Is Brat falling or failing? Unfiltered thoughts on the new remix album and its overly capitalistic nature

My initial reaction to Charli XCX’s Instagram post announcing the features on her new version was “what the fuck is Julian Casablancas doing here”. A variety of lime-green billboards, displaying a number of wacky celebrity features and big names from pop culture, announced her newest foray into chart-topping mania, “brat and it’s completely different but also still brat”.  In the words of Lorde on the Girl, so confusing remix, honestly, I was speechless.

When I first listened to brat, it was an immediate contender for my album of the year. I found it to be original, vulnerable and yet also punchy in its delivery. I loved the hectic danceability of Von dutch, the acerbic irony of Mean girls, and the unexpected poignancy of I think about it all the time abruptly followed by the unadulterated mania of 365. I could go on. I had no complaints regarding the release of an extended edition, titled “brat and it’s the same but there’s three extra songs so it’s not”, featuring The Dare’s masterful production skills on Guess which I could easily see becoming a firm favourite of mine.  

If I’m being quite frank, I spent the whole summer criticising Taylor Swift’s marketing strategy on The Tortured Poets’ Department, an album which divided fans and critics of Swift alike. As an album, it dashed my high expectations, as I disliked about 80 percent of what seemed to me to be two hours of what closely recalled ChatGPT generated poetry. Where did the true “poet” who wrote Red go? As a result, I remember my mild annoyance when Swift blocked brat’s number one charts debut by releasing a marginally altered version of TTPD. “She’s not a girls’ girl,” I remember saying, “Why doesn’t she give Charli and Chappell Roan a chance at success? They really deserve it!” It seems that even it-girl Sabrina Carpenter was slightly snubbed by the once artist, now seemingly corporate monolith (with an ungodly amount of carbon emissions to boot), and I remember thinking, “brat deserved to beat TTPD! Fuck commercial success, it needed to be number one!”

This is why it brings me a great deal of sadness to say that I feel as though Charli is following Taylor down the same capitalistic route. Churning out remix after remix, continually decreasing in artistic quality, somehow ruins the experience for me. But it’s not only this which has built up to my going-off-brat. It’s the use of its distinctive green hue and minimal font in neoliberal political campaigns to deliberately garner support from the younger generations (not to say that if you’re American, you shouldn’t vote for Kamala, in fact PLEASE VOTE FOR KAMALA). It’s her dedication of a song to Dasha Nekrasova of Red Scare podcast who has done lots of disgusting and controversial things, such as quite literally posting images of herself using a mannequin wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh for target practice (no, really, I can’t make this shit up). Although it’s incredibly unlikely Charli shares these militant views herself, it does show a level of ignorance that she was unable to realise that Dasha is not simply a controversial figure, but also violent in a deeply disturbing way. It’s her collaboration with Matty Healy of the 1975, who I perceive as a massively weird misogynist and an obnoxious twat, on a remix which turned out not great in the end anyway. It’s the fact that every single other piece of brilliant work she has ever made is now completely ignored. What about Crash? What about how I’m feeling now? Even Sucker – what happened to “breaking the rules”, Charli?

On another Instagram post, Charli expressed the opinion that “songs are endless and have the possibility to be continuously broken down, reworked, changed, morphed, mutilated into something completely unrecognizable”. And usually I’d be inclined to agree – it certainly adds something interesting to an artistic experience to completely reinvent a song from scratch rather than simply take the more conventional approach and write a new one… However, when I listened to the new version of the album for the first time on a train to Edinburgh, admittedly a little terrified by the celebrity lineup, I could quite honestly sum up the whole experience in three words: confusing, underwhelming, and unoriginal. Something about chucking a bunch of random features onto an album that was already doing perfectly well for itself as an artistic project not only felt like a blatant money grab, but also an attempt to cling on to relevancy. The thing that proves this to me most is the fact that Hello goodbye was not included on the extended version of the remix album. This song received significantly less attention (and therefore streams) than the others on the album, and therefore was not graced with a celebrity feature in the same way the others were. If Charli truly cared about reinventing brat then surely she would reinvent it in its entirety? 

Don’t get me wrong. If it sounds like I am being too harsh, up until this point, I have enjoyed all of Charli’s discography, the first two versions of brat included. But what I don’t enjoy is the constant rehashing of the same idea, the partnerships with fast fashion companies, and the loss of the individuality that I love about the rest of her discography. On the remixes (except maybe the A.G. Cook version of So I – R.I.P to the great creative mind that was SOPHIE) I don’t feel any of the same emotion and thinly concealed vulnerability that the original album displayed. As previously mentioned, I straight up disliked the 1975 feature on I might say something stupid and thought it completely took everything important away from the original version of the song. I’m a big fan of Addison Rae’s new single Diet Pepsi, and honestly there is nothing wrong with her remix of Von dutch, but nothing can compare to the exhilaration I felt listening to the original version of it when it was first released (while strutting down Market Street in a long cheetah-print coat and black suede boots). Plus, the Guess remix with Billie Eilish added absolutely nothing to the first version aside from being a bit more explicitly “queer” in the lyricism…It just felt very meh as an experience to me when the original version of the album filled me with so much excitement. The only song that truly added anything new and quirky to the experience rather than continuing old ideas were the Spring breakers remix with Kesha, an artist who is currently enjoying a well-deserved resurgence, and I felt the same exhilaration hearing her version as I did when first hearing Von dutch. It feels camp and electrifying in a very authentic way whilst also adding a new perspective to one of my favourite songs on the album (which also happens to be one of the most underrated). 

Also, even after saying all of this, I’m going to make it clear that I did not completely hate the album. In faith, I thoroughly enjoyed the Julian Casablancas track – although maybe I’m biased due to my love for the Strokes, especially during autumn. As I did the Troye Sivan one. And the Shygirl one. But overall, I found it to be completely pointless as they add nothing new to the original versions of the songs. What was the purpose? What did this reinvention truly add to the concept of brat rather than simply serving to drag out an online phenomenon which transformed Charli into an iconic internet presence and flooded social media with viral content? And I love Charli as an internet personality. But I just can’t get behind the fact that the whole album has turned into a representation of all the things I dislike about the way our society works. It’s not even that I’m condemning celebrities for not being political paragons – of course, in the climate we currently live in that will never happen. It’s just that everything about brat has become as mass-produced as the H&M clothes line that Charli endorses as time passes, and for me it’s now lost the creative spark that I once valued it for so much.

All this proves to me is that you can in fact have too much of a good thing. Sorry, Charli.