Switched on Pop - brat but it's a podcast about the album by CharliXCX

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

CharliXCX's latest album, brat, has created an internet fever dream. This club record celebrating messiness, partying, and brutal honesty has created its own color (brat green), a viral meme generator, and even an unlikely political platform. When CharliXCX endorsed Kamala Harris for president, saying "Kamala IS brat", the album took on a larger culture significance. The pundit class rushed to explain what it means to be a brat. Countless ink has been spilled dissecting the artwork and semiotics of brat, but has everyone really listened to the music? Smack in the middle of brat summer, Switched On Pop breaks down the making and meaning of the most talked about album of the season. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Shopify. orgs and records. Welcome to Switch on Pop I'm

songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So we're right smack in the

of Brat Summer. So far, Nate, you've been a real brat about it. Wait, hey, you can't just go calling me names on the pod like that. Let me show you what I mean. What do you think of this? Charlie X, EX's, Von Dutch, what do you think? Abrasive, repetitive, thin, reedy, unpleasant. Next. So you're saying she's not your number one? No, probably not top 10. All right. Today, I want to prove that you're wrong about Brat.

by making you appreciate the music on Charlie X-X's own terms. All right. I'm open to being persuaded, Charles. Maybe you should keep calling me Charles, because we'll also be talking about Charlie, X-C-X. She first started releasing music in 2008 at the age of 15 on the internet, and she came out hot on Billboard

in the mid-2010s with songs like, I love it by iconopop, went number seven. She was featured on Iggy Azalea's Fancy, went number three in 2014. And of course, her biggest hit ever, Boom Clap, her own song, went number eight in June of 2014. Boom Clap was the subject of our third episode of the podcast. And here's the thing. Charlie XEX hasn't had another top 40 single since.

Wow. Yeah, after breaking out, she had a sort of creative flourishing, going avant-pop, if you will, helping build the hyper-pop genre with her peers associated with the PC music label, like A.G. Cook, who executive produced Brat and the late producer, Sophie. And in her creative middle period, she became a favorite of the pop aficionado. Her fans call themselves angels, and they appreciate her maximalist, sometimes totally inane dance music, because it's imbued often with a deeper meaning and cultural commentary. The thing is despite critical praise for releases like Pop 2 and her self-titled album, Charlie, her career has been in a commercial wilderness.

That is until Brat. All right, Charlie, there's your opening statement. Yeah. Now I need to hear the evidence. Okay. So Brat has taken her critically acclaimed sound to an even bigger audience, which seems to be growing every single week during this summer, which people. have dubbed Brat Summer. You may be familiar with this whole rollout campaign. She took over a wall in Green Point, Brooklyn, green because the album is famously this sort of acid wash green, and she would

put up different phrases like, I'm your favorite reference. She changed it to Brat when the album came out. When the deluxe version was being announced, the wall was changed to say, Brat, and it's the same, but there's three more songs, so it's not. Wow, a wall. Okay. Groundbreaking. So, groundbreaking. The wall got people excited, as did the lyrics on this album, which dropped officially on June 14th. There were speculations about celebrity feuds with Lord and Taylor Swift. She had these amazing boiler room DJ sets that were the most RSVPed boiler room sets to date.

And things really blew up, of course, when Charlie X-CX tweeted, Kamala is Brat, leading to Kamala HQ, changing their ex-account to look like the Brat album cover, that acidy green with pixelated black lowercase font. And then the entire pundit class had to go on CNN Fox News and try to explain what does it mean to be a brat? Charlie X-C-X tweeted last night, Kamala is brats. Do you really want brats to run this country?

They already do enough damage. Thus leading to pitch floor. declaring that Brat Summer is dead, but I think Brat Summer has only just begun. There have been so many endless video essays analyzing the imagery of Brat, and it's marketing. But what about the music? I want to discuss Brat except it's music, and you've actually listened to it. Let's do it. I love that.

See, the thing is, Brat is this fully conceived art project where, yes, the art, the font, the imagery, and the music are all part of this large. artistic statement. Charlie XEX describes it as brutalist, minimalist, and all built around a specific persona, which she described to Billboard. You're just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and like maybe says some like dumb things sometimes who like feels herself but then also like maybe has a breakdown but kind of like parties through it. It's very honest. It's very blank, a little bit volatile. Yeah, like, does, like, dumb things, but, like, it's brat. You're brat.

That's brat. That's right. That is our criteria for understanding the music of brat. It is messy. It parties. It has a breakdown. This music is honest, and it is volatile. That's what it means to be brat.

