one year of brat: it’s so much more than the memes.
A queer elder millennial’s love letter to Charli XCX’s breakout album.
Queering the Burbs is a distillation of pop culture, politics and queerness published twice weekly by Joe Erbentraut. If you like what you see, please consider subscribing (many posts are free!), liking or sharing this piece, checking out Joe’s new zine, or buying Joe a coffee.
The below essay is included in Queering the Burbs #02, the new zine I just released! Check it out if you like the vibe. Now, on with the show..
It feels absolutely unbelievable to state that this past Saturday marked the one-year anniversary of Charli XCX’s Brat. So much has happened in those 365 (party girl) days and now we find ourselves kicking off another summer that feels like it will be quite different than the Brat Summer of before. Or maybe it’ll be Brat Summer all over again. Maybe it’ll be Brat Summer forever.
My fandom for mother goes deep. I remember stumbling upon one of her early singles—“Nuclear Seasons” or “Stay Away”—on the indie blogosphere sometime in 2011 or 2012, a full 14 years ago. I was hooked by the brash vocals paired with the lush, still somewhat raw production. I picked up her first full-length, True Romance, on vinyl as soon as I could get my hands on it and played it on repeat. Then I caught her first U.S. tour’s stop in Schubas, a tiny, 250-capacity venue, in November 2013.
I had a feeling Charli was going to blow up. At least, I thought she deserved to blow up. But her career progressed in bizarre fits and starts since that debut album. If you’re a newer Charli fan you need to understand: No one ever knew who I was talking about when I mentioned Charli’s name at parties.
While certain songs building their very foundations on Charli’s talents—Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” her Iggy Azalea track “Fancy,” and The Fault in Our Stars soundtrack bop “Boom Clap”—hit radio playlists and wedding DJ sets, her core tracks remained strictly an “IYKYK” situation. It felt as though she was destined to a Carly Rae Jepsen level of fame: Known and deeply respected by pop music nerds and gay men asking her to sign bottles of Rush poppers at meet-and-greets but mostly ignored by the top echelon of the industry.
By the time Brat rolled around, I had pretty much made peace with the fact that Charli would probably never be big. In many ways, I appreciated that her shows were confined to mid-size venues at a semi-reasonable price. From everything she’s said about her mindset going into her Brat era, it seems as though Charli had also come to terms with her position in the industry. On her previous album, Crash, she had taken a big swing at a slick, Janet and Britney-spiced Top 40 pop diva vibe. She brought sexy male dancers along on her tour and fully committed to intricate dance choreography on stage and in her music videos.
While Crash was Charli’s first album to break into the top 10 of the Billboard charts (and I deeply enjoyed it), it still didn’t reach the heights she was very much capable of. For Brat, as a long-time listener, you get the impression that Charli stopped trying so hard to be what the industry wanted her to be. Instead, she leaned into the party girl, hyperpop community she had immersed herself in for her still popish but more experimental projects like the Vroom Vroom EP, two incredible mixtapes—Number 1 Angel and Pop 2–and especially her pandemic-era album How I’m Feeling Now.
The result was Brat, an album steeped in authenticity, confidence, and, as Charli herself has admitted, indebted to the queer community—particularly the late Grammy-nominated trans music producer and songwriter Sophie, who collaborated with Charli on some of her most experimental and exciting pre-Brat work.
“She changed my life, you know?” Charli said of Sophie in a 2022 interview. “Not just because of her music, which obviously is so incredible, but because of the person that she was as a person. She championed us, she has this incredible energy.”
Queer and trans talent have been front and center throughout Charli’s Brat era—as they have in all her eras, really. Her “360” music video featured trans actress Hari Nef, trans influencer Alex Consani, and nonbinary model Richie Shazam. Her brilliant creative director and close friend, Terrence O’Connor, is a gay man in a relationship with the queer TikTok star Benito Skinner. On her Sweat tour, she shared the bill with queer artists Troye Sivan and Shygirl. On her “Guess” remix with Billie Eilish, she normalized a level of girl-on-girl horniness I didn’t think was possible in pop-adjacent music. And Brat also includes a deeply vulnerable tribute to Sophie called “So I.”
