On July 21, soon after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, British pop icon Charli XCX broke the internet—and middle-aged political pundits’ brains—by declaring Vice President Kamala Harris “is brat.”

kamala IS brat

— Charli (@charli_xcx) July 22, 2024

It wasn’t out of the blue; for weeks, scores of chronically online posters flooded social media feeds with edits of Harris set to the songs from Charli XCX’s newest album, Brat.

Harris, who has emerged as the likely Democratic nominee for US president, capitalized on the viral firestorm. Within hours of Charli’s blessing, the new KamalaHQ account on X changed its banner image to the iconic green of Charli’s album cover and posted its own Brat edit, which has amassed over 1.5 million views. This has led many confused, exhausted people over the age of 35 (or so) to ask: What is Brat? Why is this happening? And please will someone help me I was just trying to pay attention to the election and now I feel old?

A good example would be this recent CNN panel:

If you told me 6 months ago that CNN would have a group of panelists discussing how Charli xcx’s 6th album is being a major voting influence in the 2024 US presidential election I’d laugh in your face pic.twitter.com/3elqmXCb1J

— frankie 𖤐 (@360_brat) July 22, 2024

We had a few of our staffers break down what brat is now that it is part of the 2024 campaign. And if you are still worried, don’t fret. Their main conclusion is this: brat is dead. So, you’re safe.

OK, so, I am your stand-in Old Person who just learned about Brat (brat, BRAT?) and am befuddled. I’m scared about a lot of things—but mostly about the future of democracy (which I post about in the comments to my favorite Washington Post articles). So, my first question is: Who is Charli XCX?

Siri Chilukuri: Charli XCX is a pop singer who first rose to prominence in the 2000s as a teenager—she would make great music and post it online. Her real name is Charlotte Aitchison.

Sarah Szilagy: She’s from the UK.

Sophie Hurwitz: Oh yeah. Really important that she’s British.

Siri: She’s from Essex, specifically.

Is she the brat?

Sophie: I think brat’s more an idea than a person.

Sarah: But an idea she strives to embody, especially through Brat the album.

Siri: The question of if she’s the brat, is sort of the existential backbone of the album Brat, it explores themes of who even is a brat? What kind of qualities does that person have? What does it mean to be labeled as one by someone else? Especially as a young woman.

Sarah: That’s so right, and especially reclaiming the word “brat” from the way it’s traditionally used to describe girls and women as spoiled little children.

Sophie: She described a brat as someone who “feels like herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things. But it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.” Brat is expansive.

So brat is a good thing that people want to be?

Siri: I think good or bad, those aren’t judgments that she or anyone who has embraced the title are making. It’s more like this is a type of person that exists and then the internet proceeded to say, “relatable”.

Sarah: I wouldn’t say “good”—as in you’re a “good person” if you’re brat.

Sophie: On the album she talks about ripping her tights, being awkward at parties, feeling depressed, feeling jealous—it’s not just this unequivocally good thing. Brat is about living the party girl lifestyle, but also about being honest with oneself.

Sarah: Being brat is definitely fitting for the moment that we’re in. I think a lot of Charli listeners—Gen Z generally—feel like they’re having to function day-to-day while confronting the horrors of reality (housing costs, work, climate change, global politics, etc.).

Siri: The trouble with defining Gen Z language/trends is it’s both so serious and not that serious at all.

Sophie: Right. It’s 100 percent for real but it’s also totally a shtick.

What does it mean then to have a “brat summer”? I hope it means getting engaged in politics to defeat Trump.

Siri: Brat summer really just means embracing those parts of you that are messy, overindulgent, vulnerable, and sometimes arrogant. It didn’t necessarily have any particular tie to politics except for the timing of it all.

Sophie: Yeah. It DIDN’T have a tie to politics…but then suddenly it sort of did.

Siri: It all started with a tweet:

why did I stay up till 3am making a von dutch brat coconut tree edit featuring kamala harris and why can’t I stop watching it on repeat pic.twitter.com/hqcmerD1Pb

— ryan (@ryanlong03) July 3, 2024

What is going on here? There are many symbols I do not know.

Siri: This is the coconut tree of it all.

Sarah: The song playing in the video is “Von dutch,” it’s from Brat.

Siri: The link is to a tweet featuring a clip of VP Kamala Harris quoting her mother as saying “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ ” She then laughs her iconic laugh. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” The tweet sets that sentence to a song from the album and it went super viral.

Sarah: We’re not authoritatively saying THIS is the tweet that started it all, but it was after the presidential debate, when more politicos and pundits began publicly taking seriously the idea of a Kamala candidacy, and posters did what they always do, which is make memes.

Thank you. I found that explanation uncomfortable.

Sophie: One interesting thing: right-wingers tried to spin the coconut tree/the “you exist in the context of all in which you live” quote to make Harris look bad. But that didn’t work at all—people online want absurdity.

Siri: 100 percent, absurdity is the name of the game online. But in this case you’re right that it’s not that absurd. It makes sense that Kamala’s mother was talking about a coconut tree because she was a South Indian aunty and they just talk Like That. My mom says something similar on occasion. 

