How Politicians and Corporations Are Wrecking Brat Summer

It can be hard to keep up with what’s going on in the zeitgeist these days. Style watchers remember a not-so-distant past when it was easier to understand what was hot in contemporary fashion and pop culture, and this has now changed considerably with social media, which has accelerated and bifurcated the ways in which trends (and, confusingly, micro-trends) burn up and fade away.

“Branding has seeped into almost every part of our lives, spouted by users big and small on social media sites, [and] casually dropped in everyday conversation,” wrote Ning Chang in Shado Magazine earlier this year. “[It’s also] spurred on by corporations that rejoice in how the marketing landscape has become more simple as people pre-sort themselves into these neat little categories.” It’s a dizzying and overwhelming landscape that is the new norm for youth today.

Life moves fast, especially for gen Z. It’s understandable, then, that there’s a palpable hunger from celebrities, companies and politicians to curate brands that reflect the interests and values of the buzzing generation as it throttles forward. How do we stay on top of the elusive and fast-moving tastes of 12-to-27-year-olds?

As a member of gen Z, these efforts and campaigns for cultural relevance often come across to me as misguided and forced. In 2024, what many of my peers and I are craving from public figures is sheer authenticity, which, as Tina Fey famously noted, is both dangerous and expensive.

So after British pop singer and songwriter Charli XCX released her seventh studio album, Brat, in June, it was no surprise that it became an instant hit with fans and critics alike.

Charli XCX’s persona has always felt refreshingly honest and organic, resisting the forced methods of marketing executives to vie for mainstream acclaim. She even posted a TikTok in January, poking fun at the rejected suggestions from her label to make viral videos that feature her playing bouncer at an exclusive party or even running for president.

Her music, too, feels inspired by the U.K. club scene that she came up in during her early 20s — a product of being enmeshed in the very communities she seeks to make music for.

The experimental dance and hyperpop album debuted in the No. 3 spot on the Billboard 200 charts, and still holds the top spot on their dance and electronic album charts.

Compared with her early mainstream pop hits like “Boom Clap” (for the movie soundtrack of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars) and “Fancy,” Brat feels more refined and vulnerable than we’ve ever heard Charli XCX before.

From the time of the album release in June, my social media feeds were flooded with memes with plays on the slime-green cover and declarations that this was now, in fact, a “brat summer.”

Songs like “Apple” and “Guess” sparked viral social media dances. And like clockwork, others were ready to cash in on the fun.

When everything is brat, nothing is

Since the brat summer craze took off, Charli took it upon herself to describe, in broad terms, what a brat really is. By definition, a brat is a child, typically a badly behaved one.

To Charli XCX, a brat is “just like 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,” she explained in a TikTok.

When I first listened to Brat at the behest of my friends, I found it witty, expansive and empowering. It brought me back to the romanticized and unkempt celebrity vibes of the late 2000s and early 2010s — think Gossip Girl, the early years of Kesha, and TMZ.

When I listen to tracks like “365,” I think of backdoor parties and the dizzying fearlessness of taking on the town with my friends as a 19-year-old. On my morning commute into work, I often revisit “Von Dutch,” the high-powered, synth-heavy and smug it-girl track. “It’s OK to just admit that you’re jealous of me,” she boasts.

The album has been hailed as fierce, refreshing and subversive — Brat boasts a different kind of celebrity status, one that is brash and maximalist, but that still reveals the insidious self-doubt that lingers beneath the surface. It’s an album that is as much about the glitz, glam and mess of a night at the club as about the fears over what to do when the party's over.

In line with the title, it’s brimming with witty one-liners that lean into the ego of being a pop “it girl.” It’s also not afraid to jump headfirst into more sensitive topics like grief, motherhood and even intergenerational trauma.

Evidently, a brat can be many things. Since its release, people have taken it upon themselves to self-identify their niche personalities or identities as bratty. People who have retired to quieter lives after their party years, those who feel stuck in corporate jobs, oldest siblings, youngest siblings — all of these can be brat.

As Laura Snapes from the Guardian puts it, “Brat transcends exclusivity because Charli’s unbarred feelings of insecurity, bitchiness and obsession are so fiercely well observed... they hit less like complaints about fame — pop’s most deadening theme — than profound observations on all kinds of relationships, not least how women end up constructing brusque personae to survive the stupid hell of socialization.”

While the embrace of a brat summer has been a welcome departure from the dominance of well-manicured and highly curated pop-star personas like Taylor Swift, all good things must come to end.

And as politicians and corporations have tried to capitalize on the popularity of Brat, the less fun the whole thing has become.

Celebs, or politicians?

Funnily enough, Brat has entered the U.S. political sphere. Since announcing her decision to replace Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate in the presidential election, memes of Kamala Harris’s popular quotes and meme-able moments set to a Brat soundtrack have gained traction on social media. It wasn’t long before Charli XCX declared on X that “kamala IS brat.”

Harris’s marketing team was all too ready to lean into the phenomenon to court the youth vote by temporarily changing Harris’s branding on X to match Brat’s graphic design.

A move like this is in line with the choice to book rapper Megan Thee Stallion to perform at Kamala Harris’s campaign kickoff rally in Atlanta on July 31, with the phrase “Hotties for Harris” — appealing to her fans, who are self-proclaimed “hotties” since Megan released “Hot Girl Summer” in 2019.

The rapper even referenced Harris’s stance on reproductive rights onstage. “Now, I know my ladies in the crowd love their bodies,” she said. “And if you want to keep loving your body, you know who to vote for.”

Having an artist who embodies cultural relevance and mass popularity onstage at her rally provided an entryway for Kamala Harris to appeal to voters who may not have otherwise been engaged in her political platforms.

All sorts of companies striving for cultural relevance and appeal to the purchasing interests of gen Z have decided to hop on the Brat bandwagon.

And some are clearly more Brat-aligned than others.

Girl, so confusing

When I see heavy-handed plays at connecting with gen Z as a means to secure a vote, profit or both, I can’t help but feel skeptical. Over the past few years, it’s been unsettling to see the lines between celebrity, politician and corporation become blurry.

According to writer Harriet Hall, we’re living in the age of celebrity government, where celebrities are encouraged to leverage their platforms in support of urgent crises. And politicians, whose actual job is to make decisions for the well-being of citizens, are interacted with like celebrities.

In her piece for Cosmopolitan U.K., Hall points to how the cult of celebrity around politicians has been credited by academics with the rise of populism, “whereby politicians attempt to ingratiate themselves with the electorate by claiming to be one of us, as opposed to a member of the political elite.”

It’s concerning to watch this unfold because it feels misplaced. The more we view politicians as celebrities and fun brands, the more it distracts us from the real-life consequences of the decisions they make on the job.

It feels crucial to stay focused on actual policies and impact, and trendy campaigns that aim at forcing a connection with gen Z usually signify to me that it’s time to move on.

All good things must come to an end. As much as my love for Brat endures, so too does my exhaustion with the oversaturation of Brat content from those who, for lack of a better phrase, just don’t get the vibes.

The thing about brat summer and attempting to pin down the predilections of gen Z is that the more we seek to narrowly define it, the further we get from truly understanding it. But if people take the jump to spend a little more time on our corner of the internet, I think it’ll become slightly clearer. They might see that silly humour is a way to cope with the anxieties of finding our way in what feels like an increasingly uncertain world. When I feel helpless, the internet can be absurd and relieving and grounding. To me, that signals something more than the stereotypes that view our interests as frivolous.

For the time being, let’s make it a brat summer for the people, not the corporations and politicians.

Because if everyone is “brat,” then no one is.