We’re happy to welcome guest writer Troy Campbell to write on the topic of Charli xcx’s ‘brat’ as a metamodern pheno-meme-non. Troy’s background in consumer psychology uniquely positions him to help us understand Brat and some of the cultural trends it has influenced. Discussing the topic together as we worked on the article gave us a chance to learn some things about contemporary dance-pop and the culture surrounding it; and has also informed our ideas about how expressions of metamodernism in pop culture have expanded in new directions in recent years.
Intro and Context
In 2024, a question on a lot of people’s minds was “What is ‘brat’??” If you were tuned in to popular culture even a little last year, you were aware that recording artist Charli xcx made a big splash, not just with her album entitled brat, but with the wide reaching meme/concept of ‘brat.’ As someone who works in marketing and entertainment and teaches consumer psychology, I, myself could not seem to escape the question. Yet in the articles that I came across by culture critics offering opinions on its meaning, none applied what seems to me the most obvious and important lens for discussing ‘brat,’ which is metamodernism. In this article I’ll take a look at five “brat artifacts” and discuss why they seem notably metamodern. I’ll also use this very contemporary, very mainstream phenomenon to explore some of the changing edges of the metamodern sensibility in pop culture.
First, let’s give some context.
The question, “What is ‘brat’?” first entered public discussion around February 28th, 2024, at the time of the aggressive marketing rollout for veteran pop star Charli xcx’s album brat, which would be released in full on June 7, 2024. The pre-release period itself captured the attention of the pop and marketing worlds.
The album cover was noteworthy for being self-consciously plain – the single word “brat” across a now-iconic solid green background, apparently chosen by Charli because it was unappealing. In other words, the intention seemed to be for that ugly green to “give” the exact opposite of old-school, glitzy, high-production-values pop.
The album garnered massive mainstream attention with songs that had dance beats and lyrics that were a mix of blunt, vapid, vulnerable, heavy, and layered meanings about club culture, identity, motherhood, and childhood trauma, and that oscillated between sincerity and irony. As Brittany Spanos of Rolling Stone put it, “Brat seesaws between extremes from song to song, a hyperpop roller coaster.” (More on hyperpop in a moment.)
As the album began to roll toward its release, the memes proliferated. That brat-green color was seen all over Instagram feeds; while dances to certain songs from the album dominated TikTok feeds, elevating the phenomenon into the widespread appeal that earned the label #BratSummer. The hype continued as a later remix to the song “Guess” (featuring Billie Eilish) hit streaming. Charli xcx also announced “completely different” but “still Brat” versions of the album. We’ll get further into all of this presently.
The phenomenon of ‘brat’ reached peak cultural saturation after Charli’s famous tweet, “kamala IS brat” [sic]. The Kamala Harris campaign team and many of her supporters ran with it. For an unlikely moment, ‘brat’ became a key brand attribute for the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.
With that background in mind, let’s get to the question. What is ‘brat’?
In addition to being the title of an album, it’s also a name for the attitude of a sort of self-aware party girl – a hot mess who cleans up just long enough to make some insightful observations about her state before going hot mess again. In Charli xcx’s own words:
…like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes. Who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like, parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things. But it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.
However, there seemed to be something else that people felt that ‘brat’ responded to though couldn’t exactly put their finger on, which led them to keep asking the question, “what is ‘brat’?” even after the Charli Tiktok that had answered it. The difficult-to-describe sensibility is felt in the music, in the visual elements of the ‘brat’ artifacts, and in the cultural response. All of that made ‘brat’ a noteworthy cultural signifier.
Across its music, memes, and marketing, and echoing our chaotic, overwhelming, contemporary experience, brat oscillates between sincerity and irony. This phrase itself is noteworthy as a trope made famous by scholars Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker in their 2010 essay “Notes on Metamodernism,” which galvanized recent scholarly and cultural exploration as to the character of our current, post-postmodern moment. And, brat, (both the album and the phenomenon), as with much of metamodern art, has a focus on validating the listener’s, or the brat club-goer’s, felt experience.
