Sheer white tank tops. Skinny cigarettes (not vapes). Questionable 3 a.m. decisions.
These may be some of the trappings of a “brat,” otherwise known as a fan of the new Charli XCX album by the same name. Its arrival last week ushered in not only a slate of potential songs of the summer, but also an intense identification with the term — and a shift in mind-set.
“I think there’s a bravado to Charli’s persona, and that’s often what people see in her and what they’d like to see in themselves,” said Biz Sherbert, a host of “Nymphet Alumni,” a culture podcast. “I think the word ‘brat’ is in on that — wanting things to go your way, being badly behaved or self-centered, acting pouty and having an attitude.”
Kelly Chapman, a longtime Charli fan based in Washington, D.C., similarly defined a “brat” as “someone who misbehaves in a cheeky way and doesn’t conform to expectations.”
Ms. Chapman, 31, mused that a “brat” summer would involve: “embracing being a woman in your 30s, rejecting expectations, being honest, having fun but making moves, dating a guy from Twitter.”
Ever since Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hot Girl Summer” five years ago, pop stars and brands, as well as everyday people on social media, have spent each spring competing for the summer’s naming rights. There was the ill-fated Hot Vax Summer, Feral Girl Summer the following year, and of course, most recently, hot pink “Barbie” summer.
There were not many contenders on the scene when “Brat” dropped. With its callback to the sweat-stained, mascara-smudged aughts — when singers danced away their pain rather than therapizing it — and its eye-catching toxic-sludge-green album art, “Brat” seemed to fill a gap in the culture.
“I think people were really craving a fun summer and a collective moment that we could all get behind,” said Shelby Hull, a Charli fan who runs an Instagram page dedicated to It girls who wear wired headphones. “It’s a time to be hot, trashy, drink vodka sodas, fly to Europe on the Amex with $30 in your bank account, stay out until 3 a.m. and not care what anyone thinks.”
But Charli’s adherents are not the only “brats” making an appearance lately. The singer’s album arrived around the same time as Gabriel Smith’s debut novel “Brat,” about a 20-something writer mourning the death of his father and struggling to finish his next book, and the documentary “Brats,” which chronicles the so-called Brat Pack of the 1980s.
The word “brat” has always carried with it associations of low class and low culture, said Skye Paine, an associate professor at the State University of New York at Brockport and a music critic on YouTube. It originally referred to tatty clothing or rags, he said, and dates back to an early 16th-century poem that mentions a “wyle beggar with thy brattis” — which roughly translates to “vile beggar and thy brats.”
Over time, the word has undergone a curious shift in meaning away from “beggar” and toward “spoiled.” In popular culture, it typically points to the youthful and indulgent.
“My novel is about a protagonist reckoning with grief; he does not do this very well,” Mr. Smith said. “Grief, handled in a non-ideal way, has bratty qualities: self-obsession, solipsism, fatalism.”
Almost 40 years ago, in 1985, the writer David Blum coined the phrase “Brat Pack” in a New York magazine cover story to describe a new crop of libertine actors, all under the age of 25, among them Tom Cruise, Nicolas Cage, Rob Lowe.
“It is to the 1980s what the Rat Pack was to the 1960s — a roving band of famous young stars on the prowl for parties, women and a good time,” Mr. Blum wrote. (In the same decade, Hilary DeVries, writing for The Christian Science Monitor, placed Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney, novelists who were all under 30, in a literary brat pack.)
Some suggested that the “brat” Charli’s album invokes was closer to the type defined by the subversive riot grrrls of the 1990s. At the beginning of the decade, Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe were often referred to as brats by their college peers. Ms. Neuman remembered herself and Ms. Wolfe as “stylish, full of attitude, with a lack of respect for authority.”
During the summer, they named their band — which would go on to define the riot grrrl movement — Bratmobile.
“We liked the irreverence of it,” Ms. Neuman, the band’s drummer, said.
But while Charli’s album may seem to endorse a devil-may-care lifestyle and wry demeanor, it also touches on more earnest themes. On one track, Charli memorializes the hyperpop singer Sophie, her departed mentor. On another, she contemplates motherhood.
“It’s fun to be irreverent, but I think we’ve already reached peak irreverence for its own sake,” Ms. Chapman said. As Gen Z-ers and millennials grow older, she added, there seemed to be a move toward if not complete sincerity then a form of irony “that allows honesty to break through.”
If that’s the latest meaning of “brat,” then perhaps it’s not so bratty after all.
