An outsider, a brat, but also a singer with amazing marketing. After more than 15 years of trying to make it in the music world, Charlotte Emma Aitchison aka Charli XCX has finally made it. Her album Brat flooded social networks and gave birth to the term brat summer – the summer of brats. Now its autumn version has been released with guests such as Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish or Lorde. He continues to ride the wave of success.
It’s May 2012 and I Love It has just been released and will be the hit song of the coming summer. This punk-inflected electropop is the kind of song that makes you want to jump headlong into the air and scream at the top of your lungs. Charli XCX, not even twenty years old at the time, wrote it about coming to terms after breaking up with an older boyfriend. “I threw your jackets in my bag and threw it down the stairs / I crashed my car into a bridge and I don’t care, I love it,” she sings.
She originally wrote the lyrics for herself, but then she decided that it didn’t fit her music, so she gave it to the Swedish duo Icona Pop. Under the highly successful composition, she remained signed only as a guest artist. So she broke through as a vocalist collaborating with an electronic project, which was common at the beginning of the decade. Similarly, Sam Smith, Zara Larsson or Ella Eyre rose to prominence.
But Charli XCX did not follow their trajectory. Two years later, although she sang the successful song Boom Clap for the film Hvězdy nejresy nam and took part in the song Fancy by Iggy Azalea, she then retired for good and involuntarily to the alternative scene. At the same time, New Zealander Lorde was experiencing an unprecedented boom. In 2013, she released the single Royals. With the album Pure Heroin full of “room pop”, of which she was a part, she definitely became a mainstream personality.
No wonder the Englishwoman was jealous of her. In a recent interview, she described how it crossed her mind that she could easily have been in Lorde’s place, as they started to come out at the same time. People sometimes confused them because of their similar hairstyle – long, dark brown flowing waves. There’s even a parody interview in which the interviewer pretends to confuse Charli XCX with her New Zealand competitor and asks what inspired her to write Royals. Another time, Charli XCX announced on social networks that she will go to Lorde in disguise on Halloween. In short, a proper brat.
It’s confusing being a girl
Charli XCX released her sixth studio album called Brat this June. Sonically, it sticks to electropop with an admixture of hyperpop, i.e. a microgenre characterized, for example, by exaggeration of pop principles. In the song Girl, So Confusing, he confesses about a complicated relationship with another woman. “I don’t know if you like me / Sometimes I feel like you hate me / Sometimes I think I hate you / Maybe you just want to be like me / You always say: let’s go out, I’ll go out to eat / Sometimes it’s weird , because we don’t have much in common,” he sings.
Charli XCX also performed three times in Prague. | Photo: Reuters
After more than fifteen years on the scene, she didn’t expect Brat to be fundamentally interested. But the exact opposite followed. The bratty recording became the Internet and pop culture sensation of the year. Among other things, fans began to speculate about who Charli XCX was singing about. In retrospect, it almost seems that this was a well-thought-out marketing move and that the British musician had prepared the ground for the current remix in advance. However, she claims that her companion did not know anything about it. It is said that she was also prepared for the option that the person in question would cut off contact with her.
This month saw a remix of the hit record called Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat. Stars like Ariana Grande or Billie Eilish perform on it. And it also clears up the question of who Girl, So Confusing was about: Lorde herself, who confesses to having an eating disorder, recorded her answer to the new version. “You said we’d go out and I called it off at the last minute / I got lost in my thoughts / I’ve been fighting my body for the last few years / I’ve been trying to starve myself to be leaner / Then I gained it all back,” she responds here New Zealander. And as Charli predicted already in the original version, their collaboration caused a sensation on the Internet.
Ne Barbie, ale spratek
This applies to the entire Brat board. Nowadays, the success of music is largely determined by how well it resonates on social networks. Charli XCX did a lot more with this year’s album. The dance to Apple’s single was imitated on TikTok by influencers from all over the world, and the distinctive visual style of the recording, consisting of a poisonous green background with a simple out-of-focus text, became the basis of many Internet memes.
