Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic If you are texting the culturally aware teens in your life to ask “Um, what is ‘brat?’” I’m here to tell you, in the words of Charli XCX’s fans, that brat is a state of mind.You have almost certainly known Charli for longer than just a week. Her 2012 collaboration with Icona Pop, “I Love It”, with its irresistible crux (“you’re from the 70s, and I’m a 90s bitch!”) is a staple of wedding dance floors. And you may also have heard her 2014 hit “Boom, Clap”, a top ten single in which “the beat goes on, and on and on and on”.This June, Charli released her sixth album, with a slime green cover that went inescapably viral, its words spelt out in lower case, low-fi, pixelated font: “brat”. That word, which from the 1500s meant beggars’ children and evolved to mean spoiled, unsavoury ones, was rebranded by Charli and her team, then embraced by the internet, carrying vice-president Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign on its shoulders.Originally brat meant, according to Charli, “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes . . . feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown . . . It’s very honest, it’s very blunt, a little bit volatile.”But when Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, the popular enthusiasm for both women warped and fused. Memes bubbled across the internet: clips of Harris tinged in green asked if we think we just fell out of a coconut tree; gay men partying on Fire Island with Kamala T-shirts in brat green appeared in less than a day. Harris’s campaign quickly embraced the memes, and when Charli tweeted “Kamala IS brat”, the word grew to fully envelop her, and the race was on.“Brat is about agency!” one friend tells me. “It means we don’t have to live with this terrible world!” “Brat is action, baby!” says another. “Brat is,” says a third, quoting a Harris speech, “what can be, unburdened by what has been!”Charli XCX has recently been compared with other Gen Z pop stars, from Chappell Roan to Sabrina Carpenter, but in fact she’s been around for much longer. She got her start in 2008, as 15-year-old Charlotte Emma Aitchison of Start Hill in Essex, posting songs on MySpace. When a promoter invited her to warehouse raves in London, her parents would drive her in, and stand supportively in the back while she performed.This was the London New Rave scene of the early 2000s, known for DIY, electronic-influenced indie music that you could lose your mind to late at night. Charli was quickly signed to Atlantic/Asylum Records and released her first studio album, True Romance in 2013, which the Guardian said sounded like “an imminent star steadily staking a claim to her own turf”.But it took time. “My career hasn’t been A to B,” she has said, and for the next decade she swung between chasing commercial success and her own, independent voice. The following years were busy. She co-wrote hits for stars including Camila Cabello and Selena Gomez. Her second album, Sucker, was named one of 2014’s best pop albums by Rolling Stone. When she started working with UK art collective PC Music, her work became more experimental, though she recently told Billboard Magazine that her “vision wasn’t fully realised”. All the same, her fan base, known collectively as Charli’s Angels, continued to grow in size and loyalty. Charli’s latest album, Brat, is her most confident. It ranges from club banger (“365, party girl, I’m bumpin’ that”), to biological clock ballad (“Should I stop my birth control? ‘Cause my career feels so small In the existential scheme of it all”), and from unapologetic (“This one’s for all my mean girls”) to questioning (“I’m famous but not quite”). It feels sort of ugly, like that slime green, but also crisp and compelling, experimental, and ultimately addictive. And that bundle of opposing feelings is, in a nutshell, brat. In February, Charli performed a hugely oversubscribed set at Boiler Room in Brooklyn, manning the DJ booth in sheer tights, no trousers and a big blue T-shirt emblazoned with the words “CULT CLASSIC”. This autumn, she will co-headline the Sweat Tour, an arena tour with Australian singer-songwriter Troye Sivan, and has four UK arena dates planned for late 2024.Some fear that “brat” is already over, given the warp-speed at which internet trends travel. If the Financial Times is discussing brat, are we post-brat? Charli thinks not. “Oh?” she posted on Instagram on Friday, alongside a carousel of memes declaring brat “season” dead. You could say that Charli and Harris actually have a lot in common. They’ve both been in the game for a long time, and have worn many hats, some of which fit more comfortably than others. Charli’s music on Harris’s endorsement reawakened those American voters whose political energy had been dormant for years. It reminded them — in the wake of the travails of an ageing president, an assassination attempt, a criminal conviction and a divisive war — that politics, and life, could be fun.As her hit song “360” puts it: “I’m your favourite reference, baby.” And if Charli’s Angels and the TikTok teens have anything to do with it, “brat summer” may well last right up until election night on November [email protected] writer is the host of Life and Art, the culture podcast of FT Weekend, which recently covered Charli XCX and brat summer
