Cultural Ubiquity is a Knife
Here's my idea for the first trailer for recently-wrapped "epic melodrama" Mother Mary, which stars Anne Hathaway as a troubled popstar and has Charli xcx and Jack Antonoff handling the soundtrack:
Open with a Hathaway voiceover about the pressures of fame over slo-mo shots of a rabid audience chanting her character's stage name. Camera cuts to her in the green room: close shot of her face with a steely-but-dead-eyed expression. She walks through the guts of the stadium while the camera stays tight on her unchanged face. Background noise fades out, soundtrack music rises. It's pitched-down, transposed to a minor key, augmented by jacked-up drum hits: "I'm tectonic, moves, I make 'em/Shock you like defibrillators." People rush around Hathaway as she winds through backstage hallways, eyes dead as ever, not even registering the surrounding hubbub. "Yeah, 360/When you're in the mirror, do you like what you see?/When you're in the mirror, you're just looking at me." The lights drop, the crowd screams, a spotlight illuminates Hathaway. Now she's wearing a million-dollar smile, but her thousand-yard stare persists as she mouths along to the last line: "I'm everywhere, I'm so Julia." Boom. Cut to title and release date.
Charli xcx's "360" arrived on May 10th accompanied by a music video that functions as a taxonomy of downtown "it" girls from Rachel Sennott to Chloë Sevigny. And of course, there's Julia Fox. The song is about being iconic, about walking into the club with confidence, about being everyone else's obsession, and its buoyant, friction-less production offers no argument against the desirability of those things. But is being everywhere all it's cracked up to be? Is being So Julia aspirational?
Until two months ago, "Charli xcx" weren't words that would register for the majority of US residents. In this country, the 31-year-old British pop musician has mostly played venues with capacities in the low thousands. She was listed deep into the second line of an individual-day Coachella lineup last year. She has three Top 10 singles to her name, all of which came out over a decade ago. Those stats put her in the realm of B-/C+-list contemporaries like Bebe Rexha, Meghan Trainor, Charlie Puth, and of course Camila Cabello, AKA Charli's Wario.
It's Charli's more unquantifiable clout—her seamless assimilation into the mid-2010s PC Music/hyperpop zeitgeist, her seemingly perpetual influence on both up-and-comers and has-beens—that has historically separated her from others grubbing for extended stints in the limelight. In the years before Brat, she was just as far from being a capital-P popstar as she was the underground DIY disrupter that many make her out to be. She was, as Shaad D'Souza wrote last year, part of pop's new middle class.
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The past week has solidified my longstanding belief that a temporal piece of pop culture (a trend, if you will) isn't truly mainstream until the number of people rolling their eyes and declaring it dead reaches critical mass. I'm thinking BARBENHEIMER here, but also Boogie Down Productions' 1987 song "The Bridge Is Over." If you're not familiar, that's the record the Bronx trio released after MC Shan, a native of Queens' gargantuan Queensbridge Houses projects, dared to boast about his local scene on an earlier song called "The Bridge." BDP interpreted that boast as a claim that rap originated in QB (which is patently untrue, and which was not Shan's intent). They retaliated by not only reaffirming The Bronx's rightful place in history but also by dismissing QB's rich bed of talent as a passing fad.
The ensuing decade would prove BDP wrong. The Queensbridge projects produced '90s legends like Nas, Mobb Deep, Capone, and Cormega, all while the stranglehold that The Bronx had on hip hop's first decade began to weaken as other boroughs (and even states!) fostered scenes of their own. Rap beefs are often defined by hyperbole, but "The Bridge Is Over" is in the "historic whiffs" category alongside Benzino questioning Eminem's talent and 50 Cent betting that Curtis would outsell Kanye's Graduation.
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As "The Bridge" was for Queensbridge rap as a whole, Brat is an unprecedented success for Charli. Her career has been buoyed by spurts of critical acclaim, chart triumphs, memes, marketing, and graphic design, but never before have they all simultaneously converged to provide such a mega-boost in status. "360" proved prophetic: Charli really has been everywhere this summer.
Regardless of its stature, the Brat wave was bound to break sometime. In the streaming era, only Taylor Swift has proven herself capable of controlling the tides for decades on end (Beyoncé might also qualify, but she's a bit too comfortable laying low between album cycles). The only question was if Brat would peter out into diminishing ripples, disappear behind the shadow of fresh-faced pop Poseidons like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, or slap up against an immovable obstacle and stop dead in its tracks.
In mid-July, a good six weeks after its release, Brat hype finally seemed like it was cresting. Its artwork's chartreuse hue waned in online omnipresence. At Pitchfork Festival last weekend, Charli tour tees abounded but were dwarfed by bootleg shirts of varying levels of cringe. An onsite vendor sold Brat-themed coozies that replaced the album title with the word "beer" (I'm forever grateful to my friend Sean for snagging me one before they sold out). As a longtime fan, all of this delighted me; as a critic, it felt like over-saturation.