At this point, you're probably thinking, what credibility do I have explaining what means to be brat. Yeah, you're basically the opposite of all those things. Well, Charlie XEX and I do actually share something in common. We once were in a video explaining the future of music, and we appeared back to back. It's not like a bunch of like white males at radio stations and record labels deciding like what the general public should listen to. The boundary between can people get my work?

not be lower. You want applause? I'm not sure what. That's like when two, you know, actors do voices for an animated kids movie and they're never in the room at the same time. It's not, I wouldn't, you know, hang your hat on that. This is probably the coolest moment of my entire life and you're not appreciating it significantly. I'm sorry. I did not, I did not mean to ran on your brat parade here. That's okay. I'm not one of those white guys from a record label or from a radio station, but I am from a podcast. And hopefully with the endorsement of Charlie XX from that video, I can do justice to the music of the album. So here's what we're looking for. Messiness, partying. It's going to have a breakdown. It's honest and it's volatile. Let's start with criteria number one. Brat is messy.

Okay. Right from the very top of the album, the song, 360. This production is messy. It is unpolished. You didn't like that first song that we heard for all the same reasons. Are you hearing messiness in 360? Yeah, I am. I mean, something sonically in that opening synth line, the way the reverb sort of trails over the notes, it kind of like blends it all together, and you can't always differentiate one note from the next

in a way that I find really irritating. And then when she sings So Julia, she doesn't sing So Julia. She doesn't sing So Julia. she says, so Julia, which is not the correct pronunciation. And that, to me, is also kind of messy. So you're policing female, I'll speak? Whoa, whoa, whoa, please don't bring, don't bring the law enforcement into this.

I'm merely observing. Okay, okay, I understand. I think it's messy for all sorts of great reasons. Okay. First of all, she's telling us that she's bumping that, bumping that beat. But this song doesn't have a beat. It just has a clap. underneath there's this very abrasive 808 bass

and there's this very annoying lead sound this combination of sounds to me is kind of braddy braddy bradish just brat what should we call it brattesque I'm just gonna call it brat great we've got the lack of drums we've got this very intense 808 this annoying lead sound this keys that you don't seem to like It's all very minimalist and reminiscent of the music of Sophie, the late producer that used to be one of Charlie's main collaborators. You can hear the same kind of construction in a song like BIP from 2015.

You hear the resemblance. Yeah, it's sort of these minimalist arrangements that provide maximalist impact. The sounds are kind of, they make you feel uneasy. You didn't like the piano, the opening chords. I think part of the way that those make us feel, unresolved is the fact that they themselves are unresolved chords. We're clearly in the key of C. Charlie keeps singing the note C over and over and over again.

But the chords underneath refuse to resolve to that C. Instead, they hang on this E minor to F riff that goes back and forth. And just when you might get a resolution, no. Little G, little A minor, we never get our home chord of C. Hmm. So part of the messiness in this sort of feeling, this tension, This underlying tension comes from these unresolved chords, which build and build and build throughout the song

and never give us a sense of landing home. So this is unlocking something for me. You're claiming that many of these musical elements that I find kind of abrasive and obnoxious are intentionally so. They are as abrasive and obnoxious as the brat green cover of this album, which caused so many people frustration. Why don't you just put a pretty picture? of yourself. Well, Charlie intentionally doesn't want to do that. She doesn't want to play to the

gaze of celebrity. Instead, she wants to challenge us. But as much as she's going to be messy, this album also parties. Criteria number two. The song 360 leads right into club classics. A song that celebrates the music that she wants to hear on the dance floor, and it is a mix of absolutely everything. The first thing we hear is this repeated vocal sample over and over, a hallmark of like a classic house track. And it's actually pulled from an interview of Charlie X-E-X for many years ago. I started writing my own stuff.

And like as my musical knowledge expanded, I just kind of got into writing what I'm writing now. Her fiancé, George Daniel, from the 1975, made the beat and put that interview in there. He then added in this Jersey-slash-Baltimore club beat, a sound which is based around this core kick-drum rhythm. Then comes in this trance synth pad reminiscent of a 90s trance song like Robert Miles' children, one of the foundational trance recordings.

And then as Club Classics continues, the baseline turns into this wold. dubstep-like sound reminiscent of like Benga's 26 bass lines, a important early dubstep track. So Club Classics is a little bit of everything. It's a little bit of house. It's a little bit of Jersey Club. It's a little trance. It's a little dubstep.

