Brat Summer and the Millennial Imagination

Reflections on a meme and its disavowal

In recent weeks, the cultural conversation has revolved around memes far too much. I’m wary of contributing to that undignified phenomenon. But there’s something worth interrogating about what happened once “Brat Summer” became the progressive millennial iteration of “Hawk Tuah” in, at most, two and a half months’ time. These are not sentences that feel rewarding to type.

If you don’t know what either of these things are, good. You don’t need to read this. Both memes, inexplicably, have been given the etymological treatment by major media outlets. Slate, Rolling Stone, The Cut, CNN, Time, and countless other organs of some esteem have presumably paid people to write about these things. All you really need to know is that “Hawk Tuah” is a joke about blowjobs, and finding it funny is supposed to mean that you lean conservative, while “Brat Summer” is more or less about doing key bumps in bathrooms, and finding it funny means you are a hip, progressive millennial. There’s nothing particularly interesting left to say about Hawk Tuah; to the extent that there ever was, it was comprehensively stated in Max Read’s already seminal post, “Hawk Tuah and the Zynternet,” in which he briefly theorizes and sketches the ascendant fratty internet birthed by a confluence of forces economic (specifically, widespread legalization and advertising of gambling) and algorithmic (Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter). Nor is it especially novel to suggest, like I already have, a certain “Hawk Tuah-Brat Summer horseshoe theory,” the idea that cultures mediated by the internet will inescapably coalesce around silly signifiers that are ostensibly illegible to that culture’s out-group until they reach a point of universal dominance. What is interesting, however, is observing the general revulsion with which the broader millennial internet culture has met “Brat Summer’s” breakthrough into, of all things, the 2024 presidential campaign, a revulsion made all the more noticeable for the fact that less than a week ago the millennials now cringing were doing unpaid PR work for Kamala Harris.

Brat Summer died, per Pitchfork’s Arielle Gordon, the moment that Charli XCX tacitly endorsed Kamala Harris for president. With one tweet, the idea goes, the sovereign leader of Brat Summer granted mainstream political types explicit permission to lean into the low-concept, incoherent meme—campaign accounts updating headers, repulsive figures like Matt Yglesias tweeting lyrics about ketamine, Eric Adams doing his thing. In a split second, Brat was recontextualized from cheeky in-joke to reincarnation of “Pokemon Go to the polls.” In other words, Brat memes speed-ran their inevitable life cycle from in-group signifier to mainstream marketing tool. There’s nothing worth examining there other than the fact that it happened quite quickly, a speed that speaks more to the new architecture of the internet than anything inherent to the Bratzkrieg itself.

Things start, people feel special for understanding them, too many people understand them, and then the early adopters pronounce them dead. These cycles happen. There are people—a lot of them—who have conditioned their notion of cool on little more than liking things their parents have never heard of. Where Brat and its purported death is interesting, however, is in what it reveals about the psyche of the millennial cohort that was so eager both in its adoption and eulogizing. It’s easy to dismiss both the mass-embrace and -rejection of the lime green template as a sort of course correction for a joke that quickly overstayed its welcome. But what, specifically, about Brat-as-meme makes it resonant enough to warrant Pitchfork eulogies in the first place? Or, put more bluntly, what about millennial culture makes its mass adoption inherently cringe, rather than, say, a sign of hard-earned cultural domination?

Brat Summer, however nebulously defined, was at its root a savvy, viral marketing campaign for a pop star’s album. This level of shameless, free advertising was made palatable to hip, media-adjacent millennials because the pop star in question was Charli XCX, the type of “pop star” who, with the possible exception of this current moment, never enjoyed the sort of stratospheric, mainstream rise one associates with pop music. Brat Summer was, at its peak, purveyed by the same people who would scoff at the same marketing tactics if they were employed by a pop star of, say, Taylor Swift’s stature. In other words, hip millennials felt comfortable peddling free advertising for a pop star because the pop star was cool; the pop star was cool in large part because she was not actually that popular. In this light, Brat Summer was a quintessentially millennial cultural moment because Charli XCX is the quintessentially millennial popstar.

In Charli, a certain type of millennial sees something like their own reflection. A generation that feels it was denied a promise—be it the financial prospects of their parents, young adulthood uninterrupted by a pandemic, life structured around opportunity rather than precarity—identifies less with the pop stars who have, by objective standards, succeeded than with those whose evident brilliance has failed to translate to traditional success. Until Brat (the album, rather than the meme, for once), Charli has long occupied a space in which her dalliances with outré strains of popular music have earned her critical acclaim without much to show by way of mainstream name recognition. Is it so difficult to imagine, say, a precarious renter whose bylines will never translate into the financial security necessary for home ownership or health insurance identifying particularly strongly with the notion of brilliance perpetually, unjustly dashed?

The mass-distancing from Brat Summer is instructive insofar as nobody can succinctly articulate how, exactly, its spirit has been betrayed. One week, people posted Brat-themed edits of Kamala Harris’ benzo-inflected speech patterns to much acclaim. The next week, enough people had had their opinions shifted on Kamala’s prospects in a general election (in no small part, might I suggest, from the onslaught of Brat-adjacent memes), and these same memes were pronounced dead. The joke wasn’t betrayed unless one believes that its niche status was essential to its meaning. Brat Summer died because it succeeded; in breaking into the mainstream and attained legitimate cultural purpose, it worked exactly like an advertising campaign for a pop star is supposed to.

That the mainstreaming of this nebulous meme sparked eulogies rather than celebration reveals the extent to which millennials seek comfort in marginalization; to a generation that has prized differentiation through tasteful, niche consumption in no small part due to their dire material circumstances, conventional success itself reads like a certain failure. The irony of this, of course, is that this level of association with Charli-as-denied-star runs antithetical to the album behind the memes. In her instantly foundational Pitchfork review of Brat, friend of the blog Meaghan Garvey identifies in the record a fundamental break from the pop music du jour, casting Brat as a deliriously messy It-Girl triumph amidst a pop landscape shaped by megastars pretending that they share problems with their listeners; therapy pop, as it’s been dubbed. People like Brat because it sounds good, but also because it rebukes the notion of the falsely relatable pop star, re-establishing pop stars as the people you want to be rather than the ones who pretend they are like you. Brat is, at essence, a record about messy aspiration rather than artificial association.

What I mean to say, then, is that Brat enthusiasts understand Charli XCX to be more than just a reflection of their own one-break-away self-perceptions. Rather, as their favorite pop star, she is a representation of their ambitions and desires. In this light, the Brat Summer walk-back is all the more instructive a glimpse into the millennial psyche, insofar as it demonstrates an aversion even in the imaginary toward something like cultural success. Brat Summer, at the end of the day, stood for living your life how you wanted it to be rather than how it was. Its mass condemnation upon breaking through to the mainstream suggests that millennials, even in their wildest dreams, can conceive of success only as a certain death.