There’s a Charli XCX sized hole in Camp! Kitsch! Schmaltz! Schlock!, so correspondent
is here to discuss Brat Summer <3I spent much of June 20, my phone propped up beside me on my work-from-home desk, streaming the TikTok Live of the Greenpoint, Brooklyn brat wall (2024-2024, RIP, “ok, bye!”) which Charli XCX’s team had used to represent different stops on the PR cycle of the brat era.
STOP 1: Initial release of the album brat (painted now iconic brat green, depicting the original album art).
STOP 2: The deluxe version of the album (painted white, title updated to brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not).
STOP 3: June 20, the wall is erasured to the words:
there’s three
which over the next several hours would be altered by muralists on a scissor lift to ultimately read
l or d e
Those of us having a brat summer immediately thought of “Girl, so confusing,” the track widely speculated (though at the time not yet confirmed) to be about the New Zealand singer/songwriter Lorde.
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Much of the brat discourse focused on the perception of “diss” tracks. Specifically, which pop culture figures the diss tracks were about. The fervor lead Charli XCX to address the topic in a now-deleted TikTok:
I’m seeing online that some people think that there are diss tracks on brat, and I just wanted to come on here and clarify that there aren’t, apart from Von Dutch which kind of is, but the other tracks in question aren’t diss tracks. They’re really just about how it’s so complicated being an artist, especially a female artist, where you are pitted against your peers but also expected to be best friends with every single person constantly. And if you’re not, you’re like, deemed a bad feminist. And that to me is just, like, such an unrealistic expectation…these songs are kind of about how, as a woman, as an artist, some days you can feel on top of the world, some days you can feel unbelievably insecure, other days you can feel highly competitive, sometimes you can feel like literal trash…it’s really emotional and it’s complicated to deal with, and we’re not supposed to talk about it, but these songs do talk about it, and I’ll probably be chastised for it, but whatever. It’s reality. (r/charlixcx)
Several tracks on brat received the diss-course attention. “Sympathy is a knife,” with its reference to that “one girl” who “taps all my insecurities,” who Charli sees “backstage at my boyfriend’s show,” seems to refer to Taylor Swift, although whether the song really disses the singer is up for a debate I will not directly engage in, because I value my life.
In the opening of “Von dutch,” the first single, Charli taunts, “It’s okay to admit that you’re jealous of me,” calling to mind the partying, muscle-car-club-queen voice Charli has used throughout her career, in particular in her first PC Music collab, the Vroom Vroom EP. But from the time I first heard it, I considered, perhaps infuriatingly, that “Von dutch” was a diss track on the speaker. As Naomi Klein might put it, the diss track is the “shadow-laden woods” where Charli XCX finds herself confronting not the dissed, but herself.
In Naomi Klein’s 2023 Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Klein describes pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s How They Met Themselves:
It depicts a couple in medieval dress in a dark forest who come across another couple who are their mirror image. It is not a happy encounter. The man who sees his double draws his sword in anger, while his female companion faints, overcome by the uncanny sight…When I first came across it, I realized that this is what it means to embark on a doppelganger journey—when I set off, I too had my figurative sword drawn, ready to do battle and be the last Naomi standing. Now, in these shadow-laden woods, I find myself confronting not her but myself, and the uncomfortable truth that I still care, far too much, about the image I am projecting into the world.
In Doppelganger, Klein offers an analysis of our current bifurcated political moment through the lens of her well-documented chronic case of mistaken identity. Klein has long been confused with another public figure, Naomi Wolf (whose shift from 90s liberal third-wave feminist to 2020s anti-vax podcast guest of Steve Bannon is its own curiosity). I thought of Klein’s framing of the mirror — the impulse to confront what you discover is actually yourself — a little after midnight on June 21, while I listened, along with the rest of the bisexual world, to “The girl, so confusing version with lorde.”
