One of my most listened-to albums of the past couple of months has been “Brat” by Charli xcx, so I decided to make one of my applications to the Arts and Entertainment section of the Cavalier Daily about it. I got rejected (surprise!!) which is pretty fair considering I wrote it 20 minutes before the deadline. So I thought I would share the wealth with you guys by publishing it here. Feel free to tell me if you think it’s amazing or fantastic!
A&E Application
Summer 2024 was defined by the obsession with the nonchalant model face, sheer black tights, and anything lime green. “Brat Summer” took the world by storm thanks to “brat”, Charli XCX’s new album. This album perfectly described the transition into womanhood from contemplating motherhood to the struggles of self-image to being an “it” girl. The British singer-songwriter was able to crack the code by having some of the songs of the summer. Just by looking through this song list, you begin to see why.
Half of the album contains songs like “360”, “Club Classics”, “Mean Girls”, and “365” which sets the overarching genre of hyper-pop with references to current pop icons. In collective the songs make references to actress Julia Fox, producer SOPHIE, and model/chef Gabbriette all of which are known for their model-off-duty aesthetics and heavy influence in social media.Â
With lyrics like “I’m so Julia” you can’t help but really feel like you’re a part of the cool girls’ club. The bass has your heart pumping with a beat that you can’t help but catwalk too. This part of the album is about loving yourself to the point of blind confidence with these club songs as your background music.
The other half of the album gets more vulnerable with songs like “Girl, So confusing”, “Sympathy Is a Knife”, “Apple”, and “I Might Say Something Stupid”. These songs pull back the cool girl illusion that’s being presented by Charli and deep dive into the insecurity behind the sulky model look. In “Girl, so confusing” you see the pressures set on women in the music industry to compete against one another and how that’s affected Charli’s relationship with other women, in this case, singer/songwriter Lorde.Â
This theme of comparison to other women is also shown in songs like “Sympathy Is a Knife” and “B2B” with lyrics such as “This one girl taps my insecurities don’t know if it’s real or if I’m spiraling” and “I don’t wanna fall right back to us maybe you should run right back to her”. Both lyrics bluntly mention the insecurity of being in a space with other women who seem as though they have it better.Â
Charli also mentions in the song “I think about it all the time” she mentions her consideration of stopping her birth control with the reasoning being in this lyric, “’Cause my career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all”. This song covers the universal experience of women going through a tug-of-war battle between staying in a successful career or becoming a mother.Â
This album felt like a collection of diary entries out of Charli XCX’s journal with its relatable subjects. Even if the goal was to just tell her personal story, she was able to touch on multiple universal experiences of women to the rhythm of a song a frat guy couldn’t help but flick his wrist too. Listening through this album was a mix of emotions including feelings of shock that someone could be so blunt with their lyricism yet also comforted in that I wasn’t the only one succumbing to the patriarchal system set up to pit women against each other.Â
If you were to be honest, you too have experienced that helpless feeling of wanting to be the cool girl, be friends with her, or even “get” with her and this album gave people the ability to experience all three. Although “Brat Summer” has come to an end (as Charli XCX bluntly stated on her X account) that doesn’t mean its effects are gone. I know these songs will always have me strutting and inexplicably wanting to smoke a skinny cigarette, despite never having smoked one.Â
Conclusion
Well, I hope you enjoyed my panicked writing! Let this be a lesson, always try for the things you want because you might get in… or you won’t but it’ll be a great article for a different gig ;).