brat is slop. I thank my good friend Kayla for this revelation (and for general editorial assistance as I’ve written this). The album's problematic political identity cannot be separated from how fundamentally low effort the work is, and the low effort production is further inseparable from the deeply "Personal" and "Honest" impression the album desperately intends to manufacture. brat offers dissimulation to its own aesthetic detriment. It cannot place itself in time. It does not know what will happen next.
For years, Charli XCX's major label contract was her fans' greatest enemy. The label defunded her work with AG Cook. Something about it was so subversive that it was totally unendorsable by the conventional culture industry. The mixtapes were great. The albums were fine to bad. Why can't she make the kind of music we know she really wants to make? Well. One label to another and now we're here.
I managed to avoid brat until late one July evening. My girlfriend and I were heading home from an evening of Magic: The Gathering at our game store of choice, and decided to go to the lesbian bar down the street. It was karaoke night.
A woman in her early 20s, cheered onto the stage by a gaggle of friends, sang a version of 360 that was--a karaoke instrumental reproduction of an AG Cook-produced Charli XCX song. An astoundingly faithful one. It's hard to imagine blank slate karaoke rompler technology accurately emulating Unlock It, but here the reproduction proved uncanny before I had even heard the original. It was empty. Soon I would learn the album version sounded basically identical. When she sang the lyric ‘you gon’ jump if AG made it’, I could swear there was no way she knew who “AG” was. It made me feel strange.
There isn't a single song over 4 minutes. Every song has barely one idea. The production throughout feels thin, cheap, a minimum viable product. The songs are just no good.
360 is a song where nothing happens. Charli’s vocals play out a competent verse-chorus structure, but the monotonous production flattens whatever competent songwriting she provides into just that: a loop that continues for long enough to earn spotify revenue.
Club Classics plays like a lifeless reinvention of a cut from Xtreme Mixology where George Daniel and AG Cook have decided to thoughtlessly collide bass music, jersey club, and house, to no real end or even particular danceability. Charli provides songwriting that goes in one ear and out the other. It's "experimental" in the sense that it sounds like Filthy by Justin Timberlake (a Timbaland production). It offers the first real example of this album's collapsed definitions of “ugly” and “weird” and “niche” and “underground.”
I might say something stupid is the kind of ballad that I've appreciated on previous Charli projects, but it reiterates the problem of every track so far: there is no B section, the music goes nowhere. It recalls an eternal present with no potential for progress or future.
Talk Talk sounds like it was made for people to dance to it for exactly 30 seconds while filming themselves, but at least it has a verse. Directionless, though, still seems to be the principal character of music proliferating from short form video. The song is a total consumable object; it is robbed from its original time based context. From narrative to moment.
Von Dutch attempts the build-drop structure of a club track while its vocals dominate the mix pushing barely audible kick drums to the background.
Everything Is Romantic seems to have been made to change my opinion on this album. It's a valiant effort. I love when AG Cook interpolates a grime beat, and the spaces the rest of the track moves through are continuously inventively produced and competently written. Shockingly, it is one of less than 1/3 of the tracks that is over three minutes, that even has time to develop an interesting shape or narrative. Lyrically, it fails to do what Incredible Thoughts by the Lonely Island satirizes. The lyrics evoke some tumblr girl fake-deep mystique, as Charli dispassionately lists the contents of some horribly depressed 14-year-old’s “grunge” aesthetic blog, without enough self-awareness to be charming.
Rewind is vacuous, with zombie production and undead references to UKG aesthetics.
Girl, So Confusing is legitimately baffling. It sounds unfinished. I really don't understand this record's casio keyboard aesthetic.
Apple proves that pop music will literally never get over 80s nostalgia ever again and even AG Cook has been reanimated by this necromantic instinct. George Daniel and AG Cook's collaborations are the 2 weakest and most confused-sounding entries to this record. I never got The 1975 and I don't think I ever will. It sounds like Jack Antonoff made it.
Three Sixty Five. There is no future. The spoils of imperialism slide up your nose. Every track sounds like a demo. I can barely believe Atlantic released this.
++++
In high school, I loved PC Music. The label was among several events or bodies of work in popular music that convinced me of the potential of electronic music as a channel for generative, socially positive cultural production. I remember listening to PC Music Volumes 1 and 2 and being amazed that music could be that abrasive, subversive, and occasionally beautiful all at the same time. It felt like someone was actually doing something interesting with the unique out-of-time faux-futuristic sounds of early 2010s electropop, even if it was really just a Red Bull advertisement. When AG Cook started producing for Charli, the mixtapes felt like being in on a secret. He was a kind of pop music apparatchik, infiltrating the bureaucracy of the major label cultural regime. The PC Music underground had been given access to a real-deal, no-joke, major-label Pop Star. AG was making Real pop Good, filling it with intricacy, intention, energy, and beauty. Sophie, while she is only a ghastly shadow over brat itself, deserves mentioning here too as an adjacent force driving futuristic sonic aesthetics inside and outside of her work with Charli. "Pop: Two" remains, to me, a valiant and utopian proclamation. Above all else it strived to sound like the Future. The music was Good. But what was the real goal? Future for future's sake? Where was this subversion supposed to lead?
