brat green glasses: a theory (part two)

what happens to a (digital) dream deferred?

~Last time we got into it with the DNC and a prediction based on the last ten years of american party movement, but now let’s get into it with brat and the current state of melancholic club music, aimed like a canon at a numb grasping for an infinite moment (to be found between snare hits, i suppose), leading to what? resignation, naturally~

WHEN I GO TO THE CLUB, I WANNA HEAR THOSE CLUB CLASSICS.

If you type “who is brat” into google, you’ll get two or three youtube thumbnails of Kamala Harris and then in the corner a small headshot of Charli XCX nearby the vague label of Artist. And what was Charli’s art here? Was it Harris’s image?

No, of course not,—it’s hard to fault charli too much for any of this. She’s celebrating a ridiculously successful aesthetic extracted out from the history of house music and the last fifteen years of poptimism,—she’s turned both on their head in a way that resounds tremendously. That’s all to say, brat, as a culmination of her work in subverting pop trends and notions of camp, is a wonderful work of art, a near perfect puke-green package nearly as resounding a cohesive aesthetic statement as Sgt. Pepper’s was in 1967.

And yet at the same time it has taken on a life of its own. Brat’s become a meme, through and through, a stand-in for endless variations on a theme. This needs no saying, naturally; Brat Summer is still everywhere, even if the summer has come to a close. But what is the theme? Why does it resonate in the way it does?

There has been much online discussion about what exactly brat stands for. It’s proved to be a very patient empty vessel for whatever desires of the moment spring up.

Gita Jackson hits the nail on the head, however, that its most pure distillation is that of a yearning for the infinite moment. Charli isn’t a 365 party girl because it makes her feel fulfilled, no no no,—it’s the yearning for transcendence through a handful of small moments of infinite feeling that makes her album what it is.

“The world that exists for the 365 party girl, the protagonist of a Charli XCX album, is one that centers around annihilating the self. Sometimes it’s in moments of rare altruism, like the now well known communal experience of the girl’s bathroom at the club. Other times it’s about becoming one with the crowd, dancing and screaming to music. Sometimes it’s also about real self-annihilation, a state I’ve experienced too much, about trying to feel something other and better than being oneself (with the aid of a lot of drugs).”

It’s a secular faith in the power of music, synchronized to rhythm, going into the other room for the sake of some powder to feel above the universe, to feel annihilated beneath it, and still hearing the droning bass in the other room, still hearing the people in the other room that are having such a good time and whether that’s performative or not it doesn’t matter because the feeling of the spectator,—whether they’re looking at the scenes of the party through their phone or through headphones or through the bathroom wall,—doesn’t become the feeling of a participant for very long. And that feeling, of participation, is nothing more than a fleeting white flag, a reassertion of some secular transcendence, strikes you down and you feel okay and tranquil for a moment until that moment sinks away as others around around you emerge out from your zoning out. And now you’re back fighting to wrest away the feeling of that infinte moment again. All one has to do is work within the motions.

The desire that fills brat is the contradiction inherent between the desire to be anything but oneself (to be absorbed into the raw feeling of irl spaces), and the desire to be the one which the moment chooses as its vessel for transcendence,—these two thoughts cannot coincide completely, one is communal and the other solipsistic.

This desire for transcendence, either into the crowd or into oneself as the supreme clubber, is continually deferred and where does that lead? It leads to the end of the night where the birds are singing because it’s 3am and all you want is to lean out that window into the abyss, fall into your phone, be absorbed into bedsheets,—but lean out that window too far and you find yourself falling, falling, falling into the abyss.

And so brat, as an album, is an inherently tragic moment. It’s a smiling, dancing, pushing towards feeling, towards passion, pushing for the sake of the pushing—because what else is there to do except dance dance dance until you’re on the precipice of a breakthrough into true bohemian transcendence.

There’s a human sadness to brat that speaks well for its takeover of the summer, a fascination with emptiness in people and a desire for escaping the emptiness of modern life through a moment or two of the highest possible highs. This summer has felt like that, to a certain extent; living life feels painful because of how stagnant it has become, because of how dead the future seems. This feeling coincides, i think, with the increasing tidal wave of layoffs as AI solutions continue to be rolled out on a national scale. The future has been cancelled, and moreso the internet,—once seen as a space for the future to unfold,—has been increasingly automated, pushing the human element firmly out. A dream deferred. A human future seems impossible. Why not resign oneself to the dance? I still have faith in music, to some extent,—is this a mistake?

