We’ve had our fun, pointing at green stuff and saying “that’s brat!”, but all good things must come to an end. Brat is a great album and Charli xcx deserves her success, but that success exacts a cost: it’s a sad fact of life that nothing remains cool once it reaches a certain level of popularity. Brat will endure, however “brat summer” is dead. But who delivered the fatal blow?

THE DEMOCRATS?

God forgive Charli xcx, for she knew not what she did: what was presumably just a tossed-off tweet about Kamala Harris was seized upon by the Democrats and adopted as a vital new pillar in their campaign strategy – sure to go down well with suburban swing voters in Wisconsin. Since then, Kamala has changed her campaign HQ Twitter header picture to brat green, some of the most boring politicians in the world (including Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate) have posted brat-themed content, and the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association launched a new merchandise range. “Did someone say demo(b)rat?” asked the group on X, to which the answer is no, nobody said that and they never will. In an effort to demystify the Brat phenomenon for its largely middle-aged viewers, CNN hosted a panel discussion, which featured such penetrating insights as “aesthetic is a Gen Z word” and “brat is a cool thing.”

Whatever counter-cultural cachet the idea of ‘brat summer’ may once have had has been obliterated overnight: it’s now the 2024 equivalent of “Pokémon Go to the polls”, as edgy and transgressive as Hillary Clinton’s cameo appearance on Broad City.

LINKEDIN?

Brat summer is nothing more and nothing less than a wildly successful marketing campaign, in which many of us have been willing conscripts. It’s understandable, then, that brand strategists have been so eager to mine it for industry insights, as if Charli’s success is easily replicable for fin-tech startups and business-to-business marketing firms might benefit from positioning themselves as “so Julia!” As one expert wrote, “From Glastonbury’s green takeover to global brand partnerships, it’s clear: standing out starts with daring to be bold, brash, and totally ‘brat’ and I can not wait to have my very own brat girl summer.”

According to LinkedIn, brat summer is about re-energising your brand, building customer loyalty by authentically connecting with your audience, and creating meta-commentary which turns mistakes into marketing moments. Even if you’re well aware that the hype around the album is at least partly the result of a clever and considered strategy (albeit one with gained organic traction), there’s something kind of disenchanting about seeing it all laid out like this. Does Brat really have to be a teachable moment for the most banal forms of capitalism, or fodder for lengthy posts about how sales and HR can work things out in the remix? Can’t it just be about doing coke?

BASIC PEOPLE?

It’s great that Charli has expanded her audience, but perhaps slightly too many people have joined in the fun. From revellers at Fire Island with their brat-themed Kamala shirts to a comedian earnestly explaining that the title stands for ‘bold, real, audacious, and trend-setting’, brat summer has at times started to feel slightly tacky. The ketamine twinks have put up a valiant fight, but the marketing girlies and Clapham gays are storming the gates. For some of these new fans, you can’t help but wonder if Katy Perry might be a little more their speed… apparently “Women’s World” is good?

Once something reaches a certain saturation point, it will inevitably be taken up by people who are kind of corny and don’t really get it. This is not a mark of failure, but the cycle of any great success. It’s impossible to gatekeep culture and it would be mean-spirited even to try, but still, I have a newfound sympathy for the archetypal music bro who gets pissed off when his favourite indie band signs to a major label and breaks through to the mainstream – maybe we were too quick to judge him, too quick to dismiss his pain; maybe he was right all along.

THE WEATHER?

Before anyone sends me any angry DMs on Instagram, I am aware of the concept of climate change – and I think it’s bad. I am also aware that plenty of people around the world have suffered through apocalyptic heat waves. But here in Britain, where I live, the weather has been almost relentlessly bleak, and as the listless, dreary weeks wore on, our insistence that we were having a brat summer began to feel like self-deception.

It’s true that Brat is more of an album you listen to before going out, rather than while lounging around on the beach, but the fact that it was raining all the time seemed at odds with the atmosphere we were trying to claim was in the air – it’s hard to feel that exhilarating sense that anything could happen when you haven’t seen the sun in weeks. This summer is better suited to curling up on the sofa with a John le Carré novel than dancing till the break of dawn; better suited to a steaming mug of cocoa than a bag of MDMA. It is a summer where the introverts, and not the 365 party girls, have had the last laugh.

CHARLI XCX HERSELF?

Charli’s only crime is releasing a great album and promoting it well, but by doing so, she sowed the seeds of brat summer’s eventual destruction. The Boiler Room set, the viral skits with TikTok creators, the “brat generator” website, the “360” video and its cast of clouty online celebrities, the “brat wall” and its many surprises – it all worked too perfectly. She broke the internet, and we still haven’t pieced back together the shattered pieces. She is an Icarus figure, a tragic hero from a Shakespeare play, undone by her talent and vaunting ambition. Her fatal flaw was being too good at her job, and now we must all pay the price.

EVERYONE?

It’s easy to blame other people. But if you really want to know who killed brat summer, you must only take a look in the mirror. It was you, it was me, it was all of us. We took it too far. We memed too close to the sun. We grabbed brat summer with rough hands and squeezed it for every last drop of content, until the nights began to cool and there was nothing left.