Xenogothic has written an excellent blog post on Charli xcx’s latest album Brat, noting how in the album, she oscillates “between future club classics and jaggedly wistful ballads (that) produces the kind of depressive hedonism Mark Fisher famously called “party hauntology.” Indeed, the album moves between a grief for pre-fame subjectivity, illuminating the anxieties emerging from public recognition and pressures of industry competition amongst friends in the tracks Rewind and Girl, so confusing to a speculative reflection on the future in I think about it all the time. I know that brat summer has only just begun, but I can’t help but speculate over what follows. Another thing I can’t help doing is comparing and contrasting the bratiness of Charli xcx to the artist underscores, a fellow legend in the making of electronic music combined with bratty lyricism. If the tension in Brat between club euphoria and the pangs of personal retrospection draw out a critique of capitalism, albeit without teeth according to Mattie, I argue that the lyrical bratiness of underscores brings into view more sharply and bites down into capitalism as a domineering structure inducing anger and insecurity by contrast to Charli xcx.
In I think about it all the time, there seems to be a longing for a catharsis that goes beyond the bounds of the club: “And a baby might be mine / ‘Cause maybe one day I might/ If I don’t run out of time / Would it give my life a new purpose?” There was a comment I saw posted by Azealia Banks under an interview Charli xcx gave. She is quite harsh on Charli and enjoyers, including myself, of Charli’s music post True Romance so I don’t endorse her opinion that Charli’s move towards more club, dance-oriented pop music has been “disposable” and that “nobody moved” when Charli’s Vroom Vroom EP produced by SOPHIE signified to its listeners an invigorated futurism of mainstream dance music amidst a time of cultural stasis within pop culture contrasted with the acceleration of capitalist realism, which Mattie highlights in SOPHIE as “a beacon of popular-modernist hope in the mid-2010s because her trans-adjacent dissolution of subjectivity affirmed this delirium with a brand-new, gleeful enthusiasm.” However, Azealia Banks’s comment did remind me that Charli xcx was not always making music for the club, that her songs like Superlove included acoustic instrumentals paired with a more grunge aesthetic, songs like What I like in True Romance alluded to the innocence of a romantic dynamic pre-fame: “Used to come around, you’d be knockin’ on my front door/ playing board-games, horror films with the super gore.” However, on Brat, the lyrics to Mean Girls and the video for 360 makes me think of the influence of Charli’s move to the US, her integration into the fashion world, into market-driven pop and internet culture across from the 2010s into the 2020s.
Mattie makes the point that the album is a collection of paeans to the interiority of the depressive hedonism of the modern celebrity, and though they wish, the more they listen to the album, that it wasn’t, that the sense of loss and change in Brat feels quintessential to 2024 is doubled by the moment of frustration and bleak stagnancy as the general election in the UK approaches, with the majority of the population dissatisfied with parliamentary politics repeating austerity measures, the support of the state to Israel in Palestinian genocide, the rolling back of trans rights through a proliferating, simulated culture war exploited by politicians to mask the fact that they would rather invest in what is profitable to them than expand measures of care for those who need it. Capitalism simulates resentment between those who are subjugated and those who are subjugating, and this is something that the lyricism and textures of underscores production exorcise as well as complicate. The evolution of underscores is interesting to me, because her earlier tracks have a synthetic, stripped back, jazzy-EDM style of sampling for her production in her Skin Purifying Treatment EP in 2018. However it is in her latest albums Fishmonger, released in 2021, and Wallsocket, in 2023, where underscores really purges a bratiness in her reflections of capitalism, combining it with heavy drums and guitars, rendering us all as misbehaving rock-star brats evoking what Mattie described where “the brat misbehaves because it cannot have the thing that it wants.”
Take her song Old money bitch on Wallsocket which is captioned on SoundCloud: “Unaware of her hypocrisy, Mara bashes Old money bitch for trying to hide her wealth.” The song is angrily mocking a girl that will inherit a lot of generational wealth because she’s the daughter of a billionaire but tries to integrate with others who are not part of the ruling class, “she’s not like you or me / she’s the enemy / her parents had a seven figure wedding and divorce / she’s stolen from the CVS but her daddy’s on the board / it’s gotta be, she’s an Old money bitch!” Drawing out the way this old money bitch presents herself to conceal her wealth as she is in “head to toe in second hand forever 21 / she cuts her hair herself and then she dyes it in the tub”, underscores in the chorus switches between referring to the other girl and herself as the old money bitch, reflecting back an anger onto herself for a hypocrisy after getting into her first big fight with the old money bitch after Sarah’s sweet 19: “after Sarah’s sweet 19 we had our first big fight / she was like you live ideal lives and you don’t realise / trust me I know what it’s like.”
I think underscores does a far better job of making the listener sympathetic to both the old money bitch and the anger directed towards the old money bitch than Charli xcx does with shouting out all her Mean Girls who are New York city’s darlings because underscores leans into this mode of threat and resentment that is generated with the ruling class from the position of the subjugated: “don’t hide from us / we’re not going to hurt you / there’s nothing to be afraid of / did you know your parents are on a Wikipedia page / your dad is an accomplished man, really. / Like to see all the things he’s done for our country? / And I know you went to that school in like DC / you know the one one of the president’s kids go to / so like how did you end up here? Money troubles? / (1, 2, 3, good luck!)” Underscores goes heavy with the acoustics in the instrumental breaks using frenzied energetic guitars and drums but I also love how she nods to jersey club with the sample “back back back it up.” Underscores manages to make the listener imagine themselves as both the voice threatening the old money bitch and as the old money bitch herself as she sings “I’m an old money bitch” and there is something really cathartic, even transformative, to imagining yourself as an old money bitch who hates themselves. But what is transformative about this hatred can only come when the denial of the old money bitch’s relative privileges are abolished, when it gets externalised as a hatred for the system of capitalist realism itself and a refusal to be an agent of its reproduction.