The Brat Album and its Relation to the Hyperpop Genre
Though hailed by many as “groundbreakingly different,” naturally, the dance-pop album brat didn’t come out of nowhere. It emerged from many changes and evolutions in pop music that have been underway in the 21st century, one of the most relevant here being the subgenre of hyperpop. Kieran Press-Reynolds in Pitchfork described the album as “a carousel of clubby abandon, [that] could go down as the most mainstream ‘hyperpop’ LP ever.”
Hyperpop is many things, but it is possibly most known for how it takes the “shallow” tropes of pop music and cranks them up to higher and higher levels, proudly and ironically exaggerating what are often maligned and “annoying” qualities, such as high-pitched sounds, auto-tune, vapid lyrics, crass sexuality, maximalism, and overt girliness. As explained by Press-Reynolds, “Hyperpop was always backflipping on the edge of addictive and abrasive, which was what made it so electrifying but also off-putting to normie audiences” The phenomenon, “denies its own existence, perpetually locked in an identity crisis like a passive-aggressive teen.” These tropes co-mingle with sincere lyrics about serious social and mental health issues such as suicide, intergenerational trauma, and gender considerations. In short, the seemingly shallow choices are not trifling.
Across the genre of hyperpop, there are attempts at challenging and reinventing past norms while also reflecting contemporary feelings of overwhelm in an increasingly artificial, hypermodern cultural climate. One artifact of such awareness is the creation of cultural worlds that center marginalized sub-communities. For instance, hyperpop and much of the larger genre of club music have always been highly associated with LGBTQ+ and women. In Charli’s first tour after the Brat release she teamed with queer artist Troye Sivan. The tour was, in the words of journalist Kaelen Bell, “for the girlies and the gays.”
Hyperpop is not the only genre that influenced ‘brat’/brat and hyperpop is not the only part of pop that fits with the metamodern sensibility. 2024 saw the explosive ascent of the trinity of Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Charli xcx. In repurposing various sub-genres and aesthetics (such as classic Hollywood, club, or Cher-inspired pop), each of the three aligned their music with metamodern sensibilities. For instance, these artists engaged major themes and elements historically stereotyped as shallow or problematic (such as those around femininity), and reconstructed them to create new meanings. Sabrina Carpenter dressed in lingerie but sang primarily for women (as opposed to directing toward the gaze of horny, straight men); Chappell Roan borrowed from drag; and Charli xcx brought the club culture.
Meanwhile, Taylor Swift put out what is arguably her most metamodern album, The Tortured Poets Department, and “goth next door” Billie Eilish (as Greg Dember refers to her) released an album with the oscillating title Hit Me Hard and Soft. Billie’s comments about this title choice reflect metamodernism in its willingness to hold opposites; to put a kind of ambiguous, both/neither impossibility (a coinage of Vermeulen and van den Akker) forward as a driving aesthetic idea: “It’s an impossible request … You can’t do anything hard and soft at the same time. … I love that it’s not possible.”
All of these pop artists were successful in 2024 arguably because they swayed to the oscillations of a metamodern sensibility in different ways.
The “Apple” TikTok Meme
Brat spawned many memes and dance trends on TikTok, but one of the most famous memes, and possibly the meme that most clearly exhibits a metamodern sensibility, is the “Apple” dance meme. To understand the sensibility being enacted here, one needs to know that the song “Apple” itself is a song about Charli xcx’s own complicated relationship with her mother, her fears about becoming a mother herself, and overarching themes of intergenerational trauma. The lyrics mimed in the 15 second TikTok are sincere and vulnerable:
I think the apple’s rotten right to the core
From all the things passed down
From all the apples coming before
I split the apple down symmetrical lines
And what I find is kinda scary
Makes me just wanna drive
Many Charli xcx fans embraced the TikTok dance invented by content creator Kelly Heyer. It’s very easy to imagine a different reaction in which Charli and her fans would have responded by saying, “How dare you trivialize the sincere message of this song!” But they didn’t; they embraced the inherent oscillation, the “ironesty” of it. (And Charli also posted herself doing the fan-generated dance.) This of course makes sense because the song itself has the “both” quality to begin with. It is a song with serious themes set over a dance beat with a recognizable dance-club -style hook (“makes me just wanna drive,” repeated with fist-bumping energy) at the end of vulnerable, existential, and – in my opinion – really kinda brilliantly metaphorical lyrics.
