Why 'Brat' is All Over Your Feed and Where Did It Come From

(SPOT.ph) Last June, Andrew McCarthy released his documentary Brats, in which the actor-turned-documentarian tracked down contemporaries like Demi Moore and Emilio Estevez, a bevy of Hollywood insiders and pop culture pundits, and the New York Magazine journalist who came up with the moniker “Brat Pack”—all in an effort to unpack how the name affected his life and career. Gen X’ers who came of age in the ‘80s swooned with nostalgia watching McCarthy go through his self-help odyssey. Not even the anticlimactic climax, in which journalist David Blum refused to apologize to McCarthy for coining the term, could harsh the vibe.

Also in June, Gen Z writer Gabriel Smith published his debut novel Brat. Part-ghost story, part-hallucinatory head trip, part-meditation on grief, the novel follows an aspiring writer (very meta!) who moves back into his recently deceased father’s house, only to have whole sheets of his skin peel off. Also, a newly unearthed manuscript from his mother keep transforming into different narratives, and creeping vines of ivy threaten to swallow the house as the writer's sense of alienation grows. Written with a patched-together multimedia style favored by people who grew up on social media, the novel proved to be an immediate sensation in the UK, Smith’s homebase.

For months now, the word “brat” has seemed inescapable. But nothing has contributed more to its ubiquity than British singer-songwriter Charlie XCX (real name: Charlotte Aitchison) and her sixth studio album, whose cover art consists of nothing but the word “brat” in lower case, stretched-out Arial font against a retina-searing background of bright lime green. Sitting somewhere between 360 and 375 on the Pantone color chart, this particular neon shade is now known, of course, as “brat green.”

Peak brat

As these three examples show, the word “brat” has become loaded, a catch-all term that can span generations, but mostly late millennials and Gen Z. The phenomenon seemed to hit a peak this past week, after U.S. President Joe Biden announced he would not be seeking re-election and passed the baton to his Vice-President Kamala Harris, at which point 31-year-old Charli XCX gave her seal of approval by tweeting “kamala IS brat.”

Memes swiftly followed, and the Harris campaign swiftly reacted on X by changing the profile banner of its official rapid response page to match the color and branding of Charli XCX’s album, substituting “brat” with the all-lower-case words “kamala hq.” You don’t have to be a political strategist to know why this makes sense: It’s all about engaging the youth vote. Charli XCX’s tweet effectively served as an endorsement, a bat signal to voters in the 18-30 age bracket—a veritable army of self-identifying brats.

Defining this particular 'brat'

But what exactly does it mean to be a “brat” during this “brat summer”?

“You’re just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes,” Charli XCX told TikTok series Off The Record. “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.”

Partying through an emotional breakdown may not sound like an endorsement an American presidential candidate would want to attach herself to. But taking the quote literally isn’t the point: What Charli XCX advocates for is being her authentic self, and that is an ethos that dovetails neatly into a very Gen Z value. According to a McCann Worldgroup youth study published in 2021 surveying 32,000 participants across 26 markets all over the world, “58% of Gen Z believe that it’s important to put the truth before other factors in all situations right now.”

That means Gen Z, apart from “always looking for the next cool thing” (60% of respondents), do not want to feel like they’re being marketed to. They value messages that grow organically, that bear no traces of being put-on or forced. In one word: authenticity.

Authenticity is the hallmark of Charli XCX’s brat album. Over pulsing synth beats, she can claim empowerment as loudly as the Beyoncés of the world. (“I don’t f**king care what you think,” she sings on the propulsive album opener “360”; “I’m your number one,” she intones over and over on the chorus of “Von dutch”.) But elsewhere, Charli displays massive amounts of vulnerability, as when she confesses to being a bad friend to the recently deceased Scottish DJ and electronic dance artist SOPHIE on the tribute song “So I”, or admits to being an insecure mess who “snag[s] her tights out on the lawn chair” and “[doesn’t] know if [she] belongs here anymore” on the fourth track “I might say something stupid”. In “I think about it all the time”, she contemplates the all-too-relatable idea of having a baby before she “run[s] out of time.” She even sings about being intimated by a powerhouse girl who sounds suspiciously like Taylor Swift on the eminently danceable “Sympathy is a knife”.

It's an unvarnished ethos that extends to everything from Charli’s fashion to friend groups. Charli XCX’s team of publicists, managers and stylists won’t deny that the rollout of her best-selling, zeitgeist-capturing album was methodically planned. (Longtime creative director Imogene Strauss told Billboard the team dissected more than 65 shades of green to find just the right one.) But you wouldn’t know it to look at how the singer-songwriter presents herself to the public. Charli is just as likely to appear in men’s long-sleeved shirts and ripped jeans as she is to wear Balenciaga couture. (That hasn’t stopped Vogue UK from shilling brat-style tank tops from The Row Essentials that retail for 330 British pounds—that’s 24,819 in Philippine pesos!—or Saint Laurent leather jackets that cost close to 300,000 pesos.)

More importantly, Charli XCX has been an active proponent for inclusivity. This is another value that dovetails with Gen Z thinking: According to the 2021 McCann Worldgroup study, 70% of respondents believe that “the best way to come up with a creative idea is by bringing together people that look different and think differently.” And so, apart from producing music with the non-binary SOPHIE, Charli recruited the transgender actress Hari Nef (who appeared as one of the Barbies in Barbie) and the lesbian internet personality Julia Fox for the “360” music video. In September, she will be co-headlining a world tour with the proudly gay Australian pop star Troye Sivan.

The Kamala connection

Obviously, authenticity and inclusivity are attributes that the Kamala Harris campaign want to attach the candidate to. But Harris’s loud presence on social media may go a long way to explaining why she is the perfect politician for this brat moment.

TikTok and X users seem to be uniquely inspired by a progressive woman of color who has been known to dance at the drop of a hat and deliver unself-conscious peals of laughter. During a May 2023 White House speech at an event for expanding opportunities for Hispanic Americans, Harris touched on something her Indian mother used to say: “My mother...would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’”

The internet immediately went to work. The viral speech has generated north of 47 million posts on TikTok and inspired countless remixes, lip syncs and breathless commentary from liberal podcasters. Bringing it back to brat, an X user named Ryan Long worked until 3 am to score footage of different Harris appearances to Charli XCX’s single “Von dutch.” In the caption to his tweet, he even mused about his edit: “Why can’t I stop watching it on repeat?”

But the second portion of Harris’s viral speech is also worth mentioning. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” the presidential candidate prophetically declared. And in a coincidental act of call-and-response, Charli XCX sings about a toxic relationship in the ironically sunny “Apple”: “I think the apple’s rotten right to the core/From all the things passed down/From all the apples coming before.”

We won’t know until November if Kamala Harris will ride this wave of green all the way to the White House. Already pop culture pundits are declaring that, with her tacit political endorsement, Charli XCX has put an end to brat summer. But this strikes me as a lot of wishful thinking; if last year’s Barbie pink craze is anything to go by, we still have a deluge of “brat green” to look forward to in the fall fashion runways.

In the meantime, show your millennial and Gen Z co-workers that you’re brat by being your authentic self, being inclusive in your interactions with others...and maybe unabashedly spilling some red wine down the front of your white tank top.

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Brats is streaming now on Disney+. Gabriel Smith’s novel Brat is available in Fully Booked. You can stream Charli XCX’s album brat on Spotify, iTunes, or anywhere you get your music.