an awful way to downplay the slaughter of 335,000 people. Nor is shared heritage an excuse for ignoring that when hundreds of thousand of children are starving and dying. She has shared heritage with Narendra Modi too and he’s a fascist.
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Excellent read. Thanks very much for writing such a nuanced and complex piece.
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Thank you! It really means a lot to hear that. 🙂
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Actual leninists invaded my country (Ukraine) and started hanging ukrainians because they didnt want to participate in communism from a country that had recently enslaved them. US Communist sympathisers are morons and should refrain from appropriating a painful history that has nothing to do with any of them.
Further, canceling an artist because shes endorsing the only other candidate who is significantly less worse than trump in both domestic liberal issues and in regards to palestine is priveleged and lazy. Trump will ensure netanyahu has free reign to keep going as well as ensuring no further humanitarian aid will get in to Palestine.
Again as a person from a collapsed government, USSR, you probably do not want to live through that and should continue to work “within the system”. In a western country there is no excuse to not be participating in local elections which will ultimately change your personal life more than presidential elections, and will ultimately dictate who represents you on the national level.
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You might have me confused for a Stalinist. I’m certainly not; the tradition of communism that I belong to (Trotskyism, or international socialism) is staunchly opposed to Stalinism and everything the USSR did after about 1927, including the horrific crimes in Ukraine. Trotsky and Lenin supported Ukrainian independence and self-determination, as they did for all nations in the former Empire. Stalin undid all that as he destroyed most of the reforms of the first years of the revolution, also including abortion rights, gay marriage, etc.
To be clear we also adamantly support Ukrainian independence today, and oppose the Russian invasion.
Communism is for everyone in the world, regardless of its successes and failures in the USSR.
Socialists don’t oppose elections; we oppose capitalist political parties. There’s a difference. We do take part in some elections down the ballot.
If you got to the end of the article (I know it’s quite long), you would have seen that I haven’t cancelled Charli. I still bump the album and the remixes, and I have tickets to see her in Sydney this summer! 🙂 That doesn’t mean she or anyone should be above criticism for supporting a genocidal candidate. Think about how we would feel reading about a famous artist who made excuses for slavery before 1863. That is the kind of history that is being created.
To imagine that Harris is “significantly less worse” than Trump on Palestine is to ignore that she has helped oversee and has adamantly defended the slaughter of over 300,000 people, which has included people run over with bulldozers, children killed by snipers, mentally disabled people attacked and killed with dogs, dead babies left to decompose, etc. etc. It’s a thoughtless and ignorant thing to say, and it mainly functions as bullshit marketing and PR for the Democrats. The Biden administration and the Harris campaign make polite noise about how concerned they are, but have materially demonstrated over and over again for a year that they have no intention whatsoever of disarming Israel. Such statements have nothing to do with what Palestinians are actually going through during a literal genocide, and if you would listen to them you would know that.
Perhaps you don’t mean to dehumanize them through this kind of cynical electoral calculus (“To stop the genocide we must re-elect the people who are committing the genocide”), but that is in fact what you’re doing. There is no “worse” when it comes to genocide; there is no “worse” when it comes to the deliberate murder and starving of tens of thousands (more probably hundreds of thousands) of children. Perhaps you haven’t seen some of the same images I’ve seen.
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Lenin became anti ukrainian when ukraine decided it was opposed to centralization of communism in Russia. Then the predominant movement was for the UNR. After that, leninists started killing ukrainian villagers. The only socialist movement that ukrainians look at positively is makhno.
There are a lot of palestinian-Americans voting. Things absolutely can for palestinians if trump gets elected. Currently the US is atleast pushing for humanitarian aid into Gaza. Trump and republicans have pushed for cutting all aid. Trumps recent remarks about Gaza and beachfront property indicate he will be worse. Trump also was the administration that moved the US embassy from tel aviv to jerusalem. Every indication is there that if there is something the US could do in this situation, Trump will not do it. The democratic party can atleast be pressured to change that. There are also plenty of voices on the internet from palestinian americans that echo this sentiment. However, I am not criticizing how they choose to vote.
Also, I believe it is unfair to pin the responsibility on the Biden admin for israels current actions. This is the culmination of selling them weapons over the past 20+ years. Even if the US stopped all weapon deliveries, israel already has all of the weapons it needs. Short of bombing israel such as was done to end the Balkan wars there is not much that I know to force a resolution. Not that there isnt one that doesnt exist necessarily.
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Great article, thank you for the insight !
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You’re welcome Taaha! Thanks for reading
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I would ask you, gently, to consider whether your feelings for brat, and for pop music in general, are really about the music at all. Because it very much sounds like this post is all about you: you mock yourself for being a straight white man but go to such immense lengths to show that you’re not like the other straight white men. Your embrace of the brat phenomenon seems straightforwardly self-defensive, to me, a way to protect yourself from your own creeping fears about being a stereotype you’re desperate not to be.
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You realllllyy didn’t read this.
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Sadly you had to learn the hardway that it was a false equivalence between Harris and Trump. If you still can’t see why it was important to stop this man at all costs, maybe meditate over the issue at Trump Gaza Hotel and Resorts
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Sadly, you seem to be unable to see that if two candidates support the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of children, you don’t have to support either of them. I get really disgusted with liberals who try to say that the situation in Gaza is “worse” under Trump. There is no better or worse when it comes to genocide. It’s just marketing for the Democrats, you don’t actually care about Gaza.
