Slay? What is a brat summer. The Oldie finds out!
A brat summer is a summer that you spend being a bit brattish and badly behaved.
It’s the sort of summer when you stay out until 5.32am wearing a lime-green bikini. The sort of summer when you take up smoking again. The sort of summer when you have an ill-advised fling with a Slovakian bartender, forget to water your hydrangeas, don’t put CDs back in the right cases – and dance to the albumBrat by Charli XCX, the éminence verte citron of brat culture.
A brat, the British-born Charli XCX, 31, has explained, is ‘that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it’. The album, released to rave reviews back in June, is ‘me, my flaws, my f***-ups, my ego all rolled into one’.
To say that it has resonated would be an understatement. Brat is the Gen Z social-media phenomenon of 2024, a sure sign that the era of clean eating and virtue-signalling are behind us. Charli XCX hasn’t so much captured the zeitgeist as whipped it up with cream and drizzled it with her own special sauce.
Perhaps the only person having a brattier summer is US presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Soon after Joe Biden announced his intention not to run for president again, Charli XCX tweeted, ‘kamala IS brat’.
I’m not saying that this will come to be seen as the defining moment of 21st-century US political history, but it certainly hasn’t hurt Harris’s popularity with Gen Z voters.
Some clever young person on Harris’s team returned the compliment by switching the Kamala HQ social-media
profile to the same lurid green as the Brat album cover – and soon every American news anchor was discussing Kamala’s claims to brattishness while inadvertently promoting Charli XCX’s album. Now that’s what you call marketing synergy!
Of course, you might question whether a 59-year-old former lawyer running for president on a platform of women’s rights and strengthening democracy really has much in common with a pop star from Cambridge singing about summer flings and cocaine-fuelled club sessions.
Dare I suggest that lines like ‘Who the **** are you? I’m a brat when I’m bumpin’ that’ and ‘It’s OK to admit that you’re jealous of me’ come over a little more ... Trumpy?
Still, Harris does seem to be having fun out there on the campaign trail. And, Lord knows, we’re overdue a bit of that.