INDUSTRIAL MUSIC → ONLINE MUSIC

House and Industrial music have only in very recent years been able to make such an incredible leap to the mainstream,—it’s been a long time coming. Comparing Beyoncé’s Renaissance, or The Dare’s throwback to the 2000s electroblog malaise of LCD Soundsystem, to that of some of the significant originators of the industrial music experimentation, like Throbbing Gristle in 1976 who would strip naked and slit open their tongues on stage with double edged razor blades (and much, much worse¹), feels ridiculous.

The trend line of gradual defanging seems obvious in retrospect, it always does.

Much of early Industrial dance music involved the notion of merging with the machine, living through the circuit board, humankind fused with the future. Electronic passions. Dance music is precisely music that’s ‘on the rails,’ so to say; the beat doesn’t change dramatically even if a story is told amidst it, and this in part is where the charm lies. “Dancing about sex, power, image, warfare, identity or consciousness forces oneself to think about the mechanics of those things and how they operate as a complex network of interloping processes, just like the music,” as writes Pablo Gallardo for Pop Matters.

Kraftwerk wrote about about future utopias. Daft Punk spoke through the voice of the machine for its anonymity and its universality. Much of early electronic music, like brittish punk its heyday, played around with a winking fascism,—and for dance it works, because again, everything is mechanized and driven by passion as they’re extracted and plugged into the machine. What was the advent of nazism in germany but an accumulation and mechanization of human passions? Their aesthetic choices were meant to be a political statement, but moreso a warning about what is coming in the coming cyborg century. Is it a surprise that Kanye, who similarly spoke through the machine for 808s and Heartbreaks (but ditched the anonymity of Daft Punk’s project for a manic grabbing at becoming the biggest name on the planet), would let the machine work on him to such a drastic extent that he would one day deign himself publicly as a proud nazi?

If industrial music in America was the music of industry, having emerged out from the predominantly black working classes of Detroit, Chicago, and New York,—exploring the same mechanization of the labor class that the experimental european artists were exploring, though albeit in much more explicitly pessimistic terms,—then the modern strain of House music is firmly Post-Industrial: the sound of the working class having been transitioned, like the working class itself, from the factory floor to the digital economy, from music to be primarily listened to and performed within a club setting, into music that’s listened to and performed at home, through over-ear headphones.

And then the Hyperpop moment arrived during the pandemic, a perfect nexus point where so many of the threads of Post-Industrial House music fused fully and firmly with 2000s pop aesthetics to create a seismic earthquake of sorts. The stars aligned, and not for long, naturally. It turned out to be much to singular a moment to live for very long.

HYPERPOP AS MOMENT OF TRANSCENDENCE

Thinking back to my childhood when i first discovered the internet, i can’t help but wonder what were those hopes and dreams that cyberspace had so inspired in me? The promise of transcendence online felt real and radical,—all of us had our eyes on a fleeting moment of solipsistic futurism, bliss in the eternity of it all where we could curl up in a fetal position amidst what felt like a viable Archimedean Point for us as individuals.

I can’t look back on them without the same twisted, sickly feeling as when i look back on childhood friendships having soured with time. You and your internet, me and my internet, weren’t we the closest of friends? What happened?

The pandemic broke most of our minds, i think, precisely because it represented a mass rupture from the past,—suddenly we were irrevocably no longer where our cultural nostalgia pointed in the hazy culture of the late twentieth century,—and a promise for real change. Things were happening, actually happening, for the first time in many of our lifetimes. It felt like a precipice for real change; an actualizing of the promise of the internet as we all turned into isolated bodies engaging in unreal spaces.

And out of this malaise, this sort of fascinating and strange moment of mass isolation, came the Hyperpop moment. The music designed for irl spaces became suddenly and irrevocably the music designed for headphones;—all of the rules were turned on their head, the promise of collective self-annihilation/transcendence through togetherness in real world clubs, concert halls, stadiums, sticky-floored bars, became fully a promise of solipistic self-annihilation through bluetooth speakers and over-ear headphones.

Losing so much in the arrangement,—with those spaces, DIY music communities and underground music venues disappearing basically over night,—hyperpop felt and sounded like their funeral procession. Imagine a long line of hearses moving down a city street, each blasting radio hits from a different three-year increment of the past twenty years of pop music, so many discordant sounds playing at once that become soupy in the air between their procession and the listener (you) sitting and trying to make sense of it according to your own personal nostalgia for those moments in music.

There was a bit of hope in such a moment, though, as underneath all of the digital noise, all of the imitations of imitations of imitations, it felt as though something genuinely new was emerging.