In sum, if metamodern works are often defined by a coexistence of irony and sincerity with honest human struggles, where the existence of each neither inhibits nor negates the other, a dance to a story of intergenerational trauma is a fitting example – a sort of 15-second case study – of this.
“Guess”
On August 1st, 2024, the ‘brat’ phenomenon continued to gain momentum when Charli xcx released a remix of the song, “Guess.” This song featured Billie Eilish in her first guest performance on another artist’s song. It would become the biggest streaming hit on the album.
The original version of “Guess” begins with the silly and sexy line:
“You wanna guess the color of my underwear”
And then ends with the line:
“You wanna guess if I’m serious about this song”
Is Charli actually being serious in this song that is ostensibly about panties and thongs? The answer seems to oscillate, in the both/neither sense, between yes and no, which, again, can be taken as a metamodern aesthetic choice. In the middle, there are many explicit sexual lines. The music video features Charli literally rolling around on a pile of underwear. At first glance, this outwardly trite, goofy, and hypersexual song might seem to be just be a postmodern *winking* piece of art that playfully asks us to look at the idea of what is “real.” But through a metamodern lens, the song can be understood to be more than just a lurid club banger.
Like “Apple” and much of the content of brat, “Guess” draws the listener to earnestly consider deeper emotional issues than what might seem at first apparent from outward appearances. So what seems to be occurring here is more constructive than superficially detached; more metamodern than postmodern. Sabrina Carpenter has also recently asked her audience to “guess” in a similar way: at the end of her sexy, classy, playful, joyful, empowering, and gyrating “Short n’ Sweet” tour, Carpenter appeared in a pre-recorded, highly self-reflexive, thank you video, concluding with the question: “Was that sincere?” Like Charli xcx, Sabrina Carpenter seems like she means both, or maybe that she’s being sincere by way of being more honestly insincere.
Regardless, what is clear is that many mainstream pop stars today are constructing meanings where absurdity, over-the-top maximalism, and irony combine and play with sincerity. That is, they play in a manner that sincerely respects individual felt experience as a focal point for artistic expression – even, or especially, if it doesn’t try to conform to more stereotypical portrayals of “sincere feelings.” These are pop stars who engage in self-consciously absurd antics one minute and post videos of them crying the next, or talk of depression on the heels of a discussion about the color of underwear. In the early 2000s, what was expected of a “main pop girl” was the demure, cheerleader-like choreographed image cultivated so powerfully by someone like Britney Spears. Any messy emotions would be expected to be hidden behind the polish and glitz. Today, what is expected of a main pop girl seems quite different, with the metamodern sensibility having become more mainstream.
Different Versions of the Brat Album and Their Titles
After the release of the album brat, Charli xcx continued to build energy around the brat phenomenon by releasing different versions of the album. The way they were titled echoed a metamodern sensibility. She released an extended version and a remix album with the respective titles:
brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not
brat and it’s completely different but also still brat
The quirkiness of these metamodern, meta-aware, run-on-sentence titles fits with one of the earliest identified traits of the metamodern – the Quirky. (See an early treatment of quirky by James MacDowell). This quirky titling trope is one that many artists seem to be using. Charli’s own fiancé George Daniel, of the band The 1975, has done similarly with long album titles, such as I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It, which apparently has the distinction of being the longest album title to reach No. 1 on the US and UK album charts. We can also see this in plenty of other titles of metamodern films, such as Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All At Once, or Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer Camp’s Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.
An additional metamodern quality to point out about these different versions of the brat album is the constructive intertextuality between the albums’ songs. For instance, the original song, “Girl, So Confusing” was originally about an unidentified pop star with whom Charli xcx has tensions; but it also expresses the desire to improve their relations.