Charli XCX has long pivoted between two modes — the bombastic, hard-shelled, untouchable pop star of “Vroom Vroom,” and the sensitive, insecure, relatable version especially characteristic of her 2020 pandemic album, how i’m feeling now. “I only threw this party for you,” she croons, on the verge of tears, on “party 4 u.” So in my reading of “Von dutch,” it’s okay for Charli-the-insecure to admit that she’s jealous of the party girl persona she herself projects.
“Girl, so confusing” complicates this dynamic through the specificity of details (“they say we’ve got the same hair”) that indicate an actual subject, and the subsequent confirmation of such through the Lorde-featuring remix. Charli XCX represents the shadow self she sees in Lorde, and that women see in other women. “You're all about writing poems / But I'm about throwing parties,” she sings, although Charli’s work contains similar dichotomies. (For instance, elsewhere on the album, Charli XCX explores her conflicting desire to keep 365 partygirling while also fantasizing about motherhood.)
“Girl, so confusing” is not so much a diss track as it is, much like Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, an exploration of the phenomenon of, in public life, being mistaken for another, and how the uncanny, unwanted projection impacts your relationship to that person. You are tied together by the mirror. But in “The girl, so confusing version with lorde,” Charli XCX and Lorde explode the projection by facing the mirrors at each other.
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For Klein, doubles are “ways of not seeing”:
Not seeing ourselves clearly (because we are so busy performing an idealized version of ourselves), not seeing one another clearly (because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others), and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly (because we have partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision).
And as Klein continues, this has a frankly apocalyptic dimension: the “who and what we cannot bear to see — in our past, in our present, and in the future racing toward us” is how we (the privileged we) benefit from exploitation of people and the planet (322). In “The girl, so confusing version with lorde,” what Charli and Lorde can’t bear to see is themselves, as they truly are. Charli can’t bear to see the side of herself that isn’t a 365 partygirl, and Lorde can’t bear to see her own body. ”Afraid to be in your pictures,” Lorde describes in a later verse revealing, for the first time publicly, her history of disordered eating.
Earlier this year, the proprietor of this newsletter wrote about the “girl” of it all, in particular the ongoing coquettecore trend in the wake of our post-Roe world (as, on brat, Charli describes the titular “Mean Girls”: “In the sheer white dress, wearing last night's makeup / All coquette-ish in the pictures with the flash on):
So, no, I don’t think women wearing bows is a marker of a desire to return to some trad wife pre-feminist state. Rather, I think it’s more like self-administered reparenting, a psychotherapy in which disturbances in childhood are addressed and a sense of personal agency and control is reassigned from parent to self. Yes, we live in a post-Roe world now and a convicted rapist is quite likely to be president once again, and yet there is control in reclaiming and repairing the original wound that is ruptured again and again by these realities.
I thought of Candice’s observations on reparenting and reclaiming girlhood as I scrolled Reddit on June 21, “The girl, so confusing version with lorde” on repeat in my AirPods.
this healed me was a common sentiment.
this is girlhood was another.
Also, this makes me want to tell my friends i love them.
“The girl, so confusing version with lorde” felt healing because it was shocking, direct, unexpected, public reconciliation. In the lyrics, Charli and Lorde seemed not only to be seeing themselves clearly, but also seeing each other clearly, and representing their connection to the listener with an authenticity on the verge of the uncomfortable.
Brat Summer will likely be remembered as the summer many of us in the mainland US started to truly, physically feel the effects of climate change. In other words, when what many of us avoid looking at came squarely into frame, and we cannot help but see clearly. In our disconnected world, characterized by a loneliness epidemic, when Lorde says, “I ride for you Charli,” and Charli says, “You know I ride for you too,” we cry because deep down we want to ride for each other, and it’s becoming ever more apparent we’re riding toward the end times.
(RACHEL’S) CAMP REC(s)
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Wow, wish Naomi Klein's genius was applied like this more often :)
consider also Apple: "I guess the apple don't fall far from the tree 'cause I've been looking at you so long now I only see me"