The low effort production of the album is essential to its positioning as a "personal" "honest" work. Charli commented in an interview with Zayne Lowe that the original idea for the album art was cost cutting, avoiding an expensive photoshoot. brat looks and sounds like a kind of glitter strewn shadow of austerity, convincing you cheap construction equals some kind of Authenticity (Austericity?). It pursues personal transparency to the ends of the earth because it knows that the impression of honesty is what will sell, even if "honesty" means sounding like garbage. If a good artist strives to create a compelling and meaningful illusion, an artist selling their work on the basis of its disillusionment with themselves, their refusal to try to be good, is no real artist at all.
Slop is a two sided coin - where authenticity ends and inauthenticity begins is unknowable in a paradigm of low effort work. AI generated images of Jesus driving a big rig and hyperrealistic short form charcoal drawing time lapses are, in the incentives they respond to, fulfilling identical demands. In the same interview, Charli said "niche is rewarded so much more than it has been." But is niche a quality, a real artistic goal, or just a consumer impression of being "in” on something? Isn’t that a marketing goal more than an aesthetic or artistic one?
We can pick apart this question of what “niche” might mean in the context of this album or even in our post-everything culture with help from another quote from the interview: "I've always been caught in this dichotomy of, am I a left field underground artist or am I supposed to be a pop star?’" While Charli’s niche-ness can be argued, her underground-ness cannot. “Niche” can be aesthetic, “underground” is a distinctly material classification. I would argue it is impossible for someone who has been signed to a major label since she was 21 to make “underground” music. So if “underground” is the material condition of scrappy, independent music (like PC Music was in its beginnings), niche is that aesthetic employed to create a subsection of a mass media market, leveraging aesthetics born from underground precarity. I do think this description is accurate for Charli’s work in the past, and I think this context makes her statement that “Niche is rewarded so much more than it has been” accurate.
Furthermore, I think it indicates a shift in Charli’s self-conception, as well in the identity of PC Music, as “”””””hyperpop””””” has become a generation-defining sonic aesthetic. We should remember, here, that Charli’s work with AG Cook, Sophie, Easyfun, Lil Data, etc. was exciting because she was a pop star with a pop platform who was allowing the direct influence of underground artists into her work. Her material advantages were central to her role in the PC Music project. The problem with brat, and the confusion of all this “nicheness”, is simultaneously Charli’s internalization of niche-ness or even underground-ness as part of her artistic identity, while at the same time the sonic aesthetics of PC Music and the career successes of its luminaries are recuperated and embraced by the culture industry wholesale. This wire-crossing was inevitable. The status quo has convinced itself it was the revolution thanks to increasingly ubiquitous amnesia.
These contradictions make themselves obvious in the "kamala IS brat" meme (or mind virus, even, if you will): AG Cook and Charli XCX attained their most politically affective statement, accidentally, in a piece of music vacuous of meaning and drained of self awareness or even effort. The phrase, the color, the attitude infect what should be political discussions with unearned irreverence. A worm wiggling into everyones ears telling them it’s actually cool and makes you a cool party girl it girl whatever the fuck to use your limited political power to endorse the social and political order as it stands. The--sigh--neoliberal project of the modern democratic party proves a perfect match for an album that just doesn’t give a shit about itself, and cannot conceive of futures or alternatives. I was so distracted by PC Music’s aesthetic subversion that I looked past the political vacuum that was always its negative space. brat is only subversive by context, not by content. AG Cook and Charli XCX at one point made subversive work, so the empty hedonism of this most recent project must contain within it some subversive spirit despite refusing to question its framing of itself. Press Rewind. 360. Time has stopped. There is no up or down. There is no future or past.
PS: I think it is unproductive to critique even works of mass culture without suggesting a positive alternative. In conclusion, then, I would like to recommend a fantastic EP by a friend which I think does a much better job carrying the legacy of what PC Music was: 2009shojo self-titled ep by my friend Philip. It subversively interpolates and references pop and club music conventions while simultaneously being very thoughtfully produced and deeply emotional, all while not taking itself too seriously. In essence, it succeeds in all arenas where brat fails. They even (kind of) share a color scheme. Please give it a listen.