Charlie’s carefree bratitude | Sarah Ditum

This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. Why not subscribe to get the whole magazine? Right now we’re offering five tracks for just £10.

Tthe only thing that could have made this a bigger year for Charli XCX would have been a different outcome in the presidential election. When Kamala Harris was first announced as the Democratic candidate, Charli – real name Charlotte Gemma Aitchison – was one of the first celebrities to throw her weight behind the Harris campaign, tweeting “kamala IS brat”.

Abrupt is the name of Charli’s all-conquering 2024 album, but it’s more than that. Brat is a meme: a blurry, deliberately ugly sans serif font on an aggressively creepy green background. It’s an attitude: “I’m a brat when I’m bumpin’ that,” Charli sings on album-closing song “365,” hinting at a whole sexy, dirty, drug world of bolshy hedonism.

What all that has to do with being the leader of the free world is hard to say, but it’s a measure of Charli’s cultural clout that her intervention at the time seemed important. The summer of 2024 was billed as “brat summer,” and if Charli didn’t rule the world herself, it seemed she at least had the power to decide who would. Well, it didn’t matter in the end. But it does matter that it felt like it mattered.

At 32, Charli counts as a pop veteran. She released her first music in 2008, and my fandom started ten years ago with the song “Boom Clap” (a song that, fittingly, is an anthem to the apocalyptic bliss of falling in love). Nevertheless Abrupt had the feeling of an overnight success. As soon as you heard about it, suddenly it was everywhere.

It was as Charli had intended. The Abrupt The campaign began nearly a year before release with a carefully orchestrated tease designed to turn Charli’s superfans (dubbed “angels”) into ambassadors for the project. This reversed the trend towards high-impact, overnight album releases pioneered by Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, and it accomplished two things.

First, it created hunger for Abrupt. Second, it said that Charli did things differently. Although Taylor and Bey make use of the personal in their work, they maintain an imperial aloofness. Even their risks are calculated—when Taylor endorsed Harris, it was with a carefully measured statement, not a three-word post. Abrupt felt more cluttered. More intimate, in a sweaty, sticky way.

The first single from Abrupt was “von Dutch,” a nod to a song celebrating a clothing brand that (until very recently) was fatally associated with Y2K’s trash values. Back in the noughties, you’d find a Von Dutch trucker cap on the head of every proto-influencer in Hollywood. And then, as these personalities fell out of favor, so did the label.

For Charli, reclaiming the brand went hand in hand with reclaiming a version of the past. In interviews, she has spoken of this as going back to the “Paris Hilton days”, when fame seemed like it could actually be fun, and a public – or indeed private – misstep didn’t carry the risk of terminal annulment. It’s an appealing vision: I bought a Von Dutch sweatshirt in August and have had both it and Abrupt pretty much constant ever since.

You can get a good idea of ​​what Charli reacted against by looking at the example of Lizzo. Once an invective-spewing rapper, Lizzo reinvented herself as an all-gender-inclusive, body-positive good-times anthem dealer after 2016. But in 2023 (coincidentally, around the time Charli incited Abrupt album), hit Lizzo: She was accused by some of her back-up dancers of arrogance, unkindness and (worst of all) fat-shaming.

Lizzo denies the allegations, but the reason they were so specifically damaging to her is because she had pinned her public image to the #bekinds flag. A rapper doesn’t have to be a moral example. That’s what an activist does, and while there was a market for the pop star-as-figure-of-resistance in the years of Trump mark 1 and the covid-hosted “accounting,” it’s a role that inevitably becomes suffocating.

Abrupt is a less careful kind of pop than we’ve had in the last few years, because it’s music for people who are tired of caring. That’s why the “brat” meme rambled through the summer and into the fall, when Charli released a remix album.

That’s why when there was a brief online attempt to create outrage over the Billie Eilish remix of the toweringly explicit song “Guess,” very few took it. Was the line “Charli likes boys, but she knows I’d hit it” predatory? Read the space: nobody wants to play confectionary attack in 2024.

And that’s also why “kamala IS brat” was never more than wishful thinking. In a tough campaign for the Democrats, Harris was always the wrong candidate: too stiff, too cool, and too associated with the excesses of liberal news, especially about gender. None of this is very brat.

One of the most successful attack ads against Harris was the spot that went, “Kamala is for them/them President Trump is for you.” Voter fatigue with opaque, price-hungry regulations was an easy button for Republicans to hit.

“Brat” is certainly not a conservative term. (One of the loveliest songs on the album is “So I,” a tribute to trans producer and songwriter Sophie, who died in 2021.) But that just makes it all the more necessary for the political left to listen when the public says it’s sick of being mocked. Abrupt was the album of the year and brat is the mood of the future.