The hypocrisy of progressive-presenting political parties such as the Labour Party in the UK and the Democrats in the US, is that they claim to serve the interests of the underrepresented while imposing austerity policies to widen poverty gaps meanwhile the right wing simulate an identity for a demographic that have fallen victim to these austerity measures, namely this patriotic, white working-class man to scapegoat people of colour and migrants as responsible for the issue of a widening poverty gap. Locals (girls like us) featuring gabby start is a song that takes on this critical demeanour of “the locals,” who we see in the music video to be this demographic of a patriotic majority of white people, rocking up to a monster truck conventions waving the American flag: “I started laughing at the locals (and it comes back around!)” which is also reflected back on to the self in the chorus repeating “stop me if you’ve heard this one before / girls like us are rotten to the core!” In Locals (girls like us), what feels melancholic about the feeling of interior rot and imposter syndrome in Charli xcx’s I might say something stupid with the lyrics “I might say something stupid / talk to myself in the mirror / wear these clothes as disguise / just to re-enter the party/ door is open, let in, but still outside / I look perfect for the background” is transformed by way of a joyful, rock-heavy sonic disembowelment. The song Your favourite sidekick from the album Fishmonger makes me think that Charli xcx could have a lot of fun collaborating with underscores: “Worldwide superstar, running out of mileage / can’t sleep, 2 a.m., I don’t really mind it / ring ring pick it up, I could be your sidekick.” After all, they’re both self-proclaimed brats. They should have a brat battle! Charli, the LA neon green high fashion brat versus underscores, the Mid-West emo rock Spoiled little brat which is a song on her album Fishmonger. They should “take a picture, hope it lasts long / strictly business, shut the backlog / make a living, sing a sad song!!!” Because underscores is also a pop-star, and all she wants is a mention but yeah I guess that must have pissed you off! The final refrain in Spoiled little brat, where the yell of the chorus is chopped, the demand underscores makes to be heard intensifies: “Shut your mouth listen up when I talk / I’m a spoiled little brat and I get what I want” as she then reckons with the disappointment of this failure when the song finishes: “I’m a spoiled little brat and I get what I deserve.”
The mid-west emo acoustic guitar fluttering in Loansharks aka spoiled little brat II: Dying in the Northern Hemisphere somewhere with production from brakence and featuring gabby start, sonically switches up to hardcore dub-step throughout the song. The way underscores is straddling across the divisions of genres within a single song is something I want Charli xcx to do! Underscores grapples with the common ground between what can be speculated to be between the old money bitch and the angry, resentful, threatening voice towards her: “Ooh, and it looks like both our problems are one and the same / Okay, alright, okay (okay) / It’s the great American nightmare / happens all the time (celebrity) / I’m such a brat, I can’t afford to be / so overrated, I can’t ever be who you are / all the strain in my priorities / can’t read the future, let’s go get daddy’s credit card.” The dependence on utilising the capitalist daddy with his patriarchal privilege for survival as one that can be as constrictive as liberating is a tension underscores explores concisely and emotively. The songs My guy (corporate shuffle) and Cops and Robbers feel like capitalist daddy cautionary tales, taking place in the town she fiction-ed in the album Wallsocket where a bank teller flees Wallsocket town after being exposed for embezzling money from his clientele for over a decade and commits a bank robbery. The cinematic landscape reflective of the circumstances of capitalist desperation is embodied in her release of My guy (corporate shuffle), a single in the yet to be released version of Wallsocket that is Wallsocket (Director’s cut).
The way that people are pushed into crime as a result of capitalist desperation has been the subject of popular media in shows like Breaking Bad where Walter White enters the drug trade to generate the income to support his cancer treatment and his family after his anticipated death. Cops and robbers is narrated from the POV of the father who explains how he got into laundering money for his clients as a result of poverty: “I’ve been working as a bank teller / for like eleven years / it all started when I didn’t have / enough to pay for the crystal.” The song describes the family for hating the father for what he did while he also defers responsibility by saying that he is “not the bad guy.” In My guy (corporate shuffle) underscores addresses the wife and kids of the father: “Your hubby’s quite the little pushover / does he ask you to push him over in bed? / And did you hear about the robbery? / He looked so fishy when I saw him at the supermarket / And Martha still won’t join the PTA / I mean like, don’t you even care about your kids?” The way the music video is centred on people bull-riding and falling off speaks to an ejection, a collapse, falling from a bull that cannot be tamed. What is capitalism if not the bull that shakes one off its back in the plight for dependability? And yet, underscores delightfully confesses that the father will always be “my guy,” as her sister “tells me that you’ll never learn / I think you’re way more complicated than that / she likes to call me an apologist” and the song reaches its climax when she asserts “(But I know exactly what I am.)” Then the song explodes with pain and joy in the self-awareness of the delirium of capitalist daddy dependency.
I have to say that I agree with the above criticism of Charli xcx’s Brat, that the lingering cynicism that Mattie described in their blog post towards “the private-school pop-princess” which they said they were able to look past, is a part of this longing for Charli xcx to address her depressive hedonism in way that goes beyond the bounds of club music and melancholic ballads. To me, the album was confrontational as Chali xcx described it to be but I think underscores more explicitly exerts a confrontational catharsis of social dynamics implicated by capitalist hierarchy and power. I know it’s not about Azealia Banks, but maybe it would make her happy if underscores and Charli xcx collaborated to rock the fuck out. I know it would make me and many other listeners happy. I’m a spoiled little brat too and I get what I want, so for god’s sake, make it happen ??
(re: The Return of Party Hauntology: Notes on Brat – xenogothic)
Byrosaurus Rex 
Leave a comment