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Sure, but when given two realistic choices, wouldn’t you choose the lesser evil? One was trying to distance themselves from their predecessor’s thoughts on Gaza, and the other is fine with razing it to the ground so he and his billionaire friends can build more properties on it. In addition, Gaza is not the only issue that affects Americans — in fact, while I’d say that it’s important for the U.S. to be involved in foreign aid and maintain relationships with other nations, there are so many other domestic issues that are more relevant to Americans, including the economy, women and their reproductive rights, and race relations and police brutality. It’s such an ignorant, white savior-centered take to drag down the most qualified candidate who actually attempts to resolve issues when there’s no other realistic option. This is honestly why I cannot stand white liberals who can only take the most perfect candidate, because the perfect candidate does not exist!
And yes, it is worse under Trump because Trump doesn’t care at all — not one bit. He’s on Israel’s side. That is literally worse.
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This is such a standard, generic defense of lesser-evilism and whitewashing of Biden’s genocide that it feels like it was written by a chatbot. I spent half this essay calling out liberalism and you still think I’m a liberal?
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not reading all that but Charli xcx sucks
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You don’t want to read this and you don’t like Charli, and yet here you are in the comments when you could have kept scrolling, Bruce. Thank you for gracing us with your insight and sparkling wit. 😘
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this is the biggest pile of shite.
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Thanks for reading! 😘
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Agree with most of your commentary Jim. It is important to remember in today’s age of parasocial relationships with celebrities, many of these stars have disappointing morals and are not necessarily people you would want to surround yourself with. As is expected with imperfect human nature, the only higher power many individuals speak to is money, fame, and being in good standing with those in power. Remember to enjoy the creative output of a celebrity but do not idolize them or equate enjoyable art/creativity with being someone who cares about humanity.
As a long time Charli XCX music fan since the True Romance album (strictly music fan, not her as a person sadly) and 2nd-generation American of South Asian and Muslim heritage, I want to point out an aspect of Charli that is very important to explore in relation to her deafening silence on the genocide in Gaza and Palestine. Charli’s mother Shameera is an Indian Muslim who was part of the South Asian diaspora that was expelled and ethnically cleansed from Uganda in 1972.
In many interviews, Charli talks about regularly spending time with her maternal grandparents every weekend as she grew up in England. It is really sad for me to see her not have any introspection on what is going on in Gaza and Palestine given her heritage and being the daughter and granddaughter of people who experienced war crimes and ethnic cleansing themselves!
Yes we know that Charli is white passing and socialized as a white British girl, but with half of her heritage coming from an expelled Ugandan Indian Muslim woman, her lack of response has been grotesquely fascinating to observe and analyze to say the least. Also, the fact that she endorsed Kamala Harris and tied BRAT to a genocide supporter tells me how ignorant she is about what is going on in the world around her. All of this speaks to her depth as a person and sense of empathy and compassion for others.
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Has your opinion of this changed as of now in 2025? Recently she has been very vocal about her support for Palestine and Gaza. I was happy to see her use her platform and the greater amount of attention she was getting to promote Palestine instead of engaging with the Taylor swift “diss” track recently.I am also a long time fan and could really relate to what you wrote here. For so many years when people asked me my music tastes I would say “my favorite artist is Charli xcx” and that was always followed up with “the boom clap/fancy girl?”. And then all the sudden it was cool to like her and I was like I’ve been here all along!! But I do try to resist that mentality because I know its cringey.
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Have you feelings about this changed now? Recently I have seen her using her platform to bring awareness to the genocide in Gaza. Also when the Taylor Swift drama happened earlier this week, I was happy to see her using the greater influx of attention to promote Palestine rather than engage with the “diss” trackAlso I relate to a lot of what you wrote here. I have been a Charli fan for many years now. Before, when people would ask me about my music tastes I would always say “charli xcx is my favorite artist” which was inevitably followed with “the boom clap/fancy girl?”. And now it is cool to like her, and I’m like I have been here all along!! But I do try to resist that mindset because I know it is cringey. She is just a truly phenomenal artist. I have been to some of her concerts and I do find the explicit sexual aspects of her performance funny because it feels like there is not a single heterosexual male in sight haha. Its always such a fun and inviting community!
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Yes, it’s been good to see Charli speak up a little bit lately! In general, the movement has only kept growing and become more mainstream, and it’s placed musicians and other public figures under a lot of pressure to say something. So it’s pressure from the grassroots which is the best kind of pressure.
One narrative I hate is when a public figure finally says something, and people are like, “Where have you been for the past two years??” It doesn’t work that way – if we want more people to speak out, and we definitely do, we can’t blame them when they finally do, that’s counterproductive and unfair. Everyone has their own evolving to do and we have to be patient and accepting. (The important exception is the politicians, media, and other leaders who enabled the genocide – I don’t have any forgiveness for them.)
The one thing I second-guessed after I published this article was that it sounded like I was done with Charli, when I definitely wasn’t. If anything I got more obsessed with her music in the months after I posted this. Like I wrote about here, my politics are not always connected to my music consumption. But it is nice that she’s speaking out now!
I saw Charli at the Laneway festival here in Sydney earlier this year. She was amazing, and the crowd was exactly as you describe: very few hetero guys except a few well-behaved boyfriends. It was a great vibe.
I’ve been very puzzled by Taylor Swift beefing with her. I actually love Taylor (I’m planning to write about her soon) and I think she should be above this. Also I thought they were friends?? It’s kind of annoying the way the backlash has fuelled the relentless anti-Swift sentiment on the internet, the whole thing is such a shame. It’s good that Charli hasn’t responded but I expect she will at some point. Charli always plays it cool but I imagine it hurts to be dissed that way by the biggest star on the planet.
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Im sorry I thought one of the comments got deleted so I tried to rewrite it. You can delete one of them and this comment as well.
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No problem at all! Thanks for reading, I really appreciate it!
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