It was easy to sense haters, ambivalent bystanders, and annoyed day-one fans alike building up pressure, waiting for the tiniest pinprick to appear in Brat's bulletproof hull so they could burst through with assured PSI behind their hot takes. On Sunday night, Charli herself assured that the opening salvo of Bratlash (sorry) would look more like the Titanic's gaping iceberg wound:
I'm hard-pressed to think of a single tweet by a pop culture figure that has wielded more immediate impact. This is "George Bush doesn't care about Black people" or Super Bowl XXXVIII nip-slip-level stuff. Charli's tweet came mere hours after Joe Biden shoehorned a Kamala Harris endorsement into his drop-out announcement. That day's news cycle already resembled a reanimated decapitated chicken, but Charli dosed that brainless corpse with a Brat-stamped party pill, contents strong but unknown.
In no time at all, the "official rapid response page of Vice President Harris’ presidential campaign" Twitter account was Brat-ified, and Fox News' Greg Gutfeld and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow both spent segments attempting Charli explainers to their boomer-skewing viewerships. Even hapless NYC Mayor Eric Adams threw his hat into the ring. Regardless of how many times your parents have consensually or non-consensually heard "Fancy," "Boom Clap," and/or "I Love It," I'm guessing this week was the first time they've mentioned Charli over the phone.
Online, millennials and zoomers' reactions were unsurprisingly more plentiful and passionate. An hour before Charli's endorsement (?), someone tweeted a photo of a group of men on Fire Island wearing "BRAT Kamala shirts," noting, "the gays move SO FAST." Fancams, memes, and Katy Perry's obligatory coattail-riding also made the rounds. But at least in my (admittedly critic-heavy) corner of the internet, the prevailing mood was far less celebratory. Yesterday, Charli acknowledged this with an Instagram post compiling three outlets' "Brat Summer is over" thinkpieces.
Musicians endorsing presidential candidates will never not be cringe, but the mass exasperation at Charli's tweet was more about the larger trend of Harris' track record being erased by the meme-ability of her moment of ascension. When she ran for president in 2020, she campaigned on a harsher law-and-order platform than most of her competitors, in keeping with her resumé as a hard-nosed district attorney, then attorney general. Harris is not Trump, she's lucid(ish), but she's not progressive.
Maybe Charli will give a more measured, workshopped explanation of her opinion of Harris in the near future, but her initial tweet scans more as an ill-advised inability to halt a wildly successful marketing bit than a legitimate political stance.
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Charli is without a doubt my favorite pop artist that has been active during my adult life, and I absolutely love Brat as an album. This is the third time I've publicly written/spoken at length about it this year, but if you've only read this and my previous newsletter about the album rollout, I probably come across as a crotchety scold. Listen to the podcast I was on last month to get a better sense of my overall opinion.
Despite its club-ready sound, Brat is a heavily conflicted album that spends most of its time wrestling with the prickly elements of both stardom and adulthood. Its surrounding ephemera casts it in a more hedonistic, youthful light, and it's easy to lose sight of the actual music when memes bombard every inch of social media, but if it was boring or outright bad it wouldn't be this huge.
"Brat Summer" is a best-case scenario. It's been so long since the general populace has united around such bracing, exciting, fun music—Fetty Wap's summer 2015 dominance might be the most recent precedent. I'm not suggesting that music as a whole has gotten worse in the past decade, but most of its unexpected breakout stars have been formulaic to a fault.
I'm curious to see how Charli navigates this. Her career has already weathered more than its fair share of peaks and valleys, but this recent level of ubiquity makes every blemish more visible and inescapable. Maybe Brat will be a blip that's forever associated with 2024; maybe it's the long-overdue launch of an enduring superstar.
The discourse has quickly shifted from entertaining to tiring, and it'll likely get even more annoying, but we'll always have the music.
Plug One
Last month, I went to Atlanta to cover Awful Records' 10th anniversary show. The loose, eclectic collective meant a lot to me in the mid-2010s, when they emerged on the DIY fringes of an already-weird era of Atlanta rap. Between interviews with a couple members and my own observations, I think there's a healthy balance of rose-tinted nostalgia and sober reality. Check it out at Stereogum.
BOI (Best Of Inbox) #36
Combat - "Epic Season Finale"
Location: Baltimore // Genre: pop-punk-inflected emo // RIYL: Modern Baseball, Origami Angel // From: Stay Golden, out 8/16
Hinds - "Superstar"
Location: Madrid // Genre: anthemic indie rock // RIYL: Charly Bliss, righteous anger // From: VIVA HINDS, out 9/6
Photay - "Derecho"
Location: LA // Genre: spacey IDM // RIYL: John Talabot, Pantha du Prince // From: Windswept, out 9/20
Sister Gemini - "One Room Apartment"
Location: LA // Genre: grunge-pop // RIYL: early Waxahatchee, late-career Girlpool
Tama Gucci - "Back Then"
Location: NYC // Genre: slinky, electronic-heavy R&B // RIYL: a hypothetical collaboration between Disclosure and Toro Y Moi // From: Notes To Self, out 8/16
ZAYALLCAPS & loe4t - "Anxiety"
Location: LA // Genre: zooted, brainy, melodic rap // RIYL: midwxst and d0llywood before they went full digicore, interpolations of Britney Spears' "Toxic" // From: iMessage Platinum: Hosted by autotuneKaraoke, out now
All Inbox Infinity picks are available in playlist form via Apple Music and Spotify.