Girl, So Boring
On coolness, trend fatigue, and the demise of BRAT summer
Where were you when you realized BRAT summer was over? Were you accosted by the latest hacky lime green TikTok ad campaign? Were you browsing a Twitter feed mired in recycled coconut tree jokes? Perhaps you bolted awake in the dead of night, drenched in cold sweat, vaguely aware that something precious had just disappeared. This precious thing is not BRAT summer itself; in many ways, the moment lives on, still an object of popular obsession. What has died, or rather been beaten to death with a steel baseball bat, is its coolness.
Coolness is a slippery animal. Just when you’ve got it between your hands, you accidentally squeeze too hard and lose it. In our contemporary social media panopticon, we’ve hunted coolness to the point of extinction. Any sign of the next cool thing is photographed and posted and reposted and blogged about and recorded until, two days later, it’s cultural roadkill. Our search for coolness has become embarrassingly conspicuous and inorganic. Trends are forced, foraged, and fabricated. We look both ways before we try to like something to make sure everyone else is liking it too, but by the time we get on board, it’s already over. This breakneck boom-and-bust cycle has reached a speed so great that it’s inverted into monotony, a dull roar of microtrends that evens out into a barren cultural silence. In other words: everything is so fucking boring I don’t know what to do.
BRAT was honestly great while it lasted. I like the album, I like the music, I continue to enjoy it and will probably do so for years to come. This is, ultimately, not about the music itself, but what it came to represent. BRAT was alternative pop, it was electronic, it was messy, it was free. It wasn’t clean or polished or bubblegum. It was dirtier than Sabrina Carpenter, grungier than Olivia Rodrigo, rawer than Taylor Swift. It did what all good alternative music is supposed to do: provide an alternative to the mainstream. What happens, then, when it becomes not just mainstream but inescapable? When it is gutted and reupholstered with an almost unrecognizable aesthetic?
If you’re me, this is the time to call it quits. This time arrived, in my opinion, when the Billie Eilish “Guess” remix dropped, the official death knell of BRAT summer. It represented the ultimate sell-out, a totally unmotivated clout grab designed for mass appeal– the polar opposite of what we wanted BRAT to be. There seemed to be no impetus for Charli to feature this artist that hadn’t been cool since 2019, to put her barely-there whisper on this high-energy track. This was early August, just two months after the initial release of the BRAT album. A few weeks after the “Guess” remix came out, I had dinner with an equally jaded friend of mine who agreed our neon green summer was coming to a close. This friend, a true Charli fan who attended a BRAT album release party and illegally torrented the album when it dropped early in another hemisphere, was even more dejected than I about its tragic demise. I tried to tell him it lasted a pretty long time as trends go nowadays, estimating it had been out for four months at least. To learn that BRAT had only been on the scene for about half that time was shocking. If time flies when you’re having fun, time compresses when you’re bored, and BRAT mania had folded the summer up like origami.
I did have one thing right, though; two months is pretty damn good for something coming onto the scene in 2024. Most trends are lucky to get two weeks of coolness or, to be more precise, relevance. To borrow from the lexicon of the crotchety and old, it didn’t used to be like this. Instead of only fleeting trends, we used to experience something called “culture,” where music and movies and fashion would seep into the fabric of society in a way that was meaningful. There would always be flashes in the pan, but there would be a solid meal cooking in there too. We had cultures and subcultures and countercultures, mainstreams and alternatives and cult classics and B-sides. Now, it feels like one big cultural tornado, everything swept up in a great whirlwind. Every so often, a cow or mailbox will blow by to entertain us, but there is no escape from the tornado’s pull. There is literally no alternative.
One of my favorite pieces of criticism was written about an album I’ve never heard. It’s a Pitchfork review of Italian band Måneskin’s “Rush!” and it’s a deliciously scathing meditation on the death of the alternative genre. I wouldn’t attempt to rewrite what has already been expressed perfectly, but I want to reference a crucial observation that again may give my words a boomer-ish ring but must be said regardless. This cultural tornado– or waist-deep river of mud, or bloodthirsty hunting party, or whatever metaphor you fancy– was birthed by social media and the streaming model. Now that all music is available online to anyone at any time, now that the Internet has coalesced into a single massive space rather than a collection of tiny e-communities, all divisions and barriers have crumbled. In many ways, of course, this is a good thing. People are more connected than ever and everything is totally accessible. I don’t wish for anyone to be kept out of spaces they want to enter or for them to be barred from enjoying art they want to experience. However, it has also resulted in a singularity event in which everything exists on the same plane in time and space. There is no other place to be except the place everyone else is all the time– and this place is deeply boring.
BRAT still gets played at clubs and parties and I still dance along gleefully. People still wear green baby tees, Charli is still everyone’s favorite reference, everything’s still the same– but it’s not. Something has ended and I can’t be the only one who senses it. Maybe I jumped the gun. Maybe I’m an Olympic-level hater with no patience. I am aware that I’m at the end of a long line of bitchy young people that started at the beginning of time when Thog decided that Urk’s handprint paintings were derivative. It may be cliche, but it’s my truth. I only wish that I had the luxury afforded to past contrarians– the ability to step outside the mainstream and enjoy what thrives on the margins. Perhaps this is not something that will be handed to us, but something we have to re-forge ourselves.