When you're in the mirror, do you like what you see?
On Brat, the album(s) of the year
If I choose to believe my Apple Music end-of-year stats page, the amount of time I spent listening to music in 2024 tripled compared to last year. Much of that time was dedicated to streaming the discography of Fall Out Boy on repeat as I spent the spring and summer working on a book-length project about the band. This was how I chose to spend my summer vacation, with a list of rules like “wake up before 8” and “write 1000 words each day, even if they are bad” and “it is okay to occasionally break rules” written in the first page of a tiny notebook I carried everywhere. I wrote at home, in the local coffee shops where I sometimes see the local authors, in the Cortelyou branch of the Brooklyn library system. I wrote close to 20,000 words before something bad happened—I hit an existential crisis, started experiencing awful, daily panic attacks, and almost entirely gave up. On one particularly bad day in August, I bawled on the B train as I returned home after trying and failing to buy a new work shirt at Old Navy, lost in my head over what kind of colors and cuts I like, and what “liking” something even means.
This crisis coincided with the release of Brat, Charli xcx’s sixth album. Brat is an album about perception, the careful consideration of self, image, legacy, likability, and, in the words of Tim Kreider, the negotiation that exists between the rewards of being loved and the mortifying ordeal of being known. This tension can be heard all over Brat and its companion, the stunningly-complete remix album Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, which constantly pushes the listener away while begging for their approval, puts up an armor of cool-girl-chic while questioning the construction of the armor itself. Consider the juxtaposition of “I think about it all the time,” a tender electro-ballad centered on the potential for motherhood and how having a baby might end a career in pop music, with “365,” the track that immediately follows it, a song about looking hot while doing coke. Consider the title, a gendered insult which has been reclaimed as an aspirational aesthetic. Consider the artwork, a blurry .jpeg in gaudy lime green that has without question evolved into the most iconic album artwork of the year, if not decade. Brat is a magic eye poster, an exercise in perception that asks you what you see, how you see it, and why you see it that way.
The triumph of the dual-album, the apex of the entire Brat project, is the remix to “Girl, so confusing” featuring Lorde. The original track from Brat is a confessional, with Charli airing out the confusing details of her relationship to fellow cool-girl pop star Lorde, who seems entirely unreadable. Do you like me? Do you hate me? Are you jealous of me? Why do you act so strangely around me? The chorus reflects the conclusion: girl / it’s so confusing sometimes / to be a girl.
The remixed track is where the thesis of Brat is cracked wide open, with Lorde responding directly to the first verse, deconstructing her own behavior and attitude, demonstrating her awareness that the armor she has built around her own insecurities and discomforts with perception could be seen as a threat to another woman:
“Girl you walk like a bitch,”
When I was ten someone said that
And it’s just self defense
Until you’re building a weapon
She believed my projection
and now I totally get it
Forgot that inside the icon
There’s still a young girl from Essex
When the chorus kicks back in, “it’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl” feels more like a statement on community and solidarity against patriarchy rather than an isolating force between two women. It is this trick that the album pulls off so well, so frequently: showing you a card, then showing you the same card again later but making it feel like a different card. It’s the re-use and recontextualizing of the instrumental to “360” as “365,” and in the greater sense, it’s the act of remixing an album so thoroughly and intentionally (so many of the remixes are better than the original songs! Sorry “Apple” lovers!) that the end result is a different album entirely—but it’s also still Brat.
I am hopeful that I will return to my book soon. The good thing about an existential crisis is that reconsidering the way you see yourself inherently changes the way you see the world around you. I also know that when I finally do sit back down to continue, the final product will reflect a more complete, more honest version of the author. I tell my students that the work of writing is almost entirely the work of revising, and in 2025, I hope to embody that ethos.
It’s the end of the year! This year I watched fewer movies and played fewer video games and read more books and listened to more music than I have since the pandemic started. That feels good to me, like I’ve reclaimed some part of myself that I’ve lost. That being said I still watched a lot of movies and played a good handful of video games, so I’ll share the best of the best below:
Films of the year:
Challengers and I Saw The TV Glow are both all-timers, two movies that I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving. I feel more removed from Oscar season than I have in a long time this year, due in part to the knowledge that the two movies of the year I see as lasting masterpieces stand no chance of taking home a trophy.
Special shout out to Rap World, which still makes me laugh when I remember the lyrics “I’m a superhero and I only kill teachers” or “The credit card was invented by Hitler / He is the same type of person who’d litter.” You should watch it if you, like me, owned an Avenged Sevenfold shirt in 2008.
I loved a lot of movies this year—I use Letterboxd obsessively and try to write at least something about every movie I watch, so follow me there for more. Here is my full, numbered list of my top 27 movies of 2024.
Books of the year:
I bought a Kindle this year, which led me to reading more than I have in years. I’m finally sticking to Goodreads, which tells me I read 21 books this year. That’s starting from about May, and doesn’t include stuff I read for school, like Persepolis (adored) and Macbeth for the seventh time.
The four new releases I loved were Sloane Crosley’s Grief is for People, Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year, Tracy O’Neill’s Woman of Interest, and Lucy Sante’s I Heard Her Call My Name. I love a memoir! What can I say? I remain largely immune to buzzy novels, which I would like to change in 2025. I tried to love Martyr! this year along with everyone I know and sadly I just thought it was okay. If you have a good recommendation, please tell me about it.
Games of the year:
Kind of a muted year for games for me—I did finish Alan Wake 2 in January, which turned my world upside down and I think sets the standard for narrative in ~interactive media~ but I played about 99% of that in 2023. I also played through Persona 3 Reload, which took all year, and which I ultimately felt was Pretty Good.
The two new games I actually loved this year were Tekken 8 and Balatro. Tekken 8 is a game where you dress fighting game characters up in silly outfits and spend 15 minutes trying to find the perfect shade of khaki for the business-casual outfit you are designing for Nina Williams (apparently there is also a fighting game inside of it, weird). Balatro is a serotonin machine that utilizes the mechanics of poker and the trappings of the rogue-like genre to make numbers go up and brain feel good. I am not really one for mobile games, but I am still proud of myself for not downloading the iOS version of Balatro because I am positive it would become a problem for me and I would start seeing Flushes and Full Houses in my sleep like Tetris pieces.
Thank you for reading. If you loved or hated Brat or know the hex code for a good business-casual coded shade of khaki, please share below. You can also follow me on Bluesky (twist) which I am still debating actually using. Threads, as it turns out, sucks, so I deleted my account there.
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