But most of all, it's Charlie XX. And are really quite out of tune vocal. So working with your thesis of intentional messiness. maybe this out-of-tune vocal sort of captures the feeling of letting yourself go at the club and partying all night and not really having a care in the world because you're listening to club classics. It's almost like she's recording the partiers at the club singing over the track rather than the track itself.

And perhaps it's actually just because she's completely forgotten how to sing in tune. The early work, I could sing in tune. but now I think I've gotten so lazy because I sing with autotune all the time. Except in this moment where she did sing without auto tune, it was actually so flat that she had to ask her fiancé George to actually pitch it up a little bit so that it would be even a little bit closer to being in tune.

But intentionally, actually didn't use autotune in this moment. Why? Because she wants to capture that feeling of just letting it all hang out. Nate, you're sounding like a bit of a brat. You're cracking the door to Brad's summer wider and wider for me. I mean, hearing her chant, I want to hear those club classics is one thing. You extracting all of the club classics that are sort of lurking in the sediment of this track is quite another and makes me appreciated on another level.

So we're getting there. Bit by bit, by bit, brat by brap. All right, great, great. And there are many other what I think are as new club classics on this record. Von Dutch, which we heard at the beginning. Girl so confusing. B2B. Talk. These are party songs that are aggressive, they're raw.

They're slightly underproduced and messy and bratty. But they often do more than just make us dance. They often break down into deeper emotions. And that is the third criteria that Charlie told us about what it means to be a brat. This album is full of emotional breakdown. and even ballads, because nearly every other song really gets into her feelings. Probably my favorite is, I might say something stupid. That's the name of the song, just to be clear.

Well, here's another side of brat. Yeah, this is, I think, one of her most honest songs on the album. It's about one of the greatest fear that you can have at the club or really anywhere, which is that I don't belong here. It's a song that even feels like it doesn't even belong. at the party. It's ugly, has this incessant high hat that just guides the entire song.

There's this very ugly, noisy lead sound. And the main piano is this very sort of cheap, resonant sounding synthesizer. Together they're playing these chords that also feel like they don't belong, moving from A minor, up to this dissonant F minor. two chords you don't expect to hear next to one another. But that's not the only thing making this sound discordant.

That nasty lead sound at the top of the chords, they set up an even more jarring chord. There's this unbelievable dissonance over our F minor, this B note on the top. Ooh. Yeah. There's so much crunchy, uncomfortable, bad sounds, dissonant harmony, dissonant melody,

something is very uncomfortable, like it doesn't belong in the track. And when Charlie comes in to sing, she even adds further color to these uncomfortable chords. She briefly outlines this chord, the F minor major seventh, where you have a very dissonant E

on the top of an F minor. It's a chord we've discussed on the show in the past. It's the Psycho Chord, the Hitchcock chord. It's the detective chord heard at the end of every James Bond opening. It's the final chord in Box St. Matthew Passion, and it is now part of brat, and I might say something stupid. And what's more is that the music and the lyrics perfectly intersect.

She contemplates whether or not she even belongs within the pop sphere or in this world at all. Hearing all of the harmonic and melodic dissonances within this track does make me appreciate the vulnerability of it. And going back to the foundations of Brett Summer that you elucidated at the top of this episode. It's messy. It parties. It breaks down. It's honest. It's volatile. That kind of discomfort that you were describing seems to map to those feelings of

honesty and it's pretty refreshing to hear that juxtaposed with the party party party 360 club classics like that's that's a really striking tonal shift I'm being pulled deeper and deeper into the world of Brett. Well we're going to get deeper into that tonal shift

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who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. So far, we've heard that Brat is messy, that it is a party album, but it's also going to break down. And our fourth criteria, it is brutally, honest. We hear that on a song like So I, where Charlie joins the camp of artists like Caroline Polichick, A.J. Cook, and St. Vincent, writing an ode to the late producer, Sophie, who tragically died in an accident in 2021.

So here on So I, Charlie is directly inspired in referencing one of Sophie's most famous tracks, It's Okay to Cry, using the same ethereal, plucky, arpeggiated synths, a breathy vocal, and borrowing the chorus line from Sophie. So Charlie X, X is borrowing the sound of It's Okay to Cry, changing the meaning of the song, which was actually Sophie's coming out song, both about her gender identity, but also the first time she actually revealed her face and saying, it's okay to cry about who you are, about your struggles, about anything.