But of course, as we all know, as the pandemic receded and we all entered fully into the twenty-first century, the promise of the pandemic as a precipice was either repressed or lost entirely. SOPHIE’s untimely death, in a way, also brought down the tentpole; hyperpop died with her and whatever’s left of that moment, best embodied by Charli XCX and A.G. Cook, feels in service to her sugary sine-wave ghost.

And so the remnants become bound to melancholia for what was lost; nostalgia creeps over the horizon of the new, back to when it was actually new. The mandate remains that nothing changes. The future is not allowed, of course, to happen, and so we were put back into the same world that the pandemic destroyed. We’re still here in the ashes of that world and our melancholia towards the 2010s feels off perhaps because what we’re yearning for is simply a real world to live in,—but the real world of the 2010s was itself empty and devoid of meaning, so now we’re lost completely, drenched in meaninglessness, yearning for a time that was the only time as devoid of meaning as our own.

Perhaps the reason we long for the club scenes of the 2010s is precisely because we feel that they weren’t as performative as they are now,—we live in the apocalypse of the real, unfortunately everything is performative and when we dance we dance to escape our disappointment at the extent to which the future failed to live up to our expectations.

TRANSCENDENCE LOST

Being barred behind the cold bars of backlit screens, we yearn for human connection but every gesture feels bound up, hand-in-hand, with the loss of the real world to the false transcendence given to us by these digital spaces. At the same time every occasion for real world interaction outside the confines of wage labor feels poised towards the annihilation of the self. Nobody speaks to anyone, everyone’s sat together in a somber adherence to trying to juice something, anything out of the moment. The number of people going to concerts and clubs out of their head on ketamine has gone up substantially,—and it’s easy to ask what is the point of going out if you’re just going to zone out completely, but isn’t that itself the point? We don’t go clubbing to feel anything substantial, just to feel as if we’ve lost ourselves completely in the real.

The promise of the future is nullified;—who can scarcely imagine a version of the future better than this already abhorrent moment? On the surface of things, everything seems poised to get substantially worse and any idea of a new world, a better world, is shunned into submission.

And that’s of course where the Brat aesthetic comes hurtling back into this essay: because there’s a desire towards self-annihilation that fills up our third spaces, because there’s an adherence to nihilism, because there’s a resignation to an infinite moment of solipsistic, apocalyptic moment of individual transcendence, because interactions with other people is dangerous, in a way its never been before, but when you synchronize your dancing with strangers feeling something similar, you form a bond in a yearning for the void, for a pure digitization of the self.

The transcendent moment seemed to come during the Pandemic. It should have been a virtual rapture, a time when our faith in a digital future was redeeemed and we could all go cruising off into the san junipero simulation of our dreams. But it didn’t happen. We’re all the rejects, it turns out. Cyberspace heaven wasn’t any more achievable than the Christian heaven, it turns out.

So what do we do now except throw ourselves from windows into the open air? Perhaps we would feel something before we hit the ground.

THE AMERICANIZATION (OR RESIGNATION?) OF THE CLUB

The DNC this year snatched up Charli’s aesthetic like a parent discovering an internet buzzword from six months ago only to repeat it ad naseum until it’s truly and unequivocally more dead than the most dead of horses, and her aesthetic itself (that of a uk femme clubber), which was in its own way pulled from the modern uk clubbing culture and the working class european boom of house/techno/pirate-radio in the ‘90s, feels as if it’s finally been bludgeoned unwillingly into the same category of pop culture as the lab-crafted internationalist pop of early 2000s pop the summoned up Fight Song which Hillary beat to death on the campaign trail in 2016.

This emptiness at the heart of a secular rush for feeling something, feeling anything, does compare well to that of the navel-gazing blue collar aesthetics of early country music, of springsteen’s best works, and this of course makes it perfect for political capture. To bring up Kierkegaard for a sec,—i just came across this quote today lol,—“if this duty [towards infinity] is absolute, the ethical is reduced to a position of relativity.” By taking on and repackaging the aesthetics of a 365 party girl, by taking on the yearning towards a secular moment of transcendence that permeates pop music, they’ve found a way to sideline real dissent about their actions as the ruling class. The ethics of supporting american empire feels secondary now that there’s an adherence to a sort of secular faith towards self-annihilation that’s generally desired in so many people who’ve grown up with the false promise of liberation through technology.

But then again, Charli is not American, she’s British, which throws a whole wrench into the mix with maybe some (idk) bangers and mash?