Beyond this inclusiveness, there’s so much to Brat that dovetails with a deeply queer POV, at least in my book. When I listen to “Sympathy is a knife,” I think about what it feels like to be a visibly queer person living in a small town comparing myself to other contemporaries living in New York or LA that I see going about their careers on my social feed. “Talk talk” makes me think back to my early, all-encompassing queer crushes. “Von dutch” conjures up my incredible friend circle and how we’re just going about our lives killing it at every turn. “Everything is romantic” transports me to early mornings sipping coffee on vacation with my husband. Put simply, it all hits deep.
Because of Charli’s commitment to her queer and trans fans and collaborators, her music creates a safe space for queer and trans people to let go, to feel released from whatever is happening in the news that week, whatever is going on at work or home, and to transcend to a world where you can be as messy, as “too much,” as imperfect as you want. At a Charli XCX show, you can just close your eyes and let your body move to the throbbing beat, fully disconnecting from the regressive political reality we’re living in and just feeling it.
I got to experience the Brat vibe in person at the Sweat tour’s September 2024 stop in Chicago. While walking to the United Center from our Uber with my friend and fellow long-time Charli stan Katie, it felt like we were part of a Brat army reporting for duty along with all our fellow girls and gays. Everywhere we turned, Brat cadets were clad in various combinations of brat green and black. We were decked out in mesh and leather, with glitter covering our bodies and giant sunglasses covering our eyes. While waiting in the security line, we danced and giggled to a Brat-appropriate playlist including Cascada’s “Everytime We Touch.”
Once inside, nothing else mattered. The Brat curtain came down and Charli and Shygirl launched into their pulsing “365” remix and we were on our way for two hours of some of the most intense dancing I’ve done since college. Charli and Troye left it all on the stage, crawling, climbing, and head-banging their way through hit after hit as the rest of us non-pop divas just tried to keep up. It was a night I’ll remember forever. For that night, we didn’t need to be respectable or palatable to anyone. We were all free and we were all feral. If only we could feel that way all the time.
That is the power of Brat and why I think it will forever hold a special place in the hearts of queer and trans people. I also think this is why Brat became such a pop culture juggernaut—heck, it even inspired my first-ever piece of Queering the Burbs merch. Brat became a shorthand even for us queers that don’t live in a major city. It became a set of anthems to share in our own safe spaces for our fellow queers, weirdos, and hot girls. It became a soundtrack to our resistance and resilience. But also, ya know, none of it was ever that serious either.
As Charli hypothesized in a 2024 interview, Brat became such a moment because it was so niche and so specific. It wasn’t trying to be something for everyone, and in so doing, it delivered a vision that everyone wanted a piece of. It delivered a vision of a summer that everybody wanted to have—especially queer and trans folks gearing up for a fraught election where it felt (accurately, it turned out) like so much was at stake.
Of course, a year later, so much remains at stake—for queer people and so many other marginalized folks. We still desperately need to shake our asses to Brat at the club, in our living rooms, or in the car. And we will. In that sense, Brat Summer will live on forever, as it absolutely should.
Thank you to everyone who came out for the Pride Extra-vaganza event at Hoof + Horn yesterday. It was wonderful meeting all of you, and I was so grateful to celebrate Aurora Pride with you!
Next up on this hyperlocal mini-tour of zine events I’m doing is Annie Hex’s sold-out Queer Prom at Sidecar Supper Club this Friday, followed by the official zine release celebration at New Moon Vegan on Friday, June 20 (details below!). And the zine is available 24/7 at my online gift shop.
SONG OF THE RIGHT-NOW
I was fortunate enough to experience Grace Jones and Janelle Monae live at Ravinia this past weekend. Thanks to a series of unexpected connections, I was able to experience the show from the second row center of the pavilion. The experience was absolutely mind-blowing and something I will truly never forget. I keep thinking about how Janelle Monae discussed during the show that we as queer people need to create our own churches, and how that night was a church for queer folks, and so many other people who are under attack in this country right now.
I also keep thinking about how I was literally just a few feet away from Grace Jones, someone who had long been on my concert bucket list but who I assumed I’d probably never catch live because she performs or tours now, especially not anywhere near the Midwest. I keep thinking about how she drank red wine from a glass-mid set, spilled a bit on her hand, and then licked it off with her tongue while staring her audience down. And I keep thinking about how she banged the shit out of a pair of cymbals to “Demolition Man.” It’s my new anthem of the mome.
I’ll have more to say about the concert at some point soon. But for now I leave you with this:
I'm a walking nightmare, an arsenal of doom
I kill conversation as I walk into the room
I'm a three line whip
I'm the sort of thing they ban
I'm a walking disaster
I'm a demolition man