And Charlie is taking that message and saying, It's okay to cry and mourn the loss of Sophie. But she goes so much further in her honesty in this ode to Sophie by being frankly brutally honest about their sometimes on-again, off-again, collaborative relationship. Sophie pushed her creatively as a person, and sometimes Charlie recoiled. She later in the song talks about wishing that the time that Sophie had invited her for dinner, that Charlie stuck around instead of piecing out. It's like a eulogy that acknowledges all of the love and the frailty

that was in their relationship. And I think we could say that Brat owes so much to Sophie, not just in this song, but in its sounds and the way in which Sophie inspires this dual nature of music, which is both beautiful and ugly. Brat has plenty of songs, which are both. Just like Brat, Sophie's only full-length album, oil of every pearl's uninsides shifts back and forth between these really elegant, beautiful sounds

and so much more abrasive ones. For example, we go from the soft sounds of It's Okay to Cry to the much more aggressive pony boy. Pony, boy. I mean, that kind of, that kind of tribute feels more real and more powerful, not only to acknowledge, you know, the good memories, but also some of the raw ones that you can't suppress. even when you're on stage in front of thousands of people. And also, how cool to pay tribute not just in this direct way,

but in this more subtle way, in terms of how do you create the tapestry of an album? How do you honor the legacy of a collaborator, a friend, and a pioneering musician? Yeah, I think you hit the nail in the head. The song obviously pays tribute to Sophie, but even the form and structure of Brat has a larger credit owed to Sophie's work. I think we hear this contrast of sounds most strongly in the pairing of the final two songs. The penultimate song is one of these other very brutally honest raw songs. It's called I Think About It All the Time. It's a mid-tempo song about gratitude, death, and contemplating children.

The sounds and the harmonies are once again kind of grading and abrasive. The beat is skipping along, kind of like life moving out from under your feet. And the lyrics, couldn't be more raw. She's discussing meeting an old friend in Stockholm, meeting her new child for the first time, appreciating what it means to have a family, and even seeing the potential that maybe Charlie, too, could have a family one day.

When we discussed the track girl so confusing, I remember you sharing this insight of how Charlie writes lyrics that she's trying to make them sound like a text message she would send to her friends. These sound like a journal entry. Or maybe even a transcript of a conversation with your therapist.

It's like there's not a lot of artistry in the sense of like, oh, let me make sure this rhymes. Let me make sure this scans with the melody and rhythmically. It's very just kind of stream of consciousness that you talk, You talked about brutal honesty on that last track. I mean, we've got that in spades here.

Yeah. It's really a disarming approach to making a song. And it's even a disarming approach for her. Charlie is a rhyme master. She is a hookmaster. This is a new approach in writing lyrics for her, which she described on the podcast, Los Culturistas. Shout out Matt Rogers, front of the pod.

The way I would write on previous records, we would build a track, and then I would get on the microphone and literally be like, and then figure out the lyrics later. And then I would figure out the lyrics that fit the vowel sounds I was kind of making. So there was already this sort of like map of sound that, you know, I was trying to fit words to.

You're saying this is lyrically led. Lyrically led. And not really focusing too much on rhyme or worrying about like what fits within a stanza or anything like that, you know. So actually just I was really able to kind of just write lyrics. that I would actually say in a conversation rather than crafting them into this sort of like song

version of what I would say. You know, going back to our original animating tension here, my brat skepticism, if I heard the song without any of the context that you've provided, I might be like, well, it's very moving, but I think I would

be a little perplexed by some of these characteristics that we've been describing. But if I hear it as part of this larger Bradiverse, then it becomes much more profound. Yeah. And I find myself being really kind of stunned by the record's ability to make this shift on a dime into this new territory and to be so naked and vulnerable.

Okay. If you are stunned by the sudden shifts and unexpected turns of this album, I don't think there's a better one than the move from, I think about it all the time to the final song, 365. We go from having children on the way home. Should I start my birth control? Because my career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all. It's utter madness. We... Okay. Go ahead. Okay, I know I am but a brat novice, but that was the same beat that we heard at the beginning of the record, right?

In 360? Yes. So there's kind of like a Finnegans Wake thing going on here. The beginning is the ending. Time is a flat circle. But it's actually also the middle. Right in the center of the album is a song called Rewind, which uses basically the same idea. Rewind is 360.