As Mark Fisher wrote,—of course there’s going to be mention of Fisher here, it’s me after all lol,—when British art pop acts sing about the world, they sing predominantly about “the deterriority of American-originated consumer culture,” which is exactly the case for Charli XCX’s brat character: it’s an attempt to feel something while it’s possible within a stagnant consumer culture that only seems capable of deteriorating from here onwards. Everyone’s under the umbrella of American empire, if not by the threat of drone strikes by the net of consumerism. There’s no escape except that through numbing oneself.

All this reminds me of the phenomenon of wannabe influencers who falsely claim to be represented by brand names, typing up some fake sponsorship in their captions, buying a a rack of clothes from nordstrom to return them two days later after having recorded a number of instagram reels and tiktoks and archived them for the next month, dozens of videos of them walking, turning ever so softly on their feet, and walking back and forth like their brooklyn sublet is actually a runway in paris.

The goal here is to “make it” in the context of the world having been submerged completely beneath the digital: for many people this is the only way to make it. And in a way it does make sense,—i’m not too different with my posting on substack! I’m just as delusional for when i fall into thinking i might be able to make a living on this app! I’m falling for a lie, plain and simple. The hope for transcendence through the digital, tied up with the American grind culture still fills our lungs like a burnt vape. We have to figure out how to rid ourselves of it,—and we’re trying to, even if it’s a subconscious effort to purge ourselves of the digital demon.

The conflation of fashion with clubbing led to the snatching away of the club aesthetic from the working class. It hasn’t happened entirely quite yet, of course,—there still remains a positive outlook to many raves, DJ sets, and boiler room sets; there still remains a look to liberation through sweat and togetherness and movement, sheer movement. But just as the term “boiler room set” became itself coopted into the international Boiler Room brand, so has the aesthetics of working class inner-city parties been turned into multi-hundred dollar statement pieces from DKNY.

Back to Fisher:

“Everyone knows that there has always been a deep affinity between the working class and the aristocracy. Fundamentally aspirational, working-class culture is foreign to the levelling impulse of bourgeois culture — and of course this can be politically ambivalent, since if aspiration is about the pursuit of status and authority, it will confirm and vindicate the bourgeois world. It is only if the desire to escape inspires taking a line of flight towards the proletarian collective body and Nu-earth that it is politically positive.”

It’s clear that with the current clubbing renaissance, this deep affinity has returned to a full bloom. Designer brands are drawing on the working class’s aesthetics while the working class continues to pursue status, authority, to become a part of the aristocracy, and so the line of flight is not towards a collective body or towards any kind of nu-earth but towards a personal ascendance for the individuals on the dance floor. This is nothing new, of course. The classic American lie is that anyone can make it into the upper altitudes of the air-locked mountains of wealth in this country. But something about this desire feels different today… Perhaps it’s because any faith in escape through enlisting oneself to the economy feels as transparent a lie as it ever has been… Perhaps because the transcendence we now crave is to simply not exist… Taking power in any meaningful way feels impossible,—or at least, taking power away from the current ruling class enough to steer this ship away from the iceberg… Escaping the future with all its horrors feels impossible (and thus the trolley problem meme has become perhaps the most apt metaphor for our era)… Human feeling feels to have become obsolete, dangerous, frightening,—how did that happen? Perhaps the only way out then is through a couple fleeting moments, through snorting up our rapidly decreasing irl experiences like they’re club drugs, in pursuit, always in pursuit, of an infinite, neverending NOW…

Unfortunately the infinite moment, as something Americans have historically craved it,—whether be it by opioids or by blockbuster media franchises,—is easy to market and easy to use. The ethical becomes suspended under the weight of faith. Abraham was fine to murder his son because a voice in his head told him he must.

Sure, trump would be substantially worse if he wins this election, but let’s not fall for the idea that Harris will be any better when it comes to Palestine or that she’ll not likely be further to the right on domestic issues than Biden was,—those are little white lies. For most of the democratic party, calling for a ceasefire is no more than a lyric to sing. Sure, Harris is brat,—the party quite literally did select her for transcendence,—but let’s not assume that’s a good thing if brat is a desire for self-annihilation by way of resignation to the further decline of our planet and/or the cancellation of the future, these two ideas being perhaps the only ones any of us believe in anymore.

Anyways,

Until next time!

Xoxoxoxoxoxox,

Briffin

P.S. Any typos were entirely intentional and in no way something i missed while self-editing.

1. and there’s quite a bit worse than that on display at Throbbing Gristle shows if you look into it,—they would do some of the most truly vile things to themselves on stage that i can imagine,—i can scarcely think of a more disturbing performance than any of a handful of TG shows in their first five years. Look into it if you dare. I wouldn’t recommend it.