By Jude Jones.
On 4 July 2024, the UK Green Party posted a lime-green square to their Instagram embroidered with low-res, black pixel text: “brats vote green.” Back then, “brat summer” was still in full, poppers-scented swing: Charli XCX’s zeitgeist-shifting album was still less than a month old, the singer herself was still bumping from Brooklyn to Dalston to Ibiza for DJ performances, and CNN hadn’t gotten its sticky, cool-killing fingers on the viral sensation, which was blurring the line between subculture and, well, just culture, between musical underground and stolid, mainstream surface.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins wonders, “what is brat?”
Just eighteen days later, however, “brat summer” was over. Of course, that dead horse is already beaten too (how quick the Internet moves!). But it was not the expected overdose of ketamine that killed “brat summer”. Instead, it was a coconut, falling from a tree – yes, that already infamous “kamala IS brat” Tweet, signed, sealed and delivered by none other than queen Charli herself, being what dealt the lethal blow and becoming this election cycle’s answer to Hillary Clinton’s viral 2016 “Pokemon Go to the polls” anti-moment.
The speed with which Charli’s single Tweet managed to stop her entire cultural whirlwind is genuinely extraordinary. Retweets rapidly abounded with snarky captions like “girl, the genocide” to point out the decided un-brattiness of an establishment Dem with a history of supporting Israel’s “right to self-defence”, while the Harris campaign’s co-opting of the statement led to “brat summer” going from a hedonistic grassroots sensation to institutionalised election campaign fodder. All this instantly made “brat summer” out-of-date, like a brand Twitter page churning out ancient meme references.
In this sense, what killed “brat summer” seems to be a double-edged sword whose both sides are bad. Of course, on the one hand, the transformation of “brat summer” into normie political jargon was always going to do its damage. However, the issue clearly is not BRAT being appropriated for political ends, hence the general excitement at the UK Green Party’s ability to tap into a gen-Z lexicon when it made its own BRAT-themed election posts. After all, a party with a decent history of championing the Palestinian cause and which came in as the second most popular among voters under 40 this election seems a more natural candidate for the “brat” moniker, even if Charli never lent her own support to the suggestion.

BRAT autrice Charli XCX thrusts her support behind prospective Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

The platform formally known as Twitter reacts to “kamala IS brat”.
Charli, through a clever trick of marketing, had been able to peddle herself as a fuck-shit-up, drug-loving, queer-coded, feminist icon without the political radicality which that tends to require, and even though her “kamala IS brat” Tweet was her first-ever major political statement as a public artist. Her sweeping political endorsement of a former prosecutor who has both incarcerated 1,900 marijuana users and attempted to block gender affirming care for trans prisoners, unsurprisingly then, broke this illusion. What it left behind was the image of a millennial neoliberal whose brat feminism, which had once seemed genuinely promising, now lags only a few paces ahead of that of Katy Perry’s latest feminist-anthem flop “Woman’s World”, derided by The Guardian as “regressive” and “a song that [makes you] feel stupider every sorry time [you listen] to it.”
Unfortunately, the proof was always in the slime-green pudding. As “recession pop” marches back into the cultural lexicon, think-pieces and podcasts are already discussing the ethical implications of an album that glorifies overconsumption and celebrity in a time of heady economic hardship for most ordinary people. If throbbing tracks like “Von dutch” have subsequently gotten hoards of tank-topped twinks and their party-girl handlers screaming “Charli, you’re my religion!”, maybe it’s time to remember Karl Marx’s age-old maxim: “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature […] the opium of the people.” Or maybe we should think like the German New Left philosopher Theodor Adorno, who condemned pop music as a form of bourgeois complacency that makes capitalism “aesthetically pleasing” and dumbs the mind to the material world.

RIP Karl Marx, you would have loved brat summer.
Perhaps (and only just maybe), bringing Marx and Adorno into the “brat summer” discourse is reading a little too much into it. However, BRAT’s myopia on social issues and overall political apathy were always there, bouncing in plain sight. Why else include “Mean girls”, an ode to leftist anti-hero turned alt-right it-girl Dasha Nekrasova, on the track-list? Charli may position the song as an exploration of our cultural “fascination with means girls,” but when part of what might qualify somebody as a “mean girl” is opening fire at keffiyeh-wearing targets or regurgitating far-right spin-points, perhaps it’s time to revise what exactly we mean by “mean” in it revamped, brat-ified sense.
Maybe Kamala is brat then: fun on the surface, but growingly problematic the closer you look. And sure, there’s nothing inherently wrong with letting something be a bit of escapist fun – even after all I’ve said, I’ll probably continue banging BRAT on my AirPods and telling people to support Harris, stale memes and all, unless they want Trump’s Project 2025 to roll into fruition. However, the death of “brat summer” serves, at least in my opinion, as a sort of cautionary tale, that even if something seems fun, ironic, and cool on the surface, we should not be surprised when its politics come out banal, boring, and/or down-right harmful once we dig deeper. (And also maybe stop holding pop culture figures as paragons of political progressivism). This is a lesson I thought we had already learnt from Dasha swallowing her own Red Scare pill, but evidently brat summer’s Kamala-induced death makes it one worth repeating.
Jude Jones (@jude_j0nes2002) is the Managing Editor at GAY45 and specialises in writing on fashion, music, and art.
– – –
GAY45 is committed to publishing a diversity of articles, prose and poetry. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. And here’s our email if you wanna send a letter: [email protected].
– – –
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know.
– – –
ONE MORE THING… EXCLUSIVE CONTENT.
For your dedication and support, we offer subscriptions including fresh exclusive content every week, access to THE9 newsletter before being published, and more. For our weekly premium newsletter subscribe to Substack.
We have a printed, signed and numbered collectable edition of the magazine. Look for it here.
GAY45. SUPPORT. WE NEED YOU.
Support GAY45’s award-winning journalism. We need help for our mission.
You can donate to or support our Queer Journalism Campus on PayPal. You can also buy our merchandise.
We appreciate it. Thanks for reading.