The divine, feminine mess of BRAT
There are a lot of dirty feelings to being a woman. I’m talking vindication, jealousy, spite, and straight up hate. These are universal human vices that take on a sharp edge when viewed through the female lens — we aren’t allowed to admit we have these feelings because they fall into the catty, sexist tropes that we were meant to leave behind with the cleansing baptism of third-wave feminism. It commits the unforgivable sin of hurting other women.
And so, we as a social group have learnt to moderate these feelings. Cover them in poetry or in over-exaggerated sass (cue Taylor Swift singing “band aids don’t fix bullet holes” with her girl crew the Bad Blood video).
But then, Charli xcx drops brat and throws the rules out of the window. Her lyrics are so earnest it has the effect of watching cringe-horror. She unabashedly admits that the success of her female contemporaries is difficult for her, and she sometimes hates them for it.
The internet has been rife with speculation about who the songs are about (is that Taylor Swift who she’s avoiding in Sympathy is a Knife? Is the girl with the same hair girl, so confusing Marina or Lorde? ) but let’s be honest — subtlety is not the aim here. These aren’t diss tracks, these are confessions of a woman and artist who has straddled the tipping point between underground cult darling and huge commercial success, and has spent her career being compared and pitted against the very women she’s singing about. Instead of directing her anger more towards them, she literally invites them to jump on the track to work their shit out together
2 weeks after the release of brat, Charli announced The girl, so confusing version with lorde was dropping. In the teaser, we hear Lorde’s voice on a synth beat for the first time since her 2016 album Melodrama
Well, honestly, I was speechless
When I woke up to your voice note
You told me how you’d been feeling
Let’s work it out on the remix
In a time when big rap stars like Kendrick and Drake are dropping back-to-back-to-back diss tracks accusing each other of paedophilia and illegitimate children, it is sheer brilliance to see two pop girlies turning what could be interpreted as a snide jab into an open forum to empathise with the very person it was aimed at .
In Lorde’s verse, she sheds her lofty poet persona and joins Charli on the cutting room floor, admitting plainly that she has been so wrapped up in her own struggles that she never thought that London’s biggest boiler room baddie could ever be affected by her. There is this gorgeous moment where we see two women, healed by their collective honesty, come together in mutual understanding usually only reserved for the divine space that is the women’s bathroom
She believed my projection And now I totally get it
Forgot that inside that icon
There’s still a young girl from Essex
When Lorde sings “Cause I ride for you, Charli”, something akin to world peace in gay twitter’s universe falls into place. With one bold move, they take years of resentment and miscommunication aimed towards each other and turn it outwards to the world and the industry that put them in competition with one another.
I think that what makes makes Charli so forgivable in all her messy, ugly feelings is that in her honesty, she’s giving more than she’s taking. Yes, she’s stepping up to the ring armed with hyper-pop beats and sassy one liners, but really, she’s taking aim at her own insecurities the entire time.
You get an even deeper sense of the “young girl from Essex” she’s is grappling with with tracks like “Rewind” about wanting to go back to a time where the feminine experience was sitting in your bedroom, making mix-CDs and painting your toenails, instead of obsessing over your weight and questioning whether you deserve commercial success. And the woman she has yet to become in “I think about it all the time”, where she wonders how her career measures up to the cosmic significance of becoming a mother.
In brat, Charli xcx is angry, frustrated, brattish. But it’s not childish. It’s entirely adult in it’s ownership of it’s messiness and refusal to play the victim — it’s womanhood. It’s looking to release itself from the shackles that bind it by declaring it’s presence. Being a brat feels something like liberation.
Originally published at https://bigheng.substack.com.
