Brat by Charli XCX: A Clubbing Confessional and the Duality of Girlhood

On Thursday evenings, I go to my adult ballet lessons. I bought myself a leotard and wrap skirt so I could really feel the part as I go through all the positions. Some nights, my boyfriend picks me up and then we get something to eat. Other nights, I come home alone and then spend the rest of my evening putzing about. That’s the way I spend most of my evenings during the rest of the week too. All time is free time when you are in your twenties. Most nights, I find myself just sitting on the antique pink sofa and ruminating. My old therapist told me to keep myself busier to avoid this, but can’t she see just how busy I am? 

There’s a lot to think about. Like the fact my old high school boyfriend now has a child. Thank God for my IUD. Perhaps they are going to children’s ballet lessons while I sit on the sofa and listen to Brat by Charli xcx. Listening to I think about it all the time I feel my own thoughts externalized. I was fourteen the first time a boy told me I would make a good mother. My manager told me the other week that everything changes when you have a child; you’ll think their feet are perfect miniatures with little half moon nails. I can’t even handle looking at my own feet without feeling uncomfortable. 

On this particular evening, I did leave my apartment to take my cat for a walk. My friend has a little buggy, so we put the cat in and pushed him to the park. My son (the cat) cried (meowed) when the fire truck blared its horns down the street, and I doted over him and told him that it’s going to be okay. This is the most maternal I have ever felt. He doesn’t seem to like being outside, so I bring him back in. I’m thinking about when Charli wonders, “would it make me miss my freedom?” How do you confront the possibility of everything changing when you are so used to empty nights? 

I like to pretend I’m not like the other girls, so I listen to The Cure and Mazzy Star instead of anything in today’s top forty. I was stubbornly reluctant at first to listen to the Charli xcx’s sixth studio album, but I kept seeing that neon green shade popping up everywhere. Even my dad was sending me pictures of avocado toast with “brat” typed over. 

Maybe I avoided the album because I used to be that girl who lived only for Friday and Saturday nights while the rest of the week was spent in limbo. I remember the first night when I found the gritty world of kids who exist only in strobe light and look at everyone with eyes that wonder if this next person is the one. I love how Charli juxtaposes the polar extremes within the spectrum of girlhood in forty-one minutes. Club Classics reminded me of that first night, when the room melted away and I was only still standing because of the other kids packed in around me.  The lights were so bright that it hurt, but all you could do was keep dancing. It’s funny how Charli can capture that feeling, the incessant focus on the “right now, right now, right now,” as everything around you moves so quickly with the music’s increasing tempo. It’s not pretty really, with “sweat marks all over my clothes” and running to the bathroom while holding your hair back, but it’s right now and that’s all that there is. 

Brat isn’t pretty either; it cuts like a knife opening an inquisition into the parts of girlhood that you don’t want to look at. While it’s not misleading to include songs on the album like 360 and Von dutch which capture the experience of adolescent egocentrism, to pretend that’s all that exists under colourful club lights is to deny what really happens during those empty nights. Sure, it’s not glamorous to wake up hungover in last night’s makeup smelling like cigarette smoke and spilled beer, but what’s worse is the feeling in the pit of your stomach because you know you slept somewhere you don’t belong. It’s the bus ride home and not stopping for breakfast because you like when people say you look anorexic. It’s finally taking off last night’s makeup and being reminded that you can’t even be her when you’re trying. I don’t think Charli wrote a pop album at all. It plays like a confessional tape written by one trashy party girl for another. What pop song would dig those ugly parts out to put on display? 

Like a disc jockey, I spun the record over and over again, letting it lull me into its reverie and into reminiscence. When I used to go out, I preferred clubs to house parties. You can’t talk in a club, whether that’s talking with other people or with yourself in your own self-loathing mind. Conversely, house parties are meant for talking to strangers who, despite all that talking, remain strangers. When it becomes too much, I disappear in the bathroom to stare at a figure in the mirror who looks a bit like me, but she’s blurry at the edges. I cover those insecurities under a fresh layer of lip gloss. It’s comforting to know that this ostracism isn’t just felt by me, but if someone like Charli xcx feels it too, then what hope is there when I’m the one thinking I might say something stupid. We “wear these clothes as disguise” and distract ourselves with crushes and obsessions so that we don’t have to actually feel anything at all. 

It really is “so confusing sometimes to be a girl.” At ten in the morning, Everything is romantic, but you’re in tears by three in the afternoon because suddenly it feels like someone who died three years ago actually died today. Bold of Charli to have written So I where she reflects on the unexpected death of her former collaborator and friend SOPHIE, contending with wrongs that maybe can’t be amended. My current therapist tells me that the reason why I wake up crying in the morning might be because I haven’t processed the things that have happened in my life, and God knows I avoid thinking about it. It’s easier to be a “365 party girl” because if “I never go home / Don’t sleep, don’t eat / Just do it on repeat” then those terrible things can never be acknowledged. You keep finding yourself in these horrible situations because when you can’t picture yourself in ten years, the consequences of your actions are entirely insignificant. I don’t fear regretting my tattoos because I never imagined myself getting old enough to have that hindsight. I don’t worry about my brain because I figured I would be long gone before feeling the effects of substances and lack of sleep. It’s easier to trudge on in this foggy indiscriminate nihilism. 

Charli acknowledges the reality beneath the seemingly absurd though, which makes her less of a brat than me. Until all that pondering on the sofa, I was still in denial about how I was living. There’s a lot of things I wish I did differently, but to say it out loud is recognizing that maybe I did things wrong. Somehow, Charli manages to confess these regrets. When you pull away the bright neon and dance club beat, you see that Charli presents an introspection on mothers and girls and insecurity and jealousy. And then she works out at least one of those problems on the remix of The girl, so confusing version with Lorde which is bounds away from what you would expect to emerge from a clubbing album. 

No wonder brat jumps from white tank tops, oversized rimless sunglasses and neon acrylics to subtle Sylvia Plath hysterics. Charli isn’t bridging these two sides of girlhood by any means, but rather depicting the stark extremes in which femininity is pushed as a result of an unrelenting social pressure to be tragically beautiful.  How else are we supposed to cope with this reality without being out of touch with reality ourselves?