3605. The Brat Light motif. Yeah, it's the Brat Light motif is the sound that keeps coming back. to tell us that this is Brat. And she constructed it this way intentionally to make it feel like a DJ set where you can just go right back to the beginning. It works fluidly. And it does seem like the only way to end this album is with another sort of head spinning

turn from the incredibly vulnerable and honest to bumper that, bumping that, bumping that, bumping that, club, club, club, club. Like, yeah. I love that this album doesn't end on a sort of maudlin note. but is true to its brat party spirit. And that is the final criteria, which is that the whole thing is volatile. The fact that she goes from talking about children to then bump in that,

and now it's not just the beat, it's also illicit drugs, that she's a 365 party girl. There couldn't be a more, frankly, there's a totally inappropriate juxtaposition of these two images. This volatility continues, if you listen to the extended deluxe version

of the album, which is the brat and it's the same, but there's three more songs, so it's not deluxe version, a sort of snide criticism of the way that deluxe albums are released. She has songs like Spring Breakers, which contemplate blowing up the Grammys at the Staples Center. Room, Room, R-Tenth and I'm gonna pull up. Hey, Staples Center, what the fuck is up? Yeah, I'm parked outside, what's another girl's truck? Put the custom on, hit the worst dress list. Yeah, you better not slide, not slip, not trip, because I put, took a drag, and I just flicked it. Play, Swem, boom, boom, laugh when the body's when's when's flat. I always love hearing some creative Grammy slander on the record.

Can I give you one more final dose of volatility? You may. I've been brat-pilled. I'll take whatever you give me. I believe that Brat Summer is not over. That is just beginning. And Charlie is trying to make this so. She has just released a new version of the song Guess, featuring Billy Eilish. Do you remember the thong song, Nate? Do I? I think about it every day. You think about it all the time? I think about it all the time.

Even when I'm on stage in front of thousands of people. Well, I guess, featuring Billy Elish, I think this is the song of 2024. You want to guess the color of my underwear. You want to know what I got going on down there. Is it pretty in pink or all see-through? Is it showing off my brand-new lower-back tattoo? You want to try it. It's like it spit it, pull it to the side and get all up in it, kiss it bright again, I fit it.

Charlie likes boys, but she knows I'd hit it. It's kind of like if harder, better, faster, stronger were about underwear. It's perverted. I feel like you're talking about this like it's a Roman history of the way. It's like, it's just disgusting in a great way. It's so twisted. It's twisted and it even leaves us guessing to the very end. You want to guess if we're serious about this song.

Yeah. That's clever. Yeah. All right. Let's wrap this whole thing up. We've gone through the volatile stage. We've been through the honesty stage. We had visited the breakdown stage, the party stage, and the messiness of brat.

I think that if there was a song that really contained all of this in one, it's the song. Everything is romantic. The first time through the song we get these beautiful strings. This is the synthesis of brat lyrically. Everything is sacred and profane. And everything is love. Fall in love again and again, winding roads to manual drive. But the second time we hear the verse,

Bad tattoos on leather tan skin, Jesus Christ on a plastic sign. All of those beautiful strings are gone. we get this very discordant drumming, the vibe completely shifts. But it is synthesizing all of these qualities of Brat and showing that really underneath all of it, it's all love. Brat is perfectly honest in all of its ugliness. I think fundamentally, Nate, we are all brats.

We are all human. Now, who am I to opine on the various summer phenomena that we've encountered in years past? but this does strike me as fundamentally different than, say, 2019's Hot Girl Summer. Hot Girl Summer was about confidence and, I think, a sheen of perfection, and I think about a sort of fearlessness and empowerment. And Brat is the dark version of so many of those attributes,

a little unhinged, a little volatile, a little imperfect. And I feel like for a summer that is hot, Hot as hell, marked by political insanity, and hard to process. Yeah. This is maybe the sound of the philosophy that we need right now. I agree, but I don't think Brat Summer has fully happened yet. None of these songs have peaked into the top 10, let alone the top 50 of Billboard. What I'd like to see is for people to stop talking about Brat like we're doing right now and go and listen to it, go

Bump Brat. Bumpin that, bumpin that, bump in that, bump in that, bump of that, bump in that, bump of that, bump of that, bump of that, butt. Switched on Pop is produced by Rana Cruz, edited by Art Chung, engineered. This week by Chris Shirtleff. We're executive produced by Nishak Kerwa. Remember of the Vox Media Podcast Network and produced by Vulture, which is part of New York magazine.

You can subscribe to New York Magazine at NYMag.com slash pod. Find us on socials at Switched on Pop and tell us what brat tracks you are bumping. Next week, we'll be brat. Next week, we will be bratt. Next week, we will be back. Everything is brat, Charlie. Everything is brat. Next week, we'll be back with a brand new episode

dissecting the musical, personal stories behind two would-be pop comebacks. And until then, brats for listening. Wait, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.