One day we might make some music
The internet would go crazy
The pop star being referenced was revealed to be Lorde. Lorde then joined Charli xcx on the remixed album, and that version of the song featured Lorde singing the new lines:
You told me how you’d been feeling
Let’s work it out on the remix
I read these intertextualities as not just serving up simple meta-referentiality, but showing a sincere exploration of both artists’ interiorities and evolving personal processes, such that each new album version is both “the same” and “still Brat” but also “not” and “completely different.” Chari’s subsequent releases go beyond a postmodern limitation then, maybe giving room for the artists themselves to signal their own growth as personal changes are being worked out in and through the music.
“kamala IS brat”
On July 21, 2024, the same day President Joe Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris became the de facto Democratic candidate for President of the United States, Charli tweeted: “kamala IS brat” [sic]. Soon after, the Harris campaign adopted the brat-green color and, arguably, something of the brat attitude, in a number of aspects of their media efforts.
The synergy contributed massively to the whirlwind that was Brat Summer. It had been less than two months since brat was released (June 7th), three days before the Apple dance would first be created (July 24th), and less than two weeks before the “Guess” remix would be released (August 1st).
In a different universe – a pre-metamodern one – a candidate for the highest office in the world would likely ignore such an “endorsement,” or at most would say thank you and move on. However, the Harris team embraced this absurd meme. And much of the internet seemed to join in. For a moment American pop culture melded with politics, bringing a feeling of real energy and relevance and a contemporary (read “metamodern”) sensibility to the campaign. As the memeverse interacted with it, it became part of the Kamala Harris brand and an authentic rallying point.
Going back even two decades, this confluence would have seemed simply impossible. In the irony-saturated, postmodern era, “kamala IS brat” would have been seen as purely satirical, if not suspected as a sarcastic take-down of Harris. And, prior to the postmodern era, such an intervention by a pop star would have been dismissed as unserious, unimportant, if it even had the chance to appear on the public radar. But in this post-postmodern moment, the “brat” presidential candidate meme briefly thrived precisely because it oscillated between self-reflexive ironic whimsy and sincere support. Understanding metamodern culture helps us understand how “kamala IS brat” could happen – how it is that space has been carved for this particular manner of gleeful, ironic enthusiasm.
The brief success of the pairing was also likely due to the fact that Kamala herself exhibited those “brat qualities” in the sense that Charli xcx applies it – a strong woman in a hostile world who is unafraid to dance; who is at times charmingly awkward and has at least a partially memeable persona (e.g., see the “coconut” meme); and who oscillates between the roles of prosecutor and “Momala” among others.
Important, though, is that the meme itself (as memes do) reflected the contemporary, daily, lived realities of many, with sincerity coexisting right next to irony and absurdity. For the last decade, Democrats have been accused of struggling to be relatable to people, to appear down-to-earth, to seem “in touch,” to be a populist movement, and overall, to feel like they understand and are of the moment. (A recommended video lecture on this topic can be found here.) For that brief Brat Summer period, the Harris campaign seemed to have dialed it in. Not just because of the association with a trending pop star, but likely because the whole sensibility was taken as a statement.
In its early phase, the campaign was replete with examples of metamodern sensibilities and tropes. It would be seen by some as later returning to conventionality, thereby perhaps losing some steam. Was this downturn concomitant with the loss of the campaign’s metamodern edge? That’s hard to determine. But, it is useful to consider that the other candidate’s campaign staged its own series of metamodern moments, as seen, for example, in the seeming meta-irony of reappropriating the gay dance anthem “YMCA”; in remarks such as “take him seriously, not literally”; and in the image of Elon Musk jumping around like a normcore dork in a meme-able “Dark MAGA” cap.
If we were to use this set of elements as an attempt to explain the election results, it leads us into some speculative (and somewhat unfalsifiable) territory, so it may be best to simply state here what does seem clear: In 2024, people were excited about pop stars and presidential candidates when they were doing things that had a metamodern sensibility.
To conclude, as a consumer psychologist and social scientist, my goal is always to answer the question, What are the general psychologies and sensibilities of the mainstream and other large groups of people? More and more every year, the answer to this is found in the terrain of metamodernism. Today, the masses are literally dancing, memeing, and maybe even voting to a combination of irony and sincerity; it’s just part of who they are now.
‘brat’ is proof of that.
Author’s website: www.hidukehouse.com
Email: troy@hidukehouse.com
