It’s the word that has completely taken over this summer: Brat. Paired with the bright hue of lime green, brat might have started off as the title of British pop star Charli XCX’s sixth studio album but it has evolved into so much more. Since “BRAT” dropped on June 7, it’s been at the epicenter of pop culture; brat was adopted by numerous marketing campaigns, sparked trends like “brat summer” and was even fully embraced by Vice President Kamala Harris. But what is brat and what does it mean to call something that?
As by Charli described in a July 1 TikTok, being “brat” evokes “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes. Who feels 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.”
Charli’s definition of brat is fully reflected in her album of the same name, which touches on a spectrum of topics, like partying, insecurity, competition, motherhood and relationships. Brat is messy, real, authentic, fun. It can be a title someone gives themselves, but it’s also a way to describe a general aura or essence. In a June interview with “The News Movement,” Charli described brat as having the ability to “be like, so trashy … just like a pack of cigs and a Bic lighter. And like, a strappy white top with no bra.”
Brat is a state of mind, a calling card of the counterculture. It captures the refusal to conform to constraints of being prim and proper, and because of this, some people took serious offense to it being taken up in the political sphere. Several media outlets, including Pitchfork, went as far as to pronounce brat “dead,” attributing the loss to a tweet made by Charli on July 21 where she proclaimed, “Kamala IS brat.”
This three-word message came the same day President Joe Biden announced he was ending his re-election campaign and nominating Harris to run in his place. With the head brat’s endorsement in hand, Harris’s team fully leaned into the moment, using the album’s signature green color and typeface in the campaign's Twitter profile and posting “BRAT”-themed memes. It wasn’t long before it was making headlines in unlikely spaces like CNN and Fox News, which confirmed to many that brat’s time had come to an end.
Well, I guess someone should’ve told the mass of TikTok accounts that have been editing viral videos and memes combining songs from “BRAT” with clips of Harris, because they certainly haven’t gotten the memo. It almost warrants asking: were we too hasty in throwing away brat? Did we misunderstand its true impact? I would say so.
In an article analyzing Harris’s campaign approach, KUOW reporter Katie Campbell asserts that “this isn’t some passing social media moment. It indicates a younger candidate’s potential ability to appeal to younger voters.” For Washington state voters like 18-year old Rohana Joshi, who is quoted in KUOW's article, utilizing brat has gotten a lot of people “on the Harris train,” as she says Harris has shown relatability in adopting organic pop cultural moments like brat.
I mean, look, on TikTok videos that remix Charli’s song “365” with Harris’s “you think you fell out of a coconut tree?” sound bite, I've literally read comments that say “I have registered to vote for the first time because of this” or “I wasn’t planning on voting in November but now I am.” I’m actually gonna go so far as to argue that Harris has the credentials to capitalize on a pop culture moment like brat, seeing that during her time as a politician, she has racked quite the catalog of internet memes.
From the seminal “We did it, Joe” to her iconic laugh, Harris is a meme queen in her own right, so it only makes sense that she would adopt brat into her presidential campaign. The fact that she has tapped into the method of meme culture, which people 40 and under have been using to express their emotions for as long as we have been online, is not only extremely organic but it’s already shown to be pivotal in energizing a critical voting bloc. It also just goes to show the true power of all that is brat.
Brat, the opposite of the mainstream, lines up perfectly with what Harris represents. In the front-facing sense, in 2020, she was not your typical run-of-the-mill older white guy who usually gets picked for a presidential running mate. In an interview with NBC News, Abigail De Kosnik, associate professor at the Berkeley Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley, emphasized this point by saying, “I think there’s some edge to Harris being the first Black and Asian American woman candidate for president of the United States — that kind of just puts her automatically in that defiant kind of oppositional space in the culture.”
And I would say the same goes for Charli and what brat represents. There’s something so cool about the fact that Charli and Harris, two women of South Asian descent, can defy the standard put forth by society that tells women of color they need to be perfect and strive to impossible levels of excellence in order to be successful.
“‘BRAT’ just sets Kamala Harris’ campaign up for that defiant stance that says, ‘We’re not perfect, and you’re going to call us out on everything, but we’re still winning because we’re honest and we’re just ourselves, and we’re going to take this whole thing,’” De Kosnik said.
And that’s at the heart of what brat is all about. It’s reclaiming a term that is meant as an insult and instead going, “Yeah, you know what? I am brat, and I’m proud of it.” Being a brat isn’t about playing by someone else's rules. Instead, it’s about saying, “went my own way and I made it,” just like Charli proclaims in her song “360” and just like Harris has done in her political career.
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