OK, so, if I am understanding properly. At the moment I was gravely concerned for our nation because President Biden appeared feeble on the debate stage, potentially allowing a Trump landslide, young people were making a video of Kamala Harris talking about her grandmother set to a song by Charli XCX (who is not American) and laughing about it?

Siri: Yes, but her mother. 

Okay. Her mother. And since then, has this kept happening? These memes?

Sophie: I’ve seen more and more Brat memes—as well as criticism of the memes, and even a couple guys claiming that the memes are a CIA psyop, which is a take, for sure. The memes might legitimately be detracting from real issues with Harris’ political history—the way she defended California’s right to seek capital punishment, or how she tried to block an incarcerated trans person from getting gender-affirming surgery—and that’s bad! But I don’t think that means the Brat memes are a literal CIA project. (Am I underestimating the CIA, though?) 

Siri: What’s important to note is that this wasn’t just from Kamala Harris fans, the KHIVE as they are known online. These were from people who during her 2020 presidential campaign criticized her heavily for her past as a prosecutor or her policies in general. There was even a KHIVE apology form meme going around.

Sarah: Yes, so the Harris campaign is capitalizing on what is essentially free digital campaigning. 

Siri: Biden’s unpopularity led to people wanting something different, maybe they something a little unhinged because people now really respond to unhinged energy. And it was funny. Especially after Biden’s campaign ran Dark Brandon into the ground.

I love Dark Brandon. He was so fun.

Siri: Dark Brandon made sense for a minute but a big part of memes is usually that the person being made fun of isn’t in on the joke, once they are it’s less funny.

Sophie: When campaigns/politicians/companies start embracing a meme they also start the process of killing that meme. It has to appear grassroots, or it’s over—people aren’t going to find it funny anymore. That’s what killed Dark Brandon.

OK so over the past few weeks, these Charli memes have kept floating around. What happened after Biden stepped down? Did people stop joking around and start talking seriously about the presidency?

Siri: Nope. They went even harder with the memes.

No…

Sarah: Yes, and the memes entered the whirlpool of cross-memeification, where to understand the joke you have to understand multiple layers. And with apps like TikTok, the process both intensifies and runs faster. Then the algorithms that feed you content based on the content you’ve already interacted with create a never-ending loop of Kamala Harris girlboss edits to various pop songs.

Has Charli XCX commented on any of this?

Sophie: Yes, she tweeted “kamala IS brat.”

That’s great. She’s a Democrat.

Sophie: No, she is British. 

And she’s never been much of a leftist savior, as much as some people might’ve liked to believe that. She had a song on the Brat album that’s at least somewhat about this edgelord podcaster who’s part of this whole “Dimes Square” scene, which is about racism and bad art, I’m pretty sure. Anyway, this podcaster’s career—as far as I can tell—mostly involves popularizing slurs (?), and Charli said yes, perfect, that’s my muse! So, anyway, Brat is not the revolution.

Anything involving downtown New York City I do not want to know about, as I believe in God. What did Kamala’s campaign do?

Sophie: Kamala’s campaign embraced brat. 

Great, and so this is helping with the youth vote.

Sophie: Not exactly. Now we’re seeing some backlash to that—some people are watching kamalaHQ turn their Twitter account Brat green, posting Brat memes, and seeing it as her trying to charm her way into people’s hearts without dealing with the actual policy problems her constituents very much want her to address.

Siri: Part of the thing with internet culture is there’s an underlying nihilism to all of this as well. There’s a strong contingent of young people who really reject the usage of memes by politicians to co-opt youth culture without materially responding to what people are demanding.

https://t.co/gKxgzqZjxz pic.twitter.com/8rjAHiinSX

— junebug (@swirlgirlxo) July 22, 2024

They don’t like that “kamala IS brat”?

Siri: ​​They don’t like that a career politician can use internetspeak to get votes while the US provides support for a regime that is killing people with little to no accountability.

Sarah: Right, a lot of Gen Z might engage with it ironically for a while, and to be sure, there’s probably a sizable base of young people who find Kamala more palatable than Biden and are willing to set aside their moral objections to her policies. But I wouldn’t mistake the memes for genuine support. The leftist faction of Gen Z—the very group Dems are hoping to make progress with, especially now that Biden’s out—is going to see the campaign’s attempts to “appeal” to them as a facade behind which there are no substantive policy changes.

Sophie: In calling Kamala brat, I think Charli put the final nail in the coffin of the brat summer meme. (Of course, discussing brat summer in Mother Jones also kills brat summer).

So I just learned about Brat and now it’s over? I can’t have a brat summer?

Sarah: By the time it makes its way here, it’s already over.

Siri: Anytime a mainstream outlet writes about something it’s over.

That’s fine. Final question. What is a favorite Charli song for people who want to get into her music now? (Mine is “Track 10”; this interview was actually conducted by a 30 year old.)

Sarah: To understand the dark side of being brat, I recommend “Sympathy is a knife.”

Siri: I love “Talk talk”, which is just about yearning to communicate better with someone. It’s pretty universal but especially for anyone who has been through a tough time with a friend.

Sophie: I like “Girl, so confusing”—it’s great for those who are confused, girl or not.