ARE YOU HAVING a brat summer?
Kamala Harris is. Instant glow up from vice president to presumptive Democratic nominee for president? That’s brat. Charli XCX confirmed it.
Wait, sorry. What?
Okay. Remember in the 2008 US election when there were think pieces about how Barack Obama was with the times because he was sending texts to young people to try to get them to vote?
This is the 2024 version of that, except Kamala Harris is brat, and it’s a Kamalanomenon, and no we did not just fall out of a coconut tree – and if these things make no sense to you, we’re going to try to explain it.
The word brat has traditionally meant a bad-mannered child. This summer, it has taken on a new meaning sparked by the release of an album called ‘brat’ by British singer Charli XCX in June.
The album art and marketing materials are a confronting lime green colour with the word ‘brat’ printed in low-resolution, lower case letters.
It’s something of a pushback against previous trends that fed into certain conventions about what it means to be a woman (and often required spending a lot of money), like the “clean girl aesthetic”, which was characterised by slick buns, skincare, and clean white Ikea desks with a vanilla candle burning, or “Barbiecore”, which was pink, pink, pink.
Brat isn’t clean white or bubblegum pink; it’s slimy green. The idea of being ‘brat’ means being messy, being confident, being loud. Charli XCX said on social media that it’s about being “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes”.
Picture spicy margaritas, black sunglasses, sticky floors, nostalgic playlists with songs from 2010 to 2012. Revisiting books you read when you were fourteen and liberally dog-earing the pages. Sending the text you were afraid to send (you’re not afraid anymore). Staying up and out too late. Pointing at something green and saying ‘that’s brat’. Doing something unexpected. That’s brat.
2024 has brought The Memeification of Kamala Harris and it’s rocketed in recent weeks, especially in the last 48 hours.
Harris’ memorable, if a little confusing, turns of phrase, her hearty laugh, and her fondness for a Venn diagram have all been the subjects of tweets and video compilations.
Since the brat album came out in June, there have been TikToks about Harris having a brat summer, but they’ve really exploded since Joe Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he was dropping out, leaving Harris as the probable nominee as high-profile Democrats threw their support behind her. #bratelection has arisen as a hashtag, with social media users encouraging others to go vote, and vote for Harris. “brat is very politically active”, says one TikTokker.
why did I stay up till 3am making a von dutch brat coconut tree edit featuring kamala harris and why can’t I stop watching it on repeat pic.twitter.com/hqcmerD1Pb
— ryan (@ryanlong03) July 3, 2024
BRAT SUMMER into KAMALA PRESIDENCY 💚💚💚🥥🌴🇺🇸
— Mikehole 🏳️🌈🥥🌴 (@MichaelDrummey) July 22, 2024
pic.twitter.com/EFitBuQh2L https://t.co/sbEsXGW2es
If Kamala Harris doesn’t come out at the convention to the Brat Coconut Tree remix is it really worth it? pic.twitter.com/k1cEzZTSk7
— HAYLEY (@hayley_g) July 21, 2024
Charli XCX herself tweeted in the early hours of Monday morning: “kamala IS brat”. The official Harris campaign account on X has changed its banner to the brat album theming – a green background with a fuzzy ‘kamala hq’ printed on it.
kamala IS brat
— Charli (@charli_xcx) July 22, 2024
The brat trend isn’t the only meme to be associated with Harris. American singer Chappell Roan, whose fame skyrocketed this year, has a song with the refrain “it’s a femininomenon”. So guess what? “It’s a Kamalanomenon” has also become a thing.
The tricky thing about trying to explain new internet slang, and what is often left out in these kinds of discussions, is that these colloquialisms and the culture around them don’t just appear out of nowhere. They build on previous trends, cultural events, and shared understandings of language and the world, both online and off – or, like Kamala Harris herself would say, they “exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you”.
Before brat summer, for instance, there was hot girl summer, which was about going outside, being your best self, and making the most of the summer months – essentially, a modern day ‘carpe diem’. So what we had this year was a) an existing sentence structure in slang providing the “something” “summer” template, b) a new summer that lended itself to a new trending phrase, and c) a popular new pop album that came at just the right time in the linguistic trend cycle.
Another thing to note is that a lot of this is deeply tongue-in-cheek. Most people who comment something about brat online or use it in conversations with friends are not also using it in a college essay or work report. It’s common to see a particularly 2024 piece of content embedded deep in internet lore be reposted with commentary like “imagine trying to explain this to a Victorian child”. The term “brainrot” is also popular in this vernacular, used to describe the sheer absurdity of all of this.
Much of the allure of these absurd phrases is the absurdity itself and the humour it brings. The allure is compounded as the layers of knowledge required to decode the absurdity grow. The more bizarre a string of words on the surface level, the more that understanding it depends on understanding the context it emerged from, and the funnier it is for those who get it.
It certainly could.
For one thing, Donald Trump has succeeded at pulling in supporters on social media for almost a decade now in a way that Biden couldn’t compete with. There’s a different energy to Harris and her campaign that partly explains why people are now jumping on this memes, which offer a way for her to compete with Trump in the arena of internet opinion.
À la ‘no press is bad press’, all of this online buzz means more eyeballs on her and more attention and more interest, which is exactly what she needs right now.
Yes, her sudden entry to the race in and of itself was already big news and would have generated plenty of discussion.
But every year, more and more young people turn 18 and gain the right to vote. There are lots of them who are interested, or at least informed, about politics, but there are also many others for whom it hasn’t been something they’ve ever thought about. They don’t know who the main players are or the precise details of their political stances.
Trying to get the attention of that group and get them out to vote for you is a constant elusive goal in politics everywhere and getting Kamala Harris onto the feed of young voters on various platforms, putting her name and face in front of them in a positive light, is going to help her campaign.
(Let’s not forget about Simon Harris’s penchant for social media and where that’s gotten him.)
Also, with Biden as the candidate, there were a lot of voters, both young and old, who were extremely disillusioned. It might have been because of his age or because of his position on Gaza and Israel or because of something else, but for many reasons, there were a lot of Democrats who were really unsatisfied with the prospect of voting for Biden for president. A sizeable chunk of them may have ended up voting for a third-party candidate or not voting at all.
Harris now being so visible and under such a fresh set of circumstances will bring some of them back to the fold. There are left-wing voters who do not approve of her actions while she was a prosecutor or of her position on Israel and Gaza, and some of them still won’t vote for her, but there are others who will begrudgingly cast her vote for her because, ‘hey, she’s not Biden, and she’s definitely not Trump’. The online culture that has emerged around her may give her something of a shield, rightly or wrongly, by separating her previous actions from this new, collectively-created persona.
No. Trying to explain and put brat in a box is inherently unbrat. But we’re not sorry about it, because being unapologetic for not fitting the mould is very brat.
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