They were based on the term brother or brat. According to the artist, it describes a woman who “is a bit messy, likes to have fun and maybe sometimes says stupid things, is honest, blunt and a bit explosive”. So, to some extent, the opposite of the demands placed on women before: to be nice, orderly and obedient.
This is how the phenomenon of brat summer, or brat summer, was born, a broader feeling in life that could be contrasted with last summer, in pop culture defined by the movie Barbie.
The shade of lime green, which has come to be called brother green, was also used by the US presidential candidate Kamala Harris after Charli XCX wrote on the social network X that “Kamala is a brat” – and the post was seen by over 50 million people. In the same way, the British Green Party took up the creative idea. Flashy green began to appear in the menu of clothing manufacturers, and fashion magazines are now writing about how to subtly adapt brother green to the autumn color palette. The manufacturer of vegan sausages used the term for an advertising campaign with the inscription brat-wurst. And even Bratislava, as a city with a brat in its name, got into the search results of some Internet users.
Currently, some twenty-somethings are returning to the song I Love It, which was the soundtrack of their adolescence in 2012. In the comments on YouTube, they admit that until recently they didn’t even know who was behind it. Only today, when Charli XCX is everywhere, suddenly everything fits together and the circle closes. “This song will be written in the textbooks that it was the beginning of brother summer,” said one user.
At the same time, the effort to save money was behind the appearance of the album. At least that’s what Charli XCX says. She said she expected that people would absolutely not like Brat, perhaps even more than her previous records, so she decided to keep the price of the design to a minimum. At the same time, in the spirit of brat, she wanted to choose a color that would disgust as many people as possible.
The claim does not quite go together with the fact that part of the massive campaign for the album was the so-called brat wall – a wall in the New York neighborhood of Greenpoint, where new information about the project appeared. It looks more like marketing. But it’s a compelling story, and 32-year-old Charli XCX certainly fits the image of the chaotic outsider.
Discotheque of doubts
The Englishwoman, who also gave three concerts in the Czech Republic, has long had a reputation as an outcast balancing on the edge of mainstream and alternative, although she doesn’t quite fit into either world. It is also reflected in the track I Might Say Something Stupid, where she sings that she is “famous, but not quite”. It wasn’t until this year’s album that she caught the attention of critics and dominated the charts at the same time.
One of the reasons was Charli XCX’s honesty and ability to describe the female experience in general or the fate of a well-known personality. Electropop blared in the background as a reminder that she got her start in dance music as a teenager in England. Instead of styling herself as the flawless and strong woman that singer Katy Perry recently stepped alongside, Charli XCX chose vulnerability and admitted emotions we’re usually ashamed of, like jealousy and doubt.
In the track I Might Say Something Stupid, Charli XCX sings that she is “famous, but not really”. | Video: Atlantic Records
“I’d like to go back to the time when I wasn’t insecure and didn’t analyze the shape of my face / I only eat in good restaurants, but I’m constantly thinking about my weight,” she sings, for example, in the track Rewind about the pressure on appearance that not only famous women face. In the song I Think About It All The Time, she again thinks about becoming a mother and whether she will miss her freedom. For the autumn version, she invited the dreamy singer Bon Iver, who adds a new dimension to the tender and sincere song.
In short, Charli XCX offers a deeply feminine statement. It corresponds to the time and current feminist tendencies calling for women to support each other and not compete with each other. A shining example is the collaboration with Lorde, where both admit their weaknesses and how one envied the other. Charli XCX herself refers to the song Girl, So Confusing as the opposite of rap diss, where usually men insult each other.
By collaborating with almost twenty artists, the musician multiplied her commercial success and strengthened the aura of the star. At the same time, she also convinced the critics with the autumn remake. For example, the British Guardian praised the news with five stars and noted that in this period the singer is unstoppable. The coming years will show if Charli XCX can stay in the limelight.
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