The Week of Brat Summer Will Go Down in
Internet History
After Charli XCX declared that Vice President Kamala Harris “IS brat,” nothing was the same.
...the meme-ification of the presidential election in the US has gone from a cautious yellow to a neon, slimelike “Let’s go” green.
...Charli XCX posted on X that “kamala IS brat” and solidified something that had been percolating for weeks.
It felt to me like a VOLCANO had been percolating.
Brat Summer...has moved past Charli XCX’s album Brat to become an embodiment of the vibe of the season in 2024. For Charli, it’s about—and this is what Tapper was trying to understand—being a little messy, a little volatile, a little vulnerable.is, in its way, anti-defeatist.
This is the idea of Brat Summer that has been at the edges since Brat dropped in mid-June, and it was woven into the politics of 2024 weeks before Biden announced he was out of the running. Ryan Long, a 22-year-old college student, made a fancam of Harris’ now infamous “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” remarks overlaid with the green Brat cover back in early July. It now has more than 4 million views on X and landed Long in TechCrunch, which quoted him as saying “because of her Venn diagrams quote, Kamala goes viral on gay Twitter every couple of months. She has turned into this, like, psuedo-gay icon.”
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...Brat broke out in a year saturated with female pop stars. Sabrina Carpenter has everyone singing “Espresso.” Chappell Roan got so big in the last six months that her concert crowds now spill over into adjacent gas stations. After telling the crowd at this summer’s Gov Ball that she turned down an opportunity to play a Pride event at the White House, the Harris campaign is using Roan’s song “Femininominon” as a rallying cry on TikTok. Harris sits atop Beyoncé’s Renaissance horse in one meme, and rumor has it that Queen Bey has given the veep permission to use her song “Freedom” on the campaign trail.
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...in five or 10 years, when this week in Brat Summer is remembered...it’ll be seen as the time when something broke open. When the vibe on the internet shifted from conspiracy theories and chatter about Silicon Valley bigwigs getting behind Trump to one of pure energy. Conspiracy theories still abound, but so do a bunch of activated Swifties.
...feels like a release valve opening.